H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  “Slow down,” the Spratt said.

  I snatched the water back and glugged more.

  I saw the kid then. The Mini-Me Thing with the space gun…the gun that was one of those super-soaking, water-gun things. Plastic. It—she, as I was about to find out—was all taped up. Seemed like the breathing hole wasn’t quite in the right place because the garbage bag around it sucked back and forth, and you couldn’t even see her eyes, although there were little slits for them.

  “Who’s that?” I said in between glugs.

  “I dunno,” said Darius Spratt.

  I lowered the bottle, and I looked at him like, What?

  “She doesn’t speak. I just found her.” He thought for a moment. “She found me, actually. At school,” he said and pointed.

  He pointed like I didn’t know where our school was—which was, like, about three minutes up the road. I mean, of all the places I had thought about going and all the places I hadn’t thought about and probably should have gone to, what had never, ever, not even for a trillionth of a millisecond crossed my mind was—

  “School?!” I said.

  (Tone. Note the tone. The whole world had…and he had…gone to SCHOOL?!)

  Darius shrugged.

  “Well, what are you doing here?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  See, I think this is the worst thing you could know about me. Or one of them. It’s worse than the guinea pigs. I would… I might…have just gone. If it hadn’t been for bumping into Darius Spratt, I would… I might…maybe I would have just left those men. Maybe I would have done that. Maybe I was too scared to break into a police station and—

  “There are people trapped in there,” I said. “I’m gonna get them out.”

  Was I? Was I really?

  He didn’t shrug, but he made this noise, this “hn” grunt sound that was just the same as a shrug. It had no tone; it was just “hn.”

  “You knew?!” I said.

  “Hn.”

  “Well, we can’t just leave them!”

  He didn’t say anything then. Not even a hn.

  “I’m going to get them out,” I said.

  I snatched the peanuts off him, scarfed some, then guzzled some water. I think, honestly, I was sort of hoping he’d say something—like come up with some really, really good reason why we should just go. He didn’t.

  “Right,” I said. I looked around…er, yeah, like I was looking for some way to break in, and I wouldn’t be able to find one, and then I’d have to go.

  “I’ve got this,” said Darius Spratt. He pulled a teensy hammer out of his backpack.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I took it, just hoping he’d go away so then I could too.

  I stalked off and sized up windows.

  GO AWAY, GO AWAY, GO AWAY. Every time I looked around, Darius and the kid were still there, following me.

  “Look, just off, will you? If you’re not going to help,” I said as I strode past him.

  I got back around to the front door. I attacked it. It was some kind of special glass; the hammer bounced off. Who’d have thought it? Dartbridge Police Station has special anti-smash glass! With any luck, all the windows would be like that, and I could give up (with dignity). I stalked back around the building; Darius Spratt and the small black plastic one followed. I tried another window, and it smashed instantly, like normal glass smashes. And instantly—

  “HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!”

  You could hear them clearly.

  “A little more clearly,” I want to say, but, really, it was totally clearly. There was no going back.

  That window, it was too high up for me to just climb in on my own. I looked at Darius Spratt.

  “HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!”

  “This is stupid,” he said. “This is so stupid.”

  I was going to yee-haa and then some, because the way Darius Spratt said that, it was like a Simon way to say that—like, YOU are stupid—but he stepped forward and gave me a leg up. I could feel his feeble arms straining while I hacked away the remaining glass; then I hauled myself in, on top of someone’s desk.

  “HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!”

  I opened the window, and Beanpole Boy heaved himself in after me, backpacks and all, then turned and waggled a finger at the garbage-bag kid (GBK).

  “You stay there,” he said. “Anyone comes, you run. You hide. Go to the school. You know where.”

  I dunno whether the GBK understood that; she didn’t move.

  So there was this door to where they were, a door that was locked—a door that led to another door, with a nothing space, a bench in it, in between. On the other side of that, you could hear them shouting.

