by Patten, Sean
“They were,” she said. “But then I let it slip that I’d done occasional assistant-nursing duty at the school. Turns out that was enough ‘medical experience’ to put me to work in the infirmaries.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“What?” she asked, with a faint smile. “You don’t think I’ve got what it takes?”
“Not that,” I said. “More that Lambert must already be stretched thin with doctors if he’s been putting part-time school nurses to work.”
“You’re right about that,” she said. “And it just didn’t stop—people coming in and coming in and what few actual doctors we had putting in eighteen-hour shifts just to take a quick nap and do it again. I think the only reason they let me go was that I was getting in the way.”
I gestured to the book, which looked to be some kind of airport thriller.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
The color drained from her face.
“One of the patients had it… He didn’t make it. I figured he wouldn’t miss it.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Must’ve been hell.”
“Yeah. A hell I’m going back to bright and early tomorrow,” she said, opening the cardboard flap of the rations pack and sliding out the contents.
She began to peel back the top, but stopped midway as if something had occurred to her.
“Lambert,” she said. “That’s the name we heard at the processing station, right? The guy in charge?”
“Shit,” I said. “Almost forgot to tell you about the day I had.”
“I’m all ears,” she said.
I went into it, starting with the pipe break and everything that happened after. I told her about my meeting with Lambert, about the position he’d offered me, and about his plan—or lack thereof—for the camp. Kelly nibbled on her canned tuna as I spoke, hanging on my every word.
“Wow,” she said. “You got a meeting with the big man. And it sounds like he was really impressed with you.”
“Something like that,” I said. “For all I know he’s getting every man or woman who knows how to use a wrench into his office to butter them up and get them on board with this plan of his.”
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t sell yourself short like that. You’re smart and good with your hands and more than capable.”
God, I hated to admit it, but Kelly saying “good with your hands” got me thinking about other contexts in which that phrase would fit. I pushed the thought out of my head as quickly as I could. No sense in making things even more complicated than they were.
“Thanks,” I said. “But…I don’t know.”
“About what?”
“About Lambert. Don’t get me wrong—he seems like a good man, and I didn’t doubt him for a second when he told me that he wanted to make this place a safe haven for whoever wanted it to be. But I don’t know if he’s going to be able to pull it off.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s already stretched to capacity. God knows what’s going to happen when tens of thousands more people show up wanting food and medicine and clean drinking water. It’s going to be more than anyone can handle, no matter how determined or capable they are.”
“But you want to do it,” she said. “You want to help out.”
I glanced up from my food.
“How do you know?”
“Come on,” she said. “You don’t think I can read you like this trashy book?”
She tapped the cover of the paperback. “I know you’ve dreamed of being in the military since you were a kid. And now here comes someone to give you a shot at it.”
“Wouldn’t officially be military,” I said. “Just a support capacity.”
“But I’m right, aren’t I?”
I sighed. “You’re right. I’m thinking about it. More than thinking about it, really. I want to do it.”
She regarded me for several moments, as if trying to decide exactly what she thought about the whole thing.
“Say it,” I said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Kelly set down her rations and spoke.
“It’s just that…I get it. I get that you want to help, and I get that you want to have some kind of chance to be a part of the military. I get it. I really do.”
“But?” I asked.
“But…” she started. “We’ve got enough going right now. I mean, even when we find Steve we’re going to need to get right back on the plan we had before, finding a way out of the city and then actually making it to New Mexico. I know your heart’s in the right place, but this all just seems like another entanglement that’s going to make doing what we need to do even more difficult.”
She had a point. If Lambert was going to be giving me more responsibility, that meant less time to look for Steve.
“But I might get plugged in,” I said. “I’ll likely have access to information that could let me know where Steve is. Lambert told me that if he wasn’t at one of the med stations, he was probably taken to a hospital around twenty minutes’ drive from here.”
“Seriously?” she asked. “Then we need to go there as soon as we can.”
“How?” I asked. “Leave the camp and walk there? I know this isn’t the best situation in the world, but at least we’re safe for the moment. We’ve got food, water, shelter—”
“For now,” she said.
“For now,” I conceded. “I just think this is the best chance we’ve got. For staying alive, and for finding Steve. And if things get bad, we can always leave.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll stick around for now. Just as long as you’re going to be ready and willing to cut and run if we need to.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely. Finding Steve and getting the hell out of here are the only things that matter.”
“Good,” she said, even as she gave me a look that suggested she didn’t know whether or not she entirely believed me. I knew that look—I’d seen it more than a few times over the years.
We finished our food in silence before getting ready for bed. Minutes later we were lying next to each other as we had been the night before.
And just like the night before, Kelly curled up next to me.
