Dry Quotes

Something feels slightly off. I’m not sure what it is, but it hangs in the air like a scent. It’s in the impatience of the people in line. The way people use their carts—on the verge of being battering rams to make their way through the crowd. There’s a sort of primal hostility all around us, hidden by a veneer of suburban politeness. But even that politeness is stretching thin.

My mom takes a deep breath and sprays the kitchen table again. “As long as FEMA does its job, who cares what the news says?”

“I care,” I tell her. Because if there’s one thing I know about the news, it’s that it decides for most people—including the federal government—what is and what isn’t important. But the big news stations won’t give the Tap-Out the critical airtime it needs—not until there are images as dramatic as winds taking off roofs.

And if it takes that long for the Tap-Out to be taken seriously, it will be too late.

The thing is, I’m glad I did what I did. Not just because it has always been a fantasy of mine to blast our neighbors with my paintball gun—but because whether my dad knows it or not, I saw what was coming next. What would have happened if I didn’t pull my trigger. Because at the apex of that confrontation, my dad’s hand had instinctively traveled down to his belt...where his gun was nestled in its holster.

“You know how it works, Marybeth. If we start giving away free water, people are going to start demanding we give more. And when things get violent they’ll just take. And as you can clearly see,” he motions in the direction of the Maleckis’ house, “even sharing information is dangerous past this point.”

“They’re our neighbors!”

“When it comes down to survival you don’t have neighbors!”

“We’re going to have to live with these people when this is all over.”

“Live is the key word here! If this is as bad as I think it is, not everyone is going to make it—and if we’re going to remain among the living we need to stick with our survival plan, and keep a tight lid on our supplies. You want to give things away? Fine. Leave the door wide open when we leave for the bug-out, and let the marauders strip this place down to the wall studs.”

By having our own electricity supply, my family has made itself the unexpected envy of the neighborhood. And a target. So I stand, body trapped in the doorway, stuck between the threshold of what my lie once was and what it will soon be, staring into the dark, a hundred eyes glowing back in the night.

And I’m scared to the bone, because right now I can’t tell if I’m looking into the eyes of sheep, or wolves.

I reach into a side pocket of my own backpack and pull out the compact cartridge of bullets. The magazine, Kelton had called it. I look at it. Think hard about it. It represents everything that I hate about the world. But this isn’t the same world it was yesterday. Finally I hand him the magazine, then I start pedaling again, because I don’t want to see him snapping it into the pistol.

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 the trigger.

The desalination machines were smaller than I had expected. The attendants who worked them looked like FEMA personnel—but they weren’t wearing the official cobalt blue outfits. These were sky-blue. Turns out they sent the FEMA volunteer corps. Which really pissed me off. Did they misjudge this water crisis so badly that they dismissed how dire it was, and left it in the hands of volunteers? I know they were stretched thin, but you can’t leave an entire relief effort to a bunch of wannabe feds. Not only is it a recipe for disaster, it’s a recipe with half the ingredients missing.

“No!” Garrett yells. “We can’t just leave him! We can’t just leave Kingston!”

But behind us the dogs have started barking, and I can’t tell if they’re pursuing us into the street, or just chasing us from their territory. So I pull Garrett along, knowing that I can’t take the time to explain this to him. That Kingston, a dog that, under any other circumstance, would have been loyal to the end, made an instinctive choice for his own survival.

“Would it have been better if you actually pulled the trigger and killed that boy?”

That gives me pause for thought. My father always told me you should never draw a weapon unless you are fully prepared to use it. I was not prepared. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Then he meets my gaze, but rather than his typical bone-chilling glare, his eyes are different. Shimmering and glassy. Vulnerable. An honest display of emotion that I’ve never seen before. And in this single look I feel as if I’ve opened his personal .zip file; suddenly years of compressed emotional information comes bursting out, and I’m hit with an overwhelming truth. This is what lies beneath his indignation. All of the larger-than-life doomsday toys I adored as a kid, the anger and manipulation that pushed away Brady and threaten to push away my mother, are all just the threads of a veil woven to hide his own terror.

I can tell that he needed to do this for a whole lot of reasons. And although it’s not our water to give, sometimes doing the right thing means doing the wrong thing first. With that in mind, I realize there’s something that I have to do, too. A thing where the right far outweighs the wrong.

“Well, it’s a bankrupt, self-serving way of thinking,” says Mrs. McCracken.

“But he’s right,” I hear myself say, which is a surprise to everyone—even me. I think back to the way our own neighbors handled the division of those water bottles, and how so many of them were ready to turn against me, the one who brought it. As much as I hate to admit it, I see Mr. McCracken’s point. It’s not like it’s their fault, but I can see how, when people feel a threat to their lives, they’ll exercise any option they have. If you don’t want it to be at your expense, you have to take yourself off the table as an option.

There’s a map of southern California, a circle around it, like the highlighted path of a hurricane. SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TAP-OUT COVERAGE is what the chyrons read at the bottom, like this was some kind of event for everyone else’s entertainment. I’ve been on the receiving end of broadcasts like this from other places—but this is the first time in as long as I can remember that I’m standing in the epicenter of the disaster area.

