They walked away from the treatment plant with three full gallon containers of water.
Their father used to work in the heavily fortified treatment facility. It was a good job. Not so well paying that they could live in the city and be protected from Slithers, but since he could read and count he didn’t have to be a guard and got clean water at half the price.
They still got their weekly ration of water at half the price though neither parent was there. Niko was too young to work at the plant. Mrs. Mohammed, one of the distributors, was a friend of her father and quietly allowed them to get their water.
Up ahead there was a body lying in the middle of the road.
A fresh one, as it wasn’t there the first time they walked past.
Shawn ran ahead. “Maybe there’s something in his pockets.”
“Don’t touch him till we get there.” She called out but she didn’t think he heard.
She didn’t recognize the guy who lay twisted on the road. He was an old man, somewhere in his mid-forties, with a patchy beard and a tortured expression.
Shawn squatted with his hands on his knees. “Somebody got here first,” he said pointing to the man’s turned out pockets.
Jared kicked at the man’s leg. “He probably had crap in his pockets anyway.”
“Don’t say crap,” Niko said absently, at eleven he kept trying to swear.
“What happened to his face?”
She bent for a closer look, covering her nose against the stench. The lower half of his face was peppered with tiny holes; the damage was more extensive where his face rested in a pool of bloody vomit.
“He drank bad water.” She announced. They all took a step back, as if water poisoning was a communicable disease.
Water poisoning was fairly common outside cities; clean water got tainted or some poor bastard who couldn’t afford his weekly ration became so desperate and dehydrated that he drank rainwater.
“He shouldna puked then,” Jared said, hefting the water jug to a more comfortable position.
If it burned going down it would burn coming back up.