Savage Drift

^{CHAPTER THREE} DEAN

I stormed up toward the housing tents.

The leaves on the trees that bordered the golf course were in the final stages of falling. Red, gold, and many browns, from ochre to chocolate.

It was hard to stay mad in the presence of that kind of boastful, exuberant natural beauty. But I managed.

“Dean!” Alex called. “Wait up!”

I turned and watched him sprint up the incline to me.

“Jake was really laying it on,” he said. “It seems like it’s getting worse between you two.”

“He’s such a jerk!” I said. “He acts like he’s still her boyfriend! It’s insane.”

“I agree,” Alex said. He had to walk double-time to match my strides.

“Jake always acts so entitled. Like he deserves her—like I don’t.”

“But she’s really into you, right?” Alex asked me. “Astrid?”

I nodded.

Trust Alex to cut to the chase.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so. I mean, I’m her boyfriend. That’s clear. But… sometimes I feel like she holds me at a distance.”

“That’s just her personality though. She’s not a real showy kind of person,” Alex offered.

“She’s not showy at all,” I said. And I probably sounded as miserable as I felt.

“Jake’s just messing with you. You know that. He sees that you’re worried about Astrid and he’s playing you.”

I shrugged.

“I heard him telling Astrid that he and his dad are going to go back to Texas soon, and saying she should go with them,” I told Alex.

“That’s harsh.”

We walked.

“Look,” Alex said. “Remember what Mom always used to say? About, like, manifesting reality?”

I looked at him.

His face was changing, it seemed to me. Growing leaner.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, think about what you’re manifesting with all this fighting and the self-doubt.”

“You mean if I spend time worrying about Astrid turning to Jake, she will?” I asked.

“I mean, if you spend a lot of time being afraid of it, you could make it happen.”

I took that in.

“Because who wants to be with a guy who’s afraid all the time, you know what I mean?” he continued.

“Yes,” I sighed. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“Cheer up,” Alex said. “There could be some good surprises headed your way.”

He had a kind of a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile lurking around the side of his mouth.

“That’d be a change,” I said.

It was good to be alone in Tent J for a while. Well, alone in our five-person cubicle bedroom. The massive tent was divided down its long center by a corridor. Off the corridor were little “rooms” made by low, dividing screens. Two bunk beds stood on either side against the screens, and one single bed was set under the plastic window.

That bed, we had all decided, was Astrid’s.

Other orphaned teens were messing around in their rooms, but I had ours to myself—this was the refugee camp definition of alone time.

I wrote in my journal. Always helped.

Maybe a half hour later, Astrid came in, trailed by Jake.

They seemed to be fighting. Good.

“I just want to rest,” she told Jake.

Astrid was holding her round belly. Her face was twisted in a grimace of pain.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I sat up too fast and bonked my head on Alex’s bunk above me. Jake rolled his eyes.

“It’s a pain. Down low. Feels like cramps. I just want to rest,” Astrid said.

“I told her she’s gotta hustle over to the clinic. They probably have a pill made just for crap like this,” Jake said.

“And I told him I’m not going!” Astrid said. “They’re taking pregnant women away, Jake. I know they are.”

“Astrid, I know you’re not supposed to say this to a pregnant lady, but sweetie, you’re acting nuts!”

“Jake, I think Astrid just wants to rest,” I said. I had my hands out, trying to get them both to calm down.

“How do you explain Lisa?” Astrid fumed.

Astrid had met a few other pregnant women at the camp. They would all get together and talk about swollen ankles, stretch marks, I don’t know. Two of them had left suddenly, in the last few weeks. Both of them had been exposed to the compounds back home and now some of the pregnant women had a theory that the government was taking them away for testing.

Conspiracy theories were one thing we had an unlimited supply of in the camp.

“She probably found her relatives and left! People are leaving all the time,” Jake said.

“Lisa was my friend. She would have said good-bye,” Astrid maintained. “Dean thinks so, too.”

