H2O (16 page)

The helicopters
shot past us, swung around, and came back firing. The hail of bullets was
furious. Our front hood whipped open and flew into the windshield. Crater
couldn’t see and lost control of the car. It spun wildly, careened off the
road, straight into the unyielding tree trunks, and came to a jarring stop.

The
helicopters swung around for the final assault.

Crater was
dazed, bleeding from the head, and Lily and I were shaken. But we had to get
out before the helicopters finished us off. We tried the doors. They were
smashed shut. So we kicked out the remains of the back windshield and I pulled
Crater from the front seat. His pants were drenched in blood and from the look
of it, one of his legs was broken. Lily and I dragged him out of the car and
into the woods.

Benny and
Miloff were already on the run, a hundred yards ahead of us. Lily and I ran,
holding Crater between us, his dangling leg banging off the ground. Behind us,
we heard the roar of the helicopters growing. They were landing on the road.
Crater yelled at us to leave him behind, but we held onto him and kept running.
I glanced back and saw Fibs entering the woods.

Crater ripped
himself from our grip, crumbled to the ground, and yelled, “Get the hell out of
here!” I hoisted him back up. Bullets thudded off the tree trunks.

Crater yanked
himself away from me again and fell to the ground. I went for him and he
commanded, “Go! You’ll find what you’re looking for in Iron Horse!”

I hesitated,
not sure what he meant, and more shots rang out.

Lily shouted,
“We have to go!”

We both took
off and I caught glimpses of Miloff and Benny far ahead of us, disappearing
behind trees, then reappearing. We raced forward, following them. Behind us,
the gunfire slowed and I wondered if the Fibs had stopped for Crater. Then I
realized that Miloff and Benny had disappeared. They were no longer popping out
from behind trees.

We kept
running forward and soon enough I heard the crunching of underbrush behind us.
The Fibs were gaining on us when out of nowhere the ground beneath our feet
dropped out and we tumbled down, hitting dirt. We quickly scrambled back to our
feet. We’d fallen into a ravine, some kind of dry creek. I looked down the
length of it and saw Miloff and Benny racing away. We ran toward them and they
started to climb out of the ravine, back toward the Fibs. They were doubling
back but, for that to work, Lily and I had to get out, too. So we hurried over
to the ravine wall, grabbed some tree roots, hauled ourselves up, and scrambled
out.

We lay flat on
the ground, stock still, and waited for the Fibs. I heard them approach, drop
down into the ravine, and then I looked up and saw Miloff and Benny in the
woods ahead of us. They motioned for us to crawl toward them. We did. Then we
all ran back toward the road.

But not all
the way back. Once we closed in on the road, we ran parallel to it.

“What about
getting Crater?” I asked.

“Not in the
cards,” Miloff said.

We moved as fast as we could for
over an hour, then settled into a hike.

Miloff was
aiming for an abandoned resort. It’d been a marauder camp long ago and he’d
heard that the former occupants had left a car behind. He couldn’t be sure it
was still there, but to get to Iron Horse, we had to hike in that direction
anyway. If we were lucky, we’d make it to the resort by tomorrow night.

The
helicopters circled over us twice and that slowed us down. We didn’t want the
Fibs to spot movement, so we stopped and hid under the thickest part of the
forest.

While there, I
asked Miloff about the attack helicopters and he filled us in. Crow had
discovered four of them at a military base in what used to be California. No
one knew how to fly them, so Crow taught himself and then taught some of his
men. Miloff said that this feat more than any other had proved to Xere and the
marauders that Crow was smarter than anyone in the Territory. He’d taught
himself a complex skill based on knowledge that had disappeared.

That night we camped without a
fire so the helicopters wouldn’t spot us. In the dark, engulfed by the sounds
of animals on the prowl, Miloff told us his story.

