The Water Wars

by Cameron Stracher

  Before I could take my next breath, the man was on the ground clutching his leg. Ulysses dropped and rolled, then came up firing at the two guards by his side. One went down immediately, while the other spun backward, his hands trying to hold in the blood spilling through the belly of his tunic. The other two guards rushed forward, and one managed to get off a shot, but a round from Ulysses plugged him in the chest and dropped him where he stood. The other never got off a shot.

  This all happened quicker than the eye could follow. When it was over, my feet had barely moved. A stray bullet had split a rock not more than one meter away, and a dusting of chips and the smell of cordite still hung in the air.

  The pilot quickly tended to the two wounded men, while Ulysses confirmed the other four were dead. The man Ulysses had shot in the gut was moaning softly, and the pilot signaled he wasn’t going to make it. Ulysses took the man’s pulse, then held his head while he whimpered and gurgled blood. When the man died, Ulysses gently closed his eyelids with his fingers. Then he turned to Will and me.

  “Everyone all right?”

  I nodded, still trying to sort through what I had just seen.

  “Where did you learn to shoot like that?” asked Will.

  “I’ve learned a lot of things I wish I hadn’t.”

  Will just kept staring at Ulysses. I know he was thinking about the shootouts at the gaming center, except this one was brutal and real, and the dead did not get up and play again. Ulysses wiped his bloodstained hands on his pants, and then pushed his sweat-matted hair off his forehead with the back of one palm. His hand, I noticed, was shaking.

  “There was no bird, was there?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, there was,” said Ulysses, touching the tattoo on his neck. “Her name’s Miranda.”

  I understood everything then. I could see every line in the pirate’s craggy face. His skin was sunburned and dry. His ears were cracked and bloodied. But his brown eyes were like dark pools in which fantastic creatures swam.

  “What happened to her? To Miranda?”

  Ulysses shrugged. “What happens to most children. She got sick, and never got better.”

  “And your wife?”

  “The same.”

  “But you said you were married,” said Will, glancing down at Ulysses’s ring, smooth and lustrous in the half-light.

  “I’ll always be married. But it’ll be the next world when I see her again.”

  Our father believed in Heaven, but I thought it was a place that shakers pretended existed—without it there would be too many other questions. Ulysses, however, seemed confident he would see his wife and daughter again. And maybe, I thought, the belief was all that mattered.

  The children had drawn closer now. There were several of them who seemed older and more confident than the others, and they approached Ulysses.

  “Please, mister,” said one. “Do you have any food?” He was nearly as tall as Ulysses but less than half his weight. Clumps of hair grew from his head in no discernible pattern, and his eyes were bloodshot and rheumy. Ulysses asked his name, and the boy said he was called Thomas and the girl next to him was Danielle. I was shocked to hear Danielle was a girl; she looked almost identical to Thomas: same hair, same height, same sickly bodies. They were, in fact, brother and sister, Thomas said.

  “Where are your parents?” I asked.

  Thomas shrugged. “Dead, we think.” He explained their town had been raided by Mounties, because the residents were siphoning water from a pipeline. The adults were shot; the town burned; and the children taken prisoner to the canyon.

  “Most of us are dead now,” he concluded.

  I looked at Ulysses, and I knew he knew what I was thinking.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” he said again.

  “Yes there is,” I insisted. “Give them the canyon.”

  “Give it to them?”

  I opened my arms and stretched them tip to tip, north to south. “The drilling site. The machinery. The trucks. The weapons. Everything.”

  “They wouldn’t survive for a minute.”

  “You said they won’t survive anyway.”

  Ulysses rubbed his chin and frowned. “I suppose a mounted gun might help.” He glanced at the helicopter.

  “There’s a weapons room in the main building,” Thomas said.

  “And a cold storage with food,” said Danielle, the first words she had spoken.

  “There’s water too,” I added.

  Ulysses sighed, but he knew he had been outmaneuvered. He signaled the pilot to bring him the prisoner. When the tall man was before him, Ulysses grasped him by the edges of his collar. “The keys,” he said.

