The Crest

They stood on the Crest in the maddening smoke and looked out on the charred wasteland. Through their binoculars, they saw the man running through the trees, desperate, gasping, exhausted. Behind him the fire storm crept closer.

As they watched the terrified man trying to outrun the wildfire, all around them, the searing wind blew feathery trails of soot across the battlement while massive dust devils swirled across the land. The smoke stung their eyes and incapacitated their lungs. They gazed at the massive conflagration and imagined the fear in the running man. From their perspective, he had about two minutes left to live. Already the flames, from the thirty-five mile per hour tempest, were searing the man’s backside.

The pair continued watching the tableau from the safety of their lofty concrete wall, transfixed with his impending death. As they surveyed the scene, the man staggered, the end near. They watched the final act through field scopes and were amazed by the man’s perseverance. It seemed the blaze swallowed his body, yet he somehow emerged out of the flames. Then Margot saw him catch on fire. She gasped at the site. The man twisted and contorted, she saw him scream and roll on the ground. She turned from the ghastly scene and grew sick to her stomach.

Watching the morbid display below them; the pair wondered how it all came to be like this. The Crest was the product of a climate gone astray, damaged beyond repair, and not everyone wanted to live in it. The youth that defended the Crest possessed an apocalyptical poignancy that defined their generation. Their world was falling apart, yet they held wisdom beyond their years; they projected a tranquility about their tenebrous future; they possessed a macabre sense of humor.

On the Crest, the defenders persisted the best they could; they were eighteen-year-olds protecting a 40-mile ridgeline. They depended on their partners for support during attacks, and soundness of mind through the long monotonous days on the rampart.

Once the shaded streams and lakes held rainbow trout, but no more. The defenders realized the planet was dying, but they didn’t want to put that thought in their heads, because they knew it would stay there forever. Instead, they tried to convince themselves that things would improve; they told stories to make themselves feel happy. There was self-denial on the Crest, and that seemed okay for these young people.

The Crest Forces, otherwise known as Crefor, each patrolled their own 91 feet of wall. Their own concrete hell, a boredom extravaganza. Each peered through the curtain wall—searching for the enemy, out there in good old Oeste Americano, contemplating their existence.

“Well, that was morbid as hell. “Why did I have to see that?” Margot asked.

“I’d wipe it out of your mind if I were you. You don’t want to see that shit in your dreams.” He changed the topic. “God, it was a shit-storm yesterday,” Keegan said to his wall partner.

“One dead and four injured on our side,” Margot replied.

“We were lucky. It could have been us.”

“That’s what unnerves me. We’ve been quiet for weeks, and now it’s starting up again.”

On top, the two defenders shuffled in the ash; they studied the devastation more clearly. They stood on the battlement and stared across the expanse of lifeless trees, a lunarscape of blackened sticks in a first-grader’s drawing. They referred to everything outside the battlement with endearing terms like: the void, the expanse, the abyss, the charred remains, the netherworld, and the great beyond. Truly the vocabulary of the Shift generation.

The defenders guarded quadrant 28 along mile post fifteen. They tried to make sense of their assignment. At some point, most of the defenders on the Crest became aspiring philosophers. I mean, that’s what defending that forty-mile piece of ridgeline did to them, day in and day out. The smoke, the profound boredom, and the sudden attacks from the enemy. How else could they cope? They grew introspective, conscious of the great beyond.

“We made it to two months,” Keegan said.

“Is that good or bad?” she quipped.

“Good. Stay alert and you’ll survive,” he added.

Margot was small but strong. The strap of her M4 looked too big for her body, but she wielded the weapon with authority. She wasn’t a person to mess with.

They looked for metaphors, inspirational sayings, or other couplings to get through the boredom. ‘Smoke is the visual manifestation of the sweet hereafter.’ ‘Smoke is the soul of trees going to the heavens.’ And then there was this one, ‘Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.’ Ahh Mr. Shakespeare, you’ve done it again.

