j is for Jackson

Jeb Jackson paced the war room far below the Pentagon. Half of the city below him was waterlogged and partially evacuated but the war room was built to withstand a nuclear war.

Even so, the TV pictures made him clench his fists and pace with more vigor. He had been the leader of the free world for two decades.  He liked to boast about how a mere glance from his neon blue eyes could start or end a war. He had even succeeded where others had failed in building the Mexican wall, although his promise to force Mexico to pay had ended up being a sleight of hand. For years, he had stood as firmly and unbending as his greatest legacy against the idiotic notion of climate change. Now he was grasping for another explanation for the events that had left much of the east coast under water.

Down in the war room the operations staff were pored over a giant wooden map of the United States . There were colored blocks that they were pushing inland on poles, each representing 500,000 people at a time.

“So…” Jackson exclaimed loudly to the room and to nobody in particular. He saw them stiffen at his arrival and look around for a spokesman. Finally General Portius Nordstrom rose to his full height of 6ft 3, his nose imperious like an Eagle’s beak.

“Mister President we have an unprecedented migration from east to west. Evacuations are under way in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Hampton Roads and Boston and New York are also clearing out. We are seeing a mass migration of 14 million people, give or take a few thousand to mountainous areas with little infrastructure. We are looking at a human catastrophe.”

The President glared at him. He was not fond of hyperbole which was not something he had come to expect from  Nordstrom.

“It’s not as if this is not something we are unprepared for,” he proclaimed.

The chiefs of staff looked at him blankly, causing the President to let out an impatient snort.

“How many internment camps do we have?”

“It was 453 at the last count Mr. President,” piped up Lee Martial, one of the President’s favorite technocrats.

“Right. I know many are half empty,” snapped back the President in a manner of someone who had been teed up.   “As for those that are occupied we need to dispense with the foreigners and take in our folks. Of course ,we aren’t talking about the Hilton here. Not that I’m a fan of the Hilton anyhow. 

Remember that Hilton in Lima, Frank? Goddam awful.”

Frank nodded miserably from the sidelines.

The President continued.  “We have a food aid operation underway from the Mid-West but they are some way off. We have a few airlifts. But you don’t need me to tell you about the scale of the logistics here.  We’ve still got all these whining people from down south who are going on about it being too hot.  I’m from Nebraska. If we got a hot day we were as happy as pigs in shit. I don’t know what’s wrong with people these days.”

Frank turned away to the screens with their images of horizontal trees, power lines flat against the howling winds and rivers spilling their polluted ooze onto streets. Jeb “Jackboots” Jackson had been in power for 20 years. It was now a criminal offense to mention the Constitution. But for all of his tough rhetoric and efforts to build a new society, people were still whining. The pitch has risen to a screech and now that the scream was out, it would be hard to bottle it up again.

I is for Inundated

Mary Pierce had never seen the streets of Norfolk like this before. The eclectic eateries and bars of Ocean View were shuttered up, and garbage was being picked up and hurled across the empty roadways by the wind. To venture towards the beach was to risk being picked up by a gust and tossed into the churning, white water. The TV crew battled on, using their heavy equipment as ballast.

The water was up to Mary’s knees on what used to be the coastal road. Flooding was commonplace in Norfolk, but this road seldom flooded. The crew had to navigate a palm tree that had been picked up from a nearby Mexican restaurant and dragged across the street. She chose a half built wooden hotel with its innards being blown around in the wind as a backdrop for the shoot. “Hold it, hold it there,” said Gus, the veteran cameraman. “This is great footage. Let’s make it fast and get out of here.”

The news editor had given her a two-hour window, but it would soon lapse. Mary was terrified, not just by the howling wind but about how she would come across on the small screen. She had never done live storm footage before and was a rookie at Channel 17. Hank, the veteran storm reporter, had come down with a stomach complaint that necessitated an evacuation west, a few days earlier. Most of the general medical facilities in Hampton Roads had closed down, and ambulance crews had gone west to deal with the unfolding humanitarian crisis on the Interstates.

The cameras started rolling. Mary shrieked into the furry mic to make herself heard over the wind.

“The streets of Ocean View are  like a ghost town here. In three hours the first bands of Greta will be here and these winds are already gusting up to 80 mph. They will be double that soon. We are the last TV crew to have a presence here.”

The camera panned across the bleak scene. Trees were almost horizontal. The rain drops were hitting her like painful missiles. Suddenly she saw a figure struggling against the gusts.

“And I can’t believe it but … I can see someone in a wheelchair on these flooded streets.”

The water had reached his knees, but the man was plowing through it, although each pull on the wheels seemed to be a massive effort. His face looked as old and weathered as the beach but he was probably in his forties. Mary was heading over to him. They filmed it all live.

