Sharp and Dangerous Virtues

by Martha Moody

  “How many tanks?” Chad was asking. “Were there trucks, too, Howard?” Sharis was grateful for this practicality; she couldn’t think anymore. She sank deeper in the chair, feeling paralyzed. It was always like this, she realized. Together she and Chad made a functioning person.

  “More tanks than trucks,” Howard answered. “Five-to-one ratio, I’d say.”

  Howard knew ratios? He’d been counting?

  “A lot,” Leon echoed solemnly. “I’d say a kazillion. Don’t you think a kazillion, Howard?”

  “Well,” Howard smiled, “a kazillion might be an exaggeration.”

  “Maybe we should check out that camp,” Chad said.

  LATER ON THAT beautiful spring day, Wednesday, May 13, 2048, kamikaze Alliance planes crashed into and destroyed thirteen bridges over the Great Miami and the Mad Rivers. All the bridges were hit between 2:06 and 2:32 p.m. There was only one recording of any of the crashes, taken by an amateur meteorologist who happened to be filming clouds. Only the four I-75 bridges were left untouched, because, as the media pointed out, the Alliance must anticipate a need for them. This was frightening. Until now I-75 south of the Grid border was controlled by the U.S. Soon, the Alliance seemed to be saying, we’ll be taking it over.

  Enormous wings tilted and rising from the water.

  A profile shot of the broken Salem Avenue bridge, its nub ends bristling with cables.

  Electrical lines down and sparking.

  One of the pilots survived, but before the rescue personnel could reach him he pulled out a pistol and shot himself dead.

  An egregious act of war. The routes out of Dayton toward Cincinnati had been left open, as if the Alliance were painting a giant exit arrow heading south. They’re telling us something, Chad said, his eyes on the TV.

  The American tanks rerouted, headed for I-75 to cross north on intact bridges.

  The crashed planes were Alliance machines, but the pilots had all been Esslandians. By that evening, videos of the pilots’ farewell parties were being run on the media, interspersed with the footage of the broken bridges. Crepe paper, punch bowls, sheet cakes: the celebrations had the look, Chad thought, of the grange hall wedding receptions of his cousins. The youngest pilot was fifteen. They weren’t suicides, one of their mothers said. They were patriots, dying for Esslandia.

  Chad said. “How can you fight against people who are willing to give up their children?”

  Abba said to Sharis, “Thank God you weren’t stuck up there after the Gridding.”

  “Turn down the TV,” Sharis said, shutting the door to the basement, where the boys were playing holo-games. “The kids don’t need this.”

  Abba lifted her leg from the soaking pail filled with Epsom salts to rest it on the sofa. Her feet and ankles were red and seeping. “That could have been your son,” she said to Sharis, nodding at the face of a pilot on the TV.

  “Please,” Sharis said. She wanted to tell Abba to shut up, but she couldn’t now that Abba was so ill. Abba was too short of breath to sleep flat anymore, and spent her days and nights propped at the end of the sofa.

  “Do you think there’s medicine at that camp?” Sharis asked.

  “Of course there’s medicine,” Chad said. “How could it be called a SafePlace without medicine?”

  FROM THE BEGINNING, the Wright brothers thought their invention could have a military use. They envisioned that airplanes would be useful the way hot-air balloons were, as reconnaissance vehicles gathering information to aid troops on the ground. The first air crash fatality, Lieutenant Thomas O. Selfridge, was riding with Orville as an army observer. The Wrights’ first American contract for the sale of a plane (1908) was to the U.S. Army. A German company the next year entered into a licensing agreement with the Wrights to produce their planes in Germany.

  Could the brothers have imagined their invention used to destroy the bridges of their hometown? Should they have? Wilbur was dead before World War I, but Orville was around to see fighter pilots and the Red Baron and explosives that dropped on people straight out of the sky. At one point Orville served as a consultant to the military for the development of pilotless bombs.

  Orville didn’t die until 1948. He saw Dresden, he saw Hiroshima.

  Chad had trouble getting to sleep that night, wondering if Orville had cared.

