Authors: Mary Rosenblum
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Collections & Anthologies
She felt the market as they climbed out of the riverbed, a babble of feelings like people shouting all at once inside her head. Alberto had never offered to take her along when he went, and Nita was glad. Ramshackle booths roofed with frayed and faded plastic crowded the parking lot of the old high school. The Bee Man’s muddy fear was almost lost in the clamor of so many people. Nita stayed close behind him as they threaded their way between the piles of greens and carrots, old clothes, oily machine parts, and battered electronics that formed the dusty aisles. If she closed her eyes, she would be lost, drowned in the blare of noise.
They unloaded their packs, set out the cakes of wax and the jugs of honey at a corner of the old gray school building, in a strip of shade. Nita squatted with her back against the wall while the Bee Man traded honey and wax for hard bread, beans, dried fruit, or grimy government scrip that you could trade for water or use in a government store. People called the Bee Man David. They laughed and joked with him, while their eyes slid sideways to look at Nita. They all looked at her. Some of them looked at her body, all hungry. Others looked from her to the Bee Man and got mad, like Alberto had gotten mad at the foreman. Nita hunched against the wall, dizzy and trapped.
The Bee Man didn’t look at her at all. Nita closed her burning eyes, trying to shut out the stares and the crowd noise. When she opened them again, Alberto was standing in front of the neatly lined-up honey jugs. “Hello, Nita,” he said in his too-loud, too-careful voice.
Nita looked past his thick shoulders. Mama was walking up the crowded aisles.
“How are you getting along?” Alberto was asking the Bee Man. “I haven’t seen you for awhile.”
“Okay.” The Bee Man turned a jug of golden honey slowly between his hands. “But I’m thinking of moving on again, so I guess Nita ought to go back home with you.”
Nita stared at him, Mama forgotten for a moment, stunned by his words. He wanted her to go, wanted it with an intensity that took Nita’s breath away, made her feel sick and empty inside. Nita’s lips moved, silently shaping the word to ask him.
Why?
“You see?” Alberto turned to Mama, his temper flaring. “I told you this wasn’t going to work.”
“It’s not Nita’s fault,” the Bee Man said. “It’s nothing she did or didn’t do.” He looked past Alberto, straight at Mama. “She’s just a kid. You take her home, and you keep her there. Let her grow up.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that. “ Mama shouldered past Alberto. “You think I don’t know what you’re saying? You think I kicked my daughter out, sent her off to whore, maybe? Well, you think about what it’s like for us, mister. If we get kicked off the farm, where do we go? To one of the camps, to live on hand-outs with the no-good and the drifters? What do we do? Alberto said you’re a nice man, that you’d take her.” She clenched her fists, glared at the Bee Man. “You want to blame someone, you blame her father — you blame Sam. We had a good place, a good farm. It wasn’t much, but we took care of ourselves. And our kids.” Her voice trembled.
“He left me with the children to feed. So, now we got to scratch in the dust, bow to some strutting little rooster of a foreman who sniffs around my daughter like a dog after a bitch in heat! You want to blame someone, you blame Sam. Not me. Not my son!” She spun on her heel and stalked away, pulling her sun-scarf up over her gray hair.
“I apologize,” Alberto said between clenched teeth. “For my mother.” He had gone pale under his weathered tan. “Nita, get up. Let’s go.” He reached past the Bee Man, grabbed her by the arm.
“Wait a minute.” The Bee Man caught Alberto’s wrist. “What happened to her? Why can’t she talk?”
“She just stopped.” Alberto looked away. “She looks like Papa,” he said. “It’s scary, how much she looks like Papa.” His face twisted. “Mama didn’t mean that Papa walked out on us. It wasn’t like that at all. Papa was organizing a water strike, up in The Dalles. That’s where we lived. Two men drove up to the house one day and shot him, right in the yard. Just shot him down in cold blood. Nita was right there with him. She saw it all.”
Run!
Mama had screamed, but he hadn’t run.
The Bee Man was mad, now. Not scared any more. Mad. Like Alberto. Like Mama.
