Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

There were so many of them. It was like Harvest had an endless supply. And here they were, marching behind bullets, all black boots and dead eyes. Never slowing. Just twisting around the inside of the walls as they descended, like greedy arms reaching down towards us.

There was a rush and a riot. Half the Kalliq stormed up the steps to face the onslaught, charging mammoths before them, and the rest of the tribe ebbed inside the passages, hunkering down for the fight.

The Elder took the lonely sapling from my hand, easing it from my fingers as bullets swarmed and drilled the walls around us. And the Healer knelt beside me, bundling the remaining clump of trees in an old plastic pack, winding the saplings into a thin coil, ladling gray mud inside the bag, then drawing it shut.

There was a moment when our eyes met. Me and the Healer. Just this moment, no longer than two beats of my heart. Then I smeared Pop’s blood from my face, my hand blocking my vision for a second, and when I saw her again, the bullets were pounding into her body and making her quake.

I called out. Tried to grab her. But she slipped on the rocks and away from me, just as her smile had slipped from her lips and smashed all hope on the way down.

I grabbed the trees and swung the pack onto my shoulders. The Kalliq were surging up the great spiraled ledges, rushing to meet the battle. More than fifty mammoth riders. Then more like a hundred. The beasts pouring out of the side tunnels, stampeding upwards. Purple fur flying towards that army of gray rubber suits.

I stumbled to the rock wall. Ducking for cover. Then I felt Crow’s hands on me, pulling me close. And as I fell against him, I watched Alpha swoop up a bow and a sheath full of arrows from one of the Kalliq who’d fallen.

She aimed and fired high at Harvest’s troops on the ledges. Still breathing. Still fighting.

But if the Healer was gone, there’d be no hope of a cure for my girl.

The Kalliq were trying to stem the flow of Harvesters. There were so many pale gray troops, with so many guns, but the mammoth hide was too thick for their bullets. And the beautiful beasts reared up on their hind legs and charged up the rock ledges, their tusks bent low, trumpeting and trampling and shaking the walls.

Stones rained down and smashed into clouds of dust as the havoc unfolded, the battle raging on and pinning us beside the pit.

“Where’s Kade?” Crow called above the bullets and battle cries. I glanced about but couldn’t see that redhead bastard anywhere. And where the hell was Zee?

“We gotta get out of here,” shouted Alpha, down to her last dozen arrows.

But where? Which tunnel? Which way was the right way to go?

Because that’s what it had to come to. I was hell-bent on nowhere, all over again.

Damn rocks kept tumbling down all around us. But I got low and crawled out through the rubble, bullets thudding into the mud pit beyond, arrows whipping high into the warring abyss.

I scrambled through the rocks till my hands were on the Healer. Then I held her in my arms, pulling her against me, shuffling her limp body back to the wall.

She beamed at me. Blood on her lips. She took my hand and pushed it into her chest. “Etsa,” she whispered.

“Your name?”

She nodded, then said, “Healer.”

“Banyan.” I pointed to myself. Tears welling up. My nose snotty.

“Banyan.” Her voice was like cut glass. “Tree King.”

She put her hand on my face, then went limp in my arms. Her tongue curled down her chin as her eyes rolled back. And another woman was dead on account of those trees.

“Bring her here,” the Speaker called from one of the tunnels. I saw her face through the cascading rocks.

“Cover me,” I hollered as I shot up and ran, the trees in the pack on my back and the Healer in my arms.

I reached the entrance to the tunnel as a pillar of rock crashed behind me, cutting me off from Alpha and Crow. I stumbled. Fell. Landed at the Speaker’s feet with the Healer held out before me.

“You must leave,” she hissed as she snatched up her sister. “Take your death, and go.”

“Tell me which way, and we’re gone,” I said. There weren’t nothing for me here now. No safe haven. No remedy.

The Speaker pointed behind me. Into the open. Right at the center of the mud pit. “You go down,” she said. “You hold on and hold your breath. Until you fall through.”

“Fall through to where?”

“Catacombs. Rivers of fire.”

“And then what the hell do we do?”

I heard a great howling moan and spun around to see a mammoth stumbling blind towards us, its eyes shot and bleeding, its body bouncing and shaking and ready to fall. And I remembered that beast I’d seen sacrificed. The mammoth with the messed up leg.

“Follow the heat,” the Speaker said, clutching my arm and pulling me to her. “Then you follow the howl.”

