by Katie French
It only takes four days to run out of water.
Despite Bell’s planning and packing, her rucksacks of medicine and weapons, changes of clothes and cooking utensils, the container of spare fuel Robbie stole from the garage, it’s water that is our undoing.
Bell and I sit in the back of the parked van, sweating and staring at the last jug with a swig of water sloshing inside. Bell thrusts the jug into my chest. “Drink it and be done. I’m sick to death of staring at it.”
I shake my head and pass it back to her. “You haven’t had a drink today. Who’ll drive if you pass out?”
Bell purses her wrinkled lips. “Add another item on my to-do list. Teach you to drive.”
I don’t say that it probably doesn’t matter since we’re going to die on this dusty backroad. Staring at the jug, I beg it to expand with water. Wasn’t there a story from the Christman where he multiplied a few fish to feed the multitudes? We need a miracle right now, but all we have is each other.
Bell looks at the jug and out the van’s front window. The sun is a force. Inside the hospital, the sun always looked bright and full, pleasant even. Now, without air conditioning, the sun is roasting us alive. During the day, the van is so hot, even with the doors cracked open, I can barely stand it. At night, the temperature drops until we freeze.
But it’s water that’ll finish us. The knotty desert stretches for miles past the hustle and bustle of Albuquerque. Abandoned buildings have all gone dry. We’ve tried more faucets and hoses than I want to remember and all at terrible danger to ourselves. At one house, a man charged out at us, snarling and snapping. Bell fended him off at knifepoint until we could get back to the van and peel out.
I look at the jug and feel my throat tighten. Every cell in my body is contracting, drying out. My mouth is a desert canyon. My tongue is cracked leather.
“Goddamn this,” Bell says, pushing up. She crawls to the driver’s seat.
“What’re you doing?” I ask. “I thought we weren’t traveling during the day.”
Bell starts the van and puts it in gear. “We need water. If we don’t find it, it won’t matter if we’re spotted. They’ll find corpses with our mouths around empty water jugs.” She pulls out a map as she bumps toward the main road.
“Here,” I say, grabbing it from her. “Keep your eyes on the road.”
Bell humphs but let’s me unfold the ancient map. I stare at the squiggles in different colors. “How do you know if any of this is still good?”
“I don’t. But towns don’t just disappear, and there was a pretty big one a few miles from us if I’m reading that map right.”
“Thought you said we should avoid towns.”
“Everything I said is out the blasted window until we find water.” Bell dodges a billboard that has tipped into the road, and I rock in my seat. I take this moment to buckle myself in and singe my fingers on the hot metal seatbelt.
As Bell drives toward town, we sit bolt upright, not speaking. Being out in the open like this during the day is terrifying. I’ve cut my hair with one of the stolen knives and Bell has wound hers into a cap. We wear Robbie’s coveralls, but it won’t be enough if someone gets close. Every abandoned building, gas station, and restaurant could have Breeder’s spies. Every corner we turn could lead us into an ambush. I grip the map until my fingers form permanent indents.
If I weren’t so afraid, the scenery would be lovely. Unlike Albuquerque, here the buildings are few and far between. Shrubs and plants dot the brown landscape, and a great stretch of mountains cuts across the horizon. Above, the sky is the bluest blue with fluffy white clouds coasting along. Birds twitter and swoop. Insects buzz. And only the occasional broken-down car or crumpled building mars the beauty of nature.
Too bad we’d die if we stayed out here.
But when we get closer to the city of Santa Fe, the beauty disappears and the human destruction I’m used to starts up again. Picked-over cars lie across highway lanes. Trash scuttles across the pavement. Buildings hide dark rooms and places for people to skulk. If this is what the entire world looks like, the Breeders girls are missing much.
“What if people live in this town?” We drive by a subdivision, houses all crumbling and abandoned on the right. A burnt motorcycle husk blocks our side of the road. Bell drives around it as fast as she can. Through the open windows, the sound of our tires and the pinging of rocks on the underside of the van seem way too loud. Anyone will hear us. And anyone who lives in a desolate place like this will want whatever we have.
