by Ginger Booth
“Colonel MacLaren!” a middle aged businessman greeted him. He swallowed nervously. “I’m Alex Wiehl. We spoke on the phone. Some porters to handle your luggage. Party of thirty, I understood?”
“Thirty-two at present,” Emmett replied, pointing to the prisoners. He narrowed his eyes. “Councilman Wiehl? You are Major Beaufort’s second in command?”
“Oh, no!” replied Wiehl. “I run the hotel?”
“I see. And where is Major Beaufort’s second in command?”
“I don’t know who that is,” admitted Wiehl.
“But you’re on the Pittsburgh city council?” Emmett pressed.
“Yes… We don’t meet very often,” said Wiehl.
Emmett was clearly growing exasperated with this game of twenty questions. Though he wasn’t physically in the train fight, his adrenaline was still too pumped up to play nice.
I stepped in, with a friendly smile, and offered my hand to shake. “Dee Baker, Colonel MacLaren’s partner. Nice to meet you, Councilman Wiehl. We’re all very tired from the trip. You have transportation for us, to your hotel? I don’t think we need help with the luggage, do we, Emmett?” Indeed, our soldiers had already commandeered the luggage trolleys from the porters.
Wiehl was clearly relieved to be allowed back onto his familiar script. He gratefully led the way to a couple shuttle buses waiting for us on the street. That street was Liberty Avenue, one of the main drags of downtown Pittsburgh. I would have expected limited parking right in front of the train station. But the hotel shuttles were the only vehicles in sight. Our party were the only people in sight.
“Is it always this empty downtown, Mr. Wiehl?” I asked.
“Oh, no one lives in the triangle anymore, Ms. Baker,” he agreed.
I admitted to never having had the pleasure of visiting Pittsburgh before, except the airport, and egged Wiehl on to play tour guide. As a hotel manager, naturally he was happy and competent to oblige. My traveling companions, all still adrenaline-poisoned, quietly eavesdropped while we prattled away. Apparently the Golden Triangle, downtown Pittsburgh, was where the broad Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, flowing west, met in a V to give birth to the mighty Ohio.
Our shuttle turned a corner onto utter devastation. “Tornado,” Wiehl explained. “We had over two hundred touchdowns in the city last year. More in the suburbs, of course. Only twenty-something touchdowns this year, so far. But don’t worry, Ms. Baker – the foundation of my hotel is an excellent tornado shelter. One of the sirens is on our roof.”
Shocked, Emmett asked, “All from a single storm front?”
“Oh, no,” replied Wiehl. “Spread over six months or so. Started getting bad about this time two years ago, with the Alberta Clippers. They just wouldn’t quit.”
“Did you have many Alberta Clippers?” I only remembered a few of those storms in Connecticut that fall. The thunderstorm fronts barreled across the continent out of a blue sky, traveling over 75 miles per hour.
“Oh, yes. Maybe a dozen,” Wiehl supplied. “Ah, here we’re back on Liberty. This is the only undamaged bridge left across the Monongahela.” He pointed downriver, toward a double rail track up a steep hillside. A pile of reddish rubble lay at its base. “Over there is the famous Monongahela Incline. The immigrants who worked in the steel mills built a funicular, so they could live on Mount Washington without having to climb up there after work. The incline isn’t operating anymore. But the Duquesne Incline is still running. The inclines are very popular with tourists. Breath-taking view from the top.”
I smiled at the ‘popular with tourists’ part. Alex Wiehl was an optimistic man. I was probably his first tourist in years. And I was only playing at it in order to ease the social tension. A brief tour couldn’t hurt.
Past the bridge, we turned left along the river and soon pulled up to an ordinary middle-class chain hotel, a long five-story block of brick with a valet zone driveway and portico. The outdoor national brand name signs had been replaced with ‘Monongahela Inn’, so professionally that I wouldn’t have noticed the name change, except that the door mat still bore the original branding.
“Did you work for the company long before the borders closed, Mr. Wiehl?” I asked.
