The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  He took another deep swig from the plastic cup and swallowed, thinking over his predicament a little more. "It's the fact that he let those assholes from Monterey Mineral trash my rig. That's what still bothering me," Scout said, narrowing his brows at the realization. "They took the well. Okay. They beat me up after I punched that deputy. Yeah, I get that. I may have had a little retribution coming," he admitted, wincing a bit from the chuckle. "It was a good punch. You should have seen it."

  Murray cackled along with him. "I'm surprised you could reach his chin. What are you, like five-eight?"

  "When I ran away, they were kicking the crap out of my rig. I wouldn't be surprised if they totaled my Deeprock. Now I've got no way out. I can't go drill another well, and I can't afford to repair my rig. I can't even pay to tow it back to town."

  "Shit, man, loads of people are worse off than you. My question still stands," Murray said, stabbing a gnarled brown finger into Scout's chest. His look was serious this time, and it pinned Scout for a moment. "I don't doubt you've just run afoul of a god damned water cartel, and I'd wager they probably have plenty more in store for you. So what the hell are you going to do about it?"

  A quiet voice interrupted them. Charna Bellingham, the blonde bartender, leaned into the counter and asked Scout, "Can I get you another beer?" She turned her head as if listening to his reply, but continued to speak. "Scout, take a look outside, will ya? You might want to take the trash out back or something."

  Scout glanced over his shoulder and saw a pair of cruisers parked on the far side of the street. In that momentary glance, he saw Deputy Sykes step out of his vehicle. He slid his nightstick into its belt ring.

  "Shit," Scout whispered to himself. Scout stood from his stool. "Murray, you got to run interference for me."

  "Got to?" Murray replied. "I ain't got to nothing."

  "We got this, Scout. Get lost," said Charna, shooting Murray a piercing glare.

  Scout sprinted for the kitchen, pausing to grab a pair of beer cans from a storage shelf before he let the screen door to the alley close quietly behind him. He could hear Charna picking an argument with Murray. Despite his mock reluctance, Murray instantly assumed the role of raucous barroom drunk.

  * * *

  Scout ran down his very short list of options as he trekked back up the road toward the Deeprock. His feet were starting to throb in his boots, and he needed to get some sleep before his body just quit on him.

  His apartment had a couple of things he could use, including some spare cash tucked into a can in the closet, but he was certain it was being watched. His brief reconnaissance of the block turned him around on his heels as soon as he saw one of the Monterey Mineral trucks parked under the Chinese elms at the far end of the street.

  Scout suspected he'd just used any outstanding good will Charna—or Murray, for that matter—might have for him, and he was pretty certain if he showed his face in Damon's again, they would run him off simply to avoid becoming any more entangled. He'd have to send them a postcard or something when all this cleared up.

  Scout had decided that the two beers might get him back to the rig. In fact, they had to. The rig was full of water, and he could always tap off his wellhead if he needed. There was some food in a cooler, too, although most of it was high-carb, low-quality stuff. Then there was the rig itself, which he could scavenge. He doubted he could get the beast running again, but given enough time, one never knew, and the rig held more of his gear than his apartment. Perhaps he could hide out there for a while?

  Finally, he figured the rig was the last place Deputy Sykes or any of his goons were likely to look. When he'd run off, they were gleefully dismantling his Rupe pump and unloading a cutting torch from one of the Monterey Mineral trucks. He would need to be on the lookout for city water officials coming to tag the site, but they were engineers, not the brute squad.

  His mind wandered under the oppressive gaze of the sun, and Scout wondered if there was a way to reclaim his well and the reward. Perhaps if he could catch the city water engineers and explain to them that it was his claim... No, he admonished himself. Riley's betrayal was the tip of something much larger. Everyone supposed it would happen sooner or later. The water cartels were moving north. Fighting was not a smart move. The Mexican drug cartels of twenty years ago had moved on to more profitable pursuits. With the aqua money filling their coffers, they had become more violent and territorial, not less. If he wanted to live, he needed to get out from under their gaze.

