In a Handful of Dust (28 page)

“Well, she’s good at it,” Lynn said, repositioning the stick and walking away from Ben.

“You ask questions about the garden, and our people. You want to know how we manage, but all she wants to do is get her gun and move on.”

“Yes, she does,” Lucy agreed. The stick leapt in her hands, viciously jabbing downward, but she felt no rush of pride. “Here.”

Ben planted a flag, eyes still on Lucy. “What if she wants to go, and you don’t?”

“What about it?”

“Would you stay?”

“I don’t . . .” Lucy looked off into the distance at the blue mountains not unlike the ones Lynn had nearly died getting across, all because Lucy had asked her to. She dropped her stick and glared down at Ben, unsure how he could look so smug when he had to look up to meet her eye. “Lynn and I go together or we stay together. End of story.”

“That’s a shame.”

“What do you care?”

Ben dropped his armload of flags to the ground. “I wouldn’t say I
care
. It’s obvious you like it here and your mom doesn’t. Did you mean what you said about finding us a clean source of water and moving on?”

“Yes,” Lucy said, taking the bottle of water Ben handed to her from his backpack.

“Because that’s what she wants, or what you want?”

The odd-tasting water slid down her throat, coating her tongue with the residue she could never quite wash away. But it was water, and two weeks ago she would’ve licked puddles off the hot road to save her life.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said, handing the water back to Ben.

His smile was honest, and it nearly made his awkward face handsome. Lucy smiled back, unable to help herself. “You almost looked like your dad there for a second.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Better than my mom.”

Lucy dried her palms on her jeans before taking the stick back up. “What’s she look like?”

“Bailey’s my mom.”

“Bailey? The nurse?”

Ben sighed and re-shouldered his backpack. “Oh, I know. How did such a little shrimp of a guy come out of Bailey and Lander? It’s a genetic joke that gets trotted out for a laugh all the time, so go ahead and have your giggle.”

“I wasn’t thinking that so much as . . . ugh,” Lucy said, turning red for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.

“Well, yeah, there’s that too,” Ben agreed, falling into step beside her with his armload of blue flags. “But my dad can’t exactly be picky, you know? He had a kid with Nora and that didn’t turn out so great—”

“Wait, Nora’s daughter was Lander’s?”

“She told you about that?”

“Yeah.” Lucy looked away, answering the tiny vibe the earth had thrown her. “Here.”

“There was nothing I could do,” Ben said stiffly as he planted the flag.

“So she was your sister then?”

“Half sister, yeah,” Ben answered as they veered away from the smattering of blue flags waving behind them. “Anyway, after Rachel got killed by the lion, Dad started showing me how to manage the garden right, measure the acid in the dirt for the different vegetables and make sure they each have the proper sun exposure. It’s not an easy thing, if you want to do it right.”

Ben was swept away in the surge of importance as he talked about his duties, and Lucy let him go on through the next two flags before asking a question. “So was your dad hoping he and Bailey would be able to . . .” She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence politely.

“Make a big, healthy baby?” Ben asked, his eyebrows raised in two mocking points. “Maybe. That or by then he’d realized Nora wasn’t going to be having any more kids and he realized it was Bailey or bust.” He giggled at his own joke, but Lucy didn’t join in.

“What do you mean? Surely there’s someone else willing to . . .”

All humor slid from Ben’s face as he looked at her. “You seriously didn’t know? Jeez, Lucy, open your eyes. How many women have you seen around here?”

A cold tremor passed over Lucy despite the heat, and her witching stick jumped even though there was no water beneath it. “I thought . . .” Her words gave out as her mind jumped back to Lynn’s first shooting session from on top of the hotel. People had littered the streets, staring up at them with their eyes shaded. But none of them had been women.

“Thought what?”

“I don’t know. I guess maybe that they were out . . . you know, just doing things.”

“Doing things?” Ben laughed outright. “You’re something. No, it’s been Bailey and Nora for a long time. Then here comes your mom into town with her long hair and her birthing hips—”

“You can’t be serious,” Lucy interrupted. “Lander wants to get Lynn
pregnant
?”

