A Big Ball Of Dirt

Hollywood got it wrong, of course. If they’d parked over major cities for a while to give humanity time to think and plan, perhaps things might have gone better for us. Probably not. The first thing anyone knew of the disaster was news footage of one of the ships plunging into Lake Ontario. The world watched in utter disbelief as the enormous craft lifted soundlessly out of the water, taking millions of liters of water with it. Fish rained onto the streets of Toronto in the thousands as water sluiced off the sides of the giant, featureless cube and the world stood stock still, its collective jaw agape. By the end of that first day, the Great Lakes were gone. By the end of the second day, there wasn’t a body of fresh water more than half a kilometer in diameter left anywhere on the planet. Mankind was just starting to close its collective mouth. Not everyone was struck dumb. Some bright sparks tried to react. Messages of friendship were broadcast by public and private citizens, guns were brought into play at sites where the ships were actively stealing water and storage tanks were hastily filled. Churches and mosques filled with sincere parishioners offering prayer while politicians and generals shouted and pounded shoes on desks furiously. Still the water flew away. When the fresh water was gone, the real show began. What humanity had assumed to be the alien ships were revealed to be nothing more than small harvest craft. Massive ships hundreds of miles across plunged into the oceans day and night for the next five days until our once blue planet was little more than a big ball of dirt. Every nation on Earth had shaken itself awake and started to throw the might of their militaries at the invaders by then. They might as well have been firing rose petals for all the damage that their missiles and guns managed. Once again, Hollywood got it wrong, of course. The missiles didn’t vaporize or explode before hitting the ships. They didn’t bounce harmlessly off the alien’s force shields, nor waste their explosive force against impenetrable ships’ hulls. They simply flew right through the space that the ships seemed to occupy, emerging harmlessly on the other side. If the missile or bomb were manually detonated while inside the hull of the huge ships, no apparent effect could be seen on the outside. It was as if the ships simply were not there. Planes flew into the ships in desperate, heroic attempts to bring the silent enemy down like Randy Quaid’s lunatic pilot in Independence Day, but they too flew straight through the huge ships and emerged unharmed on the other side. Experts surmised that some sort of dimensional phasing or shifting must be involved, since all of the pilots reported seeing nothing inside the ships. No walls, no machines, no aliens and most tellingly, no water. Ships that were rising from the ocean were leaving with billions of liters of water inside, and yet the planes, bombs and missiles encountered none of the resistance that they would have hit were they to fly into a huge vessel filled with water. It seemed to the few pilots brave enough to try to sacrifice themselves that they flew into the hull and emerged on the other side at virtually the same instant. Gun camera footage confirmed what the pilots reported, while cameras outside the ships recorded the planes taking the second or so a mach 2 traverse of the vessel would take. The experts couldn’t find a way to explain the discrepancy, but by that time it was a moot point. The aliens were gone. The rape of Earth had taken just over a week. The only wrinkle in an otherwise perfect attack was an event in Northern Canada. On the second day, one of the harvester ships mysteriously stopped rising in the sky, shuddered for several minutes and began emitting a high pitched whine, the only sound heard from any of the alien ships, ever. After about an hour, the ship began to list, first to one side, then the other. The list became a decided rocking motion, then a sort of drunken swirl. After several minutes of this, it seemed to try to right itself, but as it did it began to lose altitude. By the time it crashed into the nearly dry basin of the lake it had just drained, the whine had stopped and the drunken reel had returned. It landed with one corner of its boxy shape driven into the muddy bed of the lake. The impact broke open the alien hull and returned millions of liters of fresh water to its rightful place, with the ship collapsing to sink beneath its former cargo. No ship came to reclaim the water from that particular lake and the aliens left their broken craft where it lay. With the attack happening as it did in early autumn, the lake froze over before any sort of salvage operation could begin. To salvage anything from a lakebed in Northern Canada would be considered a Herculean task under the best of conditions but by the time the ice broke up the following spring, there wasn’t an organization left on the planet that could undertake the task. Within a half a year, the effects of the change in the mass of the planet had altered the orbit of the earth by a small degree. Weather patterns went haywire, as the atmosphere sank to fill the gap left by the oceans. Cities and towns at high altitude became uninhabitable as the air thinned. Governments collapsed around the globe, overrun by thirsty populations demanding water that no longer existed. Every domesticated animal on the planet perished within a month, just weeks after the crops began to fail, sending food production into a crisis that paralleled the drought. Ironically, the people who survived in the greatest numbers were those living in or near desert areas, knowing as they did how to conserve water and use it wisely. Survivalists at first trumpeted their triumph at having the foresight to prepare for the disaster. Most of them stopped gloating as the cities emptied and their populations overran anyone found with food and water. A cup of water or a can of vegetables had become commodities worth killing for almost overnight and humanity found untold numbers of ways to kill for them. People with no way to leave the cities died either from thirst or at the hands of their thirsty neighbours, by the millions. By the end of the first year, the population of the planet had dropped from seven billion to less than seven million. The business of survival became an all consuming drive for the species. No one noticed much beyond the range of their own eyes and ears. Communications and media were no longer worth the effort, as there was no economy left to drive them. With resources so scarce, small groups of families huddled together for protection, shunning and fearing outsiders. Within a year, civilization had crumbled back to its tribal origins. Almost no one even remembered the alien craft that had crashed in the Canadian North. Chapter 1

The small house on the hill, much like its owner, gave an initial impression of poor construction and disrepair. Built almost halfway up the steep slope at the edge of the tree line, its structure seemed to slump, as if reclining exhaustedly against the hillside. Also much like its owner, this initial impression belied foundations that ran deep, giving it an unseen inner strength that allowed it to withstand the elemental fury that often lashed the house and the forest around it. The notion that the house was sagging back into the hill came from the way it had been built, with a thought to allowing the wind that whipped up the hill to slide over it and upward unimpeded, rather than catching and lifting the eaves as it blasted towards the peak of the hill. The notion that the owner, a man who sat apparently dozing on the small, rough hewn porch in a rickety looking rocking chair that appeared to have been made from scraps of wood rather than cut lumber, was inclined to the same laziness that his outward façade implied was likewise a consciously crafted illusion. If there was ever a man who embodied the cliché about books and covers, Ellis Whitaker was that man.

