H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  Do I even need to say that there was no one at the registers, no one trying to stop or control anything? No, it was a grab-what-you-can job: people laden with stuff, but lots of mad, crazy, what-do-you-want-that-for? stuff. I saw a guy with a cart full of toilet paper, two women with a cart full of washing detergent, a kid lugging a basketful of ketchup and cake frosting.

  Sounds like crazy fun, huh?

  Simon and I, we wandered into all this, and it was obvious, right away, that we’d come too late. Somewhere in that shop a dog was barking as we roamed the aisles, realizing how bad it was. Where the fruit and vegetables should have been, it was bare. I mean stripped clean, bare-naked bare, nada. Not even a single bunch of beets left. (Boo hoo.) The dairy section: the milk, the yogurt—all of it gone. He took us to where the bottled water would have been: all the drinks, all the juices, everything, gone. From the looks of it, the booze was also pretty much cleaned out, I noticed. We went to the canned fruit; that was cleaned out too—even the prunes had been taken.

  “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,” Simon kept muttering.

  I could. Inside my mouth it was as dry as when you go to the dentist’s and they put that sucky thing in your mouth, so they don’t have to work in a pool of spit. Bone dry. When I stared at those empty shelves, it was like they’d put that sucky thing right down in the middle of me and sucked up every last drop of moisture in my body.

  We didn’t even get to the ice cubes. They would have all been gone anyway. In the freezer section, there was stuff—frozen stuff, melting, thrown all over the floor. Small groups of people were bent inside the freezers, hacking away at the ice, shoveling it into garbage bags that leaked precious water. A woman was on the floor, mopping the water up with kitchen cloths and wringing it out into a bucket; two little kids stood near, sucking on kitchen cloths, each clutching a jumbo-bag of candy, and over them all, tough-looking men stood guard. One had a frothy-mouthed, mad-eyed, barking pit bull…one had a shotgun.

  “We’ll go somewhere else,” said Simon.

  He grabbed my hand and started walking me out, fast. From a display of bargain stuff he snatched up a steak and kidney pie, the kind in a can.

  “Love these,” he said.

  I never knew that.

  As we walked out, past the crashed car, I pulled away from him and picked up the biggest, most expensive bunch of flowers I could see. Just like I’d never seen Simon buy a canned pie even though he said he loved them, my mom—who totally swooned about flowers—never bought them. Not for herself.

  “For Mom,” I said.

  Before I realized I might have done a very stupid thing, it turned out I might have done a very brilliant thing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Simon stared at the bunch of flowers; water dripped from the stems.

  “You watch out for me,” he said, swapping his shopping bags and the umbrella for the flowers.

  He shoved the flowers back into some random bucket. He did the same with other stuff, shifting flowers around so he had a free bucket. I got it then. Without making any kind of a fuss about it, Simon worked around the display, collecting water. Some of the flowers were dead already, sitting in empty buckets; some were wilted, with just a dribble of water left. Some looked pretty perky and fresh. He worked really slowly and slyly, watching what was going on around him, standing back and looking around from time to time, so he just looked like some dumb, confused, scared man, wondering what on earth was going on. Thirsty people, desperate people, walked this way and that, straight past him. When he was done with one bucket, he started on another.

  And all the while I had this argument going on in my head, like, How could he know that water was OK? But it must be OK, or he wouldn’t be taking it.

  “You watch out, Ru! You watch out!” he hissed.

  I was gasping to drink. Pull yourself together, I thought—in Simon’s voice.

  I don’t know what made me do it—too many movies I guess, too many scenes in which people need to make a getaway, fast. Duh, we were going to have to walk for it anyway, but I backed up and looked outside.

  Our exit was as clear as it could be; all that was in our way was just people, coming and going. I took my Indiana Jones bird-watching hat off and fanned my face with it. So hot, so thirsty. And then I looked up.

  I don’t know what made me do that either. I wish I could say I’d learned already how important it is to keep a watch on the sky, but—like using the faucet—it’s the kind of thing I forget about a lot more than I should. I looked up…into a sky festering with death.

  It was the beginning of a storm sky. The raggedy clouds had pigged out and gotten bloated: cumulus congestus, fat with rain. Below these big guys, little sneaky fractus clouds hung around, probably wondering which side to choose…and, in the distance, but already towering miles into the sky, big momma cumulonimbus calvus, puffing herself up to make an entrance.

  She was what I would have called a thundercloud—but actually, she hadn’t quite worked herself up enough for that. It’s when she goes into bad hair day mode (seriously bouffant, with a streaky, icy flat-top) that you know she’s going to lose it big time. Big? By then, she’s the tallest thing on Earth: cumulonimbus capillatus, the thundery queen of all clouds.

  That’s what I know to say now; then, all I saw was: it really looked like it was going to rain.

  I went back inside. I was going to tell Simon about the clouds, but—

  “Give me the bags!” he shouted.

  Other people were shouting too; you could hear it, down where the freezers were. It sounded like a fight breaking out. The dog was going berserk. The men were shouting, women too. A kid screamed.

  I took Simon the bags; he set the buckets inside them.

  “Go carefully,” he said. “Stay calm.”

