Drought by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

were lying in a tangle of arms and legs on two rusty recliners, looking hot and lethargic. Mina the youngest was three and the oldest Mikey was eleven. On the steps next to them sat their twenty-one-year-old half-sister Susan. She was wearing a sweat-stained yellow dress, unbuttoned at the front, and she was flapping herself with a folded-up newspaper.
    Santos, their grandfather, was sitting in the far corner in monotonously creaking rocking chair, sucking at an unlit stogie. He was dressed only in a T-shirt and red-striped boxer shorts and a Panama hat.
    â€˜I rang the doorbell,’ said Martin.
    â€˜We heard you, Wasicu,’ said Santos, in his dry, cracked voice. ‘We figured it was you, and if it was you, then you would know where to find us. If it wasn’t you, then you would go away and leave us in peace. Today is too hot for answering doors.’
    â€˜Is your water off here, too?’ asked Martin.
    â€˜Since this morning,’ said Susan. ‘I can’t do the laundry. I can’t wash the kids. All we have left to drink is half of a bottle of Dr Pepper. I went to the store for water and soda but the store is closed, and somebody had busted open the soda machine and stolen all the soda. I mean, like, what’s happening, Martin? When are they going to turn the water back on?’
    â€˜I’m sorry, Susan, I don’t have any idea. They’ve set up a special team of people to deal with the drought, and they’ve been shutting off the water by rotation. First one neighborhood, then the next.’
    â€˜You don’t know for how long?’
    â€˜Forty-eight hours each neighborhood, that’s what they told me. But I can’t tell you for sure. It may not be as long as that.’
    â€˜Forty-eight hours?’ Susan protested. ‘We could all have died of thirst by then! What are we supposed to drink? How do we take a shower? The toilet is all blocked up already!’
    â€˜I don’t understand it,’ said Santos. ‘San Bernardino is a city that was built on water. That is what brought us Yuhaviatam here in the first place.’
    Martin sat down on the steps next to Susan and opened his folder of case notes. ‘From what I’ve been told, even the groundwater wells are running dry, which gives you some idea of how bad it must be in other parts. Right now, though, there’s nothing I can do about it, except ask you to try and be patient.’
    â€˜Patient? Why should we be patient? Whose water is it? It was our water long before you people came. Who discovered the Arrowhead Springs? Not the white people. It was us.’
    â€˜Yes, well, I know that. But I can’t change history, Santos, even if it is unfair. Now, how are the kids coming along? Mikey – how are you doing at school now, feller?’
    â€˜Mikey’s been barred from school,’ said Susan, without pausing in her newspaper-flapping.
    â€˜Oh, come on, Mikey, not
again
!’ said Martin. ‘How long have they barred you this time?’
    â€˜This time they don’t want him back, ever.’
    â€˜What did you do, Mikey?’
    Mikey shrugged and looked away. He was thin and underweight for a boy of eleven, with long black greasy hair that almost reached down to his shoulders and three silver earrings in his left ear. He was bare-chested, but wearing a baggy pair of cargo pants that were two sizes too big for him.
    â€˜He started a fire in the gym,’ said Susan. ‘He didn’t want to do no PE so he torched the changing rooms.’
    â€˜That wasn’t very smart, Mikey,’ Martin told him. ‘Why didn’t you just tell the teacher you had the mud thunder, or something like that?’ He turned to Susan and said, ‘I’ll have to see if I can get another school to take him. I can’t say that I’m all that hopeful, with his record.’
    â€˜School sucks, anyhow,’ said Mikey. ‘All the other kids kept