H2O

by Belateche, Irving

  My new plan was to get to the Corolaqua van. If the Fibs had left it alone, I’d drive it back to Clearview. So I changed course and headed toward the storage facility. On the way, I considered just how I’d be able to drive out of Yachats without getting stopped by Fibs.

  Thirty minutes later, as I was hiking past a dilapidated house, tucked in the woods, I heard shouting. I looked back and saw a lanky, old man, wielding a shotgun and herding a woman out of a shed. The woman had beautiful lemon blond hair which was disheveled, like she’d just woken up, and she was swinging a large backpack onto her shoulders.

  I slipped behind a tree and watched.

  The old man was pushing the woman forward with his shotgun and yelling at her, “Get the hell off my land,” even though that’s exactly what she was doing. When he finally pushed her onto the road, he added, “I’m calling the police, you goddamn marauder.”

  At that point, the woman could’ve walked away. There wasn’t any reason to aggravate the old man any more than he was already aggravated. But she didn’t walk away. Instead, she turned back and said, “Go ahead and call the police. You get seven years for a gun. I get one for trespassing. You lose.” Her defiance animated her green eyes.

  “You’re a goddamn crazy one,” the old man shot back. Then he lifted his shotgun, taking aim at the woman’s head.

  “I am a crazy one,” she said and started down the road.

  I was hooked. By her fierceness. A fierceness that was as striking as her beauty.

  From a safe distance, I followed her. She stuck to the open road and I stuck to the dark forest. I kept expecting her to veer into the woods and couldn’t understand why she was hiking in plain sight. If the old man did end up calling the police, she’d be walking right into their hands. Maybe, she didn’t care. Maybe she wasn’t a deserter or a marauder.

  After five minutes or so, she suddenly stopped and looked back into the woods. “Why are you following me?” she said.

  I thought I was too far back to be heard, but I should’ve realized from her backpack that she knew which sounds belonged to the wilderness and which didn’t.

  I approached her. She stood her ground. “You scared?” she said.

  “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea for us to chat out there in the open,” I said.

  The hint of a grin flashed across her lips. I’d just admitted that I was scared. “Where are you from?” she said.

  “Clearview.”

  “A deserter, huh?

  “Not exactly.”

  She tilted her head and a ray of sunlight lit up her lemon hair.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “Does that story explain why you’re hiding in the woods?”

  “I could tell it to you and you could decide for yourself.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  She joined me in the forest and, as we hiked toward the storage facility, I told her my story. The heroic version. After fixing the pump, I’d continued south to try and solve a mystery. A mystery that I’d been working on for years. I told her my theory about the extra water and that I was determined to find out what was going on with it. I didn’t tell her that it was really Crater who’d lured me south and I didn’t tell her about the salamander in the dirt. The salamander wrapped in the memory of my father. If I had told her the truth about my travels, she might’ve told me the truth about hers.

  But though we both lied about what brought us to Yachats, we told each other the truth when it came to our personal lives.

  Lily Aron was from Klamath, a coastal town in what once was the Redwood National Park. Like Yachats, Klamath had been a tourist town. It was now a lumber town that supplied lumber to the Territory.

  When the Virus struck, one of the tourists in Klamath had been a biology professor from the University of California at Berkeley. After the Virus, he didn’t return to Berkeley. There was nothing to return to. Everyone in Berkeley was dead. So the professor made Klamath his home and helped organize the town, one of the lucky towns spared by the Virus. Then, when things stabilized, he started to study the Virus but didn’t get very far. He stopped when he heard the rumors that others researching it were dying from it. He didn’t want to take the risk and he had a good reason not to. His daughter.

  She grew up in Klamath, healthy and happy with no worries and no real understanding of what had happened during the previous generation. Then she had a daughter of her own. Lily, the lemon haired girl, and Lily grew up under different circumstances than her mother. Lily’s grandfather took her under his wing and taught her things he hadn’t been able to teach to his own daughter. He’d spent so much time helping Klamath survive, that he’d neglected to pass on his breadth of knowledge to her. And when he realized that knowledge was quickly disappearing from the Territory, he vowed that he wouldn’t make that same mistake with his granddaughter. He passed on what he knew to Lily and became her tutor.

  But Lily’s mother wasn’t too keen on the tutoring. She believed that learning more than necessary could only lead to trouble. That wasn’t a surprise because that was the mindset of the Territory and she’d been brought up in that milieu. But she also worried because Lily was proving to be overly curious. As a child, Lily would hike into the redwood forest with the loggers and after the loggers started their work, she’d sneak away and explore. Each section of the forest had to be certified as Virus-free before loggers could work it, but Lily would head out anyway and afterwards her mother would punish her. She’d ground her to the house. But that made Lily want to explore even more, so it wasn’t long before she wanted to explore the entire Territory. The Virus didn’t scare her. She’d already wandered into the wilderness and emerged unscathed.

