Текст книги "Rootless"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

I screamed at Alpha and begged her to move. I grabbed her by the vest and dragged her with me around the side of the cockpit. I stumbled. Slipped. Almost lost it. Hanging on by one arm, my face staring down at the top of the dead field hand’s skull.

The noise was louder now, whining like a broken engine. I pulled myself up as Alpha yanked at the door to the cockpit. But she slipped back as the door flew open. And then she was hanging off the purple tubing below. Ten feet down. Ten feet too far.

The sun went black as locusts swarmed above us, spiraling out of the sky as I scrambled below the cockpit, inching out along a steel pipe, reaching down with my hand.

“Go,” Alpha screamed, but I just kept reaching for her as the swarm closed in above us. And then I saw locusts below, pouring out of the corn and across the service road, rising up the sides of the duster like a flood.

Alpha stretched up with her fingers, high as she could, and the locusts grew louder, wailing and buzzing and filling the air.

I locked my hand on Alpha’s wrist. Dragged her toward me, hauling her up. We slipped back along the pipe as it gave way beneath us, leapt for the cockpit as the locusts hit.

I felt their wings beat the wind through my hair and they bored through my boots as I shoved Alpha into the cab and spun around to seal the door tight behind us.

They hammered at the glass windows. They rattled at the walls. A black cloud. A blur of wings and sharp little mouths. We stamped dead the rogues that had made it inside, and then we pressed together in the middle of the cockpit, arms over our ears as we squeezed our eyes shut.

Then the roar became a buzz and it faded. Light broke back inside the cockpit. Sunlight. I opened my eyes. Stared out the window. I watched as the locusts drifted across the tops of the cornfields then swooped down all at once inside the plants, sinking into the crops like a stone. Gone to feast on some field hand, I guess. Or some other poor struggler who’d strayed into the corn.

“We’re okay?” Alpha whispered, shaking against me.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re okay.”

I stared down at the service road where the bones of the agents were splayed on the dirt. If there’d been another agent inside the pod, then they’d not made it – Alpha had shot the windshield clean through.

“We should get back,” I said.

“Wait,” she said. “Look.”

I peered west across the top of the cornfields and there, jagged and dark on the horizon, I could see the towering mess of Vega. The bulging skyline of the Electric City.

“We’re getting close,” I said. I turned to Alpha and her eyes were bright. Her lips were just inches from mine.

“You know what we’re supposed to do?” she whispered.

“Just keep on till we get there.”

“No.” She made our noses touch. “I mean now.”

She pulled me to the floor on top of her, and my heart was pounding and my mouth got thick. I felt wired up. Full of juice. And then we were kissing, something inside of me exploding as I felt her lips on mine.

She took my hands and wrapped my fingers beneath her thighs. Her legs were strong. Smooth. And she was so warm. I’d never felt anything near as soft as her skin. I kissed her jaw and her neck and then her mouth again, and kissing that girl was like the whole point of living.

Her eyes were closed and trembling and I closed mine too. Dark now. Like we’d been sucked inside some tunnel leading down through the earth.

“Damn, bud,” she said, when I stopped kissing her.

I just lay there, breathing her in.

She reached to her vest and unclipped it, as if she was unlocking herself for me. I stared into her brown eyes as she took my hand and pressed it on her chest. I felt her heart beat strong. But then Alpha grinned, like being serious had suddenly become foolish.

I went to kiss her again, but she was already grabbing her gun and standing, buttoning back up her vest. “Come on,” she said, pulling me to my feet. “They’ll be worried about us.”

She winked at me as she threw the door open, and then she slid down the ladder, blowing right through the bones of the field hand and kicking his remains into dust. I just stared after her for a moment, my body still hungry and light. Then I shot down the ladder and we hit the ground running, our eyes watching the sky for the darkness, our ears peeled for that horrible sound.

Crow shoved the door open and we dove into the wagon. Ended up in a sweaty pile on the floor by the driver’s seat, Crow just staring down at us, shaking his head.

“Your car’s tougher than it looks,” he said.

I saw Hina and Sal cowered in the back, holding on to each other, and Hina was giving me some new look I’d not seen before.

“What’s left out there?” Crow said.

“Nothing,” I told him. “Just their vehicle.”

He arched his eyebrows. “Their vehicle? Unattended?”

“Right.”

Crow sparked the engine and backed up the wagon, pointing it around the far side of the duster.

“What are you doing?” said Alpha, and Crow laughed out loud.

“I be going to see what Jah has provided for us on this fine morning. A GenTech pod ain’t salvage,” he said. “It’s gold. Solid gold.”

Crow tore through the dirt and plowed the wagon through those three piles of bones, and what was left of the agents just fizzled like smoke. We pulled so close to the GenTech pod that the two vehicles were almost touching. Then Crow cut the engine and waited until everything was silent.

