H2O (13 page)

At the fifth house, it wasn't so good. The TV was still on, for a start; the same stay-home, remain-calm broadcast playing. That was freaky. We had to shoo the cat out from the kitchen, from where it was… The cat seemed absolutely fine, so I guess nibbling on that body on the floor hadn't hurt it a bit. We didn't take stuff from there. We just left.

How stupid we were. How stupid I was. You need to just take stuff, whatever you can get. People who are dead are dead; they don't care… Maybe, even, they'd want you to take it. That's what I'd want: take it and live. And good
luck.

We stepped outside into the lovely warm evening. I felt sick—yes—and I felt something else. I felt angry.

“Let's go there,” I said, pointing at a big house up on the hill.

We had enough stuff, really; there was no need.

“Well, I suppose we might as well,” said Simon. “Unless you'd rather—”

“No!” I said. “I'm fine.”

I assumed Simon was going to say “Unless you'd rather go home—” but maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was going to say, “Unless you'd rather wait, just sit here in the sun for a moment, listening to the birds sing, and then we'll go home” or, “Unless you'd rather go let Whitby, Mimi, Clarence, and that terrier out.” But Simon, who always told me what was what and what I had to do, or else droned on at me until I was forced to say it for myself, did not, on this occasion, this one occasion, tell me what I had to do.

“OK,” he said.

I don't know why he said that. Maybe he'd gotten into the weird thrill of it too—I sort of felt like he had—or maybe he was thinking that we should just get as much stuff as we could while we could. I don't know.

The big house was detached, no cars around. No dogs barking. I had no clue who lived there, but they must have been rich. It wasn't just because it was a big house—I've got friends, like Zak, who live in big houses and they're as scruffy as our little one—it was the way it was: crisp. You know, all primped and prim and proper. A house without a hair out of place.

We crunched up the drive. We rang the doorbell. They didn't have a normal ding-dong battery-type doorbell—they had a
bell
bell. A real bell, hanging outside the door. We clanked on that; then we knocked. What we didn't do was call through the door. We didn't say, “
Hello?
We're neighbors!”

It was the first house we had come to where the front door was open. We went inside.

The smell was there to greet us. So was a cat, a little tabby. It came running up behind us from the garden. It didn't even hesitate; it just purred around us, like we were its owners, come home to feed it. We stepped inside the house, and Simon closed the living-room door—but not before I saw… There was a body in the den with a sheet over it.

We crept through into the kitchen.

It was a super-bonanza. There was a walk-in pantry. Inside it: tons and tons of stuff.

They must have been at the supermarket or somewhere like that, because there were boxed packs of water bottles, still plastic wrapped. Juice, long-life milk, soda water, tonic water. Tons of it. I felt the thirst kick right back in at the sight of it, and I swear I could have drunk every last drop. I tell you: looting, fear, rage, and grief make you mad with thirst.

“Bingo,” said Simon.

As he loaded up our backpacks and every other bag he could find, I fed the cat. I found the cat food under the sink; I got a plate and dumped the whole can of food onto it. I mashed it up a little with a fork. I set it down on the floor, and the cat scoffed.

That's what I remember: the cat scoffing and me thinking I'd done a good deed. Then thinking the cat might be as thirsty as me.

There was a bottle of water on the table and glasses. I picked up the bottle. I unscrewed the lid; it had been opened already. And then I thought,
Yeurch
.

I didn't think the water might be bad, that wasn't what I thought at all. I just thought that the bottle of water had once belonged to that dead person, and it creeped me out.

It was a half of a half of a half of a second; that's all it took. I put the bottle down; Simon snatched it up. He'd just hoisted his backpack onto his back. He snatched up that bottle and glugged the water down.

“Let's go,” he said.

He stared at me. I stared back—like he knew; like we both knew. Instantly.

And then he sort of grimaced.

A trickle of blood ran down from the corner of his mouth.

“Ruby,” he said. “I need to go home now. I need to go home to Becky and Henry.”

He turned and walked out to the front door; he steadied himself on it. He let out a roar and propelled himself off, out, down the drive, toward home. He went like…like I've seen marathon runners go, when you can see their whole body yelling
stop, stop, stop
but they're just gonna get to that finish line.

I dived back into that kitchen to grab my backpack. I think a part of me thought he would be OK, so we'd need all that water and stuff that we'd worked so hard to get. I grabbed the bag. I looked up. There was someone standing there.

A rich-looking man. Gray haired. Primped and prim and proper, like his house. Some weird look that was almost like a slow, astonished smile creeping onto his face at the sight of me—and then he looked at that bottle and that weird look curled up into a miserable frown and turned to stone. Gargoyle face.

You
. I got it; even right at that moment, I got it. He had known the water in that bottle was bad. He had put it there. It had been a trap.

