“What happened to them?” the boy’s tone was inflected with a mix of curiosity and intrigue.
Bill shrugged and held his hands out in a lamenting gesture of helplessness. “They were left to fend for themselves,” he said. “Nursing homes and hospitals were abandoned – there was no other choice. Evacuation was simply impossible – the infection spread too quickly. The highways were choked with cars and trucks, and in the warzones it became simply survival of the fittest… every man, woman and child for themselves. An entire generation of our elderly were torn from their children and grandchildren, and never heard from again.”
He paused then for the longest time, frowning and uncertain. “There is a video…” he said hesitantly, and broke off again, grappling with some internal struggle. He glanced sideways at the man who had been lured closer and made curious by the tone of indecision. The man drew himself up stiffly, his expression forthright. “We’d like to see it,” he said.
The tour guide pulled the man aside, tugging at his elbow, and lowering his voice conspiratorially. “It’s confronting,” he cautioned.
“Graphic?” the man frowned.
“Emotional,” the tour guide shook his head. “It’s a video that was recovered after the apocalypse had swept through Phoenix.”
The man’s lips pressed into a tight thin line. “Show it,” he insisted.
Bill succumbed, and went to a wheeled partition against the wall. He turned the board around to show a television monitor and then motioned for the man and boy to sit on a small hardwood bench. The lights dimmed and Bill retreated to the far side of the room as though to put physical space between him and the screen.
For several seconds the monitor was a hiss of grey noise and static, and then the haze dissolved into an image of an elderly lady, sitting stiffly in a living room sofa chair. Behind her hung neat velvet drapes across a sunlit window, and beside the chair was a small side-table with a silver-framed photograph of a laughing child with her hair braided into pigtails.
For several seconds the elderly lady looked into the camera lens, carefully composing herself. Her hands were clasped in her lap, her knees pressed together and her feet flat on the floor. She was perched delicately on the edge of the seat as though to bring herself closer to the camera. She smiled then, a trembling frail little thing that hung at the corner of her lipsticked mouth for just a few seconds before the forced happiness in her expression began to waver.
“Hello, Bonnie,” the old lady said in a croak of tremulous breath. “This is grandma, honey.” She smiled again and blew a kiss. “I love you my baby girl,” the words became anguished and all pretense of poise fell away in a brief wrenching sob. The woman held up her trembling hand as if to hide her face from the screen, and dabbed urgently at her rheumy eyes. There were tears there, clinging to her lashes like drops of morning dew. The elderly lady sniffed delicately and let out a shuddering breath.
“I’m sorry I can’t be with you, Bonnie,” the old lady forced cheerfulness into her voice. “And I’m so sorry that grandma won’t be there any more to hold your hand and smother you in special hugs. But I love you.” She shuddered, her frail pale hands fluttering in her lap like trapped doves, and it seemed for a long moment that she might not continue. But then she closed her eyes, and straightened her back. She was barely holding herself together, the cracks in her composure showing in the way her lip trembled and the struggle to find the words to express all that she felt and all that she was about to lose. “I know you will have fun at the camp, honey. You’ll have so many new friends… “her voice choked off and she looked away for an instant. When she turned back to the camera her voice was a heartbreaking whisper as if her last words would take all the strength she had left. One of her feeble hands clasped to her throat. “I love you sweetheart. Always. I love you with all my broken heart.”
The film cut to black, but for a long time no one in the room moved. It was as if the elderly lady’s pain had spilled through the screen and cut across time, leaving them all with a profound burden of sadness. At last they felt the need to break the spell. The boy got numbly to his feet and stood in silence for a long moment, and then at last he turned away solemnly, and his darkened hollow eyes fastened on the two wooden display cases by the door. The man wandered in the other direction, walking with his hands clasped behind his back, stopping to peer closely at a faded yellow letter or a photograph, before moving on again.
Bill drifted into the center of the room, standing quietly, giving the man and the boy a few minutes to absorb the enormity and significance of what they had witnessed before he continued.
“Each of the refugee camps housed many thousands of women and children,” he said, his voice still gruff. “In most instances, government buildings were hastily converted – institutions such as high schools and military bases. In less favorable situations and locations, the refugee camps were just sprawling tent cities with limited sanitation facilities where food and water supplies had to be convoyed in by a fleet of trucks each week. When the convoys were delayed by snow or rain… the situation became desperate.”
From the door leading into the next exhibition, a janitor appeared with a step-ladder in one hand. He came into the room like a student who had arrived late for a class, nodding hushed apologies to the tour guide. He was a black man in his forties or fifties, the dark crop of his tight curly hair frosted grey at the temples, and the faintly amiable expression on his face like something precious that had lost its luster. He was wearing a shapeless grey uniform, and there was a wad of greasy rags stuffed into the back pocket. He acknowledged the man and the boy with a polite smile, and then set the step-ladder beneath a burned out light bulb in the ceiling. When he had replaced the bulb, the janitor discreetly left the room again, never having uttered a word.
