Last Call

Two trucks and four people, working the cordon. Got there first, isn't leaving, isn't the enemy.

Salvage, inside El Infierno, out of two trucks with a compressor and a cutting rig. Perla Ibarra has worked the dead coast for nine years, and she knows the ground better than any map: which stairs hold, which streets flood, where the fence leaks, and what the wind did last week.

If the crew turn up at a house she is already working, she got there first. She is not moving, she is not hostile, and she is not the antagonist of anybody's evening.

Everybody on that coast calls her Last Call, because she is the one who tells people when to leave, and because it is the only warning that side of the fence gets. She has been right often enough that other crews have started watching which way her trucks are pointed.

What the crew knows#

• She works to the wind rather than the clock, and she will tell the crew when to leave whether they ask or not.
• Copper, fixtures and appliances are hers. Paper, she has learned, is worth more and she doesn't know how much.
• Her crew use radio and shouting, because there is no coverage inside the cordon worth the name.
• She has pulled two people out of that cordon who were not on her crew, and does not mention it.

Contact#