“I’m from Channel 17. Is there a reason why you haven’t evacuated?”

The man looked blankly at her, and she saw something akin to hatred in his eyes. She also noticed he had no legs below his knees, and his stumps were sticking out of the water.

“I was in the French war. The Islamics blew my legs off. You think I’m bothered by a little wind. All global warming crap.” He spat in disgust. Mary hoped the cameras had missed it with all the other water that was going down.

She could make out some crackling in her right ear from her boss Tyler.

“Great footage Mary but you need to get out of there now. We are picking up reports of a massive storm surge approaching. Get out.”

“We should find out more about this veteran, Ty.”

Now Tyler just sounded cross. “No Mary. You need to get the hell out of there. This is…”

“What Tyler?”

“Unprecedented – that may be the word.”

Still Mary hesitated. The adrenalin was making her high. An odd look on Gus’s normally impassive face, brought her down again.

“What is it?”

“Fuck. Look,” said Gus.

About half a mile down the coastal road a large brown wall had risen the size of a four-story building.
The problem was it was moving towards them.

“That can’t be the surge,” jabbered Mary.

“Run,” yelled the cameraman.

They dropped their expensive equipment and sprinted in the opposite direction. But all the time the roar was getting louder in their ears. Mary could still make out Tyler’s words in her ear, but they made no sense. The words were no longer a human voice but like the static when a stylus had reached the end of a vinyl record on her mother’s antique gramophone. As the force overwhelmed her, Mary thought she made out her mother’s face in a lit up patch of blue, left hanging in the murderous skies. It was Greta’s dirty little deception as she turned the corner and pounded the hapless crew with the weight of the Atlantic Ocean.

H is for Hell

Interstate 64 used to be just like any other highway. Stop and go and often frustrating, but generally flowing. Now it was hell. Ten hours before Greta was due to hit Hampton Roads, the highway was choked up with bumper-to-tail traffic and the low fug of spent fuel blanketed the air and irritated the nostrils. The emergency reversal had gone into effect. It was eight lanes of grinding metal oozing west, a multitude of humming lemmings with no idea where they were going, just away from the eye of the storm.

In the Dodge van, Freddie and his fretting parents sweated into the late afternoon. They had turned off the air conditioning to save gas, but the thickness of the air was almost unbearable. It had taken four hours to reach Williamsburg. Whenever the traffic nudged forward, it would come to a stop minutes later as another car broke down or ran out of gas and had to be pushed to the margins of the road, leaving its unfortunate occupants to their fate as the storm barreled toward them.

Unlike many of those on the road, Freddie had an idea of where he was going. His brother lived in western Virginia, and his eventual destination was his vacation cottage in West Virginia. eHeh He was starting to doubt if he would ever make it. For a while, he thought he would have to stay in Hampton Roads, but his bosses had told him his maps would not be a lot of good for a few days and only emergency personnel were to remain. He had been happy to get his parents out of their subdivision, but now he was starting to wonder whether it would have made more sense to sit tight, even though the maps warned otherwise.

They passed close to another stranded family. A brick red pick-up was beside the road, steam rising from the hood. A father with livid face, red enough to match his car, clutched a small child. The woman was swarthy and dark and tears drenched her cheeks. Freddie looked again and realized he knew them.

“It’s them,” he said to himself as much as anyone else.

His father and then gave him a withering look as the car moved right. “You are not going to?”

“I wouldn’t live with myself if we left that kid by the roadside.”

He wound down the window and made a gesture to the woman. “Need a ride?”

She rushed over to him. It had been just two weeks since he had last seen Diana but she seemed to have aged a matter of years, and her defiant swagger had gone.

“You would?” Then she stopped and he saw a glimmer of recognition. “I know you.”

“We met a few weeks ago.”

Diana yelled over to the man and the child. “Carson. These people can take us.”

He moved toward them slowly and stopped. Freddie saw the man take in his features and his parents in the roomy van.

“Hell no. Not him.”

“It’s entirely your choice,” said Freddie and inched the van forward in preparation to inch forward the few years the traffic would allow him. He heard a commotion. The woman was yelling at him and pulling the child.

“We’re going with them. If you want to wait for the storm that’s your choice,” she told her husband. “Hey wait mister.”

Diana got into the back seat with the child. The sliding door squealed open for the second time and then stopped as it made contact with a boot. Carson got into the back seat and stared sullenly ahead of him at the gridlock. Freddie thought it was not the best time to speak.

G is for Greta

Of all the girls in her class, Athena, Charlene and Edwina, Greta was the least popular. Ever since her growth spurt, she had inspired fear. She was abnormally large, even in her infancy and seemed to pick up all of the chaos around her and run with it.

