Authors: Benjamin Parzybok
A green light pulsed next to his name.
“Whoa,” Renee said. “That one’s good.”
“Fucking right it is.”
“Where do you suppose he is?”
Josh shrugged. “Dead or gone, amigo.” He pulled out another card and scanned again. This time it was a light-skinned girl in her twenties.
Renee shuddered. “Ugh. How did you get these cards again?”
“Could be in jail,” Josh said, “or maybe she left somehow, I don’t know. If you distribute water, you hit this button here and it registers the location and water given out. They do that when we pick up.”
“How do you know this gizmo isn’t sending your coordinates up with the request? We’re not exactly a water distribution here.”
Josh looked at her quizzically and then blanched.
“I mean it’s got the—fucking hell, the location is right there, right? You don’t think they keep track of these scanners?” Renee rose in alarm. “Bea! Get your shit!” She turned to Josh. “Nice one, dipshit.”
“No—there’s no way,” Josh said.
“Of course there is, if they’re missing one they’ll want it back. It’s sending your location. We’re out of here.”
Bea charged down the stairs and Renee instructed her to rouse the house for leaving.
“Josh, turn that fucking thing off.”
“You’re being alarmist.”
“You stay if you want. They don’t even know who you are. ”
They gathered solemnly, called from their various jobs at HQ. “We think there’s a chance someone is going to come looking for us, and because of this,”—she pointed to the scanner—“a water card scanner, every one of us has got to jump ship. This house has to look abandoned and we’ve got to find a place. Ideas?”
“Jeffersons would take us in,” Bea said. They had met the Jeffersons during the burial runs, a small house up the street.
“Good—but not all of us. Julia? You stay there and keep an eye out on HQ. Leroy, you and Chris go with her. Anyone else? I propose the rest of us camp at the water tower park.”
“Ma’am,” Chris said, ducking his head. He pointed to the slatted barrier he’d built over the big broken window that led to the front porch. “If you don’t mind my saying it, this could be caved in for effect and”—he turned red and studied the floor for a moment—“if I were you, well, it’d be effective if someone defecated on the porch. In front of the door. Make it seem like no one lived here, you know.”
Renee nodded. “Brilliant. Thank you, Chris. Everybody else, clear out!”
That night at the water tower Renee wrapped in a sheet and huddled next to Bea on top of the playground structure. Below them the others crowded together to keep warm. The night had turned chilly. Under the sheet, Renee could smell the body sweat and rankness on their clothes, grime and dust and sourness. In this moment hiding atop a playground structure, ejected by fear from their new home, the task of cleaning one’s own body felt monumental.
Josh had apologized, and then he had ridden off with the scanner to test the rest of the cards in transit, to leave a wandering trail for the thing. When he met up with them at the park he announced he had seven working cards.
Despite the news, Renee felt sick-hearted. She wondered if they’d lost their house. She suddenly wearied of fighting back, of feeling like she was in charge, of being on the run; daunted by the work ahead of them. The dust dried the saliva in her mouth and she did not feel like speaking. She wished she could see Zach. She tried to call to him with the green laser but he did not answer, and so she tucked her head into the sheet and wept, but no water came to her eyes.
Late the next afternoon they tentatively returned, collecting Julia from the neighbors on the way. Julia told them she’d wakened to see the police at their house. There were signs of them throughout—the feces on the front porch had been tracked into the house, then back-tracked and scraped off on the edge of the porch, likely with much cursing. Their ruse had worked; it was highly unlikely they’d come back to the same house, and there was hope in that.
Her first official visitor was called
Martin Ostrovsky. According to Leroy he traded in drugs and water and gasoline and had half a dozen men working for him. In other words, medium-small fry in the neighborhood bigwig business. He ran his operation about twelve blocks to the east, and theirs, the Sherwood Club, had extended into his area. There were others of these kind that would come to confront her, she thought with anxiety, and ones with a lot more clout.
She stationed Bea at the door of her office, so that she would loom behind whomever was having an audience with her, a big sentry there to intimidate, and she asked the volunteers to make regular foot traffic up and down the hall outside.
Renee stood and offered her hand, making Martin lean deep into the desk to shake. He scowled. He was big and thick with a shiny bald head—a subtle mark of wealth, for to shave a head required wasted water. From his just-visible whisker growth she could see his hair had gone gray. The two henchmen he’d brought in tow she made stay outside the house, and he was not used to being treated this way.
He asked her what she was.
“What have you heard?” Her chair was about eighteen inches higher than his, making it seem as though he was sitting in a child’s chair. It also meant that his head was about the height of her bust, which he kept glancing at, and she wondered if she might need to have her desk adjusted.
“I’ve seen the news and I know Ronny left to come work here, that backstabbing son of a bitch. How much do you pay him?”
“We’re all volunteers.”
He looked surprised and she could see him trying to figure out a business model that kept its employees without pay. “What are you shelling out then? What’s the scoop here?”
She gave him the pitch she’d given others, about neighborhood security and the inequality of the water system. About rebuilding and providing where the city had abandoned them. A network of citizens that looked out for each other. For a moment she heard her father’s voice in her, felt his power and persuasiveness rise up out of her and fill the room. How as she painted the vision she herself became lost in it, said it as if she might suddenly stand on her desk, or put her head down and cry out a spell, feeling her own words and her purpose dig deep into her gut. That by merely saying it made it happen. There was a rightness of it.
His facial muscles were taut, bunched into a grimace of puzzlement. For a moment, she thought, he had bought the vision she wove.
“We’re the neighborhood’s net. We’re its keeper.”
