Barry was a city comptroller and wild for civil war reenactment; he actually signed up for the refuge with other "soldiers" in his "unit." He wasn't sure if they didn't keep up with the subscription or if they just hadn't made it up the mountain once things went south. His wife blamed him for bringing their family to the refuge; it could not be any worse out there than it was in here, she insisted. He wasn't sure about that, but when I suggested that conditions inside the refuge could be improved, he was all ears.
Felicity had always loved the mountains and living in "the bosom of nature's abundance." She'd signed on with the refuge as a sort of wilderness timeshare, letting her come camp and learn on weekends. Abernathy had been a big draw for her, and I'd crossed paths with her on many seminars and retreats. But at those events I hadn't learned that she practiced environmental law, operated a Clean the Bay non-profit, and had inherited one-third of a ubiquitous fast food chain along with her two brothers. They refused to buy her out, and so the trade in saturated fat fueled her efforts to clean up the rest of the planet.
Mischa spoke little English, and so most of our conversations went through his eight-year-old daughter Trina. As best I could tell, Mischa had acquired controlling interest in a number of oil fields, then banks, and eventually a television station. I was never quite certain how he had come to head up such an impressive business empire; before he was a mogul, his daughter explained, he had been "a soldier." But then he had run afoul of the powers-that-be. He liquidated what he could and fled his home country. Life as an international financier was harder—I got the impression that he had been losing money since he'd fled—but all that came to an abrupt end a few months ago. He laughed as he explained that even though his subscription was an artifact of his refugee paranoia, in the end it had paid off.
Maggie found the one-on-ones harder to pull off, through some mix of inexperience and already burned bridges. People were less eager to trust her, knowing her own sordid history and predilection for talking like a caricature of Che Guevara. But she pushed past their suspicions of her ulterior motives and talked, sharing her own story as much as getting theirs. We shared notes and pointed each other to those poolies who showed the most potential for taking action. Maggie did her best, but she was always impatient.
"We've worked our way through half of the labor pool," she groused over the tub she was scrubbing. "When are we going to actually do something?"
"Half of Ponderosa's labor pool," I corrected mildly. We had swapped out parts of the water reclamation apparatus with spares and were now cleaning out the parts that had been in use for the past month. "At some point we'll need to figure out how to make contacts outside our lodge."
"Yeah, well maybe if we do something," Maggie repeated, "they'll take notice and come to us."
I transferred my tub into the rinse bin. "We do something public and more than just poolies will take notice. Once the sweeties find out we're organizing, they will move to stop us."
"Bring it," she growled at the lime caked along the rim of a glass reservoir.
"These are the sweeties that walk around with guns on their hips, Maggie," I reminded.
"Those are for show," she sniffed. "Most of them couldn't hit a barn door."
I paused in my scrubbing. "It doesn't take a great amount of skill to fire into a crowd of people. And I think you underestimate how eager some of those sweeties are to use the guns they've been carrying around for months."
She waved her scrub brush. "So we do something not public. So they won't find out."
I watched her for a long moment, long enough that she felt my eyes on her and looked up. "Tell me what you're thinking about," I asked when our eyes met.
Maggie shrugged. "I don't know, I'm not the expert, here. A… rally? We all get together and see how many of us are sick of things and… I just think it would do us good. Right now we're all so isolated."
I exhaled, trying not to show my relief. I'd half expected her to suggest some sort of midnight sabotage–something violent and dangerous. In comparison, a rally was downright reasonable. "So a meeting," I said, musing. At her nod, I moderated, "Not everyone we've spoken with, or even everyone we've flagged as potentials, are ready for that sort of commitment."
"So we just invite the ones who are ready."
I nodded thoughtfully. "We could do something like that. Just gather in one corner of the Mess some Sunday afternoon."
"Next Sunday afternoon," Maggie corrected. "This coming Sunday afternoon."
I couldn't help but chuckle. "I doubt anyone will have prior commitments or schedule conflicts."
"We get together, we put names to faces for everybody else," Maggie said, riffing with growing excitement, "we tell some stories, air our complaints, maybe vent a little frustration, and… talk about a way forward."
That last set off my alarm bells. "A way forward?" I prompted.
