End Game (Calm Act Book 1)

by Ginger Booth

  “Yes. Go with him to Montreal. Definitely.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “He might get you an ark berth with him. Can Zack give you that?”

  “No. But maybe I could give it to him. In the UNC ark.”

  Mangal looked down and played with his coffee cup.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why are you so sure I won’t make it into the UNC ark?”

  “I’m not. Dee, truly, I’m not. But we’re web developers. And you say this guy is an arkitect, who flew to San Francisco last week? He will be on an ark. Us?” He shrugged.

  I had to concede the point.

  Chapter 5

  Interesting fact: Shortages of consumer goods and electronics preceded the ocean blockades. Epidemics devastated manufacturing production in China and southeast Asia. Japan and South Korea were the first countries to barricade themselves in to control contagion, unsuccessfully in Korea’s case.

  Wednesday was a workday, made awkward by having already wished my team a happy Thanksgiving the day before. That and pretending Connor was still among us. We needed his weather API, but I decided to wait until after the holiday to assign it to one of the other guys.

  What I intended to do over the long weekend, before Adam invited me to Montreal, was spend some serious time digging through Mangal’s secret background material on the borders. But my assignment was weather, and I was getting paid for today. I compromised and studied weather until lunch, then the Canadian border situation in the afternoon.

  On weather events, the main difference between the truth and what Americans were being told at that time, was the severity. For instance, the Texas triple hurricane was reported in the news as one Category 3 and two Category 2 storms, with a combined death toll of 47. The storms were actually a Category 5 and two Category 4. The immediate death toll was in the thousands confirmed, with over 10,000 missing and unaccounted for. Between the Gulf coast refineries, offshore wells, and tankers caught off guard, the oil spills were catastrophic. Some tankers were caught in the Houston ship channel and spilled. Torrential rains overflowed the bayous and ship channel, and crude oil washed into the streets of Houston.

  And then the water supply was fouled, for the fourth largest city in the U.S. The National Guard brought in bottled water – and barricaded the freeways to keep Houstonians from fleeing to the drought-besieged inland cities. Austin-San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, and New Orleans were spared a tidal wave of refugees. But the secondary death toll started to rise from drinking contaminated water, sewage overflows, and shortages of antibiotics in the cholera and typhus outbreaks that followed. Even there, it wasn’t clear whether the antibiotics ran out, or the disease strains were resistant, or both. Bureaucracy and statistics broke down in the chaos. But estimates placed the overall death toll closer to 30,000 than 47.

  The economic toll was ongoing. Houston was left with only local resources to apply to cleaning up the oil spills. The wells and refineries were still shut down, and the Gulf Coast fisheries would remain contaminated for years. People ate the seafood anyway, because there wasn’t much choice. Texas was in the Dust Bowl zone, and agricultural output sputtered as the aquifers emptied.

  The technology for lying to the public was simple. Nationally, the event was reported but understated. Locally, the event was still understated, though not as much, and with a priority on maintaining public calm and order. When bottled water ran out – or rather, the authorities decided they couldn’t afford to send any more – Houston was assured that the tap water was safe to drink again, even though it wasn’t. Internet, phones, and travel were strictly curtailed by the Calm Act. People inciting disorder were dealt with promptly and effectively. They vanished. To be fair, those measures had strong popular support in Texas.

  I couldn’t help remembering what Zack said. “Is that what the borders are for.” They controlled refugees, yes. They prevented information and resource flows, too. They substantially shut down transportation, one of the major contributors to greenhouse gases. And they controlled disease spread.

  The Texas triple hurricane was only one example. The new Dust Bowl was worse, stretching from Texas to North Dakota, Oregon to San Diego. The stack of states from Texas up to North Dakota had its own closed borders to west and east, plus a border closing off Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle from the rest of Texas to the south. Between the drought and the GMO blight, conditions in there were worse than the mid 20th century Dust Bowl, and the people were left nowhere to run. The news did mention that, lightly and soft-pedalled. The photos shown on the news, though, were taken from the front range of the Rockies in Colorado, where things weren’t nearly as bad.

