A dystopia. Henry Block is trapped in a dystopia.
Admittedly, it’s his own fault. When he’d signed his name on the Conservation Corps’s dotted line, the recruiters had given him a duty stations preference form, and while you were probably supposed to list specific bases, in each of his four slots he’d just written BEACH. If he was going to be stuck doing this for the next two weeks, he’d figured at the time, he could at least treat it as a research trip for his Empyrean builds.
Now, standing on the Cameron, Louisiana, coastline, Henry desperately wishes he’d added at least a couple of descriptors. White sands. Palm trees. Tourists. This beach has none of that. The sand here is clumpy and gray, sharp with rocks and broken seashells. Scraggly grass rises out of the uneven dunes like scrotum hair. Instead of quaint seaside bungalows, there are trailers on stilts that some previous hurricane has left looking like they’ve been passed halfway through a paper shredder. There’s trash everywhere.
And it’s cold. Forty-nine degrees. ... Read more
