The Refugee Sentinel

by Hayes, Harrison

  “You’re a different person with clothes on.” Colton meant it as a joke but she shot him a tired gaze and a sigh. He led her to his car and she sat in the passenger seat, palms tucked between her knees, like an interrogated person wanting to show she had nothing to hide.

  He started the engine and wondered how she felt after work. Sweaty? Victorious? In the seat next to him, she punched her address in the car’s GPS. If he didn’t want sex, as he had said, why was he driving a stripper to her apartment, instead of sleeping in his own bed… alone? He remembered how Sarah insisted on always saying what was on their minds. She was a scientist and subtleties didn’t fly. In their old world, saying no to sex would have meant having no sex. How low he had fallen without her.

  “You can park in any spot without a number on it,” Maggie said. The tidy residential building glistened on the outside. Colton nestled the car in an opening between two high-end Volkswagens and killed the engine. He looked at Maggie and wanted to say something supportive but the metamorphosis of the girl, since exiting Déjà Vu had left him speechless. If he hadn’t felt her naked body on his, he wouldn’t have guessed the semi-asleep young woman burrowed in his passenger seat was a dancer. Even her tattoos were hidden under jeans and a tee. On the other hand, why was he so eager to stereotype her? What right did a killer of daughters have to judge a stripper?

  He followed her into the apartment and ended in a small kitchen decorated with bunches of dried lavender and colorful clay pots strung on a line over a gas stove. She invited him to sit at a table inside a wall nook and emptied the last of a dusty Johnny Walker bottle between two glasses.

  “So what do you for fun?” he said.

  “I like to study old paintings to find out what the painter had in mind when he created the piece.”

  “Do you paint too?”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “Strippers don’t paint. I just enjoy watching paintings of mayhem. The larger the devastation, the more it draws me in.”

  He smiled. “You should just tune to the news if you want devastation.”

  “Our devastation is boring. Theirs was poetic.”

  Colton scratched his nose. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “Let’s take “The Battle of Waterloo,” for example. I could study it for hours, like a giant Where’s Waldo puzzle. The dying horses, the men impaled by bayonets in isolated skirmishes, the pockets where the hopeless French fight on despite Wellington having already won.” She twirled the shot glass on the table. “Napoleon’s remaining men were like French lavender tossed across an angry British sea, surviving one wave, maybe two, but due to succumb by nightfall.”

  “You have an appreciation for history.”

  “With human history as crazy as is, how could you not?”

  “The fight to save the polar caps today feels like one of your devastation paintings,” he said. “With us being the French, of course.”

  Maggie’s hand massaged the back of her neck. “Look who’s the poet now.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t sound like what you do.”

  “No kidding. I realized I was a good dancer when I was seventeen. My way of being creative, you see.” She took a sip and grimaced at the whiskey’s potency. “And now you’ll ask me how many people I’ve slept with.”

  “I don’t judge you, Maggie.”

  “Yes, you do.” Her quiet words cut off his next sentence. “The only reason you’re here is screw me for a couple of hundred bucks and jerk off in my face, before the door hits your judgmental ass on the way out.”

  “I’m sorry I came.” Colton stood up, unsure where to put his hands. She took them in hers.

  “If I ask you not to judge me, the least I can do is offer the same in return. And stop being so serious, you wouldn’t be here unless I wanted you to be.” She slurped at the last of her whiskey and looked at him. For the first time, Colton didn’t avert her gaze. “Answer me a question, Mr. I-Know-Defiance-Day-Cold.”

  “Who’s making fun of who now?”

  “When everyone votes for someone else to die, wouldn’t everyone die?”

  “Wouldn’t that be a snag,” he said. “And you’d be right, but for the Sacrifice votes.”

  “So what?”

  “So those who receive a Sacrifice will survive Defiance Day. And the future will be populated by silver-spooners. Other than the children, of course. I’m sure you’ll sacrifice for your son.”

  “Lying about being a mom is a part of my gig in the club.”