The man watched the janitor slip out of the room, and then turned back to a mass of letters that had been pinned to a partition like a collection of butterflies. The colors of the pages were a rainbow, each one covered with the awkwardly formed letters of children’s handwriting.
They were grubby and creased, sprinkled with sparkling glitter and signed with crayoned love hearts and kisses. They were addressed to ‘mommy and daddy’ – kids writing in simple messages of hope and hurt around yellow colored drawings of the sun, and the Stars and Stripes.
The man heard the tour guide’s soft footsteps and he glanced over his shoulder. Bill’s expression was desperately sad. He made a crumpled face. “Tens of thousands of letters like these were written by the children that the government evacuated to the refugee camps,” he explained, “but not one of them was ever delivered. It was impossible, of course. There was no postal service, nor anyone left at home for the letters to even be delivered to. We salvaged these, and the ones on the other side of the display. The rest were destroyed.”
The man peered around the edge of the partition and saw the other letters. These were darker, the language more mature, the images recalled from dark nightmares. There were disfigured drawings of zombies, pages covered in penciled red splatters, and sketches of soldiers lying dead in fields of tall grass.
Bill looked helpless. “For generations we told our children that monsters were things of their imagination,” he said bitterly. “But they were real, after all.”
The man said nothing.
Standing by one of the wooden display cabinets, the boy was peering down through the glass at a large ledger, the pages yellowed and stained, the ink of the writing faded. The heavy book was propped at an angle on a stand like an ancient biblical relic. Scattered around the book, filling the rest of the display space, were small cards, each the shape and size of a businessman’s calling card. The tour guide went to stand unobtrusively beside the boy and waited for him to look up.
“That was the way the administrators at each of the refugee camps kept a record of their arrivals,” Bill explained. “There was no power, no computers networks, so the name of everyone sent north was registered in a led
ger like that one. For adults, the process was simple, but for children it was infinitely more complicated. Some of them didn’t recall their address, some did not know their full name… and some had been so traumatized by the horrors they had seen that they did not even speak.”
Bill pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the cabinet. The glass door swung open soundlessly and he reached for the ledger, handling it with precious care. He flipped through the pages, and the boy noted the changes of handwriting style, becoming more truncated and ragged the further into the book the guide went, as though the writing had become rushed, more urgent and overwhelmed.
“No child on those early trains sent north was allowed to board without complete identification papers,” Bill went on, as if he were talking to the faded yellow pages. “But by the time they arrived at the camps, tired and frightened, many were unable to be identified. The administrators gave them new names… which made it impossible for them to be found when the first convoys of parents were later permitted to be evacuated.”
Bill placed the ledger carefully back in its cabinet, and re-locked the glass door. He straightened slowly, pausing when he was at eye level with the boy, their faces close, and his voice became suddenly quiet but pointed.
“Only eighteen percent of all children evacuated to one of the northern refugee camps were ever re-united with their parents,” he said gravely. “Most parents were killed in the apocalypse, others were sent to different camps… you’re lucky. You know your father, and he has been a part of your life.”
The boy said nothing.
* * *
At the door that lead to the next exhibition area, Bill hesitated once more.
“You’ve seen glimpses of what it was like to be evacuated north to a refugee camp,” he said. “The next display will give you some sense of what it was like to live daily life in one of these tent cities.” He paused and held up a cautionary finger. “Nothing you are about to see has been romanticized. The museum aims to depict every aspect of apocalypse life, and how it affected our troops and our citizens. This next area is authentic, based on photographic records, and, most importantly, real-life recollections.”
He pushed the door open and the man and the boy were suddenly standing in dirt and gravel once more – a thin layer spread over the hard concrete of the museum’s floor. Tiny tendrils of dust kicked up off the man’s boots. There seemed so much to take in that for a moment he stood on the threshold, his eyes flicking everywhere at once. Beside him, the boy shrank into a little silence. They stood together, overwhelmed for several seconds.
The floor space for the exhibit was large, spread around a centerpiece of four canvas tents; two standing on each side of a narrow dirt path that ran in a straight line across to a far exit door. The tents were box-like shapes, each ten feet wide, maybe twelve feet long, and about six feet high at the pitched peak. They were made of ragged and patched canvas, and each had a hanging flap that covered gauzed windows and allowed ventilation. The tents had an air of sagging unloved neglect, spattered with mud and dappled with dust.
In front of one of the tents lay an open fire pit, encircled by rocks. The ashes were black, the rocks grimy with soot, and across the opposite side of the narrow dirt path, the guy ropes of the facing tent were strung with tattered clothes, washed and hung to dry. The man stared wide-eyed, and then slowly those displays at the edges of the room came into focus.
At each corner stood a wall-mounted monitor and before it a hard little bench. Behind the tents were piles of trash and litter, stacked like the garbage accumulated in a dark city alley. The man crinkled his nose. There was no smell of refuse – in fact the air had the faint odor of antiseptic. He walked slowly closer to the arrangements of tents with the boy drifting in stilted steps behind him, stoic and silent, rigid with smothered emotion, and his eyes darkly troubled.
