Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

CHAPTER THIRTY

I watched Crow through the shadows, mangled up and twisted. His tree-legs were splintered beneath him, looking less like legs than ever. They just looked like a sloppy old mess.

“Ready to move?” Alpha said, kneeling beside him.

I sat against the glowing walls, peering up at the mud and moss, half wondering if someone might shove their way down here to join us. But the other half of me wondered if that crater had tumbled in on itself entirely, leaving everyone in my Zion dead.

“Can you walk?” Alpha asked, and Crow let out a breath as if he’d been saving it up because it might be his last.

“I can’t even stand,” he whimpered. And I knew there weren’t no way he could. His legs were just busted up bits of bark. The shards all mashed and dangled, revealing tan bits of cracked wood. Any good the Healer had done for him, it weren’t doing no good anymore.

I watched as Alpha tried to work a jagged piece of rock from the ground, and when she finally got it loose, she took the rock over to the flank of the mammoth.

“Can you keep him still?” she asked me.

I pushed myself up, my body like one big bruise, and went over to join her, glancing at the mammoth’s face. I wondered if he already missed the rest of his kin. Did he realize he was stuck with us now, trapped in the bowels of the earth?

“What you gonna do?” I said, watching Alpha get close to him with the rock gripped in her fist. “I don’t want this thing kicking at me.”

“He’s got a name,” she said. “They called him Namo.”

“All right, then. I don’t want Namo kicking at me.” I stared into the beast’s strange, small eyes, trying not to pay too much attention to those big tusks of his. I listened to the sound of his breathing. “The ones that named you are most likely dead,” I said quietly. “I guess we got that in common.”

“He’s not gonna kick you,” Alpha said. “Just hold him steady.”

I kept looking him in the eyes and patting the side of his leg as Alpha wiped the gray mud from his belly and cut off a long swatch of fur. He let out a little rumbling moan.

“Weren’t so bad, was it?” she said. Then she took the thick purple threads over to Crow and bound up his legs, splinting them back together and tying the coarse strands in knots. So now Crow’s legs were all-GenTech, I reckoned. Bits of tree and bits of mammoth, all wound up as one.

“They’ll heal up,” Alpha said to him. “Be good as new.”

“And what do I do now? Just wait in this hole to get better?”

“You get your ass up there.” She pointed at the top of the mammoth. “We’re bringing him with us. Made ourselves a trade, didn’t we?”

So we started south again. Heading for the heat, just like the Speaker had told me. And it was hot, all right. Got hotter every twist we made through the tunnels. Felt like we were heading straight into hell.

We had Zee’s body on top of the mammoth, all tied up in its fur. And Crow had to ride up there beside my dead sister. I don’t know how he faced it. I’d barely been able to help get her lifted off the ground.

Just four of us now. Five, if you counted Namo. Five pairs of eyes in the shadows. And six saplings stuffed in a pack.

The straps of that pack cut me like a knife, as if I carried more than the weight of the trees on my shoulders. As if I carried all those who’d already died for them, too. All the strugglers GenTech had taken and killed in Vega or on Promise Island, all the survivors from the boat who had drowned in the lake. And how many Kalliq lives had been lost, on account of these saplings and the forest they might one day become?

I remembered the Healer’s face turning lifeless. Etsa, she’d said her name was. As if that was important. As if I needed the name of every woman who died in my arms. I thought of my mother, and Hina. And over and over, I thought about Zee.

They’d all died for the same reason.

Because of the last trees on earth.

And because of me?

No. I might have set things in motion, busting the trees off that island, but it weren’t my fault my sister was dead. It was more Crow’s fault, and Kade’s. They’d been the ones gathering everyone together, making tricks and bargains, desperate to race off once again.

Well, they got what they wanted. Here we were, groping our way south.

I tried to figure out exactly what it was I had promised my sister. Because I’d never been much of a brother to her. Never took care of her the way that I should. So I could at least try to make amends, I reckoned. As if you can do right by someone after they’re dead and gone.

And what was it she’d told me? That we all had to stick together. Yeah. That was her angle. Problem was, there was only one person I could trust.

