Chapter 5: Five Drops per Quart
Drum one ran dry at breakfast on the eleventh day, an hour after Claire keyed the radio twice, so she knocked the bung out of drum two.
The smell came up at her before the water did. Sour and green, like a pond in August. She tipped the lantern and looked in, and the surface had a skin on it, gray-green and faintly wrinkled, the way milk skins over when it's been boiled and left.
She stood there with the bung in her hand and didn't say anything for long enough that Leon looked up from the stove.
"What?"
"Come smell this."
He came and smelled it and stepped back fast. "That's not water. That's soup."
"The lining went." She knocked on the drum's side and it rang dull and full. "Same as the liar. Thirty-six years in a basement and it picks this week."
She'd been drawing from drum one on purpose, keeping two as the reserve. Seventeen and a half gallons of reserve, gone to pond. She sat down on the mattress and pulled the legal pad onto her knee, and her hand was steady, which surprised her.
WATER. Drum 1: empty. Drum 2: BAD. Rain (filtered, day 4): ~1 gal. Pennies drums: ~10 gal.
Good water: 1 gal.
"One gallon," Leon said, reading it upside down.
"Plus the pennies water."
"Which you said tastes like sucking a battery."
"Boiling kills what's alive in it. It doesn't take out the metal." She chewed the pen. "I could distill it. Boil it, catch the steam, cool it. Clean water."
"So do that."
"Distilling is boiling it all the way away, Leon. Every drop." She did it on the margin. Each canister boiled about six gallons, but boiling was only getting it hot. Turning it all to steam took five or six times the fire. "One canister, roughly one gallon. We've got two and a half canisters left. That's two and a half gallons of water and then no stove."
He was quiet. "How long's one gallon?"
"Half a gallon each a day, drinking only, nothing for your shoulder, nothing for washing. Two days." She put the pen down. "If we're careful, two days."
They looked at each other across the pad.
"Toilets," Leon said.
"I'm going to need you to expand on that."
"Not the bowls. The tanks. The tank on the back's clean water, it's what fills the bowl. My grandpa used to say that after a twister you could live a week off the toilet tanks in a big building." He was already pulling his boots on. "This is a police station. It's got a lot of toilets."
It did, and most of them were broken. They spent the rest of the morning going through the ground floor with buckets and a flashlight: the locker room, the holding cells, a restroom off the garage that a beam had come through. Half the porcelain lids were cracked and the tanks under them empty, drained down through hairline splits. The water heater in the boiler room, a fat steel cylinder that should have held forty gallons, had a seam opened along its bottom like a zipper and a dry rust stain on the floor around it.
They came back with six gallons. Claire tipped them into drum one through the undershirt filter and wrote it down, and it looked very small on the page.
+6 gal (toilet tanks). Total 7. 3-4 days.
Then she went through the shelter's yellow binder, the one with the Civil Defense cards in it, page by page, because she'd read the instruction cards and the radiation tables and never the parts at the back that looked like plumbing.
Page forty-one had a map.
It was drawn in pencil and inked over: the vault, the old storage tunnel, the sewer shaft, and then a line running east under the whole length of the building, marked SERVICE PASSAGE. At the end of it was a long rectangle with wavy lines inside. Somebody had lettered beside it, in the same neat capitals as every card in the binder:
AUXILIARY WATER SUPPLY. MUSEUM CISTERN. APPROX. 12,000 GAL. TREAT BEFORE USE.
She looked at it until Leon came and looked over her shoulder.
"Twelve thousand gallons," he said.
"Under our feet." She traced the passage with her finger. "The whole time."
The service passage started behind a plank door in the old storage tunnel, twenty yards past the vault, which Leon had walked by maybe fifty times and taken for a cupboard.
"Iodine," he said, while they stood in front of it with buckets and the Geiger counter and a coil of rope.
"We've had this conversation."
"We had half of it. You decided."
On the pad, that morning, she'd written TREAT BEFORE USE and then two ways to do it. Boil it, which ate propane they couldn't spare. Or iodine: five drops of tincture to a quart of clear water, ten if it was cloudy, half an hour to work. She'd got two little brown one-ounce bottles at the pharmacy, call it six hundred drops each. One bottle would treat about thirty gallons. Thirty gallons of drinking water was a month.
The other bottle was his shoulder.
"I don't want you using my shoulder's iodine on water," Leon said.
"You can live with a dirty shoulder a lot longer than you can live without water." Claire hefted her bucket. "And the antibiotics are doing the heavy lifting now. Your fever's gone. You ate seconds last night."
"I ate a cracker and a half."
"That's seconds."
He gave up, because she was right, and because she'd been right in that particular tone of voice, and he was learning that arguing past that tone only meant losing slower.
