REPEAT! A HEAT DOME ACROSS SOUTHERN TEXAS WILL KILL ANYONE WHO IS OUTSIDE AFTER 9AM. THE POWER GRID WILL FAIL. YOUR AIRCON WILL FAIL. YOU WILL DIE WITHOUT AIRCON. GET UNDERGROUND OR GET OUT BY MIDDAY IF YOU WANT TO LIVE.
The radio wasn't fucking around. Now it was a man's voice, deep and serious with a strong southern accent. He spoke quickly, repeating his message three times before Mini found the tuner and began searching for another channel.
The radio scratched and snarled, occasional blasts of music in between static as Mini sought a traffic information channel. "Do you have a subscription?" She asked casually, voice light and relaxed.
"No, none." Felice replied, taking her hands from the wheel and wiping them on a small hand towel Mini had given her earlier. The car was uncomfortably hot even with the aircon on full blast, and she was sweating constantly. The sun had risen an hour or more ago and already the outside was hotter than anything they had ever experienced before. The road ahead was swallowed up in a heat haze that distorted the trunks of the gathered cars and blended the scrappy brushland around the road into the completely cloudless, pale sky.
People in the cars around them fidgeted and stirred restlessly in the heat just as Felice did. Her thin, pale legs were sticky and irritated on the leather of the car seat, making her regret choosing to wear denim shorts. Next to her Mini had put a light cardigan on the seat to stop the irritation of sweaty leather on bare legs, and behind them in the back seat she could see Aaron twitching and moving restlessly as he tried to find a comfortable position amongst the luggage and the icebox. They had been stuck like this for nearly an hour now when they should already be on the North Loop, moving in fits and starts in a huge traffic jam crawling towards San Antonio through the steaming hot air over the road, trapped like insects under a magnifying glass by some far off incident at the junction.
Mini's question was not the first reminder of responsibilities Felice had skipped. On the journey to this sticky car trap they had passed through once-wealthy suburban housing estates that had fallen into poverty through repeated cycles of natural disaster. Hurricanes, floods, and fires had battered the homes in the tree-lined region of the west of the city, and as the insurance companies retreated from the Texas lowlands the people who lived there, unable to sell, had been forced into increasingly desperate half-measures. They passed homes with tarpaulin over damaged rooftops, raised emergency flood platforms in backyards, piles of sandbags at street corners, and stretches of burnt-out woodland between sometimes abandoned zones of housing, teeming with the tents and mobile homes of America's strange new class of semi-homeless, what Raven called the "Climate Class". As they headed further west and the suburbs became poorer these outposts of instability grew more common, scattered among the remnants of last season's storm damage. Billboards that had once advertised consumer goods and cosmetics were now stripped bare, or plastered with Party adverts featuring an AI-rejuvenated face of the President, or huge advertisements for disaster relief agencies that asked the same question Mini had asked her: "Do you have a subscription?" Felice did not. She lived in an apartment in the city at the center of the Texas oil boom – why would she need an emergency services subscription? Mini gave up her fruitless search and they returned to contemplating the column of traffic.
After a few minutes of silence, with the next brief jerk of movement as the traffic rolled forward a few dozen metres, Aaron asked, "Why are we going this way anyway? Isn't Shreveport closer?"
Felice and Mini looked at each other. Before she could stop herself, Felice replied with the truth. "Yes it is, but it's in another state and we didn't want the trouble of crossing the border."
"What trouble?" Aaron asked. "You've got your driver's license, they'll just wave you through."
Felice spared Aaron a glance in the rearview mirror, taking in his sweat-shiny, pale face, chiseled young man's cheekbones and bright blue eyes. Clueless, of course. "We need extra documents, Aaron," she said gently, "And we didn't have time to prepare them. So we're staying in Texas." She saw him frown in confusion, and could have kicked herself for not just making some glib excuse.
"What documents?" He asked. "Is your State ID out of date or something?"
Felice felt Mini's hand on her leg briefly, looked over to see her faintly shake her head. "Don't worry about it Aaron," she told him. "I'll explain it later."
