The Deluge, page 39
Ever since she made the decision to not drive two states over to find a clinic, it felt like seven years of failure. From forgetting to take folic acid to prevent spina bifida, to all the meconium they had to suction from Lali’s lungs so that Shane couldn’t hold her, and for an hour she thought her baby was dead. Lali didn’t have a “social smile” until well past eight weeks. She didn’t walk until twenty-one months, and she’d been nonverbal for nearly two years. At seven months, Shane had taught her to blink her little eyes hard whenever she heard “¡Ojitos!” But the ordeal of getting her fluent in one language destroyed any determination she had of raising her with two.
Kai turned a page, and Lali’s ojitos grew heavy. Then, of course, there were the things no one told you in any parenting class: like how despite having another human being with you all the time, you’d be unbearably lonely. You’d ache for touch in a way you’d never ached in your life. Shane had gone the clichéd route and started sleeping with her boss. Because Teddy, overweight and friendly with the staff, had so looked and sounded like a manager who would sexually harass her, she gave him too much credit when he didn’t. Still, he offered touch, and sometimes she needed that so badly.
“You okay with her?” she asked Kai.
He nodded. “We got this.”
“We got this,” Lali repeated sleepily.
“ ’Cause we’re what?” Shane asked her.
“ ’Cause we’re outlaws,” Lali replied on cue.
“Okay, mi amor. Duerme bien.” She kissed her on the forehead.
Downstairs, she found the living room empty and saw Allen alone outside by the firepit. He’d whipped up a real blaze.
“The little one’s asleep?” he asked.
She took a seat in the Adirondack chair and felt the heat from the flames on her legs. “Almost. Finally calmed down. She’s driving me a little crazy.”
“They’ll do that to you.”
Shane resisted pointing out that Allen’s wife, Emmy, had done most of the work raising their kids while he pursued a career in academia.
“Earlier, Lali kept throwing acorns in the air?” said Allen. “It was all she wanted to do.”
“Oh. She…” Shane laughed and shook her head. “She figured out this thing about bats.”
“What about them?”
“Their sonar. How they’ll dive at an acorn because they think it’s a bug. She goes into our backyard and throws stuff at the sky to get the bats to dive at it. She thinks it’s so funny.”
Allen laughed loudly at this. It was a kind and beautiful sound. She’d first met him in the Gulf during the BP crisis as he was trying to transition from “the piss-pot of academia to doing something right for the world.” She learned he’d spent his career writing about the School of the Americas, where the US military had spent decades training death squads. He’d traveled South America extensively, without speaking nearly enough Spanish. It wasn’t that he reminded her of her dad, but he spoke like a father. His voice was calming. When she and Kai decided to take the first step in this plan, she’d gone to see Professor Allen Ford. They’d met in a Cracker Barrel near Clemson, and she pulled from her battered pack a dossier: law enforcement protocols, data collection practices, surveillance techniques, over a hundred pages on the civilian explosive tracking system and the “date/plant/shift code,” and then targets—all that gas and drilling infrastructure lying out there, exposed. He hadn’t laughed in her face. Instead, he had questions.
Twenty years later, she adored him because he looked at her with love and she felt so little of that in her life these days. She almost didn’t mind what he asked next.
“Kai’s not her father, is he?”
She leaned forward, into the intensity of the heat.
“That’s not your business, Allen.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s not. But since you’ve had her—this can’t be easy on you. I guess what I’m saying is if you ever want out, Shane, I’ll be there for you. I’ll talk to the others. I’ll be on your side. We can make it so you can just fade away. I’ll get you money. You can raise her somewhere safe.”
She let out a humorless snort. “As if there is such a place.” They were quiet for a while. “You know what I think about sometimes? I wonder about her future, but not like, what will happen as the planet buckles. What I think about is, ‘Can we afford college?’ ”
“That seems reasonable, hon.”
“No it’s not,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s really not. But I can’t stand the thought of her life being like mine. Where she’s constantly worried about her bank account. Where she’s terrified of losing a tip and will put up with anything some pig customer says because if she doesn’t get his five bucks, it’s a minor catastrophe. I don’t want her to ever live a life like the one I’ve had.”
