The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  The fires burned higher all around.

  Lucy’s skin began to sear.

  CHAPTER 38

  Maria smelled the smoke long before the fires came. But even then she knew something was wrong. She saw it in the way the Vet’s troops all looked west, and in the way they all started scrambling. She saw it in the way everyone stopped taunting her.

  Damien ran past.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Big fucking shootout,” Damien shouted. “Got to go put some Merry Perrys in their place.”

  “What’s that smoke?”

  Damien laughed. “World’s burning down!”

  A bunch of the Vet’s soldiers were running to jump into pickup trucks. Checking loads on automatic weapons. Men peeled out, leaving clouds of dust that blew away in the hot winds.

  “Lemme out!” Maria called to Damien.

  “You nuts?”

  “Just throw me the key. Nobody will even know!”

  He glanced around.

  “Throw me that key and call it an offering to the Skinny Lady. You going to go shoot people, you know they’ll shoot you back, too.”

  The Vet came out the front door of his mansion. Damien gave her a helpless shrug.

  “Sorry, Maria. I can’t.”

  He ran for a truck and hopped into the back, hunkered down as it tore out of the compound. The Vet walked right past her and climbed into his own four-wheel drive. A minute later the compound was silent, except for the snuffling of the hyenas beside her.

  Nobody cared at all about her.

  Smoke thickened. The sun set red over the flames. No one returned to the compound. More flames rose in the distance. Big old fire.

  The hyenas all stared at the fires, watching with pricked ears and twitching noses as smoke whipped over them. They prowled their pen, working it from one end to the other. Trying to find a way out, Maria realized.

  Gunfire rattled in the distance, echoing across Spanish tile roofs. Maria tried to decide if that was a good thing or bad. Night fell, and still no one returned. The gunfire continued.

  The air overhead was dark with roiling smoke and bright with sparks. Burning Clearsacs cartwheeled through the sky, rising on hot winds, candle-plastic flickers. Time passed and smoke thickened. She hunkered down with the hyenas, all of them watching the horizon for signs of what was coming for them, the fate they could not avoid.

  “You want out of there?”

  A shadow moving in the night.

  “Toomie?”

  He emerged from the darkness, limping. In his hand a massive revolver gleamed silver. A .44 Magnum. Maria thought she’d never been so glad to see someone in her life. “What are you doing here?”

  “Feeling kind of glad that you’re all alone and the Vet forgot to lock his front gate on the way out.” He limped to her cage. “How do we get you out of this?”

  “There’s a key over there.”

  Toomie limped to where the Vet’s muscle had been playing cards. It felt like forever, waiting for him to get back, but a minute later he had her out and free and was bundling her close.

  “Come on,” he said. “We got to get clear of here. There’s fights happening all over. I don’t want to get caught in the cross fire.”

  Now that she could see him, he looked like hell. Ragged and exhausted. He had his leg done in a heavy makeshift brace, and his face was drawn with pain.

  “Lean on me,” she said.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “Nothing. It’s fine.” She led Toomie outside the compound. “Hang on.”

  “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

  She ignored him and ran back into the compound. She grabbed the keys to the hyenas’ pens. She went and unlocked them. The hyenas perked up at the rattling of the chains as she loosened them. And then she ran.

  The hyenas were fast.

  Santa Muerte fucking hell they were fast.

  She heard them hit the fence. The links rattled and came loose in ringing cascade.

  Toomie had his gun up. “Watch out!”

  Maria threw herself through the main gates, and Toomie slammed them closed behind her. The gates latched. The hyenas slammed into the bars. The iron shivered. Maria leaped back with a cry, shaking.

  “You’re loco, girl.”

  “Loca. Estoy loca,” Maria corrected absently. “If the Vet comes back, maybe he gets a surprise.” She wrapped her arm around Toomie’s waist. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  In every direction, fires blazed. It had even gotten into the hills—she could see the lines of flames racing upward, leaving saguaros burning like brands in the darkness, hundreds of Christs all crucified and flaming, collapsing and becoming part of the larger blaze.