I plunged out of that house and ran after Simon.

At the end of the drive, I looked back; that man was on the doorstep, the cat in his arms.

• • •

I followed Simon home. I followed him because whenever I tried to get close, whenever I called out to him, he kept waving me back, to keep me behind him, and I was too scared to disobey. I followed him, whimpering with fright like a dumb dog. I kept looking behind, but the gray-haired man didn't come. Simon cried out loud; he spat blood, he choked up blood, he threw up blood as he went. Halfway along, he stopped, dumped his backpack, pulled out the bottle of fancy wine, and smashed it open on a wall. He swigged from it.

Glass!
I thought.
But
there'll be
glass!

He raised the bottle to the sky, roared, then flung that bottle against the wall so it smashed into a million pieces, then he staggered on; I heaved his backpack up…then ditched it—the weight was just too much to bear.

He got to the house; he got up the stairs; he got to my mom and Henry.

I stood outside their bedroom door. That bunch of flowers I'd left outside, they were wilting, dying. Simon howling in agony. I opened the door. The smell punched me in the heart.

“GET OUT!” spluttered Simon.

I won't ever forget seeing him like that. At least I didn't have to see my mom and Henry too. Simon had covered them with a sheet.

I closed the door. I sat outside. The fright in me bit so hard in my guts that I felt I could puke too.

“Ru,” he called, his voice all twisty with pain. “Help me. Get tablets. Get painkillers—get whatever you can.”

I had instructions. I could do something. But tablets? All we had in the house since my mom had thrown the acetaminophen to Mrs. Fitch was indigestion stuff, hay fever stuff, and Henry's teething stuff. I knew; I'd looked when I still believed what the broadcasts said about acetaminophen.

I went downstairs; I went out the back door. I climbed over the fence that separated the Fitches' tidy garden from our messy paradise.

The back door was open. I went in. The TV was on, loud, filling the house with advice that was too late for the Fitches. I went through the stink, up to the bathroom. Unfortunately, Mr. Fitch was in there. He was the stink. I had to step right around him, thinking that if I touched him, I'd die right there with him in their horrible green bathroom. I yanked open the medicine cabinet, and I looted it. There was a lot of stuff in there; stuff I knew—acetaminophen, aspirin—stuff I didn't. Stuff prescribed for Mr. Fitch, who had a bad heart; stuff prescribed for Mrs. Fitch, who got worried about Mr. Fitch's bad heart. And a small bottle of brandy, which she told me and my mom she took a sip of every night.

“For medicinal purposes,” she said. “Just a drop, before you clean your teeth.”

(“But she doesn't have any teeth!” I whispered to my mom. And my mom stepped on my toe to shut me up.)

I took all of it; Simon would know what was what.

• • •

I knocked on the door. He didn't answer. I opened the door. His eyes rolled open as I dumped my offerings on the bed. He waved me off. He clawed open boxes; he popped pills, swallowed, slugged brandy. More and more and more pills. Simon wasn't going to get better. I wasn't helping him to live; I was helping him to die.

“Go away, Ru,” he managed to say. “Go find help.”

I thought he was going to say something else, about what I should do.

“I love you,” he said.

Simon fell asleep, and he didn't wake up.

I sat in the kitchen, and I glued together that stupid, hideous pottery vase thing he'd made. My hands were shaking so much it kept going wrong. When it finally stayed together, I put it in the sink.

Since that first morning, when I'd gone to fill the kettle and Simon had told me to stop, he'd told me the same thing most times we were in that kitchen, because most times I forgot.

I forgot. I turned the faucet on. Water gushed into the vase for too many seconds before my brain screamed and my hands did something about it. I turned off the faucet and backed away from the sink. The tap dripped into the vase.

Disgusting. Disgusting, vile, filthy—I grabbed my rubber gloves and I threw every last container full of water out the kitchen window. I didn't empty them out; I threw them out—pots and pans and everything. I poured the last of the bleach all over the floor—but I could not bring myself to throw away that vase. I emptied it and filled it up with a bottle of tonic water from my bag. I carried it up the stairs. I put it down and put the flowers in it, willing them to live.

“Simon?” I called, standing outside their bedroom door. “Simon?”

There was no reply. From the vase, the dark ooze of a leak spread across the floorboards, and I stared at it, wondering how many of those disgusting little things were crawling about in it.

The panic I felt, it was the worst kind of panic.
Blind
panic
, that's what they call it, when you stop thinking completely. I had never, ever felt so alone and so frightened in my whole life. My brain had no say at all in what happened next, which was probably the stupidest thing I've ever done—apart from the thing I'd just done, filling the vase with water, and the thing after the thing that happened next.

I couldn't stay in the house another second.

