Magpies: A Tale from the Juniper

by Meshuga

Based on "The Juniper Wars" series by Aaron Michael Ritchey. He gives us a rich world with plenty going on. I took an earlier time in his plot setup, all OG characters. "Ty Cuevas is part of the modern scrap rush into the newly created Juniper, but she doesn't want to be. She hates her job, hates her rickety steam truck, but most of all she hates Clint for bringing her out here."

Magpies

A Juniper Wars Story

Ty jerked her saw back and forth, and wiped sweat off her dirty face. She had chapped hands, cracked fingernails, sore arms, and the person to blame for all of it was Clint. Not Daddy. Daddy was a term of endearment reserved for the male parent whom she loved, and in this moment, Tymonee Rae Cuevas did not love Clint. Not even a little bit.

There was plenty of blame to spread around. Hollis was at fault, too, for engineering the world's crappiest steam engine so they could putter around inside the EM field. The Chinese, their nuke, the old "Bomb from Beijing," it was their fault the whole thing existed. Think they'd hit L.A., or New York, or D.C., someplace that made sense. Instead they launched it at Yellowstone National Park, which had the unfortunate side effect of somehow creating a static electromagnetic field. Something about capping off the volcano and subterranean pressures, a basalt flood. However it worked, it permanently knocked out the power to a huge chunk of the United States which would have been brilliant of it was the Eastern seaboard that was affected, with the White House and the Pentagon and the CIA, or the Western seaboard which produced tech and entertainment, the only true exports the U.S. had left. But that wasn't where the EMP field was. It was all the dumbest states like Wyoming and Colorado, and here in the stupid Texas panhandle, places where smart people didn't live to begin with.

The pipe snapped off, and Ty caught it before it hit the ground. She picked her way around chunks of drywall and fiberglass insulation, past the dismantled kitchen, through an empty window, and tossed it into the flatbed trailer parked in the middle of the packed dirt that served as a driveway. Then she refilled her canteen with tepid water from the tank, in the bed of their jerry rigged abomination of a steam powered pickup truck. The trailer was full and the water tank was running empty. They'd head back first thing in the morning if she were lucky. But, she wasn't the lucky type.

Ty picked through the toolbox for a fresh sawblade and bitterly wondered where Clint had gone. He'd been over in the barn pulling copper wiring, but she hadn't seen or heard anything from that direction in a while. She found a sledge hammer and a pipe wrench, hating that she knew the difference between a pipe wrench and an adjustable, and went to work on the master bathroom. She took her time. There were a million things she'd rather do, but literally none of them were possible.

First on her list was a hot shower. Hot water heaters needed electricity so she'd settle for a cold one. Pumps, however, also need electricity, so she'd have to skip it altogether. Might as well tear out the shower head and faucets, and oh yeah, how about all the piping behind the wall? Won't need that any time soon. She smashed her hammer through an ugly tile pattern, chipped porcelain stinging her bare arms. She'd rather hang out at the public gardens, but you couldn't get there without a car and cars need electricity. She'd rather eat a nice, hot pizza, but that called for an electric oven. She'd rather stream a video, or listen to music, or play a game, or read a book, but all of those required a phone or a tablet, which needed electricity. Even something so simple as knowing what time it was depended on the juice, and out here in the EM field, known among salvage monkeys as "the Juniper," it had all dried up. There wasn't much of a point sticking around anymore, which was why Clint was pretty sure whoever used to live here wouldn't mind if they tore the whole place down and sold the raw materials for cash.

With that wall out of the way, the bare pipes were exposed. She clamped her wrench around the faucet and pushed. It took a few seconds and a couple extra shoves before it gave way with a groaning squeak. Footsteps clumped behind her, and a cough. "Workin' hard?"

It was him.

"Unlike some people," she muttered.

"Thought I'd get us some dinner."

What was he talking about? "Ohmigod what is that!?" A couple of limp, dead rodents dangled by their feet in his clenched hand. The .22 rifle was slung over his shoulder.

"Prairie dogs. Noticed a town on the way in, maybe a mile out. Thought I'd get us a hot meal tonight."

"Couldn't you wait until we got back to town, like a normal person? That is one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen."

No exaggeration. They might have looked cute once, before lead slugs had torn through their delicate little bodies. Now they were just nasty; one with crimson stains on its squared incisors, an eyeball bursting out of its socket and the other rolled back, displaying mostly white in its final expression of twisted agony. The other had its eyes blessedly closed, but a rivulet of blood ran down its matted fur and dripped on the dusty linoleum.

"Oh, they don't look like much, but after they're skinned and gutted, roasting on a spit, they'll make your mouth water. Wanna help?"

The mere thought made her retch. "I'm not touching those things. They're revolting."

"Suit yourself. They're better'n stale chips, though."

She resumed wrenching and tried to think of something other than bleeding, gorey rats. "I highly doubt that," she grumbled, and twisted another pipe off.

The bathroom progressively darkened while Ty dismantled the plumbing for the toilet, then the sink. By the time she got to the electric wiring she could barely see anything, so she just gave up. She got another drink from the truck —the high desert could suck the moisture right out of your pores— and found a half empty bag of Quincy Jim's serrano & mango flavored beef jerky. Clint was near the barn, roasting his carcasses over a fire. Ty was hungry, but not that hungry; last thing she wanted was to be haunted by the mangled prairie dog ghosts of dinner past.

"Trailer's full," she said, and sat down on an old, rusted folding chair they had found in the barn.

Clint coughed. "Oh, I don't know. Still a little bit of room," was his predictable answer. They had this conversation frequently. "We'll strip the wiring from the barn, and you can finish up that guest bath. Don't want to stay too long, though, we're almost out of water." He coughed again. "We'll start back before noon, I promise."

She'd heard it before. They'd start back tomorrow, sure, but it wouldn't be before noon.

"Hey, how much you think we can get for this haul?" He noisily blew on a hunk of meat, suspended from a wire hanger, like he was toasting a macabre weenie. "Those copper tubes we got from the kitchen are good as gold." He grinned. She pulled her bucket closer to the fire and crunched pretzels. It got cold out here at night. "Yessir," Clint mused, examining his roasted treat, "we might as well be alchemists." It was quiet for a while, just the fire crackling and Clint smacking his lips. "Y'know," he leaned toward her, "we should maybe get one of those propane stoves. Boil some pasta or rice. Maybe soup. Better eating when we're out here in the field, than what we've been."

"Stove, food, plates, forks. It'd take too much space," she said.

