H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  The people in the parking lot—they weren’t just your regular shoppers; they were staggering back from town with bags and bags of stuff, shopping carts even. Not just food, either; all sorts of tons of stuff, like it was Christmas or the January sales. A man and a woman had a massive flat-screen TV in a cart; it tipped over in the parking lot and the TV smashed. They went off again with the cart, but I didn’t see them come back. Then a couple of guys got into a fight, and this woman started jumping around all over the place, waving her arms—screaming at them to stop probably, or screaming for help.

  And all the while, the radio was on, the emergency broadcast quietly telling people, over and over, to stay home and remain calm.

  Remain? Doesn’t that sort of make it sound as if people were calm and had to stay that way? When exactly did they think people had been calm?!

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” said Simon, disgusted.

  He put the binoculars down and went out of the kitchen; I heard him tramp upstairs to use his bucket in the bathroom. I picked up the binoculars.

  From a distance, the fight had just looked a little silly: tiny men scrapping; tiny lady jumping. Close up, it was fascinating—in a nasty sort of way. I almost cheered when the smaller guy managed to knock the bigger guy down—but the bigger guy didn’t get back up.

  That parking lot, didn’t Simon always go on about how it was a disgrace? Full of potholes that were now full of water. Water that was now full of death.

  You could see the big man clawing at his arm, then wrenching his whole shirt off, his body bloody where he’d hit the ground.

  It turned out the woman was with him and not the other guy; she ran to him.

  Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! I thought, even as she slumped down and cradled his head like it was a baby.

  Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her! I thought, even as the big man reached up his hand…to push her away? She grabbed his bloody hand in hers. She—NO! NO! NO!—kissed it.

  Stay home, remain calm.

  The woman bent over the man, kissing and kissing his lips; not making out, not one long kiss, but kisses and kisses and words in between, saying stuff, her body rocking, her hand going from his head to rake at hers—at hers, where her face had turned bloody—and back to his, stroking his cheek. Kissing him, rocking him, saying stuff.

  Love is stronger than pain. In the parking lot behind Dartbridge Library.

  “We need water,” said Simon, bustling back into the kitchen. “I’m going out.”

  I put the binoculars down.

  We kind of had a fight then. It wasn’t one of our old fights; this was a very new kind of a fight.

  There was no shouting, for starters. There had been no shouting (except about the faucet and that) since I’d seen my mom. The high horses did get saddled up, but very quietly, with no yee-haa. Simon didn’t want me to go with him because he was worried it wouldn’t be safe. I didn’t say I knew it wasn’t safe because I’d just seen two people dying (probably) in the library parking lot. In any case, that was other people. That wouldn’t happen to us. I point-blank refused to stay home alone.

  You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave me—that was all I had to say about everything he said.

  Also, even then—maybe especially then—I still thought that if I went with him, I might be able to get him to take me to Zak’s. I would see my friends. I would get my phone.

  I really did think this. I really did think all my friends would still be at Zak’s, wondering whether they should go out or not—although stuck in the country like that, they wouldn’t know that no one seemed to be paying any attention at all to what the broadcast was telling people. And maybe they’d know how Caspar was. I had seen what had happened to my mother and to Henry, and to the parking-lot people and to Mrs. Fitch, and still I had this thought that Caspar would still be alive. I suppose you could say it was more of a hope.

  By the time me and Simon had finished having our new not-a-fight fight, clouds had begun to appear in the sky—not big clouds, not rain clouds, but gangs of little raggedy clouds.

  Some kind of altocumulus type I now think they must have been, but I can’t remember whether they were castellanus (raggedy at the top) or floccus (raggedy at the bottom). Little, raggedy clouds.

  “Ruby,” said Simon. “I have to go now.”

  “You can’t leave me,” I said. For the zillionth time.

  Simon caved. He had to: I would not be left alone.

  “Don’t look,” he instructed as he opened the door.

  He didn’t say what at; I knew. I looked anyway. There were flies all over the mess that had been Mrs. Fitch’s face. I felt…what I would come to feel a lot, for a while—this thing I didn’t even know what to call back then, this wave of grief and shock and horror—not so much for Mrs. Fitch, in truth, but because Mrs. Fitch made me think about my mom.

  Not even out of the garden gate and all I wanted to do was go back and hide under my duvet and watch Birds of the British Isles until it all stopped.

  The gate banged shut, and I heard them: the neighbors’ dogs. Alarms screeching and squealing up from the town and still you could hear them. Dogs that wouldn’t normally be bothered by the bang of a gate being bothered by it.

  We got in the car and got as far as the end of Cooper’s Lane. It was like the traffic jam that had been there on the night Zak’s mom drove me home hadn’t budged. In fact, most of it probably hadn’t. It took a few moments to realize that most of the cars heading into town weren’t moving at all, were just stopped still, abandoned—or worse…there were people in those cars and the people weren’t moving. In between the stopped cars came the cars of the living, horns honking pointlessly as they tried to find a way through. There were cars stopped on the other side too, coming out of town, but fewer of them.