  “No keys,” the man managed. “Tumblers.”

  “The combination, then.”

  The man hesitated, and Ulysses cocked his weapon and pointed it at the man’s head. “You smell bad,” he said. “I doubt you’ll be missed.”

  The man stuttered, then quickly gave up the code. Ulysses sat him back on the ground and called for Thomas.

  “You know how to fire this?” he asked.

  Thomas took Ulysses’s gun. It looked absurdly large in his thin hands, but he released the safety like a professional. “My father taught me,” he explained.

  “Good.” Ulysses turned to the man kneeling before him. “This boy’s in charge now. You’ll do as he says. If you don’t—as you can see, his father taught him how to shoot you.”

  Dozens of other children had drawn closer, curious and hungry—vacant eyes calculating the risks, weighing whatever Ulysses had to offer. He coaxed them nearer and singled out several of the biggest, healthiest boys to accompany him to the helicopter. There they withdrew the mounted gun from its bay, and carried it to the front of the main building. Then they went back and forth several times with boxes of ammunition and crates of grenades. Will and I helped until the building was well-fortified and well-armed.

  The throng of children pushed in on us, and I worried they might riot. They didn’t smell as bad as the foul man, but they didn’t smell good either. My grip on Will was loosening, and I felt a mounting panic as the children swelled around me. They pushed and shoved and seemed to come from everywhere.

  Then Ulysses’s voice split the crowd. “Dinner!” he announced.

  A great roar erupted as Ulysses pushed Thomas toward the caves. The boy ran, not like something sickly, but something spectacular, his hair flaming and triumphant, his sister, Danielle, behind him, followed by scores of children of all sizes, the smallest carried by the tallest, the crippled guided by the able-bodied. They spilled into the caves like an ancient river, a stream of humanity drawn by the promise of food, nourishment, life itself.

  In a moment Will and I were alone with Ulysses and the pilot. Dust from hundreds of footsteps still hovered in the air. A weak sunlight pushed through. The atmosphere was rank, but a breeze had begun to blow. We had given the children what we could to protect and feed them. The rest was up to them.

  Ulysses stepped toward the helicopter. “Ready?” he asked.

  “For what?” asked Will.

  “To find Kai, of course.”

  CHAPTER 14

  We flew south.

  From the sky, the earth looked like a flattened soy cake. The blues, greens, and whites familiar from the school screens were missing, as if they had always been a lie. At fifteen hundred meters I could see dried rivers like the spidery, cracked fingers of a dead man. The only thing of color was a brilliant red sun, burning low in the west.

  On the ground I had never thought much about the earth, but from the sky it was all I could see. We could have been on Mercury or the moon, some barren place that creatures had once inhabited but now were long gone. Not a single living thing stirred, and the ever-present grayish dust spiraled in thousands of eddies. I saw something that could have been a road, but it was decomposed and swallowed up on either side. The remains of a truck or a tank were scattered like bones nearby. In the copter it was drier even than on land,
and I couldn’t lick my lips quick enough to keep them moist.

  I knew if we could climb higher, I would see the silver pearls that dotted the planet’s surface and were all that remained of the great lakes and rivers. Enormous reservoirs, they held all the fresh water left on the planet. Canals, aqueducts, pipes, and pumping stations funneled every drop into their well-guarded steel and concrete basins. Humans had finally made the world to suit their purposes. Even the weather was under their control, and the sun, moon, and stars were sure to follow.

  A chill made my bones ache and muscles shudder.

  “There’s another blanket in the rear,” said Ulysses.

  Will reached for it and handed it to me. I let it fall to my lap. “How do you know he’s there?” I asked.

  “Don’t know for certain,” said Ulysses. The PELA mercenary who had told the pirates Kai was a prisoner of Bluewater had traded the information for his life. To him, Kai was just a boy and well worth the trade. PELA did the dirty work and asked no questions.

  “So what’s your plan?” asked Will.

