The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  “It was the winds that caused the most trouble—”

  Troy started and stopped himself.

  “Anyway, blame the hurricane,” he said. “That’s always easiest.”

  Troy sidestepped around Love and reached the top of the stairs. Love suddenly switched from standing slack-jacked and dumbstruck to sprinting and lunging at Troy. She grabbed the fabric of his jumpsuit. He looked prepared for her reaction, just not her speed and strength.

  “I want to know,” Love croaked, “all of it.”

  “But you don’t. My own wife and two children—”

  “I don’t care about you!” Love barked.

  And at that moment, she didn’t. All Love cared about was her Rivka. Troy narrowed his eyes and wrested free of her grip.

  “The hurricane caused high winds to travel south along the coast,” he said. “It would have carried radioactive clouds toward North Carolina’s Fort Bragg. That’s the nation’s biggest military base. They couldn’t let that happen.”

  Troy shook his head and said the government ordered pilots to seed the clouds over southern Connecticut, southeastern New York, and northern New Jersey with silver iodide to sow rain that wrung out all the deadly radiation. Love squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head violently. No, not Rivka. No! Troy mistook her refusal for disbelief.

  “What do you think Russia did after the Chernobyl accident?” he asked. “To save Moscow and the larger cities to the northeast, they sacrificed everyone to the southwest. The smaller cities of Gomel and Novozybkov had black, radioactive rain as all the fallout was dumped on them—”

  “Stop!” Love screamed.

  Troy looked away, pained, and told Love to save her pity. Hurricane season was long over. It was spring, and most of the people in New York City had died of starvation by now. If they had stayed alive this long, it was by any means necessary.

  “There was no food for months and months,” Troy whispered. “Nothing but the meat on their bones, if you want to count that. Some did. They figured morality wasn’t doing them any good. You can’t eat it.”

  Love didn’t move or speak as Troy rushed past her and took several stairs in each stride. She heard him call out on the way down.

  “Finish the mission. It is our only hope.”

  * * *

  June 2

  T-minus 22 days to nuclear detonation

  SEVERAL TIMES, LOVE had to stop rooting around in her gutted luggage to double over in ragged breaths. When weeping was inevitable, she curled up on the floor of her utility closet and howled. Goodbyes were always final in Love’s experience. Since her days in the orphanage in Nairobi, everyone in her life had an expiration that they knew like they knew their names.

  When Love turned seventeen—an approximate age based on a designated birthday—she prepared for a mandatory discharge from her only home. Love packed up her hand-me-down clothes and the foreign novels that the nuns had given her. All the holy mothers were gathered by the door of the orphanage whispering prayers in many native tongues: Swahili, English, French, Spanish, and German. Sister Ellen’s voice rose above the rest. She had held Love as a bawling infant soon after her birth mother died. She even gave Love her name and willed fate to be kinder to a destitute orphan.

  Before Love headed out to the nearest bus station, Sister Ellen placed a hand on her shoulder. She knew that Love had suffered under their roof, despite their vigilance. Sending a teenage girl off into the world on her own was like feeding her into the lion’s mouth, but they had little choice. Open your heart when it is safe, Sister Ellen whispered. Let the light in…

  Sister Ellen may have meant Jesus. She may have meant a husband in Kenya and children who would follow. It was doubtful she meant a sassy, smart, and sexy Upper West Side Jew with big brown eyes, big hair, and a big heart. But that was exactly who Love let in, and they basked in each other’s light for a time.

  Love wiped her eyes and nose on the sleeve of her jumpsuit before taking it off. She suddenly wanted to feel and look like a person, like herself. After pawing to the bottom of her suitcase for her tangled clump of jewelry, Love saw the Mets baseball hat she stole from Rivka’s closet on the night she left New York City. It was the only part of her lover that she could keep.

