“We need water transparency! Unequal water distribution is a crime, not the other way around,” the citizen said. Violent applause broke out across the room like a string of firecrackers.
“Ma’am?” the council president said in a voice laced thick with condescension and weariness, “OK, goodbye. Goodbye.” He turned to a policeman standing against the wall, “Officer, please remove the lady from the microphone so that we may stay on topic for once.”
“I hear that,” Mayor Bartlett said. He looked up at the audience uncomfortably as the officer took the woman by the elbow and steered her toward the exit. “I completely, totally hear you, and my office and the police force are working to address those issues.” He watched as she was maneuvered toward the doorway.
Commander Roger Aachen stood and followed the citizen out, and the mayor stared for a moment, transfixed by the closed doorway through which they’d exited, while the council meeting continued.
Riding in the dark, Renee was struck by the stench first. When they crossed into Northeast it was easily apparent that city services were breaking down. There were great piles of garbage at the curbs and it reeked of rot and dead animals. The houses were dark but she heard people on their porches, sitting on their dried-out lawns. There were sounds of argument and violence, of doors being slammed and glass being broken, and she felt conversations go quiet as they rode by. She was thankful they were on bikes and moving along at a good clip, even as they hurtled recklessly through the night. She tried to search the road in front of her for objects and gripped her handlebars tightly. Further in was a great bonfire at the center of an intersection. People carried items from their houses and dumped them and the fire blazed wildly, sending a plume of sparks upward. She could see the skeletal hulk of a car in the blaze.
The dust storm had covered everything in a fine grit, and Renee tasted this on her tongue now as she rode. She was scared, and immensely happy Bea rode with her, conscious of what it had cost Bea already.
They turned toward the Cully neighborhood and two streets up, cycling hard in the dark, they collided with something stretched across the street, made invisible by the darkness. It clanged metallically when they hit and Bea and Renee were thrown from their bicycles, landing hard on the ground.
Renee stayed down, her cheek pressed against the blacktop. She tried to breathe through the new pain, a complement to the old. She could hear the scrabbling of feet and someone calling out but she was disoriented and didn’t move.
“It’s a motherfucking fence,” Bea said.
“Did what it’s supposed to.” A man’s voice in the dark. “You head back the other way now, and quick.”
Bea reached down for Renee’s arms and pulled her to a sitting position. Renee couldn’t get control of her breathing.
“We’re just passing through,” Bea yelled. “What the hell? Dumb droudies.”
“This is a safe area.”
“Safe from what?” Renee said.
“You,” the man said.
“Asshole,” Bea whispered. “We should go around. Can you get up?”
Renee stood and tried to see into whatever encampment was on the other side of the fence but it was too dark. They were a compound of some sort, she thought. “Maybe it’s safe in there.”
“You want to go in there?” Bea sighed disgustedly, and then yelled: “It’s Maid Marian.”
“No,” Renee whispered.
“Who’s that?” the man yelled back, but they could hear a hushed discussion on the other side of the fence and they picked up their bikes and waited, unsure of what to expect.
“You can pass when it’s light,” the gruff-voiced man said.
“But it’s Maid Marian.” This was a woman’s voice, and more hushed argument followed.
Somewhere to the west of them they heard two gunshots in quick succession, followed by another some seconds later.
After a scuffling and whispers in the darkness, a woman’s voice asked if they had a place to stay.
“We don’t know if they still live up here,” Renee said.
“Stupid to be out in the night,” the man’s voice said. “Come into the light.”
He cranked up a hand-powered flashlight and they proceeded toward the glow.
Renee leaned into the light and pushed back her helmet, conscious of her wounds. She looked at their faces as the shadows flickered over them and saw a range of ages and races that seemed to have nothing to do with each other. They were neighbors, she realized, banded together.
“It’s her,” the woman said.
“You better stay here tonight.” A woman emerged into the light, a pink headscarf wrapped around her hair, the tired marks of vigilance in her face.
Renee hovered close to Bea. It was only a dozen blocks or so to where they were going but her optimism had turned and running into the fence had jarred her. “Should we?” Renee whispered.
“It’s safer,” the woman with the headscarf said. “Sometimes at night there are raids.”
“Zombies,” the man said.
“—people on the lookout for water and food he means. They scavenge the empty houses, but they don’t exactly turn back when they find someone still living in one.”
They walked through a gate and passed men with guns and entered the block, fenced off at both ends. The woman with the headscarf walked in front and they followed in the dark. “I’m Lisa,” she said. “Each night two families keep guard. We work together, like a wagon circle.”
Lisa had two daughters, ten and fourteen, who scurried around preparing a guest bedroom by candlelight. She had an open intelligence in her eyes, the look of a woman who might have taught college or run a non-profit at one time, before the larger world turned violent and she’d turned inward to protect her family. She smiled at them, but couldn’t hold their gaze, dipping her head in embarrassment or shame or because she was afraid, Renee didn’t know which. Renee noticed her daughters stealing fleeting glances at her. She smiled back.