The marauders
had recruited him from Talahachee, an electricity town. Talahachee ran the
Orange Creek Dam and the dam generated power for towns in the central part of
the Territory. Miloff was one of the workers who’d venture into the wilderness
to fix transmission lines. Over the years, he’d developed a reputation for
going beyond the call of duty. He’d fix lines that ran to abandoned homes
outside of towns. He did it so people who didn’t have homes could have them,
and those people were thankful.

Then he
started heading deeper into the wilderness, following power lines that hadn’t
been used for years. He could’ve repaired them, but no one wanted to risk going
that far inland for a home. So instead of repairing them, Miloff decided to map
them, for the future, in case people started to venture out again.

He went deeper
and deeper into the wilderness, mapping out more and more of it. There weren’t
any detailed maps of the Territory and, back then, Miloff had no idea why. Of
course, now he did. Maps were another way to decipher what was going on, so the
aliens, through the Fibs, had long ago destroyed as many as they could. (When
Miloff brought up maps, I remembered that map of the western states that I’d
found as a teen and how I’d thought of it as a rare treasure. I’d been right on
that front.)

Maria,
Miloff’s wife, drew the finished maps. She was an artist, not by trade, but by
talent. Like everyone in Talahachee, she worked for the Orange Creek Dam. So
she practiced her art by drawing these maps and they were striking. Miloff and
Maria spent hours together. He’d describe what he’d seen, bringing his
adventures to life, and she’d draw the maps from his stories and sketches.
Their love for each other was intertwined with the maps of the Territory. Those
were the children they couldn’t have.

The marauders
found out about Miloff from the Line. They saw the Talahachee Town Council send
a communiqué to the Fibs, asking them to arrest Miloff for treason. They were
accusing him of connecting a power line to a marauder camp, but the marauders
saw that this communiqué had appeared out of thin air. The Town Council hadn’t
sent it. It was a false charge and that meant that the aliens wanted to get rid
of Miloff. He was a threat to their secret.
But why?

So the
marauders wanted to get to Miloff first, to protect him, and to find out why he
was a threat. They set out for Talahachee and arrived before the Fibs. They
warned Miloff and offered him sanctuary, but they couldn’t convince him that he
was in any danger. Miloff believed, like everyone in the Territory did, that if
you did your job and didn’t rock the boat, the Fibs left you alone.

That night,
the Fibs stormed his house and started shooting. They killed Maria and captured
him. But he broke free and because he knew the lay of the land better than the
Fibs, he escaped.

He camped in
the wilderness for a few nights, contemplating suicide. He knew he could join
Maria through death. Then he realized he’d already joined her. She was alive,
out here, in the land that they’d mapped together. He felt her. Here, in the
wilderness, he could still live with her. So Miloff joined the only other
people living in the wilderness. The marauders.

The next day we hiked at a fast
and steady pace. There were no helicopters.

Under the
purple glow of the evening sky, we arrived at The Cliffdale Resort. The
wilderness had taken it over. Vegetation covered its cracked walls and grew on
its roof. The decorative wooden beams that crisscrossed it were rotting and
plants grew out from the rot.

We immediately
started searching for the car and found it in the stable at the back of the
property. The key was in the ignition, but the car wouldn’t start. We checked
the gas tank and it was almost full. But the gas had probably been diluted by
condensation, so we needed a fresh supply of gas (assuming everything else
about the car still worked).

Miloff thought
there might be some gas stored on the property and we all began to search. We
rummaged through the stable’s underground storage area, the resort’s
maintenance buildings, the gardening sheds, and a half dozen other custodial
areas, and came up empty. Miloff resigned himself to hiking to Red, a small
marauder camp, where they’d have a car we could use to drive to Iron Horse. The
hike to Red would take three days.

I told Miloff
that there was still the possibility of getting the car on the road. I could
try and separate the water from the gas in the car’s tank. When it came to
water, I was good at solving problems. I’d need some isoproponal, but
considering we were at a resort, I knew the odds of finding some were pretty
good.

My first stop was the old
housekeeping storeroom. Isopropanol had been a key ingredient in dozens of
products before the Virus, including cleaning products. Sure enough, I came
across a case of Windex, a mass-produced window cleaner from those days, and I
saw isoproponal listed as one of the ingredients.

