H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  Instead, I just smiled back a tiny bit—nervously. I knew what was coming.

  Well, not the specific thing that Simon was about to say, which was hideous and appalling.

  “Did you know,” he said, “that you can drink your own urine?”

  “That’s disgusting,” I said, spitting toothpaste froth into the empty cola bottle.

  “No really,” he said, “you can. It’s just not recommended.”

  I wondered how come Simon would know such a thing, but pee drinking is probably exactly the kind of thing bird-watchers know about, in case they get thirsty on a long stakeout in a bird blind. “The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds does not recommend…”

  I gulped my cola. I caved. “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “What do you think we need to do?”

  “Get water,” I said, because I had no choice. It sounded so simple.

  “Yes,” said Simon. “Where from?”

  It felt like a massive trick question. Also not. It felt like…like he was nudging me toward what I didn’t want to do more than anything, which was to think.

  “I dunno,” I said, i.e., I don’t want to think about it.

  Simon, he just looked at me, waiting.

  “I don’t wanna go to another supermarket,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “And anyway, there’s no point. Because all the good stuff is gone anyway.”

  I stopped there. I drained my bottle of cola. I couldn’t help myself; I burped.

  “Pardon me,” I said.

  “I do, Ruby. Always, for everything,” said Simon.

  The room filled with a sticky candy ooze of emotion. There was another of those pauses we’d been having; this one was shorter—maybe only fifty years—but it was long enough for me to think NO NO NO NO NO NO. PLEASE don’t start saying stuff because I NO NO NO NO NO NO cannot bear to be hearing stuff. It was like when your grandma has had too much sherry and goes on about how much she loves you (and just so hopes you’ll be OK because it was a terrible thing, your parents splitting up), or when your dad has had too much wine and goes on about how much he loves you (and never would have abandoned you, but your mother had made her decision) (conveniently forgetting to mention that it was the discovery of HIS secret “love child,” brother-brat Dan…beloved that admittedly might have kind of forced her to make that decision) or when your best friend gets trashed and wants to talk deep and meaningful (and just so isn’t sure that Caspar is really right for you), and they get all gushy and you just want…to not be deep and meaningful. NO NO NO NO NO.

  “Well…eventually,” said Simon, and grinned. “So what are we gonna do, Ru?”

  “Get stuff from other places,” I said.

  “Like?” said Simon.

  Stop it, just stop it, I thought.

  “Like other people’s houses,” I said.

  I burped again, deliberately. It was all I had left—to show I wasn’t freaked and to keep the NO NO NO NO NO wall of shut-up strong.

  There, I’ve said what you wanted me to say, I thought…but for half of a half of a second, I thought he was going to say no, that he’d come up with another plan…that although he, like me, hadn’t seen any of our neighbors since Day One, he was sure they were all fine and there was no way we could just go breaking into other people’s homes.

  “Good thinking, Ru,” he said. “I think that’s the best thing we can do right now.”

  So that was it, then. Without actually saying the words, we had both admitted—what? That a lot of people, and maybe even most people, must be dead. Because all our neighbors were…and why should our road be any different to any other road? And we’d admitted that we were desperate and didn’t know what else to do, without actually saying that either.

  “But we’ll knock first, right?” I asked, feeling utter dread about the whole thing. “You know, because maybe there’ll be people at home…”

  “Yes, of course,” said Simon, and he went off to get the crowbar from the shed.

  For what happened next, I blame myself.

  Simon did say I could stay home, and I did think about it. “You can’t leave me,” I said.

  We got geared up all over again (about which I didn’t say a word, even though it was blazing hot and sunny). We stepped out into a kind of silence. That was the most shocking thing. While we’d been inside the house, the car alarms had been stopping, one by one. To begin with, there’d just been this yowling chorus of them—most of them far from us but carrying, with the air so still and no wind to beat them back or other noise to fight them. When they started dying off, it got so you could hear the individual ones: a fast, high-pitched spaceship weep-weep-weep-weep-weep; a deep honk-honk-honk that came in a pattern, stopping then starting again; a woop-woop, woop-woop that sounded like an American police car. I got to know a whole bunch of those alarms, all of them different—and all of them trying to remind you of what had happened, and that there was a supermarket and a parking lot and a town full of dead bodies.

  It’s not like you ever give any thought to what a town sounds like—you don’t; why would you?—until it stops sounding like a town. When we went outside, there was no people noise whatsoever. There was just birdsong, loud like you never hear it.

  A second later, when the gate clanked shut, there was another sound, which was dogs barking and whining. Dogs barking and whining inside houses. I heard the howling of the terrier that lived at the end of the terrace; I could see Mrs. Wallis’s grumpy shih tzus, Mimi and Clarence, at the living-room window, a low line of nose slime smeared on the glass where they had been running back and forth next to the windowsill, yapping. Her Siamese cat was upstairs, calmly watching us from the bedroom window. (She was called Ruby, which freaked me out when she went AWOL at night and Mrs. Wallis wandered up and down the street going, “Ruuuu-by! Ruuuu-by!”) You couldn’t see Whitby, the golden retriever at the corner house, but you could hear his big boomy bark somewhere inside.

