by Connor Mccoy
“How would we get rid of the bodies?” Arthur asked. “We can’t dump them in the river.”
“Well, we could, but we’d be killing the people downstream. And the rotting bodies eventually would wash up on the shore. With that size of an epidemic, there wouldn’t be enough people to dig graves. I think we’d have to set up some kind of crematorium. Maybe use a furnace in one of the factories. I just hope it doesn’t happen. I hope someone somewhere has figured out how to create vaccines without electricity, or is at least working on it.”
The Quartermaster had been cleaning his examining room as he talked, and now he handed Arthur a pair of disposable gloves.
“Put these on,” he said and stuck his head out the door. “We’re ready for another down here,” he called up the hall.
The Tech, or Techie, as the Quartermaster called him, brought in an older woman with a gash on her forehead. The woman was filthy, mud was crusted on her face and hands, mixed with the blood from the wound. The Quartermaster sat her in a chair.
“What happened here?” he asked her.
“I was digging roots along the bank of the river, and the bank collapsed on my head.” She reached a hand up to touch the wound.
“You need to stop doing that.” The Quartermaster pushed her hand away. “Can you bring me a basin of hot water?” he asked Arthur. “Ask M to help you.”
Arthur went to ask M about water, and she left her post to show him the way to the apartment, where a large pot of water was simmering away. She showed him where the buckets were, and told him where to find the basins. Then she hurried back to her post.
Arthur used a couple of hot pads to pour the water from the pot into the bucket. He added water to the pan from a plastic water carrier on the counter and put it back on the burner. How the heck were they keeping the stove running? He’d have to ask.
He grabbed the bucket, carried it back to the medical wing, found the closet with the basins and brought the bucket and the pan to the examining room, filled the pan and put the bucket, still half-full, on the floor near the door.
The Quartermaster added room temperature water from a jug on the counter and tested it. He nodded.
“Take that clean rag and help her clean her hands. Don’t rinse it in the water. When it’s too dirty to use anymore throw it in that pail there,” he pointed to a white plastic pail with a lid.
It reminded Arthur of the pail his mother used to keep dirty diapers in. He took the top rag, wet it and began wiping the dirt from the woman’s hands. She cried out, and Arthur thought the water was too hot for her until he saw the raw skin around her nails and the pads of her fingers.
“What’s this?” he asked, showing her hands to the Quartermaster.
“It’s from me digging up roots,” she said. “I don’t have a shovel. I have to use my hands.”
Her face was emerging from the dirt, with the Quartermaster’s help, although when the rag was applied to the wound, she hissed and started bleeding again.
Arthur got her hands as clean as he could without submerging them and tossed the rag in the bucket.
“Arthur,” The Quartermaster said, while applying ointment to the woman’s head. “I want you to go to the basement. The second door on the right. There are some piles of clothes and things. Find a pair of leather gloves that might fit our patient and bring them here, please.”
Arthur nodded and went to ask M where the basement stairs were located.
On the way down, he marveled that the Melvins were giving him run of the building. He could go anywhere he liked. There was no one to stop him, no one was paying any attention at all. He found the room, which reminded him of a thrift shop and, sure enough, there were several pairs of leather gloves. He chose the pair most likely to fit and took it back upstairs, but not before looking down the hallway into the open space. There seemed to be a lot of unusual and valuable items in the basement.
He took the stairs two at a time on his way back up and found their patient still in the examining room. The Quartermaster had removed her muddy boots and was washing her feet, looking for sores. Arthur handed her the gloves, and she put them on, flexing her fingers and looking pleased. She thanked him, and then hissed again as the Quartermaster found the blisters on her heel. He recommended she try washing regularly and come to see him when she found sores, but he didn’t look as if he believed she would. And as she was stepping out the door, she said, “It’s too damn cold out here to be taking a bath. I don’t live in the Ritz, you know.”
Arthur looked to see if the Quartermaster found that amusing, but he was already on to his next patient, and Arthur hurried to catch up.
After a morning of case after case, until they had all had begun to run together, the clinic closed for lunch, sending everyone away for an hour while they prepared and ate their food. Today was scrambled eggs and some bread baked in an outdoor oven. And made with equal parts flour and sand, Arthur thought as he sucked the grit from his teeth.
He was used to the food sent up from the kitchens at the Tribinal. He didn’t know where the cook sourced the menu, but she at least had fine flour in enough quantities that the bread didn’t wear down your teeth. There was almost always some sort of protein as well, and if he took what the others said as truth, they were lucky to be getting eggs today. Often it was oats three times a day.
The Quartermaster was especially pleased with the morning’s pay, and Arthur came to believe he’d been in the city much longer than the others. He tried to tell them that it didn’t matter which of them was Melvin because they all were being judged on their merits now, but the group maintained their anonymity, insisting they be called by their job titles.