"Oh. I still don't get it. Why can't we just –"
"Aaron!" Mini raised her voice a little, and he seemed to get the message, subsiding into silence with a small grunt. Mini shot Felice a wry smile. No one in the car was an adult when the laws changed, so it was natural that Aaron would not be aware of the special rules that attended interstate travel for women, but Felice and Mini had both been through the process enough to know it was not worth risking. Felice could still remember debating reproductive rights in school, and then the concerned tone in their female teachers' voices when they took the girls aside and told them it was no longer a suitable classroom topic. Now, more than a decade after those tense conversations, the laws were settled facts, as much a part of every woman's life as her period or the basic process of choosing well-lit streets when you walked home (if you ever walked anywhere, which Felice certainly did not). No doubt Aaron did not have to think about street lighting, had never had those tense conversations with female teachers whose despair was visible in the cold set of their faces, the grim tight lips and tired eyes. He had probably forgotten those debates ever happened. It was a man's world now, so of course going to Shreveport would seem natural to him. After all, it was closer, and the world was made for his convenience.
But the politics Felice had grown up with was as much beyond Felice's control as the storms that had wreaked such havoc on the suburbs they had passed, so she gave up thinking about it and returned her gaze to the road. "What's happening?" She muttered, feeling languid in the stuffy air of the car. Earlier they had tried opening a window to ease the sense of congestion inside the car, but the air that had entered the vehicle had only made things worse. Now everything was shut tight, and the aircon had been set to recirculation. If they could just get off this road and find some shade, or at least get some air flowing over the car again…
"Probably an accident at the junction," Mini mused, dabbing at her neck with a towel and craning her neck to see. She glanced briefly back at Aaron, as if to ask him something, then started at a sight behind the car. "Emergency vehicles," she told them, and they all craned their necks to look.
A small convoy of vehicles drove past them on the shoulder of the highway, amber lights flashing. At the front a police car, grim matte black with tinted windows and sleek roof lights. Behind it a pickup truck with a machine gun fixed to a tripod behind the cab. No one stood at the gun, probably driven into the cab by the heat, but the vehicle was heavy with menace regardless. Behind it cruised a white and red ambulance, then another police car. She could almost sense a sigh of relief following it up the column of cars – no fire engine meant, presumably, that whatever blockage lay ahead was not catastrophic, and the arrival of the authorities would resolve this snarl.
They waited. Another quarter of an hour of frustrating, draining heat, and then the traffic began moving properly, a continuous slow crawl rather than the jerking start-stop of the last hour. Felice nudged her car forward and they crawled to the intersection, halting twice before they were able to drive smoothly through the scene of the disturbance.
"Oh," Mini breathed, staring out of the window as they passed. "A militia stop. What happened?" As they passed Felice caught the tableau in sideways glances, seeing plastic traffic barriers thrown into a messy pile at the edge of the hard shoulder and one lane partially blocked by a heavy truck, now reversed as far as it could onto the shoulder of the road, with the huge star and cross flag of one of the state's largest militias flying from a flagpole fixed next to a machine gun tripod. Above the militia flag flew a smaller US flag, and above that the red and black squares of the President's Flag. A banner hanging from the truck's side read,
IDENTITY STOP – PAPERS READY – ILLEGALS OUT
The emergency vehicles were pulled up on the shoulder in front of that truck, and a cluster of men and women in high-visibility work gear were gathered around two forms lying supine on the ground. A third man leaned on the cab of the truck with one hand, hunched forward with a canteen of water in the other. He was wearing heavy brown boots, khaki work pants, a long sleeve camouflage top and a ballistic vest, with an assault rifle slung over his back. His camouflage helmet sat on the bonnet of the truck and his messy, short curly hair was plastered tight to his head, thick with sweat that gathered and rolled down his square, heavyset face. As they drove slowly by he leaned forward and vomited, a thin stream of liquid joining a larger splatter of yellowish-brown on the ground at his feet. He sagged down to the ground with his back against the truck, then immediately staggered up again, waving his hands weakly in the air and staring down at the ground with a contorted expression. His yell of pain, weakened by his evident heat exhaustion, did not penetrate the sealed windows of Felice's van.
"Looks like their little intervention didn't survive the weather," Felice observed, and then they were past and onto the North Loop.
They did not look back.