"Stuff we can do," she answered readily. "I dunno, strike? Figure out how to target the worst of the sweeties, get them demoted to labor pool? It's happened before, we can make it happen on purpose. Or hell, figure out how to get our hands on some of those guns."
And there it was. "Maggie–" I started, exasperated, and then realized I didn't know what to say next.
"You don't think we're going to need guns of our own at some point?" she challenged. "We won't change this place singing kum bay ya."
I held up a placating hand as I gathered my thoughts. "I am enough of a realist to acknowledge that it may come to violence," I admitted. "I hope it won't. I will always strive to find a peaceful solution. But you are right–at some point, we may need guns. But. We are not at that point yet. We are nowhere near that point yet. And stealing guns and hiding them is far more complicated and dangerous than we're capable of pulling off right now."
Maggie was quiet in response, intent on scrubbing. I couldn't tell if her scowl was for me or whatever she was trying to scrape off the inside of the tub.
"Can you imagine, how fucked we would be," I pushed, "if we made a mistake there? If we got caught? If somebody got shot?"
My co-conspirator reluctantly nodded. "I suppose. But what do we do in the mean time? How do we get to the point that we can start considering that kind of action?"
"Well we start with this meeting," I told her. "I think it's a great idea. You're right; we are isolated. Seeing that we're not alone will do us some real good. We can compare notes and get a better idea of what's happening all around us."
"We're being worked like slaves by idiots masquerading as feudal lords," Maggie grumbled. "What's complicated about that?"
"Any system gets complicated when you look at it close enough," I told her, feeling like I was back in my classroom. I shook it off. "Like the cabins."
That got her attention. "What about the cabins?"
"We laid foundation the other day and I sunk the heating and cooling loop with the Director."
"Came down off his lofty perch, huh?"
I tipped my head side to side. "I got the feeling he gets pretty hands-on on a regular basis. It's not like we see how Golden Eagle works on the day-to-day."
"I can tell you, Beaver Lodge works exactly like we do, just with more pressure to squeeze performance out of labor pool." Then she waved her hands. "But you were talking about the cabins."
"Yeah, and the thing of it is," I went on, "those cabins aren't going to house a lot of people."
Maggie paused in her scrubbing. "Like how many?"
"It's hard to say," I admitted, "but they're not much bigger than a pair of suites. Maybe four bedrooms? If we put a family of four in each bedroom, we'd need to build twelve cabins just for Ponderosa. Expand that to the whole refuge, that's sixty cabins. And it's not like the population actually breaks down into convenient four-person families like that. We'd probably need twice as many until it's actually families in bedrooms and not random groupings of people."
"Yeah, I think your boys are great and all, but I'm in no rush to make them roommates."
"So a hundred cabins?" I pressed on. "Even assuming we have the materials on-site and enough room for one hundred build sites–and I doubt that a great deal–it's taken Ponderosa six weeks to get one cabin half done and two more foundations dug. Even if we speed up with experience, that’s at least a year for twelve cabins, assuming the other lodges are progressing like us. Take winter into account, and a conservative estimate says it's a year and a half until we have cabins for everybody."
"Mother fucker," Maggie breathed.
"Even if we get better and faster," I went on, "and this is still assuming we can dig up that many rocks and fell that many trees, it's at least a year before we're done. And the Hosts aren't stupid. They've got far more information than we do, and they can do math."
The woman scowled. "You're getting at something but I'm still reeling at a year of grueling labor."
"The Hosts know that the cabins won't solve the poolie housing problem. Not any time soon. So the question becomes: what is the actual purpose of the cabins building project?"
Maggie stared at me for some time before repeating herself: "Mother Fucker!"
Maggie tried to go back to scrubbing and found she couldn't. "I bet they're for the Hosts," she spat. "Have you seen the little cubbyholes they've got to live in?"
"If they were for Hosts, we wouldn't be building one for Abernathy," I pointed out. "He likes his cubbyhole, been living in it for years already. And besides, we're building three, and the other lodges are supposed to be ahead of us, so even more."
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"For sweeties, then," Maggie revised without missing a beat. "Because the suites they're in aren't good enough for their delicate sensibilities."
I refrained from mentioning her own delicate sensibilities which she'd indulged in a lothario's suite for a few weeks.