"Yeah," he coughed, "you're prob'ly right. Space is money. Soon's we make enough we can… We can get out of here."

This was the first she'd heard about the possibility of leaving West Texas. Make enough for what?

"Still," he leaned back and gestured at the night sky. "Don't get to see that out in the world."

Ty grudgingly admitted it was true. She'd learned all about constellations, planets, asteroids and stuff in school, but she'd never seen what they were talking about. She thought she had. Weak little pinpricks pushing through the dazzling yellow canopy of city glare. Out here in the flats, though, street lamps were replaced with juniper trees and the only lights were nature's own. Here a billion stars blazed on an inky field, like fine diamonds on a silky cloth, and meteors danced across the Milky Way. Clint was staring at the sky and smiling. Despite everything, he was happy right then and he didn't deserve it.

"It's your fault, you know," Ty said. "What happened to Mom."

The smile was gone, his face neutral. He didn't say anything for a long time. Coyotes yapped at each other somewhere out in the dark. That was good. Meant there weren't any cougars nearby. "You sure you don't wanna try some prairie dog? Could use a little salt but it's still good."

She shook her head.

"Good night, then." He got up and put his bucket back on the truck. "Don't forget to put the fire all the way out."

Her barb had struck home. She didn't feel any better for it, but pretended she did.

They had a steam truck, more than most would-be scavengers at the time. They got to chug in and out of the Juniper at will, harvesting the wealth of abandoned goods, plastics and metals the refugees had left behind, while others could only look on. After the nuke hit everyone panicked. Radiation, nuclear winter, the threat of more bombs in higher population areas, but it turned out to be not quite as devastating as most predicted. It was a hydrogen bomb, and virtually all the radiation was consumed in the blast. Nuclear winter did come, but it was neither as long nor harsh as news anchors and other fear mongers breathlessly promised. The subsequent weeks and months brought no more missiles, and the nation heaved a collective sigh of relief. But then the lights began flickering off as a new, unforeseen horror crept down the Central Western states. Refugees poured out by the tens, and then hundreds of thousands, but Clint and Uncle Hollis were practically giddy with the opportunity Beijing's goof presented. All those buildings. All those roads. All those billboards and power lines and cell towers, copper, steel, aluminum and iron, just sitting there, waiting for someone to take it.

Hollis quickly assembled a prototype steam engine, and was now selling an improved design at a premium, fast as he could build them. Meanwhile, Clint talked Uncle Hollis into giving him the original, a wheezing disaster of a contraption mounted in the bed of an ancient blue Ford F-150. Just like that, Ty was ripped from her comfortable modern life so they could strike it rich in the gold rush of the new century. They were turning a profit, too, just not quickly. Part of the problem was that their Franken-Ford topped out at a teeth rattling 15 miles an hour. Even if you're only forty miles from town, that's still a four hour road trip when you take the dirt roads and farm paths to avoid derelict towns and major highways. That meant a lot of time in the truck, and without radio, another casualty of the electromagnetic field, that meant a lot of alone time with Clint.

Usually he chattered about whatever little thing bubbled into his mind and she wished he would shut up, but today he was silent, and it was awkward. It didn't help that there was nothing to distract. Other roads had hills and curves and trees, but this was West Texas, on top of the gigantic mesa the locals called "the caprock." The surface was sheared flat, there was nothing for the roads to curve around. Since it was about 3,000 miles above sea level and rarely saw rain, the pathetic, scraggly excuses for trees were few and far between. There was nothing to look at but fallow cotton fields and the massive pumpjacks; ugly, black grasshoppers of machines, scattered all over the fields. They should have been tirelessly bobbing their narrow heads, pulling crude to the surface, to nourish America's thirsty helicopters and tanks way over in Guangxi. Instead they were dormant, waiting for roughnecks to replace their electric motors with steam.

So they bumped and jostled their way over potholes both deep and frequent, him not saying anything and her not saying anything, and the only relief she got was every 45 minutes or so when she climbed out the window to check the fire, maybe throw in another pine two by four for fuel. Finally, Ty couldn't stand it any more so she said, "How much?"

"Hm? What?"

"How much is enough?" She repeated.

"What?"

"Last night, you said we could get out of here if we make enough, so… how much is enough?"

"Oh. Yeah I did say that. We need a hundred fifty."

A pothole almost threw her into the dash. "As in dollars?"

"Thousand dollars. One hundred fifty thousand. Dollars."

That was a lot of money. Not as much as it used to be, but still, a lot of money.

"So that's what all this has been about?" she asked, "All this junk, the reason Uncle Hollis gave us this truck, it was so you could make a hundred fifty large?"

"Well, so we could make a hundred fifty large, yeah."

"Why?"

"I, uh." Clint stalled. "I'll tell you when you're older."

"Bull. You're just making it up."

"No, really," Clint said, "that's been the plan the whole time. One hundred fifty thousand dollars, give or take, and we're done with this, this… salvage… thing."

"So like we owe the mafia or something?"

"No, it's not that, just. Trust me, ok?"

So that was it. It wasn't "get as rich as you can," it was "get this rich." She could work with that. They made anywhere from eight hundred to eight-fifty on a typical haul. They brought it in every three, sometimes four days, so if you average it at eight-twenty-five every three and a half days, that's… almost two years. Two years without a life, but that wasn't right. They spent a lot of money every time they crawled back into town, on the room, on food, on laundry. When she subtracted their spending, it came out closer to… four years. She would be nineteen by then. Her teenage years, the best of her life, wasted in this desert ARGH! Hopeless. Unless…

"What if we quit the hotel," she blurted.

"Uh, ok. Why would you want to do that?"

"It's our biggest expense. Without the hotel our spending is cut by like a third."

Clint nodded. "This is true."

"And if we only spent like half a day in town instead of two, we could make… twenty more trips a year. And if we worked really fast and filled up the trailer every two days, maybe even day and a half, we could make, hold on. Over a hundred. Like a hundred forty trips a year. That's a little over a year, a year and a half to make a hundred fifty thousand dollars."

"If you say so."

"That's still a long time," she said.

"Well, now you know why I've been pushing you so hard," but in her opinion he hadn't been pushing hard enough.

"How much do we have now?"

He reached into his pocket and handed over a roll of bills.

"Holy balls," she snapped off the band. "Why do we have that much cash?"

"Because I don't trust the banks. Don't swear."

She thumbed through the roll. They were large denominations. "Holy horse b- bananas! There's like thirty grand here! Where did this all come from?"
Clint shrugged. "Work."

