Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  “When you say ‘best-case scenario,’” he said, looming over her a little, “what exactly do you mean?”

  Isabel took a deep breath. “Every simulation of the ORCS is based on the structure during its last inspection,” she said.

  Martineau nodded. “Two years ago, after the flooding.”

  “Exactly. So the program can project future damage, but it can’t incorporate the damage that’s already happened—the erosion under the foundations.”

  For a long second, Martineau was silent.

  “And this is what we’ve been relying on all this time,” he said in a scarily calm voice. There was a fine line between “best-case scenario” and “steaming pile of moose muffins” and when you neglected to factor in physical damage that you had already seen happening with your own eyes, you were well over that line.

  And there was yet another reason this was bad—the Corps accounted for 19 of the company’s 23 contracts and 92 percent of its income. Which meant the only customer Eveland-Blades Consulting, Inc., really had was J.L. Martineau… who was now standing there looking like he’d just caught their entire staff in bed with his wife. The fact that the President of the United States was also watching was just running up the score at this point. Very few people could put on their résumé that they’d personally destroyed the last company they worked for. Maybe the escort services are hiring, thought Isabel.

  “I assume you heard I’m opening the rest of the Morganza Spillway gates at three. Can your model incorporate that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s your best guess?” said the governor. “Is that going to help?”

  Isabel hated guessing. When people asked you for your best guess, they always swore they wouldn’t take it any more seriously than it deserved, and then they always treated it as Objective and Inarguable Truth brought down on stone tablets from the summit of Mount Science. And if your best guess happened to be wrong, you could make a much more accurate guess as to who’d get the blame.

  “We’re talking about diverting an extra”—she did some quick math in her head—“360,000 cubic feet per second. My best guess is, that would slow down the rise. Overflow would happen tomorrow afternoon, not tonight.”

  The governor just stood there, looking at her with a sorrowful expression on his face.

  “Look, I really wish I had better news,” she said. “Two inches of rain is falling on the Dakotas right now. Wisconsin is getting hit again tomorrow. And all that water—or most of it—once it’s in the river it’s heading straight for us. And if last year’s Monsoon was any guide, we have at least another month of this to look forward to.”

  * * *

  Isabel had wondered what would happen when they knew for certain the ORCS would fail. She’d had a mental image of Martineau standing on the Low Sill in the middle of Highway 15 when the end came, like a captain going down with his ship, or possibly everyone in the Corps showing up dressed in their Sunday best with beer and country music, ready to reenact the deck of the Titanic Louisiana-style. It bears repeating that Isabel hadn’t been getting enough sleep.

  At 3 p.m., Isabel was right in the middle of compiling her latest report when someone knocked on the door.

  It was one of the Corps personnel, a guy who barely looked eighteen. “Ma’am?” he said. “We’re evacuating the structure and heading for high ground. I need you to move this vehicle about half a mile down the road.”

  “Thanks. Will do.” The RV was on an island between the Low Sill and Auxiliary Structures. The “high ground” on this island was not all that high, compared to the hills east of the Mississippi. If that was where they were evacuating her to, it meant none of the components of the ORCS were deemed safe to drive on for long enough to get to real safety.

  Also a bad sign—Horrocks wasn’t here, and, now that she thought of it, she hadn’t seen García last night or Roth this morning. After that little conference on the Corps tugboat, she’d thrown herself back into her work so thoroughly she hadn’t noticed that all her coworkers had fled into the night—or possibly had been banished from the premises by Martineau. Still, at least they still trusted her not to drive off and sell all this very expensive equipment on the black market or something.

  The only people left here were a handful of National Guard troops and Corps employees, all of whom were gathered in a little group at the bend in the road. Everyone was just sort of standing around, looking in one direction or another, watching the two structures… waiting to see which one gave way. Someone had set up a flagpole, but there was no wind. No one spoke.

  Isabel parked the RV somewhere it wouldn’t block their view and got out. “If anybody needs it, there’s AC in there,” she said out loud. The weather hadn’t cooled any since yesterday, and heatstroke could happen even when people weren’t working.

  She noticed, at this point, that no one had a camera out. That one detail suddenly made everything clear. These men and women had zero interest in being “eyewitnesses to history.” They were standing vigil at the deathbed of a loved one. They weren’t going to let the old soldier die alone. Isabel suddenly felt like an intruder at a private grief. She had only been working here for the past three weeks, and had met only a handful of these people. The water had already gone over the top of the Low Sill—even from here she could see the sun shining off it as it streamed through the chain-link fence.

  After about fifteen minutes, a couple of helicopters flew in. They didn’t land, but hovered at a distance, slowly circling the structure. And here’s the media, thought Isabel. She felt a sudden spike of loathing for them. The keystone of America’s economy was about to collapse, and… well, to be fair, that was pretty newsworthy. Isabel suddenly felt guilty for hating them. More began to appear.