Despite the subsistence living that he eked out of the surrounding countryside, Whitaker still tended to a paunch. His frame was longer than his slouching posture appeared, his protruding belly more muscular than one might imagine. Like everything about him, Ellis Whitaker’s body was not what it seemed.

Originally born in Canada, his mother had died when he was only twelve. She had given him her love of nature and a love of the sciences that make sense of the chaotic nature of reality. His father had left when he was only a year old. The only thing that he ever gave Ellis was his Native American heritage that allowed the boy dual citizenship in both Canada and the United States. Ellis Whitaker had spent much of his youth out-working and out-drinking men twice his age in every sort of rough labour imaginable as he drifted his way across North America. He’d baled hay in Kansas, hauled fishing nets in Nova Scotia, worked on oil rigs in Alberta and Alaska and after a particularly intense binge fueled by a particularly large paycheque, had enlisted in the Canadian Forces on his twenty-first birthday. He’d been so drunk that that the enlistment papers were covered in vomit when he looked at them the next day. True to his own sense of duty and honour, he’d shrugged his shoulders and embraced the adventure.

The two years that had passed since the aliens had stolen the Earth’s water had treated Whitaker reasonably well. Never one to buy into the doom and destruction mantra of the ridiculous survivalist movement, he had not had any sort of stockpile of water or food to see him through the crisis, no plan, no strategy. Common sense wisdom coupled with his survival training from his military background had served him well enough. Up here, among the dying forests of northern Canada, he managed.

He supposed that he had been fortunate to be camping in the northern reaches of Manitoba when the thieves had come to rape the planet and more fortunate to have had the good sense to rent a satellite phone for the week. As far as he was from the closest town, an injury or illness could easily have spelled certain death for a camper without a connection to civilization. Within hours of the first ship appearing, Whitaker had made a call to a friend on a whim, wholly unaware of the unfolding drama. He called Bill Townsend mainly to gloat about the great fishing and to rub his good friend’s nose in his success with the lure, only to learn of the unbelievable events taking place all over the world.

At first, he hadn’t believed a word of it. Logically, he thought, the first thing any invader from outside the solar system would do, would be to disable satellite communications to render military response ineffective. Surely if the planet were being invaded, he should not be able to access the satellite communications network. The panic in his friend’s voice made him reconsider that assessment. Another call, this time to his ex-wife, confirmed that the whole unlikely story was indeed true. In no reality that Ellis could imagine would his friend Bill and his ex-wife conspire to prank him.

Whitaker considered the situation for a few hours before doing anything. He tried to call Bill again, but this time got only Bill’s incongruently calm voice reciting some inane variant on the standard voicemail greeting. Ellis left no message. Having worked the problem through his military mind, he knew there was no point. The only reason not to disable the satellite communications of the defenders lay in the utter dominance of the invading force. Why would you bother to keep the bees from buzzing if you could simply walk away with the honey without getting stung?

Coldly, without another thought, Ellis shut the door on the past. For a moment, he wondered if his father had had similar, practical reasons for leaving when Ellis was a baby. For the first time in his life he felt a hint of a connection to the man he'd never known. After that feeling had passed, Ellis started building what future he could with what he had at hand. He started by building a dam.

After several days of backbreaking labour, Ellis had fashioned a serviceable dam that effectively created a tiny self feeding lake, fed by a small spring that he’d found when he first set up camp. Ellis reasoned that it was small enough to avoid immediate notice and contributed so little to the river it fed further south that the loss of such a tiny trickle might go unremarked by the thirsty invaders. Whitaker’s dam might have been less water tight than a good beaver dam and the basin not nearly as deep as he would have liked, but it served the purpose for the moment and he could improve upon it later. By his rough estimation, there was enough water in the tiny lake to sustain him for a year, or perhaps a little longer, assuming that the spring dried up once the aliens flew away with the lion’s share of Earth’s water.

Without any seeds to start a garden, Ellis expected that his diet would consist of what he could catch or find in the surrounding area. To that end he hiked several miles from his little lake to the river itself and hand picked several dozen flopping, dying trout from the dried up river bed and lugged them through the forest in a makeshift waterproof sack he’d made by cutting open his air mattress. With luck, some of the surviving fish would make a lot of little baby fish and he’d have a stable food source as well as water in his man-made lake.

Knowing that even a small body of water would eventually attract unwanted attention, Whitaker felled hundreds of small trees and saplings until he had enough scrub to weave a mat that covered the football field sized lake he had created. The mat bobbed alarmingly in the wind, threatening to break apart and expose his cache, so that he found it necessary to anchor it to the newly formed lakebed at several dozen points to give the impression of a solid plain of dead brush when viewed from above. It wasn’t perfect, but he figured that so long as it avoided the scrutiny of airborne observers for a few months, it would be enough.

