End Game (Calm Act Book 1)

by Ginger Booth

  We passed large orange signs, twice, advising that Route 2 and Route 78 were only open for Vermont local traffic through the islands on Lake Champlain. No through traffic was possible to New York state at Plattsburgh or Rouses Point. That was a surprise. With the Canadian border closing so soon, we would have expected traffic to divert into upstate New York. The border that was to close off the six states of New England from New York wasn’t due for another month. They seemed to be closing the northern edge early.

  Approaching the actual turnoff to Route 78, Adam slowed way down. An RV entered the interstate ahead of us, set itself across all lanes of traffic, and parked. Fortunately there was no one behind us. And Adam really was a good driver. From going 70 miles per hour, he managed to stop with several feet to spare before plowing into that RV.

  He laid on the horn, as a matter of principle. The RV driver cheerfully flipped him off in return. She was a petite senior citizen with wiggy ash blond curls. Gigantic purple plastic earrings matched purple lipstick and glasses frames. She cranked up the music in her RV loud enough for us to hear. Thunder Road, by Bruce Springsteen.

  Adam carefully engaged the emergency flashers, and backed the car up onto the left-hand shoulder a ways so we could see what was going on. RV after RV piled onto the road in front of the lane-blocking vehicle, and headed north.

  “It’s a gran caravan. They’re real,” Adam breathed in wonder. “I thought that was urban myth.”

  Chapter 7

  Interesting fact: By this time, all recreational drugs had been legalized in the U.S. Opiates were available without a prescription. Meanwhile, Medicare was replaced with a voucher system, and the Affordable Care Act repealed. Congress decided we couldn’t afford health care anymore due to the exploding costs of climate-related disasters.

  I’d read about several incidents with gran caravans the other day. I studied the fey nonchalance of the purple-dangly ancient Baby Boomer for several minutes. She was rocking out to Born in the U.S.A. now. I got busy with the car’s navigation system.

  “It won’t make any difference,” Adam pointed out. “I-89 is the only border crossing.” Orange signs had helpfully pointed that out, as well. “If we get off the highway, we’d just have to rejoin it farther up. Just relax and wait, I guess. How many of them can there be?”

  “Hundreds,” I suggested. “Maybe thousands.” I considered, and decided to go further out on a limb. “Adam, I work at UNC. I hear more than most people. This could be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous? Ancient hippies reliving Woodstock?”

  “Adam… they have nothing to lose.”

  He considered that sadly. “Well. That’s probably true of most people these days. Oh, look, Lady Gaga up there is moving on, good riddance. That couldn’t have been more than fifty RV’s.”

  In the time we’d waited, a half dozen other cars and trucks, and maybe a dozen semis, had joined the group waiting for the caravan to release the road to traffic again. We waited on the meridian until Adam could safely merge into the fast lane behind them from a standing stop.

  “Adam, I have a really bad feeling about this,” I eventually resumed.

  He took my hand and squeezed it reassuringly. “We’re going to Montreal. We came here to visit Montreal.”

  It was only a few more miles until the left exit into the U.S. border compound. I looked at it longingly with pursed lips. I noted that most of the semis took that left exit. I caught a glimpse of parked U.S. troop carriers as we passed the compound itself.

  Adam pressed my hand again. Within moments we were back to the rear view of fifty RV’s, clogging the plaza where the highway splayed out for Canadian border inspection.

  “Adam, see that marker? We’re in the U.S. until there.”

  “Yes?”

  “See those old guys getting out the back of the RV there? The ones with the semi-automatic weapons.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Turn left.”

  “There is no left! It’s blocked.” And there were posts there. I thought we could make it around the posts, though.

  One of the semis that had tried to push on through the border in front of us, started reversing toward us.

  “Dammit, again with this!” Adam swore some more, and backed onto the left shoulder to get out of the truck’s way.

  Having backed up far enough, the semi took the U-turn to the left in front of the Canadian line. He took out a couple posts along the way. A number of Canadian border police in bullet-proof jackets came out running. I had to respect them – I’d always been impressed with the Canadian border police. They skidded to a stop, somewhat into the U.S. side of the border, and started directing traffic. One pointed to Adam.