[...]

“It’s finally happened,” says Alyssa. “The rest of the world finally noticed and is taking the Tap-Out seriously.”

“The rest of the world is too late,” says Kelton. And he’s right. You don’t wait nearly a week until mobilizing serious resources for a disaster of this magnitude.

I would have preferred to sit in the front seat, but Alyssa’s brother called it, and if we don’t adhere to the convention of calling shotgun, what rule of law is left to us?

It didn’t taste bad. Didn’t make you spit it out, grimacing. Yes, it was a little bit earthy, but that was all. He wondered if anyone had the good sense to boil it first before drinking it. Probably not. There’s a false sense of security when you turn a shiny chrome tap in your own kitchen. Yes, you expect it not to taste quite as good as filtered water, what with all the fluoride, and chlorine, and whatever the hell else they treat the water with—but you don’t expect it to kill you. How could anyone have known?

But then my mother’s voice comes to me. My mother, who might be dead, for all I know. And she says, Things pass. Even big things. And when they’re far behind us, they don’t look big anymore.

And my father’s voice, too. Sterner, but still with the authority of experience. Everything in life is a lesson, Kelton. Learn from it. Better yourself. Become stronger.

The best way to honor them is to listen to them. To believe them. But it’s hard, so very, very hard.

For a girl like her, whose first instinct is always to fix a situation, the “nothing at all” choice isn’t easy. It’s painful. But after everything that’s happened, she realizes that her and Garrett’s survival requires the kind of aggressive hardness she usually reserves for the soccer field. Today there’s no taking a knee for the players who fall.

As we slowly drive through the encampment, some of those lost souls emerge from their tents and watch us go by. They don’t stop us, they don’t bother us, they just watch. I think they’re just being vigilant—making sure we don’t stop to harass them. I look at their weathered faces, their worn clothes, and I wonder what their stories are and how they landed here. If there’s anyone thinking about them, or wishing them well. Then I realize that by the way they’re looking at us, they’re wondering the same.

“I don’t see it like that,” Alyssa says. “People might do whatever they can to survive, but once they don’t have to worry about that, they’re different.”

“Sometimes,” Kelton argues. “Sometimes not. Some people are always like that and just pretend to be civil.”

[...]

Jacqui bounces her knees, amused. “Ooh, looks like we’ve got ourselves a classic Hobbes versus Rousseau philosophical quandary.”

It catches me off guard to hear Jacqui make such a reference. Especially because I don’t precisely know who Hobbes and Rousseau are—but not knowing and admitting you don’t know are two completely different things.

“Yes, that’s one way to see it,” I tell them. “But I think you’re both wrong. People are nouns, actions are verbs. Apples and oranges.”

“Ding! Ding! Ding! And we’ve found our Machiavelli!” Jacqui announces, like a showman.

“Have you noticed that it’s snowing?”

“What?”

Sure enough, there are snowflakes settling gently around us. But it’s got to be almost ninety degrees. Now I know the world has gone crazy.

“Don’t catch them on your tongue though,” Henry says. “I don’t think they’ll taste very good.”

I catch one with my hand, and rub it between my fingers. It’s ash.

“The brush fires have grown up,” he tells me. “They’re full-fledged forest fires now. Pretty far east of us, but the Santa Ana winds are bringing the ash our way.”

“Here, take it,” she says. “I don’t want it in my belt anymore; it’s giving me a rash.” Then she glances over at Henry. “Besides, I don’t trust myself with it, considering our current company.”

Kelton takes the gun back, surprised by the offer. “So you trust me now?”

“Absolutely not,” Jacqui says. “But at least if you do something stupid, it will be your problem, not mine.”

Jacqui herself is a loaded gun with a hair trigger—and the fact that she, in this moment, is able to recognize that, makes her seem slightly less mental. Maybe even trustworthy.

I could take it from her. I could catch up with her and take it. And drink it. Quench this thirst that burns even more than my hands.

But I won’t.

Because I know that water’s not for her.

I won’t take it. Because even though I’ve seen everyone around me lose their humanity today, I realize that in this moment, I have finally found mine.

He pushes himself up on all fours. He scrambles forward. It worked! Putting me at the forefront of his thoughts drew out what little energy he had left, just as when I had focused on helping him—and I realize that this is the true core of human nature: When we’ve lost the strength to save ourselves, we somehow find the strength to save each other.

More than two hundred thousand souls perished during humanity’s hiatus. The highest fatality count from any non-war event in the history of the nation. Yet even that number somehow feels remarkably low, and the fact that it isn’t higher is a miracle—or at least, that’s what people have been reaching for. The silver lining. Why else would so many need to be in the one place where magic still exists? Where hope is eternal? Where dreams never die?

Wasn’t it Jacqui who told us the human body is sixty percent water? Well, now I know what the rest is. The rest is dust, the rest is ash, it’s sorrow and it’s grief...But above all that, in spite of all that, binding us together...is hope. And joy. And a wellspring of all the things that still might be.