H2O (12 page)

Unload it into
what?

I heard our
own trucker slam his door shut and realized that he, too, was headed for the
discharge valves. The ones under
our
truck. If we didn’t scramble out,
he’d spot us. I saw him move past our tank, toward the back tanks. He was going
to unload them first.

“We have to
get out,” I said, “before he gets to our tank.”

“Where to?”
Lily said, “There’s no place to hide.”

Talk about an
understatement. We were on the flattest surface on Earth and surrounded by
truckers. I looked around, trying to gauge whether we could run to another
truck without being spotted, and that was when I saw the oddest thing yet.
Under that nearby truck, a thick metal ‘arm’ was rising out of the dry lakebed.
I looked over to another truck and saw the same thing, a metal arm rising from
the lakebed. I glanced from truck to truck and saw the same bizarre scene
playing out all over Black Rock and I realized that the trucks
had
pulled in to something. They’d pulled in to a water storage facility. Sarah’s
father had been right. Water was being stored here.

But why
here
?
Why make this the transfer point?

I watched the
truckers position the arms using controls attached to the arms themselves. They
fastened the arms to the discharge valves on their tanks, tightened the
couplings, opened the valves, and sent the water down through the arms. Under
the flats, there must’ve been storage tanks as big and as numerous as those in
Yachats.

Lily was
riveted by the metallic arms. “Looks like trucks do come in from the east,” she
said. “Someone’s got to haul all this inland.”

“There’s only
one way to find out. We have to stay for the night.” I turned my attention back
to the nearby trucker. While the water was draining from his truck, he’d moved
away to talk to another driver. “Those arms come out of hollows under the
flats,” I said. “The opening might be big enough for us to hide in.”

“Sounds like a
plan,” Lily said, like she had no second thoughts about the danger.

But I wondered
if the marauder whom Sarah had met had come up with the same plan, then been
crushed when the arms retracted into their hollows. Luckily, I didn’t have much
time to dwell on this scenario because we had to get out of the rigging before
our trucker got to our tank.

I scanned the
flats. Truckers were everywhere. So even though we only had to sprint about
twenty yards, it was still likely that one of them would spot us. But we didn’t
have any other options.

“You ready?” I
said.

Lily didn’t
hesitate. She grabbed her backpack and started to scramble out of the rigging.
I followed and we raced across the flats aiming for the nearby truck and the
arm underneath.

“A goddamn
marauder!” someone shouted.

We ducked
under the truck and the hollow came into view. Even with the arm protruding
from it, the opening was large enough to dive into. We both jumped and I
immediately felt panic. I didn’t hit the ground.

I was in a
freefall.

Finally, I hit
and tumbled over. I scrambled to my feet, ready to run, my heart pumping
furiously, and I eyed my surroundings.

We were in a giant cavern. The
floor beneath us was made of some kind of metal (steel?) and the arms rose from
that metal and jutted out through rectangular openings above. From down here, I
could see that the arms were aligned in an array. I was sure that we were
standing on top of one massive storage tank and each arm fed into it.

The light
streaming down through the openings created a checkered pattern on the floor,
but the cavern stretched way past this pattern, into darkness, and I couldn’t
see where it ended.

“You going
after ‘em?” a trucker shouted. The voice was above us and it sounded harsh.

“Let’s go,” I
said to Lily, expecting a trucker to drop down into the cavern.

Lily and I
took off, running past the array of arms, toward the darkness. As we ran, I
noticed that where the arms were connected to the floor, there weren’t any
seams or rivets. It was as if the floor and the arms were one huge piece of metal.
That seemed impossible.

A shot rang
out and the bullet clanged off the metal surfaces. I glanced up and saw a
trucker leaning down through one of the openings, clutching a gun. He shot at
us again and Lily and I both ducked behind an arm, but I wanted to get away
from the openings, so I grabbed Lily’s hand, waited a second or two, then took
off again. We tried to keep the metal arms between the trucker and us.

Another shot
rang out, echoing through the chamber.

Lily and I
raced forward, weaving past several more arms.

A shot
exploded off the metal floor as we hit the end of the array and ran into the
darkness. Here, the trucker couldn’t see us anymore but we couldn’t see
anything either. We raced forward and I expected to run into a wall any second.
The cavern couldn’t be too much bigger.

But we didn’t
come to a wall. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that the checkered
pattern was now fifty yards away. The trucker had stopped firing so we stopped
running. We waited in the dark and didn’t say a word. We wanted to make sure
the trucker had given up.

While we
waited I thought about the metal arms. I’d noticed that even though they were
bent in four places, I hadn’t seen any hinges, flanges, nuts, bolts, or screws.
Not one piece of hardware usually associated with a joint. I’d also noticed
something odd about the openings above us. There weren’t any panels ready to
slide over them and close them up, and I was sure the openings were closed when
the trucks had pulled in.

After thirty minutes of silence,
Lily and I began to talk again and we laid out our next move.

Truckers would
be arriving all day and unloading water. When night fell, we’d see if trucks
came in from the east to load up. If they did, we’d climb up one of the arms
and hide in the rigging of one of those trucks and see where it took us. And if
no trucks came tonight, we’d wait two or three more nights and see if they came
then. We had enough food to last about that long, but then we’d have to leave.

We had plenty
of time before nightfall so we started to explore the cavern. First, we wanted
to find out how large it was. We walked forward, farther into the dark,
expecting to hit a wall any second, but we didn’t. Our only landmark was the
checkerboard of light behind us and it became smaller and smaller as we marched
on.

“This place is
huge,” Lily said.

It was hard to
believe that we hadn’t hit a wall yet, and I added the enormity of the place to
the list of oddities I was cataloguing.

