The Dark Water (3 page)

JIMMY

JIMMY WAKES THIRSTY. HE SLAPS HIS HAND AGAINST
the dresser, trying to find a cup of water, but nothing's there. He always keeps a cup of water near the bed; the dorms at Westbrook are just so damn dry and he isn't about to get a humidifier for the room; he'd never live it down.

It's dark, Jimmy can barely see a thing, but he can see enough to know this isn't his dorm room. He's dazed. Where is he? Not at home either. He's on a couch, must have fallen asleep. But there's someone here, snuggled up behind him. Jimmy blinks, and remembers.

“Odessa,” he whispers, and she wiggles a little, down for the count too. Jimmy cranes his neck backward to look at her, but it's too dark.

“Odessa,” he says again, louder this time.

“What?” she says groggily.

“I feel weird.” It's true, he realizes. He
does
feel weird. He tries to move his arm and it's clumsy, as if it's not fully listening to him. He takes a breath, and even that feels strange, the air sifting into his lungs in an unfamiliar way.

“That's because you're an old man, remember?” Her lips are near his neck, and her breath is warm and comforting. Her arms give a reassuring squeeze around his waist; they feel good.

The squeeze releases the last gasps of his selective amnesia. He remembers it all. He had the virus, the one that's killing everyone. The one that ages you to death, wrinkles you up and takes you down. But Jimmy had it for just a short while, so that he only aged up into an adult, not a decrepit old man. Odessa's joking about that. He's older looking, sure, but fit as can be. He wiggles his arm and it buzzes with a familiar pain; the arm's just asleep. Jimmy's still finding it hard to remember that his big body is now even bigger. He takes another breath, deeper this time, and lets the air settle in his lungs.

“Not sure I'm gonna get used to this.”

“What about me?” Odessa replies, fully awake now. There's an undertone of a grin in her voice. “I'm, like, thirty-two. Guys just get sexy. Me, I'm already going downhill.”

Jimmy rolls over to face Odessa. She's definitely aged, but even in the dark he can tell she looks amazing. Her freckles, something he had teased her about just a few days ago, feel new and exciting. Her chin has sharpened, her eyes too. Her curly red hair floats around her in the dark like seaweed, but Jimmy loves that.

He touches her cheek. “I don't think so. I think you look better than ever.”

He hears her smile as much as he sees it. And then he hears something else. A
crack,
muffled. Then another. Like a string of Black Cats going off.

“What's that?” Odessa whispers.

Jimmy sits up, bringing her with him. “You hear that?” he asks the others. But no one says anything. “Guys?” he says, speaking louder.

It's too dark to know, but he knows. His stomach sinks. They left him and Odessa. They're out there right now, and they left him. Jimmy hops up and runs to the wall, tripping over a chair. He gets to the light, and in the brief moment before he flips the switch, he wonders if he shouldn't. If he should crawl over to the couch and snuggle up with Odessa and forget everything.

There's another
crack.
Jimmy flinches, turns the light on, and reality sticks. He's in the rec room, a bomb-shelter lookalike that is really just part of the Cave, Mia's dad's fortress that he and his Westbrook alumni friends built in order to protect and research the water. Odessa's still on the couch, but she's got deer eyes at the noise. There are four sleeping bags, empty on the floor. Mia, Jo, Rob, Brayden.

“Where'd they go?” Odessa asks. “Why didn't they wake us?”

Jimmy's not sure he wants to know, but they've come this far, thanks to Mia, and if she's out there and those are gunshots, then she might need help.

“Come on,” Jimmy says, slipping on his fluffy booties, the ones Mr. Kish gave him to replace his winter boots. He feels ridiculous.

Odessa opens her mouth to argue, but thinks better of it. She's changed in more ways than her looks since they left Westbrook, Jimmy realizes. Normally she'd be sulking right now, or hiding in a closet. Now her eyes are set and she's tying back her hair. Maybe getting shot in the leg will do that to you.

“You do realize those are gunshots, right?” she asks, joining him at the door.

“Yeah,” he replies unhappily.

