10:30 AM. WBGT: 99

They drove on, still traveling slowly to keep the balance of power to the aircon. Felice had no idea if it made any difference, and she thought maybe she should drive faster to make up for the hour they had lost because of the heatstruck militia, but she was also terrified of overheating the car. If they got trapped out here without their aircon, what would they do? With no clouds and the heat dome above stopping warm air from rising Felice had the sense that they were driving through an oven, being slowly heated like a retort in a laboratory. The air was thick with the threat of it.

Fortunately here the scrappy, stunted brush of the lowlands crowded close to the road, and if she drove close to the shoulder she could avoid direct sunlight. It was not cool but she could sense the difference. She even considered stopping and parking, driving fully into a patch of shade and sitting there until the car cooled a little. Maybe that would be safer for the engine too…

She was just thinking about it when she saw a small group of people huddled in the shade just off the road, looking disheveled and dirty. They passed suddenly but after a moment Mini touched her arm. “Stop,” she said in a small voice. “Let’s go back.”

“What?” Felice slowed the car to a halt, pulling into the shade on the side of the road. “Why?”

“I think…” Mini faltered. “Maybe they’re lost?” She gestured behind her, in the direction of the icebox. “We could spare them some cold water?”

Felice checked the mirror, looking for traffic – especially for threatening black vans looming out of the haze – and saw nothing. “Okay,” she agreed. “Keep an eye on the road.” She began to reverse, driving carefully along the shoulder in case anyone was coming, keeping in the shadows of the stubby trees. Gravel crunched under the wheels for a few minutes until they pulled alongside the huddled group.

Up close, it was obvious what they were. Felice kept the engine running, and looked to Mini, who looked back to Aaron. “Aaron, can you check the map? See how far it is to, um, to gasoline. Oh, and grab us some water from the icebox. Maybe the sports drinks?” She cast a glance to Felice, who nodded agreement.

“Sure,” Aaron agreed, oblivious as always to thoughts of safety or risk. He handed them a few bottles, cast a glance at the huddled group outside, and grabbed his phone to look up a map.

Felice and Mini opened the car doors and stepped out into the furnace. It was much hotter now, punishing and furious. Felice felt her breathing grow instantly shallower, as if the air itself were alien to her lungs. She felt stifled as the sweat settled on her skin, failing to cool her off in the humid air. Even in the shade she wanted to squint, her eyes revolting against the hot blast. The group of people had moved further back into the trees, out of sight of the road, and separated into several smaller groups, but one of them, a man in grimy travel-worn dark jeans and a stained t-shirt, came forward to meet them.

“We should warn them,” Mini told Felice, gesturing with her head back in the direction of the CBP vans as she held out one of the sports drink bottles to the man. He took the bottle and stepped a little closer to them, cradling it in rough, dirty hands. His t-shirt was faded and torn under one armpit, stained with sweat and grime. Dark, bloodshot eyes watched them warily in a flat, bronzed face layered with sweat-streaked dust and dirt.

“Thank you,” he said simply, voice heavily accented. He took a swig and licked his thin, cracked lips. The group behind him watched quietly, except for a baby somewhere amongst them, which whimpered and snuffled.

“These too,” Felice urged, holding the other bottles in the direction of the gathered travelers. He nodded, and Felice walked towards the group with the bottles held out, while Mini stood back and watched cautiously. They were a mixed band of men and women, mostly young, clustered around a small pile of backpacks and bedrolls. The small amount of luggage made Felice think they were itinerant workers rather than new migrants – maybe people displaced from a labor camp before a raid, and now hiding on their journey to the next one. Or maybe newcomers who had somehow slipped through the anti-immigration net. Although they were in the shade they still looked exhausted and strung out, breathing the same shallow gasping breaths as Felice. She handed the bottles to some of the women, who took them in silence. Behind her she could hear Mini speaking in a mixture of her halting Spanish and simple English with the man, who seemed to speak better English than Mini’s Spanish.

“Okay,” the man assented as Felice returned to Mini’s side, and began issuing orders to the group in sharp, short tones. The men and women behind her began to stand up, huffing and sighing and moving slowly in the heat, gathering bags and packages. “Thank you for the warning,” he said to them both, nodding his gratitude as he returned to his group. “We will move off the road.”

“Stay in the shade,” Felice warned him, a dread sense of hopelessness gathering in the pit of her stomach. “Today is going to be very hot. Find somewhere inside to hide if you can.”

He nodded, but she could tell he did not understand what she was trying to say. How could he? How could she offer urgent warnings when she had been doubting herself all morning? What did numbers on a wet globe bulb temperature scale mean to anyone, anyway? Even if she could show them the warning signs, would they heed them? Black zones on a chart, obscure numbers from a textbook… to them it was just heat.

They returned to the car and slipped inside, opening the doors as little and as quickly as possible. The car interior was blessed cool compared to the crushing heat outside, and Felice almost immediately felt her breathing deepen again, a sense of solidity returning to her thoughts. By the time she had fastened her seatbelt the group were gone, already moving back deeper into the scrub with their belongings and their baby. That sense of hopelessness returned, bringing a stinging feeling behind her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Mini asked her as she rested her hands on the steering wheel and sighed.

“They’re going to die,” Felice replied in a flat, certain voice. She thought back to the CBP van, the men carrying long bundles. Now she realized what they had been cleaning out of the back of the detention wagons. “They can’t find shelter and they can’t find anywhere cool. They’re all going to die out here.”

They sat in silence in the car, Felice’s words falling flat and final in the stifling interior. Felice could not tell if they believed her or were simply too shocked by the radicalism of her statement to reply. Like Felice, Mini was a lawyer; Aaron was a software engineer. People in their class did not say these things: as the border drew shut and the people who had once filtered through it began to disappear from public life; as women stopped talking publicly about certain topics; as news from the outside world slowly dwindled and became flatter, less informative, more vapid; they simply did not talk about certain things. Some words were not used, some phrases everyone understood just carried too much weight. Words like “camp”, “pregnancy”, “foreign”, “disaster”, these words were used more carefully now, full of hidden horrors – not just the horror of the thing, but the horror of the hidden knowledge about why these words carried their new weight, and horror at the consequences of speaking openly about it in public. Some phrases could end your legal career. Even in private some things were best not said.

“They’re all going to die,” Felice repeated with finality, “And there’s nothing we can do.” She slid the car into drive, and crawled slowly out of the shade onto the burning road. They resumed their journey, leaving the doomed travelers behind them to die unheralded in the shadows of the Texas scrub.