Nita twisted out of Alberto’s lax grip and ran. The Bee Man shouted something, but she closed her ears to it, dodged around a pile of vegetables. Green squashes went flying and a woman screeched at her. Nita ducked her head as she darted through the forest of shoulders and hips, pursued by flashes of surprise and irritation. Her eyes ached as she ran, dry as the riverbed.
*
The Bee Man followed her. In the breathless heat of late afternoon, Nita heard him call her name as she climbed up a narrow, twisting creekbed high in the folded mountains. Too late, she looked back and saw the footprint she had left in a damp patch of creekbed clay. The thunder that had awakened her last night had meant rain somewhere higher on the slopes, and the runoff had come, quick and violent, down this bed.
She hadn’t thought he would follow her. Nita shrugged her small pack higher on her shoulder and scrambled upward, toward the rim of the creekbed and drier ground where her tracks wouldn’t show. On the other side of these hills lay the sea. The Bee Man had said so. The full water jug that she had taken banged her shoulder painfully. He called to her again, his voice hoarse, as if he had been shouting for a long time.
“Nita? Come back! You can’t just run away like this. You’ll die out here.”
Not true. Nita ducked down into the hollow left by a wind-felled tree. The tilted mass of roots and sunbaked dirt roofed the torn earth, and she crouched in the cool shadow, catching her breath. She would live with the bees. The Bee Man had showed her how. The bees would find water for her. They would sing to her with the sound of the Bee Man’s peace. Nita swallowed, her throat tight, peeking down into the creekbed.
He wasn’t down in the creekbed. He had climbed the bank, too, appearing only a dozen yards away, circling around a rocky outcrop. Nita squeezed deeper into her hiding place, holding her breath.
“Nita?” He cupped his hands around his mouth, looking up the creekbed as he shouted. “Damn it, Nita. Don’t do this!”
Anger.
It wasn’t his anger that she was hearing. Nita’s arms prickled with the memory of burning stings. Killers. Afraid to move, she peeked between the twisted roots of the old tree. There they were — a little farther along the side of the streambed. Nita’s heart beat faster at the sight of the bees darting in and out of a broken treetrunk. If she had gone on a little more, she would have walked right into them.
“Nita?”
She flinched, her heart leaping. He was right beside her, on the other side of the roots. Nita squeezed her eyes closed, trying to make herself small, trying to become invisible, like she’d done in the unit, trying to hide.
The Bee Man wasn’t mad anymore, but he was still scared. Nita opened her eyes a crack. Papa had been scared like this, the day the men had come. Run, Mama had screamed, but he hadn’t run. He had looked at Nita, afraid, had scooped her up, tossed her behind the old pickup, where the men with the guns couldn’t see her.
The Bee Man hadn’t seen her. He had walked past her hiding place, was starting to climb down the side of the creekbed. Nita sucked in her breath, fear squeezing her. Rocks and pebbles, loosened by his feet, bounced down the slope. A few of them hit the killer bees’ treetrunk. Their song rose a notch and a small cloud of bees swirled into the air. The Bee Man saw them.
He looked, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t hear their song. He didn’t know that they were killers. She scrambled to her feet, her head full of their harsh warning. In a moment, he would be too close.
You can die from too many stings
, he had told her. “Stop,” she whispered, but he didn’t hear her. More bees swirled into the air, humming anger, humming death. “Stop!” she screamed.
He heard her, twisted around, his surprise flaring bright as lightning. A rock slid out from beneath his foot, and he staggered, struggling to stay on his feet. More rocks slid and he gave a cry, falling backward, rolling down the slope in a shower of dirt to slam into the killers’ tree trunk.
The killers boiled out of their nest. Nita cringed at their harsh song.
All you could do was run
, he had said.
“Run!” she screamed.
Hands covering his face, the Bee Man tried to get to his feet. He fell again and stared crawling away from the nest, too slow, too slow, yelling something as the bees swarmed over him.
The stings hurt him. It had hurt Papa to die.
Nita dropped her pack and scrambled down the slope. A killer stung her face. Their harsh song hammered at her and they settled on her, stinging, stinging, stinging. Nita stumbled, clawing at bees on her face, slapping at them, struggling with her fear.
Run!
Mama had screamed.
Why didn’t you run? I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!