  You! Turn left. Here. Get the hell back to the U.S.! The border guard had no trouble expressing this with arms and a little orange flag.

  Adam hesitated.

  Now, NOW! the border cop insisted.

  I heard one lone gunshot. Followed by quite a lot of gunshots.

  Hyperventilating, Adam made it around the U-turn back towards U.S. customs. I looked back. The border guards who’d tried to direct traffic gave that up and pelted back across the border toward the nearest building.

  “Stay to the right!” I called out. There was little time to speed up before we were at the U.S. side border plaza. “We want to exit I-89.”

  “Why…?” But thankfully Adam headed to the right. Other cars backed up to the left to go through the standard toll-booth arrangement. We seemed to be in the truck inspection lane.

  We slowly passed a building into the semi truck parking lot. There were a lot more troop carriers than I realized when we passed on the far side of the interstate. The troops they carried were loading up at a run, well armed. “Stop, Adam! Turn right here,” I ordered.

  “But, we haven’t passed inspection,” Adam quibbled.

  “Turn right, or I’m getting out of the car,” I explained. “Now, Adam!”

  “Dammit!” he swore, but did as I asked.

  “Jog left.”

  Here we found our first U.S. border patrol, cordoned across the street in orange. As one of the nice officers approached us, Adam rolled down his window, shooting me a dirty look.

  I figured it was only fair that I did the talking, since I’d been doing the navigation. I leaned across Adam and smiled at the nice armed man. “Hello, sir. We were trying to go to Montreal today. But there was gunfire at the border. Now we’re trying to exit to Route 7.” I smiled winningly. “Here are our passports. We never left the country today.” I had the passports ready for Canadian inspection just a few minutes ago.

  He saw the blue passports in my hand, glanced at the chaotic army staging area beyond us, pursed his lips, and waved us on. “Go,” he said. He signalled to the other guards to let us through.

  Adam navigated through the guards at a cautious and sober speed, and nodded to them respectfully. I leaned back into my seat, and blew out a long breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

  “You want to tell me what all that was about?” Adam asked.

  “Not just yet, thanks,” I replied, as another pocket of Army vehicles appeared in the woods to the right. This group was more of the wide-body Jeep variety, with a superstructure for mounted artillery on top. They were starting up their engines. “Turn left at the intersection. Good, we’re now on Route 7. Just follow it around. We’ll cross over I-89 and head south.”

  A few hundred feet past the last entrance back onto I-89 North, I pointed. “Duty free store. Let’s stop there.”

  With the car safely parked, we both sat back and simply breathed for a few minutes, to soothe jangling nerves. The duty free parking lot was unsurprisingly empty. Not even a house or gas station was visible in the Vermont winter woods surrounding us and Route 7.

  I rolled down my window experimentally. The isolated rural tranquility of the setting had a deep bass soundtrack of large trucks moving up the interstate, with gunshot percussion still wafting down from the border.
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  “Why not I-89 south?” Adam prompted again.

  “I don’t really want to be associated with that border right now. Do you?”

  He snorted. “No. Though we haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Yes, but the guys with the guns are kinda stressed right now. The border guards were OK, but I don’t trust the soldiers to make fine distinctions. They’re here to put down citizen terrorists. Not a good place to be an innocent bystander.”

  “Point taken. This duty-free is closed.”

  I chuckled. “Sorry.”

  “That’s alright,” Adam allowed. “I didn’t really need any liquor or cigarettes. I wouldn’t mind a stretch, though.”

  We got out of the car and stretched, and walked around the parking lot a bit to decompress. Then we got back on Route 7 heading south. A typical state ‘highway’, Route 7 was basically a two lane road linking hither to yon. Vermont standard frost heaves ridged across the road every 100 feet or so, making me appreciate the smooth suspension of Adam’s car. Sometimes we paralleled quite close to I-89, giving us glimpses of the road not travelled. It still looked well worth not travelling. We spotted occasional Army vehicles and zero civilian traffic, before Route 7 wended away from the interstate again.

