Feint, Page 3

Derek Temple could no longer crawl on his hands and knees, so he ‘Army’ crawled, dragging himself on his belly, using his elbows and legs to pull and push himself along. In his feverish state, he complained to himself about why it was called Army crawling. He was a Marine. It should be called Marine crawling.

  He measured progress in inches and feet; he had to get to the next bush or the next rock. When he rested, he turned his head to look out over the ocean in the distance. He felt so high above it, up on the ridge on the road that someone called the Barbara Streisand highway, or something like that. He thought it had been a man’s name, but Streisand sounded right.

  He shook his head in frustration at himself and it hurt, like his brain rattled around loose inside his skull.

  Moaning accompanied his crawling, and he wanted to stop the noise but couldn’t. He imagined himself a zombie, driven not by hunger but by thirst. He had to keep moving. He had one more rock to get to. One more bush. A metal gate. He had to get to a metal gate.

  Crawling, some tiny voice told him his next objective meant something. A metal gate. Weren’t cattle kept behind metal gates? Cattle meant water, and even the mucky ponds they sat in would be fine. Derek didn’t care if the water was fouled. Water was water. The metal gate meant water.

  It took an eternity, the sun somewhere high in the sky above him, hidden by thick, gray clouds, but Derek reached the gate. It loomed forty foot high in front of him, fencing on either side of it composed of twenty foot high wooden poles holding razor sharp barbed wire with six inch long spikes. He knew he could never climb over it.

  He closed his eyes and opened them again and the gate only seemed ten feet tall. He pulled himself up on the gate a little and maybe it wasn’t even ten foot. He tried to blink, tried to clear his vision, but even the water around his eyes had dried up.

  Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food.

  Three days without water was the worst. At least without oxygen, you just died. And food. Derek didn’t care about food. He only cared about water. Blessed water. Water hiding behind the gate that now, again, loomed forty feet above him. Water miles away from him, miles below him, oceans of water. The tiny voice of reason still working, buried deep inside his head somewhere, told him to be grateful the ocean lay so far away. In his current state, he wouldn’t be able to resist following his gunner’s example and drinking the toxic seawater.

  He pulled himself upright and he hadn’t been upright in days. Weeks. Months. The tank ride up the Pacific Coast Highway, the last time he had drunk water, had happened a year ago. Two years ago. Three years ago. Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food. Three. A cursed number.

  He must have grown during that time. He was fifty foot tall, looming dizzyingly high over the forty foot gate, holding on to it with both hands to keep himself from falling. But even at fifty foot tall, how did he get over a forty foot high gate surrounded by razor sharp barbed wire?

  Someone had conveniently designed the gate with horizontal slats meant to keep cattle behind it, and one of Derek’s boots fit perfectly on a slat. He watched himself hoist himself up, one slat at a time, until his head was a hundred feet high in the air and all he had to was lean forward and he fell, which is what his body wanted to do anyway, and he fell and fell and fell, his arms out in front of him to protect his head, and he lay on the sweet ground on the other side of the forty foot gate.

  And he could see a pump house in front of him.

  The pump house was too far away to crawl to, so Derek rolled. He rolled like a child rolling down a grassy slope, gravel and spiky weeds tearing at him and digging into him, his head flopping around, threatening to strike the ground with each revolution, but he rolled until he struck the ragged concrete that formed the foundation of the pump house. He could smell the water inside, just like a zombie smelling fresh meat.

  And just like a zombie shuffling aimlessly and then suddenly energized by the smell of its prey, Derek felt energy also. He crawled up onto the foundation, found the door, and went inside.

  Part of his brain told him it might be an outhouse, not a pump house. When he saw the metal stanchion with the large handle attached to it, the drain in the concrete underneath the downspout, he ridiculed the part of himself that had doubted. He’d known it was a pump house from the gate and he’d been right.

  Water stood before him and water was life.

  Three days without oxygen, three minutes without water. Right?

  When Derek arrived at his new duty location in California, he’d attended an environmental orientation. A grizzled sergeant told all the Easterners present what living in the desert meant. Water was life, he repeated over and over again. Don’t go for a drive without water. Don’t go for a hike without a canteen. Know where your water sources were and what they looked like.

  Water was life in the desert.

  Beyond the pump house was a house. A nice house. The only house on the Eddie Albert highway. Not Albert. Strudel? The Eddie Strudel highway. Was Eddie Strudelsand a singer?

  The pump looked ancient. Old style. Handle you pumped up and down and water came out.

  Some poor guy had dug this well and built this pump, surrounding the precious resource with concrete and wood. Water was life, life was water. Three days without water. Or was it three weeks?

  The poor guy hadn’t built the nice house beyond the pump house, the one with the magnificent view of the ocean of forbidden water. A rich guy came along and bought the land with the water from the original owner, paying him less than what it was worth but more than the poor guy had ever had in his entire life. He’d probably spent all of it on booze and cigarettes, but he’d been happy for a while.

  The rich guy had been happy also until the wave came and reached even his house, chasing him out. And now Derek rose shakily up on his knees in the pump house, his hand on the precious pump, willing the recalcitrant appendage to actually work, to push the handle up and down. It finally obeyed.

  Nothing came out.

  He tried harder. He found strength, standing over the pump, and he pushed and pulled, pulled and pushed, swore and cursed and yelled and moaned.

  Nothing came out.

  Three seconds without water.

  He looked around in desperation. Laminated instructions on how to prime the pump were attached to one wall. He pulled himself up and tried to focus on the words. If the pump dried up, all he had to do was pour water into it to prime it, then it would start working again.

  Water. All he needed was water. He laughed bitterly, the zombie moan sounding foreign to his ears. Water was life. Life was water.

  Three days without water.

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