Alpha staggered before me, leading the way through the catacombs, her skin tinted a pale green by the moss on the walls. She was the only one who’d stood by me. And the other two could rot down here, for all I cared. They’d both betrayed me. The one-handed field hand and the legless warrior. They’d made me break off that sapling, and for all we knew, Harvest had his hands on that tree I’d torn loose.

I relived the shock of when Pop’s blood had sprayed out, and wondered for a moment if his blood had been feeding the trees in some way, helping them get started. But I somehow knew that the blood had just been the last drops of my old man being human.

And that blood being spilled had been inevitable, thanks to Kade and Crow. They’d ruined everything—them and that parasite Harvest with his army of copies. They’d destroyed the one place I’d ever wanted to stay.

So what promise did I have to keep above all others? What was my purpose? To take care of the last trees. I’d sworn it to my mother. I’d sworn it to Zee.

But I also had a cure to find now. A remedy to save Alpha.

The tunnels we traveled down were high and wide enough that Namo could just make it through. But apart from their size, there weren’t nothing good I could say about them.

Spiked rocks hung from the ceiling, the ground was steaming and sharp, and it got hotter with every damn step. Not like the blistering sun or the scorching winds on the plains. This was some new kind of heat I’d not known before. You could feel it on your insides. Couldn’t help but breathe it in and cough it back up.

The algae on the walls glimmered. Giving off just enough light to see the emptiness and ugliness and the distance ahead. I scraped up fistfuls of the moss and shoved it in the pack with the saplings, checking the thin little trees were still coiled up snug, damp with the healing mud. Figured the moss was the only thing we’d see to eat for a while, but I didn’t eat none of it just then. God help the man who’s hungry when he has to bury his own flesh and blood.

“Never thought I’d miss snow,” said Alpha as we stumbled and sweated.

“The Speaker said there’s mountains down here.” I tried to remember the icy white world we’d left behind us, as if the memory might cool me down.

“Under the ground?” She was too worn out to sound too surprised.

“Said follow the heat, then follow the howl, and then the furthest peak points us home.”

“Home?” Kade said the word like it made his teeth ache. But then he quickened his pace, shoving past us and pushing ahead.

“Got some nerve,” I muttered. “Acting like he’s the only one gets to mourn her.”

“He was sweet on her,” Alpha said. “She was sweet on him, too.”

“’Cause he tricked her.”

“Guy has a big heart, bud. Like you.”

“Just a smooth talker.”

“You can be pretty smooth on occasion.”

“I don’t want you comparing me to him.”

“Forget it,” she said.

“He turned them against me.”

“I don’t know.”

“She’d have wanted to stay. If it weren’t for his meddling. That place was what she always wanted to find.”

“But she cared for him. Maybe that can change what you think is important.”

“He just used her. I’m telling you. He just knows the right things to say.”

I quit talking. The air had got even hotter and even harder to breathe, and Alpha peeled back her dirty vest, rubbing at the old wound GenTech had sealed up, the bit of bark that had saved her life when they’d stitched it into her.

“You all right?” I said, my heart thumping hard at the memory of the dead woman in that tin coffin. The woman who’d been all sealed up and solid wood.

“Stings a little. It’s like the mud makes it itchy.”

I tried to wipe my hand across her belly, thinking maybe the Kalliq mud weren’t doing her no favors at all. I feared it might speed things up, help the bark get growing. A disease, the Speaker had called it. A disease that spread in the spring.

“What are you doing?” Alpha said, shoving me away as I staggered against her.

“Should clean it,” I said.

“It’s fine.”

“Should keep it clean.”

“How the hell would you know what to do? I told you before,” she said. “Just act like it ain’t there.”

“You should keep the mud off it.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“And what was all that before about me dying if I kept heading south?”

“Just a feeling,” I lied. “In my gut.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Everything.”

“Why can’t you look at me?”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“You’re not gonna lose me,” she said. “I’m right here.”

She kissed me then, and I got no recollection of that kiss ending. I mean, I can’t remember my lips leaving hers. So it’s like in some part of my brain, I’m still kissing her. Like there’s a place where the kiss never stopped.