The bees would kill the Bee Man.
“I hate you!” Nita screamed with Mama’s voice and rage flared up inside her, hot as flame.
I hate you!
Fists clenched at her sides, barely feeling the stings, she sang with the killers, louder and stronger, until her song was the killers’, until they hummed her note. Then, she lowered it, gentled it.
Slowly, reluctantly almost, the dark cloud of killers lifted, thinned away, back to their tree trunk. Nita scrambled down the slope. The Bee Man lay curled up in the dust and she clutched him, terrified that he wouldn’t move, that he would lie still and silent under her hands, like Papa had. She gasped in relief as he sat up, clutching at his leg.
“My ankle,” he gasped. “I thought . . . I hope it’s just twisted. Nita?” He wiped sweat out of his eyes, his face swollen with stings as he looked at the nest. “How did you do that? How did you drive them away?”
Nita licked her lips, struggling with stony words. “I . . . hear . . . their song,” she whispered. “I . . . sang with them.”
“You hear them?”
Abruptly, Nita leaned forward, kissed the Bee Man on the lips. For a moment, he crushed her against him, fingers digging hard into her back.
“Don’t.” He pushed her away.
“You’re scared,” Nita whispered. “Of me.”
“I’m not . . .” he began. Stopped. Sighed, and pulled her against him. Gently. “I know what people think . . . about you living up here with me. I don’t give a damn what anyone says, but I didn’t know . . . how I was going to start feeling. He stared down the dry creekbed, his face folded into harsh lines. “You can’t afford to care like that anymore.”
Scared. Of her. Nita sighed, feeling hollow inside, sick with the stings, or maybe from her rage-song to the bees. She touched her face, the face that reminded Mama of
that
day, every day, felt tears and mud beneath her fingers, the lumpy swelling of stings. “I was going to go live with the bees,” she said. “By myself. I can do that.”
He was struggling with his fear. Nita waited, all still inside, like an empty hive.
The Bee Man took a long, slow breath. “It scares me, how I feel about you. I’m forty and you’re a kid, and that scares me some, too.” He gave her a sideways look. “Can you feel me, too? Like you feel the bees?”
She nodded. Fear and desire, and under it all, beesong peace, like a layer of golden honey. A stalk of tiny, white blossoms poked up from the rocks at Nita’s feet; shooting stars, coaxed into quick bloom by the shower. Nita bent and picked it. Up on the bank, the killers sang their harsh song and she shivered, tasting fear of her own. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to run always.”
“It’s a lot safer to run,” the Bee Man said, but he took the stem of flowers from her and tucked it into her hair. “Will you tell me what the bees sound like?” he asked her softly.
“I will.” She took his hand.
This time, he didn’t pull away.
* * *
THE DRYLANDS
CHAPTER ONE
T
he crowd was bigger this afternoon. It grew every day, spreading like a dark cancer across Michigan’s dry lakeshore. Waiting. For them. In the lead transport truck, Major Carter Voltaire clutched the side for balance, eyeing the crowd through the view-slit cut into the protective siding. They hated him, that mob. They hated the tired men and women riding with him. Because they were Corps, because they wore uniforms. Cold anger twisted into a knot in Carter’s guts. Every day they gathered on the strip of dusty ground between Lakeshore Drive and the sudden drop-off that had been the shore of Lake Michigan once but wasn’t anymore — not by five miles or so. When the troop trucks got closer, they’d start throwing stones.
“Heads up.” Carter’s dust mask blurred the order. “Get ready for rocks.” Gray lakebed mud caked their suncloth coveralls, cracking off in ugly scales as they moved. The salt in the dust burned the eyes, burned the lungs. Breathe enough dust out here and your lungs would never be the same, mask or no mask.
Just so those stone throwing assholes on the lakeshore could drink. Rumor blamed the latest ration reduction on the Corps. Carter’s lips tightened. What did it take to get it through their thick skulls that there wasn’t any more water? Sure it wasn’t enough, but “enough” water didn’t exist anywhere anymore. At least there was something in the pipes. After the bastards got done throwing the day’s quota of rocks and insults, they could slip back into the refugee camp, or hit the welfare taps, and get a nice drink of water. Courtesy of us, Carter thought sullenly. Courtesy of the Corps. Because the Corps had built most of the Rocky Mountain Trench Reservoir and the Great Lakes Canal system. Without the water it brought down from the blessed wetness of the arctic tundra, Michigan would be a lot farther from its old lakeshore than it was.
