H2O (10 page)

“A riot in Dartbridge? I don't think so,” said Simon. “People are just panicking a little, I guess.”

We didn't go the way we'd usually go, straight into town via the library parking lot. Simon went to the right, along the back road, South Street. Fine by me, because I didn't want to go anywhere near The George. Not so fine was…there was a guy slumped up against a wall. He looked as if he'd just fallen asleep there, like a drunk guy might, snoozing in the sun.

“Don't look,” said Simon, but I did.

He wasn't snoozing. His face was all bloody, and his eyes were gone, holes where they should have been. I didn't know it then, but that's what birds do, peck out the pieces that are easiest to get their beaks into. Nice.

In all my life, up until the day before, I'd never seen a dead person. Not counting the parking-lot people—which I didn't like to do, because I hadn't actually seen them die, had I? Like Caspar, it had to be possible that they'd be OK—I'd now seen four dead bodies.
Four
.

Ha ha ha. That's pretty funny, huh? Do you see? I was still counting.

And…does it sound too weird to say it? I felt glad that my mom was at home with Henry, not lying in the street—or in her nightie in someone's front yard, like Mrs. Fitch.

Simon was wrong. It was a riot.

South Street goes along next to the High Street, then curves in to meet it. As we walked toward the noise, you had this little view—a tiny street's width—of the High Street. And across this little gap, people—not tons of people, but little flurries and spurts of them—were going back and forth, some walking, some running, some shouting. Some with scarves tied across their faces like it was a real riot or something. Some pushing carts, most carrying all sorts of stuff.

So what we'd seen in the parking lot, it wasn't just some random thing—it was what was going down.

“We'll go to the other supermarket,” said Simon, staring at the little snippet of riot.

That was another moment when I (sort of) realized how serious it was. We basically never much went to “the other supermarket,” aka “the good one.” In my house, if there was something from “the other supermarket” in the fridge—or snuck into the freezer like the pizza—it was unusual, as in Shocksville unusual, and also a cause for deep joy. Lee's family went there all the time and always had tons of awesome stuff to eat—like ice cream, for a start, and snacky things you could microwave in seconds, french fries included. Pretty much everyone else's family shopped there too, at least sometimes. Even Zak's.

We backtracked and cut around along Snow Hill, weaving our way along the back streets until we'd nearly reached the river. Up ahead, you could see the junction where the end of the High Street meets a bunch of other roads: the bridge road from the east end of town where Leonie lived, the road that led into town from the seaside places like Paignton and Torquay, and the road that led to the hospital and the supermarket.

That junction was rammed with dead cars, with live people, with rage—you could hear it from where we stood: screaming, shouting, fighting, and the police, in a car, stuck in the middle of it, lights flashing. There was a policeman on the roof of the car with a megaphone, telling people to
Go
Home, Go Home, Go
Home
.

Simon looked…like he looked when he got handed Henry having a bawling fit. Upset, confused, and panicked. Stressed out but trying not to show it.

To get to the supermarket, we'd have to get through all that. Or—

“We could cut across the High Street further up,” I said. “Just cut across. It'll be really quick.”

Basically, I'd have marched across the Sahara if I'd thought there was something to drink on the other side. I could feel this disgusting layer of sweat building up inside the waterproof gear, and I'd already wondered if I'd have to survive by licking the inside of my raincoat.

“Where?” snapped Simon. Yup, stressed.

That's the thing about being a teenager, I guess. You know about stuff, you know about places, about shortcuts that adults don't. They get to drive everywhere; you get told, “It's only a shower,” i.e., get on with it; go. So you find the quickest way… OK, so you also find secret ways… OK and places to lurk. Places where you won't be seen by parents cruising past in cars when maybe you're supposed to be in French class or PE—or a super-expensive private guitar lesson, for example.

My shortcut, it was down this little alleyway. At the end of it, you had to cut across the High Street, but not just straight across; you had to turn left, go along a ways, and then cut right to get into another alleyway. I guess Simon must have been thirst-crazy too, because we went for it. He gripped the umbrella like it was a club and took hold of my hand.