I got my bike from the shed, and I set out for Zak's. I had no water. I had no waterproof gear. I had no “Indiana Jones goes bird-watching” hat… I didn't even have a
umbrella. Ha ha.

I never normally biked anywhere if I could help it. Leonie and me, we'd biked over to Zak's once, the summer before, and it had nearly killed us. The plan was we'd bike back, but Zak's mom ended up taking us home, the bikes in the back of the station wagon. Simon and my mom didn't see her drop me off and thought I'd biked back…and I didn't set them straight; for weeks I moaned on about how exhausted I was so I could get rides to other places. And after that I moaned on about how dangerous it was. That part was completely true. Those Devon lanes, they look so lovely, but some serious crazies drive along them—and with those high banks and hedges, there's nowhere to get out of the way if you're on a bike.

That day, that evening, it was not a problem. I didn't see or hear a single soul. Not one car passed me. I guess if you actually liked biking, it would have been lovely: a beautiful summer's evening ride in the country. I didn't really notice that, same way as this time I didn't really notice the hills me and Lee had had to get off and walk up (moaning). I didn't really notice anything until I got to Zak's and saw the station wagon wasn't there. The little zippy car wasn't there either. What was there was Zak's dad. It looked as if he had been there for a long time. Like maybe he had coming running out after the car that night. Best not to think about it, best not to look. Poor Barnaby.

I guess you know what's coming next. I guess you can guess it. My darling Lee and most of my other friends were in the kitchen, but not how I had pictured them.

It looked as though most of them had died the way Simon had died. The cups of tea—half-drunk, festering, spilled—were still on the table. The coffee never did get made. Flies that weren't busy on my friends checked out the toast, the butter, and the jam.

• • •

I remembered something Simon had said—or rather something he had not said. I'd questioned the thing about the tap water, you see. “Yes, but…” They didn't say anything about that on the TV, but Simon had said he thought it was an obvious risk. How could it be safe? I felt terrible, thinking there must be tons and tons of people like me, who wouldn't have even thought about it, people who didn't have a Simon to think for them. But I wasn't even worried about my friends; I told Simon we'd drunk water from the tap that night.

“And it was fine!” I'd said.

And Simon didn't say anything. I guess he knew.

You didn't have to be some kind of detective to work it out. Those glasses of water we'd drunk that night, the water I'd scrubbed my face with, those must have been the last drops of good water in the pipes. What we had filled the kettle with would kill us.

And later, when I thought about it, it taught me another thing: this space thing, you can't kill it by boiling it.

The radio was still on, telling my dead friends to stay home and remain calm.

If, that night, instead of going live to here and live to there, and “Ooo! Look who we've got in the studio!” if, instead of guessing and going on about other things, they had just said DON'T DRINK ANY WATER (AND, BY THE WAY, IT
IS
CONTAGIOUS), maybe my friends, maybe a whole load of other people, would still be alive. If Simon had thought of it, I couldn't understand why the government or the TV and radio people or whoever hadn't. If they'd just said that, even if they weren't sure. If.

I turned the radio off; I could have smashed it.

“Lee?” I said quietly, standing as still as she lay.

It wasn't like she was covered in blood or anything. There were just flies, buzzing. Other than that, Lee—my sweet, darling Leonie Lee—looked like…like maybe she was just messing around. Like we'd done tons of times when we were little. “Pretending to be dead.” Like any second, she'd just crack up and lose it and laugh.

“Lee, please get up,” I said, waiting for the smile to erupt on her sunken cheeks, for her to burst out laughing.

She didn't. Lee didn't smile. I was never going to see Lee's smile again.

I howled.

Still howling, sucking in air like a person with an asthma attack gasps it, I made myself look. I made myself check for everyone. I made myself see…what I had missed…just like you'd want to know about a party you'd had to leave.

You would never, ever have wanted to know about this. This'd be a thing you'd have been glad to miss.

Zak and Ronnie, they'd made it back upstairs. There was dried gore all over the keyboard, so it seemed like someone—Ronnie, for sure—had got back on the computer, still trying to look for answers where he always looked for answers, on the Web. And then? They were curled up on the bed together.

I found bodies all over that house. I found everyone…except Saskia. I checked in every room again. I called her name. I went outside and called—I could hardly bear to look at the hot tub, to think about me and Caspar, and how we had kissed…on a beautiful evening just like this and so totally not at all like this. On a beautiful evening when it looked like my life was finally going to be wonderful.

I wandered into the barn. There was all our stuff. My bag. My clothes. My makeup. My stupid cell phone, battery dead.

I gathered up everyone else's phones too. I had this idea that people would call to speak to my friends—mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, other friends—and that it was somehow my duty to tell all those people that all my friends were dead. Like those people—mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, other friends—would still be alive to tell that to.