She stands on her tiptoes and kisses him lightly, with his dry lips, bad breath, and all. He's so surprised he forgets to kiss back. It's over in a second, broken by another gunshot, but it happened.

“What was that for?” Jimmy asks, distracted in the best of ways.

She shrugs. “I like that you care about them.” She frowns. “What are we gonna do?”

“I have no idea,” he replies, and opens the door.

The hallways are empty, just like earlier, but this time it reminds Jimmy of an abandoned spaceship, one Kirk might run through before self-destructing the
Enterprise.
Jimmy doesn't remember where anything is; that was always Mia or Brayden's job. And he's not about to look to Odessa for help—she's awful with directions.

There's a short but sustained push of gunfire, but the sound echoes from either direction and doesn't help guide them at all. So he just runs, pausing near corners, checking open doors, seriously considering calling out for help but not wanting to draw the wrong kind of attention.

They turn a corner and see a T junction up ahead. Maybe fifty yards away. And then someone in scrubs like theirs runs by, from the left to the right, disappearing as fast as they materialized.

Odessa yelps, as much from surprise as fear, and Jimmy doesn't blame her. He almost did the same.

“Who was that?”

“I didn't see,” he confesses, but he pulls Odessa along after the fleeing figure. That someone was in scrubs, so she or he wasn't one of Sutton's men. Good enough for Jimmy.

They hit the intersection and turn, but after another twenty yards or so there's already another junction. A maze. Jimmy stops and listens.

He hears footsteps, clomping fast, up and to the left. But he hears something else too. Very faint, coming from the walls, the floors, everywhere. Creeping into his skin.

Miaaaaaa. Miaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

“What the fuck?” Odessa says, squeezing his hand.

“Come on!”

They keep running, and Jimmy catches a glimpse of someone up ahead, but then whoever it is takes a turn and is gone. No more footsteps, nothing. There are doors on either side, just like in most of the hallways. He assumes they're locked. Maybe from the inside.

“Hey,” he ventures, risking a semiloud voice. “It's Jimmy and Odessa. We need your help!”

Nothing.

“Please—we don't know where we are.”

A door on the right pops open, and a woman pokes her head out, looking both ways. Her dark hair is in a frayed bun and her pale skin is somehow paler, like she's just got out of a frigid lake. It's Veronica, one of the Westbrook alumni who run the Cave. She always seemed to be Mr. Kish's number two. She helped Odessa, fed her some of the last of their special life-water. She was poised and calm and sure of herself. But now there's nothing in her twitchy, red-rimmed eyes that inspires the least bit of confidence.

“I thought you were them,” she says, and she hops back into the hallway and takes off running. Jimmy and Odessa hurry after her, sprinting through the gray halls. He hears the thunking of footsteps somewhere far away. Jimmy hates not knowing what's going on.

And then Veronica stops so quickly that she slides past the door she wants. She enters a code into a keypad and motions them in.

It's a control room. Monitors everywhere. On one of them there's a tank, an actual real-life cannon-wielding tank, aiming at the Cave doors. It's not firing, though. And there are some soldiers in hazmat suits, but they're facing the other way, toward the road, where Jimmy can see three sheriff cars have pulled up, men standing behind their doors, talking, waving. The deputy who gave him a ticket for riding his bike on the sidewalk. Prick. Guess the secret's out. Fenton knows about the quarantine by now. Jimmy's veins freeze. Maybe it's spread farther. Maybe his parents are sick.

“What's going on?” Jimmy asks. Veronica has tossed herself into a seat and is flipping through channels like his roomie on a rainy day.

“I'm not sure,” she says. “But it isn't good.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Don't know. Don't know anything.”

She stops at a still image of an open vault, the map shining bright in the center of its domed room. Chuck, the other Westbrook alum, lying on the floor. Veronica curses, but keeps going. “Where are you where are you where are you?”

Then she pauses again, at a feed from the greenhouses, where Jimmy and the others had snuck in. The back entrance to the Cave. The door's open. How'd that happen? The greenhouses filled with hybrid creations are a tattered mess of broken glass and steam. Odessa—the botanist—lets out a moan. She, more than he, understands exactly what's being lost. Veronica keeps flipping, slower now, almost resigned, like she knows what's coming.