“What’s important is how you’re feeling,” I said. I was trying to sidestep the whole issue.

“Exactly,” Jake agreed. “You’re feeling crampy, so we gotta go over to the clinic.”

“I’m not going, Jake. I just need to lay down,” Astrid insisted. She dropped down onto her cot.

“If they’re taking pregnant women who were exposed, why haven’t they come for you already?” Jake asked.

“Let it go, Jake,” I said.

“Maybe because two thousand people came on the same day as we did,” Astrid continued. “Maybe they lost my file. Maybe it’s sitting at the bottom of a stack, but I don’t want to call attention to myself.”

“So, you’re not going to see the doctors here?” Jake asked. “Like ever? What, is Dean going to deliver the baby out on the eighteenth hole?”

He was right. I hated him for being right.

“The baby’s not due for another three months,” Astrid said. “We’ll be somewhere else by then.”

Astrid had received a sonogram the first day we arrived. The ultrasound technician had told her that the baby looked really healthy and big for 4 ½ months old. He said the baby’s so developed, he thought that Planned Parenthood was wrong when they told Astrid the date of conception and she was more like 6 and ½ months pregnant.

He said the baby would come in January. We had thought it would be in March.

Jake turned to me. “Dean, tell her. She has to go. I mean, come on. You don’t buy this ‘army taking people away’ nonsense, do you?”

Astrid looked at me, her mouth set in a hard line.

“Well…” I said. “I met Lisa. She seemed really nice. I think it is a little weird she didn’t say good-bye to Astrid. She kept saying she had some maternity clothes she wanted to give her—”

Jake rolled his eyes, scowling in a way that let me know he thought I was whipped.

“And it’s Astrid’s body,” I continued. “I’m not going to put pressure on her to do something she doesn’t want to do.”

“Geraldine, tell me, do you have any actual opinions of your own?” Jake asked.

“Just because I’m sensitive to Astrid’s feelings doesn’t make me a woman, Jake!”

“Go away, the two of you,” Astrid growled. “Sometimes, I think I’d be better off without the both of you!”

“Fine. Catch you later,” Jake said. He walked away.

Astrid shifted on her side, stuffing a pillow under her belly to prop it up.

Seeing the hurt on my face, her steely gaze softened. A little.

“I didn’t really mean that,” she apologized. “I just… I need a nap.”

“Okay,” I said. I turned to leave.

“Hey,” she said. “Number one: Please don’t go away mad, and number two: Would you get me a sandwich at dinner?”

I smiled. She smiled back.

“Okay and you bet,” I said. I bent down and kissed her on the top of her head.

I had found Alex and Niko strategizing in front of the Clubhouse. I joined in, figuring that the more support I could give to Niko to use diplomatic channels, the better.

At Quilchena, there was a whole office filled with bilingual signage and mild-mannered Canadian social workers who spent the day placing calls and taking calls and scrambling to help us refugees connect with family outside the camp.

I heard a joke here, Q: “How do you get 100 Canadians out of a pool?” A: “Would everyone please exit the swimming pool?”

Funny, because it’s true. I’d never seen one of them lose their temper.

But Niko gave the woman we ended up talking to a run for her money. She was a pasty lady named Helene with short hair that was gray at the temples.

“I thought Josie was dead,” Niko told Helene. “She was O, and she was off in the woods and I hoped that our friend, Mario, would somehow be able to get her into his shelter, but I didn’t really hope.”

Niko laid out the newspaper on Helene’s desk and pointed to Josie’s photograph. “And look, there she is. She’s alive and she’s trapped in one of those concentration camps!”

“Oh, now, whoa there,” Helene said. “concentration camp? That’s just not right.”

“They rounded up all the Type O’s who had been exposed to the compounds and put them in a camp. They’re treating them like criminals! We have O’s here in Quilchena who’ve been exposed and you’re not segregating them, locking them up.”