But I remember Alpha smiling at me after. Her face shy, flushed and breathless.

“Will you keep the mud off it?” I pleaded.

Namo came bumping up behind us, his breath all noisy and warm as he prodded his trunk at my head.

“All right, babe,” Alpha said, her eyes fixed on mine as she reached down to wipe her belly clean. “If that’s what you want.”

We were blackened and baked. Blown out by exhaustion. Alpha and Kade helped Crow down to the ground, and then we collapsed against the rocks. Hard enough work just to keep on breathing. Even Namo slumped down on his belly, squeezing his great frame between the rough walls, and Zee’s limp body kept rising and falling as the mammoth sucked at the heat.

We’d ditched most of our clothes. Padded some of them inside the pack with the trees, which I used as a pillow. Alpha had ripped up her vest and wore it in pieces, just a few tight rags tied to her body as we lay there, trying not to touch one another in the heat, our skin sticky against the patches of moss.

“Gotta keep moving,” Alpha said, but she didn’t move a muscle.

Follow the heat, the Speaker had told me.

But how much heat could we handle?

“Fall asleep,” Crow mumbled beside me. “Might not wake up again.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure your buddy Kade won’t want to leave you behind.”

“Can’t you let him be?” Kade called from the other side of the tunnel.

“That’s touching. It really is.” I dug an elbow at Crow. “Said you were dead weight once. Now look at him. One cripple standing up for the other.”

“Stop it,” Alpha said. “Crow’s supposed to be your friend.”

“Supposed to be.”

“This ain’t what Zee would have wanted, bud. You acting like this.”

I glanced at my sister’s thin, flopping body. All the feeling drained out of her. No pain in her bones. No regret. Just a bloodless hollow, filled with the fear and sorrow of those of us still alive.

Finally, I slept. Passed out on the rocks. And I wound up tangled with Alpha. Even as hot as it was, as painful as the heat pricked my skin, I painted myself against her. My arms wrapped around her. My hands on her sweat. But when I felt the bark on her belly, it woke me up with a blast.

I recoiled from her, afraid and throbbing. I rolled onto my back and stared up at nothing, waiting for sleep to reclaim me, my head resting on the padded pack of trees and my heart ashamed of this secret I knew, afraid that the secret might wake me over and over, again and again.

And as I lay there, part of me longed to slip off down the tunnels by myself and never look back. I could be alone without pretending to be something different. Alone like I’d been after Pop left. Those days spent on my own, days of dust and steel.

It had been harder that way, but hadn’t it also been easier? To just drift on and keep lonesome and let no one near?

But even as I dreamt of these false freedoms, I was putting my arms around Alpha again, breaking down walls faster than my mind could build them, sinking down once more inside a bitter sleep.

Until Crow woke me with his hand across my mouth.

He squeezed my nose shut, clamped my jaws tight, and I couldn’t make a sound as I struggled against him.

Then he released his grip, glaring at me to make sure I stayed quiet. And what? He wanted me to know he could still kill me? Needed me to see just what our friendship meant now?

But Crow was pointing up the tunnel, back the way we’d come from. I followed his finger, peering into the shadows. And then I heard it. A soft slap. A pitter-patter. Almost like the sound of dripping water. But not quite. More like the faint sound of footsteps.

I shouldered the plastic pack of trees, staggered up.

Kade was coiled around the sub gun, and when I tugged it away from him, his green eyes blazed open like he was about to yell out. But then, I reckon he saw the look on my face, because the punk stayed quiet. He glanced at Crow behind me. And then we heard the tapping sound again. This time a little louder. Closer.

I hoisted the gun to my shoulder, getting it ready. And then, stepping over Alpha and squeezing past Namo, I began sneaking back up the tunnel to see what I could find.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I rounded the bend with the sub gun clamped tight in my fingers. My hands sweaty on the grips. And I couldn’t see much. Just black stone and the faint green glow oozing off the walls. But there was that noise again—the tip-tap patter. Then a shuffle.

