Tsunami Wake: Post Apocalyptic Thriller (Calm Act Book 4)

by Ginger Booth

  It didn’t greatly matter that I was no princess, Emmett no prince. A country starved for royalty of its own simply invented Hollywood.

  Huh.

  I pulled Jewel into a quick hug, uncharacteristic of me, and generally counter-indicated with an apple survivor. They could go into PTSD flashbacks if you touched them. But it felt right.

  “Corduroy,” I agreed. “Of course, I have to consult with the colonel about a date. Oh, let me give you some money to get you started.”

  I transferred a full tax credit – a year’s rations – to her. I specified at least half of that should go to her, personally. If she needed more for materials and assistants, just ask. I warned her to consider what look she wanted to wear on screen herself, because she would appear on the evening news, Indie and PR both. I gave her Brandy O’Keefe’s contact info for IndieNews, and told her I’d get back to her about who would cover the wedding from PR News.

  Strange that I could confidently assign an Indie News reporter and not my own network. But I owed Brandy that story. And I owed Pam the right to assign reporters.

  “Ooh, could I have Jennifer Alvarez?” Jewel wheedled. “She is so adorable! And she would love this.”

  “She is,” I agreed. “She’s just as cute in person, too. I’ll suggest her. We’ll see. But remember, Emmett hasn’t signed off on this yet.”

  “So it’s a secret?” she asked, puzzled at my giving her money and reporters in that case. “Should I hold off on buying materials for now?”

  I wobbled my head, thinking. My eyes fell to her feet. “I want your boots. In brown.”

  “I have a cobbler,” Jewel replied, holding up a finger in a number-one gesture. This woman was a natural-born salesman. “Do you have a shoe you can spare? For sizing. Oh, and does the old –” She indicated the reject wedding dress tub in distaste. “Does that fit well? Maybe I could take that for sizing. And take measurements.” She whipped a tape measure out of her jacket with a flourish.

  Sergeant Becque grimaced. “Ma’am, we leave for the train in twenty minutes, right?” He glowered at the ceiling, still holding his gun in the two-handed ready position, while Jewel quickly measured my bust and waist and hips from several directions. Gladys decamped to prepare my dinner and snacks for the trip.

  Jewel finished her measurements and packed up, awkwardly laden with an old sneaker and storage bin, plus her big portfolio. “You’ll love it!” she assured me, oozing delight, as Becque escorted her out of my bedroom.

  “I will!” I agreed, in matching glee.

  I packed for Boston in record time. No surprise, really. I hadn’t been packing before, so much as processing email and compulsively re-reading responses from the Raj about Mangal’s statistics and Pam as news manager.

  The emails weren’t all bad. Pete Hoffman reported that people in Jersey gave more positive feedback in person, thanking the militia for their lockdown efforts, and so forth. Jersey would rejoin the national Internet on schedule tomorrow, for better or worse. And the Raj were generally relieved that I’d picked the wife of an O-6 for news editor, confident that Pam wouldn’t embarrass her husband’s team too badly. Officers seemed to take it as a given that part of the credit for a man’s rise in rank was always thanks to the wife. I half-heartedly hoped that Emmett would continue to find that the case. Half-hearted, because I thought more responsibility was about the last thing Emmett needed. Me, too.

  Delegation is a wonderful thing.

  28

  Interesting fact: Male groundhogs rouse themselves in February to go courting. They don’t mate until March, but in February they wander out to visit female groundhog burrows, sometimes overnight, to get to know each other before mating season.

  Travel in the post-Calm world continued to un-impress. I left our brownstone in Brooklyn Prospect at 5 p.m. By 6 p.m., on the Harlem train platform, Sergeant Becque handed me over to one Captain Mike Sump, regular army. His company was fresh – or wilted – from ten days pacifying North Jersey.

  Sump didn’t volunteer what he thought of Lt. Colonel Emmett MacLaren, as a result of that experience. His company must have implemented one of Emmett’s battle plans. I prudently decided not to ask how that worked out for them until after I was delivered to Emmett.

