DRY - by Neal Shusterman

9) Alyssa

We ride down Laguna Canyon Road, a main street that we’ve always taken to get to the beach. I try to transport myself back to one of the times that I enjoyed the ride, but it’s just not the same. The arid wind cuts at my face. The burn in my legs feels less like exercise and more like a dreadful punishment.

Passing neighborhoods on a major main street does allow me to peer in from a safe distance, and I’m noticing that a few areas still have electricity, which is somewhat comforting to see. It makes me think that they’re working on solving these problems. Maybe cell phone towers are out because they have no power. I try to convince myself that’s the reason why I get nothing every time I try to call my parents.

“You should stop calling,” Kelton tells me. “You’re draining your battery, and you might need your phone later.”

“Maybe it’s just really crowded there,” Garrett says, doing his own rationalizations. “Like when people were camped out for days for that last Star Wars movie.”

But would Mom and Dad camp out at the beach waiting for water, when they knew that Garrett and I were home waiting for them? As much as I want the answer to be something simple that we’ll all be able to laugh about later, the longer we don’t hear from them, the harder it is for me to paint a rosy picture.

We arrive midmorning at Laguna Beach, where the marine layer still creates an overcast haze, keeping the shoreline mercifully cool. I can smell the ocean and feel the salt air making my clothes cling to my skin. Waves thunder in the distance, and although the ocean’s cadence has always been comforting to me, the silence that lingers in between each crashing wave now strikes me as odd. Still, I push forward on my bike, flying down the last stretch of road, which dead-ends into the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach just beyond. I don’t feel the blisters on my hands anymore, or the ache in my legs. I have to see that beach. I have to know that my parents are there, and that they’re okay.

But once I’m across PCH, at the edge of the boardwalk, I hit my brakes hard and stop dead in my tracks – because before me isn’t a beach populated by families retrieving water rations, but a vast, sandy wasteland. It’s virtually deserted, with just a few random people who seem to meander aimlessly. Farther out, toward the water’s edge, are machines hitched to the backs of trucks – maybe half a dozen of them spread out along the beach – but they’re not producing water. They’re not doing anything. In fact, one of them is spewing black smoke, and another one is lying on its side.

I drop my bike and step down from the boardwalk to the sand, with Garrett and Kelton close behind. My eyes dart around, searching for my parents, desperate for even the slightest sign of them.

And then Garrett says, “Alyssa, do you hear that?”

I do – it’s a sound almost musical, and eerily electronic, that lingers just beneath the sound of the waves. I walk across the sand, and the sound gets louder, until I realize it’s not just one sound, but many, all blending together. And all at once I realize what it is.

Cell phones.

The ringtones of cell phones.

There are dozens of them lying in the sand around us, creating an eerie eight-bit symphony. The lost calls of a thousand souls.

None of us knows how to react. We just watch the phones as they vibrate and ring, trying to overcome our shock. And suddenly I realize that until just a short time ago, I was on the other end of one of those lines, calling nonstop, desperately hoping that someone would answer. I see one vibrating, halfway out of the sand, and I dare myself to grab it… I hold it in my hand and after one more ring, I answer, pressing the sandy iPhone to my ear.

“Hello?” comes the voice of a child on the other end of the line. “Mom?”

He couldn’t be any older than Garrett. I try to choose my words carefully. “This isn’t your mother,” I tell him.

“Where’s my mom?” begs the child. “Who is this? Why do you have her phone?”

I pause, not sure what I can say to calm him. “I’m at the beach,” I tell him. “Your mom dropped her phone at the beach.”

“She went there to get water…”

“I don’t think there’s any water here,” I tell him. “Can you tell that to an adult? Please tell that to an adult.”

“Where’s my mom?” the kid cries.

I try to formulate the best response I can, but it’s like I’ve lost my ability to put together coherent thoughts. I have no answer for him, any more than I have an answer for myself. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. Then I hang up and drop the phone in the sand, and when it rings again I bury it. I bury it deep enough so at least there’s one phone I can’t hear ringing anymore.

