Jolt

by Roberta M. Roy

  The plumbers were called upon to find and install washing machines and dryers in each of the churches. Soap and disinfectants were given to community members who were well only to the point where there was enough in reserve for a couple of months use in the sickbay. Showers for other than decon were prohibited due to the likelihood of water shortage and people were encouraged to bathe in the lake and to use soap primarily for spot washing of face, hands and private parts. The rising number of corpses posed a particularly difficult problem. It was decided that the energies of the people were needed to care for the living rather than for burying the dead, so the masons were called upon to build a kiln to function as a crematorium.

  Indeed it was a sad crew that lived beside the lake that spring and summer.

  Among the first to die were those with the most severe burns. Some of those with just second degree burns saw their burns heal, only to then be ravaged by radiation sickness. Those with third degree burns, lacking adequate medical care, usually suffered major infections as keeping them sterile was almost impossible. Thus, by summer’s end, only a few of the severe burn victims had survived. Those with shrapnel wounds were treated as possible in sickbay. Some healed, but many did not. Few with shrapnel wounds lacked burns or failed to come down with radiation sickness. Some seemed well except for the loss of eyesight; these were they who came from perhaps thirty-five to forty miles from ground zero. While they may have missed the worst of the fallout and the shrapnel, they had had the misfortune of looking toward an explosion when it was at its brightest. Similarly, there were those who had become deaf from the impact. Of all of those who survived, almost none of them were closer than forty miles from the site of what turned out to be more a kind of nuclear bomb rather than a melt down, but it may have been a combination of a bomb, melt-down, arson, and Dirty Bombs. Whatever were the facts, there was an assumed severity of the radioactive contamination at ground zero and no one was permitted to enter the area of major destruction and loss to study the evidence, so everyone was left guessing. By now, however, most thought the major part of the devastation had occurred as a result of a bomb as well as the cooling towers failing to work around the spent fuel stored there. Nonetheless, whatever the cause, the results had been beyond most people’s wildest speculations. Of note of course was the total lack of terrorist or even suspicious events since the event. Was it possible that all that occurred had culminated in a mass event that masked a mass suicide by some to-date unidentified terrorist group operating alone and with no ties to any of the larger networks currently known? Could they have torched the houses, detonated some smaller Dirty Bombs as well as a nuclear one and set off the melt-down? Or were these simultaneous but unrelated events? While initially the fear of further attack loomed large in everyone’s minds, as time passed people thought less and less about the likelihood of any follow-up event.

  Radiation sickness was now rampant among the Newcomers. Among those who received high doses of radiation, almost none made it to Lochlee. They had died within a day or two of the explosion wherever their miseries found them. And those with medium doses also had been taken, but their path to death had been slower, marked at first by diarrhea and vomiting that in time became bloody as they lost the linings of their stomachs and intestines. Those with lower but still fatal doses of radiation only suffered nausea and vomiting for a few days and then seemed better until about three weeks after their main exposure. At that point their white blood cell count dropped and sores began to appear on their mouths and they again began to fail. Later they would bleed from their skin, and then, too, their intestines and stomach. And in time without adequate care many, if not most, of them died, too. Only a few of the lucky ones who arrived in a timely manner to a hospital before it was overrun, lived.

  In Lochlee, care was, at best, palliative. And even if there had been doctors, there were no medicines. And as there was no hospital, life support systems were pretty non-existent beyond soap and water and straws through which to drink water into which sugar and salt had been added to encourage hydration and re-hydration. Help from outside remained very slow in coming. So as it was, everyone just made the best of it, which, as it turned out, was better than was being done in many other places.

  But generally, given the distance from the sight of the event, those who had reached Lochlee were the refugees most likely to have been least affected. Those lost in the immediate event and those who had received stronger doses of ionizing radiation had been less likely to make it so far north. So bottom line was, as cleanliness, hydration with sugar and salted water, food, and shelter was for most of them who did arrive in Lochlee all they needed, the bulk of the Newcomers survived.

  7. They Wear Red Hats

  As the hot days of summer began to settle in, Thaw and Natalie often took to the cool of the woods. Sometimes they bathed in the lake in a rocky area in the lake a good distance from the public beach around a bend and out of sight of the Newcomers. After Natalie had decided not to return to Bain, with calls and cajoling to do so, she had reconsidered and tried returning to work there on a reduced three-day-a-week part-time schedule. In this way she could also look in on her parents with some regularity. There she found that although her father still was not well, her mother seemed settled into a routine centered on care for her beloved husband.

  Natalie had hoped that the schedule would leave her time to continue her work with the Lochlee Council, on which, by the end of May, she had become a sitting member. But with the travel she rapidly approached exhaustion. Even the weekends with Thaw turned into community efforts rather than relaxation. And the haul that once seemed so short became longer with each trip. Refugees continued to strand the highways and all kinds of strange, unexpected threats lay along the way, not the least of which were the packs of wild dogs she sometimes glimpsed in the fields and woods along the way. So she handed in her resignation and slipped fully and comfortably into her new mountain-village identity.

