47) Kelton
It was different than I thought it would be. I expected it to feel monumental. Like ripping a hole in the universe. But it wasn’t.
Pop! Pop!
Simple as that. Now two men are dead, and we’re alive. I wasn’t angry, like I was back in our house when I almost turned a shotgun on our marauding neighbors. I wasn’t scared, like I was when the water-zombie kid on the beach was trying to suck the water right out of Alyssa’s mouth. Pop! Pop! Done. Move on.
Like I said, these guys were feeding on the chaos, living by video game rules. And in a game, when you defeat an enemy, what do you do? You take their weapons. Which is exactly what I did. Is that why I don’t feel anything? Because I’m living by those rules now, too?
We reach the top of the ridge and look down on the campsite, to see that the campfire, without anyone to watch it, has gotten out of control. The brush is burning. The two lawn chairs are burning.
And the fire has reached the cooler beside them.
It’s burning, giving off a rancid chemical smell. The lid is open, and I can see splashes as the water bottles inside begin to burst. “Oh no!” Alyssa puts Garret down. “Don’t move! I’ll be right back!”
Alyssa, Jacqui, and I race down, trying to get to the water, but the fire is too hot.
“God damn it!” Jacqui tries to reach through the flames, but screams, curling her hands. She’s burned herself. Still, she reaches in again. The second time must be so painful that she backs away, wailing, in pain. “No!” she screams. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”
“Look for something we can use to pull the cooler out of the flames!” I say.
But Alyssa’s looking toward the camper. “This might not be all the water they have,” she says. “I’ll check inside.”
She runs around the growing fire to the camper. The wind is blowing in that direction. It’s only a matter of time until that’s on fire, too.
“Okay, but hurry,” I yell after her. And I begin searching for a branch large enough to reach into the flames and pull out the burning cooler.
48) Alyssa
I throw open the door of the camper. It doesn’t smell good in here. I didn’t expect it to. It doesn’t look all that different from Kelton’s bug-out on the inside. Food containers and dirty clothes. And something I wasn’t expecting at all.
“Benji, is that you?”
I follow the voice to the trailer’s bedroom. There’s a woman in there. Old. Sick. A floral print housedress. Fuzzy pink slippers. She regards me with suspicion, pulling the covers over her.
“Who are you? Where’s Benji? Where’s Kyle?”
“They . . . they sent me in,” I tell her. “They sent me in for the water.”
Her suspicion grows. “They got all the water already in the cooler! Who are you?” she asks again.
I look around the room, refusing to believe there’s no water left in here. She sees what I’m doing, and she realizes that her suspicions are justified. She begins to look a little bit scared.
“They didn’t send you! Get out of here! You’re trespassing! Get out of here now!”
I know she doesn’t have a weapon of her own, because if she did, she’d have already reached for it. I have one, though. But I won’t threaten an old woman with a gun. That’s not who I am.
My eyes scan everywhere, and I see things I don’t want to see. Because on a counter by the bed, she has set up a miniature version of what must sit on her mantle at home, wherever that is. There are pictures there. Two boys. Different ages. One grabs my attention. A faded picture of the same two boys in Mickey Mouse hats, making faces at the camera. And I realize. Benji and Kyle. They were brothers. I don’t want to know this. I don’t want to know that they ever wore Mickey Mouse hats. I don’t want to know that someone has pictures of them on her bedside table. One of those little boys was going to shoot Garrett. The other one was going to rape me. Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?
“Is that smoke?” the old woman says. “What’s going on out there!”
“You can’t stay here,” I say. “You can come with us.” And the second I say it, I realize that if she does, she’s going to see her two dead sons lying in front of the truck.
“I’m not going anywhere!” she says, not grasping the bigger picture. “Do I look like I’m up for a hike?” She purses her lips and shakes her head. “You better get out of here before they come back. Nothing they hate more than trespassers.”
And then I see it! A plastic cup of water on a window ledge, just out of the woman’s reach. She sees that I see it. She gauges me, it’s a standoff . . . and she lunges for it.
I lunge too, but she gets it first. She clutches it to her chest, and I grab for it.
“It’s mine!” she says. “This is my water, not yours!”
The water sloshes in the cup as I try to grab it from her, spilling over the edge. I can’t grapple for it, because if I do it will all spill out.
“Benji! Kyle! Help!”
I grab her hand, trying to stop the water from splashing. She takes her other hand and tries to push me away. Then she moves the cup toward her lips. I know this is all the water she has. All the water that’s left. If I take it, this woman will die. If I don’t take it, my brother will die.
So I do something terrible.
I slap her. I slap her hard. It makes her lose her focus, and I’m able to slip the cup from her hand. More water spills over the side. There’s not much left now—an ounce, maybe two—not enough to quench anyone’s thirst, but maybe enough to keep my brother alive.
I back away from her. “The fire’s almost at the door,” I tell her. “You need to get out of here.”
But even if she does, what good will it do? She’s out in the middle of nowhere, alone. If the fire doesn’t get her, she’ll die of thirst out here. But still, I turn my back on her and leave. Because I have made my choice. If she has to die for my brother to live, then I will take her water and leave her to die. Henry was right. Sometimes it’s the monsters who survive. And now I am the monster.
