H2O

by Belateche, Irving

  “I don’t mean that we don’t know about her. I mean we’re not sure whose side she’s on.” I guess he could see that I took that personally because he backed up his claim. “The Fibs let her do what she wants, and they don’t do that unless you’re part of the team.”

  “Then why’d you say ‘yes?’” I couldn’t help sounding defensive.

  “You wouldn’t have come if I’d said ‘no.’ And my job was to get you to join us.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “But you don’t really believe she’s a threat, do you?”

  “Who knows? It might account for what happened in Yachats.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Before he could answer, Lily and the others had caught up to us. I didn’t want to have doubts about Lily, but now I did, so to combat that, I told myself that Crow wouldn’t have ordered Lily executed if she was working with the Fibs. Of course, that wasn’t as convincing a rebuttal as it would’ve been before I knew that the Fibs were so brutal that they executed marauders at will. Crow would have had no problem executing Lily if she no longer served his purpose.

  As we approached the end of the trail, Crater told us that the trip to Iron Horse would be tough. The Fibs would be mounting an intense search for us. They’d want to kill the marauders who planted the explosives at the lodge. That was the most daring act of sabotage they’d seen in years, so aggressive that the aliens wouldn’t need to manipulate them into hunting us down. From Crater’s attitude about the blasts, I realized that they weren’t meant to free Lily and me. They were supposed to be part of something else. Something that didn’t go as planned.

  We arrived at the car and Miloff, Lily and I climbed in. Crater and Benny hiked a little farther, to where another car was stashed. Then we all headed southeast, away from Yachats, in the same direction as the trucks headed to Black Rock. But we used different roads.

  Three hours into the trip, we fell into a contemplative silence, and in that silence, I heard a low, steady thumping. Not the kind of sound I expected to hear in the wilderness. Miloff must’ve heard it too, because he glanced up at the sky just as two helicopter gunships swept over the hills and started shooting.

  Bullets spit off the road and Crater sped up.

  The helicopters swooped down and bullets clanged off the top of our car and shattered our back windshield.

  Crater swerved wildly back and forth across the road, trying to avoid the gunfire. He couldn’t plow into the forest for cover. The woods were too dense.

  The helicopters shot past us, swung around, and came back firing. The hail of bullets was furious. Our front hood whipped open and flew into the windshield. Crater couldn’t see and lost control of the car. It spun wildly, careened off the road, straight into the unyielding tree trunks, and came to a jarring stop.

  The helicopters swung around for the final assault.

  Crater was dazed, bleeding from the head, and Lily and I were shaken. But we had to get out before the helicopters finished us off. We tried the doors. They were smashed shut. So we kicked out the remains of the back windshield and I pulled Crater from the front seat. His pants were drenched in blood and from the look of it, one of his legs was broken. Lily and I dragged him out of the car and into the woods.

  Benny and Miloff were already on the run, a hundred yards ahead of us. Lily and I ran, holding Crater between us, his dangling leg banging off the ground. Behind us, we heard the roar of the helicopters growing. They were landing on the road. Crater yelled at us to leave him behind, but we held onto him and kept running. I glanced back and saw Fibs entering the woods.

  Crater ripped himself from our grip, crumbled to the ground, and yelled, “Get the hell out of here!” I hoisted him back up. Bullets thudded off the tree trunks.

  Crater yanked himself away from me again and fell to the ground. I went for him and he commanded, “Go! You’ll find what you’re looking for in Iron Horse!”

  I hesitated, not sure what he meant, and more shots rang out.

  Lily shouted, “We have to go!”

  We both took off and I caught glimpses of Miloff and Benny far ahead of us, disappearing behind trees, then reappearing. We raced forward, following them. Behind us, the gunfire slowed and I wondered if the Fibs had stopped for Crater. Then I realized that Miloff and Benny had disappeared. They were no longer popping out from behind trees.

