Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

CHAPTER NINE

There was whole seconds when the wind rushed and gusted and I spun in the air with my eyes sealed shut. Then I hit the lake like an explosion. The sound of water smashing into my brain as my legs snapped at the surface and dragged me below.

First time I’d nearly drowned, in a river too deep, my old man had been there to save me. Second time, in a muddy pool, it had been Sal who’d hauled me back out. But I knew the third time, I’d not be so lucky.

Unless I could save myself.

I thrashed my arms around, kicked my legs. Clothes dragging at me, heavy boots pulling me down. Everything was muted. Distant. Couldn’t hardly see nothing. Just bubbles. Brown and green and blue. But a clear light wobbled above me. And below was a blackness that kept tugging me closer.

I was moving my arms in frantic circles. Swinging about, getting nowhere. Losing the frothy last gasp in my lungs. But when I felt something at my shoulder, I spun around till I had my hands on it. Heavy steel, spiky in my fingers. I peered through the swirling murk and realized I’d found a damn hook, one of the grapplers the Harvesters had slung up to the railing. I caught the hook between my knees and grabbed at the steel wire floating behind it, pulling the wire down, making it taut. And that meant it was attached to something above me.

So I used it to pull myself up.

One breath, not even a full one, was all I had to go on. And it was like it had seeped out already, I was so empty and aching. My brain throbbed and my chest got stiff. But I didn’t stop putting one hand over the other, following the wire back to the surface. The water so cold, like it might freeze me inside it, as I kicked at it and kept reaching higher, crawling my way to the light.

My senses all shattered as I broke through the surface. I burst into the air and coughed and spluttered and damn near swallowed the lake. But I held onto that steel wire as I held my head out of the water. And I found what the wire was fastened against.

A jet pod. Black and steel and slippery. Its engine was still warm, and there weren’t no one on it.

Not until I hauled myself up.

You had to lay flat on your stomach on that Harvester machine. I hooked my feet at the rear, stretched my hands to the front, then tried to get my bearings.

The flooded city lay straight ahead and not fifty yards off, all decayed walls, broke-glass windows, and rusted steel-bone frames. And our boat was spinning into that city, about to disappear in the shadows. Smoke and screams poured out of the hull, and I could see as many Harvesters as survivors on the deck, their bodies all wrangled together.

Then the boat was gone from view. Lost between the towers.

I jabbed a thumb at the pod’s ignition. Flipped a red switch and grabbed on tight, revving the engine beneath me with the grips in my hands. The pod shuddered as it bounced forward, and I thought it might stall, but pretty soon I was getting the hang of it, racing across the water and skipping through the boat’s wake, engine shrieking like a chainsaw and spewing smoke.

I clamped the pod with my thighs, throwing a glance over my shoulder as I bucked and thrashed towards the city.

Behind me, Harvest’s fleet had stopped a safe distance from the buildings, the troops on deck peering at the old world remains. I glimpsed a figure among them dressed in long gray robes, and I reckoned it was their leader, their king.

No sign of agents, though. No purple. No GenTech logos. So was Harvest working for GenTech or working for himself?

Didn’t matter, I told myself. Either way, he was after our trees.

When I spun back around, I had to bank left. Hard. Just missing a clawed rod of steel. I needed to pay better attention, damn it, now I was inside the maze.

I shook the spray from my face and spotted the boat up ahead, its entire bow under the water. So I cranked the throttle as throaty as the jet pod could muster, catching up to the boat and pulling alongside it, throwing glances up at the deck and hollering out.

Looked like the Harvesters onboard were losing the battle. But it wouldn’t matter who won if the whole boat sank. We needed to get that tank into the buildings and up to a rooftop. We needed to get the trees to those bridges and find some way to reach land.

I swerved to the right of a rusted steeple. Plowed through a floated-up pile of junk. Still, the boat spun. Still, it bounced at the buildings, slowing down a little more with each shudder and crunch.

Biggest damn tower was straight ahead, though. And I reckoned I had to get to that scraper before our boat hit it. It was the only way I might get back onboard in time and get to the trees.

I wouldn’t have long inside the building—once the boat rammed into it, I’d have minutes at best before the boat finished sinking. So I pulled away from the boat and sped faster. Took aim at a shiny column of windows in the tower ahead, hammering at the front end of my pod to get the thing slapping at the water. Faster. Harder. Then I was kicking down, launching up—and not ten feet from the building, I was airborne, arcing upwards and driving the pod through a great wall of glass.

