The Dark Water

by Seth Fishman

  “How’s that possible?” he asks.

  “No idea,” Odessa says. She’s ready to step into the room to investigate the map further, but Jimmy knows they don’t have time for this. He takes her arm.

  “Let’s worry about ourselves for a moment,” he says, looking around. “We’re back up in the center of the Cave. Where’s the greenhouses and the back entrance?”

  Just then they hear voices, boot steps.

  “Behind the map. Hurry!” he whispers, and pushes her into the room. They step over Chuck and dive behind the enormous map. It’s in the center of the room and hung in place, so the best they can do is crouch behind it and hope no one decides to walk into the room. Jimmy gets his gun ready, and takes Odessa’s pistol from her shaky hands and puts it into his waistband. She doesn’t even seem to notice.

  The voices get louder. Veronica. And Sutton.

  “. . . sure what you were trying to accomplish. You have to stop this now.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Sutton replies. They’re in the hallway, almost to the door. The Doppler effect in full force.

  “Then do something,” she replies. “Grab a ten-gallon jug of the water and send your men out and help everyone. And give some to Chuck.”

  “Screw Chuck. The condescending bastard,” he says, stopping at the door, probably to look at his former colleague. “He can rot in there.” Jimmy can hear a few other footsteps pulling up. Must be a couple guards with them.

  “There’s not much I can do now—I meant . . .” He pauses to gather himself. “I meant for this to be easy, you know? Greg’s too stubborn.”

  “Blake, that’s bullshit. You’ve killed people. Hundreds of them, maybe. This could get worse, this could get catastrophic!”

  “How was I supposed to know our hazmat suits wouldn’t stop the virus? We were supposed to contain it at Westbrook.”

  Jimmy can almost see Veronica throwing up her hands in disgust. “That doesn’t matter now, Blake. You can do something.”

  “There’s no more time, Veronica,” he says. “It’s too late.” For a moment it’s so quiet it’s hard to believe they’re still standing there. “Listen, Greg went into the well for the source . . . It’s real, just like he said. And I need it.”

  There’s a loud noise. Sutton grunts. Then Veronica cries out in pain. She slapped him and what, a guard clocked her? Jimmy tightens his hands around the gun. Odessa shakes her head no and grabs his arm.

  “Hey!” Sutton shouts at one of the guards. “Don’t touch her.”

  “Leave me alone,” Veronica yells, and Jimmy would like to think it’s because she’s refusing Sutton’s help. “You can’t just run off, Blake. Your quarantine didn’t work. Whatever it is you are trying to prove has gotten out of hand. So you have to fix things. Now, as much as it pains me to say it, you are the only one who can save us.” Her voice softens. “I know you. I know you, Blake. Please.”

  It’s quiet. Jimmy’s heard that tone of voice before. It’s the same one his mom uses on his dad after a fight. Not surprising, considering that these two used to be married.

  “Fine,” Sutton says, relief palpable in his voice, as if he were wrestling with himself and his better side won. “Gutierrez,” he barks in a commander’s tone, “get down to the well and take as much water as you can carry and go straight to Furbish Manor. Hand out water to the boys and then get to Westbrook.” He pauses, his voice sounding weary. “Last report was that a group of kids barricaded themselves up in a dorm and haven’t been infected yet. Distribute the water, just a few drops per person. I want you radioing everyone left to come in on rotation and get their share, then report to me here at the Cave. Everyone gets, no exceptions, understood?”

  “Yessir!” Gutierrez shouts, and then he’s gone, his boots squeaking on the floor. Jimmy and Odessa share a smile, the news about their surviving classmates a ray of hope.

  “Happy?” Sutton asks.

  “No,” Veronica replies. “But it’s a start.”

  “I can’t deal with it myself. I need the source,” Sutton says.

  “I thought you sent your little Judas for it,” she sneers. Jimmy’s blood boils at the reference to Brayden. He replays the image of Sutton ordering him to jump in the well.

  “I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Then what’re you going to do?”

  A pause. “We’re gonna go get it.”