  We kept running forward and soon enough I heard the crunching of underbrush behind us. The Fibs were gaining on us when out of nowhere the ground beneath our feet dropped out and we tumbled down, hitting dirt. We quickly scrambled back to our feet. We’d fallen into a ravine, some kind of dry creek. I looked down the length of it and saw Miloff and Benny racing away. We ran toward them and they started to climb out of the ravine, back toward the Fibs. They were doubling back but, for that to work, Lily and I had to get out, too. So we hurried over to the ravine wall, grabbed some tree roots, hauled ourselves up, and scrambled out.

  We lay flat on the ground, stock still, and waited for the Fibs. I heard them approach, drop down into the ravine, and then I looked up and saw Miloff and Benny in the woods ahead of us. They motioned for us to crawl toward them. We did. Then we all ran back toward the road.

  But not all the way back. Once we closed in on the road, we ran parallel to it.

  “What about getting Crater?” I asked.

  “Not in the cards,” Miloff said.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  We moved as fast as we could for over an hour, then settled into a hike.

  Miloff was aiming for an abandoned resort. It’d been a marauder camp long ago and he’d heard that the former occupants had left a car behind. He couldn’t be sure it was still there, but to get to Iron Horse, we had to hike in that direction anyway. If we were lucky, we’d make it to the resort by tomorrow night.

  The helicopters circled over us twice and that slowed us down. We didn’t want the Fibs to spot movement, so we stopped and hid under the thickest part of the forest.

  While there, I asked Miloff about the attack helicopters and he filled us in. Crow had discovered four of them at a military base in what used to be California. No one knew how to fly them, so Crow taught himself and then taught some of his men. Miloff said that this feat more than any other had proved to Xere and the marauders that Crow was smarter than anyone in the Territory. He’d taught himself a complex skill based on knowledge that had disappeared.

  That night we camped without a fire so the helicopters wouldn’t spot us. In the dark, engulfed by the sounds of animals on the prowl, Miloff told us his story.

  The marauders had recruited him from Talahachee, an electricity town. Talahachee ran the Orange Creek Dam and the dam generated power for towns in the central part of the Territory. Miloff was one of the workers who’d venture into the wilderness to fix transmission lines. Over the years, he’d developed a reputation for going beyond the call of duty. He’d fix lines that ran to abandoned homes outside of towns. He did it so people who didn’t have homes could have them, and those people were thankful.

  Then he started heading deeper into the wilderness, following power lines that hadn’t been used for years. He could’ve repaired them, but no one wanted to risk going that far inland for a home. So instead of repairing them, Miloff decided to map them, for the future, in case people started to venture out again.

  He went deeper and deeper into the wilderness, mapping out more and more of it. There weren’t any detailed maps of the Territory and, back then, Miloff had no idea why. Of course, now he did. Maps were another way to decipher what was going on, so the aliens, through the Fibs, had long ago destroyed as many as they could. (When Miloff brought up maps, I remembered that map of the western states that I’d found as a teen and how I’d thought of it as a rare treasure. I’d been right on that front.)

  Maria, Miloff’s wife, drew the finished maps. She was an artist, not by trade, but by talent. Like everyone in Talahachee, she worked for the Orange Creek Dam. So she practiced her art by d
rawing these maps and they were striking. Miloff and Maria spent hours together. He’d describe what he’d seen, bringing his adventures to life, and she’d draw the maps from his stories and sketches. Their love for each other was intertwined with the maps of the Territory. Those were the children they couldn’t have.

  The marauders found out about Miloff from the Line. They saw the Talahachee Town Council send a communiqué to the Fibs, asking them to arrest Miloff for treason. They were accusing him of connecting a power line to a marauder camp, but the marauders saw that this communiqué had appeared out of thin air. The Town Council hadn’t sent it. It was a false charge and that meant that the aliens wanted to get rid of Miloff. He was a threat to their secret. But why?

