Dry

by Neal Shusterman

  There’s a familiar gas station with a convenience store up ahead. And although I’m sure its bathroom will be even worse than ours, I don’t tell Garrett that. We pedal toward it.

  The three of us roll up to the store and step inside, taking in our surroundings. Like the rest of the world, the store is a slight aberration of normal. Bleak and dusty, the air is so thick it coats your throat. The AC’s off, which we already knew, since we hadn’t hit a single functioning streetlight between home and here. Refrigerators that usually contain soda, energy drinks, and water are empty, as expected. But what I don’t expect is how barren this place is, devoid of not just products, but even the hope of them. Only one in ten items still remain on the shelves—one type of chips, one brand of gum. It reminds me of pictures I once saw in class of a destitute market in a war-torn country, where your only options were between canned beans or bread, and if you hesitated, you didn’t get either. All the while, the grimness is mocked by fifties doo-wop music that echoes from an old battery-operated radio somewhere.

  At the far end of the store, the clerk sits behind the register. Someone I don’t know. The thing is, I know this store. Mom and I would always stop here on the way home from soccer practice to get a Powerade and corn nuts. Kind of a little ritual of ours. I thought I knew all the clerks who worked here—but not this one. He looks like the guy your parents warned you about. The one with a white windowless van rolling slowly past the park. He looks like Santa Claus after two tours in Vietnam. His shifty eyes are fixed on us, with one hand hidden below the counter.

  Garrett heads toward the bathroom, and the clerk shouts, “Gotta buy something to use the crapper.” And so, as Garrett closes the bathroom door behind him, Kelton and I move down an aisle to get something, and to get out of the guy’s line of sight.

  I settle on a bag of peanuts. As I approach the checkout, I get a closer look at the clerk—he looks worn, the skin around his eyes thick and heavy.

  “I haven’t seen you here before,” I say, as he tallies up my items.

  He studies me coolly. “I’m new.”

  “How long have the cars been like that on the freeway?” I ask, changing the subject.

  He scratches his neck. “Middle of the night, I imagine. Brought a lot of customers here. Some were cool, others thought they could just take whatever they wanted.”

  “Why didn’t you just call the cops?” I ask.

  The man chuckles, but it comes out as a hiss. “Haven’t you heard? You can’t get through. 9-1-1 lines have been jammed since yesterday.” He grins, like it’s funny. “That’ll be forty dollars,” he says.

  At first I think he’s joking. But then I realize that, no, he’s dead serious.

  “Free-market economy,” he says. “Supply and demand. And right now there’s a whole lot more demand than supply.” He leans closer. “So like I said, that’ll be forty dollars.”

  Kelton comes up beside me with a Clif Bar, having not heard any of my exchange with the clerk. That’s when I notice the cash register. It’s been smashed open. And I realize this guy isn’t wearing the ugly blue and yellow shirt that the clerks here always wear. The more I try to comprehend what happened here, the more I don’t want to know.

  Garrett comes out of the bathroom, and I grab the Clif Bar from Kelton’s hand, throw it down on the counter, and before he has a chance to object, I grab Garrett’s hand, knowing that it will startle him into submission, and I hurry all three of us out.

  “Gotta pay for the goddamn bathroom!” the man inside yells, but we are already gone.

  I hop on my bike and we race off, but I keep in the lead, setting the pace, and the pace is fast. A few blocks away I slow down enough for Garrett and Kelton to catch up with me. I stop and look back, to make sure that the guy from the convenience store isn’t chasing us.

  “What was that all about?” Kelton asks.

  I don’t tell him. Not because I don’t want to, but because the particulars don’t matter anymore. “That gun of yours—it’s in your backpack, right?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “And you know how to use it?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  I reach into a side pocket of my own backpack and pull out the compact cartridge of bullets. The magazine, Kelton had called it. I look at it. Think hard about it. It represents everything that I hate about the world. But this isn’t the same world it was yesterday. Finally I hand him the magazine, then I start pedaling again, because I don’t want to see him snapping it into the pistol.

  * * *

  SNAPSHOT: INTERSTATE, NORTHBOUND 6:30 A.M.

  When Charity first learned to drive back in the sixties, she was taught to leave one car length between you and the car ahead of you for every ten miles per hour you’re traveling. That way, you’ll give yourself ample time to brake.

  But when no one’s going anywhere, your bumpers all might as well be touching.

  Gridlock.

  Or maybe something worse, if that’s even possible.

  At first it’s the typical rush hour stop and go, but on this particular Tuesday things start to feel different right away. There’s a thickness in the air that reads like claustrophobia; it’s evident in the positioning of the cars, more tightly squeezed than ordinary traffic, and soon there’s even a sixth lane that was once a shoulder that cars have started funneling into. And stopping.

  Charity left her apartment just before five a.m., hoping to beat traffic on the way to Henderson, Nevada—where she planned to spend the worst of this crisis with her daughter and grandchildren—but it looks like she wasn’t the only one with plans to get away.

