Right Place, Right Time
Copyright© 2016 by Colin Keizer
Chapter 3: A New Beginning
16 June, 1984
Sunlight woke Jerry from the sleep of utter exhaustion. He kept his eyes tightly shut and turned his head, but it was bright everywhere. Was that ham he smelled? Bacon? Cooking pots rattled and sizzled faintly, far away, lots of them. There were many hushed voices all around, receding into a very long distance. Somewhere closer, steam whistled and shuffed. Horses whinnied, hooves clip-clopped, and metal-rimmed wooden wheels creaked as they turned, crunching gravel beneath them. That was all he heard. No traffic, no automobile engines, no crashes, no sirens, none of the noises of the city that always woke him when he slept with the windows open. Ah. Right. No windows. Ouch—no mattress, either. He was in a tent.
As he rummaged through memories from yesterday, another sound made itself known. Somewhere not far away, someone was crying, quietly, endlessly sobbing. There were other more distant voices like that one, too many voices like that.
The war?
Had somebody heard something more than Mr. Eldon could tell them last night? He probably ought to get up and find out. Soon. It’s not like he could actually fall asleep again, lying on the ground. Not even if he tried.
Noise levels inside the tent increased. Some of the boys were definitely awake.
“Nunh-uh!”
“He is too awake. I saw him move.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s awake.”
“Does too!”
“I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“What’s she doing here?”
Cautiously, Jerry opened one eye, squinting against the bright glow radiating inward from every canvas wall. Standing in the tent doorway was a small silhouette outlined by even brighter direct sunlight. He smiled reassuringly, at least he hoped it looked like a smile.
“She said I mustn’t wake you.”
Sitting up with the blanket wrapped around his waist, Jerry folded his feet under him and told the girl, “Don’t worry, you didn’t.”
She nodded solemnly and told him, “Miss Samantha asked me to tell you there’s breakfast in the dining hall.”
Ah. This was probably Sam code for “Get moving, Jerry.”
“What’s your name?”
“Amelia.”
“Thank you, Amelia. Please tell Sam, that is, Miss Samantha, that we’ll clean up and be there soon.” She vanished, leaving him to blink at the empty spot she had vacated. Looking around the tent, he saw a dozen faces, all staring at him.
“Time to start the day, boys. Fold your blankets neatly and stack them all around against the walls. When that’s done, we’ll go wash up and eat.” That plan lasted about ten seconds. It didn’t help that “neatly” was almost as much of a challenge for Jerry as it was for the kids. With one wrist in a cast, he found it just as difficult to reach both corners of a blanket. Time for a lesson in teamwork. He nodded at a quiet, dark-haired kid with glasses and a permanent squint.
“You want to help me demonstrate two-man blanket folding?” The boy nodded and took a step forward.
“What’s your name?”
“Ned.”
“Okay, everybody watch. Ned, grab that corner of my blanket, the one closest to you. Lift it up, hold it while I stretch, now bring it down to the matching corner at your feet. Pinch them together, like this, and I’ll drag my corner over to drop on yours. One more time with the fold at my feet, and we’re done. Everybody got that? Make it happen for all the blankets, stack them neatly where you slept last night, and we can all go eat breakfast.”
A few minutes later, they were all on their way to the sinks and showers building.
Scrubbed and more than ready for food, they followed their ears, noses, and appetites to the dining hall. Jerry pulled a sheet of notepaper out of one shirt pocket and counted heads as the boys trooped past him toward the food. Comparing his count with Mary’s list, he decided nobody was missing. Today he would have to work on learning more of the boys’ names from that list and attaching those names to faces.
Of course, the girls had arrived first. Sam waved and pointed him at a mostly vacant table near theirs. Carrie and Elizabeth were behind the food serving tables with several other women he didn’t recognize when he herded the boys through the line. Grabbing utensils in his good hand, he wrapped them in a napkin and stuffed the bundle into his shirt pocket. The sturdy ceramic plate was almost too heavy for him to manage one-handed. Living like that for the next few weeks while his wrist healed was going to be a challenge.
“Thanks for the juice, Carrie. Is that apple? I’m okay, I can put the glass on the plate and balance the whole works on my cast, see? The sausage smells really good, Elizabeth.” She nodded, but otherwise didn’t seem to notice him. Carrie prodded her, and she came to life, scooped up two links, and slid them onto his plate. Looking up at him, she pasted an obviously forced smile on her pale face.
“Some of them call it buffalo, and some of them call it bison. You can have seconds, if you want.” Her attention faded again, and Carrie pointed her at the plate of the boy next in line.
“Some of them call it buffalo, and some of them call it bison. You can have seconds, if you want.” Ned was totally focused on the food. Jerry noticed the almost robotic echo and raised an eyebrow at Carrie. She shrugged and turned to pour another glass of juice for the next boy in line.
The boys quickly settled at their table, heads down and vacuuming food off their plates. He’d managed a few thoughtful bites himself when Sam tapped him on the shoulder.
“Jerry, when you finish, come over to our table, please. We all need to talk.”