49) Jacqui
My hands! My hands! How stupid could I be! My hands. And still, I want to push my arms through the flames to that cooler that burns there in the middle of hell. My fingers and palms are already swelling with blisters, the pain resolving into a dull throbbing.
Kelton returns with a branch and pokes it toward the cooler. He hooks the end around the lip. My hands! My hands! He pulls on the stick, and the cooler moves half an inch. He pulls again. It slips another half inch closer. He tugs harder—and the whole side, half-molten, rips open, spilling water into the fire.
“No!”
The water steams, and as the steam clears, I can see the few remaining water bottles at the bottom of the ruptured cooler melt, spilling the contents out pointlessly. Uselessly. It does nothing to quell the fire, because the flames just close in and the remaining sides of the cooler collapse. It’s gone. All gone. And when I look up, I can see how far the fire has spread. The winds are fanning it. One more fire to add to the ones that are already blazing in the mountains around us.
Alyssa bursts out of the trailer, leaping over the flames that are about to engulf it. She’s holding something. What is that? Is that a cup? She holds it like it’s something precious. And it is.
I could take it from her. I could catch up with her and take it. And drink it. Quench this thirst that burns even more than my hands.
But I won’t.
Because I know that water’s not for her.
I won’t take it. Because even though I’ve seen everyone around me lose their humanity today, I realize that in this moment, I have finally found mine.
50) Alyssa
Garrett is exactly where I left him—on the ridge above the burning campsite, leaning against a tree. His head is lolling to one side. His eyes are slits. He might already be dead. I can’t see him breathing. He might already be dead!
“Garrett! Garrett, I’m here.”
I kneel b
eside him. I lift the cup to his lips. I pour a little in. What if he doesn’t swallow? What if he can’t swallow? Because he’s already dead?
Water dribbles out of the side of his mouth. I was too slow! I should have pulled out the gun and shot that woman the second I saw the cup of water. That’s what I should have done! It would have saved me ten seconds. Ten seconds that would have saved my brother’s life. Swallow, Garrett! Dammit, swallow!
Then he coughs. He coughs! His eyes open the tiniest bit wider.
“It’s water, Garrett!” I tell him. “Swallow it!”
“I’m trying,” he rasps. “It’s hard.”
He closes his eyes. He forces a swallow. I pour a little more in his mouth. He swallows again. I pour all the rest in. It’s easier for him to swallow the third time. He doesn’t look any better. He’s not any stronger. But I know that water is in there. Water absorbs into the body faster than anything. It will be gone from his stomach in minutes—even faster when he’s this dehydrated. His body will suck it in like a sponge.
“Is that all you’ve got?” he asks, and I actually laugh.
“There’ll be more,” I tell him.
Only now do I look back down to the campsite. Jacqui and Kelton are climbing away from it toward me. The fire has already spread to the trees at an alarming rate.
“Did the old woman get out of the camper?” I ask them, now that my tight sphere of concern can extend beyond my brother.
Kelton looks at Jacqui then back at me. “There was an old woman in the camper?”
I look down to the campsite again. The trailer and the brush all around it are fully engulfed in flames. The door is still open, the way I left it. I hear no screams. But what could I do about them, even if I did? The path to the camper is completely blocked by the fire.
“We’ve got to move,” Kelton says.
So I bend down, pick up Garrett, and go back to the truck, trying to forget I ever saw this place. But that’s not going to be easy.
51) Kelton
Jacqui can’t drive. Her hands are swollen like balloons. She tries to touch the steering wheel and wails in anguish. Between Alyssa and me, I am the lesser of two evils behind the wheel. She doesn’t have her learner’s permit yet, but I do. In spite of my father’s insistence that I need to earn the right to drive, he’s taken me to empty parking lots. According to him, I’ve totaled about twenty imaginary cars while trying to navigate those lots. Good thing all I have to worry about now are trees.
I put the car in gear, with Alyssa beside me—she can work the four-wheel-drive stick, while I put all of my attention into the normal driving part.
We lurch and grind gears. We scrape trees. We bounce violently over rocks. Jacqui curses each time she reflexively uses her hands to brace herself. I catch Garrett in the rearview mirror. He doesn’t look as terrible as he did before. He just looks bad. Like the rest of us.
I’m tired now. My lungs burn from the smoke I inhaled at the campsite. Carbon monoxide. It bonds to your red blood cells like oxygen, but unlike oxygen, it doesn’t let your blood cells go. They become useless. That’s why people die from smoke inhalation. They don’t have enough red blood cells left to carry oxygen to the brain. I’m still conscious, so I know however much I breathed in, it’s not enough to kill me. But there’s plenty of other things lining up to kill me right now. Including my own driving.
It’s so hard to keep my eyes open. But I have to.
We come over another ridge and start down a slope. But this slope is steeper than any of the others. I should have been looking at the topography map! I should have known this.
“Careful, Kelton!” Alyssa says.
I hit the brakes, and we start to skid. We’re at a steep downward grade now. Maybe thirty degrees. The wheels barely find traction. The brakes are useless. Nothing’s going to slow our descent. I just have to somehow keep us from hitting trees and boulders.
