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pielcanelavery raw, i just really need to put this up. hope to polish this, and post the last part soon.
From this data, it could be inferred that the incidence of cancer, particularly breast cancer among middle-aged and elderly women, rose by 80% following Mayor Gerardo Carrion's 1970 ordinance allowing foreign factories to operate in the region without implementing proper waste disposal procedures. Mortality and morbidity rates also increased among pregnant women. The average IQ of children in school decreased, while growth stunting and birth deformities became more common.
These figures only rose over time.
The Carrions have always downplayed these developments, insisting that the pollution problem is "not that bad" and that they continually support efforts to revive the M___ river [reference Star article from 1990]. But when asked to list the projects they have launched to this end, they could only cite information drives and small elementary school contests with general environmental protection themes. All the cleanup drives in M___ town since the 1970s have been conducted by private individuals and/or community effort, without assistance from the Carrion family or the money allotted to the local government of M___.
There are allegations from various sectors that the Carrion family have been stealing from the town's coffers to grow their personal wealth, and to pay off local and international media in order to stem public condemnation. At any rate, none of the town's money is going into cleanup efforts, or local ordinances to impose more responsible waste disposal for foreign and domestic enterprises within its jurisdiction.
Once and for all, the townspeople of M___ demand to know why.
She was not sure if her vision had become morphine-addled, or if she had seamlessly transitioned from waking into dream. She was sure that she had not been dreaming when she was taken to that place - the pain in her rattled bones was real enough - but she forgot the pain as soon as her eyes focused.
There was something in the river, visible only at certain angles of moonlight striking water. It was massive, and long, like a large colorless serpent.
It was not a serpent, however, as it had no scales, and it had large appendages on its sides, like flippers - but were thick and spread-out, and looked more like hands.
"You see it, don't you?" Victor asked.
Josie couldn't answer. She couldn't be certain how Victor could stay so calm with something like this in plain sight.
There was little to be actually seen, as the creature shimmers in and out of sight. Josie could not see the head, if it even had a head. As far as she could see, this was only the body, stretching on for miles and miles. All of it was submerged, but she could guess that it was lying belly down and very still on the clear riverbed.
"Somewhere to the north is its head," Victor was saying, close to her ear, as if the creature was a sleeping child, and he was taking care not to wake it. "It's impossible to see it now. The water far north of the river has gone completely black, thanks to the factories set up there. What do you think - what would the head look like? Would it look like the head of a snake? A dragon? A human? Would it be angelic or completely hideous?"
Josie couldn't even process his questions. He knew about this. He knew.
Josie scrambled to put the pieces together. Why did he bring her here? What was it, and why did he want her to see it?
"Josie, do you remember," Victor continued, "when we were children, we were told that our town used to be underwater. That in the old days, no one settled in this town, because it flooded so much...
"But people still tried to settle here. They tried to farm the land, which was so rich, and make a living as fisherfolk, because river life was so plentiful. And every so often, the river would swell, and wash away everything that was on it.
"Our ancestors watched the river... and they knew what to do. They started to worship it. They thought surely, there was a river god, and it only quieted down when it got its sacrifice. And in those days, the only kind of sacrifice anyone knew that would appease a god was blood."
This was nothing new. Josie vaguely remembered hearing something like that when she was younger. That in the old days, the people of M___ had had a yearly custom of sacrificing people to the river.
The details of that ritual had become lost in time, and the tales varied; some thought it was a blood sacrifice, with throats slit and blood allowed to flow into the water. Others believed it was simply a matter of holding people's heads under the water until they drowned.
Whatever it had been, the practice stopped when the Spanish came, putting an end to pagan rituals. But by that time, many people had already settled in M___. It never flooded in M__ town again, not like in the old days.
And according to the villagers' collective memory, it had nothing to do with the ritual stopping. The river simply took all the sacrifices it needed, ritual or no.
"People used to die in the river," Victor continued, "at least one every year. Maybe they would be swimming, and just never resurface... or maybe they were just washing clothes, and they would slip and hit their head on the rocks and die on the spot. Every year. The river god decided which ones and how many.
