by Martha Moody
“Yeah,” Derk chortled. “On the Duck. Listen, those women are dead ducks now! You didn’t hear the bombing? Lot of people didn’t. They finished about eight. They had the fans on full blast all night, if you noticed.” He nodded toward the monitor. “President Baxter’s supposed to make a speech any minute.” He lifted his paint can. “The ’urge wants me to do up some graffiti. She’s got a special place for me to put it. I thought “God Bless America,” what do you think?”
Before Chad could answer, the PA system crackled, and President Baxter’s voice boomed through the camp. Derk set down his equipment and stood with his hand on his heart. My student, Chad thought. He hoped his other students had more intelligence that Derk did.
Some people kept their percs on twenty-four hours a day and had themselves beeped for significant news. Chad wondered if he should have done that. On the other hand, he and his family were rested.
“ … a stunning success … We have met our objectives … while the loss of property is heavy, we are blessed with no loss of civilian American lives …”
Chad was suddenly aware of noises that sounded like gunshots. “What’s that?” he said.
Derk burst into an even bigger grin, gold tooth flashing. “Guys at the reserve camp. Celebrating. You know. Cleaning out their firearms. The ’urge cleared it.” The reserve camp was south of the SafePlace Camp, on the opposite side from the arriving trucks.
My God, Chad thought. It’s almost over. We’ll get back home. It seemed almost too easy. President Baxter was talking about strategic objectives and the healing of the country. The Gridians were valued members of the American family, President Baxter said; treatment of the insurrectionist Gridian leaders would be harsh, but the Gridian people would see justice tempered by mercy. Fourth of July, Chad was thinking. Independence Day, we’ll be back home. My family should hear this, he thought, turning back toward his dwelling.
One of the boys was cringing, huddled beneath his cot, but the other was whizzing around the room like a bottle rocket, screaming. It took an instant for Chad to grasp that the hysterical boy was Leon.
“Leon,” Chad said, “they’re shooting into the air.”
“Don’t shoot me!” Leon was shouting, the fear in his voice so raw it infected Chad.
“Leon,” Sharis said, “it’s nothing. They’re celebrating. Getting back Dayton is a big victory. You don’t want to go back to our house and be ruled by the crazy Grid people, do you?” Her perc was on, and Chad realized she’d been listening to the president, too.
Odd that Chad didn’t feel happier. They’d go back to their house, yes, but what else would they do? Would he still have a job? Would UD students from New Jersey or Florida make their return to Dayton? Nothing would be the same. Their grass would be too high to use the mower, the Hofmeisters would be mad about their awnings. Maybe the Hofmeisters wouldn’t come back.
Chad told himself that none of this mattered. They were still a family, including Abba, whom they’d rescue from the Elderkind facility and take back to their house. He and Sharis had held out for normal life, and, in the most personal of senses, they had won.
But he couldn’t really think about that now, with Leon screeching and scrambling on his hands and knees under the bunk. “Could you grab him for me, please?” Sharis said and Chad bent over and scooped Leon up, pried his fingers off the corner of the bed, and deposited him in Sharis’s lap.
“I agree with you, Leon. I hate shooting,” Sharis said, stroking his hair. Leon’s residue of that day with the Webelos, she was thinking. She should give him a talk the way she’d talked to Howard.
“The soldiers are young bucks and buckettes,” Chad said, nodding toward the noise. “It’s a release. What the heck.”
Sharis made a huff of disgust. “What about discipline? Isn’t the military supposed to believe in discipline?” Ah, Sharis, Chad thought. My passionate girl.
“The ’urge cleared it,” Chad said.
“I hate that stupid ’urge,” Sharis said, gripping Leon tighter to her, but Chad didn’t really hear his wife, being so caught up in the moment: the palpably quiet air now that Leon had stopped screaming; Baxter’s winding up his speech with a statement that sounded like a prayer; Howard lying on his cot with his head tilted back, looking at the world upside down. A baby was crying somewhere on the far side of the tent, but outside their door people were intently listening, their heads bowed or tilted to one side. The speech ended, and after a moment their fellow SafePlace guests (Chad still recoiled at that term) erupted in laughter and conversation. Everything outside their rectangle of door was a glowing green; the smell of wet grass wafted through the doorway, and the shots, Chad realized, were almost finished, ammunition giving out or discipline kicking in.
