The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  “How bad do you think things are out there?” she said, once they were waiting outside. “Now that they know?”

  “Out where?”

  “The world.”

  “Love, we can’t think about that. There’s too many other awful things we do need to think about.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’ve got Amy—”

  “My parents are out there,” Ben said. “My sister and her children are out there. I’ve got aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole tribe.”

  “I’ve only got one person out there,” Love whispered. “But she’s everything.”

  Her lips trembled silently as her eyes looked up to the night sky. Ben refused to follow her gaze; he refused to look up to that fucking comet. UD3 was now visible with an amateur telescope, barely. It appeared as a muted star. This smudge of light no larger than a pinhead was an eight-kilometer apocalypse if he failed.

  Everyone stared up into space now: the soldiers standing guard on the center’s security gates, the engineers waiting in line for the showers on the Space Museum parking lot—everyone but Ben. He didn’t need to look up to feel what everyone felt. Death was usually such a lonely, individual suffering, but extinction had a shared quality. Ben knew he was selfish to be comforted by this, but misery loves any company it can get.

  When a jeep pulled up, Love remained transfixed, but Ben wouldn’t ride three miles back to the Space Museum alone. The head of the logistics team was sitting in the back seat for an impromptu meeting in transit. In his previous life before the comet, the formal Mr. Kandegedara served as undersecretary-general for operational support at the UN. Ben had only met the Sri Lankan national once before the man joined his team holed up at the administration complex. Logistics worked best unseen, except for the marvel that was the Effort’s infrastructure, staff, processes, planning, and so on.

  Ben climbed into the back seat of the jeep and waited. The man looked grim but calm in flowing white linen clothes. Both hands were folded over his buckled seat belt; the top hand wore a gold watch and wedding band.

  “Resources will become a major concern,” Kandegedara said, with a thick accent and direct stare. “We are handling the situation to the best of our abilities.”

  He was prepared to stop there. Logistics and security were the only teams with access to external communications and transport beyond the Effort’s perimeter. Everyone else was on a need-to-know-only basis.

  “Might as well tell me what’s wrong,” Ben said, “or I’ll start guessing at hypotheticals. I can’t help it. It’s what I do.”

  Kandegedara nodded. “Medical supplies won’t be an issue,” he offered. “We have access to stockpiles from the CDC.”

  That was where the good news ended. Kandegedara reported that hoarding and looting had wiped out most of the food already in distribution. Desperate people were migrating from cities by the millions to scavenge farmland and livestock. Kandegedara had tried and failed, along with government leaders, to set up defenses for several farming belts. But the acreage was too large and scattered to protect against armed militias, especially at night. Defenses in low numbers suffered massive casualties. Adding more and more soldiers required too large a portion of the farmland’s bounty to feed and maintain, canceling out the purpose of the mission.

  “That’s not a major concern,” Ben muttered. “That’s a crisis.”

  Kandegedara agreed and continued.

  “The Effort is prioritized, of course. We will receive all initial response resources of the UN, the Red Cross, and FEMA. As for the world…the American Midwest had record-setting rainfall that ruined crops. We estimated that grain stocks, being what they are, would last ninety-one days without another harvest, but those stocks are not evenly distributed. Half are in China—”

  “Will the Effort make it to a February 1 launch?” Ben cut in.

  “Possibly. If we limit our growth—”

  “Freeze it, then,” Ben said. “Body count stays fixed as of this moment. Not a single person joins our ranks unless another one leaves.”

  Kandegedara’s jaw hinged slightly open, but no words came. Ben saw him worriedly turning his gold wedding band with the thumb of the same hand.

  “It’s what needs to be done,” Ben said more gently.

  But the man’s eyes looked far away as he thought of someone close to his heart.

  * * *

  AMY WAS SUDDENLY shaking him in his sleeping bag.

  “What?” Ben croaked, blinking with difficulty.

  His eyes were so dry.

  “You weren’t answering me,” Amy insisted.