  Colton smiled. “You’ll make a great mom one day. When you get around to it.” He squeezed her hand, which still held his. She didn’t squeeze back. “This stripper gig you do,” he said. “You’re better than that. If I were fifteen years younger, I wouldn’t need a lap-dance to ask you out.”

  “You’re asking me out?”

  “Sure I am. Let’s do lunch, sometime. You know… as if I were your old and funny uncle or an even older friend.”

  Her hand pulled away. “What if your niece has had four abortions and more failed relationships than she cared to remember?”

  “We’ve all messed up. But we do carry on.”

  “Do me a favor?”

  “What is it?”

  She exhaled. “I want you to kiss me. On the mouth. Like you kissed your ex-wife.”

  “It’s been ages since I kissed anyone. Sarah and I stopped –”

  “On the mouth,” she repeated.

  Colton met her halfway around the kitchen table. He pulled at the tiny waist and kissed her with eyes closed, once. Like he’d kissed Sarah countless times. In this moment, he could swear Sarah’s breath hit his face and his tongue nudged between the gap of her front teeth. Then he opened his eyes and saw Maggie.

  The twenty-four-year-old ran a tongue over the trail of their kiss on her lips. “I should have been born a hundred years earlier…” she said, half to Colton, half to the empty room, “when people had a future to look forward to, instead of this...” Her eyes smiled at him and her hand caressed his hair. “Give me a moment,” she said, turned around and slid out of the room.

  He returned to the table, counting the color pots over the stove. One blue, one green, two yellow… The sound of shattered glass jolted him erect and he rushed out of the kitchen and into the bedroom but Maggie wasn’t there. He went for the only other room in the apartment. He opened the bathroom door and clammy thighs slapped his face. The smell hit him too. Her bleeding knees dangled at chin level, her toes sparkled with orange nail polish she must have put on at Déjà Vu earlier in the night. The sliding shower door, thrashed by her convulsing knees, sprinkled the tiled floor with shards of broken glass. A leather belt looped around the ceiling fan and her neck. Her body spun around. The lips that had kissed him a moment earlier were smattered with blood. Her teeth were ground shut by the unconscious pressure she had applied in her final moment. A bitten-off piece of her tongue, like discarded chewing gum, sat in the pile of glass on the floor. Colton turned to one side and wept.

  two years and one hundred ninety one days till defiance day (12

  It had been months since his hospital discharge, yet Sylvya missed Colton more than she dared imagine. She looked up his Mountain View passport records and was paralyzed to discover he had left Las Vegas. It took calling his former casino employer and role-playing as his personal physician to find out he had moved to Seattle. Seattle made no sense – it was cold and distant and, most of all, flooded. And where did this leave her? Was she going to let him walk? And if she did, how long would it take for her dream to come back to life with another patient? Assuming it could come back, at all. Then her decision formed: all cities needed nurses, most of all the coastal ones. She would peruse the Seattle job boards, get hired by a hospital there and move to the upper-left corner of the continent… for the sake of the dream he had rekindled in her.

  Virginia Mason offered her a nursing position after a single phone interview. She flew with the kids from Las Vegas to SeaTac, th
e last functional northwest airport handling traffic from Boise in the east to San Francisco in the south and every other town in between. Sadie and Dallas were sleeping next to her. It was fortunate that Dallas was asleep on both beverage runs. His new gig was to fill his cheeks with soda and squeal at the bite of the bubbles against the inside of his mouth. The cheeks would stretch, with saliva and pop drooling from his puckered lips, until everything from the inside squirted out.

  She caressed their small heads. What mother would relocate her children to the other side of the continent with weeks to go until Defiance Day? A batch of turbulence shook the cabin and Sylvya let out an unconscious cry drowned by the roar of the engines. She tried to imagine Colton’s reaction to seeing her in Seattle for the first time. Would he lift her off the ground and plant a hot and dry kiss on her lips? Would his unshaven stubble grind her lips into a mush? Would he kiss her forehead and hug her, but not too long, before squatting down to embrace Sadie and Dallas, and with a big smile melt their discomfort that a stranger had kissed their mom in public.