  • • •

  “What now?” Odessa asks after their footsteps recede.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy says, racing through options. He was never very good at this part—the brainstorming.

  “Sutton’s sending out water, so we’re okay, right?”

  Jimmy shakes his head. “What if it’s spread to Fenton? What if our parents have it?”

  “But they’re going to follow Mia and the others. They’re going to go after them.”

  Jimmy wonders, not for the first time, where they went. Must be an underground cave or something that they swam to.

  “We can’t do anything about that,” he says. “We need to get some water ourselves to help others, and then get out. Find our parents, tell people. Call CNN.”

  Odessa runs her hand through her brush-fire hair. “How do we do that? I don’t know where the well is.”

  Jimmy only knows two people here who do.

  • • •

  It doesn’t take long to catch up to the sound of the boot steps and the voices. They sound muffled, but Jimmy resists the urge to get close enough to hear. That would be stupid.

  After a time, the voices fade. Stay back, he motions to Odessa, then sneaks a peek around the corner. It’s the elevator they used yesterday to get to the well, down at the end of a bright corridor. The door’s been wrenched open, exposing an empty shaft, and Jimmy sees the top of a ladder propped against the entrance.

  “We’re there,” Jimmy whispers. “The elevator’s busted.”

  “What now, then?”

  “Give me a sec.” He frowns, then tiptoes to the shaft and glances down the open hatch in the top of the elevator. The inside is scarred black, from some sort of fire, and a ladder reaches through the opening all the way to the floor.

  “If we go down that, we’re cornered,” Odessa says, leaning out over the edge, holding his arm to get a better look.

  “But that’s where the water is,” Jimmy says.

  “I know, I know. Okay, I got an idea—”

  But she never gets a chance to say anything. There’s a clang below them, someone climbing the ladder. Odessa turns to run, but Jimmy grabs her arm and pulls her back.

  “What?” she mouths, her blue eyes flashing.

  He makes shushing motions and lays himself carefully down on his belly, aiming the gun right at the head of the ladder. He waves behind him for her to move back, and she finally does, far enough away that he can’t see her. He can’t see anything really, nothing beyond the end of his gun. The ladder rings louder, step by step, and then he sees one hand, and another. Adult, male, trimmed nails and dirty fingers. Jimmy tightens his grip on the gun.

  A black knit cap tops the ridge, then a pair of eyes.

  “Shout and I’ll kill ya,” Jimmy whispers.

  The eyes stare for a beat, then the hat nods.

  “Come on, keep coming. Slow, hands where I can see them.”

  The soldier climbs. Dark eyes, round jaw, tight black gear. He has a large backpack that’s open, its maw stuffed with bottles full of water.

  “Gutierrez?” Jimmy guesses, recalling the name of the man Sutton ordered to grab water.

  An eyebrow raises. Jimmy remembers, suddenly, that he looks ten years older than this guy. That’s why he’s getting real respect. The gun helps, of course, but who’s holding it matters just as much.

  “I want you to follow me, quietly. Got that?”
<
br />   Gutierrez nods. The problem, Jimmy realizes, is that the narrow hallway isn’t exactly conducive to this move. If Gutierrez passes him here, there’d only be a foot or so between him and the gun. Too close for comfort.

  “Odessa, you there?” Jimmy calls as loudly as he dares.

  “Yeah, Jimmy.”

  “Check the hallway, make sure no one’s behind us. Find me a room. Quickly.”

  She doesn’t even reply, just squeaks away.

  Jimmy and Gutierrez keep a wary eye on each other. In movies, this is where the professional soldier calmly steps forward and takes the gun from the amateur’s hand, then explains that the safety is on. Jimmy knows the safety’s off, but he’s still sweating. He doesn’t want to shoot anyone. He wonders, idly, if he could push Gutierrez into the elevator shaft and somehow keep the bag of water bottles if he had to.

  “I got one,” Odessa says behind him, her voice low and urgent.

  “Okay, this is what I want,” Jimmy says, trying to channel his outer adult. “I’m going to walk backward and you’re going to follow, your hands raised, and that’s all you’re gonna do, got it?”