While felling the brush to create his massive camouflage net, Whitaker had marked dozens of trees that he would use to build his new home. The work was beyond exhausting as he selected the largest trees that he could manage to drag bodily up the hill to the edge of the treeline to where he planned to build. Sometimes he overestimated his own strength and was forced to split the log where he had felled it. With only the camp axe that he’d brought with him, construction was rough, at best. Unfinished logs suited the purpose better than dressed timber though, as with the natural colours and contours of split logs serving as a roof, from the air his home looked more like an abandoned lean-to than a house. At one point, he tried to camouflage the structure even further, felling a small tree and leaning it over the roof to conceal the house, but every time the wind got up, the tree would move and he finally removed it for fear that one night it would fall and rip the roof right off.

One room, built around a fireplace and chimney made from stacked river stones packed with mud became kitchen, parlour and bedroom. He built on the north face of the hill, a placement that left his home in shadow most of the day, further concealing its true nature from any eyes in the sky. He devoted one day to fashioning his only chair, making a serviceable rocker from branches he found lying around his construction area. In a small concession to comfort over practicality, he used a few square feet of canvas cut from his one man tent to make the seat and line the back of the chair.

Whitaker slept on a mattress of pine boughs that he refreshed every few days. After two years of living rough, he took no notice of the insects and arachnids that shared his bed. His air mattress, once a trout transport, had long ago been cannibalized for its precious waterproof plastic which along with the remaining canvas from his tent now served as a dew catcher that lay out on the flattest part of the slope, not far below the house. He had spent several weeks moving the trap around to try to find the best spot to use it. It only trapped a milliliter or two of precious water each day from the increasingly arid atmosphere, but every extra drop he gathered was a drop in his favour. From the dew catcher, the dew was transferred to his thermos for drinking. A mouthful of cold dew always tasted much better than the water from his brush covered pond. Whitaker could envision a morning, not too far in the future, when he would find the dew catcher as dry as the night he’d laid it out. He had already started to think about ways to set the air mattress and tent canvas to more productive uses on that day.

At first, he could see no change in the world around him. That began to change when winter hit. The loss of so much mass from its surface altered the Earth’s gravitational balancing act with the sun. Fortunately, despite its surface being covered in water, the actual mass of water on the planet had only amounted to 0.04 or so per cent of its total mass, so the gravitational change was a relatively small one. The lesser mass of the earth was pulled less strongly by the sun, shooting the planet into a more elliptical orbit, resulting in a minor change in the planet’s mean temperature at the extreme end of the ellipse, making winter just a bit colder that year. More importantly, the combination of the loss of mass and the change in the mass ratio between the Earth and the Moon resulted in a change in the planet’s rotation. Suddenly a day was barely 23 hours long. During the long summer days, Whitaker didn’t even notice the shift, bedding down with the sun and rising early, his body was too exhausted to pay attention to the time. When the fall arrived and the air began to bite into his callused flesh, he started to notice that the sun didn't stay up as long as it ought to. A few days of wearing his disused wristwatch confirmed his observations. The shorter day was not a significant or even inconvenient change to adjust to, but the incontrovertible evidence of what the invaders had done to the planet drove home the urgent necessity for Whitaker to finish his preparations for the inevitable next phase of his survival strategy.

Despite, or more accurately because of two years of his best efforts, Ellis was keenly aware that one day he would have to defend his slowly shrinking cache of water. Thirsty, desperate, intractable people would one day discover his little homestead and come to try and take it from him. And he would have to kill them.

By the looks of the party heading towards his home that he’d spied through his binoculars this morning as he collected his precious bounty from his makeshift dew catcher, today looked to be that day.

Chapter 2

Karen Newman hadn’t slept through a full night in almost two years. Since the giant cubes had come, she’d spent almost each waking moment organizing everything from water rationing to latrine digging for her little band of survivors. There were times she wondered if she should envy the survivalist nuts that had actually spent time and effort preparing for something like this. Other times she wondered if she should envy the dead and their peace. Most of the time Karen was too busy staying alive to envy anyone at all. Even in her sleep, the business of survival intruded and either one of her group or more often her own thoughts would wake her from a light slumber and direct her to attend yet another detail that would help them survive another day.

By the end of the first day of the great disaster, Karen knew that there was going to be little chance of survival for most of the planet. While news organizations and bloggers were screaming for a military or diplomatic response to the crisis, Karen gathered a small group of friends and co-workers and started planning. Somehow, without ever intending to, she’d become the head of a tribe. At first, the pressure of the responsibility had nearly sent her over the proverbial edge, but after the first few months she became accustomed to and even started to enjoy the position of leadership. Not bad for a girl who’d been a minimum wage tour guide when all of this began.

One of the great ironies of her position was how little trouble it had been to defend it. Considering that the cave system that she and her group occupied contained one of the largest bodies of fresh water remaining anywhere in the world, she’d expected to have to fight to keep it from being overrun by thirsty locals at the very least. What she hadn’t figured on was the phenomenon of local disinterest that pervaded the small Tennessee community just five miles down the road. Like Parisians who never tour the Louvre, the locals in the area seemed to be far less aware of the bounty beneath their land than the thousands of tourists that Karen guided through the caverns each year. A few families had trickled into the caves and been allowed to stay, but the expected invasion from the surrounding area had never materialized. Instead, those folks either ran off to the countryside in search of water or simply stayed where they were and died. Six months ago, Karen had sent three of her most capable people on a reconnaissance mission to the nearby town. They had found nothing but burnt out structures and mummified bodies. They had managed to scrounge some tools and ammunition for the group’s few weapons, but nothing else. One of the few wrong moves she had made during the last few years had been the obvious one of taking manpower away from setting up the cave and placing it in defensive positions at the main entrance of the cave system. Karen still shook her head at the thought

If the defending of the fledgling colony had proved ironically simple, every other aspect of their new lives made up for it by being outlandishly complex. From the first, Karen had spent inordinate amounts of time drumming the new reality into the heads of her charges rather than simply giving orders and expecting her wishes to be carried out. A finely tuned machine, it was not.