  Toomie leaned heavily against her, his breathing labored as they made each limping step.

  Overhead, chopper rotors beat the air. The heavy thud-thwap of intention, moving toward the fires and the crackle of automatic weapons.

  “It’s like the whole world’s burning up,” Maria murmured.

  “Might could be,” Toomie agreed. “They shut down all the cell networks, so the Merry Perrys can’t get themselves any more organized.”

  Hills and buildings. The sky itself on fire. Flaming Clearsacs and blood rags tumbling through the air, bright orange stars in a smoke-choked sky.

  This is what Hell is like.

  This was the Hell that she’d been warned about when she used to go to church. This was where sinners went. Except it seemed to be swallowing everyone up, not caring that people like her and Toomie were caught up in it, just as much as monsters like the Vet.

  They kept on, stumbling through the burning night. Twice they came across roving gangs. Once it was Zoners, and Toomie spoke to them, soothing, and they passed on. Once it was Texans, carrying torches and lighting more houses on fire, and Maria convinced them that she and Toomie weren’t the ones who deserved payback.

  “Between the two of us, we do okay,” Toomie observed as they crouched in a doorway.

  The crack and shatter of rifle and pistol fire echoed over the rooftops. More and more places were going up.

  Maria wiped sweat and soot from her face. “You think your houses are even there anymore?”

  “Guess we’ll find out.”

  Toomie’s face was bathed with sweat, and his features were clenched in a rictus of suffering.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine, Little Queen. Just fine. We should get going.”

  Maria held him back. “Why’d you come for me?” she asked. “You didn’t have to.”

  Toomie laughed and winced. “Almost didn’t.”

  “But you did.”

  He looked down at the pistol in his hands. “Sometimes you realize that not risking something so you can live is worse than dying.”

  “I want to live,” Maria said.

  “We all want to live,” Toomie said.

  “We got to get out of here.”

  He laughed. “After this…” He shook his head. “You can bet the Calies and the Nevada guardies are going to fight even harder to hold the line.” He waved out at the burning city. “This here’s a lesson for anyone who’s looking.”

  “Nobody’s gonna want Texans now, are they?”

  Toomie hauled himself to his feet. “Can you blame them?” He held out his gun to her. “Here, you need to see this. Hold it. When it shoots, it’ll kick.”

  “Why are you showing me this?”

  He looked at her seriously. “Because if someone comes after us, and it comes down to running, I want you to run.”

  “You’ll make it.”

  But the longer they walked, and the more running battles they slid past, the more Maria doubted.

  The heat of the night and fires was a smothering blanket, and without water, they were walking in a desert. When they finally reached a squatter camp near the Friendship pumps, all they found was ash and rubble. All the makeshift housing. All the Red Cross tents. All of it
gone.

  Bodies smoked. The smell of roasted meat clogged the air. Animals picked through the rubble, wild dogs and coyotes, tearing at corpses and snarling at one another.

  Maria and Toomie picked their way over the rubble, trying to see if the pumps were running. Toomie clutched the pistol, pointing it at the packs of animals, and Maria wondered what they’d do if the animals actually came after them. There were too many to shoot them all.

  Toomie studied the pumps from the edge of the plaza. “I don’t think they’re running. Electronics probably melted when all this went up.”

  Maria stared at the dead pumps longingly, wishing she’d thought to bring water from the Vet’s compound.

  The dog packs continued to root through the corpses.

  “We got to get out of Phoenix.”

  Toomie laughed sadly. “And go where?”

  “North. Cali. Anywhere but here.”

  “How you going to do that? Vet owns most all the people who know how to wetback it across the Colorado.” He shook his head. “I got nailed that way once already, remember? He’ll have people on the lookout for us.”

  “Maybe the Vet’s dead.”

  “You think?”

  She didn’t. The Vet would never die. He was a demon. Him and his hyenas. They’d never die.