People found Keegan to be complicated. He possessed the mind of an artist, intelligent, and astute in the ways of urban expression — tagging, painting, and murals. They liked Keegan, but his stubbornness grated on them. He seemed undisciplined, roguish. The Crest required thinking on your feet when the time came. Instinctual reaction was not Keegan’s problem. He was a natural born leader, it was that in-between time, that lethal mix of boredom and ambiguity that brought him down.

The Crest was a massive battlement with a parapet on top. The location was also known as the Cascade Crest, or the more infamous Pacific Crest. They patrolled in opposite directions, 42 paces down and 42 paces back to the start, on and on it went. They met at the flanking tower for breaks, in a rock chamber at the bottom. Inside were a few rough chairs and a rough-hewn tiny table. A small fireplace kept the place habitable.

“Nothing can prepare you for the haze. Every day, it seems worse,” he said to her. “Cigarette? Your lungs are gonna get hammered, anyway. You might as well put something in there you enjoy.”

“Thanks.” She took one.

“I suppose if you’re asthmatic up on the Crest, you’re toast,” he declared. “There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Smoke is smoke. Asthmatics die for want of an inhaler.”

Can the authorities not screen those people out?

“They try but they can’t get everyone, and there are so many that fake their asthma symptoms to avoid service. They screw things up for the real ones.”

“Faking it?”

“Yep, the true asthmatics beg and plead their case, but the authorities think they’re faking it. Shit, I’ll admit it. I tried to get out of Crest duty too, wheezing and gasping in the interview. They didn’t buy it. Too bad for the real asthmatics, though.”

“You’re a fine role model,” Margot said, disgusted.

“I’m not as bad as I sound.” Regretting that, he divulged his little secret to her.

Keegan liked Margot. She was growing on him. She was the smartest one in the pod, and she never lost an argument. She enjoyed fashion and wanted to attend designer school in Europe, pre-Shift.

“Most of the people they send to the Crest make it through,” he replied. “Shit, we’ll be done before you know it.”

“Except those guys in quadrant 114 yesterday.”

“You’re right, so stay alert.” He took a drag on his cigarette.

“During a twelve-hour shift, I suck in the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes of smoke. Since I smoke a pack a day, that makes three packs a day for me.” He laughed at his humor, but he knew it was true. “I see lung cancer in my future,” he joked, which was also a strong possibility.

Margot stood there, hacking and shivering. “The fog is intense today.”

“Actually smog. Smoke and fog combined. You’re frozen on the outside from the damp and poisoned on the inside from the smog,” he said.

She changed the subject, depressed with the smog talk. “How’d you like breakfast this morning?”

“Real bacon for a change. Maybe they’re thinking that the Crest Forces are actual people deserving proper food,” he replied.

“God, it was amazing, the aroma of bacon, like straight from the frying pan. Crispy, salty. I stuffed my face.”

“Like an old diner on Powell Boulevard at 3 a.m. Dripping with grease. Ecstasy.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. We’ll be back to soupy oatmeal and Permafrost Corporation Tastes Like Bacon, stem-cell bacon soon enough. What do you think of our pod?”

“They seem okay. I mean, we have some smart defenders and some average ones. What high school are you from?” he asked.

“West Linn, freshman, before it closed.”

“Smart kid,” Keegan said.

Margot ignored the remark. “And you?”

“Gresham.”

“Excellent school. Nearby.”

The pair stopped chatting and returned to patrol their 91 feet of property along the battlement. They knew why they were there. Every year, the authorities rounded up thousands of high school graduates to protect the Greater Portland enclave. Two-year stints. There were others in their pod too, including Lenore, Ben, Emilio, Agathe, Markus, and Beatrice, eight in all, each pod responsible for their 1/7th of a mile on the Crest.

“You don’t look thrilled today,” Keegan said to Margot as they returned to their designated meeting spot at the flanking tower. His breath frosty in the cold air.

“Duh? Who is? None of us had any choice, did we? Still, someone must protect the enclave. Protect our families.”