Maybe she does.

There's Sutton and a group of heavily armed men, crouch-running with their rifles up. They must've entered the Cave through the back door, even though Mia blew up the Aqueduct to try to stop them. Jimmy tries to imagine a bucket brigade of soldiers in hazmat suits passing rocks down the hill until they've cleared enough space to enter the tunnels. On the monitor, they've hit the elevator doors to the well. Veronica patches in another monitor, simultaneously showing the cavern where the well is. There's Mia, Rob, Jo. They're standing on the catwalk, yelling at one another, their mouths moving even if their voices don't come through.

“Run! He's almost there!” Jimmy shouts at the screen.

“They can't hear you,” Veronica says.

“But can't you speak to them through the loudspeakers or something? Like you did to us back at the greenhouses?” Odessa asks.

Veronica flips a switch, but before she gets a chance to speak, Mia jumps. It's as if the switch was for Mia, as if Veronica just made her do it. Mia
dives
into the well. Rob and Jo look at each other and then do it too, one after the other, disappearing below the surface. It's only when the water settles that Jimmy realizes there's
actually water in the well,
while before, it was empty, and that whole story Mia's dad had told them about the water coming every seventeen years was really real. The virus is real, the water is real. Jimmy's an adult now. Everything's real.

“She can't do that. That's impossible,” Veronica says, shaking her head at the screen.

“What just happened?” Odessa murmurs.

Veronica flips the switch again, turning off the intercom. Just in time, because there's a flash, blinding the screen, and soon after, Sutton's there, at the water, with his guys. He makes a motion and they fan out, running to search all the nooks and crannies in the Cave—fat luck there. A number of other soldiers hurry to activate the pumps and suck water into the fifty-five-gallon blue plastic barrels Mr. Kish had set up for storing the water. Sutton bends over and takes a mouthful of the water. Jimmy can see him relax as he sits down and drinks more. He motions to someone. Odessa grabs Jimmy's arm and squeezes, like they're watching a thriller, like she can't bear to see what's coming next.

Brayden steps forward. There's no one else in the room, the other soldiers are out of the frame, searching the small tunnels nearby. Brayden, the new kid Jimmy finally got around to liking. He's shaking his head, he's saying no to something.

“Turn on the sound,” Jimmy says.

Veronica looks at him, then back at the screen. “Okay, but no talking. They'll hear us.”

She flips the switch.

. . . no way.

That's the deal we made.

It's so strange hearing their voices in surround sound.

You want me to jump into the well? Are you insane?

Sutton draws his gun and holds it out to his side, the threat clear.

Fine, say I don't drown. Then what? What am I even looking for?

Greg always called it the source, so it's probably a stream or brook or whatever—I don't know. But I bet you my life your friends are already there. I bet you Greg told them where to go. Find them, they'll lead you to it.

But why do you even care? What could be more “special” than this?
Brayden kicks the water with his foot.

Jimmy wonders the same. Why not just be happy with the water? It
heals
people. What more is Sutton looking for?

You think I wanted all this death, you think I wanted to create the virus? Not at all. I saw a way to take the water to the next level, to make it do more than just heal an injury or the flu. I wanted it to keep on healing, to make the body immune to everything.

You mean make you immortal?

Of course, immortal. The virus is just the other side of the coin. It is death, and I want to find life. If the crap that Greg's been babbling about for years turns out to be true and there really is something down there, something I can use to make the water make me. . . Just find Kish's daughter and tag along with them. Got it?

Watching, Jimmy feels a rage building inside him that's hard to fathom. He's felt something like this at football games, before storming the field or after taking a big hit. He's felt it the one time he got in a fight, when he almost killed Trent Bishop for calling him a townie. He feels it building from his gut and pushing through his skin, making his gum up and his ears burn. And when Brayden speaks next, it's just too much for him.

Okay, whatever. Just . . . just this is it. After this, I'm done.