“Yes, fifteen years,” he replied. “I’d only just transferred to Pittsburgh, though. I was in Johnson City before that. Tennessee.”
“And you were elected right away to city council?” I asked, surprised.
“Oh, no, I was just appointed to the council a few months ago,” he demurred. “I joined the Chamber of Commerce right away. Great way to make friends in a new city. Ah – should I just hand out keys and let you people sort out room assignments?” he offered hopefully. “The entire hotel is at your disposal.”
“Johnson,” Emmett ordered. Captain Johnson further delegated, and a sergeant accompanied Mr. Wiehl to the registration desk.
“Our only contact is useless,” Emmett commented to the IBIS team.
I poked him. “Emmett, I think he’s one of the movers behind the Penn–Ohio joint venture. Don’t write him off just because he isn’t who you thought he was. Schwabacher and Taibbi’s re-industrialization plan is important.”
“Uh-huh,” Emmett said sadly.
We both brightened immeasurably when we stepped into the hotel lobby. This provided tastefully bland lounge seating areas, a closed bar, and an open buffet, brimming over with delicious wafts of dinner. Our prisoners were already being escorted to a ground-floor conference room for questioning. The troops stared at the buffet, but apparently hadn’t been given leave to devour it yet.
I didn’t have that problem. I dumped my gear in a booth near the lobby and started filling my plate. Emmett and the IBIS pair followed my lead.
After nearly 24 hours travel from our home in the hungry devastation of New York City, that buffet was just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and smelled. We had roast beef. Pork loin. Pot roast. Fried chicken. Macaroni and cheese. A choice of five cooked vegetables. Fresh tossed salad with all the trimmings and choice of four salad dressings. Potatoes three ways. Fresh chicken and dumpling soup. Warm fresh bread. Unlimited butter.
In New England and New York–New Jersey, we didn’t have enough wheat flour to make bread, let alone enough oil to waste on deep-frying. A single plate from this amazing buffet held more treats than any of us in the Apple had eaten in the past six months combined. And that was just the dinner buffet. I carried my mounded plate beyond to stare at the dessert spread. Peach and blueberry and apple pies, blueberry cobbler, yellow cake with frosting, pastries, fresh apples and grapes and a selection of cheeses and crackers. My mouth hung open at the beauty of the colors, the riches arrayed here before us. Apparently sugar wasn’t in short supply here, either.
“You can’t eat your first plate, piglet,” Emmett commented beside me. But he stared at the color-drenched desserts just as raptly as I did. And his dinner plate was mounded even higher than mine, with three different rolls perched precariously on top.
Captain Johnson called out to the troops, “As soon as the Colonel is seated, we will proceed by rank to the buffet. With decorum, ladies and gentlemen.”
We slipped into our booth with alacrity, to let loose the ravening horde.
“You may be right, Ms. Baker,” Kalnietis offered from across our shared table. “Penn has plenty of food.”
I nodded, eyes smiling, teeth sinking into warm fresh bread dripping with real butter, like everyone else at our table. Judging from their plates, our new IBIS friends from greater Virginia were just as starved for wheat and meat and deep fried things as we were.
It seemed briefly that there might be war at the hot buffet, as rolls ran out before the lower-ranked soldiers got any. But a smiling overweight middle-aged woman emerged to save the day with another vast platter of dinner rolls and Texas toast. She was trailed by a possible daughter, around age 20, wheeling out replacement hot trays of more roast beef and fried chicken.
“I like Alex Wiehl,”
I proclaimed, when my mouth was temporarily empty. “I like Penn. The war, completely forgiven.” My dinner companions nodded emphatically, their mouths full.
We could have happily gorged the evening away. But before we had a chance to sample the dessert buffet, the interrogators emerged to report what they’d learned from the prisoners. Wisely, Captain Johnson and his top sergeant had sent in plates for them.
The lead interrogator was Sergeant Tibbs.
