I started getting worried when I noticed Mrs. Levingworth hovering near the phone. It looked like she wanted to make a phone call. But my dad didn’t work with anyone, so I wasn’t sure who she was planning to call. Maybe the police. Clearview had two policemen.
When evening fell, Mrs. Levingworth’s worry was palpable. She told me it was time to go to her house. I’d spend the night there. She said that my dad was spending the night in Merryville. But she hadn’t made any phone calls so I wondered how she’d found that out. She couldn’t know that.
I wanted to wait for my dad and I stationed myself at the front window.
She tried to coax me into going home with her and Rick. It was dinnertime and she wanted to cook us dinner.
I said I wanted to stay and wait. I wouldn’t leave. So she finally went ahead and made some calls. I didn’t know it at the time, but she asked the police to check in with the Fibs. The Fibs were in charge of policing the Territory. When there was a serious problem, towns would call them in.
Then Mrs. Levingworth made dinner, and I ate my dinner in front of the window.
Mrs. Levingworth told me everything would be okay. She repeated that my dad was spending the night in Merryville.
I didn’t go to bed that night. I stared out the window. Rick and Mrs. Levingworth spent the night at my house.
I watched the night get darker.
I watched the dawn rise. A haunting purple sky.
I waited for my dad.
Mrs. Levingworth made breakfast.
I didn’t eat.
Then it was time to go to school, but I didn’t want to go to school.
Mrs. Levingworth called Mrs. Simmons and had her swing by and take Rick to school. Mrs. Levingworth stayed with me, but we didn’t talk.
I waited.
Sometime around noon, a car pulled up to the house and Mr. Kadish stepped out. I saw him hesitate before approaching the house.
He came to the door and I don’t know if Mrs. Levingworth heard his car, but she opened the door before he knocked. He stepped inside and saw me by the window. He smiled, but it wasn’t a smile. It was something sad that looked like a smile.
He and Mrs. Levingworth headed into the kitchen without talking.
I moved quietly toward the kitchen door to listen. They spoke in somber tones and I couldn’t make out the words, but I could tell they were sad words.
I went back to the window and stared outside.
Mrs. Levingworth walked out of the kitchen. Mr. Kadish followed. He headed to the front door and left.
Mrs. Levingworth stepped up to me and said we needed to talk.
I said, “Let’s wait until my dad comes home.”
Another hour passed before she was ready to talk and I was ready to listen.
She told me that my dad had died. She didn’t tell me how or why and I didn’t ask. That would come later.
I saw tears roll down her face and I saw her lips quiver.
She hugged me tight and I felt her body trembling.
I was alone.
Chapter Three
I drove the Corolaqua van to Troy Street. I wanted to say good-bye to Benny before heading out.
All that made Clearview a town, except for its most important asset, Corolaqua, was on Troy Street. The shops that sold food, clothes, and Remnants, and the few repair and trade shops that weren’t run out of people’s houses. The Town Hall was also here. Like every other town in the Territory, a Town Council ran Clearview and six days a week, the Councilmen showed up at the Town Hall and did their best to keep Clearview functional. The Town Hall also housed the Line, which was how all the towns communicated with each other. The Line held the Territory together. Barely.
Benny ran the Line in Clearview.
I met Benny Spokane in kindergarten. Back then, I had other friends, too, because kids didn’t resent me yet. They liked that I knew things, and they asked me questions about those things and I answered them.
Benny was one of the kids who asked me questions. His family, like all families, didn’t encourage him to learn more than what he was taught in school. So when Benny found out that there was a lot more to learn, he turned to me. Before the Virus, schools taught all sorts of subjects, but now they stuck to the basics. Enough to communicate and survive in a world of rudimentary living. And parents could stop sending their kids to school whenever they wanted to. It was more important for your kid to help grow food or sew shirts or fish or chop wood or keep an old car or bicycle going. Or to work one of the necessary jobs in town.
In third grade, after my dad was murdered, kids stopped asking me questions. They were scared of me, like I was tainted by my dad’s death. Benny stopped asking me questions, too. But he didn’t have that same look in his eyes that the other kids had. When I’d catch other kids staring at me, their eyes were full of fear. Benny’s eyes were full of questions.
Finally, after a couple of months, he was so desperate to learn new things that he couldn’t hold out any longer. He started asking me questions again. I answered the ones I could and if I didn’t know the answer, I was so happy to have someone ask questions again, that I’d go home and look it up.
I was living with the Levingworths. They took me in after my dad was murdered. But every weekend, they’d let me go back to my house for a few hours and I took advantage of that. I’d look through my dad’s books and find answers to Benny’s questions, and that led me back to my dad. I was keeping my promise to him. That I’d always keep learning. And this sealed my friendship with Benny.
By fifth grade, Benny didn’t have to ask me questions anymore. I’d voluntarily tell him what I was learning. And by seventh grade, Benny was returning the favor. He was learning things on his own and teaching them to me. He didn’t have the resources I had, my father’s books, CDs, DVDs, old flash drives crammed with information, etc. Instead, he’d sneak into Clearview’s abandoned buildings and dig up old books and magazines. He’d even sneak into the school’s old warehouse on Edgerton and spend hours there, reading study guides the teachers had long ago abandoned.
