Dead Water Zone (10 page)

“Oh, good,” said one blandly.

Paul could only stare. They looked so ordinary, these two Cityweb men. They could have been clerks, stamping documents, listlessly filling
in forms. They could have been suburban fathers—maybe they were. One had a slight belly pushing against his shirt; the other wore cheap polyester pants bagging over white sneakers. They looked so harmless. Paul felt sick.

“So this is Samuel’s brother.”

The voice came from the shadows at the far end of the room. It sounded like cracking joints, a dry grating of bones. Paul squinted into the darkness but made out nothing except a faint smudge of movement.

“There’s a certain likeness,” came the voice again. “If this one were to be stripped bare.” The pitch of the pervasive droning deepened, and a shape emerged into the light.

Mosquito. That was the first thought that pierced the white noise in his head. The bone-pale arms and legs were little more than insect filaments, with elbows and knees that looked bulbous even though they couldn’t have been any bigger than golf balls. It was impossible to tell what sex it was; the body was so wizened, clothed only in a few tatters of cloth around its hips. Its skeletal torso throbbed rhythmically, as if in sync with a heartbeat, and Paul could clearly make out the tracery of blood vessels and veins beneath the skin. But there also seemed to be veins over the skin—bundles of thin, transparent tubing twined
around the creature’s arms and legs, chest and neck, pricking into the flesh. A clear liquid oozed through the tubes, circulating and recirculating, and he knew there was not an ounce of blood in this thing’s body—only dead water. He looked up at its head and was momentarily transfixed by the milky-white eyes, which bounced back light so they seemed to focus on everything at once. Even though it was skull-like, fleshless, he could unmistakably see Decks in it.

Where was Sam? What had they done to him? Everything was collapsing around him now. It was like one of his brother’s huge war games—if you looked away or didn’t keep up well enough, everything changed on you, the whole game board, all the rules. Decks had said David would have died months ago. And here he was with two very relaxed Cityweb men and a room full of lab equipment that could only be Sam’s. Nothing made any sense. He was surprised to feel an aching disappointment through his panic: this was not what he had expected. He had wanted to find Sam here, alone, to talk.

David Sturm took three rapid steps toward Paul and then stood absolutely still.

“Yes, he’s pure,” he told the two Cityweb men, “wonderfully pure. But the other one has water in her.” He flicked a skeletal hand in
Monica’s direction. “You’re not a drinker, are you? No, the hum’s too faint. Your parents must have been Waterdrinkers, then, leaving their traces? That’s right, isn’t it?” Sturm paused, his head angled pensively. “I recognize you.”

Monica’s body was rigid. “My mother’s here, isn’t she?”

“So many came here,” said Sturm, almost absentmindedly.

“She came here to drink your water, eight months ago.”

“Then she’s dead,” said Sturm simply.

Monica stared ahead, without words, but Paul could feel her grief washing over him like the heat from the furnace.

“She would have been very eager to drink it,” Sturm went on. “Happy to take the chance. All of them were. It was an exciting time.”

“What is it?” she asked darkly. “The water. Tell me.”

And it was only then that Paul heard her voice crack with rage. “You tell me what it is, you stinking freak!”

“It’s a mistake.”

Sam’s voice crept invisibly out of the shadows, and Paul’s body filled with joy. He involuntarily took a few steps in the direction of his brother’s voice.

“Stay where you are!” Sked snapped behind him.

Sam’s voice hung tantalizingly in the air. “Can’t you come out where I can see you?” Paul asked.

“Not now,” said Sam, his voice coming from a different location.

“Are you okay?”

“The source is here, Paul. I found it.”

There was something disturbing about his voice, Paul thought, a cold detachment he’d never heard before.

“What do you mean, it’s a mistake?” asked Monica insistently.

“A terrible, wonderful mistake,” Sam replied from the darkness. “Twenty years ago, the City launched a pollution cleanup program, much like the one they’re working on now. They designed a microorganism, a primitive version of the garbage gobbler I was testing at the university. But this earlier one was a secret. They wanted to test it on-site. They sent divers down and dropped a canister right here, underneath Rat Castle.