  We picked up the bags, and we walked out, away from the shouting and the screaming. A few steps into the parking lot, Simon looked up at the sky.

  “,” he said.

  I thought he’d say we had to go back inside, but you could hear things were really going crazy in there. For a second, Simon wavered in the grip of a mind melt, then shouted, “Run!”

  I thought we were heading for home. I ran, the precious water from my bucket slopping everywhere.

  “Ruby!” yelled Simon.

  I looked behind and saw him standing at the open door of a car.

  “HERE!” he shouted. “COME HERE!” like I was a dog.

  I turned and dove for the car, ended up in the driver’s seat; from the bag on my lap, stinky water leaked all over my waterproof trousers—which weren’t actually waterproof at all. I could see the material darkening, the water just soaking on through. The fight that had gone on inside my own head came screeching out of my mouth, louder than the racket of the alarms:

  “What if it’s poisoned?!”

  I looked at Simon, who was glugging from his bucket.

  “Aaah!” he shouted and wiped his mouth, as though it was the best thing he’d ever had to drink. “Ruby, I really don’t think this water has been changed in days, do you?”

  “But how do you know that?!”

  “Because with everything that’s gone on,” said Simon, shouting very slowly, “I don’t think anyone would have thought they needed to go and break into the supermarket and give the flowers some water. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  He didn’t know that for sure; he couldn’t know that. I stared into the bucket in the bag on my lap; it looked worse—so much worse—than pizza, pea, and fish-finger melt-water. AND it stank. AND it was probably teeming with millions of wiggly little space bugs, all waving their tentacles at me, going, “Have a lovely drink, Ruby!” AND I thought I’d go mad with thirst just looking at it, AND I thought Simon had already gone mad. That’s what thirst does; it gets to a certain point, and you’ll drink anything just to make it stop. You jus
t don’t care anymore. That’s why people go crazy in deserts and drink sand, thinking it’s water, or why shipwrecked sailors stuck in lifeboats crack and glug down buckets of seawater (then go mad and end up bumping off their shipmates to gnaw on their bones). All I could do was stare into that bucket of stinking water thinking, I JUST WANT TO DRINK.

  “And I feel fine,” shouted Simon.

  I drank.

  Yes, OK, I can say how disgusting that water tasted. Horrible—and also very, very, very good. For just a few moments, the world was wonderful. You see, nothing happened. The whole world—the whole gone-mental world—just carried on around us; people scurrying through the parking lot—but you know what? We were OK. That feeling, that gorgeous feeling when you’re thirsty—so thirsty—and you finally get to drink…aaah!

  Then… I’d never heard a gun fired, not in real life, but I knew right away that’s what it was. There was this massive shattering, crashing sound of glass breaking, followed by another gunshot.

  What happened next, it was pretty bad.

  People ran from the supermarket, zigzagging through the parking lot, fresh car alarms bursting out all over.

  A big fat raindrop fell on the windshield. I watched it, that single, fat, glassy blob of rain; I watched it splat and slide. Then another came and another, and another.

  “Lock the doors,” said Simon.

  I couldn’t think how; which button?

  “Your side,” said Simon. “Your lock.”

  He reached right over me and hit the lock on my door. SCHTOMP! The doors locked.

  The people in the parking lot were screaming, running for cover—running back to the supermarket, where other people were trying to get out. Screams, shouts, gunshots. People running all over.

  BLAM! A woman—a little trail of blood running down her face—slammed against the car. She saw us inside; she tried to get in the backseat of the car on Simon’s side, a baby seat there.

  “Let me in!” she screamed.

  “You do not open the doors,” shouted Simon, his voice hard and cold.

  The woman scooted around the car—

  BLAM! Her palms slammed down on my window; her face pressed close—the look on it, the terror, the pleading. She could have been my mom.

  “Please!” she screamed at me.

  “There’s nothing we can do for her,” shouted Simon. “Ruby: there’s nothing we can do.”

  All I could do was look at her, tears streaming down my face, mumbling, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Tears streaming down her face: “Please, please, please…”

  She howled with rage, right up against the glass, then smashed her fist against the window. She spat at me—at the glass between us—and stumbled away.

  “Get in the back,” said Simon, grabbing the bucket on my lap and shoving it down next to his. “Get in the back!” he shouted, yanking me up and pushing me through, onto the backseat. “Lie down!”

  He squashed down on top of me, the two of us crammed in next to the baby seat.

  “Act dead.”

  That was what he said, “Act dead.”

  The gunshots went on. The screaming went on. The alarms, on and on and on. You could hear people pushing past the car; a couple times someone yanked on a door handle. It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming out loud when that happened.

  “Don’t think this gets you out of your studies,” Simon bellowed in my ear.

  My nose was pressed against the back of the seat. I could feel his breath in my ear. I heard the fear in it, smelled the rotten-egg stink of that water.

  I thought he’d gone mad.

  “Let’s start with the reasons why Britain’s empire declined in the twentieth century,” he shouted. He jabbed me, hard, his thumb in my rib. “The decline of the empire was caused by…”

  I was crying—or trying to. No tears would come.

