The Water Knife (37 page)

Angel was looking up at her again.

“Just go,” he said. He reached up and touched her cheek. “It’s okay. Really. We’re all good.”

You can’t undo what you’ve done
.

Not far away, a string of condominiums caught fire, roaring. If their stucco had been intact, they might have resisted the fire, but too many windows had been knocked out and too many doors kicked in. The whole area was a tinderbox. Too many bare studs exposed, and too many nooks and crannies for fire and sparks to lodge and lick.

The conflagration expanded, leaping from condo complex to houses, to more complexes. Bone-dry desert winds caught the flames and whipped them higher. The roar of the flames was like a freight train, bearing down on them.

“Run,” Angel whispered.

She spied an abandoned wheelbarrow. Cursing her own stubbornness, she ran to retrieve it. Her back protested as she tried to heave Angel in. The wheelbarrow almost tipped over, but she caught it in time. Balanced him in it.

The wheel was flat. Of course it was. Who would have bothered to pump it?

Another house exploded, enveloped in searing flames that seemed to have come from within, all the wood roaring alive in a single moment as the heat surrounding it caused spontaneous ignition.

Lucy grabbed the wheelbarrow’s handles and started pushing Angel awkwardly down the street. More and more of the houses were catching fire.

Blistering heat washed over her.

Angel lay limp in the wheelbarrow, looking as if he were already dead.

I’m such a fool
.

She spared a glance over her shoulder and redoubled her clumsy run.

Behind her a curtain of flame filled the sky, rising and hungry. She could run, but she couldn’t stay ahead of the flames forever, and there was no way to get around them. Ahead of her, the subdivision road ended in a cul-de-sac.

She’d never be able to drag Angel through all the houses and backyards ahead of her and still keep ahead of the flames behind. With a curse, she set down the wheelbarrow and ran back toward the blaze.

Small wickering fires were already starting, sparked by swirling debris. Lucy grabbed a piece of scrap lumber and shoved it into the flames.

Carrying her makeshift torch, she ran back the way she’d come.

If this doesn’t work, we’re going to be awfully well done
.

She ran ahead of where Angel lay like a broken doll in the wheelbarrow and started lighting new buildings on fire.

She lit all the houses at the end of the cul-de-sac, running through their interiors, encouraging the flames, moving from one house to the next, to the next.

Flames flickered and grew. Roared.

She ran back to Angel. They were sandwiched now between two rising walls of flame, one in front, one behind. The air was searingly hot. She hauled Angel out of the wheelbarrow, and they lay on the hot pavement together. She reached out and held his hand.

A long time ago she’d interviewed firefighters. It had been back when they still had some interest in trying to control the massive conflagrations that were engulfing the mountain forests.

A wilderness firefighter had described how his crew had nearly been burned to death when a fire turned on them as they ran up a hill. As the fires pursued them in the grasses, he had the idea of lighting the grasses ahead of him. They lit the fires and fled upward, chasing their own burn, running into the blackened fuelless land that they opened up.

He’d saved his fire crew’s life.

The heat around them intensified. Beside her Angel moaned. He’d lost an impossible amount of blood.
I am such a fool
, Lucy thought, but still she didn’t run.

The maelstrom turned people into animals. Had almost turned her into the same. But now, finally, she thought she understood. The maelstrom of fear could drive almost anyone to become less than they were. To tear apart your neighbors, to string them up on fences.

But now finally she thought she understood those few people who stood against narcos and
cholobis
, who stood up against money, and water knives, and militias—all the people who chose the right way instead of the easy way. Instead of the safe way. Instead of the smart way.

She was in the maelstrom, and it didn’t matter. She held the hand of the water knife she’d killed as the fires burned higher.

She didn’t run. Either she would burn here, a part of the horror she had helped create, or she would walk free of it, cleansed.

The fires burned higher all around.

Lucy’s skin began to sear.

M
aria smelled the smoke long before the fires came. But even then she knew something was wrong. She saw it in the way the Vet’s troops all looked west, and in the way they all started scrambling. She saw it in the way everyone stopped taunting her.

Damien ran past.

“What’s going on?”

“Big fucking shootout,” Damien shouted. “Got to go put some Merry Perrys in their place.”

“What’s that smoke?”

Damien laughed. “World’s burning down!”

A bunch of the Vet’s soldiers were running to jump into pickup trucks. Checking loads on automatic weapons. Men peeled out, leaving clouds of dust that blew away in the hot winds.

“Lemme out!” Maria called to Damien.

“You nuts?”

“Just throw me the key. Nobody will even know!”

He glanced around.

