The Water Knife (41 page)

Maybe in a thousand years everyone would be living underground or in arcologies, with only their greenhouses touching the surface, all their moisture carefully collected and held. Maybe in a thousand years humanity would become a burrowing species, safely tucked underground for survival—

“There’s our man.” Angel pointed.

Across the street an old guy was limping toward the mouth of the under-construction section of the Taiyang, pushing a
pupusa
cart, hunched against the flying dust.

“How the hell is he going to sell
pupusas
in this?”

But Angel was already pulling a shirt over his face and climbing out of the truck, letting in a blast of gritty air.

Lucy grabbed her own mask and climbed out with him, hurriedly strapping it on as Angel hobbled across the street. Lucy caught up and slid an arm under him. She thought he’d fight for a moment, but then he was leaning against her.

“Thanks,” he gasped through the shirt. He started coughing.

“Use my mask,” she shouted.

Before he could argue, she stripped it off her own face and settled it on his. Pulled the straps tight.

Quite a pair
, she thought.
Me with the goggles, him with the mask
.

They made their way over to where the vendors were clustered, all of them wearing filters and goggles of their own, looking at her and Angel bug-eyed through lenses. Strange alien creatures all watching them, hoping for a sale.

Lucy helped Angel limp to where the
pupusa
man was setting up his cart, pulling out flapping plastic and struts that looked as if they were designed to cocoon his cooking space.

He turned at their approach. Cocked his head as Angel tried to shout through his mask. The man shook his head, uncomprehending, and lifted his own mask, squinting at them.

“What did you say?”

“We’re looking for a girl!” Lucy shouted. “We heard she was staying with you!”

The man looked suspicious. “Who’d you hear that from?”

“I helped her out,” Angel said.

When the man didn’t seem to understand, he lifted his mask and shouted into the man’s ear. “I helped her out! Couple weeks back! She told me about you. She said you’d keep her safe.”

“She said that, huh?” The man seemed sad. He turned away. “Help me get this set up! Then I can talk.”

They all struggled in the winds with the tent poles, getting them inserted, and then strapped the Gore-Tex liner to the hoops. Once it was set up, there was a small space where they could all shove their heads underneath and where the man could stand over his griddle. They all pushed up masks and goggles.

“Is that girl here? I need to talk to her,” Angel said.

“Why?”

“She’s got something valuable,” Lucy said. “Something extremely valuable.”

The man laughed. “I doubt that.”

“There’d be a reward,” Angel said. “Big one.”

The man gave Angel a cynical look. “Oh yeah? What’re you offering?”

“I can get you both across the Colorado River and put you in a Cypress development in Las Vegas.”

The man laughed right in his face. When Angel didn’t laugh with him, he stopped. Then looked surprised. He turned to Lucy.

“He serious?”

Lucy grimaced. “Yeah, I think he could do that. If you can help, you can probably get more than that, too. A lot more. Don’t take his first offer.”

“So can I talk to her?” Angel asked.

“Sorry.” The man looked sad. “She’s not here anymore. She left days ago.”

Angel’s face fell.

“Gone where?” Lucy asked.

“She was hitching to the border,” the man said. “She was going to cross the river.”

Angel leaned over the cart, his expression feverish. “Where? Do you know where she’s crossing?”

“We looked at the maps. We thought her best chance was outside Carver City.”

Lucy couldn’t help but laugh, even as Angel cursed beside her.

“Y
ou’re sure she had the book with her?” Angel asked as he shifted position in the cramped truck cab.

Between the
pupusa
guy named Toomie and Lucy driving, there wasn’t much room to get comfortable, and after three hours of steady driving Angel’s stitches pinched and ached.

He wondered if he would have hurt as much if the day were clear and they’d been driving fast. Instead they were inching through blowing dust, with everyone staring out at billowing muddy brown air that cut visibility to fifty feet.

Lucy shifted into a low gear as they started winding up an incline.

Refugees emerged as shambling ghosts in the brown haze, illuminated by the truck’s storm lights. Bizarre hunched forms stumbling away from the destruction of Carver City and toward the dubious refuge of Phoenix, a steady stream of destitution that slowed their progress to a crawl.

When they’d gotten off the interstate and onto this ancient bit of Route 66, it had seemed like a good idea, avoiding the main highways, out from under Arizona State Patrol’s surveillance. The last thing Angel needed was to be pulled over and arrested when his fake IDs pinged wrong.

But the route was clogged with traffic, and now they forged through it in a slow molasses rumble.