  “Anyway,” Toomie said. “We’re broke, and the price will be up for Texans. People will be even more desperate to get out than before. Price will be sky-high. We got to bide our time, raise some cash, and then make a move. Help me up. When we get back to my house, we’ll make a plan.”

  “You really think your house is still there?” Maria asked.

  Toomie laughed darkly. “Hell if I know.”

  A new flight of helicopters beat the air above them, dark birds against the orange of fires and blowing dust in the sky.

  Maria watched them pass, hell-bent on some objective that she couldn’t guess. Maybe they were firefighting choppers, trying to control the blazes. Or maybe they were National Guard, out to put her people in their place.

  “I think I’m going to try to cross anyway,” she said, “without a guide.”

  “You’ll die out there.”

  Maria laughed sharply. “I’m dead here, too. It’s just slower, that’s all.”

  An armored personnel carrier sped by. It seemed small and alone in the empty streets. Irrelevant in the face of the flames that were filling more and more of the horizon.

  “So…what? You’re just going to hike across three hundred miles of desert and swim the Colorado? Even the pros can’t get people across all the time.”

  “Like you said, the pros would hand me over to the Vet anyway. And if I stick around…” She shrugged. “The Vet’s probably gonna come out of this stronger. And once he catches wind that I’m still around, he’ll definitely come for me again.”

  “You can hide with me, though. We know to be more careful now. We can make it work.”

  Toomie sounded like her father, promising impossible things because he wanted to believe. And now, as Toomie promised safety and protection, Maria found herself wanting to believe in him, too. To believe that somehow she could count on the older, more experienced man to take care of her. To provide for her. To solve her problems for her. Just the way she’d pinned her hopes on Papa, and Sarah had pinned her hopes on Mike Ratan.

  “We can go together,” she offered. “We can both go.”

  Toomie tapped his leg. “I don’t think I’m up for much hiking or swimming rivers. Your hand doesn’t look too good, either.”

  Maria clenched her throbbing hand into a fist, hiding it from his gaze. “We can find a way.”

  “Now who’s telling pretty stories?”

  She fell silent. He squeezed her shoulder. “At least wait a day or two before you go.”

  “Why? So you can talk me out of it?”

  “No.” He dragged himself upright, grunting. “I need to show you how to shoot this gun.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Angel was with his mother again. She was making tamales, taking corn husks and cornmeal, wrapping them around red shreds of pork. In the background an old track of Don Omar played, and she was laughing, smiling as she worked, moving to the music, and he was watching, peering over the counter.

  “Get a chair,” she said. “You can’t see from down there.”

  He climbed up beside her.

  She showed him how to wrap the cornmeal. He called it corn sushi, and she laughed at that and hugged him. They made corn sushi together while she teased him that maybe he should learn Japanese and go into business if he liked sushi so much, and he’d felt close to her while they waited for his sisters to come home from school.

  He remembered the heat coming from the pot where she steamed all the tamales together. He could remember the tile of the counter, could remember everything about it, the smell and the red apron she wore…

  He was sad because he knew it was only a memory, and she was dead, and Mexico with her, and so were Aya and Selena, and so was Papa. But it was okay, he decided. At least he could be with Mama now. He was safe, and he could smell corn in the air and feel the scald of the steam. Could smell the ingredients burning. Could smell the smoke.

  Mama was looking at him strangely. He realized that he was burning.

  His whole body was burning hot.

  Mama kept saying, “We need to get you to a doctor.”

  Angel wanted to tell her it was okay. Everything died. She was dead, after all, so why should she worry about him? But she was praying to the Virgin to protect him, and he tried to explain again that there really wasn’t anything left to save, that he and the Virgin and Jesus had all made the split a long, long time ago, but she was still down on her knees beside him, praying—

  “Wake up. Come on. Wake up.”

  She was kissing him, breathing; Angel gasped. He tried to sit up. Fell back with pain ripping through him.