"We have not sold thirty grand worth of steel screws and copper conduit. What is this?"

"I had a little extra," Clint said.

She drilled him with her best "I'm not buying it" look.

"I sold the house."

"But. But why?"

"Fresh start."

No more house. That was hard to take in. "Are we at least going back to Dallas?"

Clint raised his brows and pushed his lower lip out. "We'll see."

"But we definitely won't stay in Lamesa?"

"Definitely not."

It was a lot to process. "When were you planning on telling me?"

"I don't know. When you were ready to talk, I guess. This is the longest conversation we've had since, I don't know. A really long time."

She was floored, and not a little angry. "Whatever." Ty stared at all the brown and yellow nothing through the window.

"Hey, Ty," Clint said.

"What."

"Next time, just go ahead and say 'horse balls.' 'Horse bananas' is so much worse."

First thing Ty wanted to do, rolling into the little boomtown of Lamesa and blessed electricity, was to shower. Then maybe order a pizza, but before they did that they had to sell the goods. These days, scrap was as good as cash, and even though law enforcement kept a strong presence this side of the Juniper, you still didn't leave a bunch of bills lying around loose in your trailer. They pulled into their usual fence, a junkyard run by a man called Jimmy, which was probably short for Jimenez. With a dusting of Mexican ancestry herself, Ty thought his nickname should be pronounced "Himmy," but West Texans had a thing about disregarding any language or even dialect that wasn't their own. They called this town "LaMEsa" for the love of sense.

There was a line, the late afternoon "rush" of scavengers. Clint pulled in beside a huge diesel truck, and Ty climbed out to kill the fire. She hated waiting in line.

"Can you keep an eye on this," Clint said, "I need to see a man, if you know what I mean."

"Fine." When she was little, he used to say he was taking a dump, but Mom civilized him. Jimmy was dealing with a woman, lean and tough as a strip of beef jerky, while four of his workers used dollies to haul mounds of scrap out of her massive cattle trailer. The woman's ride was equally impressive, apparently a converted Mack truck with the relatively compact diesel powertrain torn from under the hood, replaced with a gigantic steam engine, visible through a liberally perforated shroud. The block was so impressive, it almost distracted from what looked like an elephant gun, sitting on a ring mount on the cab's roof. Bandits would think twice, or even three times, before trying to hold that one up.

Another truck pulled in beside theirs, a comparably modest diesel engine dualie, and a middle aged guy with about six days worth of growth on his neck, a mesh trucker cap advertising a feed store, and a lazy eye climbed down.

"Been here long?" He drawled at her.

She shrugged.

"Hey, I'm talkin' at you."

"No, not long," she said. What a dingleberry. That's what her friends would call him. If she'd had any friends.

"This here your rig?" He took a can of chew from his back pocket and casually shook it, thumping a finger on the side in an informal, yet potent ritual.

She didn't want to talk, especially not to this guy. She ignored him.

"I said, is this your rig?"

"Yeah, it's mine."

He eyeballed the bulky motor in the back and sniffed. "It's what, a compound three stroker, run tandem? Looks like it was hammered t'gether by a pack a flyin' monkeys."

Got that right.

"This thing even got a tranny, or it runnin' straight to th' differentials?"

No idea what he was even talking about. She shrugged again.

"Steam, though. Bettern' this here fuel hog I got." He turned his gaze at the trailer. "You fill this thing y'self?"

"Me and my. Partner."

Another truck pulled in next to Dingleberry, identical to his except it was red instead of white, but just as dirty. "Hey Walt." The guy was heavyset, maybe in his fifties, also wearing a trucker cap over his puffy, shiny pink face with red cheeks. "Glad I caught you out here," he wheezed, "gotta spread the word. You gotta be careful with them kerosene lanterns, workin' through the night. Mason done knocked one of 'em down by accident 'n damn near burned half the town down." He gulped for a breath.

Walt snickered. "Serves ya'all right, gettin' greedy."

"Ah'm serious, Mason just 'bout died with that smoke inalation tryin' to put it out 'fore it spread, ain't no fire department or nothin', just blankets 'n strong language. Took out the house he was workin' on and the one beside it. Buchanan hit the roof but weren't nothin' to do about it." He took another breath.

"Buchanan can suck it. Serves him right for tryin' to claim Welch by hisself. Bit off bigger'n he could chew."

"Oh, quit yer yappin', you just upset that he won't tell all ya'll how to work them city wells. Besides, you all makin' out all right. What is that, cotton gin?" The fat guy nodded at Walt's trailer.

"Quiet down."

One of the junkyard workers approached, a boy in a sleeveless shirt that showed off a pair of skinny, rounded biceps, and a straw cowboy hat with the brim folded up on both sides. He had to be around Ty's age since most of the older ones were fighting the Sino War, over in China. "Sorry about the wait. We're trying to move this along for you guys today. Who was next?"

The guy in front of Ty was already being seen. Crap. Clint usually handled this. Ty waved her hand.
"Ok, let's see what we got here…" he shifted some of the stuff around and let out a low whistle. "PVC pipe. That's 1980's vintage plumbing. Lot of #2 copper, too. You get this out of Seminole? Seagraves?"
"No. Just, around."

"Alright, gimme a hand here and we'll get you fixed up." He brought over a pair of dollies and heavy duty plastic crates for sorting. He worked fast and she tried to keep up, but he kept correcting her. #1 copper in this crate, #2 in that. No, that's #2, see that corrosion? That's romex, it goes over here. Hey gimme a hand with this sheet metal. They stacked the crates and he hauled them back, both dollies at a time. It took her and Clint three and a half days to fill that trailer with scrap, and that kid about 15 minutes to empty.

"Alright," he said, now tapping away at a micro tablet he'd produced from the back pocket of his Wranglers, "that comes up to $834.68, that sound about right?"

She almost let him get away with her customary shrug, but then she remembered. Two long years, going back into the silent, empty, eerie dead zone, only to come back to the marginally civilized hick town of Lamesa, where salvage monkeys spit tobacco juice and leered at you from underneath their dirty trucker caps. "No, I need nine hundred."

The kid laughed. "What?"

"You heard me, nine hundred even."

"For what?"
"Because I need it."

He shook his head. "I need a day off but it don't work like that. I can't give you sixty five more just 'cause you're pretty."

She'd just spent three and a half days in the field without so much as a shower. She wasn't going to let this snot make fun of her, no matter how good his arms looked. "Alright then, pack it up."