  Thaw was back to painting now and once or twice a week, Natalie would fix a lunch and Thaw would drag along a canvas and paints and set up on some rocks that had long served him as an easel. With him he would bring some sketches of scenes among the Newcomers.

  Since painting the large portrait of Natalie and amusing himself by sketching poses of her that particularly caught his eye, he had more and more moved toward painting people rather than animals in his pictures. However, the Newcomers had a profound impact on the pictures, and Thaw’s new style and subject matter tended to be almost a snapshot commentary on life at the camp where the notion of a family took on a new meaning. On the one hand it would be more closely knit, while on the other, given the ill and dying, it would have a kind of loose separateness about it. A mother might be laughing with her little children while propped in the shade against a car an old man might be lying under a cover on a blanket or a teenage boy might be sitting, head and shoulders slumped, gaunt and lifeless, against the family car. Or perhaps a group of mourners would be gathered around the kiln while birds flew unaffected among the trees. Or a family might be picnicking on the grass, a pyramid-shaped molding privy in the background.

  The people in these new paintings of Thaw’s were more rapidly drawn and painted, and unlike his portrait of Natalie or the birds and animals of his earlier work, they often seemed to lack really specific faces and identities. Sometimes one among them would form the center of attention for the scene. That one would have a clarity that matched his earlier works and would be most carefully done. And in that one, beauty or hunger or pain or a numbed or wistful quality would shine through with painstaking clarity.

  It seemed to Thaw that time was at a greater premium than it had been. He continued to paint as he had always done, moving rather rapidly for the greater part of the picture. But the number of items and persons that came through his brush had increased in number, giving his new works a kind of overrun feeling. That and his new sense of urgency lent to a sharpness of clarity in the images. And somehow, overall,
Natalie felt that the results successfully captured the overwhelmingly close disarray of the Newcomer camps and the village’s new, cramped lifestyle.

  One hot, humid morning, Natalie sat on a rock drying her hair. “Thaw, Lem said there’s been fighting breaking out in the camps at times. He blames it on the hot weather.”

  “Hmm.”

  Natalie rubbed and dried her coppery hair with a small white towel. “Do you think we’re going to have problems with violence now?”

  Thaw kept painting. He did not change his gaze toward Natalie. “I don’t know,” he answered somewhat abstractly.

  Natalie’s hair hung forward over her bent head as she used her fingers to fluff it. “I wonder what they fight over.”

  Thaw took a step back to size up his work. “I don’t know.”

  “Suppose things get out of hand. Lem says every day there are more and more squabbles and fights. Also there have been some break-ins in the village.” Natalie’s hair felt only damp to the touch now, so, using her fingers, she began to comb it into place. “He thinks it’s probably teenagers. What do you think we should do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Natalie’s hair was a mass of ringlets. By the time she was done, if you didn’t know better you might have guessed it had been professionally set and styled. But her hair had not detracted her from her concerns. “You know what I think?”

  Thaw had moved closer to the canvas and was working with a smaller brush on the details of a small child’s face. “No.”

  “I think we need to expand the role of our deputies to include maintaining the peace. Where the travelers are cooperative, the presence of the deputized guys in red hats is helping along the roads. But some people coming through are not always willing to either move on or park where they’re asked to park. So Martha says your father told her that they’ve had to threaten citizen’s arrests in order to get people to comply…although she says he doesn’t know what they would do with them or where they would keep anyone if they did make an arrest. To date the bluff has worked, but I think we’re going to have to expand deputies’ duties to include the potential for making arrests if necessary. I mean, not that they don’t already have that option anyway. As citizens, I mean. But we would have to set up some kind of a holding area for them to await trial and make sure the word got around of the change.”

  “Probably not a bad idea.” The child’s face smiled up at him.

  “You know, Thaw, that’s how places like New York City lowered their crime rate to the lowest in years. Well, not with citizen arrests, perhaps. But with police. We would just have to use those deputized as if they were regular police.” She shoved her brush and comb into the small flowered purse that also served as a knapsack. Then she folded the towel.

  Thaw was cleaning his brushes. Apparently he was finished for the day. “Maybe you should bring it up at Council.”

  That afternoon, Natalie, Lem and Lem’s sister May took a walk as they often did when they wanted to talk about things out of earshot of the children. They discussed Natalie’s proposal for explicitly expanding the deer-hunters-and-gun-toters-turned-deputies’ powers and setting up some kind of a system for hearing cases and maintaining a holding place for use until the troopers could come in and take them. Then Lem called Larry, the town council chair, who agreed to meet with them a bit at his house with Natalie and Lem.

  When Lem mentioned it to Thaw, the younger man begged off joining them as he wanted to do some sculpting, so later that night Larry, Natalie, and Lem met and hammered out a proposal to be presented at the next Council meeting. They would recommend the setting up a temporary holding area for any who might be arrested thereafter. It would be set up in the firehouse behind where the fire engine was parked. Two holding pens adequate to hold four prisoners would be built. There, anyone arrested would wait, pending arrival of the State Troopers to come and take the arrested individual or individuals to the nearest working Court for a hearing.

