H2O (10 page)

A couple
workers stepped outside and started talking to each other in short bursts, like
they were bored and didn’t want to put in the effort to talk. They looked to be
in their fifties, set in their ways, and neither of them looked friendly. After
ten minutes or so, they headed back inside.

Twenty minutes
later, a woman in her forties, looking exhausted, stepped outside and dragged
herself over to one of the trailers. She didn’t look too friendly either.

Then five
minutes later, we saw a woman in her early twenties step outside and slam the
door behind her. She whipped off her ponytail holder and vigorously shook out
her long brown hair. She looked angry and ready to pick a fight. Right behind
her, an older man stepped out. He was large and lumbering and walked with a
stoop, as if life had beat him down. He began to talk to the woman. He might’ve
been her husband but the age difference and the dynamic between them told me
that he was her father. And it looked like he was telling her that everything
would be okay. She listened to him and softened, her slender body relaxing, but
as soon as he went back inside, she looked angry again, like she knew
everything would never be okay. Ever.

Lily and I
both thought that this woman might be angry enough to tell us where all the
trucks were headed.

The woman marched toward one of
the trailers and we stepped out of the forest. We were ready with an
explanation about why we were here. We’d come up with it while we were scoping
out the workers. But when I saw this woman up close, I knew that launching into
our explanation wasn’t the right move. With her, it’d be better to get to the
point. So I blurted out, “Can you help us?”

“You’re not
truckers,” she said. “Are you marauders?” She was wary, but curious.

“No,” Lily
said.

“Who are you?”

“No one
special,” I said. “We’re trying to make it through the dead land to see if
there are towns on the other coast.”

“How’d you get
this far?” she fired back.

“We hitched,”
Lily said.

“No trucker’d
give you a ride.”

“One did,” I
said.

“I don’t
believe you. He’d lose his job and they got it easy.”

Now, it was
time to lay out our explanation. “We bribed him,” I said. “We found some
medicine in an old hospital – medicine that his wife needed and we traded it
for a ride.” This slowed her down. She was weighing it. Everyone knew that
medicine was rare.

“What happens
if you’re caught on the road without a visa?” she asked.

“We haven’t
been caught,” Lily said.

But I could
tell that she didn’t really want to know what would happen to
us
. She
wanted to know what would happen to
her
. What would happen if
she
ran away and was caught without a visa? So I answered
that
question.
“You get five years in jail,” I said. “Then you go back to where you came
from.”

She relaxed a
little, then smirked and said, “So the trucker said he’d take you to the other
coast, huh?”

“He didn’t say
exactly how far he’d take us. But he took the medicine and gave us a ride,” I
said.

“Well, you
traded that medicine for a dead end,” she said, her brown eyes sparkling. The
joke was on us. “The trucks go to Black Rock, about another hundred fifty miles
away, then back to the Territory. Black Rock is as far east as you’re gonna
get.”

Lily and I
looked at each other, confused. Black Rock was a dry lakebed in the middle of a
desert. It was the largest flat mud surface on Earth. There was literally
nothing there. Why would trucks be hauling water to Black Rock?

Sarah invited us into her
trailer. The way she put it was that if we continued to talk out here, we’d
have to deal with some of her coworkers and they “hated strangers more than
each other.”

Once inside,
it became clear that she wanted advice. She dreamt of running away and she
wanted to know how to avoid the Fibs. She told us that a few truckers had
offered to whisk her away, but their offers came with strings attached. They
wanted her to stay with them and, for her, that meant going from the prison of
the diner to the prison of their houses. And if she ran away from them, they’d
report her to the Fibs and she’d have to start her new life in the Territory as
a fugitive.

So she’d come
up with another plan. From the time she was a child, she’d known the forest was
safe from the Virus. All through her childhood and teen years, she and her
friends had dared each other to go deeper and deeper into the woods and not one
of them had ever contracted the Virus. So over the years, she’d trained herself
to survive in the wilderness, preparing for the day that she’d hike away from
the rest stop on her own, without help from any truckers. She had learned how
to trap small animals and cook them on open flames. She’d experimented with
wild plants and knew which were edible and which made her sick. And she’d also
learned to dress wounds in case she injured herself. But even with all this
preparation, she’d never left.

And I
understood why. Fear was more powerful than dreams.

Sarah offered
us food and, as we ate, she answered our questions about the rest stop. The
seven families who worked here, including her and her dad, owned it. Food for
the diner was trucked in once a week, but all the other trucks that stopped
here were water trucks.

I asked her
why the rest stop was even here if the water was only going as far as Black
Rock. The distance from Yachats to Black Rock was five hundred miles. Truckers
could do the round trip in one or two days. They didn’t need a rest stop. They
made way longer trips in the Territory.

She explained
that the truckers weren’t allowed to deliver water to Black Rock at night. So
when they weren’t going to make it before nightfall, they’d stop at the rest
stop, have a meal, spend the night in their trucks, then drive the hundred
fifty miles left in the morning.

We asked a few
more questions before I asked the only question that mattered. Who were the
truckers delivering the water to?

Sarah said she
had no idea, but I guess she could tell that we badly wanted an answer, so she
told us her father’s theory. He believed that, at night, trucks drove into
Black Rock from the east and hauled the water inland. He thought that there
were
towns inland but that they’d sprung up way after the Virus so they weren’t like
the towns in the Territory. They were wilder and unorganized and didn’t have
the resources to purify their own drinking water.

“What do the
truckers say?” I asked.

“They never
talk about the water,” she said.

“What about
Black Rock? Do the truckers say there’s a water storage facility there?” For
her father’s theory to be true, the water had to be stored there so that trucks
could come in from the east and haul it away.

