The Deluge, page 67
In capitals around the world, from London to Pretoria, Accra to Ottawa, Tokyo to Wellington, Brasília to Seoul, activists pitched tents and blocked traffic. They hung banners and sprayed the walls of their public buildings with graffiti; they came in numbers so dense that even the most prepared governments were caught flat-footed. Moscow deployed security forces to major public spaces. In Hong Kong, fifty thousand troops marched through the streets, the city militarily occupied before anyone could even leave their door with a sign. Liza Yudong’s app, however, was downloaded by nearly ten million Chinese devices in just forty-eight hours. They arrived faster than the tear gas and rubber bullets could uproot them, hungry people, desperate people, passionate people, and everyone in between, linking arms in the digital world, and demanding an immediate halt to the incineration of the planet, a blooming fascism, and the gangster capitalism that had led them all to this point.
Within the halls of the captured Capitol, lit by candles and a few generator-powered bulbs, cots, tents, and sleeping bags crowded all available floor space, from the Old Supreme Court Chamber to the Crypt where the sandstone columns had been handcrafted by slaves rented from antebellum plantations. They set up shop in staff and security offices, slept on couches, helped themselves to mini fridges stocked with every variety of snack and booze. In the city beneath the building, they found enough food and water to sustain the movement for at least another two months. They worked to assign and distribute provisions both within the Capitol and to those still holding the Mall. They moved their war room from the trailer behind the battered concert stage to the office of the Speaker of the House.
“They want to take down the rest of the paintings in the Rotunda,” said Holly Pietrus. They had a solar lamp set on the desk, and it cast an eerie, irradiated glow over their faces. The top organizers still wore their soiled, sweaty Blue Bands even after nearly three months. “The Baptism of Pocahontas, the Landing of Columbus, all of them.”
“Who does?” asked Seth Young.
“The tribes supporting us.” The leaders of these nations had set up several tipis in the Rotunda, where dead political leaders of the empire that had wiped away their ancestors typically lay in state.
“And another faction is demanding we take out all the pictures and statues of men,” said Levine. “Including the bust of MLK for his sexual misconduct.”
Kate rubbed her face and tried to blink away her exhaustion. She hadn’t slept more than a couple hours a night since the day of the attempted clearing. Everyone was looking at her, and she couldn’t help it. Maybe it was a whole childhood of her father telling her she was too white to understand this or that Native thing. Maybe she was remembering her first sting of pepper spray with the Oceti Sakowin at Standing Rock a lifetime ago, but some kind of deep, pent-up anger, directed at the wrong people, came bursting out of her then.
“Do we not have bigger fucking fish to fry here?” She saw the people around the desk recoil in the lamplight, so that the shadows jumped on their faces. She picked at a blood blister on her thumb. Even for someone who was fine with not showering for weeks at a time, she felt grimy, itchy.
Tom Levine, whose lungs still ached from inhaling smoke as he fought the flames during the incursion, whose fiancée had stopped answering his messages, was not about to let this moment be lost to squabbling. He had never in his wildest dreams imagined it would go this far, that he’d be back in these halls under such circumstances. He put his palms together in prayer and pointed them at his friend.
“Kate, we can’t be the mob putting their feet up on the Speaker’s desk in ’21. We can’t let the images of our people ransacking the halls stand. And we can’t start redecorating.”
“Maybe it’s time to ask,” said Seth Young, “what exactly we are doing here.”
Kate snatched up a tablet, streaming the news. The chyron read GLOBAL PROTESTS RESULT IN CRACKDOWNS; PRESIDENT LOVE SILENT ON SIEGE OF WASHINGTON.
“What do you think we’re doing here? It’s working, Seth.”
“Working how?” he asked slowly. Calm but very skeptical.
She threw up her hands, gesturing to august walls all around them, bugging her eyes at the obvious. “Look where we’re holding our meeting.”
