The Refugee Sentinel (6 page)

She exhaled. “I want you to kiss me. On the mouth. Like you kissed your ex-wife.”

“It’s been ages since I kissed anyone. Sarah and I stopped –”

“On the mouth,” she repeated.

Colton met her halfway around the kitchen table. He pulled at the tiny waist and kissed her with eyes closed, once. Like he’d kissed Sarah countless times. In this moment, he could swear Sarah’s breath hit his face and his tongue nudged between the gap of her front teeth. Then he opened his eyes and saw Maggie.

The twenty-four-year-old ran a tongue over the trail of their kiss on her lips. “I should have been born a hundred years earlier…” she said, half to Colton, half to the empty room, “when people had a future to look forward to, instead of this...” Her eyes smiled at him and her hand caressed his hair. “Give me a moment,” she said, turned around and slid out of the room.

He returned to the table, counting the color pots over the stove. One blue, one green, two yellow… The sound of shattered glass jolted him erect and he rushed out of the kitchen and into the bedroom but Maggie wasn’t there. He went for the only other room in the apartment. He opened the bathroom door and clammy thighs slapped his face. The smell hit him too. Her bleeding knees dangled at chin level, her toes sparkled with orange nail polish she must have put on at Déjà Vu earlier in the night. The sliding shower door, thrashed by her convulsing knees, sprinkled the tiled floor with shards of broken glass. A leather belt looped around the ceiling fan and her neck. Her body spun around. The lips that had kissed him a moment earlier were smattered with blood. Her teeth were ground shut by the unconscious pressure she had applied in her final moment. A bitten-off piece of her tongue, like discarded chewing gum, sat in the pile of glass on the floor. Colton turned to one side and wept.

It had been months since his hospital discharge, yet Sylvya missed Colton more than she dared imagine. She looked up his Mountain View passport records and was paralyzed to discover he had left Las Vegas. It took calling his former casino employer and role-playing as his personal physician to find out he had moved to Seattle. Seattle made no sense – it was cold and distant and, most of all, flooded. And where did this leave her? Was she going to let him walk? And if she did, how long would it take for her dream to come back to life with another patient? Assuming it could come back, at all. Then her decision formed: all cities needed nurses, most of all the coastal ones. She would peruse the Seattle job boards, get hired by a hospital there and move to the upper-left corner of the continent… for the sake of the dream he had rekindled in her.

Virginia Mason offered her a nursing position after a single phone interview. She flew with the kids from Las Vegas to SeaTac, the last functional northwest airport handling traffic from Boise in the east to San Francisco in the south and every other town in between. Sadie and Dallas were sleeping next to her. It was fortunate that Dallas was asleep on both beverage runs. His new gig was to fill his cheeks with soda and squeal at the bite of the bubbles against the inside of his mouth. The cheeks would stretch, with saliva and pop drooling from his puckered lips, until everything from the inside squirted out.

She caressed their small heads. What mother would relocate her children to the other side of the continent with weeks to go until Defiance Day? A batch of turbulence shook the cabin and Sylvya let out an unconscious cry drowned by the roar of the engines. She tried to imagine Colton’s reaction to seeing her in Seattle for the first time. Would he lift her off the ground and plant a hot and dry kiss on her lips? Would his unshaven stubble grind her lips into a mush? Would he kiss her forehead and hug her, but not too long, before squatting down to embrace Sadie and Dallas, and with a big smile melt their discomfort that a stranger had kissed their mom in public.

Another turbulence bump. Sylvya rubbed her bloodshot eyes, squishing a contact lens under her lid, upper or lower – she couldn’t tell. The world became a fuzzy mess on the right but she didn’t care. She was headed to him and that was all that mattered. The thought of him set fire through her veins as powerful as the maternal love for her children. He made her feel the way cancer cells felt about chemotherapy. Bones with cancer lit up the scanners in bright yellow and red; the brighter the colors, the further along the tumors. But several Zometa treatments later, the red would turn into hollow black, filled with dead cells. He was her Zometa. Without him, the desire, unfettered and red, to take care of someone would chew through her until she either died or lost sanity.

The plane’s wheels thudded on the SeaTac tarmac. Dallas and Sadie woke and started playing slapsies. Sylvya gathered their toys from the faded seats, nostalgic for her own childhood. She would love to play a game of waking up in Colton’s arms and smelling peanuts on his breath.

She cleared the airport checkpoint without a hiccup thanks to the Virginia Mason nurse-permit. As luck would have it, others from her flight weren’t as prepared. A middle-aged couple with two teenage sons were detained for traveling with forged relocation permits and dispatched to confinement cells until the day of their voting executions. Because of the delay, Sylvya’s group arrived in Seattle after curfew and were forced to spend the night at a ULE detention center until their city permits could be processed the following morning.

The curfew horn woke Sylvya at eight-thirty-am and she held her breath, despite the sleep deprivation, at the view of Seattle’s majestic skyline flanked by the Cascades against the morning sun. The Puget Sound waters had devoured the city, but the mountains rose proud in the back, impervious to the human hubbub underneath. At noon, their paperwork cleared and the Timmonses were allowed in town. After an hour of navigating through suspension bridges and submerged neighborhoods, they reached the Virginia Mason. Defiance Day had so drained the city of nurses that, in addition to the employment permit, the hospital accommodated the three Timmonses in a rent-free condo downtown.

