The Water Wars

by Cameron Stracher

  I didn’t answer, and Nasri seemed disappointed by my silence. But my stomach was knotted, and I couldn’t talk even if I had wanted to. After several attempts Nasri stopped trying. “It’s a shame to lose you,” he said. “You’re such a cute girl.”

  I flinched, but he had already turned for the door. When it closed we were in darkness again.

  “Vera?” asked Will.

  “Bluewater has Kai.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.” Anyone who knew the location of the river was a threat to Bluewater and its water monopoly. That was why it had paid PELA to kidnap Dr. Tinker. The desalinating companies were like countries unto themselves—fighting for territory and power. Just as nations profited from surpluses, they profited from shortages and scarcity. But they wouldn’t have killed Dr. Tinker if they had thought he was still useful.

  I could feel the hover-carrier lifting off the ancient riverbed. Time seemed to have slowed; each second was like the space between drops of water. In between the drops I could feel my friend’s absence.

  “They’re going to kill him, Will.”

  “No, they won’t. Why would they? Think about it logically, Vera. If Bluewater went through the trouble to kidnap him from his home, why kill him?”

  I wanted to believe Will was right, but I knew he wasn’t. If Dr. Tinker was dead, it meant Bluewater no longer needed him. If they no longer needed him, it meant they knew the location of the river, or had Kai, or both. Soon they would not need Kai either.

  I sank to the floor of the carrier. My hands were still tied behind my back, so I curled into an awkward ball, my feet facing one direction, my head and knees in the other. Will sidled up beside me and nudged my shoulder onto his thigh. His ripped trousers still smelled faintly of chemo-wash, the brand our father kept buying even after our mother could no longer do the laundry.

  We stayed that way for a long time. The carrier swooped and dipped, crossing the wrecked and forsaken land. Below us were hectares of parched earth, fissured and broken without a trace of green. A dazzling sun illuminated metallic yellows, grays, and blues: mercury, lead, cadmium. The air was dusty and glittered gold with thousands of particles swirling in the wind. I dozed, or thought I did, my mind jumbled and disjointed like confetti.

  When the carriers finally stopped, it was late afternoon. The rear doors were flung open, and the cargo hold was bathed in a sudden chill. A lone horn sounded in the distance. It made me shiver. “Where are we?” I asked Will.

  “Welcome to Niagara!” said Nasri from the rear steps. “Enjoy the honeymoon!” His laugh was brittle and thin.

  I rose slowly and helped Will off the floor. We stood unsteadily, blinking in the harsh light. Nasri scampered into the cargo hold, followed by two of his men who were dressed as if for combat: boots, kev-jackets, pistols tucked in waistbands. He signaled to them, and one of them grabbed Will, while the other took firm hold of my arm.

  “Normally we’d get more for you,” Nasri said, squeezing Will’s cheek between his forefinger and thumb. “But your sister here is feisty, and there is that nasty wound on your leg.”

  “You can’t sell us!” I said.

  “See what I mean?” said Nasri. “Feisty!”

  “How much are they paying you?” I asked. “Our father will pay you more.”

  “I thought your parents were dead. Besides, we’ve come too far to ransom you back to your family.”

  Outside, the horn sounded again, and the men tightened their grips.

  “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls…” said Nasri, and then there was that cackle again.

  “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “You will become quite excellent shimmiers, capable of disappearing into the narrowest hole. Then you will be sold off to mercenaries to fight in the war.”

  Will’s face was pale and covered in a sheen of perspiration. He gripped my elbow unsteadily. But he stood on his two feet and spoke in a clear, strong voice.

  “You won’t get away with this,” he said.

  “But I will,” said Nasri.

  “Then you should hope we die here. Because if we don’t, one day I’ll be old enough, and I will hunt you down and kill you.”

  Nasri smiled, but his brown eye twitched. “Tough words for such a skinny boy. I suppose I should kill you now.”

