The Water Knife (11 page)

Maria looked away, not saying anything, but Damien caught her
expression. “You listen tight, girl. Vet will nail your little tits to the wall if he catches you entrepreneurializing without permission.”

“I know.”

“You know.” Damien made a face. “Sure you know. That’s why you’re looking all shifty. You remember this: if I got my eye on you, it means other people got their eyes on you, too. If the Vet’s boys catch you over by that arcology peddling without tax, he’ll make your pretty smile real wide with some fishhooks and a knife. No joke. You’re too pretty to get cut like that.”

Sarah tugged Maria’s shoulder. “We know, Damien. They’ll get their cut.”

“And I want mine, too.”

Maria started to protest, but Sarah squeezed her hand so tight, it felt as if her fingers were breaking.

“You’ll get yours, too.”

When Damien was gone, Maria went off. “What are you doing? You know how much of a cut that’s going to take?”

Sarah didn’t even raise her voice. “You’ll still make plenty. Now come on. We got to get Esteban paid and get this wagon over to Toomie before people start waking up.”

“But—”

Sarah just looked at her. “It’s the way it is, girl. Ain’t no point fighting it. You can’t get hung up on how these things are. Now let’s go pay our tax and get your money.”

Her voice was low and coddling, urging Maria to see that no matter how much she mewed, no one was just going to give her any milk.

A
ngel flew south, a falcon hunting.

The Mojave lay sere and open, a burned, wind-abraded scape of oxidized gravels and pale clays, scabbed with creosote bushes and twisted Joshua trees. One hundred twenty degrees in the shade, and heat rippling off the pavement, mirage shimmer. The sun raged across the sky, and the only movement on the interstate was Angel’s Tesla, blazing.

It had been a desperate land before, and it was a desperate land still. Angel had always liked the desert for its lack of illusions. Here, plants spread their roots wide and shallow, starved for every drop. Their saps crystalized to hard shellac, fighting to keep every molecule of moisture from evaporating. Leaves strained up into the unforgiving sky, shaped to catch and channel any rare drop that might happen to fall upon them.

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They’d played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They’d pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they’d turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans—vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They’d had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.

The desert was different. It had always been a gaunt and feral thing. Always hunting for its next sip. The desert never forgot itself.
A thin fall of winter rain was all that kept yucca and creosote blooming. If there was other life, it cowered alongside the banks of the few capillary rivers that braved the blazing lands and never strayed far.

The desert never took water for granted.

Angel opened up the Tesla. His car sank low on the pavement and accelerated, burning across the truest place Angel had ever known.

He slashed through checkpoints, radioing credentials ahead. Nevada guardies stood by in flak jackets, waving him on. Drones circled overhead, invisible in the smoke-and-blue sky.

Occasionally, Angel caught glimpses of militias: the sun-flash of high-power scopes tracking as the Tesla shot down the empty highway, Mormons and northern Nevada ranchers doing volunteer rotations: South Border Marauders, Desert Dogs, a half-dozen others recruited from across the state—Catherine Case’s second army, all of them doing their bit to keep refugees from swamping their fragile promised land.

Angel suspected that he knew some of those hunkered behind the stony ridges. He remembered their hatred-hardened faces and murder-flicker eyes. At the time he’d sympathized with their hopeless hate. He was their worst nightmare: a Vegas water knife, sitting in their living rooms, making offers they couldn’t refuse. The Devil in black, offering a bloody deal for their salvation. He’d perched on frayed couches and sagging La-Z-Boy recliners. He’d leaned against peeling-paint porch rails and stood in the hot close air of horse barns, always making the same offer. He’d spoken low, conspiratorially, laying out the deal that would save them from the hell that Catherine Case was busy creating for them as her pipeline projects pumped away their water.