The quiet evening found mother and children in a new two-bedroom home with working lights and running water. Soon, the kids’ rhythmic breathing filled the bedroom with calming frequency. Sylvya, too, lay down feeling full. They had a safe home – dare she dream for more? Would it be greedy to wish Colton fell asleep beside her too, for months on end, and years, together with the kids? She knew he’d embrace her the moment they saw each other. Seattle was her American Dream, where she would reinvent herself for him.

The smell of rot didn’t feel repulsive anymore, the sights of desolated bridges felt temporary, and the ticking bomb of Defiance Day felt like another calendar date to come and go. She felt hopeful. She would claim the person who was hers and help him see life as she did. Sylvya Timmons fell asleep a happy woman.

Natt Gurloskey scanned Seattle’s downtown from the precinct’s twentieth-floor windows and his heart wept. Drowning in the rain, the city had given out and the lives of the fifteen million Seattleites have become barrack lives. This defeat lay in the years before. In the decisions that weren't made and the visions that weren't there. But it was also his fault. This was his city, after all, and it
had gone out for good, like a flare at the onslaught of a permanent night. Not the night that gave way to the morning after, but an incurable virus demanding capitulation. Once this virus had moved in, it refused to leave. It turned buildings into mildewy rubble. It took away the oxygen and sunlight, and demanded hope as a hostage, shipping it away somewhere far, never to return again. The night grew thicker with each new inch it captured. First, it took over one street corner, then a second one, then sprawled over to all adjacent alleys. The parts of town that fell under its control forgot what living felt like. The other parts bid their time until its inescapable arrival, assuring themselves they had lived well and that any life, no matter how good, had to end sometime. These were the depths to which Natt’s city had fallen. Except there was no night, but it felt like there was.

Yet again, Natt hadn’t slept. The three espresso cups he had downed earlier gurgled in his stomach, good for no more than inflaming his gastritis. He had to see the mayor today, sometime before the five-pm curfew, which his police department had imposed on this once vibrant, but now besieged, city. Natt walked on the beaten down linoleum and into the elevator hoping no one else would jump in with him. He disliked strangers. He disliked them even more in proximity. The elevator doors closed in unison with another gastritic salute from his stomach. Someone had scratched a hasty star, to designate where the new lobby was, next to the plastic button for the twelfth floor: vandalism with a pinch of dark humor. Six months ago, the star would have sat next to the tenth-floor button. Six months from now, Gurloskey and whoever else was dumb enough to still live in this dead city would have to move the star higher. The elevator ding startled him. It wasn’t noon yet but he couldn’t keep his eyes open and gave himself a solemn promise to turn in by nine tonight.

He followed the handmade “Exit” arrows scratched on the walls and ended at what had once been a solid sidewall, now cut out and replaced with the gaping entry of a jet bridge leading to the main suspension bridge outside.

The rot hit his nostrils as soon as he stepped into the open. Fourth Avenue looked like a Venice canal, only more run-down. The water lapped at awnings and sidewalls, hundreds of feet above the submerged street level. High-rises jutted at crooked angles, like scattered concrete dominos, sunk partway in the sloshing waves. Barnacles covered the walls as high as a foot above the water and soiled sea-foam cuddled along once-functioning windows, now boarded by steel plates. Mayor Mullins had learned from New York’s U-shaped berm and Rotterdam’s seven-hundred-foot floodgates. As a result, Seattle was prepared when Greenland melted. But when the flood stayed, the city started its three-year-long suffering. The outer ocean wall bought some time for Mullins and Gurloskey to erect suspension bridges above the major downtown avenues. But when the wall bowed head to the persistent tidal pressure, whatever lay behind stood no chance. Furniture and computers, carpets and wiring were gone in less than a week. Entire city blocks were submerged to their third floors. The cars parked in the streets drifted in the water, like bobbing apples, and Seattle turned into a ghost town, without electricity, heat or human compassion. The smell of death filled the air as the waters corroded the buildings from within. The city’s seaport, once a proud gateway to Asia’s largest economies, became an oversized and lifeless aquarium.

This was the flood Gurloskey fought against, set to reclaim his tattered town even if it meant strapping Seattle on his back and pulling it away from the waters of the Puget Sound. He imposed a night curfew, growing in perimeter and time with each passing week. He dispersed the crowds of protesters that had been picketing for months. He converted banks into prisons and filled them with looters. Without search warrants, he barreled into residences within ten miles of the flooded downtown, confiscating any firearms his cops could lay hands on. He slept in his office for months without going home, regardless of how tempting it felt to flee to the high suburbs of Woodinville. He hadn’t seen Eaton and Chloe and missed them, but a part of him didn’t mind, because they weren’t supposed to know him like this.