Five minutes
later, we finally hit a wall, and I ran my hand along it. “It’s made of metal,”
I said and knelt down to feel where the wall met the floor. The bottom of the
wall curved smoothly into the floor. “There isn’t a seam here. It’s like the
entire cavern is one piece of steel.”

“That’s not
possible, right?” Lily said.

I didn’t
answer. I looked back to the array, which was now just a tiny dot of light in
the distance. How could this place be this big and still be machined from one
piece of metal?

“Let’s look
for that equipment,” I said. We had already concluded that somewhere down here
there had to be machinery that pumped all this water back up from the storage
tank below.

We headed back
toward the array, the only area where there was enough light to examine the
chamber. “Who do you think runs this thing?” Lily said. “It doesn’t just take
care of itself.”

“Maybe there’s
a town near the flats,” I said, but even though I’d volunteered that, for some
reason, I didn’t believe it myself.

Back at the array, we walked up
and down the rows of arms and didn’t come across any equipment. We saw nothing
but the smooth, unblemished surface of the metal floor rising into the arms.

We were also
on the lookout for any truckers taking potshots at us from above, but the only
things we saw up there were the bellies of trucks. Periodically, those bellies
moved as truckers moved their second and third tanks over the arms. Then we’d
hear the soft hums of the arms being repositioned. Those hums were as clean and
elegant as the smooth surfaces around us.

After we
finished exploring the lit area of the cavern, we debated whether to explore
the dark outer reaches. We’d have to do it by feel because we wouldn’t be able
to see anything. In the end, we decided to hold off. So we hid in the dark,
just out of sight of the openings, and listened to the trucks. Our wave of
trucks left and the next wave pulled in, and that’s how it went all day long.
One wave after another, washing on shore, then retreating. We had plenty of
time to talk and late in the afternoon, Lily finally told me the truth about
her travels.

Lily grew up learning biology.
Her grandfather taught it to her and Lily had wanted to learn as much as
possible. But her mother insisted that the tutoring stop and eventually her
mother won that battle. That’s when Lily started to pursue biology on her own.
And it was during that time that she became interested in the Virus.

She started to
research it, trying to hide her work from her mom, knowing that her mom
wouldn’t approve. Well, she was right. Her mom found her research, then tried
to stop her from doing any more, and so began a series of bitter arguments.
During one of those arguments, her mom let it slip that Lily’s grandfather had
studied the Virus and had abandoned his research because it was far too
dangerous. By now Lily’s grandfather had passed away, so Lily couldn’t ask him
about it, but she badly wanted to find his research. She tried to dig it up,
practically taking apart the house, and she even searched other places in town
where her grandfather had spent time. She couldn’t find even one shred of his
research, so she accused her mom of destroying it and that led to more bitter
arguments.

If only Lily
had connected the disappearance of that research to the disappearance of
scientific knowledge in the Territory, she might’ve forgiven her mom. But like
me, and everyone else in the Territory, she didn’t connect the missing pieces
of her own puzzle to the missing pieces of the larger puzzle. Neither of us
suspected that much more than ignorance was working to destroy knowledge.

Lily ended up wanting to develop
a vaccine for the Virus. A vaccine that would allow people to travel anywhere,
anytime. To do this, she needed sophisticated equipment and specific drugs and
that was why she’d begun taking trips to other towns. It wasn’t to explore the
Territory.

She traveled
to dead towns that were once home to hospitals or medical labs or biotech
research firms. There, she’d search for the equipment or drugs she needed. Her
mom was furious about the trips, but Lily went anyway. And every once in a
while, she’d find the right piece of equipment or a drug or even some relevant
study that could help with her research. None of this mattered to her mom.
After Lily’s first trip, her mom stopped talking to her.

Lily made another dozen trips
over the years and most of them were failures. Many of the hospitals and
medical labs had already been looted clean. The biotech firms were usually
better targets, and she ended up finding enough equipment and drugs to continue
her research. (On this trip, the one that had led through Yachats, she’d been
headed to a biotech lab in Cutler.)

When I asked
if she was getting closer to finding a vaccine, she said that she needed more
information about the Virus itself. At one point, she thought she’d caught a
lucky break when she came across an old epidemiological study. It’d been
started right after the outbreak, but was never finished. And what it found was
confusing.

Lily explained
that there are two ways a virus spreads. Vertical transmission, mother to
child, and horizontal transmission, person to person, like through air, saliva,
or contaminated food. The Passim Virus was horizontal and that made sense.
That’s how pandemics usually spread. But what wasn’t normal was the pattern of
transmission. The Virus popped up in so many places at the same time that it
didn’t seem possible that transmissions between those places could’ve already
occurred. Especially when you took into account another anomaly. The incubation
period. If you became infected, you died within a few hours. From what Lily had
been able to learn through the scant information she’d managed to dig up about
other viruses, that was practically unheard of.

Lily also told me about her
attempts to locate a good sample of the Virus. First, she had focused on
samples stored in abandoned labs. It was a long shot that the samples would be
still living, but a sample was a sample. She ventured out on four of these
expeditions and each was a failure. The samples weren’t where they were
supposed to be. She said it was like following a fake treasure map.

So for the
last few years, she had changed tactics. She’d decided to collect a sample from
a recent victim, and that meant flirting with Mateo Ford, the guy who ran the
Line in Klamath. Mateo was the key to finding out what towns were reporting new
victims. When Mateo gave her information that she thought might lead to a
victim, she’d head out.

But when she
arrived in a town that had reported a death, the people there would always
stonewall her. Sometimes they denied that there’d been a victim at all. She
didn’t know if the information Mateo had gleaned from the Line was just plain
wrong, or if these people were lying because they didn’t want outsiders to
think the Virus had infected their town. Other times, she’d make it to a town
and find that the victim had been cremated or already buried.