H2O

by Belateche, Irving

  “Roy,” he said.

  I felt tears on my face. My tears. This was a miracle. A miracle I’d never let myself believe in. From the time I was nine, I had spent every day forcing myself to accept that my father was dead and gone forever.

  “I’m sorry, Roy,” he said.

  I wiped the tears from my face and asked, “What happened?” And that question came from anger, not joy.

  “I love you, Roy,” he said. “And I hope that you can forgive me.” He stepped over to the couch and sat down, then motioned for me to do the same.

  I sat in one of the chairs and I couldn’t say anything. Joy and anger were battling to control me.

  “When the Virus hit, it killed most scientists, just like it killed most everyone,” he said. “But unlike other survivors, the scientists who made it through didn’t really have a chance. The aliens hunted them down and killed them. We still don’t know how they did it, the Fibs weren’t around yet, but they did it. Still, some managed to fall through the cracks.”

  “Like Lily’s grandmother,” I said, wondering if he thought Lily might be a traitor, like Crater had hinted at.

  “Exactly,” he said, without betraying his thoughts about Lily. “And like Zach Bell, a grad student studying physics at a school on the east coast. He was visiting his girlfriend in Bend, Oregon, when the Virus hit, so he escaped it and somehow escaped that wave of slaughter, too. Eventually, he settled down in Clearview and that’s where I met him.

  “I was a kid and by that time, he was a very old man. But he still remembered science. A hell of a lot of it. And he wanted to pass it on to someone. Someone who’d appreciate it and understand it. So he taught me what he knew. But Roy, he never put the pieces together. Probably because back then, it was all about putting the pieces of a society back together.

  “Anyway, I was obsessed with what he’d taught me. And as the years passed, I kept learning more and then I figured out that something wasn’t quite right about the Territory. So I quietly reached out to others, but not quietly enough. The Fibs were about to hunt me down when Jonah Wolfe offered me sanctuary. He offered to fake my death.”

  “Why didn’t you ever contact me?” I blurted out. I wanted to hear more of his story but I needed to ask that question.

  “I wanted to,” he said. “And I kept promising myself that I would. But it was a risk. I knew you’d want to join me, Roy. You’d want to be a marauder. And that would’ve made you a target for execution. So I waited. And months turned into years.”

  “You sacrificed me,” I said.

  “I did, and that’s why I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

  “You could’ve come to me. Just once.”

  “I didn’t.”

  I expected him to add to that. To justify what he’d done. But he was silent.

  And so was I. I resisted the urge to cram all the missing years into this one conversation. I wanted to go back to the day I was staring out the window of our house, waiting for him to return home from Merryville. I wanted him to come home that afternoon. I wanted to start again from then. To live all those years with my dad.

  He must’ve taken my silence to mean he could skip all those years. “I need your help,” he said.

  “You’re going to attack the space tanker.”

  “No. We’re going to take back control of the Territory.”

  Will Xere, my father, told me the plan. The marauders believed that if they had any chance of winning a battle with the aliens, they first had to tell everyone in the Territory that Earth was a mining colony. Once everyone understood that they were slaves on their own planet, then they’d band together to free themselves.

  And the key was the Line. It wasn’t just that the marauders could get the truth out on the Line, though that was part of it, it was that if the marauders could control the Line, the aliens could no longer use it to manipulate the Territory.

  I learned that the heart of the Line was in Palo Alto, the Fibs’ hometown. It was housed in a concrete building under the constant watch of the Fibs. And inside that building was a restricted area, an area that the Fibs, themselves, had never entered. All the Territory’s communications ran through the routers, servers, and switchers located in that restricted area. Through that hardware, the aliens manipulated and controlled the entire Territory.

  The marauders planned to enter that concrete building, and that restricted area, and destroy the heart of the Line. But when my father got to that part, I didn’t get it. I asked him how the marauders were going to control the Line if they’d just destroyed it. His answer took me my surprise. It was the last thing I’d expected.

  The marauders had built another Line, in Santa Barbara, a dead town close to Port Hueneme. There, the marauders had found a University which hadn’t been stripped clean of its routers, servers, and switchers, and they’d used that equipment as the foundation for the new Line. The new Line used the old Line’s infrastructure, all the cables already laid out throughout the Territory. But the marauders had looped it around Palo Alto. It had taken years to get it right and those mysterious data packets that Benny had seen were test runs for the new Line.

  After explaining it all, my father stood up, walked across the room, and pulled a book down from one of the shelves. He handled it with reverence and I saw the title, The Old Man and The Sea.

  “The old man was you,” I said. “And the sea was the water.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “You thought I’d understand that when I was nine?” Some of my anger was resurfacing.

  “No, but I knew you’d get it later.”

  He was right. Somehow, it’d sunk in and helped point me to the water. “Like the four elements,” I said. “You taught them to me just so I’d get that water was important.”

  “I couldn’t tell you the truth. You were too young. But I had to lay the groundwork. I hoped that when you were old enough, you’d figure it out.”

  “I did.”

  He smiled. “I knew you would.”

