H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  I lay back down, my brain buzzing, fizzing, infected with rage and sadness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I dreamed about my mom.

  Does that happen to you? You dream about the people who have died—only they’re still alive, and everything is lovely, or at least normal. And then you wake up, and you wonder how it can be that you saw them, that you heard them, that you touched them… They were there, and now they are gone again. And realizing that makes the hurt stab knife-sharp. I truly don’t know what is worse: the nightmares or those dreams.

  When I woke up and realized it was a dream, it made me sob. I struggled out of my tangle of fleece. The others were still asleep: Darling with Princess; Whitby, also a traitor, had crept over under Darius’s table (probably attracted by the stink). I got up and—truth? I checked on Darius Spratt. I just looked, like you can’t help but look at a person sleeping.

  . What if he really was the last boy on Earth?

  I felt another sob come, and I like to think I wouldn’t have gone outside if I’d have thought it was still raining, but the truth is I forgot to even think about that; I just pushed open the door and went out. Then I looked up. The sky looked weird: half of it milky and stripy (cirrostratus fibratus!), half of it yellowy and pale and sickly looking. The sick part was overhead. For a moment I thought some new and dreadful thing was happening to the sky, and I panicked about where the the sun had gone. Dur. It was dawn; that’s all it was. Me and the sun had gotten up together; it was dawn and it was cold. I rescued my fleece bed from inside the polytunnel, wrapped myself in it, and walked up the track.

  There was a farmhouse at the top of it; it seemed like there was no one home, but I didn’t go closer, and there were cows mooing somewhere just round the corner—which was great; no one would hear me as I howled my eyes out.

  The milky stripes had burned away and the sun kept me company, kindly promising a toasty day, as I walked back down the track and opened up the back of the car. That was the first time I saw how mad my packing had been: there was nothing anyone would call sensible, apart from about ten thousand pairs of underwear. It was weird. Having dreamed about my mom, I felt like she was looking over my shoulder, wondering why I’d packed such silly clothes.

  “Sorry, Mom,” I whispered.

  I changed—right there, on that track—into a looted dress. It was a silver sequiny thing from the evil old hag’s boutique, a thing I’d never normally have been allowed. I felt better just putting it on—and, I swear, it was pretty much the most sensible thing I had, apart from some super-skinny skinny jeans I didn’t much fancy the effort of squeezing into. I picked up one of the trashy magazines and went back into the tunnel to fix my makeup.

  It smelled so sweet in there (despite a whiff of Spratt). The others were still asleep. Only Whitby opened a lazy eye but didn’t even pretend to take an interest. I climbed back up among the pots and sat cross-legged in a sea of flowers, flicking through the gossip while I sorted out my face.

  Yup, it was still orange. The post-make-out pink chin was pretty much gone. I felt kind of sad about it, even. Gone. My eyes looked piggyish, in need of serious work. I slapped on some moisturizer followed by a mega coat of foundation.

  I was a blank canvas. I, me, Ruby stared back at myself in my compact mirror.

  I need to get to my dad, I told myself. I just need to get to my dad.

  I sighed…and in that sigh, I became aware of a small pair of eyes watching me—I looked. The kid shut her eyes.

  Right, I thought. Gotcha.

  I didn’t look at her again. I went for it; I put stuff on my face—eye shadow, mascara, blush, lipstick—then I’d change my mind. I’d take it off again. I’d pretend I didn’t know which color eye shadow I wanted, which lipstick went best… The kid got up and edged toward the table. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

  All the while, that place heated up. The warmth of it was delicious, like being on vacation someplace nice.

  “Hmmm,” I sighed at the purple eye shadow. I stripped it off.

  “If only someone could help me,” I said.

  That didn’t work.

  I tried the gold eye shadow. The glittery, gorgeous gold. I had one eye done when I saw something flitter… I looked up and saw a butterfly.

  “Oh!” I said.

  I pointed at it, for the benefit of my audience of one.

  This butterfly, this white-winged destroyer of cabbages, flitted about.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my audience of one watching it too.

  And then a small thing happened.