  Love felt the cap’s orange embroidered letters and thought of her Rivka: her wry sense of humor, her smile and laugh, the ripe fullness of her body, the way she always tried to coax a smile. On the night Love abandoned Rivka for the Effort, there was no talk of love. Left unspoken, it was there as she placed her switchblade on Rivka’s pillow and walked out of their Bronx apartment unarmed. Love had found love, her calling since she was given a name.

  Love hopped down two flights of stairs wearing one beaded earring with a dangling feather, the same earring she wore on the day of her arrival in French Guiana. Love ran through the lobby of the Space Museum out to the front entrance, where Zhen and Amy were saying their goodbyes. And here, like before, she realized she loved people at the verge of losing them.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t sure I could do this,” Love muttered, then cleared her throat.

  Zhen stood patiently. She had finally swapped her white lab coat for a military jumpsuit and steel-toe boots that looked too big.

  “I want to give you something,” Love said, placing the baseball hat on Zhen’s head. “Even though you don’t look like much of a Mets fan.”

  Zhen asked for a translation.

  “Means you don’t look like a jackass,” Love clarified. “But it’ll keep the sun off your face.”

  She adjusted the plastic snaps in the back.

  “Looks better on you anyway,” Love whispered in Mandarin.

  Zhen asked why Love never wore the cap herself. Love replied that she wasn’t much of a Mets fan, either, but more of a fan of a fan.

  “It belonged to someone very important who will look over you now,” Love added. “Someone I loved.”

  Her fingers drifted up one last time to touch the hat’s embroidery. Love was ambivalent on religion in adulthood, but she always believed in ghosts—the bad and the good. Zhen smiled and turned to look at an Asian man waiting for her in the back seat of a jeep. He nodded when she pointed to the hat, but he didn’t smile back. When Zhen turned back to the two women, her own smile had thinned into a tight line of fear.

  Love felt an emptying in her gut: a familiar survivor’s guilt. The Effort had purged nearly half of its staff. Love was still shocked—and she was a distrustful person to begin with. But it was hard to argue with the reality that there wasn’t enough food. Half of their heroes were left to hang in the wind in order to save the remaining half who had to complete the mission. Love was one of very few interpreters chosen to remain on what was officially termed Bare Essentials. Chuck, Jin-soo, the Professor, and the rest of the Space Flight team would also stay to keep the HYCIV on course to intercept UD3, eject and detonate its lead impactor on the comet’s surface, and steer the nuclear charge into the crater. All other staff would join the unofficially nicknamed Bare Bones discharges.

  Love opened her mouth, but she struggled to speak of the emotional thunderstorms that raged inside her. Instead of forcing out words, she reached for Zhen and held her instead. At least she could do that. Zhen wrapped her arms around Love’s torso and squeezed.

  “I’m allowed to cry now, right?” Amy asked Zhen.

  She burst into tears without waiting for an answer. Amy always did what Amy wanted. Zhen embraced her next, and Amy dropped her head onto her shoulder. Love watched her crown—unremarkable, greasy brown hair that grew to platinum—bob with hitching cries.

  “Bring Ben back,” Zhen said into Amy’s ear.

  Amy nodded and winced, but the words pushed her to stand up straight and wipe at her runny eyes and nose. To Love, Amy had only grown more beautiful as each desperate day passed.

  “I will,” Amy agreed. “I saw him look at me the other day. His eyes focused, I swear it. Ben will come back, just like your friend Cheung did. And I�
�ll be there when he does.”

  Amy’s scratchy voice was the only sound that made Ben stir and blink, like a dreamer who wanted to wake.

  “But what about you, Zhen?” Amy cried. “You may have saved the goddamn world, and yet here you are.”

  Zhen took Amy’s and Love’s hands in each of her own.

  “Not me,” she said, and smiled bravely. “We.”

  * * *

  GIVEN HER STATUS and contribution to the Effort, Zhen and her friend Dewei were the last nonessential staff to be discharged. They were each given backpacks with a generous amount of supplies: packaged food, water, a field first aid kit with penicillin, antimalarial pills, water purification tablets, mosquito netting, sleeping bags, and so on. Zhen was grateful. Most discharges got nothing but a canteen of water. However, carrying anything worth killing for was a danger in itself.