"And when sweeties move into a cabin, that frees up a suite," she continued with the renewed vigor of fresh injustice. "Which the Hosts use as an incentive to keep us poolies in line. Favorites get promoted to the lodge. So poolies, then sweeties, then whatever we call the fucks in the cabins, and the Hosts on top. They've got this whole caste system game nailed."
"I'm not sure they're that intentional about it," I moderated, even as I remembered Cole talking about "building culture."
"They're entirely intentional about this," Maggie insisted. "It's just like the empty suite in Beaver lodge."
I blinked. "The what, now?"
"The empty suite in Beaver," Maggie repeated, and actually started scrubbing again. "Have you not heard of this?" When I shook my head, she explained: "Clark keeps one of her suites empty, just waiting for the right subscribers to prove themselves worthy of it."
"Seriously?" I asked, incredulous.
Maggie snapped her chin up and down in one sharp nod. "I've seen it."
"And it's not… damaged, or its bathrooms' broken or something?" I suggested, groping for some reasonable explanation.
"Aw, aren't you cute, trying to find an excuse for them," she sneered. "No, Polyanna, it's a perfectly functional suite. I tried the taps, and…" She faltered for a moment, then pushed on through. "I can attest the bed works just fine, too."
Maggie fell silent after that, no doubt reliving old betrayals and recriminations in her head. I, meanwhile, was trying to come to grips with a suite sitting empty in Beaver lodge while dozens of families slept in makeshift cots and hammocks just next door. A functioning shower. Space to stretch out, to feel comfortable, to feel human. All of it, denied to homeless refugees (what else were we?) to make us work harder. It was monstrous.
I set aside a clean tub and picked up the next one. "I'm starting to look forward to our little gathering, Maggie. Thank you for suggesting it."
I never told Maggie anything more about my interaction with Cole, about how I got him to talk. I didn't tell her about Aubrey, either, but there was little secret to keep, there, outside of whatever was in those vials. But I'd flirted with Cole and he'd responded. Somehow that felt more significant than running drugs for a sweetie I'd slept with months ago.
Did I hold my tongue about Cole because I feared that Maggie would want me to exploit that link with the Director of the refuge? Did I stay quiet about Aubrey because I knew Maggie would have nothing but disdain for an affair with a sweetie?
Or did I just want to keep those interactions to myself, a secret only for me to know–for me to mull over in my bunk at night?
Sometimes I wondered if I kept delivering Aubrey's envelopes just for her perfume. Each time she gave me a handoff I would smell her for the rest of the day, as if I could turn around and she'd be there behind me. When she stepped close, the heady mix of that fragrance, her body heat, her breath, even the barest hint of her sweat in the summer heat… it overwhelmed me.
I told myself that I trusted her, in my more sober moments, that I knew she was a woman of principles and if she said it needed to be done, it did. But what did I know of her, really? Two nights of drinking wine on the Lodge balcony, chatting and flirting: that was all I had to go on, and in that moment most of my attention had been focused on oh-god-is-this-really-happening, not some inventory of her moral character.
But I did know Cole. Compared to my one weekend with Aubrey, I'd spent dozens working alongside Cole. An intense man, and a driven one–so driven, in fact, that he'd disregard the little problems until they turned into big problems. Reckless. Your typical man-with-a-vision who'll stop at nothing to see it come true. And this was the man whose eager smile and responsive chatter I was keeping to myself? Why?
In all the time I'd known him, over the course of years, he'd never made a move, never expressed romantic interest in me. Had things changed, cooped up in the refuge for who knows how long, putting him on the prowl for companionship? Or had I, perhaps, imagined it all?
I was not young. Two grown boys in my wake, too. These were not the kind of things that men looked for, in my experience. If Jameson could marry the three prettiest girls in his Lodge, no doubt Cole could, too. For all I knew, Cole kept a rotation of sweet young things from Golden Eagle cycling through his bedroom.
Maybe I hadn't said anything about Cole because Maggie might laugh at the very idea I'd turned his head. And that laugh would shatter all of it, like a house of mirrors collapsing. If Cole couldn't possibly want me, neither could Aubrey. The only person who could want me was Arthur, and that for nostalgia more than anything else. More accurately, the sense that he'd had something taken away unjustly and he'd like it back, if only to prove that he'd never really lost it, never fumbled it, never screwed up.
