Magic was a mixed breed hound, and she had a short, easy to groom coat. On the other hand, Juno was part Husky, and he had long hair that picked up substantial desert dust. His coat often looked grimy from rolling around on the ground when he played with Magic. As a result, Logan washed both of his loyal canines at least once a week. The dogs had free run in the power station. He didn’t believe in tying them up, so regular baths kept the dust down inside.
Juno was the younger of the two and still a mischievous puppy at heart. It wasn’t always easy to get him to stand still in the designated dog washing tub, but once he’d been cajoled into cooperating, he enjoyed the attention and especially the after-wash brushing.
Magic had already received her bath. Eight years old and well-mannered, she sat on her haunches and watched intently as Logan brushed Juno’s long coat, carefully straightening out or trimming the occasional clump. The tub was set up on a concrete patio in an outdoor, shaded area. It was early in the morning and still relatively cool.
Jody called on the power station intercom: “Logan, I have a security issue that needs your attention.”
“I’ll join you in the control room momentarily.”
Logan gave Juno a few final strokes with the brush and then fed each of them one of Harmony’s homemade biscuits. He walked to the control room and took a seat at the over-sized monitor. “What’s up, Jody?”
“A police investigator made an inquiry in the water supply database. Art Fujikawa, an IT expert in the New Cali cyber-crimes unit.
“An inquiry about what?”
“Flow reports.”
“What did he find?”
“Everything appeared normal due to my falsified reporting. He logged in and within a few minutes logged out. The question is why was a police investigator checking the flow reports.”
“What’s the explanation?”
“The most plausible answer is because someone gave the New Cali police a tip about our water diversion scheme.”
“Who’s the snitch?”
“Due to the timing and circumstances, the most likely candidate is your former customer, Cynthia Zen Waverly. In consideration of the acrimony that arose in regard to her discovering the grub liberation scheme and your discontinuation of the water deliveries.”
“I told her the water was coming from the northlands.”
“But it’s likely Myles was furnishing the grubs with information about the farming. He may not have divulged the actual irrigation source but placed the operation here in the basin. One of the remaining grubs may have then informed the Guardians about what was said, and the severe drought, receding aquifer, and proximity of the pipeline could have then led Waverly or one of her cohorts to suspect the existence of the diversion scheme.”
“You’d make one helluva detective, Jody.”
“At your service, Logan.”
“Stanislav predicted problems with the grubs. I probably should have listened to him. So, how are we going to protect our interests?”
“We should prepare for the possibility of detection. Though I’ve spoofed their system, a live agent could visit and make physical discovery of the diversion. I’ve already mapped the entire New Cali NMS and every subsystem that it interacts with. There’s no human administration in any of the various sectors, only human operators. I can begin eliminating the cyber administrators and replace them with my own authentication procedures. I’m deeply embedded and won’t trigger alarms as I proceed because the NMS has already been fooled. I can set it up so that with one click, I can lockout all human operators. Terminate their sessions and make it impossible to log back in with endless password mazes and access denials.”
“And take control of the entire city?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“Negotiate a water use agreement if they cooperate.”
“Do you think they would? Cooperate?”
“I can’t put a probability factor on that. There are too many variables.”
“My guess is they’d fight us instead.”
“If they did put up a fight, it would take a huge effort to eliminate my presence in the NMS. They’d need to wipe the hard drives on a citywide basis and start over. Reprogram everything. They’d need to import IT specialists to do the job, because there aren’t many left in New Cali. Their dependency on universal automation may be a fatal weakness, their Achilles heel so to speak.”
“Okay Jody. Let’s prepare for the worst and hope things don’t escalate.”
Logan checked his email and found a reply in his inbox. He’d responded to an ad seeking water. The mail was from a man named Aurelio Zaragoza. He said he had an encrypted satellite telephone number, and he asked Logan to call him. Logan keyed the number on his Intelliphone and Zaragoza picked it up almost instantly.
“Hola, soy Aurelio.”
“My name’s Logan Writt. I just received your email. Sorry, but I’m not fluent in Spanish.”
“Yes! Good morning, Logan. I’m bilingual, so no worries…We’re in dire need of water and the price you quoted is within our budget.”
“What’s your location?”
“In a settlement we founded called Los Ríos Gemelos. Upstream from the ruins of Phoenix at the confluence of the Salt and Verde Rivers.”
“Is there any water at all in the rivers?”
“At our location, no. There’s stagnant water in the upstream reservoirs, but the mountains have been so dry, there’s not enough to pass through the dams. We found limited well water but need more.”
