Earth Thirst (12 page)

Mere pushes some of her lank hair back from her face, staring at the long muzzle of the gun. I notice that the sleeve of her shirt is ripped in several places. There are similar tears in her pants, closer to her bare feet, and a thin gash along the bottom of her left foot is stained with blood, a few smeared drops like tears.

My tongue is thick in my mouth, and my hand shakes as I carefully bend her leg so that the bottom of her foot rests against the ground. Out of sight, out of mind. Her right foot is the injured one. That's where I need to be focusing my attention.

Her ankle is tender and swelling already. I touch the skin, probing gently, and she hisses at me when I prod her too much. “It's not broken,” I announce, wiggling her foot. “We can soak it in the water; that'll help bring the swelling down.” I turn toward the creek, meaning to look for a good place for her to perch for a few minutes, but her gasp brings me around.

“Your back,” she says.

“It's fine,” I lie. I have no idea what she sees, but I can guess. There is no pain, which means I've already blocked out the nerve endings, leaving them to die in isolation. The flesh is necrotic, certainly, and given the way my shirt
clings
to me, I'm sure the melted slurry of skin and fabric isn't pleasant to look at.

“No, it's not fine,” she argues. Her hands flutter as she talks. “I may be as high as a kite, but I know no one can run that fast—for that long. I saw you throw the microwave at that man like it was a… an empty milk carton. And—” Her hands start to flutter in the direction of my back.

“There's nothing to do about it now,” I tell her. “Try not to think about it.
I'm
trying not to.”

Her gaze returns to the pistol, and I know she's looking at the elongated barrel, and the bulbous shape attached to the back. It's a CO2 pistol—elegant in a way, but cumbersome in many others. The grip of the gun contains the CO2 cartridge, and there's a bulbous clump on the back of the gun where the hammer normally would be. I find the seal on the top and pop the blister open with my thumb. I shake out several of the pellets on the ground, unwilling to even touch them, and Mere leans over to pick one up. “What is it?” she asks, rolling the yellow-green pellet between her fingers.

I reseal the hopper, and point the pistol at a clump of weeds growing around a small rock. When I pull the trigger, compressed air forces one of the pellets out of the barrel with a hollow pop. The pellet hits the rock, breaks, and its contents spatter on the weeds, which all but burst into flame for as quickly as they shrivel and blacken.

“Defoliant,” I say.

“Weed killer?” She stares at the blackened weeds. “But it never works that fast.”

“You're thinking of herbicides which are a poison. Plants don't come back with herbicides. Defoliants are, like the name, meant to clear cover as quickly as possible. Agent Orange, for example.”

She focuses on the tiny pellet between her fingers, her face moving through an exaggerated series of expressions. “This is Agent Orange?”

I offer her a bitter laugh. “No, this is much, much stronger.”

She shudders and drops the pellet. “And it works on human flesh too.”

“I doubt it,” I say. Her head swivels around to look at me, and her pupils are still too large. I crawl over to the damp rock, and being careful to not touch any of the chemical stain, I pull it out of the ground. “Touch it,” I say when I return with the chemical-stained rock.

“What?” She tries to bat my arm away. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Unfortunately, I don't think I am,” I say. “Please. Touch it.”

“I'm not going to touch it.”

I grab her hand and force it against the rock. She shrieks and pulls away, freeing herself from my now-loose grip. She tries to slap me with her other hand and I take the blow on my shoulder as I throw the rock away. It bounces into the underbrush where its taint can only hurt other plants.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she yells.

“Do you feel anything?”

She slaps at me again as I repeat my question. The words finally penetrate her outrage and she blinks several times before she looks down at her hand. “No,” she says. With a shudder, she wipes her hand on a nearby patch of grass and, as we watch, the stalks brown and wither. “Oh my God,” she whispers. “What is it?”

“The perfect weapon,” I say.

It all makes sense now. The lure of the whaling fleet, the aerosol dispersion trap on the processing boat, Secutores and their obvious watchers, the pellet guns: this has all been a test environment set up by whoever is funding Kyodo Kujira.

They've finally figured out a way to kill us.

