Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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CHAPTER THREE

In the far corner of the hull, I could see Pop’s tank looming in the shadows. Apart from a few crates and boxes, it was the only thing down there, and our footsteps echoed against the metal walls as Zee and I rushed down the ramp and ran to the trees.

Still cloaked in black steel and sat up on thick wheels, the tank was more than six-foot high and maybe five feet wide. And where the small viewing panel—a steel flap hanging down to reveal some glass and all that was inside—was popped open, red lights were pulsing and splashing out. So I reckoned that meant Zee was right to be freaked. Something was wrong, all right. The insides of the tank had always been lit up solid gold before now.

I peered in through the glass at the thin green saplings floating in the liquid. They were about two-foot tall and still tethered to the remains of Pop’s body, which was crumpled at the bottom of the tank and bobbing up and down. Twiggy hair clung to his scalp, and his fibrous skin was knotted to his crooked bones, and somehow, it felt like looking in at the strange guts of this shiny machine. All of it strobing beneath the electric red lights.

“What’s it doing?” I asked Zee, watching the lights flash gold but then red, the colors of a sky at sundown.

“I don’t know. But there’s something else.” She pointed inside the steel panel, and shimmering at the base of the glass was a number—bright and white and blinking each second. A long number. Hard to work out.

“Can you read it?” I asked her.

“Almost three hundred thousand,” she said, but before Zee finished, the number changed. “It drops by one each second that passes.”

I watched the last digit change to a five. Then a four. And above us in the cargo hold, the strugglers stomped their feet and raised their voices.

“Those bastards need to give it a damn rest,” I yelled up at the ceiling.

“Calm down.”

“Calm? How can we be calm? What the hell’s this thing counting down to?”

“Zero.”

“I guessed that much. I mean, what happens then?”

“Your mother would have known.”

But there was nothing left of my mother except this thing she had started. She’d sacrificed herself in the end, so I could keep living. And as I stared at the remains of my father, the echoes of something human bouncing around in the tank, I figured my mother only lived on in the same way that he did. She lived on in those bits and pieces of a dead man from which she’d grown the last trees on earth.

“They’re bigger,” Zee said, peering into the tank with me. And she was right—each sapling had grown a little longer since we’d left the island. Their thin, budding limbs stretched further out of Pop’s flimsy body, which had in turn shrunk at their base, as if being used up as the saplings spiraled higher through the liquid, groping closer to the lights above. “Bigger has to be better, right?”

“Of course.” Didn’t take a tree builder to know that. I stared at the bark that had grown over Pop’s skin, and it suddenly made me feel so lonely to see what my old man had become. Trees or no trees, bones or no bones, Pop was gone, and he couldn’t get goner.

I tapped at the glass. “Could be this thing’s low on juice. But I don’t see no engine on it. It’s like they had it charged up.”

“Meaning the charge is wearing off?”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Maybe the controller could help.”

Alpha had taken the control pad off the tank and hooked it into the boat, back before she’d given up trying to hack into the boat’s steering so we could change our course if we ran into trouble.

“It’s up in the cockpit,” I said. Seemed a long shot the controller would do any good. Thing was for steering the tank, not charging it. But I had to do something. And I hated the feeling of being trapped down there below deck, so close to the water, my guts churning as the boat churned through the lake.

“I’ll go get it,” I said. “We can connect it back in.”

“And what should I do?”

“Make sure that number don’t start ticking down any faster.”

As I ran back through the hull, the whoosh of the water pressed tight at the walls, like the lake meant to crush me to death. I bolted up the ramp, back into daylight, feeling queasy and sucking in air, then stopping for a moment to clutch hold of the railing at the rear of the boat.

And I knew something was wrong soon as I started slipping through the puddles, heading for the ladder that led up to the cockpit.

The rain splashed out of the clouds, and the wind beat the sky, and the boat plunged on just like always. But it was as if the volume was messed, and the world had become louder in all the wrong places.