“What are you doing?” Lisa said. “I mean up here.”
Renee shrugged and thought about the answer. “Looking for the rest of our group,” she said finally. “We were separated.” She hunted around for something else to say. “We’re regrouping.”
Bea cleared her throat. “We’re going to find more trucks. We’re going to redistribute the stolen water back.”
Lisa looked up at Renee and she saw that there was awe there. It humbled Renee, someone older and wiser and more experienced looking at her as if she were someone who could really solve their problems. It made her feel like an impostor, like a sham, and she tried to rise to expectations. She swallowed and smiled. “My name is really Renee,” she said, “and this is Bea.”
In the morning, the Cully neighborhood in Northeast Portland felt like a strange desert outpost, with trash and dust blowing around in the street and people staring suspiciously from their porches. They heard another round of gunshots and accelerated toward their destination.
When they arrived they stood outside their friends’ house and saw that it had burned. Dirt had been used to put out the fire, or to keep it from spreading to neighbors, but it had burned almost to the foundation. In the front yard there were scattered belongings and clothes, charred and filthy. The refuse left over after scavenging. Pieces of furniture and other unrecognizable items had been dragged from the scene and then discarded. Renee found among the detritus a trampled and heat-warped photo of her friends, the couple and their child posing in a pumpkin patch.
She couldn’t bring herself to look any closer at the house for fear of finding remains. She sat at the side of the road and put her head in her hands. She wasn’t sure where to go next.
“We need to find a house fast,” Bea said. “Back to Lisa’s?”
“We don’t know what we’re doing,” Renee said. She pictured Zach, how sometimes the look on his face made her feel like she was telling him the greatest story ever told. She wondered about turning back and stabbed at the gr
ound with the heel of her boot.
“Renee,” Bea said, and took hold of her arm.
Four men came toward them from the end of the block, walking hurriedly. It wasn’t easy to determine their ages for the grime and hollow eyes and untamed beards. They were armed with crude weapons, pipes and knives.
“Now, Renee.” Bea put her hand out to help her friend up.
They mounted their bikes and the men broke into a run.
Renee turned and flipped them off and they pedaled hard to the end of the block. At the intersection she looked back. A shot rang out and the men scattered, ducking low and running toward the side of the road. One of them fell writhing on the ground.
They rode hard for a couple more blocks, putting space in between them and whatever conflict was behind. Every part of her ached, her injured ribs made the intake of breath a chore. She felt like crying. At Forty-seventh and Cully they stopped and Renee leaned over and breathed hard. “Fuck this.” She wrapped her hand around the rebar she’d strapped to her handlebars as a weapon and listened.
A group of three kids in torn, dirty clothing approached them, speaking Spanish between themselves. Two twin girls of about six or seven, and a little brother. Renee and Bea waited.
“Hola, niños,” Renee said. “Tengan cuidado en la calle, no? Donde están sus padres?”
“We speak English,” one of the twins said indignantly. The children gripped hold of Renee’s bicycle, the boy laced his fingers through the spokes. They stared up at her.
Renee looked back from where they’d come but they weren’t being followed.
“Where are you going?” one of the twins asked. She wore a soiled baseball cap that said Go Organic! Both of the girls had their hair inexpertly cut short, as if they’d worked at each other’s heads with a pair of child’s scissors. The boy’s hair was grown long. All three of them wore half a dozen pin-on buttons each, advertising some long-gone political campaign.
“We don’t know,” Renee said. “I like your buttons.”
“Do you have any food?”
Renee pulled a nut bar out of her pack and broke it between them, and they devoured it instantly.
After the boy licked his fingers clean he studiously unpinned one of his buttons and handed it to Renee.
She pinned it to her own shirt. It said: Ascend together!—¡Suben Juntos! Muskogee for Senate. “How does it look?” she asked.
They stared at her blankly, too shy perhaps to tell her it was on wrong or didn’t suit her. “Where are your parents?”
The girl with the hat pointed at a house down the block. “My dad is working.”
“What does he do?”
“He runs for Gregor. Do you know Gregor?”
“He’s the boss,” the boy said.
“The boss of what?” Renee said.
They looked at each other in silent conference. “Everything,” the boy said.
“No,” the girl with the hat said.
“Not at all,” the other girl said.
“What’s he like?” Renee asked.
“Nice. Fat,” one of the girls said. Her thin shoulders rose in a shrug. “I don’t know.”
“And your mom? Who takes care of you during the day?”
“She’s dead,” the boy said.
“We don’t need taken care of,” the girl with the hat said. “We take care of our dad. We saw you on the TV.”
“I wish I could show you my hiding place,” the boy said mournfully.
“Are you going to get another water truck?” the other girl said.
“Pow!” the boy said.
Renee glanced at Bea and raised her eyebrows and said phew. Bea told her they should get going.
The children had her bike ensnared in a spider’s web of small fingers, their eyes expectant and hopeful at the thought of being included on future adventures. Renee assured them next time they would definitely be enlisted.
