Chapter 18 - Water

Conrad ate his lunch standing up at the counter while talking to Igor. They were using the natural light from the line of windows to illuminate the map of the grounds. I might have cared about their conversation at another time, but I was too busy trying to eat my own lunch while holding a trembling bog-monster on my lap. No amount of assurance could convince Kappa that there was nothing to worry about.

Which, to be honest, was fair. There was a whole lot to worry about, but since Kappa couldn’t see the barrier or do anything about it, I figured he shouldn’t have to worry.

I, on the other hand, could see the barrier (given the bizarre definition of “see” that applied to me), so I felt that worrying was my duty. As soon as I was done eating, I went back to the library to see if Iset needed any help.

We talked for several minutes. She thanked me but pointed out, in her gentle, beautiful way, that she was in the middle of some complex calculations involving magical theorems that I didn’t even know the names of, so there wasn’t much I could do.

I took one look at what she was writing and knew instantly what I could do: I could leave her alone to work.

I went back to the kitchen. Mrs. Park was there now, eating and holding Kappa on her lap while he trembled. Conrad and Igor were still at the counter, but the map was rolled up in Conrad’s hand. They were facing each other, talking in a mutter. When I entered the room, the larger of Igor’s two eyes swiveled over to watch me.

Conrad said something to him. Igor pursed his lips, then whispered something back. Conrad dropped his head in a nod, then turned to me.

“Mera, I’m going out for some water—”

The words burst out of me: “There’s water out there?”

We weren’t desperate yet, but we were down to our last few gallons, and I had poured a quarter of one over Kappa that morning to help keep his skin moist. I was starting to worry about how long the rest would last.

“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Conrad said. “Would you like to come?”

My heart leapt. Would I like to come? Oh, yes! With the wouldest of woulds! If Iset didn’t need me, then there was nothing else for me to do except clean up after the zombie massacre. Igor had hidden what was left of the bodies, but we still had to wipe up a lot of zombie blood and…other…stuff.

I would’ve rather signed a five-year indentured-servant contract to become a water donkey.

On the other hand…

My eyes wandered to Igor who was ruthlessly cleaning the kitchen counters for the third time. It took a lot of bleach to wash away the memory of zombie gore.

“Igor, do you need my help?” I asked.

He let out a huh. “I’ve never asked for your help before. I don’t know why I’d start now.”

That stung, but I did my best to let it go. He had asked me to help when it came to protecting Iset. I could let him be the hermit king of his kitchen, as long as we both understood that he could call on me when it mattered.

“Mrs. Park?” I said.

“Thank you, Emerra,” she said, “but Ingvar’s been helping me. We can spare you for a while longer.”

My eyes darted back over to Igor. He scowled at the countertop and scrubbed harder.

So much for him being a hermit.

“Kappa,” I said, “would you like to come outside with me and Conrad?”

Kappa buried his head in Mrs. Park’s chest.

Mrs. Park put her hand over his head. “I’m afraid that’s a lost cause. At least for today. Kappa refuses to go outside unless he has to use the outhouse.”

The “outhouse” was Mrs. Park’s genteel way of referring to the bucket and seat we’d put over a hole in the ground. There was no “house” involved—just “out”—but it would have to do until we got the power back, and thus our water, or we had time to build some walls around it.

She continued, “Even then, he won’t go unless Conrad is with him.”

“Okay.” I walked over and crouched down so I’d be level with Kappa’s head. “Hey, buddy, you know I love you, right?”

Kappa turned his head enough to peek at me. He nodded.

I reached out and stroked the fin on the side of his head. “Good.”

As I stood to go, Kappa called out, “Don’t be lost!”

I turned back.

“Stay with Conrad,” Kappa insisted.

“I will,” I said. “I promise.”

Our first stop was a small building outside the short stone wall, behind the gardener’s shed. Conrad called it the hunter’s hut.

“It’s where they used to dress and process the game they picked up,” he said.

“Game?”

“Dead animals.”

“Dead animals shouldn’t be called game. Games are fun. There’s nothing fun about dead animals.”

“I guess you’re not that hungry yet.”

There were no dead animals in the hut, but there was a lot of building materials. Wood pieces, boards, poles, metal pipes, and pvc pipes were stacked along the back wall or laying on the floor, divided by type and size. Along the shorter side wall was a large table cluttered with glass jars that held nails and screws. Above the table, hanging on the wall, was a line of rusty tools.

I recognized some of them, but others were a mystery.