The sound of a flushing toilet had been the first one to interrupt her sleep on the first night in the cave system. The whoosh of the precious water had brought her wide awake instantly. Without a thought, Karen leapt from her makeshift cot and ran down the short walkway to the washrooms. A sleepy young man, the brother of one of Karen’s coworkers was feeling his way out of the men’s room when Karen brought him fully awake by grabbing his right ear and tugging sharply downward. His yelp brought the rest of the little group awake, sleeping as they were in the foyer in front of the gift shop next to the washrooms.

Karen called out to make sure she had their attention, then she yanked on the young man’s ear again, making sure she had his attention as well.

“Keith here has just volunteered for a job.” Keith made a sound that might have been a sob or perhaps a word, but Karen jerked his ear again and continued as if he wasn’t there. She was furious and knew that she had to make everyone understand why, right now, or they wouldn’t last a month.

“Keith is going to board up the bathrooms.” She used his captive ear to turn his tearful face up towards hers. He nodded weakly, confused and terrified. “When he’s done that, he’s going to go back into the cave and dig us a nice deep latrine.” She jerked his ear again and glared out at the assembled refugees in front of her. No one dared to breathe.

“Now, Keith is going to tell us why he’s going to do these things.” She let go of his ear and he twisted away from her violently as she did. She looked at two of the men nearest him and made sure that they knew what she expected of them next with a loaded look.

“Fuck you, lady!” Keith shouted through snot and tears, one hand cradling his ear.

Karen sighed. He didn’t understand. None of them did. She walked over to the gift shop and turned on the television set mounted at the front door. Usually it played a dvd about the caves on a loop, but it had a cable connection that had been installed after September 11 to give the staff a link to the outside world when necessary. She flipped it on, not bothering to check what channel was playing. It didn’t matter. They were all playing the same images, even the movie stations and the weather channels. She muted the feed and stood off to one side so everyone could see the image on the screen. Shot after shot of giant crafts flying away with millions of gallons of water played constantly. It was obvious from the changing vistas and angles that this wasn’t one event but dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of events playing out all over the planet.

“Fuck me, Keith? Tell it to them.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the screen. “They are laughing at you, Keith. They’re stealing every drop of water on the planet and you’re helping them.” She resisted the urge to belittle him, to call him a name. She had to get through to him, not antagonize him further.

Keith started to respond but his confusion and fear caught him short. He just glared at her through watery eyes. She saw confusion on other faces in the room.

Karen sighed again. Still, they weren’t getting it.

She made sure he was looking right at her. Her voice was barely a whisper, but the acoustics of the room carried it to every ear.

“Water, Keith. Water.” She held his gaze until he dropped his. He understood. She swept her eyes across the room, holding each of the fifteen pairs of eyes that looked back at her for a moment before moving on to the next. She had to make them all understand. Keith had to be made an example of to drive home the point. Finally, quietly, she broke the silence.

“Water is life.” Eyes shifted from face to face around the room and finally back to her, but no one spoke.

“Water is life,” she repeated, a little louder. She had their attention so focused that she knew that she had to use this one chance to make them understand the new reality they faced.

“We cannot waste a drop. Not. One. Drop.” Several heads bobbed in agreement.

“Water is life.” More heads bobbed.

“Water is life.” This time a few voices joined her, unbidden. She hadn’t expected that, but she knew it was something to use. She raised her voice one last time and every voice in the cavern, even Keith’s joined her this time.

“Water is life.” She put extra emphasis on the last word. Better they focus on what they had, their lives, not what they potentially might lose.

She turned to Keith, afraid that he might defy her then, breaking the fragile magic that the moment had woven over the group, but he just stood there, looking at her with an impenetrable expression. The silence held for a few heartbeats. Karen saw that he was about to speak and bit the inside of her cheek to stifle her response. She’d humiliated him publicly and if she pushed him now she might force him to fight her leadership and then she might never get the situation under control.

He had wiped his eyes and nose and looked around the room though clear eyes for the first time since Karen had ambushed him a lifetime ago.

“Does anybody know where the tools are?” Karen could have kissed him in that moment. She’d truly reached him and he not only accepted his punishment but he had made it clear to everyone that he accepted her.

It was only then that Karen realized that she was standing in front of the group in her underwear.

Despite almost dying of embarrassment that night once she realized her state of undress, Karen still smiled at the memory of it. It had been a small victory, but it had set the tone for the group that first night and from then on they had deferred to Karen’s judgment in most things. She was younger than many of them, but after that first night no one seemed to notice her age or mention that there were others whose backgrounds might have suited them better to leadership than hers. She was in charge and that was the end of it.

Since that night there had been occasional flare ups of rebellious spirit, but Karen’s levelheaded approach had dealt with them and her generally wise and intelligent leadership had kept them to a minimum. Most of the early challenges to her leadership had come from those who had once been her close friends, not the various acquaintances and strangers that had been folded into the tribe along the way. It seemed that her friends felt more comfortable disagreeing with her than the others and it took a few private moments to convince them to see thing her way. She’d lost most of her friends over the first months, but she’d saved all their lives and counted the bargain as just.