Greta was loud, destructive and bad to be around. She was the seventh named storm of the busy 2040 season. People fled as her oversized backside approached and feared her booming voice.

While other storms over the last year had threatened to cause destruction, but veered away from the coast, Greta showed no sign retreating. People were already making comparisons with Charlie in 2038 that hit Charleston and dragged half of the historic city into the sea, killing 320 people.

Greta was already causing havoc in the Carribean, hitting Cuba with winds of 150 mph. There were few Floridians left now and 'wash zones' had been set up in many of the shattered east coast resorts, which involved the digging of deep pits and lagoons around the abandoned buildings.

Greta was projected to come ashore at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. She was packing winds of 165 mph and her bands were closely packed together. The storm's imminent arrival threw the residents of low-lying Hampton Roads into a panic.

Emergency planners of the seven cities met for a crisis meeting but it was delayed because they couldn't agree on a venue. Officials from Virginia Beach said the meeting should be held in their city because it had the biggest population but their counterparts at Newport News argued their city was likely to be at the eye of the storm after the devastation of Huricane Karla four years earlier.

The emergency planners from Norfolk made an 11th hour bid to take charge, pointing to flood maps that suggested much of their city would be under water. 

Just three days before the expected arrival of Greta, the emergency teams got together. They pored over maps and vacillated between a full scale evacuation and a riding out the storm. While some officials pointed to the chaos of attempted evacuations in the past when storms threatened but ultimately deceived, others said Greta was unprecedented. When she was unexpectedly downgraded again, they hesitated.

Two days out Greta gathered strength, was upgraded again and the howling winds at the heart of the hurricane gathered speed to 195 mph. The evacuation order was finally given.

F is for Freddie

When Freddie Smallhouse took a job with the city planning department eight years earlier he had never dreamed how controversial his position would eventually become.

Smallhouse had been happy to work in a backroom checking the details of applications and the relevant codes, while channeling his monthly paychecks back to his parents. Unfortunately, his bosses had other ideas. It all started one day when he was asked to present some findings about erosion on the Chesapeake Bay to member of the council. Planning officials usually sought to blind council members with science on these occasions. They even had a list of intimidating words to use that were guaranteed to stymie councilors. Clearly Freddie Smallhouse had not read the script when he presented the findings in a layman’s way.

Smallhouse had watched an amazed expression wash over the Mayor’s grizzled features.

“Hey. I actually understand what this fella’s saying,” he declared.

“Now you’ve gone and done it,” the planning director hissed in Smallhouse’s ear.

The planning director was right. After his initial presentation, Smallhouse became a hot property in the council chamber. He was the closest thing to a rock star in the council chamber. He was routinely dragged in front of the members who appreciated his ability to explain planning concepts to them as he would to an eight-year-old. Smalhouse had a quality that became increasingly rare and valued in the mid 21^st Century – that of patience.

When he was appointed to head up the flooding management department in 2034, the workload was manageable and there were five inspectors. Five years later there were 15. Increasingly inspectors found themselves drawing up new flood maps that obliterated properties and having to spread the bad news that homeowners would either have to move out or jack up their properties.

Smallhouse often accompanied his officers in the field. He hated the idea of being a distant boss who heard about issues second hand. And there were a lot of issues.

One day in late July he was out near Carrolton with Herbert Mayhew, a veteran inspector who made no secret of the stress constant interactions with the public put him under.

“Seriously Freddie. If I get any more abuse I’m walking.”

“Just work it out Herb. How long have you got left here? Can’t be more than a couple of years. OK who’s next?”

“Oh God. It’s Tarheel Trailer Park. Mr. Carson Collins.”

“You’ll need some back up for this one.”

“I’ll need an Advil.”

They approached the trailer late in the afternoon. Smallhouse went through the mental checklist. Rusted car. Check. Confederate flag. Check. Pitbull. Check.”

He rapped on the door three times, carefully avoiding the splinters between the peeling paint.

A young woman with dark and not unattractive features came to the door. Smallhouse tried to imagine her wearing something more complementary than the shapeless dungarees. He was struggling.

“Good afternoon. Diana Collins I presume.”

“Yep. Who are you?”

“I’m Frederick Smallhouse from the planning department. I was wondering if Mr. Collins was at home. There was a large Ford pickup nearby and a child could be heard wailing in the trailer but there was no sign of Carson.

“He’s not in,” said Diana. “You can talk to me,” with the pained expression of a woman who was being treated as an accessory to her husband.

“I apologize,” said Freddie. “Our records say the last conversation we had was with your husband and he made some rather forceful points, it says here. My inspector here came by a couple of weeks ago to talk about the flooding risk. We wanted to check on your progress in moving.”

The woman’s olive eyes started back blankly and then there was a sliver of recognition. “So who was the inspector who I spoke with?”

