Manuel Espinosa's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Manuel Espinosa shook the waterskin at his hip and heard the answer he had been avoiding. A swallow left, maybe two. Three months east of the coast, chasing a valley strangers kept describing to him with the same green hills, and he was going to die of thirst on a flat road because he had trusted the last creek to have a sister up ahead. He climbed the rise beside the road to read the land, the way he had taught himself to do after the second dead zone took his food and his good knife. From the top, the road ran straight for hours. A mile ahead, a stand of dead trees leaned together, trunks twisted, bark peeled, the branches bare and hollowed out. He knew what that meant now. Travelers had drawn shapes like it in the dirt for him. Where the trees died in a tight group and stayed standing, the ground underneath held nothing a man could drink. Past the dead grove, the road kept going into pale grass and dust. He looked for a roof, a tank, a fence, any human line. Far out, almost at the edge of what his eyes could hold, he saw a broken shape against the sky. Roofs stacked wrong. Walls leaning into each other. A small collapsed neighborhood, close enough packed to still cast one silhouette. He measured the distance against the water in the skin and the sun on his neck. If he walked steady and did not stop, he could reach the ruins before dark. If he stopped to rest, he would not start again. He drank one mouthful, capped the skin, and started down the rise. At the dead grove he did not slow. He held his breath past the trunks out of habit, though he knew the air was fine; it was the dirt that killed. His legs went loose around the second hour. He talked to himself to stay upright, and noticed, as he had been noticing for weeks, that his voice sounded like a stranger's. That still bothered him. He kept it bothering him. It gave him something to carry. The sun was low when he reached the first broken porch. He went from house to house on shaking legs, kicking through boards, looking for the shine of glass or metal. In the fourth ruin he found a cracked plastic drum tipped under a caved roof, half full of rainwater, a skin of dust floating on top. He strained it through his shirt into the waterskin until the skin was heavy again, and drank until his stomach hurt. Then he sat with his back to a leaning wall and let his hands stop shaking. He had bought himself another week of road. Somewhere past these houses, the green hills were still only a rumor, and he had just proved he could keep walking toward them.