The Water Knife (4 page)

Meteorologists all talked as if there could be records—and record-breakers—as if there were some pattern they could discern. Weather anchors used the word
drought
, but
drought
implied that
drought
could end; it was a passing event, not the status quo.

But maybe they were destined for a single continuous storm—a permanent blight of dust and wildfire smoke and drought, and the only records broken would be for days where anyone could even see the sun—

A news alert popped up, glowing on Lucy’s screen. Her scanner came alive as well, police bands crackling. Something about it sounded wrong. It was up on her social feeds, too.

Cops all over @Hilton6. Bet it’s bodies. #PhoenixDowntheTubes

More backup was being called in.

Not just some hooker or PV factory worker who had gotten raped and dumped in a dry swimming pool. Someone important. Someone even Phoenix PD couldn’t ignore.

A person of interest.

With a sigh Lucy gave one last envious look at Sunny, still burrowed under the bed, and shut down her computer. She might not be able to make it to Carver City, but this was too local to ignore, even with the storm.

In the dust room Lucy strapped on an REI filter mask and grit goggles—Desert Adventure Pro II—a care package gift from her sister Anna the year before. She took a final breath of clean air, then plowed out into the storm with her camera wrapped securely in plastic.

Sand blasted her skin raw as she ran toward the memory of her truck’s location. She fumbled with its door handle, squinting in the darkness, and finally got it open. Slammed it closed behind her and sat hunched, feeling her heart pounding as wind shook the cab.

Grit hissed against glass and metal.

When she powered up the truck, dust motes swirled inside, a red veil before the glow of the instrument panel’s LEDs. She revved the engine, trying to remember the last time she’d changed the filters on its intakes, hoping it wouldn’t clog and die. She switched on storm lights and pulled out, bumping down the potholed street more by memory than sight.

It was nearly impossible to drive, even with the big storm lights blazing low from the truck. The street ahead disappeared into a wall of roiling dust. She passed other vehicles pulled over, waiting it out. People wiser than she.

Lucy drove slowly, inching along side streets, wondering why she bothered, knowing she couldn’t get good art in a storm like this, yet still compelled to press on, even as winds threatened to pitch her Ford off the road. She plowed down Phoenix’s six-lane boulevards, the empty optimistic cross streets of a car culture now so drifted with dust that vehicles moved in single file between dunes, glued to one another’s taillights as they navigated the hillocks of a city being swallowed by desert.

At last she spied the dim flicker of high-rise lights, the sentinel blaze of the Hilton 6, and the even stronger glares of the construction lighting of the rising Taiyang Arcology, the half-alive monster looming over all things Phoenix.

The Taiyang’s struts gleamed like ghostly bones in the haze of flying dust.

Lucy pulled the truck over to what she decided was a curb and parked, leaving the truck lights on, hazards flashing. She grabbed her head lamp out of the glove box, then leaned against the door, forcing it open against the buffeting wind.

As she made her way into the glare of her own headlights, she found flares on the road. She traced the line of flickering magnesium glows. Ahead, human forms rose out of the darkness. Men and women in uniform, flashlight beams waving wildly. Cruisers strobing red-and-blues.

She forged closer, her breathing loud in her ears, her mask wet on her face from the moisture of her lungs, pushing past cops vainly struggling to control a crime scene that was blowing away.

Blood rivers and dust intermingled on the boulevard, a mini-badlands of murder becoming drifted, muddy, and coagulated.

Lucy’s headlamp illuminated a pair of corpses.
Just more bodies
, she thought, but then her headlamp caught one of the faces, black with blood-dust scabs and nearly covered with a drift.

She gasped.

All around her, cops and techs milled, but they had their hands full fighting the storm, trying to see through their own city-issued masks and filters. Lucy pushed closer, trying to prove to herself that her nightmares weren’t real and alive and true. But even without his eyes in his skull, she knew him instantly.

“Oh, Jamie,” she whispered. “What are you doing here?”

A hand grabbed her shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” the cop shouted, his voice muffled by flying sand and filter mask.

Without waiting for an answer, he dragged her back.

Lucy fought for a moment, then let herself be hauled behind crime scene tape that was flapping and flying as the cops unwound it:

CAUTION - CUIDADO -
CAUTION - CUIDADO -
- CAUTION

A warning she’d tried to give to Jamie just a few weeks before, right inside the Hilton 6’s bar, where all the people were now pressing
their faces against the glass to get a better view of his death out here on the sandblasted street.

