Earth Thirst

by Mark Teppo

  I look down at her hand, and think how easily it would be to take her for Nigel. A simple rotation of my arm to break her grip; my other hand around her throat. The panic light in her eyes as I carry her back to the room. The smell of her fear. The hammering sound of her heart. The smell of all that blood.

  It would be so easy.

  “You didn't see anything,” I say as I carefully remove her hand from my arm.

  In the corridor behind her, Talus is watching. I lift my head fractionally and she looks—a quick glance over her shoulder—and it is enough of a distraction for me to walk away from her. This time I don't stop or turn around when she calls my name.

  The hallway is too narrow. The ceiling is too low. My breath hurts my throat, and through a film of tears, I mistake the deck door for an airtight hatch, and I'm transported back to the factory ship again. My face, beneath all the topical cream, itches and burns. I start to run. All I want to do is get away; all I want is to get out of this metal prison. Away from all the toxins spewed by these mouth-breathers. Away from all the sterile death of this construct. Back to Mother's embrace. Back to the earth.

  I hit the door at a run, and the metal bends beneath my hands. The wind strikes my face with a stinging slap, and I suck in a huge lungful of cold air, ignoring the fiery tearing in my chest. The railing is cold under my hands, slick with water, and I grip it tightly. The ocean isn't the ground, but it still teems with life, and I can feel it. I can feel all that vibrant energy.

  Mere grabs my shoulder. I react, spinning out from beneath her grip, and my hands bury themselves in the fabric of her coat. She shrieks as I lift her over the railing, and her feet drum against the side of the boat.

  The wind blows my hood back, and seeing my face frightens her even more. I tighten my grip. “Stop struggling,” I say. “I might let go.”

  Her hands are on my arms, and even though the panic light is bright in her eyes, she stops thrashing.

  “We survive,” I tell her, “because we know who to trust. Everything else—every other person on this planet—does not matter. That is the first law of Arcadia. Do you understand?”

  I wait, my arms strong and unburdened by her weight, until she nods. A tiny sob escapes from her as I bring her back to the deck. She backs away from me when I let go, though she runs into the railing before she can take more than a single step. Her hands clutch the front of her coat, and she won't look at me. “I'm sorry,” she says, her voice so soft against the noise of the sea.

  “For what?” I say, even though I know I shouldn't reply—that I shouldn't be drawn into this conversation.

  The corner of her mouth moves, and I realize I've just given myself away. She raises her head and looks at me. She doesn't flinch at the sight of my face, and the weak light from the yellow line on the horizon highlights the scar on her throat. “It must be very lonely,” she says and there is a different light in her eyes now.

  She isn't afraid.

  * * *

  “You should have brought the reporter.” Talus is standing too close to me. I can smell the stale stink of his breath. We've been away from land too long; our bodies are retaining too many toxins. “She's too curious.”

  I swallow my rage. “What did you expect?” I snap.

  Phoebe gives me her enigmatic glare, saying nothing. Talus doesn't notice her—he's unaware of the tension in her frame. How close she is to doing violence. The wet sounds coming from Nigel and the young Prime Earth volunteer aren't helping. We're all feeling the thirst. The boy's eyes are open; there's still life in that flesh, and though he can't speak, he's trying to get our attention. Trying to beg for his life.

  His name is Francis, and his tragic flaw is his nicotine addiction. If he hadn't been heading out to the deck for a cigarette, I wouldn't have met him in the corridor. If he had stayed in his tiny bunk, he might have had a chance to become a helpful statistic in the media war against the tobacco companies. Forty-three percent chance of contracting lung cancer by his fortieth birthday. As it stands, he won't turn twenty-six.

  His blood is polluted, of course, awash with a cocktail of carcinogens and nicotine, but there are still raw nutrients that Nigel can extract. It won't be enough, like Phoebe warned us, but Nigel will be able to repair some of the caustic damage from the aerosol spray. The blood will help.

  “We have to be strategic,” I say to Talus. “There might be a few assets we can leverage here. We need to be careful with our resources.”