The offer was simple: work, money, water—life. Stop shooting at Vegas and start shooting Zoners. If they yoked themselves to the purposes of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, all things were possible. They might even grow a little, with a friendly tap into the East Basin Pipeline. She’d let them drink. Maybe even let them smear a bit of water across the land. Angel went from house to house and town to town, offering one last chance to haul themselves out of the abyss.

And, as Case had predicted, they’d seized it with both hands.

Militias sprang up on the border, perched along the shoulder of
the Colorado River, looking across the waters toward Arizona and Utah. Scalps appeared as warnings along interstates. Chain gangs of Zoners and Merry Perrys were marched back down into the river and told to swim for the other side. Some people even made it.

Senators back east demanded that Nevada end its militia lawlessness, and Governor Andrews dutifully sent out the guardies to hunt down the bandits. He paraded theatrical arrests in front of news cameras and lined up defiant citizen defenders in court. And as soon as the cameras went dark, the cuffs came off, and Catherine Case’s militias returned to their posts along the river.

Angel crossed the border at Lake Mead. The bathtub rings of the reservoir stood stark against the pale desert stones. At one time, long before Angel’s tenure, Lake Mead had held waters that nearly topped the Hoover Dam. It had been full. Now marinas lay like toy ruins on the mud flats of the lake, and guardies and drones buzzed above the dam, keeping watch over Vegas’s shrunken reservoir.

Every car that sought to cross the bridge that spanned the canyon of the Colorado River was searched. These days nothing came close to the dam without being inspected multiple times.

Rather than go through the hassle, Angel dropped his car at the border, handing it off to an SNWA employee, and walked across the bridge with the rest of the foot traffic. Peering over the embankment with all the other tourists at the gleaming blue waters of Lake Mead. The lifeline of Las Vegas. A portion of the lake was covered with a half-finished gossamer structure, a carbon fiber roof that would eventually enclose the entire lake. SNWA’s latest megaproject, trying to reduce evaporation.

On the far side of the river, Angel processed through Arizona border security, submitting to the state’s arbitrary searches. He ignored the angry faces of the Arizona Border Patrol and let them do their searches and paw through his fake credentials.

They had their dogs sniff him, and they searched him again, but eventually they let him pass. Border guards were border guards, and at the end of the day Zoners still wanted people to come visit their beat-to-hell state. To spend money there, to give them a little bit of what they’d lost.

Angel came through the last checkpoint and legally stood on Arizona
soil. Up on the embankments, refugees had set up their tents. People intent on attempting a midnight run across the river, right into the teeth of the people Angel had recruited to stop them.

It was a nightly ritual. Texans and Mexicans and Zoners would rush the river. Some of them would get through. Most of them wouldn’t. All up and down the river, from Lake Mead down south to Lake Havasu and farther on, there were encampments like this.

Pure Life and Aquafina and CamelBak had set up relief tents. Getting good PR photos of how they cared for refugees.

Your purchase helps us mitigate the impacts of climate change on vulnerable peoples around the world
.

Angel wandered among the relief operations, until he found a revival tent full of Merry Perrys. He eased in.

People were in line, confessing sins, buying tokens of devotion. Whipping themselves into a frenzy as they prayed to the same God that was hammering them with drought to give them some luck as they attempted their runs across the river.

A man came up beside Angel and offered him a Merry Perry token.

“Mark of God, sir?”

Angel dropped a dollar coin into the man’s coffee can. The man handed Angel a keylink along with an atonement token and passed on.

Angel left the prayer tent.

Out beside the highway another bright yellow Tesla shone in the sun, waiting obediently for his arrival. Its door slid open.

He climbed in and checked the contents of the car. SIG Sauer in a compartment under the seat, along with three magazines of bullets. He loaded the gun and put it back. Checked his documents. A couple Arizona driver’s licenses with his picture on them. Mateo Bolívar. Simon Espera. Badges to go with them. Phoenix PD. Arizona Criminal Investigations Division. FBI. Different jurisdictions for different convenient moments. In the trunk there would be uniforms to match. Suits and ties. Jackets and jeans. Probably a full state trooper uniform, too. SNWA was thorough.

