She hung up and shook her head. “Most people are cooperative. But I wouldn’t have a job if everything ran right.” She didn’t let Lillian come that time because it might be dangerous, so she asked Lillian to help at the information desk under the arches at the tower end of City Hall. Lillian was there when a boy, maybe four years old, came and asked for food. He was dirty and his hair wasn’t combed.
“I’ll get something,” she said to the adults at the desk and ran inside to the table of sandwiches and juice. He looked up at Lillian when she handed him the food with wide eyes, and maybe he felt rescued. He ate the sandwich in huge bites while the adults fussed over him and tried to find him a place to stay. She hoped he was safe.
She told Berenike about it when she came back. Berenike nodded and said, “That’s what we do.”
Lillian didn’t know what else to do, but it seemed like there was a lot more that needed to be done.
Berenike was remembering everything she’d hated about her old job. As far away as that job felt—five days now—the argument she was in seemed fresh and familiar.
“No,” she said, “we can’t give you those vans for tomorrow.”
Then she was silent. That was a negotiating tactic. She’d dealt with this guy before, the new southeastern Wisconsin manager of AutoKar, who’d gotten the job by battlefield promotion. He had always been far, far too competitive, and he wanted everything he could get. Old Man Tito and the Summer Ngan prayer lady—who were alive, she’d checked—would have been better choices.
He’d even forwarded her contact information at City Hall to three customers who had pestered her: the imported-foods guy she’d had the cops shut down when the Prez’s cold first hit, a clothing retailer, and a law firm, which had no need for a van, but the lawyers knew how to sound threatening. In fact, none of those three needed a van. Cars would do. And the AutoKar manager had no right to tie up her line with annoying, fake-intimidating people asking for what they didn’t need.
Vans? No such luck, asshole. But he knew silence was a good negotiating tool, too, and he was trying to outwait her.
Finally, to get him off the line, she said, “We’re going to need those vans to pick up and deliver medicines and the supplies to manufacture medicines. This is critical because we needed them yesterday. So no, we’re not going to return the vans.” And you’re contractually bound to maintain them anyway, she could have added, and she wanted to gloat, but she had better things to do than to start an unnecessary argument.
“I don’t have enough for my priority clients,” he said, “let alone regular clients with real needs.”
AutoKar had never had a big enough fleet. He knew that.
“I’m sorry. This is still an emergency,” she said. And she terminated the call. Then she wondered why she’d said I’m sorry. She wasn’t, and he didn’t deserve the courtesy.
This was what she’d hated about her old job. Customer contact, including internal and business-to-business clients, and having to act responsible and proper rather than saying what she really wanted to tell people. As for the small fleet, she’d always believed that wasn’t actually due to underinvestment. Instead, she suspected that AutoKar and its competitors had a secret agreement with private-car manufacturers to avoid becoming rivals. The shortage was designed to encourage people to go out and buy their own car.
Not much proof of that, though. A lot needed to change in the future about business transparency. A country couldn’t run on bullshit and expect to solve problems. That had led to disasters like the Prez’s cold. More disasters didn’t have to happen. Worse, refugee camps were filled with people dead from the Prez’s cold and then cholera, which was completely preventable, not just a dereliction of duty, actually probably deliberate.…
She was staring at nothing, pounding her fist on her desk. Get back to work. She had plenty of it.
The city didn’t have a big enough fleet for everything it needed to do. So just as she had before the Prez’s cold, she spent her days satisfying no one. Even worse, whenever she left the building, she saw private cars just sitting there waiting for their owners, and how many of those owners were dead? Probably hundreds of cars in Milwaukee alone now had no owners. They could be put to use.
Perhaps the city could ask people who had cars if they could share them. She’d proposed that to the mayor, and he said it was a great idea and he’d work on it, but he’d also looked like he was about to get sick. A quarter of his staff was out, and they weren’t all coming back. Neal had survived a bullet, but then he got sick, and being already seriously injured …
Karen never recovered, either, although Nina and Deedee were fine and reshaping the businesses where they worked. Some of the news was good.
The rest … not enough cars, not enough medicine, not enough food, and broken supply chains. Her lunch had been mayonnaise on stale bread. Breakfast was banana oatmeal, which she’d pretended to like only for Lillian’s sake, and it had cost twice what it should have. She didn’t have much of an appetite anyway—well, that was one way to lose weight.
In a lot of places, including a couple of incidents in Milwaukee, fear of contagion hadn’t staved off looting. In some places—too much chaos for exact numbers—local governments had collapsed due to loss of personnel or loss of authority, but that had happened in only one town run by a mutiny. Mutineers kept things going. Mostly, the lights were still on, despite actual gun battles with so-called patriots who couldn’t read