“A sense of duty. That’s good,” he said.

“I’m going to make the best of it,” she answered.

“And what did they tell you about the Shift?” Keegan asked.

“Not a lot. I mean, basic training was a bitch. They never got into the Shift or why things are the way they are.”

“It happened so fast. We reached what the news called inflection points. Goddamn inflection points, that was all they talked about, like the day of reckoning.”

“Inflection points? It was a blur to me. I never kept up on the science,” she asked.

“Periods of collapse. First there was the Amazon inflection point, then the Antarctic inflection point, next the Greenland inflection point. As cynical as I sound, it really happened, and quickly. The Oregon forests died from drought, insects and disease and then fires grew more intense. That’s when they began to close the schools. It was like watching a movie about the death of mankind.”

They detected gunfire in the distance and they hustled to their positions on the wall, kneeling over, scanning the area with binoculars. Despite the smog, they sensed the enemy waiting. The two defenders patrolled their portions and got back together in the flanking tower. At 10:00 am, a worker named Vera pushed a cart with thermoses of hot chicory coffee. The older woman spoke endearingly to the defenders.

“How are you today, my dears?”

“Fine, Vera.”

“Keeping up the good spirits, I hope.”

“As best we can, I guess.”

“Well, don’t you worry, your two years fly by fast.”

“You have coffee today?”

“Chicory coffee, my dear. You know we don’t have the real thing anymore, but it’s a suitable substitute.”

She poured them each a cup. They held the hot mugs of chicory in their icy hands and sipped; their senses revived. Faith in humanity returned.

“Why are they always attacking us?” she asked.

Margot seemed naïve. Keegan thought.

“Really?” he answered sarcastically.

“Really,” she replied.

“The Antisis despise us. They think science is evil.”

Vera overheard the conversation but said nothing.

“Well, I’d best be on my way, my dears.”

“Thank you, Vera.”

The old woman left the flanking tower and walked to the next pair of defenders.

“But why, aren’t they the beneficiaries of science?” Margot asked, continuing the conversation.

“Not really. They’re on a crusade. And they believe everyone should live off the land. Get back to a simpler life.”

“Screwed up.”

“I’ll say, and with the Antisis, the Shift is just a natural cycle of the heavens, not man-caused.”

“Why are they so angry?”

“Because they failed to organize themselves when The Shift came. They found themselves outside the enclaves without resources and food. Good enough?”

The pair returned to patrolling. The Crest’s physical location in the Cascades became legendary. Then, the enclave authorities built an actual fortified barricade on top to keep the bad guys out. After that, they recruited eighteen-year-olds to man it. The world came to that, putting the geeks, dorks, techies, and ninety-eight-pound weaklings in the line of fire. God, what a cluster.

They conscripted all eighteen-year-olds, unless you got an exemption. Unless your family paid the money to the right person to take you off the list. Corrupt.

As walls go, the battlement wasn’t much to look at but it reached twenty feet high in places, and gave the Crefor a commanding view of the militias coming at them. A six-foot-wide walkway had a curtain wall for shooting. Targeting defenders was difficult for snipers, even if they were good shots. A defender never stops in the same place along the curtain wall. A defender’s job was to spot the enemy before they could launch an attack and blast them back to oblivion. That was the big picture, but it never worked that way in practice.

Margot and Keegan got together back at the flanking tower.

“Who are these scientists?” Margot asked.

“Remember the botany training in boot camp?”

“Yea, but I still don’t get it.”

“They are our raison d’être. They are the best plant scientists in the world. They came here for a reason, to save ’plant kind,’” he joked. “Remember, we defend the nursery, too. That’s five million tree seedlings.”

“Seems weird to protect plants rather than people.”

“I’ll say, but with the Shift, it’s about the trees, sister, and don’t you forget it. California’s burned up and the Oregon forests are dying too. They’re desperate, you can see it on their faces,” he said.

Gunfire erupted in the fog’s gulf. It sounded closer this time.