"Do what now?"

"Pack my salvage back up, I'll take it to G&D."

"You can't— wait a sec." He looked at the row of trucks waiting. "Ma'am, you got $835 dollars worth of scrap here, G&D won't pay no more for it."

Ma'am? Where she came from, when people got mad they got more polite. It might not be best to push it too hard. "Ok, $875."

He looked from her to the trucks, and then at his tablet. "But I can't even if I wanted to, you don't—. That's not how it works."

"Just pay the lady," Walt said, "we ain't got all day."

"I guess I'll just… Here, I added a service charge." He handed the tablet to her. She pressed her thumbprint on three different forms.

"And this one for the wire transfer," he said.

Wait. She wasn't linked to Clint's account, not that it mattered. He'd want cold currency anyway. "Can I get that in cash? Thanks so much," she said sweetly.

He ground his teeth and stalked off to the office, returning with a handful of bills. He counted each into her open palm with crisp precision.

"Thanks again," she said.

"Pleasure doing business," he returned, in a tone that said it was definitely not a pleasure. Ty climbed into the bed of her truck and refired the coals in the firebox.

"You shore did handle him," Walt chuckled, while another burly scrapyard employee hauled his junk off to be weighed. "Had him over a barrel, but I tell you what. If it's money you're after, sugar, you're in the wrong business." He leaned against the bed of her truck and spit a brown stream of tobacco into the dirt. "Up Lubbock way, they got 'em some clubs. How 'bout you sell me that chug-puffer of yours and I'll drop you off up in the big city? Pretty girl like you could make a heap."

At first Ty didn't understand what he meant. As she connected the dots, she developed an intense objection to his touching anything of hers, even if it was the ugly, pitiful joke of a salvage vehicle. She swung into the driver's side and tapped the pressure gauge, the one at the upper left that wasn't in most trucks, that told her when the pistons were firing fast enough to drive. "The Juniper ain't no place for a woman no how," he called after her.

"Yeah, what about her," Ty nodded at the giant steam monster pulling out of the yard, its menacing gun swinging in its mount over the bumps.

"Riva Vaughn? That ain't no woman. That's a rattlesnake with a hat."

The passenger side door opened and Clint climbed in, coughing. Her gauge hit red and she eased the lever up, perhaps a little too quickly. The truck lurched forward, and she followed the cattle trailer onto the road.

Clint grinned. "If you want to learn to drive, why don't we start outside town?"

She shot him a look. "This dump hardly qualifies as a town."

"Granted. Drive on."

They were washed, laundered, fed, restocked, and heading back out to the field by mid-afternoon the following day. Clint started in the driver's seat, just in case law enforcement wanted to do their job that day, but once they hit the field they switched. Driving, even with a trailer, wasn't hard when you drive straight, there are no other vehicles, and your speeds are lower than a school zone.

"Guess you weren't joking about a half day in town," Clint observed.

"Whatever it takes to get us home," Tymonee said.

"Is that why you gave that boy such a hard time?"

She didn't know he saw that.

"He liked you, you know. Well, up to the point where you shook him down for a quarter of his profit."

"No he didn't."

"Turn left here."

She turned left.

"Did he?"

"He made sure he was the one to process your haul," he said, and coughed.

She didn't quite know what to think about that, so she changed the subject. "Did you pick up some meds?"

"The pharmacist was out, said it'd be two days before more came in. I'll get some next trip back."

Time went faster when you had something to do. She concentrated on staying in the middle of the dirt roads, and avoiding potholes as best she could. Soon they were almost to their site, but Clint, who had been keeping an eye on the mirror, leaned his head out the window and said, "We might have a problem."

"What?"

"I think we're being followed."

A chill ran over her. "Are you sure?"

"No, but somebody's been sticking with us for the last half hour. And nobody's as slow as us, and we use the dirt roads for a reason."

"So they're—"

"Maybe."

She leaned out the window to see if it was a white dualie, but it was too far away. All that was visible was a plume of dirt a few miles behind them.

"Eyes on the road."

She jerked the wheel to the right. Almost wound up in a ditch. "Why would they come after us, we're obviously on our way out."

"To find our site," Clint coughed. "Then they'll either chase us off or wait until we're full, then pick us up on the way in." He checked the mirror again. "Don't worry about it, they won't do anything to us for now. If they're even bandits at all. Might just be lost."

She noticed he checked his shoulder holster anyway. "So do I go to our site or keep going?"

"Don't make the turn, keep going. We'll either find another one or come back to it once they leave."

"Ok." She gripped the wheel and tried to stay calm, but now that she knew they were there, she kept looking in the mirror every five seconds. "Should we maybe go north, toward Denver City?"

"No," he coughed. "That belongs to the oil company. They'll get jumpy if we roll in unannounced. Just keep heading west. They'll lose interest."

They didn't lose interest. At least, not for a long time. Ty kept chugging along, and Clint checked the firebox six times as that cloud of dust kept coming. It didn't come closer, though, and her anxiety melted into irritation. She concentrated on driving, mostly smoothing out the deceleration as they approached a T in the road. She used the sun, which was now well into its downward arc, as a general guide to keep going west, and alternated north and south when she had no other choice. "We'll be in New Mexico soon if this keeps up," Clint said.

Out here there wasn't so much as a road marker, much less a border sign."How would we even tell?"

The sun was half gone, the horizon lit in glorious flame when Clint finally announced they were alone. "Stop at the next farmhouse," he said, "or gin. Or whatever." But she hadn't seen a building of any sort for what felt like hours. Impossible to tell for sure.

Eventually she saw a clump of trees, and headed toward it in hopes they were serving as a windbreak for a house, and not a stray copse of juniper on the border of yet another field. To her relief, it proved to be the former.

The place was clearly abandoned, maybe even from before the knockout. The doors were locked, and once they broke inside, appeared to be stripped clean. No furniture, no blinds, even the appliances and some of the fixtures were gone. Just the carpet, the walls, and the wiring and plumbing inside them remained. Clint checked the outbuildings, and found more of the same. Nothing but drifts of pale, sandy dirt that had filtered through holes in the corrugated tin. A shame, but there was still money to be made. At least it was safe. They broke out their sleeping bags and pillows, and slept on the floor. Just one more incentive to get it done fast and get paid.

Clint's coughing kept her up most of the interminable night. She was grateful when gray light turned to gold and she could get started on the demolition.

