James A. Moore is the bestselling and award-winning author of more than forty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy, and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under the Overtree, Blood Red, Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring antihero, Jonathan Crowley), and Seven Forges series. His most recent novels include The Silent Army and the forthcoming The Last Sacrifice. In addition to writing multiple short stories, he has edited, with Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, the British Invasion anthology for Cemetery Dance Publications.
RED DIRT
BY MIRA GRANT
Pallets of bottled water sat stacked against the wall of a storage container, waiting to be shipped on to their next destination. They were a new brand, something hoity-toity that claimed to come from the purest sources on Earth. As if that weren’t what they all said; as if it weren’t pure bullshit, designed to strip-mine the wallets of the rich and indolent. This stuff cost pennies to make, and probably drained some poor community that couldn’t afford to lose its groundwater in the process.
Matthew O’Neil had been a night watchman for seven years. He knew where the cameras were. He knew when the other watchmen came through. Most of all, he knew what was safe to steal — or to allow to be stolen. He never took a damn thing for himself. That would have been a crime and a sin, and his mama didn’t raise no sinners. She’d raised three good, God-fearing boys who just wanted to give back to their communities in whatever way they could.
The men who stood before him now, looking at the water, were practically drooling in their excitement. Clean water was always a good thing, and too often, it cost too dear for the people who needed it the most. The shelters and the hospitals would benefit like nothing going from having this, and the people who’d shipped it here? Who’d abandoned it here? They wouldn’t even notice that it was gone.
“You’re sure?” one of them asked, for the fifth time.
“Bill says it was supposed to ship out months ago,” said Matthew. “I don’t know whether a wire got crossed or whether their original buyer got cold feet, but it don’t bother me none. No one’s watching this stuff. Take it away, and if anyone ever comes looking — which I doubt — I’ll play dumb. Get it where it’s needed.”
“You’re a good guy,” said one of the men, clapping Matthew on the shoulder. He drank in the praise, and watched as the three of them began hoisting water onto their shoulders and toting it away.
God might help those who helped themselves, but there was nothing wrong with giving His hand a little nudge in the right direction every now and then.
Sick people had a smell.
Kathleen had known that since she was a little girl, when her Gram had gone down ill with the cancer, and taken to her bed to sweat the sick out as much as she could. “No hospitals for me, muffin,” she’d said when she caught her granddaughter and dearest love looking at her with concern. “Doctors can’t cut out what ails me, and they’ll just take all we’ve got left to us in the world and not leave you with a penny to call your own. Let me sleep. I’ll get better, if I can sleep.”
Kathleen had known even then that cancer wasn’t like the flu. You couldn’t just sleep the cancer away. Cancer would have its due, and cancer had had its due, putting her Gram into the ground not six months after she’d been diagnosed. Half the town had come out for her funeral. Kathleen had spent the entire thing hiding her face in her mother’s skirts, and all those people had called her shy and delicate and sad, and not one of them had realized that she was furious. Rage was eating her alive the way cancer had eaten her Gram, because where had all these people been when Gram was dying? A dollar from every one of them would have paid for doctors, and tests, and time. Money bought time.
Rich people could afford to get better. Poor people couldn’t afford anything but sleep, and when sleep didn’t cure what ailed them, they’d get a six-foot hole and a good pine box, and someone else would get their feather pillows.
Kathleen had gotten her grandmother’s feather pillows, and then, when the will had been read, her grandmother’s life savings, kept in the bank and hidden from everyone else in the family. Her mother had been the one to take her down to the bank, to hear the number, and to tell her daughter, in a voice Kathleen had never heard before, “You need to pretend this never happened. You don’t have that money. You can’t loan it to me for the grocery bill, or use it to buy yourself a new pair of shoes. That money isn’t real until it’s time for college. Do you understand?”
And Kathleen, who never wanted to see another person sleep the cancer away, had nodded. Had told her “Yes,” even though she hadn’t fully understood — not then, and not for another ten years, not until that money had been the seed that she planted to carry herself all the way to college, and then to medical school after that. No one else in her family was ever going to worry about a doctor taking them for everything they had. Never again.
Now, as she walked the halls of Troy Memorial, heading for her office, she wanted nothing more in the world than to sink into her bed — still loaded down with feather pillows, even if they didn’t smell like Gram anymore — and sleep something else away: exhaustion. Being the head of Oncology for a hospital this small and this strapped really meant being the head of Whatever Damn Well Needs Doing. Over the course of the day she had set two broken bones, talked a pair of children into getting their shots, given prenatal vitamins to Susie from down the block, and helped a young woman get her brother, who was obviously suffering from some sort of overdose, into the exam room. It wasn’t just that she was young, and pretty, and still new enough to be enthusiastic about her work. It was that she came from here.
Every other doctor in this hospital came from Away, that wide and nebulous place outside of Alabama, where people who didn’t understand their way of life tried to make laws defining it. There were people who didn’t want to be seen by anyone but her. She’d come from Here. She understood them in a way that no doctor from Away could ever hope to. So when emergencies came in, even if she wasn’t on call, she was more likely to be called in than anyone else in the building.
Because of all this, and more, it was no surprise when she heard running footsteps behind her. “Kat! Wait up!”
“Phil, no, and no, Phil, and every other variation on that sentence that you can come up with.” She turned, making no effort to hide her weariness. Maybe if he realized how tired she was, he would have mercy for the first time in his benighted life. “I’ve been on shift for twenty-four hours. I’m not a resident anymore! This shit is supposed to stop!”
“I know, I know, and you know I wouldn’t do this unless it was an emergency.” Phil slowed to a stop, shoving his glasses back into place. They had slipped halfway down his nose, giving him the appearance of a genially absentminded professor.
The impression wasn’t too far wrong. Dr. Phil Clines was a general practitioner, and was actually responsible for the sorts of things that Kathleen spent half her time doing. She wasn’t picking up his slack, either — if there was anyone at the hospital who worked as hard as she did, it was Phil. It was just a matter of too many patients and not nearly enough funding keeping them perpetually scrambling for solid ground.
He really did look worried. Kathleen took pity. “What is it?”