  TUURO HAD SETTLED himself in an old barn near the Englewood Dam. Behind the barn was a downsloping wooded hillside he thought it best to avoid, but walking straight out from the barn took him to the road that crossed the dam to a shopping center, where in the parking lot behind K-Bob’s he scrounged for food and supplies. He’d found a stash of what were probably old horse blankets in the barn’s basement, and he slept curled up in the loft. A plastic jump rope hung over one of the rafters. This reassured him: if things got unbearable, he had rope.

  “WE’LL PICK YOU up,” said the woman’s voice on the phone. “Right away, sir. Two thirteen Custard Lane. Three adults and two children, one family unit.”

  “What should we look for?” Chad asked. “You won’t come in a tank, will you?”

  “Oh, no, sir.” The woman on the phone chuckled. “Just a regular APC, sir.” Armored personnel carrier. The boys would be disappointed. “Remember, one eighteen-by-thirty-inch suitcase maximum per person. And don’t worry about sleeping bags. The camp’s fully equipped. It’s a joint venture with Marriott, sir. We’re your place for shelter and more.”

  Chad felt like he was dreaming. It wasn’t yet nine in the morning on Friday, not forty-eight hours after the bridges had been hit, and the afternoon before they hadn’t decided what they would do. The president’s message had said that the necessary preregistration for the camp could be done online. Chad had typed in the necessary data, then hesitated a moment before sending it on. The clock in the kitchen was ticking. Chad was in his usual chair, Sharis was on the family room floor leaning against the sofa, Howard slumped beside her, a reader in front of his nose. Leon was crouched on the other end of the sofa playing a perc game called Conundrum, and Abba was slumped on the sofa sleeping, because lately she slept all the time. A warm afternoon with the windows open and no lights on, an afternoon that felt like summer even though it was only May. No TV on, because of the boys. The night before Leon had spotted two fireflies, and Chad had been relieved when he couldn’t catch them. Don’t hurt the lights of the world, Chad had thought.

  “What do you think?” Chad had asked Sharis about the camp registration. “Should I send it?” Almost impossible, at that moment, to believe anything could hurt them, although less than five miles away there were wrecked planes and sacrificial bodies.

  Sharis looked up at him from the floor, and Chad had the feeling—a sort of thrill—that with her fingertip she could reach out and touch, just touch, an enormous metal ball, starting it this way or that, so that later, when it came careening through the woods with all its snapping and heaviness and violence, he would think back to this moment, when she was holding up her finger and deciding.

  Sharis said, “When you see tanks, it’s serious.”

  “At the internment camps for the Japanese during World War II everyone ate in the mess tents and they divided themselves into kids’ and adults’ tables. That was bad, the ages eating separately. It started the breakdown of the nuclear family.” One of Prem’s favorite points, although Chad wasn’t sure why he was mentioning it.

  “What if we agree to always eat together?” Sharis had said. “Even if there’s a mess tent.”

  “I want to eat with you, Mommy,” Howard said.

  “How about you, Leon?” Sharis asked, targeting her voice to the sofa. “Would you always eat with us?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Leon, intent on his game.

  “What does Abba think?” Sharis asked.

  Chad shrugged. “I’m sure she’ll agree with whatever we decide.”

  Abba’s easier than a child, Sharis had thought, and then it hit her that that might be something Abba worked on. She was different
since the day Howard and Leon had been through their trauma with the Webelos. She’d stopped 90 percent of her talking, and what she did say seemed to matter.

  Sharis said, “I think we should go to the camp because of Abba. I bet they’ll have her medicines.”

  Chad was already drifting away, his mind flying out that green rectangle of window—wishing, more than anything, that his neighborhood in late spring wasn’t beautiful, that he couldn’t hear its call to him to stay.

  GRADY’S FATHER’S VOICE was hardy over the perc, his face red. “Great opportunities! Durable goods are at a ten-year low. Everybody’s rushing for Marriott, but that’s too creamy for me these days. But the market for beds and sleeping bags! Did you know Duradown puts out a … ?”

  Grady wasn’t listening. He was watching his father’s lips move, thinking that single-mindedness like his father’s, in one way, kept the country going, but in another way it was insane. He had buried someone’s face. Three whole cities—Columbus and Dayton and Indianapolis—were being evacuated, while half of his army colleagues had been ordered to move from the air force base into downtown Dayton to defend it.