These days, the group functioned as a unit, albeit less than perfectly smoothly. Many things, like drinking water rationing, had been simpler than she’d expected to implement. People understood that they couldn’t drink as much as they wanted anymore and accepted the change readily. Food rationing had been relatively simple to implement as well, since it was obvious to everyone that food was at a premium in the caves. What Karen hadn’t expected was the resistance to other changes that seemed so obviously necessary to her. People still wanted to wash their clothes, brush their teeth, boil their food and wash their bodies and it took frequent harangues to dissuade them from these practices, particularly in those early days. The incident with Keith had helped, but the habits of a lifetime die hard, particularly when the results of change include bad breath and body odour. It made it doubly difficult to convince the refugees to give up their creature comforts when a massive body of water sat a few hundred meters down a passageway.

In the early days, Karen had spent day after day reminding people that no one knew where that water was coming from or even if it was still coming. The assumption among scientists and cavers was that the underground lake was fed by underground springs or perhaps even an underground river, but no one knew for certain. As a precaution, Karen had marked the water level of the lake and made certain that everyone was aware of the need to monitor the lake’s level. When the group had proved intractable in their desire to wash their clothes and bodies, Karen had snuck down to the lake and changed the marker in the middle of the night. The next day one of the group had come running up the passageway to tell everyone that the water level had dropped. The arguments about washing and cooking had subsided pretty quickly after that. Karen still kept an eye on the water level, but for the moment it had only dropped by a few millimeters in the two years since the spacecraft had come.

Eventually, having convinced them of the urgency of conservation, she had placed Keith in charge of water security. Since that first night, Keith had become her most fervent supporter and her right hand man in all things, enforcing her rules in her stead while she slept or explored the depths of the cavern system. These days he was also one of the more pleasant things that kept her awake at night.

The noise that awakened her this night was not one of the usual ones. No one was fighting over bunk space or chores. No babies (and there had been several born after the first year, once none of the girls could renew their birth control pill prescriptions) were crying. Certainly no toilets were flushing.

It had been a gunshot.

Karen had counted herself lucky that the little band of survivors had never had to defend their refuge in those early days and she’d endured many arguments over posting guards at the main entrance every night. They had a few rifles and shotguns that some of the more forward thinking members of the group had brought with them in those early days, but since they were used to hunt the game that fed the group, ammunition was at a premium. No one in her group would be wasting ammunition by shooting in the dark. Besides, that shot hadn’t sounded like a rifle or a shotgun blast. Karen wasn’t one of those people that could identify a gun’s caliber by its sound, but the shot that had brought her awake sounded…bigger.

Once more, Karen found herself out of bed without a thought and running towards a sound that heralded a challenge to her tribe’s survival.

In her underwear.