28
Interesting fact: When people joined the meshnet on Long Island, they received a Help Wanted ad – We Pay in Food, All Skills Needed. Major Cameron’s team planned to use this to compile an inventory of people and skills. But one of the first ten respondents pointed out that the quarantine already collected this information. After that, it was a matter of days before experienced public works crews were located and back on the job.
Winter spun by quickly. For one thing, it was about the mildest winter I could remember in Connecticut. Climate change was a factor, of course, but our local winters ran the gamut as far back as I could remember. Some years we had bitter arctic winters, blowing straight down from the Canadian Shield, snow-clad from Thanksgiving to April, with temperatures plunging well below zero. And then there were other years like this one, where snow fell and melted within a day. More often than not, it fell as rain in the first place. The mild winter was a great mercy for the survivors in the Apple.
I saw Emmett again before New Year’s. General Cullen convened a mid-course review for Project Reunion, held at a hotel in Greenwich this time. Even I was impressed when I cobbled together everything the software and media teams had contributed. My presentation got the second longest standing ovation of the summit. The longest, of course, was reserved for Emmett.
By then, all four quarantine camps were graduating refugees at full capacity, nearly 200,000 people a week. They were no longer strictly quarantine camps, though. Once Clarke Whitfield’s falsified data was out of the way, CDC researchers found that the weaponized strain of Ebola had died out months before. Illnesses of starvation and bad sanitation they had in plenty. But there were no confirmed new cases of Ebola. The four-week program at the camps continued, though, for careful feeding and rehabilitation before release.
The only major mid-course correction was that Admiral O’Hara of the Virginia states, and General Schwabacher of the Ohio, urged a joint offensive against Pennsylvania to take back the Northeast’s strategic supplies. They were satisfied that Project Reunion was well run, and approved of expanding it. Homeland Security, working jointly with agents infiltrated into Pennsylvania by General Cullen, believed they’d located the caches. Obviously, I didn’t attend the meetings where they planned their strike. Neither did Emmett. But the more supplies they liberated from Penn, the longer Project Reunion could run, and the more New Yorkers would be released for resettlement.
January brought little news of the Penn war, largely because it was censored out. In the end, outnumbered and faced with ethical instead of territory demands, Penn’s other military leaders chose to execute Tolliver and sue for peace. They had to relinquish three quarters of their food stockpiles, most of which New England’s Link graciously ceded to New York’s Cullen. They didn’t release details of what happened to the rest of the war materiel. Emmett told me they had to fork over most of that, too.
They never added a Camp Penn. Instead, Camp Upstate and Camp Jersey scaled up and started sending refugees to Pennsylvania within weeks. Camp Yankee also ran an extra couple weeks, processing 150,000 more settlers for New England than originally planned.
We learned that Penn never lost power or Internet internally. They’d just interdicted the Internet at the borders. Most people inside were in good shape. One Penn Resco came in at level 9 on the 10-level Resco scale, breaking Cam’s previous record performance for the Northeast. Cam was miffed, but conceded that Penn had better raw agricultural talent to work with. None of Penn was below level 3, not even Philadelphia. The level 3’s were ark fiefdoms like those in New York and New England. There were some bizarre new religious enclaves in Penn, some home to people the Northeast thought long dead and gone.
Bygones gradually became bygones, once sensible people were talking to each other again.
The meshnet release was a huge success. I didn’t have much to do with it anymore. But it spread like wildfire throughout the Apple and Long Island.
I bowed out of the PR interviews, too, mostly. There was just too much work to supervise on the PR websites, between the refugee matchmaking and people lost-and-found and volunteer coordinator databases. The steering committee collared me and demanded that I manage more, and travel less. Kyla and Jennifer continued with the human interest stories for the broadcast series. Amiri Baz and his team kept up with the more dangerous reporting. They all did a much better job of it than I could, anyway. They didn’t get sidetracked trying to fix things the way I did.