The ground got loose beneath me. Gravel and rocks. I skidded and crunched and made too much noise. Grabbed the wall to steady myself. And then, as I peered up the tunnel, I thought I saw a murky shape flicker and bounce through the shadows, getting smaller. Fading away.

Or was it just my mind playing games?

I held still. Listened.

No sound now. No scrabble of footsteps.

I loosened my grip on the gun. And then I turned and ran back to the others.

“What is it?” Alpha whispered, eyes open wide.

“I don’t know,” I told them. “Maybe nothing.”

“Could be Harvest,” Kade said. “They could have followed us down here.”

“All I saw was shadows.” I shrugged. “That sound could have just been the ceiling dripping.”

“Better keep our eyes open and keep moving,” Alpha said, staggering up and catching herself at the wall. She called to Namo, waking him.

“I hope it is Harvest.” Kade was eyeing the sub gun. “I hope some of those troops made it down here, so we can take them out. All of them. I couldn’t ever kill enough.”

“We’re in no shape for fighting. We can barely walk.” Alpha was pulling at Namo to get him to stand. And I reckoned that beast had been built for the cold and the high mountain passes, not for squeezing along these sweltering tubes.

“Let’s help Crow back on top,” Alpha said.

“You help him,” I muttered, pushing off. “I’m gonna scout ahead.”

I staggered on, the sub gun hung from my shoulder and jabbing my side, the pack of trees on my back, and the sweat dripping off me. I stumbled around one sharp twist in the tunnel after the next. But then a blast of red light was scorching my eyeballs, and a wave of heat was blasting my skin.

I shielded my face and pushed closer. Blinking my eyes open, trying to get used to the sting. It was like getting too close to the flame on a blowtorch. Reminded me of building with my old man, welding branches together in the tops of our trees.

And then I could see it, all up close and in person—the flame of legend, the molten rivers of myth. A moving wasteland of lava. Hell, it was like this was where all the lava got born.

“We’ve reached it,” I hollered back at the others, but the heat burned my words right out of the air. So I just waited for them to catch up to me, as I stared out across the tumble and roar of the Rift.

The tunnel had ended on the high edge of a cliff. And below, everything was orange and gold and tar black and smoking. All of it bursting in bubble and flames. It was like being trapped inside an engine as its circuits got blown. Crackling sparks gushed upwards, then fell like a burning rain.

I could barely see the black cliffs that marked the far side. Must have been a mile across at least. And the slabs of lava rumbled and surged before me like a mighty river. Like blood boiling too thick for its veins.

I pressed back into the tunnel, waiting till I could see Namo’s shiny eyes, his shaggy shape, and the silhouettes of bodies bundled upon him. I swear, you couldn’t even tell which one of them bodies was dead.

“We’re here,” I called. “We made it.”

Alpha slid down Namo’s crusted fur, then staggered towards me through the heat, her skin coated in soot.

“We’ll have to follow this ledge,” she said, pointing along the top of the cliff. “See if it crosses somewhere. But I reckon there’s something we gotta do first.”

She stared down at the lava. Sweat and tears ran down her face. Then she went and untied Zee’s body from the top of the mammoth and gently pulled it down.

The fiery light burned in Kade’s eyes when he joined us at the cliff’s edge. And Crow came crawling over, too, pulling himself along with his hands.

“Help me up,” he whispered.

“You sure?” Alpha asked him.

“Course I’m sure. A Soljah stands for a funeral.”

She got beneath him and hauled him upright, and then Crow was leaning on me, stinking of mud and sweat, his splinted legs quivering.

I had to hold him steady. I mean, he’d have pitched over the edge if I hadn’t given him a hand. And as I steadied him against me, I checked out Alpha’s handiwork—the purple thread woven around the busted brown bark of his legs. Looked like it was holding things together, all right. Almost looked like the fur had begun to fuse to the wood.

“Who’s gonna say something?” Alpha had Zee bundled in her arms now, my sister’s once-beautiful face covered in dried blood and cracked full of dirt. Her eyelids were drooped shut, as if she might only be sleeping. But, no. You’d have never thought that.

