The Water Wars

by Cameron Stracher

  “Where are we?”

  “Sanctuary,” said the pirate.

  The men hopped out of the back of the truck and left us inside. I could hear motors shutting down all around and men greeting each other loudly. I tried to stand, but the plastene cuffs the pirates had placed around my ankles made it impossible. I fell and started to cry.

  Will put one arm around me. “Shh,” he murmured. “It’s all right.”

  “They’re going to kill us,” I choked out.

  “If they were going to kill us, they would have done it already. They could have left us by the side of the road instead of bringing us all the way up here.”

  I had to admit it would have been easy enough to shoot us and leave us in the road. Pirates did it all the time. “Then why are we here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s wait and see. We must have something they want.”

  I tried to imagine what the pirates might want, but I couldn’t. We weren’t rich, and we had no water. If the pirates hoped for a ransom, our father barely had enough money for our mother’s medicine. He would give them everything, but it wouldn’t be enough. Thinking about it only made me cry harder.

  “Don’t cry, Vera,” said Will. He smoothed my hair against the side of my face, outlining a brown parenthesis against my cheek.

  “I wish we were home.”

  “We will go home. I promise.”

  “I wish we had told the Guard. I’d rather be in jail than here.”

  Will took a deep breath. “We’re hundreds of kilometers from Illinowa. We have to see what the pirates have planned. We need to stay calm, watch, and wait. We’ll have our chance.”

  Of course Will was right again. But I realized clearly for the first time how desperate our plight was. It had been foolish to think we could rescue Kai. Now, wherever he was, it couldn’t be worse than being held captive by pirates. Even cannibals were more trustworthy.

  Before I could let my fears completely overwhelm me, the doors on the back of the truck burst open, and two new pirates came inside.

  “You two,” said one of the men, as if there might be two other children in the back of the truck. “Come with me.”

  Will lifted a leg to show him it was cuffed. The pirate growled, then stomped out. In a moment he returned with wire cutters. “Worthless,” he said. Then he snipped clean through our restraints.

  We stumbled out of the back of the truck and into a night lit by torches and halo-lights. I blinked and nearly keeled over, but Will caught me. The pirate took me by the other arm, and he marched us across a dirt lot toward a cinder-block building. There were about a half-dozen trucks parked in a circle alongside some heavy machinery. The helicopter had landed nearby. Smoke still trailed from its exhaust, and its blades spun lazily. Men watched as we crossed the lot—dark men, disheveled and dirty. A dog barked, and I instinctively gripped the pirate’s hand, then let go. Although I was trembling inside, I made up my mind to refuse to let the pirate know. I held up my head and strode purposefully forward.

  The man rapped once on a steel door at the front of the cinder-block building. In a moment the door opened, and he pushed us inside. The dimly lit room was darker than the night, and my eyes were momentarily blind. I could make out a few candles and then soft fabrics hanging from the walls. Music played quietly—acoustic instruments from an earlier era. Even as my eyes adjusted, however, my brain could not. Curtains, candles, and music were the last things I expected from pirates, and they were a stark contrast from the concrete exterior.

  “What kind of children walk the open road?” asked a deep voice from the shadows.

  “We weren’t walking,” said Will. “We had our pedicycles.”

  “Didn’t get you very far, did they?”

  The voice belonged to a man about our father’s age and height. He wore black boots, a gray sweatshirt, and black canvas pants that fit tightly at his waist. He had longish hair, a thick beard, and a tattoo of a small bird on the side of his neck. His nails were clean, and he wore a single yellow band on his left ring finger. His hands were stroking the fur on the heads of two golden-brown dogs.

  I stepped back instinctively, but the dogs remained still. “Are you going to kill us?” I asked.

  “Kill you? Why would I kill you?”

  “You’ve kidnapped us.”

  “I haven’t kidnapped you. We found you on the road. You would’ve starved to death if we hadn’t picked you up.”