“What happened here?” asks Kelton. And bit by bit the clues emerge. They are in plain sight around us, right there in the sand. It’s as if a tornado had passed through, depositing debris everywhere – debris that looms like a shadow of terrible events I can’t even begin to imagine. Plastic tables and chairs are overthrown, trash all around, being picked at by seagulls. A single abandoned shoe, which somehow seems creepiest of all. And the sand is peppered with black aluminum cans – dozens of them. I’m hit with a wave of the most awful stench, like bleach mixed with snot. It stings the insides of my nostrils, so I hold my nose, but it hardly helps. Kelton reaches down and picks up one of the cans, holding it at a safe distance.

“These are tear gas canisters,” Kelton says. “There must have been a riot squad here…”

And then there are the machines. We approach the closest one; I can see that it’s torn to shreds. All of them are. This one’s stainless steel facade has been peeled back, exposing its innards as if it were decomposing from the inside out. Tubes and wiring herniate from the opening, all leading to a series of dials and gauges, connected to three ruptured vats, and behind it, a series of arrested pistons.

Could people have done this? Could we have fought each other over these lifesaving machines, reducing them to scrap metal? Could we be so desperate for drinkable water that we’re willing to destroy the very machines that could create it, just to get that first sip…? And if so, were Mom and Dad among them?

Now I can see that at each ruined desalination machine stands a police officer in riot gear with an automatic rifle, warning people to keep away – as if there’s still something to protect.

“What happened here?” I ask the one closest to us, keeping a safe distance.

“You need to leave the beach, miss. Go home. Wait there for further instructions.”

“What happened to the people who were here?” I demand. “Were they sent somewhere else? A different beach?”

“It isn’t safe to be here,” he tells me. “You need to go home.”

I back away, right into Garrett, whose eyes have teared up, and it has nothing to do with the tear gas.

“Make him tell you where they went!” Garrett says, as if he can order me to make demands of an armed officer.

“Uh … guys?”

I look over to Kelton, who’s standing closer to the water’s edge. I follow his gaze to the spiteful ocean and direct all of my hate toward it. I can’t stand the way each crashing wave of undrinkable water mocks us.

“What is that?” asks Kelton. He points to something that’s floating, moving forward and backward with the rolling surf – a dark outline in the rolling water, visible for only moments between waves. “Is that…” Kelton squints. “Is that a body?”

And I know that whatever it is, I’ve had enough. It’s more than not wanting to know. I don’t even want to know the depth of the things I don’t want to know. I grab Garrett and pull him away, and call to Kelton.

“Kelton! We’re leaving!” Because maybe I can’t order a crowd control officer, but I sure as hell can order Kelton. Especially when it’s for his own good.

I will not think about my parents now, because if I do, I will crumble. Getting home will be an uphill ride in more ways than one, and that has to be the focus of all my mental energy right now. Getting us home.

We get to our bikes back at the boardwalk.

“We have to DO something!” Garrett insists. “We can’t just leave!”

And I turn on Garrett with a fury I didn’t even know I had. “Garrett, if you don’t shut your mouth right now I’m going to shut it for you!”

And that just brings forth a deluge of tears from him. But I can’t cry. I have to hold it together, and I’m sorry, so sorry that I took my frustration out on him. I take him into my arms and hold him. I let him sob. I don’t say anything. I just let him sob, because I know that’s what he needs. And he knows I didn’t mean it. He knows because of how tight I’m holding him. And I won’t let go until he’s ready for me to.

“Alyssa, we should go,” says Kelton, looking even more freaked out by the unidentified floating object than I am.

Garrett pulls away from me gently. “Let’s just go,” he says, tired, defeated.

The plan is to travel back the way we came, but even before we get started, something across the street grips my attention … the sound of shouting voices. It’s a trio of kids our age, or maybe a year or two older. They’re in front of the abandoned Laguna movie theater. They’ve formed a circle, playing some sort of game – as if this were a time for fun and games. I turn to ride toward them, hoping that maybe they can give us some information about what went down here, but as I come around a parked car, I can see the truth of the situation. They aren’t playing. They’re pushing around an older man, who’s maybe in his sixties. It’s three on one and he’s helpless to defend himself. Without thinking it through, I jump off my bike, my hands curled into fists, and I’m marching toward them.

