"Often funny, as well as easy to imagine ... To The Last Drop envisions just how quickly greed and thirst could spark another war between the states."
★★★★ (4 stars) -- High Times Magazine, April 2009
"Wice’s flowing narrative skill is the ideal remedy to quench an audience’s thirst ... Is To The Last Drop a prophecy? A foreshadowing? A carefully calculated answer to the equation we’re still writing with each gallon down the drain? -- Santa Fe Reporter, July 2008
To The Last Drop follows five characters through the course of a war between Texas and New Mexico. The novel begins with the accidental discovery of water in the arid southeast corner of New Mexico. Texas and New Mexico become tangled in a bitter legal dispute over the rights to that water. A series of increasingly aggressive border skirmishes leads to an invasion by the Texas State Guard.
The Texas militia sweeps aside the paltry resistance and occupies New Mexico. The conquered territory is renamed New Texas. The Military Governor exploits New Texas for its water while forcing it to pay for the cost of its own occupation.
Resistance to the Texas occupation begins in isolated pockets strung together by a pirate radio station. Censorship and brutality by Texas leads to violent reprisals by a growing insurgency. The rebellion burns in the city streets, on the internet and throughout the remote desert mountains.
"Whiskey is for drinking,
and water is for fighting over."
-- Mark Twain
characters
Eddie Brown
Amateur biologist and slacker, he transforms into Dr. X, the leader of the New Mexican resistance.
Hormigo
Head of the Diablos motorcycle gang, a vigilante partisan who fights for his own interests.
Billy Ortiz
Indigent and disenfranchised, he becomes the sort of hero who is never remembered by history.
U.S. Armstrong
The Military Governor of New Texas is a successful businessman whose aspirations condemn his family’s dignity.
Taylor Jon Bridges
A vulgar young speedfreak and violent shock trooper for the Texas State Guard.