I heard voices at the bow—and that weren’t right, it was only Crow up at the bow. And that weren’t his voice. Or Alpha’s.

Then I saw the cargo-hold doors hanging open, the padlock broken.

And I heard footsteps come rushing up behind me.

A fist crashed into my head and drove me straight down, and all I could see was black.

Someone was kneeling on me like they meant to split my spine open, and they were working me over, their fists like hammers, knuckles like nails. My bones screamed out, but my brain was all scrambled, and my mouth weren’t working. And next thing I knew, I was being dragged across the deck, all out of focus and splayed out sideways, and when we got up to the bow, I could make out enough to see that all hell had broke loose.

The guy holding me was a stranger—just a wiry knot of muscles, eyes like bruises—but I sure recognized the redhead who was pressing a knife at Crow’s throat.

Crow looked helpless. Brought down by a blade tied off to a stump of bone. He was all contorted on the deck, legs useless beneath him. His head yanked back in Kade’s one good hand.

But I spotted Alpha, too. Not ten feet from them. And my pirate girl had her shotgun pointed straight at Kade’s head.

Standoff is what it was. Must have been about fifty strugglers stood around in scraps of purple turning slick in the freezing rain. They had a few clubs and one lousy knife between them. So that meant they’d not yet found the guns.

“Alpha,” I called, and the dude holding me thumped me in the guts so hard, I nearly bit off my tongue.

“You look like me, bud?” she said, not turning her gaze even slightly. Never taking her eyes off the redhead with the knife. “Or you look like Crow?”

I tried to speak, but the bastard holding me clogged up my mouth with his filthy fingers. And for a moment, there was only the sound of the wind in the rain, and the rumble of the boat’s engines as it burned up juice and stained the waters oily behind us.

And I wished that I did look like Alpha. I wished I had a gun in my hand and the world at my feet.

“Guess that means you look like Crow,” she muttered, her gaze still fixed straight ahead.

I tried to make a moaning sound, loud enough she might hear it. And I knew she couldn’t look at me, but I wanted her to know what I was thinking from the look in my eyes.

We couldn’t lose him. That’s what my eyes would have told her. We couldn’t risk losing Crow. I needed him. This man who’d been a warrior and then a watcher and who now was a cripple. This man who’d been turned into a freak and had somehow turned into my friend.

But it weren’t Alpha’s style to back down from a fight. And I imagined her weighing the odds, wondering if she could drop Kade to the ground before his knife even flickered, or wondering if Crow was a dead man, anyway, whether she laid her gun down or not.

“I’ll kill every one of you,” she called. “If you harm either one of them.” But as she said it, Alpha hoisted up the shotgun and threw it out off the boat, into the water.

“I gave it up,” she cried, as the ragged bodies swarmed towards her. “Now let them both go.”

But Alpha could shout all she wanted and it wouldn’t make any difference.

We weren’t calling the shots anymore.

CHAPTER FOUR

Rain and blood filled my eyes as the bodies roared past me, feet trampling and voices arguing about what this posse ought to do with us now.

But what had we done to them? Hell, they’d have never woken up from Project Zion if it weren’t for me. And I’d planned to let them go, hadn’t I? Soon as we hit land.

Only now they’d find my trees. And my trees were in trouble.

I heard Alpha screaming. Then Crow was screaming, too.

Then silence.

I slipped my arm free as the rain made me slick. But Muscles wrapped a hand around my windpipe and squashed me flat on the deck.

“Keep him down,” Kade said, and he appeared above me, his spine straight, head up, the rain bouncing on his shoulders as he gazed out at the lake.

“Did you kill them?” My voice was cracked and brittle as I stared up at him.

“You know what?” he said. “I hate this. Really, I do.”

I struggled and strained, but Kade bent down and put his hand on my shoulder, his green eyes like deep pools of water. So calm, and somehow that made me even more scared.

