The Water Knife (40 page)

A pause. “Well, Angel, I suppose it was around the time that I realized so many people turn out to be unreliable. If there’s one thing I can count on, though, it’s that California will protect its own interests. And as long as our interests align, that makes them far more reliable than my own people.”

“I ain’t dead. How’s that for reliable?”

He could hear a waterfall in the background. She was probably at the SNWA offices, on her office balcony, looking down into the central cooling bore. Enjoying the hanging gardens. Surrounded by the lush world that she’d created.

“I always knew you were one of my best,” she said.

“I don’t have the water rights, either.”

“That’s harder to believe.”

“Did Braxton put you up to this?” Angel asked. “You know that
pendejo
hates me.”

A moment of hesitation.

He pressed. “Was it him?”

“Does it matter?”

“What if I can find you those water rights?” The Calies perked up at that, but Angel ignored them. “What if I bring them to you?”

“You mean because you have them and you were planning on selling them off the way everyone else who gets hold of them tries to sell them?”

“Because I’m still working for you! Just like I always have.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“You used to trust me.”

“I trust that everyone is out for themselves these days. That’s turning out to be a very reliable assumption.”

“Not me, though. That’s why you sent me down here in the first place. I don’t do that.”

Catherine Case laughed. “Okay. Sure, Angel. For old times’ sake. If you hand over those rights, I’m willing to forget the whole thing happened. I’ll take the bounty off your head, and you can come right back home to Cypress. We can call it a big misunderstanding.”

“I can work with that.”

Her voice hardened. “If they show up in someone else’s hands, I’ll know it was you, and I swear I’ll be right there hunting you along with California and Arizona for the rest of your life.”

“I get the picture.” He paused. “I don’t suppose you could turn my IDs on again. It would help me get the job done.”

“Would you trust me if I said I would?” Case asked. Angel could hear the smile in her voice.

“I’ve never stopped working for you,” he said.

“I like you, Angel, but I’m not going to be made a fool. Get me those rights, and we’ll talk about bringing you back from the dead.” She clicked off.

The senior guy chuckled. “Your boss sounds like my boss.”

“Yeah. She’s not real sentimental.”

“Too bad for you. Because if you don’t have the rights, and we don’t have the rights, you’re a walking dead man.”

“No.” Angel hauled himself to his feet. “I know where they are.”

“You
what
?” Lucy and the Calies stared at him, shocked.

“Everyone’s looking for paper,” Angel said. “I know where paper is.”

T
he problem with maps was that they never told you what was really on the ground, Maria thought.

When she and Toomie were planning it, it had seemed so simple.

They could zoom in and out on satellite views of the towns that ran along the edge of the Colorado River. Look at the dams. Look at all the waters and where they lay. Look at the reservoirs that were still kept full and those that had been drained and turned back into steep, nearly inaccessible canyons.

It was all there for them to look at and plan around, and she’d assembled her equipment carefully. She had the water wings she’d use, and the clothes she’d wear that night, made of midnight fabric that she’d use to disappear. She’d thought about how low she’d need to float in the calm waters of the reservoir as she crossed, barely above the waterline, cold to infrared scopes.

It could be done. She could do it.

With Toomie’s help, she’d caught a ride out near the border with some Chinese solar engineers who were regulars at his
pupusa
stand. They’d thought it was interesting to help a girl make her run at the border, a safe sort of adventure for them to take her along when they went out to inspect their photovoltaic arrays, and it had all worked so simply that she could almost see herself making it all the way across, without a hitch.

And then she’d arrived in Carver City and found chaos in the streets, and the far shores of the river glinting with sniper scopes and watching militias. It seemed like half of Nevada and California had turned out to make sure the desperate people of Carver City couldn’t make a run for it.

The Red Cross tents were full of people getting sick as the town’s
water systems failed. The city was awash with sewage, and there weren’t anywhere near enough Jonnytrucks to serve a hundred thousand people. And now the National Guard had swept in, looking as if they were going to push everyone out any second.

At night Maria crept down to the waters of the reservoir where Carver City perched.

The reservoir was low. She made her way down over weathered sandstones and clay soils, shattered magma.