  “The decline of the empire was caused by?” he persisted.

  He jabbed me again.

  “Things that happened in Britain and things that happened in other places.” I sobbed into the seat.

  “Other places?”

  “Like India!” I wailed.

  “What happened in India? Come on! I know you know this, Ru.”

  “Gandhi,” I shouted into the seat.

  “Gandhi? Gandhi who? What? How? Why? This is an essay question, not a multiple choice.” Jab. “Please, Ruby! Think!”

  “The Indian…the National Congress was…founded in 1885…”

  We went through it all: Gandhi coming along, Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Simon didn’t know it like I knew it, but that didn’t stop him asking tricky questions, and he knew a lot more about what Churchill and the British government had been up to.

  In time, all the people noise stopped. All you could hear were alarms, alarms, alarms…and the rain, drumming down on the roof of the car. Hammering down—so loud you could hear it over the rest of the racket. If it had been some old beater, like my dad’s, we would have been done for. My dad’s car leaked where you wouldn’t think a car could leak.

  It was best not to think about that.

  Eventually, the rain stopped—for a while—but we didn’t dare leave the car. Directly above us, the sky was groaning with clouds. Always hard to tell what kind when you’re cowering underneath it. The sun managed to poke through a little before it chickened out completely and gave up for the night. The world was soaking wet…and people quiet. The car alarms, they went on.

  We climbed back into the front seats. For a moment, we just sat.

  This is a thing I learned about alarms. It’s sort of based on Henry’s crying. If you go on hearing it, tuning in to it, feeling it, you will go nuts. So you have to find a way to tune out, to not hear it. If you can, you put a pillow over your ears and just pretend you’re crashed out at a really noisy party—but you’ve had a great time, right, so you don’t mind the noise. If there’s no pillow, stuff whatever you can into your ears.

  “Is there any tissue or something?” I shouted. Parenty people, even in times of extreme crisis, always have that kind of thing.

  The parenty people who’d owned that car did. Simon ransacked the glove compartment and found baby wipes and candy. He handed the baby wipes and candy to me and used his penknife to open the canned pie. He cut his hand doing it.

  “Ru, would you like some of this?” he shouted, holding out the soggy, uncooked pie.

  “It’s OK, thanks,” I shouted, even though my stomach was growling. I was stuffing strips of baby wipe into my ears.

  “I respect your position on vegetarianism,” he shouted.

  Huh?! I pulled the baby wipe out of my ears just to be sure I’d heard him right.

  “I said I respect your position on vegetarianism,” he repeated.

  What?! He’d never said that before, not once.

  “Thanks,” I shouted. I stuffed the baby wipe back into my ear and offered him some. He stuffed some into his ears.

  “But, honey,” he practically screamed, overcompensating for the earplugs.

  He’d never said that either, not once. Honey.

  “I think right now it would really be OK to eat this. I mean, I think it would really be OK. And I, for one, will never mention it again.”

  I hesitated; I was so hungry…

  “Even though you wear leather shoes,” he shouted.

  Tchuh! For one microsecond, I thought we were teetering on the brink of an old argument. I dunno how I even had the strength left to do it, but I flashed a yee-haa look at him. He was smiling—gently—holding out the pie, streamers of baby wipe hanging from his ears.

  “I think all that doesn’t matter much right now,” he shouted. “If you’re hungry, please, eat?”

  I peeled off a strip of raw, soggy pastry. It tasted great.

 
We ate—candy from the glove compartment for dessert—and I told him my noise-survival theory.

  It got dark. It got cooler. There were lights on in the hospital, lights on in the supermarket. You just never saw anyone.

  “Can we go home now?” I shouted.

  Simon leaned over my seat to peer at the sky. Pointless, really, but I’d been doing it too. There were no stars, and the darker it got, the harder it was even to guess how thick, how heavy the cloud was that hid them, i.e., how likely it was that there would be more rain.

  “Can’t we just at least put the heater on?”

  “We’d need the engine on,” shouted Simon, peering across me.

  “Well, would it be OK to do that?” I shouted.

  Simon turned his head and saw the keys.

  “Well done, Ru,” he sighed.

  He turned the key. The dashboard lit up. It looked extremely beautiful.

  In the end, Simon decided we couldn’t start the engine. The noise would be a risk. The sound, even among the alarms, might attract people, he said. I didn’t disagree; if there was any chance that lady might come back…

  And we couldn’t drive off, could we? We were completely boxed in, stranded in a sea of other stranded cars. Simon said he thought maybe the cars had been left by people trying to get to the hospital that first night, not caring—or not knowing—that it wasn’t that kind of hospital. I wished he’d shut up, because of the baby seat in the back of the car. That was a terrible thought… It also freaked me out, thinking how Caspar had been, but I’d seen no blood or anything smeared around the car. Maybe the car had belonged to someone who was just visiting someone, and they’d left the baby at home. Someone visiting someone in a hurry, forgot they’d left their keys in the car, and didn’t come back.

  So we froze, but we had the radio. And when we realized there was nothing to be heard but what we’d heard before, we had music. That is to say, we listened to The Carpenters, The Greatest Hits Collection, Disc One. It was the only CD they had.