  Zhen saw the southern checkpoint on the Effort perimeter approaching ahead. It felt like only days since she had last seen it on the way to the Cayenne airport, not the months she barely remembered from working to exhaustion. Zhen’s heart raced and her palms sweated. Time was such a relative thing, especially when you had none. Will I die today?

  Her jeep parked in front of the checkpoint gate, where fifty French soldiers clustered in a black mass with barking dogs.

  “Keep the dogs away from us!” Zhen shouted.

  She could see Dewei was just as terrified. They deserved some dignity. Almost immediately, the handlers pulled back on their leashes until the animals disappeared in the crowd. Zhen looked to Dewei and nodded. He stepped out of the jeep and hefted his backpack onto his shoulders, and then helped Zhen with her own. The French soldiers were humble and sad, but firm as they explained their role. Turning to Dewei, Zhen explained in Mandarin: They’re saying we can’t come back.

  Grim-faced, he nodded.

  “Miss Zhen!”

  The shout came from the perimeter. A soldier in a green camo uniform ran along barbed wire toward her with his rifle pointed down.

  “Miss Zhen, wait!”

  He stopped in front of her, panting. There was an American flag stitched on his uniform. His rifle was larger than the others with a long, thin muzzle and mounted scope on top.

  “Miss Zhen, we never got to meet,” he said between breaths, “but I was in the security detail at Cayenne. I was the sniper who…”

  His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but his face angled slightly toward Dewei.

  Zhen translated for Dewei: This is the man who saved your life. Dewei opened his mouth and took a step back. He bowed to the soldier with his heavy pack. The sniper nodded back briskly. It must be difficult to be thanked for killing another man.

  “It’s been a good morning,” the sniper offered. “No one’s fired a shot and the road’s been mostly clear. Mostly.”

  He said it in earnest, but with a good deal of pity. When Zhen asked what made for a bad morning, he started to say one thing then changed his mind and said another.

  “How’s Amy?” he asked.

  Zhen forced a smile.

  “Strong.”

  This was hurting her. She would lose control soon. Zhen nodded to the French soldiers manning the gate. She was as ready as she could be.

  “Discharge!”

  Their shouts rang out in French and English first. Interpreters along the perimeter repeated their shouts in a range of languages. The French soldiers opened the gate manually and stepped aside. Zhen didn’t move. Dewei took her trembling hand and pulled her gently one step forward. Neither of them expected to get very far or live very long.

  “And don’t worry about those two,” the sniper said, nodding toward the highway. “They were discharged an hour ago. One of ’em is still in shock.”

  Zhen looked down the road and saw two figures wavy with heat distortion. One large figure sat on the asphalt, while a smaller figure tried to pull the other up to a standing position.

  “I thought we were the only nonessentials left?” Zhen asked.

  “You probably were,” the sniper replied, “but we had the last plane from Fort Hood land today. Brought a few brain doctors and surgeons. They had a devil of a time tracking down those kinda specialists in this mess, but they’d do anything to help Dr. Schwartz and the others with the catatonia.”

  He pointed to the figures.

  “Stragglers from the plane. As long as discharges keep a distance, we don’t have to shoot ’em,” he said matter-of-factly, and then squinted into the scope of his rifle for a better look within its crosshairs.

  Zhen shuddered a breath. She squeezed Dewei’s hand and led him past the gates, which were pushed back into place immediately.

  “I’ve got your back again,” the sniper called out, but Zhen didn’t turn around.

  Bullhorns blared and made them startle. An interpreter shouted warnings in poor Mandarin. They had to keep moving forward. Zhen walked as fast as she could with her heavy pack. Eventually the two wavy figures on the highway solidified into two men with duffel bags. The smaller, older man had darker skin and long hair. He looked somewhat Asian but definitely not Han Chinese. The young white man on the ground had a beard and a half-stricken, half-delirious expression that stretched into a smile when he saw her.

