The Water Knife (3 page)

A man straightened. “I’m Yu.” Slim and tanned, balding. Comb-over. Scars of old acne on his cheeks.

Angel tossed papers at him as Camel Corps spread out and secured the control room. “You’re shut down.”

Yu caught the papers clumsily. “The hell we are! This is on appeal.”

“Appeal all you want, tomorrow,” Angel said. “Tonight you got an order to shut down. Check the signatures.”

“We’re supplying a hundred thousand people! You can’t just turn off their water.”

“Judges say we’ve got senior rights,” Angel said. “You should be glad we’re letting you keep what you already got in your pipes. If your people are careful, they can live on buckets for a couple days, till they clear out.”

Yu was riffling through the papers. “But this ruling is a farce! We’re getting a stay, and this is going to be overturned. This ruling—it barely exists! Tomorrow it’s gone!”

“Knew you’d say something like that. Problem is, it’s not tomorrow right now. It’s today. And today the judges say you got to stop stealing the state of Nevada’s water.”

“You’re going to be liable, though!” Yu sputtered. He made a heroic effort to calm himself. “We both know how serious this is. Whatever happens to Carver City is on you. We have security cams. All of this is going to be public record. You can’t want this to be on your head when judgments start coming down.”

Angel decided he kind of liked the balding bureaucrat. Simon Yu was
dedicated
. Had the feel of one of those good-government guys who got a job because he wanted to make the world a better place. Genuine old-school civil servant genuinely dedicated to the old-school benefit of the people.

And now here the guy was, cajoling Angel. Playing the let’s-be-reasonable, don’t-be-hasty game.

Too bad it wasn’t the game they were playing.

“…This is going to piss off a lot of powerful people,” Yu was saying. “You aren’t going to get off. The feds aren’t going to let something like this happen.”

It was a bit like meeting a dinosaur, Angel decided. Kind of icy to see, sure, but really, how the hell had the man ever survived?

“Powerful people?” Angel smiled gently. “You cut a deal with California I’m not aware of? They own your water, and somehow I don’t
know? ’Cause from where we stand, you’re pumping some crappy junior water right that you bought secondhand off a farmer in western Colorado, and you got no cards left to play. This is water that should have come to us a long time ago. Says so in those papers I just gave you.”

Yu gave Angel a sullen glare.

“Come on, Yu.” Angel lightly punched the man in the shoulder. “Don’t look so down. We both been in this game long enough to know someone’s got to lose. Law of the River says senior rights gets it all. Junior rights?” Angel shrugged. “Not so much.”

“Who did you pay off?” Yu asked. “Stevens? Arroyo?”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s a hundred thousand people’s lives!”

“Shouldn’t have bet them on such crappy water rights, then,” Gupta commented from across the control room, where she was checking out the flashing lights of pump monitors.

Angel hid a smirk as Yu shot her a dirty look. “The soldier’s right, Yu. You got your notice there. We’re giving you twenty-five more minutes to clear out, and after that I’m dropping some Hades and Hellfire on this place. So clear it out before we light it up.”

“You’re going to blow us up?”

A bunch of the soldiers laughed at that.

Gupta said, “You did see us come in with the helicopters, right?”

“I’m not leaving,” Yu said coldly. “You can kill me if you want. Let’s see how that works out for you.”

Angel sighed. “I just knew you’d be stand-up that way.”

Before Yu could retort, Angel grabbed him and slammed him to the floor. He buried a knee in the bureaucrat’s back. Grabbed an arm and twisted it.

“You’re destroying—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Angel wrenched Yu’s other hand behind his back and zip-cuffed him. “A whole fucking city. A hundred thousand lives. Plus somebody’s golf course. But like you noticed, dead bodies do make things complicated, so we’re taking your bald ass out of here. You can sue us tomorrow.”

“You can’t do this!”
Yu shouted from where his face was mashed into the floor.

Angel knelt down beside the helpless man. “I feel like you’re taking
this personally, Simon. But it ain’t that way. We’re just cogs in a big old machine, right?” He jerked Yu upright. “This is bigger than you and me. We’re both just doing our jobs.” He gave Yu a shove, propelling him through the doors. To Gupta, he called back, “Check the rest of the place, and make sure it’s cleared. I want this place on fire in ten!”

Outside Reyes was standing at the chopper door, waiting.

“We’ve got Zoners, incoming!” Reyes shouted.

“Well, that ain’t good. How long?”

“Five minutes.”

“Fucking hell.” Angel made a twirling motion with his finger. “Spin us up, then! I got what I came for.”

