“What’s worse, Dane, is that I’m angry! I’m a Six, right? Why do I have to pay for Ones? Why can’t they do more to get it together and take care of themselves, anyway? If this was how my father’s generation felt before the Burning, then I suppose it’s true, change the system, but nothing changes.”

  Audrey peered around the glass edge of Paul’s door and cleared her throat. Dane turned, causing Audrey to flush, giving Dane’s perfectly coiffed dark hair and piercing light eyes a long look before flicking her gaze back to her boss. “Senator Abbott, if you’re all set here …?”

  Paul waved her away, watching Audrey give another suggestive glance toward his assistant. Dammit. Even in his sweater and jeans the man was wanted by women. And he didn’t even want them.

  Paul walked over and sat down at his desk, glaring not at Level One but now at Dane. The two men stared at each other. At last, Paul stood, walking to the left wall of the office and pressed the flush cabinets set within to reveal a bar. He chose two glasses of finely cut crystal before helping himself to a 100-year-old bottle of Scotch swiped from the salvage raids. He glanced back before pouring, one hand on the bottle. Dane shrugged. Paul chuckled. He knew his assistant turned a blind eye to his and the rest of the senators’ sticky fingers on salvage spoils. Paul, as senior, always snagged the very best.

  Paul poured two fingers, skipping the ice. He carefully capped the bottle and placed it on the desk. It did not go back in the cabinet.

  “To change,” Dane said, drinking his in one swig.

  Paul raised his to his lips, then set the crystal down with a thump, watching Dane pour them each another, the golden nectar swirling in his glass. Dane sipped his, but now it was Paul who knocked his back. Every time, he felt like he was downing a precious metal.

  He swiveled around, facing the Community lights again. He closed his eyes, seeing it like it once was: open farmland, a scattering of yurts and cabins the survivors constructed around a rudimentary county hospital. He remembered finding that hospital with his father. They had traveled hundreds of miles using electric cars rigged with heavy solar panels.

  “Dad … I think I see something,” Paul remembered shouting. They were somewhere in the Dakotas, most likely North Dakota, and they had been on the road for days.

  “I don’t see anything, son.” Jim, Paul’s father, was near defeat. Paul’s mom and two sisters died in the Burning, and it looked like they might not make it themselves.

  “No, Dad – DAD! Pull over!” Jim screeched to a halt – there were no rules of the road anymore, or for that matter, laws themselves, and the car veered wildly, spinning a bit and stopping sideways.

  The pair sat in the middle of an abandoned, somewhat melted road, facing a dilapidated, old building. It was old, it was cracked, but it was also big, and most importantly, standing. Paul’s father cried.

  It was the second, and last, time Paul ever saw his father cry. The first was only days earlier, after returning home from their hike under a lake. Jim sobbed openly at the sight of his wife and daughters, burned to death in the pool. The fires had been too fierce.

  Paul took a deep shuddering breath and forced himself to open his eyes and return to the present. He spun his office chair around so fast that it almost spun off its axis. He poured himself another drink and jumped to his feet, pacing, attempting to shake the memory of his sisters clinging to his mother in that pool.

  “Did I ever tell you why we named it the Community?”

  “No,” Dane said quietly, as Paul paced frenetically back and forth in front of the windows. “That was your decision?”

  “Course not. That was dad. Everyone wanted to name it Abbotten, after him. But dear old dad said if we called it the Community it stripped away the borders, no territories, no countries.” The liquor was starting to run through him, warming him up.

  “Dad was so damn cocky. He was just playing them. The Level system was only so he could stay in charge. Pretending ‘fair is fair’ and all that.”

  “But it is fair, sir. How can you say otherwise?”

  Paul sat down hard in his chair, leaning back so far that he had to wave furiously, paddling the air to keep upright. “No, it’s not! Sure, you pay the Level Five tax, you’re a Level Five. But it’s all corrupt. Dane, you should know better.”

  Dane shrugged, but crossed his ankles and shook his head when Paul raised the bottle in Dane’s direction.

  “It’s a good system, sir. You and your father built something you should be proud of.”