I never aimed for upper level management at UNC, back in my corporate days. It felt downright odd to have a full-time job doing that now. Not at all what I’d envisioned when Mangal and I recruited the Amen1 hackers to help us publish weather reports a year before. At least I still telecommuted. But my inbox rapidly grew to rival Emmett’s. He wryly recommended some management texts he’d enjoyed, and encouraged me to hire assistants.
I tried to give some land back to the West Totoket agricultural committee. I showed them my tentative plans. I told them I wasn’t sure I’d be able to carry through for the whole season. That I might still find a way to reunite with Emmett somewhere, somehow.
My farming neighbors studied my plans and declared themselves delighted. They assured me that whenever I needed to walk away, they’d be happy to take over. We’d just split the proceeds for the year.
In other words, they weren’t any more eager than I was, for the back-breaking years of effort to convert lawn and asphalt into productive farmland. Getting the land onto the right path in spring was a lot more than half the battle.
The ground never froze that winter, so I acquired a tiller and a day laborer. I had the worker slowly slice strips of sod from the lawns, and lay them out to grow on unused driveways. For this year, I was shooting for alternating stripes of grass and forage legumes on the livestock lawns. Prepping the crop yards, without the stripes of grass, would have to wait for spring. Otherwise the rains would just wash the bare soil down into the street.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy being a farm manager, instead of a farmer. I made up the plans and acquired the tools and material. I spent a half hour or so teaching someone else step by step how to carry out the work. Then I went back to my office while they did the grueling labor for hours of follow-through. It was downright orgasmic. Especially the part where they were grateful for the chance to work for food – no guilt. My land grant came with an impressive food credit budget to pay these people. The Cocos made hiring a breeze.
I’d like to say I learned my lesson, and didn’t take on any more side-projects. ‘Uh-huh,’ as Emmett would say.
My next big distraction came from my day job. I was alone in my office at the end of January, reviewing feedback and plans on the PR broadcasts. Early signs of worthwhile competition were brewing. But at that point, we seemed to produce the most popular new ‘television’ programming in the U.S., so far as I could tell.
My phone rang. “Hold for the Speaker of the House,” my caller announced.
“The what?”
“I am speaking to Ms. Dee Baker? General manager of the Amenac and Project Reunion websites?”
“This is she,” I agreed, bemused. The most general of the managers, anyway.
“Then please hold for the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
I idly clicked a record button on my computer, and put the call on speaker.
“Ms. Baker! Thank you for agreeing to speak with me,” the next voice said. She sounded familiar from her speech announcing President O’Donnell’s impeachment. Not that I’
d agreed to speak with her, exactly. “I’m hoping you can help me broadcast a series of statements regarding the Calm Act.”
“An honor, Madam Speaker,” I replied, lost. “But, you seem able to do that on your own?”
“My speech in December didn’t reach anyone,” Speaker Krause complained, “until Project Reunion re-broadcast it.”
“Ah. You want to speak to our viewership. Well, I’m sure we’d mention anything of interest in your broadcast.” Probably edited, I didn’t add. Though apparently we both heard it.
“I understand you will spin this for your audience, Ms. Baker. I’m not a fool,” she sniped. “I’ve dealt with the press far longer than you’ve been pretending to be a journalist.”
I contemplated the hang up button, but courteously gave her 10 seconds before applying it. I smiled for practice during the silence. You can always hear a smile over the phone.
The Speaker sighed, and apparently recalled that she was asking me for a favor. “What I’m hoping for, is to frame the announcements with interviews and a retrospective. Explain the Calm Act, its three phases, and its accomplishments. A Calm Act special report.”
This time I was honestly struck dumb.
“Ms. Baker?”
“I’m…listening,” I managed. The Calm Act’s primary accomplishment was to lose over a hundred million American lives. Apparently you can hear flabbergasted over a phone as well.
“The Calm Act was necessary,” Speaker Krause insisted. “We need to explain that. And set the stage for the final phase.”
“Final. Phase,” I echoed. What, kill off the rest of us?
“Our announcement in March, of the final phase of the Calm Act,” Krause said.