The hot water heater was always first. It took both of them to wrestle those bulky things into the trailer. Next was the kitchen, specifically the sink. She ate granola bars and drank water, and cleared the plumbing in that room in less than two hours. Next she went after the bathrooms, only a one and a half bath, and had them done before lunch. It was all about the brass fittings. That was what sold for most, that and bare bright copper. Most of the copper was tarnished, oxidized black or fused over time with lesser materials, but every once in awhile a metallic flash would catch her eye, and she'd go for it.

She checked in on Clint. He was supposed to be doing the wiring, but was falling behind. He hadn't eaten much, and that hoarse cough was getting worse. She sighed. Last thing they needed was to spend extra days in town while he kicked this bug, but it looked like they wouldn't have a choice. Ty redoubled her efforts, and by sundown the trailer was half full, even though she'd packed it as tight as she could. It was different, now that she knew there was a limit to aim at. Before she'd felt like a hostage, an unwilling soul suspended in Purgatory, with Clint as the judge. Now she had a goal, and a stake in her own fate, and he didn't seem so bad. She was exhausted, and more than a little satisfied with her accomplishment.

Nights had been getting colder, and this was the worst yet. They huddled over a fire she'd set on the back porch, sheltered from the wind but open enough for the smoke to vent. "If we can do this again tomorrow," she said, "we should be able to head in first thing next day."

"Yeah, sorry I've been dragging," he said in between coughs, "I didn't hold up my end today."

"Don't worry about it."

He sniffed. The fire crackled, eating pieces of a door. She'd removed the hinges, of course, using a speeder bar.

"Hey dad?" she said.

"Hm?"

"What I said the other night, about Mom. It isn't true. It wasn't your fault."

He grimaced. "No you, you were right. It kind of is my fault. I should've worked more overtime, been more available to the boss. Then maybe I wouldn't have lost my job.

"But it's hard to know," he continued, "I thought she needed me, you know, with her Mom and… and your brother. I didn't know it was either me or the meds. That she couldn't have both, I mean, I thought I could be there for her and give her the pills. But it turned out she just needed the pills, and once I was fired…"

"Yeah."

Last year and a half was brutal. Grandma's Alzheimer's got worse, and they had to put her in a senior living center. They couldn't afford one of the nice ones with the sweet nurses and the luxury soaps in the bathrooms. They had to settle for the state run facility with buzzing lights and plastic spoons, where the residents were treated like prisoners who bit and messed themselves, even though they were just old and confused in bodies that refused to work, and minds that could not understand this really was for the best. Ty had felt obligated to join Mom on visits, but Grandma didn't even recognize her own daughter most days, and alternated between cries and screams when she did. It was a bad place for a woman with a history of alcohol abuse and chronic depression, but Mom held up. But then two uniformed men came to the door to say that Carson, the boy with the shy blue eyes and an uncommonly strong penchant for pralines 'n cream, the one who'd volunteered the day war was declared, was killed in battle. A mortar. Could have hit anybody. There were not any recoverable remains. People had relapsed for less but Mom held strong. Then Clint lost his job.

Maybe he was right. Maybe if they could have afforded to keep her on her antidepressants, she would still be scolding Tymonee about her grades and preaching the gospel of mesquite smoked BBQ to a handful of backyard congregants, but they could not. Clint found her in the bathtub, naked and covered with blood. They later learned her blood alcohol content was 0.73, blackout drunk. Ty understood why her Mom wanted to die. It was the violence of it that she couldn't grasp. There were a dozen easier, less painful ways to go. Mom wanted to punish herself. Everyone else was just collateral damage.

"Still, I shouldn't have said it."

He shrugged. "It's ok."

"She was a good person though, right?"

Clint stared into the flames for a long time. "Yes she was," he finally said. "And she loved you, desperately. She just… her depression… she just didn't know how to anymore, that's the only way I can think to explain it." He coughed. His eyes were shiny. "She just didn't know how."

Now Ty felt like crying, too, but she didn't. "I miss her," she said.

"Yeah, I do too."

Clint's cough got even worse. The previous day she worked so they could get paid and go home. Now she worked so they could get him out of the cold and resting on a bed. His coughs were as frequent as ever, but were losing their volume and violence, which she took to be a bad sign. She finished the bathrooms by midday, but by then he looked so gray, she asked if maybe they should head back early. He didn't argue. They packed their sleeping bags, lit the firebox, and hit the dirt road heading east.

It had been easy, coming out. They had been just going away, looking for no place in particular, but now that she had a destination in mind doubts plagued her. Lamesa was east, she knew that much, but just how far north or south they had wandered she wasn't sure. There were no signs, and the map they had printed of the region was useless without a point of reference. There were no landmarks, just endless miles of empty fields in every direction. With no other choice, she did the same thing she had coming in, alternating north and south when she had to, and striking east whenever she had the chance. Somewhere out there, though, was highway 180; a smooth asphalt road that went straight into town. At this point she thought she might be willing to risk the bandits.

About an hour into the return trip, the regular chuffs of the engine turned into sputters, the pressure gauge dropped and the truck stalled. It wasn't the fire, Clint had just checked it. She didn't know of anything else to do, so she opened the box to be sure. Yep, the coals were hot. Something was broke.

"It's the boiler," Clint finally said. "See? Sprung a hole in the seam. All the steam escaped, we'll have to patch it up and get more water."

"Ok," Ty said, her hopes for getting into town at a reasonable hour dwindling, "how do we do that."

"Well, normally with solder, but we don't have an iron and it wouldn't work out here if we did. Or epoxy. We might have some in the toolbox, check that."

She folded the box open and pulled out a drawer. "What's it look like?"

He coughed. "Tubes, two of them. Here, let me see." Clint dug around, but couldn't find anything. "Well crap," he said. "Just about anything you could want to take something apart, nothing in here to put something back together." He rubbed his face. "We'd have had to wait 48 hours anyway, never mind."

"Could we just plug it?" she said, "Like with shirts, maybe?"

Clint snapped his fingers. "Yes, let's try that."

They packed the seam as tightly as they could, and filled the boiler with their drinking water. They used half the tank, but fortunately they hadn't been out long and had enough to spare. The coals in the box were still live, so it didn't take long until the pressure was back up and they were moving again. Clint stayed back to babysit the engine, and Ty nervously worked around the potholes.

"Get to the paved road if you can," Clint called through the open window.

His tone was not encouraging. "Which direction is it?" she shouted.

"...North," he said. "Try north."

