The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “Leave me the fuck alone!”

  “Normally, I’d just cut you like a pig and be done with it,” Angel grunted, as he hefted Yu onto his back in a fireman’s carry. “But since we’re doing this all aboveboard and public, that’s not on the table. But don’t push me. Seriously.” He began lumbering for the sole remaining chopper.

  The last of Carver City’s treatment-plant workers were diving into their cars and speeding away from the pumping facility, kicking up plumes of dust. Rats jumping the sinking ship.

  Reyes was glaring at Angel. “Hurry the fuck up!”

  “I’m here! Let’s go already!”

  Angel dumped Yu into the chopper. They lifted off with Angel riding the skid. He clawed his way inside.

  Gupta was back at her gun, already opening fire as Angel strapped in. Angel’s military glass lit up with firing solutions. He peered out the open door as military intelligence software portioned out the water-treatment plant: filtering towers, pumping engines, power supply, backup generators—

  Missiles spat from the choppers’ tubes, arcs of fire, silent in the air and then explosively loud as they buried themselves in the guts of Carver City’s water infrastructure.

  Flaming mushrooms boiled up into the night, bathing the desert orange, illuminating the black locust shapes of the hovering choppers as they launched more rounds.

  Simon Yu lay at Angel’s feet, zip-cuffed and impotent to stop the destruction, watching as his world went up in mushroom clouds.

  In the flickering light of the explosions, Angel could make out tears on the man’s face. Water gushing from his eyes, as telling in its own way as a man’s sweat: Simon Yu, mourning the place he’d tried so hard to save. Sucker had ice in his blood, for sure. Didn’t look it, but the sucker had him some ice.

  Too bad it hadn’t helped.

  It’s the end of times, Angel thought as more missiles pummeled the water-treatment plant. It’s the goddamn end of times.

  And then on the heels of that thought, another followed, unbidden.

  Guess that makes me the Devil.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lucy woke to the sound of rain. A benediction, gently pattering. For the first time in more than a year, her body relaxed.

  The release of tension was so sudden that for a moment she felt as if she were filled with helium. Weightless. All her sadness and horror sloughed off her frame like the skin of a snake, too confining and gritted and dry to contain her any longer, and she was rising.

  She was new and clean and lighter than air, and she sobbed with the release of it.

  And then she woke fully, and it wasn’t rain caressing the windows of her home but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again.

  She lay still in bed, trembling with the loss of the dream. Blotting away tears.

  Sand slushed against the glass, a steady etching.

  The dream had seemed so real: the rain pouring down; the softness in the air; the smell of plants blossoming. Her clenched pores and the tight clays of the desert all opening wide, welcoming the gift—the land and her body, absorbing the miracle of water that fell from the sky. Godwater, American settlers had once called it as they invaded slowly across the prairies of the Midwest and then pressed into the arid lands beyond the Rocky Mountains.

  Godwater.

  Water that fell of its own volition, right out of the sky.

  In Lucy’s dream it had been as gentle as a kiss. Blessing and absolution, cascading from the heavens. And now it was gone. Her lips were cracked and broken.

  Lucy kicked off sweaty sheets and went to peer outside. The few streetlights that hadn’t been shot out by gangs stood as dim moons struggling against a reddish haze. The storm was thickening even as she watched, the streetlights collapsing into blackness, leaving retina stains of imagined glows in their place. The light going out of the world. Lucy thought she’d read that somewhere—some old Christian thing. The death of Jesus, maybe. The light going out, forever.

  Jesus blows out, and La Santa Muerte blows in.

  Lucy went back to bed and stretched out on the mattress, listening as the winds whipped the night. Somewhere outside, a dog was howling for safety. A stray maybe. It would be dead in the morning, another victim of Big Daddy Drought.

  A whine from beneath her bed echoed the begging outside: Sunny, crouched and shivering, thanks to the changes in air pressure.

  Lucy crawled out of bed again and went to fill a dish with water from her urn. Unconsciously, she checked its level, knowing before she saw the numbers that she still had twenty gallons, yet unable to prevent herself from checking the little LED meter anyway, confirming the count she had in her own head.