  “The Mets suck!” he shouted.

  Zhen dropped Dewei’s hand and reached up to touch the baseball cap Love had fitted on her head.

  “Did the guards say anything about me?” the young man asked, his smile gone.

  “That you have to keep moving,” Zhen replied. “We all have to keep moving or they’ll shoot.”

  With that, the smaller man grabbed the larger one by the arm and tried again to bring him to a stand. He seemed aware of imminent danger, but his friend was like a resting ox. Dewei stepped around to help. He grabbed the young man by his leather belt, then angled his feet together and leaned back to leverage the combined weight of his body and backpack; he was always a good loadmaster. The young man on the ground tilted and finally stood up. His eyes never looked away from the checkpoint.

  “If I could just talk to them again—” he muttered, looking to the perimeter of barbed wire, soldiers, and live ammunition.

  He started walking toward the checkpoint. Dewei hollered and grabbed the duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He planted his legs like a wedge but only dragged forward several meters. The older man screamed and boxed his friend on the ear to stun him. Zhen dropped her pack and sprinted around them.

  “Don’t shoot!” she shouted back at the soldiers.

  Hundreds of eyes were watching. Hundreds of mouths shouted Hold fire! at one another. Zhen still mattered, even outside the Effort’s perimeter. She stepped up to the bearded young man until her face was right below his.

  “You. Must. Stop!” she shouted.

  There would be no talking, she assured him, only shooting. The young man’s face suddenly sagged with realization and fatigue.

  “But I’ve come so far…”

  Zhen said that she and Dewei had come much farther, from the other side of the globe, but it didn’t matter. The Effort no longer needed them.

  “We must leave,” she said.

  The young man allowed Zhen to pull him in the other direction with his friend and Dewei right behind. They walked in silence along the highway until they could no longer see the Effort’s perimeter, only the occasional soldier standing fifty yards apart on the asphalt.

  “This road leads southeast to Cayenne,” Zhen said, pointing to the sparse line of soldiers and a patrol jeep blaring warnings far in the distance. “We don’t want to stay on this road. I know. I’ve seen what comes next.”

  The smaller man looked up at the sun and then pointed off to the right, due south. He took off his leather shoes and socks and left them behind on the highway before stepping onto dry grass. The younger man followed. He looked back over his shoulder at Zhen and Dewei and nodded for them to come along.

  Dewei looked to Zhen and frowned.

  “We can’t
trust these men,” he whispered.

  Dewei was right. But the one man was very big and strong. And the other had purpose and place; he looked like he belonged as he melted into shade from the bordering forest. Zhen was a small urban dweller who had given herself up for dead as soon as she was discharged from the Effort. At least the two men in front of her were a new development, a step away from that prediction.

  Zhen took Dewei by the hand and led him away from the highway leading to Cayenne. Dewei followed, shaking his head. He would follow her anywhere, he said, but didn’t have to like it. The group trekked through forest until they reached a river, probably a tributary of the Kourou River. The river was too wide to cross on foot, so they followed its bends until they reached a narrow bridge.

  On the opposite bank, Zhen saw several wood-slat houses on stilts. One house stood less than fifteen meters from the bridge. The pile of bodies was visible only from halfway across the water. Zhen froze. Dewei turned back to her, his raised eyebrows forming a question. He had been too busy watching the other men in front of them and had missed the danger surrounding them. Zhen had to point because she couldn’t speak. The other men crossed the bridge, but only the large one stopped to gape. Zhen saw his whole body sigh and his wide shoulders slump at the horrific sight. Some of the bodies were small children.

  Zhen forced herself to cross the bridge, but she refused to move for a closer look. Dewei stood beside her and shielded her view until the big man walked back over to join them.

  “I’m guessing these houses are already picked clean,” he said. “That would explain the family rotting in a pile over there.”