Then he gestured behind him, and Alpha and Crow got sucked out of the crowd. Battered and bleeding. But still blinking, still breathing.

Kade leaned in closer, his stink all up in my face. “I don’t do unto others what they don’t do to me. Though I’m afraid I can’t speak for the rest of my crew.”

“Your crew?” I tried to pull my head away from him. “You folks had a vote or something?”

A fire came into his eyes. “Well, if we had, I guarantee not one of them would have voted for you.”

My back was swollen tight from the beating. Had blood pouring out from a gash on my cheekbone, and bruises blooming all up my ribs. The pain made me stagger, but Kade grabbed my neck, shoving me down the ramp into the gloom of the hull.

In the far corner, I could see the outline of the steel box. Closed up now. Its secrets hidden for just a little while longer.

“Banyan?” Zee rushed towards me, but stopped cold when she saw who I was with.

“Long story, gorgeous,” Kade said. “He’ll tell you later.”

His blade shone in the dim light as he gestured me forward. And by the time we reached the tank, more than a dozen folk had come down there to join us.

“Keep your distance, people,” Kade told them. “Let me check this thing’s safe.”

They all held back, like his words cast a spell or something. I mean, some of them strugglers must have been twice his age. It was that voice of his. Like he was too confident to have to be cocky. The voice of someone who knew all the shit you did not.

“All right,” he said, pushing me forward. “Go ahead and open her up.”

“We were gonna let you go,” I said. “Soon as we found land.”

“Too late for that, bro. I want to see what you were so keen to keep hidden away.”

“Clear your people out,” I muttered, so only he’d hear me. “It’s better to keep this thing secret till we get somewhere safe.”

“Not the way I operate.”

“You know these people? You think you can trust them?”

“Only person I don’t trust is you.” He stepped closer, raised the knife, and prodded it at my shoulder. “Now show me what’s in there. Come on. Show us all.”

I found the panel and set to prying it open, and as I did, the golden lights spilled out and turned red. The tank flashed and flared, and I stared at the numbers blinking on the glass. The first number was a two, followed by an eight, and all the way at the end, the last digit dropped lower with each beat of my heart.

I thought of that damn control pad, up in the cockpit. But could it do any good, anyway? All we’d used it for was steering the tank around. And if this tank that protected the trees was about to run out of power, then the only place I knew to charge it was back in the Orchard on Promise Island.

“You gotta get close to see it,” I muttered, backing away so Kade could push up to the glass and peer inside.

If it hadn’t been tied to his stump, I swear he would have dropped his damn knife. I could see his shoulders lose traction. His whole body went soft. And when he pulled his face away, the glass was steamed up from him breathing on it.

Then there was this moment where he tried to stop the bodies rushing past him for their own look at what was inside the tank, but Kade couldn’t focus right or get his arms up, and when he spoke again, his voice didn’t come out half as commanding.

“What is it?” he whispered, bringing his gaze to meet mine.

“You know what it is.”

He rubbed his thumb in his eyes. “Tell me what you see in there.”

“Same thing you see.”

“It’s real?”

“Kade,” said one of his buddies. “You all right?”

“You saw it?” he asked them. He was scratching his left arm with his one hand, fingering the holes GenTech’s cables had left behind. “You all see it?”

“It’s trees,” I said, just to shut him up. “Them are saplings, you damn fool.”

I watched as the strugglers feasted their eyes on my father—the human skin turned green and craggy, the shoots coming out of Pop’s hands and feet. They’d see the sapling curling from the remains of his stomach, and the one that had sprouted from out of his heart. And what did they think when they saw the little tree where his mouth had once been? Did it unravel their insides as it uncoiled towards them?

“How?” Kade’s voice trembled. Not so damn sure of himself now.

A couple folk had dropped to the ground and bowed their heads to the floor, like they were praying to that tank and all that was in it.

“Science,” I muttered. “GenTech.”