  He cracked open a beer and took a long swig from it while he marched up the road. The pavement was hot enough that he could detect a slight singed Vibram smell over the aroma of the fermented rice and barley. The liquid was warm, but it quenched his thirst, at least for the time being. Scout started walking on the faded white line, hoping that might help his boots last a little while longer.

  When he finished the beer, Scout cocked an arm back, preparing to toss it into the rabbitbrush growing on the roadside, then checked himself. He looked at the can and began to wonder how far these guys were willing to chase him. Could they use his trash, discarded along the road, to track him? He didn't know, and he didn't want to risk it.

  Perhaps I need to account for my assets, he thought. What have I got right now? He could refill the beer can when he made it to Pipe Spring, if the seep was still flowing. That would help him get a little further. His boots were in pretty good shape, although the laces on the left one were fraying near the toe box. Scout pulled his orange, brown, and green wool flannel shirt from around his waist and rolled both the empty and full aluminum cans inside it, turning it into an improvised satchel when he slung it over his shoulder. He tilted the bill of his ball cap toward the sun, blocking some glare and shading his face.

  * * *

  "Sergeant Major, we need you down here right away. Over." The voice of the guardsman sounded a little panicked. The roundup had been going pretty well up to this point. Two truckloads of water refugees from the Lower Forty-Eight were already bouncing down forest roads to holding camps for processing and eventual deportation.

  Legal challenges and all those bones of contention would mean that Canada would be putting most of these people up for a good long while, but that was never his concern. The camps were a necessary provision for the Great Wall program to be successful, and Santiago's job was to fill them up as fast as he could. He took the radio from his aide-de-camp and keyed the microphone.

  "What'cha have for me, guardsman?" Santiago asked.

  "Nothing good. You should be able to see the drone imagery now, Sergeant Major."

  Santiago pulled the pocket device from his coat and sorted through a menu selection before he found the drone’s video footage. The camera focused on what looked to be an abandoned mine near the head of a steeply walled valley. The picture was a little grainy, and distant from the target, so it was difficult to tell what he was looking at.

  "Can you guys zoom in?" he said into the radio. Icons jumped across the screen, and eventually, a target acquisition box lit up around a dark patch under some hemlocks to the left of the mine. The camera zoomed in.

  At first, Santiago did not realize he was looking at a mound of bodies. He thought it was just another camp of water refugees laid out in a bare spot near the mine entrance, but then it occurred to him that no one was moving. No one was running, despite the very obvious presence of his Mounties moving in on the perimeter.

  "Get me a sat phone, would you?" he said to his aide-de-camp. "There's a shit-ton of hurt down there and we need reporters swarming this area right away.”

  “Sir,” said the lieutenant. “I’m being told that these people probably died from exposure. Maybe they got lost in the mine?”

  Santiago lifted the sat phone to his ear, but gave the aide-de-camp an order to follow-up. “Listen, let’s set up a cordon. When the coyote comes out of that den, I want to nab this one.”

  The lieutenant nodded his understanding. “We’ll find him, sir. There are kids in that
mess.”

  * * *

  "Wrecked!" Scout exclaimed to the coyotes howling over the hill. He was perched on the edge of a rock cliff, part of the Moenkopi formation that loomed above his dig site. Sykes and his water cartel goons had driven his rig off the capped well, then set fire to his Deeprock.

  On the march back to his rig, he had left the road, walking parallel to the pavement for quite a bit of the trip. He had thought about sticking his thumb out to hitch a ride, but Scout had gotten lucky. Just a few minutes after he stepped from the pavement, a pair of headlights cut a bright swath through the night. These were soon followed by six big trucks with blacked-out windows, none of them taking notice of the crouched figure huddled in the tall sagebrush. Sykes had been at the head of that caravan, so despite hunger, the buzz ringing his ears from the beers, and a pounding headache, Scout breathed a sigh of relief.