“Alyssa, wait,” Kelton calls, but I’m already committed.

“Hey!” I yell. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The tallest of the kids turns to me. He has tousled bleached-blond hair and glacial blue eyes. He’s rough-hewn like a jock, but his multiple piercings tell me he’s not.

“Mind your own business!” he says.

The man they’re pushing around stumbles to the ground. And the kid kicks him. He actually kicks him!

“Leave him alone,” I yell, “or I’m getting those officers from the beach!”

“They won’t care,” says one of the other kids. “They won’t even leave their posts.”

“You’re monsters!” I yell, and the blue-eyed kid goes feral on me.

“Monsters? We’re monsters? You don’t know me!”

“I know all I need to know! You’re beating on some poor defenseless man!”

“Do you know what this asshole did?” yells the blue-eyed kid. “We saw him hide a bottle of water in his car! And he won’t share a drop of it!”

“So?” I counter. “It’s his water! You have no right!”

“We have every right!”

Only now do I see how dry his lips are. Not just dry but parched and chapped to the point of bleeding. None of these kids look right. Their skin is thin and almost leprous gray. The corners of their mouths are white with dried spit. And the look in their eyes is almost rabid.

The tall kid turns and kicks the man again. “Give us your goddamn keys!”

“Please,” pleads the man. “I need that water! I need it for my family!”

“So do I, asshole! You think because you drive a freaking BMW your lives mean more?”

Before he can kick the man again, I hurl myself into the middle. His foot connects with my calf. It’ll give me a charley horse, but at least it may have saved this guy from getting a broken rib.

“You don’t have to give them anything,” I tell the man, but he’s too frightened to fight them anymore. He fumbles in his pocket, and holds the keys out to the blue-eyed kid. But before the kid can snatch them out of his hands, I do instead, and hold them tight in my fist.

“You’re not getting these,” I tell the kid.

The man, no longer the focus of their fury, scrambles away, not caring about his BMW or his water; he just wants to get out of this alive. And now I realize that I’m the one who might not. The blond kid grabs me. He has a neck tattoo that seems to practically throb with his fury. It’s a biohazard symbol.

“Mess her up, Dalton,” says one of the other boys.

“Hey – maybe she’s got water, too!” says the third.

The blond kid – Dalton – tries to wrench the keys from my hand, but I won’t let go of them. I refuse to allow this sorry excuse for a human being have them. His unnerving blue eyes dart back and forth across my face, and his cracked lips peel into a truly terrible grin. Deranged and dangerous.

“You’re sweating,” he says. “Which means you’ve been drinking water…” And then the grin vanishes. “Where is it?”

“Get away from my sister!” I hear Garrett yell. He runs toward us but one of the other kids grabs him. I try to pull out of Dalton’s grip, but I can’t get free, no matter how hard I try.

“Where’s your water!” he demands.

And then something comes over me. My own animal nature. “Right here,” I tell him. And I spit in his face.

It doesn’t faze him at all. And I’m suddenly hit with this strange sensation, like there’s an emergency alarm echoing in my head, and my brain is helpless to identify its source. But as this boy wipes the spittle from his cheek with his free hand, the awful feeling becomes identifiable. It’s a horror that makes me sick to my stomach. I know what he’s about to do before he does it.

He looks at his fingers, glistening with my spittle … and he licks it off. I try to struggle free, but Dalton pushes me hard against the wall and locks eyes with me.

“Do it again!” he demands. And when I don’t, he presses his body against me. I can’t move. “Do it, or I swear I’ll suck it right out of you!” And he moves his terrible dry mouth toward mine.

Then from a few yards away, comes a voice of salvation.

“Let her go, or I’ll blow your goddamn brains out!”

 

 

10) Kelton

I didn’t want to have to pull out my gun, but the second that creep got too close to Alyssa, it’s like some protective instinct kicked in. Now my Ruger is pointed right at his head. I’m supposed to point it at his chest, but at this angle all I have is his back, and a bullet in the back could go straight through him and into Alyssa. But he’s taller. A head shot will miss Alyssa.