She complied. Ty still kept east when she could, but now she always turned left at the Ts. Her knuckles were white, tension ran through her shoulders and squeezed her chest, but she could not force herself to relax. The phrase "what if we can't" didn't enter her mind; she wouldn't let it. All she could think was "we have to," and she tried to will that rattling engine to chug just a little faster. The needle on that gauge trembled ever so slightly, a bad, bad sign as it had always held steady as a rock before, while they pitched and swayed over the bumpy road. After just twenty of the longest minutes of her life, though, the pressure fell beneath the line again.

"More water," Clint barked through another cough. "It's soaking out. Maybe if the cloths were lined with oil or something…" They drained the last of their tank into the boiler and tried again. Now she wasn't even thinking about Lamesa. It was just the highway, only the highway, if they found it then someone would eventually come. Hopefully today. They'd have to abandon the trailer, but that was okay. They could come back out with supplies, with that epoxy, fix the the boiler and get back into business. Clint would have to rest a couple days anyway. They would be okay, she told herself, so long as they got to the highway, and that was bound to happen any time now. She'd been heading north. She couldn't see it yet, but of course she wouldn't. The road lies flat; unless there was a vehicle on it, she wouldn't know it was there until they pulled up onto it. She ignored that gauge, nothing she could do about it anyhow, and focused on the road, turning left then right, and it died a third time.

Panic bubbled in her chest for a bare five seconds, but she forced it down. She slammed her palms on the wheel. Water. They just needed water, a lot of it. It was like the most plentiful thing on the planet, it was everywhere, everything needed it, they just had to get a couple gallons. They used to farm here. "Wells." She said, then louder, "They have wells! Where are the wells?"

She hopped out of the cab and climbed into the truck bed.

"They're out in the middle of the fields. See that?" Clint pointed toward a clump of weeds in the distance. "That's probably a well. It's worth a shot, let's get some tools."

They gathered a toolbag with everything they thought they might need; screwdrivers, adjustable wrench, hammer, and crescents and sockets in every size from 7/16ths to an inch. Ty grabbed a cheater pipe from the salvage heap, and the now empty water tank, and they trudged out to the center of the field. Sure enough, there was a mechanical hulk sitting on a concrete slab underneath all those tumbleweeds, but Ty didn't have the foggiest what to do next.

"Looks like it ran on natural gas," Clint said. "See these lines here. This is the motor, and this is where the water comes out. So I guess if we can just figure a way to disconnect the motor and pump it manually, we might get water."

She understood the words he was saying, but couldn't connect them to anything she was seeing in front of her. The thing just looked like a mass of pipes and wires and cast iron housing. "Ok, so what do I do?"

Clint pointed. "Take that apart," he said. Good. She knew how to take things apart.

The late autumn wind whipped around her ears and chilled her to the bone, and tried to push her down the field. She worked with clammy fingers, twisting bolts that were frozen with age, reaching with her small hands into the hard to get places.

"Sure could use a can of WD-40," Clint said, but they didn't have one so they used elbow grease and the cheater pipe instead, careful not to round off the bolt heads.

Snot ran down her nose, and she was thirsty. The work was tough and exasperating, but soon there was a pile of parts and hardware scattered on the slab.

"Ok," Clint said, "if everything works the way I hope it does, we move that thing a lot and water will comes out of here." He pointed to a protruding mechanical whatsit and an open pipe. He grabbed the whatsit and pushed down. It didn't move. He pulled up. It didn't move. He shook it back and forth, hauled on it side to side, shoved it, it did nothing. Then he triest twisting. It budged a little.

"It's on a screw," he said excitedly, "we have to turn it, fast."

Easier said than done.

It did turn, but only with a lot of effort. Fast was difficult, even when when they wedged the cheater pipe in. The trouble was that Clint was slow, wincing every time he shoved on the improvised lever, and Ty was just too short to get a good angle.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"I think I broke a rib yesterday, it's been bothering me."

That explained it. She tried harder, shoving and grunting, and she kept at it for a good half hour, as if her life depended on it. For all they knew, it did. Clint helped as best he could, but there was just no way to get enough speed.

"Water must be a hundred feet below or more," He explained. "It's leaking back down before it gets to the faucet. Not enough rpms."

Scattered parts. Waving grass. A well with no water, or none they could get at, anyway. This project was a total loss, but for the handful of loose scrap they'd freed. "What do we do now?"

Clint eyed the darkening sky. Ty hadn't realized how long it had taken, she was so absorbed in the work. "Looks like we're spending the night in the truck," he rasped. She stood still a moment, then stooped down and retrieved the tools, clinking them into the bag. They trudged back out of the field, with less panic than when they had gone in, but more fear.

It was a flaw, more lack of a feature, really, that the modified truck no longer had a heater. There was the firebox, of course, but it did nothing to warm the cab. There were granola bars and Quincy Jim's, but neither Ty nor Clint wanted salt. They ate every single apple they'd bought in town, and prayed they wouldn't regret it.

"We'll leave the truck," Clint said, "and keep north. We'll hit that road eventually, and then someone will pick us up. Those crews, they got people going back and forth to town every day. We might have to wait all day, but someone will come."

Tymonee nodded. The worst thing that could possibly happen had happened, but they would still be okay. A setback, yes. They'd have to find the truck again, they'd have to fix it, but it could be done. In the short term, they just needed to get to the road. Get to town. They climbed into sleeping bags and tried to get as comfortable as possible in the cramped cab, but despite the hard work she'd put in that day, with salvage in the morning and that frantic effort for water, Ty couldn't sleep. Maybe it was the nerves, but there was also a question chewing the back of her brain. Had been for a couple days now. Clint wasn't asleep, either, so it seemed as good a time as any to ask. Better, actually, since it would help get her mind off the doom. "Hey Dad," she said, "what's the money for?"

He coughed. "I thought we could start building a theme park. It's a down payment for a roller coaster."

She kicked him. "Those things are like a million dollars."

"Hence the large down payment."

"I mean they're more like ten million," she said. "A hundred fifty isn't near enough and besides, no way they'd let you use that much steel." Ty scowled and pointed at him, mimicking the recruiting billboards. "There's a WAR on!"

Clint's laughs dissolved into coughs. "Yeah, you're right. It's not for a roller coaster."

"So what is it?"

"Eh," he shrugged. "I told you before, I'll tell you when you're older."

"But I am older," she said. "Two whole days. And now I know how to drive."

He didn't say anything.

"I just want to know," she said, now serious. "I mean I'm out here and it's cold, and I'm kind of thirsty, and I just wish I knew what it was all for."