  He put the book back. “I didn’t want you to come to Iron Horse because you wanted to find your father,” he said. “I wanted you to come because of the water. Because you wanted answers.”

  I could tell he was lying. And it was that lie that made me less angry. Will Xere, the marauder leader, may have wanted me to come to Iron Horse because of the water, but Will Xere, my father, wanted me to come so he could see his son before the assault. That was written on his face. My dad wanted to see me because he knew he might die in battle.

  We stepped into the cabin’s small kitchen, and my dad opened a bottle of Curado and poured us each a glass. Then he began to cook dinner. Fried fish and potatoes.

  The potatoes sizzled and that warm feeling from long ago began to fill me up. Love for my dad. But still, all those years of loneliness and sadness refused to move over. I remembered our last meal together. My dad had been quiet. He’d known he was leaving forever. “Why didn’t you just tell me you had to go?” I said. “Why did you want me to believe you were dead?”

  “If you knew I was out there somewhere, someday you’d come looking for me,” he said. “I didn’t want to risk that. It was setting you up to die.” He pulled the potato slices from the oil and changed the subject. He asked about my life.

  We ate and I filled him in. But when I took into account the last few days, filling him in about my life amounted to telling a simple story: I’d built on what he’d taught me and kept the promise he asked of me. To keep learning. Then I became an outsider because I’d learned too much. But I kept going and discovered that there was something about the water. And I was just curious enough about the water to head south to find answers. And I found my dad.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The next morning, Alek Sanders briefed Lily, Benny, and me on the assault. The marauders would launch the attack tomorrow night. The timetable had been pushed up because of Yachats. Originally, the marauders were going to detonate bombs in Yachats twelve hou
rs before the assault, to draw the Fibs from Palo Alto to Yachats. But the Fibs had swarmed into town way before anything drew them there. Crater and Miloff had been as surprised as I’d been to find them in town. The only good part about the surprise was that those explosives were then used to free Lily and me.

  The original plan called for the Fibs and their helicopters to be on their way to Yachats during the assault on the Line, but now they’d be returning from Yachats, if they weren’t already back. But that was a chance the marauders had to take. Like Crater, my father believed that someone had tipped the Fibs off about Yachats. Now he figured the longer he waited, the greater the chance of the Fibs finding out about the real plan. But neither my father, nor any of the other marauders, accused Lily of being the snitch. Even if they thought it, they hadn’t treated her any differently than they’d treated Benny and me. So far.

  Sanders told us the assault on Palo Alto would incorporate four diversionary attacks on the town’s most critical sites. The marauders planned to set off explosives at Arastradero Road, where power lines brought electricity into Palo Alto, at the El Camino Reservoir, which supplied water to the city, at the Stapleton Warehouse, where the Fibs stored their food, and at Victor Crow’s headquarters.

  This was all in the service of getting as many of the Fibs as possible away from the real target, the entrance to the concrete building which housed the Line.

  The logistics had been laid out weeks ago, but Sanders added us in. Benny and I were going to be part of the direct assault on the Line. With Benny, the marauders now had a communications expert who could go in with them, which was why they’d recruited him. They didn’t want to risk sending in Sue Chen, the marauders’ own expert. She had designed the new Line and would run it, so was taking part in one of the diversionary attacks. If possible, the marauders wanted Benny to find out how the aliens controlled the Line. That information could prove to be valuable in the future. But he was told the priority was to destroy the Line regardless of what information was gleaned during the assault.

  Like Benny, I was chosen for the assault on the Line. I wasn’t a communications expert, but I knew enough about technology and various kinds of equipment that I, too, might be able to figure out how the aliens controlled the Line.

  After the briefing, over lunch, Alek Sanders told us how he came to be a marauder, and I began to see a pattern. When the aliens went too far with the wrong people, or right people if you looked at it from our perspective, those people were driven to find the truth and the truth led through the wilderness and to the marauders.

  Before joining the marauders, Alek worked in the refineries. His job was to find spare parts for the refineries and when he couldn’t find spare parts, his job was to construct makeshift parts. It took a smart man to design and construct those parts and Sanders fit the bill.

  Sanders’ daughter, Laura, worked on the shipping side of the refineries. She was smart like her dad and she helped monitor the oil coming in to Rapahanoc from Port Huemene, and the resulting gas and diesel going out to the Territory. After a few years on the job, she began to notice some anomalies, so she started to dig deeper into the shipping data, much more than her job required. Eventually, she came to the conclusion that somewhere up north, diesel was being stored. She told her father and a few other people in Rapahanoc, but no one cared.

  Eventually, she went through the numbers with Sanders and he listened to her and agreed to talk to some truckers. A week later, Laura awoke at six, took a shower, dressed, and had her coffee. Her usual routine. Then she headed to her office, but she never got there.

  At noon, Sanders learned that his daughter hadn’t shown up for work. That was a first. So he went home to check on her, but she wasn’t there. Then he walked her route to the office, but didn’t spot her. So he walked it again, stopping along the way, checking buildings, yards, woods, and clearings, and he also knocked on people’s doors. But no luck.

