H2O Read online

  H2O

  Irving Belateche

  Laurel Canyon Press

  Los Angeles

  H2O

  Copyright © 2012 by Irving Belateche

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ISBN: 978-0984026531

  Laurel Canyon Press

  Los Angeles, California

  www.LaurelCanyonPress.com

  Cover design by Karri Klawiter

  Cover design based on the painting “Seal Rock 2” by Albert Beirstadt

  www.artbykarri.com

  Layout provided by Everything Indie

  www.everything-indie.com

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter One

  The phone rang, waking me up from a deep sleep. The kind of sleep where you don’t have a past or future, just a murky present that you don’t quite understand. It was Frank and he wanted me down at the plant. A pump in one of the pumping stations had broken down and I was next in line to fix it.

  That I understood.

  But as I dressed, I tried not to think about it.

  I was always thinking too much so I turned this into yet another test of whether I could stop. I couldn’t. I knew that fixing that pump meant heading out into the wilderness and I knew that heading out into the wilderness meant heading out to die.

  I drove up the rugged coast toward the desalination plant. It was twenty miles outside of Clearview and the road was empty. Just like the road into the wilderness would be. Except for the trucks. They’d be driving that road, the cold gray sky hanging over them, the dark forest pressing in on them, and the pockmarked road stretching out in front of them. I’d be the only other person on that road.

  I blunted this line of thinking before it took over. I focused on the here and now. I looked down to the shoreline below the road. The waves were breaking hard. The ocean was angry, and that was fine with me. I liked the ocean regardless of its mood. It reminded me of my dad. We used to walk along that shoreline and he’d tell me how the world worked. He knew because he knew science. Others didn’t.

  “The world is made up of four elements,” my dad had said. “Air, Fire, Water and Earth.”

  Of course, he knew that these weren’t the real elements, but I was only four at the time and he was laying the groundwork for something else. For a secret he wanted to tell me. The biggest secret in the world.

  We both looked out over the ocean. The sun was red orange, the ocean dark blue, and the waves broke white and big.

  My dad said, “Water is the most important element.”

  I thought he’d said that because we lived in Clearview, a water town. But that wasn’t the reason. The reason was that groundwork. He wanted me to understand a few basics first. Then he’d tell me the secret.

  But he never did tell me. Not on that day or any other day. Before he could, the marauders murdered him.

  I looked back up from the ocean and the massive plant came into view. It was a grand structure, but it was old. Its iron beams were coated in thick, brown rust and its concrete walls were gouged from the battering of ocean storms.

  I pulled into the parking lot. One third full. The night shift was still on, and the morning shift, my shift, wouldn’t pull in for another two hours.

  I walked toward the plant’s entrance and glanced up at the faded green letters above the doors. I wondered if this was the last time I’d see them. They spelled out the name of the company that used to own the plant, ‘Corolaqua.’ But Corolaqua, like all companies, and all states and countries, was long gone.

  Many decades ago, the Passim Virus killed almost everyone. The few who’d survived it lived in small towns along the west coast, and they fended for themselves. They hunted and fished and grew their own food.

  Then, as things stabilized, the small towns started trading with each other. First food, then machines. Computers, refrigerators, washers and dryers, and every piece of equipment that still worked. They called them Remnants, and the more they broke down, the more valuable the ones that still worked became. So valuable that people risked their lives salvaging them from the dead cities where the Passim Virus still lurked.

  A few small towns were luckier than others. They could still produce fresh water (like Clearview) or fuel or electricity. Every town needed water, fuel, and electricity, so these towns traded for the best food and the best Remnants.

  And the truck towns did fine, too. They supplied the trucks that kept the whole show going. Without trucks, there wouldn’t be any trading, and without trading, there wouldn’t be any Territory. (The Territory was the unofficial name for this nameless affiliation of towns.)

  I stepped into the control room and saw Joe McDonough and Green Haily stationed up front, staring at the bank of monitors. They both glanced at me without bothering to hide their contempt. No big deal. I was used to it.

  In the back, Frank Bannon, the plant foreman, was sitting at his desk. He launched right in, “It’s about two hundred miles south.”

  “What’s it running at?” I asked.

  “About seventy-five percent.” He handed me the paperwork: A visa with the Clearview seal on it, directions for the trip south, instructions on how to repair the pump, and a list of the supplies I’d need for the job.