  We're in the middle of the fucking ocean, I don't say, we can't afford to let our fear rule us. That's what they want us to do.

  “They don't know how well it worked,” Phoebe says.

  “That's right,” I echo. “We got off the boat. All they'll have is video footage, but it won't tell them much. They don't know how well it works. Until they can be sure, they'll be cautious. They'll want more data.”

  Talus chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment, his attention straying toward the dying boy. “Nigel will need more blood,” he says.

  “No.” I shut that conversation down.

  He whirls on me, a blur of motion, and his hand moves even faster. I feel it coming, but I don't move out of the way. My head snaps to the side, and my mouth fills with the warm taste of blood. “Know your place, liar,” he hisses.

  I don't cringe, nor do I reply right away. I take a moment or two to watch his eyes. “I do know my place,” I respond. “And that is to respect and serve. But if you fail to uphold the first, then I am not bound to the second.”

  He starts to sneer at me, and then his gaze flickers to Phoebe behind me, and the expression vanishes like a shadow fleeing the rising moon. “The reporter is dangerous,” he says, recovering and retreating to a safer position.

  “Agreed,” I reply, meeting him halfway. “But to whom?”

  He growls in his throat, and I hear the accusation caught there. Liar.

  Suddenly weary of this conversation, I turn away from Talus. “I will find out what she knows—because she will tell me—and then we will decide if she can still be useful to us,” I say. “We will decide together. It will be a group decision.”

  I watch the light go out of the boy's eyes. His face goes slack, and Nigel lifts his mouth from the boy's neck. A shudder runs through his frame, and it isn't the same sort of spasm he had been exhibiting earlier.

  Talus glares at me. I've challenged his authority. I will have to answer for my insubordination eventually, but he's smart enough—he's old enough—to know the truth of my words. We need better intel. We need to know who we are fighting and why. He doesn't like it, but we need Mere.

  He doesn't like having to trust a human.

  I don't blame him, but we don't have any choice.

  We're cut off from Arcadia. On our own and in dangerous terrain. In such conditions, there are rarely good choices. Only the expedient ones that increase your chance of survival.

  FIVE

  Ostensibly, our mission was an intelligence-gathering assignment, but I had been party to enough cluster-fucks designed by an armchair committee to know the signs. We were being exiled, and the Grove wouldn't be terribly saddened if none of us returned. I suspected my previous incident with Meredith was the reason I had been chosen—and it was starting to occur to me that her presence on the boat simply made things easier if the Grove was attempting to purge weeds from the garden. It had been a couple of decades since I had seen Phoebe, and it had never been easy to tell what she was thinking. She was like that though—perpetually inscrutable. In many ways, it didn't matter if we were talking to one another. She and I were bound together. There may be more animosity than love between us, but there would always be respect.

  I had heard stories about Talus—the man had a hair-trigger and a history of letting the bloodlust rule him. Nigel was the odd man out—nothing I had heard suggested he was anything other than a perfect soldier—and perhaps his secondary objective was to push the rest of the team overboard somewhere below the sixtieth parall
el. By the time we managed to return to Arcadia, we'd crave Mother's embrace so much that we'd agree to anything. She'd strip the incendiary memories from our heads while we lay in her arms—the revolutionary zeal, the incessant need to question authority—and when we were born again, we'd be resplendent with the pure spirit of Arcadia.

  It never worked quite right with me, and I suspected it had something to do with the auguries I had performed before coming to Arcadia. I had seen the world differently than the rest. I remembered more than I was supposed to—I knew there were holes in my history that weren't entirely the result of decades-long slumber. I could remember the way Arcadia used to be. We used to not fear the sun. We used to be able to breathe the air. We used to be able to sleep anywhere.

  But so much has changed in the last two hundred years.