“Sure, why do you think he’s the one that’s sitting with her while she’s shooting? You really think he doesn’t have better things to do?”

Lucy looked to the city, shading her eyes against the glare and searching for the flash of the rifle among the thousands of panes of glass. “He wouldn’t force her, would he?”

“What, rape her? My dad? Nah.” Ben dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “He likes to get people to do what he wants, not make them.”

“No danger of that then,” she said. “Lynn’s not interested.”

Ben reached up and awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, I don’t like the idea either. I might be small, but I’m still my dad’s son. And right now, I’m the only one he’s got. I’m hoping he’ll realize you turned out small, and kinda stupid too, so he’ll give up the idea of making a baby with your mom.”

“Well, let’s hope so,” Lucy said through gritted teeth, and swept her stick across the sand. The rush of surprise and anger was sending tremors through her skin, making it impossible to listen for the quiet pull of water.

“Oh, and speaking of rape,” Ben said casually, taking his backpack off again. “I have something for you.”

The stick jumped in her hands, and Lucy rested one end on the sand. “You are the worst person in the world to try to do this with,” she said.

“Sorry,” Ben mumbled as he dug in his pack. “Here, these are for you and your mom.” He handed Lucy two black rectangles with prongs at the top.

“What’s this?”

“Push the button on the side,” Ben said.

She did, and a bright-blue arc of light jumped from one prong to the other. The rectangle buzzed in her hand and Lucy yelped, dropping it to the ground. “What the hell?”

“It’s electricity,” Ben explained. “Nora and Bailey carry them too, although I don’t think any of the men would ever consider touching you while my dad forbids it.”

Lucy toed the black object in the sand mistrustfully. “So it shocks people?”

“Yeah, anybody gives you trouble, you—ZZZZZZ—” Ben imitated jerking motions. “Zap ’em. It’s really pretty neat. Catch a turtle and I’ll show you how it works.”

“I think I’m okay,” Lucy said, putting both in her own backpack. She picked her stick up and looked behind them at the handful of blue flags spotting the desert. “We should keep going.”

“Dad wanted us to place all of these,” Ben said, looking doubtfully at the pile still at his feet. “We should stick some in random places.”

Lucy shook her head. “And then people would be digging for no reason. I can’t always be sure what I find is a solid bet, but I won’t set people looking where I know there’s nothing.”

Ben blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Have it your way then.”

She flapped her arms about her, muscles cramping from holding them straight for so long. “Give me a sec, I’ll be ready soon.”

“Whenever,” Ben said, flopping to the desert floor.

“So, were there ever other women? Has it always been just Nora and Bailey?”

“Huh? Oh no, there used to be a whole lot more people here, in general. Then cholera swept through right around the time I was born, and it wiped out a lot of us.”

“Cholera’s bad stuff.”

“We’d taken in some new people and one of them was falling sick but hiding it. Probably one of the females, because not long after that their water supply was infected.”

“The women drank from different water?”

Ben shaded his eyes to look up at her. “Dad said it caused too much trouble and distraction to have everybody doing as they pleased, so men and women lived apart.”

“And people were okay with that?”

“I guess they had water and food, so they were okay with anything.”

Lucy dropped down next to Ben in the sand, pulling out her water bottle. “So one of the women was sick with cholera?”

“Yeah. Whoever it was, they were all drawing out of the same tank in the women and children’s hotel, and a few days later most of them were dead. Dad said it was such a stink they ended up torching the place, hoping to kill off the bug.”

“It work?”

“Seems so. We haven’t had a case of cholera since then, although it made Nora straight paranoid. She made Lander take her out to the hospital—the real one—and the library to get medical books so she could know all there was to know about waterborne illnesses. She had groups of men carrying boxes of books that weighed more than me up into her hotel room for days.”

Lucy’s hand stopped cold on the cap of her bottle, as a bubble of hope rose from her long-dormant heart. “She know about polio?”

“She knows about damn near everything. Even if she doesn’t, I guarantee you anything anybody needs to know is in those books.”

Lucy jammed her bottle into the depths of her pack to hide the quaking of her hands. “All right then, let’s get moving.”

Ben remained where he was, lying in the sun like the big cat she’d seen through Lynn’s scope. “So it doesn’t bother you?”