  She crouched down beside the bed. Pushed the dish toward the dog.

  Sunny regarded her from the deep shadows, miserable. He wouldn’t come out to drink.

  If Lucy had been superstitious, she would have suspected that the ragged Australian shepherd knew something she didn’t. That he sensed evil in the air, the Devil’s wings beating overhead, maybe.

  The Chinese believed that animals could sense earthquakes. Used them to predict disasters. The Communists of old China had once evacced ninety thousand people from the city of Haicheng before a major earthquake, sensing it hours ahead. Saving lives because they trusted animals to know things that human beings did not.

  One of the biotects at Taiyang International had told Lucy about it. Used it to illustrate how China knew how to see the world clearly and planned ahead. And because of it, China was resilient in comparison to the brokeback version of America where he’d been stationed.

  When an animal spoke, you were supposed to pay attention.

  Sunny huddled beneath the bed, fur and skin twitching, giving off a low, continuous, miserable whine.

  “Come on out, boy.”

  He wouldn’t budge.

  “Come on. The storm’s on the outside. It’s not in here.”

  Nothing.

  Lucy sat cross-legged on the tile, regarding Sunny. The tile was cool at least.

  Why didn’t she just sleep on the floor? What made her even bother with a bed or sheet in the summer? Or the spring or fall, for that matter?

  Lucy splayed herself belly down on the clay tile, letting it press against her bare skin. She reached under the bed to Sunny.

  “We’re okay,” she murmured, running her fingers though his fur. “Shh. Shh. It’s okay. We’re okay.”

  She tried to force herself to relax, but a nervous shiver of her own refused to stop rippling under her skin. A discomfited ticking awareness.

  No wonder Sunny was under the bed.

  No matter how much Lucy tried to tell herself the dog was crazy, her own lizard brain believed the dog’s warning.

  Something was outside, something dark and hungry, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that the horrific thing was turning its attention to her—to her and Sunny and this safe little island of hunkered adobe shelter that she called home.

  Lucy got up and checked the dead bolts on the doors to the dust room.

  You’re being paranoid.

  Sunny whined again.

  “Shut up, boy.”

  The sound of her own voice bothered her.

  She made another circuit of the house, checking to make sure all the windows were sealed. Startled at her own reflection in the kitchen window.

  Didn’t I close that?

  She pulled the Guatemalan weave across the glass, half-expecting a face to appear in the darkness beyond. It was superstitious and absurd to think that anyone could actually be out in the storm looking in at her, but now she went and pulled on jeans anyway, feeling better clothed. Feeling at least psychologically protected as she gave up on sleep for good. No way she was sleeping now. Not with this storm-induced anxiety running its fingers between her shoulder blades.

  Might as well work.

  Lucy opened her computer and scanned her fingerprints on the trackpad. Keyed her passwords as the winds continued t
o lash her home. The house batteries were lower than she would have liked. They had a twenty-year warranty, but Charlene was always telling her that was bullshit. Lucy just hoped the storm would pass by morning so she could sweep off the solar panels and get the charge back up.

  Sunny whined again.

  Lucy ignored him and logged into her revenue trackers.

  She’d posted a new story with original art that Timo had shot. If she was honest, the pics really sold the story: a truck filled with belongings, mired to the hubs in dust, trying to get away from Phoenix and failing miserably. The latest in collapse pornography. The story was kicking around the net, syndicating and collecting eyeballs and revenue, but Lucy was surprised it hadn’t gotten the attention she’d hoped.

  She scanned the feeds, looking for reasons her eyeball share might have slipped. Something was happening over by the Colorado River: a firefight or a bombing.

  #CarverCity, #CoRiver, #BlackHelicopters…

  Bigger news organizations were already on it. Lucy pulled up video and got a water manager spitting invective about Las Vegas. She’d have pegged him as a lunatic, except for the wreckage and flames blazing behind him, lending credence to the idea that Las Vegas really had rolled in with its water knives and done some precipitous cutting.