  “Is that why your men chased us and hunted us down?”

  The pirate frowned and stopped petting the dogs. “You ran from them.”

  “Because they were pirates.”

  “What do you know about pirates?”

  I considered his question. Everything I knew about pirates, I had learned in school. They were dangerous, lawless men, who would do anything to steal water, including killing and maiming. But it was true that I had never met a real pirate, and didn’t know anyone who had.

  “Pirates steal water,” said Will, “water that’s meant for other people.”

  The pirate laughed, deep and rich. His hair bounced on his shoulders like something alive. “Governments steal water,” he said, “water that doesn’t belong to them.”

  Will stared at the pirate but didn’t say anything else. Water belonged to whoever drilled or refined it, and pirates certainly did neither. They took the water collected through the hard work of others.

  “So now what are you going to do with us?” I asked.

  “What should I do?” asked the pirate.

  “Let us go.”

  “Can’t do that, little sister. How will you get home? It’s dangerous out there for children.”

  Of course the pirate was right. There was nothing but rocks and sand between here and home. Even if we could get back across the border now, we could never walk hundreds of kilometers without water. And even if we could, bandits or coyotes would surely get to us. We were trapped with bad men in a foreign republic. I bit my lip to stop myself from crying again.

  “We’re not children,” said Will, annoyed.

  I expected the pirate to laugh, as shakers usually did when kids insisted they were grown up. But instead he did something strange. He raised his head and looked off into the distance as if he could see something there. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  “Will you let us go, then?”

  The pirate returned his gaze to Will, and then he did laugh. “Do I look like a fool? Let you run straight to the army?”

  “We won’t. We promise!” said Will.

  “A boy’s promise. That’s pretty.”

  “It’s worth more than a pirate’s.”

  “You have a lot to learn about pirates.”

  I knew what Will was thinking: The farther we went, the harder it would be to get home. The harder it was to get home, the less likely we were to ever see our parents again—traveling with pirates, no less, who knew where or how far? Twenty-four hours ago we had a plan to rescue Kai. Now we needed rescuing.

  “We’re looking for a boy,” said the pirate. “About your age.”

  “A boy?” repeated Will.

  “A boy and his father—a driller.”

  I opened my mouth, but quickly shut it.

  Kai, I thought. They’re looking for Kai.

  CHAPTER 8

  The pirate was called Ulysses. He said he was named after an ancient warrior, but I had never heard that tale. I thought of him instead as the king of the pirates. Like a king he rode tall and proud at the wheel in the first truck. He insisted the pirates had no king; they didn’t even have a leader. They were wanderers who went wherever the winds and water took them.

  “Why do they follow you, then?” I asked.

  “They’re free not to. They follow me because they want to.”

  “That still makes you the leader.”

  “Are we free not to follow you?” asked Will. He sat pressed up against the door. Ulysses was driving, and I was in the middle. The two dogs—Ch
eetah and Pooch—sat in a small compartment behind us. Cheetah (or maybe it was Pooch) kept poking her head over the divider and sniffing my face. Although the dogs had frightened me when they first tracked us, up close they seemed like large furry dolls that would rather sleep, lick, and sniff than bite. In fact, I knew, dogs had been pets until feeding them made their masters hungry.

  “You’re children. Children don’t have choices.”

  “That’s just what shakers always say.”

  “They say it because it’s true.”

  I had no idea where we were, except I knew we were traveling north again. The pirates seemed to know what they were doing, because their caravan moved fast—as fast as the broken roads allowed. I counted ten vehicles: three pickups, two jeeps, four tanker cars, and a converted fire truck the pirates used for pumping water. Somewhere overhead, the helicopter followed.

  “Do you have children?” I asked.

  The pirate was silent for a moment. “No,” he said finally.

  “Are you married?” asked Will.

  “Yes,” said Ulysses.

  “Where’s your wife, then?” I asked.