  “Perhaps we’d better walk,” said Simon, jamming the car into reverse.

  We went back home.

  We had one last not-a-fight fight, a mini one, right outside our garden gate.

  “Ruby,” he said. “I really want you to stay home.”

  You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, and all the while the alarms going, the sirens going, the neighbors’ dogs barking, the buzz of flies…the little gangs of poisoned clouds snuggling up together, getting just a little thicker and fatter and sinkier.

  I won the fight that wasn’t a fight, but I paid a terrible price for it. Even though it was totally obvious it wasn’t going to rain anytime soon, Simon made us go back into the house and get dressed in rain boots, waterproof pants, and double raincoats. He told me to put the hood up on my raincoat, then produced one of his “Indiana Jones goes bird-watching” hats.

  “No,” I said. “No way. I’d rather die.”

  I didn’t mean I’d rather die as in killer-rain die. I just meant…whatever it was I used to mean when I said stuff like that. He slapped the hat on my head, then cruelly tightened the hood of the raincoat.

  I was outraged by the horror and shame of it, but I couldn’t say anything, could I? Yes I could! I loosened the hood from my mouth and scabby chin.

  “Well, what are we going to do about our hands?” I said.

  I only said that to point out the pointlessness of it all, not so he’d go and get dishwashing gloves for us both.

  He dangled them in front of me.

  “If you’d rather not,” he said, “we can both stay home and die of thirst.”

  I did feel that was somewhat unnecessarily brutal, but I put the awful gloves on and retightened the hood of the raincoat. The less you could see of my face, the less likely it’d be that someone would recognize me—with any luck. Simon handed me Mom’s massive umbrella.

  “I’m not putting it up,” I mumbled through the raincoat.

  “Right,” said Simon.
“But if I say you need to, you do it.”

  “’K,” I mumbled.

  We marched back out the gate, and he opened the trunk of the car and handed me the shopping bags; you know, those big “green” long-lasting ones people use—“because they fit so well in the back of a car,” Ronnie said, meaning there was nothing eco about them.

  “So you do what I say, when I say, young lady.”

  “Yes,” I said. It came out all loud and wobbly, so it sounded about a micro-millimeter off a yee-haa yes…but, truth is, I was scared.

  It was baking hot, and I was sweating by the time we’d walked about three steps. When we got to the alleyway that led from right by our house into town, I was sweating even more—and I got more scared.

  What you might need to know at this point is that Dartbridge is basically the hippie capital of the universe. It is drowning in tie-dye and organic vegetables. People walk barefoot through the streets not because they are poor, but because they want a closer connection to the Earth (despite the fact that there’s a ton of asphalt on top of it). Even the graffiti, which looks kind of cool, is hippie; this squiggly symbol for peace gets spray-painted everywhere. Dartbridge, Ronnie said, was “a place so laid-back it was practically comatose.”

  Below the alarms and the sirens and the car horns, you could hear…not just shouts and screams, but the sound of things—glass—smashing.

  “Is it a riot?” I asked.

  I’d seen stuff like that on TV before. It happened in other countries mainly, but also in the UK when people were annoyed about stuff the government was doing—which Ronnie said would happen a lot more often if people knew what was really going on.

  “A riot in Dartbridge? I don’t think so,” said Simon. “People are just panicking a little, I guess.”

  We didn’t go the way we’d usually go, straight into town via the library parking lot. Simon went to the right, along the back road, South Street. Fine by me, because I didn’t want to go anywhere near The George. Not so fine was…there was a guy slumped up against a wall. He looked as if he’d just fallen asleep there, like a drunk guy might, snoozing in the sun.

  “Don’t look,” said Simon, but I did.

  He wasn’t snoozing. His face was all bloody, and his eyes were gone, holes where they should have been. I didn’t know it then, but that’s what birds do, peck out the pieces that are easiest to get their beaks into. Nice.

  In all my life, up until the day before, I’d never seen a dead person. Not counting the parking-lot people—which I didn’t like to do, because I hadn’t actually seen them die, had I? Like Caspar, it had to be possible that they’d be OK—I’d now seen four dead bodies. Four.

  Ha ha ha. That’s pretty funny, huh? Do you see? I was still counting.

  And…does it sound too weird to say it? I felt glad that my mom was at home with Henry, not lying in the street—or in her nightie in someone’s front yard, like Mrs. Fitch.

  Simon was wrong. It was a riot.

  South Street goes along next to the High Street, then curves in to meet it. As we walked toward the noise, you had this little view—a tiny street’s width—of the High Street. And across this little gap, people—not tons of people, but little flurries and spurts of them—were going back and forth, some walking, some running, some shouting. Some with scarves tied across their faces like it was a real riot or something. Some pushing carts, most carrying all sorts of stuff.

  So what we’d seen in the parking lot, it wasn’t just some random thing—it was what was going down.

  “We’ll go to the other supermarket,” said Simon, staring at the little snippet of riot.