  Florida was sinking and tortured by hurricanes. The southeast baked under murderous heat waves. Freaky storms were everywhere, playing havoc with agriculture even where there was enough water. Storms like the Alberta Clipper weren’t new. But they used to end in the Great Lakes, not blow straight out to the Atlantic coast. Phenomena like ball lightning and the northern lights visible in Connecticut, used to be rare.

  Before breaking for lunch, I summarized this and more regarding the weather, and sent it in encoded form to my friends across the Pacific. I wasn’t sure what good it would do them. But it’s hard to learn such things and keep it bottled up inside. I was also pretty sure that at least my friend Down Under was still free to speak.

  After lunch, I studied the Canadian border, since I was headed there. This border was more of an enigma, or at least a work in progress. Mexico and the Caribbean countries weren’t given a choice. The U.S. shut them out unilaterally. But the Canadian border was more collaborative in nature. Canada considered itself somewhat underpopulated and was willing to take some climate refugees. Yet it was not willing to be overwhelmed with refugees, and was very cautious about disease spread. It’s a very long border, and its closing was proceeding piecemeal. For reasons that remained murky, Washington D.C. was pushing the close of the Quebec and New Brunswick borders above New York state and New England. The local states and provinces involved were dragging their heels.

  There had to be a reason that border was closing on December 1. But I couldn’t find it.

  -o-

  A glance at the clock roused me from my studies to check on the gang. Everyone else had called it quits, but Shelley was still earnestly working at 4 p.m. I called her on the phone to thank her for her dedication and hard work, and told her to knock off for the weekend. She was reluctant because I was still working. Poor kid. I assured her I was done for now, and cheerfully chatted about my holiday plans and pre-cooking tonight for Thanksgiving. She was headed up to stay with her mother near Hartford for a few days. Apparently her family was just the two of them.

  I intended the conversation be light and cheerful and short. After a few minutes it dawned on me that the girl was near tears and panicked at the idea of going back to her Mom’s. “Hey, Shelley, what’s going on? Not that it’s any of my business.” It really wasn’t. And I didn’t want to care. “But you seem upset.”

  “She doesn’t want me to l-live down here in Stamford. It’s too expensive, and I could telecommute from home – her home. And my internship’s almost up anyway, so she wants me to move home now.”

  “And you don’t want to do that.”

  “No. She’s… It’s… This semester is the first time I’ve lived away from her. It’s like I can finally fight my way to the surface and breathe. I can’t go back!”

  “Wow. Well, first, you can keep working for UNC if you want. You’re a valued member of my team. You don’t have to leave in December or January to go back to school if you don’t want to yet.”

  “Really? Oh, thank you, thank you, Dee!”

  “You’re welcome. Does that… Is that enough for now? I mean, you’ll be physically safe going to your Mom’s for just Thanksgiving dinner, right?”

  “I don’t have to stay all weekend.” She said this wonderingly, as though it were divine revelation.

  “Well, if I we
re that uncomfortable, I wouldn’t. You’re a strong, independent grown woman now.” They stressed the Pygmalion Effect in supervisor school. I took the lesson to heart. “It’s an adjustment with parents, that their little girl is growing up. You know, be kind to your Mom, but do what’s right for yourself.”

  I winced my way through several more excessively intimate minutes until she seemed prepared to face her weekend, then signed off with her, and work, to go cook some yams.

  Cooking yams isn’t much of a challenge.

  I called Zack to let him know I was going away for the weekend with a friend to Montreal. He wished me a good time, and said he’d freeze some leftover turkey for me. He was sweet. I got off the phone quickly, though, before I said anything awkward.

  I called Adam to confirm our plans. He’d called the night before when I agreed to the trip, and then he was going to make reservations. The plan was an early start Friday, and the afternoon and Friday night in Burlington, recharging his Tesla, then on to Montreal for Saturday night. This sounded problematic for getting back on Sunday, but he assured me we could top up the charge during a leisurely lunch on the way back.