  She looks to the other side of the highway, noticing that drivers going in the opposite direction seem to be in the same predicament, perhaps even worse, since there are a few cars stuck facing in the wrong way—something she’s never seen before. Clearly the traffic got so bad, people turned around on the road and tried to go the other way, hoping that backtracking would actually cut their losses. Then again, this is probably the kind of elliptical logic that jammed up the highway in the first place.

  Charity takes in her surroundings. An impatient man on a Harley trying to work his way between traffic, like threading a needle. A family in a minivan. A cable repair truck. She passes the time by thinking about who these people might be and what their stories are. Where they’re coming from and where they’re going. Sure, the water crisis is bad, but not every one of these people could possibly believe it’s so bad that they’d need to leave for greener pastures.

  Charity looks to an old black and white image of her and her late husband wedged into the dashboard. If he were still alive, she thinks to herself, he’d probably be kicking and screaming by now. For decades the two of them owned a pawn shop, where Charity would handle the customers—she was always the cool-tempered one. Her parents had named her Charity, one of the seven virtues, and she had always tried to live up to that name, giving her full heart to whoever she encountered—rare in the pawn business, but it was what it was. She added a ray of light in miserable circumstances. However, now, staring into the endless snarl of automobiles, she’s starting to wish they had named her Patience.

  Another half hour and still no movement. Not an inch. People start to get restless, standing on the roof like packs of meerkats, all trying to get a better view of the highway ahead. A man and his young son walk down the row past Charity. She rolls down her window.

  “Getting out for a stretch?” she asks.

  The father smiles weakly. “Gonna check things out up ahead—see if anyone knows what the hold-up is.” The fact that people are doing something active to help the situation makes her feel a little bit better. And things could be worse. In between lanes, kids now play tag, weaving in and out of the landlocked cars, while their parents play cards on the hoods. It makes her think of her own daughter. How she always worries when Charity makes the long drive to Nevada. At this rate, she might not get there till dark.

  Another forty-five minutes
. The sun beams down now—any impatient honking has stopped. Most of the cars’ engines are off. There are people in cars around her who seem to have given up hope altogether, but are hanging tough in their vehicles. Some even huddle together by the side of the road, or lie down in the shade between cars, as if going to sleep and then waking would magically make this situation disappear. Charity taps her hand on the dash, anxiety growing. The man and his son never returned to their car. It will have to be towed and will add that much more pain to the process. Charity locks her doors and leans back, resting her eyes for a brief moment. . . .

  Thirty minutes later her eyes snap open as she’s awakened by the sound of screams ricocheting between cars, originating from God knows where—and then someone sprints past her window. And then someone else, and before she knows it, the scene is total chaos. Everyone abandons their cars and runs south, the complete opposite direction of traffic. What would compel every one of them to run in the opposite direction of where they were headed?

  Charity steps out of her car to get a better view, walking north, against the stampede . . . and finally sees what everyone is running from.

  A fire.

  Black smoke billows and swirls in the morning sky, and below it, maybe fifty yards ahead, is a single car that has caught on fire. It’s a valid reason to flee, because if that car explodes, and if the explosion is large enough, it could set off a chain reaction of exploding cars up and down the freeway. But if Charity has learned anything in all her years, it’s to keep a calm head—especially in the face of utter chaos. She is a child of the sixties; following the pack blindly has never been her ethos. Instead, Charity decides to ask herself the contrarian questions of the world, because unique questions will always yield unique answers.

  She marches forward, against the current, even as the mob grows, cascading in an avalanche of panic that picks up everyone else in its path—including those who don’t even know why they’re running. Charity moves toward the fire, the hysteria heightening. People are trampled. Bruised. Bloodied.

  But where everyone else sees disaster, Charity finds opportunity. Back when she and her husband had the pawn shop, Charity learned a thing or two about junk. It was always about looking closer. Finding the treasure in the trash. Identifying the true diamonds that were worth more than the fake gold ring that held them.

  She searches the dozens of cars for anything that could help her put the fire out. What kind of car would have a fire extinguisher? she thinks to herself. She goes to the TV cable truck and opens up the back double doors—but with no luck. Just boxes of wires and junk. And then the situation escalates even further with the sound of a blast. The car that’s on fire up ahead has exploded, blowing off the hood and setting fire to a couch in the bed of a nearby pickup truck. This is rapidly going from bad to worse.

  Charity scans the rows of cars one final time and sees an electrician’s van, with the electrician long gone. She quickly pops the back doors open—and bingo! A fire extinguisher, right there strapped to the door. So Charity marches toward the blaze, extinguisher in hand, a fire in her eyes hotter than any earthly inferno.

  * * *

  9) Alyssa

  We ride down Laguna Canyon Road, a main street that we’ve always taken to get to the beach. I try to transport myself back to one of the times that I enjoyed the ride, but it’s just not the same. The arid wind cuts at my face. The burn in my legs feels less like exercise and more like a dreadful punishment.

  Passing neighborhoods on a major main street does allow me to peer in from a safe distance, and I’m noticing that a few areas still have electricity, which is somewhat comforting to see. It makes me think that they’re working on solving these problems. Maybe cell phone towers are out because they have no power. I try to convince myself that’s the reason why I get nothing every time I try to call my parents.

