A Separate War and Other Stories

  “Almost there,” Jain said from over her shoulder above me. “Headquarters.”

  My foot hit carpeted concrete and I waited for Jain while the others went ahead. “So what’s at headquarters?”

  “Mostly supplies. Some low-tech communications gear. Everything’s nine-volt solar power.”

  It was a large warehouse room with dim lights here and there. Crates of food and water. A child’s crib was a grab bag of miscellaneous cans and boxes; Jain rummaged through it and got a Snickers bar. “Hungry?”

  “No, more like naked. You got clothes down here?” She walked me down a few yards, and there were clothes of all kinds roughly folded and sorted by size. I stepped into some black pants and found a black jersey, a fit combination for my new job as revolutionary turncoat, except for the Bergdorf labels. A fancy outfit to be buried in.

  A tall skinny man walked up and offered his hand. “You’re Lieutenant Drexel?”

  “I don’t think I’m Lieutenant anyone anymore. Ardis.” He was hard to look at. Besides the skin striations from the virus, a face wound had torn a hole in his cheek, exposing his back teeth.

  He nodded. “I’m Wally, more or less in charge of this area. Has Jain filled you in?”

  “Not much. You aren’t actually carriers?”

  “No. We may have been, right after we recovered. People who came in to help us died. We think it was leftover virus from the attack. But what we think doesn’t make any difference.

  “It left us weak. Old people who survived the attack all died in the first year; now people in their fifties and sixties are going the same way. Infections, pneumonia, bronchitis.”

  “Our immune systems are shot,” Jain said. “If we don’t get medical help, we’ll all be dead in a few years.”

  “We don’t really understand what’s going on,” Wally said. “They’ve got hundreds of us out at the Newton Center; we’ve seen them. You’d think by now they’d know that none of us are carrying the disease.”

  “Maybe they wouldn’t know, if they’re really strict about quarantine,” I said.

  “Not all of them are,” Jain said. “The guards wear surgical masks, but we’ve seen some take them off to smoke, even when there were ‘carriers’ around.”

  “Could just be carelessness,” Wally said. “We’re trying to avoid a conspiracy mind-set here.”

  I nodded. “Hard to see how it’s to anybody’s advantage to maintain the status quo. All of Boston shut down needlessly? Who profits?”

  “Who set off the bomb?” Jain asked.

  “Well, we assume—”

  “But we don’t know, right? Has anybody claimed responsibility?”

  “No. Presumably they don’t want to be nuked to glowing rubble.”

  “What if it wasn’t ‘them’? What if it was us?”

  “Jain,” Wally said.

  “Well, the bomb didn’t go off in the business district or Back Bay. It went off in Roxbury, and if it hadn’t been for the wind reversing, you wouldn’t have had one percent white casualties. You don’t like what that implies, Wally, and neither do I, but a fact is a fact.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “Well, they did find what might have been the bomb casing,” Wally said, “in the back of a blown-up truck down in Roxbury. Texas license plates. But there was a lot of that kind of damage in the riots, before everybody was too weak to riot.”

  “I can take you down to see it. Pretty safe. Army doesn’t do much down there.”

  “Nightlights?”

  “Go during the day. We only go out at night to attract attention.”

  We did go out to see it the next day, and I could have made a case for or against Jain’s suspicions. The Texas truck did have a tank in the back that had exploded, but the part that remained attached was identified as LP gas, which it seemed to have been using for fuel. Of course that might have been camouflage for a tank full of the mystery virus; the engine was set up to switch between LP and gasoline.

  The driver had died in the explosion. Jain’s theory for that wasn’t simple suicide, but rather that he had driven around the black neighborhoods for hours, maybe a whole day, releasing the stuff slowly, making sure it would get to its target. He himself would have been one of the first infected. He survived through the initial symptoms, and when he was sure it was working, destroyed the evidence, killing himself.