  “Have you thought about moving that money you got from Aunt Laura? Make a move when you can, son. Time waits for no man. Seize the day.”

  “I’m getting married when this is over,” Grady said, and then, when his father’s eyebrows raised: “No particular person.”

  Marriage sounded good to Grady now. He wanted something solid, something stable.

  “ALL ABOARD!” THE army driver said, and the five of them clambered into his Ford APC, his cheerful cry making it seem as if this was an adventure, a trip to a prank-filled camp that might be featured in a summer movie. Leon and Chad sat next to the driver; Sharis, Howard, and Abba took the back, the editon in Sharis’s lap. The driver had signed on for four years, then reupped. Wait’ll they saw the pool and the playgrounds. And the cafeteria tent, huge. With a special food line and seating section just for kids. The driver twisted his head and winked at Howard.

  The relocation camps for the city of Dayton and its suburbs were all south. Far enough south? the media asked, but there had been political considerations, with the counties below Montgomery unwilling to give up land. Dayton’s population west of I-75, largely Melano, had been stranded by the destruction of the bridges, and was being bused an hour west to an abandoned church camp being managed by Elderkind, the nursing home giant.

  The driver took them south on Far Hills for five miles, up and over the midpoint of Centerville, which was the highest elevation in the county, then turned left and drove two miles to the Schoolhouse Haven SafePlace. In the foreground of the SafePlace lay a vast expanse of enormous tents and portable toilets, punctuated by an occasional tree, and it took Chad a moment to get his bearings. Schoolhouse Haven had once been Schoolhouse Park. Chad had played baseball several times here as a boy, when his team traveled to compete with a Centerville team. Across Nutt Road from the SafePlace entrance was an army reserve encampment, with modular buildings that looked much more substantial that the SafePlace tents. “Where are the trailers?” Chad asked.

  “Wait a minute, here’s a joke for you boys,” their driver said. “If you’re dying in the dining room, what do you do?”

  Leon wasn’t listening, but Sharis knew the word “dying” was too much for Howard. “I give up,” she answered quickly.

  “Go to the living room!”

  “Where are the trailers?” Chad repeated.

  The gaze of the lackey (Chad suddenly saw this was what he was) turned vague. “I’m not sure they’re here yet. You’ll have to talk to the concierge.” He pronounced this “consy-URGE.” “She’ll be right with you.” He stopped the truck where it was and hurried unceremoniously off, disappearing into a shed forty feet away that appeared to be an office, with blinds and an air conditioner in its single window.

  “I don’t want to stay if we don’t get a trailer,” Chad said in a low voice. There were a number of uniformed soldiers milling around them, and he didn’t want to be overheard.

  “But if Dayton’s going to be bombed …” Sharis said. “And if Abba can get medicine …”

  “We’re not in Dayton, we’re in Centerville.”

  “I don’t think bombs recognize borders.”

  “Are you kidding? Bombs recognize nothing but borders.”

  Abba was staring out the small APC window. There were times she didn’t seem to hear them.

  “Not local borders.” Sharis snapped. “Not borders between cities and suburbs.”

  “Stop fighting!” Howard cried out. There was a moment of silence.

  “Howard, do you see any trailers?” Sharis asked, craning her head.

  “Is that a trailer, Mommy? Over there?” But it was not.

  “Mommy, I’m bored,” Leon announced.

  “You’ll just have to be bored, Leon,” Sharis said, and Chad, hearing the tension in her voice, erupted: “You shut up, Leon! How can you say you’re bored when at this moment we …” He stopped talking at the sight of a young woman in camouflage shorts and a white shirt walking toward them, waving an iris scanner and smiling.

  “It’s the ’urge,” Chad said, sitting up straighter, smiling back.

  “You must be the Gribbles,” the concierge enthused, sticking her hand through the open window. “I’m Julie.” She spotted Abba and her voice rose. “Oh, and you brought your own elder!” Sharis looked at Chad, her flat gaze filled with misgiving.