  The balding man was ranting that he’d been abducted by Nevada guardies and then dumped in the desert to hike his way back to the wreckage of his own treatment plant.

  “This was Catherine Case! She completely ignored that we’re appealing! We have rights!”

  “Are you going to sue?”

  “You’re damn right we’re going to sue! She’s gone too far this time.”

  More sites were lighting up with the story. Arizona local stations and personalities, beating the drums of regional anger, generating hits and ad revenue off the battlefield images as they inflamed local hatreds. More revenue would be flowing in as the comments blew up and people threw the story onto their social networks.

  Lucy flagged the story for her trackers, but with the storm and the distance, she’d already missed the window to take much credit or do anything except draft off the hits of other journos.

  She kicked the story into her own feeds, just to assure her readers that she was aware of Carver City’s evisceration, and turned to her own primary sources, hunting for leads in the sloshing sea of social media, stories that she could get to first and claim as her own.

  Dozens of new comments, hashtag #PhoenixDowntheTubes:

  Supposed to leave again today, except for another damn storm. #Depressed #PhoenixDowntheTubes

  How you know you’re at the end: You’re drinking your own piss and telling yourself its spring water. #PhoenixDowntheTubes #ClearsacLove

  Score! We’re going North! #BCLottery #Seeyoubitches

  Choppers in the canyon. Anyone know who’s out there? #CoRiver #BlackHelicopters

  They’re still outside my door! Where the fuck is the cavalry?!! @PhoenixPD

  Don’t use Route 66. #CaliMilitia #DronePack #MM16

  WTF? When did Samm’s Bar Close? #Ineedadrink #PhoenixDowntheTubes

  Pic: PHOENIX RISING Billboard stuccoed with Clearsacs. LOL. #PhoenixDowntheTubes. #PhoenixArts #PhoenixRising

  She’d been tracking Phoenix residents, their hashtags and commentaries, for years. A proxy map for the city’s implosion. Virtual echoes of a physical disaster.

  In her own mind she imagined Phoenix as a sinkhole, sucking everything down—buildings, lives, streets, history—all of it tipping and spilling into the gaping maw of disaster—sand, slumped saguaros, subdivisions—all of it going down.

  And Lucy, circling the edge of the hole, documenting.

  Her critics said she was just another collapse pornographer, and on her bad days she agreed: just another journo hunting for salacious imagery, like the vultures who descended on Houston after a Cat 6, or the sensationalized imagery of a fallen Detroit being swallowed by nature. But on other days Lucy had the feeling that she wasn’t so much eroticizing a city’s death as excavating a future as it yawned below them. As if she were saying, This is us. This is how we all end. There’s only one door out, and we all use it.

  When she’d first arrived in the city as a green reporter, it hadn’t felt so personal. Back then she’d made jokes about the Zoners, enjoying the easy stories and micropayment deposits. Making quick cash off voyeuristic enticements for click-thru.

  #Clickbait

  #CollapsePorn

  #PhoenixDowntheTubes

  The residents of Phoenix and its suburbs were the new Texans, those Merry Perry fools, and Lucy and her colleagues from CNN and Xinhua and Kindle Post and Agence France-Presse and Google/New York Times were more than happy to feed on the corpse. The country had watched Texas fall apart, so everyone knew how it worked. Phoenix was Austin, but bigger and badder and more total.

  Collapse 2.0: Denial, Collapse, Acceptance, Refugees.

  Lucy was just there to watch the Zoners hit the wall, up close and personal. Autopsy the corpse with a high-power microscope, and a cold Dos Equis in her hand.

  #BetterThemThanUs.

  But then she’d met a few of the Zoners. Set down roots in the city. She helped her friend Timo gut his house, ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping the bones out of a corpse.

  They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes, and she’d written up the experience—a family home of three generations made valueless because the suburb’s water had gone dry and Phoenix wouldn’t allow a hookup.