  You would think a nutcase like that would want people to know who had done it, get his name in the history books, but they don’t always. The Oklahoma City bombing when I was a kid, and the St. Louis Arch.

  Anyhow, my job wasn’t to explain anything, but just to demonstrate. For that, I only had to stay alive.

  After the first symptomless day, I was pretty sure. They wanted me to stay with them for a couple of weeks, to prove their point beyond a shadow of a doubt, which was no problem. I moved in with Jain, and we sort of picked up where we’d left off. She looked a little different, but it wasn’t her looks that had attracted me to her.

  And instead of the walk-up in Roxbury, we were living in a three-million-dollar suite overlooking the Charles. We could even have taken the twelfth-floor penthouse, but under the circumstances that wouldn’t be practical. Without elevators, it was still a walk-up, and we had to carry all our water up from the river.

  It was not a typical lovers’ reunion. So much of the catching up was about the horrors she had survived and my own less dramatic horror of watching martial law and paranoaic isolationism erode the American way of life.

  Or maybe this nightmare was the real America, stripped of cosmetic civilization. What my mother had called the Reaganbush jungle, the moneyed few in control, protecting their fortunes at any social cost. That was Jain’s party line, too.

  But the people who owned this huge suite would probably like to have it back. The Brahmins who owned Boston would definitely like it back.

  And every day I remained uninfected made the situation more mysterious. Who was profiting from this big lie?

  We would find out. In a way.

  The mechanics of the exposé had to be a little roundabout. We couldn’t just go on television and do a tell-all show. There were plenty of stations in Boston, but nobody knew the equipment well enough to juryrig it to work with our low-voltage sun power, or even knew whether it was possible.

  It was easy enough to make a disk, though, a home video of uninfected me surrounded by survivors, telling my story and theirs. Then we made about a hundred copies of the disk and had them tossed over the fence all around the border of the infected area. Even if no civilians found them, guards would, and it would be easy for them to verify from military records that I was who I said I was.

  Four people died in the process of trying to distribute the disks. Well, they were weapons of a sort. Against the status quo.

  A couple of days after that, Jain and I were sitting at home reading, when I heard the whining sound of a track decelerating outside. I looked through the dirty window and it was Track Number Seven, my old one.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jain said. There was an escape route through a duct in the basement.

  “You go,” I said. “I think they want to talk.”

  “Yeah, they wanna talk.” She grabbed my arm. “Go!”

  I shook her off. “They know I’m here. If they wanted to hurt me they could have dropped one artillery round in our lap.”

  “You trust them?”

  “They’re just people, Jain.” The doors of the track opened and three armored soldiers came out.

  “People, shit.” I heard her bare feet slapping down the stairs and fought the urge to follow her.

  The three came up the outdoor steps, and I opened the door for them. They filed inside without a word.

  One had captain’s bars. When they were all in the living room he said, “This is her?”

  “Yeah. That’s her.”

  “Mark,” I said. He turned around and left.

  The captain grabbed one arm a
nd then the other, and pinioned me. “Let’s do it.”

  The other had red crosses on each shoulder. He or she pulled a syringe out of a web-belt pocket.

  There was a huge explosion, and the medic went down, hard. The captain let go of me and spun around. Jain was standing at the top of the basement steps with an 11-mm. Glock. She and the captain fired at the same time. He hit her in the center of the chest. Her blood spattered the wall behind her and she was dead before she started to fall.

  Her bullet staggered him, but the armor worked, and he recovered before I had time to do more than scream. He punched me in the side of the head and I collapsed.

  He hauled me roughly to my feet. “Medic. Get the fuck up.”

  He moaned. “Jesus, man.” He got up on one elbow. “Think she broke my sternum.”

  “I’ll break more’n that. Do your job.”

  He got up slowly, painfully. Found the syringe on the floor.

  “What’s that?” Though I knew. He gave me an injection in the shoulder and threw the needle away.

  The captain shoved me toward the door. “Let’s go make another video.”