I kept waiting for Kade to speak up. It seemed to me like he would. But then I realized Kade was going to be too busy crying. He had his one hand hiding his eyeballs and his stump jammed in his mouth.

Waves of heat ruptured the air around us. Black rocks crumbled from the cliff, crusty and smoking, and they splashed in the lava and got swallowed in flames.

But beneath all the noise was a silence. And it was Crow that broke that silence in the end, his voice bright and clear. He weren’t speaking, he was singing.

It was an old song my father had taught me, and I weren’t much of a singer, but I joined in on the chorus. Alpha did, too.

“Now let me fly.”

I remembered what I’d told Zee on Promise Island—that I was going to fix her. That I’d get trees growing around her and never leave her behind.

“Now let me fly.”

I was going to grow her trees from these saplings stuffed in a pack on my back.

“Now let me fly to Zion.”

But it hadn’t been me breaking up the team, ruining everything.

I felt Crow slump against me, suffocating me, wrapping me in a sweaty cloak made of sorrow. And I began to sense this sorrow would destroy us. If we didn’t stop the blame and the guilt.

“Now let me fly.”

I put my arm around Crow’s waist to help him stand taller. Started to think we were all trying to do our best with this task we’d been given. We were all bent beneath the same curse.

“Now let me fly to Zion.”

Alpha let go of Zee’s body, and my sister’s hair fanned out and her limbs spun as she fell. And I had wanted to touch her one last time, even though she’d been made ugly, and as foreign as the first day I saw her.

But now she was twirling and tumbling. And I was holding my breath as she got further and further, and further away.

We worked our way out along the ledge, following the top of the cliffs the only way we could go. The burial had left us numb amid the buzz and sizzle. Cold amid the heat.

I glanced back along the cliffs, making sure we weren’t being followed, remembering that noise that had sounded like footsteps, behind us in the tunnel. But all I’d seen in the tunnel was shadows, and all I saw now was the air shimmering like a fever, as if the heat was devouring everything in sight.

Kade stumbled into me, his eyes pointing straight down at the blaze, and I grabbed him, pulling him upright.

“You need to ride up top?” I called, yelling above the lava’s crackle and roar. Crow was the only one still huddled on the mammoth, gripping its fur as it shuffled and swayed, keeping as far from the cliff’s edge as it could.

“It’s more likely to fall than we are,” Kade shouted back at me. “I’m not getting up there. This is suicide.”

“We have to follow the heat.”

He cussed at me.

“Take my hand,” I said.

“For what?”

“You’re getting too sloppy.”

“And what do you care?”

“Maybe I don’t.” I gazed into the inferno. “But Zee did.”

His head slumped against his chest like his neck just got broke. And when he started scratching real bad at his arm, I remembered old Frost doing the same thing—reckoned it was a crystal-junky move and maybe Kade was craving a fix.

“It’s bad, man,” he said. “All of this. It hurts so raw, and feels so heavy.”

“I know. Might get worse, too.”

“There’s worse?” He quit scratching himself, tried to smile. I could see his face fighting to do it.

“Take my hand,” I told him, and when he did, our fingers made a fist.

We fought on. Above us, just smoke and jagged black rocks. And below us, the river of fire getting wider, and the far cliffs receding further each time I looked.

The lava was so bright it was blinding, and it singed your nostrils and droned in your eardrums, so you got full of it, became a part of it, moving inside the flame. And I started to reckon somewhere that lava would cool and turn into rock, and someday, perhaps, that rock might be mountains. For every end, there’s a beginning, I guess. And maybe all that burns comes back.

And as if to mark this chaos and creation, people had once built walls here. Long ago, before their sky was encased in this hot, rocky tomb. Before the lava had burst forth and ruptured. Before the Darkness, I suppose. Before the stars fell from the sky.

Somewhere in those distant days, in the glory of the old world, people had built walls, homes and roads here at the dormant gates of hell. Because up ahead, below the ridge we were on, stood the singed carcass of a dead settlement. And while the buildings back in the lake had been sunk and frozen, these buildings looked like they’d been cooked alive.