Although how M could be considered a title, he wasn’t sure. P at least stood for Physician’s Assistant. The Doctor he discovered had been a surgeon in another state before the EMP, but the three younger people didn’t volunteer their pasts. He felt a degree of embarrassment from P, but he couldn’t tell what from. He let them know he had been a lawyer before the crash, on the fast track to partner. It was how he had ended up on the Cut Court. His legal background.
P looked as though she’d like to ask questions, but there was only time to clean up after themselves before heading back to the clinic. As they were departing the apartment, the Doctor took him aside.
“Stay here and rest,” the Doc said. “Your internal organs took a beating, quite literally, and you’ve been on the go all morning. My bed is through here, spend the afternoon resting. Doctor’s orders.”
Arthur wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was exhausted. He’d only been a helper, but he felt as though he’d been working in an emergency room for days on end. So he didn’t protest when the Doctor sent him to bed. He was grateful.
The smell of coffee woke him, and he was confused. Surely they didn’t drink coffee at dinner. But who knew, maybe they needed a pick-me-up before preparing the clinic for the morning. He levered himself out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes.
“Good morning, sleepy head,” P said as he walked into the kitchen. “I’ve never in my life seen such a sound sleeper. You slept through M and Techie arguing about whose turn it was to wash the dinner dishes. You must have been exhausted.”
“It’s morning?” Arthur asked. “I thought you were making coffee for dinner.” He rubbed his eyes and twitched a curtain aside. Sure enough, the world outside the window was bathed in early morning light. There was frost on the leaves of the bushes against the building.
“Nope, coffee for breakfast. You slept all afternoon and through the night. Not surprising, considering the beating you took. We probably shouldn’t have worked you so hard yesterday morning. You must remember to take regular breaks today. You won’t do us any good if you have to spend another week in bed.”
“Yes, nurse,” Arthur said.
“Not nurse, Physician’s Assistant, remember? That’s why I’m called P.” She grinned at him. “Now sit down and have some breakfast.”
“Where is everyone else?” he asked when he was seated.
She set a bowl of oats, a jar of honey and a cup of coffee in front of him. “They’ve already gone to work,” she said.
“But they left me here to look after you, so I got out of the morning duties.” She looked at the old windup clock that sat on the kitchen counter. “But now I’ve got to go. Can you take care of yourself?” She cocked her head at him.
“Of course. I’ll see you at the clinic.” She waved as she stepped out the door.
Arthur finished his breakfast slowly and sipped his coffee while thinking. He needed to pull back from these people. How could he be objective about these people if he was living among them? He must step back. Regain his detachment. Tonight he would go home, and in the morning he would report to the Court before coming back here. A conversation with Chantal would get his head back in the right place.
He finished his breakfast and cleaned the dishes in the sink with hot water from the stove. Then he tidied the bedclothes before sitting on the bed to put his shoes on. He felt mussed and wrinkled after sleeping in his clothes, but it didn’t make sense to take the time to go home to change.
He joined the others in the clinic, and today he thought he’d spend some time with M, checking people in. That way he’d know who came in, if anyone of interest to the Court was seeking treatment. That would be a better use of his time. And it would keep him out of P’s company, which he thought was probably a good thing. She had a way of smiling that made him forget what he was supposed to be doing.
The morning was filled with a line of mothers bringing in their children for a multitude of problems. Robbie manned the waiting room, fetching cups of water and telling stories to the restless toddlers. Sitting next to M in the entryway, Arthur’s head began to pound, and he smiled wanly at M.
“Doesn’t the crying get to you?” he asked. He wanted to press his hands to his temples but refrained. He did not want to come across as a prima donna.
“I just tune it out,” she said. “But if it bothers you, could help Techie down in the basement. He’s boiling linens. It’s hot, steamy work, but very quiet.”
He nodded gratefully and made his way to the basement, following the smell of laundry to the wing opposite the clinic. The room with the boiler was dim, the only light coming in from narrow windows near the tall ceilings. Techie was standing near a vat of steaming laundry, watching as steaming water poured from a tap. He nodded to Arthur.
“Escaping crying children?” Techie asked. “I think the mothers all got together and decided to all come on the same morning.”
“It does seem like a gabfest in the waiting room,” Arthur said, “but how they can talk over all those crying babies is confounding. I couldn’t even hear myself think.”
“I was pretty happy to come down here myself.” Techie stirred the laundry until a few soap suds appeared on the surface of the water. “Watch out,” he said. “I’m going to drain the vat. You might want to stand on that ledge over there.” He pointed to a concrete walkway that ran along the wall, from the hallway where the modern laundry room stood, through this cubby and along to the furnace room.
Arthur stood on the walkway and Techie opened a tap in the bottom of the vat and let the water run onto the floor and down the drain. The volume of water was too much for the pipe and it pooled on the sloping floor for a few minutes before the hole in the floor made a loud sucking sound and the rest of the water disappeared down the drain.
Then Techie hopped down from the edge of the vat where he’d been perched, closed the tap at the bottom of the container, and let the hot water run over the linens again. “This is the rinse,” he said, “to get rid of the most soap. Unfortunately, we don’t have a cold water tap here, so the rinse isn’t as effective as it could be.”