As I glanced back at the mud pit, it squelched and steamed. We had to go into it, down inside it. But for how damn long?

“You ever gone down there?” I asked her.

“You will travel beneath the Speak It Mountains.” The Speaker’s face was pure sorrow. “There it is I learned. And there, you will learn also.”

“Learn what?” I shouted over the sounds of terror descending from above.

The Speaker scooped her twin tighter, cradling her dead sister to her breast. “Long have I seen this. Long I have feared.”

I stared at the pit again, wondering how much slime we had to go through before we found the far side.

“The furthest peak you see,” she said. “Will point to your home.”

“Mountains? You sure? Under the ground?”

I heard Alpha screaming. She was somewhere on the other side of the rocks. Calling my name.

The Speaker clutched my wrist. “You will see. And learn. Speak your question to the winds.”

I took one last look at those twin sisters. The long, sweeping mane of the Speaker flowed into the Healer’s and forged a dark sky between them.

Then I stood, cinching the pack to my spine. And I turned and dashed through the blitz.

The walls were splintering into boulders around me, sealing shut the tunnels and sizzling the mud. I clambered up till I reached the top of a stony pile, and I spotted Alpha and Crow, not thirty yards from me.

But they were surrounded by Harvesters.

I slipped on top of the rocks, trying to hold steady and see what was happening. Trying to figure out something I could do. And as I toppled, I froze up on the inside—one of the troops was pulling off his mask and revealing the scars on his horrible face.

It was him. The original King Bastard. And I could see him talking to Alpha. Looked like he knew her. Like he recognized her from Old Orleans.

It seemed to happen in slow motion, him shoving his gun up into her chest. She had the bow in her hands. But no arrows. Nothing left to fight back with.

Crow tried to take a step forward, but Harvest shoved him in the gut, and he went down so easy. And then Harvest turned back to Alpha, jabbing his gun at her as he stroked a gloved hand on her cheek.

“No,” I screamed. I pulled the pack off my shoulders, held it high in the air. “This is what you want,” I called as Harvest spun around and saw me. “The trees. They’re here. Just you let her go.”

“You fool.” His voice was so loud, it seemed to blister at the edges. “You think you’re in a position to bargain with me?”

“I’ll give you what you want,” I shouted.

“I don’t need you to give it to me, boy. It’s mine already.” The tip of his gun stabbed Alpha’s ribs. His free hand grabbed at her throat. “I’ll take the trees and leave you all dead in this hole.”

“Let her go.” The words tore my voice open. “You owe us that much.”

“I owe you nothing,” he screamed, rage breaking across his twisted features. “And your suffering shall be severe.”

The fighting seemed to grow quiet above us. Like distant thunder. But the rocks still splintered and crashed, shattering and smoking the air.

“Hey, Harvest.” It was Kade’s voice ringing out. “I’ve got a sub gun ready to blow your brains out, you piece of shit.”

I spotted him crouched in the rocks below me, keeping his head down. His red hair coated in dust, and the sub gun poking through the debris.

Harvest pulled his gun off Alpha, his ugly eyes searching the broken stacks.

“That’s right,” Kade called. “Keep backing up.”

“You can’t win.” Harvest glanced up at me. “How do you plan to keep GenTech from their prize? They will hunt you down. They will find you and kill you. They’ll take back the trees, and you’ll have changed nothing.”

“And what would you do?” I yelled.

“I have an army. I can protect them.” He pointed at Crow on the ground. Waved his gun in the air. “Your friends are nothing. Savages and pirates. And you? You’re just a boy.”

“And you’re a dead man,” Kade shouted. “Unless you call this thing off.”

“Wait.” This was Zee. Her voice seemed to come out of nowhere. But then I saw her crawling through the landslide towards Harvest. And what the hell was she doing?

“We have to stop this,” she shouted. “We can’t just keep running.”

“No, no.” Kade’s voice got panicked. She was moving into the middle. Coming right between him and his man. “Move, sweetheart. Get out of the way.”

But she was blocking him. Blocking his angle. I watched the whole thing happen right in front of my eyes.

“We could work together.” Zee glanced up at me as she said it. Then she turned to Harvest, her hands held out before her. Her long, dark hair painted gray by the earth. As if she were suddenly old and frail as the falling rocks, and her eyes were the last thing young and pretty at all.