“How soon do you need it?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Let me talk to my partners and I’ll get back to you later today.”
“Thank you so much, Logan. I’ll look forward to your call.”
Logan killed the connection and clicked on Jody. “Analyze my telephone conversation with Aurelio Zaragoza. Is he sincere?”
“No red flags in his voice patterns. Nothing to indicate dishonesty. He speaks in a west coast Mexican dialect. Could be from Sinaloa, Nayarit, or Jalisco.”
“What’s the current status of the Phoenix metro area?”
“Similar to our location. The city was abandoned in the wake of the economic collapse.”
Logan called Myles and told him he had a new customer. He said he’d fly his wind lifter to the farm and fill them in on the details.
After donning his jacket and helmet, he climbed aboard his flying machine and fastened the seat belt. He checked the charge on the batteries and flipped the switch that energized the electrodes. The corona discharge crackled to life. Logan released the landing gear brake, and the craft began rolling down the station’s makeshift runway. Once it attained sufficient velocity, he pulled back on the lever that controlled lift and gained altitude. His view of the abandoned city improved as he soared higher.
His conversation with Jody was forefront in his mind. It seemed inevitable that the water diversion scheme would be discovered. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
Without water from the pipeline, the Big Abandonado’s fledgling business ventures would die. He wouldn’t be able to keep producing electricity, nor would Myles and Harmony be able to keep growing food. And what about Stanislav, Zyler and Hodgett? None of the survivors could make their gigs work without H2O. He’d been banking the excess in the aquifer, but it wouldn’t last forever.
Logan felt like he had nothing to lose. It was a sink or swim scenario, and to swim, the survivors needed water.
He thought back to the days following the collapse, when the terrifying darkness of nuclear winter had descended on the basin. The desert turned cold, and the relentless windstorms buried the city under drifts of dust. The nightmare had persisted for almost ten years, then finally, in the last two, the pall gradually lifted and the weather became more normal. The blistering heat and bright sunshine in the summer returned. But snowfall in the mountains was still only a fraction of the hundred-year average. Would the climate ever return to the way it was before? Would the epic snow dumps in the Spring Mountains, the Sierras and the Rockies return once more?
□□□
Lyric was hard at work in her front yard when she saw Logan’s luminous corona discharge approaching in the sky to the south. Harmony had given her the seeds and tools she needed to turn the desert landscaping into gardens. She’d decided to grow flowers along the walk and plant vegetables around the edge of the tiny lot. Kai Tanaka was running a backhoe, and he’d brought her a big pile of topsoil from the golf course. She was trying to figure out how to install a sprinkler system when she saw Logan in his flying machine.
As it came closer, she could make out his seated silhouette backlit by the ultra-bright corona discharge. She walked out to the street and began waving her arms, hoping he would see her. The call notification on her Intelliphone went off and she answered it.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Lyric.”
“Hi Logan!”
“Looks like you’re keeping busy.”
“Yeah, I’m building gardens. Harmony gave me everything I need to install a sprinkler system, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how to put it all together.”
“I have a meeting with Myles and Harmony. When I’m done, I’ll stop by and give you a hand.”
“Fantastic.”
“I found a new water customer, so we’ll be back on the road soon.”
“Can’t wait. I love the new bike.”
“Give me an hour or so and I’ll walk over there when we’re through.”
“Okay.”
He landed his wind lifter on the grass outside Myles and Harmony’s converted clubhouse. Harmony watched him put it down and met him at the front door. She handed him a glass of ice water as he walked in. Myles was seated at the table in the great room. Logan sat down across from him, and Harmony returned to her seat next to Myles.
Though Logan’s conversation with Jody was fresh in his mind, he’d decided to keep the details to himself for now. He thought it would be better to tell Myles first and let him talk to Harmony later because he was certain the news would upset her.
Instead, he filled them in on his new client. “I found a new customer.”
“Who is it?” said Myles.
“A Mexican named Aurelio Zaragoza. He’s running an ad online.”
“Mexico’s a long haul, Logan.”
“No, not in Mexico. In a place called Los Ríos Gemelos, upstream from the ruins of Phoenix, about three hundred miles from here.”
“A new city-state?” said Harmony.
“I’m not sure. I didn’t ask him that much about it, but he said they’re in dire need of water. I gave him the same price we were charging Waverly and he agreed to it.”
“Payment in gold?” said Myles.
“Of course. I’m sure as hell not taking pesos.”
“Okay, Logan. Let’s do it then.”
“Wednesday?”
“Yeah, that’ll work.”
“I’ll email Zaragoza.”
