Author: Majoki
Carpenter counted out loud while trying to carefully step over the swollen bodies. In the clunky hazmat suit his boot came down on the neck of a child.
Swynton jerked away from the sight, but there was really nowhere to turn from the reality of hundreds of bloated bodies washed up on Galveston’s beaches. Carpenter had asked her to accompany him into what the local officials had dubbed the Containment Zone. Police and Coast Guard vessels just offshore were still busy trying to corral the corpses that had yet to wash back in with the tide.
Based on what she was seeing, hundreds and hundreds looked to have perished. The days-long heat dome had spiked yesterday, the grid failed, and multitudes flocked to Galveston’s beaches in a mad rush to cool off in the Gulf waters. But there was no relief in the sea. Only tragedy.
The warmest ocean temperatures ever recorded combined with the searing air temps overwhelmed most beach-goers. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke robbed them of strength and/or consciousness, and they simply drowned in the steamy, still waters.
Carpenter stopped counting and removed his boot from the child’s neck. “Sorry. This is just a shit situation. Nobody…no body…deserves this.”
“It’s horrific.”
“Yes. And it’ll get worse. The county coroner’s office called me in. I’m getting called in a lot more places for these kind of tragedies, to collect data, analyze it, and model the scope of the problem. Officials have started calling me the heat death guy. But nothing I’m doing is stopping what’s happening.”
“So, why am I here?”
“Because I could get you past the police tape. Because you’re a local and you need to see this. Because you’re a media influencer and someone needs to tell this story in a way that’s visceral, that’s viral.”
“Won’t the sheer number of dead here say it all?”
“Numbers, statistics. We’ve heard them all for decades as climate catastrophes kill more and more each year.” Carpenter knelt down and gingerly brushed his sandy boot print off the child’s neck. “So, get out your phone, Swynton, and do your viral media thing because data doesn’t always change beliefs, but corpses, lots of corpses, do.”