Project Reunion (17 page)

“Leaving me?” I echoed.

Emmett nodded slowly, eyes searching mine. “You didn’t really think I was going to command this operation from your living room. Did you, Dee?”

“I thought the generals, and the admiral...”

“I’m coordinating the civilian evacuation,” he said softly. “It takes a boat-load of officers to do this, Dee. Literally. Plus the train-load, truck-load, and helicopter. And a whole lot of Rescos, Cocos, and volunteers. And a beautiful and visionary PR lead.”

I smiled dutifully, and looked down at my hands. “When are you leaving?”

“Half past rooster.”

He gave me time to process that, and didn’t speak again until I looked up. Even then, he gave me time to speak first, if I wanted to. Instead I attempted a brave smile. I bet it came out ghastly.

“I invited the whole family to dinner tonight,” he said. “Trey and Shelley and Alex. To tell them. Didn’t want to blind-side you, though.”

“Yeah. No. Thank you.”

He smiled slightly at the Yeah-No. He used to make fun of Zack and me for sharing that verbal tick. Long ago. Several new normals ago. And here it was, time for another new normal. And he’d only just moved in.

Emmett pulled me onto his lap after all. “Don’t fall back into being sad, Dee,” he whispered. “We wanted this, more than anything. I’m a soldier. Some days I go to work and can’t take you with me. It’s what I do.”

“This time it’s months,” I said. “I’ll miss you.”

“We’ll talk on the phone. And I’ll pop home now and then for a break.” At my eager glance, he cautioned, “Not for a few weeks, at least. Darlin’... I intend to have the time of my life, career-wise. I hope you do, too.”

“It should be fun,” I said, nodding.

He kissed me on the head. “I want to help Alex with the livestock before supper. See you in a bit.”

Chapter 13

Interesting fact: Studies attempted to explain what ‘special something’ the survivors of New York had, that the dead had lacked. None of their findings were especially convincing.

The day Emmett and Adam invested Staten Island, I was on the far end of Long Island, oblivious.

“Dee!” Grinning, Major Cameron grabbed me up into a big hug that caught me by surprise, when I climbed down from the Coast Guard boat. It’s not as though I knew Cameron well. Two weeks ago, I hadn’t known him at all. My video wrangler, Kyla, recorded every bit of our enthusiastic reunion.

One of Cam’s old Cocos from Windham County had met us at the dock in New London with supplies to bring across. Here, skeletally thin men and women, dressed in fresh militia camouflage, stepped up to offload it all. They packed it into Cam’s waiting trucks.

“Chicks,” Kyla prompted.

“Oh, yeah!” I cried. “Careful with that one! Cam, that’s three dozen chicks.”

“Oooh!” Cam crooned on cue. He stepped up to the cadaverous man holding the box, and opened it up to grin at the chicks. “Welcome to Long Island, my pretties!” He plucked up one of the little tan fuzzballs and cupped it in his hand to pet it. Kyla dove in for a close-up.

“What’s with the chicks, Cam?” I asked. I thought it was obvious enough, but prompted him for the sake of the video footage.

“It’s almost November,” he explained. “Not a lot we can do with crops right now. But we have all these lovely lawns on Long Island to support livestock. Some eggs and milk will make a huge difference to our food supply.” He looked straight into the camera, heartfelt. “Windham County, Connecticut – thank you for the chickens!”

That was certainly the money shot, a buff and attractive blond man, earnestly saluting the folks back home with an adorable baby animal. Kyla nodded curtly, and moved off to record the people loading the trucks.

Those chicks were only a month old, just beginning to look chicken-shaped. It would be another four months or so for any to lay eggs. I wished I’d thought to bring some rabbits for Cam to set loose. Alex wouldn’t have given up his pets for meat, though.

Cam grinned at me. “Does she have a personality, or just an eye? Your camera woman.”

“I’ll try to introduce you,” I replied. “But that’s how she is. I try to get to know her. We get a couple minutes into the conversation. Then the camera’s out again, and she tells me to repeat what I just said. She’s pretty intense. Kyla, is her name.”