  “If only my father could see me now,” Paul muttered, holding his glass and staring into the bottom as if it held a solution to his problem. “A failure of the great Jim Abbott.”

  He put his glass up, holding it close to his cheek now. “Or … is it Jim Abbott the great?”

  “Your father would have nothing but praise.”

  “No. No, no, no, Dane. The only thing he’d praise is my votes. And that’s because Nora looks dead! They’re not even voting for me. They’re voting for Nate, the poor bastard.”

  “Citizens aren’t stupid, sir. They’re voting for you because you do a competent job.”

  “Ha!” Paul snorted, laughing as he downed a fourth – fifth? – drink and dropped the glass to his desk. “The thing is, they are. Once they find out what waits for them on the outside, they’re going to be pissed.”

  Dane frowned. Paul could almost feel the waves of disapproval coming from his assistant when he stumbled slightly on his way back to the tall cabinet, the almost empty bottle in his left hand. He tripped, most of the remaining Scotch sloshing out of the bottle and onto the nearby sofa. Paul’s face flamed red as he flailed on the ground, waving away Dane’s offers of help. When Paul finally pulled himself up, he was looking at a dusty picture frame that had fallen behind the console table. Hidden from main view, he could now see the photo clearly.

  Paul. Jim. And Eugene – the first person to hear the radio calls and find Jim and Paul.

  Dane watched Paul pick up the abandoned photo.

  “Who’s that?”

  Paul put the frame on his desk, keeping his eye on the occupants. “That,” he said, his voice quieter. “Is Eugene.”

  “Eugene Eddy, you mean? The scientist?”

  “The very one.” Paul eased onto the sofa, his eyes never leaving the photo. Dane moved to sit next to Paul, perching on the far edge so as not to stain his pants. Already the Scotch had seeped onto much of the cushions and infused the room with its marker-like scent.

  “He was only a few years older than me. And he was smarrrt.” Paul was getting more difficult to understand by the minute. “But boy could he get things done.”

  “Like what?”

  Paul leaned back, his heels digging into the carpet, toes upward with his legs splayed out. He put up both hands and started ticking off items on his left hand.

  “One, he jerry-rigged the cell towers – those things looked like goners – so we could make calls. Two, he did something with water and worked with our farming detail to grow food even with all that ioni … ionuh … the radioactive shit in the sky. Three, same thing, figured out that deep lakes protected wildlife, so we still had protein, though I could live the rest of my life without another fish, thank you very much. And four, the mills.” Paul leaned back, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Smart.”

  “Forget smart. Eugene was a bloody genius. I used …” Paul flushed, then continued. “I used to trail him around like a puppy. But he never told me to go away.” Paul paused, swaying. “Back then, everyone just said, ‘there go the boys,’ because we were inseparable.”

  “Sounds like you two were close.”

  “Like brothers.” A long silence stretched between them. At last Paul looked up, squinting in an effort to focus on Dane’s face. “My dad screwed it up.”

  Dane raised an eyebrow but didn’t respond.

  “Everyone thought Eugene won the vote for Community Leader, and a lot of people distrusted the system. It’s why dad renamed it the Protectant, did I ever tell you that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, thasss why. Dad and Eugene. Who oversaw counting votes? Dad. Of course people were going to get mad, can you imagine what would happen if I went down there and did that? No. Wouldn’t fly.” Paul leaned in close, blowing his Scotch-infused breath directly on Dane’s face, and Dane bobbled.

  “I was a teen, what did I know. But that was just another fight.”

  It was the first of many. There was the time Rebecca and Eugene decided to get married. When Paul defended his father’s decision to ration food stores, so a wedding cake couldn’t be baked. Or the time Rebecca was pregnant and gave birth to a dead baby; Jim Abbott argued radiation’s effect should end natural childbirth. That had been a turning point between Rebecca and Jim.

  “So, what happened?” Dane asked, interrupting Paul’s thoughts. “Voter fraud caused the big split?”

  Paul shook his head, the dozens of arguments floating around his alcohol-addled brain.

  “No, no. It was … the mills.”