  Boiling yams is no challenge. But I wanted brown sugar on my candied yams the next day. It was bad enough that I had to use margarine instead of butter, because Mangal’s Jain ‘extended family’ – his preschool children were the couple’s only blood relatives in the group – were eco-vegan. And yeah, I didn’t have any brown sugar left.

  Thanksgiving Eve always was a scary time to go to the supermarket. The ever-decreasing selection of fresh vegetables in the produce aisle was disguised by artful displays of what was available – lots of pumpkins and other squash, cabbages, onions, and potatoes, mountains of apples and bagged cranberries, and plenty of hydroponic salad greens. Remembering what I’d read about Houston earlier, I gave thanks yet again that I lived in New England, where water was plentiful and food grew well. The selection would get tedious between Christmas and Easter, but for now shoppers were content enough in the produce aisle.

  As I wandered toward the baking ingredients, signs of stress grew. The long lines at the cashiers. The armed guards by the cashiers. Meat was scarce, and everybody wanted some for Thanksgiving. Prices were astronomical, especially for turkeys. I skirted a belligerent shopper in line who declaimed loudly that this had to stop, with his particular opinion of how to fix ‘this.’ He was a heavy guy with a nearly full cart, well over a thousand dollars of stuff. The woman ahead of him stared down defeated at her small basket of canned goods.

  There was a crash just before I got to the juice aisle. Several armed guards pushed past me as they rushed toward the loud voices. A trickle of pomegranate or cranberry juice flowed out the end of the aisle like blood. I paused and glanced cautiously up the aisle before crossing on. Aha. Beer aisle. The guards wrestled a middle-class white man to the ground while his wife made the children look away.

  I took a deep breath, and skedaddled past the double-wide holiday specials aisle. I was nearly run over by a woman triumphantly bearing two dented cans of pumpkin pie filling, high in the air. The dents were probably fresh, and safe from botulism. I spied a number of other cans lying on the floor. The aisle was packed with people.

  The next aisle was mine. Holiday baking. Hoarder central.

  Everyone was struck by the hoarder bug sooner or later. Fortunately not everyone hoarded the same thing, nor usually at the same time, except before snowstorms, hurricanes, and holidays. My particular weaknesses were survivalist seed tins, canning jars with lids, toilet paper, and batteries. I had two spare batteries for my computer, plus a giant house battery that could run the natural gas furnace and the refrigerators during power outages, and charge the other batteries.

  More people preferred to hoard sugar and flour. White flour puffed into the air like a cloud. The aisle was packed with humanity at its most neurotic. Sadly the sugar shelves were halfway up that crazed aisle. An older man dodged out hugging a 50-pound bag of sugar. I asked him if there was any brown sugar left. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t respond. He took position in a checkout line with nothing but his giant sugar bag. People thronged him begging to split the sugar after checkout. He shook his head spasmodically and refused to talk to any of them. When one of the other customers threatened to hit him with a frozen chicken, the cashier guard had enough. The sugar buyer was whisked to the front of the line.

  I stole another glance into the aisle. It just wasn’t worth it. Beet sugar with a dab of molasses would have to do instead of brown sugar.

  I drove home in the muggy dark. Too late to do much good against climate change, the U.S. had finally turned off the colossal waste of streetlights in suburbs. Outdoor Christmas lights were also forbidden, so we got to celebrate Thanksgiving without the eager Christmas jump-starters. The night creatures like raccoons and possums seemed to be thriving. Or at least I saw them more often, in headlights or a flashlight. I’ve always admired their attitude – the brilliant and devious can-do cheer of a raccoon, and the way possums survived getting hit by cars over and over again. They just shuffled off into the woods to heal up and fight another day. Resilient critters.

  Some of my neighbors felt differently about streetlights and the night critters. The couple with the nice swimming pool had been at perpetual war with Connecticut wildlife, both the furry and leafy varieties. But the raccoons had won, and the house stood dark and empty.

