H2O (8 page)

“Okay,” she
said. “Let’s hear it.”

She joined me in the forest and,
as we hiked toward the storage facility, I told her my story. The heroic
version. After fixing the pump, I’d continued south to try and solve a mystery.
A mystery that I’d been working on for years. I told her my theory about the
extra water and that I was determined to find out what was going on with it. I
didn’t tell her that it was really Crater who’d lured me south and I didn’t
tell her about the salamander in the dirt. The salamander wrapped in the memory
of my father. If I had told her the truth about my travels, she might’ve told
me the truth about hers.

But though we
both lied about what brought us to Yachats, we told each other the truth when
it came to our personal lives.

Lily Aron was from Klamath, a
coastal town in what once was the Redwood National Park. Like Yachats, Klamath
had been a tourist town. It was now a lumber town that supplied lumber to the
Territory.

When the Virus
struck, one of the tourists in Klamath had been a biology professor from the
University of California at Berkeley. After the Virus, he didn’t return to
Berkeley. There was nothing to return to. Everyone in Berkeley was dead. So the
professor made Klamath his home and helped organize the town, one of the lucky
towns spared by the Virus. Then, when things stabilized, he started to study
the Virus but didn’t get very far. He stopped when he heard the rumors that
others researching it were dying from it. He didn’t want to take the risk and
he had a good reason not to. His daughter.

She grew up in
Klamath, healthy and happy with no worries and no real understanding of what
had happened during the previous generation. Then she had a daughter of her
own. Lily, the lemon haired girl, and Lily grew up under different
circumstances than her mother. Lily’s grandfather took her under his wing and
taught her things he hadn’t been able to teach to his own daughter. He’d spent
so much time helping Klamath survive, that he’d neglected to pass on his
breadth of knowledge to her. And when he realized that knowledge was quickly
disappearing from the Territory, he vowed that he wouldn’t make that same
mistake with his granddaughter. He passed on what he knew to Lily and became
her tutor.

But Lily’s
mother wasn’t too keen on the tutoring. She believed that learning more than
necessary could only lead to trouble. That wasn’t a surprise because that was
the mindset of the Territory and she’d been brought up in that milieu. But she
also worried because Lily was proving to be overly curious. As a child, Lily
would hike into the redwood forest with the loggers and after the loggers
started their work, she’d sneak away and explore. Each section of the forest
had to be certified as Virus-free before loggers could work it, but Lily would
head out anyway and afterwards her mother would punish her. She’d ground her to
the house. But that made Lily want to explore even more, so it wasn’t long
before she wanted to explore the entire Territory. The Virus didn’t scare her.
She’d already wandered into the wilderness and emerged unscathed.

At twenty-two,
Lily requested a visa to travel up the coast. Unfortunately, by this time, her
mother had become a Councilwoman and she lobbied the rest of the Councilmen to
vote against it. It wasn’t that tough to convince them. Town Councils issued
visas only to those who had critical reasons to travel. As long as the Virus
and marauders were out there and as long as the stability of the Territory was
at stake, the law was clear: No one traveled without a compelling reason.

The Town
Council rejected Lily’s request for a visa, but her response was to travel up
the coast anyway and that was the first of a series of lawless excursions.
She’d had many over the years, and that alone should’ve tipped me off. There
had
to be more to her desire to explore the Territory than just curiosity. She
wasn’t the type who was just interested in sightseeing. And I should’ve been
clued in by the fact that her grandfather, her tutor, had been a biology
professor. Lily was trained to think and to seek out answers.

As we got closer to the storage
facility, I told her my plan. I wanted to continue putting the pieces of my
water puzzle together, but I couldn’t do that with the Fibs hunting me down. I
told her I had to get back to Clearview and, on an impulse, I also offered her
a ride north.

To my
surprise, she accepted.