“Where does the water come from?” Arthur asked. “There can’t still be water in the pipes.”
“Two places,” Techie pointed to a hose running from the ceiling down to a water tank above the boiler. “The first is a huge rain barrel on the roof. It catches rainwater, which is run through a filter to get rid of bugs and leaves, and then down into a holding tank on the side of the building just out there.” He pointed to the outer wall. “It’s gravity-fed, but useless when it’s freezing outside. The second is an old metal hand pump that was used to pull water from a well before electricity. It’s hooked to an underground cistern that fills when it rains. When we can’t use the gravity feed, we pump water into the boiler from the next room.”
“How did you set this all up? I can’t believe you could get all the parts you’d need,” Arthur said.
“We didn’t. We think it was part of the museum. Maybe a demonstration room, because it was all set up when we got here.” He opened a door in the furnace and fed the fire within a few more logs. “But it’s functional. Watch out, I’m draining the vat again.”
He drained the vat and transferred the dripping laundry to a metal barrel on a stand with a crank on one end and holes peppering the sides. He shut the lid and cranked, making the barrel spin and water spray from the openings and drain onto the floor. No wonder there was only the vat, the spinner, and the barrel in this space, it was all water and steam.
When Techie began pulling the still soggy, but at least not waterlogged, sheets and rags from the spinner, Arthur joined him. They lugged the linens into the modern laundry next door and hung everything on lines suspended across the room. The sweat trickled down Arthur’s back and soaked into his shirt.
Once that was done they headed back into the boiler room with a basket Techie picked up from just outside the laundry and moved back to the boiler room to start all over again. By lunch break, sweat was dripping down their faces, and their clothes were plastered against their skin.
They took their food upstairs, through the ballroom and out onto the balcony overlooking the park. It was cool but sunny, and their clothes began to dry. Arthur was relieved that he didn’t have to sit next to any of the others while smelling like body odor and laundry soap. And he could keep his thoughts from straying to P and her warm smile.
After lunch Techie suggested to Arthur that he rest for a while, but Arthur felt the need to go back to the clinic. However, after a woman pushed herself against a wall as he passed, he thought perhaps it would be better if he bathed and changed his clothes.
Out on the street in the cool sunlight, Arthur realized that he was feeling better than he had in a while. His mood had been lifted by the hard work, and the days he’d been in bed after his beating made him feel cared for. Like his needs mattered. He was not just a cog in the wheel of justice, but a human being to be cherished like the rest.
The air in his apartment was stale, and dust covered every surface, so before he bathed, he tidied. Dusting the tops of the bookcase, counters, and tabletops -- both the dining and coffee tables. He opened the windows and let the cool autumn air flood the rooms before he took himself to the bathroom, where he had stored bottles of water. He stood in the shower and sponged himself off until he felt clean again. He hung his soot-covered clothes over the edge of the tub and took himself to his bedroom to find fresh clothing.
The bed looked so welcoming, but he put his back to it and dressed in what might have been called work casual once upon a time, when there was work. He took a quick look in the mirror, he was presentable, but was that gray in his hair? He brushed his hand across his head. No, it was a trick of the light and damp hair. Not that he should care, everyone went prematurely gray these days.
The bed reflected in his mirror caught his eye, but he put the thought of sleep to the back of his mind. It could wait. It had been more than a week since he’d been to the Court, and he was sure they were waiting for him to check in. And he would have by now if he hadn’t come upon those thugs.
He still had no idea why they had targeted him. They didn’t say a thing while they were trying to kill him. Perhaps it was merely racially motivated. Black men still wore targets on their
backs after all this time. There had been no note, no threat of retribution for the Court, nothing to indicate the motivation behind the act. Probably a random act of violence.
He left the room, closing the door on the siren song of the bed, and went to stand on his balcony. He was only on the third floor in a modest brownstone building, nothing like the luxury that Chantal lived in, with her views of the city and mirrored walls. But it was his view, his neighborhood, his town. He was happy with it.
As happy as he could be without light, culture, and safety. But it would come, and he would be a part of it. He breathed deeply, enjoying the sunlight reflecting off the leaves still remaining on the trees. It was a beautiful day, and he had all afternoon to make his way to the Court. Unless the Court was in session, the judges didn’t meet until dinner, and that would be as fine a time as any to give his progress report.
He double-locked the door to the balcony, then the door to his apartment and the door on the street before heading quickly down the stairs and out into the afternoon.
Chapter Eight
Chantal was alone in her chambers at the Court when a quiet knock sounded at the door.
“Yes?”
One of the Court pages opened the door, a young man of about fifteen years, who stepped in, stood at attention and spoke. “Judge Davis has returned, your Honor.” He turned and left, shutting the door behind him.
So, Arthur had turned up again. Interesting. She was very interested in discovering where he’d been for the last week. She’d almost given up on him. She pulled on her judge's robe and took a quick look in the mirror before leaving her chambers. It wouldn’t do to be less than perfect this evening. Her position as the head of the Court must not be in question.