The Water Wars (9 page)

The radio burst forth again in that strange language. The driver answered, and another voice joined in as well. Then more silence.

I strained to hear something, and I could just make out boots crunching against gravel outside. I pressed my face to the truck’s side, and I could hear the engine ticking as it cooled. More boots crunched, and a new voice called out. There was some muffled talking, and some more boots joined in. Then a hand grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me away from the side.

“What’s so interesting?” asked the pirate who had spoken to Will. He was large, bearded, and bald, and his arms were covered with tattoos.

I shrugged. My ears burned.

“You’re wasting your time snooping,” said the pirate.

“You’re going to buy your way across.” The idea came to me in a flash.

“You’re a smart missy.”

How else did pirates move about so freely? They couldn’t fight their way across, because they were outnumbered. Plus all those boots outside meant people talking about something important: money, water, or both.

“But how do you know they won’t shoot you once you’re across?” I asked. “No, that would be stupid,” I said, answering my own question.

The pirate nodded. “We wash their hands, and they wash ours.”

“Is it illegal to steal water if they don’t arrest you?” I asked.

“Not if you pay them enough.” The pirate smiled widely, big gaps where his teeth should be.

Perhaps this was the way things worked in the shaker world. The rules only applied to people who couldn’t afford different rules. If you had money, you had choices—like pirates crossing the border freely, or Kai not attending school, or the WABs drinking clean water. If you didn’t, you had only chances.

The talking stopped, and then the truck’s engine growled to life. The other vehicles joined in, and soon we were moving. I could hear the helicopter overhead again.

“Where are you taking us?”

“Only he knows for sure,” the pirate said.

“He? Who?”

But the pirate was silent, and from the glare Will gave me, I knew it was best not to keep asking questions.

We drove for another hour until the sun had completely set. My bottom ached, and my neck was stiff and sore. Will had fallen asleep against my thigh. He awoke with a start when the truck honked loudly three times, followed by two short taps. After a moment an air horn responded with the same sequence. The truck lurched forward, and the sound against the tires was smoother and quieter. After a few minutes, the truck slowed, then stopped again.

“Where are we?”

“Sanctuary,” said the pirate.

The men hopped out of the back of the truck and left us inside. I could hear motors shutting down all around and men greeting each other loudly. I tried to stand, but the plastene cuffs the pirates had placed around my ankles made it impossible. I fell and started to cry.

Will put one arm around me. “Shh,” he murmured. “It’s all right.”

“They’re going to kill us,” I choked out.

“If they were going to kill us, they would have done it already. They could have left us by the side of the road instead of bringing us all the way up here.”

I had to admit it would have been easy enough to shoot us and leave us in the road. Pirates did it all the time. “Then why are we here?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s wait and see. We must have something they want.”

I tried to imagine what the pirates might want, but I couldn’t. We weren’t rich, and we had no water. If the pirates hoped for a ransom, our father barely had enough money for our mother’s medicine. He would give them everything, but it wouldn’t be enough. Thinking about it only made me cry harder.

“Don’t cry, Vera,” said Will. He smoothed my hair against the side of my face, outlining a brown parenthesis against my cheek.

“I wish we were home.”

“We will go home. I promise.”

“I wish we had told the Guard. I’d rather be in jail than here.”

Will took a deep breath. “We’re hundreds of kilometers from Illinowa. We have to see what the pirates have planned. We need to stay calm, watch, and wait. We’ll have our chance.”

Of course Will was right again. But I realized clearly for the first time how desperate our plight was. It had been foolish to think we could rescue Kai. Now, wherever he was, it couldn’t be worse than being held captive by pirates. Even cannibals were more trustworthy.

Before I could let my fears completely overwhelm me, the doors on the back of the truck burst open, and two new pirates came inside.

“You two,” said one of the men, as if there might be two other children in the back of the truck. “Come with me.”

Will lifted a leg to show him it was cuffed. The pirate growled, then stomped out. In a moment he returned with wire cutters. “Worthless,” he said. Then he snipped clean through our restraints.

We stumbled out of the back of the truck and into a night lit by torches and halo-lights. I blinked and nearly keeled over, but Will caught me. The pirate took me by the other arm, and he marched us across a dirt lot toward a cinder-block building. There were about a half-dozen trucks parked in a circle alongside some heavy machinery. The helicopter had landed nearby. Smoke still trailed from its exhaust, and its blades spun lazily. Men watched as we crossed the lot—dark men, disheveled and dirty. A dog barked, and I instinctively gripped the pirate’s hand, then let go. Although I was trembling inside, I made up my mind to refuse to let the pirate know. I held up my head and strode purposefully forward.

The man rapped once on a steel door at the front of the cinder-block building. In a moment the door opened, and he pushed us inside. The dimly lit room was darker than the night, and my eyes were momentarily blind. I could make out a few candles and then soft fabrics hanging from the walls. Music played quietly—acoustic instruments from an earlier era. Even as my eyes adjusted, however, my brain could not. Curtains, candles, and music were the last things I expected from pirates, and they were a stark contrast from the concrete exterior.

“What kind of children walk the open road?” asked a deep voice from the shadows.

“We weren’t walking,” said Will. “We had our pedicycles.”

“Didn’t get you very far, did they?”

The voice belonged to a man about our father’s age and height. He wore black boots, a gray sweatshirt, and black canvas pants that fit tightly at his waist. He had longish hair, a thick beard, and a tattoo of a small bird on the side of his neck. His nails were clean, and he wore a single yellow band on his left ring finger. His hands were stroking the fur on the heads of two golden-brown dogs.