  He kept looking and finally found her the next day. She’d been shot five times and her body dumped in the woods. He was crushed.

  The local police investigated and the Fibs were called in. The Fibs concluded that Laura had discovered where the marauders hid their fuel supply and before she could report it, the marauders had killed her.

  Sanders didn’t believe that for a second. He knew what Laura had told him. She’d never mentioned the marauders. So Sanders headed north to investigate and discovered that Laura had been right. Diesel was being stored in Yachats. And he saw that trucks were fueling up on it and heading east. Trucks loaded with water. He was sure that Laura, his smart daughter, had been murdered because whoever ran this operation wanted it kept secret. But who?

  Sanders took a trucker hostage and got his answer. It was the Fibs. And now that he knew who’d killed his daughter, he sought out the enemy of the Fibs. The marauders. And when he found them, they told him who the real enemy was. Of course, he had to see it to believe it and when he saw the golden ship at Black Rock, he understood that his daughter had been murdered to keep the mining operation hidden.

  Sanders had been one of the new guard, one of the men that Jonah wouldn’t allow on the Black Rock raid. Jonah thought Sanders was too smart to lose. But Sanders was also the man who’d redesigned the incendiary bombs for the raid, so he was burdened with the guilt that the bombs had failed and all those marauders had been massacred. For him, this new assault was a second chance.

  Lily, Benny, and I spent the afternoon learning how to fire machine guns and throw hand grenades. We weren’t expected to use them, but Sanders wanted us to be prepared. Afterwards, Sanders told Lily she was going to be part of my father’s team, the team that would attack Crow’s headquarters.

  I didn’t like that we’d be separated and worried that there was a nefarious reason behind it. Maybe Lily, the traitor, was put on my father’s team so he could keep the enemy close at hand, or worse. Maybe he and the marauders planned to kill her and they’d do it as part of the assault so I wouldn’t know. I tried to convince myself that this was paranoia and focused instead on something else that was bothering me. Something I knew was real. My dad wasn’t part of the team attacking the Line. Shouldn’t he lead the charge? Wasn’t he the leader of the marauders? Maybe the marauders had decided that they didn’t want to lose another leader. Regardless, I lost some respect for him.

  All the marauders had dinner together that night and, afterwards, I spend more time alone with my father, in his cabin, surrounded by his collection of books. We focused on what might happen after the assault. He thought that if we destroyed the Line, the aliens would either abandon Earth or attack it. He had no doubt that they had some kind of economic formula which determined whether a mining operation was worth fighting for or not. And if they attacked, he was sure they still wouldn’t reveal themselves. For some reason, that was paramount in all their tactics and my father hoped to find out why. Was there some Achilles’ heel there? They’d use Fibs as they always did to hunt us down and kill us.

  “And what if they abandon Earth?” I said. “Won’t the Fibs still hunt us down? Crow’s not going to believe that we blew up the Line to free the Earth from aliens.”

  “At first, he’ll go after us,” my dad said. “But then he’ll see the difference in the Territory. He’s smart. Without all that false information flooding the Line, every pattern in the Territory is going to change. And he’ll definitely see that no one’s paying him to ship that water anymore. He’ll probably never accept why everything changed, but it won’t take him long to realize that it has changed.”

  I agreed with that, but I saw a lot of unknowns. Too many. Still, I didn’t challenge him. My bet was that he and the marauders had weighed dozens of plans, each with its own problems, and had decided that this one was best.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  We left Iron Horse before dawn, traveling in a caravan of seven cars. The trip to Palo Alto would take six hours. We’d stop in Sunol, just outside of Palo Alto, and wait there until nigh
tfall. We’d launch our attack at two a.m.

  There wasn’t much conversation in my car. The sun rose during our trip, throwing rosy light over the changing terrain. When we entered this part of the Territory, unlike up north, the wilderness ended and we began to travel through an endless landscape of sprawling, dead towns. Miles and miles of suburban towns that ran all the way to the dead city of San Francisco.

  The marauders had scouted this route as safe from the Virus, but some roads were still littered with skeletal remains and dried-out, leathery corpses. The morning sun painted long stark shadows around the gruesome remains and I felt revulsion when I should’ve felt anger. This was more evidence that the aliens had committed mass murder to establish their mining colony.

  We arrived at Sunol, twenty miles from Palo Alto. Sunol had once been home to a National Park so we were once again protected by the wilderness. We’d be here for twelve hours and then we’d drive around the San Francisco Bay, past the salt marshes of the Bayland, and up into Palo Alto.

  We ate a meal, and then broke up into small groups.

  Lily and I hiked away from the others. We hadn’t been alone since Crater had rescued us, and I thought she’d want to talk about how her life had changed in the blink of an eye. But she talked about my father.

  She said I’d received a great gift. A miracle. My father had returned from the dead. So why was I angry?

  I told her that my father had abandoned me. How could I ever forgive him?

  She kissed me and said that I’d have to find a way. Otherwise, I was squandering a miracle. She kissed me again and we watched the orange sun slide under the tree line. A ray of sunlight shone through the branches and caught Lily’s hair, sparkling it lemon yellow.