“Cool,” Cam said, sizing her up, then reviewing his team’s operation. “If Mora picked her, I’m sure she’s good.”

“This is a drop in the bucket, isn’t it, Cam. How are you really doing out here? I know Emmett and Carlos were worried about you. And deeply impressed that you would tackle this. Carlos said to convey his respect.”

“Really,” he replied thoughtfully. “Please convey mine to him.”

The trucks were sparsely loaded, the militia climbing back on board. We were all packed up and ready to go. “That didn’t take long,” Cam commented. “Shall we?”

“Ms. Baker!” The Coast Guard commander called down to me from the boat. Two crew were already casting off. “Noon, two days from now, right here. Correct?”

“We’ll be here!” I called up. My smile ached. I realized a bit late in the game that I was terrified, to be stranded on Long Island. Hardly a tropical deserted island. Surely a devastated one. “Thanks for the ride!”

The captain waved cheerfully. The closest crew member gave me a searching look, then a curt nod of respect. She hopped onto the boat to leave.

-o-

Long Island Sound is wide where I live, maybe 18 miles. Toward the city end, the salt water gap between Manhattan Island and Brooklyn is called a river, and not a particularly big one. At Orient Point, where the Coast Guard dropped me off, on the north fork of eastern Long Island, we were maybe 8 miles from the Connecticut coast, maybe a dozen southwest of New London. I’d taken the ferry across once, just for fun. It took over three hours each way, after the hour drive to New London. Fortunately, the Coast Guard ride only took about 45 minutes.

I’d never taken the ferry again, because Orient Point isn’t very exciting. It’s a bucolic place, fairly flat, lots of green grass and trees, some farmland. In other words, it looks nearly identical to the Connecticut shore, clearly visible across the water. Which made for an awfully long trip to reach someplace that looked just like where I started, except with fewer people. There’s a lot of beautiful scenery within a 4-hour drive of New Haven. Orient Point is merely homey. The fabulously wealthy Hamptons, where elite New Yorkers escaped the heat for the summer party scene, were on Montauk, the other claw point to the south of us. It was nearly 30 miles west along now-deserted roads to reach Riverhead, where the Orient and Montauk forks met.

Along the way, Cam explained to me that Tom Aoyama had started his quarantine working his way down Orient Point. Then they barricaded Orient off and started again from the end of Montauk, the more populous point. Now, six months into the project, they’d advanced to a few miles west of Riverhead.

“So you’re nearly a third of the way to Manhattan?”

“That’s misleading,” Cam said. “It’s a third of the distance, but nowhere near a third of the land. Maybe a twentieth of the people.”

“Do you get a lot of refugees out here, from the city? You know, people who’ve heard the rumors and flock to safety?”

“No, actually,” Cam replied. “Almost nobody heads back west to carry the tale. Once they’re here, they wait for their turn to go through quarantine. Power and long distance communications are all down. And who’d believe them if they went back? Would you walk 50 miles, on a rumor? When you can barely walk a block? When you’ve heard a thousand rumors that promised help, but never panned out? And most of them left you worse off.”

“Makes sense, I guess. What are they like? The refugees. Off the record.” Kyla was in the other truck. Cam and I were alone in the cab, so he could grill me about Emmett’s operation. “What we publish will be for PR purposes. I’ll only publish truth, but... Constructive truth, I guess.”

“Good way to put it,” Cam agreed. “They’re pretty shell-shocked. Vacant. Staring. They avoid touching, meeting anyone’s eye. The guilt...” Cam stopped speaking for a minute, his mouth drawn in a hard line. “They lived, Dee. A lot of them did terrible things to live. What they saw was horrific. And we’re on eastern Long Island. Off-season, it wasn’t much more crowded than home.”

“What town?” I asked, to lighten the conversation. We chatted family for a while, and I looked out the window. Occasionally I saw gaunt people working in the fields, still harvesting the tall grass for hay, some with nothing more than a machete. It would take an eternity to mow a field that way. The fresh-cut grass smelled nice, over an underlying cloying smell of rot, that grew as we headed west.