"Some people thought, maybe the river god was evil. Maybe it deserved to die, and even if it couldn't be killed, maybe it could be captured. But guess what, Josie? There was no way to trap a river god. At least, not until the factories were built."
Josie shook her head. It wasn't making sense. Why was he talking about capturing a river god? Was he saying this thing under the water was a god? Their god?
"You're very smart, Josie. You've always been the smartest in class. I know you're not in the best of health now, but...do you understand?" Hands clenched and unclenched around the handles of the chair she sat on - the slightest hint of nerves. "I learned about it from my family when I was in my third year of college. I had already made up my mind that I was going to take my uncle's place in local politics, so this was something I had to know. You, on the other hand, had already made up your mind that you were going to be a great journalist, cutting your teeth on beats from our hometown. So there was no way in hell I could tell you."
Josie remembered. They hadn't spoken since graduation. They had been friends in high school (to be more accurate, they had been part of the same barkada or close-knit group) but neither of them had kept their promise to stay in touch.
"But you were the first person I wanted to tell." He looked down at her. "Can you believe that?"
When they met again, decades after they had graduated from high school, Victor was already a mayor. He was holding a press conference (now locally infamous for the "not that bad" spiel) addressing Greenpeace's findings of M___ river having the highest levels of lead ever measured in that part of the globe. Josie had attended it - and had been thrown out by Victor's staff, for "disrupting" the conference with her aggressive questioning.
In the midst of all the conflicting feelings inside her, Josie chuckled.
"What is it?" Victor asked.
"It's funny," she said weakly, "you never answered any of my questions back when I was reporting on the river. Not even when I wrote all those articles attacking you and your family. Now here we are."
"Here we are," Victor echoed. Despite himself, he even echoed Josie's mirth. "Look, would you have believed me if I told you the truth?"
"So you just decided to shut up," Josie ventured, "like the rest of your wicked family."
At this, Victor fell silent.
At another time, Josie would have regretted her tactlessness, as she usually did - but since she fell ill, she rarely found regret as an option.
Victor stepped out from behind the wheelchair and stood on the precipice. He squared his shoulders and locked his hands behind his back. Small and narrow-shouldered as he was, Josie was reminded of an emperor surveying his conquered lands.
"You know what," he began in a tone that rang with false light-heartedness, "I've always wondered, Josie - why do you blame my family? Why do you think we caused your cancer? I hear you weren't exactly a health buff in your youth. All that booze, all those boyfriends..."
"Fuck you." Josie allowed herself some bemusement; those were the first words that night that she could utter straight.
"...and I hear you even did a little experimenting with, shall we say, non-prescription medicines." He looked back over his shoulder, smiling, but did not meet her eyes. "You can't seriously tell me none of that helped."
In another place and time, it would have been so easy to shoot him down. She could say, for instance, that the other women of M___ who suffered from breast cancer had not been as careless growing up, had been decent, quiet, and hardworking all their lives, so it was impossible to use her wild growing-up years as a standard.
She could say the levels of lead and other toxic chemicals in the blood of the people who drank from and bathed in the poisoned river, who breathed in fumes from the unmanaged waste dumps along the water, were inhumanely high. She could cite her own medical records, and study after study proving that she and the people of M___ were exposed to carcinogenic materials, for years and years.
She could even slap in his face how the mayor of M___ traditionally lived within town borders, but his or her family hardly ever did. In fact, they usually lived in the States, in England, living in luxury off the taxes of the people of M___, in places where there were far fewer things in the water, the soil and the air that could kill them. As a result, few of their members died of cancer - at least fewer than the members of other old families in M___.
From as far back as Josie could remember, only the immediate family of the designated successor of the mayor - the Carrion scion who was set to run and win in the next rigged elections, after the current mayor's final term was up - lived in town, besides the mayor him or herself. Victor had been that successor, once.
"Would you still call my family wicked, Josie," he said quietly now, in a low tone that almost seemed threatening, "if you knew that we're all that's keeping our town from drowning?"
He sounded angry. He must have been. This was the point he was trying to make, and - sick as she was - Josie continued to resist it.