Clint sighed. "You're right," he said. "You have a right to know." He was quiet for a while. The wind howled outside the windows, continuously pelting the truck with a light spray of dirt. She let him collect his thoughts.

"How set are you on Dallas?" he finally said.

"What do you mean?"

"You've been talking about going back to Dallas. What do you think about not going back, just living someplace else?"

Ty'd lived in some part of Dallas her whole life. "What do you mean, like, Wisconsin?"

"I was thinking a little more tropical."

"So… Florida?"

"I was thinking more like Costa Rica. Or New Zealand."

Hadn't seen that one coming. "Why?"

Clint smiled weakly. "Why not? We got nothing tying us down." But then he got more serious. "They were already talking about reinstituting the draft," he said, "but the nuke sealed it. Now they're already passing a bill to include women. The day after you turn eighteen, they'll send orders, that's for sure."

"That's not for three years. Won't it be over by then?"

Clint made a noise, a little like a laugh, but not his 'mildly amused' laugh. It was more the 'you poor naïve soul' laugh. "We fell for one of the classic blunders: 'never start a land war in Asia.'"

"What?"

"Never mind. No, the war won't be over by then. Not even close."

That was a sobering thought. Ty had somehow believed the world would be back to normal by the time she officially became an adult. After the Chi-Coms invaded Taiwan everything just erupted. Recruiting, flag waving, righteous indignation, it was all anyone could talk about. She figured it was because it was something new, something fresh. Everyone was tired of equality and poverty and all the problems that wouldn't go away, so they lost themselves in this war. That's what her social sciences instructor Mrs. Coughlin said. In a couple years, when enough men died and the people were reminded how horrible war really was, they would vote the hawks out of Washington and pressure the government to draw up a treaty. Ty had believed her. It had been especially easy out here, too. Nothing to remind of the outside world's troubles. Just wind.

Ty still didn't completely understand, though. "So what is the money for, again?"

"It's so you don't have to go to China."

It all clicked together. "Because we'll be in Costa Rica instead."

He made a finger pistol and fired off an imaginary round. "Non-extradition country. The money is for travel. Fake passports, maybe bribes. Setup money." He coughed, and winced through the pain. "We'd have to learn a new language, but I think we'd be alright. Then again," he tapped the window, "I was starting to think, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to stay here, in the Juniper. It's not like they could find us, you know, and maybe it wouldn't be so bad…"

He was rambling. She should say something. "This is for real? You're not pulling my leg, you're serious?"

"As a heart attack."

She hadn't planned her future like some girls. "I want to be a marine biologist," or "I want to be an FBI agent." Even if she were a planner, "international fugitive" never would have been a consideration. If Dad was right, though, most of those other girls wouldn't get what they wanted, either. All those aspiring biologists and agents would probably end up dead on some Chinese hill, like her brother.

"Costa Rica sounds nice."

The sunrise that next morning was glorious as ever, as shades of gray gave way to roses, and golds, and violets, and finally to deep azure. They packed up what they could from the truck; a heavy jacket, pockets stuffed with food, lighters, pocket knives. She wished they could take the sleeping bags, just in case they had to spend another night in the open, but they were too bulky. Then, with weary uncertainty, they followed the farm road north.

She'd despised the truck as a misshapen monstrosity and a barely functioning vehicle, but now that she was on foot, she understood how fast 15 miles an hour really was. They walked. And walked. And walked some more, and when they came to a T in the road, she turned around and found she could still see that truck, sitting in the middle of a long, brown, unbroken path. Ty's workboots were just a little too big for her, so her feet were already a little sore, and she wished she could have a drink of water.

That T was a problem, too. It wasn't at right angles, they could either go north and west, toward what they thought must be the road, or south and east, closer to town. They stood for a moment, unsure of what to do, but though neither road offered certainty, staying still was definitely the wrong choice. Clint wordlessly chose north. Probably right, she thought. Once they were in a vehicle, it wouldn't matter if they were a mile or two further from their destination.

They walked, past weeds and silent wells, and dead power lines and dirt clods and more weeds. There was nothing else. It was empty, and quiet, and dry. Just walk, just walk. The westward slant bent back north. We'll get there. We will. And when we do, we'll feel silly for fearing we wouldn't.

She stopped looking up, it was too depressing. Nothing changed. They never got closer. There was nothing to get close to, so she looked at the ground to reassure herself that she was making progress. She wanted to hold her Dad's hand, but he wasn't there. She wildly looked around and found him about a hundred yards behind, like her, head down. She waited for him to catch up, then took his hand, and walked at his pace. He was getting worse by the hour. He needed a rest.

One place was as good as any. They sat down, side by side, in what once was an irrigation ditch, a just a little out of the wind. She ate, reluctantly, and his body weakly convulsed with coughs. They sat for a long time. "Come on," she finally said, "gotta keep going. Let's find that road." She helped him stand and they slowly kept on.

They took another break, and another. Each time she ate a little more, but he did not. When she walked, he stumbled. She helped him but it was awkward, a big man leaning on his teenage daughter. "Keep going," he said, "I'm slowing you down."

"You idiot," she said, "I'm not abandoning you out in the desert."

"Well I didn't mean forever," he coughed. "I want you to come back."

"Well how would I find you? Just shut up, let's get to the road."

Night fell, and they still had not found it. That worried her. She thought maybe they were walking in circles. It could happen. You never felt like you were walking in circles, but you could. Still, she didn't see how it could have happened to them. She'd kept a close eye on the sun, made sure they didn't double back. They always stuck to the dirt path. She just had no idea how far they had walked, how fast they had walked, or where they had started.

Ty missed the truck. She thought it had been cold the night before, but in the wind, with no sleeping bags and with their body heat uncontained, it was brutal. She would have just kept walking, even on bruised and blistered feet, but it would have been impossible for Clint. She needed water. She craved it. This dry arid wind, it sucked the moisture right out of your pores. She was thirsty beyond anything she had previously experienced, or even thought possible, and she knew that as tired and cold and battered and dry as she felt, Clint was worse. Much worse.

Despite everything, she slept. When she woke, she almost wished she hadn't. She didn't move, dreading the march, dreading the thirst and knowing it would get worse, and dreading staying still.

"Come on, Dad, we have to go," she said, and he did not move.

"Dad?" She shook him. "Come on, get up. Dad?" and her heart quaked.

Then he coughed.

She tugged at him, and he tried, she could see that, but he couldn't make it up.