  There were lights on in the house on the other side. An older single mom and her teenaged son lived there. I often chatted with them while I was out gardening. But the gardens were bedded down for winter now. Muggy heat wasn’t enough to grow crops. There just wasn’t enough sun in late November. I still had cabbages and potatoes out in the ground, but that was more of a storage convenience. I could harvest them through Christmas.

  Maybe she had some brown sugar. If not, at least I could wish them a neighborly happy Thanksgiving.

  I tried the doorbell, but wasn’t sure if I’d heard it ring. I did hear footsteps. After another minute, I tried knocking on the door, and stood where someone peeking out the window could see me. More furtive footsteps inside, and a rustling at the curtain.

  I smiled and waved. “Hi, Alex. It’s me, Dee from next door.”

  The teenager opened the door a crack. “Um, hi.” Alex was a handsome kid, with a compact muscular build, short straight black hair, and warm Hispanic features. Furtiveness didn’t display the best in him tonight.

  “Hi, happy Thanksgiving!” I said.

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Hey, Alex, is your Mom home?”

  “Um, no. She’s, um, away.”

  I blinked. Away. For Thanksgiving? Leaving a 14-year-old behind. That wasn’t who I thought his mother Anne was. Not at all.

  “Oh. Sorry to miss her. I was wondering if I might borrow a cup of brown sugar. Do you have any?”

  “Um, I dunno.”

  “May I come in?”

  “No! Um, I’ll look. Wait a minute.”

  I contemplated Anne the absentee mom while I waited on the dark front stoop. Not a divorcée, Anne had Alex solo from the start. She worked from home as I did, some kind of data analyst, fairly successful to afford a nice home and to raise a kid single-handedly. She didn’t go overboard with the holidays, but spent quality time with Alex, shooting hoops or tending the lawn together. They seemed a nice family. Watching her with Alex, I’d even considered what it would be like to have a child by myself.

  Alex returned to thrust a partly-used bag of brown sugar out at me.

  The door started closing the moment I took the bag. “Thanks. Hey, Alex? Do you have plans for Thanksgiving?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  I suspected this meant he had a date with virtual friends for online gaming.

  “Well, if you need anything, while your Mom’s away? Feel free to come over. Ah, I’ll be away mostly this weekend. But I’ll be back.”

  “OK.” The door shut.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, Al
ex,” I said softly, hand on the door in benediction.

  It never would have occurred to me, then, not to tell the teenager next door I’d be away a few days. In summer I hired him to water the garden while I was away.

  Back in my house, the pathos of the day expressed itself with more hoarding. I hit the Internet to find what I could stock up on in Burlington and Montreal. Hoarding doesn’t really succeed at soothing anxiety, but shopping is kinda fun.

  Chapter 6

  Interesting fact: The GMO blight virtually annihilated North American GMO corn and soy crops. Once the disease was identified, farmers were ordered to burn standing crops. This was too little too late to prevent the disease spreading throughout the continent. Limited production the following two years was largely confined to producing non-GMO seed. This turned into a brush war in several Minnesota counties when organic farmers were ordered to turn their soybean seed over to Montagro, the extremely powerful multinational inventor of the GMO crops. The U.S. military was dispatched in aid of Montagro, but on arrival, the commanding officer elected to back down. Somehow Canadian border forces mixed in on the organic farmers’ side. Local news wasn’t allowed to cover the story until fed up townsfolk took over the broadcast stations. Five Montagro executives were burned alive in the subsequent Montagro Bonfire that razed almost every Montagro facility in the state. The U.S. military commander eventually received an honorable discharge after serving some time in prison.

  “Cabbages,” Adam said blankly, as I tucked my crate of produce into his opulent leather-upholstered back seat. “I was planning to feed you on this trip.”

  I grinned. “Trade goods. I was hoping to do a spot of shopping in Burlington. The guy wanted some of my home-grown. There are dried tomatoes and canned peppers under the cabbage.”

  “You’re a gardener!” He gazed at the winter bones of my sleeping garden in surprise. “Is that what all that is. That’s industrious. Is there also luggage?”