H2O (5 page)

Just before evening, I finished.
Then I cleaned up the pumping station, checked again to see that everything
worked perfectly, and under the setting sun, I hauled everything back to the
van.

Then I just
sat in the van, on the shoulder of the road, ready to go, but not sure where
to. South or north? The engine was idling.

The easiest
thing to do was to pull out and go forward. I was facing north, toward
Clearview, so I’d be heading home. I looked to the west and saw the setting sun
was now turning red. A dark, deep red. Night would soon fall and that triggered
a new option. I considered camping for another night. Maybe Crater would come
back and answer some of my questions. Maybe those answers would help me make a
decision.

But I realized
that he’d already come back, last night, when I was sleeping. He’d come back
and drawn the salamander in the dirt. The salamander that Fire stole from
Water. The salamander that made my dad laugh.

I made a
U-turn and headed south.

Night fell and the only lights
around were the beams from my headlights raking the pockmarked road in front of
me. Again, I expected to see trucks, but I didn’t. Over the ocean, I saw
millions of stars, a panorama of gold specks which ended at the dark horizon.

As the reality
of heading into the unknown settled over me, I started to think about what lay
ahead. The first town I’d hit, meaning a town with people, would be Yachats. It
was three hundred miles south. If I drove half the night and slept the other
half, I’d arrive at dawn. But did Crater want me to go that far south? Or did
he expect me to find whatever it was he wanted me to find before that?

My visa was
only good for the Swan Peninsula so if I drove all the way to Yachats, the
police there would arrest me. And there was also the possibility that the Fibs
could pull me over anywhere along the line and that was definitely the
worst-case scenario. Fibs were far more aggressive than local police. That’s
why they were the law of the Territory.

I knew a little about Yachats
from my study of the Territory. Before the Virus, it’d been a tourist town. In
the summer, vacationers would walk its beaches, swim its slice of the cold
Pacific, and hike its coastal forests. In the winter, they’d stay in Yachats’
mountain lodges, and ski and snowboard.

But now
Yachats fended for itself. More so than most towns in the Territory. And
because it was self-sufficient, it wasn’t very active on the Line. That was why
I didn’t know much about the place. I did remember that it survived on fishing.
Salmon, trout, and smelt. It traded some of its catch to other towns, but
mostly traded within its own borders.

The miles passed and just when I
thought I’d never see a truck or any other vehicle on the road, I saw red
lights up ahead. Tail lights. I felt relief. I wasn’t alone.

As I
approached the taillights, I saw that they belonged to a tank truck, which
meant the truck was hauling either water or fuel. My guess was water. The
aqueduct system had ended about a hundred miles back, so water headed farther
south would have to be trucked. I rolled down my window to see if I could smell
gas or diesel. I didn’t smell either and concluded the truck was hauling water.
I passed it and watched its headlights fade in my rearview mirror as I left it
behind.

A few miles
later, I passed another truck. Again, a tank truck hauling water. Then I passed
another and I began to wonder why I wasn’t passing trucks hauling other goods.
I passed three more tank trucks and my thoughts jumped to Crater. Was this what
he’d wanted me to see?

I started
calculating. I wanted to figure out the frequency of trucks it’d take to haul
water to Yachats and to the towns south of it. Florence, Dunes City, Reedsport, Winchester Bay, Lakeside, North Bend, Charleston, Bandon, Langlois and Port
Orford. Water had to be trucked to these towns because they weren’t connected
to Corolaqua’s aqueducts. I knew how much water Corolaqua pumped out and I
remembered the rough estimates I’d come up with for each town’s population.

As I passed
another tank truck, and then another, I started running some numbers: The
amount of water each truck carried, the amount of water each town required, and
the number and frequency of trucks I’d seen so far. I also took into
consideration some of the other facts I remembered from my study of the
Territory. Like how much water the farmers outside of North Bend used and how
much water the tiny population of Langlois used for their apple orchards. I
marshaled all the facts and began to calculate the frequency of tank trucks
that I should
expect
to see on this road.