He glanced at the girls’ table. It was immediately clear that Mary was keeping an eye on Elizabeth. She also seemed to be coping well with a little girl who wanted cuddling more than oatmeal. Sarah had damp paper towels in both hands to wipe grease off another girl’s face. One of the older girls had taken over spoon-feeding a much younger girl and appeared confident in what she was doing. The other little girls had mostly emptied their plates and begun looking curiously around the dining hall.
Some of the boys had already cleared their plates and gone back for seconds. Jerry wanted to hear what Sam, Mary, and the other women had to say. They’d had much more time than him last night, listening to Mr. Eldon. Maybe they had learned something about the encampment or about that weird black rectangle that had brought everyone here. It sure looked like Elizabeth had learned something, and she didn’t seem at all happy about whatever it was.
Most of all, he wanted to know if they’d found out anything about the war. For instance, was there really a war? Everything that had happened since he’d walked into that Mormon temple had been so well organized, so quick, and so neat that it made even thinking about war just plain strange.
Sam looked up and smiled when he sat down in the space between her and Mary. Her sister tried a smile also, but was obviously too concerned about their situation to put much into it.
“Jerry? Thank you for staying with us. It really helps the boys to have you with them.”
“Glad I could help, Mary, and happier still that we’re not stuck doing that in a big concrete hole in the ground. I just wish I knew how we got here and where ‘here’ is. Have any of you learned anything?”
Silence. They all knew something, but nobody wanted to be the first to put it in words. Finally, Sam spoke up. “Everyone from here tells us we’re safe. They really mean it, and I don’t think it’s the kind of safe from being only a few miles away when...” He nodded, understanding immediately the words she didn’t want to use in front of the kids.
“Somehow, yesterday, we traveled a very long way from Everett. I looked at the sky last night, Jerry, after the girls went to sleep. The constellations are the same as home, but look a bit different here. I’m not sure how much different, but I think it’s important. Mr. Eldon, our guide last night, told us we are in a temporary camp. He told us a lot more while you were at the clinic. We also learned some new things this morning as we worked with the cooks on breakfast.
“Actually, there’s nothing really temporary about this place, except for the tents and some of us, as everybody sorts out how to go forward. This is actually kind of an annex of a town. The hard parts, like drilled wells and plumbed bathrooms and community kitchens with stoves and pans and sinks, those they had already built long ago. Overbuilt, really. Far more than their town needed. A lot of the people helping cook food for us yesterday, putting up tents, guiding us around, they live in their own homes in the town. They volunteered to help all of us in the ... in the emergency. Except for the doctors and nurses and people like them that are already working to help others, everybody has jobs they need to get back to, so we’ll have to pick up a lot of the cooking, cleaning, and other work for ourselves right away.
“When we arrived last night, did you notice how big this town is? The wooden buildings around us are mostly brand new. Some, like the dining halls, clinic, and warehouse, are only a few years old. Most of the apartment buildings are mass-produced from huge kits, and the ones closest to us here are really new. Some were only finished last week. Concrete pads for more of them will be poured today or tomorrow, and the goal is to have all of us out of the tents as soon as possible.
“People in the other parts of town have been living in buildings just like these for a while, some for years. A lot of those have empty rooms that some of us will move to right away. People assembled the newest buildings here over the last few weeks after the war warnings began. They were mostly empty until yesterday. I saw teams of men and women soldiers putting up walls for another one this morning. They want us out of the tents and inside something sturdy before any bad storms hit this place. When they say “bad storm,” it sounds a lot like the hurricanes I thought I’d left behind in Florida when Mary and I came to Everett. The constellations I saw last night remind me of Florida, too.
“Mr. Eldon told us we’ll be here for a few days, maybe a week or more. Somebody somewhere else, it seems to me they mean government people, will try to use the information we all gave to Mr. Eldon, together with all the information they collect from other people, to put families back together.
“They also want to find out more about our jobs, schooling, and other abilities. More than they already asked us yesterday. That should happen today and tomorrow. People with farming, fishing, logging, and that sort of experience will go to work right away. Teachers will need to go through some testing, and the ones who pass will have lots of work right away, too. The people running this place want to give us all useful work to do. They’ll make sure anybody who needs help quickly learns to do something useful. They use that word ‘useful’ a lot.
“Everybody sleeping in tents will have to move into buildings as they are built. There aren’t enough soldiers to put all the building kits together fast enough, so some of us will have to do that, too. Mr. Eldon was really apologetic this morning about the tents we slept in last night. He didn’t want to put women and kids in them, but that’s all they had left. No, that’s not right. I actually saw some people sleeping under tarp tents this morning. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody slept under the sky last night. I hope there were enough blankets to go around.”
She stopped, looked down at her hands, and seemed to search carefully for the right words. “There are more than three thousand rescued people in this place, Jerry. Mr. Eldon didn’t know the final count when he talked with us yesterday. They had planned on more like one thousand, but of course, that didn’t work out. There are lots more towns like this one, too, hundreds of them, he said, and most of their annexes have at least a thousand rescued people in them just like this one. Well, probably lots more than a thousand, actually. I expect most of them are just as overloaded as we are here.”
Sam stopped again, head down, unable to go on. In a moment, he saw her shoulders shaking and realized she was crying. It took him a little longer to figure out why.
“Hundreds?” His own eyes stung as he did the math.