The Thirsty

Jenna knows what a car is. A car is for sleeping and storing food and hiding when the thirsties breach the barricades. A car will keep your daily water cooler so your five sips in the morning and your half a cup at night slide down your throat like the glorious waterfalls in the picture books. A car can protect you from the skin-blistering sun and the black clouds spitting nasty hot raindrops that turn you into a thirsty if your raging body drought drives you to swallow them.

Liam dashed into the rain yesterday after water rations were cut again—the third person in a month to give up. He and Jenna were on sentry duty at the compound’s gate when the notice was posted. Jenna watched his face turn to stone. She yelled, “Li, no,” but he flew into the deserted street in front of the gate, dodging rusted out cars and broken bicycles and skeletons of thirsties, raising his hands to the sky and tilting his head back to catch raindrops on his tongue. He howled and laughed and danced in circles. When he looked back at Jenna with red raw eyes and shrieked and came for her, outstretched arms reaching for her throat, Jenna sidestepped and swiped at him with her blade. But her swipe was half-hearted, tentative as if she were a rookie sentry with no kills, and Liam disappeared into the rain.

Cars don’t move, and Jenna can’t understand why this particular car is sitting on some kind of tracks as if it plans to go somewhere. She is in a strange high-ceilinged building with glass walls too far outside the compound. The rule is you must always be able to see the barricades unless you are part of a water foraging team. Jenna is only a gate sentry, but she has deserted her post and her new partner because she glimpsed Liam in the distance scurrying between grassy brown yards and dormant swing sets and empty porches. Liam ran up and over the hood of a car, and Jenna sprinted after him. Cars are also for Liam’s fifteenth birthday last week, for sitting in the backseat so close your feet overlap and neither of you thinks your unwashed bodies are foul, for laying your hand on Liam’s chest to feel his heart beating and for twisting your fingers around the chain of the silver heart-shaped locket you have just given him—the one your mother gave you so many years ago. Cars are for dreaming of a time when there might be rivers of golden pure water to revel in with Liam and your skin isn’t shriveled like the sad little husks of brown corn in the compound’s feeble gardens and your tongue isn’t a dried-up old orange peel. Jenna knows what oranges were. She ate a slice of orange once when she was very small.

She stares at the car on the tracks. Liam—what was once Liam—ran into the building only a minute ago, but he is not in or under the car. Many people believe thirsties that can think rationally, even remember their former lives. And that they set sinister, even mocking, traps. Jenna’s friend Mike claims a thirsty once dropped on him from a catwalk in the crumbling old warehouse next to the compound after leaving a dead rat as bait. The scary thing was, Mike said, that he’d been chasing rats all morning. The thirsty must have watched him—conscious of his blade and his vigilance—then killed the rat and left the meat on the bones to lure him. The really scary thing, according to Mike, was that the thirsty was his cousin. They had grown up hunting rats together. They killed them quickly, painlessly, but this dead rat was a sack of broken bones.

Jenna isn’t sure she believes Mike’s story, but it doesn’t matter. She can’t leave Liam like this. She glances outside to mark the sun in the sky. There isn’t much time. She must be inside the compound before dark. The gate opens for no one after sunset. She shudders at the thought of being trapped in the coal-black night with thirsties whose eyes can see into the darkness as if it is daytime, whose legs run so much faster than hers, whose hands twitch in anticipation, whose fingers snap over and over. No one knows for certain why thirsties click their fingers. Nightmares of snapping shatter Jenna’s sleep—the clicking grows louder and louder in her ears, closer and closer, until it is inside her and she wakes screaming each dawn.

She looks again out the window walls—she is too visible. A blur of green and black and maybe arms and legs darts past across the street. Jenna is sure Liam was wearing his blue t-shirt that reads, “Life is Good” yesterday. She moves quickly forward, her blade at the ready, sweat running down her cheeks, her shoulders, her back. There are rows of nozzles above her head and on the lower walls and a dust-covered sign. She can just make out the word, “vehicle.” She discovers long strips of cloth hanging from the ceiling at the end of the room. At first, she thinks they cover a wall, but then realizes the building and its tracks continue after the cloths. She bites her lip in frustration—she should have spotted this sooner.

Jenna carefully moves one of the cloth strips with her outstretched blade. Her hand is shaking, her fear alive and growing. She is used to being able to see thirsties coming from far down the street or the woods a solid fifty feet from the compound gate. She is used to battling thirsties outside where there is plenty of room to dodge and weave and to swing her blade.

She is used to thirsties not being Liam.