  Ben said he was only sleeping, but Amy yelled that his eyes had been open and vacant. She was shaking. Ben pulled his arms out of his sleeping bag so he could wrap them around her.

  “Maybe it’s all these pills they force on us,” Ben said. “Pills for anxiety, pills for insomnia, pills for side effects from other pills…They’ve got me zonked.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Amy whispered, “but then I saw you breathing.”

  She was probably hallucinating with exhaustion; it happened to all of them. Ben unzipped her sleeping bag and coaxed her inside. He promised that he was as fine as he could be given the circumstances. Now it was Amy’s turn to offer comfort.

  “The nuclear team has made lots of progress,” she said quietly. “And the Ariane rocket team is ahead of schedule.”

  Amy didn’t mention the HYCIV team. Their status was confidential, and she was shrewd enough to know there was still a problem. Amy might not see the elephant in the cleanroom clearly, but she could see the shadow it cast. She avoided the topic because she didn’t want Ben to break confidentiality, which they both knew he would.

  “You showered,” she said, drawing closer to cuddle. “Thank God.”

  Ben said he had to shower for the cleanroom environment; there wasn’t time otherwise. One of his muscles spasmed so violently that he startled and tried to get up, saying there wasn’t even time for sleep. Amy wrestled him like a mermaid by flipping her legs up and over to pin him down with the tail end of her sleeping bag.

  “I may have found a diamond in the rough today,” she said, trying to be more upbeat. “We processed twenty-three Chinese engineers at security. Only one of them was a woman. She’s got these faded scars on her face. From a cleft palate, I think. Her boss man doesn’t like her. She’s only here because she’s fucking phenomenal. It’s gotta be why. Maybe she could join the HYCIV team—”

  “You can’t count on them.”

  “What?”

  “The Chinese. They may go rogue like Russia and the others.”

  “Why?”

  Ben sighed. Of course he would tell her.

  “We think UD3 will hit mainland China,” he whispered, even though they were alone in the Penthouse. Amy absorbed the shock of his statement in silence.

  “The odds are high,” he added. “But we don’t want anyone to know; there are too many dangers. After threat scenario fifty-three—”

  “Where the asteroid split in two, right? Didn’t you role-play Germany in that one?”

  Threat scenario 53 was one of the very rare scenarios where reaction time was greatly reduced. Given that a typical time frame for any successful space mission was five years, countermeasures were rushed and unsuccessful. Instead of deflecting the simulated asteroid, interceptors split the rock, half of which exploded over Dhaka with a loss of twenty million virtual people. The other half hit the Philippine Sea and caused tsunamis that devastated the coasts of Japan, Taiwan, mainland China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea

  Threat scenario 53 led to 54, 55, and 56, where countries outside of a trajectory might not want to hedge their bets with a failed deflection that resulted in several dangerous pieces of an asteroid or comet. In scenario 55, North Korea attacked a Japanese spaceport with short-range missiles.

  “You’re a good listener,” Ben said, sniffing back a runny nose.

  He was too bone-tired. That h
ad to explain his fresh tears, that and his fear of losing either Amy or his sanity—or both—before his watch ran out of time. Doctors tried to put him on antianxiety meds, but they gave him such lucid dreams, where all his fears played out, reshuffled, and played out again. Amy died in more than a few, so he stopped taking those pills and tried some different ones.

  “We don’t want anyone to know, Amy,” Ben said with a yawn. “Not our own people. Not our own government.”

  “You don’t think…” Amy started.

  The United States didn’t have a policy for cosmic impacts outside their own borders. Ben wasn’t positive that the president would have given up the country’s entire nuclear arsenal if he had known that North America wasn’t in the direct line of fire. He might have kept his 6,185 warheads, knowing that Russia had kept their own 6,500 warheads. This was a risk Ben couldn’t take, but he was falling back asleep and didn’t have the energy to explain another danger that was far from new: apathy.