As Allen opened his mouth to reply, Quinn’s boots creaked across the warped-wood porch.
“Should we finish this?” she said.
Shane and Allen rose to go inside, leaving the fire to smolder down to its coals.
* * *
It was closing in on midnight. They all had to be back on the road the next day. Shane sat on the living room’s large plush couch, while Quinn sat pretzel-style at the other end, her wool-socked feet tucked under her. Allen hunched forward in the armchair breathing noisily through a deviated septum. Murdock stood at the kitchen counter, playing with a plastic clip for a potato chip bag. Kai sat sideways at the head of the dining table, his back straight, hands clenched as if at the helm of a ship fighting rough waves.
“A corporate headquarters is easier in some ways, harder in others,” Murdock explained. “I could probably get it done with a hillbilly mix of some kind. Off the top of my head, a brew of gas, diesel, and glycerin tar soap—splash some of that around—but it’s more time intensive.”
“I don’t like the idea of office buildings,” said Kai. “So much harder to control.”
“We still make a call to evacuate,” Quinn argued. “Principally, it’s the same procedure.”
They agreed they needed escalation, but they’d been going around for hours about what that escalation should look like. All kinds of ideas had been floated.
“Industry is beefing up security—satellites tracking pipelines, drones watching power plants, engineers monitoring grids.” Quinn shook her head. She’d been chewing her nails to splinters all night. Greasy strands of hair hung in her face, the same candlelit color as the homey lamps of the cabin. “An office building might actually be a softer target now.”
“But much harder to control the variables of the attack,” Kai repeated.
“It’s also not infrastructure. An office building…” Allen made a troubled sound in the back of his throat. “It’s personal. It’s leaning toward humans instead of machinery.”
Kai stood. They’d shut off the lights in the rest of the cabin. It created the illusion of isolation, an island of light. The wood crackled and hissed in the fireplace. Kai fed it another log but didn’t sit back down.
“Okay,” said Kai. “We have a few ideas on the table: Why not all of them?”
Quinn’s eyes drifted up from her ragged nails. “All of them?”
“Yes. All of them. The refinery, the tar sands facility, the dragline manufacturer. We have two cells, dozens of operatives ready and willing, and we have this new delivery method”—he nodded at Murdock, clacking away with the potato chip clip—“that Kel is itching to try out. Our original goal was to create disastrous uncertainty in the market for dirty energy, make it too risky and expensive for investors, but it’s all been surprisingly resilient. So let’s hit the full fucking menu.”
Shane felt an agitation bubbling in her core. The urge to interrupt a friend can itch worse than a hive.
“We keep it geographically dispersed. All in a twenty-four-hour period. We show them we’re everywhere.”
“What about the office building?” asked Quinn.
“We shouldn’t hit office buildings,” said Allen.
“Why is that so important to you?” she demanded.
“Our only goal is to inflict damage on the infrastructure,” he reminded her.
“A corporate headquarters is infrastructure, Allen. It’s where they make the decisions on how to best turn the world to ash for shareholder value.”
“We don’t want to inspire the wrong thing. It’s not a far step from office buildings to playgrounds.”
“They have significant equipment in their Calgary offices,” said Kai. “I’m not saying it’s a must.”
They all jumped as a hard gust slammed the living room windows. It sounded like someone smacking the glass with a palm, and only the moan of the wind that followed reassured them they were still alone. Nevertheless, they sat in silence for a moment, and Shane knew their four hearts were pounding as hard as hers.
“Maybe.” Quinn hugged her knees to her chest. “What I think—and what I’ve always thought—is we need to escalate toward some version of total war. Whatever that means for us. Destroy the economic infrastructure, and if that means bridges, railroads, the electric grid, server storage facilities, so be it.”
Shane watched Allen squirm at this. “We’ll garner no support for taking away people’s comforts.”
