Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  “Hi. My name is Isabel Bradshaw. That’s B-R-A-D-S-H-A-W. I’m looking for my family. Same name.”

  “The Bradshaws?” Lawrence asked. “That would be… a couple in their late seventies, a couple in their early fifties, a sixteen-year-old boy, and a four-year-old girl?”

  “That’s some of them,” said Isabel. “There should also be two women, ages twenty-five and nineteen.”

  Lawrence shook his head. “No sign of them. Just the others.”

  WHAT. “But… they should be here. They should have arrived with everybody else.” Isabel took a couple of slow, deep breaths to keep herself from panicking.

  “Hold on a minute. Let me check the entrance logs.”

  “They arrived on the third of this month, if that’s any help.”

  “Yes, it is. Thank you… you’re right. There they are, Chelsey and Kristen.” His face brightened, then clouded over. “Okay, I think I’ve figured out what happened. See, you can’t have more than six people living in a residence at the same time. It’s against the rules. My guess is, those two were held back until they could be relocated and then we lost track of them.”

  “You lost track of them.” A teenage girl. And a woman who can be roofied with chocolate. You lost track of them. I’m not asking you to go around defending fair maidens with sword in hand, but aren’t you just a tiny bit embarrassed right now?

  “Yeah. Either they were assigned somewhere else and it didn’t get recorded or they went off on their own looking for an unused residence.”

  “What do you mean, assigned somewhere else? Another camp?”

  “We don’t do that. It’s disruptive and it wastes fuel. I’m almost certain they’re somewhere in this camp. I wish I could tell you where.”

  “I wish you could too,” said Isabel, in lieu of grabbing him by his pencil neck and shaking him until he agreed to grow a competence.

  “Try to understand,” he said. “This time last year there were 600,000 people in this camp. Four months ago, we were down to 84,000. Now we’re up to just over 500,000. Ideally, we should still be able to keep track of everybody, but with that kind of turnover, with a system that was slapped together in a rush over a year ago and the state refusing to provide any resources… you see the problem.”

  Isabel sighed. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Chelsey can only sort of take care of herself. She got a bad Jellicoe last year.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Lawrence. “We do make a special effort to keep tabs on people with disabilities. What about the other one—Kristen? She have any issues?”

  “No.” Apart from being too nice for her own good.

  “Then it’s probably for the best if they’re together. She can look after Chelsey better than we could. I’m sorry I can’t tell you where they are, though.

  “I can tell you where to find most of your family.” He took out a paper map and unfolded it to show the whole camp. He took a red pen and drew an X on a residence about two thirds of the way to the northwestern side. Then he drew a path from the front to the residence. It took only two turns, and looked walkable even with armloads of groceries.

  “I think this is your best bet,” he said. “You don’t have to follow it exactly. If you stick to the main paths, you’ll be all right. If you get thirsty, these buildings with the little wave markings are the water distribution centers. Oh, and this area right here, south of the western health center? You might want to stay out of that.”

  “Why that area in particular?”

  “You know about sex offender clusters?” said Lawrence. “Those neighborhoods where you get a lot of sex offenders ’cause it’s the one place around they can move to?”

  “What about them?”

  “A lot of cities have found ways to break them up—find some place in the middle of the cluster and designate it as a public park or something. Morgan’s pretty much cleaned them out of New York State. I’m sure it boosts the property values, but all those creeps have gotta go somewhere, and…”

  “Let me guess. They ended up here.”

  “Yeah. They’re kinda concentrated right here.” Lawrence tapped a spot on the map.

  “No, they’re not,” said Ashley. “They had to move back in September. They’re in the western corner now.”

  “You sure? I didn’t hear about it. Anyway, this is the straightest way to get to your family, and I’m pretty sure it’s safe.” There were several questions Isabel wanted to ask at this point, such as You’re “pretty sure” it’s safe, but why the uncertainty? And if the sex offenders had to move, who made them move? But the line behind her was getting really long. She couldn’t stay here all day.