Every once in a while, though, I'd catch Arthur looking me up, not possessively but with a familiar hunger in his eyes. It wasn't all nostalgia and wounded pride with him. And if Arthur wanted me like that, perhaps it was not impossible that Cole and Aubrey might, too.
Which was the core of it, I realized: I kept these interactions to myself just to preserve the possibility of romance, that I might be wanted. Day to day, I was a dusty, dirty, achey, stinky mess, accounted as nothing more than a strong back and a pair of willing hands. Barely human. But if someone might think of me as something more… even the hope of it made me feel alive. Made me forget the grime and the stench. Kept me sane.
Even if it was the resident despot. Or some sort of drug-running rogue medic. For the sake of retaining my sanity and humanity, I'd take what I could get.
—
"Hey, we remember you!" cried one of two young women who dropped their trays onto the table and sat down opposite me. For a moment, I struggled to place them. One plump, blonde, and cheery; the other lanky, brunette, and also cheery. Neither could be more than twenty-five; I felt like I was back in the first few weeks of fall semester, trying to remember the names of new students. "From church a few weeks ago, right?"
"Oh, right, of course," I responded with a nod. They were the two girls from Gray Wolf Lodge who'd sat near me. "How goes your hunt for some nice young men?"
They tittered at that, but the giggles died off quickly.
"Not so well," I observed.
"We are not the only applicants for the positions," the darker-haired one noted sourly. "And we're not sure the others are playing fair." She looked sidelong at her friend, who shared an aggrieved sigh with her.
"There are rumors," the other one explained, "that the Mountain Lion boys have a… secret hideaway somewhere in the refuge, where they…" She waved a dispirited hand.
"Apparently it's pretty seedy," her friend put in. "But it has a tatty old mattress, so it gets the job done."
I wrinkled my nose in sympathy. "I'm sorry to hear that. Remind me your names? I'm Susan."
Rachel was the curvy blonde; Rebecca the brunette. "Thanks for letting us sit with you, by the way. We don't know a lot of people in third mess."
Making conversation, I asked why we had the pleasure of their company. "Oh, we were playing waitress for the Wolfpack while they had their–what was it–strategic planning meeting," Rachel said, and then giggled. "Not that I think that will happen again."
Her friend shared her amusement. "Did you see Tzavaras's face?" she laughed. "She was so pissed."
My ears had immediately perked at 'strategic planning,' so I prompted the conversation along, hoping to steer it back towards what they might have overheard. "Do they usually have… waitresses for their meetings?"
Rachel shook her head. "No, it was some lieutenant's bright idea. He got his hands on some hooch, and wanted… well. I got the feeling he was hoping we'd wear less as we poured drinks."
Rebecca snorted. "Yeah. Because when I was packing to hike through the mountains to a secret summer camp to wait out the apocalypse, I made sure to grab my bikini."
"Well I did," Rachel said with a smile. "But mostly because my one-piece was dirty and I thought, you know, maybe swimming? Before we found out what it was really like."
I chuckled along with them, then applied a little pressure towards juicier details. "You said Tzavaras was angry. Did she just not want you two overhearing their bickering about poolie management?" I hoped, though, that there had been more sensitive information bandied about.
"Oh, no, that's not what pissed her off," Rebecca laughed. "She was upset that one of her guys wanted us to be eye candy. Chewed him out for it but good, too."
My eyebrows lifted. "Is she… normally so… concerned?"
Rachel looked uncertain but Rebecca nodded eagerly. "Tzavaras has got our back. I mean, I just assume it's from being a lady in the military for so long, but she takes no shit on the misogyny front." Then she covered her lips with the tips of her fingers. "Oh, excuse my language."
Rachel winked conspiratorially across the table. "We may have… tested the quality of the hooch we were serving."
I laughed. "Any good?"
"Oh, it was awful," Rebecca giggled.
Rachel looked dubiously at her friend. "And stronger than it looked."
"Tzavaras okay with drunk soldiers at her strategy meeting?" I prompted with a smirk which I hope invited gossip.
Rebecca snorted. "I think that's the only reason she let us stay," she tittered.