“When the pollution didn’t break down around the harbor, the City abandoned the project. But something happened to the garbage gobblers. I got hold of the bioengineering templates at the university. I think they must have reacted with
some radioactive trace elements in the water. It caused a chain of mutations. It keeps regenerating itself down there, right below our feet. That’s what made the water turn. That’s what’s changed us.”

“Garbage, then,” said Monica. “Pollution in our veins!”

Paul looked at her, alarmed by the self-loathing in her voice.

“A gift,” rasped David Sturm angrily.

“We have uses for it,” said the Cityweb man with the white sneakers. “Your brother’s developing a refined strain of the water. We’re very interested in its applications.”

A row of machines emitted a series of sharp beeps, and Paul heard the furnace flaring.

“It won’t be much longer now,” said Sam. “We’ll have the first canister within twelve hours.”

“Sam, please let me see you,” Paul said, trying to stave off panic.

There was no answer.

“What the hell’s going on, Sam?” he shouted.

“Shackle both of them,” Sturm told the two Cityweb men. “Take them below to one of the isolation cells. Give them a taste of how my ancestors lived in Rat Castle.”

T
HICK METAL HOOPS
had been shackled to his ankles and wrists, chaining him to the wall. He couldn’t shift his body more than a foot in any direction. He thrashed against the manacles, but the ancient iron links held tight. Beside him, in the pitch-blackness, he could hear Monica going through the same pointless motions, cursing under her breath. His muscles ached with exhaustion.

“Why lock us up? Why didn’t they just kill us?”

“They don’t want us dead yet, or Sked would have done it in the passage. They’re planning something.”

“They’ve got Sam.”

“It sounds like they’re all working together.
They said he was refining it for them.”

“He can’t be helping them.” But there was no conviction in his words. He had no idea what was going on. It was like some horrible math problem, too many variables, too many possible answers.

“Decks, Armitage—they’ll come looking for us, won’t they?” he said.

“If they do, they might be joining us down here.”

The walls and floorboards were wet, beads of sticky water oozing from the joints. They were probably below the waterline, in a cell in the deep hold of a slowly sinking ship. He reached out, touching hands with her in the darkness.

“I’m sorry about your mom.”

“I wanted to know for sure. Now I do.”

“She didn’t know what she was doing.” He wanted to comfort her and wished he could see her face.

“She had a choice. Maybe not toward the end but closer to the beginning. She didn’t have to keep drinking it—if she’d cared more.”

“She cared,” he said, not knowing if that was the right thing to say. He wondered if even now, in the darkness, she was trying to control her expression. “I’m sure she cared a lot.”

“He’s hardly human, is he, David Sturm? All because of some junk in the water. When I looked
at him, I couldn’t believe we had the same thing inside us.”

“It’s not the same,” Paul told her gently. “It’s not the same at all. And you don’t drink it. You never have.”

“But I’ve wanted to!” she said angrily, pulling away her hand. “I lied when I said I didn’t. So many times I’ve almost done it, guzzled it into me! Just to see what it was Mom felt. Maybe you’re right, Paul; maybe she couldn’t help it. But it was in her; it’s in me! I’m just like her!”

“No! You’re not responsible for what your mother did!”

“It’s inevitable. Before long, I’ll start drinking the water, too!”

“You won’t! It doesn’t work like that.” He had no idea if he was right, but what else could he say? He had to convince her—himself, too.

“I don’t know if I loved her,” she said, “or just wanted to love her. But I don’t want to be like her, Paul. I don’t.”

He pushed himself across the planking as far as his chains would allow. “Come close.”

Their mouths barely met. He could feel her tears on his face. He shut his eyes, wanting to lose himself in her warmth, drink her taste into him. Her tongue brushed lightly against his, and his whole body glowed. He could feel one of her
hands knotted through his hair, and he wanted her to pull at it, pull as hard as she could, hurt him if need be, to bring them as close together as possible. And he had it again—the whole world collapsed into the feel of her mouth against his, the smell of her hair.

When a muscle cramped in his neck, he winced and laughed at the same time. He kneaded his neck clumsily with a manacled hand. “Wow, that really hurt.”