  That was another moment when I (sort of) realized how serious it was. We basically never much went to “the other supermarket,” aka “the good one.” In my house, if there was something from “the other supermarket” in the fridge—or snuck into the freezer like the pizza—it was unusual, as in Shocksville unusual, and also a cause for deep joy. Lee’s family went there all the time and always had tons of awesome stuff to eat—like ice cream, for a start, and snacky things you could microwave in seconds, french fries included. Pretty much everyone else’s family shopped there too, at least sometimes. Even Zak’s.

  We backtracked and cut around along Snow Hill, weaving our way along the back streets until we’d nearly reached the river. Up ahead, you could see the junction where the end of the High Street meets a bunch of other roads: the bridge road from the east end of town where Leonie lived, the road that led into town from the seaside places like Paignton and Torquay, and the road that led to the hospital and the supermarket.

  That junction was rammed with dead cars, with live people, with rage—you could hear it from where we stood: screaming, shouting, fighting, and the police, in a car, stuck in the middle of it, lights flashing. There was a policeman on the roof of the car with a megaphone, telling people to Go Home, Go Home, Go Home.

  Simon looked…like he looked when he got handed Henry having a bawling fit. Upset, confused, and panicked. Stressed out but trying not to show it.

  To get to the supermarket, we’d have to get through all that. Or—

  “We could cut across the High Street further up,” I said. “Just cut across. It’ll be really quick.”

  Basically, I’d have marched across the Sahara if I’d thought there was something to drink on the other side. I could feel this disgusting layer of sweat building up inside the waterproof gear, and I’d already wondered if I’d have to survive by licking the inside of my raincoat.

  “Where?” snapped Simon. Yup, stressed.

  That’s the thing about being a teenager, I guess. You know about stuff, you know about places, about shortcuts that adults don’t. They get to drive everywhere; you get told, “It’s only a shower,” i.e., get on with it; go. So you find the quickest way… OK, so you also find secret ways… OK and places to lurk. Places where you won’t be seen by parents cruising past in cars when maybe you’re supposed to be in French class or PE—or a super-expensive private guitar lesson, for example.

  My shortcut, it was down this little alleyway. At the end of it, you had to cut across the High Street, but not just straight across; you had to turn left, go along a ways, and then cut right to get into another alleyway. I guess Simon must have been thirst-crazy too, because we went for it. He gripped the umbrella like it was a club and took hold of my hand.

  When I was small, when we first came here, when I first went out anywhere on my own with Simon (which wasn’t for a long time), he’d try to get me to hold his hand to cross the road. I wouldn’t do it. I’d fold my arms and march across the road alone. If you’d told me one day I’d cross the High Street in broad daylight holding his hand…I wouldn’t have believed you for a second.

  I held his hand so tight.

  There. That’s a thing I’ve said for my mom. And for Simon.

  But honestly—and this is the weird thing—it wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. The riot, I mean. Yes, it was like nothing you’d ever seen (well, certainly not in Dartbridge); there were people running around and smashing windows and stealing stuff and shouting at each other (plus alarms going off), but what you realized in about ten seconds is that although it’s really scary and about as far from anything normal you would ever expect to see—especially in the hippie capital of the entire universe—no one is paying any attention to you at all. Everyone is just doing their own thing; they couldn’t care less about you…unless you tried to take their TV or their tennis shoes or their bags of food or something, I bet. (So that was fine by me, because it wasn’t like anyone in the middle of a riot was going to see me holding “Daddy’s” hand and stop and say, “Ruby?! Oh my ! What ARE you wearing?!”)

  Those people there, rioting, they looked like the kind of people you saw every day in Dartbridge. Some of them were just ordinary people; some of them looked like the sort of people who probably s
pent a lot of time going to basket-weaving workshops or worshipping crystals in woodland glades. Point is, the hippies and the townies, everyone, had gone nuts. If it had been organized by the school, it would have been what they called a “group activity,” which meant you weren’t allowed to just stick with your friends, but you had to actually “participate” with the sorts of people you’d really rather die—I must stop saying that—than participate with.

  We cut back down, onto the hospital road, which was jammed with stopped cars. On the other side of that was the supermarket.

  I guess we’d gone too far to turn back, so we went forward.

  You know how a supermarket parking lot normally is? Everyone circling around like pizza-eating vultures just to try to park one space closer to the doors? Well, it wasn’t like that at all. Cars were parked all over—not neatly in the spaces but jammed in everywhere, none of them moving, no one even packing stuff into them or honking and tooting to get out. Only dead cars, abandoned cars—and car alarms, going on and on.

  “Come on,” said Simon, dragging me through it.

  Up ahead, the supermarket looked nuts. There were a lot of people going in and out of it, but it was the biggest supermarket for miles around, so that wasn’t unusual. You didn’t really get how bad it was until you got closer. Then you could see the front doors were all smashed in. And I do mean all smashed in—not just the glass in the doors broken or something, but the actual doors were gone. A truck was right inside the shop, smashed into the flower display.