  “The plan?” Ulysses chuckled. For the first time, I noticed that his clothes were ragged and torn. His unwashed hair and unshaved beard made him look like the older men in the gaming center. When he grinned, his crazed and cracked smile framed a handful of battered yellow teeth. But his brown eyes glittered like a promise. “Save the kid. Find the water. Get rich.”

  “Seriously. Don’t you have a plan?” I asked.

  Ulysses tried to look serious for a minute. “I thought you were the smart one,” he said. “Don’t you have a plan?”

  “You can’t just fly into the Great Coast, shoot your way into Bluewater, and take Kai and his father,” I told him.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause you can’t. They’ll kill you, for one thing.”

  Ulysses scratched his beard. “Hmm. Need a better plan.”

  The pilot interrupted with a question about their route, and he and Ulysses reviewed our position against a crinkled and torn map. We were flying low, and now there were the unmistakable signs of habitation: broken roads, scavenged vehicles, the ruins of concrete buildings, smashed and flat as if they had been crushed by a giant foot. But no people, and no other signs of life.

  “The cities were the first to go,” said Ulysses, noticing that I was staring out the window.

  “Why?”

  “Most of them have no water. They piped it in from the country. There were riots and war.”

  “The Great Panic.”

  “Before that, even. The Panic came later. When the Canadians dammed the rivers and the last great polar cap melted.”

  “They melted it for water,” said Will, who pushed himself forward so that he was practically sitting on my seat.

  “It was already melting. The ice caps were retreating, and the sea did the rest.”

  “Why didn’t anyone stop it?”

  “They couldn’t. It happened too quickly, and it was too warm. Countries took what they could. But when the ice caps melted, all that water was wasted—it spilled into the sea and turned to salt. The aquifers had already dried up. The lakes had been drained or poisoned. All that was left were the rivers, and most of those were already dammed.”

  “What about the rain?” I asked. “The sky.”

  Ulysses nodded slowly. “There should be enough rain for everyone. But there isn’t. We’ve dammed the clouds too.”

  Now I could see something gray off in the distance. At first I thought it was a landing strip, but as we got closer, it spread to the horizon, and flecks of white appeared on its surface. It was water, I realized, as far as the eye could see, to the edge of the earth and beyond. We had seen pictures of the ocean in school, of course, but the photos couldn’t capture the vastness of the unbroken plain, or its emptiness. Earth was mostly water, yet nearly all of it was undrinkable. During the Great Panic, the coastal cities suffered most. Looking at the unbroken stretch of grayish-green, it seemed as if all of man’s problems could be solved if only we could drink from the ocean. But we couldn’t.

  Then I saw something else: a blue octagon resting on the sea. It appeared first like an indistinguishable point on a darkened background, but as we got closer, it resolved into eight sides, like a giant blue spider, each with an oversized silver pipe that stretched into the ocean. I could see as well that it wasn’t actually on the ocean. It sat above the water on steel stilts that the waves could not touch.

  “What is that building?” I asked, though I suspected I knew the answer.

  “Bluewater,” confirmed Ulysses. “That’s where they do their magic.”

  The global desalination company’s magic came with a price. Desalination was more expensive than most countries could afford, and large-scale desalination poisoned the oceans with minerals, chemicals, and sludge. Yet just as humans might turn to cannibalism if they were hungry enough, governments turned to the sea for their water. Soon companies like Bluewater were more wealthy and powerful than any nation, and anyone who could afford the price lived with a steady source of water.

  “It’s more taking without giving,” Ulysses concluded. “Someday they’ll pay.”

  The helicopter dipped left, and my stomach dropped. But what I saw next made me sick with worry. A jet in the near distance, close enough that I could see the Bluewater emblem—a black spigot superimposed over a blue wave. It rocketed low in the sky, then banked toward us.

  “Ulysses,” I whispered.