She followed a draw deeper down and in the darkness came across rocks that had been inscribed with lovers’ notes and spray-painted markings.
Joey and Mei. Spring Break Forever. Kilroy was here
. Hearts with arrows through them. Funny faces.

Except the lake’s waterline was still far below her.

She realized that people had once boated to these locations and tied up here, marked their summers and vacations and loves…And later the waters had drained below this high point, leaving not just the bathtub ring of a water stain around the reservoir but also this secondary ring of memories and mementos where people had once swum to shore.

Maria crept deeper into the gully, scrambling. Stubbing her toes. Her shoes were no good. Her hand throbbed, and she was still clumsy with it, trying to use just her few remaining fingers.

She got down to the waterline and started to blow up the water wings. They were black as night. She bundled her hair under a kerchief of the same material. Toomie had said this was the stuff. Ninety-nine percent black. It would absorb all light. She would be nothing in the moonlight. She could lie on her back and slowly move across the waters. A turtle, barely surfaced.

She picked through her belongings, deciding what to bring and what to leave. The keepers she bundled inside triple layers of old plastic bags, hoping they wouldn’t soak through. Cash that Toomie had given her. A few changes of clothes. Clearsacs and energy bars. The old heavy paper book that Mike Ratan had given her and that she’d taken on impulse.

She weighed the book in her hand. It was heavy, and the swim was far.

Really, she should have tried to sell it. Ratan had said she could sell it. Money she could carry—a book she couldn’t.

She squatted on the banks of the water, looking across. Somewhere over there people would be waiting for her. People whose job it was to try to catch her.

She stared at the distant shore. They’d be wearing black, too, she thought. They’d try to blend in as well.

She squatted down to watch the shore.

I’ll look for an hour. If nothing moves in an hour, I’ll cross
.

“S
o you just handed over millions of dollars’ worth of water rights.”

“Billions probably. Imperial Valley agriculture is worth that much alone.”

“And you just let her walk right out with it,” Lucy goaded.

“I had Calies on me at the time. I wasn’t worried about some paper book.”

Lucy laughed. “No wonder your boss is trying to drop missiles on you. It does sound like a fake excuse.”

They were staked out just outside the Taiyang as a dust storm blew in and shook the rusted truck that Angel had insisted they trade Charlene for, after heisting the Calies’ SUV and leaving them marooned in the distant subdivision.

He was slumped against the door, eyes closed, cradling a sac of medical nutrients. He breathed shallowly as the growth stimulants slowly trickled into his veins.

“You would have let her walk out with the book, too,” he said. “It’s wallpaper. Every water manager, every bureaucrat—even you got that damn book. All of you with your nice hard-copy first editions, all of you pretending you know shit.” He opened his eyes blearily. “Acting like you all saw this shit coming.”

He closed his eyes again and slumped back against the door. “That guy Reisner, now. That man saw things. He looked. All these people now, though? The ones who put that book up like a trophy? They’re the ones who stood by and let it all happen. They call him one of their prophets now. But they weren’t listening back then. Back then no one gave a shit about what that man said.” He squeezed the sac dry and detached it from the needle in his arm. “We got any more of these sacs?”

“You’ve already pumped three.”

“I did?”

“Christ. You’re a mess. You need to rest.”

“I need to find those rights. Just keep your eyes out for the
pupusa
man. The girl said she had a friend who was a
pupusa
man.”

“You can’t just jack up on growth stimulants and think you’re going to heal.”

“I can’t let that girl go and think I’m going to live.”

“Don’t you find it kind of ironic that a Texas refugee holds the key to your survival?”

Angel gave her a dirty look. “Are you enjoying this?”

“Maybe a little.”

There had been times as a journalist when Lucy had felt that she was scrabbling around on the outside of a story, trying to ascertain truth through dust-caked windows, but all she’d been able to discern had been the shadow play.

She could make guesses as to what all the power players were doing, and why, but she had never known. And in many cases she came away without any sense of meaning at all.

Someone like Jamie died.

A politician sold his stock in the Taiyang.