Chopper blades came alive, an angry shriek. Their whine drowned out Yu’s next words, but his expression was enough for Angel to understand the man’s hatred.

“Don’t take this personally!” Angel shouted back. “In another year we’ll hire you up in Vegas! You’re too good to waste here! SNWA can use good people like you!”

Angel tried to tug Yu into the chopper, but the man resisted. He was glaring at Angel, eyes squinting against the dustwash. Guardie choppers started lifting off, locusts rising. Angel gave Yu another tug. “Time to go, old man.”

“The hell you say!”

With sudden surprising strength, Yu tore free and bolted back toward his water-treatment plant, stumbling, hands still zip-cuffed behind his back but running determinedly for the building from which the last of his people were fleeing.

Angel exchanged a pained look with Reyes.

Dedicated bastard. Right down to the end, the pencil pusher was dedicated.

“We’ve got to go!” Reyes shouted. “If the Zoners get their choppers up here, we’ll end up in a firefight, and the feds will be all up on our asses then. There’s some shit they won’t put up with, and a state-to-state gun battle is definitely one of them. We need to clear out!”

Angel looked back at Yu as he fled. “Just give me one minute!”

“Thirty seconds!”

Angel gave Reyes a disgusted look and charged after Yu.

All around him choppers were lifting off, rising like leaves on hot desert winds. Angel pelted through the flying grit, squinting against sand sting.

He caught Yu at the door to the treatment plant. “Well, you’re stubborn. I’ll give you that.”

“Let me go!”

Instead, Angel flipped him hard onto the ground. The landing took Yu’s breath away, and Angel took advantage of the man’s paralysis to zip-cuff his ankles, too.

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Normally, I’d just cut you like a pig and be done with it,” Angel grunted, as he hefted Yu onto his back in a fireman’s carry. “But since we’re doing this all aboveboard and public, that’s not on the table. But don’t push me. Seriously.” He began lumbering for the sole remaining chopper.

The last of Carver City’s treatment-plant workers were diving into their cars and speeding away from the pumping facility, kicking up plumes of dust. Rats jumping the sinking ship.

Reyes was glaring at Angel. “Hurry the fuck up!”

“I’m here! Let’s go already!”

Angel dumped Yu into the chopper. They lifted off with Angel riding the skid. He clawed his way inside.

Gupta was back at her gun, already opening fire as Angel strapped in. Angel’s military glass lit up with firing solutions. He peered out the open door as military intelligence software portioned out the water-treatment plant: filtering towers, pumping engines, power supply, backup generators—

Missiles spat from the choppers’ tubes, arcs of fire, silent in the air and then explosively loud as they buried themselves in the guts of Carver City’s water infrastructure.

Flaming mushrooms boiled up into the night, bathing the desert orange, illuminating the black locust shapes of the hovering choppers as they launched more rounds.

Simon Yu lay at Angel’s feet, zip-cuffed and impotent to stop the destruction, watching as his world went up in mushroom clouds.

In the flickering light of the explosions, Angel could make out
tears on the man’s face. Water gushing from his eyes, as telling in its own way as a man’s sweat: Simon Yu, mourning the place he’d tried so hard to save. Sucker had ice in his blood, for sure. Didn’t look it, but the sucker had him some ice.

Too bad it hadn’t helped.

It’s the end of times
, Angel thought as more missiles pummeled the water-treatment plant.
It’s the goddamn end of times
.

And then on the heels of that thought, another followed, unbidden.

Guess that makes me the Devil
.

L
ucy woke to the sound of rain. A benediction, gently pattering. For the first time in more than a year, her body relaxed.

The release of tension was so sudden that for a moment she felt as if she were filled with helium. Weightless. All her sadness and horror sloughed off her frame like the skin of a snake, too confining and gritted and dry to contain her any longer, and she was rising.

She was new and clean and lighter than air, and she sobbed with the release of it.

And then she woke fully, and it wasn’t rain caressing the windows of her home but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again.

She lay still in bed, trembling with the loss of the dream. Blotting away tears.

Sand slushed against the glass, a steady etching.

The dream had seemed so real: the rain pouring down; the softness in the air; the smell of plants blossoming. Her clenched pores and the tight clays of the desert all opening wide, welcoming the gift—the land and her body, absorbing the miracle of water that fell from the sky. Godwater, American settlers had once called it as they invaded slowly across the prairies of the Midwest and then pressed into the arid lands beyond the Rocky Mountains.

Godwater.

Water that fell of its own volition, right out of the sky.

In Lucy’s dream it had been as gentle as a kiss. Blessing and absolution, cascading from the heavens. And now it was gone. Her lips were cracked and broken.