I sequestered
myself in the resort’s maintenance room and began to build a makeshift
distillation tank. Meanwhile, in case my experiment didn’t work out, Lily,
Benny and Miloff gathered supplies for a hike to Red. I worked all afternoon
and so did they. Then we all took a break for dinner. The marauders who’d used
this as a base camp had left the pantry stocked with food, so our meal turned
out to be a welcome luxury.

The food
itself was a reflection of the marauders’ determination to survive in the
wilderness. Since their camps didn’t have power, they preserved their food
using the same methods that the small, self-sufficient towns in the Territory
did. Salt, oil, sugar, alcohol, vinegar, drying, cold storage, and lactic
fermentation.

After dinner,
I finished building the tank and I distilled the isoproponal. Then I rigged up
a spray dryer and turned the isoproponal into a powder.

I tracked down
Miloff and we headed to the stable where I dropped the powder into the car’s
gas tank. Miloff keyed the ignition, but the car still wouldn’t start. He tried
a few more times and it sounded like the engine wanted to catch, but it
wouldn’t. We gave it a break for ten minutes, then I dropped in more powder.
Miloff turned the ignition and the car started. For the first time since I’d
met Miloff, he laughed.

We packed the
car for the next day’s journey.

We each slept in our own room
that night. My room was musty, but comfortable. After the nights spent under
rolling trucks and cold skies, my sleep was heavy.

I dreamt of
trucks crossing the wilderness. Tank trucks. The roads they traveled were
freshly paved, the asphalt sparkling under a brilliant sun.

But the trucks
had no drivers.

Truck after
truck rolled to the coasts. The brown coast of Africa, the green coast of
Europe, the blue coast of Asia, and the gold coast of North America. The ocean
levels were low and the beaches wide.

New
desalination plants dotted the coasts, each plant molded from one huge piece of
alien steel, like grand sculptures from a pristine future. The gleaming plants
inhaled seawater and exhaled pure water. The driverless trucks filled their
tanks with that pure water and headed inland. There wasn’t a man or woman in
sight.

I was watching
the start of water’s journey to the stars. A journey that didn’t need the help
of men. And when I awoke and my head cleared, I was left with one thought:
There’d come a time when the aliens didn’t need men to mine their water and
when that time came, they’d kill the rest of us.

We drove south, over cracked and
battered roads. Roads that Miloff knew would be free of Fibs and trucks. In
some areas, vegetation covered the roads, but never thick enough to stop us.
When we entered the redwood forests, the giant trees gave us complete cover.
Even though I’d seen photos of redwoods, I wasn’t prepared for their grandeur.
All other trees were peasants compared to these kings. Under their protection,
we drove the rest of the way to Red, a small marauder base camp consisting of
three cabins.

Four marauders
were currently stationed in Red. Their job was to make forays to the east,
explore abandoned towns where the Virus was dead, and search for valuable
Remnants. They brought those Remnants back to Red, and every few months
transported them to Iron Horse.

That night, as
I settled into a cabin, through the open window, I heard Miloff and the four
marauders talking in hushed voices. There was an energy to their conversation,
a kind of euphoric anticipation, and I knew they were talking about the plan to
free the Territory.

At dawn, we
filled the car’s gas tank from Red’s supply of gas and we headed southwest.
Just before noon, we drove out from under the cover of the redwoods and into
bright sunlight. By nightfall, we’d be in Iron Horse, a tiny town in what once
was Plumas County, California. Plumas was a rural county where the Sierra
Nevada Mountains met the Cascade Mountains and where millions of acres of
forests met thousands of miles of rivers. It was a haven before the Virus.

We made good
time and arrived in the early evening. The town was made up of just one small
block of buildings, all two stories high. None of them housed shops like in
Clearview or Yachats. Instead, they housed the marauders’ operations, supplies,
and, most importantly, their access to the Line. Iron Horse was hardwired to
the Line and from here, the marauders monitored the entire system.