“Come on,” he said, feeling himself, his wife, their whole existence soften. “Let’s go outside and see the great big world.”
Leon shook his head ferociously.
“Come on.”
“I can’t carry him,” Sharis said.
“I’ll take him.” Chad lifted Leon off Sharis’s lap, his son’s stiffening only momentary before he collapsed, spent, with his cheek on his father’s shoulder. “Come on, Howard.” Chad waggled his free hand.
“Is it safe?” Since they arrived here, Howard had spent 90 percent of his waking hours outside.
“Sure, it’s safe. Everything’s over. It’s never been safer.”
The whole camp seemed to be outside. Outside and milling, their clothes looking brighter and cleaner, their faces lit up, the dark circles beneath their eyes somehow faded. Sharis walked beside Chad and Leon through the door of their dwelling, Howard scrambling to his feet behind them. Outside the sky was like a picture, blue with puffy clouds. Chad put his arm around Sharis and squeezed her ribs, the bones caving slightly beneath his fingers, and his first thought when she went limp was that he had hurt her, he didn’t know his own strength, what kind of brute was he? Then he saw the hole in the top of her head and how it filled up like a magic thimble. The sight mesmerized him, and it took him an instant to realize the liquid in the hole was blood. The blood spilled into Sharis’s dark hair. Leon shouldn’t see this, Chad thought, loosening his grip so his son would slide to the ground. “Go inside!” he said, meaning to warn Leon and Howard, but other people outside—and they weren’t really happy, he could see that now, the clusters of children and adults and adolescents (they break down the nuclear family in here, they do)—were turning toward him, their faces changing as they took in the limp wife and the blood running down her head and face, and within seconds it was a panic, no other word for it, people were diving into the tents, and Chad, when he thought back on it, remembered no particular person beyond his family, just the hurtling bodies and the screaming.
A stray bullet, fired in celebration. Infinitesimal, the media would say later of the odds. Tragic. Interviews with the offending reservists, the commanding officers, physicists who explained the trajectory of the bullet.
Chad lifted Sharis back through the doorway and put her on the ground. “Get further inside!” he said to Howard, who backed into the canvas wall. Leon was sobbing and clinging to his brother’s leg. Sharis’s face was very white, her eyes open. Chad was not sure she still existed. “I’m glad I married you,” he said. She blinked. Oh, God, he thought, I haven’t shaved for days. She had never liked his beard. He hoped desperately that he didn’t look like Derk.
“Me too,” she said. And then, as if her words might not be clear to him: “You.” Her pupils got big and round, like drains forced open. He dropped himself on top of her, gently, and he lifted her and cradled her in his arms, but there was never an instant—despite what people thought—that he didn’t understand that she was dead. He knew she was dead as soon as he saw her pupils widen, but accepting it took time. I’m an adaptable person, he was thinking, I can cope, I will cope. At the same time this new reality was too much for him. He saw that it would take days, weeks, months before he truly understood it
. My brain can only do so much. Sharis’s body was a comfort to him, the last bit of her he had. He wanted to cradle it. He didn’t want to let it go. Later, the ’urge told him he’d been scary. Even the commands of the medical personnel and the stares of the gathering crowd and his own children and the blood spreading over his chest and arms and pants had not been enough to make him assent to have his wife taken away from him. Scary? he felt like shouting at the ’urge. Good! I wanted to be scary!
DIANA SAT IN front of her bank of monitors, mouth agape. Every station, it seemed, was showing the same footage, people screaming and running, a field clearing, and, in the distance, one man lifting something and carrying it into a tent. “Did you get that?” Her boss was yelling. “Did you see that? That would never have happened in a Red Cross camp!”