FOURTEEN

T
he trees are alight with the fire of dawn by the time we get back to my hotel, and Mere is asleep before I can cover her with a blanket. I lie down next to her—on my side since my back still hurts—and as soon as I close my eyes, most of the day vanishes. When I open them again, the light in the room has changed—the sun is on the other side of the sky now—and Mere isn't in the bed anymore.

I sit up slowly, feeling an unnatural stiffness in my back. Mere is sitting in the overstuffed wingback chair, dressed only in the white cotton robe that comes with the room. She's reading the morning paper. Some of her hair is damp and her face is clean and pink. I can smell the lavender scent of the hotel's complimentary soap on her skin.

“You don't breathe when you sleep,” she says.

My mouth is dry—it's an unpleasant sensation—and when I move, I feel a layer of skin on my back cracking and shifting like loose shards of shale. “I'm a shallow breather,” I say.

She lowers the paper and regards me. Her eyes are clear. Whatever they were doping her with at Eden Park doesn't linger long. “Just because I was drugged doesn't mean I wasn't paying attention. And that's not the only incident either. You picked me up like I weighed nothing and held me over the railing on the
Cetacean Liberty
. Do you remember that? And I saw Phoebe—”

“You saw Phoebe do what?”

“Gus—you remember Gus?—knows some Japanese. I asked him what ‘
kyuuketsuki
' means.”

I was more curious about what Phoebe had done, but Mere has a point she wants to make. “What does it mean?” I prompt.

She folds the paper and puts it on the table. Without a word, she gets up and walks to the heavy curtains that are keeping most of the light out. She yanks them open and the room floods with sunlight. I put up a hand to keep the worst of the glare out. My optics are sitting on the dresser next to the TV. I wish they were a little closer, but I don't move to get them. The light hurts my eyes, but I won't suffer any permanent damage. Not right away, at least.

“This is stupid,” Mere says with a snort. She walks back to the chair and sits down. “I mean, there you are. Sitting in full sunlight. You came out during the day on the boat too.” She makes a noise in her throat and flaps her hand at my face. “Open your mouth. Show me.”

“Show you what?” I ask, squinting at her.

“Let me see your teeth.”

I stand, my back complaining again, and close the curtains before I grant her request.

My teeth are much like hers, except—

“No dental work,” she notices.

“Why would there be?” I point out.

A laugh escapes her throat before she can stop it, and she puts a hand over her mouth as if she is embarrassed by the sound. “I'm sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “I don't—this isn't… I'm having a hard time…”

“You wanted to know about Arcadia, Mere,” I say as I wander over to the narrow desk and search for something to write on. “This is your chance.”

“Huh. True enough, I guess.” She rubs her hands across her arms as if she is catching a chill. “Okay, out with it, Mere,” she sighs, talking herself into something. “Ah, shit. This is too weird, but what other explanation is there? I mean, I'm sure there's a
rational
explanation, but what does rational even mean, really? And then there's Clarke's Law, right? The whole
magic is just science we don't understand
argument.”

Having found a piece of paper and a pen, I return to the bed and start making a list.

She interrupts her stream of consciousness thinking. “What are you doing?”

“I'm making a shopping list.”

“Why?”

“We need a few things.” I point at her robe. “Unless you want to go around wearing that.”

“No.” She is flustered for a moment, her hands touching the robe. “No, I don't. Silas, you're not answering my question.”

I raise my eyes to her face. “You haven't asked one yet.”

“What are you?”

“I was born a
Dardanoi,
in a place that was once called Troas, which later became Anatolia and is now part of Turkey. Later, I became an Arcadian.”

“What's an Arcadian?” she asks.

I offer her a smile. “What do you think?”

“I think ‘
kyuuketsuki'
means
‘vampire
,' and I also think you're not answering my question.”

“I'm not using the words you want me to use, but I am answering your questions.” I say. “You have to ask better questions.”

She makes a face and fidgets. I know what she wants to know, and I'm not making it easy for her. Why? Because what she thinks she knows isn't true, anyway.

“Look,” I say, “a vampire is a creature out of folklore. Stoker made his career out of sensationalizing what is a bit of propaganda that had its roots several hundred years earlier. The old stories were just a way to scare children and keep the locals malleable. It's all true inasmuch as it functions as an effective deterrent.”

“But that doesn't explain what I saw.”