  The seed of our panic had been laid by the Romantics and had been steadily nurtured by the Modernists and their hyphenated children. Stir in the nihilism of Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Lovecraft, and Camus—as well as the brutal reality of two World Wars—and the resulting harvest was rife with fear, despair, and a mad yearning to be coddled. Capitalism, Communism, and a few other -isms tried their best, but it took corporate greed to finally figure out how to yoke humanity, and once yoked, they were easy to lead.

  We became the bogeymen, the terror that threatened everything they were told they needed. The message spread, always the same. At first it was just the Internet, magnified by the vitriolic half-percent that purports to be the reasonable voice of the popular consensus, and then talk radio, in all the big markets, began to treat it as something other than a bad Internet meme that wouldn't die. Eventually, the networks discovered there was money in fear-mongering and the modern monster was given a face and a mission statement: we were the children of anarchy, the sons and daughters of Free Love radicals who wanted to turn the world into a socialist prison camp; the world was a free market economy, and we were the barbarians who only wanted to pillage and plunder the marketplace.

  All the while, their dark Satanic mills kept pumping poisons into the air, earth, and water. We didn't stop them because we were afraid to, and that fear has started to seep up from Mother's roots.

  * * *

  There is whisky in Captain Morse's mug, and the alcohol blurs his eyes and taints his breath. It gives him strength too, a ruddy flush in his cheeks, and his gestures are big and exaggerated. As if he were playing for a television audience, the one he imagines due to him for his courageous stance against corporate malfeasance and ecological destruction. “They're going hunting,” he tells me as I enter the bridge. He points out the curved window at the two narrow shapes on the water. “Both of them.”

  The harpooners are moving away from the factory ship, heading in an easterly direction. Hugging the edge of the persistent storm that never quite breaks. I don't see the patrol boat. “Any whale sign?” I ask.

  Captain Morse's mouth flaps for a second and then he gestures off toward port, mumbling something about radar echoes. He strides across the deck and jabs the sailor standing in front of the navigation console in the shoulder. “Get in front of them,” he commands. “We need to be beat them to the pod.”

  The man, one of three able-bodied sailors who came with the boat, glances at me briefly and then nods. “Aye aye, Cap'n,” he replies as he complies. The growling sound beneath our feet grows louder, and the persistent tremor in the deck increases. In my gut, I can feel the slow twist of our changing aspect as the Cetacean Liberty responds to the sailor's commands. The factory ship begins to drift to starboard, and I finally spot the thin blade of the patrol boat peeking from around the bow of the bigger ship.

  The pair of harpooners stay squarely in front of us.

  “Tuna,” Captain Morse says.

  “Excuse me?” I inquire.

  “It's not ‘chicken' when we're on water. Right? So, what's the ‘chicken of the sea'? Tuna.” He laughs, a bray of open-mouthed laughter, punctuated by a long pull on his mug. “Let's go show these bitches how to play tuna.”

  I wonder how long he's been waiting to say that, and as I watch the factory ship and its armored shadow grow smaller and smaller, I also wonder if there's another game being played. A wild what? A wild salmon chase, to keep with the captain's nautical vernacular. Both harpoon boats make sense if they are actually trying to harvest a whale. Realistically, we can only engage one boat at a time, leaving the other to go about its bloody business. But if that were the case, they'd be splitting up, trying to put as much distance between themselves as they approached the pod. Making us choose one or the other. Why the tag-team approach?

  I sense another presence behind me. Mere. Her scent is easy to pick up in the close quarters of the bridge.

  “Is your girl going to be ready?” Captain Morse asks. “If any of those bastards even think about shooting at us, I want to know before they get the courage to try it. Okay?”

  “Aye-aye, Cap'n,” I echo. “She'll be ready.”

  * * *

  “Was that little show for my sake?” Mere asks me a few moments later as we navigate the narrow hallway outside the bridge.

  “No.”

  “Is she actually going to shoot first?”

  I stop, and turn on her, showing her my teeth. “We never shoot first,” I snarl.

  She holds her ground. “What if they don't miss?” Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are bright.

  “Then—” I break off, looking away from her face. Then, there will be one less whisky-tainted mouth-breather to leech off her resources. Then, there will be more for the rest of us.