“Please,” she called, blinking at Harvest. “Make the killing stop. And we’ll join you. We’ll make a stand against GenTech together. The few can’t control the many, not now. Not if everyone—”

Her voice got cut before she could finish. Her pretty eyes got squeezed ugly as they bulged out of her head.

And Harvest kept emptying his bullets into her.

“No,” Kade screamed as he leapt out from the rocks and rushed towards Zee, unleashing his sub gun over her collapsing body, aiming right at Harvest. But the replicants were falling in front of their master, shielding his body with theirs.

And I stood there on the pile of rocks like I was floating above everything. My stomach churning and my lungs forgetting to breathe. The trees held high over my head. My sister dying on the ground below me.

My father, my mother, and now Zee. I’d lost all the family I’d been given.

But through the carnage, I saw Kade standing over Zee’s body, still working the sub gun. Still screaming and fighting. I saw Alpha dragging Crow away from the battle. Still running. Still trying.

And I knew the closer you get to nothing, the more you have to lose.

I shouldered the pack as I rushed down into the battle. But before I could reach the fight, a mass of rock fell and detonated into a thousand screaming pieces, wiping everything out.

I fell back, blind in the dust, rock shrapnel piercing my skin. And as things cleared, the break in the bullets persisted—so I kept low, fumbling forward. I spotted shadows in the blur and crawled towards them.

“Where’s Zee?” I said, finding Kade and pulling him upright. He lifted his one hand, and Zee’s fingers were clasped tight in his.

I leaned over her. Could hear her chest wheezing and gurgling on some whole new level. She was coughing up blood, her eyes fluttering in a silent howl.

“Can you stand?” I asked Kade.

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s the gun?” I scrabbled around for it. The dust was starting to clear, and pretty soon we’d be out in the open, and the bullets would be flying once more.

“Alpha,” I called out, though it meant giving away our position. Reckon I just needed to know she was there.

No answer came back.

Beneath the debris, I felt the tip of the gun, warm on my fingers. I started to grab at it, but then I felt something thumping my back.

I glanced up. Behind me. Peering through the haze. And damned if it weren’t a mammoth, swinging its shaggy trunk at my head.

It was the one we’d first seen, the one I’d patted, high on that ridge in the starlight. I’d have recognized that thing anywhere, and now it kept shoving at me, getting me to move out of the way.

Then it reached its trunk around Zee and lifted her real gentle, putting her up on its back.

“Holy shit,” I said. “It’s helping.”

But Kade weren’t listening. He was already climbing up there, too.

“Come on,” he said, straddling the mammoth’s hump and yanking a fistful of fur till the thing turned and trotted in a circle around me.

I snatched up the sub gun, then leapt for the side of the beast and clambered my way up.

And before I’d got used to sitting on the thing, it was charging through the rubble in an all out stampede.

“There.” I pointed as we emerged from the dust. Alpha was wrestling a Harvester for his gun, and Crow was pulling himself out from under the rocks beside them.

I aimed the sub gun at the back of the Harvester’s head. Had been awhile since I’d killed a man. Not near long enough.

I squeezed the trigger, took him out. And Alpha’s eyes grew wide when she saw us. She pulled up Crow as we charged towards them, and together they jumped for the mammoth, then wrestled their way to the top.

I pulled them close, had Alpha help hold Zee in place. Kade was aiming the mammoth for one of the wide tunnel entrances, a passage that hadn’t yet been blocked by the crumbling walls.

“Hold up,” I hollered. “That ain’t the right way.”

“And where do you think we’re going?” he yelled back.

“We gotta go down.” I pointed at the mud pit. “In there.”

“Through the pit?” Alpha screamed.

“It’s the only way. The Speaker told me. It’s the way south.”

The Harvesters had us surrounded, closing in, their bullets shrieking through the air.

“Let’s do it,” Crow said, and Kade turned the mammoth around just as the crater began to collapse all around us.

We plunged on through the hail of bullets, the spinning slabs and the steam.

“Hold on,” Kade yelled. And for a second, it felt like we were flying.

But then we dropped and splattered, and the world turned quiet as we sank down inside the mud.

PART THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The hot silver mud seized us and squeezed us and shut down every scream. My flesh pressed flat against my bones, slime oozing into my ears and under my eyelids, jamming up into my nose.

