241 Days
To Go
He came speeding across the grass, the fastest thing in the world, tearing up sod and spitting it behind him. Esther and Chan woke under their bean bags. Eli stood up on the tramp. I was on the top of the fort, the crow's nest. I took the fireman's pole down. Panic. Trouble. Tingling thighs. Something in my stomach pulling down toward Hell.
We scurried to the ground and stood to attention. Kane fetched a stick; Chan armed himself with my fishing rod, made from a curtain rail. The Jeep squealed to a halt, leaving ugly skid marks, and Kane strode over and put his weapon up like a sentry, followed by Eli and Chan. Esther and I stayed by the fort, guarding our bananas and our jam jars full of yellow juice. Watson stood by himself at the side. Two bugs in his jar were about to fight. Watson wanted results.
Anya and Maeve and KT climbed down from the Jeep. Anya pulled a Snickers from her pocket, snapped it and crumbled it, tossed the uneaten, wasted bits into the grass, rubbed her hands on her pants. We all tried to see where the caramel crumbs had gone, licking our sandpaper lips.
'Is time we are tradingk,' Anya announced. From Level One of the fort, I dropped down onto the bark, swinging like an orangutan on my ropy arms. We'd had visits from "King" Adam just five times. Every visit had meant insult, or trouble, or death.
In school I always got nervous when I did speeches. This speech had a lot more at stake, though, than some gold stars on a sticker chart.
'We're building ac- ac –aqueducts,' I said, summoning goodness and courage and openness. 'Recreational pools, sewerage, clean, filtered water. We are the Community of Equals, and we'd like to invite you to shuse – I mean, share in the USE of our water filter.'
'Urgh, she hasn't even been to Peru,' Esther said, 'When I was in Peru, we purified the water for a WHOLE village. Just sayin.'
I wanted to choke her. 'Es! You're supposed to be on my side.'
'And you're supposed to be leave your friends' boyfriends alone. Maeve told me something veeeery interesting about you, Eden Shepherd.'
'I think I'll stick with bottled water, or maybe my magic margarita mix,' KT said, spreading her body across the shiny green Jeep. Her words sparkled and shone. She'd rolled up her singlet and now it was a bikini. 'Thanks for the offer, though. Enjoy your river slime. Come over for a margarita any time.'
Kane swiped the air in front of his sister, the first stage of a fist fight. 'You'll run out of your stupid friggin… pantry.'
'We have eight cubic metres of food. How much have yous got?'
'Where?' I said. 'Hold up a second: where are you getting this food? We could split it equally if, if – if we had a – a sort of, I don't know, United Nations, we would ration– '
'Omigosh are you serious right now?! The UN doesn't mean NOTHIN in here! But wow, yay!' KT did an insulting clap and fluttered her eyelashes. 'Way to dream, Suffragette!'
'She's always been like this,' Maeve said, rolling her eyes, slouching against the braver women.
'You!' Anya pointed at Esther. 'King Adam, he seek to acquisition the chair. He wanting this for his comfortingk.'
Esther's face went hard and frozen. She reversed – but she didn't flee. 'How… how much?'
Anya looked at King Adam, sitting in the passenger seat wearing his beanie, his fingerless gloves plus sunglasses he must have taken from the stand inside the service station. I thought I could even see the price tags dangling from them.
'I've up to 900K budgeted for the chair,' King Adam's amplified voice announced, robotic, plastic. 'A nice little profit I made from a recent sale. I can spare it. What was it P. T. Barnum said? There's a certain type of person who's born every minute, I can't quite remember the word he use– '
'YOU LEAVE HER ALONE!' I screamed.
'I WANT MY SPADE BACK,' Kane said, and poked Anya in the eye. Anya turned away then revolved and in a blur of boot and skull knocked Kane to the ground with a roundhouse kick.
'Get him!' Maeve squealed. She was clapping and hugging KT. The girls were biting their fingers with excitement. 'Kill him!'
Chan rushed forward; Anya punched him between his lungs and Chan bent over, clawing the grass, desperate for breath while Esther unstrapped herself and fell onto Chan to shield him. Anya was staggering forward, her left leg drawing back, preparing to kick Chan's head, when Kane tackled her. They rolled like crocodiles, scratching and strangling and punching before Eli dragged Kane off her. Anya got up, charged forwards – then Adam's voice sounded.
'ANYA. RETURN.' She stopped a couple of feet from where Eli held Kane's struggling shoulders. Anya stomped back to the Jeep, hardly looking behind, hardly resentful. She lifted her king out of the Jeep, carried him to the edge of the water filter trench, and planted Adam's legs on the ground. Adam had a small potbelly now but the rest of him seemed to have shrunk a little. He would shrink until he became a brain in a jar, probably. Anya must have been carrying him around his camp while he controlled his puppets.
'Watson, good to see you,' Adam said to his friend. 'How's life amongst the primates?'
'The findings are unsurprising,' Watson sighed, and the two of them twittered for a minute, some shit about "probability" and "forecast." I fantasised for a second about slaughtering Watson, torturing him, zapping his skull until that uncaring organ exploded.
All of us now moved towards the lip of Kane's empty, dry trench, the product of hundreds of hours damming the river, eighty hours digging, six hours of hauling rocks. Moneyland had mansions twenty metres tall, boulevards which took years to flatten, a botanic garden with thousands of hours put into its cultivation – but to me, Kane's crude canal was our most astonishing creation. Sure it was just big holes in the ground, but it was the first time we'd managed to control nature.