“Probably flood control, community integration and solutions,” Mayhew chimed in.

“So with regard to moving out of here?” Freddie continued.

“Oh Carson said that’s not something we are doing,” Diana told him.

Freddie Smallhouse suppressed a sigh and used his slow and level voice. “I’m not sure you understand Mrs. Collins. It’s mandatory. I mean you have to move for your own safety. That river will swell up and could endanger your family. See those empty plots. There were trailers there a couple of weeks ago.”

The woman gave a half shrug. They heard the roar of an engine behind them as a big Dodge approached. Carson swung out of it and planted his heavy boots next to Smallhouse.

“What the hell do you want?”

Smallhouse repeated the spiel he had given to Diana. Carson cut him short. There was a swelling in his throat and he aimed spittle at Smallhouse’s foot. It missed and slid down the grass.

“Mr. Collins. We know this is not easy and your family has lived her for more than 10 years. I’m afraid it’s just not safe anymore. There are people moving from low lying areas all over Hampton Roads.”

“Let the rats move,” growled Carson. “We ain’t going nowhere.” He spat again and this time it hit its target.

E is for Estavez

For the traditional smugglers of drugs, people and other commodities the wall had been a disaster. For Estavez Estralla it has been an opportunity.

Estralla had been a struggling engineering student in Mexico City with an unfashionable interest in sewers when he had answered an online ad to get more money for the weekend.  Over a period of months he had met nondescript and abstract men in remote desert locations who had asked him to oversee tunneling operations. He almost turned back when he saw the first rendezvous location, fearing he was going to be butchered by the cartels. But when he survived his first outing and was given a large wad of grimy notes for his trouble, he came back again and again.

Estralla was given trickles of information about what he was doing. It was never enough to give him a full picture. Then after a year of training laborers to build tunnels to nowhere in the desert, he was taken into a small cinder block building and informed he would be working on a tunnel under the wall. Estralla had felt a range of emotions from fear to excitement. But he was also honored to be asked to lead the dig.

The 2,000 mile concrete wall had been in place for five years now and the anger had yet to subside south of the boarder where it was viewed as a racist statement.

Those who had daubed graffiti on the wall had quickly realized it was almost impossible to police every mile of it. There were cameras but they could be disabled and shot out of action. Even with the cameras taken out, the convex shape of the wall and the fact it was topped with razor wire made climbing it an almost impossible undertaking.

The answer that had been developed in Mexico City was The Barbarian, a small but powerful tunneling machine that could dislodge hundreds of cubic feet of sand and earth every few minutes. Estralla was consulted about the best places to tunnel under the wall and on setting up diversionary tactics that would distract the American security guards.

The July night he first moved the Barbarian to the wall taught him a life lesson. He was just 26 but in charge of a large team of engineers and workmen. A minor wall incursion had been organized two miles north to divert attention away from what they were doing. The heat had been relentless, even at 11 p.m. the sweat mopped up his clothes as The Barbarian dug into the desert sand under the wall. The machine had been designed to operate at a low hum that was barely audible outside the sand. They made fast work, completing a tunnel under the wall in two hours but stopping before a hole opened up on the Arizona side. The debris was taken away by teams of men with wheelbarrows to trucks hidden beyond the dunes. Estralla had made sure to strengthen the wall so as the sides held, when he heard the ping of shots from up above. He peered out to see one of the workmen lying on the sand. He heard jabbering up above on the wall and more shots rang out. But the men had gone to ground. He lay in the tunnel for two hours before he ventured out under the stars.

The guards had gone on the top of the wall and he joined another engineer in moving the dead man away from the wall. Two weeks later he was back at the tunnel as a line of Mexicans who had paid large sums of money used his tunnel to escape to the United States.

For four months the tunnel was used by escapees. While many of the migrants were economic others were climatic. The temperatures in parts of Mexico were now so high that crops could no longer grow and men died in the midday sun. They spoke longingly of places they had read about where it still rained like Washington and Oregon.  

Over the course of two years, Estralla built nine tunnels under the wall. Three were discovered but only long after they had ceased to be used. He ceased to think about the wall as a barrier, rather as a layer of Swiss cheese riddled with holes. For Estralla, the passage of the migrants under the wall was the end of his responsibility. But once the migrants reached the United States, their troubles were far from over. An exodus was already taking place from the southern states and they had to take their chances on the hazardous journey north.

D is for Diana

When she was a small girl Diana had dreamed about being a princess. Many small girls dream of becoming princesses but Diana was led to the dream because every time she told people her name people would talk about an English princess.

When she was old enough to get on the Internet at her uncle’s house, Diana would search for pictures of the princess and see her perfect blonde features and her tiara shining back at her, like life made for Disney. Unlike a Disney princess, it appeared her marriage to the heir to the throne had gone downhill and she had ended up dead in an underpass in Paris, the City of Love.