This time, though, I wasn’t sure she did it without thinking.
Chapter 9
Three days later
“Easy!”
My voice cut through the work site, getting the attention of the nearest handful of crew members. I didn’t want their attention, though—I wanted them to focus on the job.
“Together!” I said. “One of you sets that thing down first you’re gonna throw it out of balance. And believe me, a few hundred pounds of steel landing on your foot isn’t the way you want to earn a few days off work!”
The men turned their attention back to the pipe in their hands, apparently now realizing that this wasn’t a matter to screw around with.
“Slow!” I called out once they were in position. “Eyes on each other. Set it down…down…”
They did as I asked, gently lowering the pipe into the ditch they’d dug for it the previous hour. Relief hit me the moment they had it down and I saw that none of them had been injured in the process. A smashed hand was the land thing anyone needed at a time like this. With the situation at the infirmaries as dire as it had been, slicing the hand off and hoping for the best would likely be a better option.
One of the refugee workers turned towards the setting sun, the brilliant orange from the light mixing with the swirling white wisps of clouds.
“We done yet, boss?” he asked, his hands on the small of his back as he leaned backward.
I considered the matter. We still had a good hour left until the sun went down completely. That meant one more hour closer to finishing the sewer system project I’d been supervising for the last few days.
But the men looked rough. Most of the guys on the thirty-man crew had been soft-bellied office types up until the power went out. Physical labor like this would be a tall order even if they ha
d a nice, air-conditioned house with a TV and a fridge full of beer to come home to at the end of the day.
I stared at the man who’d asked for a moment or two, letting him know that as the supervisor, the matter was my call to make, not his. Tough to balance making sure morale was high with not giving every complainer what he wanted. One of the many things I’d been learning since I’d taken the position.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s call it a day.”
Several of the men let out loud sighs of relief. I didn’t blame them one bit—we’d been at the damn thing since morning.
“Get back home and get some rest,” I said. “Be ready bright and early tomorrow. Remember, Esperanza isn’t going to build itself!”
None of the men looked too thrilled at that. But like me, they knew there weren’t any other options. We were already far, far behind where we needed to be with the infrastructure of the camp—which was looking more like a shantytown by the day—and each day fresh arrivals continued to pour into the already overcrowded grounds. The sewer system was going to go a long way in making conditions better for a good chunk of one of the tent cities, but it was only a very small drop in a very large bucket.
I’d tried to motivate the men with the same sort of talk that Lambert has used to get me on board—talk of turning Esperanza into a place worthy of its name. How years from now people might look back on Esperanza as one of the few beacons of civilization in a world plunged into darkness.
It all ended up sounding better in my head than it did coming out of my mouth. Most of the men weren’t all that concerned about being a shining city on the hill or whatever big talk I’d served them up. Most of them were more worried about making their family’s bellies were full at the end of the day and that they could through the night without sleeping in shifts. And I couldn’t blame them.
I watched the men shuffle off the work site, a few soldiers coming in to make sure that they had their papers. The paper checks had been getting more and more common over the last couple days—not to mention rougher. And I’d heard stories of some troops taking the law, or what was left of it, into their own hands and ejecting some refugees who hadn’t had their papers on them. Just throwing them out on their asses into the middle of the desert, no care to who they were leaving behind.
All rumors, of course. But I’d seen with my own eyes how rough the troops had been getting, and how they hadn’t been hesitating to raise their guns at refugees who they felt had gotten a little too close to their personal bubbles. This was all against Lambert’s orders, of course—the general favored more of a soft touch. But over the last few days I could almost feel the chain of command breaking down as more of the troops seemed to sense the camp was becoming well stretched past its capacity.
As I walked back to the tent, I took in the scene, noting how things had gotten worse with each passing day. Tents had long been filled to capacity, and it was only my position as one of Lambert’s hand-picked supervisors that allowed me and Kelly to still have our private accommodations. But I wondered how long this was going to last—I could almost feel the envious eyes of the families stuffed into the tents around us.
I headed down the long central road of the main campgrounds, nicknamed “Main Street,” both as a practical name and as an ironic nod to some kind of Main Street USA road that it was most certainly not. The sick and the homeless lined the roads, some of them reaching up to me as I walked past, hoping for some kind of handout, others too tired to even bother with that. The soldiers moved them every morning, but by sundown the streets would be packed again. It was like pushing back the tide with a broom.
Beyond the fences of the main camp grounds, tents and other makeshift shelters stretched as far as the eye could see, all cast in the silvery sheen of the rising moonlight, dozens and dozens of fires cracking among them. It was so calm it was eerie, and all I could think about when I looked out on the tens of thousands of refugees was how long it would be able to hold like this before something gave.
And something would.