“Do you have any water?” the boy asked.
Renee pulled out her water bottle and she heard Bea exhale in disgust. She poured a couple of teaspoonfuls into each of their open mouths. Little motherless birds, she thought, and tried to keep despair at bay. “Would you kids do me a favor? Tell your dad to pass on a message to Gregor. Tell him Maid Marian wants to meet with him.”
“’Kay,” the girl with the hat said. The kids all looked down the street toward their house, and the meeting seemed suddenly over.
“You got it?” Renee said. “What’s the message?”
“You want to meet him!” the girl snapped. “Bye!” The children ran back in the direction of their house.
Renee watched them disappear between houses and felt anxious for them. “Was there some kind of dog whistle we missed, or did they just get bored?” she said.
After the kids, the block went quiet. A slight breeze shifted the big dead trees dryly over them. Renee stared up into the eerie branches and listened. There was no human sound.
Renee pointed with her chin toward a house down the street. It was obscured behind a wiry mass of leafless shrubbery.
The house was a Craftsman, but it had been built as if, Renee thought, the builder didn’t understand the scale represented on the blueprints. Everything about the house was big, and it dwarfed the other houses on the block. It stood three stories tall and occupied a massive footprint. Like other houses in the neighborhood, it sat on a big lot, in this case a full acre. An eight-foot chain-link fence and the remains of a thickly treed perimeter encased it like an urban fortress.
Zach did the poster layout over lunch. He was cautious, but he knew he didn’t need to be. No one would look at his machine except Berger, a project manager, who liked to glide around like some kind of inter-office eel and look at everyone’s screens. But Berger had contracted E. coli and was in the hospital. Renee’s group fled after warrants were put out for their arrests, their identities pieced together by video-tape and surveillance. They didn’t dare use any traceable medium to try and contact each other. So he and Renee had schemed up the coded poster. Before becoming a copywriter he’d been a graphic artist and had enjoyed the work.
He hand-drew a robin with a leather aviator hood. Across the robin was strapped a quiver full of slender water vials. He scanned and colorized the drawing and along the bottom he typed 147S@LHURST@9, which he hoped would translate to: The Robin Hoods (or, the robbing hoods, as it were) who lived at 147 Skidmore meet at the Laurelhurst Theater at 9 p.m. Then Zach would post vigil in front of the theater for a few minutes every night, waiting for one of them to materialize, unsure if this was what he really wanted in the first place. He could recognize them by sight, and some nights the theater still worked, showing a single short film, whatever they managed to get going while the power was on, imported from the East Coast or from their archives.
He was helping Renee, but were he honest with himself he could care less about the rest of her activist-crew. He felt certain they would only suck her more deeply into trouble—something she was fairly capable of doing already. He wasn’t sure any of them were bright enough to turn his obscure poster into a private message anyway. And he felt it highly likely that he was endangering Renee rather than helping her. He leaned back from the design and appreciated his work. All things aside, it was, he saw, really fucking good.
Still, he had to help somehow. He thought of her constantly, up in some strange, dangerous neighborhood. He’d do whatever he could.
Zach stood up in his cube and eyed the printer down at the end of the hall. There were six office doorways—three sets, one on each side of the hall—to pass by in order to retrieve the side project from the large-format color printer. A layout of this size would occupy the printer for about three minutes. Zach stretched and then walked casually down to the printer. As he went he tried to eye which offices were occupied and which weren’t, a thing he could never remember. A few had permanently closed doors, colleagues who’d migrated away, or in one case, died. The printer was off the break room, where Nevel appeared
to be cleaning furiously, and so Zach turned around self-consciously and shuffled back to his desk. He hated this. He pulled out a legal pad of paper and quickly scratched out half a dozen word associations so there was evidence of work on his desk. They were trying to pitch a satellite telecommunications firm that sold equipment to the Middle East. One of the few companies with energy exemptions. Business must go on. One must work under the premise that the apocalypse was not nigh. And it seemed to him that money was sought after even more feverishly as people died, as if a wage, or the pursuit of, were some kind of shield against their own mortalities. They were all dying of thirst; money was one elixir.
We’s in yo head!, he wrote, and then sketched a satellite with a lightning bolt coming out of it and straight into a stick-figure’s head. He kept his ears out for Nevel.
Sputnik is thirsty for more.
The all-seeing eye.
He penciled out a quick sketch of Renee, giving her braids and a tin-foil hat. He remembered the first time he’d seen her in the cafe, joking with somebody at the counter, a warm wit to her. She gestured her arms wide as she made a customer laugh. When his turn in line came, he’d been struck with her spell. He’d lingered there, deciding long over the scones, as she spoke about the qualities of each, how this scone, with the chocolate, was for sadness, for mornings when you wake up and there’s an unspeakable shadow right here—she tapped above her own heart—and this with the cranberries would be fire in the belly, like locomotive fuel, and this one with the apricot bits was for love, the finding and keeping of it.
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