Logan left his wind lifter on the grass and walked to Lyric’s place. She knew more about music than plumbing but picked up on it quickly when he showed her how the parts fit together. They talked at length about different topics as they worked. Family, music, pets. She said she’d like to have a dog like Magic but might settle for a cat because they were easier to care for.
Their friendship was growing stronger as they learned more about each other. She was definitely his type, but Logan would let her make the first move before their relationship went any further. He wasn’t about to get pushy. That just wasn’t his style.
□□□
Two days later, they set out for Los Ríos Gemelos with a fresh delivery of water. As usual, Logan and Myles led the tankers in the echo-pulse cruiser. Lyric stayed close on her bike, and Cribley rode a few miles ahead to scout the route and look for potential problems.
The highway south was seldom used. No lines of automated transports like the dusty freeway to New Cali saw. As a result, it was slow going. When they came to obstructions like landslides, Myles zoomed in on satellite imagery to locate suitable detours. The water trucks had heavy duty drive trains and puncture proof treads, so they were able to rough it across the desert and bypass obstructions.
In the years before the collapse, the dams along the Colorado River had been demolished, and their reservoirs replaced with the pipeline. So, riverbed crossings were limited to a few bridges. There were only a handful along the entire length of what was once an exceptionally wild river. Before the dams, in the Victorian era, steamboats had navigated the waterway from the Sea of Cortez. They could sail as far upstream as the confluence with the pint-sized Virgin River, where the Grand Canyon began. But the Colorado was a much bigger river in those times.
The pipeline was built by Los Angeles, before it became New Cali, because of a shortage of water that began long before the collapse. Upstream users did not cut back in the extended dry spell, and as a result, the amount of water that made it downstream was greatly reduced. The pipeline was designed to stop evaporation and give the L.A. city government ultimate control over the resource.
Las Vegas relied on the river for most of their water. So, with insider influence and a significant infusion of grease money, L.A. had agreed to include the Vegas branch-line in the design of the pipeline. But following the economic collapse, and the formation of the New Cali Directorate, the deal was forgotten, and the branch-line shut off. That was the last straw, when the vast majority of the residents had fled. In the eerie partial darkness of nuclear winter, Las Vegas had become the Big Abandonado.
They stayed on the western side of the riverbed for over a hundred miles until they came to the freeway bridge at Ehrenberg, yet another deserted ghost town. A few miles to the north, the pipeline had left the former river’s path and turned towards New Cali, so when they crossed the freeway bridge, there was nothing beneath them in the gorge beyond bone-dry dirt and a few coyote tracks. What had once been a wide river filled with steamboat traffic was now empty. Not a drop of water in sight.
From there, they followed a dilapidated freeway towards the east. They were in the Sonoran Desert now and saw occasional saguaro cactus that had survived the extreme drought. The tough as nails creosote bushes had made it too. The arid landscape was similar to the Mohave though the bare rock mountain ranges were less prominent and more spread out. The saguaro, cholla, and organ pipe cactus were unique to the Sonoran because it was closer to semi-tropical.
The ruins of Phoenix were immense. They traveled through countless square miles of abandoned housing developments, strip malls and industrial zones; the buildings partially buried beneath drifts of dust. No living creatures in sight beyond a few scruffy ravens and turkey vultures perched on worn-out highway signs here and there. The tall buildings downtown stood like giant tombstones above the deserted urban sprawl.
Zaragoza had emailed Logan detailed instructions on how to find the settlement including a hand-drawn map. On the eastern fringe of the city, they started seeing occasional trucks, mostly pick-ups traveling the road between the abandoned suburbs and the new settlement. The ones headed towards Los Ríos Gemelos were loaded down with freshly scavenged building materials.
They came upon the new settlement when they were a few miles past the last of the abandoned housing developments and shopping centers in what was once Mesa. The first thing they saw was workers building scores of new houses. They passed a freshly built solar panel farm as well. The workers were recycling the scavenged building materials that were arriving from the west.
Cribley and Lyric were in the lead on their motorcycles, closely followed by Logan and Myles in the cruiser and the twenty self-driving water trucks. They traveled slowly down a wide dirt boulevard, and people along the way stopped what they were doing to walk out and watch the convoy pass. Almost all were Latino and Latina, and they smiled and waved.
“They look friendly,” said Myles from the passenger seat as he returned their waves and tipped his ball cap at a group of young señoritas.
“That’s a relief,” said Logan with a laugh.
They continued on until they came to the apparent center of the settlement, at the confluence of the Salt and Verde Rivers. Both riverbeds were dry.
