The Refugees
Campfire Stories: Volume 2, Issue 3
Chosen prompt: ‘Concession’ from the English language dictionary screensaver.
Special thanks to author Dana Burke, who helped unwittingly steer our subjects’ fates in this issue. If you were curious, the other possible word choice was ‘concinnity.’
Visit Dana’s website to learn more: danaeburke.com
Taro fell asleep, attempting to transcribe the unknown characters into his worn notebook carefully. Noemi watched through the crack of the door from across the hall until she could hear him snoring lightly, then woke up her son.
Noemi and Rob went out to the decontamination room to patch the hole in the suit that Taro wore when he went outside for supplies. Rob, who was middle-aged now and rough-handed from working at the naval shipyards since he was in his twenties, looked up at his ageless mother as she gracefully patched the suit that she had also sabotaged with all the grace of a magician.
“Rob! Watch the door, bobo!”
“Bahala na si Mama!” Rob replied, and he walked out the door without closing it.
Rob kept walking, not necessarily worried about his mother getting caught, Taro’s radiation sickness, or having lied to him about having the same symptoms to normalize the condition. He didn’t think Taro suspected anything but wished he didn’t have to lie to such a kind young man. As he came around the corner into the supply room, Rob tripped over a digital camera and hit his face on the floor hard enough to make his nose bleed.
He got up, picked up the camera, and went to the freezer for an ice pack while pinching his nose’s bridge to stanch the blood flow. As he sat there making sure his nose wasn’t broken, he could hear the unmistakable pitter-patter of his mother’s tiny feet coming down the hallway toward him. Noemi looked at Rob and chuckled.
“Bobo.”
She picked up the camera and started looking through the pictures on it.
“Mamaaaaaaaaaaaa…”
“What? We might learn something important.”
A video of Taro going out for supplies started playing. Noemi’s face turned pale.
“Mama?”
I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and saw the lights on in the kitchen. It looked like Noemi was making a snack at the counter. I don’t know what to think about her; she’s sometimes overbearing. And her story about the linga in Sulawesi seems a little too convenient to be true to me. I’ve studied lost languages for over ten years, and everything is always complicated. She believes my story about having radiation sickness. She seems to think it so strongly that she and her son say they have symptoms that mirror mine.
I returned to my room and looked for my camera to transfer the pictures and videos to my tablet. It wasn’t there. Where had I left it? I had set it up yesterday when I went out for supplies to take a video of the encounter. I took the video in case I didn’t return, so there would be evidence of whatever happened to me outside. Nothing happened—nothing I wasn’t anticipating, anyway.
Rob sat there, waiting for his mother to move, to make a sound, to write something down, smash the camera … do something. She was catatonic. There was a noise in the hallway, and he heard someone using the toilet. Rob got up and poked Noemi in the arm.
“Gising na, Mama,” he whispered.
Noemi grabbed Rob’s bloody, swollen nose and pointed his face toward the camera.
“Owwwwww!”
“What do you see?”
“Taro is getting a wagon of supplies from the soldiers.”
“What don’t you see?”
“Mama, just tell me what you’re looking at.”
“The soldiers don’t have canisters on their masks,” she paused the video, zoomed in, and pointed, “and their Geiger counter is reading 2.427!”
“That sounds low. Is that low?”
“That is normal. There is no radiation outside, my little bobo!”
“Do you think Taro knows that?”
I couldn’t find my camera in my room, so I went to look in the equipment storage space we set up in what used to be the dining room. No luck. I was sure I’d find it there; that’s where I had sat down with it last to eat and write down some notes. I saw some blood on the floor and thought that was odd, so I quietly went to the kitchen.
That’s where I found them. Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum had my camera over at the counter by the refrigerator, and they were arguing about something in a language that sounded similar to Tagalog. It could be a dialect of Makassaric. I spent my life learning dead languages, not living ones, but this one was lively sounding.
Rob turned around first. I stifled a laugh as I looked at his startled face, with the crooked, bleeding nose and the raccoon eyes already forming. He stiffened and gasped like someone had just stuck a finger up his butt without warning.
Noemi turned around and, well, I don’t know.
I woke up the following day with my camera next to me on the bed, and it had been erased. My jaw throbbed with every heartbeat, and there was a glass of … water? No. It was rubbing alcohol. A glass with some rubbing alcohol and teeth sat beside my camera. I stuck my finger in my mouth and found a gap in my front teeth that could account for all eight teeth in the cup.
I looked at the door and saw Noemi standing there with a bandage on her right hand.
“Hell of a jab.”
“Here, take your pictures back,” Noemi tossed a flash drive at me, a concession of contrition or an attempt to buy back some goodwill for another reason; I still do not know.
It hit me in the face. I’m a doctor of cryptologic linguistics, not an athlete.
“Thanks.”
“What are you doing here?”
“We are leaving soon. I gave the soldiers a message, requesting the NAVCOMMSTA to move us all to their new facility at Alameda.”
Noemi looked at me in what did not appear to be a genuine surprise. She seemed to be forcing it, like when you play with a baby and make faces at it.
“Why don’t you look surprised?”
“I was the one that gave you your vaccinations when you started working there, and there should be some soldiers or sailors here by morning. I hailed them on the HAM radio while you were sleeping.”
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