Mindy McGinnis - In a Handful of Dust

Ben blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Have it your way then.”

She flapped her arms about her, muscles cramping from holding them straight for so long. “Give me a sec, I’ll be ready soon.”

“Whenever,” Ben said, flopping to the desert floor.

“So, were there ever other women? Has it always been just Nora and Bailey?”

“Huh? Oh no, there used to be a whole lot more people here, in general. Then cholera swept through right around the time I was born, and it wiped out a lot of us.”

“Cholera’s bad stuff.”

“We’d taken in some new people and one of them was falling sick but hiding it. Probably one of the females, because not long after that their water supply was infected.”

“The women drank from different water?”

Ben shaded his eyes to look up at her. “Dad said it caused too much trouble and distraction to have everybody doing as they pleased, so men and women lived apart.”

“And people were okay with that?”

“I guess they had water and food, so they were okay with anything.”

Lucy dropped down next to Ben in the sand, pulling out her water bottle. “So one of the women was sick with cholera?”

“Yeah. Whoever it was, they were all drawing out of the same tank in the women and children’s hotel, and a few days later most of them were dead. Dad said it was such a stink they ended up torching the place, hoping to kill off the bug.”

“It work?”

“Seems so. We haven’t had a case of cholera since then, although it made Nora straight paranoid. She made Lander take her out to the hospital—the real one—and the library to get medical books so she could know all there was to know about waterborne illnesses. She had groups of men carrying boxes of books that weighed more than me up into her hotel room for days.”

Lucy’s hand stopped cold on the cap of her bottle, as a bubble of hope rose from her long-dormant heart. “She know about polio?”

“She knows about damn near everything. Even if she doesn’t, I guarantee you anything anybody needs to know is in those books.”

Lucy jammed her bottle into the depths of her pack to hide the quaking of her hands. “All right then, let’s get moving.”

Ben remained where he was, lying in the sun like the big cat she’d seen through Lynn’s scope. “So it doesn’t bother you?”

“What’s that?”

Ben’s smile was slow and measured, nothing like the spontaneous one that had burst across his face earlier. “You gave up your secret way too early.”

Lucy’s eyebrows came together as she looked at him, comprehension only dawning as she remembered the look on the men’s faces as they’d carefully bundled Lynn’s nearly lifeless body into the backseat of the car. In her own state she’d not questioned why perfect strangers would be scared at the thought of Lynn dying.

“You would’ve saved us anyway,” Lucy said slowly, “whether I could witch or not. Because you need women.”

“Well,” Ben said, “you’re not so stupid after all.”

“Get that away from me,” Lynn said, when Lucy offered her the zapper in their room that evening.

“It’s not such a bad idea,” Lucy argued. “Lander keeps your gun locked up when he’s not on the roof with you, and you’re weak like a fish on shore.”

“Maybe, but that thing’s no good unless somebody is in arm’s reach. My rifle keeps them farther even when it’s not loaded.”

“Fine.” Lucy put both zappers into her pack. “But I’ll point out again that you don’t have the rifle, period.”

Lynn threw an arm over her face, and her voice came out muffled by the crook of her elbow. “I’ll get it back. Lander’s not the most charming man in the world, but he’s not stupid either. If it helps them to arm me, he’ll do it.”

Lucy unlaced her boots carefully, weighing her words before speaking. “I found quite a few veins today.”

“Viable ones?”

“Think so. Ben was pretty distracting, so I couldn’t get a feel for how deep they were, but there’s water out there.”

Lynn grunted, but offered nothing more.

Lucy stripped off her clothes and slid into her own bed. Darkness had filled the rest of the room, but she could see the outline of Lynn’s arm tented over her face in the moonlight. “Ben said Nora and Bailey were the only women here before we showed up.”

The eruption of panic she’d been expecting didn’t come. Instead Lynn sighed, the simple exhalation a measure of how trapped she felt. “I know.”

“How?”

“Lander can’t always know what I’m looking at through the scope, and I see plenty, but never once a woman. So asking a few of the right questions to Nora today opened her up a bit. She even told me how come there’s no guns around here except mine.” Lucy rolled onto her side to hear Lynn better as her disembodied voice floated through the darkness.

“I was wondering,” Lucy said. “Seems like a city this size there’d be guns somewhere.”

“There was, back when the Shortage first happened. Plenty, to hear Nora tell it. But people were panicking here, same as back home. Mother said when things first went down it was chaos. In a city this size, with the hotels filled with those who didn’t belong, it turned downright nasty. Those that lived here claimed their water for themselves.”

“So what happened?”

“Those who didn’t belong were tossed into the desert, but they didn’t go easy. Nora said there was so much blood the sand was like mud, and people sinking into it up to their ankles while they begged to stay.”

Lucy reached for the bottle she had beside her bed, though she hadn’t adjusted to the taste of the water yet. The burning heat of the desert was a fresh memory, and the image of desperate people driven to madness made her clutch the bottle all the more tightly. “They all die?”

“Seems someone among the outcasts was no idiot, and they made their way over to a place called Lake Mead. Lost a lot on the walk. Nora said there were buzzards in a straight line in the sky. People must’ve been dropping every few feet.”

Lucy had seen enough buzzards in her time, their black wings and long, slow descents marking the final resting place of someone unlucky. “That’s horrible.”

“They weren’t the only ones who headed to the lake. There were plenty of people those days that didn’t like everything this city stood for, and the things that went on in it. So when the people who lived in the City of Sin made judgment calls about who got to survive after the Shortage, it didn’t set well with those who had took up at the lake. When the exiles straggled in, there was no sympathy for the city dwellers among either group, and a common enemy makes for fast friends.

“They came back at night and went after those who had killed their loved ones. Nora said if she had thought the sand was mud before, then the streets were rivers that night.

“The people from the lake scoured the city, took every gun they found, adding to their own strength and ensuring any revenge the people of Las Vegas tried to take would be of the unarmed kind. Nora says still if anyone from the city tries to take the pass to Lake Mead, they get a warning shot. But only sometimes.”

“So all the water they’ve got access to is what’s in the hotel tanks, the stored pool water and such. If they run out…”

“If they run out, they’re dead, and I’ve got no idea how much is left. But the fact they’ll let a stranger like me clear areas where there’s old water stored says a lot.”

Threads of thought spun webs in Lucy’s brain, and when she spoke again it was with a hesitant voice. “Ben says there was a bad wave of cholera back when he was born. For all they know the water in those hotels they’ve been cut off from is infected with Lord knows what all.”