"My family alone holds the distinction of knowing about the river god and how it lives. Rest assured, not every member of the Carrion family knows, and more than one member has openly expressed disgust at what the Carrion family is knowingly doing to the M___ river. Keeping silent is how we've been able to keep going since the dawn of time.
"What my family has, Josie, is a sacred trust. It is the knowledge that every three hundred years, in spite of the sacrifices made to it, the river god wakes and washes away the town of M___. It leaves nothing standing - not a stone, not a pillar, nothing made by man.
"Three hundred years ago, this place was a drowned waste. Dead bodies of humans and livestock were strewn on the banks, ruins of houses and farmland dotted the drenched fields. The spirit had awakened and changed the river's shape. The survivors were lost, mad with grief, desperate.
"Then the Spaniards brought their God. And assured them that their God would protect them, so that tragedy would never strike their town again, as sure as God had told Noah that he would never again destroy the world in flood. The survivors, desperate for solace, believed, and abandoned their old faiths without question.
"But not the Carrions. They took their new name from the Spaniards, and took their gifts, and swore fealty to the new God, but never forgot."
How noble he made the Carrions seem, Josie quietly mused. How admirable, those landgrabbers, smugglers, thieves, lechers going around unashamed of their infidelities. Knowing this did nothing to change what Josie knew of the Carrions: that they were warlords, reveling in their untouchability. Who highly likely had blood in their hands, considering how their detractors quietly disappeared in the middle of the night.
...Possibly even sacrificed to the river. Who could tell.
God knew Josie herself got an earful from the Carrion family lawyers when she was still active as a journalist - she got threatening letters, emails, texts, all of which were never paid much attention to. Once, a black van was parked outside her house for several successive nights; it suddenly sped off as soon as anyone from her family approached it.
One night, many nights after Josie thought the van had disappeared for good, a bullet was fired into their front door. The shooter sped off on a motorcycle. But even if no one saw the actual shooting, Josie and her neighbors already knew who the shooter was, or at least to whose private militia he belonged.
The Carrions were not good people. Josie knew this even when she was young. In fact, it was a wonder that mousy little Victor ever became part of their little high school gang. He would have had other crowds to run with, children from more affluent families, with looser morals.
She and her friends had decided long ago that Victor was "the good Carrion." When he became mayor, he did his part in helping them all forget.
"Over time, the Carrions learned that there IS a way to trap the river god. And even if that means doing dreadful things. The river god lives in the river, and feeds off the river - and if the river dies, the god has nothing left to live on."
Josie's eyes remained fixed on the thing in the river - and in her mind, it moved. It must have moved just because the river current buoyed its limbs, or rocked its body.
She wanted to tell herself "this is no god"... but she felt her knees shake in its presence, and she felt her mind clouding over. She had to fight, as she sometimes did when being brought under by medication, for clarity of thought.
"So if the river dies... it dies?" Josie stammered. "That can't be right... if so, it should be dead by now. If so, this part of the river wouldn't stay clean... the impurities from further up the river should have flowed down... and contaminated it. But... there's no... chemical smell here... at all..."
And if the sunlight came, Josie didn't doubt she'd find a river - nothing but a stretch of river, clean as they come, so clear you could see through to the bottom.
"You're right," Victor replied. "It's not as simple as that. Just because the river dies, that doesn't mean the god dies as well. The god doesn't die, it simply... sleeps. This part you see here, the only clean part of the river - this is the heart of the sleeping beast."
"The ground here is loose and unsteady." Victor swept an arm out in front of him - gesturing to the soil bordering the river beneath. "No factories or houses can be built here. In fact, quite a few people have slipped on the rocks or the silt bank and drowned. Now and then people may come here to swim, or to relax - but given how difficult it is to come here from civilization, it's been mostly left alone."
"So you haven't looked... into other ways... of killing it?" Josie labored to say. "Clearly... polluting the river... isn't working. Why persist?"
"What would you suggest?" Though he didn't turn toward her, Josie could hear his bitterness. No desperation there: if it had ever been there, it must have died out a long time ago. "You wouldn't have believed me if I told you. I can't draw attention to it, at the risk of bringing a lot of people here and waking it up. Besides..." He paused, searching for the best words to say the next difficult thing: "what makes you think this is the only nature god that needs to be kept asleep?"