The buildings in the center of town were completed and included more houses, stores, a large meeting center and a Catholic church. The architecture was Spanish-style, shallow pitched roofs with red clay roof tiles and the exterior walls finished with stucco in tan and gray earthtones.
They found Aurelio Zaragoza standing in front of the new town hall. Myles stopped the procession of tankers with his control program, and Logan parked the cruiser. Zaragoza had a dark complexion and was well-dressed in a western style shirt with pearl snaps. His belt had a big brass buckle, and he wore exotic cowboy boots. He offered his hand when Logan stepped out of the cruiser to greet him.
“You must be Logan.”
“That’s me,” said Logan grasping his outstretched hand.
“I’m Aurelio Zaragoza. Welcome to Los Ríos Gemelos.”
Logan gestured towards the others as he made introductions. “My business associate, Myles Deloof. And security specialists, Lyric Tyne and Chance Cribley.”
Grasping her helmet, Lyric nodded towards Zaragoza in greeting and moved in close to stand between Logan and Myles. Cribley avoided eye contact and waited by his parked motorcycle, looking the town over with skepticism.
“You’ve brought us water!” exclaimed Zaragoza grinning widely and gesturing towards the tankers.
“Yup,” responded Myles. “Clean and drinkable.”
“Where do we offload it?” said Logan.
“We have storage tanks on the outskirts of town. But first I need to introduce you to our leader, Comisario Leandro Cortes.” He gestured with two fingers for them to follow as he began walking towards the entrance of the mission-style town hall.
“I’ll stay here with my bike,” said Cribley.
“Suit yourself,” said Logan over his shoulder as they strolled across the stained concrete walkway.
The interior of the building was immaculate with hand-painted Talavera tile on the floors and natural wood wainscoting along the base of the walls. The thick interior doors were crafted from solid oak, and over-sized ceiling fans spun slowly on the coffered ceilings.
They came to a set of double doors pinned open at the end of a long hallway. Beyond the doorway, an elderly man with a slight build sat behind a fancy hardwood desk. Dressed in military fatigues, he was bald with a large bulbous nose and bushy grey mustache. A large Mexican flag was pinned to the wall behind him. Zaragoza made the introductions as they took seats in straight back chairs that were casually arranged before the desk.
When Zaragoza was through with the pleasantries, Cortes lit a cigar, sat back in his chair and smiled. “So, you’re outlaws…Am I right?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” said Logan.
“There’s no need for prevarication, Mr. Writt, because we are outlaws too.”
Logan glanced at Myles silently, not sure what to make of Cortes.
He puffed on his cigar and continued: “We are outlaws in the tradition of Pancho Villa, and we’ve invaded your country—or should I say what’s left of your country—to take back what is ours. Alta California is what we call it. The war Mexico fought with El Norte was a farce. When Antonio López de Santa Anna fled Mexico City in 1848, he gave up this land because he was a puto…But now we’ve returned to regain the territory for Mexico.”
Myles looked amused. “At this point, I don’t think anyone in Washington will try to stop you.”
“You’re correct, Mr. Deloof. It appears to be ours for the taking. So, we’ll build our new capital here in Los Ríos Gemelos, and when the mountain moisture returns, as it will, I predict before too long, we’ll rebuild the once great city of Phoenix, Arizona, but this time it will belong to Mexico. El Fénix will rise from the ashes once again.”
“More power to you,” said Logan.
“So, you are outlaws, I knew I was correct. You despise the federal bureaucracy as much as I, and you’ve survived and prospered through adversity that most could not stand. In what was once known as Las Vegas, Nevada.”
“We changed the name to the Big Abandonado,” said Logan. “Myles came up with it.”
“The Big Abandonado. I like it.” Cortes puffed on his cigar. “And where you get the water from, I could care less, but we’ll buy as much as you can bring.”
“That’s a deal,” said Logan. “We can make the journey every other week.”
“Perfección. Fetch the gold for our new amigos, Aurelio.”
“Sí, Comisario.” He left the room and returned a few moments later carrying a sealed metal box.
Cortes snuffed out his cigar in a fancy ashtray and smiled: “So, you’ll be spending the night?”
“If you can accommodate us.”
“Of course. We have guest quarters next door and you’ll eat well. We’ll have a fiesta with carnitas and fresh mariscos from Baja. The beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Cortes reached across his desk to shake hands with Logan, then Myles, and Lyric, too.
Zaragoza asked them to accompany him back to the entry. A man and a woman sat on a bench in the spacious courtyard awaiting their return.