I gripped at the mammoth’s fur as the beast drifted lower, pulling us deeper into the earth, as if sucking us inside a wound.

And I felt weightless, as the mud turned even heavier and sealed up around me, but I kept my grip on the mammoth, still dropping with it, lower and lower, until we weren’t drowning, we were falling.

I was out in the air.

I let go of the mammoth and braced myself, then landed in a heap, splashing into a puddle and cracking my shoulder on hard stone. I rolled onto my side, smearing the mud off my face and feeling at the pack full of saplings, still bundled and coiled and strapped to my back.

The mammoth staggered to its feet and towered there, eyes blinking from muddy sockets, its long fur matted and dripping with filth. And I pictured the mammoth I’d seen sacrificed, the beast of burden I’d seen drown. Only it hadn’t drowned at all. Not if it had ended up down here.

As my eyes got used to the dim light, I realized how much I could see. The walls were covered with the green algae I’d become accustomed to in the Kalliq’s caves, but down here, that moss glowed as bright as the North Lights had shone in the sky. I stared up at the thick gray mud we’d pushed through, and it was sealing back in on itself with a squelch, big globs splattering around us, patches of moss crusted across the mud like tiny hands trying to hold it in place.

“Zee,” I called, spitting the muck from my teeth. The others groaned and cursed in the gloom, and Alpha crawled up beside me, coated in slime.

“Where’s my sister?” I whispered.

“She’s here,” Kade said, and I followed the broken sound of his voice.

When I found him, I put my hand on his shoulder, and he was shuddering so fierce, I could barely hold on. As he pulled away from Zee, I knelt down beside her. The mud had mingled with the blood on her skin, silver and red, swirling in the mossy green glow of the walls. Zee’s eyes were wide open and so white and twitchy, and they somehow reminded me of that old world camera she’d once had, as if she were snapping pictures of me with her eyeballs, freezing these moments in the back of her brain.

“He did good, didn’t he?” she said, her voice like rusty metal, and I realized she was staring at the mammoth, behind me.

“Yeah,” I said. “So did you.”

Kade let out a sob, and I gripped tighter on his shoulder, trying to quit my own tears from falling, because I didn’t want this to be the last way Zee saw me. I reckoned I’d already let the girl down too many times.

“I was wrong,” Zee croaked.

“You were brave.”

“Where’s Crow?” she asked.

“I’ll find him,” Alpha said, and I heard her shuffle away.

Zee closed her eyes, and now Kade was howling beside her, just letting all the pain inside of him loose. It was such a wretched sound. Wild and fierce, but fragile. Like his insides were caught on fire, his spine full of smoke.

“You can make it,” I said to Zee when Kade’s cry had become a whimper, and my own words got frothy as the tears streamed down my face. “Look at this mud all around you. It’ll heal you.”

“I can feel it,” she whispered. “Prickles.”

“It healed me up,” I said, but I’d been gouged by a couple of arrows, and Zee had been drilled full of lead.

Crow crawled up on his belly, Alpha helping him claw his way close. And Zee reached her hand to Crow’s face, her fingers shaking. She wiped at the mud on his cheeks, tracing the edge of a faint scar.

“I’ll miss you,” she whispered.

“I shouldn’t have let Frost take you out of that house,” Crow said, and it was as if I’d never before heard his real voice at all.

“But I’ve seen so much.” Zee turned to me, choking up blood, and I lifted her, holding her gently against me as Kade rolled up in a ball beside us.

“You have to promise,” she said, as if scraping the words from the roof of her mouth. “Promise you’ll take care of them.”

Her lungs were gurgling, swollen and shut.

“You know that I will,” I told her.

“But you’ll have to give them up,” she said. “In the end.”

I squeezed her little body.

“Promise me, Banyan. You can’t keep them. You have to use them to bind folk together.”

“You’re coming with us,” I said.

“No.” She pulled her head back so she could see me. And she made a smile so sad that it shredded my heart. “I have loved you, my brother.”

“Please.”

“Even if you didn’t know.”

“Please don’t go.”

“I’m sorry we weren’t small together,” she whispered.

“Don’t leave me.”

“And I’m sorry I won’t see you grow old.”

“But Zee. I’m already so alone.”

“No,” she croaked. “No, you’re not.”

She coughed up more blood, and I felt it warm on my chest.

“Promise me,” she whispered. “That you won’t keep them hidden.” She was sinking against me now. “You have to trust people, Banyan.”