There were others, elsewhere in the world?
She was burning to know, but was afraid to ask. Her body held her back. Already learning about the river god made her inquisitive brain go on overdrive, and it hurt - and if she acknowledged the pain, it was sure to hurt more.
So many questions. So many people she wanted to talk to, so many places she needed to go. She had to find out more, one way or another.
Tears filled her eyes. This was torture. And Victor must have known.
"Why would you want to kill it, Josie? Without the god, there is no river. There is no water flowing straight through this town. And, polluted as it is, it still contributes to something vital: the nurturing of a dam - a great source of electric power, farm irrigation and general water supply not only in our town, but also the towns adjacent. Through the chemical waste, it still provides nourishment to the trees along its banks, to the last remaining wild animals living near it.
"Dark as it is, poisoned as it is... the river is the foundation of our town. It is us."
Josie wished to protest. She wanted to say it was madness to keep up the farce.
But she had little time. The stress and excitement from the ordeal left her weak and running after breath. She sincerely doubted Victor had taken her there with the right equipment to help; she might lose consciousness, and never regain it.
She mustered her remaining breath for one last question, the most important one, the one she couldn't die without knowing the answer to:
"Why... tell... me?"
It might have been the only time he noticed she was suffering. All pretense at respectability fell from his shoulders as he rushed to her side.
He started to tinker with the morphine drip, but he fumbled in the dark, and he wasn't able to get hold of the small plastic wheel immediately. More than that, his fingers were unsteady. Josie only noticed it because pain was starting to overwhelm her, and she had time to ask herself what the hell was taking him so long to do something about it.
She tried reaching up to grab the wheel herself, but she only had a vague idea where it was, exactly. And she had never controlled her own morphine before, and the last iota of common sense she had left was telling her it was a bad idea.
Victor was still talking as she blacked out.
"Why tell you?" His voice started to become fainter. "It's because we're friends. And I did this to you. I'm sorry. I can't save you. But I can give you this."
tbc
From this data, it could be inferred that the incidence of cancer, particularly breast cancer among middle-aged and elderly women, rose by 80% following Mayor Gerardo Carrion's 1970 ordinance allowing foreign factories to operate in the region without implementing proper waste disposal procedures. Mortality and morbidity rates also increased among pregnant women. The average IQ of children in school decreased, while growth stunting and birth deformities became more common.
These figures only rose over time.
The Carrions have always downplayed these developments, insisting that the pollution problem is "not that bad" and that they continually support efforts to revive the M___ river [reference Star article from 1990]. But when asked to list the projects they have launched to this end, they could only cite information drives and small elementary school contests with general environmental protection themes. All the cleanup drives in M___ town since the 1970s have been conducted by private individuals and/or community effort, without assistance from the Carrion family or the money allotted to the local government of M___.
There are allegations from various sectors that the Carrion family have been stealing from the town's coffers to grow their personal wealth, and to pay off local and international media in order to stem public condemnation. At any rate, none of the town's money is going into cleanup efforts, or local ordinances to impose more responsible waste disposal for foreign and domestic enterprises within its jurisdiction.
Once and for all, the townspeople of M___ demand to know why.
She was not sure if her vision had become morphine-addled, or if she had seamlessly transitioned from waking into dream. She was sure that she had not been dreaming when she was taken to that place - the pain in her rattled bones was real enough - but she forgot the pain as soon as her eyes focused.
There was something in the river, visible only at certain angles of moonlight striking water. It was massive, and long, like a large colorless serpent.
It was not a serpent, however, as it had no scales, and it had large appendages on its sides, like flippers - but were thick and spread-out, and looked more like hands.
"You see it, don't you?" Victor asked.
Josie couldn't answer. She couldn't be certain how Victor could stay so calm with something like this in plain sight.
There was little to be actually seen, as the creature shimmers in and out of sight. Josie could not see the head, if it even had a head. As far as she could see, this was only the body, stretching on for miles and miles. All of it was submerged, but she could guess that it was lying belly down and very still on the clear riverbed.