  When the water over the Sill looked about a foot deep, it happened. There were cracking noises, distant but loud… a scream of overstressed steel… and then the southeast end of the Low Sill fell. It seemed to happen in slow motion, sinking rather than dropping, but that was only because Isabel was seeing it from three thousand feet away. The noise of its collapse took a little over two and a half seconds to reach her ears. She felt it through the soles of her sneakers before she heard it. Then the roar of the water drowned out everything else.

  With terrifying speed, the water thundering through the breach ate into the soft silt of the island’s bank. As much as fifty feet of it vanished in the first minute. In the next few minutes, another fifty feet was eroded away, including the spot where the RV had been parked. It slowed a little after that, but Isabel was deeply relieved when she saw more helicopters coming—these from the National Guard. As soon as one landed nearby, she headed straight for it, leaving behind her bicycle and the company’s RV with equal indifference.

  They’re never going to rebuild it, thought Isabel as she got on board. The foundations are all gouged out. And God only knows how much it would cost. And there’s too much else that needs rebuilding now… like about a dozen major cities and three or four entire states. And everybody knows President Pratt would rather get a root canal than spend one dime more on infrastructure than he has to. And really, what would be the point? To force the river back into its old bed for another ten or twenty years?

  But even if it made sense, we wouldn’t do it. Oh, we’d say we were going to do it—we’d promise ourselves every year that we were going to get around to it one of these days. But it’d be like those space missions we keep hearing about—back to the moon, on to Mars—the ones that never seem to get out of the planning phase. Or that nationwide high-speed rail network that’s been ten years in the future for as long as I can remember. When did we become the country that’s always going to do things? When did we stop being the country that actually does things? She turned and looked at the American flag hanging limp in the still air. Old Glory. Right now that seemed like the perfect name for it.

  In every disaster, no matter how terrible, there are always a few people who stay behind and try
to ride it out. Exasperated governors have taken to advising these people to write their SSNs on their bodies somewhere to make their corpses easier to identify.

  In the case of those who remained along the Atchafalaya when the ORCS failed, this would have been a waste of time. Almost none of their bodies were ever found.

  For the first thirty miles or so of its new course, the Mississippi appeared in the form of an oncoming wall of water several miles wide that cut through human civilization like a windshield through a swarm of gnats. Every town from Simmesport to Krotz Springs simply vanished, scoured from the face of the land as though they had never existed. A few of the inhabitants of Krotz Springs, seeing the ORCS collapse on their screens, had just enough time to get in their cars and head for high ground.

  Further south, the river spread out, losing some of its force. A stretch of I-10 several miles wide, and the levees around Morgan City by the Gulf, were undermined and collapsed instead of simply being annihilated in one blow. The heavier bits of debris—pieces of the ORCS, the Krotz Springs Bridge—found resting places and sank into the silt. Other pieces of debris lodged against their north sides, forming the foundations of new islands in the new delta.

  * * *

  It was with some pleasure that Carrie signed the Drug Law Reform Act. Its official name was something a lot longer, but nobody cared, least of all her. Henceforth in Virginia, marijuana would be legal. Other things—heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, black-market prescription drugs—would lead to small fines and mandatory time in a drug treatment center. Distribution of those things would lead to much bigger fines. Distribution, not “intent to distribute”—Pratt was right about that. All this would save the commonwealth a fair amount of money in the long run.

  A pity they couldn’t get an advance on that money now. Of the fifty Emergency Housing Centers that FEMA was planning to build—each capable of housing up to six hundred thousand people—one was in the Shenandoah Valley. To put that another way, for at least a few months the commonwealth would have a new city in it with over double the population of Richmond.

  Which would be a good deal, if anybody in that city were going to be earning any taxable income. As it was, they were going to put a massive demand on services for as long as they were there, and Carrie wasn’t sure how much help she was going to get from Washington. The one guy there who hated to spend taxpayers’ money was also the one guy in the Oval Office.

  This was coming at a time when half the commonwealth was tightening its belts… literally. The price of wheat, corn and soybeans was already going up in anticipation of future shortages. And food was a fungible commodity. When people started to bulk-buy rice and potatoes, within a week the price of those had gone up too.

  And that didn’t even include the economic problems they were having in the Tidewater, which were like the Rust Belt and the coal country rolled into one. The only people putting any money into those areas were speculators like her genius of a brother, buying up coastal property cheap and trusting in the government to restore its “true” value.

  If nothing else, this would be good for the farming communities. Most of Carrie’s time in Virginia had been spent in Richmond or the Norfolk area, and most of her political allies were north of the Rappahannock, but you could never neglect the rural areas—that lesson had been learned, thank you. And Virginia’s farms, being too far north for the heat kill, too far east for the drought and too far south for the Monsoon, had been blessed with bountiful harvests this year. You had to take your blessings where you found them at times like this. According to Thel, who was studying in Beijing this school year, the food situation over there was worse… for the general public, if not for exchange students.