“But the locusts ate everything.” Kade shook his head like you do when you’re trying to wake yourself up. “After the Darkness. Every animal and plant. The swarms ate it all when the sun came back. Everything except GenTech’s corn.”

He was almost right. Far as we knew, after the Darkness changed everything, the whole world over, more than a hundred years back, the locusts had consumed anything that tried to grow, anything that had somehow survived. Anything, that is, but for the engineered corn that grew with GenTech’s logo stamped on the kernels.

Got so the locusts started feeding on human flesh, and GenTech grew powerful inside the walls of their city, Vega, stuffing themselves full of corn and brewing it into fuel, while most outside the Electric City struggled on in ragged bunches, trapped in the dust, with the surging oceans on both coasts, the massive South Wall sealing things off at the bottom, and the Rift pinning things in from up top.

“But GenTech found a forest on that island,” I said. “And they fused a man with what was left of the trees.”

“Why?” a woman asked, her eyes wild as she turned from the tank and looked to me for answers.

“So they could change the trees up, mess with them, make them too tough for the locusts. Then they could bring a forest back to the mainland and sell us apples like they sell us the corn.”

“Apples?” Kade’s gaze tightened, and I swear that dude’s teeth chewed the air for a second, like his mouth was watering and his brain could hardly keep up. “Fruit trees?” He said it like he was ringing a bell to force himself back to business. “Apples? And you kept this good news to yourself?”

“Guess you’d have been throwing a party.”

“You give me some apples, we’ll have a party, all right. You ever heard of cider? Ah, yes. A drink from the age of plenty. The days of governments and law and order. The days of food growing everywhere.” There he went again, like he knew everything you didn’t. “Cider’s sweeter than corn whiskey, I’ll wager. Ladies and gents, do you realize what we’ve got here? Do you realize what our young friend stole?”

“I didn’t steal it.”

“Then GenTech Corporation must think mighty highly of you.”

I pointed at the holes they’d drilled into his skin. “They were gonna do this to you. All of you. You were gonna be used up for their forest. Until I yanked their damn cables out of your arms.”

“Needed our help, I suppose.” His eyes flickered to the tank. “So you could get this thing out of there.”

“It ain’t a thing. It’s trees. All of the trees we’re gonna get. And that man who died in there was my father, so maybe you ought to show some respect.”

“Your father?” Kade’s eyes were like a battle between crazy and calm. “Well, who the man was does not concern me. Apples, on the other hand, certainly grab my attention. How long till we see one?”

“Never.” Zee stepped up beside me and sounded about as spiky as she looked smooth. “Unless we stop arguing and start to work things out.”

Before Kade could respond, someone was hollering his name from up on deck. I turned and saw Muscles running down the ramp towards us. “You gotta come,” he was shouting. “Kade. Come quick.”

“Boats?” Kade asked. “Or land?”

“Neither. There’s a message coming in.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Kade made me scamper up the ladder to the cockpit, and once he pushed me inside it, I found Crow and Alpha on the floor with their backs pressed together, bound with the same purple wire I’d built my little tree from.

“You should go easy,” I said to the strugglers messing with dials and switches on the far wall. “Before you break something.”

“Never mind him,” Kade said, bumping fists with his cohorts. “He’s had a rough day. Now, what do you have for me?”

“Can’t get it back.” This was some bucktoothed geezer. “But there was a voice coming in. That screen over there.”

A transmission? Out here? It could only be GenTech. And there could be no worse news.

“Untie my friends,” I said to Kade as he tapped his knife on the monitors. “You’re gonna need our help.”

“Doesn’t work that way, bro. The girl’s a little too feisty. Even for me.”

“Just eating this up,” I said. “Ain’t you?”

“No, sir.” He jabbed his stumped arm at his belly. “I’m saving myself for those apples.”

“Half the hands,” Alpha muttered from the floor. “And twice the mouth.”