CHAD HAD HEARD once from Prem that the Gridians didn’t bury their dead, but instead chopped them up and distributed them on the fields. “Gem of the day, huh, Prem?” Chad had responded, because Prem delighted in being a fount of gruesome knowledge. “It is true!” Prem squealed. “Absolute truth! Think of that when you eat your next potato”—aiming this dig at Ramsey, the ancient history specialist, who practiced a particularly righteous vegetarianism.
Chad wanted to do that for Sharis. He wanted to take her back to their old yard and let her feed her bulbs. She would love that. She would want that. Chad tried to explain this to the ’urge and the other officials, but everyone thought he was crazy. Someone appeared with an injection. “What is this?” Chad shouted, twisting to get free. “Is this Calmadol?” Thinking of Sharis and the night she had escaped the Gridding, how without a molecule of medication she’d been strong enough to watch. “I don’t want—” he yelled, but by then the shot had taken hold.
“WHAT DO YOU think? They were bleeding the water system, and then the head of water disappears, and with her every bit of information. Of course she’s alive. She’s up there on the Grid eating corn fritters with maple syrup.” The general licked his lips. “Wait till they catch her. She was friendly with that Ferrescu, who everyone knows …” The general bit off his words. “I can’t believe the level of corruption in this town! You almost think: no wonder it got destroyed. Like Gomorrah or something. You familiar with Gomorrah?”
“No, sir.” Twenty-eight hours after the final bombing, Grady had brought the general to a piece of remaining high land, a hill just south of town. Around them the ravaged landscape looked like a swamp of unthinkable size, the smoking remains of buildings dotting the water like rotted stumps. South, in the distance, was a broken line of fuzzy green. North there was nothing but brown and, above it, brown smoke from the Grid fires. Somewhere northeast the air force base remained intact, but the pilot couldn’t make it out from here.
“Town that got destroyed by God in the Bible. Old Testament. Bad town.”
Dayton wasn’t Gomorrah, Grady thought. He wondered if victors always blamed a place’s destruction on the place itself. Probably even Gomorrah wasn’t Gomorrah. The ground beneath their feet was littered with plastic bags and pieces of wood: Grady suspected this hill had started out as a landfill.
“You know what my father used to say?” The general said. “Sometimes you’ve got to spend money to save money. And sometimes you’ve got to destroy a place to save it.” He brought a hand to his forehead. “Oh, God, do I have a headache. I think it’s the smell. You notice that god-awful smell?”
Acrid and something else, something rotted and organic. Dead Alliance solders? Animals? Collapsed sewer lines? The dump beneath their feet? Everyone kept saying they had gotten all the natives out. Casualty-averse. That thing with the mother named after the movie star had been a freak accident, not a war casualty at all. Of course, President Baxter had said that no Americans had been killed during the munitions raid, either, but that was where Grady had seen the Face of War.
“What happened to your face, by the way?” the general said, turning, and for a second Grady thought he’d read his mind. “You didn’t crash a Hellion, did you?”
“No, I …” but before Grady could finish the general was singing: “Putre-, putre-, putre-, putreFACtion. Putre-, putre- …”
He’s a sick human being, Grady thought. The realization made him feel jostled and confused, as if he were trying to stand upright on a swaying train. Life was easier if you didn’t think things. He remembered Rapunzel at the Green House, her blonde, soft bush and its sweet, clean smell. Impossible that the world could contain both this and that, and yet it did.
“WHERE ARE MY boys?” Chad said when he woke up. By then it was Saturday. “Where’s Abba?”
Everyone was soothing. They’re fine, they’re fine …
“I want to go home,” he said. “When do I get back to my house?”
They’re fine, they’re fine …
Sharis was slated for burial in Woodland Cemetery, Cincinnati’s oldest and most historic graveyard. They’d been lucky to find a space there for her; Abba had consented.
“Cincinnati? What about Dayton? What about David’s Cemetery near our house?”
A mental health tech stepped in. “No one’s going to be going back to Dayton for a while.” Something about chemicals in the water, about the aquifer being contaminated. The Gridians had sent them tainted water.
The world could be terrible, Chad thought. Things happened that were random and vicious, and no virtue in the world could ever stand up to them. No virtue in the world except, perhaps, persistence.