He licked his lips and tried not to sound scared. He’d entered into this one reluctant step at a time, and now he was riddled with dread. He’d lived less than five blocks away during the Trump insurrection, which had demonstrated something frighteningly ephemeral about what constituted power. Now that he was part of such a thing, it scared him so much more. “I’m really worried this has gone too far.”
“Of fucking course it’s gone too far!” Kate exploded. “That’s the whole fucking point, Seth!” The veins in her neck straining, Kate stepped into his space, pointing at the carpet. “We need to keep people here. We need to keep up the disruption, the momentum, the panic of the people who pull the levers. The stock market is starting to freak out. People are rising up. Opportunities like this do not come often.”
“So we just sit here?” Seth asked, unable to meet her gaze, wondering if Ash had been right, wondering whose wagon he’d hitched himself to. “While we wait for them to try again?”
“Of course not.” The heads of leadership turned all at once to Liza. She was painting her nails purple, blowing on them, and then reapplying the little brush. “We have the law-making building. So we explain what laws we want to pass, the ones that the people who normally sit in these stupid chairs refuse to.” Liza rolled her eyes. “And to answer your question—yes, it does get tiring being the brains of the operation.”
For five weeks following the attempted clearing, the Capitol transformed into a twenty-four-hour stump speech, beamed out to the world. They recruited occupiers from every walk of life, gave them the Speaker’s dais, and together they painted a rolling, epic vision of a more just, equitable, healthy world. The feed never stopped. The speakers never let up this rolling sermon. A woman whose sons were both dead of heroin overdoses inveighing for an end to the drug war. A farmer advocating for regenerative agriculture. A doctor explaining the health benefits of electrifying the transportation sector. More viewers watched a student named Kelly Pasquina speak about the need for a global wealth tax than watched that year’s Super Bowl. Her brother, Walt, now wearing a Blue Band, appeared briefly in an interview. The reporter asked the Marine why he went AWOL. Pasquina replied, “I don’t care for politics. But the country’s a lot like me, in that we should listen to my kid sister.”
Who knows where it all may have led? Then, as the siege of D.C. stretched into its fourth month, the heat swept in.
JUNE 30
With authorities scrambling to cut water, power, internet, and supply routes, the temperature spiked to 109 degrees. A dome of high pressure descended on two-thirds of the nation, sending temperatures soaring into the triple digits, smashing records in every city it touched. In the last decade, dangerous heat waves had grown more fearsome but also normalized. Cities learned and instituted best practices, providing cooling centers, managing power grids, and sending social workers to the elderly and disabled, but the summer of ’34 was unprecedented not just in heat but duration.
The poor and elderly were in the most danger. Baby boomers, divorced, widowed, aging, constituted the largest generation of elderly people living alone in the country’s history, and the heat storm, as it came to be known, quickly became a quiet mass murderer. Hyperthermia is a nasty way to go. It begins slowly, with a bit of dizziness, and then ramps up quickly. For instance, Kyenna Blake, a seventy-seven-year-old woman living in Eastland Gardens, found the power out in the apartment where she’d lived the last forty years, where her children had grown up and then moved away, where her husband had died. She began by feeling puky, having trouble breathing. She went for the phone to call 911, but there was a wait. She was on hold. Like many victims of heat, she began to pull off her clothes because the feel of them against her skin was agony on her nerve endings. Then she vomited. Her muscles were shedding dead cells into her bloodstream, clogging her body’s plumbing, while pieces of her organs cooked. Her kidneys and bladder were the first to shut down. Her heart, mercifully, went next.
Andrea Sanchez had never seen anything like this. On June 10, the thermometer hit 115 degrees, and she and her partner were called away from the Mall because folks all over the city were smelling the bodies. Bagging these corpses was dreadful work. It wasn’t like a gunshot wound, an overdose, or a suicide. People cooked and then they melted. She had to cut the chain to get into one boiling apartment. The smell was so foul she fought to keep her gorge down. She found Kyenna Blake’s body covered in dark flies and bleach-white maggots. The morgue was overflowing, and the county medical examiner had to call in refrigerated trucks to store the dead. The line of ambulances wrapped around the block. “Just consider yourself blessed,” she told her fellow officers working back at the Mall, “that you’re part of that embarrassment instead of this nightmare.”