When I was small, when we first came here, when I first went out anywhere on my own with Simon (which wasn't for a long time), he'd try to get me to hold his hand to cross the road. I wouldn't do it. I'd fold my arms and march across the road alone. If you'd told me one day I'd cross the High Street in broad daylight holding his hand…I wouldn't have believed you for a second.

I held his hand so tight.

There. That's a thing I've said for my mom. And for Simon.

But honestly—and this is the weird thing—it wasn't as bad as I had thought it would be. The riot, I mean. Yes, it was like nothing you'd ever seen (well, certainly not in Dartbridge); there were people running around and smashing windows and stealing stuff and shouting at each other (plus alarms going off), but what you realized in about ten seconds is that although it's really scary and about as far from anything normal you would ever expect to see—especially in the hippie capital of the entire universe—no one is paying any attention to you at all. Everyone is just doing their own thing; they couldn't care less about you…unless you tried to take their TV or their tennis shoes or their bags of food or something, I bet. (So that was fine by me, because it wasn't like anyone in the middle of a riot was going to see me holding “Daddy's” hand and stop and say, “Ruby?! Oh my
! What ARE you wearing?!”)

Those people there, rioting, they looked like the kind of people you saw every day in Dartbridge. Some of them were just ordinary people; some of them looked like the sort of people who probably spent a lot of time going to basket-weaving workshops or worshipping crystals in woodland glades. Point is, the hippies and the townies,
everyone
, had gone nuts. If it had been organized by the school, it would have been what they called a “group activity,” which meant you weren't allowed to just stick with your friends, but you had to actually “participate” with the sorts of people you'd really rather
die
—I must stop saying that—than participate with.

We cut back down, onto the hospital road, which was jammed with stopped cars. On the other side of that was the supermarket.

I guess we'd gone too far to turn back, so we went forward.

You know how a supermarket parking lot normally is? Everyone circling around like pizza-eating vultures just to try to park one space closer to the doors? Well, it wasn't like that at all. Cars were parked all over—not neatly in the spaces but jammed in everywhere, none of them moving, no one even packing stuff into them or honking and tooting to get out. Only dead cars, abandoned cars—and car alarms, going on and on.

“Come on,” said Simon, dragging me through it.

Up ahead, the supermarket looked nuts. There were a lot of people going in and out of it, but it was the biggest supermarket for miles around, so that wasn't unusual. You didn't really get how bad it was until you got closer. Then you could see the front doors were all smashed in. And I do mean all smashed in—not just the glass in the doors broken or something, but the actual doors were gone. A truck was right inside the shop, smashed into the flower display.

Do I even need to say that there was no one at the registers, no one trying to stop or control anything? No, it was a grab-what-you-can job: people laden with stuff, but lots of mad, crazy, what-do-you-want-that-for? stuff. I saw a guy with a cart full of toilet paper, two women with a cart full of washing detergent, a kid lugging a basketful of ketchup and cake frosting.

Sounds like crazy fun, huh?

Simon and I, we wandered into all this, and it was obvious, right away, that we'd come too late. Somewhere in that shop a dog was barking as we roamed the aisles, realizing how bad it was. Where the fruit and vegetables should have been, it was bare. I mean stripped clean, bare-naked bare, nada. Not even a single bunch of beets left. (Boo hoo.) The dairy section: the milk, the yogurt—all of it gone. He took us to where the bottled water would have been: all the drinks, all the juices, everything, gone. From the looks of it, the booze was also pretty much cleaned out, I noticed. We went to the canned fruit; that was cleaned out too—even the prunes had been taken.

“I can't believe this, I can't believe this,” Simon kept muttering.

I could. Inside my mouth it was as dry as when you go to the dentist's and they put that sucky thing in your mouth, so they don't have to work in a pool of spit. Bone dry. When I stared at those empty shelves, it was like they'd put that sucky thing right down in the middle of me and sucked up every last drop of moisture in my body.