"Come on Daddy, try harder. Let's go." She sounded like him, when she was five and he was impatient with her skinned knee or something. He pulled himself up onto all fours, and crawled out of the ditch on his hands and knees. She wriggled underneath him, got his arm around his shoulders, and helped him stand up. Then they shuffled on. He stumbled a lot, and she helped him along. They were slow, though. Too slow. And Clint knew it.

"I can't keep going," he said after what may have been ten minutes, or may have been an hour. "You have to go on, you can get there faster without me."

"No. Don't waste your breath, just keep walking." But a buzzard had been following them for some time now, lazily gliding on the wind. She wasn't sure if she was being wise, or brave, or if she was just scared to be alone.

Finally, when they reached a dead pumpjack mid morning, Clint collapsed.

"I can't," he whispered. "I can't anymore."

"Daddy, no, don't quit. We're almost there. You know that." She insisted, but her resolve was cracking and that frightened her, really terrified her. The thought she could leave him behind and a tiny sliver of her even prefered it. "We're almost there. We'll just rest a bit."

He shook his head. "If you go, you might." His body shook. "Make it."

"No." She trembled. "If I leave you here, I won't be able to find you again. Not in time. We'll take a rest and go again, together."

"Go on. If you don't we'll both die."

"No, don't say that," tears welled in her eyes.

"I have to say it." His chest spasmed. "I'd be killing you if I didn't."

She just shook her head. She couldn't argue, but she wouldn't accept. It was death out here in the wilderness, she knew it and he knew it. If she left him, it would be forever.

"The money," he said, reaching into his inside coat pocket, "Take it. Costa Rica."

Tears welled in her eyes. How could he just give up?

"Go on," he shook the roll. "Take it."

"Fine," she said, "But I'm getting help. I'll come back."

She dragged him right up against the machine, so he could rest out of the wind.

"There, is that good, will you be okay?"

"Yeah, I'll be fine," he whispered. "Take this, too." He tried to hand her the little pistol, but he fumbled it and it dropped to the ground. She picked it up. Between breaths, he said, "Don't point it. At anything. You don't want. Want to kill, right?"

"Right."

He reached up to hold her cheek in his hand. "I love you, sweet girl. You're gonna be alright."

She lost control. "I love you, Daddy," she said, over and over, "I'm sorry, Daddy, I love you." She held him and she cried, because he was saying goodbye and she wasn't ready, but she knew it was true. She wouldn't be able to find her way back to him. Not in time. Maybe never. But the only other choice was to lie down and die with him, and she wasn't ready for that either. Not yet.

Ty left him there, sitting against a dead pumpjack in the Texas wasteland, and in the pit of her soul she knew, she would never see him again.

She walked, she hurt, in a dozen different places in a dozen different ways. Her nose was raw from wiping. Her stomach ached from emptiness. Her eyes burned from salt tears. Her chapped lips bled, and her feet throbbed and stung, from ten thousand tiny impacts that pounded and rubbed her feet inside her boots. Her heart was a shell. She had spent so much time angry at him, and now he was gone. She didn't know what to do next, so she just walked. Find the road. Figure it out after that. So she walked, and eventually, she did find that road.

It was late evening, the sunlight in its gasping throes when she climbed up a slight rise, and it was there. Gray asphalt, painted white and yellow lines vanishing and reappearing under drifts of dirt, stretching as far as she could see from east to west. She put the sun at her back, and walked. And thought about dying.

It was late. Even in its heyday, the stretch between Lamesa and the New Mexican border was remote. Scavengers would have already gone back to town, or returned to their sites by now, and the night was cold. The only reason she'd made it through the last one, she knew, was from shared warmth. His body was far behind, and by now it wouldn't have any warmth left. She would freeze out here under the silvery moon, unless she found some kind of shelter and fuel to burn. The way her luck had been running, she wasn't betting on it. Then, far behind her, a glimmer of light appeared.

It was a truck, running with some new incandescent headlights. Weaker than electric, sure, but bright enough for the job. Of course, she didn't enter its glow until it was almost on her, and she didn't hear it until the same. The truck swerved and braked while she stumbled out of the way, half convinced she was delusional and was seeing hallucinations. The red door split open and a pair of boots tumbled out with a man attached to them.

"What the hell you doin' out walkin' in the middle of the road at night here in the— Don't you got no better sense than to— why in the hell…"

She just stared at him, at the man. It couldn't be real, it was one of those things that happen in dreams because they are just muzzy cotton dreams and nothing has to make sense because it isn't.

"I almost ran you over— hey. Hey I know you, you're that girl I done seen at Jimmy's."

Might as well play along. "Water?" was what she meant to say, but it came out as a whimper and a moan.

"Where's your compadre?"

Maybe this was real. She gestured weakly behind her. "Gone."

The man stood there for a second, she recognized him. It was the fat one, not Dingleberry Walt, it was the shiny fat one who talked too much. "Oh, sugar, I'm so sorry. Listen, where's that cash?"

Nope, a dream, definitely a dream. She just stood, mute, waiting for everything to dissolve into flies or for him to turn into a stuffed rabbit. Maybe she could fly to Lamesa.

"The cash, the kid paid you in cash. Whole buncha bennies, where is it?" He shook her coat, reached into her pockets, dumping out the lighter and the multitool and the wrappers, which irritated her.

"Hey, don't litter," she mumbled, but the phantasm didn't listen. It's fingers grasped at the buttons on her coat, and she decided she was done with this so she just gave it what it wanted.

"Here." She reached into the breast pocket and watched her hand offer the fat, green roll of bills. The man grinned and took it.

"Sorry, honey, but you gotta know Walt was right. Juniper ain't no place for a woman. Don't you worry now, I won't spend it all in one place." He winked and sauntered back toward his idling truck.

She didn't remember reaching for the gun, she just felt it in her hands as she raised it level. There was something she wanted to kill. She squeezed the trigger, but it was stuck. There was a tab, a safety. She clicked it, and squeezed the trigger again. It barked and jumped, louder and harder than she expected. The sound rolled out from where she stood, in all directions, louder than a dream, but she didn't stop. She brought it down and squeezed again and again, rhythm more important than direction, ten times, until it was dry. She missed a lot, but not all of them. The body didn't pitch and fall; the legs just buckled and collapsed into a heap, and there were bullet holes in the side of the truck. Her ears were ringing, and all she could think was, where is the water?

Then she stooped down, to pick up the brass. A metallic flash had caught her eye, so she went for it.