“You thought I was a freak when you first came,” she said reflectively.

“No,” he said, surprised and guilty.

She chuckled quietly. “Come on, I could tell. I was ugly to you.”

“Never ugly—just different, I guess. I’d never seen a girl like you in Governor’s Hill.”

“I’ve been up there, you know.”

“You were?”

“Once, a few years back. I wanted to have a look. Everyone had these perfect lawns. You could see lines where they unrolled the grass.”

Paul smiled in the darkness of the cell. Governor’s Hill now seemed a very long time ago.

“I went to a mall,” she said. “The girls were pretty. They looked a little plastic, most of them, but I wished I was more like them. So I pickpocketed a couple, came back home. I was so angry at
Mom for drinking the water, for making me a freak.”

“You’re not,” said Paul. “You’re very beautiful.” He’d never said that before.

She touched his hand. “Thank you. But it’s not just the outside, Paul.” She sighed. “I could build the biggest gate in the world, run my life with perfect control, but Mom’d still be inside me, running through my veins. And I’ll never be free of her.”

Paul thought achingly of Sam. They didn’t look like brothers; their blood and bodies were completely different, but Paul felt more bound to him than if they’d been identical twins. When he looked in the mirror, sometimes he saw his brother gazing back.

“I worry,” said Monica, “that I might be like Sam.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to us—anyone who had Waterdrinker parents. I think we might have shortened lives, too.”

“No,” he told her fiercely. “No!”

Her fingers tightened around his in a grip that was almost painful.

The creak of a door woke him with a start. He could make out a thin silhouette slipping into the
cell and crouching against the opposite wall.

“You awake?”

“Sam?”

“I didn’t think you’d come, Paul. I really didn’t.”

“You kept running away—at Jailer’s Pier and that night at the stilt house. Why?”

“I didn’t want you to see me. You would have been shocked. That’s why I left the diskette for you at the boathouse.”

“You left it?” But his surprise quickly wore off. Of course. Sam was too exacting to leave something by accident. But Paul found it a little unnerving all the same, as if he’d fallen unknowingly into the steel grooves of some perfect strategy in one of Sam’s board games. Sam watching him, leaving clues for him to find, while Paul looked for him in desperation.

“Can I see you now?” he asked nervously.

A pale flashlight beam washed down the far wall. Paul squinted. He supposed he’d been expecting something far worse, something with tubes. But he was only concentrating on Sam’s face, afraid of what he might see if he looked lower. It was still recognizable, still Sam. The hollows of his cheeks were slightly deeper, the thin, black hair a little longer. His blue eyes seemed duller than Paul remembered, and he thought of
Sturm’s eyes, cataract white, without pupils or color. As he stared, his vision seemed to contract, and everything else around him disappeared. For a few moments he actually forgot about his chains.

“It’s good to see you,” he whispered.

Now he let his eyes slide down from his brother’s face. The skin that showed through his tattered T-shirt and jeans was skeleton-white, and Paul could see the angles and planes of bones and ribs, alarmingly close to the surface. A dream image glittered dully in his mind—Sam lifting his shirt,
Paul, watch.

“What’s happened, Sam?” Beside him, Monica shifted in her sleep; Paul glanced over, worried that their voices might wake her. He wanted to be alone with Sam.

“Don’t worry,” his brother said. “She needs deep sleep for a few hours. She’s been running off of the water for too long. She won’t wake up.”

“When did they catch you?” Paul asked.

“They didn’t. We caught them. They were using infrared scanning from their helicopter. They must have picked up the ship’s furnace. When they set down in Rat Castle, Sturm could feel them coming. We surprised them, took away their guns, shackled them. Sturm’s very powerful with the water now, very fast.”

“He was supposed to be dead.”

“Not dead—sleeping. He’d managed to give himself a total transfusion of the water, and that put him into a coma. The water was still contaminated. I gave him a partial transfusion of the filtered water I’d been using, and he came out of it.”

His brother’s voice was detached, clinical. He could have been talking to a stranger.