  There was a click, followed by a DZZZZZZZZZZZ—a soft buzzing sound from this box in the corner of the tunnel.

  Darling pricked up her ears. Whitby got up from under the table and stretched, then slouched off outside to have a sniff around. Darling tried to follow, but the kid picked her up. My audience increased to two.

  OK. I daubed my brush in gold. I was poised, ready to sweep it across my other eyelid, when I heard a funny gurgling sound above me.

  I looked up. I saw pipes. In one half of a milli-nanosecond I got it.

  Such pretty flowers.

  “RUN!” I screamed.

  PSSSSSSSSSSSHT!

  I leaped off the table, sending pots of flowers tumbling and crashing.

  “OUT!” I yelled at the kid, grabbing her and shoving her toward the door—I turned and I yanked Darius Spratt off the table by his tank top. Behind us, water showered down, a shimmering curtain of it moving in on us as—PSSSSHT! PSSSSSSSSSSSHT! PSSSSSSSSSSSHT!—one sprinkler after another burst into life, cool air kissing our backs as we ran.

  As we reached the door, Whitby blundered into us.

  “OUT!” I screamed.

  Know what? I didn’t hesitate. We burst out of the polytunnel and I went straight for the trunk to rummage for the crowbar because it felt as if we were being attacked, as if maybe someone could have set those sprinklers off deliberately.

  “It’s automatic,” panted Darius, studying the sky. “It’ll be automatic.”

  “You don’t know that!” I screamed into his face, then carried on rummaging.

  “There’s a battery.”

  “The thing in the box?”

  “Yeah. It would be on a timer, wouldn’t it?”

  My hands found the crowbar even as my brain decided the Spratt was right; those plants were perfect, and like Simon had said about the supermarket flowers, it was too hard to imagine someone thinking, Hey, the world’s in meltdown, but I think I’ll just water the plants. Every day.

  “That water’s probably OK too,” said Darius. Satisfied that the sky was OK, he actually looked at me. “It’s probably from a tank.”

  “Really? Well, why don’t you go back in there, then?” I snarled. “And take a shower—because YOU REALLY NEED ONE.”

  Whitby bounded around like a puppy, cranked up from all the running around, thinking some brilliant new game was being played. Darling wriggled to join him, but the kid wouldn’t let her go. For the humans, the trauma wasn’t quite over. Everything in Darius’s whole-wheat survival kit was getting rained on in that tunnel. Everything we had to eat and drink (apart from vodka!) was being watered with the flowers. The bag of phones was still in the car, but I’d lost my makeup—that was totally disastrous—and now the kid only had that mangy sweatshirt to wear. But the biggest calamity of all had fallen on Darius Spratt, who had lost his trousers. Dig the underpants, Grandpa.

  “I got too hot,” he said, going bright red.

  I couldn’t help myself; I snorted with mocking laughter.

  “Shut up,” said Darius, hiding his modesty.

  I tried to control myself as I offered what I had. The skinny jeans were a nonstarter, so it was down to fancy frocks and floaty tops…or a silver sequiny stretchy miniskirt from the same line as my dress.

 
I cracked up completely when he put it on. How that kid managed not to laugh I do not know—you could see she wanted to.

  “I am NOT walking around like this,” said Darius.

  Then I realized we sort of matched. I stopped laughing. I didn’t want to walk around like that either.

  I didn’t want to walk around period; we needed gas, or we needed a new car.

  “There’s a farm,” I said.

  And Darius and the kid couldn’t walk around, period. I had on brilliant killer-heel boots from the old hag’s place; their feet were naked. The track looked damp. Drying, but scarily damp. (How much water do you need to touch your body before it’ll kill you? Really, how much?) I rummaged around in my bags and plunked down the only spare footwear I had: jeweled flip-flops. The kid seemed to like hers (even though she wouldn’t take them off me and had to have them replunked to her by Darius and even though they were a hundred sizes too big); Darius Spratt’s hairy-toed feet squashed into the pair I gave him like monster’s feet, oozing over the front, the sides, and the back. He looked at me helplessly.

  “I am not going to carry you,” I said. “I am SO not going to carry you.”