“I’m sorry, Quinn,” Kai added. “But you have a bad habit of entertaining high-cost fantasies. We’re not toppling capitalism in one fell swoop. We’re propogandists eking out greenhouse gas reductions where we can and raising insurance, security, and operational costs. That’s always been the plan.”
“Have you seen how little this is working?” Quinn stabbed two fingers at the coffee table. The beer bottles and chip crumbs rattled. “We first came here in 2014, and we didn’t execute our first operation until nearly a decade later. Now almost another decade has gone by. Seventeen years, and the situation has gone from catastrophic to apocalyptic. We are out of time, and you two show no fucking urgency.”
And then the two of them were arguing, as juvenile and simple-minded as a debate in a Slapdish worlde. Quinn told Kai to go write press releases for Aamanzaihou. Kai told Quinn to go tack up a Che Guevara poster in her dorm room. And on they went. Murdock clacked his potato chip clip and pouted his lower lip like he was watching a good show. Allen rubbed his bald head. Finally, Shane stood and walked to the fire, interrupting their argument with her tired body.
“Enough,” she said. They quieted. “Quinn’s right.”
“Right about what?” Allen asked.
“Our approach.”
“That’s cryptic,” said Kai.
“We’re not effective because we’re not that frightening. Not really. We’re cute. An amusing sideshow in the news cycle. A nuisance at best.” She looked into the fire. “That’s why they don’t use our real name. They’re calling us the same thing as the last cute little group of revolutionaries who changed nothing.”
“Besides, what makes them think only men can pull this off?” Quinn joked. No one was in the mood.
“It’s been seventeen years,” she said, and those words lingered for a moment.
“Shane.” Murdock tossed the clip on the counter. “It’s late, and we’re all gone tomorrow. Maybe just say what it is you want to say, huh?”
Shane looked directly at Kai when she said, brusquely, determinedly, “Targets. In politics and business. So-called civilians, if you believe in such a thing.”
There was a moment of quiet as all their minds worked around the wording. Kai glared at her.
“Absolutely not.” He crossed his arms and shook his head. “We’re not even discussing that. Move on.”
“That’s not how this works. We hear each other out—”
“Move on.”
“You don’t have a veto, Kai.”
“Move. The fuck. On.”
“I want to hear what she has to say,” said Quinn.
“No,” cried Kai. He gripped a living room chair and slammed its legs against the hardwood. “That is not what we’re about. We’re not even talking through it. That’s not why we— That’s not— We’re not killers—”
KAI While driving across Illinois once as a teenager, on his way to visit his then girlfriend on winter break from college, his car hit a patch of ice and spun out at nearly seventy mph. There was that skidding, slippery sense of an absolute loss of control, of having one’s fate served up to chance in a way that felt so unfair, so terrifying. Now he searched for any way to wrestle the wheel back.
“I’m a killer.” Murdock took a seat on a living room chair, bringing a fat leg up under its partner so that he looked like an oversized version of the pudgy children in Lali’s daycare. “I was part of a savage military campaign that killed hundreds of thousands and turned the Middle East to rubble. I don’t shirk my complicity in that. Not anymore.” He gestured to the chair Kai had just rattled. “Now, before we go start calling each other ‘murderer’ I suggest we hear Shane out, as per the rules we established long ago and far away. Then we vote. Like always.”
QUINN Felt a thrill crawl up her legs and arms into the core of her chest. Finally, someone was going to say what she’d been thinking since roughly 2016 when the country went truly dark and all the evil men stepped right out into the spotlight. They needed to be stronger, fiercer, and crueler than the people they were up against, or they stood no chance. Kai tried to catch her eye because he surely thought he could persuade her back to his side, but she ignored him. Shane looked positively frightening standing there, this fattening, bedraggled mother suddenly picking up the sword.
After a moment Kai did as Murdock demanded, pulled the chair out and sat back down, furious but silent. Murdock’s eyes slid to Shane, offering her the floor again. She took it.