Diana liked to hang out at her uncle and aunt’s home because they did unorthodox things like have meals at the table and send her to bed at regular times. But it all changed the day when aunt Bea was out at the service at the Baptist church and uncle Hendric started acted strangely. She had blocked it out but had a memory that lingered across the long years after of the dirt flying away from her feet on the road and her uncle standing at the door with his pants around his ankles.

She had agonized for hours about telling her mother. She had a low fear in her gut about the consequences, but had never imagined the tirade that was let loose on her and the long hours that followed locked in the airless room below the crawl space. As she watched spiders and more sinister varieties of bugs in the half-light, Diana re-lit her memories of a princess from a half-forgotten time and way she lit up dark places. During those long hours she would look mournfully at her dark locks and reflect on the many miles between rural Virginia and those places in Europe where it was still possible to be a princess.

While most kids hated school in her village, Diana lived for it. She would linger behind at the end of classes, offering to clean up or help the teachers carry books. But whenever she seemed to be making progress, her mother would move. Often she would move to escape Hank. Usually Hank would come back.

Diana was conflicted about whether she welcomed it. When Hank was around her mother would turn on her less. But sometimes when they had both been drinking, they would take it in turns to pummel her body with household objects, making sure to spare the visible parts of the child from bruising.

One summer day in Carrolton when another fight was ratcheting up in her house, Diana made her escape. At the age of 14, her mother had given her more independence but had failed to enroll her in school. She escaped down the dusty path to the slow-moving river and sat for what seemed like hours in the stifling heat under a tree. She saw a lanky youth appear on the river bank before her, take out a rod and cast into the thick waters. The sight surprised her because she thought there had been nothing alive in the river for years.

She thought he hadn’t noticed her under the tree but after half an hour of sitting quietly in the sun he turned to her and grunted an acknowledgement.

“This a good place for fishing?” she asked.

The youth laughed. “Ain’t nowhere good for fishing these days. Caught a bream last week but mostly do it because it’s what I did when I was a kid.”

They ended up sitting in the sun for hours, chatting for periods or just lying by the river. Carson explained he liked to get to the river to escape from his brothers. Diana said she would like to have some brothers to escape from. Carson was 16. He pulled out some hand rolled tobacco and they smoked into the evening. Later on Carson put his hand in Diana’s jeans.

For the rest of that summer their rendezvous by the river became regular events. Carson stopped bringing his defunct fishing gear and Diana didn’t bother wearing pantie. They only stopped when Diana’s periods stopped. Then everything changed. There was another beating but this time they didn’t even care about her face and a hasty flight at midnight. Carson went along with it but imperceptibly something changed and the innocence of the river bank was lost.

Diana chartered her life with Carson in terms of a series of descents and disappointments but she still clung to the memories of the river bank and the trade-off that he had never hit her. The day the inspector came represented a further descent. She was smoking heavily on the trailer of the porch, looking around her and coming to resent all the clichés her life represented. The big limp Confederate flag hung outside the trailer and a mass of rusting pick-up trucks occupied the drive way in various phases of disrepair. She could see the resigned look in the eyes of the inspector as he surveyed his surroundings before talking to her, the struggle in his dark eyes as his professional personal fought his personal feelings.

“Mrs. Collins I do you mind if I talk to you for a while about the river?”

“The stream behind the trailer?”

“Yes. Well it’s more than that. As you know last spring’s flood almost wiped out this trailer park.”

Diana had no idea what his angle was but felt some resentment rising.

“It’s better now. We’ve had no more problems, thank you.”

The inspector pulled out some documents. “I’m not sure if you are familiar with the country’s new flood maps but this trailer park is projected to be a flood zone by 2042. That’s just two years Mrs. Collins. The owners have told us they are relocating the park to Waverly.”

“That’s miles away.”

“The city has an assistance program.”

Diana stepped back and her dark eyes became watery. The passion she had inherited from her Mexican ancestry was quick to surface at times like this. She felt a stirring in her bosom below the cheap K-Mart acrylic blouse.

C is for Carson

Carson liked the Muleskinners. It was one of the few bars in Tidewater where he could go without getting into trouble or meeting someone who wanted to drag him outside and across the gravel. The Muleskinners was lived-in and downbeat from the worn cow hide on the chairs to the rough hews oak bar with its even rougher liquors. It was a beloved watering hole for bikers and while Carson had never got on a bike – at least not one he owned in a sober state – he had a grudging respect for bikers who kept themselves to themselves and gave him his space.