  I was in the Newton cell for about eight hours when I started to cough. By then I’d written most of this. Though I don’t suppose anyone will ever see it. It will be burned with my clothes, with my body.

  I’ll never know whether Jain was completely right. She had at least part of the story.

  My face is stiffening. The ridges don’t show in the cell’s dirty metal mirror, but I can feel them under the skin.

  It’s hard to make my jaw work to close my mouth. Before long it will stay a little bit open, then more, until it’s wide as it can go. I know that from the pictures of the corpses. I wonder whether you die before the jaw breaks.

  I’m isolated from everybody, but from the small window of my cell I can see the exercise yard, and I can see that Wally was right. There aren’t any old people left among the survivors. Nobody over their midforties. Next year it might be midthirties. In a few years, Newton, like Boston, will be empty.

  They can have their city back. Turn off the nightlights, repair the artillery damage. Scrub the dried blood off the walls, pick up the bones and throw them away.

  Whenever I move, I can hear the little motors of the camera as it tracks me from the darkness of the corridor. Sometimes I see a glint of light from its lens.

  I don’t think there was any conspiracy. Just a status quo that perpetuated itself. Us versus them in a waiting game. With insignificant me poised for a few days in the middle: an us who was a them; a them who was an us.

  Who lost and found and lost her shadow.

  (2003)

  Civil Disobedience

  I’m old enough to remember when the Beltway was a highway, not a dike. Even then, there were miles that had to be elevated over low places that periodically flooded.

  We lived in suburban Maryland when I was a child. I remember seeing on television the pictures of downtown Washington after Hurricane Hilda, with the Washington Monument and the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial all isolated islands. My brother and I helped our parents stack sandbags around our Bethesda house, but the water rose over them. Good thing the house had two stories.

  That was when they built the George W. Bush Dam to regulate the flow of the Potomac, after Hilda. (My grandfather kept mumbling “Bush Dam…Damn Bush.) That really was the beginning of the end for the UniParty, a symbol for all that went wrong afterwards.

  The politicos claimed they didn’t cause the water to rise—it was supposed to be a slow process, hundreds or even thousands of years before a greenhouse crisis. I guess they built the dam just in case they were wrong.

  Then there were three hurricanes in four weeks, and they all made it this far north, so the dam closed up tight—and people in flooded Maryland and Virginia could look over the Beltway dike and see low-and-dry Washington, and sort of resent what their tax dollars had bought. Maybe what happened was inevitable.

  Over the next decade, the dikes also went up around New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Miami. The Hamptons, Cape Cod. Temporary at first, but soon enough, as the water rose, bricked into permanence. While suburbs and less wealthy coastal towns from Maine to Florida simply drowned.

  By the time the water got to rooftop level, of course all those towns were deserted, their inhabitants relocated inland, into Rehab camps if they couldn’t afford anything else. We spent a couple of years in the Rockville one, until Dad had saved enough to get into an apartment in Frederick. It was about as big as a matchbox, but by then we two boys had gone off to college and trade school.

  I was an autodidact without too much respect for authority, so I said the hell with college and became a SCUBA instructor, a job with a future. That was after I’d been in the Navy for one year, and the Navy brig for one week. Long enough in the service to learn some underwater demolition, and that’s on my website, which brought me to the attention of Homeland Security, about a day and a half after the Bush Dam blew.

  Actually, I’m surprised it took them that long. Most of my income for several years had been from Soggy Suburbs, diving tours of the drowned suburbs of Washington. People mostly come back to see what’s become of the family manse, now that fish have moved in, and it does not generate goodwill toward the government. They’ve tried to shut me down a couple of times, but I have lawyers from both the ACLU and the Better Business Bureau on my side.

  I returned to my dock with a boatload of tourists—only four, in the bitter January cold—and found a couple of suits and a couple of cops waiting, along with a Homeland Security helicopter. They had a federal warrant to bring me in for questioning.