  The train from Harlem to New Haven used to take an hour and a half. It took longer than that to load the train. I tried to doze in the dark. But arc-lights from the loading crews kept stabbing in. Once we finally got moving, we made good progress until the Connecticut border. After that, the train stopped at every lockdown checkpoint, and proceeded at dead slow on partially submerged tracks. We stopped altogether for four hours to wait out high tide, parked in an inky black drowned marsh somewhat short of New Haven.

  My map app reported that we were sitting at minus 1 foot elevation with respect to today’s sea level. Net rise was now 7.5 feet. Still rising.

  Sump’s contingent was the only one bound for Boston. The bulk of the train carried relief forces to Narragansett. I didn’t see any other civilians. But I wasn’t allowed to wander. Captain Sump kept me wedged firmly between himself and one Specialist Cherie. He ordered this nice black woman to accompany me even to the restroom and ‘hand me the toilet paper.’

  Young Cherie took this literally, and joined me in the tiny toilet stall, where we took turns. We never did find a good way to stow her rifle in there. My toes, still tender from the tsunami, did not appreciate her army boots.

  At least Cherie didn’t have lice and fleas as a souvenir of North Jersey. Some of the others did. The new troops in North Jersey hadn’t anticipated vermin. Emmett and the militia used to share the civilian delousing facilities. But the regular army wisely avoided that level of intimacy with the locals. What I overheard of the troop’s impressions of North Jersey was discouraging. I tried not to take it personally on Emmett’s behalf. He wouldn’t have.

  The railroad gave out before Providence. Someone had pilfered the steel rails. Not that it mattered. From the footage I’d seen of Providence, this was the end of the line. We breakfasted near dawn, waiting our turn, while army transports transshipped the forces bound for Narragansett. These days, the Hudson Army was hoarding MRE’s – meals-ready-to-eat – for battle conditions. The morning rations came from large cardboard boxes, with minimal packaging inside. A few soldiers cut and doled out six-inch squares of apple leather and three-inch squares of stale cornbread. Canteens were refilled from a keg. Mine was a water bottle. Percolating sixty or so people through a train car, to visit a keg, and also take a turn at the overused bathroom, took a long time.

  Eventually our own pair of bio-buses arrived to cart us to Boston.

  The city looked deceptively normal from the deserted highway. Not that I ever much liked Boston. Nestled between New York and Boston, Connecticut natives tended to prefer one city or the other. I was firmly in the New York fan camp. Boston struck me as an over-sized New Haven with less pleasant weather. The highway delivered us nearly to the front door of Emmett’s current location at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, around 10 a.m.

  It’s only 200 miles from Brooklyn to Boston. By troop train and bus, the trip took seventeen hours.

  Emmett waited with another platoon in the lobby of a business school building. The glassed-in space offered a pretty view of the Charles River, edged with a strip of park, featuring trees, benches, and paved pathway. Boston proper rose beyond the river. I smiled and waved to Emmett, glanced at the serious young Captain Sump, and resigned myself to hurry up and wait another hour while they shuffled troops.

  But Emmett smiled crookedly, ordered Sump to secure the perimeter, and introduced me to his other sidekick, Lieutenant Ruggiero of the local National Guard. Who smiled, shook hands as though genuinely pleased to meet me, and briskly excused himself to coordinate with Sump.

  “Long trip,” I complained froggily, after Emmett kissed my forehead. My cold was past the dripping stage when I left Brooklyn Prospect. Now it had settled as a heaviness in my chest
.

  “Uh-huh. Just let him do his job, darlin’. He takes orders just fine.” No, Emmett hadn’t missed my unhappy glance at Captain Sump. “Epidemiology briefing upstairs. Public health status, Boston and the burbs.”

  “I have a news crew coming,” I said, loathe to add my own complications. “Maybe I should wait for them.”

  Emmett shrugged. “They can loiter down here. You’re with me.”

  He simply shouldered my luggage, took my arm, and strolled us up the stairs to our briefing. I could have fallen in love with him all over again for that. It felt heavenly to be liberated from military logistics.

  The briefing was one I could be useful in, too, with lots of detail data for me to wrangle and compare with Hudson equivalents, while Emmett interviewed the experts. They even provided good wired Internet and hot herbal tea.