  “Hn,” said Darius Spratt.

  I wrestled a belt-leash onto Whitby—he was so giddy from trying to figure out the new game of running and flip-flop throwing, I could just see him taking it into his doggy head to have a little fun with a herd of cows—and we started up the track.

  Remember that game you played when you were a kid? When you were only allowed to step on the light parts on the pavement, the parts that were dry, and you weren’t allowed to step on the dark parts that were still wet from rain? And you’d have a race with your mom, and before you knew it, you’d be at the place—the library or school—that had seemed so far away? Monster-feet Spratt lurched from one light patch to another, then got stuck.

  I had to hoist him onto my back. His arms wrapped tight around me. His hairy legs dangled. Donkey Ruby. In killer heels. Trudging along in a fog of Parfum de Spratte.

  Whitby did go nuts when he saw the cows, and the cows went nuts when they saw us. I had to dump the Spratt in the farmyard because Whitby wanted to say hello to those cows so much he was going to pull me over—and they would have had no choice about the meet and greet because they were shut up in the barn. You could pretty much take that as a sign that there was no one home (or certainly not home and alive), but what proved that was the dogs: two collies chained up right outside the front door, dead. Those collies, by the door, there wasn’t even a water bowl for them. I guess whoever had left them there hadn’t thought it would be forever.

  A better sight was that there was an old worn-out farm truck: open, keys in it. Great. I shut Whitby inside; the kid clutched Darling, so I couldn’t do the same with her.

  The Spratt picked his way across the farmyard and tried the front door: locked.

  “Knock first!” I told him. “You’ve got to knock first and shout. Tell them we just want help.”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone home,” said the Spratt.

  I shoved him out of the way, and I knocked and shouted how we just wanted help—“And we’re just kids!” I yelled—though the cows were making so much noise, it was probably pretty much pointless.

  We stalked around the house and found that even the farmers had been having a barbecue. In this little yard, at the back, it was still there: half-cooked meat, rained on; bowls of salad, swimming in water; pecked-at soggy bread and chips. BBQ Britain Sizzles.

  We had to go in through a window, then let the kid in through the back door. Inside, it smelled bad. Sweet, spicy bad. The fridge was a no-go area, with nothing to drink in it anyway, but they had a pantry with cans of stuff in it. Darius sat the kid at the kitchen table with a spoon and a can of peaches, and the kid sat Darling down on the kitchen table to sniff at a can of sardines I’d opened.

  “You get scared, you bang your spoon on the table,” Darius told her, and we went to see what we could get.

  We hadn’t even gotten halfway up the stairs before the spoon banged on the table. We rushed back in expecting some sort of horror, and instead found an enormous ginger bruiser of a cat sitting on the table, eyeballing Darling.

  “Kitty just wants to see what there is to eat,” I said, and, as Darling hadn’t touched the sardines, I lured the cat off the table with them and shut it in the den. The kid watched, tight-lipped.

  “Dogs don’t like fish,” said Darius, plonking a handful of dog biscuits that were way too big for Darling on the table.

  I got a rolling pin and gave them a battering—the kid and Darling flinched.

  “So she can eat them,” I said softly, wondering how come everything I did somehow ended up with me seeming like an ogre when all I was ever trying to do was HELP.

  Darling crunched delicately; the kid relaxed and spooned herself another peach.

  Ever worn second-hand clothes? Ever worn them and wondered who they had belonged to? We didn’t have to wonder; there was a couple dead on the bed. I decided I’d rather stick with sequins than the clothes of a dead Mrs. Farmer, but Darius didn’t exactly have much choice.

  “Can I get some privacy here?” he said, pulling clothes out of their closet.

  There was no reason to go poking around; I was just looking for the bathroom to see if I could find something for Darius’s pits. I opened a door.

  She was lying on the bed. Her room was just like mine. Same mess of stuff she probably got yelled at for every day. Clothes jumbled on the floor with her school stuff: same books, same exams coming up. Same mess of makeup scattered all over the dressing table. Same wall plastered with photos of her and her friends… I wondered which boy she had liked. I decided it had probably been the dark-haired one.