He could hear them now, not chanting, just growling. Like animals. Carter’s teeth snapped together as the truck dropped into a rutted, dried-out sinkhole. “Get ready to hit the deck,” he yelled. High sides had been added to the flatbed trucks the Corps used as crew transport. It protected them from the worst of the rocks. But it was only medium-weight plastic board and it wouldn’t stop a bullet. Carter touched the Beretta at his hip, reassured by its weight. All officers went armed. An armed guard went out with every crew, carrying a laser-sighted M20. Carter shaded his eyes, stomach churning.
You were always nervous, coming in. Running the damn gauntlet. His crew braced themselves against the lurch and sway of the truck, watching through the slits or staring at each other, waiting for the rocks. They joked about it in the barracks — toss a little black humor around. No one was joking today. It was getting to all of them. Working conditions were bad enough on the lakebed, and this shift had been hell. They’d slid around in sticky mud, had mired a dozer to the seat in a sinkhole trying to get that purification intake in on schedule. The CO was going to be pissed.
In the five years he’d been posted here, he’d built how many new intakes? Lake Michigan’s sullen, scummy beach receded farther out every year. Too late, he thought bitterly. We stopped doubting the global warming thing. Just too damn late. On the lakeshore, a young, black man danced out from the edge of the crowd, waving his arms, yelling something. Gave them the finger.
Yeah, we get the drift. Carter shifted his stance, touched the Beretta.
The level beams of the setting sun turned the dust haze to gold. Carter shaded his eyes, but the dust had blurred individuals into a faceless mass. It got into your soul, the dust. Ate it away, the way it ate your lungs. The setting sun reflected back from the glass of the Chicago towers, blinding him, making the black panels of the solar arrays stand out like the wings of crouching demons.
“Shit. Look at ’em.” Lieutenant Garr spat over the side of the truck. He had been the one who mired the dozer, and he was still touchy. “I kinda wish one of ’em would try something big.” He jerked his head at Suarez, who had the M20 today. “Blow a couple away.”
“Cool it, Lieutenant.” Carter rubbed a hand over his face, knowing exactly how Garr felt. The Beretta hung like a lead weight on his belt. “We could lose.”
“Me, I’d go for the grenades.” Garr grunted, made as if to spit again and didn’t. “Even with bone grafts, Abado’s never gonna be happy with what he sees in the mirror.”
Corporal Abado had driven the dozer — until he stopped a brick. The protective sides didn’t deflect everything, and brick did a lot of damage if it hit in the right place. Like your face.
“If I was doin’ it, I’d just shut off all the welfare taps.” Garr jerked a stiff finger across his throat. “They can’t pay for it, let ’em die. Who the hell do they think keeps the water running? Shit, turn it off.”
“Ease off,” Carter snapped. Yeah, he felt the same way sometimes, but this kind of talk didn’t help morale at all. And it was bad enough. They hated you — the civilians — and you ended up hating them back. Every time a new water cut came down, the Corps took the blame. Keepers of the water? Yeah, sure, Carter thought bitterly. Maybe you just had to hate
something
, just to stay sane.
He’d lost three men this past year. Shot dead by snipers, two of ’em. Simons died when they blew a pipe. Shrapnel had gutted him and he bled to death before they could get him in.
The truck slowed. Willy, their driver, had a lot of practice running brick alley. He took it in slow enough so the troublemakers had time to get out from under the wheels if they hustled, but fast enough that not too many rocks got over the sides. They could see the faces now; black, Latino, and white. The cheap masks hid gender and the lakebed dust turned them all into the same gray color. It was as if the drought had done what laws had never quite achieved. It had blurred color and gender lines, turning everyone into one gray, sexless race of thirst and rage.
Carter took a deep breath, a hot bubble of anger pressing against his ribs. He was tired of living in a damn cage, tired of getting screamed at, tired of rocks and snipers.
