There’s blood in the water.
I didn’t notice it when I ran the tap, but as the froth settled, it appeared. A fine red skein, twisting like a capillary down the middle of the glass, staining the water’s clarity. Like always, a tightness grips my throat that I can’t quite swallow past. Mo sees my expression and snorts. He tells me I’ll get used to it, after all, pretty much everyone else has. He rubs the raw skin on his wrists, they still haven’t healed properly. He says he sometimes wonders if they ever will.
The blood started showing up in the town water supply about ten months ago. Nothing Scripture, no wine-dark floods or anything. Just a strand here and there, like a twist of DNA from some extinct creature, unearthed when we dug the town’s foundations. I raise the glass to my eye, and peer into it. One, single, strung-out drop, it would be easy to miss if it weren’t for the bitter taste of iron it leaves behind your teeth.
Like the rest of the town, the water treatment plant is only a couple of years old, but the engineers went over it inch by inch anyway, scouring the aluminium pipes for the source of the contamination. They didn’t find it, but the town Fathers couldn’t leave it there, the blood caused uproar. It was on the front page of the paper for three solid weeks. Inevitably, there was an expedition to the river’s source. I watched them go: a queue of fourteen jeeps twisting up the mountainside, dark as smoke against the snow.
Now, supposedly there were bandits in the mountains – stragglers left behind from the old tribe, with machine guns and nasty habits involving iron bed frames and car batteries – so the expedition went armed. Like a lot of the men, my Dad practised in the back yard before he left, sharpening up the old National Service training. He hissed in concentration as he squeezed off rounds from the old automatic. Chips of bark flew from the target painted on the tree. I felt a little surge of pride as I watched him, every shot hit dead centre. Dad had never got out of form. Mo watched him with me from the window. He snorted, kissed his teeth in disgust and shook his head. ‘Wood-carving with bullets’ he called it, ‘arts and crafts’, said it didn’t prove anything. He said Dad had gone soft, and if he ran into any of the old tribe he was dead. That got under my skin like a hot needle and I snapped at Mo to get back down to the cellar before Dad came inside.
In the end though, it wasn’t no old tribe bandit did for the expedition. It was the cold. Temperatures crashed south of the red-line on the metre, fit to freeze the fuel in their tanks. Blizzards immersed them in blinding white. One of the jeeps skidded off the track and smashed through the ice into the river. I’m told it was so cold that the hearts of the men inside just stopped, their muscles locking with the shock of it. I look into the glass now, and imagine them looking back at me, panicking and drowning but oh so still, as though all the river water were still one thing, and the ice was a broken window back onto their lives.
Mo stood with me at my bedroom window as the jeeps blundered back out of the snow. He counted to thirteen, then nodded once in satisfaction, turned and headed back down to the basement without a word still rubbing his wrists. And the blood kept twisting through the water, like the smallest, ugliest predator you ever saw.
I don’t know who had the idea to have the stuff tested, but whoever it was, we seized on it and sent vials of tap water away to a lab up state. Anticipation soured into restlessness, and as we waited for the results, our guesses spread like a cold on an air plane. Was it bear or pig blood? Or marmoset or wolf? Was it all a giant prank? We had a sweepstake on what the tests would find, with a rusted hulk of a second hand truck as a prize. I had a bit of my allowance still left for the betting, and I needed a car, so at breakfast I asked Dad what he thought. He peered at me over his whisky tumbler and didn’t smile. It was obvious, wasn’t it? He said.
The test results were inconclusive. It was human blood, that much they were sure of, and fresh-ish. But that’s all they could say. I know what Dad was thinking, but I have no idea if they can even test for the difference between Old Tribe blood and ours.
We couldn’t find the source of the contamination, and we couldn’t make it stop, so what was there left to do? Pack up the whole town? After all we did to claim it? Dad’s alone in still refusing to drink the water. He’s stuck to his whisky, there are bruise-coloured pools under his eyes and his sweat’s started to smell sour. Everyone else has gotten used to it. Turns out it doesn’t really do any harm, there are pinkish blotches appearing on the teeth and the whites of the eyes of a few unfortunate people, but they just smile with their mouths shut and we don’t look them in the eye and we all get by like that. Everyone’s gotten used to it, except me.
Every time I get a tainted glass, I manage maybe one swallow, and then I have to throw it out. The thought of drinking it makes me feel sick. My teeth ache constantly from all the lemonade I’m swigging instead. Mo rips the piss something chronic, calls me Soda Boy, like I’m some fizzy-drink’s sidekick. He says I need to grow a pair – hit the tap, or hit the bottle, like my Dad. He gets spiteful, so I get spiteful too. Do you know what Dad’ll do to you if I tell him about you? I’ll say to him, but he just smiles at me, slow and vicious. You think he doesn’t know? He’ll reply. Why do you think you’re the only two who won’t drink the water?
It’s a good question. They didn’t bring us kids to the town until the first houses were built, and that was months after the territory was cleared, but we know, everyone knows how fierce my Dad fought. The capital sent in a regiment of professionals to help with the fighting, but even they were impressed, said he fought like a soldier. I walked around school glowing when they told me that. Dad was making us a home, somewhere we belonged
He told me I had to understand what that meant, what it was worth.
So Dad led me down the basement steps, and flicked the switch. The harsh white tube lights spat and flickered on, and that was when I first saw Mo. I’d never met one of the Tribe before in the flesh. Blue nylon ropes stood out stark against the dried blood on his wrists, but he wasn’t struggling. His green uniform was ripped and filthy. All I could make out of the serial number over his breast pocket was “#MO 279H”. He was just looking at me, looking at with eyes that seemed to stare all the way through me. Maybe to the mountains where he thought his parents had fled to. There was a click as Dad loaded the magazine into the pistol, the ceramic grip was very cold as he pressed it to my palm. He’s the last one, Dad said. He leaned forward and kissed my forehead. Whatever you decide to do I’ll understand. He smiled the kind of smile that won’t stay on your face properly, and then turned and jogged up the stairs.
I’ll understand. Those last two words twisted through me, polluting me. Staining the clarity of my thinking. Understand what? What did he want me to do? As the door closed, I looked at Mo. I remember thinking he looked very young to be in the army, to have that uniform. For a horrible moment, I wondered if Dad had made him wear it, to make him seem more grown up, like a real combatant. But the thought died quickly, because if there was one thing Dad knew, one thing he impressed on us, its that we’re all combatants. I hefted the gun. It was as cold as snow, and as heavy as an avalanche in my hand.
Now, I stare at the bloody water, my throat tight. My hand is sweating slightly against the glass, but it isn’t heavy, the way the pistol was. It gets easier. Mo’s behind me. He’s calling me a pussy, telling me to man up and drink it like everyone else does. Swallow it, he says. Maybe he’s right. After all, Dad and the others cleansed the territory. They made it clean and new so they’d have somewhere to raise their children and grandchildren. Somewhere they belonged and that belonged to them. To us. Mine will probably be the last generation that remembers what they paid for it. In a few decades, no one will know that the water here was ever any different. The blood twists through the water. The glass rattles against my teeth, but I steady it, and I drink.