“Kelton!” yells Jacqui. “You’re losing it!”
As if I didn’t already know. I turn the wheel right. We sideswipe a tree. A sharp turn left. We bounce over a boulder so big, I hear it scrape on our underbelly. And as bad as I thought the grade already was, it gets steeper. There’s nothing I can do now. Gravity has taken over. I grip the wheel, brace myself.
A loud bang. A flash of white.
A pain in my gut and chest, like I got kicked in the stomach.
I gasp, can’t get enough air. Maybe the carbon monoxide got me after all.
No, the wind is knocked out of me, that’s all. And the airbags have deployed. And we’re not moving anymore.
“Is everyone okay?” I hear Alyssa say.
“No,” says Jacqui, which is her way of saying yes. Garrett just groans and tells me I suck at driving.
I kick open the door. Immediately I smell gasoline. “Careful,” I tell everyone. “I think we ruptured the gas tank.”
We’re on a road now. Narrow, poorly maintained, but it’s a road!
“This must be East Fork Road!”
At least that’s something. I walk around the truck, but it’s barely walking. My feet are dragging. Everything hurts. My head feels like it’s going to crack in half like an egg. I want to lie down so badly. So badly. Just for a minute. But I don’t. Because I know that feeling. I know what that feeling means.
The truck is done. It looks like it’s been through a demolition derby. One wheel is flat, another one is turned completely sideways.
“The reservoir is about a mile that way,” I say, pointing west. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”
“I think I can make it,” says Garrett, the only one who’s had any water in two days, but Alyssa and Jacqui look at me like I just pronounced a death sentence.
Jacqui shakes her head. “I don’t know if I have a mile left in me, Kelton.”
“Don’t think about it,” Alyssa says. “We just walk, and keep on walking. Even after we feel like we can’t, we just keep on walking.”
So we stop talking, and we start walking. West. And I find myself taking the lead.
Because I have a sudden burst of energy.
52) Alyssa
Walking. Walking. One foot. Then the next. Then the next.
I am not alive. I am not dead. I am something in between. Shuffle. Shuffle. Step. Step. How far is a mile? How many steps? It doesn’t matter. I can’t count. My higher brain functions have mostly shut down. I think about nothing but the water up ahead. I allow it to pull my feet forward. Step. Step. Shuffle. Shuffle.
And the others are the same. Kelton is a few feet ahead of us, but I can see the way his feet move, that it’s not a normal gait. It’s the same dragging shuffle as the rest of us. For a few minutes it looked like he had his second wind, but he’s slowing down.
I think we’re water-zombies now.
Smoke pours through the trees, creating a haze in front of us. I start to cough.
“How much farther?” I ask. It barely comes out. It doesn’t sound like my voice.
No one answers me. My guess is that there’s maybe only a quarter mile to go . . .
. . . but the smoke gets denser. Less than a minute later, I see flames up ahead.
Is this from the campsite fire, or is it another fire? I don’t know why it matters, but somehow it does. Like the flames are driven by the angry spirits of Benji and Kyle and their invalid mother.
The fire has already leaped to the other side of the road. Now this narrow road looks like the black tongue of a great beast of fire about to swallow us. Which is worse, I wonder, death by fire, or death by thirst? How can you choose the lesser of two evils, when both evils are too great to measure?
“We can’t get through,” says Kelton. “We’ll go north, back into the forest, to the right of us.”
“That’s away from the water,” Jacqui says.
“And from the fire,” Kelton responds. “We’ll go around it, and reach the reservoir from the north.”
But getting around the fire means adding at least an
other half mile to the journey.
“We’re almost there!” says Jacqui. “I can see the water!”
I think that must be a hallucination, because when I look into the furnace of the road up ahead, all I see is smoke and flames.
“I think I can make it,” says Jacqui.
“You can’t,” I tell her. I know it’s not what she wants to hear, but you can’t fight a wildfire with willpower. You can’t intimidate flames.
Then behind us, I hear an explosion. A mushroom cloud of black smoke billows into the sky.
“The truck . . . ,” says Kelton. There was gasoline pouring from it when we left it. If the fire has crept in behind us and ignited the gas, then we’re cut off. There’s nowhere for us to go now but up the slope to the right of us. North, around the flames.
“There’s water just ahead,” Jacqui insists. “I know there is. I saw it.” She looks to the flames sweeping from tree to tree. “You can’t outrun this. The only way to that water is forward.” Then she looks at her swollen, red hands. “What’s a little fire, anyway?”
She holds eye contact with me just for a moment . . . and I know that she’s going to make a run for it. She will either reach the water, or the flames will consume her. Either way, this may be the last we will see of each other. I want to say something, but I don’t know what to say. Good luck sounds so trite and pointless in the face of this. I guess she feels the same way, because she just nods—an acceptance of all things not said—then turns and shuffles down the road. A few more steps and she lifts her feet instead of shuffling. Then she’s running. She’s actually running! And the last we see of her is her back as she disappears into the smoke.
“Alyssa, come on,” says Garrett.
“We should have stopped her. . . .”
Dry Page 29