There was only one person whose death I wasn't going to have to explain to anybody: Saskia. Her stuff wasn't in the barn. Her stuff had gone.

When I went back through the kitchen, I saw Caspar's phone and MP3 player on the floor next to his jeans. I took them too. And then I did what really was the most stupid of stupidest things I have ever done.

I biked home.

Hardly any distance from the house, I realized I was dying of thirst—and it felt like I really was. What I had seen at Zak's, it was so dreadful, so stomach-churningly sick-making in every way, that I hadn't thought to look for anything to drink. So, so stupid. I'd had nothing but some juice and a few ice cubes; I'd biked miles on a boiling hot evening, and now I had yet more miles to bike on a boiling hot night—which was the other stupid part of the stupidest thing: you never travel when you can't see the sky. Even when there are stars out—and there were—you can't see what kind of clouds are creeping up at night—and there were clouds creeping up. The sky, the night, the
everything
closing in on me.

I could have gone to other houses; there were houses, some with lights on. That didn't mean much anymore. From our kitchen window, we'd seen lights on all over; it didn't mean people were alive…and even if they were, there was no telling what they might do.

Pain throbbed in my head; my tongue bumped around in my mouth. I remembered the thing Simon had said, about drinking your own pee…and I remembered another thing he had said once, a long time ago when I was just a little kid. We were on a walk, and I was moaning about being thirsty—like about five minutes after we'd set off, probably. What was unusual was we didn't have the ten tons of stuff Simon normally took. (I can hear my mom now: “Do we really need to take all that?” and Simon would say, “Well, I'm the one that's carrying it.” He was our Sherpa Tenzing. Whenever you wanted something, Simon had it.) Only on that day, he didn't. It wasn't a
planned
walk with maps and stuff; it was a stop-off from a country pub lunch—at which I'd begged for a cola and been given lemonade, like that was somehow better for you. That kind of thing happened a lot.

“Ru,” Simon said to me. “I'll show you an old Sioux Indian technique.”

Probably it wasn't an old Sioux Indian thing at all. Probably it was a bird-watcher's survival thing. But I don't think it was something Simon made up. Simon didn't make things up.

“You find yourself a pebble,” Simon said, picking one off the ground and rubbing it clean on his trousers, “and you suck it.”

He popped the pebble in his mouth.

“It stimulates your production of saliva,” he said, rolling the pebble around in his mouth, “and makes you feel less thirsty.”

I grabbed the nearest pebble.

“Stop it!” said my mom. “Don't teach her that! That could be dirty, Ruby. You might choke! What you need to do is imagine—what would you like to drink right now?”

“A cola,” I said. “With lots of ice—and a slice of lemon.”

I can remember even now: I added the part about the lemon to show how grown-up I was—but the cola? I chose that because they hadn't let me have one, and I knew for sure that if I had been allowed one, I wouldn't feel thirsty like I did.

“So you just imagine that's what you're drinking,” said my mom. “You try that.”

I stopped my bike on the moonlit road. I didn't drink my own pee; I felt like I had no pee in me anyway. I couldn't see a pebble, so I picked up a small, sharp lump of road grit. I wiped it a little and put it in my mouth. I rummaged in my bag and pulled out Caspar's MP3 player, fiddled with it in the dark. Music blared. For a second, I was going to skip the track, look for something I knew, when I realized it
was
something I knew. It was Caspar. No band playing with him, just Caspar and his guitar. I looked at the sky—stars disappearing, moon disappearing—and I biked on, listening to Caspar's sweet, smoochy voice singing love in my ear and thinking about an ice-cold cola with a slice of lemon.

When I got in, I gulped so many bottles of water I threw up. I threw up until there was nothing left to throw up but bitter, acidy stuff.

I had this terror moment of thinking maybe I was
sick
sick—rain sick—and then I pulled myself together. My head hurt, but I wasn't about to go see what—if anything—Simon had left that I could take for that.

I'd called his name when I got home. An ostrich thing. There'd been no answer. I did not want to go up there and see why. I knew why.

I remembered what my mom did when I got sunburned (which totally wouldn't have happened if we'd gone on vacation to normal places and/or they'd just let me get a decent spray tan, etc.). On the outside, you need to cool the skin; on the inside, what I had was dehydration. I mixed a bit of salt and sugar with some water, and I forced myself to sip, sip, sip it, even though my stomach was churning, and I wanted to gulp it and throw it up again at the same time.

I sorted the phones out, starting with mine. That meant going upstairs, to the attic, to my bedroom, where I hadn't been—except to grab stuff—for days. I didn't hang around then either. I didn't want to look at my stuff, my stuff that had to do with the me that had been—and my friends. Most especially the photos plastered all over the walls. Me and my friends. And most precious of all: me and Caspar—and Saskia, barging into the photo to lean on his shoulder, pouting.