  Approaching his rig, Scout smelled fumes of a diesel fire. The thick smoke periodically clouded out the moonlight. His rig was still smoldering.

  "Totally wrecked!" he moaned in frustration. Something flared inside the cab, casting some additional light on the scene of destruction below him. Small objects cast dark shadows as the fire got going again, and Scout wondered if maybe some of his stuff had been thrown from the rig as fuels exploded. Looking at the pair of opened beer cans, one in each fist, he supposed it was worth checking out before he moved along.

  Scout stumbled quite a bit on his hike down to the rig. He needed food, water, and sleep. He'd made it this far on the smoldering coals of his anger, but those were dying.

  His cooler had been tossed from the rig, but most of the food had been picked over. Mice and maybe a raccoon, he supposed. He steered clear of the mess, knowing that the intermingled droppings could carry Hanta or worse. He was able to tap some water off the capped well, which felt refreshingly cold going down his parched throat, and the can of chips he fished out of a prickly pear seemed safe.

  He was too tired to do much more than stare. Scout had been standing stationary for maybe ten minutes when a pair of headlights lit up the narrow dirt road leading down to the mess. Scout breathed a sigh of relief when an old Ford pickup braked to a stop next to him.

  Murray rolled down the driver's window. "Figured you might head this way. Come on, get in," he said, kicking open the passenger door of the idling truck. "There's going to be a ton of company, we need to beat feet."

  * * *

  "Charna pointed out to me that you'd kindly overlooked my business dealings at the end of the bar. But you never suspected?" Murray said, raising an eyebrow in disbelief.

  "Nope. Just thought you were some drunk pissing away his Indian Affairs check," Scout said.

  "Well, don't that beat all," Murray said. "Guess I could have left you for Sykes and his crew after all. Yeah, that’s my cover, but I’ve been working special operations for Navajo Council for years.”

  "Look," Scout said, breaking up the uncomfortable silence that followed, "I'm plenty grateful, don't get me wrong, but if you're really a coyote, what's your angle? I may have missed your operation at Damon's, but that wasn't really my job when I was bouncing. I can tell you didn't just drive me past Boise out of the kindness of your heart. If Sykes is water cartel then you probably just brought a world of hurt in your direction. What do you want, Murray?"

  After he'd eaten the bag of gas station fried chicken Murray had handed over, Scout had slept for a considerable portion of the drive across Nevada and Idaho. Scout had not woken until they stopped at an Interstate rest station just outside Boise. The air was crisp in the early morning light, and Murray had handed him a clean towel from a toolbox in the back of the truck and told him to freshen up.

  "Well, Scout, I'm going to take your claim, and I'd like what's left of your rig." Murray's malicious chuckle was back. "Turns out you left your imprint on that well cap. County knows it, which means the State and the Fed know it too. That's why Sykes and his crew ain't leaving you be. They want the registration tab, but you're going to give it to me. Well, to the Navajo Nation, anyway.”

  Scout poked a hand into the rear pocket of his jeans and pulled from it the little rectangle of metal. "Damn, I forgot. How'd you know?"

  "That kid posted pictures on the net. He was gloating about his double-cross, but that don't matter much. We have people monitoring water cartel movement all across the southwest. I work Navajo special ops. Not just a coyote. One of our guys noticed the registration plate hanging from the wellhead, he put two and two together, and the tribal board called me in to 'help you out of a sticky situation,'" Murray explained, holding up a pocket device for Scout to see.

  "So here's how it's going to go down," Murray continued. "Those rights are on old Navajo land, that's why we want them. After I get that plate from you, Fredonia don't come into this much. Besides, you don't want them to go to Sykes and his crew, do ya?”

  “Yeah, but that water bounty is mine. I earned it,” Scout protested.

  "They ain't going to let you keep that tab. That's why they've been hunting for you, but once it's registered with the State, we can move with the Fed to reclaim some of that water and consequently the land. Anyway, we figure you're better off getting as far away as you can. If there’s one thing you can say about the water cartel, it’s that they’re vindictive. So that's the exchange. You give me that tab, I get you over the border to Canada. I took you this far to show you we mean business, but also 'cause you never tried to push me out of Damon's." Murray squinted into the morning light.