I shrug. “Can you explain everything you see, Mere?”

“No,” she says, “but you're just side-stepping my question. You and I both know what I saw, and you know damn well that's not normal.” She levers a finger at me. “And don't give me that
But what is normal?
bullshit.”

“Look, you know this as well as I: every story has a kernel of truth to it, doesn't it? All our folklore is based around an effort to explain something, right? You start with a key truth—something you are willing to believe is absolutely swear-to-God true—and then layers and layers of embellishments and other nonsense get piled on top, until no one can really remember what the original kernel was. Or whether it was really true, in an objective sense.”

“If I come over there and punch you in the face, I think we can both agree there's some objective truth to the fact that it'll hurt.”

I smile. “Do you want me to say that I'm a vampire, Mere?” I spread my arms. “I'm a vampire. Do you feel better? Safer?”

“No,” she snaps, “because you're just saying it to placate me.”

“It could also be true.”

“But what if I don't believe in vampires?”

“That makes me a liar, then.” I remember something Talus said to me on the boat. “You wouldn't be the first to think so of me.” I write one more item down before I offer her the piece of paper.

“What is this?”

“A shopping list,” I tell her again.

When it becomes clear that I'm not going to get up and bring it to her, Mere gets out of the chair and takes the list from me. She stands—legs slightly apart, body square to me—as she reads the list. “A loofa?” She looks up and notices my expression. “What?”

I shake my head and look away. She's made her decision already, even if she hasn't mentally accepted it. Her body language has given her away. “A loofa is one of nature's best exfoliators,” I say.

“Why? Oh—” She wrinkles her nose. “Never mind. What am I going to do for clothes? And cash?”

When I stand up, we're close to one another, and we both pause for a second, gauging each other. “I have money,” I say, spoiling the moment. I cast about for my coat and spot it on the floor of the shallow closet. I was going to offer it to her, but the back is a gnarled mess of melted fibers and bits of my skin. “Stick with the robe,” I say. “Be eccentric until you can find some tourist crap.”

“Spoken like a man who has done this before,” she says.

A fragment of memory floats through my head. Yellow lights along a river. A two-spired cathedral with a rounded hump of flying buttresses. Gargoyle skyline. I'm wearing less than the robe Mere's wearing now. “Once or twice,” I admit.

“What if I don't come back?” she asks. “What is stopping me from running to the police?”

“What are you going to tell them?”

She nods. “It's Kyodo Kujira, isn't it? Those pellets. Whoever is behind this is gunning for Arcadia, aren't they?”

“We can talk about it when you get back.”

She laughs. “Of course. What better incentive could there be for me to not run screaming to the police?”

“I can't think of one,” I reply.

The truth is: I need her help, and it'll be easier if she's already decided to stay for her own reasons. I need someone I can trust, even if it is only inasmuch as sharing convergent short-term goals.

Arcadia has been dying slowly for centuries now. As the planet becomes more and more toxic, we inch ever closer to extinction. Whoever is manufacturing this chemical is trying to accelerate the process, and with Arcadia gone, there will be no stewards left.

That sounds like the sort of story Mere might be interested in.

* * *

I follow her, of course, even though I know she'll come back. I want to know if anyone notices her, eccentric style of clothing aside. Have we lost Secutores? Is there anyone else?

In the old days, we held to the Rule of Rome—kill everyone; leave nothing behind—but in the last few hundred years, as a general policy “salting the earth” has become less viable. It was easier to be invisible; to hide in the shadows and prey upon their fear of the dark. They welcomed any excuse to look away.

But we got lazy; we forgot our mission. We convinced ourselves that we didn't need to know, and like a field untended and unwatched, weeds grew. After several generations, they became strong and entrenched. Like clover with thousands of runners beneath the surface, binding everything together. Choking the life out of the native grasses.

It is easy to remain unseen when I follow Mere. I know her mannerisms: the way she tucks her hair behind her left ear when she stops at a street corner and looks both ways; how she makes tiny popping motions with her lips when she is reading and thinking; her quick, distance-devouring stride; she plays chicken with anyone walking in the opposite direction, unconsciously—oblivious, even—waiting for them to side-step first. Without her knowing, we fall into the same routine we had two years ago.