So that meant
I had to explain that getting the van wasn’t going to be so easy and after I
filled her in on that, she surprised me again. She said she’d help me get the
van out of the storage facility. Well, now came the last of bit of information
she needed to know before committing. I told her Victor Crow was in town and I
thought I’d see some fear in her radiant green eyes, but instead I saw
curiosity. She said that in all her travels, she’d never run into him. I asked
her if she feared getting caught by the Fibs and she said that she’d been
detained by them a few times, but always released. She suspected that her
mother, who’d been a Councilwoman for over a decade, played a key role in that.
A reluctant role. Her mother may have hated her travels, but she still didn’t
want to see her only daughter in jail.

I could’ve
pressed Lily more about why she wanted to risk helping a fugitive, but I was
far too happy to have her along as a traveling companion. I’d already fallen
for her easy intelligence and fearlessness, so I accepted her explanation that
riding with me was better than her usual way of traveling (which was to stow
away in the rigging which some truckers added to the underside of their
trucks.)

We made it to that same spot I’d
found earlier, the one with the good view of the facility. We counted five Fibs
on duty, then I pointed out the Corolaqua van. It was still parked where I’d
left it, near the small building. The good news was that no Fibs were watching
it. They were focused on various clusters of storage tanks. And that seemed to
bolster my theory. The Fibs were in Yachats because of a possible marauder
attack.

Lily and I
studied the facility, looking at it as if it were a maze. We needed to get out
of that maze. The starting point was my van and the end point was the front
exit, the only exit.
And
our route had to avoid the five Fibs and the
flagmen.

We came up
with the best route we could, but there was one Fib we couldn’t avoid. He was
stationed at an intersection near the exit and we had to pass through that
intersection. So Lily volunteered to distract him. The plan was for me to drive
the van out while she raced into the facility, in a panic, and told him that
she’d just seen a couple of marauders. He’d either leave his post to check her
story out, or he’d leave his post to detain her. Either way, the intersection
would be temporarily clear. And if he detained her, she was sure she’d be freed
like she’d always been.

We set up a
rendezvous spot, then hiked down and parted ways.

I stepped out of the woods onto
the facility grounds, right behind the small building. I made my way along its
back wall, using it as cover, and as soon as I cleared the building, I hurried
toward my van. My timing had to match Lily’s, so I couldn’t wait for the coast
to be clear and, sure enough, a trucker stepped out of the building.

I slowed down,
so I wouldn’t look suspicious and he glanced at me. I kept my expression
neutral, climbed into the van, started it up, and pulled out. I checked my
rearview mirror and saw that the trucker was now watching my van. There was
nothing I could do about that.

I snaked
through the facility along the route we’d mapped out and it was all going
smoothly until I found myself stuck behind a truck. A flagman was directing the
truck, helping it maneuver up to a storage tank. I waited, knowing that I
couldn’t take another route and hoping my luck hadn’t turned. We’d known that
there was the possibility of a flagman being drawn from his post to help a
trucker maneuver. We’d seen that from above, but it didn’t happen a lot. Well,
it was happening now, and then it got worse.

The flagman
spotted me and started walking toward me. I saw a slim opening in front of me,
so I weighed whether to floor it or not, but quickly decided against it. This
wasn’t a Fib. It was a flagman. So I rolled down my window.

“Fibs are
looking for you, bud,” he said. “Why don’t you pull over?”

“What do they
want with me?” I asked.

He smirked.
“Like they’re gonna tell me.”

That comment
told me everything I needed to know. Like everyone in the Territory, he wasn’t
fond of the Fibs, so I said, “They probably were looking for an excuse to
search my van and take my Curado.”

The flagman
smiled and that closed the deal.

“Tell you
what,” I said. “You take it. Better you than them.” And without waiting for an
answer, I leaned over, quickly pawed through my food supplies, pulled out the
bottle of Curado and handed it to him.

He checked it
out, grinning and appreciating his good luck. “I’ve never tried it,” he said.

Of course not,
I thought. It’d probably cost him two years pay. “Enjoy,” I said, and pulled
away, right through that slim opening.

