Read Online The Refugee Sentinel by Harrison Hayes - Free Book Online
Authors: Harrison Hayes
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another gastritic salute from his stomach. Someone had scratched a hasty star, to designate where the new lobby was, next to the plastic button for the twelfth floor: vandalism with a pinch of dark humor. Six months ago, the star would have sat next to the tenth-floor button. Six months from now, Gurloskey and whoever else was dumb enough to still live in this dead city would have to move the star higher. The elevator ding startled him. It wasn’t noon yet but he couldn’t keep his eyes open and gave himself a solemn promise to turn in by nine tonight.
He followed the handmade “Exit” arrows scratched on the walls and ended at what had once been a solid sidewall, now cut out and replaced with the gaping entry of a jet bridge leading to the main suspension bridge outside.
The rot hit his nostrils as soon as he stepped into the open. Fourth Avenue looked like a Venice canal, only more run-down. The water lapped at awnings and sidewalls, hundreds of feet above the submerged street level. High-rises jutted at crooked angles, like scattered concrete dominos, sunk partway in the sloshing waves. Barnacles covered the walls as high as a foot above the water and soiled sea-foam cuddled along once-functioning windows, now boarded by steel plates. Mayor Mullins had learned from New York’s U-shaped berm and Rotterdam’s seven-hundred-foot floodgates. As a result, Seattle was prepared when Greenland melted. But when the flood stayed, the city started its three-year-long suffering. The outer ocean wall bought some time for Mullins and Gurloskey to erect suspension bridges above the major downtown avenues. But when the wall bowed head to the persistent tidal pressure, whatever lay behind stood no chance. Furniture and computers, carpets and wiring were gone in less than a week. Entire city blocks were submerged to their third floors. The cars parked in the streets drifted in the water, like bobbing apples, and Seattle turned into a ghost town, without electricity, heat or human compassion. The smell of death filled the air as the waters corroded the buildings from within. The city’s seaport, once a proud gateway to Asia’s largest economies, became an oversized and lifeless aquarium.
This was the flood Gurloskey fought against, set to reclaim his tattered town even if it meant strapping Seattle on his back and pulling it away from the waters of the Puget Sound. He imposed a night curfew, growing in perimeter and time with each passing week. He dispersed the crowds of protesters that had been picketing for months. He converted banks into prisons and filled them with looters. Without search warrants, he barreled into residences within ten miles of the flooded downtown, confiscating any firearms his cops could lay hands on. He slept in his office for months without going home, regardless of how tempting it felt to flee to the high suburbs of Woodinville. He hadn’t seen Eaton and Chloe and missed them, but a part of him didn’t mind, because they weren’t supposed to know him like this.
In time, one slow week after the next, the riots subsided, the night patrols uncovered fewer and fewer dead bodies at dawn, running water was restored to the municipal buildings and several downtown shelters opened for those without a place to call home. People were pulling together, seeing that togetherness was the ticket for survival. Mullins featured his Police Chief in a growing number of video calls with other mayors, dishing proven advice on how Seattle was coping. By the end of the sixth month, to Natt’s exhausted astonishment, it felt like he’d turned the tide on Mother Nature by a creaky inch. By less than an inch. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine life in his city returning to relative normalcy. A new normalcy by any account, but a normalcy anyway. He felt good and more in love with his family and the Seattle he had begun to save.
Then Antarctica fell and raised the oceans by another two hundred feet.
sixteen days
He followed the handmade “Exit” arrows scratched on the walls and ended at what had once been a solid sidewall, now cut out and replaced with the gaping entry of a jet bridge leading to the main suspension bridge outside.
The rot hit his nostrils as soon as he stepped into the open. Fourth Avenue looked like a Venice canal, only more run-down. The water lapped at awnings and sidewalls, hundreds of feet above the submerged street level. High-rises jutted at crooked angles, like scattered concrete dominos, sunk partway in the sloshing waves. Barnacles covered the walls as high as a foot above the water and soiled sea-foam cuddled along once-functioning windows, now boarded by steel plates. Mayor Mullins had learned from New York’s U-shaped berm and Rotterdam’s seven-hundred-foot floodgates. As a result, Seattle was prepared when Greenland melted. But when the flood stayed, the city started its three-year-long suffering. The outer ocean wall bought some time for Mullins and Gurloskey to erect suspension bridges above the major downtown avenues. But when the wall bowed head to the persistent tidal pressure, whatever lay behind stood no chance. Furniture and computers, carpets and wiring were gone in less than a week. Entire city blocks were submerged to their third floors. The cars parked in the streets drifted in the water, like bobbing apples, and Seattle turned into a ghost town, without electricity, heat or human compassion. The smell of death filled the air as the waters corroded the buildings from within. The city’s seaport, once a proud gateway to Asia’s largest economies, became an oversized and lifeless aquarium.
This was the flood Gurloskey fought against, set to reclaim his tattered town even if it meant strapping Seattle on his back and pulling it away from the waters of the Puget Sound. He imposed a night curfew, growing in perimeter and time with each passing week. He dispersed the crowds of protesters that had been picketing for months. He converted banks into prisons and filled them with looters. Without search warrants, he barreled into residences within ten miles of the flooded downtown, confiscating any firearms his cops could lay hands on. He slept in his office for months without going home, regardless of how tempting it felt to flee to the high suburbs of Woodinville. He hadn’t seen Eaton and Chloe and missed them, but a part of him didn’t mind, because they weren’t supposed to know him like this.
In time, one slow week after the next, the riots subsided, the night patrols uncovered fewer and fewer dead bodies at dawn, running water was restored to the municipal buildings and several downtown shelters opened for those without a place to call home. People were pulling together, seeing that togetherness was the ticket for survival. Mullins featured his Police Chief in a growing number of video calls with other mayors, dishing proven advice on how Seattle was coping. By the end of the sixth month, to Natt’s exhausted astonishment, it felt like he’d turned the tide on Mother Nature by a creaky inch. By less than an inch. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine life in his city returning to relative normalcy. A new normalcy by any account, but a normalcy anyway. He felt good and more in love with his family and the Seattle he had begun to save.
Then Antarctica fell and raised the oceans by another two hundred feet.
sixteen days
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