It reminded Angel of the speed bumps his father had driven over, so long ago when they’d run from Mexico. The kind of thing that you never thought about and that never bothered you until you were sure that this one last speed bump was going to be the one that slowed you down too much and let the assassins who were hunting you catch up and kill your ass.

“You’re sure Maria had the book?” Angel asked again.

“You asked that twenty times already,” Lucy said.

“When she left Phoenix, she had it,” Toomie said patiently. “Maybe she dumped it or sold it by now. It would be dead weight for her, trying to swim the river.”

Angel could imagine her on the road, selling it to some roadside pawn man. One of the hundreds who preyed on refugees on the move, offering cut-rate cash or even bottles of water and food in return for valuables.

Angel forced himself to sit back and pretend relaxation. It was out of his hands. Lucy was driving. Maria was out there somewhere. He’d played every card he had. Now it just came down to seeing what La Santa Muerte had in store for him.

Lucy downshifted again, easing through the masses of refugees filling the road. They were like cattle in one of those old-fashioned cattle drives, just rambling all over the road, willy-nilly.

People peered in through their windows, dust mask bug-eyed faces, distorted by filters and lenses. Alien creatures staring in at them.

“You’re going the wrong way!” someone shouted as they passed.

“Tell me about it,” Lucy muttered.

She steered around a broken-down Tesla, half off the road and sunk into soft dirt. “I’ve never seen the road like this.”

“When we looked at the maps,” Toomie said, “I didn’t know it was like this out here.”

“It’s Carver City,” Angel said, stifling his own feelings of frustration. “It’s about time for them to dry up.”

“About time?” Toomie asked.

“They had their water cut a little while back.”

“You mean Las Vegas cut their water,” Lucy amended. “You cut their water.”

“That was weeks ago,” Toomie said.

“Yeah.” Angel inclined his head. “But it takes time for people to get a grip on how screwed they are. Relief agencies come in, so they hang on a little longer on buckets and Red Cross pumps and dipping Clearsacs into the river on their own.

“But sewage treatment isn’t working anymore, since they got no
water going through the system. So then disease starts to be a problem. There aren’t enough Clearsacs and Jonnytrucks to go around.

“So then National Guard shows up. People are trying to pump water out of the river themselves, start running black-market rings, but between disease and the guardies all over them, they start to figure out that shitting in buckets isn’t going to take them very far.

“So then the businesses go away. And then the jobs dry up.

“Once the money goes away, people start to get it finally. Renters always leave first. They got nothing tied to a place that doesn’t have water coming out of the taps, so they get out quick. But the homeowners hang on, at least a while longer. But even they break eventually. First just a few, then more—and then it’s this.” He gestured out at the river of refugees filling the highway. “A whole city getting the fuck out.”

“How the hell are we going to find one girl in all this?” Lucy asked.

“If she made it through, I know where she was going to try to cross,” Toomie said.

“That’s a big if,” Lucy said as she braked again and pulled aside to let a clog of cars piled high with belonging push past.

Ahead, a National Guard Humvee and soldiers were keeping an eye on the refugees, making sure that the exodus stayed orderly. Lucy eased forward again, forging through the people, making them give way. Dust blew around them in great billowing clouds.

Angel drummed his fingers on his knees, knowing there was nothing he could do to speed their progress against the flood of humanity coming at them on the road. An Arizona National Guard truck ground past them, full of people, all hanging on to the edges.

“You got your gun handy?” Angel asked.

“It’s not going to come to that,” Lucy said.

Angel decided he wasn’t going to argue over what people did and didn’t do when they lost everything. Lucy still wanted to think the best of people. That was fine. Idealists were nice company. Didn’t eat you alive.

“There’s no way Maria could have made it through all this,” Lucy said again.

“The girl’s a survivor,” Angel said. “She made it to Phoenix from Texas, and those are bad roads, too. Worse, some of them. New Mexicans
are picking people off all the way across that state. Hanging Merry Perrys on fence posts to make their point.”

“She wasn’t alone then,” Lucy said. “She still had her family.”

“She’ll make it,” Toomie said firmly. “Like your boyfriend said—she’s tough.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

Toomie shrugged.

“He’s not.”

Angel was pleased to hear uncertainty in Lucy’s voice, a mirror to his own puzzling over what exactly they were to each other.

They passed a medical station peopled with Red Cross workers and CamelBak reps handing out relief supplies. The National Guard kept watch, making sure people stood in lines and stayed orderly as they took hydration packs and Clearsacs and energy bars from the relief workers.

Just off to the side, someone had set up in their truck, offering rides to housing in Phoenix that was guaranteed close to the Red Cross pumps and first-in-line rights for part-time construction jobs on the Taiyang. Full package only $500 per person.