  “Have you had booster shots?” said Ashley.

  Isabel paused. Had she ever gotten around to getting booster shots? She couldn’t remember, but she suspected not. There always seemed to be something else to take care of. And she certainly hadn’t brought her medical records here.

  “If you’re not sure, you can get them now,” the nurse said, opening a small refrigerator by her desk and taking out a box. “You’re not anti-vaccine, are you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Some of the other residents… they don’t have a sense of humor about that. They heard about the outbreak in Texas Charlie and they’re afraid. You’ll notice the graffiti when you go out that way.” She approached Isabel and took a set of needles out of the box. “You want to look away?”

  “Why?” There might have been a time in Isabel’s childhood when she was bothered by needles, but that had been many years and allergy treatments ago. She got out of the way of the line and rolled up her sleeve.

  Seeing Lawrence’s desk from this angle, she noticed the photo of two children on it, and the ring on his finger. This guy had a family, and here he was on Christmas Eve making at least some kind of effort to help an enormous mob of strangers. And it seemed like when he failed to help, it was the system’s fault, not his. And for all she knew, Chelsey had gone off looking for a cabin on her own, and Kristen had followed her. It was the sort of thing they’d do.

  But if they ended up in the middle of the sex offenders’ ghetto, I’m going to beat his pointy little face into the back of his skull as a statement of principle.

  * * *

  As soon as she got through the rear door, Isabel saw the graffiti Ashley had been referring to. It was in huge red letters sprayed on the side of a trailer, and it said MATAREMOS A LOS ANTIVACUNISTAS SIN PREVIO AVISO. Isabel’s Spanish was pretty rusty, but she couldn’t help noticing that the first word in this sentence was a form of the verb “to kill” that looked kind of first-person-plural, and the final phrase was “without prior notice.” Trying very hard not to look like an anti-vaxxer, she ventured into the camp.

  If you focused on the people rather than the cabins and trailers, it didn’t look so bad. Every fifty feet or so, Isabel passed somebody else visiting family and friends, bringing gifts and exchanging hugs. Well, it is Christmas Eve. Probably this place wasn’t so great back in July.

  The only thing about the people that was odd was the ones wearing white armbands with the letter M on them. They were all adults or older teenagers, predominantly male, and all armed—but not all with the same weapons. Isabel saw a woman with a small handgun in a holster next to a man with what was obviously a hunting rifle slung over his back. Their weapons were openly displayed, but not held in their hands. They didn’t seem to be doing much—just standing around like crossing guards, watching everybody. Sometimes somebody waved at them, or stopped and said hello.

  When Isabel looked toward the places where all these people were living, that made her feel a lot less Christmassy. The homes ranged from new trailers, to old worn trailers, to relatively well-built cabins, to cabins that didn’t look fit for human habitation. A lot of the cabins had bright blue FEMA tarps stretched over boards in place of a roof, which explained why the people living in these camps were called “tarpies.” They couldn’t be all that safe, either—on every thi
rd block, there was a trailer or cabin that had been gutted by fire. Her family had come here not too long ago, and well after the influx of refugees from the Monsoon. They wouldn’t have gotten first choice. And God only knew where Chelsey and Kristen had ended up.

  It got worse. The residences were arranged in blocks. When you looked at the blocks, you noticed that they tended to be kind of monolithic. There were blocks where everybody was Hispanic, blocks where everybody was black, blocks that were mainly white with some Asians and South Asians, and blocks where everybody was white. Has this place been taken over by gangs? Like prison or something? Please tell me Kristen and Scott didn’t have to get swastika tattoos. That would make it really hard for them to find a job.

  Isabel wondered if the whole camp was self-segregated like this. For whatever it was worth, the mysterious White Armband Guys were drawn from every race and ethnicity, and mixed freely. That was a good sign. Unless it wasn’t. After all, the only area that was guaranteed to be multiracial was the Pervertopia Lawrence had mentioned—sex crimes weren’t the exclusive province of any one group.