"Somewhere to the north is its head," Victor was saying, close to her ear, as if the creature was a sleeping child, and he was taking care not to wake it. "It's impossible to see it now. The water far north of the river has gone completely black, thanks to the factories set up there. What do you think - what would the head look like? Would it look like the head of a snake? A dragon? A human? Would it be angelic or completely hideous?"
Josie couldn't even process his questions. He knew about this. He knew.
Josie scrambled to put the pieces together. Why did he bring her here? What was it, and why did he want her to see it?
"Josie, do you remember," Victor continued, "when we were children, we were told that our town used to be underwater. That in the old days, no one settled in this town, because it flooded so much...
"But people still tried to settle here. They tried to farm the land, which was so rich, and make a living as fisherfolk, because river life was so plentiful. And every so often, the river would swell, and wash away everything that was on it.
"Our ancestors watched the river... and they knew what to do. They started to worship it. They thought surely, there was a river god, and it only quieted down when it got its sacrifice. And in those days, the only kind of sacrifice anyone knew that would appease a god was blood."
This was nothing new. Josie vaguely remembered hearing something like that when she was younger. That in the old days, the people of M___ had had a yearly custom of sacrificing people to the river.
The details of that ritual had become lost in time, and the tales varied; some thought it was a blood sacrifice, with throats slit and blood allowed to flow into the water. Others believed it was simply a matter of holding people's heads under the water until they drowned.
Whatever it had been, the practice stopped when the Spanish came, putting an end to pagan rituals. But by that time, many people had already settled in M___. It never flooded in M__ town again, not like in the old days.
And according to the villagers' collective memory, it had nothing to do with the ritual stopping. The river simply took all the sacrifices it needed, ritual or no.
"People used to die in the river," Victor continued, "at least one every year. Maybe they would be swimming, and just never resurface... or maybe they were just washing clothes, and they would slip and hit their head on the rocks and die on the spot. Every year. The river god decided which ones and how many.
"Some people thought, maybe the river god was evil. Maybe it deserved to die, and even if it couldn't be killed, maybe it could be captured. But guess what, Josie? There was no way to trap a river god. At least, not until the factories were built."
Josie shook her head. It wasn't making sense. Why was he talking about capturing a river god? Was he saying this thing under the water was a god? Their god?
"You're very smart, Josie. You've always been the smartest in class. I know you're not in the best of health now, but...do you understand?" Hands clenched and unclenched around the handles of the chair she sat on - the slightest hint of nerves. "I learned about it from my family when I was in my third year of college. I had already made up my mind that I was going to take my uncle's place in local politics, so this was something I had to know. You, on the other hand, had already made up your mind that you were going to be a great journalist, cutting your teeth on beats from our hometown. So there was no way in hell I could tell you."
Josie remembered. They hadn't spoken since graduation. They had been friends in high school (to be more accurate, they had been part of the same barkada or close-knit group) but neither of them had kept their promise to stay in touch.
"But you were the first person I wanted to tell." He looked down at her. "Can you believe that?"
When they met again, decades after they had graduated from high school, Victor was already a mayor. He was holding a press conference (now locally infamous for the "not that bad" spiel) addressing Greenpeace's findings of M___ river having the highest levels of lead ever measured in that part of the globe. Josie had attended it - and had been thrown out by Victor's staff, for "disrupting" the conference with her aggressive questioning.
In the midst of all the conflicting feelings inside her, Josie chuckled.
"What is it?" Victor asked.
"It's funny," she said weakly, "you never answered any of my questions back when I was reporting on the river. Not even when I wrote all those articles attacking you and your family. Now here we are."
"Here we are," Victor echoed. Despite himself, he even echoed Josie's mirth. "Look, would you have believed me if I told you the truth?"
"So you just decided to shut up," Josie ventured, "like the rest of your wicked family."
At this, Victor fell silent.
At another time, Josie would have regretted her tactlessness, as she usually did - but since she fell ill, she rarely found regret as an option.
Victor stepped out from behind the wheelchair and stood on the precipice. He squared his shoulders and locked his hands behind his back. Small and narrow-shouldered as he was, Josie was reminded of an emperor surveying his conquered lands.