I checked the
rearview mirror to see what he’d do next. He was walking back toward the front
of the truck, taking his time and keeping the bottle low to his side, hidden. I
was sure he was trying to figure out where to stash his prize. Somewhere out of
sight of any Fib. He’d never dreamt he’d come across a bottle of the fabled
liquor and he wasn’t going to lose it now.

I swung around two more storage
tanks and found myself behind a slow-moving truck. It was slow because it was a
triple tank truck. I pulled to its left, checked for approaching trucks, and
didn’t see any. So I started to pass it and as I did, I noticed rigging
underneath the tanks. The rigging was crammed with sacks. (Lily had told me the
truckers added this rigging to haul extra goods that they’d sell on the side.)
The whole set-up looked rough and uncomfortable. No wonder she didn’t like
traveling that way.

I passed the
tank truck and I knew that the next left would be the moment of truth. It led
to the intersection with the Fib. Hopefully, Lily had cleared him out. In terms
of the timing, I was on schedule, so I felt fairly confident that my bad luck
was behind me. Especially because I’d managed to talk my way out of getting
pulled over.

I took the
left and looked down the lane. No Fib. Great. I couldn’t help speeding up a
little to make sure I’d get through the intersection before he returned. I made
it through and didn’t see any sign of the Fib. Lily had done her job. I
continued toward the exit, glancing up and down the remaining lanes, which were
clear of Fibs. Still, I began to feel a little uneasy, like something was
wrong. But I shrugged it off and thought about meeting Lily at the rendezvous
spot, an empty campground, tucked in the hills, about a mile away.

I turned and
started down the lane that would take me to the main road and I spotted Lily.
This wasn’t good. About a hundred yards in front of me, two Fibs had her backed
up against the side of a double tank truck that was loading up on water. Lily’s
backpack was on the ground and it looked like the Fibs were interrogating her.
They saw my van and one of them moved to the middle of the lane, drew his gun,
and motioned for me to stop. But I couldn’t just stop, and give myself up. I
had to help Lily. It was my fault that the Fibs had captured her and I was
almost a hundred percent sure that, this time, they weren’t going to let her
go.

Lily was up
against the truck’s first tank, and the second tank was hooked up to a ten
million gallon storage tank. A pipe, made of industrial plastic, probably
Teflon fluorocarbon (like some of the pipes at Corolaqua), connected the two.
Teflon fluorocarbon was a tough plastic able to withstand the powerful pressure
of water gushing through it.

That pressure
was going to be my weapon.

I sped up,
hoping that Lily would know what to do.

The Fib saw me
bearing down on him so instead of shooting at me, he raced out of the way to
save himself, and at the last second, I swerved my van toward the truck, aiming
for the second tank. I smashed into it and the air bag exploded from my
steering wheel so I didn’t actually get to see the pipe break lose but I heard
the deluge and I knew that this collision had sent hundreds of gallons of water
spewing.

I scrambled
out of the van and ran toward the back of the storage tank. Water was flooding
the entire area, and I spotted Lily running through the spray. We both sprinted
past the storage tank, leaving the deluge behind.

“We have to
get to the woods,” I said, running across a lane.

“They’re
expecting that,” she said.

She was right.
We ran between two storage tanks and I glanced back. A Fib was crossing the
lane, bearing down on us.

“I’ve got a
better idea,” she said.

“I’m all
ears.”

“We need to
find a truck heading out. With rigging.”

I remembered
the triple tank truck I’d passed minutes ago. It was probably still on its way
out. “I know just the truck.”

We wove
between the massive storage tanks, heading in that direction, until we spotted
it.

“When it
passes, we run for the rigging,” Lily said.

The truck
rolled closer.

“What if the
driver sees us?” I asked.

“They have a
blind spot. Toward the front of the first tank,” she said. “Run straight to the
front of the tank. Don’t run alongside it, and he won’t see us.”

We sprinted to
the blind spot, ducked under the tank, and crawled into the rigging beneath. We
were lying next to burlap sacks packed with onions. The sacks hid us from view
on the far side, but we were exposed on the near side, so we pulled some of the
sacks around.