“These aren’t our good tools, are they?” I asked.

“There’s a newer set we keep in the garage.” Conrad nodded to the set on the wall. “I don’t know how old those are.”

My eyes lingered on the rusty blade of an ax. “I didn’t think that Darius would tolerate something like this.”

Darius liked to have the newest and the best tools, and once he had them, he took care of them. The condition of these tools would’ve been like a stake through his vampire heart.

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“They might’ve been like that before he got here,” Conrad said.

“Why doesn’t he throw them away?”

Conrad shrugged. “Don’t all homes have that one corner that gets forgotten?”

Did they? When I was young, I was the corner of the home that was forgotten. I had sat alone against the wall, ignored and rusting. I hadn’t lived in any other home long enough to learn about their forgotten places. Maybe a home isn’t your home until you know about them.

I thought about the zombie nests and shivered.

“These’ll do,” Conrad said.

I turned around. He was standing by the metal pipes, holding two 3/4-inch pipes, one in each hand. One was three feet long. The other was four feet long.

“I was hoping for something longer,” he said as he inspected the pipes, “but we can make these work.”

We walked back to the porch where the empty water jugs were waiting for us. Igor—god bless his grumpy heart—had saved every one of them. Conrad passed the metal pipes through the handles of the empty jugs so we could haul them all at once. There were four jugs on the three-foot pipe and six on the four-foot pipe.

I insisted on carrying both pipes while we walked.

“I have to make myself useful, and this is about what I can handle.” I shifted the bars on my shoulders while trying to keep the empty jugs from sliding off either end. “Once they’re full of water, they’re all yours.”

“I can carry them both ways,” Conrad said. “It’s not hard for me.”

“Nope! We need some kind of excuse for me being here.”

“It can’t be because you want to be here?”

I smiled faintly. At the same time, my stomach sank, and when I spoke, I kept my eyes on the ground. “You and Igor were talking about me when I came in the kitchen, weren’t you?”

Conrad glanced at me, then looked forward again. “Yes.”

“What were you saying?”

“I told him I wanted to offer you a chance to get outside without having to look at dead body parts. He agreed.”

There’s a complex, quiet kind of happiness that can feel almost sour.

I let out a breath of laughter. “He’s the grouchiest sweetheart in the whole world.”

Conrad had nothing to say to that.

“It doesn’t seem fair though,” I said. “Why is everyone taking care of me? I know I can’t help with magical math, but I can clean!”

“Emerra, the last time you helped someone clean, you set off a zombie apocalypse.”

I looked up and let out a cry of rage and indignation. Conrad laughed.

I turned to him fast enough to send three empty jugs flying. “Do you really want to pick a fight with a girl who’s duel-wielding metal pipes? I will end you, wolf-boy!”

Conrad, still chuckling, picked up the empty jugs and hung them back on the pipes. He put a hand on my head and looked me in the eyes. “I was teasing you, Mera. You know we don’t blame you.”

I looked down. “Yeah. I know.”

We continued walking in the direction we’d been heading.

Conrad said, “I think people like taking care of others. Especially when we’re all in the same mess.” He tucked his hands into his pockets. “It’s the pack instinct. There’s not much point surviving alone. You want people there, so you take care of them. It feels…” His ears did an embarrassed waggle as he struggled to think of how to describe it. “…valuable. Like it’s worth more than anything else you can do.”

My cheeks turned a faint shade of pink. I knew what Conrad was talking about, and I agreed with him. Why would it be embarrassing to hear someone say it out loud?

Since the only known cure for illogical embarrassment was brazenness, I raised my voice: “Sure, but who do I get to take care of?”

Conrad looked at me. His fluffy brow was crinkled. “You’re taking care of all of us.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but my brain stalled the words before they hit my vocal cords.

Conrad was right. That’s what I was doing. I had played at being a surgeon to a smelly, thrashing corpse, inspected dead body parts, stood guard in front of Mrs. Park and Iset, let Conrad hug me when he was falling apart, and held Kappa while I ate. I loved every last one of them—including Igor!—and taking care of them was all that mattered to me.

Why did I feel like that didn’t count? Why did I feel like I always needed to do more?

Ugh. I probably needed some therapy around there.

We went to the outlet for the spring first. A short pipe and spigot stuck out from the long underground pipe that fed into the distant collection reservoir. Conrad dug out the area under the spigot so he’d have an easier time filling the jugs, then turned the handle.

There were a few echoing gulps. Two cups of water sputtered out.

Conrad frowned.