Ray Torres told her to walk away from reporting about a certain body.

She often reported events but seldom saw through the dust-caked window to the underlying motivations. She’d always assumed that there was more to the story and that the power players were just too good at hiding it from her.

But now as they sat outside the Taiyang in a gathering dust storm, she was getting an entirely different sense of the world.

They have no idea what they’re doing. These are the people who are supposed to be pulling all the strings, and they’re making it up as they go along
.

“Wake me up if you see the
pupusa
guy.” Angel closed his eyes.

Pupusas
. The fate of states and towns and cities and farms hung on whether a
pupusa
man showed up for work in the middle of a dust storm.

It was as strange and bizarre as the story of the charred neighborhoods
south of Phoenix, all razed because of an assassination gone wrong.

Fires still guttered in the hills of South Mountain Park, old saguaros that should have been impervious to fire, burning merrily away. All because some bureaucrat up in Las Vegas had decided that one of her water knives had double-crossed her.

And then there was Angel. Half-mad with fever and the conviction that if he could just find the right gift for the Queen of the Colorado, he could return to her good graces.

It would have been a comedy, if so many people’s lives hadn’t hung in the balance.

“You know, it’s probably burned up by now, and all the papers with it.”

Angel opened his eyes. “I’m trying to be optimistic here.”

“What are you going to do with those papers when you get them?”

“Get them to my boss. Why?” His face was flushed and sweaty as he peered through the muddy air to where a bunch of vendors were setting up carts.

“You’re seriously going to give them to the lady who dropped a missile on your head?”

“Two missiles. That wasn’t personal.”

“You know, if you had those rights, you could give them to Phoenix.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

Lucy waved out at the shredded city, enveloped in increasing dust haze. “They could use the help.”

Angel laughed and closed his eyes again. “Phoenix is dead. Anyway, Catherine Case will hunt me to the ends of the earth if I don’t come up with those rights. No way I’m taking a bullet for Phoenix.”

“Even if it would stop all this suffering?”

“I ain’t Jesus Christ. I got no need to be a martyr. And definitely not for Phoenix. Anyway, everyone’s suffering. Everywhere. That’s just the way it is.”

“What about these people here, though?”

But he was already asleep, hunched around the last sac of nutrient formula. Asleep, he looked shockingly harmless. Just a tired man who had been through the same meat grinder as everyone else.

Lucy remembered how doubtful Charlene had been when they’d shown up in the Calies’ SUV looking to trade it out. Warning her that they weren’t doing her much of a favor, because Angel was sure there would be trackers in the vehicle, and as soon as the Calies made contact with their bosses, they’d be hunting for it.

That hadn’t bothered Charlene at all, but still, she’d had questions. “Are you sure about this?” she’d asked Lucy. “Is it worth it?”

She’d been covered with soot from a salvage operation, trying to put together more new housing after the burnout of the riots, and when she asked, she acted as if she were talking about the trade. But Lucy knew she was really talking about Angel, who had already crawled into Charlene’s truck, where he’d jammed the first needle of medical growth stimulant into a vein and was now slumped over in the seat, nearly unconscious, cradling the sac as it dripped into him.

Is it?

The biggest story of her career. Was it worth the risk?

But God, what a story. Just the tick-tock eyewitness account of how half of Phoenix had burned because of a failed assassination was gold. Let alone the rest of it.

And yet here was Charlene, still in her head, asking her if it was worth it. Another story. Another scoop. More hits. More click-thru. More revenue. And for what?

#PhoenixDowntheTubes?

“He’s dangerous,” Charlene had observed.

“He’s not all bad. Anyway, he can barely lift his arms right now.”

“That’s not what I mean. You and him…”

“I’m a big girl. Trust me, I can handle him.” Lucy had shown Charlene the pistol she’d taken from the Calies. “I’m armed and I’m dangerous.” Which had made Charlene grin wide, showing her missing front teeth.

“Now I feel better.”

The gun made Lucy feel better, too, sitting beside the sleeping water knife. The dust storm buffeted the truck, and as it thickened, it felt as if she were in a strange cocoon, wrapped away from the storm. The dust filters wheezed quietly, cleaning the air. After all the bags of medical nutrients, he looked almost human. Drawn but functional.