  So the marauders wanted to get to Miloff first, to protect him, and to find out why he was a threat. They set out for Talahachee and arrived before the Fibs. They warned Miloff and offered him sanctuary, but they couldn’t convince him that he was in any danger. Miloff believed, like everyone in the Territory did, that if you did your job and didn’t rock the boat, the Fibs left you alone.

  That night, the Fibs stormed his house and started shooting. They killed Maria and captured him. But he broke free and because he knew the lay of the land better than the Fibs, he escaped.

  He camped in the wilderness for a few nights, contemplating suicide. He knew he could join Maria through death. Then he realized he’d already joined her. She was alive, out here, in the land that they’d mapped together. He felt her. Here, in the wilderness, he could still live with her. So Miloff joined the only other people living in the wilderness. The marauders.

  Chapter Thirty

  The next day we hiked at a fast and steady pace. There were no helicopters.

  Under the purple glow of the evening sky, we arrived at The Cliffdale Resort. The wilderness had taken it over. Vegetation covered its cracked walls and grew on its roof. The decorative wooden beams that crisscrossed it were rotting and plants grew out from the rot.

  We immediately started searching for the car and found it in the stable at the back of the property. The key was in the ignition, but the car wouldn’t start. We checked the gas tank and it was almost full. But the gas had probably been diluted by condensation, so we needed a fresh supply of gas (assuming everything else about the car still worked).

  Miloff thought there might be some gas stored on the property and we all began to search. We rummaged through the stable’s underground storage area, the resort’s maintenance buildings, the gardening sheds, and a half dozen other custodial areas, and came up empty. Miloff resigned himself to hiking to Red, a small marauder camp, where they’d have a car we could use to drive to Iron Horse. The hike to Red would take three days.

  I told Miloff that there was still the possibility of getting the car on the road. I could try and separate the water from the gas in the car’s tank. When it came to water, I was good at solving problems. I’d need some isoproponal, but considering we were at a resort, I knew the odds of finding some were pretty good.

  My first stop was the old housekeeping storeroom. Isopropanol had been a key ingredient in dozens of products before the Virus, including cleaning products. Sure enough, I came across a case of Windex, a mass-produced window cleaner from those days, and I saw isoproponal listed as one of the ingredients.

  I sequestered myself in the resort’s maintenance room and began to build a makeshift distillation tank. Meanwhile, in case my experiment didn’t work out, Lily, Benny and Miloff gathered supplies for a hike to Red. I worked all afternoon and so did they. Then we all took a break for dinner. The marauders who’d used this as a base camp had left the pantry stocked with food, so our meal turned out to be a welcome luxury.

  The food itself was a reflection of the marauders’ determination to survive in the wilderness. Since their camps didn’t have power, they preserved their food using the same methods that the small, self-sufficient towns in the Territory did. Salt, oil, sugar, alcohol, vinegar, drying, cold storage, and lactic fermentation.

  After dinner, I finished building the tank and I distilled the isoproponal. Then I rigged up a spray dryer and turned the isoproponal into a powder.

  I tracked down Miloff and we headed to the stable where I dropped the powder into the car’s gas tank. Miloff keyed the ignition, but the car still wouldn’t start. He tried a few more times and it sounded like the engine wanted to catch, but it wouldn’t. We gave it a break for ten minutes, then I dropped in more powder. Miloff turned the ignition and the car started. For the first time since I’d met Miloff, he laughed.

  We packed the car for the next day’s journey.

  We each slept in our own room that night. My room was musty, but comfortable. After the nights spent under rolling trucks and cold skies, my sleep was heavy.

  I dreamt of trucks crossing the wilderness. Tank trucks. The roads they traveled were freshly paved, the asphalt sparkling under a brilliant sun.

  But the trucks had no drivers.

  Truck after truck rolled to the coasts. The brown coast of Africa, the green coast of Europe, the blue coast of Asia, and the gold coast of North America. The ocean levels were low and the beaches wide.

