“Seems pretty stupid, honestly,” said Robert. “What good does it do to stand watch if we’re all going to do it drunk?”
Billy, who had just been getting ready to pour two more cups, betrayed a fleeting expression of hurt before he covered it up with a smile and said, “Well, no one’s planning on getting drunk, kid. It’s just to take the chill off, you know?”
“No, I don’t know,” Robert said. Samantha tried to lay a calming hand on his arm but he shrugged her off, and I could see that he was winding up for quite a tear. “Please explain to me how you take the chill off without drinking to a point of being numb. I mean, it seemed perfectly clear to me that the same thing is accomplished more easily by putting on a fucking sweater as opposed to intentionally thinning out your blood. Exactly what backwoods, shit-kicker, home remed…”
“Robert.” It came from Jake. His voice was flat and low; I almost didn’t hear him. Robert certainly did—the tone of Jake’s voice stopped him in his tracks before he could truly unload.
“Yeah?” Robert asked. He looked less than pleased at being interrupted while in the process of building up momentum. His voice was impatient.
“Not a single thing that’s come out of your mouth since we’ve arrived has been useful. It would be good if you thought about that and maybe see if you might be able to contribute something meaningful the next time you open it.”
“Oh! Well, how abou…”
“Shut the fuck up, Robert.”
I had only known Jake a few days by that point, but in that time, I don’t think I can recall him ever using the word “fuck” in conversation. I have since learned that he can curse with some of the best (you should see him when he gets going with Gibs sometime) but he tends to be very polite with people he doesn’t know well…at least until he gets a lock on them. You become attuned to his manner of speaking and assume that it’s the only way he communicates. In reality, he’s more of a vocal chameleon—changing expressions and speech patterns to suit his audience (another one of those behaviors that tends to draw people to him). Consequently, for those rare occasions when he does say “fuck” in strange company, the reaction in those around him is similar to what you see in animals when thunder cracks unexpectedly: they cringe and try to crawl under the nearest cover. Even with people who have only just met him, it’s as though they sense that he pulls that word out only for special events.
In Robert’s case, his mouth fell open, and he seemed to shrink about three inches in his chair.
“I’m sure you’ve had a long and stressful day,” Jake continued as though nothing had happened. “Why don’t you turn in? I’ll take your watch for you so that you can be fully rested for tomorrow.”
Samantha rose from her chair, eyes downcast, and pulled at her brother’s hand. Inwardly, my heart ached for her embarrassment, but there was nothing any of us could say that wouldn’t make it worse. He followed her, trying and failing to walk with some kind of dignity. They got into the minivan and were hidden behind the tinted windows.
“I’m sorry for that, Lizzy,” Jake said.
“It’s okay. He had it coming.”
Jake looked at Ben and Otis in turn. “I apologize to the both of you for that.”
Ben nodded at Jake, clearly shaken by the exchange. Otis nodded to Elizabeth and asked, “Do you know any card games, honey?”
“Mom taught me Crazy Eights,” she said.
“Ben knows that one, don’t you son?”
“Yeah!” Ben said. He pulled an old, beaten pack of Bicycle playing cards out of his jacket pocket. Looking at the rest of us, he asked, “Is it alright if we play on the tailgate of the truck?” I said, “Of course,” so he took her off to the truck a few feet away, pulled down the gate, and helped her to climb up onto it. He jumped up beside her and started shuffling the deck.
“Been rough with him. Robert, I mean,” Otis said quietly. “He gets like that. I don’t know the details behind what happened to their parents, but I know it wasn’t pretty. I’m not sure how strong to be with him. Don’t know what’s appropriate.”
“He’ll be a problem eventually,” Jake said. “You’ll want to get that handled or leave him behind soon.”
Otis’s heavy sigh indicated that this was a problem that had been troubling him. “Yeah,” he agreed.
Billy took a sip of whiskey, coughed, and said, “You were saying about the tents?”
“Oh, sure,” Otis said. “So, they were rounding us up, good bad, or indifferent. Not being mean about it but just making it clear that we were coming with them no matter what. Took us all down to the tent city and put us in these big old communal things with row on row of cots.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said. Otis nodded to me and lifted his cup in a little salute.
“From there, they shuffled us around some more,” he continued. “As folks within a tent got sick, they were moved out into quarantine sub-areas; sick tents within the tent city, I guess you’d call it. In time, the number of sick equaled the number of healthy, and then the ratio overbalanced the other way. It became easier for them to move the healthy into their own sub-areas. It started getting crazy toward the end. Ben and I were moved sometimes two or three times a day. The following morning, there were always more people who had passed on in the night—more people that had to be hauled out to the pits. After a while, I figured out that no one was actually working on any kind of cure or medicine to make it right. They were just playing a giant human shell game with us until there were none left to move around anymore.”
The sound of cards slapping down on the tailgate startled me. The kids giggled, and half-argued, half-joked about who won the last round. The sound of Lizzy laughing and playing with another child helped to take the chill off the story Otis shared.
“We were in those tents, oh, five…maybe six weeks? That’s all it took for some three hundred thousand people from Albuquerque and the surrounding areas as well as another fifteen thousand Army, medical, and support staff to get whittled down to something approaching less than one percent. I have no idea how many were left when the dying finally stopped; Ben and I didn’t stay around to find out.”
Otis drained what was left of his cup and gasped. Billy offered more, which was accepted gratefully. I noticed a slight tremor in Otis’s hand as he held out the cup.
He was silent a moment while looking off into the distance at nothing in particular. Suddenly, he sat up and asked, “You folks remember the National Dispatch?”
It didn’t ring a bell for me. Billy, Jake, and I looked among ourselves, and it became clear that none of us had heard of it.
“Ah, must not have circulated out your way. You remember that all the private news networks were still trying to get back up and running after the Flare? Well, they never quite had the chance to get off the ground, and any traction they got was lost when everyone started getting sick. The Stars and Stripes created an offshoot service called The National Dispatch. Started using it as an interim service to deliver news updates and keep everyone informed. Nothing fancy—just basic newsprint, maybe five or six pages per issue, zero advertisements.”
“Why the name change?” asked Jake.
“Had something to do with branding,” Otis said. “I asked one of the soldiers about it in the tents. He said they were trying to minimize the appearance that the news media had been taken over by the government, which it essentially had. Wasn’t like they were being shady; the government was literally the only organization left that was capable of getting the word out.”