“What makes us think these elites are any different from all the other tyrants and kings who’ve come before? Because they wear suits? If anything, they’re worse. We are talking about people who are happily incinerating the conditions for life on Earth for nothing more than a few quarters of profit. We can hem and haw about violence, but—fuck, man—they are the most violent people history’s ever seen. And there’s just no time left.”
She huffed a disbelieving breath and put her hands on her hips like she couldn’t believe her daughter had wet herself again.
“There won’t be any chance to look back and second-guess because we can’t wait a few decades to build a worthwhile mass resistance. By then it’ll be too late. So how will they be stopped? This is the only tactical move left. The corporate state is faceless. The fossil-fuel elite is anonymous, but behind this holocaust there are human beings, and they have addresses. We can rip those masks right off. I see three benefits to this. First, it’s easy. Small bombs or a handgun. All you need are one or two operatives per target. We’ve built a clandestine network in an age when that’s supposedly impossible. The second advantage is that it demonstrates what’s actually at stake. This is life and death for all of us, and it’s time to choose sides. We offer amnesty to anyone who turns against the fossil system, who joins us in sabotage or resistance. Otherwise, every defender and apparatchik of the regime is fair game.” She paused. “Their families are fair game.”
PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED Part of Allen’s curriculum for his class about radical movements always included the anarchists of the 1880s and ’90s who attempted to instigate insurrection by assassinating various “class enemies.” How frustrating that history was so chockful of lessons that people so heedlessly ignored again and again. To lecture Shane on how those killings did far more to alienate the working classes than inspire them seemed, in this context, rather pointless: Where’s the thrill in learning about history when you can make history? He’d feared this moment for some time now, that one of them might suggest such a thing. He just never thought it would be Shane.
MURDOCK Hadn’t thought Shane had it in her. He’d pegged her as more the mother hen of the group or the glue guy, in sports terms. Not that he wasn’t still in love with the lady. Speaking of inconvenient truths. When he looked between the professor, Kai, and Quinn Worthington, though, he could see far down the road. His brain fireworked, the way it sometimes did, and he wondered if he was back in Iraq or in this cabin or off in some restaurant in the future, discussing their endgame and watching darkening clouds roll in across stewing whitecapped water.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Kai, rubbing his face.
“You know what scares me?” She pointed upstairs, her voice straining. “That something awful is coming for my daughter. These people, the carbon profiteers and the politicians who do their bidding—they own every aspect of the system. They own the courts, the media, the political process at every level. That’s why this has all been futile so far.” She thumped her chest with a fist. “So they need to feel the fear that I feel for her. They need to feel that something is coming for them and theirs.”
Kai massaged his eye sockets. The dishwasher hummed. Outside, the gentle tinkling of wind chimes.
“You said three,” said Quinn. “Benefits, you said.”
“The third is simple.” Shane paused. “People enjoy killing. We’ll recruit easily.”
Kai shook his head, staring straight at the dark green carpet.
“Well,” said Murdock. “This just got real. Someone tell me why Shane ain’t right on this.”
“If it’s not self-evident, Murdock—” Kai began, and Allen cut him off with a palm.
“I’ve got three reasons for Shane’s three reasons.” He looked at her with a father’s practiced disappointment and held his hand in the OK sign. “First, we’ve got to understand that the five of us—no matter how many new cells we start—we’re never winning this in any military sense. It’s, how they say, about hearts and minds. Right now, we’re folk heroes to a certain set. We will lose popular support the minute we start killing people.” Shane saw that he was sweating, and because he had no eyebrows to catch the beads, he had to swipe at his brow as he searched for the words. “The media might be calling us terrorists, but people do not think of us like ISIS or neo-Nazis. We take a human life and that changes. Second”—he flashed a peace sign—“the way I see it, alls we’d be doing is killing cogs in a machine. Nothing more. It’s time and work and risk to take out an interchangeable functionary. They mint thousands of new ones in the Ivy League every year. Finally”—he held his index finger high—“we differ with Morris and her ilk about what ‘nonviolence’ means, yes, but nonviolent movements ultimately succeed by flipping those within the power structure. Our goal shouldn’t be to kill them but recruit them. Wake up their souls.”
