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Ian snatched at Piper’s arm as she staggered beside him. They’d walked through the pre-dawn hours and into the morning, taking shelter only when the temperature soared well over a hundred degrees and the sun climbed brutally overhead to beat down on them.

They’d each gotten about four ounces of water from their makeshift condensation still, but they needed thirty times that much to survive for long in this oven. He was starting to see things—lakes of water just ahead. People running towards them. Trees and birds where there could be none.

He knew hallucinations came with the latter stages of dehydration. Next up would be unconsciousness, and then, of course, death. If only he could find something, anything, that indicated where a trace of moisture could be found.

The gods might have given them last night together, but today, the gods were feeling cruel. There was no water. Anywhere.

He’d stopped worrying about the greater good of the residents of Las Vegas, and his entire world had narrowed down to just this moment. The two of them. Taking another step.

The sun finally set, and they moved out again. His muscles should have felt marginally rested after the break, but every hour the dehydration deepened, his feet and legs cramped more severely, and the pain in his head and eyeballs become more unbearable.

Every step was a herculean struggle to lift his foot and force it to slide forward.

Piper wasn’t in any better shape. They were just about to the end of their ropes.

He feared they’d missed Overton, shooting too far to one side or the other of the small town and continuing to walk out into the great desert of central Nevada.

He’d pretty much decided that it was time to sit down, get comfortable, and give up the ghost when he saw it. A square shape on the horizon that was not nature-made.

Another mirage?

He squinted at the low, black rectangle. “Do you see something?” he asked Piper cautiously.

She peered at where he was pointing feebly. “Is that a house?” she rasped.

He let out a breath of relief he didn’t know he’d been holding.

He was not crazy, and he was not seeing things.

Thank God. It was a building of some kind, tucked at the base of the ridge they’d been paralleling for the past hour.

Odds were it was abandoned, but it meant shelter, at least, for the two of them.

“Is that a farm of some kind?” she asked.

“Hope so.”

“Do you think it has a phone?”

“Hell, I’ll be thrilled if it has a well.”

“Good point.” A pause. “How far away is it?”

He eyed the low shape, which had resolved into two structures, both long and low, one larger than the other. House and barn, maybe? “Half-mile,” he guesstimated. “Twenty minutes.” At full strength, they could make it in ten. But at the shambling pace they were managing now, not a chance.

That turned out to be a good estimate. And, indeed, a dilapidated house and a more dilapidated barn rose out of the desert grit.

If nothing else, a pale ribbon of driveway wound in the other direction in the moonlight, presumably joining up with a road of some kind.

They were close to civilization. Or at least, they knew how to find it, now.

“Looks abandoned,” Piper announced, sounding disappointed.

“It would be too easy if we just walked up to a house and were able to call for help,” he replied. No shitty mission like this ever caught a break like that.

The closer they got, the more abandoned the place looked. The window panes were cracked and the front door wasn’t hanging quite right. He knocked anyway and shouted a hello. Only the blowing wind whispered back to him. He pushed the front door open.

Oh, yeah. It was abandoned. A few pieces of cobweb and dust covered furniture remained, but trash littered the floor along with plentiful rat droppings.

“Great,” Piper commented drolly. “If we don’t die of Yusef’s virus, we can catch hantavirus from the rat poop in here and die from that, instead.”

He grinned over at her in the dark space and headed for the kitchen.

If there was a phone or water to be had, that would be where they found both.

An old rotary phone did hang on the wall, but there was no dial tone.

Not that he was surprised. He was more disappointed when a twist of the faucets on the sink yielded no water.

“Let’s try the barn,” he suggested.

They went back outside and headed for the other building. The faint moonlight made this place look even spookier than it already would have with its falling down fences and odd tumbleweed drifting through, ghostlike.

He put his good shoulder into shoving open the big sliding door and Piper slipped past him as he took a minute to gasp in pain.

“Bingo!” she crowed.

He stepped into the gloom. Sonofagun. A tractor. Old, rusty, and cobweb covered, but a tractor.