Chapter 3 

“Once he is crowned king, Aragorn marries Arwen.” “And then what?” asked Kendra, coughing weakly. Robert Williams knew from experience that the weaker cough was a bad sign. Kendra’s lungs were filling with fluid and her body was becoming too weak to expel it. Very soon now, eleven year old Kendra Marks would drown in her own fluids and there wasn’t a damned thing he or anybody could do about it. Drawing from memory clouded by fatigue and grief, Williams swallowed the sob that was screaming for release from deep within his chest and continued with his recounting of the Lord of the Rings for the dying child. He knew that he wasn’t getting the details right and that at times he had confused events from the books and the movies of Peter Jackson, but that simply didn’t matter. Kendra needed to be comforted and the story seemed to take her mind off the pain that she was in. With no more meds left to give her for the pneumonia or even the pain, keeping her mind occupied with visions of Frodo Baggins and his companions was all he could do for her. “Well, now, let me think. King Aragorn presented the four brave hobbits to his subjects, thousands and thousands of people who had come to see him crowned and wed. While everyone watched, he sank to one knee in a deep, heartfelt bow of respect to the four little people who had saved Middle Earth. Everyone there, all those thousands of people bowed too, leaving only the four tiny hobbits standing. They all knew then that bravery doesn’t come from being big, or strong or even wise. It comes from having a huge heart and wanting nothing more than to protect a friend.” Kendra’s eyes were wide as she listened, but she wasn’t looking at him or the cramped, poorly lit room that they were in. She was seeing four brave hobbits watch thousands of people bow before them, looking at each other in awe. Kendra coughed again, weaker still. Robert wasn’t sure if he should continue or let the child rest, but she turned her huge eyes to him and implored him for more even as her body was wracked with weak spasms. “Shortly after that, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin return to the Shire. When they get there, they find that it has been taken over by some very bad people who are cutting down all the trees.” “Tell me the end, Rob, please?” Kendra’s voice was barely audible, even in the tomb like silence of the small room that they were in. “But this is the best part!” exclaimed Robert, without thinking. Then he looked harder at the little girl in the bed and he knew then that she knew that her time was almost gone. “I wanna know how it ends. Please?” She had just asked for her last request. His heart broke one more time. How many times now, he wondered. A dozen? Two? He’d lost count long ago, and still the people here just kept dying. The wound of his grief had long ago scarred over, but this life, this death had ripped into him afresh. “Okay Kendra. I’ll tell you the end.” He took a deep, calming breath, trying to remember the meditative techniques he’d learned during rehab all those years ago and let the last of the story pour out of him. He told her how Sam married the girl he admired so much, how Merry and Pippin became important men, leaders in their own right. Kendra was breathing so shallowly now that he could hardly see her chest rise and fall beneath the threadbare sheet. “Finally, poor Frodo, still damaged inside by the poison of the great spider and the foul magic of the ring that still twists him in knots,” Kendra gasped, a frail, tragic sound that pushed him to rush through the final moments of the story, “he just can’t stand to stay in the Shire any longer.” He gently took Kendra’s limp wrist in his hand, feeling for a pulse that was no longer there. Another tiny, feeble sob escaped from her lips, but no sound of drawing breath followed it. “So, with his beloved Gandalf and a wizened Bilbo Baggins, he boarded the last ship for the undying lands, leaving Sam and Merry and Pippin behind, to miss…and mourn their friend.” As he sat with the cooling body, wracked now with deep, gut wrenching sobs of his own, Robert Williams prayed fervently that before her pupils dilated in death that she’d been able to see Frodo get on that damned boat. After an hour or so, he realized that the tiny, beautiful hand that he was holding had grown noticeably cold in his. There was nothing to be done here now. The child was with God and his duty was to those who still lived. He gently covered Kendra Marks with her threadbare sheet and got up from the cracked plastic chair that had been his whole world these past two days. Kendra’s mother had been a dear friend of his for many years since they’d met at the Our Home rehab center back when they’d both been fighting demons that were too big to battle alone. Kendra had been born addicted to crack, suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and yet somehow that tiny, doomed infant had grown into a dazzlingly beautiful girl child before his eyes. And now she was dead. Millie Marks never knew who Kendra’s father was. There was even a small chance that she might have been Robert’s own child, but by the time Millie had gotten clean and gone through the legal nightmare of getting a ward of the State returned to her parental custody, it just didn’t seem very important to anyone. Millie had created her own little miracle with Kendra and she was the fiercest, most dedicated mother Robert had ever had the honour to meet. Kendra had been just young enough when the court battles ended that she had no memory of ever not having a mother, at least not until the cubes came. Millie Marks had found a deep and abiding Christian faith while she and Robert had kicked and screamed their way through months of rehab together. The Bible and God were the only things that Millie had been able to cling to during those tortuous weeks and months. Robert too had found God in rehab and the two had become deeply bonded in Christ. Sadly, when the cubes came and God didn’t answer Millie’s desperate prayers for earthly salvation for the world, for her and more importantly for her nine year old daughter, Millie’s faith had broken. While Robert watched over her and Kendra, spiriting them to a tiny, isolated village in northern Saskatchewan where he had once lived and worked back in his days as a wandering junkie, Millie crawled head first into a bottle or a needle or handful of pills, whatever was to hand, whatever she could find that gave here the illusion of escape and she stayed there until one day she found a little too much and didn’t have to pretend to escape anymore. Robert Williams had been a very good reformed junkie. He had stayed clean for years, eventually taking some courses and turning his experience on the streets and in the gutters to help others get through the hell that he had travelled to get clean. He worked with men and women who had seen and lived things that no civilized person can see and live and still remain civilized and he helped pull many of them back from the brink of madness and death and into the light of Christ. