The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  When they’d gotten off the interstate and onto this ancient bit of Route 66, it had seemed like a good idea, avoiding the main highways, out from under Arizona State Patrol’s surveillance. The last thing Angel needed was to be pulled over and arrested when his fake IDs pinged wrong.

  But the route was clogged with traffic, and now they forged through it in a slow molasses rumble.

  It reminded Angel of the speed bumps his father had driven over, so long ago when they’d run from Mexico. The kind of thing that you never thought about and that never bothered you until you were sure that this one last speed bump was going to be the one that slowed you down too much and let the assassins who were hunting you catch up and kill your ass.

  “You’re sure Maria had the book?” Angel asked again.

  “You asked that twenty times already,” Lucy said.

  “When she left Phoenix, she had it,” Toomie said patiently. “Maybe she dumped it or sold it by now. It would be dead weight for her, trying to swim the river.”

  Angel could imagine her on the road, selling it to some roadside pawn man. One of the hundreds who preyed on refugees on the move, offering cut-rate cash or even bottles of water and food in return for valuables.

  Angel forced himself to sit back and pretend relaxation. It was out of his hands. Lucy was driving. Maria was out there somewhere. He’d played every card he had. Now it just came down to seeing what La Santa Muerte had in store for him.

  Lucy downshifted again, easing through the masses of refugees filling the road. They were like cattle in one of those old-fashioned cattle drives, just rambling all over the road, willy-nilly.

  People peered in through their windows, dust mask bug-eyed faces, distorted by filters and lenses. Alien creatures staring in at them.

  “You’re going the wrong way!” someone shouted as they passed.

  “Tell me about it,” Lucy muttered.

  She steered around a broken-down Tesla, half off the road and sunk into soft dirt. “I’ve never seen the road like this.”

  “When we looked at the maps,” Toomie said, “I didn’t know it was like this out here.”

  “It’s Carver City,” Angel said, stifling his own feelings of frustration. “It’s about time for them to dry up.”

  “About time?” Toomie asked.

  “They had their water cut a little while back.”

  “You mean Las Vegas cut their water,” Lucy amended. “You cut their water.”

  “That was weeks ago,” Toomie said.

  “Yeah.” Angel inclined his head. “But it takes time for people to get a grip on how screwed they are. Relief agencies come in, so they hang on a little longer on buckets and Red Cross pumps and dipping Clearsacs into the river on their own.

  “But sewage treatment isn’t working anymore, since they got no water going through the system. So then disease starts to be a problem. There aren’t enough Clearsacs and Jonnytrucks to go around.

  “So then National Guard shows up. People are trying to pump water out of the river themselves, start running black-market rings, but between disease and the guardies all over them, they start to figure out that shitting in buckets isn’t going to take them very far.

  “So then the businesses go away. And then the jobs dry up.

  “Once the money goes away, people start to get it finally. Renters always leave first. They got nothing tied to a place that doesn’t have water coming out of the taps, so they get out quick. But the homeowners hang on, at least a while longer. But even they break eventually. First just a few, then more—and then it’s this.” He gestured out at the river of refugees filling the highway. “A whole city getting the fuck out.”

  “How the hell are we going to find one girl in all this?” Lucy asked.

  “If she made it through, I know where she was going to try to cross,” Toomie said.

  “That’s a big if,” Lucy said as she braked again and pulled aside to let a clog of cars piled high with belonging push past.

  Ahead, a National Guard Humvee and soldiers were keeping an eye on the refugees, making sure that the exodus stayed orderly. Lucy eased forward again, forging through the people, making them give way. Dust blew around them in great billowing clouds.

  Angel drummed his fingers on his knees, knowing there was nothing he could do to speed their progress against the flood of humanity coming at them on the road. An Arizona National Guard truck ground past them, full of people, all hanging on to the edges.

  “You got your gun handy?” Angel asked.

  “It’s not going to come to that,” Lucy said.

  Angel decided he wasn’t going to argue over what people did and didn’t do when they lost everything. Lucy still wanted to think the best of people. That was fine. Idealists were nice company. Didn’t eat you alive.

  “There’s no way Maria could have made it through all this,” Lucy said again.

  “The girl’s a survivor,” Angel said. “She made it to Phoenix from Texas, and those are bad roads, too. Worse, some of them. New Mexicans are picking people off all the way across that state. Hanging Merry Perrys on fence posts to make their point.”

  “She wasn’t alone then,” Lucy said. “She still had her family.”

  “She’ll make it,” Toomie said firmly. “Like your boyfriend said—she’s tough.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  Toomie shrugged.

  “He’s not.”

  Angel was pleased to hear uncertainty in Lucy’s voice, a mirror to his own puzzling over what exactly they were to each other.

  They passed a medical station peopled with Red Cross workers and CamelBak reps handing out relief supplies. The National Guard kept watch, making sure people stood in lines and stayed orderly as they took hydration packs and Clearsacs and energy bars from the relief workers.

  Just off to the side, someone had set up in their truck, offering rides to housing in Phoenix that was guaranteed close to the Red Cross pumps and first-in-line rights for part-time construction jobs on the Taiyang. Full package only $500 per person.