"You know what," he began in a tone that rang with false light-heartedness, "I've always wondered, Josie - why do you blame my family? Why do you think we caused your cancer? I hear you weren't exactly a health buff in your youth. All that booze, all those boyfriends..."
"Fuck you." Josie allowed herself some bemusement; those were the first words that night that she could utter straight.
"...and I hear you even did a little experimenting with, shall we say, non-prescription medicines." He looked back over his shoulder, smiling, but did not meet her eyes. "You can't seriously tell me none of that helped."
In another place and time, it would have been so easy to shoot him down. She could say, for instance, that the other women of M___ who suffered from breast cancer had not been as careless growing up, had been decent, quiet, and hardworking all their lives, so it was impossible to use her wild growing-up years as a standard.
She could say the levels of lead and other toxic chemicals in the blood of the people who drank from and bathed in the poisoned river, who breathed in fumes from the unmanaged waste dumps along the water, were inhumanely high. She could cite her own medical records, and study after study proving that she and the people of M___ were exposed to carcinogenic materials, for years and years.
She could even slap in his face how the mayor of M___ traditionally lived within town borders, but his or her family hardly ever did. In fact, they usually lived in the States, in England, living in luxury off the taxes of the people of M___, in places where there were far fewer things in the water, the soil and the air that could kill them. As a result, few of their members died of cancer - at least fewer than the members of other old families in M___.
From as far back as Josie could remember, only the immediate family of the designated successor of the mayor - the Carrion scion who was set to run and win in the next rigged elections, after the current mayor's final term was up - lived in town, besides the mayor him or herself. Victor had been that successor, once.
"Would you still call my family wicked, Josie," he said quietly now, in a low tone that almost seemed threatening, "if you knew that we're all that's keeping our town from drowning?"
He sounded angry. He must have been. This was the point he was trying to make, and - sick as she was - Josie continued to resist it.
"My family alone holds the distinction of knowing about the river god and how it lives. Rest assured, not every member of the Carrion family knows, and more than one member has openly expressed disgust at what the Carrion family is knowingly doing to the M___ river. Keeping silent is how we've been able to keep going since the dawn of time.
"What my family has, Josie, is a sacred trust. It is the knowledge that every three hundred years, in spite of the sacrifices made to it, the river god wakes and washes away the town of M___. It leaves nothing standing - not a stone, not a pillar, nothing made by man.
"Three hundred years ago, this place was a drowned waste. Dead bodies of humans and livestock were strewn on the banks, ruins of houses and farmland dotted the drenched fields. The spirit had awakened and changed the river's shape. The survivors were lost, mad with grief, desperate.
"Then the Spaniards brought their God. And assured them that their God would protect them, so that tragedy would never strike their town again, as sure as God had told Noah that he would never again destroy the world in flood. The survivors, desperate for solace, believed, and abandoned their old faiths without question.
"But not the Carrions. They took their new name from the Spaniards, and took their gifts, and swore fealty to the new God, but never forgot."
How noble he made the Carrions seem, Josie quietly mused. How admirable, those landgrabbers, smugglers, thieves, lechers going around unashamed of their infidelities. Knowing this did nothing to change what Josie knew of the Carrions: that they were warlords, reveling in their untouchability. Who highly likely had blood in their hands, considering how their detractors quietly disappeared in the middle of the night.
...Possibly even sacrificed to the river. Who could tell.
God knew Josie herself got an earful from the Carrion family lawyers when she was still active as a journalist - she got threatening letters, emails, texts, all of which were never paid much attention to. Once, a black van was parked outside her house for several successive nights; it suddenly sped off as soon as anyone from her family approached it.
One night, many nights after Josie thought the van had disappeared for good, a bullet was fired into their front door. The shooter sped off on a motorcycle. But even if no one saw the actual shooting, Josie and her neighbors already knew who the shooter was, or at least to whose private militia he belonged.
The Carrions were not good people. Josie knew this even when she was young. In fact, it was a wonder that mousy little Victor ever became part of their little high school gang. He would have had other crowds to run with, children from more affluent families, with looser morals.