In time, one slow week after the next, the riots subsided, the night patrols uncovered fewer and fewer dead bodies at dawn, running water was restored to the municipal buildings and several downtown shelters opened for those without a place to call home. People were pulling together, seeing that togetherness was the ticket for survival. Mullins featured his Police Chief in a growing number of video calls with other mayors, dishing proven advice on how Seattle was coping. By the end of the sixth month, to Natt’s exhausted astonishment, it felt like he’d turned the tide on Mother Nature by a creaky inch. By less than an inch. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine life in his city returning to relative normalcy. A new normalcy by any account, but a normalcy anyway. He felt good and more in love with his family and the Seattle he had begun to save.

Then Antarctica fell and raised the oceans by another two hundred feet.

“Good to hear your voice when I know who I’m hearing,” Colton said and moved the phone from one ear to the other.

“We’re divorced, Colton.”

Through the phone line, he wanted to crawl to her, to the woman he’d be drawn to forever because of guilt and adoration, in equal parts. “How have you been, Sarah?”

“I shouldn’t have called that night…” she cleared her throat. “The ULE Ministry of Science gave me your number and I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I was relieved to hear from you.”

“I was in a poor condition.”

“I didn’t mind.”

“How have you been? Still in Vegas?” she said.

Underneath her question, Colton sensed impatience. She’d always been lousy at pleasantries. “Vegas was the closet for too many skeletons. I’m in back in Seattle now. For a couple of years of what I call my post-Sarah era.”

“Took you a while.”

“You see, I kept one of your old voicemails on my cell. The time you asked me to get formula on my way home. Yana had turned red from crying while you were taking a shower and you called because it couldn’t wait. Then you dropped the phone in the water.” He chuckled. “The message died midsentence, before you could ask for the formula, but I figured it out. I could finish your sentences back then.” He coughed to steady his voice. “I copied this message from phone to phone, for more than three years. But holding on to it felt like a monument to my sins. I deleted your voice and moved to Seattle, starting a life of starting to forget you. But your call the other night…”

“Always the poet who chooses the bigger good, over the lesser evil,” she said. “Are you married now?”

“No more marriages for me, Sarah. Not after you.”

“Don’t...”

“You asked.” He closed his eyes.

“I have no room for distractions. Living with Yana and without you has been good, until this tragedy. Which is why I called last week. Should have handled it better, but I still need your answer.”

“First you call me a distraction then you say you should have asked me to die in a more thoughtful way.”

“Don’t fight me on this, unless you’ve already voted.”

“Only for me to know,” he said, wondering when was the last time they had a conversation without fighting.

“I need to know too.” He could hear her teeth clench. “If there was a way to avoid knowing, I would have.”

“You find the best words to convince a man, Dr. Parker. Or are you back to Dr. Perkins?”

“My surname is irrelevant.”

“I haven’t voted yet,” he said, “or sacrificed.”

“Then I have to.”

“You have to what?”

“Ask my question from the other night. But I don’t need an immediate answer. You still have a couple of weeks to decide.”

“Until Defiance Day?” Colton’s hand that wasn’t holding the phone, rubbed his eyes. A headache was tiptoeing underneath his temples, not at full strength yet, but coming.

“It would mean Yana lives.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“How about I re-marry you?” she said.

“Is remarriage the going rate for my life?”

“If there was another way, I’d have found it.”

“Which only makes you a High-Potential, prohibited from Sacrifice or earmark,” he said.

“Focus on what matters, Colton.”

“What does? As a Hi-Po, maybe you can explain it to me.”

“Voting matters.”

“Is that what you call forcing a person to choose another person for extermination?”

“It’s a legal earmark vote.”

He laughed. “So if the extermination is legal, then it’s good extermination.”

“Think of how lucky she would be. To survive Defiance Day with the other Sacrifice recipients.”

“You know people call them Silver-Spooners, right?”

“I don’t care about people’s high-minded bullshit. Defiance Day will solve Earth’s population problem with one sweep that’s legal and efficient.”

“And barbaric…” he said.

“There’ll be no more castrations afterwards, Colton. No more curfews and no more disappearing species.”

“Just a few million Silver-Spooners with an irrevocable sense of entitlement, tasked to rebuild our world.”

“Stop being such a child. Vote Sacrifice if you hate voting earmark so much.”

“Which is what you’d have me do.”

“Law requires you to vote one way or the other,” she said.

“If Defiance Day is this humane process, why do you need my Sacrifice to save your daughter?”

“She’s your daughter too. Whom you almost killed before her first birthday.”

“I can always count on you to remind me.”

A noisy breath through the nose. “You win. OK?” she said. “I’m begging you. I’m not telling, I’m begging. Do you realize how hard this is for me?”

He did. The Sarah Perkins he used to know was the one on top. Always. An oversized painting of “La Niña,” the sole Columbus ship to survive the journey to the New World, hung in her lab. The words of the Great Explorer were etched on it, “All my life, I’ve been chasing the Sun. Now I’m going to catch it.” She was born a Sun-chaser. He suspected she married him to have a child and keep colonizing the unknown, through Yana, long after her own death. Now Columbus was begging him and he hated having pushed her so far.

“I’ll think this over. How do I get a hold of you?”

“The number I’m calling from should be on your Caller ID. I’ll make sure I call you too.”

The phone went dead. She was getting good at hanging up without giving him the chance to say goodbye.