The windows sliced and slivered, and I covered my face with my hands, bailing before the pod slammed into the far wall of the room I’d entered, the impact shaking the ceiling and filling the air with debris.

I landed hard. My bones battered, but nothing broken. And soon as the air cleared, I began busting past tables and chairs and old gadget salvage, working my way out of the room and hunting some stairs.

I had to climb up—higher than the boat’s deck—if I was going to get back onboard when the boat hit.

The stairwell switchbacked up the inner core of the scraper, and it was crowded with bones, old bodies cluttering the steps, arrows all down the walls. The remains of some battle, I reckoned. But I had no time to ponder it as I raced up, clearing four steps with each stride. Just had to get high enough before the boat hit. Then I had to get the tank off the boat and into this stairwell.

These steps were our only way up to those bridges.

And the bridges would be our only way out.

When the boat smashed into the scraper, the whole building groaned and bent, as if it might topple from the impact. But I pushed on through the carnage, staggering into a room full of plastic booths, then kicking my way through them, crashing towards the boat as the boat crashed through the room towards me, like it was eating its way through the walls.

The back end of the boat was the only part still above water now, and strugglers were pouring off what was left of the deck, vaulting over the railing, then rushing into the building, their purple coats stained with blood, dead Harvesters mangled between them.

I saw Kade leap from the deck onto the railing, the sub gun strapped to his shoulder, his hand reaching out to keep his balance as he readied to jump into the room.

I rushed towards him, fighting through the strugglers swarming past me in the opposite direction.

“Where’s the tank?” I yelled, because it was always those trees that seemed to matter most to me. Even more than my friends, or the little kids I’d smuggled into the belly of the boat.

As Kade landed in the room beside me, he pointed back through the confusion, back onboard.

And there, rolling up the ramp out of the hull, came our big black box—the tank of trees, cloaked in steel and in motion. Zee was riding on top, the controller clamped tight in her fists. She was wheeling the tank back and forth across the sloping deck, trying to keep it steady as the boat slumped and sank beneath her.

She had Crow bundled beside her and was ramping up now, trying to steer through a hole in the deck’s railing and get off the boat before it sank too low.

But as soon as she touched down, just inside the torn-up room, the tank’s wheels skidded and snagged, and I knew they weren’t going to make it. They’d landed much too close to the edge.

I raced towards them, wires and sparks thrashing out of the walls and ceiling. And when I reached the tank, I grabbed Zee’s leg and pulled her off, dragging her towards me, Crow coming, too, the big guy landing in an unconscious pile at my feet.

But the tank was creaking and swaying and leaning back the wrong way, ready to topple and follow the boat into the freezing depths.

I grabbed the controller from Zee and spun the tank’s wheels in the right direction, keeping it upright, working it further into the room. Moving it away from the edge, steering it to safety as the last bits of the boat disappeared into the lake.

“Where’s Alpha?” I screamed, throwing down the controller and staring at Kade. The last of the survivors scurried past us and raced up the stairwell. Anyone still on the boat was trapped below the surface. Lost in the water.

Kade had reels of bullets hooked onto his arm and strapped on his back, and he had the sub gun resting on his shoulder. The sub gun I’d last seen Alpha using.

“Where is she?” I yelled at him.

He just shook his head.

I stared out of the shattered windows at where the boat was now just bubbles. I waited till it was nothing but gone.

Dread shivered my spine.

“She couldn’t have been onboard,” I whispered.

Everything seemed so quiet without the whine of engines. Everything was still for a moment, and everything was wrong.

“You think they have more of those speeders?” Zee sounded frantic, barely holding it together.

“Harvest’ll find a way in here.” Kade started shoving debris out of the way, trying to clear a path for the tank through the remains of the room. “We don’t have much time. We have to get up to those bridges.”

“But we have to find her,” I said.

“There’s nowhere to look, Banyan.” Zee had blood on her hip. Her whole body soaking wet and shaking as she grabbed at my arm. “You think Alpha would have wanted us to stay here?”

She started pulling at me. Every inch of her stained thick with fear.

“You can’t say it like she’s already dead.”

“There’s only one way to go.” Zee pointed at the stairs. And the steep way would always be my way, I realized.

I felt pressed into nothing, as if the sky was crashing upon me and the ground refused to yield.

I watched Zee shake Crow, checking to see if he was still breathing. But hell, she should have been checking me, too. If Alpha was in that lake, then she was nowhere, and I was nowhere without her.