  “This seems ridiculous,” Adam said. “That RV driver who blocked the interstate, a terrorist? She must have been 80 years old.”

  “Exactly, Adam. She has nothing left to lose. Maybe she has breast cancer, maybe she needs a heart bypass or a hip replacement. She’s not going to get treatment. The Medicare vouchers can’t cover anything like that. Maybe she has kids and grandkids, a stake in the future of the world. They can’t help her, they can barely help themselves. They need to toe the line and please bosses or doctors or whoever, hoping to pay for food, maybe an ark berth, and get a chance to live. Maybe she can do something they can’t, about how screwed up the world is.”

  Adam considered that. “Baby Boomers? They gave up idealism and switched to materialism a long time ago.”

  I shrugged yes-and-no. “Some of that is age-related. In your middle decades, you work hard, amass money, launch kids or careers or businesses. But there comes a point when that’s done, whether for good, bad, or indifferent. Then you look around and say, ‘What’s left? What else did I need to get around to?’”

  “OK, I could see that,” Adam allowed. “But why attack the Canadian border? You know if they’d wanted to, they could have simply driven through that border crossing today in peace.”

  I grinned. “They’d have to give up their weapons to do it.”

  Adam grinned wryly in return. “Well, yeah. And on second thought, I’m not so sure the Canadians would have let them in. If I were Canada, I wouldn’t want to take refugees from the American health care fiasco.”

  “Agreed.” I shrugged again. “Maybe the gran caravan just wants to make a big noise. Say ‘I matter, and this is not OK,’ as loudly as they can. Or maybe they want to keep the Quebec border open. Or, force it closed early, with certain people successfully caught on the wrong side. I don’t know.”

  What I did know was a bit too specific to share. Deanna Jo’s squelched research included an investigation into this social movement. When a gran caravan staged an assault like this, there were usually demands. The demands might involve freedom, opening the borders, health care, banning the arks, or something else.

  But they generally weren’t demands that the people attacked could grant. A demonstration like this was staged theater. Civil disobedience was the point.

  As we entered the fine town of Swanton Vermont, population 6,000, I offered Adam three choices for our route back to Burlington. We could continue for more of Route 7, try rejoining I-89, or head out to the islands in Lake Champlain for some scenery.

  “You don’t sound too happy about I-89,” he observed.

  “I think all those men with the uniforms and guns are garrisoned closer to Burlington,” I replied. “That’s what interstates were originally for. Mobilizing troops quickly.”

  “Well, you went to school here. Does Route 7 ever get more interesting?”

  So far Route 7 featured plenty of trees punctuated by winter fields of stubble, and a smattering of Vermont-standard black-spotted white cows. Scenic, but repetitive. That was pretty much the standard scenery all the way down to Massachusetts.

  “I went to school here, and no one ever mentioned Route 7. There are some national parks out on the islands.”

  Adam considered this. “So, more trees, fewer cows. If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon get back to Burlington faster. Let’s try I-89 again. Unless you’re going to threaten to jump out of the car again.”

  “Not right this moment,” I said sweetly. I reserved the right to change my mind later.

  But in the event, the I-89 entrance ramps were blocked off in Swanton, both north and south-bound. We pulled into a gas station at the intersection to use the facilities and buy snacks.

  Adam was already interviewing the cashier in the store by the time I made it in.

  “Army did that, about a half hour ago,” the beefy teenager supplied at the checkout counter. “None of them came in. Don’t know why they did it. Accident, maybe.”

  “Have you heard anything about Route 7 down to Burlington? Or Route 78 out to the islands?”

  The teenager shrugged. He jerked his head to indicate the orange sawhorses across the nearest entrance ramp, visible out the store window. “That was the only excitement today. Been pretty slow. It’s 8 dollars for the gallon water jug.”