  Relax. People don’t look afraid of the White Armband Guys. They seem comfortable around them. You should be too.

  * * *

  The Bradshaw cabin looked more or less okay, but it had a tarp for a roof. Mom-mom answered the door when Isabel knocked. She looked thinner than Isabel remembered her, but her face still brightened up.

  “Isabel! Come in! It’s so good to see you! What have you got there?”

  “Just some food. I’ll get you the presents tomorrow.” Isabel looked around. “Where is everybody?”

  “Out helping fix up the Tuplin place. Did you carry all this here yourself?”

  Isabel nodded.

  “I’ll put it away, then. You go keep an eye on Jourdain.”

  What followed was half an hour of Isabel reading books aloud to Jourdain. She had the feeling she wasn’t doing it right—Kristen was much better at giving different voices to different characters.

  Once her niece had curled up next to her and fallen asleep, she spent the next hour listening to Pop-pop tell some of the old stories from Tilghman Island—the terrible shipwreck of ’79, the night of the 75-ton catch. She’d heard these stories before, but Isabel wanted to get them straight in her mind. There was something about triumphs and tragedies on a small, human scale that had a strange appeal for her right now. In a world that went through human life and fortune like it was so much fossil fuel, it was all the more important to listen to those stories and try to remember them.

  Then the rest of the family came back. “I understand Chelsey and Kristen are living somewhere else,” said Isabel. “What happened there?”

  “The guys at the front desk were supposed to assign them somewhere,” said Pop. “They never got around to it. The girls waited until it was starting to get dark, then they went looking for a place on their own.”

  “They said they figured it was what you’d do in their place,” said Scott.

  Rather than wait around all night, I might do that. And at least now I know the rest of the family hasn’t lost contact with them. Still, it alarmed Isabel a little to think that other people were using her as a role model. That was a lot of responsibility.

  “So where are they?”

  “There’s a cabin right near the middle of camp. It’s pretty bad, but nothing’s happened to them.”

  “Okay,” said Isabel. “Wait—there’s already six of you here. Does this mean I need to spend the night with them?”

  “I hope not,” said Mom. “I don’t think it’s safe where they are.”

  “I don’t want to get you guys in trouble.” Also, I kinda gave up on the whole safety thing when I came here. And I’d hate myself if I were any safer than Kristen. “And I really want to see them.”

  “It’s not that bad where they are,” said Scott. “There’s people looking out for them.”

  “Who’s doing it?” said Isabel. “Who’s in charge around here, anyway?”

  Scott looked at Pop. Pop sat down and told her the story.

  As Isabel listened, she realized that this camp wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d thought it would be. Her mistake had been comparing it to prison. Take a bunch of young males, mostly unmarried, raised in dysfunctional families and bad neighborhoods, unemployed and self-selected for violence, and throw them together in a crappy place, and they organized themselves into gangs. Do the same thing to men and women from every age group, every walk of life, whole families, and they organized themselves into… churches. Or rather, some of them did. The rest joined later out of a need for mutual aid and some kind of community.

  Which was why the Bradshaws were living on this block—this was a Methodist community, and that was the church they’d grown up with. Probably nobody but the pastor could have said how Methodism was different from other branches of Christianity, but that hardly mattered. It was a familiar name, and in a place like this that was more than good enough. People got together for worship, and then stayed to see who needed what and who was available to help. They weren’t waiting for God to step in and fix this place up. Instead, they seemed to have gotten the idea that the Lord helped those who helped themselves, and even if He didn’t, hey, at least you’d just helped yourself.

  And not all the groups were churches. There was an American Legion, a bikers’ club, and a gaming group. Scott took her map of the camp and added to it, showing her the various churches and other groups and over which blocks they held sway. Isabel would have felt better about the human race in general if one of them had been “The Organization of People who have Agreed to Assist One Another on a Regular Basis out of Mutual Self-Interest.”