I passed two
more tank trucks and, twenty miles later, I passed three more.

I continued to
crunch the numbers, but halfway to Yachats, the long day spent repairing the
pump caught up to me, so I pulled over and fell asleep.

Three hours
later, I awoke to find one question dominating my thoughts. How far south did
Crater want me to go? Dawn would be rising in about an hour and I’d be in
Yachats in three. Had I already found what he wanted me to find? The trucks
hauling water? I didn’t know, and there was only one way to find out, so I
pulled back on the road and continued south.

I passed
twenty-four more tank trucks before hitting the outskirts of Yachats. I didn’t
pass any other kind of truck. I
did
pass single tank trucks headed in
the
other
direction and from their speed and the way they swayed on the
road, I could tell they were empty. They were headed north to reload.

Closing in on
Yachats, I began to see signs of life. Close to the road, I saw crumbling
motels with clotheslines and bicycles out front and vegetable gardens growing
on the adjacent land. Then I saw old farmhouses, shacks, and ramshackle barns
speckled across the countryside. Up in the rolling hills, I caught glimpses of
dilapidated homes.

But something
was odd. It didn’t hit me immediately, but took a good number of miles to make
an impact. I should’ve been spotting signs of a fishing town. Boats, boat
hitches, boat trailers, fishing equipment, bait farms, and fishing nets. But I
didn’t see any of those things. Instead, I saw truck parts strewed in fields,
yards, driveways, etc. Engine blocks, exhaust pipes, truck tires, and parts
that I didn’t recognize because I didn’t know much about trucks.

Yachats was
looking like a truck town. Could my study of the Territory have been that far
off? Benny had confirmed that Yachats was an autonomous fishing town. Even
though the town rarely used the Line, when it did, its communications verified
that it was a fishing town.

I made it into Yachats proper,
and its small downtown area. Here, I saw what I expected to see. Small shops
that sold food and clothes and Remnants, and a few storefront repair and trade
shops. But I also saw garages with repair bays and, inside those bays, I saw
truck cabs with their hoods open and mechanics at work.

I passed a few
people on the streets and they glanced at my van. I hoped to make it through
Yachats before they called the police. I passed a two-story building, maintained
better than the other buildings, and I had no doubt that this was the Town
Hall. I debated whether to pull over, head inside, and ask when Yachats had
become a truck town. At the same time, I knew that I had no real evidence to
prove that Yachats had ever been anything other than a truck town. I thought I
knew the Territory, but maybe I didn’t. I knew the ‘map’ of the Territory (and
it was a poor map at that), but not the Territory itself.

Then I looked
past the Town Hall, up into the hills, and I saw something that instantly
changed everything I knew about the Territory. I was stunned.
And
I was
sure that this was what Crater had wanted me to see.

I drove up into the hills, toward
a huge swath of cleared land. But it wasn’t the cleared land that had shocked
me. It was the massive storage tanks that covered that land. Five million
gallon tanks, ten million gallon tanks, and twenty-five million gallon tanks.
And I knew exactly what was in those tanks.

Water.

But why was it
being stored here? And why didn’t anyone know about it?

I didn’t want
to risk driving into the storage facility, which was teeming with trucks, so I
headed up into the hills above it. I’d check it out from up there. I followed
small winding roads up, passing a few old lodges and abandoned campgrounds. I
took a few wrong turns, before I found myself on a road that ran above the
storage area
and
parallel to it. It didn’t have a direct view of the
clearing so I decided to pull over and hike into the woods below the road.

It didn’t take
me long to find a good vantage point. I saw an orderly process unfolding below
me. Single tank trucks pulled up to storage tanks and unloaded their water,
while double and triple tank trucks pulled up and loaded up on water. Flagmen
waved the trucks up and down the lanes and kept the whole process moving.

