by Mike Mullin
Darla struggled under me. I tried to hold her still and keep her head and body protected. Someone caught my right hand and wrenched my arm behind my back. I felt a plastic loop around my wrist, cutting into it as he cinched it tight. Then my left wrist was forced to join the right and locked into the other half of the handcuffs.
Someone grabbed me under my arm and dragged me off Darla, setting me upright. They cuffed her as well and marched us back into the tent.
The captain still sat at his desk. Darla strained against the guy holding her and yelled, “What the—”
“Quiet!” Captain Jameson roared. “I’ll overlook this behavior since you’re new here, but one more word and you’ll start your stay at Camp Galena in a punishment hut.”
I watched Darla. She screwed up her face to start yelling at the guy again. I kicked her ankle. She glowered at me, her face twisted into a ferocious scowl. I shook my head.
It worked, because Darla didn’t say anything else, and we didn’t learn what a punishment hut was. At least not right at that moment. The guards marched us to a gate in the fence and cut off the handcuffs. Then they thrust our backpacks into our arms and shoved us through the gate.
Chapter 43
The guards weren’t the least bit gentle when they tossed us through the gate. I fell on my face in the packed snow. I pushed myself upright on arms that still trembled from the fight, wiped the ice off my cheeks, and looked around.
The first thing I noticed was how many people were there. This place was crowded. Old, young, families, individuals, white, Hispanic, black—the only thing everyone had in common was that they were all dressed in dirty, ragged clothing. I hadn’t seen so many people in one place since the eruption; in fact, I hadn’t seen a crowd like this even before the volcano.
The second thing I noticed was the camp’s size. We were on a relatively flat ridgetop. The fence stretched three hundred or four hundred yards in each direction before it reached a corner. It was chain link, like all the fences we’d seen here, twelve feet high and topped by a coil of razor wire.
A thin guy with a dirty gray beard reached for my backpack. I shoved his hand away and grabbed our packs. He slunk off into the crowd.
Inside the fence, the snow had been churned to a dirty, frozen slush by thousands of feet. Outside, a smaller fenced area contained four large white canvas tents—the admissions area we’d come through. Beyond that, I saw the highway.
There were green canvas tents in ragged rows inside the camp. A few of them were erected on raised wooden platforms, but most were pitched directly on the cold ground. Almost all of them were closed, flaps tied tightly against the wind. The tents that weren’t closed were full, each packed with a dozen or more people.
A loudspeaker mounted on a nearby fence post crackled to life. The sound was distorted and overly loud: “Mabel Hawkins, report to Gate C immediately. Mabel Hawkins, Gate C.”
A narrow strip about five feet wide just inside the fence was clear of people. Darla walked into the clear area and I asked her, “You sure it’s safe? What if that fence is electric?”
“It’s fine,” she replied. “You can’t electrify chain link directly—it’d just ground out. If this were electric there’d be insulators and extra wires. She slapped the fence to prove her point. Then she squatted and reached into my pack, inventorying the contents.
They’d taken almost everything. Our skis, food, rope, knife, and hatchet were all gone. All we had left was our clothing, blankets, plastic tarp, water bottles, frying pan, and a few matches.
Darla snatched the frying pan and hurled it at the base of the fence. It hit with a dull clank and came to rest a few feet away. “Christ!” she yelled. “They took goddamn everything.”
A nasty purple bruise was spreading across the side of Darla’s face. I touched it as gently as I could, trying to figure out if the guards had broken any of her bones. “That hurt?” I asked.
“The pork, the wheat, our knife, and the hand-ax—what the hell do the guards need with that crap, anyway?”
“I don’t know.” I kept probing her cheekbone. It didn’t seem broken, but I wasn’t sure.
Darla slapped my hand away. “Quit messing with my face. It’s fine. And Jack, what was the point of killing him? He survived silicosis, a burning barn, the blizzard, and a long trip in a backpack just to be shot by some asshole guard? Why? I just don’t get it.”
“I don’t know.” I tried to give her a hug, but she pushed me away and started ramming stuff back into my pack. At least our backpacks had plenty of extra room now. Darla stuffed her pack inside mine.
I squatted on my ankles, resting my back against the fence, and Darla squatted beside me. Her hands were on one of the backpack straps, crinkling it into a ball and releasing it, over and over, in barely restrained fury.
“We’ll get out of here somehow,” I said. “What’s a twelve-foot fence and coil of razor wire to us, after everything we’ve been through?”
“Why pen us in at all? I feel like a pig on the way to the slaughterhouse.”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. “We’ll find a way out.”
“Yeah, they’re going to regret the day they locked us in here.” Darla’s eyes had narrowed to a hard squint, and she was scowling.
A pair of guards patrolling along the outside of the fence walked toward us. As they approached, one of them yelled, “Hey, you! No leaning on the fence.”
I ignored him. When he got close enough, he kicked at my back through the chain link. I saw it coming and scrambled away, but not quite fast enough. His toe caught me in the small of my back.
“Asshole,” Darla said aloud.
The guards laughed.