The instant the other two creeps see my Ruger, they drop Garrett and bolt. But the tall blond kid still grips Alyssa.

“I said let her go!” My hand trembles. I reach up my other hand into a two-handed grip, but it doesn’t help.

Now he turns to see the gun, and Alyssa uses the moment to break free, instantly distancing herself and going straight to Garrett to protect him.

The creep just stands there, looking at me as if he doesn’t care if I pull the trigger. As if he’s already resigned himself to death.

I stare him straight in those ice-blue eyes, and then focus back on my aim. Now my hands aren’t just trembling, they’re shaking. Violently. I try to stop them, but it’s like my brain can’t seem to send the signal that far down my arms – like I’m disconnected from my own body. And now I’m struck with a crippling wave of panic that starts in my chest and pulls like a lethal gravity, collapsing my lungs until I’ve imploded so deep within myself, I can’t breathe. I can barely gasp.

“He’ll do it!” Alyssa screams. The sound reverberates and echoes. “You better run like your friends.”

“No,” he says. Just “no.” And then he takes a step toward me. Or does he? I can barely tell because now my vision is going spotty, as my brain misfires, shutting down piston by piston.

“Do it, Kelton! Do it!” Garrett yells.

But I can’t. With all the training, with everything I’ve been taught about self defense and the wielding of weapons, something inside me blows a critical fuse. I can’t bring myself to pull that trigger.

And the kid knows it.

He lurches forward, knocking me back, and the gun flies out of my hands. I can’t let him get it! He’ll kill all of us! He’s that crazy – I know he is!

The weapon lands in the trash-filled gutter. We both scramble for it. I don’t know which one of us is more desperate to get it. And when I get to where I thought I saw it land, it’s not there. Instead, there’s a girl standing there as if she appeared out of nowhere. A girl I’ve never seen before – and she’s holding my gun. Pointed directly at me.

She cocks it, loading a bullet into the chamber with expert precision, and I realize that even if I had pulled that trigger, nothing would have happened, because I never even took the safety off. She smiles, almost seductively – and it’s in this moment I realize that the gun isn’t pointed at me at all. She has it trained on the ice-eyed creep who’s right behind me.

She brushes me out of the way with a deranged sort of confidence and puts the muzzle of the gun to the kid’s forehead.

I look to Alyssa, who, just like me, is shocked by the appearance of this mysterious girl, and terrified by what her intentions might be. I struggle to force my anxiety attack away.

The kid winces as she presses the gun harder against his forehead, a lot more terrified of her than he was of me. He stammers excuses – anything to buy time. “It’s them, not me – they have the water – why me?”

“Why you?” she says, oddly pensive. “I guess I don’t really like your face. Bet it was once pretty though. Pretty beach boy. I got dumped by too many of those.” Although I can’t see why anyone would dump her. She’s not just tough, she’s stunning in a wild kind of way. Dark and mysterious. But then maybe they dumped her because she’s freaking psychotic.

She blows a long strand of black hair away from her face, revealing inscrutable dark eyes that pierce in a very different way than the kid’s blue ones.

Then she holds her free hand out to Alyssa, keeping the gun against the kid’s head.

“The keys, please,” she says, and when Alyssa doesn’t move, she adds, “The keys or I’ll kill him.”

I start to add everything up. If this girl knows about the keys, she wasn’t just walking by when this happened. It means she saw everything. That she was watching, and waiting to make her move. But if she saw, then why does she think that Alyssa will save this kid?

And suddenly I realize why.

Because Alyssa will. This girl read that about Alyssa in just a few seconds of seeing her.

“Please,” cries the kid. He’d probably wet himself if he had any water left to expel. “Please … my mom and sister – they’re counting on me to bring back water. If you kill me, you kill them, too!”

“Wow, that sucks,” the girl says, and presses my gun harder against his head. “Keys, please,” she says again to Alyssa.

“Okay,” says Alyssa, trying to placate her. “No one has to die here.”

“No!” complains Garrett. “Just let her shoot him!”