I was
surprised to see double and triple tank trucks. On my way down, I hadn’t seen
any. So it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they must all be heading
south with their full loads. But why? The towns south of Yachats had plenty of
water from the three desalination plants in the southern part of the Territory.

In addition to
that anomaly, there was another. I was staring at way more water than Corolaqua
was pumping out. The number of storage tanks meant that water was being trucked
into Yachats from other desalination plants. And not just from the Willapa Bay
plant up north, but also from those plants down south and that made no sense at
all. Why would water be coming in from the south, then going back out
to
the south?

I wanted some
answers, but I couldn’t risk questioning a trucker. Truckers weren’t Fibs
themselves, but they might as well have been. They were licensed by the Fibs,
so they acted like another set of eyes and ears for them. If a trucker
suspected that I was in Yachats without a visa, he’d report it to the Fibs and
I’d be jailed as a deserter. That meant five years in the penitentiary in
Devinbridge.

I drove back into town. I had
decided that I’d question a shopkeeper. And if that shopkeeper asked me
questions of his own, I’d tell him that I’d driven down from Clearview to meet
with Yachats’ Councilmen about a water quality problem. My Corolaqua van would
be proof that my story was true.

I parked on
the main street, grabbed an empty bag from under my seat, and headed into a
vegetable shop. The shopkeeper was short, thick, and grave looking. He eyed me
suspiciously, which I’d expected since I was an outsider, but what I didn’t
expect was the hostility he radiated.

I perused the
bins of vegetables. Carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers. The shopkeeper was
going through a ledger, but kept glancing at me. I put some carrots in my bag
and turned to him, ready to launch into small talk, but he beat me to it.

“Corolaqua?”
he said. “What brings you to Yachats?” He’d already made note of my van and he
wasn’t waiting to get right to the point. I realized that I’d picked the wrong
shopkeeper, but it was too late to back out now.

“Came down to
check on the water quality,” I said.

“Kind of
dicey, driving through the wilderness,” he said. “Why didn’t you use the Line?”

“I have to
take samples.”

“We couldn’t
do that for you and truck ‘em up?”

This guy
wasn’t going to let anything go.

“You need the
right equipment,” I said, and brought the carrots to the counter, ready to get
out.

“You could’ve
sent the equipment down with a trucker.”

“Yeah, but you
need to know how to use it or else we can’t trust the samples.”

He didn’t
respond to that and his silence told me he wasn’t buying any of my story. He
put the carrots on the scale, and I accepted that he was going to report me to
the police as soon as I stepped out of his shop. Once that sunk in, I decided I
might as well ask him a question and get something out of my foolish visit.

I was too wary
to ask him directly about the water so I said, “When did Yachats go from a
fishing town to a truck town?”

“Who told you
we were a fishing town?”

“That’s what
I’d always heard,” he said.

“Guess you
always heard wrong.”

I handed him a
few coins and he gave me change then looked back down at his ledger. He didn’t
say another word.

I walked out
without having learned anything new and now I had no choice but to leave town.
My bet was the shopkeeper was already on the phone to the police. I got into my
van, ready to flee, but found that I couldn’t do it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe the
coward label from last night was still too vivid.

I wanted some
answers so I decided to go to where the answers were.

I headed up to
the storage facility.

I should’ve
headed back to Clearview.

I entered the facility and
followed the wide road that ran down the center. I remembered the layout from
my perch in the hills so I knew where I wanted to go. A parking area in the
southwest corner. There, I’d seen truckers park their trucks and head into a
nearby building. That building was probably a place for them to stretch their
legs. My plan was to try talk to a trucker there.

I turned onto
a smaller lane and passed trucks loading up on water and flagmen guiding trucks
through intersections. Some of the flagmen glanced at me, but none stopped me.
That should’ve been enough to make me suspicious, but I chalked it up to my
Corolaqua van. I told myself that a van from a water plant fit right in when I
should’ve told myself this was way too easy.