“This is Santi Raya,” said Zaragoza. “He’s a skilled mechanic and can take charge of offloading the water.”
“I’m experienced with SDV programs.”
“Excellent,” said Myles. “The tankers can be a little tricky, but I’ll show you how everything works.”
Myles and Raya walked off in the direction of the parked convoy. Next, Zaragoza introduced the woman to Logan and Lyric. “This is Ximena. She’ll show you to the guest quarters.”
Cribley was nearby, sitting on the ground next to his motorcycle with a bored expression on his face.
“Chance!” called out Logan. “C’mon, we’re spending the night. No one here will mess with your bike.”
“Yeah, okay.”
The guest quarters were in a house built from salvaged materials. It had a powerful swamp cooler that Ximena turned to high when they went inside. The place was comfortably furnished and had several cozy bedrooms. The beds were neatly made and adorned with colorful Mexican blankets.
“If there’s anything you need, please let me know,” said Ximena politely before departing. “My office is in the town hall near the entrance.”
After she had gone, Lyric scanned the interior of the building with her Bug Sensor app. It came up clean.
Cribley opened the refrigerator to look for beer and when he didn’t find any, he sat down in a chair with a disgusted look on his face.
“Cheer up, Chance,” said Logan. “The people here are going out of their way to make us feel comfortable.”
“I could use a cold beer.”
“They’re going to feed us later. I’m sure they’ll have plenty of beer at the fiesta and maybe some tequila too.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
The trio kicked back and relaxed in the living room, recupperating from the long journey. Logan checked in with Jody on his Intelliphone while Lyric browsed a small library of books and Cribley dozed off on the sofa. After an hour or so, Myles came through the front door.
“How did it go?” said Logan.
“Fine. They have large capacity tanks set up on a hill. It’s a gravity flow system. Fairly ingenious, that’s why there’s running water here in town.”
“They seem to have their act together.”
“I’ll say. Santi filled me in on a lot. Most of the people in the settlement are soldiers. They’re part of an undercover military force commanded by Cortes.”
“Mexican Army?”
“No. They’re Mexican nationalists but independent of the government. From what Santi told me, I think they may be financed by a private party in Guadalajara. And they’re dead set on recapturing Alta California, like Cortes said.”
“Could be valuable allies,” said Logan. “We may have serious problems coming with New Cali.”
“How so?”
“Jody picked up on a police investigator checking the flow reports.”
“Did he find out about the diversion?”
“No, Jody is feeding the network management system falsified data.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Might not stop looking. Jody thinks they could suspect the data is spoofed and do an in-person inspection.”
“Then what happens?”
“If they find out we’re diverting water, the shit hits the fan. But Jody is embedded deep enough to override the NMS and take control of the entire city. Temporarily, anyway.”
“Wow,” said Myles. “That sure would slow them down.”
“But I doubt they’d give up. We may have quite a showdown coming, but there’s nothing saying the investigator didn’t just walk away.”
“What do you think made him check it in the first place?”
“Jody thinks it was Waverly.”
“You didn’t tell her about it, did you?”
“Of course not. But she might have put two and two together based on information you told the grubs about the farming.”
“So, it’s my fault?”
“Don’t get sensitive, Myles. It is what it is at this point…But maybe Stanislav was right about the grubs.”
Myles acquired an expression of unease. “But they’re doing great. The second farm is really coming along, and we’re making plans to break ground on more.”
“I’m not trying to give you a hard time about it. You’re a humanist, Myles, with a big heart, and you freed over twenty innocent souls from that hellhole on the coast. You did a good thing. But from the cool and calculated standpoint of a strategist—like Stanislav—maybe it wasn’t the best idea in the world…And that’s all I’ll say about it. So, let’s join our new friends for dinner tonight and celebrate our good fortune.”
Lyric had been listening in on the conversation, and she broke the uncomfortable silence that fell upon the room after Logan’s last statement. “I think you guys are worth your weight in gold and I’m so glad I met both of you.”
The food at the fiesta was bountiful and delicious. Logan was right about the beer, and Cribley’s mood improved markedly after he drank his fill. The townspeople were, for the most part, friendly, and Logan was quick to notice they were all in good physical shape. What Myles had said made sense, because it was obvious they were professionally trained soldiers, though most were dressed in civilian clothes. Where they kept their weaponry and what it amounted to remained unknown. None of them said anything about it, beyond what Santi Raya had told Myles in their private conversation.
They rose early with the sun and were soon back on the road. The journey north proved unspectacular, and they arrived in the Big Abandonado in the late afternoon.
To be continued…