  Both men simultaneously looked out the window at the rows upon rows of mills – acres that stretched far beyond in fields of white, stretching out like daisies beyond the Community’s desert, barren circle.

  Dane frowned. “The mills?”

  “Eugene developed the science for them the year before. How they drew O2 from the groundwater and replenished the atmosphere? That was all Eugene. If it had been five years earlier, he would have won a Nobel for it. Anyway, Eugene calculated it wouldn’t be enough in the end.”

  Paul cleared his throat, finding it suddenly dry. The implication of Eugene’s long foretold conclusion hung in the air, unspoken.

  “What did he suggest instead?” Dane asked finally.

  “That we were to uproot everything we’d built and go further north.”

  “Where … where the Fringe is.”

  Paul looked at Dane, squinting again at his assistant. The two had only spoken of the Fringe once before, at the clinic. Dane probably wouldn’t be doing so now, if Paul wasn’t so drunk. What were they talking about again?

  “So that was the big fight?”

  “Fights, shmights. People always fighting. I swear it’s what I deal with all day, every day. Why are you here again, Dane?”

  Dane tilted his head to the side. Paul stared back at his assistant through half-closed eyes, watching as Dane stood, and felt him give him a light pat.

  “No reason, sir. Was going to recommend you crash here. I’ll get you a blanket.”

  Oh. He could use a blanket. He looked out the tall windows – those were some tall windows – where Level Four resided. It was where the farms originally began. He remembered the last argument between Eugene and himself. He leaned back against the sofa, vaguely recognizing the soft folds of fabric Dane draped over him, and wondered if Eugene ever thought about the past, too.

  “Paul, I did it. I DID IT,” Eugene yelled as he ran into the old, decrepit building that held their supplies. It was a former dairy farm that hadn’t seen a cow in years, but the smell of manure pervaded its walls and floors.

  A seventeen-year-old Paul crouched on the floor, counting bars of soap next to yawning open doors. The herbalist had rolled by in her wagon earlier, and every piece needed to be counted and distributed into bi-weekly family baskets.

  A crestfallen Paul looked at the crate. Eugene realized his shouting caused his best friend to lose count. Eugene watched Paul sigh, toss a rough-hewn bar back onto the heap, and stand up. Wiping his hands on his stained canvas pants, Paul turned to face Eugene. He looked curious, and Eugene didn’t blame him, he never yelled. Come to think of it, he wasn’t the running type, either.

  “Did you run here?” Paul asked, incredulous.

  “Forget that—” Eugene strode across the cement entrance, past the chalkboards listing every family and their allotted rations, grabbing Paul by the shoulders, and gripping tightly as he shook his head, almost as if he himself couldn’t believe his own accomplishment.

  “I did it – I DID it. We can get it back, we can get it all back.” Eugene whooped, releasing Paul and clasping his fists, shaking them victoriously above his head.

  Paul watched his friend with a bemused expression.

  “Okay, tell me you idiot. What can we get back?”

  Eugene stopped dancing around, pausing to catch his breath. “The earth, boy,” Eugene said, not seeing Paul frown when he used the word “boy.”

  “I finally configured the right formula to draw oxygen from the mill, that, combined with protective spheres, will ultimately cross-pollinate, thwart the heat and reinvigorate the soil.”

  Paul stared at Eugene for a long moment, squinting. “What?”

  “The point is, the earth can be saved, we can be saved. It can all go back to like it was,” Eugene said a little too enthusiastically. Paul frowned. Eugene just grinned back, he couldn’t help it.

  “Look …” Paul began.

  “I mean, it will take time and a lot of manpower,” Eugene interrupted, something he made a habit out of doing. A dark shadow passed across Paul’s face, but Eugene didn’t see it. “I’m telling you, this will restore the earth’s forests and if we do it quickly enough, it will renew the earth’s atmosphere and reduce the effect of the sun on the …” Eugene trailed off, finally noticing his friend, who wasn’t listening but standing in the doorway.

  Eugene moved to join him, the pair of them staring at the small amount of geo mills Eugene developed only two years earlier. Paul turned, arms crossed, forehead crinkled deep in thought.