He said nothing, his eyes blank and startled. He tried a smile, and then one corner of Martin’s lip slowly raised into a sneer and he swore. “Keeper? What’s that supposed to mean?”
She saw that it was over, then. No alliances would be built here, their intentions were at odds. If the Sherwood Club continued to grow like they were, they would overrun his territory and their aims would clash. “You can go talk to Ronny if you want to.” Her voice hardened. “But it’s his choice. If he wants to stay, he stays. You know, as a leader yourself, you could make a difference. We would be happy to have your service.”
Martin scoffed, “Oh, I’ll talk to him.” He pointed at her. “And I’ll be back.”
Renee pulled a sheet of paper from her stack. On it was written the name of every “boss” in the Northeast that her volunteers had come up with. She found Martin’s name and crossed it off. “Good luck,” she said.
After he left in a huff of disgust and confusion she went over her list. By each name she had written the estimated number of employees, what their business was, and any notes she had about their reputation. She would invite each of them to meet with her.
“You’re going to make a lot of enemies,” Bea said.
Renee startled, having forgotten that Bea was in the room, as still as a statue and holding the shotgun. She leaned back in her chair. “Yeah. His employees would rather work here.”
“I think you need more guards.”
Renee nodded. She stared at her friend, leaning against the door of her office and could hear in her voice all the ways Bea thought she was being foolish, and Renee wasn’t sure she disagreed with her. “Would you take care of that for me, Bea? Also, maybe you ought to have someone tail Ronny for a few days.”
The plan with the tunnel was not entirely clear, but that did not bother Nevel in the least. He
was driven, mainly, by the fervor to dig. One must trust that one’s subconscious has an intent, he thought. But then, as he remembered some of the dreams he’d had lately, he worried that perhaps his subconscious was not to be trusted after all. Perhaps his subconscious was working against him, rebelling against his conscious mind, assuming control, propelling him to do things that he should not be doing.
But what harm is a tunnel, he thought. Other than, say, the threat of collapse. He wiped the sweat from his brow and left a long dirt streak there along his receding hairline. “But you won’t, eh?” He patted one of its supports, which felt firm enough under his hand. Maybe the harm was that he was obsessed with it when he should be doing something else. Averting some catastrophe he was not yet aware of or making a solid plan for survival for his family’s future.
He suddenly craved to ask the question of his sleeping daughter, who’d only started speaking, and subsequently began spouting out pidgin prophecy like an oracle. This was silliness, he could see that, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she might still carry with her some omniscience from the other side, before birth, before she was anything.
He removed his shoes at the basement door and did his best to scrub himself off with the towel his wife had thoughtfully installed for him there. As he ascended the stairs he remembered that in one of his dreams the mayor had appeared with giant wings. From his bed he had watched the winged mayor flutter against his bedroom window as if he were a moth drawn by the light inside, his efforts frustrated by the glass between them.
At his daughter’s bedside he saw that she was sleeping hard, deep below dreams, and his desire to wake her for divination evaporated. Instead, he pulled the sheet up to her shoulder and admired her. These were questions he needed to answer himself.
In one quick motion she raised up on one elbow and stared intensely at him in the dim light, her eyes sparkling black beads, and he put his hands to his chest, waiting for the oracular blow that was to come. But after a moment, she only asked for her bear.
He located the dirty little stuffed animal wedged between the wall and the mattress. She wrapped it tightly in her arms again and fell back into sleep.
It was time to fly right, he told himself as he trudged back downstairs toward the basement. To stick up for his family, fists a-blazing. Once back in the tunnel, though, he picked up his shovel and began to dig anew.
Water distribution in Cully happened at a dysfunctional elementary school. Parents with younger children h
ad been the first to migrate away.
A water truck pulled into the large open-air structure built over the basketball court, to the side of the dry field. Behind it, eight National Guardsmen pulled in in two jeeps. With their rifles out, they guided people back to the perimeter while distribution was organized.
Renee and the others stood on the edge of the crowd and watched. She had a sweatshirt hood pulled deep over her face. Of the nine days she’d been to this station, three days had been violent and there’d been one death; a heavyset man attempted to steal the truck while it was in operation. He was killed brutally by a guardsman who wasted no bullets, but beat him to death with his rifle butt.
The crowd surrounding the truck was irritable with dehydration and hunger, and the system was slow and hostile.
She imagined the feel of carrying her own unit gallon home. The heaviness of that wealth.
The criminal database and the water distribution lists cross-referenced, so known criminals regularly emerged a few days after a crime, delirious with dehydration, or showed up in the hospital sick after having tried to drink from the river sludge, or fled the city to join the shadowy gangs that roved outside the governed area.
Renee crouched and watched. It was a lot of fucking work, she thought, just to survive. Today they were trying a couple of cards and Josh would be their guinea pig. Tomorrow they would try more, letting those with cards run through and then dressing them up for another go-through.
Someone patted the top of her head insistently, and she looked up to see Leroy.
“What?”
“Look.”
She stood and tried to follow where he pointed. “I don’t know what you’re trying to show me.”
Leroy pointed again, and then turned his back to where he’d pointed, as if bracing for a blow. She looked around his shoulder.
“Brown shirt, brown shirt,” Leroy whispered.
She saw him, a black man in his late twenties or early thirties. Twenty yards away, mingled into the crowd. He had woolly hair and a well-used light brown T-shirt, a hole below the collar. His face was angular and lean, his beard sparse, and then he looked directly at her and smiled. Renee shifted so that she was hidden behind Leroy. “Who is he?”