  It was an interesting ride. I’m used to seeing the ’burbs underwater, of course, but it was strange to fly over what had become an inland sea, inside the Beltway dike. The dam demolition had been a pretty thorough job, and in less than a day, it became as deep inside the Beltway as outside. They can fill up the collapsed part and pump the water out, but it will take a long time.

  (The guy who did it called it “civil disobedience” rather than terrorism, which I thought was a stretch. But he did time the charges so that the flooding was gradual, and no one drowned.)

  Since I was a suspected terrorist, I lost the protection of the courts, not to mention the ACLU and the Better Business Bureau. They didn’t haul out the cattle prods, but they did lock me in a small room for twenty-four hours, saying, “We’ll get to you.”

  It could have been worse. It was a hotel room, not a jail, but there was nothing to read or eat, no TV or phone. They took my shoulder bag with the book I was reading and my computer and cell.

  I guess they thought that would scare me. It just made me angry, and then resigned. I hadn’t really done anything, but since when did that matter, with the UniParty. And not doing anything was not the same as not knowing anything.

  The smell of mildew was pervasive, and the carpet was squishy. When we landed on the roof, it looked like about four stories were above the waterline. I couldn’t see anything from the room; the window was painted over with white paint from the outside.

  Exactly twenty-four hours after they had brought me in, one of the suits entered through the hotel-room door, leaving a guard outside.

  “What do you need a cop for?”

  He gave me a look. “Full employment.” He sat down on the couch. “First of all, where were you—”

  “I get food, you get answers.”

  “You have that backward.” He looked at the back of his hand. “Answers, then food. Can you prove where you were when the dam was sabotaged?”

  “No, and neither can you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Food.”

  Yet another look. He stood up without a word and knocked twice on the door. The guard opened it, and he left.

  A few minutes later I tried knocking, myself. No result. But the man did come back eventually, bearing a ham sandwich on a Best Western plate.

&nbs
p; I peeled back the white bread and looked at it. “What if I don’t eat ham?”

  “You left a package of sliced ham in your refrigerator on K Street. You ordered a ham sandwich at Denny’s for lunch on the twenty-eighth of November. I checked while they were making the sandwich.”

  Now that was scary, considering where my refrigerator was now. I tore into the sandwich even though it was probably full of truth serum. “If you know so much about me,” I said between bites, “then you must know where I was at any given time.”

  “You said that neither you nor I could say where we were when the dam blew.”

  “No…you asked where I was when it was sabotaged. That could have been a week or a year before the actual explosions. The saboteurs were probably back in Albania or Alabama or wherever by then.”

  “So where were you when it blew?”

  “At my girlfriend’s place. It rattled the dishes and a picture fell off the wall.”

  “That’s the tree house she’s squatting in, out in Wheaton?”

  “Home sweet home, yeah. Her original apartment is kind of damp. She paid a premium for ground floor. Wrong side of the Beltway.”

  “So we only have her word for where you were.”

  “And mine, yes. What, you don’t have surveillance cameras out in Treetown yet?”

  “None that show her place.”

  I guess it was my turn to respond, or react. I finished the sandwich instead, slowly, while he watched. He took the plate, I suppose so I couldn’t Frisbee it at his head, take his keys and gun, subdue the guard, steal the helicopter, and go blow up the New York dike. Instead I posited: “If the saboteurs could have been anyplace in the world when it blew, what difference does it make where I was?”

  “You weren’t in town. It looks like you knew something was going to happen.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, really. We got a warrant, and a Navy SEAL forensic team searched your apartment.”

  “Are my goldfish all right? Water’s kind of cold.”

  “It’s interesting what’s missing. Not just toiletries and clothes, but boxes of books and pictures from the walls. Your computer system, not portable. All the paper having to do with your business. Your pistol and its registration. You moved them with four cab rides between your apartment and the Sligo dock, all two days before the Flood.”