  Lucy sat back on her heels, sweaty and smudged, pretty journo looking down on him, his own personal saint.

  Not a bad way to wake up.

  Except he hurt. God damn he hurt. He couldn’t move an inch without hurting, and a man was kneeling beside him, holding a needle.

  “Well, he’s not dead yet,” the man joked.

  “Hold on,” Lucy said, gripping Angel’s hand.

  He wanted to tell her that she was hurting his hand with how tight she was squeezing, but the man slid a needle into Angel’s skin.

  Angel went under.

  —

  The sicario was sitting beside him. They were both sitting on little plastic chairs, keeping company with the body of the man the sicario had killed. Angel knew the sicario was a bad man, and that he was in terrible danger from him, but the man seemed to like Angel’s presence, and Angel didn’t dare run.

  The sicario had a bottle of mezcal in his hand, and he used it to gesture at the victim he’d just gunned down. “That’s how I’m going,” the sicario said. “Live by the sword, die by the sword, you know?” He looked at Angel seriously. “Remember that, mijo. We live by the sword, and we die by the sword. Make a meal of lead, and lead makes a meal of you.”

  Angel knew the man was Angel’s father, under the skin. The sicario was his real father. Not the cop who Angel had fled north with years ago and who had promised that everything would be okay, and that he wasn’t someone the narcos would care about. The man who had lost his whole family because he didn’t know how to sniff the wind and understand when it had turned against him.

  The sicario was Angel’s real father. This assassin saw the world without delusion.

  “I’m going to die by the sword, too, but you don’t have to,” the sicario said. “You go up to El Norte. Make another try. No more of this eating by lead.”

  “But what about Mama and Aya?”

  “You don’t get to take anyone with you, ¿entiendes?” He shook the bottle warningly. “Either that, or you stay here, and you live by the sword and you die by the sword. So you go north and
live clean. Down here it’s too hot for you.”

  “But I don’t live by the sword.”

  He laughed. “Don’t you worry about that, mijo. You will.”

  He leaned over with his mezcal bottle and starting jabbing Angel’s body with its mouth. And everywhere the bottle touched, miraculous holes opened in Angel’s flesh. Blood spilled out. Angel stared down at his bullet holes. He wasn’t scared. The wounds hurt, but they seemed right to him. As if he’d always been meant to have them.

  “I got holes in me,” he murmured.

  The sicario took a swig of mezcal and laughed. “So get your woman to sew them up.”

  “She is sewing me up.”

  “Not that woman.” The sicario looked exasperated. “The one who put them there in the first place!” He drank from the bottle, then jabbed it into Angel again, giving him another bullet hole. “You really are too stupid to live. Stupido. Dumbo.” Two more jabs. Two more bullet holes.

  “Your Spanish is bad.”

  The sicario laughed. “You been away so long, how would you know?” He grinned at Angel. “You want some advice, mijo? Don’t piss off las mujeres. ‘It is better to live in a wasteland, than with an angry woman.’ You know that saying? Deep verdad there, mijo. Don’t matter if it’s Mexico or Chihuahua Cartel or up there in El Norte. A pissed-off woman will cut off your balls and leave you singing like a sparrow.”

  “But I’m not married.”

  The sicario smiled knowingly. “All the little gangsters who run around on their girls say that.” He held up an admonishing finger. “But the girls, they know. They know what you’re up to. Even if they don’t say anything, they know. Look what happened to me!” He gestured at his body, and Angel saw that the man, too, was riven with bullet holes.

  “You see what my woman did?” the sicario said. “And now they all sing songs about this puta. It was supposed to be my corrido, but they gave it to her, and I get, what? A couple verses, and then the bitch does this to me.”

  He leaned over, gesturing sharply with his bottle. “And that part in the song where I beat her till she spit blood? Not true! I swear it on my mother. Sure, maybe I got around a little on her. But I never beat her hard.” He shook his head seriously. “All that was lies for her song.”