  So that was how individual neighborhoods were organized within the camp. There was also a handful of teachers and medical personnel among the displaced, who’d gotten together to help FEMA provide a certain limited amount of education and health care to the residents.

  But what was really holding the whole thing together was the camp militia—something Isabel hadn’t even known existed until this conversation. It consisted of everybody in camp that had weapons and was trained to use them, or wanted to be trained. They held exercises twice a week. They had no guns beyond the ones they’d brought, and their only uniform was the armbands Isabel had seen. But they were the ones who had strong-armed the sex offender community into moving out to the western corner of the camp, well away from anyone with children. Also well away from her sisters. One less thing to worry about.

  * * *

  For all his assurances that this camp was really pretty safe, Scott accompanied Isabel to Chelsey and Kristen’s cabin. According to the map, it was right on the border between “Iglesia Catolica” and “some kind of Muslim thing.” The neighborhood looked… it wouldn’t be fair to say bad, because all the neighborhoods in Texas Foxtrot looked equally bad. This particular one looked like somebody else’s bad neighborhood.

  Racist.

  Shove it. In College Park, Isabel had gotten used to being in a minority, and sometimes the only white girl in the room—the others being immigrants from all parts of the world. Not only that, other white students tended to be from white-collar, upper-middle-class backgrounds, and she felt like she had only slightly more in common with them than with the kids from Brazil, Mongolia, Pakistan, or Liberia. But of course at College Park, there was really only one ethnic group… students.

  “We’re here,” said Scott, gesturing at a cabin between two trailers. It looked worse than Pop’s. Not only were the roofs made of tarps, but parts of the walls appeared to be backdrop panels from a theater set. “Listen, I gotta go. I promised the Burchams I’d help get their place wired and I’m already late.”

  “See you tomorrow.” Isabel knocked on the door—not hard, but the door shook a little in its frame. “Chelsey? Kristen? It’s me.”

  From somewhere inside came Kristen’s voice: “Isabel! Great! Come in!” Isabel tried the door and found it either locked or stu
ck—she couldn’t tell from the feel of it. She was about to start rattling it when Chelsey said “Careful—you’ll break it. Let me get that.”

  Also not a good sign, thought Isabel. She was starting to forget what good signs looked like. There was a click of a key in a lock, and Chelsey opened the door for her. Her dark-blond curls were hanging in her face. She was wearing pajama bottoms, no makeup, and one of Isabel’s old College Park sweatshirts. The disparity between her bust and Isabel’s was such that the sweatshirt only came down to her belly button.

  “Before you come in,” said Chelsey, “there’s something I have to tell you. We kind of have a bedbug problem.”

  “You’re shitting me, right?”

  “I shit you not.”

  Isabel stood there for a moment. This would explain why they hadn’t moved Jourdain in with her mother.

  “Fuck it,” she finally said. She stepped through the door and shut it behind her. That done, she drew Chelsey into a hug.

  “Merry Christmas, blondie.” Isabel would never be able to explain to anyone outside the family why she called Chelsey “blondie” when Kristen was even blonder.

  “Same to you, chunkybutt.”

  “So how bad is it?”

  “We covered the bedroom in bean leaves,” said Kristen, pulling out a chair for Isabel. “Those are supposed to work. They’ve got these little hairs and the bugs sort of get their legs stuck on them.”

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “There’s a farm east of here. It belongs to a Mr. Williams. We trade with him sometimes, but he gave me the bean leaves for free. He says with winters so mild, he can grow things over the winter now. He’s a very nice man.” Kristen paused. “You know, I keep hearing how the locals don’t get along with us as well as they used to—especially since the midterms—but I don’t see it. The few people I’ve talked to have been very friendly.”

  “She bats her pretty blue eyes at ’em and tells ’em Jesus loves ’em, and they’ll give her anything,” said Chelsey. “And don’t worry. If Mr. Williams decides he wants something in return, I’ll take care of it.” Isabel was pretty sure she didn’t mean money. This seemed like a great time to change the subject.