  A desert-camouflage Humvee with a couple armed guards was right next to it with a big sign:

  WE BUY JEWELRY. BEST PRICES.

  “You think anyone takes them up on their offers?” Toomie asked.

  “All the time,” Angel said.

  “It’s ugly,” Toomie said. “People taking advantage of people.”

  “It’s life,” Angel said.

  Lucy gave him an annoyed glance. “Don’t sound so content about it.”

  “It is what it is,” he said. “No point in wishing people were something different. That’s how people get killed.”

  “Sometimes people stand up for better ideals,” Toomie said.

  Angel shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s not high ideals that’s going to get you into a Cypress development.”

  Toomie gave him a cold look and turned to talk to Lucy.

  The two of them were getting along better than Angel would have thought. He wondered if it was something about Phoenix people, Zoners getting along with each other, or if it was something about him that made them turn away.

  “She’s never going to make it across the river,” Angel said. “If she’s already tried to cross, we’ve lost her.”

  “She’s pretty savvy,” Toomie said. “We had a plan. She’s got flotation.”

  “No.” Angel shook his head. “That’s where her trip stops. The only people who make it across are the ones who pay big fines to the militias. People who try to cross indy don’t make it. They never make it.”

  “You’d know,” Lucy said.

  Angel ignored the criticism.

  He was trying to figure angles. Wondering if he should try to call in favors from that side of the river. Get some of the Nevada guardies and militia people to be on the lookout for Maria, trying to figure if he was so far out in the cold that that would just mean that more people here in Arizona would start hunting for him.

  Lucy was busy explaining
Angel’s role in setting up the Nevada Sovereign Militia.

  “You did that, too?” Toomie asked, his expression dismayed. “You actually put those people on the border to keep everyone else out?”

  “Nevada doesn’t survive if it gets flooded with Zoners and Texans.” Angel shrugged. “Anyway, California does worse.”

  “It will be pretty ironic if this girl ends up skinned because of you,” Lucy said. “You’ll end up with a price on your head because of the people you hired.”

  “You think I haven’t thought of that already?”

  Toomie looked disgusted. “If I didn’t care so much for Maria, I’d say there would be real poetic justice in that.”

  Two peas in a pod, his riding companions. Angel turned his attention to the refugees outside the window, trying to ignore the rasp of conscience scraping at the back of his mind.

  He wouldn’t say it out loud, but every time they brought up the things he’d done on behalf of Catherine Case, it triggered a chill of superstitious anxiety that he was about to pay the price for all his sins, that there was someone looking down on him: maybe God, maybe La Santa Muerte, maybe a big old Buddhist karmic flyswatter…something anyway, something coming down on him, pissed off, wanting to see him pay.

  Maybe you only do so much cutting before the knife cuts you.

  It reminded him of the sicario. Living by the gun, dying by the gun. Call it irony. Call it poetic justice. This river of refugees keeping him from his goal felt somehow personal. As if he were being punished for his sins.

  I made all these refugees.

  Live by the sword, die by the sword.

  “I think the dust is getting better,” Lucy said.

  They kept winding up through low hills, forcing through the flow of refugees. At last they crested a hill and started down the other side, moving more steadily now. Sunshine began to pierce the brown haze. The dust was passing, a veil being lifted before them, replaced by sunshine and blue sky, almost blinding after the dimness of the dust storm.

  Angel tried to get his bearings.

  Lucy pointed. “There’s the CAP.”

  A thin blue line, straight as a ruler, carrying water from the Colorado River across the burning desert.

  It glinted in the sunlight. Phoenix’s lifeline. It would be pumped uphill and tunneled through mountains. More than three hundred miles of canal system, all taking water to a burned-out city in the middle of a blazing desert.

  “It looks small,” Toomie said. “You wouldn’t think it would be enough water for a whole city.”

  “Sometimes it isn’t,” Angel said.

  “Not when you blow it up, anyway,” Lucy said.

  “You did that, too?” Toomie asked. “God damn, you got a lot to answer for.”

  “If I didn’t do it, she’d find someone else who would, and I’d be out of a job.”

  “You are out of a job,” Lucy reminded him.

  “Not for long.”

  “I still don’t know why you trust her.”

  “Case?” Angel laughed. “You got me shot up, too, but I trust you.”

  “You’re right. You’re insane.”

  Angel didn’t mind the dig. With the clearing of the storm, a new optimism gripped him. Just being out of the storm, able to see ahead—

  They came around a corner, and the land fell away below, revealing the Colorado River, and beside it their destination.

  Lucy hit the brakes as they all stared through the grimy windshield.

  “Christ,” Lucy said. “There’s your dead city.”

  They all got out. Far below, streams of refugees were flooding out of Carver City. Rivers of tiny ants, all being funneled away from their homes. Choppers beat the air overhead. National Guard Humvees stood sentry at regular intervals on the highway below, keeping order. Whole convoys were leaving the city.

  Across the river California guardies had set up small bunkers to keep watch over the river flow. The glass of long-range scopes glinted in the sunlight, revealing the locations of snipers. Militias picking out their targets. Choppers buzzed up and down the river, the thud-thwap of their rotors announcing their presence.