“What’s that?”

Ben’s smile was slow and measured, nothing like the spontaneous one that had burst across his face earlier. “You gave up your secret way too early.”

Lucy’s eyebrows came together as she looked at him, comprehension only dawning as she remembered the look on the men’s faces as they’d carefully bundled Lynn’s nearly lifeless body into the backseat of the car. In her own state she’d not questioned why perfect strangers would be scared at the thought of Lynn dying.

“You would’ve saved us anyway,” Lucy said slowly, “whether I could witch or not. Because you need women.”

“Well,” Ben said, “you’re not so stupid after all.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“G
et that away from me,” Lynn said, when Lucy offered her the zapper in their room that evening.

“It’s not such a bad idea,” Lucy argued. “Lander keeps your gun locked up when he’s not on the roof with you, and you’re weak like a fish on shore.”

“Maybe, but that thing’s no good unless somebody is in arm’s reach. My rifle keeps them farther even when it’s not loaded.”

“Fine.” Lucy put both zappers into her pack. “But I’ll point out
again
that you don’t have the rifle, period.”

Lynn threw an arm over her face, and her voice came out muffled by the crook of her elbow. “I’ll get it back. Lander’s not the most charming man in the world, but he’s not stupid either. If it helps them to arm me, he’ll do it.”

Lucy unlaced her boots carefully, weighing her words before speaking. “I found quite a few veins today.”

“Viable ones?”

“Think so. Ben was pretty distracting, so I couldn’t get a feel for how deep they were, but there’s water out there.”

Lynn grunted, but offered nothing more.

Lucy stripped off her clothes and slid into her own bed. Darkness had filled the rest of the room, but she could see the outline of Lynn’s arm tented over her face in the moonlight. “Ben said Nora and Bailey were the only women here before we showed up.”

The eruption of panic she’d been expecting didn’t come. Instead Lynn sighed, the simple exhalation a measure of how trapped she felt. “I know.”

“How?”

“Lander can’t always know what I’m looking at through the scope, and I see plenty, but never once a woman. So asking a few of the right questions to Nora today opened her up a bit. She even told me how come there’s no guns around here except mine.” Lucy rolled onto her side to hear Lynn better as her disembodied voice floated through the darkness.

“I was wondering,” Lucy said. “Seems like a city this size there’d be guns somewhere.”

“There was, back when the Shortage first happened. Plenty, to hear Nora tell it. But people were panicking here, same as back home. Mother said when things first went down it was chaos. In a city this size, with the hotels filled with those who didn’t belong, it turned downright nasty. Those that lived here claimed their water for themselves.”

“So what happened?”

“Those who didn’t belong were tossed into the desert, but they didn’t go easy. Nora said there was so much blood the sand was like mud, and people sinking into it up to their ankles while they begged to stay.”

Lucy reached for the bottle she had beside her bed, though she hadn’t adjusted to the taste of the water yet. The burning heat of the desert was a fresh memory, and the image of desperate people driven to madness made her clutch the bottle all the more tightly. “They all die?”

“Seems someone among the outcasts was no idiot, and they made their way over to a place called Lake Mead. Lost a lot on the walk. Nora said there were buzzards in a straight line in the sky. People must’ve been dropping every few feet.”

Lucy had seen enough buzzards in her time, their black wings and long, slow descents marking the final resting place of someone unlucky. “That’s horrible.”

“They weren’t the only ones who headed to the lake. There were plenty of people those days that didn’t like everything this city stood for, and the things that went on in it. So when the people who lived in the City of Sin made judgment calls about who got to survive after the Shortage, it didn’t set well with those who had took up at the lake. When the exiles straggled in, there was no sympathy for the city dwellers among either group, and a common enemy makes for fast friends.

“They came back at night and went after those who had killed their loved ones. Nora said if she had thought the sand was mud before, then the streets were rivers that night.

“The people from the lake scoured the city, took every gun they found, adding to their own strength and ensuring any revenge the people of Las Vegas tried to take would be of the unarmed kind. Nora says still if anyone from the city tries to take the pass to Lake Mead, they get a warning shot. But only sometimes.”