LAND OF DROUGHT

LAND OF DROUGHT 

PART I

Rays of bright orange light cut through the pitch black home of the Daniels’ family, their glow lining the cracks of shut curtains. On the stovetop, one lonely kettle catches a ray of sun peering through the window above, emboldened by the refracting power of glass. The shine off of the stainless steel pot grows dangerously bright, and soon the water leftover from yesterday’s coffee begins to steam. The house thermometer’s red ethanol has risen up just shy of its maximum. 

One hundred and twenty-two degrees fahrenheit…  

Lying in his bed, Haydn sleeps through both the heavy hum of an industrial air conditioner and his father’s absurdly loud snoring coming from the other room.

Through the white-noise and snores, the unmistakably piercing whistle of a boiling kettle snaps Haydn out of a dream and slowly onto his feet. Squinting and adjusting his eyes one at a time, he takes a moment to fully wake up before acknowledging the sound. He shouts out,

 “Dad! The kettle!”

His father responds back with a long, drawn out snore.

Haydn pauses, uncertain what to think, as the loud whistle rises to a higher, more obnoxious pitch. He grudgingly steps out of his room, sore eyes instantly struck blind by the glow emanating from their kitchen, at the same time taken aback by the wave of hot air flushing into his air conditioned room. He flips the light on, and takes pause at the sight of their stovetop kettle boiling water all on its own. As he moves to pick up the pot, his arm briefly feels the immense heat under the superpowered ray of light. One glance at the thermometer confirms what he already feels from the air–

One hundred and twenty-eight degrees… 

–A heat wave.

His father grumbles to him from behind.

“You sure are good at finding new ways to waste water.” he says, rubbing his eyes awake.

“We resorted to conserving molecules now? The well really runnin’ that dry, or have you finally lost your mind?” Haydn retorts. 

“That there is one drop in a very, very limited ocean. The way things are now, in this heat, we don’t have molecules left to spare. Or did you forget?” 

They maintain an awkward silence, his father holding back a smirk only long enough for his son to believe he’s serious. Haydn smirks back. 

“Turn on the house A/C, will you? And shut off both the bedroom units while you’re at it.” asks his father. 

“Both? You can’t do yours yourself?”

His father picks up the kettle and gestures with it, 

“Not if I’m makin’ coffee.” 

Haydn walks up to a much larger air  conditioning unit hooked up inside of their fireplace, which they don’t have much use for anymore. 

“You’re not wrong, Haydn. About the well.” his father continues, peering outside through the window curtain, pondering the sight of three tall contraptions of metal bars and pipes sat in the distance amidst a wide flat of desert. Twenty or so workers stand on the platforms handling the dangerous machinery. The last sufficient water well for hundreds of miles, thousands of people rely on the Daniels’ water to survive.

“All things come to an end.”

“How much do you think is left down there? At least a few more months right? Long enough to find more?”

“I’ve spent my life, and my life’s savings, looking for an oasis… somewhere in this godforsaken desert. You know, when I was a kid all of this was covered in green.” his father recalls, gesturing his hand across the vast, dead landscape.

“I know, Dad.”

“By the time I was your age, it looked like this.”

His father pours his cup of coffee, then another for Haydn. Passing his son the cup he tells him–

“We’ll always have enough for us, Haydn. But when we have nothing left to share these people will turn on us despite everything we’ve done to help them.”

He looks out the window once more, this time not at the structure but at the people in it.

“I’ve seen many desperate men… but none more primal than a man dying of thirst…”

Haydn is unsure of what to say, all he knows is that with every bone in his body he wants his father to be wrong. “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

PART II

Up on the center platform of the large, mechanized drill rig, Haydn’s father supervises the process of thick steel pipes pumping into and out of the earth’s dry, droughted surface. A wide, inflated water hose runs from the base of the drill site along a stretch of cracked dirt to the back of an ocean-blue tanker. 

The pulsing rhythm of the drill begins to slow. The father, standing over the control panel, stares intensely as the motion comes to a halt, something weighing on his mind. He slams a button on the panel powering down the rest of the structure’s mechanisms, and calls out towards the tanker truck–

“ALL CLEAR!”

Over by the truck, a set of hands grips the end of the hose and, in one aggressive motion, twists it off from the side of the rusted tanker and lowers it, one last pump of crystal clear water flowing out onto the ground. Haydn drops the hose, his feet soaked. He takes off his left work glove, cups his hand under the last little stream of water and hydrates himself. He chuckles at a thought: he’s sweating more beads of water under the hot sun than he had just had to drink. 

Approaching the door of the sixteen-wheeler truck, Haydn turns towards his father, standing atop the distant water drill rig, and gestures one last sarcastic salute before climbing into the driver’s seat. An experienced truck driver, Haydn runs through his usual routine of checking gauges, fixing mirrors, and ensuring an empty piss jug as he prepares for a long trip into town.

The truck moves across the rugged, bumpy farmland before reaching the main road. With each curve in the road Haydn hears the echo of splashing water from inside the tanker. He’s spent months of his life on the road, delivering the essence of all life to people who have nothing but complaints for him when he arrives at their doors. Still, he believes that the instinct in people to protect each other is stronger than our drive to tear each other apart. Every now and again, someone does something that convinces him so.

Hours pass, the glint of stars poke through the blue sky as day turns to night. Haydn, nearing the first town on his route, navigates the winding road with fading visibility. He hears a soft rumbling under his feet, something not unusual in a truck so old and punished. At so late an hour, yet so little road left to travel, Haydn steps harder on the gas hoping to reach town while he can still see it. 

Approaching the next turn, far too fast for any inexperienced driver, he feels another rumble. This time he sees clearly what caused it: pieces of the looming cliff breaking off in a catastrophic rockslide. The first chunks of rock scatter across the road, he swerves to avoid them but the loose soil that came with it tips the truck off course and off into a ditch. The last thing Haydn hears before being knocked unconscious is the bursting of the tanker of water as it collides with the ground.

….

Haydn wakes up, trapped upside down by his seatbelt. Squinting and adjusting his eyes, he sees through blurred vision a pool of blood painting the roof of the truck that now makes up the floor. A multitude of sounds hit his ears at once. Shouting voices, honking car horns and the shuffling of dirt. Haydn instinctively unclicks his seatbelt, and is reminded of gravity with a hard smack onto the bloodied metal below. Outside the cracked driver seat window, he watches a horde of legs pass by. He reaches his hand out for help, all he gets is the hard stomp of a shoe crushing his hand, and pressing it down into wet mud. He screams in pain, and follows his scream with a cry for help.

“HELP! PLEASE! I CAN’T MOVE!”

Despite what appears to be hundreds of people, nobody comes to his aid. He reaches his hand out again and grips the truck door, struggling to pull himself mere inches closer to escape. He’s able to see out, and watches in horror. Under the heavy raining of precious water, burst from the crashed water tanker, a frenzied crowd pushes and tramples over each other with buckets, jugs, whatever they can use to savor every last drop, whatever they miss wasting away into the mud. Under the rain showers, they dance the chaotic dance of desperation, unconcerned with anything else but their thirst. 

As he feels his consciousness slowly fade, he grieves not for himself but for his faith in humanity. His father’s words play over and over in his head, the last words he’ll ever hear. 

“HAYDN? HAYDN!”

Or so he thought…