  Locks have keys. Keys get kept places.

  Annoyingly, it was Darius who found them—at the front desk, the place where you go to tell the police stuff, like help, help the whole town’s rioting, or that someone’s stolen your bike (which you’d forgotten to lock). Behind that was a ton of keys. Those got us through the nowhere space. When we came into the corridor of cells, those men started screaming.

  The stench of bodies, dead and alive, was incredible. It hit your stomach as loudly as the screams, and the battering at the doors hit your ears. There was a peephole in each door, but I was too scared even to look. I think it would be fair to say that I was terrified. It felt like…if we let them out, we’d get torn apart—like they were wild dogs or demons.

  I turned to look at Darius and saw my own terror on his face. We backed up into the nowhere room.

  “We’ll have to give them your stuff,” I said.

  He hesitated.

  “They’re just hungry and thirsty. They’re desperate. We’ll give them your stuff and then we’ll let them out.”

  “They could be murderers,” said Darius.

  “What, all of them?”

  He shrugged. “Hn,” he said. “In here for a reason, aren’t they?”

  As much as I pretty much hate Darius Spratt, I can’t claim I didn’t agree with him. I can’t claim I didn’t want to just walk away; I wanted to run away—but then it came to me, the truth of it, that couldn’t be denied:

  “If we don’t let them out, we’re murderers.”

  Darius stared at the floor for a moment, then groaned and dumped his supplies.

  In the door of each cell was a hatch. We unbolted them, one at a time, and hands snatched what was offered. You had to shut your mind to it, the stink and the shouting and the swearing—and then the fighting you could hear starting up in the cells as desperate men battled over bottles of water, over crummy bags of peanuts.

  “Let us out of here! ! ! ! Let us out!”

  None of the keys would fit.

  “For ’s sake!” shouted a guy through the hatch of the first cell. “Come on!”

  His voice, it sounded so broken. So dry, sore, and broken.

  “The keys won’t fit!” I cried.

  “! It’s a kid. It’s a kid. SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” he screamed louder and louder. “IT’S A KID!!! SHUT UP!”

  That corridor of cells, it quieted down.

  “The keys won’t fit!” I shouted at the row of doors.

  There was another outbreak of swearing until the guy in the first cell shouted them all back down again.

  “Try the custody desk, hon—behind you, on the way in. Try there.”

  Darius nodded at me and went to look.

  “Hon?” said the guy.

  “My friend’s gone,” I said. The fear made my voice shake and stammer.

  (Please note, that’s how traumatized I was: I called Darius Spratt my friend.)

  Darius came back right away with a bunch of what looked like keys to a giant’s house—keys four times the size of normal keys.

  “Did you get them?” said the cell guy, hearing their ra
ttle.

  “Yes…” I said.

  It was quiet compared to how it had been, but from every cell, you could still hear it, this bubbling of swearing, cursing, desperation. It felt like any second, it would all go crazy again—and who knew what would happen when the doors were actually opened?

  Darius cleared his throat. “Look, you’ve got to promise not to hurt us or anything,” he told the row of doors.

  It sounds so stupid now, him saying that. It even kind of sounded stupid at the time, and it made those men angry. The swearing started up again until the guy in the first cell shouted them down.

  “I swear,” he said, “on my mother’s life. No one will hurt you.”

  Right then and there, I thought, Your mother is probably dead. Like mine.

  There was nothing else we could do. Darius unlocked his cell.

  There were five men packed in there; three of them didn’t come out.

  The one that had spoken to us stood there with his face all twisted up and twitching …I suppose he might have wanted to cry, but when you get dehydrated like that, you can’t get any tears.

  “Thank you,” he managed to say. He leaned on the wall.

  “Everyone’s dead,” I told him. “Everyone’s dead.”

  I don’t even know why I said that. I really don’t.

  That man, he kind of nodded, like he could believe it, like he already knew.

  He held out his hand for the keys.