From her apartment in New York, Rekia Reynolds worked A Fierce Blue Fire’s mutual aid network, trying to dispatch as many members as she could to check on the elderly and disabled in the neighborhoods where FBF operated Outposts. She worked sixteen hours a day coordinating this complex operation, but FBF’s ranks had been pilfered and degraded. In the past few years, folks had left because of PRIRA, because the organization was no longer viewed as pure. Then many of its members had joined the occupation of D.C., where they themselves now risked succumbing to heatstroke. Rekia’s anger at her fiancé was only eclipsed by her blinding fury at Kate Morris. When they first met, Rekia had been the revolutionary, the one who wanted to storm the capital. Now she was left with the broken carapace of their organization, watching society’s marginalized, mostly the Black and brown, die in real time because Kate had gutted their resources for her own vainglory. She read about Kyenna Blake in the Post and knew that if this had happened in 2032, they would have had volunteers knocking on her door to get her to a cooling center. Rekia’s engagement ring was gone, and she’d smashed Tom’s VR system against the hardwood and left its electronic guts lying on the floor of his office.
In cities across the country, power grids and substations began to buckle. In Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Knoxville, Louisville, Memphis, Atlanta, the blackouts and brownouts crippled infrastructure. Cooling stations lost power, AC units were worthless, mobile phone networks stopped working, and people were stranded in their homes. No VR, TV, lights, or refrigerators. Crack open the elevator doors of a high-rise and find two parents and three children cooked to death inside after only a few hours. Sky-high ozone and humidity. A heat index across the South of 133 degrees. A human body can only take two days of uninterrupted exposure to such temperatures. Electrolytes go haywire, exhaustion, respiratory issues, and renal failure follow. Hospital beds were overrun like nothing since Covid-19. Ambulances were booked solid, emergency response times up to four hours. Many hospitals had to close their doors to new admissions, all the beds taken. It’s called bypass status, and a father can show up with a child who has a body temperature of 105 and they tell that man, “Sorry, sir, try across town.”
The headlines flipped. DEATH TOLL SKYROCKETS; SHOCKING HEAT KILLS HUNDREDS; HOMICIDES SPIKE WITH THERMOMETER; HEAT STORM HAS NO END IN SIGHT. Folks illegally opening fire hydrants on city streets to cool down, and suddenly water pressure vanishes for the whole neighborhood. Add this to water pump failures during the blackouts, and suddenly taps are dry. Multiple airports shut down as the runways melted, grinding the July travel season to a halt, and gouging a new hole in a stalling economy. The temperatures cracked roads, and highways were lined with broken-down cars. Potter’s fields were overwhelmed, and city governments worked quickly on the PR side of their mass-graves situation. Prisons and detention centers could get away with anything, but one leaked memo, delivered to the Arpaio Illegal Immigrant Detention Facility in Arizona, urged wardens to use the heat to “clear capacity” and “reduce inmate numbers.”
Victor Love’s response to these dual emergencies of open revolt in the nation’s capital and a murderous heat wave was a rare press conference where he took only five questions. He praised first responders and chided people for not checking on their relatives. This was not met with a lot of satisfaction. Then there was The Pastor taking to his VR worlde to claim he had predicted this too.
“I prophesied fire, I prophesied flood, I told you God would send heat to punish this country. The Bible also predicts there will be a breakdown of the family unit, and here we are with a faggot sodomizing another man in the White House. It predicts more crime, and here we are with a takeover of our great nation’s capital. It predicts apathy toward Christians, and here we are with scientists and liberals moaning about your hamburger or your car instead of acknowledging the staggering signs that Christ already walks the earth at the End of Days.”
