Nathaniel Rich - Odds Against Tomorrow

She rinsed and spat, forcefully. She appeared again in the little stretch of space between the bathroom and the living room, what might be called a hallway if it were longer than three feet.

“After everything we’ve been through.”

“Why do you keep saying that? I wasn’t going to abandon you.”

“Hold on.” She went back into the bathroom. The water ran. She spat again.

When she emerged, she scrutinized his face, squinting, as if to detect some hidden pattern there. Whatever she saw couldn’t have worked to his advantage. His skin still tender and pinkish from his little adventure in the Ticonderoga crematorium. A yellow scab on his chin that was just beginning to peel. His flat hair whorled in cowlicks like an electrocution victim; his eyes red, scummy with sleep; and his semi-beard, a growth of five days — what Rikki called his “Mexicano look,” which had something to do with the fact that only his mustache grew in fully, the hair on his cheeks growing out sparsely and in different directions, like spines on a saguaro. He knew this much about his appearance without consulting a mirror. He also realized that his mouth was hanging open, like a taxidermied bear.

“Fine,” she said at last. “I believe you.”

“Really?”

“I have no choice, do I? What else can I do? Even if I wanted to go home, all the buses have left. I don’t know what is happening in the city; there’s no way to tell what horrors are raging there. And I’m not going to stay by myself in this camp. It wouldn’t be safe. So I’m completely vulnerable. Another way of saying that is, I’m screwed.” Her voice lowered. “Besides. We have to trust each other if we’re going to try to make Future Days work.”

“Right. Good point.” And that was the moment of cowardice. Wrong, he should have said. I’m not going to work at Future Days. But that would have started a conversation he was not prepared to have. A conversation that would end with her leaving him. So he just sat there with a bland smile, like the selfish weasel he was.

“So,” said Jane. “Breakfast?”

They followed the crowds to the food tent.

“It’s really not so bad here,” said Jane. “See?”

He saw. It really was so bad. Five men stood in a line outside a trailer just twenty yards down. None of them talked with each other. Mitchell knew what they were waiting for. The previous night Marcy Rosado had, through tears, cataloged the depredations she had seen on FEMA Island: propane tanks were being filched right and left; small children found syringes in the field and used them in unsupervised games of doctor; and women who had lost everything in the storm were turning tricks. He hadn’t mentioned this to Jane, and he didn’t now, but one look at those men standing outside the trailer, hands in pockets, the red ribbon dangling from the door handle, and he knew that the trailer was open for business.

Those men were patient, but no one else seemed to be. Breakfast wasn’t served until eight o’clock, but even now the line was growing — Mitchell could see it from their trailer on the other side of the camp. The other refugees streamed by them, quick-walking or jogging toward the food. It was unsettling, this mania at every meal, the people rapacious in their hunger. It was like they were racing against one another. It was like they were running for their lives.

They waited ninety minutes before being handed their microwaved breakfast burrito. It was cold. Biting into the tortilla, the flaky eggs coming loose all over the paper wrapping, the congealed salsa oozing like berry preserves, Mitchell thought of the frozen burritos he had stocked in his freezer before it had been crowded out by his money, and he had a strange pang of nostalgia for his old apartment. What condition was it in now? If an empty house, left alone for a single year, begins to harbor animals, what happens to a New York City apartment, its window blown in, its electricity out, in the week after a hurricane? Do rats make nests in the bathtub? Does the couch bloom moss? He didn’t want to think about the refrigerator. Undoubtedly by now the leftovers from Chosan Galbi had colonized the shelves, employing crude biological warfare, entrenching for a long occupation.

“This is gruggy,” said Jane, washing down a bite with a gulp from her allotted pint of orange juice. “But I’m going to eat every morsel.” She appeared to gag slightly as she pushed the burrito into her mouth.

They sat on a bench crushed between the Motas and the Watkins family of East New York. The Watkinses had been behind Jane and Mitchell in line. Between increasingly violent imprecations to their misbehaving children — there seemed to be about eleven of them in all — they had recited a tedious story about taking a public bus for eight hours through Queens with a band of manacled convicts.

“We’re too rich for this,” Mitchell whispered. He was trying to eat quickly and avoid eye contact with the other refugees, wearing his FEMA baseball hat low on his head. He worried about a repeat of yesterday’s encounter. Perhaps Marcy Rosado would see him and arouse her mob. Only this time the mob would include the entire camp.

“Exactly,” said Jane. “We should be eating baked Alaska or something. Though I’d settle for a hamburger.”

She did look starving. Like a refugee.

“I can’t stop thinking of that building you ran into at Ticonderoga,” she said.

“The infirmary. Where Elsa lived.”

“How the walls were collapsing in on themselves. That’s how it’s been since Tammy, isn’t it? The walls collapsing in on themselves?”

Mitchell put down his burrito. He leaned in so that the Motas and Watkinses couldn’t overhear.

“You think I’m good at predicting disasters?”

“Not really,” said Jane. “I’m just betting my career on it.”

“Well, this?” He gestured around the meal tent, at the impatient refugees still standing in line, at the Watkinses screaming at their children, who were stealing one another’s burritos. “This is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“I know,” said Jane, and she put down her burrito. “I can’t eat this anymore. Let’s just go back to the trailer. Now .”

They hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when a bomb detonated. A plume of smoke burst into the air three rows down. They approached cautiously, following the crowd across the field. A trailer’s propane tank had burst. Gas fumes blurred the air. The couple who lived there were lying on the grass, blackened by the smoke.

“They’re dead,” said Jane.

But the couple began to cough and wheeze, and slowly they crawled away from the wreckage. The crowd stood by and watched until the flames had burned themselves out. And then they began to line up for lunch.

9.

The corner of the chain-link fence was occluded by the blocky form of Hank Cho. “Blocky” wasn’t quite the right term: he really resembled a single block, as of granite or wood. A human two-by-four. Even from twenty-five yards away, in the darkness, there was no mistaking his girth. Jane squeezed Mitchell’s arm.

“Where are all the others?”

“Maybe they’re coming.”

“Maybe this is a trap .”

It was an argument that would have persuaded the old Mitchell. If he had worried that Alec Charnoble, at their first meeting, might slaughter him in the middle of the night on the seventy-fifth floor of the Empire State Building, where surveillance cameras and motion sensors and keystroke recorders detected their every move, then shouldn’t he be alarmed at the prospect of meeting an inordinately built Korean — or Chinese — man in the middle of the night on an island that had minimal security and was descending briskly into chaos ? Soon the men would be stalking one another as at Ticonderoga and at the flooded deli on Madison Avenue. What would stop Hank Cho from dismembering them right there and then? He could boast to the rest of the refugees that he had killed the false prophet. Yet even as Mitchell’s brain went through the familiar convolutions of worst-case scenarioism, he felt oddly removed from himself. His brain’s logical infrastructure still functioned, but the fear, the hot animal fear, was absent. He yanked Jane the final fifteen yards toward Hank Cho.