  Scout held the tab, pondering Murray's proposition for a moment. "Can you add any money to that?"

  "For the registration? No, but you want to write me a bill of sale for what’s left of your Deeprock, I'll make sure you walk over the border with a full pack, new boots, and a wad of Canadian cash. We have people that can fix your rig up proper, but that’s got to be above board."

  "Sykes burned—" Scout started to say.

  "Yeah, yeah. Whatever. You going to take me up on my offer?"

  Scout reluctantly put the registration tab in Murray's weathered palm.

  * * *

  His feet were throbbing even though Scout had been shedding weight for miles. First, he had popped open one can of tuna after another. Then, not having any place to dispose of the packaging, he’d dropped the empties along the trail. After that he chucked the huge tube of toothpaste and later the toothbrush into a stand of Douglas fir. This part of Northern Idaho was littered with the cast-offs of a thousand refugees.

  The new boots Murray had picked up for him had given him blisters on both heels, but the big external frame backpack, overloaded with bulky and heavy objects hastily purchased from a discount outdoor retailer in Boise, was the real problem. Twin hotspots had formed on his hips and were by far more painful than the beating his feet were taking.

  Murray had called the route he had penciled onto the topographical maps a "water trail," one of the many refugee ingresses to Canada. He had insisted it would be easy for Scout to find his way, assuring him that this was still a mostly unguarded way into the country.

  "Stick to the lowlands, well below the tree-line,” Murray had warned him. “It’s all wilderness, but if you get up too high, the loitering drones might spot you. They have them on both sides of the Great Wall.”

  Scout hoped he was nearing the end of the trail, but was uncertain. The many miles of foot-packed trails meandered back and forth, confusing his sense of the distance and direction. He was not the first refugee that had come this way. The growing pile of cast-off objects at the bottom of the hill testified to the passage of many before him.

  Eventually, he stood in front of a half-collapsed tunnel that bore a dark path into the side of a scree field, searching for a sign. A tailings pile cascaded for a couple of hundred feet below him, yellow and rust-colored, redolent with the sulfuric acid leaching from the broken rocks mined from the heart of the mountain. Getting to this site, he had cast off his sleeping bag, the cheap brown tarp, a
nd some spare clothing. The climb was steep, and once through the tunnel, he would need to move quickly.

  He found the pair of hashmarks he had been looking for scratched into a boulder near the entrance.

  "This is it," Scout said aloud, pausing. "Well, it's probably it."

  Murray had drawn a map of the tunnel structure on the back of a kid's menu pilfered from a neighboring diner table. "Once you're in the tunnel, follow this route. Don't improvise. I've been through this tunnel network several times, and all the wrong turns lead to something nasty. Follow the hashmarks, take your time, and don't make mistakes."

  Scout had started to wonder if he should make a camp and save his border crossing for the following day when a search light, mounted to the underside of a big helicopter, began to scan the far side of the narrow valley from where he stood. He sucked in a deep breath and ducked under the decaying timber lintel of the mine entrance.

  The bulky backpack frame came off almost immediately. It protruded above his head and kept knocking against the unstable boulders in the ceiling of the mine. Each tap or ding from the frame knocked little pebbles free and filled him with anxiety. He dragged the aluminum frame over the floor of the mine with one hand while shining a disposable flashlight ahead of himself with the other. The cold from the previous night had cracked the plastic case of the light, so he had to concentrate on holding the assembly together. When he forgot, the light flickered on and off, plunging the unfamiliar space into impenetrable darkness.

  The entrance shaft ran fairly level and was mostly straight, but rock fall obscured any light from the tunnel mouth. He'd had to crawl under or squeeze past several of these. Initially, the way was easy to follow by the very many tracks left in the fine dust that covered the floor of the mine.