The passage was brick, low enough that he had to stoop, and older than the tunnel it came off. Water stood on the floor, an inch of it and then three, black under the flashlight, and the smell got stronger as they went: wet stone, and then something under that, sharp and animal. Sewer. Somewhere the passage met the drains, and the drains had been seeping into it.
"Rats," Claire said, wrinkling her nose.
"Rats would be nice. Rats are normal."
Her ankle was holding. She walked carefully, testing each step, and didn't complain, and he kept the light low so she could see her feet.
After two hundred yards the passage ended at an iron door with a wheel in the middle of it like a ship's hatch. It hadn't been turned in decades. They both leaned on the wheel, him with his left arm and her with both, and it moved with a screech that went all the way down the passage and came back.
Then they were standing on a stone ledge, and the flashlight went out over water.
It was bigger than the vault. A long vaulted room of old red brick, the ceiling coming down in arches onto square pillars that stood up out of the water like the legs of a pier. The water was black and perfectly flat. In the near corner a fat iron downpipe came out of the ceiling and ended a foot above the surface; it would carry rain from the roof, when there was rain. At the far end, eighty feet off, the light found an iron grate set low in the wall, half underwater.
"Overflow," Claire said. "Goes to the sewer."
She knelt on the ledge, put the headphones on and lowered the Geiger probe on its cord until it almost touched the surface.
He watched her face. She listened for a long time.
"Barely over background." She pulled one earcup off. "The rain on the fourth day washed down the roof and into this, but it's twelve thousand gallons. And the dust settles." She lowered the probe further, until it went into the water to the length of her forearm, and frowned. "It's on the bottom. It'll be in the silt. So we don't stir the bottom. We take from the top."
"Like the tins."
"Like the tins, but bigger."
He tied the rope to the bucket's handle and lowered it from the ledge, and it settled into the black water and filled, and the sound of it, a soft glug in all that quiet, went out across the cistern and echoed back off the arches.
At the far end, by the grate, something pale moved.
He'd taken it for a sack. A heap of something caught against the overflow. Now it lifted, slowly, out of the water, and it was a head and shoulders, and the face was white and swollen and smooth as a peeled egg, and it turned toward the sound.
"Claire. Back."
She was already on her feet. The thing came off the grate and into the deeper water, moving the way they all moved, without hurry, its arms reaching through the water ahead of it. It went under. Its head came up again twenty feet closer. It had been in the water a long time. Its skin had gone loose on it.
Leon fired. The shot was enormous in that space, a cracking boom that slammed off the brick and came back a dozen times. The round hit its shoulder and turned it half around and it kept coming. He breathed out and fired again, and again, and the second one took it in the face, and it stopped moving and turned slowly over in the water and floated, arms out.
The echoes went on for a long time after.
When they stopped, Claire said quietly, "We were going to drink that."
"We still might." He holstered the pistol. Twenty-eight rounds. He did the subtraction without wanting to. "It came in through the grate. From the sewer."
"Then so can the next one."
They sat on the ledge with their backs to the iron door and the flashlight off to save the cells, and Claire made herself think.
The body lay out in the middle of the cistern, a pale smudge when she turned the light on it. It would float out there and rot until the water was something nobody could treat with iodine or boiling or anything else.
"Somebody has to go in," she said.
"Not you."
"Not you." She turned the light on his shoulder, on the dressing under his shirt. "You go into sewer water with that and the cephalexin's got a whole new job. You've got six days of capsules left, Leon. We don't have another pharmacy."
"Your ankle."
"My ankle's in a bandage. My ankle can get wet." She was already pulling off her jacket. "Look. There's a shelf."
There was. Along the far wall, under the grate, the floor came up in a kind of silt bank, shallow enough that the water there looked waist-deep at most, maybe less. She could wade along the wall without swimming. Without stirring the deep part.
From the pumproom off the ledge, where a rusted hand pump sat bolted to the floor, he brought her a pike pole, a long wooden shaft with an iron hook, old fire equipment the museum had kept by the cistern. He held the light. She went down the ladder into the water.
It was so cold it stopped her breath. She stood on the bottom rung with the water at her thighs and her teeth clamped and waited for her body to stop screaming, and it didn't, so she went anyway.
She moved along the wall one step at a time. The silt under her boots was soft as cake batter. Every step sent up a slow gray cloud, and she stopped each time and let it settle before she took the next. Leon talked to her the whole way, low and even, the way he had on the shaft, and for once she didn't tell him to stop.
"Little more. It's ten feet out from you. You've got it."