On a wet Tuesday night in April there were no bikers and Carson, Jimmy and Jed almost had the place to themselves. Carson disliked the lack of atmosphere and the risk of being overheard. He went over to the antique juke box and fed it quarters. Some old song from 40 years ago blasted out about “Mister Jones.”

“Who the fuck was Mr. Jones?” said Jed.

“Like I’d know that,” growled Carson. He was on edge from a long day laying pipes by the James River. He glugged the whisky and it stung his mouth. He wanted to blur that edge and bury the image of two nights ago.

“You saw the news reports?” murmured Jimmy.

As if on cue the image of the missing kid from Newport News appeared on the big screen over the bar.

Carson was on his feet before he realized it, hollering at Mike the bartender.

“For God’s sake Mike. Get it on football and git rid of the local news,” he said.

Mike wore his usual vacant expression.

“You know we don’t have black faces in this bar?”

Mike laughed quietly and gave a toothless grin. “Well not been since I worked here.”

Jed was chucking. “Like they’d know not to go here. Wouldn’t get us going to their church. Remember when that guy walked in?”

“Walked out again right fast,” chimed in Jimmy.

Carson liked it when the banter started flowing. It steered the conversation away from where they wanted it to go and the kid’s face in the marshes before the heavy machinery came down on it. What was that anyhow? A transmission from an old truck they had told him.

When they looked up at the TV again they saw a line of people, police and residents of the South East community looking for him. They were at least 15 miles in the wrong directions.

“Boy that scent has gone cold,” declared Jed.

Carson shot him that look he reserved from Diana when dinner was an abomination. “Shut the hell up.”

“Hey Mike. I told ya to change that channel.”

“Oh right,” said the barman. “Steelers it is.”

Carson could deal with the Steelers. Just not the diggers. He thought of the dirt and the blood and blamed the kid for his dirty mouth. If he hadn’t said those things he would have got away with a beating. Racism cut both ways but folks didn’t seem to realize that. He took another slug of whisky. The edge was starting to rub off. He caressed his grease strewn Levis and imagined the smooth feel of Diana’s legs. Maybe it would not be such a bad night, after all.

B is for Borneo

Anna Kravac had a visitor. She saw his indistinct profile through the mosquito net that separated her office from the waiting room. There was something about the cut of the nose in the silhouette that caused a movement in her gut, six parts painful but four parts jarringly pleasurable. Still she moved slowly, even for her.

Finally, she walked into the waiting room and a familiar pair of olive eyes looked back at her. “Marcel?”

The man looked back at her. He was a distinguished looking gentleman still although he must have been nearing the end of his fifth decade, with salt and pepper features, dapper in a white jacket that would surely be sullied with sweat by the day’s end.

Anna felt her words desert her. It wasn’t a trait people associated with her.

“Marcel?” she started again.

“Ah yes Anna, I’m sorry this is so out of the blue.” His French accent was muted but still there. Blue sounded more like the Gallic Bleu.

At last she found her stride. “Marcel. There is no blue out there. Have you looked around? It’s all brown. Dust on the road and fires. When did you last see the sky Marcel. Why do you come here now talking about the blue?”

The man shrugged. The last time they had parted they had been equals. Their bodies had still fitted. Anna may have been 15 years older but she had the allure and experience of an older woman. Now she felt the difference keenly. She was a bag of bones and Marcel was still a dapper Frenchman in a part of the world where Frenchmen carried an allure. He could charm and she could nag or bang on about her memories. There was a painful silence and it annoyed Anna to have to fill it.

“So why are you here?”

The silence continued but Marcel looked at her keenly.

“I think you need to give it up now Anna?”

Anna drew herself back like a bird, readying to strike but she spoke more slowly than usual.

“Oh my God Marcel. They have tracked you down and sent you here to talk to me. How desperate are they exactly?”

Marcel moved closer and brushed her hand with his. She snapped it away. “That’s not quite true. I heard about it. Well Anna who hasn’t? But I was talking to an official last week and I didn’t like what I was hearing. I was frankly concerned.”

“About what?”

Again the Gallic shrug. “I was concerned that you might disappear in the night.”

There was a dried up spiky fruit on the table. Anna grabbed it hard and felt it cut into her hands.

“You care about me after 20 years? You suddenly care about me. How much are they paying you Marcel?” She was aware she was more shrill than she would have liked to be.

Marcel had adopted the doomed expression of a small boy who knows his quest for candy will be fruitless. “Anna. I know you are passionate about the cause but when did you last save an orangutan?”

“We are always saving them Marcel,” she shrieked back. “You know Billy was…” She trailed off Billy had been saved three years ago. Since then she had looked at the dusty road and the fires.

“Anna. There’s a stuffed orangutan in the museum at Kota Kinabalu. There are a few in zoos. They have been extinct in the wild for more than two years. They are gone – it's over. But your rescue foundation is still here on this road, blocking the new Interstate. Your rescue mission is extinct. You should go home.”