  * * *

  Isabel stepped out of the shower and started scrubbing at her hair with a towel. The drier she got it doing this, the less she’d have to use the dryer. With the pipelines still cut, power bills weren’t as high as they were on the other side of the Mississippi, but… she had other reasons for wanting to save money. (This would have been a great time for her to look at herself in the full-length mirror and spend a couple paragraphs admiring her naked body at various angles, but the mirror was still fogged over, so that was out. Sorry.)

  Her armphone was resting on the bathroom windowsill. Just as she was about to turn on her hairdryer, it started playing “I Won’t Forget” and said “It’s Mom.” She picked it up.

  “Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

  “Hi, Isabel. How is everything? Are they giving you your job back?”

  “Afraid not.” Isabel bit her lip. It really hurt to disappoint her mother. “I got the word yesterday—they said not to bother coming back after the furlough. I’ve got severance pay, though. And I’m already looking.”

  “That’s good. Is General Martineau going to be any help?”

  “He didn’t make any promises. I’m definitely going to be looking at the Corps.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news too,” said Mom. “And I think I should be the one to tell you, so Chelsey doesn’t have to. Rod’s left.”

  Isabel just stood there, blinking. There were so many bits of bad news she’d been expecting, but this wasn’t any of them.

  “I know you didn’t like him.”

  “Well, yeah, but I didn’t want him to disappear! Did he say why?”

  “It’s Chelsey. She hasn’t been the same since that Jellicoe thing. She keeps forgetting to do things. Pay the bills, go shopping… I think the only reason she can still hold down her job is she doesn’t like the job enough for it to mess with her mind. Anyway, Rod says he’s willing to pay child support, but he doesn’t feel qualified to be her caretaker.”

  “What about Jourdain? Did he take her?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Chelsey can take care of a child by herself right now.”

  “They’re moving back in with us.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “Because Mom-mom and Pop-pop are living there too!”

  “They’re helping take care of Jourdain.”

  “And what if things don’t work out on Smith Island and you have to find room for your parents?”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen. Their house may be small, but it’ll last as long as the island does. Speaking of people being other people’s caretakers, how’s Hunter?”

  “Taking care of me right now,” said Isabel. “He’s turning out to be a pretty good cook.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. He can do amazing things with a Crock-Pot.” Which was true. In fact, at this very moment the Marksville apartment they shared was fragrant with the smell of a pot of chicken and sausage gumbo in the kitchen. He’d made it last night after he got home from work and set it to cook overnight. In a couple of hours it’d be done and they’d have dinner for breakfast, which was almost as good as having breakfast for dinner.

  What Isabel didn’t say was Hunter never deviates from the recipe by so much as a teaspoon because he’s too afraid of screwing up. The story she’d heard from her friends about bachelor chefs was that most of them couldn’t afford to throw away food that didn’t turn out right, especially these days. So their standards went down a lot faster than their skills went up. They were eventually able to prepare meals to their own satisfaction, but not necessarily anybody else’s. That made Hunter kind of a catch.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear he’s good at something.”

  “Mom,” said Isabel, “did you ever criticize Rod this much?”

  “Well, no, I didn’t.”

  “And look how that turned out.”

  “It’s not that simple, hon,” she said. “I know I’m not being fair, but—how do I put this?” She paused for a moment.

  “Chelsey was never going to make a smart choice,” Mom finally said. “Her judgment was never as good as yours, even before… well, you know. We were all afraid she was going to end up with a bum or some cri
minal or something. Compared to that, Rod seemed pretty good.”

  Time for a complete change of subject. “What about that mildew problem in the kitchen? Has that been straightened out?” That had been a chronic issue ever since Gordon hit. Now that they had seven people in one house with frequent visits from Kristen, that seemed relevant.

  “I think we need to call those guys back,” said Mom. “I’m not convinced they got all the mildew.”

  “If you don’t think they did it right the first time, why hire them the second time?”

  “Addie Anthony recommended them. I don’t want her to think I don’t trust her.”

  * * *

  Once the conversation was over, Isabel finished drying herself off and put on her powder-blue bathrobe. She tied the sash tight around her waist, just enough to accentuate her curves. She also gave her hair an extra going-over with the dryer and combed it into something alluring.

  She turned to glance at Hunter as she stepped out of the bathroom. He was awake, and quietly mustering the energy to haul himself out of bed. He worked the evening shift at a 3D print shop, which meant he got home pretty tired. On nights like last night, when he got home and fixed something for the next day, he collapsed into bed and was asleep in moments. They hadn’t had sex since Sunday evening. Isabel was in a mood to rectify that, and the first step was to erectify him.

  Isabel went to the kitchen, brewed a pot of chyq, poured Hunter a cup and waited. It was one of those mugs that changed color depending on the temperature of the contents. As soon as it had gone down from red to a sort of yellow-orange, the chyq would be at about the temperature Hunter liked. In the meantime, she had a cup herself.

  Hunter’s long hair, always messier than hers no matter what he did, was spread across the pillow. He looked much as he had in college—not obese, but heavy enough that Isabel usually preferred to be on top.