I grip my seatbelt and try not to have a heart attack.
We pass rows and rows of houses. Then rows and rows of buildings—old offices and shops, brick and adobe decaying. Tattered awnings flap like tortured birds. The walls are tagged with ominous graffiti. Spray-painted skulls stare back from shop fronts. The words “death to all who enter” scrawl across a former dentist’s office. Bell eyes the building, but turns her gaze back to the road.
“Gun’s in the glove compartment.” She nods to it.
I glance at it and then turn to Bell.
“I don’t know how.”
“Item one hundred on the to-do list: teach you to shoot.”
I open the glove compartment and pull out the gun. The feeling of the solid metal in my lap is severe and strange.
“Things have changed since I been out,” Bell whispers. “Things have definitely changed.”
“What was it like growing up out here?” I ask, palming the gun and trying to breathe.
Bell puckers her mouth, remembering. “When I was a kid, things weren’t so bad. Sure, there was drought, lawlessness, the occasional murder in the street, but there were enough good people ‘round to put a stop to most foolishness. We had electricity ‘bout half the time. They’d run the movie theaters on Saturdays. I remember sitting beside my brother David in the top row. He loved to sit up there. Before he was killed.”
“Sorry,” I say because I don’t know what else to offer.
She shrugs. “When I was twenty or so, things really fell apart. By then, the population had dipped so low that everything ground to a halt. No water, no sewer, no electricity. You take away a man’s refrigerator and all hell breaks loose.” She smiles.
“Cities weren’t safe. I moved with my dad and brother Charlie to a cave for a while. That was as fun as you’d imagine.”
Bell drives through the battered downtown area and the buildings space out a little more. I breathe a little easier.
“When did the Breeders come around?” I ask.
“I got swooped up when I was twenty-five. Bastards killed my dad. Luckily, Charlie had gone hunting.”
“Did you ever see Charlie again?”
She shakes her head and goes quiet. I want to ask more—she’s never been able to talk about the world outside freely before—but I can see each word costs her.
We drive past another dead body lying on the sidewalk. Clothes flutter in the wind around bones and shriveled skin. I turn away.
“What happened to these people?” I ask.
Bell shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. It’s not gonna happen to us. I want you to look out for puddles, windmills, or buildings that might’ve had their own water-treatment facilities. City water is probably shut off, but if we find a place that’s big enough, they might have their own pumps or wells. Might be able to draw water from there.”
I nod and try to do what she’s telling me, but I keep seeing shapes that could be bodies—a lump under a dusty tarp inside a blown-out convenience store, shoes sticking out of a pile of rubble.
Bell slams on the brakes, flinging me forward. My chest smashes into the seatbelt and my head snaps down. The gun clatters to the floor.
“What the—?”
A man is standing in the center of the road. His clothes are tattered rags. His shirt is splattered with blood. He looks barely on his feet, though from blood loss or disease I can’t tell. His desperate eyes search our faces through the windshield.
“Help me.” His eyes are wet, his cheeks sunken.
Bell reaches for the gun that was on my lap, but it’s fallen to the floor. “Get the gun,” she says. “Now!”
I reach down. “But he needs help.”
My hands fish through all the items at my feet until my fingertips brush metal.
Bell revs the engine. “Get out of the road, or I swear I’ll run you down!” she yells out the window.
There’s a click at my open window. When I turn, I come eye to eye with the barrel of a gun.
“Don’t move,” the man holding a gun to my head says. His voice is like a rod of steel. “Turn off the engine and get your hands off the wheel,” he says to Bell.
When she doesn’t move, he shoves the gun into my temple. I gasp.
“Okay, okay.” Bell turns off the engine and lifts her hands up in surrender.
The first man from the road walks over and looks in Bell’s window. Up close, I can see he isn’t near death. His body is lean but underlain with muscle. His dark, wavy hair and tan skin are clean.
“Now what do we have here?” His tone is light, almost gleeful.