We didn't even get to the ice cubes. They would have all been gone anyway. In the freezer section, there was stuff—frozen stuff, melting, thrown all over the floor. Small groups of people were bent inside the freezers, hacking away at the ice, shoveling it into garbage bags that leaked precious water. A woman was on the floor, mopping the water up with kitchen cloths and wringing it out into a bucket; two little kids stood near, sucking on kitchen cloths, each clutching a jumbo-bag of candy, and over them all, tough-looking men stood guard. One had a frothy-mouthed, mad-eyed, barking pit bull…one had a shotgun.

“We'll go somewhere else,” said Simon.

He grabbed my hand and started walking me out, fast. From a display of bargain stuff he snatched up a steak and kidney pie, the kind in a can.

“Love these,” he said.

I never knew that.

As we walked out, past the crashed car, I pulled away from him and picked up the biggest, most expensive bunch of flowers I could see. Just like I'd never seen Simon buy a canned pie even though he said he loved them, my mom—who totally swooned about flowers—never bought them. Not for herself.

“For Mom,” I said.

Before I realized I might have done a very stupid thing, it turned out I might have done a very brilliant thing.

Simon stared at the bunch of flowers; water dripped from the stems.

“You watch out for me,” he said, swapping his shopping bags and the umbrella for the flowers.

He shoved the flowers back into some random bucket. He did the same with other stuff, shifting flowers around so he had a free bucket. I got it then. Without making any kind of a fuss about it, Simon worked around the display, collecting water. Some of the flowers were dead already, sitting in empty buckets; some were wilted, with just a dribble of water left. Some looked pretty perky and fresh. He worked really slowly and slyly, watching what was going on around him, standing back and looking around from time to time, so he just looked like some dumb, confused, scared man, wondering what on earth was going on. Thirsty people, desperate people, walked this way and that, straight past him. When he was done with one bucket, he started on another.

And all the while I had this argument going on in my head, like,
How
could
he
know
that
water
was
OK? But it must be OK, or he wouldn't be taking
it.

“You watch out, Ru! You watch out!” he hissed.

I was gasping to drink.
Pull
yourself
together
, I thought—in Simon's voice.

I don't know what made me do it—too many movies I guess, too many scenes in which people need to make a getaway, fast. Duh, we were going to have to walk for it anyway, but I backed up and looked outside.

Our exit was as clear as it could be; all that was in our way was just people, coming and going. I took my Indiana Jones bird-watching hat off and fanned my face with it. So hot, so thirsty. And then I looked up.

I don't know what made me do that either. I wish I could say I'd learned already how important it is to keep a watch on the sky, but—like using the faucet—it's the kind of thing I forget about a lot more than I should. I looked up…into a sky festering with death.

It was the beginning of a storm sky. The raggedy clouds had pigged out and gotten bloated: cumulus congestus, fat with rain. Below these big guys, little sneaky fractus clouds hung around, probably wondering which side to choose…and, in the distance, but already towering miles into the sky, big momma cumulonimbus calvus, puffing herself up to make an entrance.

She was what I would have called a thundercloud—but actually, she hadn't quite worked herself up enough for that. It's when she goes into bad hair day mode (seriously bouffant, with a streaky, icy flat-top) that you know she's going to lose it big time. Big? By then, she's the tallest thing on Earth: cumulonimbus capillatus, the thundery queen of all clouds.

That's what I know to say now; then, all I saw was: it really looked like it was going to rain.

I went back inside. I was going to tell Simon about the clouds, but—

“Give me the bags!” he shouted.

Other people were shouting too; you could hear it, down where the freezers were. It sounded like a fight breaking out. The dog was going berserk. The men were shouting, women too. A kid screamed.

I took Simon the bags; he set the buckets inside them.

“Go carefully,” he said. “Stay calm.”