Lucy kicked off sweaty sheets and went to peer outside. The few streetlights that hadn’t been shot out by gangs stood as dim moons
struggling against a reddish haze. The storm was thickening even as she watched, the streetlights collapsing into blackness, leaving retina stains of imagined glows in their place. The light going out of the world. Lucy thought she’d read that somewhere—some old Christian thing. The death of Jesus, maybe. The light going out, forever.

Jesus blows out, and La Santa Muerte blows in
.

Lucy went back to bed and stretched out on the mattress, listening as the winds whipped the night. Somewhere outside, a dog was howling for safety. A stray maybe. It would be dead in the morning, another victim of Big Daddy Drought.

A whine from beneath her bed echoed the begging outside: Sunny, crouched and shivering, thanks to the changes in air pressure.

Lucy crawled out of bed again and went to fill a dish with water from her urn. Unconsciously, she checked its level, knowing before she saw the numbers that she still had twenty gallons, yet unable to prevent herself from checking the little LED meter anyway, confirming the count she had in her own head.

She crouched down beside the bed. Pushed the dish toward the dog.

Sunny regarded her from the deep shadows, miserable. He wouldn’t come out to drink.

If Lucy had been superstitious, she would have suspected that the ragged Australian shepherd knew something she didn’t. That he sensed evil in the air, the Devil’s wings beating overhead, maybe.

The Chinese believed that animals could sense earthquakes. Used them to predict disasters. The Communists of old China had once evacced ninety thousand people from the city of Haicheng before a major earthquake, sensing it hours ahead. Saving lives because they trusted animals to know things that human beings did not.

One of the biotects at Taiyang International had told Lucy about it. Used it to illustrate how China knew how to see the world clearly and planned ahead. And because of it, China was resilient in comparison to the brokeback version of America where he’d been stationed.

When an animal spoke, you were supposed to pay attention.

Sunny huddled beneath the bed, fur and skin twitching, giving off a low, continuous, miserable whine.

“Come on out, boy.”

He wouldn’t budge.

“Come on. The storm’s on the outside. It’s not in here.”

Nothing.

Lucy sat cross-legged on the tile, regarding Sunny. The tile was cool at least.

Why didn’t she just sleep on the floor? What made her even bother with a bed or sheet in the summer? Or the spring or fall, for that matter?

Lucy splayed herself belly down on the clay tile, letting it press against her bare skin. She reached under the bed to Sunny.

“We’re okay,” she murmured, running her fingers though his fur. “Shh. Shh. It’s okay. We’re okay.”

She tried to force herself to relax, but a nervous shiver of her own refused to stop rippling under her skin. A discomfited ticking awareness.

No wonder Sunny was under the bed.

No matter how much Lucy tried to tell herself the dog was crazy, her own lizard brain believed the dog’s warning.

Something was outside, something dark and hungry, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that the horrific thing was turning its attention to her—to her and Sunny and this safe little island of hunkered adobe shelter that she called home.

Lucy got up and checked the dead bolts on the doors to the dust room.

You’re being paranoid
.

Sunny whined again.

“Shut up, boy.”

The sound of her own voice bothered her.

She made another circuit of the house, checking to make sure all the windows were sealed. Startled at her own reflection in the kitchen window.

Didn’t I close that?

She pulled the Guatemalan weave across the glass, half-expecting a face to appear in the darkness beyond. It was superstitious and absurd to think that anyone could actually be out in the storm looking in at her, but now she went and pulled on jeans anyway, feeling better clothed. Feeling at least psychologically protected as she gave up on
sleep for good. No way she was sleeping now. Not with this storm-induced anxiety running its fingers between her shoulder blades.

Might as well work
.

Lucy opened her computer and scanned her fingerprints on the trackpad. Keyed her passwords as the winds continued to lash her home. The house batteries were lower than she would have liked. They had a twenty-year warranty, but Charlene was always telling her that was bullshit. Lucy just hoped the storm would pass by morning so she could sweep off the solar panels and get the charge back up.

Sunny whined again.

Lucy ignored him and logged into her revenue trackers.

She’d posted a new story with original art that Timo had shot. If she was honest, the pics really sold the story: a truck filled with belongings, mired to the hubs in dust, trying to get away from Phoenix and failing miserably. The latest in collapse pornography. The story was kicking around the net, syndicating and collecting eyeballs and revenue, but Lucy was surprised it hadn’t gotten the attention she’d hoped.

She scanned the feeds, looking for reasons her eyeball share might have slipped. Something was happening over by the Colorado River: a firefight or a bombing.