President Love was addicted to right-wing media, which spewed nonstop invective about his failed presidency, his incompetence, his cowardice for failing to put down an insurrection that had sacked the Capitol while he hid at Camp David and did nothing. News stories emerged claiming a police officer was dead at the hands of protestors, beaten to death during the attempt to restore order, they said. The organizing committee worked tirelessly to combat the narrative, but facts were dismissed. There were other stories, of course, the usual onslaught of misinformation blasted across the media landscape: Women raped in their tents, captured police officers and soldiers being tortured and executed, precious documents at the Library of Congress soiled and shredded, the sex-crazed whore arranging orgies in the Senate Chamber to “initiate” children. Look at what Kate Morris’s loose values had caused. Meanwhile, the death toll ticked up day by day, the counting of dead Americans still a highly popular national pastime, and eventually twenty-two thousand deaths would be attributed to these weeks of record temperatures and humidity.
Authorities offered a deal to the occupiers: cooling centers, bottled water, and amnesty waited for those who walked away. Many had no choice but to take them up on this offer. Individuals were carried to the checkpoints to be taken to nearby hospitals where they were given intravenous fluids or dumped in tubs of ice.
Beyond the thousands of army, police, and security personnel, beyond the drones and helicopters practically parked in the clouds, the rotors forming a permanent background hum, the city was arid and eerie. Trash blew like tumbleweeds along abandoned streets. Drought tightened the dirt, and a veil of orange dust, stamped alive by the feet of thousands, hung over the Mall. When the sun fled, no electricity for miles, the city fell into bottomless night. With all light extinguished, a storm of sailing stars became visible, the glow of the Milky Way. The occupiers huddled in a cinched, fearless nexus radiating out from the Mall. Everyone with children had left, taking advantage of the amnesty while they could. The bouncy castle lay in tattered ribbons, tangled with the razor wire of the toppled fence. The smell grew worse than ever. Day by day, the occupation dwindled as more people took the government’s deal. They were exhausted, dirty, hungry, ill, and yes, afraid. The interminable heat was like wearing a suit of death. So they walked to the checkpoints, put their hands on their heads as instructed, and were allowed to leave—just as soon as they’d been fingerprinted, photographed, cheek-swabbed, and catalogued in a growing database.
In the kitchen serving the Senate cafeteria, Seth Young and Tom Levine were splitting a can of tomatoes and the last of the beers they’d rescued from the walk-in refrigerators. It was July 20.
“So you and I did the same thing,” noted Seth. “Our partners told us not to go, and we did anyway. What’s that about?”
Levine speared a tomato and slurped it off the tines of the fork. “I don’t know. You said you weren’t going to stay more than a few days, I said I wasn’t going to be a part of this, but—”
“It took over. Like if you weren’t here, you wouldn’t go a day the rest of your life without thinking about it.”
Tom favored Seth with a grim expression. “Yup.”
“What I tried to explain to Ash”—Seth put his hands a foot apart—“is that ‘my god, honey, I’m doing this for Forrest. I’m not abandoning him or you or anyone else. This is our way of fighting for his future.’ ” He shifted his eyes to his new friend. During the attempted clearing, the explosion of a stun grenade had sent Seth sprawling onto his back. He couldn’t hear a thing and his eyes were stinging with gas. That was when Tom scooped him up by the shoulders, hauled him to his feet, and hustled him to safety behind a trailer. “I’m thinking of taking the amnesty,” Seth admitted. “I need to get back to my family.”
“No one would judge you,” said Tom without hesitation. He held their can up. “We’re almost out of tomatoes anyway.”
Seth was thinking about how anxious Ash had been when he met Seth’s family for the first time. Ash had no way of copping to his nerves, so instead, he got hyper-analytical and prattled on about obscure mathematical concepts no one understood—except that Seth’s dad was an engineer and a math freak himself. Seth watched with great pleasure as his dad engaged Ash on some arcane point, and Ash looked like he’d had sand blown in his face. He told Ash after dinner, “I’ve never seen you harder than when you talked to my dad about the singsong conjecture.”
“It’s Singmaster’s conjecture, Seth, and don’t be crude.” And Seth did what he always did to prove Ashir was not always so analytical: He put his hand on his crotch in the back of the driverless.