  IN CHATTANOOGA, DIANA found a job doing administrative work for the Red Cross. The first few weeks she did little more than relay messages, but then the news of the camps outside the various cities erupted. The Red Cross people were distressed about the camps; they couldn’t believe the Feds had partnered with Marriott and not them. And getting Elderkind involved was just a joke. Eventually, many more camps might be needed, outside other Grid border cities, and Diana’s new job was to monitor media transmissions from the evacuated cities and compile daily reports using notable moments. If Marriott made itself look terrible, so be it. “They have no idea what they’re getting into,” Diana’s boss said of Marriott. “They’re recreation, not rescue.”

  Diana had been sitting at her monitors when the planes crashed into the bridges in Dayton. Since she had the biggest monitors in the room, within minutes she was the center of the uproar.

  “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “It’s like the World Trade Center.”

  “And another beautiful day.”

  “It has to be the Gridians. Don’t you think it’s Gridians?”

  “God, those Esslandians aren’t even human!”

  “They’re human,” Diana said, remembering the Esslandian president’s little eyes. He had talked to her by videophone for close to an hour. What did she mean to him? The girlfriend of the nature center’s director. He was desperate for an ally, she thought. He wanted someone outside the Grid to understand him. It comforted her to remember that time, because already her days in the nature center didn’t seem real. If it weren’t for the infant growing in her belly, Charles could be a person she’d dreamed up.

  “How can they be human? Life means nothing to them.”

  “They take a long view,” Diana heard herself saying. “They’re more interested in the survival of a population than a single individual.”

  She’d had no more spotting. Her pregnancy was fine. Meant to be.

  “Species survival.” Someone was muttering. “Bullshit.”

  “But it’s not,” Diana said. “Species survival is important. Look at groves of trees!”

  She didn’t stop. By the time she finished people were backing away from her. No one asked her where she’d gotten such ideas. At the end of the day she packed up her purse and went home, knowing that she’d used up all the goodwill engendered by her pregnancy, that tomorrow she would need to start explaining.

  the safeplace camp

  “THEY’RE SPLITTING UP nuclear families,” Sharis said, followin
g Chad through the door and inside. “You can’t deny that.”

  Chad was trying to stress the positive. He was very impressed, for example, with the door of their apartment (their “dwelling,” to use the Marriott term), which had a frame and locked and opened and was tall enough that Chad didn’t bump his head. Those Marriott people knew their stuff. Chad said, “Howard and Leon are with us a ton. You don’t mind them making friends, do you?” The kickball games, the crafts, the children’s activity center with its hologram hall. The cheerful and ubiquitous concierge—“the ’urge,” as everyone called her.

  Chad kept his voice down, because despite the sound-muffling fabric you could often make out your neighbors’ words through the partitions. They were staying in what appeared to be a former catering tent now divided into eight dwellings. Because Abba made their group larger than the average family of three to four, they had been given a corner area. Sharis and Chad and the boys slept in bunk beds against the adjoining inner walls. Abba had been given a fold-up cot topped by an air mattress, although she was more comfortable sleeping sitting up in the inflatable armchair. There were indeed medicines here for Abba, but not precisely the ones she had been taking. Also, the camp doctor was covering all three Dayton camps, and Abba so far had only seen a physician extender.

  Sharis hated the camp. No, that was inaccurate: the camp itself was pleasant enough, and all the inmates (ha!) seemed reasonably happy, but simply having all these powerless people lumped together took Sharis back to the Gridding. It seemed impossible that people who asked her which street she was from and what did she think of the remaining school year being canceled couldn’t tell that she was different, didn’t see her as a shredded being. Get me out of here! she thought. Save me from this unrelenting niceness. The nighttime noises of crying or snuffling or the occasional imprecation were a comfort to her, proof that other people here could be unhappy. There were times she hated Chad’s optimism, the beautiful weather, the hundreds of people around her, and, perhaps most oppressively, the enforced good cheer. There seemed to be a secret pact that people wouldn’t talk about the future. On the other side of their tent a group of families whose sons had played football together gathered each evening for a songfest, and the music and shouts from the campfire were almost more than Sharis could bear.