One day the desert ended and a parched, desolate forest replaced it. The forest too seemed to stretch forever, but there was not a single living thing within it. Everywhere around me I was surrounded by the aftereffects of a fire.
By the time we reached the Pacific, I could no longer tell the days and weeks apart. The men camped in the concrete remains of a desalination plant half-submerged in the water. The sound of waves crashing against the side of the building became maddening as the weeks went by. I gathered from the two men’s conversations that the smuggler’s ship that was to take us from this place had capsized, and it would be another month before the next one came. We waited.
Every night, the men listened to a small radio for news. For weeks there was nothing, and then a burst of reports of a mystery illness radiating from Columbus, and then nothing again.
A vessel arrived in late October. It was an old fiberglass crabber, badly beaten and ill-suited for the ocean. From the moment the men dragged me onboard, I was green with seasickness.
The trip north was slow and rough. The captain kept close to the shoreline, and often the men cursed him and said he was going to run us ashore.
THEN ONE DAY I looked out the cabin window to see a strange city alight with floating glitter. As we neared the port, I saw places in the water where previous ships had run into the submerged barrier reefs.
“You made it, kid,” the shorter man said. “New Anchorage—the neutral state. Welcome home.”
Excerpted from:
HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE FOR TRUTH AND REUNIFICATION, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THIRD CONGRESS (DECEMBER 1, 2123)
Members Present:
SENATOR ELI THOMPSON (New Reunificationist—Arkansas) Chair
SENATOR BARBARA AIKENS (Democrat—Cascadia/Oregon) Vice Chair
SENATOR PETER JINDAL (New Reunificationist—Missouri)
SENATOR CLAY NORMAN (Democrat—Illinois)
SENATOR BERNARD WILLIS (Democrat—Indiana)
Witnesses:
COLONEL BARRET SINGER (Ret.)
SEN. THOMPSON: Good morning, everyone. If we can get the screen up and running, I think we can pick up where we left off yesterday. Senator Aikens?
SEN. AIKENS: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Colonel, before we go back to the surveillance footage, I just wanted to ask you about something you mentioned yesterday. About the two soldiers who were manning the Rossville checkpoint—Private Martin Baker and, what was the other one’s name again?
COL. SINGER: Bud Baker Jr.
SEN. AIKENS: That’s right, thank you. You mentioned yesterday that they were—let me see…in your words, “wired for kinetics,” rather than border guard duty, is that correct?
COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: And what exactly did you mean by that, Colonel?
COL. SINGER: Well, certain young men, as soon as they arrive at the recruiter’s office, you can tell…What I mean is, if it had still been a hot war, I wouldn’t have assigned those boys to guard duty.
SEN. WILLIS: I think it’s pretty clear what the Colonel is saying, Senator. Those two boys were mean sons of bitches.
COL. SINGER: That would be an accurate description.
SEN. WILLIS: Can’t say I blame them, with what they’d been through.
SEN. AIKENS: Thank you, Colonel. Let’s go back to the video. Now, my understanding is that this is the only surviving footage of the crossing on that day?
COL. SINGER: That’s all we’ve got left, is the overhead. No ground-level, no audio.
SEN. AIKENS: So at the end of the day we’re left with what, exactly? Conjecture? A guess?
COL. SINGER: Well, ma’am, what we do know is that, shortly before the first cases appeared in Columbus, the same sickness was noted in the hospital to which this particular bus was headed. So there is some reason to believe that the person responsible for the virus could have come across the border on that bus.
SEN. AIKENS: But we have no manifest, no hospital records. Colonel, we don’t even know the name of anyone on this video except your two soldiers.
COL. SINGER: That’s right, ma’am. Obviously the decade of the Reunification Plague decimated many parts of this country, and countless records were lost. We’re left only with what survived.
SEN. AIKENS: Very well. Let’s play it. So the medical transport bus arrives at the checkpoint that day at around noon, is that correct?
COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: And there were no other vehicles or convoys of any kind cleared for passage to the North that day.
COL. SINGER: That’s right. It was two days to the Reunification Ceremony. The entire Southern border was on lockdown.
SEN. AIKENS: So the two soldiers at the Rossville checkpoint would have known ahead of time that this bus was to be allowed through?
COL. SINGER: They would have known it was an authorized vehicle, but we would never tell our soldiers to simply let a vehicle through. They would have known they would be expected to inspect the vehicle and check the paperwork of every passenger. Same as they would with anyone trying to come north from the Red.
SEN. AIKENS: So if we can go ahead and skip to the point where the passengers disembark…yes, thank you. Now at this point, one of the two young men—Private Martin Baker, I believe—is still inside the guard building. So what we have here is his brother, Bud Baker Jr., essentially ordering the passengers to line up for individual inspection. Is that correct, Colonel?
COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am. Again, standard procedure.
SEN. AIKENS: Now I see that, with the first two patients in line, Private Bud Jr. is perhaps a bit curt, but those interactions take just a minute or two. When he sees the third patient, however, I think it’s fairly evident that his demeanor changes, wouldn’t you say?
COL. SINGER: I suppose.
SEN. AIKENS: Any idea why?
COL. SINGER: Could be the size of the individual. You can see she appears to be a fairly intimidating woman, from a physical standpoint. Could be because she appears to be much younger than the first two people in line. Could be she reminded him of someone, or he thought he’d seen her before. Could be he just got a bad vibe from her—an instinctual thing.
SEN. AIKENS: So the young man who wheels her forward, he hands the travel permits to the Private for inspection. And now—if we can just pause it here—Colonel, can you tell me what the Private is saying here?
COL. SINGER: He’s asking her what her illness is.
SEN. AIKENS: He didn’t do that with the first two patients.
COL. SINGER: No ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: And her reply?
COL. SINGER: The way she’s facing, the overhead doesn’t catch her face.
SEN. AIKENS: But is it a fair assessment, Colonel, to say that the Private doesn’t believe her?
COL. SINGER: I couldn’t tell you. Obviously he doesn’t just let her pass.
SEN. AIKENS: That’s right. He orders her to stand up.
COL. SINGER: That’s what the lip readers tell me.
SEN. AIKENS: And when the young man pushing her wheelchair interjects, the Private doesn’t hesitate to raise his rifle at him and order him to his knees.
COL. SINGER: Senator, you’re talking about two boys who were bound and blindfolded and made to sit there while a Red insurrectionist—one who was never captured—tortured and killed their father. You’re talking about two boys who lied about their age on the recruitment form so they could get out to the front, two boys who’d only been stationed at that crossing a few weeks. Obviously this isn’t the way we train our border guards to perform inspections. Maybe he was having a bad day. Unfortunately we’ll never know, given that, by the end of the week, everyone you see on that screen was dead.
SEN. AIKENS: That’s not what confuses me, Colonel. If we could move ahead…so he turns back to this woman in the wheelchair, and it’s safe to say he orders her to stand up once more. And when she doesn’t, he kicks her chair over, sending her to the ground near where that young man is kneeling. Now he’s got the rifle pointed at the two of them, and I would expect at this point that, at the very least, he’s going to detain these two, if not the other ten patients as well. You stop the video right here and ask me what’s going to happen next, and I would bet my bottom dollar that nobody’s going to cross the border that day.