“Gotta love modern medicine,” he’d said as he’d squeezed the first
sac dry. “If I had this juice back when I was younger, I bet I wouldn’t even have scars.”

Another gust of wind shook the truck. Outside it looked as if Phoenix were about to become the next Hohokam civilization.

Above them on the street, a PHOENIX RISING billboard glowed, but the winds seemed to be short-circuiting the screen. It kept flickering—some kind of electrical short. It was irritating, because the flicker occurred without pattern. On for a moment. Then dying. Then back on again, blazing, before going into a dim-flicker flutter for a few seconds.

Behind the billboard the Taiyang Arcology rose, banks of glass offices and the bright lights of full-spectrum grow lamps blazing over its vertical farm sections. None of the lights in the Taiyang flickered. The people who lived and worked in there might not even know the storm was brewing. Cool and comfortable behind their air filters, with their A/C and water recycling, they might not even care that the world was falling apart outside their windows.

The Taiyang had survived the fires and riots, and even now it continued its construction expansion, despite the dust storm that enveloped it.

A girl stumbled past in the storm, delicate, leaning against the winds. Hispanic. Her face covered by salvaged cloth, squinting against the dust.

“Is that the girl you want?” Lucy nudged Angel.

He opened bleary eyes. “No. Only if she’s with a
pupusa
man.”

“If he shows up at all today.”

“He’ll show.” Angel waved out through the windshield to the Taiyang’s construction, where headlamp beams played wildly in the storm. “As long as those workers show up, he’ll show, too.”

All the workers would be wearing full-head dust masks today, breathing wet exhalations over and over, but Angel was right. They were all here, despite the storm.

“You’ll see,” he said. “He’ll come. The man’s got to eat.”

“We just got dug out of the last one, and now we’ve got another,” Lucy said. “You’d think at some point we’d catch a break.”

“I don’t think we get any more breaks. From here on out, it’s just one big dust storm.”

“Hohokam,” Lucy said at the same time as Angel said, “All used up.”

They exchanged wry glances.

“It makes you wonder what people will call us when archaeologists dig us up in another couple thousand years,” Lucy said. “Will they have some word for us? For this time period? Will we be Federalists, because the country was still working? Or is this the Decline of the Americans?”

“Maybe they’ll just say this was the Dry Time.”

“Maybe no one will dig us up at all. Maybe there won’t be anyone left to name us.”

“Don’t got much faith in carbon sequestration?” Angel asked.

“I think the world is big, and we broke it.” She shrugged. “Jamie used to go off on this all the time. How we saw what was coming and didn’t do anything about it.” She shook her head. “God, he had a lot of contempt for us.”

“If he was so smart, he should have seen what he was getting into. Maybe he’d still be alive.”

“There are different kinds of smart.”

“Alive smart. And dead smart.”

“Says the man who’s been dodging Hellfire missiles.”

“Still alive, though.”

“Jamie always complained that we didn’t do anything when it was obvious what we should do. Now”—she paused—“I’m not sure we really know anymore. It would be easier to prepare if we had some kind of a map that told us what was going to hit us next, except we waited so long, we’re off the map. It makes you wonder if anyone is going to actually survive.”

“People will survive,” Angel said. “Someone always survives.”

“I didn’t peg you for an optimist.”

“I’m not saying it’s going to be pretty. But someone…someone will adapt. They’ll make some kind of new culture that knows how to—”

“Be smart?”

“Or how to make a Clearsac for your entire body.”

“I think that’s called the Taiyang.”

“There you go,” Angel said. “People adapting and surviving.”

The Taiyang glowed in the muddy darkness of the storm, seductive. From this angle Lucy could make out the silhouettes of atriums and perhaps even greenery within. A lush place where everyone could go inside and hide. It might be too hard to live outside, but indoors life could still be good.

With A/C and industrial air filters and 90 percent water recycling, life could still be good, even in Hell.

Maybe that’s what the archaeologists will call us. The Outdoors Period. For when people still lived outdoors
.