  “Why are you here?” I shake off the other thoughts. Remember your priorities.

  “This is where the action is,” she says.

  “There's action in Afghanistan, too.”

  “Not the same sort.” She shakes her head. “Besides, I don't care for the heat. Nor, I suspect, do you.”

  “You don't know me.” Still on edge from my conversation with Talus, from the threats and accusations rumbling beneath his words.

  “I think I do.”

  A bark of laughter escapes me—a hyena-like bray of noise. “Do you now?”

  “The Beering data. It wasn't an accident that my guy found it. He was supposed to give it to me.”

  The laugh dies. “Who?” I try.

  “Not ‘what?'”

  “What?” It isn't hard to be confused.

  “You asked me ‘who,' not ‘what.'”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I'm talking about you're not as clever as you think; I'm talking about how much danger you're in, and how this little excursion had better be worth a great deal to your people because it is going to cost you.”

  “You have no idea what you're talking about. What do you know about costs?”

  “You tell me.” She lifts her chin, and the scar is like a serpent coiling down into the hollow of her throat. “You killed him, didn't you?” she asks. “You killed Kirkov.”

  I look away again, unwilling to let her question in. Talus's accusation echoes in my head. I have lied to him, as I've lied to everyone since that night.

  Up the old fire escape outside the run-down apartment he's lured her to. The old Chechen gangster, Illytch Dmitri Kirkov, wanting revenge for the damage her story has done to his organization—not Beering Foods, but the other organization that was piggy-backing off Beering. Kirkov limps, an old wound from the First Chechen War, but his grip is strong and secure. He's got a knee in the small of her back, and he's pulling her head up. The knife is the only thing he's kept from his old life, back in Chechnya, and it's worn with age and use. He goes to cut her throat, and he almost makes it.

  But not quite.

  The first lie—the one that has set me on this path—is the one I tell myself that night: She didn't see anything.

  I tried to forget. But we're not good at letting go of memory. It's so fragile. We can't help ourselves.

  And so we lie instead.

&nbs
p; * * *

  The captain plays tuna with the harpoon boats for the rest of the day, completely oblivious to the fact that we never spot a single whale. Whoever is in command aboard the factory ship knows we're hiding in plain sight onboard the Cetacean Liberty. They know we're somewhat at the mercy of the captain's whims. By catering to his blind desire to be the man who saved the whales, they've lured us away with the two harpoon boats.

  Eight hours, spent watching three boats engage in a clumsy game of Chase Me! Chase Me! The captains of the harpoon boats clearly have orders to lead us on, and they participate in Morse's game just enough to feed his ego. Just enough to keep his adrenaline up. To keep his focus on them.

  Phoebe is frustrated too. She stalks along the starboard railing, her hands clenching and unclenching as she strides back and forth. All the way, watching the nearest boat for any provocation, any sign that they're going to do anything other than tease us. But they won't, and everyone knows it.

  Everyone except Captain Morse.

  I know something is wrong when Talus appears on deck. He staggers slightly in the half-light, his optics darker than necessary against the wan sunlight. He walks slowly, like the deck is slick beneath his feet or like a man who has been shaken from a long slumber. I get Phoebe's attention and we meet Talus in the lee of the bridge.

  “Nigel's gone,” he says. He shakes his head when Phoebe starts to say something. “I've already looked. He's not there.”

  I look out at the nearest ship, trying to gauge the distance. “How long?”

  “I don't know. An hour, perhaps. Maybe more. I thought he was meditating.”

  I cast my mind back over the last hour, trying to map the relative positions of all the boats during that time. There had been a near miss with the smaller of the two harpoon boats—the one known as the White Egret—close enough we could see the expression on the faces of the half-dozen crewmen who had gathered at the rail to stare, mouths open, at our fancy boat. Since then, the White Egret had fallen behind, and the captain had claimed a victory—“she's lost her nerve!”—but now I wasn't so sure.