  I looked up from the paperwork and caught a flash of regret on Frank’s face. Frank was a good guy and he felt bad for sending me out. He knew it was a death sentence. But it wasn’t his choice. The last hire was always the first to go and that policy made sense. The man with the least experience was expendable. If the marauders murdered him or if the Virus killed him, it wouldn’t be that big a loss.

  But Frank knew that in my case, this policy didn’t make sense. If equipment right here at the plant broke down, a far greater problem than a malfunction in the far reaches of the Territory, I’d be the only one with a shot at fixing it. The other workers at the plant knew how to operate the equipment assigned to them and could perform minor repairs, but they couldn’t fix a major breakdown. They didn’t even understand how each piece of equipment w
orked in conjunction with the others to purify seawater.

  The intake valves under the shoreline inhaled the seawater into the plant. The water then traveled through gigantic, high-density plastic pipes, where dosing pumps adjusted the flow rate. (My job at the plant was to operate one of those dosing pumps.) The water then spiraled through huge gravity filters and reverse osmosis cells and when it came out of those cells, it was ready for the Territory.

  If you knew the chemistry and physics behind the process, it really wasn’t too hard to follow. But even McDonough and Haily, who monitored the whole process for the morning shift, didn’t understand it. They were trained to read the monitors, spot signs of trouble, and report that trouble to Frank. I gave Frank credit. He understood the process as well as you could without knowing the science behind it.

  “After you load up the van, go home and pick up whatever you’re gonna need,” he said. “If it’s just a damn animal that crawled in there, you’ll be back tomorrow. But if it’s a big job, count on three days.”

  I loaded up the Corolaqua van, left my car in the parking lot, and headed back to my place. It’d been three years since the last pump broke down. Back then, Frank had sent Gary Ledic out to fix it and that was the last anyone saw of him. Some people said marauders had killed him, but most thought it’d been the Virus.

  The Virus lived everywhere. My dad had taught me that it was originally called the Passim Virus because ‘passim’ meant ‘everywhere’ in Latin. I’d since learned that ‘passim’ meant more than ‘everywhere.’ It meant ‘scattered around randomly’ and that was the perfect description. The Virus still lived in dead cities. In Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and every city in between. And it lived in the wilderness. That’s why people never left their towns. That, and the marauders.

  As for myself, I didn’t care whether the marauders had killed Ledic or the Virus had or that he’d been killed at all. I didn’t like him. He’d tried to murder me. So when he didn’t come back, it was one less thing for me to think about.

  Chapter Two

  At home, I packed for the trip south. My dad used to go on trips but they weren’t suicide missions like this one. Town Councils would hire him when a crucial piece of machinery in their towns broke down. My dad knew science, so sometimes he could fix the machinery. There weren’t many around like him. Now there were even less. Way less.

  The day before he’d go on a trip, he’d fry us fish and potatoes for dinner. In the late afternoons, we’d drive out to Hickemy’s and we’d pick out the fillets. That was our ritual. But the day before he left for Merryville, the last day I ever saw him, he changed our ritual.

  We still headed to Hickemy’s, but this time we stopped at the beach first. We never walked the shoreline the day before his trips. And he didn’t launch into whatever he was going to teach me like he usually did on these walks. He was silent. And his breathing was faster than normal.

  The red orange sun was sliding into the sea, and some of the white caps were big while others were small. The ocean couldn’t decide whether to be calm or anxious, just like my dad.

  We sat on the sand and watched the sun turn deep red. The white caps danced. My dad put his arm around my shoulders and I waited for him to talk, to tell me why we hadn’t gone straight to Hickemy’s. Instead, he told me that there was the same amount of water on Earth right now as there’d been millions of years ago. He said that Earth never lost nor gained water.

  That seemed impossible and I didn’t believe him.

  He said that water went round and round. Evaporating, condensing, raining, and evaporating again. He went into detail about the sun’s heat, transpiration, and cool air and clouds.

  But I was thinking about Jimmy Hickemy, the fisherman.

  Every dawn, Jimmy sailed his boat out to sea and fished until noon. Every afternoon, in his back yard, he gutted, cleaned and filleted his catch. Every evening, on his back porch, he’d lay the fish out on beds of shiny ice, and people from Clearview would come by and pick up their dinner.

  “The world is a big place,” my dad said.

  I looked at the ocean. He was right. I couldn’t see where the world ended.

  “But it’s mostly water,” he said, and looked up to the sky. “That’s what you see when you look down from the stars.”

  I looked up to the sky. “I know,” I said, and I did. He’d already taught me that there were stars and planets out there. Galaxies and solar systems. Thousands of them. He’d taught me that a vast majority of those planets didn’t have water. Earth was special because it had water.