“Think it runs?” she asked.

“Doubtful,” he replied as she hoisted herself up onto the seat. She pushed and pulled at clutches and throttles, and turned the key, which was conveniently in the ignition. Nothing. He was not surprised.

He was surprised, however, when she jumped down and moved to the cowling at the side of the engine, lifted it in a cloud of dust, and pointed the flashlight from the backpack at the motor. “You know diesels?” he blurted.

“You’ve met my father, right? Of course, I do.”

He moved over to stare into the engine compartment. He knew a little about diesel engines, himself. “There are a bunch of tools over on the wall and the ones in the backpack. Thing we might be able to get it running?” he asked.

“Worth a try. Riding it to town sounds a hell of a lot better than hiking. And this doesn’t look to be in that bad a shape. I think we’ll need to blow out the fuel lines and clean the distributor cap at a minimum. Help me turn this shaft manually to see if it has seized or not.”

He grabbed the thick steel shaft she pointed at, and between the two of them they got it to move about a quarter-turn.

She nodded eagerly. “I think this may be salvageable.”

He poked around and found a lantern. A little kerosene sloshed around in the bottom of it and he got it going with help from the fire starter built into Harness Guy’s jackknife.

That guy was going to be pissed to have lost this gear.

But that’s what the bastard got for shoving them out of a damned helicopter.

“How about you start working on this while I go looking for water?” he said to Piper. Where there were people and animals, there was bound to be a water source of some kind.

She got to work pulling fuel lines and patching them up with a roll of duct tape she’d found, working by lantern light.

He noticed Piper blinking hard from time to time like her vision was fuzzing out or she was fighting back severe head pain.

They had to find water, soon, whether or not this tractor got running again.

No telling if it had enough fuel in it to make it to the nearest town, and they couldn’t withstand another day in the killer heat without water.

He moved outside and spotted a broken-down windmill.

A rusty trough stood beside it. The windmill must turn a well pump for animal drinking water.

He examined the windmill, and although most of the fan blades were destroyed, the rest of the apparatus looked relatively intact.

Awkwardly, he climbed the old, wooden tower some thirty feet up in the air.

It was awful having to use his shoulder like this, but what choice did he have? Piper needed water.

He gritted his teeth against the throbbing pain and pushed on. He grabbed a broken fan blade awkwardly and gave the thing a good tug. It gave a loud squeal and turned sluggishly. He grabbed a higher blade and pulled again, groaning aloud in his agony. Another quarter turn.

Slowly, slowly, he managed to get the wheel turning.

It was risky poking his hands between the jagged ends of the blades to continue turning the windmill, but he ignored the splinters and cuts and got the thing spinning at a reasonable clip.

Anybody’s guess if turning this thing would actually bring up some water to the trough.

He figured he turned the windmill for upward of ten minutes—long enough for both of his shoulders to be screaming and for his resolve to be wavering badly when he heard another sound.

A splash.

“Piper!” he yelled. “Quick. Bring the tarp!”

She came running and stopped in shock when she spotted him high off the ground.

“Catch the water!” he called down to her.

She darted forward, draping their plastic tarp under the spigot that was trickling water into the trough. “It’s nasty,” she announced.

“Pipes are probably rusted. Iron won’t kill us, and we can filter it before we drink it.”

“Do you need me to come up there and help?” she offered.

“No!” he replied sharply.

Working together, him turning the blades and her holding up the cupped tarp, they captured several gallons of red, ugly water. But it was water. And he was trained in all kinds of methods for making water safe to consume.

Exhausted, he climbed down the scaffolding. Piper pointed the flashlight at the water and he grinned broadly. “That’s just flakes of rust. If we give it an hour or two, the sediment will settle to the bottom, and we can skim the clean water off the top.”

“You’re assuming the water has no bacteria in it that would kill us or make us deathly ill,” she replied. “Not that I care at this point.”

“I think I can set up a distilling apparatus with the junk in the barn. In a few hours, we’ll have drinkable water.”

Piper made a sound suspiciously close to a sob.