  “I’ll do the rest,” he said. “You go.”

  We didn’t argue.

  “You’re good kids,” he shouted after us. “God bless you!”

  “Don’t drink the water!” Darius shouted back at him.

  I guess Darius hadn’t seen what I had seen. There was a drinking fountain in that cell. I can’t think about that. They must have found out the hard way about the water.

  We climbed back out through the window. The kid was still there, waiting. Some random scary guy, bloody—like fighting bloody, eyes and nose—burst out through the window behind us. He dropped down to the ground, nodded politely at us, and then ran.

  “We should get out of here,” said Darius Spratt.

  You don’t say, I thought.

  As we ran around to the front of the police station, another guy staggered past us. I grabbed my bike.

  “Don’t you want to come with us?” blurted Darius Spratt.

  “No!” I said. As in, No way. As in, As if. “I’m going to my dad’s.”

  I biked off.

  Toward home. I wasn’t so nuts that I was going to bike to London, was I? I didn’t know how I was going to get there. I had what Simon would have called “a slight logistical problem,” which is what he said when I told him where I was going to go, and he’d point out that that would depend on me getting a ride from “someone” and that “someone” had other plans that did not involve driving me about like a chauffeur.

  “We’ll be at the school!” Darius Spratt shouted after me.

  I looked over my shoulder at the two of them, just standing there.

  “Bye!” I shouted, which I thought was very charitable of me, considering.

  Charitable and also a further sign of how serious the situation was: girls like me don’t even acknowledge the existence of boys like Darius Spratt. It’s a basic law of nature.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I took the shortest route home, cutting across the top of the High Street.

  That was some sight: in the late afternoon sun, it was a river of broken glass, glittering. I leaned the bike against a wall and waded in, just a little, just to see.

  Things floated on that river. Bodies, yes, but other things too: toys, electrical stuff, books, candy, random items of furniture even…and shoes, clothes, jewelry. Makeup. Really good makeup. The kind I couldn’t afford, even if I’d been allowed to buy it.

  I told myself I needed some more of that dry shampoo anyway, and while I was looking for it, I just happened to wander into a couple other shops, just to see…and, er, basically…it turned into my own one-girl riot.

  You know where normally you’d have to spend, like, about an hour trying testers on the back of your hand and umming and ahhing because you could only afford one lipstick so you had to get it right? I didn’t even bother with the testers. I just took every lipstick I liked. You know how you’d have to choose which color to get a top in because no way in a billion years could you get both or all three or all four, no matter how good they were? How you’d have to put that jacket back because it was way out of your price range? How your mom would go CRAZY if you bought that dress? How you liked those shoes, but you weren’t really sure what they’d go with? How no way would you be allowed a bikini like that and no way, not ever could you get fancy, flimsy, floaty, flirty underwear? How you had to make do with one bottle of perfume? And only had one decent bag? And no no no no no way could you ever get, like, real jewelry, stuff that was actually silver or full-on diamante mega-bling, with matching earrings AND a tiara?

  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

  I GOT SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH STUFF!!!!!!

  (Even though: 1. It was Dartbridge High Street, which, as you can imagine, is not exactly Camden Lock or Covent Garden or Oxford Street or even Exeter, and 2. In some cases, I’d been beaten to it, e.g., the place that sold MP3 players and phones and tablets and stuff was cleaned out. I checked. Thoroughly.)

  I don’t care how awful it sounds. I didn’t care then, that’s for sure, and I don’t much care now. For the first time since before it rained, I was actually happy—or distracted, I was going to say—but you know what? I think I really was happy. I had, like, a crazy amount of stuff—so much stuff I had to double back to loot bigger (and better!) bags to carry it in—and I think I would have gone on and on with it, never mind how I was going to get it home, if it hadn’t been for The George. I’d forgotten all about it, and the air stank so bad anyway that I hadn’t noticed the smell wasn’t just bodies—it was a burned pub.