'Nice mud puddle,' Adam said. 'Please explain.'
Kane folded his arms proudly and tried to make his neck thicker. His face was pink and covered in scratches and his lips were bloody. 'The water flows in from the river, goes into whatever function pool you want, like washing and drinking and whatnot, gets cleaned in three stages, 148 per cent cleaner each time.'
'148 per cent, I see. Is your percentage cumulative or compound?'
Kane's strength crumbled a tiny bit. He hopped down into the trench and shrugged. It was deep enough it could have swallowed him.
'Look, it's rather good for a hole,' Adam said, barely suppressing his grin, 'And I think you'll make a competent engineer.' Adam gestured to the latrine. 'Doing anything to prevent faecal bacteria from leaching into the groundwater, are you?'
'I don't know what fickle bacteria is, but we're not doing enough Number Twos to worry about pollution,' Kane called up from his hole, cautiously. 'We only shit every three days. Toilet water goes back in the river and the river carries the sewage away. Anywho, we've just poured water into the spa and the latrine for now. When I'm ready to flood the thing, y'know, let the water in, all I've gotta do is kick out this here two by four.' He walked across three metres of the trench bottom, garden stones crunching beneath his feet, and knocked on a single sheet of plywood holding the river at bay. The back of the plywood containment wall was propped up by one 2x4, hammered into the ground by Kane stomping on it.
'Surely you don't intend to simply kick that out,' Adam said, 'Looks like it's pretty well stuck in the ground.'
'I'd do it right now just to show ya, cept the water'll come in,' Kane said. 'Aw – and I forgot to mention – see this area over here?' He turned his back to the containment wall and the dodgy brace holding it up. 'Once that's dug out, I'ma put in a fish farm. Fish in a barrel, how about it?'
'We got your back, bro,' called Chan, gasping, holding his broken stomach. I would need to check on his ribs. I couldn't even remember if I'd kept all the supplies from my $900,000 medikit or thrown it all away to get the EpiPen. Thrown it away, probably.
We were staunch for only a nanosecond. Then Adam mentioned money and we broke. 'I admire your resourcefulness. In fact, while I'm here, I'd like to hire your engineering expertise.'
Kane heard the cha-ching of a cash register and went for it. 'My prices is pretty steep, bro. Hundred grand.'
'Oh, the price isn't a worry. See, I have a particular need for a sturdy piece of wood over at my compound to hold the door open, let the air in. Just a single two by four. I was wondering if you could help me find the right one.'
'CAREFUL,' I called down to Kane, 'Don't you trust that snake. Let's call a meeting.' I pressed open my Org. Its light was a gross, faded orange. My body's chemicals were all messed up. I pressed the conch sound in my ring tones, but the conch sounded like a crushed trumpet, all weak and high-pitched.
I could see Kane in the bottom of the trench, his brow wriggling with confusion. 'Ede, shut your mouth and shut up with the sound effects,' he finally decided. 'It's a hunk of wood. I gotta hustle til they let us outta here. This boy gots to get paiiid.'
'And if no one lets us out? Then what's your million worth?'
'Still worth a million, retard. No more talky-talky.' Kane put his hands on his hips and looked up at Adam. 'Oh – I just remembered,' Kane said with an evil grin, 'We really need our wood for cooking fires and stuff so, like, prices are gonna have to go up.'
'I have a budget of $200,000.'
'Two bits of wood for two hundred kay. Pretty sweet deal for you.'
'I only need the one.' Adam began pulling wads of money from the pockets of his cargo pants and tossed them to the bottom of the trench.
'This is only thirty grand,' Kane complained, rooting amongst the stones, 'Pay up, bro.'
Adam clapped twice and his girls drove the Jeep alongside the trench. Anya handed a brick of money to Adam. Adam unwrapped it, took the rubber band off each bundle, and began scattering the notes like confetti down into the trench. Adam's girl gang didn't switch the engine off. They weren't sticking around.
'This ain't a strip club, homie. Why you gotta make it rain?' He shoved notes inside his toga, into his jaw and the waistband of his undies.
'I believe I've decided on a suitable piece of wood. Anya?'
Anya leaned over the trench, where Kane was mired in dirt and stones and muddy money, scooping tens of thousands of dollars up with brown, sticky hands. Anya put her hand on the 2x4 holding up the plywood retaining wall, yanked it firmly, rolled away from the trench, and let Adam do the final pull before Adam moved as far from the trench as he could, too. Kane, his face hunched over the mud and money, didn't even see Anya pull the 2x4 loose, or see the water change instantly into an angry wall which slammed into his back.
I watched the plywood wall fly through the trench, battering Kane as a herd of white waves pushed it. I watched Kane being there, then he was not there. I watched a patch of brown water turn briefly pink before the river smashed through the filters and flooded the canal within seconds, diluting the blood until the river's colour was back to normal. Kane Stiles was insignificant to the mountain of water. Just a blip. We blinked; he was gone.
I watched wet bank notes seep out and onto the grass. I watched Adam and Anya and Maeve and KT drive away. As they disappeared across the field, the huge tyres squirting grass, Adam proudly waggled his piece of wood out the window. There was no blood on his clothes, or his Jeep, or his friends, or his piece of wood. He hadn't gotten dirty at all.