“I promise,” I told her.

Zee’s eyes darted to Alpha. Then she rolled her head towards Kade.

And then her body turned crooked and crumpled.

Her bones were just a shell. Something that would rot. This sister I’d kept a stranger and never loved like I should.

And what had I done to deserve her saying she loved me? I’d never been there. Never known her. Hell, I didn’t even deserve to make her a promise. I’d been all set to say goodbye and hunker down in that crater, and she’d been ready to head south without me, and I would have just stood back and watched her go.

But now there’d be no more leaving and no more loving, no more her wishing I was wiser or rolling her eyes at me being foolish, no more the feeling of her head on my shoulder, or the sight of her long hair dancing in the wind.

“We should have gone,” Kade said, his voice full of anger as he uncoiled himself from the ground. “We should have gone, instead of arguing. Instead of you wasting our time.”

“Stop,” I said.

“She’d still be here.”

“You can’t do that.”

“If you had just come along and not been so selfish.”

I let his words hang in the air, like I was letting them be true.

“Leave it, Kade,” Alpha said. “Think about what she was saying. The four of us have to work together, or it’ll all be for nothing.”

“It’s already for nothing.” He slammed his stumped arm against the wall.

“Not if we loved her,” I whispered.

He spun around, glaring down at me. “What do you know about love?”

“Go easy,” said Crow.

“Your love is selfish. It’s just as selfish as you.”

“Let him be,” Crow said louder. “Miss Zee was his sister.”

“But he never acted like it. And what sort of plan is this now?” Kade grabbed his sub gun, shaking the mud out of the barrel, then feeding in the last of his ammo, uncoiling the half-empty belt of bullets from around his waist.

“The Speaker said it’s the way,” I said quietly.

“You messed up, man. You messed it up. All of it. And she’s dead because of you.”

I bolted up and grabbed him by his shoulders. Pressed him hard against the wall. “And what was she to you?”

“Someone I chose. Not someone that got forced on me.”

Chunks of mud dripped onto us, smacking on the ground and spraying across the walls.

I let go of Kade’s shoulders.

He was right. I never chose Zee for my sister. And loving her might have meant even more on account of that.

Yet all I could do now was bury her, and remember her. Or try to forget. But I would not accept the blame for her death.

“You did this,” I said to Kade. “You were the ones called that meeting. Distracting the whole tribe. Getting them all in one place.”

“Leave it,” Alpha said, coming between us. “Both of you. She died because of Harvest. And because of something she believed.”

“What?” I said. “That we all have to work together?”

“It’s people like Harvest that prove her wrong. Not people like you. And not people like Kade.”

He pushed past me and stumbled down the tunnel. I peered after him, toward the waves of heat that waited through the catacombs beyond.

“Please, Banyan.” Alpha put her arms around me. “You have to stay strong. I know it’s hard. I know it hurts like it won’t ever stop. I had a sister of my own, remember? So I know it. The feeling. Having Zee around reminded me what that was like.”

“She didn’t remind me of anyone.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“We can’t let her just sit here.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want her to die for nothing.”

“We’ll find Harvest,” Alpha said. “If he’s still alive, we’ll find him.”

“I don’t care about Harvest.”

“We’ll kill him.”

I shook my head. “I want the killing to stop.”

“But we gotta fight for that to happen. Can’t just run and hide and hope to stay hidden. We’ll have to make a stand in the end.”

“In the end.” My legs gave out as my voice cracked, and I sank down onto my knees, peering up at Alpha. “Maybe when it’s all over, you and me could settle down someplace, and I could build something for her. A statue. Something Zee would have liked.”

“Course you will.” Alpha held my face to her belly, and I felt the cool piece of bark that was stitched on her skin. “We’ll do it together.”

But you’ll die, too, I thought. In the spring.

And I reckoned there was only one way to stop the people I loved dying for nothing. “Me and you get south, we head to Old Orleans,” I whispered. “We start the trees growing, make all this death mean something. Then we gather your pirates to protect our trees from GenTech and people like Harvest. We gather all the pirates, from all over the plains.”

“What about these two?” Alpha glanced down the tunnel at Kade, where he leaned against the wall, sobbing. Then she looked at Crow, splayed out on the ground beside Zee.

“They were gonna walk away from me,” I said. “Why should I care what they do?”