Without a word, he closed the valve and started investigating the area around the pipe, using every sense he had. He looked at everything, sniffed the ground, and tapped the exposed pipe to listen to its sound. He returned to the spigot and opened it wide. This time, there was nothing.

He ran his thumb over his jaw and let out a quiet huh.

“Is everything okay?” I tried to sound calm, but there was at least one shrill alarm bell ringing in my head.

“There’s no water.” Conrad turned off the spigot and stood up. “Come on, we have to go back to the reservoir.”

“Will there be water there?”

“There should be.”

“You don’t sound too certain.”

“Let me take one of the pipes, Mera. This is more walking than you bargained for.” He took a pipe off my shoulder without waiting for an answer, then started walking.

I followed him and repeated, louder, “You don’t sound too certain.”

“There should be water in the reservoir. It holds a thousand gallons gathered from the spring and the well. The only reason we don’t have access to it at the house is because the electricity failed. There’s an emergency manual pump attached to the reservoir for times like this.”

The alarm bell quieted. A little.

“Then why do you sound uncertain?” I asked.

“Because there was supposed to be water coming from the spring, and I don’t know why there wasn’t any.”

“Did it run out or something?”

“Igor said it wasn’t a seasonal spring, and even if it was, it’s early May and we had a lot of snow this winter.”

“Maybe the pipe’s hooked up wrong.”

Conrad shook his head. “That spring’s been feeding the mansion since it was built, and it’s been hooked up to the reservoir since the reservoir was added. If there was something wrong with the pipes, Igor and Darius would’ve known.”

“So the water’s just gone?”

“Maybe I missed something. We’ll worry about it after we’ve tried the reservoir.”

I expected the reservoir to be huge. I mean, a thousand gallons? Wow. And maybe it was big, but I couldn’t tell because the tank was buried. All I could see was some kind of access pipe sticking out of the ground, a box that had something to do with the electric pump, and, a few feet away, a hand pump. It looked like a slimmer, silver version of the cast iron hand pumps you see in old western movies.

Conrad put down the pipe he was carrying and went over to the access hole. Two seconds after he removed the lid, an easy smile lifted the edge of his mouth.

“Water?” I chirped.

“We’ve got water,” he said. “I can smell it. There’s plenty.”

I whooped for joy.

As Conrad put the cover back on the hole, he nodded toward the hand pump. “Now we have to see if whoever used it last remembered to lock the ball valve.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really, but it’ll spare us from having to go back to the house to get some water to prime the pump.”

Thank goodness, whoever had been last to use it had remembered to lock the valve.

The plan was for Conrad and I to take turns pumping while the other person held a jug under the spigot, but my momentum flagged halfway through pumping out the water to fill my first jug.

“Tired already?” Conrad asked.

“No, I—” I stared at the sky. “I thought I saw something.”

“Like a bird?”

I murmured, “Bigger.”

Conrad stood up from his crouch and looked at the sky with me. “How big?”

“Big like the sky.” I frowned and lowered my head. “Forget it. Let’s get these jugs filled.”

I returned to pumping with a new vigor.

“I can do it faster,” Conrad offered.

I thought for a moment, then nodded and stepped away. I had my pride, but not enough to drown out my sudden desire to get back to the mansion.

We filled the jugs, locked off the valve, and loaded up the pipes. Conrad hoisted both pipes and placed one on each shoulder. We started for the mansion.

I suspect that we were both trying to act calm, but the speed of our nonchalant walk was faster than what would normally be allowed if we were playing it cool.

We had only gone a few yards when Conrad stopped and swore. I came up to his side and waited to hear the bad news.

“Mera,” he said, “I need you to listen to me.”

An instant sense of dread drove my attention like a pin shot from a gun, and fixed it on Conrad. I knew that tone. He was in guardian mode. I nodded. I was all ears and eager for instruction.

“You run pretty fast for a human.” He lowered the pipes from his shoulders, slid the jugs off, and put the water on the ground. “You’re going to run now, and you’re going to run like your life depends on it.”

I nodded again. More emphatic this time.

“I’m going to be beside you at least part of the way, but if I ever fall back, you have to keep running. Don’t slow down, and don’t look behind you. Do you understand?”

My chest felt tight, but I managed to squeak out, “Yes.”

He handed me the three-foot pipe. “Head for the mansion. Tell Igor more zombies are coming.”

I clenched my hands around the end of the pipe like it was a baseball bat.

“We start running now,” Conrad said.

I turned toward the mansion and booked it.