“Sturm had been trying to refine the water for years,” Sam went on. “Superheating—that was his method. At first I thought it was laughable, like alchemists, lead into gold. But after a few tests, I could see that he was onto something. I’ve found a way to refine it, Paul. It’s very time-consuming and doesn’t produce much. But it makes the water infinitely more powerful. I’m the only one who knows how to do it. Sturm needs me. And the Cityweb men need me, too.”

“For what?”

“They’re not stupid. After they found my working notes in the lab, they did their homework. They think it’s worth a lot of money.”

“And you’re helping them?”

“The water belongs to Sturm. He’ll kill anyone who tries to steal it. He came to an agreement with them. I think it’s stupid—I don’t trust them—but the two Cityweb guys say they’ll buy the refined water from him and sell it in the City.”

“A new drug?”

“In small doses, it should give you a short burst of exhilaration, heightened awareness, speed, strength.” Sam chuckled darkly. “I’m sure it’s going to be very popular. But I’m refining it for myself, please understand that—for my own experiments.”

“I thought they’d kill you,” said Paul. He wanted to break through the icy crust of his brother’s voice: It’s me, remember me? Talk to me. “I was sure they would kill you.” He felt he might cry. “They were looking for you when I came.”

“Not me, Paul. You.”

“What do you mean?”

“They came to Rat Castle almost a week ago.”

“What about Sked—he was looking for you.”

Sam shook his head. “Sked was out of touch, didn’t know they’d found me.”

“But look, last night on the boat, he tried to kill us!”

“No, Cityweb had caught up with him by then. He was only supposed to bring you here.”

Paul was panicky now. “It’s because I read the diskette, isn’t it?”

“They want to use you, Paul. You’re uncontaminated. Pure.”

Sturm’s words sounded in his head.
He’s pure,
wonderfully pure.
Paul was suddenly aware of an icy chill seeping through his whole body.

“They want to test the refined water on you.”

“No.” His voice was barely audible.

“They’ll kill you if you won’t let them.”

“I won’t take any of that crap inside me!”

“It’s not dangerous; I can guarantee that. And the doses will be too small to be addictive. I’ll administer them myself.”

He stared in disbelief. “You want me to do this, don’t you?” Things started slipping into place: the phone call, the arranged meeting, the diskette left for him to find at the boathouse. He thought of Sam in the ship’s passageway, leading him toward Sturm and Cityweb.

“You knew all along, didn’t you, Sam?”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“You lured me here for them!”

“They said they’d cut me off from the water if I didn’t. I had no choice.”

No choice. Wasn’t that Armitage’s explanation, too?
I had no choice.
And Monica’s mother. She’d had no choice either—he’d said so himself, to soothe Monica.

“You betrayed me, Sam.”

“Let’s see what he looks like without his clothes on,’” Sam recited the words slowly, carefully. “His shirt…his jeans.’”

Paul could barely swallow. “How did you know?”

“Randy’s friends were talking about it in the hallways—too stupid to keep their mouths shut about how they were all going to meet, and wait for me after school. Randy knew where I’d be. And Randy knew where I’d be…,” his voice trailed off, as though he were actually savoring the memory—“because you knew where I’d be.”

“I told them not to touch you,” Paul said quickly, desperate now to explain. “Randy promised me. He was just supposed to scare you—”

“You were a fool to believe him.”

“I know.”

He had no words now. Any apology would be hollow. But there was a spark of hope, a glimpse of something shared, something that might bring them together.

“Why did you do that to me, Paul?”

“Because I hated you!” The words were hot and unexpected and euphoric. “I hated you because you were leaving home and you didn’t care that I was going to be left behind. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, Sam! We were supposed to stay together. We made plans, remember? You once told me I was nothing without you. And you were right. But I never said you were nothing without me. I wanted to show you!
You still needed me!”

He’d been straining against the chains, and now he slumped back, breathing hard. “It was wrong what I did.”

“You were the only person I trusted,” came Sam’s measured reply, and with a sick heart, Paul knew the moment was over. “And when you set me up, you convinced me of what I always knew deep down. That you can only rely on yourself. I needed you once, Paul,” said Sam, standing. “But not now, not anymore.”