A desert-camouflage Humvee with a couple armed guards was right next to it with a big sign:

WE BUY JEWELRY. BEST PRICES.

“You think anyone takes them up on their offers?” Toomie asked.

“All the time,” Angel said.

“It’s ugly,” Toomie said. “People taking advantage of people.”

“It’s life,” Angel said.

Lucy gave him an annoyed glance. “Don’t sound so content about it.”

“It is what it is,” he said. “No point in wishing people were something different. That’s how people get killed.”

“Sometimes people stand up for better ideals,” Toomie said.

Angel shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s not high ideals that’s going to get you into a Cypress development.”

Toomie gave him a cold look and turned to talk to Lucy.

The two of them were getting along better than Angel would have
thought. He wondered if it was something about Phoenix people, Zoners getting along with each other, or if it was something about him that made them turn away.

“She’s never going to make it across the river,” Angel said. “If she’s already tried to cross, we’ve lost her.”

“She’s pretty savvy,” Toomie said. “We had a plan. She’s got flotation.”

“No.” Angel shook his head. “That’s where her trip stops. The only people who make it across are the ones who pay big fines to the militias. People who try to cross indy don’t make it. They never make it.”

“You’d know,” Lucy said.

Angel ignored the criticism.

He was trying to figure angles. Wondering if he should try to call in favors from that side of the river. Get some of the Nevada guardies and militia people to be on the lookout for Maria, trying to figure if he was so far out in the cold that that would just mean that more people here in Arizona would start hunting for him.

Lucy was busy explaining Angel’s role in setting up the Nevada Sovereign Militia.

“You did that, too?” Toomie asked, his expression dismayed. “You actually put those people on the border to keep everyone else out?”

“Nevada doesn’t survive if it gets flooded with Zoners and Texans.” Angel shrugged. “Anyway, California does worse.”

“It will be pretty ironic if this girl ends up skinned because of you,” Lucy said. “You’ll end up with a price on your head because of the people you hired.”

“You think I haven’t thought of that already?”

Toomie looked disgusted. “If I didn’t care so much for Maria, I’d say there would be real poetic justice in that.”

Two peas in a pod, his riding companions. Angel turned his attention to the refugees outside the window, trying to ignore the rasp of conscience scraping at the back of his mind.

He wouldn’t say it out loud, but every time they brought up the things he’d done on behalf of Catherine Case, it triggered a chill of superstitious anxiety that he was about to pay the price for all his sins, that there was someone looking down on him: maybe God, maybe La
Santa Muerte, maybe a big old Buddhist karmic flyswatter…something anyway, something coming down on him, pissed off, wanting to see him pay.

Maybe you only do so much cutting before the knife cuts you
.

It reminded him of the
sicario
. Living by the gun, dying by the gun. Call it irony. Call it poetic justice. This river of refugees keeping him from his goal felt somehow personal. As if he were being punished for his sins.

I made all these refugees
.

Live by the sword, die by the sword
.

“I think the dust is getting better,” Lucy said.

They kept winding up through low hills, forcing through the flow of refugees. At last they crested a hill and started down the other side, moving more steadily now. Sunshine began to pierce the brown haze. The dust was passing, a veil being lifted before them, replaced by sunshine and blue sky, almost blinding after the dimness of the dust storm.

Angel tried to get his bearings.

Lucy pointed. “There’s the CAP.”

A thin blue line, straight as a ruler, carrying water from the Colorado River across the burning desert.

It glinted in the sunlight. Phoenix’s lifeline. It would be pumped uphill and tunneled through mountains. More than three hundred miles of canal system, all taking water to a burned-out city in the middle of a blazing desert.

“It looks small,” Toomie said. “You wouldn’t think it would be enough water for a whole city.”

“Sometimes it isn’t,” Angel said.

“Not when you blow it up, anyway,” Lucy said.

“You did that, too?” Toomie asked. “God damn, you got a lot to answer for.”

“If I didn’t do it, she’d find someone else who would, and I’d be out of a job.”

“You are out of a job,” Lucy reminded him.

“Not for long.”

“I still don’t know why you trust her.”

“Case?” Angel laughed. “You got me shot up, too, but I trust you.”

“You’re right. You’re insane.”

Angel didn’t mind the dig. With the clearing of the storm, a new optimism gripped him. Just being out of the storm, able to see ahead—

They came around a corner, and the land fell away below, revealing the Colorado River, and beside it their destination.

Lucy hit the brakes as they all stared through the grimy windshield.

“Christ,” Lucy said. “There’s your dead city.”