Jenna stumbles back at the sudden sound of clicking behind the cloths. She trips over the tracks and sits down hard. Her blade clatters to the cement floor, bouncing twice, announcing her presence, ringing the dinner bell. Thirsties’ ears are as powerful as their eyes.

The clicking comes closer. Fingers snapping. Faster and faster like Jenna’s heartbeat. A red unblinking eyeball appears between two hanging cloths.

Jenna grabs her blade and scrambles to her feet. She lunges forward, crying, “Liam!” and thrusting her blade through the cloths. It skewers nothing so she shoves her way through, swinging wildly, until she can see. Her breaths come in ragged gasps, her heart pounds in her chest.

Liam is gone again. There are more nozzles and cloth strips, and Jenna counts eight monstrosities that resemble the pine trees in the picture books except they are also made of cloth and hang from a metal frame. Liam could be hiding behind any of them. Jenna sees the end of the building, sees the setting sun through an open archway and a veil of dust that never lifts, that seems to grow thicker with each rainfall. She steps on a grate. There is a pit below her, a drainage pit of some kind. Liam’s fingers could curl up through the grate’s bars and twist around Jenna’s feet or he could push up against the grate and tumble her to the floor. She will hit her head and awaken to Liam tearing out her throat to drink her blood. She leaps off the grate, her blade nearly slipping out of her sweat-drenched hand.

There is a large tank on the wall to the left. Jenna’s eyes dart back and forth between it and the pit. Did the tank once hold water? Could it still? Surely the foragers would have found it by now. Jenna knows it is her duty to check, knows she should atone for leaving her post, but she wants so badly to go home now, and she wants so badly for Liam to be there, for it to be yesterday again so she can throw her arms around him and stop him from running into the rain and hold him and make the thirst and the parched tongues and the desiccated skin not matter.

She inches to her left, blade pointing out, eyes scanning everywhere as she has been taught and as she now teaches the little ones. Left, right, up, down. Again and again. Particular attention to possible hiding places. Maybe Liam has bolted out the archway. Or is he crouching behind one of those big cloth shapes or in the pit? Or clinging to the ceiling like a giant bug? Jenna glances up again just as the pit emits a shrill squeak. She jumps, but it is only a rat, fat from eating the bodies of thirsties, squeezing between the grate’s bars. She should kill it and bring it back to the cook, but there is no time. The sun is an angry orange ball outside the archway, sinking lower and lower and casting gnarled shadows throughout the room. The coming darkness threatens to swallow her. Jenna sees another thirsty further down the road scuttling over the horizon. The thirsty wears blue. Is it Liam?

She has almost reached the tank when she steps on something small and hard. She bends down to pick it up with her free hand and her dried-out, scratchy eyes fill with tears. There is barely enough light left to make out the locket, but Jenna savors its familiar smooth wonder in the palm of her hand. She leans against the tank and holds the locket to her heart, feeling the broken chain start to slip between her fingers.

The chain stops slipping. It is not broken. The clasp has been undone.

The full horror of this hits Jenna just as a flurry of arms and legs erupts from the crevice between the top of the tank and the wall.

A grinning face plummets toward her, teeth bare, arms twitching, reaching for her, fingers snapping.

Jenna dives to the left, and Liam lands next to her, his leg grazing hers. In the darkness, his feral eyes glow, his fingers snap even faster. Jenna stumbles to her feet and whispers “Li, please.” He is so close she can feel his hot rancid breath on her face.

She clutches her blade in one hand and the locket in the other. Liam’s fingers snap over and over—they are only a blur.

Jenna steps back. The wall is behind her. There is nowhere to go. Her entire body trembles, her legs will give out any second.

His smile grows wider. The cold dead-Liam grin consumes his beautiful face, and Jenna’s fear explodes into rage. She leaps forward and drives her blade into his chest. She grips Liam’s shoulder with fingers still wrapped around the locket chain and pulls him into the blade as she has done with other thirsties.

Liam stops clicking as he slumps forward, and Jenna pulls the blade free. She gasps for breath as she catches him and gently lowers him to the floor. The building is almost fully dark now. She wraps her hand around the sweet smoothness of the locket and stands up, still breathing hard. She loops the chain around her neck, securing the clasp, feeling the locket bounce against her heart as she starts toward the archway. Her legs are heavy, her arms ache. She steps outside and scans her surroundings even as the awful weight of what she has done threatens to crush her into nothing, into one of the sorrowers who wander the compound day and night, murmuring names only they remember. Jenna’s mouth is bone-dry. She has never been so thirsty. She has just enough time to make it back before the closing of the gate. She glances back at the building’s logo emblazoned high on a wall. The logo shows a car inside a big bubble. Jenna knows what soap is. She is allowed to bathe once a year. She begins to run.