  That last was directed at me. I nodded thanks and continued roaming the sparsely populated shelves. There was only one free-standing aisle left, plus the refrigerated wall. All the freezers were powered off, along with half the refrigerators. Even with the diminished capacity, there was still plenty of empty between the neatly spaced cold items for sale, mostly from local dairies. I considered, and decided against, pre-packaged egg salad sandwiches on wheat, vegetable-free. No telling how old the mayonnaise might be in those. On the open shelves, the usual candy and chips sections were missing, along with almost everything else. Having reviewed all the options, I joined Adam with nothing but the water jug and a sliced round sourdough boule loaf that felt fairly fresh.

  The teenager charged us 10 dollars for the bread, and added 2 dollars each for using the bathrooms.

  Before we got underway again, I unpacked some dried strawberries I brought along for driving snacks, and our selection of three cheeses. Adam supplied refillable coffee cups from Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts, and a clever hand-held cheese slicing tool he’d picked up at the flea market. Compared to what we’d hoped for in Montreal, it was a bare little meal. Then again, it was Thanksgiving week. We were hardly starving. And the sourdough bread turned out to be surprisingly good.

  “Navigator, I fancy islands,” announced Adam, as he turned back toward downtown Swanton.

  “A lovely choice. But fair warning, it’s longer that way,” I said.

  Adam shrugged. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to Montreal. Might as well take the scenic route.”

  “Islands it is.”

  The ride was a little prettier, following the Mississquoi River, through a national wildlife refuge. The first ‘island,’ Alburg, was actually a headland that jutted down from Canada. As we turned south again on Route 2, signs reiterated what we’d already seen advertised on I-89 – the border crossings here were already closed, both to Canada and to New York state. In fact, Route 2 thataway was barricaded off with the orange sawhorses I was suddenly growing very tired of.

  “I think there’s an ark up there,” Adam murmured.

  I looked back over my shoulder, trying to see what would make him think so. “Seems like a good place for one. I guess.”

  He gave me a quick glance and a smile. “It’s the housing along the road. Every place we’ve passed seems to have new construction or renovations, fresh paint, new outbuildings. Have you seen new construction anywhere else on this tr
ip?”

  “No,” I agreed, looking at the rare buildings with fresh eyes as we passed them. “I guess I always thought of an ark as being closed in from the atmosphere.”

  He nodded. “The main facilities would be sealed. But outside the ark they’d have a military and agricultural buffer zone. Sort of like farm villages scattered around a medieval castle. They can go out to tend the fields and fight off any attackers, and take refuge part-time inside the ark if the air is bad. Or if they’re injured, or put their children inside the ark for safety, and so on.”

  “Serfs. Soldiers, volunteering to be peasants?”

  Adam nodded slowly. “It’s their way into an ark. Sort of.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be irate at the idea of ark-serfs, or annoyed that I’d never heard of this job opportunity. Not that I had any experience soldiering. I’d never even fired a gun. “Is that how it is with your ark?” My voice betrayed a touch of the irate.

  “No. My ark is… different.”

  I didn’t get to follow up this intriguing comment right away.

  Adam stopped the car just before the Route 2 bridge across to the next island, North Hero. Four men in Army camouflage fatigues with helmets, goggles, and submachine guns stood blocking the road.

  A sign to the right read Albert Dunes State Park. Behind it stretched a long line of RV’s. We’d found the rest of the gran caravan.

  -o-

  We were taken to their immediate leader in Adam’s own car. The distance was an easy walk, but the guard grabbed the chance to drive the Tesla. His sidekick enjoyed simply sitting in one, though he only got to sit backwards and point a gun at us in the back seat. The guys were still in a grand mood as they marched away after delivering us, thumping each other on the back and joking around. They looked to be maybe 30 years old, maybe less.

  The leader had emerged from an RV when they knocked for him. He was maybe 45, pleasantly handsome, lean and square-faced, with a shaggy brown mane and large glasses, wearing a light blue hospital scrub top over thick unbleached thermal shirt, paired with blue jeans and hiking boots. He took our keys and put them in his pocket with a shrug.