She and her friends had decided long ago that Victor was "the good Carrion." When he became mayor, he did his part in helping them all forget.
"Over time, the Carrions learned that there IS a way to trap the river god. And even if that means doing dreadful things. The river god lives in the river, and feeds off the river - and if the river dies, the god has nothing left to live on."
Josie's eyes remained fixed on the thing in the river - and in her mind, it moved. It must have moved just because the river current buoyed its limbs, or rocked its body.
She wanted to tell herself "this is no god"... but she felt her knees shake in its presence, and she felt her mind clouding over. She had to fight, as she sometimes did when being brought under by medication, for clarity of thought.
"So if the river dies... it dies?" Josie stammered. "That can't be right... if so, it should be dead by now. If so, this part of the river wouldn't stay clean... the impurities from further up the river should have flowed down... and contaminated it. But... there's no... chemical smell here... at all..."
And if the sunlight came, Josie didn't doubt she'd find a river - nothing but a stretch of river, clean as they come, so clear you could see through to the bottom.
"You're right," Victor replied. "It's not as simple as that. Just because the river dies, that doesn't mean the god dies as well. The god doesn't die, it simply... sleeps. This part you see here, the only clean part of the river - this is the heart of the sleeping beast."
"The ground here is loose and unsteady." Victor swept an arm out in front of him - gesturing to the soil bordering the river beneath. "No factories or houses can be built here. In fact, quite a few people have slipped on the rocks or the silt bank and drowned. Now and then people may come here to swim, or to relax - but given how difficult it is to come here from civilization, it's been mostly left alone."
"So you haven't looked... into other ways... of killing it?" Josie labored to say. "Clearly... polluting the river... isn't working. Why persist?"
"What would you suggest?" Though he didn't turn toward her, Josie could hear his bitterness. No desperation there: if it had ever been there, it must have died out a long time ago. "You wouldn't have believed me if I told you. I can't draw attention to it, at the risk of bringing a lot of people here and waking it up. Besides..." He paused, searching for the best words to say the next difficult thing: "what makes you think this is the only nature god that needs to be kept asleep?"
There were others, elsewhere in the world?
She was burning to know, but was afraid to ask. Her body held her back. Already learning about the river god made her inquisitive brain go on overdrive, and it hurt - and if she acknowledged the pain, it was sure to hurt more.
So many questions. So many people she wanted to talk to, so many places she needed to go. She had to find out more, one way or another.
Tears filled her eyes. This was torture. And Victor must have known.
"Why would you want to kill it, Josie? Without the god, there is no river. There is no water flowing straight through this town. And, polluted as it is, it still contributes to something vital: the nurturing of a dam - a great source of electric power, farm irrigation and general water supply not only in our town, but also the towns adjacent. Through the chemical waste, it still provides nourishment to the trees along its banks, to the last remaining wild animals living near it.
"Dark as it is, poisoned as it is... the river is the foundation of our town. It is us."
Josie wished to protest. She wanted to say it was madness to keep up the farce.
But she had little time. The stress and excitement from the ordeal left her weak and running after breath. She sincerely doubted Victor had taken her there with the right equipment to help; she might lose consciousness, and never regain it.
She mustered her remaining breath for one last question, the most important one, the one she couldn't die without knowing the answer to:
"Why... tell... me?"
It might have been the only time he noticed she was suffering. All pretense at respectability fell from his shoulders as he rushed to her side.
He started to tinker with the morphine drip, but he fumbled in the dark, and he wasn't able to get hold of the small plastic wheel immediately. More than that, his fingers were unsteady. Josie only noticed it because pain was starting to overwhelm her, and she had time to ask herself what the hell was taking him so long to do something about it.
She tried reaching up to grab the wheel herself, but she only had a vague idea where it was, exactly. And she had never controlled her own morphine before, and the last iota of common sense she had left was telling her it was a bad idea.
Victor was still talking as she blacked out.
"Why tell you?" His voice started to become fainter. "It's because we're friends. And I did this to you. I'm sorry. I can't save you. But I can give you this."
tbc