“Throw me that key and call it an offering to the Skinny Lady. You going to go shoot people, you know they’ll shoot you back, too.”

The Vet came out the front door of his mansion. Damien gave her a helpless shrug.

“Sorry, Maria. I can’t.”

He ran for a truck and hopped into the back, hunkered down as it tore out of the compound. The Vet walked right past her and climbed into his own four-wheel drive. A minute later the compound was silent, except for the snuffling of the hyenas beside her.

Nobody cared at all about her.

Smoke thickened. The sun set red over the flames. No one returned to the compound. More flames rose in the distance. Big old fire.

The hyenas all stared at the fires, watching with pricked ears and twitching noses as smoke whipped over them. They prowled their pen, working it from one end to the other. Trying to find a way out, Maria realized.

Gunfire rattled in the distance, echoing across Spanish tile roofs. Maria tried to decide if that was a good thing or bad. Night fell, and still no one returned. The gunfire continued.

The air overhead was dark with roiling smoke and bright with sparks. Burning Clearsacs cartwheeled through the sky, rising on hot winds, candle-plastic flickers. Time passed and smoke thickened. She hunkered down with the hyenas, all of them watching the horizon for signs of what was coming for them, the fate they could not avoid.

“You want out of there?”

A shadow moving in the night.

“Toomie?”

He emerged from the darkness, limping. In his hand a massive revolver gleamed silver. A .44 Magnum. Maria thought she’d never been so glad to see someone in her life. “What are you doing here?”

“Feeling kind of glad that you’re all alone and the Vet forgot to lock his front gate on the way out.” He limped to her cage. “How do we get you out of this?”

“There’s a key over there.”

Toomie limped to where the Vet’s muscle had been playing cards. It felt like forever, waiting for him to get back, but a minute later he had her out and free and was bundling her close.

“Come on,” he said. “We got to get clear of here. There’s fights happening all over. I don’t want to get caught in the cross fire.”

Now that she could see him, he looked like hell. Ragged and exhausted. He had his leg done in a heavy makeshift brace, and his face was drawn with pain.

“Lean on me,” she said.

“What happened to your hand?”

“Nothing. It’s fine.” She led Toomie outside the compound. “Hang on.”

“What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

She ignored him and ran back into the compound. She grabbed the keys to the hyenas’ pens. She went and unlocked them. The hyenas perked up at the rattling of the chains as she loosened them. And then she ran.

The hyenas were fast.

Santa Muerte fucking hell
they were fast.

She heard them hit the fence. The links rattled and came loose in ringing cascade.

Toomie had his gun up. “Watch out!”

Maria threw herself through the main gates, and Toomie slammed them closed behind her. The gates latched. The hyenas slammed into the bars. The iron shivered. Maria leaped back with a cry, shaking.

“You’re
loco
, girl.”

“Loca. Estoy loca,”
Maria corrected absently. “If the Vet comes back, maybe he gets a surprise.” She wrapped her arm around Toomie’s waist. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

In every direction, fires blazed. It had even gotten into the hills—she could see the lines of flames racing upward, leaving saguaros burning like brands in the darkness, hundreds of Christs all crucified and flaming, collapsing and becoming part of the larger blaze.

Toomie leaned heavily against her, his breathing labored as they made each limping step.

Overhead, chopper rotors beat the air. The heavy thud-thwap of intention, moving toward the fires and the crackle of automatic weapons.

“It’s like the whole world’s burning up,” Maria murmured.

“Might could be,” Toomie agreed. “They shut down all the cell networks, so the Merry Perrys can’t get themselves any more organized.”

Hills and buildings. The sky itself on fire. Flaming Clearsacs and blood rags tumbling through the air, bright orange stars in a smoke-choked sky.

This is what Hell is like
.

This was the Hell that she’d been warned about when she used to go to church. This was where sinners went. Except it seemed to be
swallowing everyone up, not caring that people like her and Toomie were caught up in it, just as much as monsters like the Vet.

They kept on, stumbling through the burning night. Twice they came across roving gangs. Once it was Zoners, and Toomie spoke to them, soothing, and they passed on. Once it was Texans, carrying torches and lighting more houses on fire, and Maria convinced them that she and Toomie weren’t the ones who deserved payback.

“Between the two of us, we do okay,” Toomie observed as they crouched in a doorway.

The crack and shatter of rifle and pistol fire echoed over the rooftops. More and more places were going up.

Maria wiped sweat and soot from her face. “You think your houses are even there anymore?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

Toomie’s face was bathed with sweat, and his features were clenched in a rictus of suffering.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine, Little Queen. Just fine. We should get going.”