“Funny. I don’t remember you and my mouth getting acquainted. But maybe we can find time for that later on.” Kade turned from the monitors so he could flash her his handsome grin, but then the screen behind him was sparking to life.

A noise had rustled up out of nowhere. Weren’t just sound, neither. A scrappy picture was beaming in through the static, crackling like flames in a snowstorm. And as the blur turned into an image, the noise became words, and the voice weren’t just talking, it was talking right at me.

“I see you, tree builder,” the man said. “I see you.”

The whole place ground to a stop. And I just stood there. Staring at the face that hovered and flashed on the monitor. A face I recognized, even though it had changed.

A dead man’s face that was all too alive.

King Harvest’s scalp was as pale and hairless as it had been, but below it, his cheeks and nose were now twisted and curled, as if the flesh was trying to drip off his skull. He’d been burned. Scarred. But he was still alive, all right. Hell, he was right there on that monitor and staring straight at me.

“Yes.” Harvest’s voice cracked through the static. “I remember you, boy.” He reached a hand to his melted cheeks, pinching at the bloodless skin. “You left me with this souvenir, after all.”

Had thought I’d seen him shot down. Knew now it had only been one of his damn replicants, those pale King Harvest copies he surrounded himself with. Meanwhile, the king himself must have escaped his slave ship and scuttled away—though not before the explosions tore up his face.

“Should’ve stayed out of Old Orleans,” I said, glancing around, trying to figure out how he was able to see me. Had to be some sort of camera somewhere, hooking into the transmission.

“And you should have stuck to making trees out of metal,” he said, before a bout of interference severed our link.

I turned to the others. Crow was staring at the monitor, just jumbled there in a pile on the floor. And Alpha was trying to arc her head around so she could see the screen—but I figured if she could see him, then maybe Harvest would see her, and I felt an urge to shield her from his gaze, as if that might keep her safe.

“Keep him talking,” Kade whispered, and I turned back to the monitor as the fuzz broke clear. I looked into the pits of Harvest’s eyes. The black-and-white image became color, but it didn’t make much difference, since everything about that man was some shade of smoke.

“So what’s up, Candlewax?” I said.

His melted face attempted a smile, but the scars wouldn’t let it happen. “I’ll let you keep the boat, tree builder. And everyone on it.”

“Bastard wants a trade,” Alpha said, and suddenly Harvest’s eyes started to dance around, like he was trying to peer out of the screen.

“All we got is the boat,” I said, grabbing back his attention. “Don’t know what else you’d be after.”

“Oh, I’m quite sure you do know. Glass tank. Roughly six feet high and five feet across. Illuminated by golden lights, and full of clear liquid. Something very special floating inside.”

“You still working for GenTech, old man? What they giving you to come out here?”

“Don’t presume to know anything about why I’m here, boy. I’m offering you a chance. And I suggest that you take it.”

“Does sound like quite the opportunity.”

He nodded. “I’m glad you see reason.”

“Except I’d rather see you in hell.”

Harvest’s face disappeared for a bit, washed out in a sea of gray splinters. And when he came back, he looked neither angry nor surprised. “Very well,” he said, like he was distracted by something. Like he was too busy all of a sudden to play any more games. “I’ll take what I came for, then blow your boat from the water.”

“You’ll have to find us first.”

“My dear tree builder,” Harvest said, “I already have.”

The image shrank off the screen like it had been sucked down a drain. But before Harvest’s face spiraled all the way gone, me and Kade were peering out through the windows, our faces pressed up against the glass. I strained my eyeballs, but there was no sign of nothing. Not to the south, anyway. I peered west—nothing but the endless water and sky. I stared east—empty. Then I ran back through the cockpit, swung outside over the ladder, and gazed behind us, my eyes turning watery in the wind.

“We can expect company,” Kade called after me. “Just a question of when.”

I leaned back inside and watched as he untied the knife from the end of his arm.