They were just shells, really. Blackened ruins, surrounded by lava and stripped naked by fire. But it weren’t the buildings that interested me, it was the slab of roads that was tethered to the city. A gnarled old network of highways that seemed to bounce and float upon the lava. A mess of old asphalt strips, clogged full of cars.

“There’s our way across,” I said, grabbing Alpha and Kade beside me. I pointed at the floating chunk of ancient roads that led out from the remains of the city to the other side of the lava. I felt Alpha lean against me like she was about to fall, and I shook her. “Come on,” I shouted. “We’re almost there.”

The ledge we’d been working along led all the way down to the city, though it meant we had to drop closer to the terrible heat. We edged lower, turning rigid when the Rift roared with some new fury and lava shot up in towering spurts. Ash falling. Smoke everywhere. I could feel my bones baking and my brains getting fried.

I used the sub gun like a crutch, leaning on it as I staggered forward. And now and then, I still checked the path behind us. But if anyone had followed us down here, they’d have to be as near dead as us.

We hit the crumbling streets of concrete and embers, then struggled on through the city, making our way to the car-clogged highways that floated beyond the jumbled old walls. The buildings offered some protection, shielding us from the heat, and we stopped and rested amid them. Everything caked with rubble and painted with soot.

I was sore and suckered, the pack heavy against my sweaty spine. I went to spit but had no spit in me, so I just slumped there and listened to the Rift bubble and blow in the distance, like it was waiting on us, knowing we had to face it in the end.

Everything had looked black and empty inside the buildings, but I pushed myself to my feet and staggered closer to a broken window. The others called to me, but I waved them off. Just kept wondering if there was anything left inside this burned out shell. An old world can of food, maybe. An ancient glass bottle with some water inside.

I kicked out the last bits of broken glass from the window, prodding it clear with the sub gun, then shoved my way in.

The ash was so thick, I had to wade through it, and I knew right away the place had been picked over plenty. Probably got scavenged as soon as the Darkness began.

I worked my way deeper, though. Just in case something had survived. I climbed past counters and boxes, shelves that had long ago turned frail in the heat. Had been some sort of market once. In the days when there’d been more to eat than GenTech’s Superfood. But everything fell apart when I touched it, and I realized just being in there was stupid. We needed to get out of the city, get across the lava, and get away from all this.

I heard scraping noises above me, somewhere inside the building. A shuffling sound. And I picked up my pace, finding the broken window and climbing back out. Figured that building was getting ready to tumble.

As we stepped onto the twist of highways leading out of the city, the ground shifted and swayed beneath us. Hell, this rocky chunk of tarmac bobbed in the lava the same way our old boat had once bobbed on that lake. Until the boat sank, that is. But I couldn’t think about sinking as we began squeezing between the old cars and climbing across their remains, making our way through the scrap that choked the old road.

We crawled and jumped from the roof of one car to another. Namo and Crow lagging behind us, the mammoth shoving the charred metal out of his way. And we were a good ways from the city now. I mean, we were committed to following this slab of highway, no matter how much it spindled and swam. I could see where it reached to the cliffs in the distance, and we were getting there. Choked and staggered, but getting there. Long as this burned memory of the old world could keep us afloat.

I lost my footing and slipped through a car windshield. Alpha grabbed me, dragging me out through a coal-dust cloud. I felt the car shift, then slide a little. The rocks beneath us stretching. Buckling. The lava churning underneath.

I cinched the pack of trees even tighter to my back.

“He’s too heavy,” Alpha shouted, pointing up at the mammoth as he rumbled past us. That big ball of fur had his small eyes stretched wide, and they darted this way and that way, and he was moving all jittery, like the ground was scorching him. He was shoving the cars out of his way quicker now, and when they slowed him down, he’d damn near start hopping on the spot.

“Crow,” I called. “Calm him down.”

But Crow was already trying to hold the beast steady, and it weren’t doing no good. And then Kade was hollering. He was up ahead of us, and I could hardly hear him above the roar of the lava, but he was screaming, pointing behind me.

I stared back, gazing across the tombstone traffic, studying the black cliffs and the black buildings. And then I saw it. In the city. All over the city.

It looked as if the walls were alive.