By eighth grade, most of the other kids were ostracizing us. And in ninth grade, they began to kick the crap out of us. Benny was small so he was an easy target. Kids would beat him up anywhere, anytime. But he got used to it and did a good job of hiding the purple bruises the punches left. He knew that snitching would make things worse.
I was a big kid, so kids had to plan their attacks on me and make sure they outnumbered me. They’d ambush me with overwhelming force and even though I’d fight back, I’d take a pounding. I could fight one or two kids, but three or more was too much. Still, sometimes I’d get in some good punches. Like Benny, I hid the bruises, but Mrs. Levingworth still figured it out and talked to the parents of the guilty kids. She was protective of me because I had no one but her, but it made things worse and I had to tell her to stop.
There were two other smart kids in our school, Rick Levingworth (who got stuck with me as his ‘foster’ brother, more on that later) and Ellen Sanchez, and maybe you could say they were smarter than me because they chose to play dumb and fit in. (Only later, did they feel it was okay to exercise some of their smarts.) No one in town was sympathetic to smart kids or to smart adults. And it wasn’t really being ‘smart’ that was the problem. It was that no one believed learning facts, concepts, theories, or subjects which had long been forgotten could help their town survive.
At that age, I thought that this was just the way it was. But as I grew older, I began to wonder why it was this way. It’d be years before I learned the answer. First, I’d have to discover that secret my dad had wanted to tell me.
I stepped into the Town Hall and the building was quiet. No one was in this early, except for Benny. Benny’s ‘office’ was in the basement and that was fine with him. The Councilmen were too lazy to head down there, so they didn’t bother him much.
I headed down the stairs and to the end of the hallway and knocked on Benny’s door. No answer. Bu
t I was sure he was in there working on computer code and entranced by it. I opened the door and stepped into a small room packed with computer monitors, hard drives, assorted hardware, and a mass of cables. Some of the hardware was dedicated to the Line, but most of it was Benny’s personal stash. He’d rebuilt these Remnants himself.
Benny was sitting in front of a monitor, scrolling through lines of code. He was small and wiry and his leg jittered when he was anxious. If he was concentrating on computer code, his leg never jittered.
“Got a problem with the exec files?” he said, without looking up from his work.
“Nope.”
“Then why the visit?” He didn’t want to be bothered. Nothing was happening on the Line so this was a good time for him to work on his own stuff.
“Take a guess,” I said.
He stopped checking code and looked at me and I didn’t have to say it. He knew. His leg started jittering.
“Sending you out is just plain dumb,” he said, “a losing strategy. Frank knows that.”
“He’s gotta follow the rules,” I said.
“Not in this case.”
“They’d turn on him in two seconds if he sent someone else,” I said, and that was the truth. The plant workers would vote in a new foreman by the end of the day if Frank gave me special treatment.
“If you don’t come back, the plant’s over,” Benny said.
“The plant did fine before me. It’ll do fine after.”
“We both know that’s a bunch of crap.”
Benny was right. But only partially. He was right that I was the only one who had a shot at fixing a serious breakdown, but it was also a fact that the plant had never had a serious breakdown. The truth was, that way before I came along, someone always managed to find a way to make the necessary repairs. Why water plants, refineries, and electric plants continued to function was a mystery. A lucky mystery that no one questioned. They didn’t know enough to question it.
“What are you hearing?” I said. I wanted to know what kind of danger I was heading into, and the Line was the only source for that.
“Bandon said they lost a trucker a couple days ago,” Benny said. “A marauder attack.” Bandon was a truck town.
“What about the Virus?” I asked.
“Three cases yesterday. Four the day before.”
“Not bad.”
“Tell that to the deceased,” he said, and glanced up at me. “Just don’t do any exploring.”
“I’m sticking to the road and the pumping station.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Benny and I used to talk about exploring the Territory. We were sure that there was a bonanza of knowledge hidden out there and we wanted to find it. But the reality was that we’d given up on ever venturing out of Clearview. The chance of dying from the Virus or at the hands of the marauders was just too great. Not to mention that leaving Clearview without a visa was desertion and the Fibs jailed all deserters. Though we never actually said it, we were too frightened to leave. Our fears were greater than our dreams.
“Maybe when I get back, you’ll have figured out what those data packets are,” I said.
“Don’t count on it. It’s too weird a code.”
Over the last two years, Benny had noticed mysterious data packets moving through the Line. At first, he’d thought a fellow Lineman from another town was behind them. But after digging around a little, he’d concluded that none of the other Linemen knew enough to pull this off. Like everyone else in the Territory, they knew how to do their jobs, but that was it. They didn’t even know that the Line was a stripped down version of an expansive communications network once called the Internet. Before the Virus, all kinds of information had flowed through this network. Even video. Back then, bandwidth was big enough to carry a ton of information. Bandwidth was like the pipes and aqueducts that carried water from Corolaqua to other towns. But while Corolaqua’s pipes and aqueducts could still carry plenty of water, what was left of the Internet was barely enough bandwidth to connect the towns.