  I wondered if she had died before her parents, and had her mom to comfort her, or whether she’d died alone.

  I felt cold then, shivery. I looked in her closet. I took one of her cardigans because I had to; I took a T-shirt for a Princess dress.

  “Thanks,” I said to her. I wanted to do something for her.

  It takes a girl to know a girl. I picked out what I knew would be her best dress—this gorgeous lacy white frock she’d probably had to beg to get. I took it off the hanger. I held it by the straps and, careful not to touch her, I laid it on her body.

  “That’s a great dress,” I said. “You look really pretty.”

  When I came out of the room, Darius, in jeans, was coming out of the bathroom, spraying stuff into his pits.

  “Are you OK?” he asked as he ditched the empty can of man-spray and pulled on a checked shirt.

  Before I could have some weird, random thought about him looking not too repulsive, really, considering, I blanked it by staring at his dead man’s socks. I felt it again, that I really, really wanted to talk. It just wasn’t the time.

  “Here,” I said, throwing the T-shirt at him. “You’d better give this to her.”

  “I’ll get your skirt,” he said.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Ruby?” said Darius. “Are you OK?”

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, I thought. I didn’t know whether I meant him or me.

  “Don’t go in there,” I said, closing the door to her room.

  Apart from there being nothing much but the syrup from canned fruit to drink, the house was good to us. Very good. It sounds awful—well, it would have sounded awful to the me that used to be me—but they had a big old stove like Zak’s parents had, only even older, and it was still on, so we made a massive pile of scrambled eggs and sat and ate them in the stinking house of dead people. It was the first hot food I’d eaten since…that stew Simon had made. Which was…

  “How long has it been?” I said out loud.

  Darius didn’t ask what I meant.

  “Six days,” he said.

  After break
fast, we got busy. First we fought. Darius, dead-man’s sock feet shoved in rain boots, wanted us all to get geared up in garbage-bag armor, and I refused. I had to stand in the yard and shout about how blue the sky was (it was!) before he’d listen. Then I got on with things. I checked the truck, ignoring Whitby’s boomy barks (he wanted out) and the cows’ mooing (I guess they wanted out too). I started it up: over half a tank of gas. I didn’t know how far that would take us, but anywhere out of there was good enough. We raided the house for everything that was useful—and I mean everything: food, anything waterproof, more rain boots, garbage bags, tape, blankets, tools—a whole bag of them, but no pointless electric stuff.

  Crazy, really. I thought I’d never get us stuck like that again with no gas, and the way things were, it seemed like we could pretty much go into any house or any shop and get what we needed. It was just that…there’s this fear thing, isn’t there? Every time you go in someplace, the fear that there might be someone, anyone there…and the other fear, which is really more a fear of yourself, that you are going to see something, yet another something, that will upset you. May Meltdown. So it’s easier—isn’t it?—to stock up.

  “We should let them out,” I said to Darius, looking at the shouty cows.

  “Hn,” he said.

  “Well, we should, shouldn’t we? It’s not like any of them are gonna be murderers, is it?”

  “Cows kill more people than sharks,” he said.

  “Keep out of the way, then, if you’re scared.”

  “I’m not scared. I’m just saying.”

  I was scared too, but another thing I’d learned on Simon’s country walks was how to deal with cows. Mostly they won’t come near you anyway, so you should just ignore them and not crowd them…but if they’re frisky or curious, you need to show them who’s boss. You need to act big and stern and noisy. And if you’re really worried, you should get a branch or a nice chunky stick. I got a mop from the house.

  Darius brought the kid out to see. (The kid in her new Princess T-shirt dress that was a hundred sizes too big and a pair of rain boots that were a hundred sizes too big.) That surprised me—like, why would he do that?—and it annoyed me—like, are they just going to stand there and watch me mess it up? Afterward, I thought maybe he did it so she could learn something: either that cows could turn nasty and were best avoided (“See how they’re trampling Ruby?”) or a thing about handling animals (“See how Ruby nearly got trampled?”). In either case, it was not a great lesson.