“Cut your friends loose.” He threw the blade in my direction, and it jangled onto the floor. “Then fetch us our guns.”

“You’re letting us go?”

“I’m doing what you should have done to begin with,” he said, pushing past me as I picked up the blade. “There are enough enemies out there. We can’t afford to make more of them.”

I weren’t ready to trust this smooth-talking redhead who’d put a knife at Crow’s throat. But I reckoned he did have a point.

“If we’re working together, you should know that tank seems to be running out of power,” I said. “And it’s all that’s protecting the trees.”

“All right. I’ll see if there’s someone who knows how to rig a charge to it.”

I grabbed the tank’s control pad from where Alpha had left it, handed it to Kade. “This might help.”

He coiled the control pad’s wires around his shoulder. “Anything else I should know?”

“The boat’s steering is locked. Keeps heading south, no matter what.”

“Some escape plan this was. Man, you really thought things through, didn’t you?”

I pointed at the steps that ran up through the ceiling of the cockpit and into the gun tower. “There’s a scope up there. Big old sub gun. Your weapons. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“Then let me know what you see through that scope. I’m heading below.”

“That’s it?” Alpha called after him. “Face on a screen, and you run off and hide?”

“Oh, I’m not hiding.” Kade swung outside, gripping the ladder with his one hand and waving his damn stump in the air. “I just think we’ll need all hands on deck.”

“Thought I saw Harvest die,” I told Alpha as we climbed to the top of the gun tower, moving as fast as we could. “I thought Jawbone shot that freak full of lead.”

“Bastard’s been slippery a long time, bud.”

“You see that scar on him?”

“Could only hear him. Heard that voice every year of my life, remember?”

And I did remember. He’d come trading with the pirates at Old Orleans for slaves he could sell to GenTech. He’d snatched Crow and Zee off the road, and Hina—Zee’s mother, who’d been such a perfect copy of my own mother that I reckon Pop had fallen in love with the same woman twice.

I remembered dragging Hina out of the wreckage of Harvest’s slave ship. I’d saved her then. But I hadn’t been able to save her in the cornfields, when the locusts had come.

“Zee’s gonna take it hard,” I said as we reached the bundle of guns we’d tied in plastic and stashed out of sight. “I saw how Harvest had them locked up in cages.”

“You want me to tell her?”

“No,” I said, figuring I should be the one to do it. “You better get folk ready for battle. Don’t want them shooting themselves in the foot.”

“They did all right getting out of that bunker.”

“But it’ll all be for nothing if we all die out here.”

“You meant that about the tank running low?”

“That’s what it looks like,” I said, picturing those red lights flashing like some sort of alarm. “I’m hoping maybe the controller can fix it. Or that we can charge it back up.”

“We can do that?”

“I don’t know.”

She began to lower the bundle of weapons down towards the cockpit. “I’ll teach people how best to use these things. You keep a lookout for Harvest. And keep your eyes on Red, too.”

At the top of the tower was the meanest sub gun you ever seen. Whole buckets of ammo fed into the gun’s belly, and its mouth was fixed to point out off the boat. You could swivel the gun all the way around, and I sat in the control seat and pushed my eye to the scope. Started north, then turned my way to the east.

The skies had cleared some, but the low western sun was about to sink into clouds. Everything on the horizon was blank—empty and shadowed. But I kept turning the scope. I angled due east. Southeast. And then, on the far edge of the world, I saw a smattering of small black points, static and sticking out of the water.

And what was that looming behind them?

I pulled my face off the scope. Jammed it back on again. I twisted at the focus wheel until I could see. The black points were dotted in a clump across the horizon—rocks, maybe—but behind them was a smear of brown and gray and little pieces of white, and hell, yes, that was dirt and snow I was seeing. I almost yelled down into the cockpit that we’d found land, at last. But I figured I should keep on with my scanning.

And as I steered my sights south, I spotted the fleet of boats that was coming our way.