We didn’t make it stop raining
, he wanted to scream at them.
The first chunk of concrete clanged against the truck’s fender and Willy sped up slightly. “Incoming!” Clutching the bed wall, Carter squinted through the view-slit. The other two trucks were right behind, practically on their bumper. More rocks. He ducked as something
whammed
into the plastic armor. Almost home. A few dozen meters and they’d be through the gate, safe once more inside the chain-link and razor-wire fence around the base. Safe inside their cage.
The cheap dust masks muffled the shouts, turning them into the ugly, unintelligible barking of animals. A bottle arched over the side of the truck and smashed against the wall. Glass fragments and wetness stung the exposed skin of Carter’s face and his heart skipped a beat. No smell of gasoline or organics. No feel of a chemical burn. The puddle on the warped floorboards was yellow. Piss? A security details rolled the big gates open. “Everybody clear the area immediately,” a burly captain bellowed through a loudspeaker. “This area is off-limits to civilians. Clear it immediately. I repeat . . .”
Now the crowd would back off, closing in behind the trucks to chase them through the gates, hooting and howling, throwing the last barrage of stones and garbage. It had become a warped ritual.
The crowd stirred suddenly, bunching into thick knots. The wall of faces and bodies parted and a battered little VW charged through, raising a plume of dust behind it.
Heading straight for them.
“What the hell?” someone yelled behind Carter. “Watch it, Willy!’
He was trying. The truck veered, but it was like an elephant trying to dodge. The right front wheel slammed into a sinkhole with a crash. Bodies went flying, slamming into the armor walls, bouncing around like so many dolls. Carter clutched his view-slit, muscles screaming as the truck tried to shake him loose. The van was almost on them . . . Murphy was down and God knew where his rifle was. The van was aiming for the rear of the cab. Trying to blow the fuel tank? It could be loaded with plastic. Carter yanked his Beretta out. Had to aim one-handed, cowboy shot. The truck swerved again, slamming him against the side, nearly tearing his grip loose. He had seconds. Sun on the windshield . . . he squinted. Couldn’t see the driver.
Now!
He squeezed the trigger, emptying it at the oncoming car, firing as the windshield dissolved in a glittering shower of glass. Got you, Carter thought, and the anger in his chest blossomed hot and sweet in his throat. Got you, you bastard.
The VW swerved wildly, sideswiping the truck with a groan of rending metal. For a moment the two vehicles locked and Carter looked down through the smashed windshield, into wide, surprised eyes in a small face, a dusty blue tee shirt splotched dark with blood. Then the big truck seemed to shake itself free and they were past, roaring for the gate and safety. Behind them, the car rolled slowly over. One wheel spun briefly and then it exploded with a
whump
of burning fuel. With a howl, the dusty mob surged forward, screaming, hands reaching to tear them apart . . .
“Carter? Hey, Carter, wake up.”
Carter bolted upright, gasping.
“Hey, it’s okay. It’s just me.”
“Johnny?” The room came suddenly into focus — walls, bed, his room on the base. Johnny stood in the doorway, looking worried. “I-I’m awake.” Carter ran a shaking hand through his hair. “It’s all right.”
“Like hell.” The mattress dipped as Johnny sat down on the end of the bed, his freckled face still worried. “You can get some pills from the doc, you know. Hell, I take ’em.” He laughed, coughed. “You sleep good.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that.” Carter glanced at the bedside clock. Six AM and just getting light. The Chicago Riot was weeks ago. The burned-out rubble of the camps and the looted distribution centers had been bulldozed into trucks and dumped out on the lakebed. The unclaimed bodies —so damn many bodies — had been buried.
A kid. Carter tossed the tangled and sweaty sheet aside, rolled to his feet. He’d shot a kid. He’d looked ten. Maybe twelve.
And it had felt so good. To pull that trigger.
“What’s buggin’ you, man?” Johnny lit a cigarette. “The inquiry? They cleared you. You got a commendation.”
“It’s just the heat.” He leaned on his dresser, staring out through the dusty glass at the blare of heat and light.
“Don’t shit me.” Johnny blew smoke at him. “Spill it.”