  New desalination plants dotted the coasts, each plant molded from one huge piece of alien steel, like grand sculptures from a pristine future. The gleaming plants inhaled seawater and exhaled pure water. The driverless trucks filled their tanks with that pure water and headed inland. There wasn’t a man or woman in sight.

  I was watching the start of water’s journey to the stars. A journey that didn’t need the help of men. And when I awoke and my head cleared, I was left with one thought: There’d come a time when the aliens didn’t need men to mine their water and when that time came, they’d kill the rest of us.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  We drove south, over cracked and battered roads. Roads that Miloff knew would be free of Fibs and trucks. In some areas, vegetation covered the roads, but never thick enough to stop us. When we entered the redwood forests, the giant trees gave us complete cover. Even though I’d seen photos of redwoods, I wasn’t prepared for their grandeur. All other trees were peasants compared to these kings. Under their protection, we drove the rest of the way to Red, a small marauder base camp consisting of three cabins.

  Four marauders were currently stationed in Red. Their job was to make forays to the east, explore abandoned towns where the Virus was dead, and search for valuable Remnants. They brought those Remnants back to Red, and every few months transported them to Iron Horse.

  That night, as I settled into a cabin, through the open window, I heard Miloff and the four marauders talking in hushed voices. There was an energy to their conversation, a kind of euphoric anticipation, and I knew they were talking about the plan to free the Territory.

  At dawn, we filled the car’s gas tank from Red’s supply of gas and we headed southwest. Just before noon, we drove out from under the cover of the redwoods and into bright sunlight. By nightfall, we’d be in Iron Horse, a tiny town in what once was Plumas County, California. Plumas was a rural county where the Sierra Nevada Mountains met the Cascade Mountains and where millions of acres of forests met thousands of miles of rivers. It was a haven before the Virus.

  We made good time and arrived in the early evening. The town was made up of just one small block of buildings, all two stories high. None of them housed shops like in Clearview or Yachats. Instead, they housed the marauders’ operations, supplies, and, most importantly, their access to the Line. Iron Horse was hardwired to the Line and from here, the marauders monitored the entire system.

  Miloff parked and led us into one of the buildings. Inside, a group of marauders was eating. Miloff pointed Lily, Benny and me to the back, where we grabbed plates, and served ourselves from bowls of food set out buffet style.

  Miloff exchanged greetings with the marauders and they asked him about Crater. I saw their faces darken. They weren’t prepared for the loss. Crater was a hero to them and I understood why
. Even though I’d only known him for a few days, I’d felt his bravery and calmness.

  As Lily, Benny, and I headed to an empty table, I thought the marauders were eyeing me. Maybe they were blaming me for Crater’s death since he’d been sent to fetch me. But before that paranoia got the better of me, Miloff came over and said, “I want you to meet someone.” I was about to find out that the marauders had been eyeing me, but it wasn’t because they blamed me for Crater’s death.

  I headed out with Miloff and, in the car, I asked him what was up. He said I’d find out in a minute. We drove down Iron Horse’s one street and back into the wilderness. We passed a few cabins on the outskirts of town and came to one which was set way back in the forest. It was an unadorned cabin at the end of long dirt driveway. Miloff drove up the driveway, pulled up to the cabin, and said, “Go on in.”

  “Who’s in there?” I said.

  “Will Xere.”

  “You’re not going to introduce us?” I said, confused as to why he was delivering me to Xere.

  “He knows who you are.”

  I stepped into the cabin. It was packed from floor to ceiling with shelves of books. The books dwarfed the worn couch, gouged coffee table, and two chairs which made up the humble living room. On the other side of the room, a large man stood up from a desk and turned to face me.

  I was shocked. Emotions that I’d never felt before swept over me. I was staring at my dad.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  He held me in his steady gaze and didn’t say a thing. His eyes were filled with tears.

  He looked older. Much older than the memories of him etched in my mind. He took a step forward and I rushed him and we hugged, tightly.