Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

Author:Steven Amsterdam [Amsterdam, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780733636318
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Published: 2016-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

It’s all worked out: I’ll verify Shane, give him a cash grant. Take the identities of two of Brownlee’s least-missed dead, make up new cards with their codes (she can get them from Medical), approve them for cash grants and work up north. Margo and Shane will get on the bus. I’ll sign off on my work, as usual, and then disappear, as would be usual, for the standard week or so, until the next event demands my presence. Tonight, I’ll get on the same bus, as if it’s a coincidence. At the Mid-City depot, she’ll explain to Shane what she swears he already knows, that it’s over. Then she and I will get on a bus heading north. She won’t tell me where to. It’s a surprise, but it’s somewhere we haven’t been, a town so small and out of the way it doesn’t even have any resettlers there. We’ll be invisible.

And what will Margo and I do when we arrive at this new paradise? Use the grants that go with the new identities and start our lives over, like everyone else. Enjoy being the least-missed dead people from Brownlee. Get reacquainted. Wait for the next event to push us along.

Most evacuees don’t learn. They try to resettle some place exciting (a target) or temperate (subject to floods, fires or earthquakes). Or they identify this month’s most thermo-politically neutral region. They assume they’re not going to have to pack again. Even though it may be the third or fourth resettling for some of them, they’re still completely tweaked with relocation fever. Full of piss and (as the expression goes) vinegar. They take their first steps around their new home and get confident, make friends, buy appliances, plant tomatoes. You want to shake them: do you really think this time’s going to be different?

We’re on the bus to Mid-City now, part one of the plan. Margo and Shane are in the back, convincingly sleeping on each other. My pack is on my lap. You never let go of your possessions when there are evacuees around.

I’m in front, with the rest of personnel. They’re all strangers to me except the psych doctor who, today, is completely sober and feels like chatting.

“I’m going to catch up with these cool guys. They’ve been camping up in the southern mountains for years. Predictable weather, enough food to find. I’m collecting some supplies for them, then heading out. Come. They’ve got all the equipment. You need some air, dude, you look like hell.”

Fortunately, he’s carrying half a bottle of Cuban rum. I’ve got government-issue mixed juice and it doesn’t take too much negotiating to get him started. I engage. I elaborate my difficulties to substantiate his diagnosis. It is hell, I tell him, having access to the documented histories of everyone’s bad investments – that I never wanted that kind of power, that I haven’t spoken to my parents in years, that I spend hours and hours alone, and, finally, that I saw an ex and it hurt.

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