  #CollapsePorn for sure, except now Lucy was one of the actors, right alongside Timo and his sister Amparo and her three-year-old daughter, who’d cried and cried as the adults destroyed the only house she’d ever known.

  Sunny whined again from beneath the bed.

  “It’ll pass,” Lucy said absently, then wondered if it was true.

  The weather people were saying they might set a record for dust storms. Sixty-five recorded so far, and more on the way.

  But what if there were no limit to the storms?

  Meteorologists all talked as if there could be records—and record-breakers—as if there were some pattern they could discern. Weather anchors used the word drought, but drought implied that drought could end; it was a passing event, not the status quo.

  But maybe they were destined for a single continuous storm—a permanent blight of dust and wildfire smoke and drought, and the only records broken would be for days where anyone could even see the sun—

  A news alert popped up, glowing on Lucy’s screen. Her scanner came alive as well, police bands crackling. Something about it sounded wrong. It was up on her social feeds, too.

  Cops all over @Hilton6. Bet it’s bodies. #PhoenixDowntheTubes

  More backup was being called in.

  Not just some hooker or PV factory worker who had gotten raped and dumped in a dry swimming pool. Someone important. Someone even Phoenix PD couldn’t ignore.

  A person of interest.

  With a sigh Lucy gave one last envious look at Sunny, still burrowed under the bed, and shut down her computer. She might not be able to make it to Carver City, but this was too local to ignore, even with the storm.

  In the dust room Lucy strapped on an REI filter mask and grit goggles—Desert Adventure Pro II—a care package gift from her sister Anna the year before. She took a final breath of clean air, then plowed out into the storm with her camera wrapped securely in plastic.

  Sand blasted her skin raw as she ran toward the memory of her truck’s location. She fumbled with its door handle, squinting in the darkness, and finally got it open. Slammed it closed behind her and sat hunched, feeling her heart pounding as wind shook the cab.

  Grit hissed against glass and metal.

  When she powered up the truck, dust motes swirled inside, a red veil before the glow of the instrument panel’s LEDs. She revved the engine, trying to remember the last time she’d c
hanged the filters on its intakes, hoping it wouldn’t clog and die. She switched on storm lights and pulled out, bumping down the potholed street more by memory than sight.

  It was nearly impossible to drive, even with the big storm lights blazing low from the truck. The street ahead disappeared into a wall of roiling dust. She passed other vehicles pulled over, waiting it out. People wiser than she.

  Lucy drove slowly, inching along side streets, wondering why she bothered, knowing she couldn’t get good art in a storm like this, yet still compelled to press on, even as winds threatened to pitch her Ford off the road. She plowed down Phoenix’s six-lane boulevards, the empty optimistic cross streets of a car culture now so drifted with dust that vehicles moved in single file between dunes, glued to one another’s taillights as they navigated the hillocks of a city being swallowed by desert.

  At last she spied the dim flicker of high-rise lights, the sentinel blaze of the Hilton 6, and the even stronger glares of the construction lighting of the rising Taiyang Arcology, the half-alive monster looming over all things Phoenix.

  The Taiyang’s struts gleamed like ghostly bones in the haze of flying dust.

  Lucy pulled the truck over to what she decided was a curb and parked, leaving the truck lights on, hazards flashing. She grabbed her head lamp out of the glove box, then leaned against the door, forcing it open against the buffeting wind.

  As she made her way into the glare of her own headlights, she found flares on the road. She traced the line of flickering magnesium glows. Ahead, human forms rose out of the darkness. Men and women in uniform, flashlight beams waving wildly. Cruisers strobing red-and-blues.

  She forged closer, her breathing loud in her ears, her mask wet on her face from the moisture of her lungs, pushing past cops vainly struggling to control a crime scene that was blowing away.

  Blood rivers and dust intermingled on the boulevard, a mini-badlands of murder becoming drifted, muddy, and coagulated.

  Lucy’s headlamp illuminated a pair of corpses. Just more bodies, she thought, but then her headlamp caught one of the faces, black with blood-dust scabs and nearly covered with a drift.