  “You should stop calling,” Kelton tells me. “You’re draining your battery, and you might need your phone later.”

  “Maybe it’s just really crowded there,” Garrett says, doing his own rationalizations. “Like when people were camped out for days for that last Star Wars movie.”

  But would Mom and Dad camp out at the beach waiting for water, when they knew that Garrett and I were home waiting for them? As much as I want the answer to be something simple that we’ll all be able to laugh about later, the longer we don’t hear from them, the harder it is for me to paint a rosy picture.

  We arrive midmorning at Laguna Beach, where the marine layer still creates an overcast haze, keeping the shoreline mercifully cool. I can smell the ocean and feel the salt air making my clothes cling to my skin. Waves thunder in the distance, and although the ocean’s cadence has always been comforting to me, the silence that lingers in between each crashing wave now strikes me as odd. Still, I push forward on my bike, flying down the last stretch of road, which dead-ends into the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach just beyond. I don’t feel the blisters on my hands anymore, or the ache in my legs. I have to see that beach. I have to know that my parents are there, and that they’re okay.

  But once I’m across PCH, at the edge of the boardwalk, I hit my brakes hard and stop dead in my tracks—because before me isn’t a beach populated by families retrieving water rations, but a vast, sandy wasteland. It’s virtually deserted, with just a few random people who seem to meander aimlessly. Farther out, toward the water’s edge, are machines hitched to the backs of trucks—maybe half a dozen of them spread out along the beach—but they’re not producing water. They’re not doing anything. In fact, one of them is spewing black smoke, and another one is lying on its side.

  I drop my bike and step down from the boardwalk to the sand, with Garrett and Kelton close behind. My eyes dart around, searching for my parents, desperate for even the slightest sign of them.

  And then Garrett says, “Alyssa, do you hear that?”

  I do—it’s a sound almost musical, and eerily electronic, that lingers just beneath the sound of the waves. I walk across the sand, and the sound gets louder, until I realize it’s not just one sound, but many, all blending together. And all at once I realize what it is.

  Cell phones.

  The ringtones of cell phones.

  There are dozens of them lying in the sand around us, creating an eerie eight-bit symphony. The lost calls of a thousand souls.

  • • •

  None of us knows how to react. We just watch the phones as they vibrate and ring, trying to overcome our shock. And suddenly I realize that until just a short time ago, I was on the other end of one of those lines, calling nonstop, desperately hoping that someone would answer. I see one vibrating, halfway out of the sand, and I dare myself to grab it. . . . I hold it in my hand and after one more ring, I answer, pressing the sandy iPhone to my ear.

  “Hello?” comes the voice of a child on the other end of the line. “Mom?”

  He couldn’t be any older than Garrett. I try to choose my words carefully. “This isn’t your mother,” I tell him.

  “Where’s my mom?” begs the child. “Who is this? Why do you have her phone?”

  I pause, not sure what I can say to calm him. “I’m at the beach,” I tell him. “Your mom dropped her phone at the beach.”

  “She went there to get water. . . .”

  “I don’t think there’s any water here,” I tell him. “Can you tell that to an adult? Please tell that to an adult.”

  “Where’s my mom?” the kid cries.

  I try to formulate the best response I can, but it’s like I’ve lost my ability to put together coherent thoughts. I have no answer for him, any more than I have an answer for myself. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. Then I hang up and drop the phone in the sand, and when it rings again I bury it. I bury it deep enough so at least there’s one phone I can’t hear ringing anymore.

  “What happened here?” asks Kelton. And bit by bit the clues emerge. They are in plain sight around us, right there in the sand. It’s as if a tornado had passed thro
ugh, depositing debris everywhere—debris that looms like a shadow of terrible events I can’t even begin to imagine. Plastic tables and chairs are overthrown, trash all around, being picked at by seagulls. A single abandoned shoe, which somehow seems creepiest of all. And the sand is peppered with black aluminum cans—dozens of them. I’m hit with a wave of the most awful stench, like bleach mixed with snot. It stings the insides of my nostrils, so I hold my nose, but it hardly helps. Kelton reaches down and picks up one of the cans, holding it at a safe distance.

  “These are tear gas canisters,” Kelton says. “There must have been a riot squad here. . . .”

  And then there are the machines. We approach the closest one; I can see that it’s torn to shreds. All of them are. This one’s stainless steel facade has been peeled back, exposing its innards as if it were decomposing from the inside out. Tubes and wiring herniate from the opening, all leading to a series of dials and gauges, connected to three ruptured vats, and behind it, a series of arrested pistons.

  Could people have done this? Could we have fought each other over these lifesaving machines, reducing them to scrap metal? Could we be so desperate for drinkable water that we’re willing to destroy the very machines that could create it, just to get that first sip? . . . And if so, were Mom and Dad among them?

  Now I can see that at each ruined desalination machine stands a police officer in riot gear with an automatic rifle, warning people to keep away—as if there’s still something to protect.

  “What happened here?” I ask the one closest to us, keeping a safe distance.

  “You need to leave the beach, miss. Go home. Wait there for further instructions.”