  “You ask a lot of questions,” said Ulysses.

  I waited for him to say something else, but he did not, so I decided to stay silent as well. I peered out the window over Will’s shoulder. Minnesota did not look any different than home. The landscape was brown and dry, and there were broken buildings and cracked roads everywhere. No people; no signs of life. If there was more water here, you certainly couldn’t see it from the ground. Minnesota kept its riches well-hidden.

  The trucks rumbled northward. I nudged Will, but he ignored me. I occupied myself instead by scanning the horizon for clouds. The sky, however, was perfectly blue, and every time I thought I saw a wisp of moisture, it turned out to be a trick of the eye, sunlight glancing off dust.

  I wondered what our father was doing right now. Had he gone to the army to report our disappearance? Had he told our mother? In her fragile state, the news could make her worse. But surely she would notice our absence. The more I thought about it, the more I became sick with anxiety—not for myself, but for my parents. In the front of the truck, I felt strangely secure with Ulysses driving, although I knew I should be frightened. But when I thought of my parents—alone and worried—I was seized with panic. I reached for Will’s hand, and though he was pretending to be asleep against the door, he twined his fingers with mine and held tight.

  We spent the night in the truck with the dogs. Ulysses said it was too dangerous to sleep in the tents. I didn’t think pirates were afraid of anything, but he explained that Minnesota was one of the few places where wild animals still roamed freely. They were aggressive and hungry and would think nothing of eating a couple of children if they could. Although it was cold in the truck and grew colder as the night deepened, Ulysses had plenty of blankets. In the darkest part of the night, he started the engine and warmed the truck with the heater. The rumble of the engine and the warm circulating air soon made me drowsy, and I fell back asleep.

  In the morning I awoke with my head against Ulysses’s shoulder. For a moment, before I was fully awake, I could swear he was watching me. But when I opened my eyes, he was looking straight ahead.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, rubbing my forehead with the palm of one hand. I was embarrassed to have fallen asleep on him and didn’t want him to think I had noticed.

  “You’ll know when we get there,” said the pirate.

  “How do you know where you’re going?” I asked.

  “A pirate’s intuition,” said Ulysses. When he smiled the creases around his mouth looked like deep crags. He shook off his blankets and opened the door of the truck. “You stay here,” he commanded.

  I watched him walk to the closest truck, his broad shoulders swaying as if he were carrying a weight, one leg dragging slightly, the dogs at his side. He had told us pirates didn’t fight except when forced to; they preferred to use stealth and cunning. But most of the pirates I had seen were crossed with scars, missing fingers, and crooked or bent limbs. For men who didn’t like to fight, they were well-bruised and battle-worn.

  “They’re taking us farther north,” I said.

  “I know,” said Will.

  “Why are they following Kai?”

  “We don’t know it’s Kai. It could be any boy and his father.”

  “If they’re following him, it means he’s still alive.”

  Will nodded.

  “But if he’s alive and they learn that we know him, then we’re in danger,” I whispered.

  “We’re already in danger.”

  “Why can’t the army rescue us?” By now the RGs had surely reviewed the security logs and would be looking for us. I would gladly take being arrested over being killed.

  Will shook his head. “They won’t cross the border. You know that.”

  The lower republics would not risk war with Minnesota over two missing children—not when they were already at war with the Empire of Canada and the Arctic Archipelago. Although Minnesota was technically neutral, the republics depended on it for fresh water. They would do nothing to upset that delicate balance. By crossing the border, we had lost all hope of rescue.

  We stared out the front window, watching the pirates gathering inside the circle of trucks. Someone had made a fire, and breakfast was cooking. The salty, smoky smell of something frying in a pan drifted into the front cab. My stomach grumbled. I realized I had not eaten since breakfast the day before. I was famished. Will, too, sniffed eagerly.