  TWENTY

  The Known World

  in Past Tense

  South Bronx, New York

  November 19

  T-minus 74 days to launch

  RIVKA COULD HEAR the raids outside her windows—and they were getting closer. She risked a peek through the seam of her curtains. A group of men, ten or fifteen of them, stood between an old pickup truck and an apartment complex across the street. Rivka watched as they looped chains from their trailer hitch to the iron bars on a first-floor window. The truck driver gunned his engine and burned rubber until the bars ripped off the windowpane.

  She saw the axe before she heard shattering glass. One by one, the men crawled through the window of the building. When the screaming started, Rivka sank to the floor and covered her ears. Hours later there was only silence, which wasn’t better when you considered the implication.

  Crazy with fear and loneliness, Rivka started hearing voices. Most were shrill as they told her to run for her life. Only one, a baritone with an echo, just wanted to say hello. The voice came from a heating vent beside her bedframe. Rivka got on her hands and knees to listen.

  “It’s Lamar,” said the baritone. “From downstairs.”

  A smile found its way to Rivka’s lips. She hadn’t spoken to anyone since her cellphone died.

  “You still a Yankees fan?” she asked, projecting down the vent.

  “You still a fuckin’ Mets fan?”

  “Hey, this vent is in my bedroom,” she said. “How much can you hear down there?”

  “You lesbians’re better than cable.”

  “Pervert!”

  They laughed together, but it didn’t last long. Rivka and Love were past tense. So much of the known world was past tense. Rivka pulled her folded legs to her chest and rested her chin on her kneecaps. She asked how Lamar was doing.

  “Hungry and thirsty,” he said immediately. “Lonely,” he added after a bit of silence. “Keisha…Keisha’s gone.”

  Keisha was Lamar’s girlfriend. She had a killer figure and a sharp tongue. After things got bad, Keisha moved into their building for her own safety. Lamar was huge; six-foot-five with a wide, solid frame that could crush a person like a tipped vending machine.

  “I told her to stay here with the door locked,” Lamar said. “But I couldn’t find much to eat or drink on my own. We were starving. One day I came home and she wasn’t here. No one broke in, so she must have gone looking for water and food. You got any upstairs? I filled up my tub, but it’s almost dry.”

  Rivka lied and said no. After a pause, she asked how many days Keisha had been missing.

  “Since we lost power. Eleven days.”

  Rivka closed her eyes and took a breath.

  “They’re not coming back, Lamar. Not Keisha. Not Love.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, barely audible.

  “Then you know we need to get out of here.”

  It wasn’t a question. If they stayed in the Bronx, they were dead. There was no fresh water and no food. The toilets were backed up with sewage, and the streets were full of armed gangs in daylight.

  “You know my cousin showed up a couple weeks ago?” Lamar said. “Last anyone knew, he was doing time up in Sing Sing for armed robbery.”

  Lamar said that most of the guards at the maximum-security prison deserted their posts. The remaining guards were left with the dilemma of either releasing all the men or allowing them to starve to death in their cells.

  “My cousin said bad men left that prison with just their jumpsuits. Real bad. And he was no angel his self,” Lamar admitted. “It’s not just a comet we gotta worry about, Rivka. It’s us.”

  “People have good in them,” Rivka whispered.

  Her voice grew stronger as she told Lamar that she was coming downstairs with food.

  “You let me in,” she insisted.

  All that was left in her apartment was a half bag of rice cakes, a freeze-dried meal from a camping store that promised to be beef stroganoff, and plastic liters of bottled water. Rivka dropped the food and a water bottle into her leather bag and tiptoed down the stairwell. She scratched quietly on the door of 1B. Lamar opened it several inches along the length of a security chain. Rivka waited while he scanned the hallway to be sure they were alone.

  Lamar had lost weight, although there was a lot of him to begin with. He stood shivering, leaner in his Yankees jacket and skull cap. Rivka was also down two notches on her belt. Her hourglass figure had a lot less curve. The breakdown-of-civil-society diet had done them both wonders. Rivka pulled the food and water out of her bag. His look of gratitude in the moment before Lamar snatched the packages and tore them open was like nothing Rivka had ever seen. Lamar swallowed without much chewing then downed the water in gulps. His eyes snapped back to her bag.