  Wow. It was gone. There was a charred black hole where The George had been. Only its beams remained: black bones hanging above a tumble of burned-up rubble. That place, where I had known for sure that I was in love, it was as dead as any dead person.

  It was hard to carry on after that. I did try. There was this one particular boutique-y shop, the one that had THE best stuff in it and was owned by an evil old hag cunningly disguised as a super-chic designer-model-type woman, who hated me and my friends and anyone who was younger than her—hated the way that sort of woman does when she realizes we could easily look better than her if we only had the right clothes—and who would blast us with death-ray stares and openly persecute us with “Can I help you?”-type questions that didn’t mean “Can I help you?” at all but meant “Get out of my shop, you rude young girl” whenever we dared venture into her insanely expensive kingdom of exclusive style—which wasn’t often but which was often enough for our hungry eyes to have gazed longingly at every item in there.

  I emptied a rack of sequined items, grabbed belts that cost a year’s allowance each and stuffed them into super-expensive handbags I didn’t even like all that much.

  Surrounded by booty, sipping a fizzy organic ginseng drink looted from the designer mini-fridge at the back of the evil old hag’s designer shop, I sat on the church wall, practically panting. Not from the heat—and it was bakingly, dead-body-rottingly warm—but from the mad, dizzy-making thrill of the thing. I could take anything—ANYTHING—I wanted.

  And I’d have given anything to have Lee there with me, so that it really would be actual fun. Everything was dreadful, but there was this. There was this—and no one to share it with.

  I burped.

  Except Saskia. See…what I knew was that where she lived was just behind the church. I hadn’t even been there, to her house, but Lee had. I’d just go look, that’s what I thoug
ht. I’d just go look.

  Truth? I wasn’t even sure how much I wanted to see Saskia, because I felt like there were things I might want to ask that I wouldn’t want to hear the answers to. Not even how she had gotten away from Zak’s exactly, but…hadn’t I seen Saskia refuse that glass of water Sarah had offered? Had she thought about stuff everyone else was too freaked with panic to think about? Stuff that not even Barnaby knew? Had she thought about that stuff and…not even bothered to tell anyone? Did she just stand around complaining about wanting to go home while she watched everyone else die?

  Her road, it wasn’t nice. It was close to the hospital. Where normally there’d be parking for residents only, it was jammed…with the usual—cars, bodies. I’d dumped my stuff at the church because I figured I wouldn’t be long. I’d just go look; if I couldn’t find her immediately, I’d go back—immediately.

  The thrill of the shopping thing got killed by how that road was, but I got this other buzz on: how you feel when you’re looking for someone, how you just want to know… So I picked my way right down that road; then I turned, I crossed the street, and I picked my way back. I wasn’t about to start shouting her name or anything, and I didn’t even know how I’d know which house was hers…until I did.

  In the living-room window, I saw the sweetest, darlingest, snow-white Chihuahua you ever did see. Wagging her little tail at me; scratching at the glass with her tiny, mighty paws.

  I knew this Chihuahua. I had seen this Chihuahua. This Chihuahua had to be—she HAD to be—the one that belonged to Saskia’s mom. Hadn’t we all ooh’ed and aah’ed and cooed over her when Saskia’s mom had come to pick us up from Ronnie’s flop of a party?

  She had been called Tiffany—or maybe that was Saskia’s mom’s name?

  “Hello, darling!” I whispered at her, my heart totally melting.

  I ran up to the front door. I rang the doorbell. I shouted through the letterbox.

  “Saskia! Hey, Sask!”

  Then, “It’s me, Ruby!” I shouted when there was no reply.

  I went around through the gate to the back.

  Saskia’s mom, plus a bunch of other people, were in the garden. They’d been having a barbecue—with a fancy buffet, that had gotten wrecked. Stuff spilled all over the place. Saskia’s mom lying right in the middle of it all. Saskia’s mom, plus dip. That had to be guacamole, right?