She reached with the pike. The hook caught in the thing's collar, and she pulled, and it came across the water toward her, turning, its swollen face looking at the ceiling. She didn't look at it. She walked backward along the shelf to the grate, towing it, and the water came up to her waist and then her ribs, and her ankle turned on something under the silt and she went down.
Black cold closed over her head.
She came up choking, the pike still in her fist, water in her nose and her mouth and her eyes, Leon's voice shouting her name off every arch. She spat, and spat again. It tasted of iron and rot.
"I'm okay," she shouted. "I'm okay. Don't you dare come in here."
He hadn't. He was on the bottom rung with one foot in the water and the light shaking.
She got the body to the grate. The bars were rusted, and two at the bottom had rotted through, which was how it had come in; she shoved it back through the gap with the pike and felt the current on the other side take it. Then she wired the gap shut with the copper wire from her jeans pocket, round and round the bars, twisting each turn with the pliers, her fingers so numb she had to look at them to know they were working. Beyond the grate, out in the sewer, something splashed, far off. She worked faster.
When she came up the ladder Leon had his blanket open, and he wrapped her in it and held on, and she shook so hard against him her teeth clacked.
"You went under," he said into her wet hair.
"I noticed."
"Did you swallow any?"
"Some." She coughed. "I spat most of it."
He held her tighter and didn't say anything else, and she understood that was because anything else would come out as shouting.
They carried water back that afternoon, ten gallons a trip in two buckets slung on a broom handle between them, taken from the surface by the downpipe, as far from the grate as the room allowed. Back in the vault it went through the sand-and-charcoal bucket into drum one. Then, a quart at a time into the coffee pot, five drops of iodine each, and half an hour on the watch.
It tasted like the inside of a hospital. Claire dropped a lemon candy from the 1962 tin into her cup and swirled it until it dissolved, and the water tasted like a hospital that had once had a lemon in it.
WATER. Cistern: 12,000 gal (!). Drum 1: 17 gal raw, filtered. Drinking: 1 gal/day, 5 drops/qt. Iodine bottle 1 = water (~30 gal = 1 month). Bottle 2 = L's shoulder. Boil for wounds only. Grate wired shut.
Ammo: L 28 rds.
Then, under it, because she was the one with the pad and the pad was for true things: C went under. Swallowed some.
At six on the thirteenth day the woman came back on State simplex, and Leon keyed twice to tell her they were there.
She talked fast. She didn't give a name. Walt was fine; Walt was on a desk in the capital, moved there on the seventh, a few hours after his last two clicks, by a signature nobody on the ridge had ever seen before. The man who'd taken his post at Four wasn't State Patrol and wasn't from the command post, and he had Walt's radio car and Walt's log book, which was how he knew the hour and the clicks. Walt said give him nothing.
"And the weather," she said. "Forecast has the first hard freeze on the ridge around the twenty-first. You're lower, and you've got walls. It'll still find you." A pause. "Two days. Same time."
Leon wrote FREEZE ~21st on the pad in his own handwriting, which was worse than Claire's, and drew a box round it.
Eight days.
That evening Claire boiled a pot of cistern water on the stove, which they could spare now, and announced that he smelled like the sewer and it was his turn. He knelt over the mop bucket with his shirt off and his good arm braced on the floor, and she poured warm water over his head from the coffee mug and worked the hospital soap through his hair with her fingers.
"You're very tense," she said.
"You're very close to my shoulder."
"I'm nowhere near your shoulder." She scratched lightly behind his ear, and he flinched so hard the water slopped. She stopped. "Oh," she said, delighted. "Oh, no."
"Don't."
"You're ticklish."
"I'm armed."
"You're in your undershirt with soap in your eyes." She did it again, and he made a sound he would have denied making under oath, and she was laughing, her forehead against his back, the mug forgotten. He reached back blind and caught her wrist and she let him, and they knelt there in the steam from the bucket with her laughing into his spine, and for a minute nothing was happening in the world but that.
Later, with the lantern turned down and the blankets over both of them, she said into the dark, "So what are we?"
He thought about it. "Two survivors. RPD shelter."
"Leon."
"I don't know what you call it." He found her hand under the blanket. "When I was digging under that counter, I wasn't thinking partner."
She was quiet. Then she turned over and kissed him, slow, and settled her head on his good shoulder, and that was as good as any word he'd have found.
On the fourteenth day he went down the service passage alone for the morning's water, because her ankle had swollen again from the fall and he'd won the argument for once, by pointing at it.
At the iron door he stopped.
The silt along the floor of the passage, where the sewer seeped in, had been smooth yesterday. He knew it had. He'd walked it four times.
Now there was a print in it, a yard from the wall. It was as wide as a tractor tire and nearly as long as his arm, pressed deep into the mud, and as he watched, black water was still welling up slowly into the bottom of it.