“Let us go,” Bell says. “We’ll give you what we have.”
The first man reaches through the window and pulls off Bell’s hat. Her braid tumbles out. He reaches for her wrist, but she yanks her arm away.
“I’d be careful,” the man with the gun says. He presses the muzzle harder into my temple.
“How do we know there are bullets in that gun?” Bell asks.
“Try me,” the man says.
Bell lets her arms droop into her lap. The bloody man reaches in and turns her palm over. He fingers the ahnk brand on the skin of her wrist. “Breeders.”
“Cuff ‘em,” the man says. The gun draws back.
The man at my window isn’t much older than me with short, brown hair and skin tanned to almost the exact same color. His denim pants and coat are brown, too, either from dirt or made that way. Even the newsy cap pulled down around his hair is a shade of brown. He has the same features and bright blue eyes as his counterpart. Brothers, I think. No, twins. Identical twins.
When he looks at me, at the cloth covering the burns on my face, I can tell he despises me.
I tuck my head down and wish I could crawl in a hole. What will they do with us? Will they sell us back to the hospital? I cannot face Houghtson. I pray that he’s dead.
The men bind our wrists with rough twine. The second man works in silence. But the bloody man, who introduced himself as Gabe, chatters as he twists rope around Bell’s wrists.
“So, escaping the Breeders, eh?” he asks Bell. “We haven’t seen many of those lately. Right, Tommy?”
Tommy cinches the rope around my wrist so tight I wince. “They don’t need to know our names. Hurry up.”
Gabe ignores Tommy. “Haven’t been to Albuquerque in a long time myself, but I hear it’s quite the entertainment hub. A fella told me the gambling alone is worth the trip.” He looks at Bell for a contribution but gets a cold glare instead. “Ever been to the night bazaar?”
“Shut up, you dirt pie,” Bell says. “Finish tying the knot so we can get on with it.”
I shoot Bell a warning glance, but Gabe doesn’t lose his temper. “Such colorful language in Albuquerque,” he says, finishing the knot. “We really must visit.” He looks at Tommy.
Tommy ignores him and yanks open my door. “Get out.”
I do, but my legs have cramped from all the riding and maybe from lack of water and sleep. I trip and fall.
Tommy catches me and pulls me up. His face has a hint of pity, but when he sees me looking, it disappears.
“Get in the back.” He helps me around the van and through the van’s doors.
Bell yanks herself away from Gabe’s hands and manages to scoot herself in without help. When the men shut the back door, she begins signing as best she can with bound hands.
Say nothing, her hands say. Watch me. Do what I do.
I sign back yes and then, What will happen?
Bell shakes her head. She doesn’t know.
The men drive through town in silence. I watch out the window, my fear climbing. Wherever they’re taking us, it can’t be good. Either they want to keep us for their own purposes or hold us until the Breeders pick us up. I have no idea what will happen if we get sent back to the hospital. If Houghtson survived, he’ll make me pay. If he didn’t, maybe we can talk Dr. Bashees into giving us our old life back.
Who am I kidding? They’d probably make a spectacle of us. Sell us to Rukus, or give us away as a door prize to the most abusive trader. I’m not worth much because of my face, but I am pregnant. That’s worth something.
I think of the tiny paunch that rises beneath my coveralls. These men can’t know. A baby girl would be worth a lifetime’s wages. The thought of having my child cut from my lifeless body freezes me solid. I watch the broken shops we pass and try not to cry.
At the wheel, Tommy drives with white knuckles, his eyes flitting to each dark building in anticipation. If he’s nervous, they aren’t alone. That means these two aren’t the only ones we need to watch out for.
Unlike Tommy, Gabe chatters on about the town, Albuquerque, and gambling. He doesn’t mind that no one answers his questions. Neither of these men seems like the marauders and kidnappers I’ve heard about. Then I remember the gun jammed into my temple.
Tommy turns down a driveway. Trees line one side and large parking lots the other. Up ahead, several adobe-orange buildings fill the horizon. I strain to read signs as we pass. Something about “Admissions” and “Luke Hall.” A metal statue, all angles and sharp points, goes by on my right.