  Ulysses gestured for us to get out of the truck. I hesitated until he made an eating motion: cupping one hand and putting it to his mouth. Then I scrambled from the seat and jumped to the ground. Will followed.

  “Hungry?” Ulysses asked when I reached him.

  I didn’t wait for a second question. I took the first plate offered.

  The food was delicious. Ulysses said it was real bacon, grown on a real farm. I had never eaten real bacon before and licked my plate clean. Growing animals was expensive and dangerous, and it was only permitted by government license. It was a waste of resources, the government said, water that could be put to better use. Yet somehow WABs managed to provide meat at their own tables.

  I noticed the bald pirate who had first spoken to us in the truck. His name was Ali, and he called out to me as I passed with a plate of seconds. He wore a kev-jacket and a long scarf loosely wrapped around his neck. When I approached he smiled widely. “Not so frightened anymore, are we, missy?” he asked.

  It was true that I found him friendly and even humorous, but I couldn’t help thinking the pirates were taking us away from our parents to a place from which we might not return. The pirates were nice to us now, but Will and I were still prisoners, not free to leave or go our own way. I waved to him and moved on.

  The pirates spent the rest of the morning preparing the trucks, unloading and reloading materials. They were skilled mechanics; small clusters of men worked under the chassis or on the engines. Gasoline-powered vehicles were rare and temperamental, although they could out-haul anything electric. In a pinch, they could be rigged to burn siphoned bio-gas from a generator while the electrical grid was unreliable and often unavailable. This was why our father had bought our pedicycles which, I remembered sadly, were now abandoned hundreds of kilometers behind us on the road.

  The way the pirates squeezed their supplies into the trucks was like a feat of magic. Not only were there weapons and explosives, but cans of food, fabric, blankets, clothing, shoes, electrical parts, tools, spare tires, oxygen, medicine, carbon blocks, nails, salt, chlorine, and iodine. There were even boxes of real beer which Ulysses would not let us near because, he claimed, it was worth more than everything else combined. In short they had all they needed for a prolonged journey or extended siege. “Be prepared,” said Ulysses. “That’s our motto.”

  It seemed to be a silly motto, but Ulysses looked deadly serious as he hauled boxes into the
back of the truck. The sweat shone on his brow despite the morning chill, and muscles flexed beneath his shirt. I tried to lift a box to help, but it was too heavy, so I occupied myself by gathering the small things the pirates had overlooked. Cheetah followed me everywhere I went, and I quickly learned to distinguish her from her sister, because Cheetah’s fur had flecks of black mixed in with the gold, she was smaller than Pooch, and her left ear flopped to one side. She even let me pet her and growled contentedly. It was hard to believe this was the same animal that had pursued us on the road, and it made me wonder whether I had been wrong to fear her at all.

  Will wandered off to watch two pirates repair an axle, and before long he was scampering beneath the wheels and following their directions.

  By noon the trucks were reorganized in an arrangement known only to the pirates. Nothing looked different, yet everything was in a new place. Ulysses gave the signal, and the men climbed into their vehicles. Will joined me in the front seat of the truck. Cheetah and Pooch squeezed into the small compartment behind us.

  “The men are getting ready for a battle,” said Will.

  “How do you know?”

  “They told me.”

  I didn’t believe it, although Will seemed sure. When I asked Ulysses, he just grunted. “Pirates are always prepared for battle,” he said. He wouldn’t say anything more.

  “Didn’t you notice?” said Will. “Their tankers are empty. They’re going to steal what they can’t buy.”

  “Pirates don’t steal,” said Ulysses. “We make offers people can’t refuse.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means they steal,” said Will.

  Ulysses smiled.

  If there was going to be a battle, I didn’t want to be in the middle of it. The Minnesotans—or whomever the pirates were meeting—would not give up their water without a fight. Although I didn’t understand the politics, I was certain the pirates couldn’t just drive into a republic, pay off the border guards, steal water, and drive out again. But that’s exactly what it appeared they were doing.