  “Never stop learning, Roy,” he said, then kissed the top of my head.

  “I won’t, Dad.”

  We pulled up to Jimmy Hickemy’s dilapidated ranch house. There were a few cars and a bunch of bicycles out front.

  I hurried into the back yard and up the steps onto the porch. I squeezed between customers picking out fillets and started to check out the fish. White, pink, and orange fillets, neatly laid out over ice.

  Jimmy saw me. “What’ll it be?” he said. He always treated me like an adult and I liked it.

  I looked at the halibut. That’s what I wanted.

  “Let’s see what your dad says,” Jimmy said.

  I expected my dad to say ‘no.’ We hadn’t bought Halibut in a while. It was more expensive than the other fillets.

  My dad made it up to the porch and saw that I was standing in front of the Halibut.

  “Please, dad,” I said.

  He looked over the fillets. “They look pretty good, don’t they?”

  “Good enough to eat,” I said.

  He laughed, and Jimmy laughed, too.

  “Give us a couple of good ones, Jimmy,” my dad said. “Good enough to eat.”

  I laughed.

  My dad and I sliced the potatoes. I did it carefully, like he’d taught me. When we finished, he put the slices into the pan and as soon as they hit the oil, the kitchen filled with sizzling.

  He was quiet, concentrating on the cooking. More so than usual. The silence made the popping and crackling of the oil louder than I’d ever heard it.

  He battered the fish and began to fry it in the black iron skillet. He glanced at me a couple of times and smiled.

  I watched him standing in front of the stove, cooking us dinner. I loved him.

  I packed enough food for four days and also packed a bottle of Curado. Curado was the rarest, most expensive alcohol in the Territory. It’d been distilled in Nahcotta, a town up north in what used to be Washington State. Nahcotta was the last town to have an industrial distillery that worked. It’d stopped working thirty years ago.

  Someone had given my dad three bottles of the fabled liquor for a job he’d done. My dad had slowly sipped through one bottle, but two remained. He wasn’t a drinker.

  After I finished packing a couple changes of clothes, I started to pick out a book for the trip. If I ended up spending a few nights in the wilderness, I wanted to be prepared. I always read before bed. My dad had read to me every night and I’d kept the tradition up. The house was full of books. His books. And he’d always taken a book on his trips.

  I remembered watching him going through the rows of books for his last trip. The fish and potatoes from dinner were still warm in my stomach.

  “Air?” he asked.

  “East,” I said.

  “Water?” he said.

  “West.”

  “Fire?”

  “South.”

  “Earth?”

  “North.”

  I was nine years old and my father had taught me the real elements and the periodic table, but we still had fun with the original four. Ancient civilizations, the ones that had believed in these elements, associated each of them with a direction and with certain animals.

  “Air is eagle and falcon,” I said, “Water is dolphin and turtle. Earth is bull and bear. And Fire is lion and—,” I paused before delivering the punch line, “—salamander.”r />
  He laughed at salamander. It was a running joke between us. In one of my dad’s books, we’d read that one ancient civilization had grouped salamanders with Fire. But salamanders were amphibians and we wondered why they hadn’t been grouped with water. So I’d said, “Fire stole salamanders from Water and headed south.” (South was Fire’s direction.)

  My dad liked that theory and we ended up building a whole mythology around it. All the animals had originally flocked to Water because it was the most important element. So the other elements became jealous and started stealing Water’s animals. We’d spend hours weaving stories about the sneaky ways that Air, Fire, and Earth stole animals from Water.

  My dad finally pulled a book down from one of the shelves and I saw the title. The Old Man and the Sea. (It’d be years before I realized that he meant for me to see that title and to understand that it was connected to the secret.)

  The next morning, before he left for Merryville, he drove me to school. He told me that after school I was to go home with Rick Levingworth. I’d spend the night there and he’d pick me up from school the next afternoon.

  I went to school, spent the night at the Levingworth’s, but the next day, after school, my dad didn’t pick me up. I waited until everyone was gone before I accepted Mrs. Levingworth’s offer to drive me home. We got to my house, but my dad wasn’t there either. So Mrs. Levingworth said I’d go home with her and wait there, and we’d check back later.

  But I didn’t want to go and she caved in. We stayed.

  Rick and I played a game on a computer that my dad had rebuilt. In the game, alien ships attacked us and we tried to shoot them down. Very few families in town had computers that worked, and almost none had computer games, so Rick was happy to hang out at my house.