Dr. McKay placed another photo in front of the one Liv was holding. The image was of a large room in a warehouse with a concrete floor. Around the perimeter of the room was a chain-link fence. People were lying on mats, blanketed by foil sheets. “This one has better image quality, and here’s why.” He pointed at one Boot in the photo, gesturing towards the people, as if waking them up.
“So, we’ve got one Boot who guards them. We’ve got their surveillance camera right here.” Dr. McKay pointed to a device affixed to the fencing in the right-hand corner of the photo. “But this workhouse, my friend, is a converted All-mart store. And our guy managed to give us a live feed from the All-mart’s surveillance system.”
Dr. McKay positioned the photograph in front of him like a show and tell, pointing at the blanketed figures. “So we know these are not just people. These are children. And we can confirm they have been separated from their parents. Between the execution images and these jailed children, we’re not talking workhouses, Liv.”
“They’re concentration camps.”
“Exactly.”
Liv took a deep breath and leaned back, looking at the ceiling tiles, searching for order in their lines and cracks. She shifted her bum and the paper crunched over the examination table.
“The bad news is, we don’t have a lot of time. Others are being rounded up quickly, and we certainly aren’t able to hide everyone, even though we’re all going to try. There are only so many allies willing to shelter people, inside and outside the city. Good news is, because the Renovation is unfolding so quickly, each compound has its security flaws, which means—”
“We may be able to get some people out?” said Liv.
“More than that. There’s a plan, especially given the number of Boots we’re recruiting to the Resistance from the inside.” Dr. McKay removed his latex gloves and threw them into the trash bin under his desk.
“Which means we’re moving ahead with an uprising,” Liv said to the ceiling tiles. “When? The way things are going, we need to move quickly.”
“I know, Liv. It’s a lot. Know that Erin sends her love and the baby is doing okay.”
Liv sat up, quickly. “She sent you pictures?”
“Sorry, bud. But she wanted me to tell you the baby isn’t a baby anymore. He’s officially a toddler.”
Dr. McKay wheeled his chair to his workstation and pushed the photos through a paper shredder. Liv dressed herself to the sound of the machine’s blades transforming the horrific images into slivers of indiscernible smudges. For many Others, these would be the last photos taken of them.
Liv touched Dr. McKay’s shoulder one last time before exiting the clinic, pretending she had seen nothing.
The return of flooding in the preceding summer had led to water contamination at shorelines across the country, which led to endless lineups of people begging for food, water and shelter. The relentless currents made river rocks of everyone. Wading hip-deep through the rainbow streaks of gasoline, people found shelter on rooftops and bridges, no longer mighty. Arms poked out of office buildings, waving at passing helicopters, pleading for rescue.
“I have been standing here since seven this morning,” said an Indigenous woman on a news segment. A large warehouse stood at the top of a rolling hill, the surrounding trees wavering in the wind and rain. A front-facing carrier held her sleeping baby, while another young child burrowed his face into her side. The woman firmly held the stem of the microphone alongside the uneasy reporter. “Our Tyendinaga Mohawk territory is just east of Belleville, Ontario, and I was told this depot in Peterborough, 125 kilometres northwest of us, was the closest place I could get water and food for my two children.”
The news reporter nodded, feigning concern, while trying to pry the mother’s hands off her beloved microphone. “The rule is, according to that warehouse sign over there, a maximum of one five-gallon water container and one box of dried goods per family. But I’ve been watching these white families backing up their big SUVs to the warehouse, practically mowing all of us down, and carrying out boxes and boxes of goods to their trunks! Who is allowing this to happen? What gives those people the right to take more than any of us?!”
On the Confederation Bridge, hordes of people fled the northeast province of Prince Edward Island for the higher elevation of neighbouring New Brunswick. Motor vehicles braved the bridge’s twelve-kilometre span over tumultuous waves. The piers were stunted by rising sea levels. But members of the island’s Muslim community were forced to go by foot.
“Everyone on our street was forced to leave their cars behind. They couldn’t move through the water,” said a teenage Muslim girl to a news camera as she shouldered the weight of her grandmother. High winds and the numbness of her lips obscured the audio, then finally, “The people who could drive to New Brunswick took extra people. But they turned us away. So, we just have to walk.”
“What made the motorists turn you away?” the reporter asked, struggling to keep the windsock on the microphone. He turned the device back to the girl, the sleeve of his trench coat catching the gusts like a khaki-coloured kite.
At the sound of this question, the girl and her grandmother were already moving on. Still, the microphone managed to catch the girl’s voice: “Look at everyone on foot, sir. What do we all have in common?” The camera zoomed out on a line of Brown folks bracing themselves against the tempest of water and air, salwar kameezes and hijabs damp against their bodies.
In southern Ontario, the concrete jungle of Toronto was transformed into a shallow bayou. Park benches sat in water like rafts in muck. Beneath the surface of floating detritus, curbstones and fire hydrants grew fluffy with green algae. Metal posts wavered in the tide with submerged bicycles still chained to their stems.
Some citizens continued to commute to work, as if denying within themselves the truth of the environmental crisis, as if putting on their pantsuits and packing their lunches would somehow make the city run again. Business as usual. But when the flooded subways had to halt operations, and when people began posting live videos on social media of being stranded in the streets atop recycling bins, holding on for dear life to a lamppost, the calamity finally became palpable.
One live video was of a Black man with his toddler daughter. He held up his phone to show his child sitting in her white, plastic baby bathtub, like a makeshift boat in the rising water, waving at the camera. He turned the camera towards his face and explained: “This is the way my girl and I are making our way through the city. Right now, we’re trying to find any dry land where we can sleep tonight because our basement apartment is swamped.” He kept the camera on himself as he waded through the hip-deep water, holding the edge of the floating bathtub, his daughter cross-legged and wearing a small rain jacket. “We ask that if you have a home that’s elevated, that has any dry land, please, please, please, let people in. Help people. Feed them. Let them stay there for as long as possible. Share supplies. We all have to help each other. I don’t even know who can see this video. But please share this.”
The video went viral. People did share the video, not to answer his plea for help but as a warning of things to come.
Lower-income areas of the city sat in the stench of overflowing sewage, leaving their occupants to flee north towards elevated areas like Forest Hill, Sunnybrook and the Bridle Path. These affluent communities, spared from the floods, closed access to outsiders begging for shelter. Members of the media requesting interviews with households that refused to assist the displaced were briskly turned away. People around the world watched footage of the once-quiet streets of the rich being swarmed with land refugees, their Brown and Black faces trying to push through newly erected barriers, their tight fists wrapped around the fencing, their voices begging for justice.