  The list of persons with hunting licenses had been used to determine who was eligible to serve as a peacekeeper or enforcement officer. A quick list of expanded powers and responsibilities for each was drawn up. Following the Council’s acceptance of the temporary retention proposal, the holding pens necessary for its enforcement were built behind the fire engine. And as the citizens’ communications center had its hands full with ongoing responsibilities, the local bank became a phone bank to determine who was and who was not willing to serve on the enforcement team and when and where. An effort was made to establish some kind of a schedule that divided those who would patrol in the camps from those who would patrol the roads from those who would man the retention area.

  Those who patrolled the camps and holding area were chosen because they were licensed to carry handguns in shoulder holsters, which, it was hoped, would be less threatening to the children while just as effective with the adults. Those who patrolled the roads were permitted to carry any gun they preferred, as long as they were kept in easy view. Again, each deputy was required to wear a red hat with their official deputy name tag and identifying number pinned onto it.

  Some of the Red Hats, as they quickly came to be called, who were in charge of traffic control, were required to stand, shot guns ready, at intervals along the road. There they would answer travelers’ questions, provide directions, and define the “rules” for that area. And, as necessary, they made citizens’ arrests as deputized representatives of the village. Each carried either a set of handcuffs or a rope with instructions as to how to most quickly turn the rope into a kind of handcuffs.

  As cell phones did not work reliably in the area and there was no guaranteed way to communicate to contact the police or troopers, the Red Hats were instructed to be sure to read the accused his or her rights from the back of the makeshift Citizens’ Patrol Identification Card they carried in the plastic holder on their caps.

  As most of the travelers were more frustrated than criminal, just the gun and the traffic control or peacekeeper ID generally sufficed. However, there were some blatant exceptions, and a few times a week someone, usually an angry driver or two yelling women or a disgruntled male, might be brought in for holding and a hearing.

  As an upshot of this, some of the Red Hats were, so to speak, given the opportunity to moonlight when they were hired to guard the local lumber yard. This had become necessary as the Newcomers’ desire to build what they did not have turned out to be strong and, in particular, some of the teenagers among them saw the wood almost as theirs for the taking. So what once had sat open to all in the community, appearing to be free for the taking, now was patrolled by a hired Red Hat.

  Although the Red Hats seemed to have a calming effect on most everyone, there were still some villagers who felt the need to back up the Red Hats’ efforts with neighborhood watches. Since gasoline was scare, these villagers patrolled on foot, in pairs, between six in the evening and one in the morning. The troopers were then called in for pickups from the firehouse once or twice a week.

  So despite the relentless heat of summer, the evidence of violence rose only slightly in the camps while in the village the night patrol seemed by-and-large to have solved the problem of break-ins.

  But in Bain, riots continued to break out, the news of which only served to reinforce Natalie’s belief that giving up her job there had been the right thing. She felt her mother in the more residential area in which she was located was probably as safe as could be expected and the bus from her corner took her daily directly to the hospital where her father was recuperating, so she did not have to worry about her driving through gangs, unprotected in a car.

  Thaw’s work at Nick-Sue remained on hold as the university had not reopened its classes as yet.

  As the summer progressed, the mortality rate and the number of sick and dying decreased in the camps. The overall improved general health of those who survived benefited both families and the climate within the community. Less and less were the vehicles and shanties to be foun
d surrounded by ill and dying persons languishing in the early morning sun or evening shade. More and more people seemed to move freely among the shanties and makeshift homes of the Newcomers. Friendships began to be formed among the well who had survived. They even began to make plans for the future. Some would move on. Others would winter-in. But regardless of what they had decided to do, there was always identifiable work to be done.

  And so, given that without their own sick and dying they could turn their energies to the future, a number of things happened. Many of the Newcomers seemed to acculturate into the community. Also they began a serious search for ways to provide adequate protection from the winter cold for themselves and their loved ones. How they went about it required creativity and communication skills. It had been only shear luck they landed in a close-knit community that was comfortable with its identity and willing to work with them. But landed they had. And now they were putting down roots.

  8. Pets

  Had school been open, Caroline would have been in first grade. But no matter to her. Nothing she liked better than looking for wild flowers, climbing rocks, or going fishing. She preferred that her dark hair be kept short as she had no patience with snarls. It was early in the season, but already her cheeks were taking on a ruddy color, and her increasingly outdoor-based life seemed to be just what she needed. She had arrived in Lochlee taller than her older sister Dahlia and was still growing like a weed. This morning she burst into Lem’s kitchen, banging closed the front door of the house behind her. Her dark eyes were sparkling with excitement.

  “Look, Mums! It’s a tree frog! But I think it lives under the bushes outside the front door. See, it’s not even afraid!” She held out her hand and a small somewhat gray, powdery-looking tree toad sat on her palm looking through and over the upraised fence of her fingers.

  “Carrie, take that thing out of here and wash your hands. And it’s not a frog. It’s a toad.” May was not much on creatures of the woods. “Next thing you know you’ll have warts!”