He’d been so completely sure of himself.

They’d been drinking in the bar of the Hilton 6: Lucy, grubby from a week without a shower; Jamie, so polished that he almost glowed in the low light. Trimmed nails. Clean blond hair, not stringy with grease like hers, not gritty with the desert that was drifting across the sidewalks just outside their floor-to-ceiling windows.

Jamie could afford all the showers he wanted. He liked to flaunt it.

The bartender was shaking something cold and green into a martini glass, the silver of the mixer clashing with skull rings of gold on his brown fingers…

The skulls had stood out to Lucy, because she’d looked up from them to meet the bartender’s dark brown eyes and known that if it weren’t for Jamie’s polished presence, the bartender would have run her out a long time ago. Even aid workers had enough grace to scrub up before they came down to the bar to drown out the memory of their day’s work. Lucy just looked like another Texas refugee.

Jamie had been talking. “I mean, John Wesley Powell saw it coming way back in 1850. So it’s not like no one had warning. If that fucker could sit on the banks of the Colorado River a hundred fifty years ago, and know there wouldn’t be enough water to cover everything, you’d think we’d have figured it out, too.”

“There weren’t as many people then.”

Jamie glanced over at her, blue eyes cold. “There are going to be a lot fewer now.”

Behind them the low murmured conversations of aid workers and UN intervention people mingled with the surreal strains of Finnish dirge music. USAID. Salvation Army. Red Crescent drought specialists. Doctors Without Borders. Red Cross. And then others: Chinese investment bankers from the Taiyang, down out of their arcology and slumming. Halliburton and Ibis execs, doing water prospecting, insisting that they could frack aquifers into gushers if Phoenix would just foot the bill. Private security guards off duty and on. Bureaucrat-level narcos. A few well-heeled Merry Perry refugees, speaking in low tones with the coyotes who would spirit them across the final boundaries and lead them north. That odd mix of broken souls, bleeding
hearts, and predators who occupied the shattered places of the world. Human spackle, filling the cracks of disaster.

Jamie seemed to read her mind. “They’re all vultures. Every one of them.”

Lucy sipped her beer. Pressed the glass to her dust-caked cheek, savoring the cool. “A few years ago you would have said the same about me.”

“No.” Jamie was still watching the vultures. “You were meant to be here. You’re one of us. Just like all the other fools who refuse to see where this thing is headed.” He toasted her with his vodka.

“Oh, I know where this is headed.”

“So why stay?”

“It’s more alive here.”

Jamie laughed at that, a bark of cynical humor that cracked the muffled dimness of the bar, startling patrons who had only been pretending relaxation. “People only really live when they’re about to die,” he said. “Before then it’s all a waste. You don’t appreciate how good it is until you’re really in the shit.”

They were quiet for a while, then he said, “We knew it was all going to go to hell, and we just stood by and watched it happen anyway. There ought to be a prize for that kind of stupidity.”

“Maybe we knew, but we didn’t know how to believe,” Lucy suggested.

“Belief.” He snorted. “I could kiss a thousand crosses. Fucking belief.” Again, bitterly: “Belief is for God. For love. For trust. I
believe
I can trust you. I
believe
you love me.” He quirked an eyebrow. “I believe God is looking down on us and laughing.”

He sipped his vodka, pinching the martini stem between his fingers, turning it idly on the bar, watching the olives go round and round. “This was never about believing. You think someone like Catherine Case up in Vegas
believes
things? This was about looking and seeing. Pure data. You don’t believe data—you test data.” He grimaced. “If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like
believe
or
disbelieve
around.”

He waved out at the dusty avenue beyond the windows: Texas bangbang girls gesturing desperately at cars cruising slowly past,
party slummers in from California and fivers down from the arcology, picking off the desperate. “This should have been about testing and confirmation, and we turned it into a question of faith. Fucking Merry Perrys praying for rain.” He snorted. “No wonder the Chinese are kicking our ass.”

He went quiet again, then said, “I’m tired of pretending we’ve got a way out. I’m tired of suing pissant water ticks for pumping out our aquifers, and I’m tired of protecting goddamn fools.”

“You’ve got a better idea?”

Jamie looked up at her, blue eyes twinkling. “Definitely.”

Lucy laughed. “Bullshit. You’re in this just as deep as the rest of us.”