"I'm sure they were only talking about who digs what hole, anyway," I said. I wasn't sure if I was more amused or frustrated at how diffident the two tipsy ladies were proving to be.
"No, they were all looking over maps and talking about–what was it–assault vectors. Seizing targets."
"Force multipliers," the other put in. "Site B."
A scowl knit itself across my brow. "Maps of the refuge?" I asked, trying to tamp down my instant suspicion, or at least make it less visible. Was Tzavaras planning some sort of coup?
"No, road maps, city maps," Rebecca shook her head. "Not here. Other places."
I frowned. "Were they… hypothetical war games and the like?"
Suddenly grave, Rachel shook her head. "No, they were very serious about how much risk they were willing to take for each target."
"So they're planning raids,” I concluded soberly.
For a brief moment, Rachel met my eye and I could feel the full, terrible weight of the revelation. The Wolfpack weren't happy guarding the henhouse.
Rebecca, missing the gravity between the two of us, shrugged. "When all you've got is a hammer, right? And Tzavaras is in command of a whole bag of hammers." A beat later, she realized what she'd said and dissolved into giggles.
"If they piss someone off and lead them back here–" I said to Rachel fearfully. She only shrugged helplessly. As if we didn't have enough to worry about inside the refuge, now I could contemplate the spectre of raids against a poorly-selected target, more capable or more vindictive than they appeared, escalating to some sort of petty war.
Not to mention the sickening prospect that all our work would be supporting a band of plundering bandits. A voice in the back of my head sourly noted that we'd jokingly called the refuge proto-feudal, and now we'd achieved full bloom.
The two women had gleaned no further details, so we moved on to other, less distressing topics. Almost out of habit, I fell into the ebb and flow of a relational meeting, interviewing the both of them.
Despite appearances, Rachel and Rebecca were not old friends who had come to the refuge together. Rachel was 19, fresh from taking a year off to backpack around Europe–a trip funded by her stock broker parents. She had planned to attend her mother's alma mater in the fall, but wasn't very enthusiastic about the prospect. Those plans had obviously been cancelled in the panicked flight to Tall Pines.
Rebecca, by contrast, was a university sophomore studying anthropology and dance ("because why have one useless major when you can have two?"). Her boyfriend had insisted on bringing her to the refuge when his parents decided it was time for the family to bug out of civilization. They did not have a spare subscription for her; it was a terrible gamble that could have left her abandoned outside the gate. But the boyfriend hadn’t made it–gunned down before they ever reached the mountain–and so Rebecca took his berth.
The two met in the Gray Wolf labor pool and latched on to each other immediately. It was easy to see why: Rachel looked up to Rebecca's relative maturity while Rebecca relied on her friend's familiarity with the refuge and the refugee elites who populated it. (Even tipsy, Rebecca had carefully deflected any questions about her family's wealth growing up.) They served as each other's bulwark against the refuge's sometimes incomprehensible yet ever-present dangers.
I heard myself say, "Hey, after lunch on Sunday, there's a bunch of us meeting up here in the Mess. Just to… chat, hang out, maybe vent our gripes to sympathetic ears. If you wanted to join us?" Why was I inviting them to the networking event? Had I got caught up in the rhythm of the relational meeting and invited them by reflex?
They hardly struck me as the type to take action, but rather the type to roll over and vainly try to follow whatever rules were inflicted on them. Perhaps they'd cry to each other in a weak, private moment about how it was all so hard. But stepping up to change the rules themselves must have seemed as alien to them as bucking down to honest labor would seem to Bukhari.
Perhaps it was their youthful vitality (how much did I miss having students to inspire me!). Did I unconsciously detect some hidden reservoir of determination beneath Rebecca's obfuscated past? Or most likely, I told myself, it was that strength they clearly gave each other, the strength to persevere against an incoherent but plainly hostile world. That was something that our fledgling network could use.
Both of the lit up like lightbulbs at the invitation. "I'll bring my guitar!" Rachel promised, and before I could ask how she had come to possess one, they rose to leave. "It was really nice catching up with you!" they smiled, and then disappeared into the press of poolies filing out the doors.
What had happened? It felt like my head was spinning. I chuckled at myself and downed the rest of the water in my mug. Young people.
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