“You don’t burn the bodies,” I hazarded.

“That’s a waste of fuel,” Cam agreed. “Better to bury them as fertilizer.”

“How can you bear it, Cam?”

“I am healthy and well, Dee. My husband Dwayne is here with me. We are right where we want to be, doing what we chose to do. Together. We are here to make a difference.” His body at the wheel was erect and resolute. The fire of a zealot shone in his eyes. “Without a Resco here, the Northeast could take some refugees, then turn its back on whoever was left. Say they’d done all they could. I’m here to give Long Island a voice. The other Rescos can’t ignore me.”

Who was I to call him crazy? Emmett was off to do something at least as insane, and I was behind him all the way. “Thank you, Major Cameron,” I breathed.

Cam took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “Emmett knows what he’s doing, Dee. Believe it.”

-o-

“You must be Dwayne!” I said. He certainly looked like a Dwayne, with cafe au lait skin and short playful dreadlocks. I pegged him as around five years younger than Cam. Where Cam was upright and earnest, Dwayne seemed rounded and flexible and sway-backed, with a playful flashing smile.

“Must be!” he agreed. “Welcome to Camp Cameron, our not-so-humble abode. I love this place.” He stepped beside me, and waved his arm wide to show off the spread in his imagination. “The horses and stables go there. And a gazebo on that little rise. Surrounded by rhododendrons.”

“You said wisteria yesterday,” Cameron commented. He exuded not-into-flowers.

“The wisteria bloom after the rhodies,” Dwayne explained.

“I can see it,” I agreed. The rise was hard to detect. The grass grew waist-high around their sprawling brick ranch-style house. I guessed the lot at several acres. It featured a guest house, a triple garage for storage, and a large parking plaza for the trucks.

“I like her, Cam. I like you. I’ll share my rabbit with you. I caught a rabbit today, hon.”

“Outstanding, Dwayne. Dee, Kyla, my husband Dwayne Perard is a Coco,” Cameron offered by way of introduction. “Or used to be a Coco. Of Windham township in Connecticut. We haven’t gotten that far yet here.”

“We’re working to secure the water supply,” Dwayne clarified. “Water. Sewage. Communications. Power.”

“Enough power for water and communications, anyway. Dwayne, we have chicks. No, the other kind. That truck.”

“Sorry, ladies, back to work. Slave driver.” Dwayne shot Cam a crooked grin and headed for the trucks. He sang the militia workers a bit of a Jackson 5 song –
simple as ABC, 1, 2, 3, baby you and me...
I admired his ability to project good cheer toward their vacant faces. He got them moving and working again, slowly.

Cameron took us to tour a civilian encampment nearby, squatters in a once-upscale apartment complex. He called them day laborers. He and Dwayne, or local farmers, could go there to recruit a group of workers for whatever task. There was an open trench latrine, that the Army had dug for them when the quarantine line passed through here. Without the water mains running, the residents relied on a swimming pool to collect drinking and wash water. The downspouts of the roof rain gutters were redirected into the pool with add-on bits of gutter, scavenged from other buildings.

Cameron called out and hired a half dozen people to help him work on the local pumping station. They each got an apple as down payment on their wages, to eat on their way to the job site for energy. Kyla and I elected to stay and talk to the locals instead of following Cam. He looked dubious about that, and called Dwayne on a walkie-talkie, asking him to check up on us in a bit.

Then Kyla and I were alone with the sullen refugees. The ones who’d emerged from their apartments hoping for work and food, mostly disappeared back into the buildings. I spotted a few furtive children’s faces behind drapes or bushes. They vanished if we got close to them. Some women stood their ground by the pool, out washing clothes. I approached one, who looked slightly more spirited than the others.

“Can I help?” I offered, with a friendly smile. Kyla hid behind her camera, recording.

“Rinse,” she said. She was washing in a big beer cooler with detergent suds. A dish tub of sudsy clothes sat waiting next to another beer cooler, apparently the rinse water.