  “Do it,” said Will. “It’s your last chance.” He stared back at Nasri fiercely.

  I couldn’t believe Will was talking to Nasri this way, daring him to kill us. Nasri was just crazy enough to do it—we had already seen him shoot Dr. Tinker. But he didn’t even remove his pistol from his waistband.

  “I hope you live long enough to follow through on your plans,” Nasri said. Then he signaled to his men, and they followed him from the hold, dragging us like old luggage.

  Nothing prepared me for the scene that greeted us when we stepped from the carrier. If someone had told me we were on the moon, I wouldn’t have doubted it. The land was pocked and cratered, with holes as large as entire canyons. Though the sun was shining, it was through a dusty haze, weak and distant. Giant machines, which at first I thought were buildings, perched beside mountains of rocks and sand. A bone-rattling wind blew, and it carried a stench that was indescribable and yet horribly familiar: a metallic smell, like sticking your head into a venti-unit, or being buried alive. It was the smell of sickness, disease, and death.

  Most striking, however, were the children: thousands of them scrambling over the piles of dirt or shimmying down into crevices between rocks. Deep in the canyon bottom, they scurried from drill hole to drill hole, emerging into the gloom like colonies of insects.

  They were sick. I could see it even from a distance. Though some wore shields, they could not cover watery inflamed eyes, swollen lips, bloody noses, open scabs, and pus-filled wounds. Some were missing fingers, and others were missing entire limbs. Many were bald or balding, and every now and then, one would collapse and lay still.

  “What is this place?” I whispered.

  “It used to be a great waterfall,” said Nasri.

  I’d heard about Niagara in school. So much water rushed from the mountains that it poured off the shelf of the land into the giant canyon. The power of the waterfall generated enough electricity to light an entire city, and the people who lived there grew rich and prosperous. Then oil replaced water as the cheaper form of power, and the people fled while the city deteriorated. Now water meant great wealth again, except it had been squandered and wasted, and all that remained was trapped hundreds of meters below ground.

  Nasri repeated the story to us. He seemed to take pleasure in his history lesson. It was as if it gave him a sense of superiority to recount the foolishness of people who had thought their resources were endless. In dangerous times, people like Nasri ruled. They cared little for grand ideals, but much more for survival. They watched their backs and wielded quick knives. Their lives were nasty, brutish, and short.

  “And the children?” I asked.

  “Waiting for Santa Claus,” said Nasri.

  His men shoved us roughly toward a tin-roofed compound that appeared to be the office or headquarters of whoever ran the drilling operation. Will dragged his bad leg while I tried to slow down so he could keep up. Although we passed several groups of children, none looked at us. There wasn’t a single one who appeared healthy. Even those with all their limbs and digits had open wounds on the backs of their hands or arms and scabby spots on their heads where their hair was missing. I tried to get Will’s attention, but he was staring at the children, his mouth open in horror.

  I was interrupted by the sight of a tall man who appeared from the trailer with two armed guards. He seemed to know Nasri, and the two men exchanged greetings while the guards watched warily. Then he stepped over toward Will, took his lower jaw in his hand, and cast an appraising glance over the length of his body.

  “What happened to this one?” he asked.

  “Leg wound. He’ll be fine. It’s h
ealing nicely.”

  The man grunted and tore open the rest of Will’s trouser leg with a knife. His wound looked worse than before, more green than red and moist with fluid. The man poked at it with the tip of his knife, and Will winced visibly but remained silent.

  “No worse than anyone else,” concluded the man.

  Then he approached me, and I could smell his stink before he was within arm’s length. There was no way to describe it except to say that he had obviously never wasted any chemicals on cleaning himself. He was rancid, and I couldn’t help gagging.

  “You’ll grow used to it,” he said. “They all do.” He lifted my head by my hair, then pulled down my eyelids with a thick blackened finger. “Good root tone,” he said. “I’ll take ’em both.”

  “They’re fifty credits each.”

  “I’ll give you forty for them both.”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Fifty.”

