Corporal Derek Temple of the ill fated Marine First Combat Regiment stumbled through desert hills hoping to find some source of drinkable water.
The towns along the California coast, Cambria, Cayucos, and others, had all been destroyed by the tsunami. On his way to attack the aliens at Hearst Castle, he and the other marines had passed the wreckage of these once picturesque communities, and he knew they were now useless to him and the M1A1 Abrams weapons loader who still tagged along behind him, so he stuck to the hills in his desperate search.
Half crazed with thirst, half tempted to follow the example of the gunner who had probably died drinking seawater, Derek eventually found a road still bragging to be the Eric Streasand Memorial Highway, although there wasn’t enough of it left to justify the sign. But what remained headed east, away from the ocean and away from the destruction, and it gave Derek a little hope. He turned to follow it inland, the weapons loader following behind, and together they climbed higher up into the hills that paralleled the coast.
Derek knew they were bound to find something in this direction, some source of water, anything that had been out of reach of the destructive wave that wiped out the Western Coast of the Americas, and he climbed the hills with hope.
Water.
It had to be out there. They just had to get to higher ground.
Broken pavement turned to intact roadway and walking uphill became slightly easier. The loader, Private Jordan Sollers, moaned as he walked behind Derek, and Derek thought the two of them must look like the zombies from all of those apocalypse shows and movies.
They stumbled on.
The highway climbed a ridge and every step upward became a personal challenge and every glimpse of the ocean in the distance became a toxic reminder of the water his body craved.
How long could they go without water?
He recalled that in Boy Scouts, he’d been taught the human body could go three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Was that true?
Some people could hold their breath for more than three minutes. And people on hunger strikes lived longer than three weeks, although they were sometimes force fed by others.
Could he hold on longer than three days without water?
How long had it been?
While trying to figure out when he’d last had water, he heard a noise, a soft thud, behind him. He turned to see the loader crumpled on the ground.
“Stay with me, buddy,” he tried to say but no words came out of his mouth, just a low, soft, zombie moan. Maybe that’s why zombies moaned. They couldn’t drink and their mouths were too dry to say what they needed to say.
Derek collapsed next to the private and tried to wake him. The man wouldn’t rouse. Derek laid his head on the loader’s chest and closed his eyes.
He awoke.
It was dark and he was cold.
He remembered that about the desert. Searing hot during the day and freezing cold at night, only the alien induced clouds changed everything, changed the weather patterns, making it cold during the day and bitter at night. One more reason to hate them.
They’d passed dirt roads and footpaths that led to who knew where as they hiked up the highway, but had seen no buildings. Derek had decided against exploring these side paths for two reasons. One, they could lead nowhere and he didn’t have the strength to hike to nowhere. Two, they all went downhill from the ridge and he didn’t want to walk back up. He had no strength to walk now and trying to make his way back up a hill would be impossible.
So he lay, his head on the chest of the loader who still breathed, and thought about what to do next.
He had to get up. He had to find water in a desert. The ocean he could no longer see in the dark mocked him. Fifty trillion, zillion gallons of water in the Pacific and he could drink none of it. They were miles from the ocean now, high up, and he could no longer hear the waves. The tsunami couldn’t have reached this high, couldn’t have destroyed everything. The road was intact, desert scrub still intact, although the occasional highway sign they’d seen had been twisted and bent.
And all he could think of was all of the water that had caused that damage and his mind burned with thirst.
He tried to get up but all he could manage was to get to his hands and knees. He tried to say something to the fallen loader, but he couldn’t speak, so he just began crawling.
His knees hurt quickly and he knew he couldn’t get far. How did babies crawl for so long? No wonder they started walking so quickly. No one would want to crawl for any length of time. His palms hurt and his knees ached, so he tried to force himself up to his feet. He fell.
His face lay on the roadway and he pictured how he’d look the next day, surely dead of thirst, lying on the road like an unlucky possum from back home.
Roadkill.
Derek Roadkill Temple.
We’re sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Temple, to inform you that your son, Marine Lance Corporal Derek Temple, became roadkill while trying to fight aliens. He just didn’t have the right stuff.
Derek tried to laugh at his thoughts, which seemed hysterically funny, but all that came out was the low moan that seemed to be the only noise his mouth could produce.
He turned his head, getting it around just enough to see how far he’d come.
The loader was only yards away. He hadn’t gotten far.
He rested there for a while, hoping a semi didn’t come barreling down the highway, running over them both. Then he hoped the semi would come, the driver stopping and bringing them a canteen of water.
Or a slushy!
He dreamed of a slushy. Cold and wet and sweet from the corner gas station convenience store, he’d drink it through its fat straw until it slurped and rasped, the bottom of the straw stuck in an air pocket in the ice. Then he’d stir it up and drink more until it happened again. At some point he’d rip the lid off and scoop the ice into his parched mouth, letting it melt on his blazing hot and swollen tongue.
He wondered if the gunner had died in the ocean. He wondered how the gunner had died, for surely he had. A man couldn’t drink seawater. Did he hallucinate? Did he just sit in the ocean and drink and drink and drink and die of thirst anyway? Couldn’t the human body simply extract some water from the ocean?
He knew it couldn’t. He’d remembered someone drilling that into him. Something to do with the body’s isotonic state, although he couldn’t recall what that meant. Then he remembered. The salt made you urinate, but you urinated fresh water, well, slightly less than fresh water, and all the salt from the ocean built up inside your body, making you urinate more, and you actually got rid of all the water in your body.
So the gunner had peed himself to death.
Derek would have laughed if he could.
Then he remembered that some people survived in the desert by drinking their own pee. He pictured the hot, burning brown his pee must look like right now and the salt water sounded better. Not that he had anything to pee into. Not that he could even stand up to pee into something.
Light in the sky intruded on his feverish musings and he knew he had to try to keep moving. He wasn’t going to survive this next day without water.
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