  What you could not hear—or see—were any of their owners.

  The part of me that knew their owners were dead wanted to say to Simon, “Stop, let’s rescue the poor pets!” But I wanted to believe those people were still alive, that even if they weren’t there right now, they’d come home and be really upset if their pets were gone, so I said nothing.

  We walked on, backpacks on our backs. I felt like a criminal, and we hadn’t even done anything yet. I said I didn’t want to go in our neighbors’ houses; I didn’t want to go in any house that belonged to anyone I knew, not even people I didn’t know know, but just knew from seeing them about. That pretty much ruled out the whole of our road. There were other houses we could go to, down at the town end of our road, but I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to go anywhere close to the shops, where there might be other people around—people going crazy, people with guns. So we went the other way.

  Simon stopped outside a house toward the end of our road.

  I shook my head. “Not this one,” I said.

  I didn’t know the people there at all, but I could picture them: this un-Dartbridge-like couple with stylish suits, shiny cars, and no kids. So we headed off our road, up another road. He stopped outside the next house. I didn’t know who lived there. There was no car outside; no dog barked, no cat watched. I’d run out of reasons to say no.

  We went up to the front door. Simon knocked.

  We stood for a while, the afternoon heat baking us. Simon knocked again. No one came.

  Simon got the crowbar out of his backpack, put on a pair of super-tough gardening gloves.

  “Can’t we just say something first?” I whispered. I was so worried there would be someone in that house. Someone alive. Or dying but alive. “I mean, they might be in. They might just be scared.”

  “OK, Ru,” said Simon.

  He bent his head down, lif
ted the letterbox, and shouted.

  “Hello?”

  When there was no answer, he gripped the crowbar.

  “Once more?” I said.

  Simon bent his head down to the letterbox and opened it. He peered in.

  “Hello?! We’re neighbors!” he called.

  No reply.

  He looked at me; I nodded. He smashed the glass in the door.

  That smash—it was so loud. It felt like the whole of Dartbridge would hear it.

  “If someone comes,” he said, “you run home.”

  It seemed a little late to be saying that kind of stuff, but maybe that smash had freaked him too. It felt like you could still hear it, echoing across the whole town.

  He reached his hand in and tried to open the door. He couldn’t.

  I’d been learning a lot of stuff about Simon, how clever he was; what he wasn’t clever at, at all, was breaking into houses.

  “We’ll go around the back,” he said.

  Really, that was what we should have tried first. We went around to the side of the house. We tried the back door—it was locked, so we peered in through the kitchen window.

  It was easy. He smashed it, he opened it, and he climbed in.

  I hated that, him being in there and me being outside. If something happened to either of us…

  I tried not to think about that. Without being told to, I kept watch while Simon ransacked.

  He handed me a can of fruit salad and a bag of ice cubes. At this rate, we’d have to break into about fifty houses just to get through a single day. And if we ever wanted to do something hygienic—like get enough water to actually ever wash again—we’d probably have to break into the whole of Dartbridge. I was just about coping with baby wipes, but although something told me Simon wouldn’t consider it a priority, I was dangerously close to running out of that spray-in dry shampoo stuff. I’d actually had to move on to the blonde glittery stuff, which was strictly reserved for nights out because if I wore it in the daytime it looked kind of… “You look like you’ve got dandruff,” was what Dan said, doing pantomime choking after I’d sprayed it. Brat. (And I probably wouldn’t have had to use it in the first place if my mom would actually let me dye my hair.) (And which I suspected she would have caved on if Simon hadn’t gone and agreed with her the first time she said no.)

  Thinking about all that made me completely depressed. In every way.

  “Shouldn’t we leave a note or something?” I asked.

  “No,” said Simon, climbing back through the window.

  I think I kind of glared at him. It could have turned into a fight, but, honestly, I was too depressed to bother.

  “Ru,” he said. “I know this feels awful, what we’re doing now, but it’s what we have to do. I don’t think these people are coming home. I think a lot of people are dead, Ru.”

  There: it had been said.

  • • •

  The next house was more difficult but had much better pickings. It wasn’t more difficult to get into—they’d left the back door open—but…it smelled like our house smelled: sweet and spicy. Thing is, what was in the fridge and the cupboards was so good, you didn’t even care: juice, soy milk, sparkling water, and vino collapso supremo, said Simon, stuffing a fancy-looking bottle of wine into his backpack as I glugged down juice.

  The third house and the fourth? I got over myself. Yes, we still knocked and shouted, but you kind of knew no one would come. And though I felt that dread about what we would find (dead people), I sort of also felt this weird thrill thing, this weird hungry energy to get stuff—the buzz when you find something, the triumph as our backpacks filled up.

  At the fifth house, it wasn’t so good. The TV was still on, for a start; the same stay-home, remain-calm broadcast playing. That was freaky. We had to shoo the cat out from the kitchen, from where it was… The cat seemed absolutely fine, so I guess nibbling on that body on the floor hadn’t hurt it a bit. We didn’t take stuff from there. We just left.