  “God.” Toomie shielded his eyes in the sun, studying the activity. “There’s no way she can make it through all this.”

  “She wasn’t going to cross right here, was she?” Angel asked, trying not to let his anxiety show.

  “No.” Toomie gestured up the Colorado River. “We figured if she went overland, farther upstream, away from people, patrols would be less.”

  “How determined you think she is?” Angel asked.

  “Pretty determined.”

  Angel stared down at the city that he had ravaged. The road was completely filled by refugees and National Guard patrols. Somewhere down in that chaos his water rights were slipping out of his grasp.

  Irony? Poetic justice?

  Angel decided he didn’t like either very much.

  CHAPTER 45

  Lucy tried driving down to Carver City, but Arizona Highway Patrol turned them back.

  “Road’s closed!” they shouted. “Turn it around! One way only!”

  “They want to stop looters from going in,” Angel said.

  To Lucy, he sounded dejected, as if this new window into the horrors that he’d wrought had finally gotten to him.

  She turned the truck around and drove back up to their earlier vantage point. Down below, cops and guardies continued waving traffic through. A few of them glanced up, seeming to mark them.

  “If we hang around here much longer, we’re begging for trouble,” Lucy said. “Those cops aren’t going to leave us alone.”

  “Yeah. And if they pick me up, I’m done,” Angel said. He scowled down at the stream of traffic coming their way, staring so hard Lucy almost thought he was trying to pick Maria out from all the other ants in the clots of refugees.

  Abruptly he said, “I think we can do this.”

  “Do what?” Toomie asked. “I can’t walk down there.”

  “That makes two of us,” Angel said. “We got to sell the truck.”

  “Are you kidding?” Lucy glared at him. “It’s not mine.”

  Angel gave her a smug smile. “You want to see how this turns out, don’t you?”

  It was infuriating to have someone who could see inside her head.

  Lucy ended up trading Charlene’s truck in return for a couple of cheap electric dirt bikes that Angel bargained off the refugee stream coming out of the city.

  “Charlene is going kill me,” Lucy said as she handed over the keys. She shot Angel a dark look. “Do you know how many cars I’ve lost since I met you?”

  Angel had the grace to at least look embarrassed. “Soon as I’m back in Vegas, I can pay it all back.”

  “Right,” Lucy said. “I’m sure you’ve got an amazing expense account when your boss isn’t trying to kill you.”

  Toomie managed to get himself aboard one of the bikes, and Angel and Lucy took the other.

  “Go easy on me,” Angel said. “I’m not up for doing any jumps.”

  They set off overland, cutting around the checkpoints, buzzing across the pale yellow dirt. They wound between creosote bushes and tall spiky tendrils of ocotillo, passing yucca and, once, a lonely Joshua tree.

  The desert was transitioning, Lucy realized. They were out of the Sonoran Desert and into the Mojave. Dry cousins, merging and blending, and the three of them crossing the transition.

  The electric bikes announced their travel with an artificial whir, but nothing moved on the desert except the winds.

  When they reached the Colorado River, they turned upstream, following the rough terrain, looking for paths that might lead down to the river’s edge and clues to where Maria might choose to make her crossing.

  They rode for hours, cutting close to the water, finding no evidence of the girl, then being forced to ride away, to cut back in again when the hills and trails allowed it.

  The bikes started to run low on power. Lucy pu
lled their bike to a halt.

  “What’s the issue?” Angel asked.

  “We’re about half out of juice,” she said. “We didn’t bring any panels to charge with, even on a trickle.”

  “Long walk back,” Toomie said.

  “You want to go back, you can,” Angel said. “I’ll go on. You two don’t got to do this.” He was gaunt and sweating. Rings of exhaustion shadowed his eyes.

  Toomie shook his head. “No, I’m not letting her go again.” He said it with such finality that Lucy wondered what guilt the man felt he needed to atone for.

  We’re all here to atone, she realized. None of us is going back.

  “There’s a good chance she’s already gone across,” Angel said. “Probably already dead.”

  “Still got to look,” Toomie said firmly.

  Lucy shook her head as well.

  Angel grinned at her. “Journo can’t let the story go.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Good,” he sighed. “ ’Cause it’s hard enough just hanging on. Not sure if I could drive the bike on my own without ripping myself all to hell.”

  He wrapped his arms more firmly around her waist, and Lucy engaged the bike again, wondering at how odd it was that someone who had frightened her not so long ago had now become so dependent.

  They sped off again, rolling and bouncing, buzzing across the sere desert, winding along the edge of the river.

  The power on her bike steadily bled away, and Lucy began to wonder how they actually were going to make it back. They’d gone miles. How many days would it take to hike to Carver City? Already the sun was searing her skin, burning so that it would darken and peel and bleed.

  Could the girl have really come this far?

  Lucy could imagine Anna up in Vancouver, shaking her head in dismay at the way she made decisions. The risks she took and the reasons for them. She could almost hear Anna saying, You’re not one of them. You can just walk away. You’re the only one who can just walk away. You’re suicidal.