But Alyssa ignores him and puts the keys in the girl’s hands.

She immediately pulls the gun away from the blond kid’s forehead, plants a foot on his chest, and pushes him over backward. Who the hell is this girl? She acts gleefully impulsive, but in reality, I don’t think there’s anything impulsive about her. I think she’s calculating, and smart.

As for the blue-eyed kid, he stays on the ground, curled up in fetal position, broken and sobbing, which is how I imagine he’ll spend the rest of eternity.

 

 

11) Alyssa

I saw her first. The way she flew out from a hidden doorway the instant Kelton lost his grip on the gun. That grin on her face when she picked it up. It all happened too fast to react, and all I wanted to do was protect Garrett – who seems to be the only one of the three of us who wants a stranger’s brains splattered on the sidewalk today. I will not think about that. Our new threat is this girl.

She’s dressed in black with long, dark hair. Sort of an olive complexion. Hard to tell her ethnicity – kind of like Garrett and me. No one ever knows what we are either, which has its ups and downs. She’s fit, muscular. She’s also bruised in a few places, with a cut on her arm. God knows what that’s all about. There’s a strange flush to her cheeks – a heat about her that’s different from thirst. Not sure what that’s about either. All I know is that she’s cross-wired enough to put a gun to that kid’s head like it was nothing. She did save us, but why? Was it only to get those keys? And she still has Kelton’s gun. So how safe are we, really?

“That was awesome,” Garrett says, stars in his eyes like he was just rescued by Wonder Woman.

She strides away, but I go after her, Garrett and Kelton following in our wake.

“Hey – that gun is ours,” I tell her. She doesn’t even slow down.

“I don’t think so. I saved your asses from the water-zombie, so I get the gun. Fair trade.”

“Water-zombie…” says Kelton, thinking about it. “That’s exactly what he was.”

“The human body is about sixty percent water,” the girl says. “But I would say he was down to forty-five percent. I’m not sure what percentage makes you toast, but he’s well on his way.”

I take a moment to look back at the kid crumpled in front of the theater. How could he be so terrifying just a moment ago, and so helpless now? And how many more so-called water-zombies are we going to encounter between here and home? And without any way of defending ourselves. Suddenly the safe and sane world I thought I knew is filled with terrifying unknowns. So which is worse, those unknowns, or the freaky girl who just saved us?

“Hey – if you’re going to take that car,” I say, “the least you could do is give us a ride.”

She spins toward me, temper suddenly raging. “What are you, sixteen? An entitled cheerleader type from a perfect family? Think everyone in the world owes you a favor?”

“What’s your problem?” Now I’m kind of getting pissed off.

She takes another step toward me, getting dangerously close. I can see in the corner of my eye that her hand is tightening around the gun. I try not to show any fear.

“Just tell us what happened here. We came looking for my parents and we can’t find them.”

Hearing that seems to notch down her attitude just a bit. Maybe she has a soul after all. “Can’t help you,” she says. “It wasn’t pretty. That’s all I know. Best if you crawl back under your rock, hunker down, and wait this out.”

And then Kelton, who’s been pretty subdued since losing the gun, says, “That cut on your arm is infected, isn’t it?”

She turns to him. “It’s just a cut.”

“I know an infected wound when I see it. It’s bad.”

She scrutinizes him, suddenly not so cavalier. “So?” she says.

“So if the infection gets into your blood, you’ll wish you were just dying of thirst… But I have antibiotics at home. Take us there, and you can have all you need.”

The girl twirls her hair around her finger, considering. I try to peg her age. Nineteen maybe. Going on thirty. Is this really a good idea? No. But currently ideas are all coming in various shades of bad.

“You got names?” she asks.

“I’m Alyssa. This is my brother, Garrett. That’s Kelton.”

“Kelton,” she mocks. “Who names their kid Kelton?”

Kelton sighs. “I ask myself that question all the time.”

She smiles at that. It only looks half psychotic. “I’m Jacqui. You better not be lying about those antibiotics. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

I look to our bicycles lying in the street, and realize that if they end up the only casualties from this morning, that’s fine with me.