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than his successes and little could tear him apart more viciously than his failures. Every relapsed addict tore at him like a dull knife in the chest. His passion made him an excellent counselor and his faith helped make him an excellent person. He wept for Millie, for her lost faith and for the little girl she left behind as long and as hard as he had wept for his own lost father the day that the cancer had taken him. When he and some of the townsfolk had finished burying Millie, Robert had led them in a short, but moving prayer. After a moment of silence, he lifted his bowed head and looked around at the faces of the gathered people, these strangers that had taken he and Millie and Kendra in without a word of complaint, despite the desperate situation that the entire globe now faced as the impact of a world without water began to reverberate through the popuation. He had been lucky to get Millie and Kendra here as quickly as he did. The few remaining news outlets were reporting that almost every populated area on the planet had turned to massive, widespread looting and wholesale slaughter as humanity struggled to survive. As he walked away from the fresh grave, Kendra’s tiny hand in his, he looked back at Millie’s final resting place. He looked down at the beautiful, confused face of the child he now found in his care. Slowing to a stop, he knelt down to bring his eyes level with hers and gently took both her shoulders in his hand and held her gaze for a moment. “Kendra, your mommy is with Jesus now. You know that, right?” The child nodded, uncertainly, but he could see that she was carefully weighing his words. “Your mommy was a very brave, very strong person and she loved you very, very much.” Tears trickled out of puffy eyes and down chubby cheeks. “Why did she have to go?” Kendra stretched the last syllable into a wail and the dam of her emotions broke completely. She collapsed forward into his arms, sobbing incoherently as he made all those gentle, nonsense sounds that adults make when children cry with good reason. He stroked her hair and let her sob. The feeling of wetness on his shoulder as her tears soaked through his shirt made him smile sadly as he hugged her to him. Finally, he felt her start to bring her snorting and gasping under control. Grasping her again by the shoulders he pushed her back so she could see his face again and once again their gazes met. “See, honey, your mom was smart, and strong and she loved you more than anything. But she forgot one thing.” Kendra still couldn’t speak though her tears, but he knew he had her attention. “She forgot the most important thing of all. Your mommy forgot that God helps those that help each other.” He pulled the girl back to him for another tight hug and then he stood up and turned her towards town. The tiny populace was busy with tasks like laying out barricades to defend at either end of the short main street, gathering food at the general store and a hundred other things that might help them survive another day. No one was idle, not even the few who had just returned from burying the town’s most recent tragedy. He looked down at the little girl and said, “Wanna go help?” The smile that beamed up at him through her tears surely reached all the way to Heaven. Two years later, Robert Williams closed the door to a room that held the body of the bravest, strongest little girl he'd ever had the priveledge to know. Her lungs, underdeveloped at birth thanks to her mother's various drug addictions had finally betrayed her. That beautiful little child would never smile up at him again. In his heart he knew she was smiling down, even now, but that wasn't enough. The winter was almost over, the grip of the killing cold just about released. Too late for Kendra, but the spring was the best time to head north. While everyone else had scrambled to survive, withdrawing into their own small worlds, Robert Williams had kept the town's shortwave radio working, communicating with the few others out there who had managed to keep their wits and their equipment. It seemed that the tiny network of shortwave buffs were the only ones keeping the memory of the crashed alien ship in the Canadian north alive. No one had heard anything about a salvage plan in over a year and these days even the notion of the existence of the ship was more of an inside joke than anything else. A month ago, when the rumour that someone, somewhere might be mounting a new operation had started making the rounds, he'd paid little attention. While it was only a rumour, it was a persistent one. In the next weeks it had not gone away, unlike a hundred others that had come and gone over the last months. Now that he had lost Kendra too, Robert Williams no longer had anything left to tie him to the town. The day after he and some of his friends had buried the little girl, he packed up some provisions, bartered his few housewares for some sturdy hiking boots and a warm jacket. He handed over control of the shortwave to a retired electrician who had helped him keep the thing running. When one of his friends asked him why he was leaving, Robert gave him an enigmatic, sad smile. "God helps those that help each other." 