  But he had already seen the jet, and he barked quick instructions to the pilot. The helicopter swooped back to the right, but there was no way to outrun a jet. The next time, it passed so close that I could actually see the pilot in the cockpit. He wore a black and blue helmet with an oxygen mask over his mouth, and his eyes were covered by something see-through and metallic. He dipped his wings twice, signaling us to land, but the helicopter pilot ignored him.

  “Fly inland,” Ulysses instructed.

  The helicopter turned from the ocean and raced over the land. The jet kept pace, crisscrossing the sky above us and repeatedly dipping its wings. Once we even saw the pilot make a landing motion with one of his hands, but Ulysses and his pilot ignored him.

  “They’re going to shoot us down,” said Will matter-of-factly.

  “Not yet,” said Ulysses.

  Now the helicopter was over a thick field of geno-soy, a crop that was irrigated with water from the desalinating factory. The plants looked withered and brown, but I knew they had been genetically altered to require as little water as possible, which allowed them to survive in harsh conditions. The fields stretched as far as I could see without a retractable roof or any sign of evaporation management. They rippled in the wind from the rotors, bending like waves in a storm. Their beauty was transfixing and held my eye as the horizon disappeared.

  The shadow of the jet moved swiftly across the ground. It bore down on us before I saw it in the air. There was a puff of smoke from beneath one of its wings and a missile flew at us with deadly accuracy.

  “Ulysses!” I screamed this time.

  There was no time even to blink. The missile exploded in a ball of fire just one hundred meters from the nose of the helicopter. It knocked us sideways and threw Will and me to the floor, but the copter remained in the air.

  “A warning shot,” said Ulysses. Then to the pilot: “Take us down before they straighten their aim.”

  We scrambled back into our seats, and this time we buckled ourselves in securely. If there was a place to land, I didn’t see it. But the pilot hurried to the ground as if he did. Too fast! We were coming in too fast! We couldn’t land at this speed!

  There was a terrific ripping noise and a spine-shattering crash. The windows blew out, and everything inside flew outside. The safety harnesses cut deeply into our shoulders, and the backs of the seats were like hard rubber mallets against our heads.

  The hush that followed was the stillness of death. Ulysses was the first to speak. “Vera? Will? Roland?
”

  Will’s voice was soft but clear. My head hurt, but as far as I could tell, nothing was broken or bleeding. The pilot, however, was silent.

  “Roland?” Ulysses repeated.

  The pilot’s body was not in the helicopter—or what was left of the metal wreckage. I craned my head to see that Will was still strapped into his seat, although the steel trusses on which the seat had been fastened were ripped from the bottom of the helicopter’s frame. Ulysses was pinned between the door and the roof and struggling to free himself. But there was no sign of Roland.

  Then I saw him, lying in the geno-soy about twenty meters from the left door. His head was snapped back at an unnatural angle, and one arm was twisted beneath him. I knew he was dead before I even noticed the bright red pool that stained the brown plants. Bile rose in my throat, and I forced down a strangled cry.

  “What is it?” asked Ulysses.

  “He’s dead,” I sputtered.

  “No time for mourning,” he said. “Help me out of here.”

  Will slipped from his safety harness and climbed through the twisted debris to help Ulysses. “He needs a proper burial!” Will exclaimed.

  “Can’t wait for that.”

  As if to punctuate his words, the jet roared overhead. White contrails in the sky; a light mist like rain.

  “Have to get moving,” said Ulysses. “They won’t leave us alone for long.”

  I released my seat beat and felt a stabbing, electric pain through my shoulder. Before I could stand, I fell to the ground.

  Will was next to me, and then Ulysses. His brisk and indifferent demeanor suddenly melted. “What is it, little sister?” he asked.

  “My shoulder,” I managed.

  Ulysses gently manipulated my arm. The pain was like a thousand knives in an open wound. “Dislocated,” he concluded. “I can fix it, but it will hurt worse first.”

  “How much worse?”

  “Like stretching the muscle until it tears.”

  “And then it will feel better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do it.”

  Ulysses looked at me long and hard, as if he were weighing the pain against his ability to inflict it.