  “Deal.”

  The man pulled out a wireless device from his rear pocket and beamed the transaction to Nasri’s handheld.

  The entire encounter had taken no more than a minute, and suddenly we were locked in the strong grip of two guards. “There’s nowhere to run,” said the man. “You’ll learn that soon too.”

  As bad as things had been, they were now worse. This was a prison camp disguised as a drilling operation, and I was certain the money that had just changed hands was not merely for free labor. Other horrors awaited us, deadly and unknown.

  “Nasri!” I called out.

  He stopped and turned around. “What is it?” he asked. His hand was already on the key pad of the hover-carrier.

  “I don’t believe you are a bad man.”

  “But I am.”

  “Don’t you have any kids of your own?”

  “None that I care about.”

  He turned and raised a finger to punch the code on the hover-carrier door pad.

  A thumping sound like a thousand birds beating their wings at the same time interrupted him, while a sharp and violent wind spat sand across the sky. I looked up, but the wind filled my eyes with tears. A rocket scorched overhead, and the lead hover-carrier exploded in flames. Machine gun fire ripped the air. Nasri screamed as the door shredded in his hands. His men dropped to their knees to return fire, but bullets cut through their kev-jackets as though they were blankets.

  Smoke, shrapnel, pandemonium, and death were everywhere. I reached for Will, and we flung ourselves to the ground—with nothing but rubble to save us.

  CHAPTER 13

  The helicopter hovered fifty meters above the ground, firing short bursts from its mounted guns. The ground exploded in shattered rock. Nasri’s men ran for cover behind the wreck of the hover-carrier, but they were easy prey for the guns that picked them off like targets on a screen. Their small arms fire fell harmlessly back from the sky, and they were quickly silenced.

  The two surviving carriers sped off into the desert with the copter in pursuit. The carriers were fast, but the helicopter was faster, and it caught the first one about three kilometers downriver. With two rockets it left the carrier a smoldering hulk in the sand. Even from a distance, Will and I could see orange flames lick the ground while black smoke curled into the sky. The other carrier was luckier. It raced in the opposite direction and soon disappeared beyond the range of the copter. The pilot circled overhead with no chance of pursuit. Nose bowed low and blades rotating slowly, the copter made its way back to the site.

  The canyon floor was deserted. The massive drilling machines worked unattended like robots on an alien planet, mining for water below the dead lake’s surface. The walls of the canyon reverberated with the sound of metal grinding rock. Gray dust floated in the air, coating everything with a ghostly pallor. Even the guards had disappeared, retreating underground like snakes.

  The copter landed on the abandoned floor. I peered out from behind the small pile of rocks that had protected us as the door popped open and the pilot emerged. He was followed by another man about fifteen centimeters taller and ten kilos heavier. The pilot was tattooed up his bare arms and open vest, and even his helmet had decals and insignias. The other man, however, was unadorned, except for a single small tattoo of a bird on his neck.

  “Ulysses!” I cried. I ran from the hiding place before Will could stop me.

  Ulysses turned toward the sound of my voice. When he saw me, he dropped to one knee and raised his arms. I ran right into him, throwing my hands around his thick neck. His chest was warm and full, and I buried my head in the rough fabric of his shirt.

  “I thought you were dead,” I whispered.

  “I thought you were dead!” he roared.

  I hugged him harder and was surprised at how good it felt. It had been a long time since I had hugged anyone like that, and I held on tightly. Finally I stepped back and looked at him. There was a new wound on his forehead, and when I touched it gently, he flinched.

  “That’s the worst of it,” he said. The story tumbled out of his mouth in a rush: After the dam had burst, he had been knocked unconscious and awoke in the truck, one leg wedged under the seat and his arms tangled in wire. Somehow he hadn’t drowned, and the truck had been pushed by the waters to drier ground. He had managed to extricate his arms and leg, then to crawl through the open door and collapse. The helicopter had found him lying on the ground about half a kilometer from the truck, nearly dead of dehydration even though the waters from the dam still flowed nearby.