“Well, that’s true.”

It was true, but it was also true that they had been forced to take some O’s away. People who flew into a rage at the slightest insult, who couldn’t stop getting in fights, who couldn’t handle the crowds, the lines, the waiting.

“Look at my friend Dean, here. He’s O and he was exposed. He’s fine.”

This made me kind of nervous. It wasn’t that I was afraid of them knowing about my past, exactly, but I didn’t want to be singled out, either.

Helene gave me a weak smile and a little nod.

She thought for a moment.

“It is certainly not the policy here in Canada to contain people this way, but listen, I will take your case to the review board and I will personally make a case for a transfer for your friend,” she told Niko.

“Hey! That’s great!” I said. I clapped Niko on the shoulder.

“We just need to fill out some forms, and I’ll also need to get a petition slot,” Helene told us. “There’s a bit of a waiting list for new requests.”

“How long?” Niko asked.

“Probably a week or two,” Helene said.

“And after that?”

“After that?”

“How long would the transfer take?” Niko asked. He was very quiet then, very calm.

“Another week to ten days to process the transfer.”

“Thank you,” Niko said. His voice was cold, almost robotic.

“Oh, good,” she said. “I was worried that wouldn’t be fast enough for you. But it is?”

Niko gave an indistinct nod. “If that’s the fastest way…”

“It is, short of you and me driving down there and getting her out ourselves!” she joked.

Alex and I exchanged a look.

“Let me get you the forms,” Helene said and she scurried out of the room.

Niko looked at us.

“Captain McKinley,” he said.

As it happened, the shuttle to the Air Force base was done for the day.

“Sleep on it, Niko,” Alex advised him as we walked toward the dining hall. “That’s what you always tell me. You need to make a careful plan. Don’t go rushing off.”

“She’s alive, Alex. All this time I thought she was dead. I want to see her. I want to tell her—”

Niko choked up, then corrected his course, getting back to the issue at hand: “Here’s my plan—I’m going to go see Captain McKinley and I’m not going to leave his side until he says he’ll fly me out of here. When I get to the States, I’ll hitchhike.”

The hitchhiking was actually the only good part of the plan. It wasn’t as dangerous as it used to be. With the gas shortages, it was actually against the law to drive your car with less than three people in it.

Not that we knew, since we were only allowed off the camp in the shuttle bus, but from what I’d read in the papers, it was making for some very weird car rides stateside.

“I’m going to need an air mask,” Niko said, thinking. “Do you guys know anyone who has one for barter?”

“Why? For the drifts?” Alex asked, shocked. “Niko, do you think they’re real?”

This was the biggest source of gossip and rumor in the camp.

In the last weekly radio address from whatever undisclosed secure location the government of the United States of America was operating out of, President Booker had assured us that as far as he knew, the drifts were just rumors. He said that the military had assured him that the clean-up of the compounds was completed and the Four Corners area was safe. (Burned and bombed into a giant, black desert, but safe.) He promised that if he ever comes to find out there’s been some sort of cover-up, he will take swift action.

But then he went back to talking about the efforts to house and feed and clothe the seven million displaced victims of the megatsunami up and down the East Coast, and I got the feeling he just wishes the Four Corners would disappear.

“I can’t afford to gamble,” Niko told Alex. “I don’t know what route I’m going to take. I could get close to the area.”

“You don’t need to get anywhere near the Four Corners,” I broke in. “You stay north, way north, and then dip down to Missouri. They put the camps in those Midwestern cities to keep them far away from the Four Corners. There’s no reason for you to—”

“If the drifts are real, and if I run into them, I’m dead meat,” Niko said. “So, I’m going to find a mask. It’s part of the careful plan I’m making.”

Niko cast Alex a pointed look and walked away.

“He’s not the same,” Alex said. “He never used to be like that. Sarcastic?”

I shrugged. “A lot of us are different now.”