“Any sign of trouble,” Benny said, “and you run as fast you can.” Then he suddenly stood up and hugged me. It was a rare emotional display of our friendship, and what it meant was obvious. He knew I might not return.
Chapter Four
I headed south. To my right, rugged gray cliffs ran down to the ocean. To my left, a dark green forest ran inland as far as the eye could see. The road was worn and for long stretches, the lane lines were gone. Then, out of nowhere, I’d see a few, patchy and faded, like mysterious hieroglyphics from an ancient culture.
Decent roads meant trucks could haul goods up and down the Territory, so some towns used road repair to trade for goods. Percy, a mid-size town, took care of this stretch of road, but I was sure that lane lines were its last priority. Over the last couple of years, five men from Percy had died from the Virus. They’d caught it while working on the roads, but every town did what it could to survive.
The road soon veered away from the ocean and deeper into the wilderness, an endless forest of lime green, black green, and hues of green I’d never seen before. I wanted to see trucks on the road, but I didn’t and that made me wary. Everyone in the Territory knew the wilderness was home to the marauders. They’d found pockets of land without the Virus and these sanctuaries became the base camps from which they’d ambush truckers and workers on the roads.
I kept my eyes on the forest looking for signs of an ambush and stayed hyper-alert for the next three hours until the road veered back toward the ocean. As soon as I saw the blue Pacific, I felt safer and calmer. I knew a lot about the ocean and about water.
A few years after the marauders murdered my father, I began to teach myself as much as I could about water. I had decided that the time had come to find out why my father had impressed on me that water was important.
I studied the science books which he’d salvaged, and I verified what he’d said on the beach that day: There was a finite amount of water on Earth. Earth never gained nor lost water. I learned the water cycle in detail, going way beyond what my dad had taught me. I learned about oceans, rivers, streams, lakes, glaciers and underground aquifers. I learned that humans, themselves, were seventy percent water. Then I taught myself exactly how the Corolaqua plant purified seawater and I studied the chemistry of water, a compound, not an element, made of hydrogen and oxygen, which were elements. I continued on with chemistry, then biology and physics. I was building on the foundation that my father had laid down.
But I went too far. At least, according to everyone in Clearview. They thought I was obsessed with useless knowledge, and they thought it was because I didn’t want to face losing my dad. They said that I was obsessed with learning because I was trying to fill a hole in my life. A bottomless hole that could never be filled. To everyone in town, I was crazy. Psychologically damaged beyond repair.
So, as I got older, I decided to keep what I knew to myself and I made more of an effort to fit in, like Rick Levingworth and Ellen Sanchez did. It took a while, but it worked. Most people stopped thinking I was crazy. Unfortunately, they instead started to think I looked down on them and started to resent me again. Still, that was better than it’d been and it would’ve been a good way to leave it, but I made things worse.
I discovered that there was something going on with the water.
A few years out of school, I decided to compile a kind of almanac about the Territory. The number of towns, their populations, the amount and kind of food they produced, the goods and services they provided, how much they traded, etc. I wanted to gather together as many facts about each town as I could.
But information was hard to come by. Much harder than I’d expected. So I enlisted Benny’s help. He tried to verify information through the Line. But the people who ran the Line in other towns were suspicious. Answering these questions wasn’t part of their jobs. The Line was for trade, reports about the Virus and marauders, and communication between the towns and the Fibs. Most of his reque
sts never received answers at all, like they’d completely disappeared from the Line.
At first, my plan was to build an accurate portrait of the Territory, but that soon changed into something else. I started crunching numbers and then I took those numbers and referenced them to what I knew about Corolaqua’s water output. That’s when I began to see that things didn’t add up.
Under any possible scenario, Corolaqua was pumping out way more water than needed. Corolaqua provided water for the towns from Port Orford to Astoria, and those towns’ populations couldn’t possibly consume all the water we pumped out. And the desalination plant in Willapa Bay, which served the towns north of Astoria up to Moclips, wasn’t needed at all. Between what we pumped out and the rainfall and aquifers up there, they had plenty of water.
Then, by carefully tracking trade on the Line, Benny and I suspected the same thing was going on in the southern part of the Territory. We couldn’t confirm it, but it looked like there were three desalination plants south of Port Orford, in what used to be California. But the towns down there required only one plant, if any. There just weren’t enough people in the Territory to justify five plants operating at full capacity. Way more water was being purified and shipped than needed, including water required for farming. No matter how you added it up, the numbers didn’t make any sense.
So where was all this extra water going? Was it being shipped inland? But there were no towns inland. At least that’s what we’d been taught all our lives. It was rumored that there might be a string of towns on the east coast, but no one had ever confirmed that. And even if that were true, it didn’t make sense that water was being purified on one coast and trucked across two thousand miles of dead land to the other coast. Was it possible that some towns in the Territory were using the water for something that the rest of us didn’t know about? I didn’t have an answer to that question, but I became obsessed with finding one.
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