His comments alarmed Anna as much as they angered her. Anna had no place she could call home other than the ramshackle rescue foundation hut. Before setting up the non-profit she had cleaned toilet bowls at restaurants in Seattle. The jungle had been her first and last love. But it had been a long time since she had seen green or blue. There was a small preservation down the road known as Jungle Plantation. It preserved the old jungle with its vast trees in two acres so kids could one day walk through it and look up in amazement at the tall trees before being whisked back to a fast food dinner on the interstate.

She looked back at his muscled arms and wondered what it would be like to have him again before sliding  a sharp implement into that well-toned body. However, when she looked back at him she realized it has been many long years since he had seen her as a lover. Those olive eyes that were once wide with passion were filled with old lady pity.

She drew her diminutive frame as high as she could muster.

“Just piss off out of here Marcel. They build the interstate over my dead body.”

A is for Arctic

It's A-Z Challenge time again and I am woefully unprepared. Last year my mini novel was just about written by April 1. I allowed myself some rare smugness. This year - not so much. April may not be the cruelest month  but it's certainly the craziest, and not the best time to embark on a novel set in projected further in which the world is ravaged by global warming. A happy thought indeed...

The research station was equipped with heavy black curtains to keep out the sharp light that assailed the grimy windows, but David Brice still found it difficult to keep out the daylight from his racing mind. Just the knowledge that it was out there at midnight played tricks with him, forcing him out of his bed to twitch at the curtains.

Even at midnight the sun was brilliant and skittish, making patterns on the thin blue of the sea ice. The sea ice was a vast, frigid and unforgiving sheet that absorbed the heat of the rays and gave back little in return. It remained below freezing point this close to the pole, even in July.

A brilliant shaft of midnight sunlight spread across the trampled floor, highlighting a mish-mash of boot prints. Brice heard a low moan as Wales shifted in his bed. He quickly replaced the curtain not wanting to incur the wrath of the man mountain who was routinely compared to Chewbacca minus the loyalty.

Wales had a disconcerting habit of letting his firsts do the talking. Brice had stayed out of arguments with him, but felt his vast shadow fell over him the time Wales walked in as he surveyed the big man’s magazine collection. Brice had become side tracked by how many things a woman could do with a cucumber and failed to notice Wales enter the room. He looked up to see the angry lines crossing the man’s granite features and winched for the blow. But Wales merely snatched away the magazine and threw it in a drawer.

Sharing a room with Wales was one reason why Brice was keen to get the Arctic job finished up.  He had also been tapped to work on a water sampling project in the Amazon and was looking forward to warmer climes. But the drilling equipment had been quarantined in Murmansk due to another dispute with the Russians and had only arrived last week. The engineers were finally convinced everything was in place and the testing would begin in a matter of hours. Brice wondered if the anticipation sullied with fear of failure as he prepared to finally do what he was being paid for, was keeping him awake.

He rubbed his temples, trying to sooth the low grade headache that had dogged him for the last two weeks. As he started to drift away Wales started to ratchet up his snoring.

It was going to be one of those days.

Brice was up by 5 a.m. the next morning. He liked to be up and out, leaving his complaining team in his slipstream. The sampling station was a dark mass of giant tripods and tubes that looked like an alien craft had landed on the Polar ice. Brice rubbed his gloved hands together and set to work adjusting dials to make the fine measurements. It was a process that would be repeated across different parts of the ice cap over the days to come but Brice would be relinquished in a couple of weeks.

He took down measurements long hand in a book as the engineers  powered up the station. It hummed quietly and Brice activated the drop down through the ice. This was one of the deepest parts of the ice layer. It would be 15 feet before they hit water. Every foot down he measured the consistency of the ice, writing down the readings in his notebook and on an iPad. Brice was known for his meticulous nature. He would never make mental calculations at the scene or jump to conclusions. Still after two hours of readings, something was bothering him.

In the afternoon back at the station, Brice fed the figures into his model simulator. The bright red graphs were superimposed over each other and Brice got a sinking feeling in the depth of his stomach. Wales slammed a hot coffee on his desk. It slopped over the papers. Brice thought about yelling at him, but thought better of it. He put off picking up the phone to Roger Davies but every figure he fed into the graph was telling him the same thing.

Finally he dialed the number and the call was picked up in an office at the other side of the research center.

“Roger. I think you should see this.”

He immediately heard the intolerance of the academic in the other man’s voice.

“Can’t it wait?”

“I’m thinking not.” At times like this Brice wished his voice was a lot less Wisconsin and more New York gangster.

He heard Davies sigh and agree to come over. He was looking over his shoulder 10 minutes later.