“We leave this door open,” he said, pointing at the passenger side. “We’re quick. And we’re quiet. Anyone hears anything, the door closes in ten seconds. Right?”

“All right,” I said, then I turned to Sal and Hina. “You two stay in here.”

“I want to come,” Sal said.

“You’re too slow, kid.”

“It’s all right,” Hina said, giving me that strange look again, like her eyes were trying to tell me something. “I’ll watch him.”

Alpha popped open the door and we fell into daylight, the sky blue above us and the corn a deep green.

The pod had sunk on busted tires, bullet holes riddled the paint job, and all its glass was shattered. We lifted up the side hatch. And then we dropped down inside a whole different world.

GenTech purple. Everywhere. Everything clean looking, shiny, like it had been snatched from a dream. They had gadgets down in that pod that you could tell were a whole different league. None of it was sprouting wires or had been taped together or was rigged backward and falling apart. These gizmos were tidier than the console in Harvest’s ship. Sleek and small and silent.

“There it is,” Crow said, kneeling on a seat, getting up close to a glittery console on the wall.

Alpha still had her head out the top of the hatch, watching the skies.

“What is it?” I said to Crow.

“This here’s the main hub,” he said. “And the readouts. But there’ll be another one around somewhere.” He yanked open some panels and rummaged inside.

“You see anything?” I said to Alpha, giving her leg a squeeze.

“Quiet,” she said. “I’m listening.”

I stared around the pod again. Picked up a foam hat with the GenTech logo plastered across the front of it.

“Fancy shit,” I said.

“As fancy as it comes,” said Crow, digging inside a box of tools. “Look in the back for their guns, little man.”

I stuck my head back there and found a spare set of suits all neatly folded and stacked in place. And there, hanging off the ceiling, were two purple handguns that looked a whole lot better than the one I’d been using. The guns were clean and smooth, looked like they’d never even been used. I unclipped them, grabbed them off the ceiling, then I scooted back to the front of the pod.

“I got it,” Crow said.

“What is it?” I stared at the small box in the palm of his hand.

“This,” Crow said, his grin broad as I’d seen it, “is a GenTech Positioning System. Agent types in coordinates, it tells them where to go. This is it, little man. This is what we been needing. This right here is our GPS.”

Sal couldn’t believe it. His eyes grew as big as his whole head. Hell, I could hardly believe it myself. But there we were, heading west, winding through the service roads, weaving our way through that maze of corn, and when we popped out the other side, all we’d have to do is enter those numbers, the north one and the east one, and then we’d just glide right on through. My old man seemed close all of a sudden. Like he could be waiting around the next bend in the road.

Alpha wanted to enter the numbers right then, see how far away we’d be heading, but Crow just dangled the gadget off his fingertips, holding it away from us. Had to conserve the battery, he said. Better to wait till we were out of the maze.

I drove through till the sun went down, and when it got dark I pulled over next to the corn and shut the engine off. We couldn’t risk using the headlights, and the absence of moon made it too dark to see.

The five of us clumped in the back of the wagon, all rammed together as we guessed about the future. Closest thing to family I’d known since Pop had been taken. A team, all of a sudden. A real team. Hell, even Hina seemed to be smiling, though she also kept stealing strange looks at me. I paid that no mind, though. We had food in our bellies and tomorrow on our brains. And the next day, and the next one. And every day after that.

“What do you think they look like?” Alpha said.

“Like that, you dummy,” Sal yelled, pointing at Hina’s belly and laughing. “What do you think they’re going to look like?”

“But do you think there’s just a couple?” she said. “Or a whole big stand?”

“There’s a stand,” I said, picturing the photo of my father. “Whole forest.”

“You bet there’s a whole forest. And I bet there are oranges and coconuts and almonds, too. Imagine the flavors.” Sal let out a shriek. He slapped me on the thigh. “We’re going to be so loaded. So rich we won’t even know what to do.”

Crow had stayed quiet mostly, but now he chimed in. “Just remember, Mister Sal, your daddy might be there, too.” Crow stared at me as he said it.

“That’s right,” Sal said, nodding at Crow. Then the kid turned his face so I couldn’t see it. I thought about the correction, the hidden tattoo.

And I thought about Zee.

Thinking about her made me solemn. Couldn’t help but picture her in the back of the wagon with us, celebrating something we’d not yet done. And it made me think about what was going to happen when the journey ended. Would I really find my father in that stand of trees? Alive? The old Rasta had said Pop had until spring. And winter had only just barely begun.

So if my old man was there, what would come next? Could we build us a house in those treetops? Or had the trees already been cut down and sold? Was that what it came down to? Selling the forest like a bucket of corn? Something for the pirates. Something for the Soljahs. Who else? The Salvage Guild?

Still, as long as GenTech didn’t get it. I thought about the endless rows of crops that surrounded us. Enough food you could feed every struggler. Or you could just get rich off your prices, and keep people low down and starved.