I should have taught that, Chad thought. I should have had that in my course. He’d add it to the presentation, he thought—but then he realized Sharis would not be there to film him.
“We’d better get him on meds,” the mental health tech was saying. “I don’t see this guy handling the funeral bare.”
AFTER THE DAM explosion, Tuuro was picked up by an army medic truck and taken to a hospital in Dayton. When he woke up they asked him his name. Theodore Simpkins, he said. In the last rush out of Dayton before the flooding Tuuro was placed in an ambulance and driven south through Cincinnati into Lexington, Kentucky. “I’m going the wrong way,” he thought when the nurse told him they were crossing the Ohio River. But he had no choice.
In Lexington he managed to heal. The artificial skin took hold. It left him a slightly paler color on his back and face. He thought to himself that he no longer looked African.
He was released from the hospital to a convalescent center, and it was there, sitting in a flock of people in wheelchairs in the intake room, that he had his great opportunity.
“How many people today?” the doctor was saying. She was young, with long red hair and a face that veered between sympathy and impassivity, as if it were incompletely hardened. With the war over, a huge influx of refugees, some of them injured or sick, was swamping any outpost of the health care system within two hundred miles of the old Grid border. “You look simple, what’s your name?” the doctor asked, pointing her finger at Tuuro.
“Bob White,” Tuuro said.
“Bob White like the bird? You look pretty good, Mr. White. You don’t look like you’re drowning in medical complications. You basically healthy?” Tuuro nodded. “Cathy, grab his vitals and let’s get him to a room.”
“I don’t see him on the list,” Cathy said.
“What happened to you?” the doctor asked. “Where’d you come from?”
Tuuro told her in two sentences.
The doctor raised her eyebrows. “You lived through one of the dam explosions? Wowsa.”
Tuuro nodded. “Lucky Bob,” he said, and he did seem impossibly lucky, because his old kind self—Tuuro, two u’s, and I will bury you, my son, and Yes, General, I will help you—had been hopelessly stupid and trusting, an embarrassment, and it amazed him that such a person had survived.
The doctor looked over Cathy’s shoulder. “They may have forgotten him. Or mis-ID’ed him, like that woman yesterday.”
Tuuro decided to push it. “They were calling me something like … Simp
son? But I’m not Simpson.”
Cathy said, “Here’s a Simpkins.”
“You’re not Theodore Simpkins?” The doctor asked. “Hold on a minute.” She pulled out her perc and typed something in. “It’s not an absolute ID,” she said. “He’s got eye damage from the burn.”
Craftiness would help him. That and anger, real or feigned, and the strength to keep resisting and demand.
“I am not Theodore Simpson!” Tuuro bellowed. “My name is Bob White!”
“Okay, Mr. White, calm down,” the doctor said. “These things happen. You have to remember, lately there’s been lots of confusion.” She keyed the new name into her perc. “Get Mr. White to a room, Cathy.” She patted Tuuro on the shoulder. “Good luck to you. Be brave.”
AFTER THE BOMBING of Dayton, the U.S. ground troops in trucks and tanks crossed the I-75 bridges and headed north, spreading out along the southernmost Grid roads and then fanning north in parallel. The fires they set behind them were methodical and limited, the Grid roads themselves being fire barriers. Their instructions were to evacuate the villages, and there were actually buses for that purpose, but in many villages there was resistance, and in Village 57, home to the former environmental engineer from Lindisfarne who had become the unofficial Grid (Esslandian) theologian, the troops discovered the entire population, including women and children, lying dead in a vast circle in a field.
You could try all you wanted, President Baxter said in his daily message, but you couldn’t save people who were bent on their own destruction.
The army kept moving. The projection was that only 20 percent of the Grid would require alighting, but it was closer to 40 percent before the Esslandian president, in his bunker under the Green House, shot himself and his family, leaving the remaining Esslandian officials scrambling to ascertain the mechanism of surrender. Two more villages were destroyed before the Esslandians resorted to white sheets and pillowcases hung out of windows. With the Grid back in American hands and troops heading north, the Alliance pulled quickly out of Cleveland, and eventually all parties signed the Malmö (Sweden) Accord.