Angel finished going through the identities and shoved Bolívar into his wallet. He turned on the car. High-performance filters kicked
on, sensing dust in the cabin’s interior, cycling rapidly. Guaranteed to strip out infections. Hantavirus, valley fever, and the common cold didn’t stand a chance.

As the cabin cooled, Angel called into SNWA, confirming on an encrypted line that he’d taken possession of the vehicle and was headed for Phoenix. He pulled out.

A few minutes later Case called in.

“Yeah?” Angel asked, puzzled as he let her connect.

Case’s cool liquid voice joined him inside the nearly silent Tesla cabin. “You’re over the border?” she asked.

“Well, I got FEMA tents as far as the eye can see, and I just passed a tipped-over Jonnytruck that I swear I saw kids trying to hijack, so yeah, it looks like I’m in Arizona.” He laughed. “The only other place this could be is Texas.”

“I’m glad you’re entertained by your job, Angel.”

“Not Angel.” Angel glanced at the ID he’d tossed onto the seat beside him. “Mateo, today. Mateo.”

“Better than making you pretend you’re a Vikram again.”

“My Hindi ain’t bad.”

Angel cut between a long line of cars, their belongings strapped to their roofs, and accelerated, catching an on-ramp eastbound.

The westbound lanes were choked with traffic, but almost nothing was headed his direction.

“Huh,” he said. “No one seems to want to go to Phoenix.”

Case laughed. Angel accelerated, burning across the flat yellow desert. Heat waves rippled the horizon. Discarded Clearsacs festooned the yucca and creosote, glittering like Christmas decorations. The gaunt refugees of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico turned away from him as he ripped past, leaving dust boiling around them.

“I’m guessing this isn’t just a friendly call?”

“I want to ask you about Ellis,” Case said. “You worked with him a few years ago.”

“Sure. Setting up the South Nevada Marauders. And last year with those Samoan Mormons. Loved that gig.”

“Did he ever say anything about feeling discontented?”

Angel blew by a Merry Perry prayer circle, the people standing with their heads bowed, asking God for safe passage north.

“God damn, there’s a lot of Merry Perrys over here,” he said.

“They’re like roaches. You really can’t smash them fast enough. Now quit stalling and tell me about Ellis.”

“Nothing to tell. He seemed fine to me.” Angel paused. “Wait. You asking me if he’s loyal? Like he’d defect to Cali or something?”

Tents with Red Cross and Salvation Army logos blurred past. Beside them bodies lay in bags, long rows of people whose journey had ended. Rows and rows of bodies, waiting for guardies to bury them.

“Ellis was supposed to check in,” Case said. “I haven’t heard from him. You think he would have taken a payoff to go dark?”

Angel whistled. “Doesn’t sound like him. He’s a good church boy. All about keeping his word, being a good man, that kind of thing. Why? What’s this about?”

“Patterns,” Case said. “It’s about patterns. Watch yourself down there in Phoenix.”

“I’m fine.”

“Julio is losing his cool, and now Ellis is out of pocket.”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence.”

“I don’t work with coincidences.”

“Yeah,” Angel said, thinking back on his conversations with Ellis. The two of them lying out under the stars, avoiding motels so no one could put a hit on them, working the river. Building militias.

Case said something else, but her voice crackled, dropping out. “Say again?”

Another crackle of static.

Angel spied a brown smudge on the horizon. “Hey, you’re breaking up. I think a storm just ate your cell tower. I’m going to have to call you back.”

Static was the only answer.

He watched the smudge. It was definitely rising. Billowing high. Filling the horizon. Rushing toward him.

Angel opened the Tesla wide, not caring how much battery he burned, racing down the highway, racing the storm. Refugee relief stations and guardie command centers whipped past. The storm kept coming. A wall of dust a mile high, crashing over everything in its path.