My sister snatched up the control pad and punched it to life, the wheels beneath the tank clicking into action.

I’d never even known what to do, I realized. I’d never been able to show her or tell her in the ways I had wanted. There’d been no words to describe right the way that girl made me feel.

“Alpha,” I yelled out, turning back to the lake and the remains of the city. I screamed her name at the drowned buildings and the damned lake and the big empty sky.

“Get him up,” Zee called, and when I finally turned from the water, I saw Kade helping her shove Crow on top of our steel-cloaked tank of trees, while I just stood there, useless.

Then my sister grabbed hold of me again, pushing me through the furniture and junk, following behind Kade as he steered the tank through the rubble.

And I just let Zee keep me moving. As if there was nothing else I could do.

CHAPTER TEN

We had to pile up the bones in the stairwell, creating a crumbling ramp for the tank’s heavy wheels. Then our big black box cracked and crawled its way upward, Crow slumped unconscious on top of the thing, and the wheels spinning out underneath if we didn’t angle things right.

The remains of the dead were crisp and brittle beneath the weight of the tank, popping and snapping as we pushed higher. I peered back past the switchbacks, searching for signs of life behind us, but all I could see was the old bones, arrows pried into the eye sockets of skulls and skeleton ribs. This city was a graveyard, a place to rot and be forgotten. We were just rattling around in a tomb.

The scraper might have once been real pretty from the outside, all that glass and steel towering up to the clouds, but the roof was just flat, ugly concrete, vented with old shafts and exhausts. And it was littered like the stairwell had been—more bones and more arrows, even some broken old spears.

I hunched down on a pile of cinder blocks, gripping my knees with my hands so I might quit shaking. But the fear was spreading through me. The pain and the loss and the knives of the feeling. I stared up at the sky, and it was some of the prettiest blue I ever had seen, but I knew that everything pretty ended up like this building, ugly and wasted and ready to fall. I leaned over and puked, retching and wretched, covered in sweat but so damn cold.

I forced myself to stand, though. Shivering in the wind as I scraped what was left of me back together to keep pushing on.

There were three bridges leading off the rooftop, each one woven out of thick steel cables and anchored to the concrete with rusted bolts. Each bridge stretched to a different building, creaking and sagging in the middle and not looking too stable. They were narrow, too. Just about wide enough for the wheels of our tank.

I was so damn lightheaded, I thought I might float away, but when I bent down and checked the steelwork, the feel of the metal seemed to ground me a little. Reminded me of all the years I’d spent building trees with Pop.

I stared out across the rooftops, watching the bridges drooping and swaying. They formed a web, patched across this old city that drowned. And it made me think of another old city—the city on the plains where Alpha had made me promise to return. She’d wanted me to get the trees to her band of pirates in Old Orleans.

But could I do that for her? Could I do it without her?

In the distance, I saw the strugglers who’d escaped off the boat, already disappearing into the skyline maze. Same people I’d locked up. The people who couldn’t be trusted. Until something worse came along.

And where would they go now? What would they do? Out there, past the eastern edge of the buildings, I saw hills as old as time. Land. Just like we’d wanted. Brown dirt. Snow on the high ground. But how did we get there from here? And then what? Then where?

“Which one do we take?” Zee said, the wind whipping her wet hair all around her. She pointed at the bridges, but I just stared down below.

We were a good hundred feet above the water, and part of me wanted to topple down there and smack at the surface, then become withered and shriveled in all that blackness.

“Thought you wanted to hand the trees over,” I said, my voice shaking, as I turned to face Zee. “Thought we were supposed to give them to Harvest.”

“He’s going to kill us,” she screamed.

“So he kills us, takes the trees, and the trees keep living. Ain’t that all that matters to you?”

“I never wanted to die.”

“Nor did Alpha.”

“Stop.”

“We could have used your help fighting.”

“Fighting was your idea.” Her voice fought the wind to see which one was louder. “Yours.”

“Just pick a bridge,” said Kade. “Whichever looks strongest.”

He combed the city with the scope of the sub gun, still trying to keep things together. Still playing the fearless leader, even though he had no one to lead. And how had he ended up in that gun tower, anyway?

How was he the one ended up with that gun?

“This one,” Zee said, turning from me and stomping her foot at a bridge.

“No,” Kade said. “We go west.”

“Away from land?” cried Zee.

“Away from them.”

Kade pointed at a rooftop just east of us, where pouring out of a doorway stormed a whole crew of Harvesters.