  At twenty-two, Lily requested a visa to travel up the coast. Unfortunately, by this time, her mother had become a Councilwoman and she lobbied the rest of the Councilmen to vote against it. It wasn’t that tough to convince them. Town Councils issued visas only to those who had critical reasons to travel. As long as the Virus and marauders were out there and as long as the stability of the Territory was at stake, the law was clear: No one traveled without a compelling reason.

  The Town Council rejected Lily’s request for a visa, but her response was to travel up the coast anyway and that was the first of a series of lawless excursions. She’d had many over the years, and that alone should’ve tipped me off. There had to be more to her desire to explore the Territory than just curiosity. She wasn’t the type who was just interested in sightseeing. And I should’ve been clued in by the fact that her grandfather, her tutor, had been a biology professor. Lily was trained to think and to seek out answers.

  As we got closer to the storage facility, I told her my plan. I wanted to continue putting the pieces of my water puzzle together, but I couldn’t do that with the Fibs hunting me down. I told her I had to get back to Clearview and, on an impulse, I also offered her a ride north.

  To my surprise, she accepted.

  So that meant I had to explain that getting the van wasn’t going to be so easy and after I filled her in on that, she surprised me again. She said she’d help me get the van out of the storage facility. Well, now came the last of bit of information she needed to know before committing. I told her Victor Crow was in town and I thought I’d see some fear in her radiant green eyes, but instead I saw curiosity. She said that in all her travels, she’d never run into him. I asked her if she feared getting caught by the Fibs and she said that she’d been detained by them a few times, but always released. She suspected that her mother, who’d been a Councilwoman for over a decade, played a key role in that. A reluctant role. Her mother may have hated her travels, but she still didn’t want to see her only daughter in jail.

  I could’ve pressed Lily more about why she wanted to risk helping a fugitive, but I was far too happy to have her along as a traveling companion. I’d already fallen for her easy intelligence and fearlessness, so I accepted her explanatio
n that riding with me was better than her usual way of traveling (which was to stow away in the rigging which some truckers added to the underside of their trucks.)

  We made it to that same spot I’d found earlier, the one with the good view of the facility. We counted five Fibs on duty, then I pointed out the Corolaqua van. It was still parked where I’d left it, near the small building. The good news was that no Fibs were watching it. They were focused on various clusters of storage tanks. And that seemed to bolster my theory. The Fibs were in Yachats because of a possible marauder attack.

  Lily and I studied the facility, looking at it as if it were a maze. We needed to get out of that maze. The starting point was my van and the end point was the front exit, the only exit. And our route had to avoid the five Fibs and the flagmen.

  We came up with the best route we could, but there was one Fib we couldn’t avoid. He was stationed at an intersection near the exit and we had to pass through that intersection. So Lily volunteered to distract him. The plan was for me to drive the van out while she raced into the facility, in a panic, and told him that she’d just seen a couple of marauders. He’d either leave his post to check her story out, or he’d leave his post to detain her. Either way, the intersection would be temporarily clear. And if he detained her, she was sure she’d be freed like she’d always been.

  We set up a rendezvous spot, then hiked down and parted ways.

  I stepped out of the woods onto the facility grounds, right behind the small building. I made my way along its back wall, using it as cover, and as soon as I cleared the building, I hurried toward my van. My timing had to match Lily’s, so I couldn’t wait for the coast to be clear and, sure enough, a trucker stepped out of the building.

  I slowed down, so I wouldn’t look suspicious and he glanced at me. I kept my expression neutral, climbed into the van, started it up, and pulled out. I checked my rearview mirror and saw that the trucker was now watching my van. There was nothing I could do about that.

  I snaked through the facility along the route we’d mapped out and it was all going smoothly until I found myself stuck behind a truck. A flagman was directing the truck, helping it maneuver up to a storage tank. I waited, knowing that I couldn’t take another route and hoping my luck hadn’t turned. We’d known that there was the possibility of a flagman being drawn from his post to help a trucker maneuver. We’d seen that from above, but it didn’t happen a lot. Well, it was happening now, and then it got worse.

  The flagman spotted me and started walking toward me. I saw a slim opening in front of me, so I weighed whether to floor it or not, but quickly decided against it. This wasn’t a Fib. It was a flagman. So I rolled down my window.

  “Fibs are looking for you, bud,” he said. “Why don’t you pull over?”

  “What do they want with me?” I asked.

  He smirked. “Like they’re gonna tell me.”

  That comment told me everything I needed to know. Like everyone in the Territory, he wasn’t fond of the Fibs, so I said, “They probably were looking for an excuse to search my van and take my Curado.”

  The flagman smiled and that closed the deal.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “You take it. Better you than them.” And without waiting for an answer, I leaned over, quickly pawed through my food supplies, pulled out the bottle of Curado and handed it to him.

  He checked it out, grinning and appreciating his good luck. “I’ve never tried it,” he said.

  Of course not, I thought. It’d probably cost him two years pay. “Enjoy,” I said, and pulled away, right through that slim opening.

  I checked the rearview mirror to see what he’d do next. He was walking back toward the front of the truck, taking his time and keeping the bottle low to his side, hidden. I was sure he was trying to figure out where to stash his prize. Somewhere out of sight of any Fib. He’d never dreamt he’d come across a bottle of the fabled liquor and he wasn’t going to lose it now.