We picked up the bags, and we walked out, away from the shouting and the screaming. A few steps into the parking lot, Simon looked up at the sky.

“
,” he said.

I thought he'd say we had to go back inside, but you could hear things were really going crazy in there. For a second, Simon wavered in the grip of a mind melt, then shouted, “Run!”

I thought we were heading for home. I ran, the precious water from my bucket slopping everywhere.

“Ruby!” yelled Simon.

I looked behind and saw him standing at the open door of a car.

“HERE!” he shouted. “COME HERE!” like I was a dog.

I turned and dove for the car, ended up in the driver's seat; from the bag on my lap, stinky water leaked all over my waterproof trousers—which weren't actually waterproof at all. I could see the material darkening, the water just soaking on through. The fight that had gone on inside my own head came screeching out of my mouth, louder than the racket of the alarms:

“
What
if
it's
poisoned?!
”

I looked at Simon, who was glugging from his bucket.

“Aaah!” he shouted and wiped his mouth, as though it was the best thing he'd ever had to drink. “Ruby, I really don't think this water has been changed in days, do you?”

“
But
how
do
you
know
that?!
”

“Because with everything that's
gone
on
,” said Simon, shouting very slowly, “I don't think anyone would have thought they needed to go and break into the supermarket and give the flowers some water. In fact, I'm sure of it.”

He didn't know that for sure; he couldn't know that. I stared into the bucket in the bag on my lap; it looked worse—so much worse—than pizza, pea, and fish-finger melt-water. AND it stank. AND it was probably teeming with millions of wiggly little space bugs, all waving their tentacles at me, going, “Have a lovely drink, Ruby!” AND I thought I'd go mad with thirst just looking at it, AND I thought Simon had already gone mad. That's what thirst does; it gets to a certain point, and you'll drink anything just to make it stop. You just don't care anymore. That's why people go crazy in deserts and drink sand, thinking it's water, or why shipwrecked sailors stuck in lifeboats crack and glug down buckets of seawater (then go mad and end up bumping off their shipmates to gnaw on their bones). All I could do was stare into that bucket of stinking water thinking,
I
JUST
WANT
TO
DRINK
.

“And I feel fine,” shouted Simon.

I drank.

Yes, OK, I can say how disgusting that water tasted. Horrible—and also very, very, very good. For just a few moments, the world was wonderful. You see, nothing happened. The whole world—the whole gone-mental world—just carried on around us; people scurrying through the parking lot—but you know what? We were OK. That feeling, that gorgeous feeling when you're thirsty—so thirsty—and you finally get to drink…aaah!

Then… I'd never heard a gun fired, not in real life, but I knew right away that's what it was. There was this massive shattering, crashing sound of glass breaking, followed by another gunshot.

What happened next, it was pretty bad.

People ran from the supermarket, zigzagging through the parking lot, fresh car alarms bursting out all over.

A big fat raindrop fell on the windshield. I watched it, that single, fat, glassy blob of rain; I watched it splat and slide. Then another came and another, and another.

“Lock the doors,” said Simon.

I couldn't think how; which button?

“Your side,” said Simon. “Your lock.”

He reached right over me and hit the lock on my door. SCHTOMP! The doors locked.

The people in the parking lot were screaming, running for cover—running back to the supermarket, where other people were trying to get out. Screams, shouts, gunshots. People running all over.

BLAM! A woman—a little trail of blood running down her face—slammed against the car. She saw us inside; she tried to get in the backseat of the car on Simon's side, a baby seat there.

“Let me in!” she screamed.

“You do not open the doors,” shouted Simon, his voice hard and cold.

The woman scooted around the car—

BLAM! Her palms slammed down on my window; her face pressed close—the look on it, the terror, the pleading. She could have been my mom.

“Please!” she screamed at me.

“There's nothing we can do for her,” shouted Simon. “Ruby: there's nothing we can do.”

All I could do was look at her, tears streaming down my face, mumbling, “I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.” Tears streaming down her face: “Please, please, please…”

She howled with rage, right up against the glass, then smashed her fist against the window. She spat at me—at the glass between us—and stumbled away.