  How stupid we were. How stupid I was. You need to just take stuff, whatever you can get. People who are dead are dead; they don’t care… Maybe, even, they’d want you to take it. That’s what I’d want: take it and live. And good luck.

  We stepped outside into the lovely warm evening. I felt sick—yes—and I felt something else. I felt angry.

  “Let’s go there,” I said, pointing at a big house up on the hill.

  We had enough stuff, really; there was no need.

  “Well, I suppose we might as well,” said Simon. “Unless you’d rather—”

  “No!” I said. “I’m fine.”

  I assumed Simon was going to say “Unless you’d rather go home—” but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was going to say, “Unless you’d rather wait, just sit here in the sun for a moment, listening to the birds sing, and then we’ll go home” or, “Unless you’d rather go let Whitby, Mimi, Clarence, and that terrier out.” But Simon, who always told me what was what and what I had to do, or else droned on at me until I was forced to say it for myself, did not, on this occasion, this one occasion, tell me what I had to do.

  “OK,” he said.

  I don’t know why he said that. Maybe he’d gotten into the weird thrill of it too—I sort of felt like he had—or maybe he was thinking that we should just get as much stuff as we could while we could. I don’t know.

  The big house was detached, no cars around. No dogs barking. I had no clue who lived there, but they must have been rich. It wasn’t just because it was a big house—I’ve got friends, like Zak, who live in big houses and they’re as scruffy as our little one—it was the way it was: crisp. You know, all primped and prim and proper. A house without a hair out of place.

  We crunched up the drive. We rang the doorbell. They didn’t have a normal ding-dong battery-type doorbell—they had a bell bell. A real bell, hanging outside the door. We clanked on that; then we knocked. What we didn’t do was call through the door. We didn’t say, “Hello? We’re neighbors!”

  It was the first house we had come to where the front door was open. We went inside.

  The smell was there to greet us. So was a cat, a little tabby. It came running up behind us from the garden. It didn’t even hesitate; it just purred around us, like we were its owners, come home to feed it. We stepped inside the house, and Simon closed the living-room door—but not before I saw… There was a body in the den with a sheet over it.

  We crept through into the kitchen.

  It was a super-bonanza. There was a walk-in pantry. Inside it: tons and tons of stuff.

  They must have been at the supermarket or somewhere like that, because there were boxed packs of water bottles, still plastic wrapped. Juice, long-life milk, soda water, tonic water. Tons of it. I felt the thirst kick right back in at the sight of it, and I swear I could have drunk every last drop. I tell you: looting, fear, rage, and grief make you mad with thirst.

  “Bingo,” said Simon.

  As he loaded up our backpacks and every other bag he could find, I fed the cat. I found the cat food under the sink; I got a plate and dumped the whole can of food onto it. I mashed it up a little with a fork. I set it down on the floor, and the cat scoffed.

  That’s what I remember: the cat scoffing and me thinking I’d done a good deed. Then thinking the cat might be as thirsty as me.

  There was a bottle of water on the table and glasses. I picked up the bottle. I unscrewed the lid; it had been opened already. And then I thought, Yeurch.

  I didn’t think the water might be bad, that wasn’t what I thought at all. I just thought that the bottle of water had once belonged to that dead person, and it creeped me out.

  It was a half of a half of a half of a second; that’s all it took. I put the bottle down; Simon snatched it up. He’d just hoisted his backpack onto his back. He snatched up that bottle and glugged the water down.r />
  “Let’s go,” he said.

  He stared at me. I stared back—like he knew; like we both knew. Instantly.

  And then he sort of grimaced.

  A trickle of blood ran down from the corner of his mouth.

  “Ruby,” he said. “I need to go home now. I need to go home to Becky and Henry.”

  He turned and walked out to the front door; he steadied himself on it. He let out a roar and propelled himself off, out, down the drive, toward home. He went like…like I’ve seen marathon runners go, when you can see their whole body yelling stop, stop, stop but they’re just gonna get to that finish line.

  I dived back into that kitchen to grab my backpack. I think a part of me thought he would be OK, so we’d need all that water and stuff that we’d worked so hard to get. I grabbed the bag. I looked up. There was someone standing there.

  A rich-looking man. Gray haired. Primped and prim and proper, like his house. Some weird look that was almost like a slow, astonished smile creeping onto his face at the sight of me—and then he looked at that bottle and that weird look curled up into a miserable frown and turned to stone. Gargoyle face.

  You . I got it; even right at that moment, I got it. He had known the water in that bottle was bad. He had put it there. It had been a trap.

  I plunged out of that house and ran after Simon.

  At the end of the drive, I looked back; that man was on the doorstep, the cat in his arms.

  • • •

  I followed Simon home. I followed him because whenever I tried to get close, whenever I called out to him, he kept waving me back, to keep me behind him, and I was too scared to disobey. I followed him, whimpering with fright like a dumb dog. I kept looking behind, but the gray-haired man didn’t come. Simon cried out loud; he spat blood, he choked up blood, he threw up blood as he went. Halfway along, he stopped, dumped his backpack, pulled out the bottle of fancy wine, and smashed it open on a wall. He swigged from it.