  Another turbulence bump. Sylvya rubbed her bloodshot eyes, squishing a contact lens under her lid, upper or lower – she couldn’t tell. The world became a fuzzy mess on the right but she didn’t care. She was headed to him and that was all that mattered. The thought of him set fire through her veins as powerful as the maternal love for her children. He made her feel the way cancer cells felt about chemotherapy. Bones with cancer lit up the scanners in bright yellow and red; the brighter the colors, the further along the tumors. But several Zometa treatments later, the red would turn into hollow black, filled with dead cells. He was her Zometa. Without him, the desire, unfettered and red, to take care of someone would chew through her until she either died or lost sanity.

  The plane’s wheels thudded on the SeaTac tarmac. Dallas and Sadie woke and started playing slapsies. Sylvya gathered their toys from the faded seats, nostalgic for her own childhood. She would love to play a game of waking up in Colton’s arms and smelling peanuts on his breath.

  She cleared the airport checkpoint without a hiccup thanks to the Virginia Mason nurse-permit. As luck would have it, others from her flight weren’t as prepared. A middle-aged couple with two teenage sons were detained for traveling with forged relocation permits and dispatched to confinement cells until the day of their voting executions. Because of the delay, Sylvya’s group arrived in Seattle after curfew and were forced to spend the night at a ULE detention center until their city permits could be processed the following morning.

  The curfew horn woke Sylvya at eight-thirty-am and she held her breath, despite the sleep deprivation, at the view of Seattle’s majestic skyline flanked by the Cascades against the morning sun. The Puget Sound waters had devoured the city, but the mountains rose proud in the back, impervious to the human hubbub underneath. At noon, their paperwork cleared and the Timmonses were allowed in town. After an hour of navigating through suspension bridges and submerged neighborhoods, they reached the Virginia Mason. Defiance Day had so drained the city of nurses that, in addition to the employment permit, the hospital accommodated the three Timmonses in a rent-free condo downtown.

  The quiet evening found mother and children in a new two-bedroom home with working lights and running water. Soon, the kids’ rhythmic breathing filled the bedroom with calming frequency. Sylvya, too, lay down feeling full. They had a safe home – dare she dream for more? Would it be greedy to wish Colton fell asleep beside her too, for months on end, and years, together with the kids? She knew he’d embrace her the moment they saw each other. Seattle was her American Dream, where she would reinvent herself for him.

  The smell of rot didn’t feel repulsive anymore, the sights of desolated bridges felt temporary, and the ticking bomb of Defiance Day felt like another calendar date to come and go. She felt hopeful. She would claim the person who was hers and help him see life as she did. Sylvya Timmons fell asleep a happy woman.

  seventeen days till defiance day (13

  Natt Gurloskey scanned Seattle’s downtown from the precinct’s twentieth-floor windows and his heart wept. Drowning in the rain, the city had given out and the lives of the fifteen million Seattleites have become barrack lives. This defeat lay in the years before. In the decisions that weren't made and the visions that weren't there. But it was also his fault. This was his city, after all, and it had gone out for good, like a flare at the onslaught of a permanent night. Not the night that gave way to the morning after, but an incurable virus demanding capitulation. Once this virus had moved in, it refused to leave. It turned buildings into mildewy rubble. It took away the oxygen and sunlight, and demanded hope as a hostage, shipping it away somewhere far, never to return again. The night grew thicker with each new inch it captured. First, it took over one street corner, then a second one, then sprawled over to all adjacent alleys. The parts of town that fell under its control forgot what living felt like. The other parts bid their time until its inescapable arrival, assuring themselves they had lived well and that any life, no matter how good, had to end sometime. These were the depths to which Natt’s city had fallen. Except there was no night, but it felt like there was.