  “That was the last of the food,” she told him.

  Lamar asked if she was lying again, so she showed him the empty bottom of her bag.

  “Bet that’s a real Prada bag,” Lamar said sadly. “And here we are in the same boat.”

  “Yeah, well, time for that boat to set sail.”

  Manhattan was occupied by the army, or at least it was before the blackout. To reach Harlem, Rivka and Lamar would literally have to walk through fire, or—

  “We’ll swim it,” she told him.

  Lamar shook his big head sadly.

  “Can’t swim.”

  Rivka’s shoulders slumped. Her eyes gave a look like, You’re fucking kidding me?

  “Was I s’posed to learn in my tub?” he asked.

  Rivka had swim lessons in the chlorinated water at the JCC on the Upper West Side and later honed her skills summering in the Hamptons. She grit her teeth and pounded a nearby wall, then whimpered. Lamar muttered an apology, but Rivka wanted none of it.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she said.

  We…such a beautiful thing, as in, acting together rather than alone. Rivka put out her other hand, the one not throbbing with pain. Lamar took it and squeezed.

  “We…We’ll leave after dark,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  Rivka went back up to her room. Not to pack—they couldn’t take much with them into the water—but to plan. How the hell was she going to keep Lamar from sinking? Rivka paced her apartment as sunlight faded to twilight. What would a Boy Scout do? What would Love do, besides leave?

  Water bottles! Rivka opened one and dumped pristine, mountain spring water down her kitchen sink. They needed to float more than they needed to drink. Rivka emptied all but two of the liter bottles then recapped and packed them into two plastic trash bags. Rivka tucked her hand-crank flashlight and switchblade into the zipped pockets of her winter coat. It was November, and the air grew frigid and crisp once the sun went down.

  As Rivka walked out her front door carrying the trash bags by their drawstrings, she glanced back but kept moving. Without Lamar, she might never have found the courage to leave.

  “You takin’ out the trash?” Lamar asked, as he locked his front door behind her.r />
  “More like saving your life.”

  She placed the crinkling trash bags on the floor and handed him one of the two unopened bottles of water.

  “Drink up for the road,” she said, and unscrewed the cap of her own bottle.

  They clunked plastic in a toast, then pounded water. Rivka handed Lamar a trash bag of bottled air. She told him about the flashlight but didn’t think they should use it until they were close to the water.

  “It’s dark out there,” Lamar warned. “Darker than you ever knew.”

  He wasn’t kidding. If not for the fat moon, they’d be blind. Rivka faltered at the front door of their building. She gave herself only a moment to feel the physical manifestations of terror: spiked heart rate, blood pressure and respiration; a flood of stress hormones preparing her to mobilize. Lamar took her hand and pulled her forward.

  Gone were all the lights, traffic, and loud pedestrians gabbing to each other and their phones. In their place was a shadowed, concrete wasteland. Rivka could hear movements and see silhouettes dodging the moonlight. Raiders only came out when they could see.

  “Look,” Lamar whispered. “The Mitchel Houses are over there.”

  He lifted their clasped, gloved hands and used them to point at the tall developments like a compass needle. Having scavenged for food in the darkest hours of the night, Lamar was used to the new reality.

  Rivka found her bearings and guided the both of them west toward the Harlem River. It was slowgoing. They couldn’t see their feet and kept tripping on uneven sidewalks, trash, and noisy broken glass. Despite her disorientation, Rivka knew exactly where they needed to go. Most of the Manhattan eastern shoreline rose in a steep retaining wall up to Harlem River Drive. However, there was a section that had easier access to the water, the rehabbed Harlem River Park.

  Rivka used to ride her bike over the Third Avenue Bridge and cruise along the path. Before returning, she would prop her bike against the wall of concrete at the water’s edge. The barrier couldn’t have been more than five feet above the river, and there was a small ledge leading out to marsh grass. Rivka had seen it as she looked out to the water, thinking of her parents on the Upper West Side where she grew up and the home she made for herself in Harlem as a young adult, telling herself she could return one day.