It was getting late, and neither of us had any idea where we’d sleep. But more urgently, we hadn’t used the bathroom since we’d been picked up on the road hours ago. Darla stopped a kid who was hurrying by and asked him where the restrooms were. He pointed, then twisted free of her grasp and ran off.
We walked for a long time in the direction the kid had pointed without seeing anything resembling a latrine. It was slow going, picking our way around knots of people. Some were huddled in groups, talking or just shivering together. Others lay on the ground, wrapped in blankets and pressed against their family or friends for warmth. Every now and then we passed someone who was alone. Most of the loners looked dead, frozen to the ground where they lay, but when I got too close to one of them, his eyes popped open and he glared, warning me away.
We smelled the latrine before we saw it—although calling it a latrine was far too generous. Beside the far fence, a long ditch had been dug, about twenty-four inches wide and eighteen inches deep. Ten or eleven people squatted along its length, doing their business in front of God and everyone.
The other problem, besides the complete lack of privacy, was the lack of toilet paper, sinks, or soap. Sure, Darla and I hadn’t been too particular about those things as we traveled, but this was different: Thousands of people were using this ditch as a public restroom. I glanced up and down the line. Two people had brought their own toilet paper, but others were using newspaper or handsful of snow to clean themselves. Darla turned away and put her hands on her knees.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“Yeah. A little nauseous. I’ll be okay.”
I shrugged and stepped up to the ditch. I don’t like going in public—even the rows of urinals without dividers at school used to bug me. So it took me awhile. But when I zipped up and left the stench of the ditch, Darla hadn’t moved.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“No, I need to pee.”
“Well?” I shrugged.
“I can’t squat over that thing without taking my jeans off. And there’s nothing to lean against.”
I understood what she meant. When she had needed to pee on the road, she’d find a tree to lean her back against and pull her jeans just partway down. I’d never, um, watched the whole process of course; I’m not that pervy. But I�
�d seen enough to get the general idea of how it was done. “Come on. I’ll be your tree.”
So I stood on one side of the ditch, and Darla stood on the other. She leaned her back against me and pulled her pants down just enough to do her business. I tried not to watch, but there was no point. Hundreds of people were within eyesight, and Darla wasn’t the only woman squatting over that ditch.
“Well, that was humiliating . . . and disgusting,” Darla said as she pulled up her pants.
“Nobody was really looking.”
“You’re not helping.”
“And you’re not the one who got splashed.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“No worries. It’s only a little bit on my boot. Goes with the territory when you volunteer to be a tree.”
It was getting dark. I was hungry, but we hadn’t seen any sign of food since we’d been thrown into the camp. I was more worried about finding a safe place to sleep. It would be a cold night if we couldn’t find shelter of some sort.
At first, we wandered from tent to tent. But every tent was full, and just touching the flaps often brought shouted curses and threats from within. Some of the tents even had people posted outside guarding them. Other refugees clustered on the lee sides of the tents where they’d be protected from the wind. We might have done that, too, but all the good spots had been taken already.
“I’ve got an idea,” Darla said. “Follow me.”
She led us directly into the teeth of the wind, which had picked up as darkness fell, making it harder and harder to see. It started snowing—hard, icy pellets that stung as the wind whipped them against my skin. I shivered, remembering almost freezing to death under the bridge just a week before. Several times we stumbled over people lying on the ground, made invisible by the snow and darkness.
Darla led us all the way across the camp. The wind was fiercer here with nothing but a chain-link fence to block it. A few tents were scattered on this side of the camp, all of them full, of course. Darla trudged toward one that was built on a low wooden platform. The lee side of the tent was packed—people lay pretty much on top of each other in a long V shape, trying to escape the wind’s nip and howl.
We walked to the windward side of the tent. For the first time since we’d arrived, we were alone. Everyone was avoiding this, the most exposed spot in the whole camp. I didn’t see any reasonable place to sleep—hopefully Darla knew what she was doing.
Snow had drifted against the tent platform. Darla dug a trough in the snow against the tent. It was less than two feet wide and a foot deep, but it would hold us both. She lined the snow-ditch with our plastic tarp and blankets. Then we lay down and wrapped the tarp and blankets over ourselves.
At first, it was terribly cold. But as we lay there shivering and hugging each other for warmth, the snow began to blow up over us, covering our tarp. After an hour or so, we were completely buried and toasty warm. I drifted off to sleep.
I woke up once in the night, feeling sweaty and claustrophobic. I stretched my arm out over my head and poked a hole in the snowdrift. The icy air smelled sharp and relieved my sense of confinement. Darla murmured something in her sleep and pressed herself even tighter against me.
The next time I awoke, it was to the gentle pressure of Darla’s lips against mine. I returned her kiss, getting more and more into it until it occurred to me that I probably had terrible morning breath. Still, Darla tasted fine, and she wasn’t complaining. . . . I broke off the kiss, anyway.
“We should get up,” she said. “I heard voices a while ago.”
“Is it morning?”
Darla reached out and reopened the hole I’d made during the night. A spot of light hit my face. “Guess so.”