Maria held him back. “Why’d you come for me?” she asked. “You didn’t have to.”

Toomie laughed and winced. “Almost didn’t.”

“But you did.”

He looked down at the pistol in his hands. “Sometimes you realize that not risking something so you can live is worse than dying.”

“I want to live,” Maria said.

“We
all
want to live,” Toomie said.

“We got to get out of here.”

He laughed. “After this…” He shook his head. “You can bet the Calies and the Nevada guardies are going to fight even harder to hold the line.” He waved out at the burning city. “This here’s a lesson for anyone who’s looking.”

“Nobody’s gonna want Texans now, are they?”

Toomie hauled himself to his feet. “Can you blame them?” He held out his gun to her. “Here, you need to see this. Hold it. When it shoots, it’ll kick.”

“Why are you showing me this?”

He looked at her seriously. “Because if someone comes after us, and it comes down to running, I want you to
run
.”

“You’ll make it.”

But the longer they walked, and the more running battles they slid past, the more Maria doubted.

The heat of the night and fires was a smothering blanket, and without water, they were walking in a desert. When they finally reached a squatter camp near the Friendship pumps, all they found was ash and rubble. All the makeshift housing. All the Red Cross tents. All of it gone.

Bodies smoked. The smell of roasted meat clogged the air. Animals picked through the rubble, wild dogs and coyotes, tearing at corpses and snarling at one another.

Maria and Toomie picked their way over the rubble, trying to see if the pumps were running. Toomie clutched the pistol, pointing it at the packs of animals, and Maria wondered what they’d do if the animals actually came after them. There were too many to shoot them all.

Toomie studied the pumps from the edge of the plaza. “I don’t think they’re running. Electronics probably melted when all this went up.”

Maria stared at the dead pumps longingly, wishing she’d thought to bring water from the Vet’s compound.

The dog packs continued to root through the corpses.

“We got to get out of Phoenix.”

Toomie laughed sadly. “And go where?”

“North. Cali. Anywhere but here.”

“How you going to do that? Vet owns most all the people who know how to wetback it across the Colorado.” He shook his head. “I got nailed that way once already, remember? He’ll have people on the lookout for us.”

“Maybe the Vet’s dead.”

“You think?”

She didn’t. The Vet would never die. He was a demon. Him and his hyenas. They’d never die.

“Anyway,” Toomie said. “We’re broke, and the price will be up for Texans. People will be even more desperate to get out than before. Price will be sky-high. We got to bide our time, raise some cash, and
then make a move. Help me up. When we get back to my house, we’ll make a plan.”

“You really think your house is still there?” Maria asked.

Toomie laughed darkly. “Hell if I know.”

A new flight of helicopters beat the air above them, dark birds against the orange of fires and blowing dust in the sky.

Maria watched them pass, hell-bent on some objective that she couldn’t guess. Maybe they were firefighting choppers, trying to control the blazes. Or maybe they were National Guard, out to put her people in their place.

“I think I’m going to try to cross anyway,” she said, “without a guide.”

“You’ll die out there.”

Maria laughed sharply. “I’m dead here, too. It’s just slower, that’s all.”

An armored personnel carrier sped by. It seemed small and alone in the empty streets. Irrelevant in the face of the flames that were filling more and more of the horizon.

“So…what? You’re just going to hike across three hundred miles of desert and swim the Colorado? Even the pros can’t get people across all the time.”

“Like you said, the pros would hand me over to the Vet anyway. And if I stick around…” She shrugged. “The Vet’s probably gonna come out of this stronger. And once he catches wind that I’m still around, he’ll definitely come for me again.”

“You can hide with me, though. We know to be more careful now. We can make it work.”

Toomie sounded like her father, promising impossible things because he wanted to believe. And now, as Toomie promised safety and protection, Maria found herself wanting to believe in him, too. To believe that somehow she could count on the older, more experienced man to take care of her. To provide for her. To solve her problems for her. Just the way she’d pinned her hopes on Papa, and Sarah had pinned her hopes on Mike Ratan.

“We can go together,” she offered. “We can both go.”

Toomie tapped his leg. “I don’t think I’m up for much hiking or swimming rivers. Your hand doesn’t look too good, either.”

Maria clenched her throbbing hand into a fist, hiding it from his gaze. “We can find a way.”

“Now who’s telling pretty stories?”

She fell silent. He squeezed her shoulder. “At least wait a day or two before you go.”

“Why? So you can talk me out of it?”

“No.” He dragged himself upright, grunting. “I need to show you how to shoot this gun.”