Brice showed the chief scientist the graphs. Davies said nothing but the sharp strokes he was giving to his beard betrayed his anxiety.

“I assume there’s something wrong with the equipment,” he said finally and unconvincingly.

“There’s nothing to suggest anything’s wrong with the equipment,” Brice replied.

“We can get Arctic Surveyor 2 out there tomorrow to double check.”

“So you don’t think these results are correct?”

“Oh come on David. Are you seriously saying the Arctic ice has gone from 12 feet last year to just six this year? If you are right global warming would be more out of control than we know it is.”

“It’s just one place Roger. We are moving it half a mile north tomorrow."

“Right. Yes. Good,” said Davies.

“Of course if these readings are accurate, it may not even be safe to be here on this station. When’s the chopper back?” Brice asked.

“Not for a couple of weeks. Let’s put in some late nights and get it here this time next week?”

Davies had walked out before the enormity of his words had set in. Brice had been working with him for five years. He had never cut a research project short before.

The Long Lost Art of Air Glamor

Anyone remember the days when air travel used to be glamorous? Ok I don't recall it being quite like this but it was certainly different to how it is now.

I have memories of a flight to Canada back in the day when the air hostesses plied me with free beer on demand - and that was in cattle class. Today you have to pay through the nose for a can of Coors Lite and the stewardesses look at you like you need intervention  if you even ask for alcohol. Increasingly,I don't even bother and just make do with their ice water and micro packets of peanuts.

On Friday night I was flying out to Colorado on Delta. I haven't heard many good things about Delta other than the fact you may be marginally less likely to spend the night on an airport bench than if you are flying with American. Last time I flew on Delta, I did indeed spend an unscheduled night in Atlanta. The airline didn't pay for the hotel, but it stumped up for a tooth brush and wash cloth.

On Friday when I showed up at Norfolk for my flight, I was somewhat alarmed to see it was an hour late. This would not have been a problem if Norfolk was not one of those airports which flies to about three destinations so, invariably you have to connect. There was an hour between my connection to Denver at La Guardia which is up north somewhere.

I did the clueless thing for a while, going through security anyhow and buying an overpriced coffee until my significant other who was already in Denver - miraculously via an American flight that had not ben diverted to Puerto Rico - suggested I might want to retreat from the deserted check-in desk and talk to someone at Delta.

Inevitably, my flight from La Guardia had been the last and the woman suggested I could hang out in Atlanta all night testing just how comfy the benches were or get a flight out to Atlanta at 5.44 a.m. I opted for the later and went home for a skinny sleep.

The next day I amazed myself by getting on a flight that wasn't delayed and getting to Denver. I decided to mix up the flying fun by opting for peanuts and water on one flight and Fig Newtons and water on the second flight. On one flight I was close enough to first class to see real food and to sneak a peak of their movies. I avoided check in luggage because it costs about $20 per item and the chances of making connections would be negligible.

The glamor days of flying may be long gone but I reflected on the fact that at least there was little prospect of the passenger next to be spilling food or orange juice on me. At one time I was on a roll and would seldom arrive at a destination without a smattering or orange juice or red wine on my pants.

My Delta experience on Friday made me increasingly nervous about the return flight which involved a window of about 50 minutes to get the last flight to Norfolk out of Detroit. I figured of all of the places to test out the benches, Detroit was probably the worst. My angst increased when the flight out of Denver was posted as 20 minutes late. I spoke to the Delta guy on the gate who said it was no big deal because the pilot would make up the difference because of a tail wind and the flight should get in by 9.05 p.m. for my 9.45 flight.

The flight got in just before 9.20 and I was not alone in having about 20 minutes to make a connection. The aircrew advised people for whom Detriot was their final destination to allow us changers to get off first. Either there were a lot of changers or nobody wanted to admit living in Detroit. In the carnage that ensued, old women partially crushed babies in the rush to get off. I was ahead of the game, fuelled as I was by a bag that contained three salty peanuts. I deftly ducked in front of a man who had 15 minutes to make a flight to DC and made a dash for freedom. I checked the information board and was alarmed to see my flight left from Concourse C and I was in Concourse A.

Getting to Concourse A involved riding a train, about five escalators and a a walkway that appeared to connect Chicago to Detroit. The escalator had been deliberately packed with the most immobile people in Detriot. Still, at the back of my mind was the full horror of hanging out here all night. I ducked and dived and ran. By the time I reached the gate I was sweating profusely and had expended all of my peanut energy. I had made it about 10 minutes before the gate closed. I even found the boarding pass on my smartphone and the battery hadn't quite run down.

For a while I sat in my seat and blissfully thought about how I would dine in style before reaching Norfolk at midnight. It would be pretzels this time...