“Like I said,
they never talk about the water and we all learn not to ask about it.” Then she
suddenly asked us about the marauders, like she somehow connected them to
water, and I noticed that her eyes lit up when she mentioned them. Lily told
her the standard stuff and I could see that this was a letdown for Sarah, so I
added, “I met a marauder.” That got her attention. It also got Lily’s attention
because I still hadn’t told
her
about Crater.

“He wanted to
know about the water, right?” Sarah asked me.

She
did
connect the marauders to water. Why?

“You’re not
really headed east to see if towns are there,” she said. “You’re following the
water.”

“That’s
right,” I said.

She looked
toward the diner, like she was weighing whether to open up, then she looked
back at us, ready to tell us the secret that she’d been dying to tell us all
along.

“Three years ago, when I was in
the forest, training myself for the getaway, the one I still haven’t managed to
make,” she said, “I trapped a rabbit. I was skinning it and gutting it and
thought someone was watching me. Maybe Brian, who had a crush on me. I called
out and no one answered. So I built my fire and cooked the rabbit.

“When I
started to eat, he came out. Except it wasn’t Brian. It was a marauder. And he
told me he was impressed with what he’d seen. He asked me if I wanted to join
the marauders. I wanted to escape, but I didn’t want to be a marauder. I told
him that I was learning how to survive in the wilderness, so I could make it
through
the wilderness and into the Territory. I wanted to live in a town, not the
wilderness.

“He accepted
that and then told me he was here to find out about the water. So I told him
about Black Rock. Why not? He didn’t seem like a bad person, like those stories
you hear about the marauders. He hadn’t attacked the rest stop or the trucks or
stolen anything. He just wanted to find out where the water was going. Like
you.”

Sarah looked
back to the diner, anxious. She clearly wanted to get through her story before
her dad showed up. “So he said that he was going out to Black Rock to find out
what was going on. He also said that he’d come back and take me to the
Territory if I wanted to go. I could decide when he got back.

“He left and I
began to think about it. He seemed like a good guy. But what if he was lying?
What if I went with him and he wanted me to stay with him? Like the truckers.
I’d have to run and then I’d be running from the marauders and that wouldn’t be
so good.”

Sarah stopped
and took a breath, “Turns out I didn’t have to worry about it. He never came
back.”

She was upset.
She had wanted to escape and she’d thought that this marauder might have been
her passage out. She told us that no one had ever approached her again. When
she went out into the forest, she was always on the lookout for marauders, but
she was always disappointed.

Sarah cleared the table and
washed the dishes. Her dad’s shift was almost over and she wanted us to hide in
her bedroom for the night. We said we’d sleep outside, but she insisted we stay
inside. She said her dad respected her privacy and would never go into her
bedroom.

We settled in
on blankets on her bedroom floor and, when her dad came home, I overheard their
conversation and understood why Sarah hadn’t run away. It wasn’t because of
fear. She and her dad talked about the supply of food at the diner, the number
of truckers who’d come through that day, a feud with another family over work
schedules, and other mundane topics, but shining through the small talk was
Sarah’s bond with her dad. That bond was stronger than her dream of escape.

As I let the
warmth of their conversation wash over me, I noticed a DVD movie on Sarah’s
dresser. She had told us that their community had acquired two hundred and seventy-two
movies over the years and that she had watched them over and over again. This
one was “Planet of the Apes” and that movie was the story of my life.

Roughly five thousand movies
floated around Clearview. Ellen Sanchez, the phone service operator, had the
biggest collection in town, one hundred or so, and it was at her house, at a
birthday party, that I first saw “Planet of the Apes.” I was in elementary
school and it was right after my dad’s murder. She’d invited me to her party
because she felt sorry for me.

I watched the
movie and decided it was about my father. He was like the smart astronaut in
the movie, Taylor. Taylor crash lands in the wilderness of another planet and
starts to hike away from the crash site, looking for signs of life. Then apes
suddenly attack him. Vicious, stupid apes. And just like Taylor, my father had
ventured out into the wilderness and marauders had attacked him. Vicious,
stupid marauders.

A week after
the birthday party, I asked Rick if he would borrow the DVD for me. I didn’t
want to borrow it directly from Ellen because I didn’t want other kids to taunt
her for lending one of her precious DVDs to the weird kid. Rick must’ve
borrowed that DVD for me over a dozen times. The last time, I figured out how
to copy it and I didn’t have to borrow it again.

As the years
passed, Taylor, the astronaut, went from representing my father to representing
me, and the apes went from representing the marauders to representing other
kids. I was Taylor, trying to hide the knowledge I’d learned, and the kids were
the apes, hunting me down and kicking the crap out of me because I knew too
much.

Then, as I got
older, I wasn’t Taylor anymore, I was Dr. Zira, the scientist. She was the one
who’d started to understand why things worked the way they did and she wanted
to tell the other apes. But the apes wouldn’t listen to her and, if she talked
too much, they’d kill her.

Of course, I
never thought that anyone in Clearview would really want to kill me. I’d
decided that what had happened at the Mory Aqueduct was just kids getting out
of hand. But after I started my job at Corolaqua, I discovered that I was
wrong. Someone
did
want to kill me.

During my first months at
Corolaqua, I tried to keep a low profile. But Frank had heard that I was good
at analyzing and fixing things (that was why the Town Council had wanted me to
work at Corolaqua), so he asked me to check out some of the plant’s equipment.
The equipment worked, but sometimes had minor hiccups which no one had been able
to fix.

I studied the
problems and came up with repairs. So it didn’t take long for the other plant
workers to resent me and their resentment quickly grew. I found out just how
much during the annual Corolaqua celebration.

Every year, Corolaqua threw a
party at Welketch Beach and invited everyone in town. It started in the
evening, under the orange red sun, and went long into the night. It’d been a
town ritual for forty years. People swam, played football, and soccer, and they
barbecued and drank.