“Get in the back,” said Simon, grabbing the bucket on my lap and shoving it down next to his. “Get in the back!” he shouted, yanking me up and pushing me through, onto the backseat. “Lie down!”

He squashed down on top of me, the two of us crammed in next to the baby seat.

“Act dead.”

That was what he said, “Act dead.”

The gunshots went on. The screaming went on. The alarms, on and on and on. You could hear people pushing past the car; a couple times someone yanked on a door handle. It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming out loud when that happened.

“Don't think this gets you out of your studies,” Simon bellowed in my ear.

My nose was pressed against the back of the seat. I could feel his breath in my ear. I heard the fear in it, smelled the rotten-egg stink of that water.

I thought he'd gone mad.

“Let's start with the reasons why Britain's empire declined in the twentieth century,” he shouted. He jabbed me, hard, his thumb in my rib. “The decline of the empire was caused by…”

I was crying—or trying to. No tears would come.

“The decline of the empire was caused by?” he persisted.

He jabbed me again.

“Things that happened in Britain and things that happened in other places.” I sobbed into the seat.

“Other places?”

“Like India!” I wailed.

“What happened in India? Come on! I know you know this, Ru.”

“Gandhi,” I shouted into the seat.

“Gandhi? Gandhi who? What? How? Why? This is an essay question, not a multiple choice.” Jab. “Please, Ruby! Think!”

“The Indian…the National Congress was…founded in 1885…”

We went through it all: Gandhi coming along, Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Simon didn't know it like I knew it, but that didn't stop him asking tricky questions, and he knew a lot more about what Churchill and the British government had been up to.

In time, all the people noise stopped. All you could hear were alarms, alarms, alarms…and the rain, drumming down on the roof of the car.
Hammering
down—so loud you could hear it over the rest of the racket. If it had been some old beater, like my dad's, we would have been done for. My dad's car leaked where you wouldn't think a car could leak.

It was best not to think about that.

Eventually, the rain stopped—for a while—but we didn't dare leave the car. Directly above us, the sky was groaning with clouds. Always hard to tell what kind when you're cowering underneath it. The sun managed to poke through a little before it chickened out completely and gave up for the night. The world was soaking wet…and people quiet. The car alarms, they went on.

We climbed back into the front seats. For a moment, we just sat.

This is a thing I learned about alarms. It's sort of based on Henry's crying. If you go on hearing it, tuning in to it, feeling it, you will go nuts. So you have to find a way to tune out, to not hear it. If you can, you put a pillow over your ears and just pretend you're crashed out at a really noisy party—but you've had a great time, right, so you don't mind the noise. If there's no pillow, stuff whatever you can into your ears.

“Is there any tissue or something?” I shouted. Parenty people, even in times of extreme crisis, always have that kind of thing.

The parenty people who'd owned that car did. Simon ransacked the glove compartment and found baby wipes and candy. He handed the baby wipes and candy to me and used his penknife to open the canned pie. He cut his hand doing it.

“Ru, would you like some of this?” he shouted, holding out the soggy, uncooked pie.

“It's OK, thanks,” I shouted, even though my stomach was growling. I was stuffing strips of baby wipe into my ears.

“I respect your position on vegetarianism,” he shouted.

Huh?!
I pulled the baby wipe out of my ears just to be sure I'd heard him right.

“I said I respect your position on vegetarianism,” he repeated.

What?!
He'd never said that before, not once.

“Thanks,” I shouted. I stuffed the baby wipe back into my ear and offered him some. He stuffed some into his ears.

“But,
honey
,” he practically screamed, overcompensating for the earplugs.

He'd never said that either, not once.
Honey.

“I think right now it would really be OK to eat this. I mean, I think it would really be OK. And I, for one, will never mention it again.”

I hesitated; I was so hungry…

“Even though you wear leather shoes,” he shouted.