The Water Knife Read Online Free PDF

her own.
    Dozens of new comments, hashtag #PhoenixDowntheTubes:
Supposed to leave again today, except for another damn storm. #Depressed #PhoenixDowntheTubes
    How you know you’re at the end: You’re drinking your own piss and telling yourself its spring water. #PhoenixDowntheTubes #ClearsacLove
    Score! We’re going North! #BCLottery #Seeyoubitches
    Choppers in the canyon. Anyone know who’s out there? #CoRiver #BlackHelicopters
    They’re still outside my door! Where the fuck is the cavalry?!! @PhoenixPD
    Don’t use Route 66. #CaliMilitia #DronePack #MM16
    WTF? When did Samm’s Bar Close? #Ineedadrink #PhoenixDowntheTubes
    Pic: PHOENIX RISING Billboard stuccoed with Clearsacs. LOL. #PhoenixDowntheTubes. #PhoenixArts #PhoenixRising
    She’d been tracking Phoenix residents, their hashtags and commentaries, for years. A proxy map for the city’s implosion. Virtual echoes of a physical disaster.
    In her own mind she imagined Phoenix as a sinkhole, sucking everything down—buildings, lives, streets, history—all of it tipping and spilling into the gaping maw of disaster—sand, slumped saguaros, subdivisions—all of it going down.
    And Lucy, circling the edge of the hole, documenting.
    Her critics said she was just another collapse pornographer, and on her bad days she agreed: just another journo hunting for salacious imagery, like the vultures who descended on Houston after a Cat 6, or the sensationalized imagery of a fallen Detroit being swallowed by nature. But on other days Lucy had the feeling that she wasn’t so much eroticizing a city’s death as excavating a future as it yawned below them. As if she were saying,
This is us. This is how we all end. There’s only one door out, and we all use it
.
    When she’d first arrived in the city as a green reporter, it hadn’t felt so personal. Back then she’d made jokes about the Zoners, enjoying the easy stories and micropayment deposits. Making quick cash off voyeuristic enticements for click-thru.
#Clickbait
    #CollapsePorn
    #PhoenixDowntheTubes
    The residents of Phoenix and its suburbs were the new Texans, those Merry Perry fools, and Lucy and her colleagues from CNN and Xinhua and
Kindle Post
and Agence France-Presse and Google/New
York Times
were more than happy to feed on the corpse. The country had watched Texas fall apart, so everyone knew how it worked. Phoenix was Austin, but bigger and badder and more total.
    Collapse 2.0: Denial, Collapse, Acceptance, Refugees.
    Lucy was just there to watch the Zoners hit the wall, up close and personal. Autopsy the corpse with a high-power microscope, and a cold Dos Equis in her hand.
    #BetterThemThanUs.
    But then she’d met a few of the Zoners. Set down roots in the city. She helped her friend Timo gut his house, ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping the bones out of a corpse.
    They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes, and she’d written up the experience—a family home of three generations made valueless because the suburb’s water had gone dry and Phoenix wouldn’t allow a hookup.
    #CollapsePorn for sure, except now Lucy was one of the actors, right alongside Timo and his sister Amparo and her three-year-old daughter, who’d cried and cried as the adults destroyed the only house she’d ever known.
    Sunny whined again from beneath the bed.
    “It’ll pass,” Lucy said absently, then wondered if it was true.
    The weather people were saying they might set a record for dust storms. Sixty-five recorded so far, and more on the way.
    But what if there were no limit to the storms?
    Meteorologists all talked as if there could be records—and record-breakers—as if there were some pattern they could discern. Weather anchors used the word
drought
, but
drought
implied that
drought
could end; it was a passing event, not the status quo.
    But maybe they were destined for a single continuous storm—a permanent blight of