Chapter 4 For what seemed like the millionth time that morning, Ibrahim muttered a curse under his breath as the pick slipped and he scraped his raw knuckles on the wet rocks. From the other side of the rock face, he could hear Osama’s pick plinking at the stone wall between the two men and in the spaces between the strikes, Ibrahim fancied that he could hear curses under Osama’s breath as well. These days it was too dangerous to blaspheme where anyone could overhear, but the thought that he might not be the only sinner in the tunnel made him smile in the dark. By rights, Ibrahim’s father should be the one down here in the dark, ankle deep in frigid water, picking off chunks of rock from a wall that could collapse upon him at any moment, but a son’s sense of duty and a need to improve his standing in the village had overcome Ibrahim’s good sense. Beyond duty and need, Ibrahim had a deeper agenda that he had not mentioned as he argued to be allowed to be one of the two men to open the tunnel. At this crucial moment when the two tunnels were about to connect, the wisdom of age, not the strength of youth was called for, but Ibrahim had insisted on taking his father’s place and finally the old man had relented. Ibrahim sincerely hoped he would live to regret the decision. Here in the Sahara, men of his village had been carving tunnels like the one he was now hacking out of the living rock for a thousand years or more. They had found he trick to releasing the water trapped in the layers of stone beneath the sand for millions of years and in so doing had created a Garden of Eden in the middle of one of the driest places on the globe. Ironically, now that the alien thieves had robbed the planet of more than ninety-five percent of the surface water, the oasis they had created was now one of the wettest places on Earth. With this new tunnel system, they would have more water than they had ever had before the aliens came. Plans were in place to capture and store the water in huge hidden cisterns on the outskirts of the village. As he mindlessly swung the pick at the stubborn stone, Ibrahim reflected on the twisted path that had brought him here. In the eyes of the community and even his own family, Ibrahim al Fahad was almost a stranger, returned only days before the alien vessels had come to steal the world’s water, gone for more than a decade to live among the infidel. After two years among his former peers, it seemed to Ibrahim that he was little more than tolerated and certainly not trusted. Taking the dangerous job of opening up the water tunnel had seemed like a way to gain some stature among the villagers, but he doubted even risking his life would overcome what they saw as a Western taint in him. If they only knew just how tainted he actually was, they might have arranged to have the tunnel collapse upon him intentionally. That thought made him smile even more than the thought of Osama’s curses. After all, the Imam of the village had often indicated a preference for stoning as a remedy for apostasy, not that any of the villagers had ever given cause for him to suspect them of such crimes. Ibrahim hid his own position on Islam, attending the five daily prayer sessions, pressing his head to the carpet, incanting the verses just as all the men of the village did. He had no tangible proof that to not do so might endanger him, but the subtext of the fiery rhetoric that came from the tiny local mosque was quite clear and quite frightening to him. On returning from his studies abroad, Ibrahim had every intention of explaining to his family that during his time away from the village, he had come to some conclusions about life that were at odds with his Muslim upbringing. At the time, he had harboured few illusions about the reception his revelations would receive, but he had not feared more than a verbal assault and a temporary or perhaps even a permanent estrangement from his family. His village had always been devout to a man, but never fanatical or hostile to those of other faiths. Within a day of the alien attack, all that had changed. The Imam had begun quoting the Qur’an in a new way, with emphasis on the sword and the infidel instead of the peace and beauty that had always characterized the way Ibrahim had been raised in the faith. The change served to reinforce Ibrahim’s newfound thoughts on religion in general and Islam in particular. It also frightened any notion of revealing to his family that he had rejected their faith in favour of an atheistic world view right out of him. As the global crisis deepened, the village drew in upon itself. Outside influences were suddenly seen as dangerous and frightening, outsiders viewed with suspicion and repelled from the territory by gangs of armed men. Young men who had been boys when Ibrahim had left to study in England now patrolled the outskirts of the village with weapons and a predatory hunger that made him feel a cold lump of ice in his belly whenever they turned their hard gazes in his direction. These were no longer the boys he had played football with in the sands outside the village. The thought of what could happen should these hard men learn that Ibrahim was no longer a believer terrified him more than the tons of rock above his head. At least the rock would end it quickly. Finally, a small tremor shook in the middle of the rock face before him. Osama was almost through. Ibrahim shouted a warning to him through the thin rock. Now was the time when enthusiasm for the nearness of the task’s completion could easily overcome good sense and kill both men. For the next few hours they picked slowly and carefully at loose rocks, gently opening and then widening a hole that would let the water flow from Ibrahim’s side of the tunnel downward to Osama’s side and on to the outlet near the village. Painstakingly removing the rocks seemed to take longer than digging the entire tunnel had, but rushing now would foolishly endanger both the men and the project. They left as much of the wall intact as possible, concentrating on widening the hole at the base of the wall to let the water flow without weakening the structure. If the water eventually wore away the wall months or years from now, causing the tunnel to collapse and cut off the flow as sometimes happened, at least the two men would be long out of danger. It took most of the afternoon, but at last the two bedraggled, dirty and exhausted men emerged to triumphant shouts from the gathered village above. A wave from a black clad woman some several hundred yards away, towards the village, confirmed that water was indeed flowing freely. Ibrahim’s father beamed with pride as the men hoisted Ibrahim and Osama on their shoulders and marched them down to the village. Everyone laughed as the two men were dumped from their perch into the flowing water they had just released. Traditionally, the diggers of the final segment of a well were the first to wash in its waters and the first to drink from its bounty. With the new state of the world, Ibrahim and Osama would likely be the only two people to ever bathe in these waters and drink from them without rationing. In the moment of celebration, people momentarily allowed themselves to forget the new reality. The brief respite would not, could not last for long. As he sloshed around in the cold water, revelling in the sensation, Ibrahim reached down to his trousers and felt the unusually dense and heavy material there. No one around him could have known that the smile on his face arose not only from the joy of his triumph in the tunnel and the sense of community his accomplishment had won for him, but also from the novel sensation beneath his fingertips. Despite hours spent ankle deep in water as he dug and his current position on his back in the path of the water rushing from the new well, Ibrahim’s special pants were bone dry. Though they did not know it, the people of Ibrahim’s village had the privilege of being present at what Ibrahim hoped was the first successful practical test of a remarkable new technology. “My son, you seem a million miles away.” Ibrahim’s father’s smiling face blocked out the sun as he reached down with a callused hand to help his son out of the water. “Sorry, Father. I was just thinking how much some of my old school mates would enjoy seeing me like this.” Seeing his father’s expression fall, Ibrahim immediately regretted bringing up his past. The old man had scraped and saved to send his only son to England to get an education, but somehow the mention of Ibrahim’s school or his time abroad always seemed to push his father away, a fact that deeply saddened Ibrahim who longed to share stories of his studies and the people he had met then. These days the two men rarely spoke at all and now Ibrahim had managed to spoil a brief moment of connection between them by bringing up the sore subject. He often wondered just how much education one needed before one might actually learn to keep tongue behind teeth once in a while. A few minutes later, Ibrahim stood alone in the tiny room that he once again occupied. Nothing of the childhood he had spent in this room remained, cleared away by parents who assumed he would only return to visit but rarely, never to stay. He dearly wished that an item or two from his youth might still be tucked away in a corner of the small house, but knowing his father’s pragmatic ways, Ibrahim doubted there was much chance of that. Stripping off his sopping wet shirt, Ibrahim did a strange thing. He twisted it up tightly, but before wringing the water from it, he lay back on his bed and held it above his legs. When he began to twist the shirt tightly, the water poured out of the wet material and onto his strangely dry trousers. No sooner did the water hit the material of the trousers than it completely disappeared, leaving no trace on the surface of the material. Once he had wrung the shirt as dry as he could, Ibrahim rose from the bed, leaving absolutely no trace of dampness on the sheets. Next, Ibrahim constructed an odd contraption beside the bed. He hung a cord between two chairs and then dragged a large, low slung metal tub underneath the cord. He stood in the tub while he removed his unusually heavy trousers. Taking care that the pants hung securely on the cord, completely within the circumference of the metal tub, Ibrahim let go of his now suspended pants. At first, nothing happened. Then, almost imperceptibly, a wet spot appeared at the lowest point of one of the legs of the dangling material. Then another spot on the other leg and shortly after that, a wet patch appeared on the waist band of the pants. Within a few seconds, water began to drip out of the material. Then more. Then more still, until after a few minutes the tub was nearly half full. An idiot grin split Ibrahim’s face. Without a laboratory analysis, Ibrahim could not be certain, but he was supremely confident that tests would show that the water he had collected was pure and unsullied, despite the fact that he had urinated in his trousers no less than three times while digging in the tunnel. Aquaprene, if it functioned as he had designed it to, would filter out the impurities from the water he waded in and the water from his own body equally, since the molecules of h2o would bond to the Aquaprene material exclusively. Aside from any residual dirt or contaminant in the tub itself, the water he had just released ought to be purer and cleaner than any purified or distilled water could ever hope to be. His mother had not questioned why he wanted pants fashioned from the roll of strange material he had brought with him when he returned for his visit, and her handiwork had given him a secret way to do a final, practical test of his invention. When he had arrived in the village on his way to Dubai to meet with investors, Ibrahim had envisioned Aquaprene as a way to halve the costs of living in water poor areas like the Persian Gulf, making him an extremely rich man in the bargain. Now he knew that he held the key to a far more worthy goal. Ibrahim al Wadi was about to save the world.