“I don’t know.” Carter shrugged. “It just seemed so . . . pointless you know? So many people died. And I . . . started it. You know?”
Johnny was shaking his head. “You are a
case,
you know? You’re responsible for the drought, aren’t you? I forgot. You stopped the rain, didn’t you? You dried up all the farmland and the forests and cost all those poor people their jobs, didn’t you? Damn, you are some kind of bastard.”
“Ah, cut it out.” Carter shrugged, laughed. “Okay, I’ll stop.”
“Hey, I know it was bad, man.” Johnny’s face had gone serious. “It looked like all of Chi was burning to the ground in the news. I figured you guys were all dead. You didn’t start it and you can’t end it, and you know it.” Johnny crushed the end of his cigarette out on the heel of his boot. “The refugee camps are getting bigger, the experts say it’s not gonna rain, and those people in the camps, the ones who’ve lost everything, they’re gonna take it out on you. They want all the water they can drink and they’re gonna kill to get it. They’re enemies now,” he said softly. “They’re not on our side any more.”
“Dammit, we’re all on the same side.” It had taken two brigades of the 82nd Airborne and the 75th Rangers to deal with Chicago. And they had dealt with it, in spades. The South Side and the camps looked like the aftermath of a war; burned-out buildings, scorched piles of rubble. He looked beyond the vicious thorns of the wire perimeter fence, out to where water shimmered in the lakebed. Scummy, salty, precious water — the dying lake seemed to exert some kind of strange magnetic power. The Chicago refugee camps had been the biggest in the country, as if the lake had attracted all the rootless people for a hundred miles in any direction, had drawn them into the shadow of Chicago’s soaring towers and self-contained arcologies. It had attracted darkness with them — pulled in the frustration, the despair, and the rage that made people want to lash out, to break something, anything.
“Funny, how we both ended up serving water.” Carter kept his eyes on that distant shimmer. “Priests of the new religion, Johnny?”
“Speak for yourself.” Johnny laughed. “I’m divorced, not celibate. Just ask Amber. I think my ex is keeping count.”
“You know what I mean.” But Carter smiled in spite of his mood. Johnny could do that.
“If you mean water is power, you’re a tad slow figuring that one out.” Johnny levered himself to his feet. “You know, you’re not much fun, Lieutenant Colonel Voltaire. I came here to celebrate your promotion and transfer, and you’re not doing a very good job of celebrating. You’ve got a hangover is all. Get a shower and let’s get some breakfast. That’s an order.” Johnny grabbed Carter’s robe from the end of the bed, threw it at him. “As a member of the Water Policy Committee, I’m your boss, remember? Hell, I’m a
god
. Hop to it.”
“Yes, sir.” Carter gave him a mock salute and headed for the bath room.
Johnny was almost right — about his being a god. This had been a fancy hotel once, and now the officers had their own showers. Carter shivered as he stepped under the feeble spray of tepid water. Too early for the solar panels to have warmed up the tanks. Yeah, Water Policy decided who got the water, and how much. But it was up to the Corps to get it there, keep it running, and defend it. In the old days, the Corps had been a bunch of engineers. They had built levees and designed dams and were mostly civilian employees. Carter wondered if any of them had ever gone armed. Maybe after the hurricanes flattened New Orleans back at the start of the century. Not otherwise. He banged the soap into its tray and turned the spray back on to rinse off the lather.
It had taken presidential emergency powers to condemn private water rights in the first place, and that had nearly triggered a revolution right there. Afterward, no one could agree on who should administer the water, so . . . they had redefined the Corps. Water Policy might not be a bunch of gods, but they answered only to God, and the Corps answered only to Water Policy. Which made Johnny a member of the most powerful body politic in the US. No, that was no surprise at all — not if you knew Johnny. A few people made the mistake of not taking him seriously, writing him off as nothing more than a rich man’s spoiled son. That was a serious mistake. When Johnny wanted something, he didn’t kid around. It was no accident that he was the youngest member of Water Policy. When they were kids, Johnny had said he was going to be president. When he got older, he’d realized that Water Policy had more power. Ever since the Middle East fiasco, the presidency hadn’t been worth much.