  Packing up my computer afterward, I smiled at a stray memory. I asked once what Cam thought of my relationship. He said that Emmett and I seemed to bond over data analysis. Granted, it was a barbed compliment. But he was right. Emmett earned another hero’s grin from me by sending a quick text to Sump and Ruggiero before we stood to shake hands and bid good-bye to the epidemiologists. With luck, we could stroll straight out of here to our next appointment.

  Alas, it was not to be. Descending back to the lobby, Emmett caught Ruggiero’s eye with a glance of question and got a can-do nod and a smile in return.

  Sump, however, needed to talk. “Colonel, should I dispatch someone to take Ms. Baker to the hotel?”

  “No, captain,” Emmett replied evenly. “She’s with me.”

  Sump did not evaporate.

  “Captain, Ms. Baker is my partner. That is not a euphemism. We work together. We’re both Rescos.” He paused between statements, hoping Sump would take a hint. “Is there a problem, captain?”

  “Sir, there’s a news crew here,” he said.

  Emmett and I looked around and waved. “Yes, captain. They belong to Ms. Baker.”

  The stolid young captain looked alarmed.

  “Captain, PR News is pro-Raj,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about. The news crew will shelter among the troops. Nose around, talk to people, record things. They’re a resource. A little extra security, even.” I smiled. “People don’t like to be caught on camera being bad.”

  Emmett added, “Resco service is a bit chaotic, captain. If you’ll excuse us.” He resumed walking us out the door. “Lunch next, darlin’. Then city infrastructure briefing.”

  Those events would happen at another MIT building, so we strolled across the campus. More people seemed to be out and about, mingling rather than moving with purpose. I assumed they were just catching some sun at lunch hour. I wouldn’t call it a nice day, but the wind had died down to merely breezy instead of gale-force. The air was a coastal clammy near-50 degrees, with broken clouds and occasional sun. That made the day nicer than the past week, with a thin hint of spring.

  The lawn loiterers made our guards twitchy, though. Four soldiers hemmed us in. I wanted to chat with Emmett about my wedding concept, but not with an audience. Instead we enjoyed some peace and wintry sun on our faces.

  The second building wasn’t nearly as appealing as the first, designed to impose in utilitarian grey brick. Burned-out wrecks of cars littered the drive in front of its high and broad stone steps, leading to a miserly entrance squeezed between squarish columns. I could still smell burned rubber from the cars. Whatever conflict deposited them here was fairly recent.

  The lunchroom was as utilitarian as the exterior. But the city engineers were nice, and the inevitable clam chowder with cornbread cleared my sinuses. After eating, Emmett and our new acquaintances sat back over tea to relax before our 1 p.m. briefing, Knowing Emmett, he’d learn as much from this casual talk as from the presentation later, and bond with the infrastructure team. I wished I could stay and join in.

  But I excused myself to check on the PRN evening news lineup. A sharp-faced 50-something woman, head of parks and recreation, kindly showed me to the ladies’ room and an Internet-wired office near the auditorium for our after-lunch meeting.

  The office featured a wide window. I opened the blinds, and narrowed my eyes. The lawn locals had thickened into a throng. Well, that was Sump and Ruggiero’s problem, not mine.

  I plugged in and checked Pam’s efficient virtual newsroom. Her story lineup looked fine. I called her to say so.

  “Great,” Pam said, subdued. “But Dee, what about the York thing? I think we have to respond.”

  “York thing? Pam, I’ve been traveling or in meetings since five last night. I only have about fifteen minutes now. Just didn’t want to hold you up for tonight’s news.”

  “Oh, hell,” she said. “Dee, Eddie York decided to get revenge. He put out a newsletter an hour ago. Spread like wildfire over email. I sent you a copy. You need to read that.”

  I sifted a thousand emails to locate the one Pam referred to, and hung up with her to read.

  Queen of Censors, he called me, both in the headline and in a caption under the photo of me with Emmett. My eyes pricked with tears against my will. No one, no one, in the ex-U.S.A. had made as big a dent in the Calm Act’s censorship as I had!