  I swung around two more storage tanks and found myself behind a slow-moving truck. It was slow because it was a triple tank truck. I pulled to its left, checked for approaching trucks, and didn’t see any. So I started to pass it and as I did, I noticed rigging underneath the tanks. The rigging was crammed with sacks. (Lily had told me the truckers added this rigging to haul extra goods that they’d sell on the side.) The whole set-up looked rough and uncomfortable. No wonder she didn’t like traveling that way.

  I passed the tank truck and I knew that the next left would be the moment of truth. It led to the intersection with the Fib. Hopefully, Lily had cleared him out. In terms of the timing, I was on schedule, so I felt fairly confident that my bad luck was behind me. Especially because I’d managed to talk my way out of getting pulled over.

  I took the left and looked down the lane. No Fib. Great. I couldn’t help speeding up a little to make sure I’d get through the intersection before he returned. I made it through and didn’t see any sign of the Fib. Lily had done her job. I continued toward the exit, glancing up and down the remaining lanes, which were clear of Fibs. Still, I began to feel a little uneasy, like something was wrong. But I shrugged it off and thought about meeting Lily at the rendezvous spot, an empty campground, tucked in the hills, about a mile away.

  I turned and started down the lane that would take me to the main road and I spotted Lily. This wasn’t good. About a hundred yards in front of me, two Fibs had her backed up against the side of a double tank truck that was loading up on water. Lily’s backpack was on the ground and it looked like the Fibs were interrogating her. They saw my van and one of them moved to the middle of the lane, drew his gun, and motioned for me to stop. But I couldn’t just stop, and give myself up. I had to help Lily. It was my fault that the Fibs had captured her and I was almost a hundred percent sure that, this time, they weren’t going to let her go.

  Lily was up against the truck’s first tank, and the second tank was hooked up to a ten million gallon storage tank. A pipe, made of industrial plastic, probably Teflon fluorocarbon (like some of the pipes at Corolaqua), connected the two. Teflon fluorocarbon was a tough plastic able to withstand the powerful pressure of water gushing through it.

  That pressure was going to be my weapon.

  I sped up, hoping that Lily would know what to do.

  The Fib saw me bearing down on him so instead of shooting at me, he raced out of the way to save himself, and at the last second, I swerved my van toward the truck, aiming for the second tank. I smashed into it and the air bag exploded from my steering wheel so I didn’t actually get to see the pipe break lose but I heard the deluge and I knew that this collision had sent hundreds of gallons of water spewing.

  I scrambled out of the van and ran toward the back of the storage tank. Water was flooding the entire area, and I spotted Lily running through the spray. We both sprinted past the storage tank, leaving the deluge behind.

  “We have to get to the woods,” I said, running across a lane.

  “They’re expecting that,” she said.

  She was right. We ran between two storage tanks and I glanced back. A Fib was crossing the lane, bearing down on us.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” she said.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “We need to find a truck heading out. With rigging.”

  I remembered the triple tank truck I’d passed minutes ago. It was probably still on its way out. “I know just the truck.”

  We wove between the massive storage tanks, heading in that direction, until we spotted it.

  “When it passes, we run for the rigging,” Lily said.

  The truck rolled closer.

  “What if the driver sees us?” I asked.

  “They have a blind spot. Toward the front of the first tank,” she said. “Run straight to the front of the tank. Don’t run alongside it, and he won’t see us.”

  We sprinted to the blind spot, ducked under the tank, and crawled into the rigging beneath. We were lying next to burlap sacks packed with onions
. The sacks hid us from view on the far side, but we were exposed on the near side, so we pulled some of the sacks around.

  The truck rolled forward and when I saw water flowing on the lane beneath us, I knew we were passing the scene of the crash and close to exiting the facility.

  Two minutes later, the truck picked up speed. We were out.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The sound of the truck’s engine was thunderous, so we couldn’t talk. After a couple of miles, the truck slowed and I said, “I turned you into a fugitive.”

  “I volunteered,” Lily said.

  I smiled. In the midst of our near disastrous escape, she still had a sense of humor. “I won’t be able to give you that ride to Clearview,” I said.

  “I kind of figured that.”

  “If we stay on this truck, we’re going south,” I said, almost as an afterthought, maybe to assure myself that we were still in control somehow.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a triple tank and I didn’t see any triples or doubles when I came in from the north.”

  “Then they’re headed east,” she said.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Well, I came up from the south and I didn’t see any triple and double tank trucks either,” she said. “And we know they’re not going west into the ocean. That leaves east, right?”

  I didn’t respond. Why would trucks go east? The Territory’s eastern border was thirty miles inland from the coast and past that border were two thousand miles of dead land. I went back to the thought I’d had many years ago – that the extra water was being shipped to small towns that had survived on the east coast. But just as I had concluded back then, hauling water across two thousand miles of dead land didn’t make any sense. Lily had to be wrong. The water had to be heading south.