  Gutierrez nods, but he also runs his eyes over Jimmy, sizing him up. Jimmy doesn’t like that, he can almost feel the calculations going on in the soldier’s head.

  Jimmy walks backward, desperately hoping Odessa is watching and will tell him if he’s about to hit a wall. He hits the intersection and feels Odessa’s hand on his back, like he’s docking gently into a space station.

  They reach an open door, not twenty yards later, and Jimmy orders Gutierrez in. He feels a small moment of triumph. It’s like he just won a level of a game: “Get the bad guy down the hall while walking backward.” It’s a storage closet, loaded with mops, brooms, cleaning supplies, metal shelves and stacked chairs. “Give me the backpack.”

  Gutierrez takes it off slowly, and risks speaking for the first time. “What do you want with these? I need them. People will die.”

  Jimmy pauses. “I know, and I want you to follow your orders as soon as you can. But I need the water too, and I’m not about to go down that elevator shaft. I’m taking the water to Fenton, to make sure everyone’s okay there.”

  “But there’s no one sick in Fenton,” Gutierrez insists, shaking his head, his voice unsure.

  “You don’t want to be here, do you?” Odessa asks, surprising them both. She’s staring hard at Gutierrez, as intimidating as a woman in scrubs and slippers can be.

  He doesn’t reply, but watches her carefully. The room feels suddenly smaller. Jimmy feels the weight of the gun in his hand.

  “You were hired by Sutton for what? To guard the school?”

  “We didn’t know what he was gonna do,” Gutierrez admits.

  “Doesn’t that matter?”

  “Not to some.”

  “But it does to you?” she asks.

  He shrugs, like a little boy admitting his guilt. He puts his hand on a shelf to steady himself, but all Jimmy sees is the Raid bug spray nearby. This room is full of MacGyver-style weapons.

  “Okay here’s what’s gonna happen,” Odessa continues, not missing a beat. “I’m gonna take this water, and Jimmy here’s going to guard you. In five minutes, Jimmy’ll let you go, and you’ll just follow your original orders to bring water to Westbrook all over again. Clear?”

  “What are you doing?” Jimmy asks. “Don’t split us up.”

  “Saving as many people as we can,” she replies. Her face is hard. “Oh, come on, Jimmy. How else are we gonna get out of here? If we let him go now he’ll run to Sutton and we’ll get caught.” She wheels on Gutierrez: “And do you really think Fenton is okay, when the virus spreads through hazmat suits? Get your head on straight.”

  Chastised, Gutierrez looks away from her.

  “You sure there’s no one sick in Fenton?” Jimmy asks.

  Gutierrez’s quiet. “Not from the last report.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  He shakes his head.

  Odessa jumps in. “You want to save your soldier friends at Furbish Manor, right? You actually want to help the kids at Westbrook?” Gutierrez stares her down. He doesn’t like being spoken to that way. She’s not phased though. It’s clear the soldier’s uncomfortable with Sutton and what he’s doing.

  “Then pretend we never existed.”

  She hefts the backpack and steps close to Jimmy. “You’ll come after me, right?”

  “I want to go with you,” he whines. This, to him, is far from the plan.

  “Jimmy, there’s no way we’d get the water, aside from this, right here right now. We have to take it. And then you have to let him go. Even if he sounds the alarm. If he doesn’t get water out there too, everyone’s screwed. We need each other.”

  “Girly,” Gutierrez pipes up. “I’m not gonna tell.”

  Odessa considers, but shakes her head. “I can’t afford to believe you. Jimmy, just watch him for ten minutes. Give me enough time to get ahead, okay?”

  “You sure?” he says, feeling absolutely helpless. Just a week ago she’d have wanted to Instagram this.

  She smiles, slapping the water-filled backpack. “What can hurt me?” Then she turns to Gutierrez. “Hey, flyboy. Which way’s out?”

  He nods his head to the right, as if that’s really helpful. And then she’s gone. Just gone.

  Jimmy pulls a plastic chair from a stack and sits there, watching Gutierrez and trying his darnedest to hear Odessa’s footsteps recede down the hallway.