  The accompanying photo of Emmett and me was taken at the Thanksgiving after-party during Project Reunion, both of us smiling in triumph. I wore Navy ‘digital blueberry’ fatigues that night while my beautiful blue velour holiday dress was being decontaminated to bleached denim blue. That photo claimed, without words, that I was a military stooge, not a civilian. In the business myself, I could see that at a glance. But the ordinary public would absorb the lying message without a thought.

  New England Patriot Press, bragged the header, in a heavy Gothic script that evoked The New York Times and the Depression era. The piece continued in a lurid exposé of Eddie York’s time in the PR News editorial contest. Formatted in newspaper columns under the page-wide Queen of Censors headline and photo, vignettes in his diatribe posed as separate stories.

  He published the stories I’d squashed, and spun others in the most incendiary way possible.

  Another Resco Wife to Head PR News – Succeeds Queen of Censors

  Narragansett Death Toll Due to Link’s Negligence – NE Gov-Gen Cashiered

  MacLaren Gives Death Angel Military Honors – Did He Help Murder NYC?

  Florida Nuked the South Pole

  Selling Concentration Camps to Jersey

  Baker and Cameron Naked in a Tree –

  K I S S I N G?

  Climate Change Faked to Control the Masses – Selling Slavery

  Brooklyn Resco Mansion – Payoff?

  Protest Rally at MIT – Expecting 100,000

  Oh, hell, York published that Emmett and I were here at MIT, and now. That wasn’t a campus lunch crowd outside. It was a riot forming. How? The news crew that rendezvoused with me here? We hired that team away from Eddie York.

  “Emmett, we have a problem,” I croaked into the phone. He’d picked up on the first ring. “The news crew told Eddie York our location. Or someone did. He called a protest rally outside. Against us. Me, really.”

  “Eddie who did what?”

  “I’ll forward you something. But there’s a mob forming outside. They’re after me. Maybe you.”

  From the sound effects, Emmett excused himself from the table, walked to the narrow lunchroom window, and with a slither of blinds, took a look for himself. “OK,” he said. “Rejoin me ASAP, darlin’. Stay away from windows.”

  Of course, I’d stepped to my window to look out again, too. I sheepishly stepped back and sat to pack up my things. “No, I need to make calls. Get on top of this.”

  “No,” Emmett said. “You need to be here with me.”

  “Don’t need the audience, honey.”

  “Not safe, darling. Want you where I can see you.”

  “Kinda busy, colonel. Love you.” I hung up on him. I hated doing that. I’d likely apologize in tears later. I called Dave next.
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  “Your Highness!” Dave answered on the first ring, too. “How may I serve?”

  “Cute,” I said. “Shoot me now. Oh, wait, York already sent a mob. Tell me we can kill this newsletter. And preferably York, too.”

  “York’s dead,” Dave reported. “HomeSec shot and killed him a half hour after York sent the newsletter.”

  “That was quick. And they stopped to interrogate Mangal?”

  “They do like to intimidate. Emailed a photo of York’s dead body to everyone in his address book. ‘Come forward promptly if you’d rather talk than die.’ You probably got a copy in your inbox.”

  “Could be photoshopped,” I mused, diverted.

  “In half an hour? Brains blown out across a laptop keyboard. Let’s see Will shop a photo that fast.”

  I cleared my throat. “Excuse me while I retch, Dave.”

  “Sorry. So, stopping propagation. Cyber warfare mode engaged. Chas had luck blocking it on the meshnet, we think. Dead in its tracks there. Ditto on Amenac. Popeye’s trying to register it as a virus on the virus checker databases, to cover email users.”

  “Oh, that’s smart!” I said in admiration. If the computer virus checkers identified York’s email newsletter as malware, the mail servers would automatically stop propagation, and mail reading apps wouldn’t display it. Even copies already in circulation would be quarantined and deleted.

  “Trying, I said,” Dave clarified.

  “Got it. So you’ve got everything under control there? Don’t need me?”

  “Mangal’s got about a hundred people handling queries,” Dave said. “He uttered an obscenity,” he added in a wondering tone. “I never heard Mangal swear before.”

  “Can’t blame him.”