The bridge swayed as the tank rolled onto the woven cables and balanced above all the nothing below us. And as Zee stepped onto the bridge, it lurched even worse, swinging from side to side.

“Climb on top,” Kade told her, adding his own weight to the cables. “But go slow.”

Zee clambered for the top of the steel box, then Kade crawled up onto it after her, everything bobbing and weaving each time they moved.

But how much weight could these bridges handle?

I heard the Harvesters racing behind us, boot heels slapping at concrete.

They wouldn’t shoot at us, though. They couldn’t risk losing the trees, and they’d lose everything if this tank fell into the waters. But I reckoned they could catch up to us, wrestle the tank from us. And it sounded like they were getting real close.

So I shuffled out onto the bridge. Got my hands on the steel walls of the tank, steadied myself, and dragged myself up. Then we were all huddled together, our knees pinning Crow in place as Zee gently rolled the tank forward.

The bridge was barely wide enough. Cables corralled us in place, but we were tripping and tipping, the tank teetering this way and that.

The wind sucked us inside its noise, and Kade’s sub gun cracked like thunder when he fired at the Harvesters on the rooftop behind us. But it should have been Alpha with her finger on that trigger. Not this son of a bitch.

The bridge sank real bad in the middle, like the cables had all gone slack. But we made it across, rolled up onto the next roof with a bump, went wheeling across it, then began rattling down a bridge even longer and more scraggly than the last. It kept us away from the Harvesters, but it didn’t lead much closer to shore.

Replicants were popping out onto rooftops all over the city, crawling over the buildings like a disease, multiplying and festering and closing in quick.

Kade took aim at a bridge across from us that was chock-full of troops, and as he opened fire, the steel cables beneath us began to pivot and swing so bad, I lost my grip on Crow.

I grabbed at him, hauling him against me with one hand while I held onto the tank with the other. And when we rolled up onto the next roof, Zee started to cut to the east, but I grabbed the controls from her and ground the tank to a halt.

“Land’s this way,” she yelled, trying to snatch back the controller, scratching her nails at my fists.

“I know,” I said, because the bridge before us stretched away from the city and down to the shoreline. “But what about them?”

I was staring back across the web of steel to where a group of survivors were running towards us, racing across a bridge, steel cables shaking beneath their pounding feet. I was checking their faces. Searching for Alpha. Knowing they were all that was left.

Out in front, I could see a woman sprinting along with a kid in her arms, and it was that mechanic from the Salvage Guild. The one who’d fixed the boat so we could steer straight into this mess.

I saw Muscles limping along, a girl hooked on his shoulders.

There were others I recognized. But no one I knew.

“Come on, bro.” Kade thumped me on the back.

“Ain’t they your people?” I said, watching the poor souls from the boat. Folk who’d fought their way off Promise Island, then fought their way up here. And I reckon I should have trusted them all to begin with, because now I saw the fear in their eyes, they didn’t look like strangers, they looked just like me.

“They don’t belong to me,” said Kade, and I let Zee steal back the controller.

I reckoned those strugglers belonged to no one at all.

We were midway down that last bridge when I felt it go sloppy. Punched too wide and pinched too thin. There was too much damn weight on the cables, but here came everyone behind us, anyway—the last of the survivors, the Harvesters—all squeezing onto the bridge.

“Hold on,” Kade shouted as Zee forced the tank to go faster. The cables were moaning, shredded and rusty. And land looked so close now. Mucky and solid. I could almost taste the dirt and the rocks. But the cables started snapping and screeching, and then there was no more damn bridge at all.

We were hurtling through the air. And when I crashed down, I landed in the water, just shy of the shoreline.

I stood, up to my hips in the water, and stared back at those who’d been on the wrong side of the bridge. Those who’d managed to hold on had been whipped back to the buildings. They were sliding down the concrete walls and smashing into the lake.

So we’d got separation from that Harvester posse, but we’d lost our survivors. The ones who’d made a stand and the ones who’d sat singing. They were gone. Just like Alpha.

I pictured the little thing with the sticky-out ears, remembered prying the gun from her too-small fingers. And what good had it done? I’d failed them all in the end. Left them all behind.

I staggered and fell through thin bits of ice, slipping on the cold rocks beneath.

“Alpha,” I whispered, like her name was tears I was crying. I sank to my knees, but there were hands on me, lifting me.

“Help,” Zee said. “I can’t find Crow.”