University, Bell signs.
I frown, not familiar with the word.
She tries again, her fingers flying. Big school.
I nod and watch as we drive through empty parking lots until Tommy pulls up behind a two-story building with balconies around the second floor. An old bike rack with a well-oiled bike takes up half the sidewalk. Two sturdy chairs sit out front, waiting for visitors. It’s homey. Lived in. This must be where they stay.
Tommy parks and looks at Gabe. “Think you can help me get them inside?”
Gabe winks. “Sure, little brother.”
They walk around the van and open the doors. “Get out,” Tommy says.
We crawl forward on our knees and bound hands. When we get to the edge of the van, they grab our arms and Tommy pulls his gun from his pants. He takes Bell this time and nods for Gabe to handle me. He must think I’m easier. He’s right.
Gabe strides up and smiles. His flashing eyes and movie-star grin would melt my heart if I didn’t think he might kill us. “Shall I show you inside?”
I frown at him. “You act like this is a date instead of an abduction.”
“Aren’t dates just two people getting to know each other better? That’s what we’re going to do.” His smile widens.
“That’s why you held us at gunpoint?” I ask. “To get to know us better?”
“Among other things.” He pauses, looking at the bandages on half of my face. “Looks like you had a bit of trouble. Was it the Breeders?”
I blush and duck my head. “Something like that.”
He frowns.
I feel like dirt.
“This way, please.” His smile is gone now. He gestures toward the building that Tommy has already pulled Bell into. “After you.”
I walk with him close behind. Tommy holds open the main door. Bell stands like a rigid mannequin inside. Her eyes rove over every inch as they wait for Gabe and me to enter. She’s marking escape routes right now. I can’t get my mind to think that way. Maybe it’s from being told where to walk and what to do every minute of my life.
Once we’re inside, Tommy locks the front door. Sidelights on either side have been boarded shut as have all the windows on both ends. We walk a long, dark hallway to another door, open it, and walk upstairs. The second floor is identical to the fir
st with apartments on either side, except the windows aren’t boarded. On this floor, the apartment doors stand ajar, giving the whole place an openness I didn’t expect. As we walk, I glance in the rooms. Past the small kitchens, each apartment is filled with strange collections. One has rows and rows of framed paintings, hung and stacked around the walls. Another apartment has clay statues, pots, urns, and beautifully painted plates stacked on the counters and floor. A third has colorful costumes hung on rolling carts: bright feather boas, longs skirts, and shaggy coats.
Gabe stops beside me and peers in. “My collection. Do you know we could put on every play Shakespeare ever wrote using the costumes in this apartment alone?”
I raise an eyebrow. “What?”
“Shakespeare? Romeo and Juliet?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Well,” he says, scratching his chin. “Then we have a lot of work to do.”
“Gabe!” Tommy calls from down the hallway.
Gabe glances up and gives Tommy a roll of his eyes. Then he leans toward me. “So uncultured, my brother.” Then, to Tommy, “Keep your pants on.”
Gabe puts his hand on the small of my back and leads me forward. Tommy glares at me as I enter the room at the end of the hall. It’s the only room not wide open, but he’s unlocked it and stands waiting impatiently at the door.
“Hurry up,” he grumbles.
This apartment is the same size and shape as the ones full of art, but it’s nearly empty. I only need one glance around to know that Tommy furnished this one. The furniture is functional and plain. The walls are white and bare. A few dirty plates are stacked by a small sink inside the kitchen and some boots are on their sides by the door, but everything else is shipshape. Past the kitchen, the space opens up into what was probably a living room with a balcony on the far end. A hallway to the left looks like it leads to at least one bedroom and probably a bathroom. The carpet has been worn threadbare over the years, and there’s a hole in the far wall that looks like a fist made it, but this apartment is in good shape. No holes in the roof. No sagging beams. This building has stood for over a hundred years. Someone must’ve been taking good care of it.