We unburied ourselves from the snowdrift. It would have been a beautiful day if there’d been any sun. The snow and wind had died down during the night, leaving behind a thin white blanket that temporarily hid the camp’s ugliness.
We packed our bedding and scouted the area. Nobody was around; the tents were empty, and the dog piles of people sleeping at the lee side of each tent were gone. Paths beaten in the snow led away from every tent. Strangely, all the trails ran parallel. Every single person had gotten up and walked, zombie-like, in the exact same direction. We’d slept through it all.
Curious, we followed one of the paths. It was almost perfectly straight, except for an occasional swerve around a tent. After a quarter mile or so, the paths started to blend into each other so that all the snow was pocked with footprints. There was no longer a discernable trail to follow, but we kept walking in the same direction.
We’d seen only one person along our route, a woman about my mother’s age in the snow beside one of the tents, curled into a fetal position, unmoving. Her hands and feet were bare and tinged blue. I walked over to her, ignoring Darla’s glare, and put my hand against her neck. It was cold and lifeless.
I stood and took a deep breath. The icy air entering my lungs brought something else with it: a wave of sadness so intense I had to close my eyes and fight to hold back tears. That woman could have been my mother. I felt Darla’s arms around me. “You okay?” she said.
“Yeah . . . no.” My sorrow dissolved in a wave of pure fury. What kind of place was this, where tens of thousands of people were herded together without adequate shelter, without decent latrines? A cattle pen, not fit for humans. And the guards, Captain Jameson, they were people just like me. For the first time ever, I felt ashamed of my species. The volcano had taken our homes, our food, our automobiles, and our airplanes, but it hadn’t taken our humanity. No, we’d given that up on our own.
A little farther on, I heard a dull roar that slowly increased in volume as we walked. We rounded a tent and found the source of the noise—a huge crowd, thousands upon thousands of people pressed together in a mob that stretched as far as I could see to both my left and my right.
We stepped to the back of the crowd. It sounded worse than the high-school cafeteria used to at that moment when everyone had finished eating and a few hundred shouted conversations were going on simultaneously.
Darla tapped some guy on the back and yelled, “What’s going on?”
He turned and shouted back, “New here?”
“Yeah.”
“Chow line.”
“Slop line, more like it,” someone else yelled.
Slop mob would have been an even better description. There was no organization that remotely resembled a line. But we hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime yesterday, so we settled into the back of the crowd to wait.
After a while, we saw people forcing their way out of the mob. They had a terrible time of it—everyone else was pressing forward into any open space. But the folks trying to leave shoved and jammed their elbows into others, eventually managing to worm their way out of the crush. I noticed something odd: all the people leaving had a blotch of blue paint on their left hands. A few of them were carrying Dixie cups, but nobody had any food.
We waited in the mob for more than two hours before I got close enough to see. The crowd pressed forward toward a fence. Beyond the fence stood a series of field kitchens, something like what the Lion’s Club used to set up every year at the Black Hawk County Fair. Dozens of small hatches had been cut in the fence at about chest height. Guys in fatigues were manning each hatch. I watched a refugee fight his way up to the fence. When he got there, he held out both hands. The guard spray-painted a blob of blue on the back of his left hand and put a Dixie cup in his right. The refugee wolfed down the contents of the Dixie cup before he’d taken more than two steps from the hatch, eating with his fingers. I couldn’t see what he was eating.
It turned out to be rice. Bland, white rice—and not much of it. The paper cups held maybe eight ounces, and they weren’t full. I squeezed the rice into my mouth. When I finished, I tore the cup in half and licked the inside. I was still hungry; we’d waited most of the morning for barely enough food to satisfy a robin.
As we walked away, I saw a ki
d, maybe eight or nine years old, sitting on the ground, furiously scrubbing his left hand with snow. It was raw and red, but the blue paint clung to it in stubborn patches. As I watched, he scrubbed too hard, and a trickle of blood seeped out of the back of his hand, staining the snow red.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Trying to get seconds,” the kid said. “It’s useless, they won’t feed you if your hand’s bleeding.” He looked as if he might cry.
“When is lunch?”
“Lunch? Are you crazy?”
“Dinner?”
“You could try the yellow coats. But you’re probably too tall.”
“Too tall?” Darla said. “What do you mean?”
The kid jumped to his feet. Darla tried to grab his arm but missed. He ran off.
Chapter 44
We spent what little remained of the morning exploring the camp. The main area, where we and all the thousands of other refugees were fenced in, was about a half-mile square. At the south side, between the camp and the highway, were three separately fenced areas: First, the admissions area where we’d entered the camp, which also contained tents for barracks and administration. Second, a vehicle depot that held three bulldozers, a front-end loader, a bus, and a whole bunch of trucks and Humvees. And third, a small area dotted with little sheds that looked like doghouses.
The latrine ditch we’d used the night before was in the northeast corner of the camp, as far as possible from the admin area. Along the west edge of the camp, we found a row of five water spigots attached to wood posts. People were filling every kind of container imaginable. Ice coated the ground around the spigots.
The kitchens were also at the west end of the camp. They were closed and quiet now, except for one. About a dozen people in yellow parkas worked there.