  Yet again, Natt hadn’t slept. The three espresso cups he had downed earlier gurgled in his stomach, good for no more than inflaming his gastritis. He had to see the mayor today, sometime before the five-pm curfew, which his police department had imposed on this once vibrant, but now besieged, city. Natt walked on the beaten down linoleum and into the elevator hoping no one else would jump in with him. He disliked strangers. He disliked them even more in proximity. The elevator doors closed in unison with another gastritic salute from his stomach. Someone had scratched a hasty star, to designate where the new lobby was, next to the plastic button for the twelfth floor: vandalism with a pinch of dark humor. Six months ago, the star would have sat next to the tenth-floor button. Six months from now, Gurloskey and whoever else was dumb enough to still live in this dead city would have to move the star higher. The elevator ding startled him. It wasn’t noon yet but he couldn’t keep his eyes open and gave himself a solemn promise to turn in by nine tonight.

  He followed the handmade “Exit” arrows scratched on the walls and ended at what had once been a solid sidewall, now cut out and replaced with the gaping entry of a jet bridge leading to the main suspension bridge outside.

  The rot hit his nostrils as soon as he stepped into the open. Fourth Avenue looked like a Venice canal, only more run-down. The water lapped at awnings and sidewalls, hundreds of feet above the submerged street level. High-rises jutted at crooked angles, like scattered concrete dominos, sunk partway in the sloshing waves. Barnacles covered the walls as high as a foot above the water and soiled sea-foam cuddled along once-functioning windows, now boarded by steel plates. Mayor Mullins had learned from New York’s U-shaped berm and Rotterdam’s seven-hundred-foot floodgates. As a result, Seattle was prepared when Greenland melted. But when the flood stayed, the city started its three-year-long suffering. The outer ocean wall bought some time for Mullins and Gurloskey to erect suspension bridges above the major downtown avenues. But when the wall bowed head to the persistent tidal pressure, whatever lay behind stood no chance. Furniture and computers, carpets and wiring were gone in less than a week. Entire city blocks were submerged to their third floors. The cars parked in the streets drifted in the water, like bobbing apples, and Seattle turned into a ghost town, without electricity, heat or human compassion. The smell of death filled the air as the waters corroded the buildings from within. The city’s seaport, once a proud gateway to Asia’s largest economies, became an oversized and lifeless aquarium.

  This was the flood Gurloskey fought against, set to reclaim his tattered town even if it meant strapping Seattle on his back and pulling it away from the waters of the Puget Sound. He imposed a night curfew, growing in perimeter and time with each passing week. He dispersed the crowds of protesters that had been picketing for months. He converted banks into prisons and filled them with
looters. Without search warrants, he barreled into residences within ten miles of the flooded downtown, confiscating any firearms his cops could lay hands on. He slept in his office for months without going home, regardless of how tempting it felt to flee to the high suburbs of Woodinville. He hadn’t seen Eaton and Chloe and missed them, but a part of him didn’t mind, because they weren’t supposed to know him like this.

  In time, one slow week after the next, the riots subsided, the night patrols uncovered fewer and fewer dead bodies at dawn, running water was restored to the municipal buildings and several downtown shelters opened for those without a place to call home. People were pulling together, seeing that togetherness was the ticket for survival. Mullins featured his Police Chief in a growing number of video calls with other mayors, dishing proven advice on how Seattle was coping. By the end of the sixth month, to Natt’s exhausted astonishment, it felt like he’d turned the tide on Mother Nature by a creaky inch. By less than an inch. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine life in his city returning to relative normalcy. A new normalcy by any account, but a normalcy anyway. He felt good and more in love with his family and the Seattle he had begun to save.

  Then Antarctica fell and raised the oceans by another two hundred feet.

  sixteen days till defiance day (14

  “Good to hear your voice when I know who I’m hearing,” Colton said and moved the phone from one ear to the other.

  “We’re divorced, Colton.”

  Through the phone line, he wanted to crawl to her, to the woman he’d be drawn to forever because of guilt and adoration, in equal parts. “How have you been, Sarah?”

  “I shouldn’t have called that night…” she cleared her throat. “The ULE Ministry of Science gave me your number and I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “I was relieved to hear from you.”

  “I was in a poor condition.”