epilogue
blue helmets
That deployment only lasted two weeks: one week of frontline services, at first in improvised safety gear, and then as the supply chains caught up with the crisis, another week with good bunny suits and a headquarters—that had once been Gramps’s house—outfitted with decontam showers and scrounged beds and storerooms with the supplies we delivered all day to people waiting for FEMA to arrive.
FEMA was stretched thin. The plume had scoured the Valley, and Burbank wasn’t the worst-hit place. They had a lot of customers, so we stayed on for another week.
But by the third week, it was time to go. There were still going to be Blue Helmets in Burbank for a long time, helping the evacuees pack their essentials and find new homes elsewhere, but I couldn’t be one of them. I started having these middle-of-the-night crying fits. I couldn’t say what I was crying about, but it wasn’t good for me or for the other Blue Helmets in our HQ. I thought a lot about what Ana Lucía had said: We didn’t just leave Tehachapi, we buried it. It’s dead. We can’t go home. We don’t have a home anymore. Going back? It’d be like digging up Grandma’s bones and sitting her down at the end of the Thanksgiving table.
Phuong and I discussed putting in for an overseas assignment—she still had friends in London working on Thames estuary retreats—but in the end, we decided we’d head for Santa Barbara.
Why Santa Barbara? Well, it was a town I’d visited several times and remembered as a beautiful place. It was facing the same dangers that lots of Southern California coastal towns were working through, only it had been a laggard, behind leaders like San Juan Capistrano.
And it was a place that said it would take in a lot of Burbankers. That made it weirdly perfect: Burbank may have been beyond saving, but I could still help my neighbors. I started by wrapping up a bag of gold krugerrands in construction-grade mylar, addressing it to the general relief fund, and leaving it on the receptionist’s desk at the main resettlement office. I’m sure they had cameras and could have identified me, but they didn’t. Sometimes I caught my fellow Blue Helmets looking at me in a weird way, especially Vikram, and I wondered if they knew. If so, everyone kept quiet about it.
* * *
Phuong and I woke late one morning. We had couples’ housing, a converted shipping container with a kitchenette and a toilet, treated with insulating foam and air-conditioned with a combination of rooftop turbines and panels.
We’d worked late the night before: the heat pump in one of the new refugee high-rises we’d helped finish had died when everyone turned on their air conditioners, and the outside wet-bulb temp was up around 90°F, which was getting into lethal heatstroke territory.
I had just certified on heat pump repair and I dialed in a brain trust of senior techs around the world while Phuong, Wilmar, and Milena played dogsbody and we’d gotten it running again just after midnight. The system automatically redetailed our morning assignments to someone else and we remembered to turn off our alarms before collapsing into bed.
After breakfast, Phuong suggested we head to the beach and do some bodysurfing before the sun grew too hot, so we put on our UV-blocking bodysuits and flip-flops and grabbed our water bottles and walked through the midmorning town, first the new part we’d helped build, then the old part that had been heavily infilled, then the drowned part with its floating walkways, abandoned and soggy and sinking.
We threaded our way along the walkways until we came to a sandbar that the Blue Helmets had helped a bunch of surfers create. Some were bobbing out on the sea already, catching waves when they came but mostly content to just float in the cool water as the scorching sun rose overhead.
We joined them, and Phuong caught a couple of good waves and then I managed to catch one and nearly brained myself on some flotsam. It was scary at first, exhilarating in retrospect, and now the sun was getting high enough that we decided that we needed to go add another layer of zinc to our faces if we were going to stay out in it.
I was reapplying the orange and blue stripes across Phuong’s cheeks and forehead when Armen and Dave found us, preceded by a bow wave of weed fumes.
Dave waved his hands in the air. “Holy shit you two, you have to see this.” They were both in hi-viz and coveralls, with work gloves stuffed in the pockets. They’d proven to be surprisingly effective as a work crew … but only when paired with each other. When either one got paired with someone else, it was an unmitigated disaster all around.
Armen, a little more stoned perhaps, trailed him by a half step, but nodded vigorously. “Seriously.”
So we scooped up our water and slid into our sandals and followed them around a bend in the coast, just in time to see three smartly turned-out Zodiacs with fuel-cell outboards tying up to half-submerged parking meters.
They were crewed by young men and women as smartly turned out as their boats in boat-shorts, formfitting, low-rise rock-hopper shoes, and pristine white sailing shirts. Each wore a ball cap embroidered with a cursive motto: THE MORAL HAZARD.
“Ahoy” was what the leader—an improbably good-looking Asian guy with a dazzling smile—actually said, as he leapt nimbly onto a floating pathway and headed for dry land … and us. “Permission to come ashore?”
Phuong narrowed her eyes at him. “You appear to be ashore, and the permission isn’t ours to give. What can we help you with?”
The rest of the boaters were coming ashore now, scrubbed faces, white shirts, white, white smiles. “We’re from the Flotilla!” he said. “It’s about a mile offshore. We’re doing an information tour down the coast and wanted to see about offering you and your neighbors a chance to come aboard and see what the future could be like!”
Armen and Dave found that very funny. I grabbed Phuong’s hand and squeezed it, and she squeezed back.