“The filth that accumulated in camps such as these could not be avoided,” the tour guide explained. “Sanitation services were mostly non-existent, and there was no sewerage. Usually the camps had latrine pits dug away from the tents, but they were far from ideal circumstances to contain the constant looming threat of disease. What you see displayed here are resin replicas of those things that cannot be recreated; the rubbish, the rats, the decomposing corpses of stray kittens and dogs… all those things have been replicated. The broken glass, the fragments of porcelain and bottles are real – so keep your boots on.” He smiled briefly, and without any humor. The man nodded distractedly. He felt himself being drawn by a morbid fascination towards the four tents, as though his feet moved without conscious volition.
The closest tent was covered in dark cloth patches, each crudely hand-sewn, as if the fabric of the canvas had been worn threadbare. The front flaps were tied back, and he stood at the entry for a long moment, peering into the gloom before finally ducking his head and stepping inside. The distinctive odor of canvas filled his nostrils, underlined by a pronounced mustiness – making the air stale and thick to breath.
The floor of the tent was a tangle of rumpled and mismatched bed sheets and coarse blankets, littered with a child’s tattered bundles of clothes. From a hook screwed into one of the tent’s upright posts hung a lantern. There was nothing else – nothing at all. The tent felt cramped and full, yet contained nothing other than those things essential for warmth and light. He saw no belongings – not even a photograph. It was impersonal, and infinitely sad.
The man squatted down amongst the soiled bed linen and closed his eyes, trying to visualize the life of a young woman, perhaps with a baby, living in a camp, existing with no hope, no future. He imagined the cloying dread of the unknown, the ever-present fear of food and water shortages… of a child playing amongst the rats and the filthy refuse – and the weight of it seemed to come down upon his shoulders as a heavy burden of guilt. He got to his feet, his bones suddenly made old and impossibly weary, and went quickly out through the open flaps to stand back under the artificial light of the exhibition space.
It felt as if he had been drenched in despair.
The tour guide recognized the man’s pallid expression, the drawn anguish on his face.
“Each tent here reflects the lives of those people who endured as a refugee,” he said gently. “They’re all the same, but in their own way, each is different.”
The man only half-heard. He went numbed and dazed across the narrow dirt path and ducked manfully into the next tent.
It was as the tour guide had warned – the same sadness, the same sense of squalid desperation that seemed to saturate the thin canvas fibers of the walls. But the touches were different. Here the bed sheets were neatly folded and arranged to make two narrow mattresses on the hard ground, and there was a small cardboard suitcase, its sides buckled, scuffed and torn, standing on its end like a piece of makeshift furniture. Stacked on the narrow space lay an unopened can of soup, a bottle of water, a plastic comb and a small round mirror. The man caught a glimpse of his reflection and barely recognized the gaunt haggard face that peered back. He looked around the tent suddenly feeling guilty, as though he were intruding – as though at any moment the occupant of this grim little space might come back through the flap and scream at him in fear.
He went out into the light and circled the tent slowly, stepping over the dirty sagging guy ropes and pegs. At the rear corner of the tent he saw a rat gnawing at the canvas, and for an instant he stared in wide-eyed shock. The creature had been rendered so lifelike he blinked in surprise. There were more of them – at least a dozen other sculpted rats amidst a pile of discarded food scraps and communal waste that had been carelessly discarded. The man circled the open earthen pit and shook his head heavily. He could imagine the swarms of disease-spreading flies that would have been thick in the summer air, and the nauseating reek as the refuse had decomposed. He shuddered.
The boy was sitting stiffly on a wooden bench before a monitor in one corner of the room. The man could see a grainy color video footage playing across th
e screen and as he drifted closer, the boy must have sensed his nearness. He turned, his eyes simmering, his face darkly clouded and then sprung to his feet. The boy left the man standing there and went to another monitor.
The man sat down. On the screen flashed the image of a young mother sitting cross-legged in front of a tent. She sat in the dirt, the hem of her long ragged dress rucked up around her knees. She was nursing a baby, with a shawl modestly draped over her shoulder. The woman’s head hung lowered, fussing quietly over the infant, and then she slowly lifted her eyes to the camera and a tendril of lank fringe hung down across her face. Through the veil of hair her eyes were hollow empty holes, gouged out by suffering and despair and hopelessness. The cheeks of the woman’s face were sunken, the flesh drawn tight and thin across the bone, her lips flaked and cracked. She stared vacantly at the cameraman, listless and lethargic, as though even to smile required more effort than she had strength for. Beside the woman, squatting bare-legged and grubby, sat a girl, perhaps three years old. The eyes in the face of the child were enormous – too big for the sad little face. She was sobbing fretfully, slumped against her mother’s side while the air buzzed with swarming flies.
The video image cut to a wide shot, showing hundreds and hundreds of similar tents lined into rows, the sky thick with tendrils of languid smoke from the cooking fires that hung limp in the air, and over the image was laid snatches of audio recordings, each a different voice of misery and wretched despair.
Brink of Extinction Page 11