  “But … why? We just invested all that time and effort in the mills. They’re spectacular, man,” Paul waved an arm toward the newly constructed mills that harnessed the land, sun and water to emulate ten trees with each mill.

  The residents immediately noticed a difference, and both Eugene and Jim – the inventor and the instigator – widely praised.

  Eugene frowned. “That was just the start. But this, this is the beginning to the end. We can truly rebuild with my discovery.”

  “Oh,” said Paul, his eyes narrowed. “Your discovery. I get it. You’re just angling to run the whole place, aren’t you? It’s not enough we act like a crazy cult and share everything – we’re all just a brotherhood,” Paul said, in a mocking voice.

  Eugene stood, jaw slack, staring. He couldn’t believe the words coming out of his best friend’s mouth, yet somehow, he expected it all along. Any son of Jim’s was bound to turn power-hungry.

  “But then you’re saying we have to break our back for a new invention. I think you’re trying to mess with our heads,” Paul said, his voice rising.

  “What?” Eugene said, stunned. “Paul, no, those mills are temporary. Temporary. It was always just a means to an end until we found the solution. And I found it! We can get the planet back to where it once was. Fifty years from now it’ll be like all this never happened.” Eugene stopped talking, realizing his teeth were chattering. He didn’t know if it was because he was cold from sweat drying, or the chill of realizing he couldn’t stay in the Community anymore. Everything – and everyone – he knew, gone. It hit him with such finality that he realized it was something he couldn’t deny any longer. If he lived in a place with the Abbotts, he or the earth would die. Most likely both.

  “Oh,” Paul said, leaning against the doorway, his 6’6” height filling the frame. “Sure. And who finds the solution? Let me guess! Eugene!” Paul gave a cold smile. “You know what? I think you’re angry you didn’t get the votes and dad is the leader. Look – you’re young, you have a lot to learn. Dad said you could be Senior Science Advisor.”

  Eugene took a step back. He had given so totally of himself these last four years since the Darwinian Event, he didn’t even know who he was anymore – himself or the Community.

  “Are you serious? This has nothing to do with your precious votes,” spat Eugene.

  Paul uncrossed his arms, looking momentarily abashed.

  “Eugene …”

  “You’re right,” Eugene agreed, cutting him off. “I was in way over my head running against your dad. But I also have ideas. Some great ideas. And I just discovered how to bring us all back. So maybe it’s best I start this somewhere that isn’t here.”

  Paul was quiet. He didn’t argue. “Where will you go?” Paul asked, curious, and because Eugene knew his friend didn’t really think he would leave. It was considered almost suicidal to go outside the Community.

  Eugene shrugged. “North. That will help restoration the most.”

  Paul nodded, still looking unconvinced. “Okay, then.”

  Eugene looked at Paul, moving to walk past him, who remained tall and foreboding in the doorway. “Okay, then,” Eugene repeated.

  Eugene started. He looked at Beccs, sleeping peacefully. He didn’t know why that memory came back so suddenly after all these years. Was it because Nora was here? And all this talk of Paul? Eugene lay back in bed, glancing at the full moon outside their bedroom window, and wondered if Paul ever thought about the past, too.

  Dane watched Paul snoring peacefully in a boozy slumber on the sofa, one arm on the floor. He shook his head, then set about organizing paperwork – actual paper – that his boss had dropped. Dane shuffled – then reshuffled – then filed and dropped the paperwork before organizing it for a fifth time, each time scanning its contents quickly, lest the office cameras catch him out.

  Nothing on the paperwork mentioned the space program, Levels, geo mills, clinics or anything that Paul oversaw.

  Dear Leaders of the Geographical Region of the Middle Americas,

  The global community has sent communications with confirmed receipt of messaging. Your lack of response indicates we must take independent measures.

  The enforcement of airspace around your territory is a detriment to the global community. It is a generous territory that you claim, and one that has proven difficult to navigate when securing supplies in this increasingly barren landscape.

  Enforcing military power around your airspace leaves us no choice but to respond in the same fashion.

 

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