  11

  LISA’S GONE. TO DIVERT THE GUARDS, SHE SAID. BUT it’s odd having the run of the place. We tiptoe through what is essentially Randt’s throne room. It’s like sneaking around the principal’s office. But true to her word, no one’s around as we ghost to the foyer. In fact, there’s no noise at all aside from our steps. It’s unnerving.

  The trickiest part is activating the elevator, even with Lisa’s instructions. The keys are in another language, like the cursive version of the hieroglyphics on the map. Lisa told Rob what to look for—a tall tree and a man with a fire at his feet, both separate buttons—but now that we’re here, the air drafting up from below, urgency beating in our hearts, finding these images is like playing memory with cards. There are hundreds of them, as if the elevator was built to fly into space.

  “There it is,” Jo says, pointing at a tree. But Rob stops her hand and says, “No way, look. That’s a small tree. That’s not even the same type of tree that Lisa described.”

  “Wow, thanks, Odessa,” I say with mock admiration, comparing him to our genius botanist who’s back in the Cave.

  Rob smiles, but doesn’t answer as his finger quickly traces the line of glyphs. He’s good at this stuff, I know, almost bred for it, what with the hours of online gaming, the coding he does. I hear voices; one of them might be Lisa’s. “Hurry, Rob,” I say. What if he gets it wrong? Will an alarm sound? Will we go to a random floor? Will we just sit here smiling while a troop of Keepers storms in with their fighting ribbons?

  “Got ’em,” he whispers, triumphant. He presses a tree image, one that, for me, is hard to distinguish from what Jo pointed at, and then a man on fire and suddenly we’re moving, the elevator descending as smoothly as it rose and then just as suddenly stopping. We only went down maybe thirty feet, and are at the edge of a dark and empty foyer, encased in shadows, just like Lisa said.

  “Hurry,” I say, and jump from the elevator. Jo joins me but Rob’s still on the elevator, futzing with the glyphs.

  “Rob, come on! No time!”

  “We have to send the elevator back,” he says, whispering harshly. My fear spikes. He’s right. What a basic thing to forget. The guards will come out to get the elevator and see that it was parked one floor below and there goes our surprise.

  Rob pushes a couple buttons and sprints toward the edge but before he tak
es three steps, the elevator begins moving, rising up quickly. Rob trips and lands on his stomach, halfway off the elevator, his arms dangling over the side.

  “No!” Jo shrieks in horror, rushing ahead to grab him. I’m right beside her. If the elevator keeps going, Rob will be cut in half by the ceiling as the elevator zooms upward. I jump, take his left hand and immediately lose my grip, falling hard on my ass. Jo’s got his right hand, though, and she flings herself backward. Rob slides off and into her lap and they lie breathing hard, but alive. My whole body shakes with relief.

  “That was supposed to be the easy part,” I say, and Rob and Jo laugh. Rob pats his body over and over to make sure he’s in one piece.

  We hear voices above again—Lisa instigating part two of the escape. That’s why we’re here. Apparently, Randt left the floor we’re on empty to give to Lisa when she’s ready to take a husband. Part one: Lisa somehow persuades the penthouse guards that she didn’t lie to them. But we can’t just go down to the garden, because the Keepers there would see us. Part two: Lisa goes ahead of us to clear the way.

  The elevator descends, very quickly, and from the shadows we can see the two guards on the platform with Lisa, heading down, her hair leaving a trail of neon blue behind her.

  The emptiness of the dark room is unnerving, and we sit with our backs to it, looking out on the atrium, waiting for five minutes to pass. My body’s tense, wired to go. It feels like that moment back at Furbish Manor, when we were lined up against the wall before running through the firefight and into the woods. Brayden was there, but that was the beginning of his betrayal. Just a hundred feet away his parents were bound, gagged, locked up in the basement and he was let go.

  Finally, Rob gets up and calls the elevator, which begins its upward climb once again. “Now we just take this down and hide in the trees directly in front of the elevator. Or that’s what Lisa said. Sounds easy enough.”