The Water Wars - Cameron Stracher [48]
Before I could take my next breath, the man was on the ground clutching his leg. Ulysses dropped and rolled, then came up firing at the two guards by his side. One went down immediately, while the other spun backward, his hands trying to hold in the blood spilling through the belly of his tunic. The other two guards rushed forward, and one managed to get off a shot, but a round from Ulysses plugged him in the chest and dropped him where he stood. The other never got off a shot.
This all happened quicker than the eye could follow. When it was over, my feet had barely moved. A stray bullet had split a rock not more than one meter away, and a dusting of chips and the smell of cordite still hung in the air.
The pilot quickly tended to the two wounded men, while Ulysses confirmed the other four were dead. The man Ulysses had shot in the gut was moaning softly, and the pilot signaled he wasn’t going to make it. Ulysses took the man’s pulse, then held his head while he whimpered and gurgled blood. When the man died, Ulysses gently closed his eyelids with his fingers. Then he turned to Will and me.
“Everyone all right?”
I nodded, still trying to sort through what I had just seen.
“Where did you learn to shoot like that?” asked Will.
“I’ve learned a lot of things I wish I hadn’t.”
Will just kept staring at Ulysses. I know he was thinking about the shootouts at the gaming center, except this one was brutal and real, and the dead did not get up and play again. Ulysses wiped his bloodstained hands on his pants, and then pushed his sweat-matted hair off his forehead with the back of one palm. His hand, I noticed, was shaking.
“There was no bird, was there?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, there was,” said Ulysses, touching the tattoo on his neck. “Her name’s Miranda.”
I understood everything then. I could see every line in the pirate’s craggy face. His skin was sunburned and dry. His ears were cracked and bloodied. But his brown eyes were like dark pools in which fantastic creatures swam.
“What happened to her? To Miranda?”
Ulysses shrugged. “What happens to most children. She got sick, and never got better.”
“And your wife?”
“The same.”
“But you said you were married,” said Will, glancing down at Ulysses’s ring, smooth and lustrous in the half-light.
“I’ll always be married. But it’ll be the next world when I see her again.”
Our father believed in Heaven, but I thought it was a place that shakers pretended existed—without it there would be too many other questions. Ulysses, however, seemed confident he would see his wife and daughter again. And maybe, I thought, the belief was all that mattered.
The children had drawn closer now. There were several of them who seemed older and more confident than the others, and they approached Ulysses.
“Please, mister,” said one. “Do you have any food?” He was nearly as tall as Ulysses but less than half his weight. Clumps of hair grew from his head in no discernible pattern, and his eyes were bloodshot and rheumy. Ulysses asked his name, and the boy said he was called Thomas and the girl next to him was Danielle. I was shocked to hear Danielle was a girl; she looked almost identical to Thomas: same hair, same height, same sickly bodies. They were, in fact, brother and sister, Thomas said.
“Where are your parents?” I asked.
Thomas shrugged. “Dead, we think.” He explained their town had been raided by Mounties, because the residents were siphoning water from a pipeline. The adults were shot; the town burned; and the children taken prisoner to the canyon.
“Most of us are dead now,” he concluded.
I looked at Ulysses, and I knew he knew what I was thinking.
“There’s nothing we can do,” he said again.
“Yes there is,” I insisted. “Give them the canyon.”
“Give it to them?”
I opened my arms and stretched them tip to tip, north to south. “The drilling site. The machinery. The trucks. The weapons. Everything.”
“They wouldn’t survive for a minute.”
“You said they won’t survive anyway.”
Ulysses rubbed his chin and frowned. “I suppose a mounted gun might help.