I stepped into the tent to see Kelly sprawled out on the mattress, staring up at the ceiling, a vacant expression on her face—one that seemed to be the default for the refugees at Esperanza.
After kicking off my shoes I sat down on the bed, Kelly not moving an inch.
“Hey,” I said. “You all right?”
She continued to stare up above, and for a moment I worried that she’d gone catatonic on me. But after a long, slow breath, she turned her head and looked up at me.
“You ever seen Gone with the Wind?” she asked.
“Huh?” I asked, confused.
“You know,” she said. “The biggest movie of all time.”
“I know of the movie,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it.”
“You’d know if you had,” she said. “It’s incredible. I’m surprised I never made you watch it.”
“You know I’m more of an ’80s-action-flick type,” I said.
“True.”
“Why are you asking about that?” I asked.
Her brow furrowed.
“The hospital today,” she said. “It was…it was bad.”
I nodded. “I can only imagine.”
“There was this scene in the movie where Scarlett’s working at one of those makeshift Civil War hospitals and it’s totally barebones, just men on stretchers screaming out in pain from stab wounds and gunshots and whatever else.”
Already I could sense what she was getting at.
“And then one of the doctors comes over to a patient, tells him that his hand’s infected and it has to go. The patient starts screaming and crying, and just when you think it couldn’t get any worse for him, the doctor tells the nurse they they’re out of anesthetic and they’re going to have to take it off without it.”
My gut tightened. Kelly sighed and went on.
“One of the workers got brought in today after having an accident on one of the work sites. A piece of equipment fell over onto him, pinned him down by the leg.”
“Shit,” I said. “Bad?”
She shook her head, as if still in disbelief.
“His leg was…ruined. No way to save it, probably even if we had the best equipment in the world and the electricity was still on. Thing had to come off. And we’d run out of any kind of painkiller aside from aspirin this morning.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“His…his screams,” she said. “I’m never going to forget them. And the guy, he was barely out of his teens.”
I reached over and took her hand and squeezed it.
“Justin,” she said, her tone grave. “We have to leave. We can’t stay here any longer. I know it, and you know it.”
“But the work…”
“There’s too much of it,” she said. “I know you want to help, and so do I. But this place isn’t being built up—it’s the opposite. It’s like a slowly collapsing building that we need to get clear of before it falls down on top of us.”
Part of me knew she was right. It felt good to be a part of what Lambert was trying to do, to actually be using my skills to help. But there was just too much work to be done.
“Tonight,” she said. “We can leave tonight. Grab some rations and leave and…”
“What about Steve?”
“What have we found out about him since we’ve been here?” she asked. “Nothing. Lambert told you he was probably at the hospital, right? We can go there and ask around. At the very least I bet someone could tell us where he went.”
I shook my head. “Staying put is the best chance we have to find him,” I said. “You think that hospital is going to be any less chaotic than the med stations here?”
I could tell by the look on her face that she knew I had a point.
“But they won’t have tens of thousands of refugees packed around them,” Kelly said. “Do you know what I heard from some of the other staff at the infirmary? Gangs—some of the refugees outside the fences
are actually forming gangs and fighting over territory and food and God knows what else. And it’s outside of the fences for now, but you know as well as I do that these soldiers are getting closer to breaking point by the day.”
I’d heard the same rumors. And they made sense—there were only so many troops to go around, and it was only normal that any unpatrolled patch of the refugee camp would find some way to fill the need for order.
“What do you want to do, then?” I said. “Just cut and run?”
Still on her back, she turned her gaze back to the ceiling.
“I hate it,” she said. “I haven’t been able to be much of a help in the infirmary, but I think this place is going to swallow us up if we don’t get out of here soon.”
There was fear in her voice, real fear.
“How about this,” I said. “Tomorrow I talk to Lambert. Tell him that I need some info on Steve.”
“And if he doesn’t have any?”
“Then we figure it out from there. But I feel I need to see if he’s going to fulfill his end of the bargain. God knows the man has enough on his plate that we can forgive him taking a few days.”
She took in a deep breath and let it out.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s just…I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “But we’ll figure it out.”
She rolled over on her side, and almost without thinking I laid back on the bed next to her. Within seconds her body was curled up against mine, and there was no doubt this time as to whether or not she was conscious of what she was doing.
It felt good to have her there like that. And in those last few moments before I drifted off into sleep, all I could think about was how I’d do whatever it took to keep her safe.
Chapter 10
May 15
Lambert was on my mind all through that next morning on the job site. Kelly had been dead right—the general had told me that my helping out would get me more info on Steve, and so far he’d come up short. I knew he was a busy man, but at the very least he owed me some kind of update on what the hell was going on with my brother, or even here at the camp.