#CarverCity, #CoRiver, #BlackHelicopters…

Bigger news organizations were already on it. Lucy pulled up video and got a water manager spitting invective about Las Vegas. She’d have pegged him as a lunatic, except for the wreckage and flames blazing behind him, lending credence to the idea that Las Vegas really had rolled in with its water knives and done some precipitous cutting.

The balding man was ranting that he’d been abducted by Nevada guardies and then dumped in the desert to hike his way back to the wreckage of his own treatment plant.

“This was Catherine Case! She completely ignored that we’re appealing! We have rights!”

“Are you going to sue?”

“You’re damn right we’re going to sue! She’s gone too far this time.”

More sites were lighting up with the story. Arizona local stations
and personalities, beating the drums of regional anger, generating hits and ad revenue off the battlefield images as they inflamed local hatreds. More revenue would be flowing in as the comments blew up and people threw the story onto their social networks.

Lucy flagged the story for her trackers, but with the storm and the distance, she’d already missed the window to take much credit or do anything except draft off the hits of other journos.

She kicked the story into her own feeds, just to assure her readers that she was aware of Carver City’s evisceration, and turned to her own primary sources, hunting for leads in the sloshing sea of social media, stories that she could get to first and claim as her own.

Dozens of new comments, hashtag #PhoenixDowntheTubes:

Supposed to leave again today, except for another damn storm. #Depressed #PhoenixDowntheTubes

How you know you’re at the end: You’re drinking your own piss and telling yourself its spring water. #PhoenixDowntheTubes #ClearsacLove

Score! We’re going North! #BCLottery #Seeyoubitches

Choppers in the canyon. Anyone know who’s out there? #CoRiver #BlackHelicopters

They’re still outside my door! Where the fuck is the cavalry?!! @PhoenixPD

Don’t use Route 66. #CaliMilitia #DronePack #MM16

WTF? When did Samm’s Bar Close? #Ineedadrink #PhoenixDowntheTubes

Pic: PHOENIX RISING Billboard stuccoed with Clearsacs. LOL. #PhoenixDowntheTubes. #PhoenixArts #PhoenixRising

She’d been tracking Phoenix residents, their hashtags and commentaries, for years. A proxy map for the city’s implosion. Virtual echoes of a physical disaster.

In her own mind she imagined Phoenix as a sinkhole, sucking everything down—buildings, lives, streets, history—all of it tipping and spilling into the gaping maw of disaster—sand, slumped saguaros, subdivisions—all of it going down.

And Lucy, circling the edge of the hole, documenting.

Her critics said she was just another collapse pornographer, and on her bad days she agreed: just another journo hunting for salacious imagery, like the vultures who descended on Houston after a Cat 6, or the sensationalized imagery of a fallen Detroit being swallowed by nature. But on other days Lucy had the feeling that she wasn’t so much eroticizing a city’s death as excavating a future as it yawned below them. As if she were saying,
This is us. This is how we all end. There’s only one door out, and we all use it
.

When she’d first arrived in the city as a green reporter, it hadn’t felt so personal. Back then she’d made jokes about the Zoners, enjoying the easy stories and micropayment deposits. Making quick cash off voyeuristic enticements for click-thru.

#Clickbait

#CollapsePorn

#PhoenixDowntheTubes

The residents of Phoenix and its suburbs were the new Texans, those Merry Perry fools, and Lucy and her colleagues from CNN and Xinhua and
Kindle Post
and Agence France-Presse and Google/New
York Times
were more than happy to feed on the corpse. The country had watched Texas fall apart, so everyone knew how it worked. Phoenix was Austin, but bigger and badder and more total.

Collapse 2.0: Denial, Collapse, Acceptance, Refugees.

Lucy was just there to watch the Zoners hit the wall, up close and personal. Autopsy the corpse with a high-power microscope, and a cold Dos Equis in her hand.

#BetterThemThanUs.

But then she’d met a few of the Zoners. Set down roots in the city. She helped her friend Timo gut his house, ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping the bones out of a corpse.

They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes, and she’d written up the experience—a family home of three generations made valueless because the suburb’s water had gone dry and Phoenix wouldn’t allow a hookup.

#CollapsePorn for sure, except now Lucy was one of the actors, right alongside Timo and his sister Amparo and her three-year-old daughter, who’d cried and cried as the adults destroyed the only house she’d ever known.

Sunny whined again from beneath the bed.

“It’ll pass,” Lucy said absently, then wondered if it was true.

The weather people were saying they might set a record for dust storms. Sixty-five recorded so far, and more on the way.

But what if there were no limit to the storms?