I stepped back instinctively, but the dogs remained still. “Are you going to kill us?” I asked.

“Kill you? Why would I kill you?”

“You’ve kidnapped us.”

“I haven’t kidnapped you. We found you on the road. You would’ve starved to death if we hadn’t picked you up.”

“Is that why your men chased us and hunted us down?”

The pirate frowned and stopped petting the dogs. “You ran from them.”

“Because they were pirates.”

“What do you know about pirates?”

I considered his question. Everything I knew about pirates, I had learned in school. They were dangerous, lawless men, who would do anything to steal water, including killing and maiming. But it was true that I had never met a real pirate, and didn’t know anyone who had.

“Pirates steal water,” said Will, “water that’s meant for other people.”

The pirate laughed, deep and rich. His hair bounced on his shoulders like something alive. “Governments steal water,” he said, “water that doesn’t belong to them.”

Will stared at the pirate but didn’t say anything else. Water belonged to whoever drilled or refined it, and pirates certainly did neither. They took the water collected through the hard work of others.

“So now what are you going to do with us?” I asked.

“What should I do?” asked the pirate.

“Let us go.”

“Can’t do that, little sister. How will you get home? It’s dangerous out there for children.”

Of course the pirate was right. There was nothing but rocks and sand between here and home. Even if we could get back across the border now, we could never walk hundreds of kilometers without water. And even if we could, bandits or coyotes would surely get to us. We were trapped with bad men in a foreign republic. I bit my lip to stop myself from crying again.

“We’re not children,” said Will, annoyed.

I expected the pirate to laugh, as shakers usually did when kids insisted they were grown up. But instead he did something strange. He raised his head and looked off into the distance as if he could see something there. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

“Will you let us go, then?”

The pirate returned his gaze to Will, and then he did laugh. “Do I look like a fool? Let you run straight to the army?”

“We won’t. We promise!” said Will.

“A boy’s promise. That’s pretty.”

“It’s worth more than a pirate’s.”

“You have a lot to learn about pirates.”

I knew what Will was thinking: The farther we went, the harder it would be to get home. The harder it was to get home, the less likely we were to ever see our parents again—traveling with pirates, no less, who knew where or how far? Twenty-four hours ago we had a plan to rescue Kai. Now
we
needed rescuing.

“We’re looking for a boy,” said the pirate. “About your age.”

“A boy?” repeated Will.

“A boy and his father—a driller.”

I opened my mouth, but quickly shut it.

Kai,
I thought.
They’re looking for Kai.

T
he pirate was called Ulysses. He said he was named after an ancient warrior, but I had never heard that tale. I thought of him instead as the king of the pirates. Like a king he rode tall and proud at the wheel in the first truck. He insisted the pirates had no king; they didn’t even have a leader. They were wanderers who went wherever the winds and water took them.

“Why do they follow you, then?” I asked.

“They’re free not to. They follow me because they want to.”

“That still makes you the leader.”

“Are we free not to follow you?” asked Will. He sat pressed up against the door. Ulysses was driving, and I was in the middle. The two dogs—Cheetah and Pooch—sat in a small compartment behind us. Cheetah (or maybe it was Pooch) kept poking her head over the divider and sniffing my face. Although the dogs had frightened me when they first tracked us, up close they seemed like large furry dolls that would rather sleep, lick, and sniff than bite. In fact, I knew, dogs had been pets until feeding them made their masters hungry.

“You’re children. Children don’t have choices.”

“That’s just what shakers always say.”

“They say it because it’s true.”

I had no idea where we were, except I knew we were traveling north again. The pirates seemed to know what they were doing, because their caravan moved fast—as fast as the broken roads allowed. I counted ten vehicles: three pickups, two jeeps, four tanker cars, and a converted fire truck the pirates used for pumping water. Somewhere overhead, the helicopter followed.

“Do you have children?” I asked.

The pirate was silent for a moment. “No,” he said finally.

“Are you married?” asked Will.

“Yes,” said Ulysses.

“Where’s your wife, then?” I asked.

“You ask a lot of questions,” said Ulysses.

I waited for him to say something else, but he did not, so I decided to stay silent as well. I peered out the window over Will’s shoulder. Minnesota did not look any different than home. The landscape was brown and dry, and there were broken buildings and cracked roads everywhere. No people; no signs of life. If there was more water here, you certainly couldn’t see it from the ground. Minnesota kept its riches well-hidden.

The trucks rumbled northward. I nudged Will, but he ignored me. I occupied myself instead by scanning the horizon for clouds. The sky, however, was perfectly blue, and every time I thought I saw a wisp of moisture, it turned out to be a trick of the eye, sunlight glancing off dust.

I wondered what our father was doing right now. Had he gone to the army to report our disappearance? Had he told our mother? In her fragile state, the news could make her worse. But surely she would notice our absence. The more I thought about it, the more I became sick with anxiety—not for myself, but for my parents. In the front of the truck, I felt strangely secure with Ulysses driving, although I knew I should be frightened. But when I thought of my parents—alone and worried—I was seized with panic. I reached for Will’s hand, and though he was pretending to be asleep against the door, he twined his fingers with mine and held tight.

We spent the night in the truck with the dogs. Ulysses said it was too dangerous to sleep in the tents. I didn’t think pirates were afraid of anything, but he explained that Minnesota was one of the few places where wild animals still roamed freely. They were aggressive and hungry and would think nothing of eating a couple of children if they could. Although it was cold in the truck and grew colder as the night deepened, Ulysses had plenty of blankets. In the darkest part of the night, he started the engine and warmed the truck with the heater. The rumble of the engine and the warm circulating air soon made me drowsy, and I fell back asleep.