  Most of the pirates’ equipment had been destroyed, and at least half his men were dead or missing. The dogs were gone, and he assumed they were dead too. Only two trucks still functioned, and the pirates had salvaged parts for a third. Ulysses left the survivors to repair what they could while he and the pilot took off to search for Will and me. They ambushed some of Nasri’s men on the road, and from them they learned we were in the canyon.

  “We couldn’t leave you in the hands of PELA,” he concluded.

  I never felt more grateful to have been captured by pirates. But the loss of my new friends weighed heavily again: Ali, Pooch, and Cheetah. Death was everywhere, but never so sudden or so violent. The images of swollen bodies taken by the river haunted me, faces purpled and blackened tongues extended. I would never forget the sight of blood spurting from Dr. Tinker’s head, dark red and viscous. I shut my eyes, but the dead were still there: hands twisted, legs akimbo, mouths frozen in horrible screams. But I didn’t see Kai, and that gave me the slimmest hope.

  Will had stood quietly nearby, listening to Ulysses’s story, and now he ventured closer. “What about the driller?” he asked. “The driller and his son?”

  “Kai?” asked Ulysses.

  I tried to hide my surprise but could not. Ulysses laughed and said, “I’m not a dunce. You gave it away the first day we met you. Then we heard you talking in the truck. Of course we know Rikkai. I told you we were following him.”

  “You said you were following a boy and his father.”

  “The father goes where the boy tells him.”

  Was Kai alive? I felt my heart quicken.

  “He’s a diviner,” explained Ulysses. “Finds water with his nose. And he’s found something big.”

  “His nose?” repeated Will.

  “That’s the theory, but there are lots of them. Doesn’t matter how he does it. The fact is, he can find water, and his father drills for it.”

  He can find water. I remembered the way Kai first spilled water on the road, as if he knew there was plenty more where it came from. The gifts he brought to our home. How he found the underground spring at the abandoned mill. He can find water.

  “Is Kai here then?” asked Will.

  Ulysses shook his head. “No. This is an evil place. It’s all dried up. In a couple months, the final aquifer will fail. The men will try to hide it by adding chemicals to the water that remains, but after a while even that will become too expensive, and they’ll abandon it.”

  “What will happen to the kids?”
I asked.

  Ulysses’s mouth drew tight. “They’ll die. Or the men will shoot them and bury them in the caves. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “We have to help them!”

  Ulysses did not respond, but children began emerging from the caves and drill holes, drawn by the helicopter, the lack of gunfire, and a constant driving thirst.

  “There are too many,” said the pilot, speaking for the first time.

  “We can try.”

  Now there were more children, hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands, standing on the edges of the entrances to the caves, staring back. I could feel their eyes, curious and burning, beseeching me. We had to save them.

  Ulysses put his hand on my forearm. “The most we can do is free them from here, give them some water, and hope they make it on their own.”

  “They’ll die. You said so.”

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  I was about to argue, but Ulysses raised his gun. I looked to where he was aiming, and saw the tall man with his two guards approaching. Two other guards were about twenty meters behind them. Ulysses gently pushed me backward toward Will and the pilot.

  “Put down the weapon,” instructed the man.

  Ulysses adjusted his grip and sighted through the laser.

  “You’re outnumbered,” the man continued. “Drop your weapon.”

  “Outnumbered on the ground. There’s a bird in the air will take out all of you before you can get off a single shot.”

  The tall man considered this. “And where is this bird?”

  “She’s silent, but you’ll hear her if you don’t lay down your guns.”

  The man smiled, but it was clear he was nervous as he looked from Ulysses to the sky and back to Ulysses again. Perhaps Ulysses was bluffing, but pirates were known to surprise their foes, and there was already one helicopter responsible for a dozen dead bodies.

  “Better come with us, then,” said the man, and he took one step toward Ulysses.