The Water Knife Read Online Free PDF Page B

dust and wildfire smoke and drought, and the only records broken would be for days where anyone could even see the sun—
    A news alert popped up, glowing on Lucy’s screen. Her scanner came alive as well, police bands crackling. Something about it sounded wrong. It was up on her social feeds, too.
Cops all over @Hilton6. Bet it’s bodies. #PhoenixDowntheTubes
    More backup was being called in.
    Not just some hooker or PV factory worker who had gotten raped and dumped in a dry swimming pool. Someone important. Someone even Phoenix PD couldn’t ignore.
    A person of interest.
    With a sigh Lucy gave one last envious look at Sunny, still burrowed under the bed, and shut down her computer. She might not be able to make it to Carver City, but this was too local to ignore, even with the storm.
    In the dust room Lucy strapped on an REI filter mask and grit goggles—Desert Adventure Pro II—a care package gift from her sister Anna the year before. She took a final breath of clean air, then plowed out into the storm with her camera wrapped securely in plastic.
    Sand blasted her skin raw as she ran toward the memory of her truck’s location. She fumbled with its door handle, squinting in the darkness, and finally got it open. Slammed it closed behind her and sat hunched, feeling her heart pounding as wind shook the cab.
    Grit hissed against glass and metal.
    When she powered up the truck, dust motes swirled inside, a red veil before the glow of the instrument panel’s LEDs. She revved the engine, trying to remember the last time she’d changed the filters on its intakes, hoping it wouldn’t clog and die. She switched on storm lights and pulled out, bumping down the potholed street more by memory than sight.
    It was nearly impossible to drive, even with the big storm lights blazing low from the truck. The street ahead disappeared into a wall of roiling dust. She passed other vehicles pulled over, waiting it out. People wiser than she.
    Lucy drove slowly, inching along side streets, wondering why she bothered, knowing she couldn’t get good art in a storm like this, yet still compelled to press on, even as winds threatened to pitch her Ford off the road. She plowed down Phoenix’s six-lane boulevards, the empty optimistic cross streets of a car culture now so drifted with dust that vehicles moved in single file between dunes, glued to one another’s taillights as they navigated the hillocks of a city being swallowed by desert.
    At last she spied the dim flicker of high-rise lights, the sentinel blaze of the Hilton 6, and the even stronger glares of the construction lighting of the rising Taiyang Arcology, the half-alive monster looming over all things Phoenix.
    The Taiyang’s struts gleamed like ghostly bones in the haze of flying dust.
    Lucy pulled the truck over to what she decided was a curb and parked, leaving the truck lights on, hazards flashing. She grabbed her head lamp out of the glove box, then leaned against the door, forcing it open against the buffeting wind.
    As she made her way into the glare of her own headlights, she found flares on the road. She traced the line of flickering magnesium glows. Ahead, human forms rose out of the darkness. Men and women in uniform, flashlight beams waving wildly. Cruisers strobing red-and-blues.
    She forged closer, her breathing loud in her ears, her mask wet on her face from the moisture of her lungs, pushing past cops vainly struggling to control a crime scene that was blowing away.
    Blood rivers and dust intermingled on the boulevard, a mini-badlands of murder becoming drifted, muddy, and coagulated.
    Lucy’s headlamp illuminated a pair of corpses.
Just more bodies
, she thought, but then her headlamp caught one of the faces, black with blood-dust scabs and nearly covered with a drift.
    She gasped.
    All around her, cops and techs milled, but they had their hands full fighting the storm, trying to see through their own city-issued masks and filters. Lucy pushed closer, trying