Soon we had eaten and talked enough to be sleepy. No damn air in the wagon that hadn’t been breathed a thousand times over. We were drowsy. All of us. Even the watcher.

“Been awake since Old Orleans,” Crow said, pulling my old man’s sombrero over his face. “Believe I earned me some shut eye.”

And one by one, our heads dropped till we were all passed out and sleeping. Reckon I was the last to go, pressed up against Alpha as her face twitched and her mouth hung open. I loved the smell of her, and I remember thinking that right before I fell asleep.

Before my eyes fell shut and everything changed again.

It was Hina that woke me. She was poking at my back, and I sat up and glanced around the wagon. Everyone was sleeping. Everyone but her and me.

She pointed at the hatch, gesturing that she wanted to go outside. The moon was up now, white on the cornstalks.

“We can’t,” I whispered. But she nodded. And I wondered if this meant she had something to tell me. About my father. About the trees.

I popped the hatch open, nice and quiet, and I breathed in the fresh smell of crops as I poked my head through.

Straining to listen, I climbed out of the wagon and held the hatch so Hina could come beside me. I stared around at the night, thinking about the locusts and that awful noise they made, thinking how Hina had better make this real quick. But she surprised me by clicking the hatch shut behind us.

“Come with me,” she whispered, taking my hand. And then she led me inside the corn.

Our footsteps made a dry, cracking sound. We squeezed past the stalks until we found a sort of clearing, just enough space that we could stand facing each other. All I could hear was the thump of my heart. It was stupid being out there. I knew it was dangerous. But if Hina had something to tell me, I reckoned it was something I needed to hear.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“I remembered where it came from,” she said, and as she spoke she lifted her shirt off her belly, showing me the leaves and branches of that beautiful tree. I could see her pulse through her stomach.

“I thought you were dead,” she said. “When you climbed that machine and the swarms came. But you’re strong, like your father. And I remembered it. How they sent me to find him. To bring him back home.”

I went to speak, but she talked right over me, all the while stroking at the colors tattooed on her skin.

“He wanted to stop it,” she said. Her voice was like she’d just come awake. “All of it. And now I have to warn you.”

“What?” I said. “Warn me about what?”

But Hina just closed her eyes. Her fingers still caressing the tattoo tree but the rest of her like she was sleeping, standing on her feet but caught in a dream. And for a moment everything was silent. Everything was still. But then I heard the footsteps come crunching toward us. Closer and closer. Someone stepping through the corn.

The poacher’s face looked like it had once been broke open and then pieced back together wrong. He stood before us. An ugly shadow beneath the bright white of the moon.

“Get away from her,” the man said. But I was frozen, like I was tangled up in the plants. “Move,” he said, and this time he pointed a shotgun at my head.

I stepped aside, the gun following my every move, waving just inches from my face. I went to say something, but the man cut me off.

“Keep your mouth shut, boy.”

He shone his flashlight over Hina, top to bottom, his mouth hanging open and stringy with spit, his eyes bulging out of his head. He blinked as he jabbed the flashlight at her skin, like he was testing whether or not she was real. Then he stared at me again and pushed the shotgun under my jaw.

The man turned his head and waved his flashlight in a figure eight. He knocked four times at a cornstalk.

“How many are there?” he said.

“Ain’t no one else,” I told him, my voice as shaky as the rest of me.

“In the car?” He jabbed the shotgun deeper. “How many in the car?”

“It’s empty,” I said. “Broken.”

“You lie.” He sneered. “But it’ll do you no good.”

I heard more footsteps in the crops, and the poacher gestured for me to start walking. I pushed Hina in front of me, keeping my hands on her shoulders and trying to block her from the poacher as he stabbed his gun at my spine and shoved us back toward the wagon.

When we stepped onto the service road, about twenty poachers stepped onto it with us. They slid through the stems and appeared in the night, like they’d bled right out of the crops. Some of them didn’t even carry guns, just knives or hacksaws. They wore clothes made of corn husks, and all their feet were bare.

I studied the shriveled bodies and the faces in the moonlight. Dead eyes. More scars than teeth.

The poacher behind me prodded his gun at my head, pushing me against the wagon as he tried to peer inside it. Then he took the butt of the shotgun and pounded at the roof.

“Come on out,” he roared.

The rest of the poachers had circled the car now. Heads stooped and weapons raised. The man pounded on the wagon again.

“We don’t want you,” he yelled. “Just the car and what’s in it. So come on out. Or your friends here are gonna suffer.” He stared at Hina as he said it and I felt her tremble beside me.

The man hammered at the roof until the rear hatch lifted as if the pounding had popped it loose. Sal’s head stuck out and the poacher made a sound that was supposed to be laughter.

“Shit,” the man said, pulling Sal out of the car by his ear. “Look at the size of this one.”

It all happened so fast there was no time to think.

A gun fired out the back of the wagon, and the bullet sank into that brokeface poacher, launched him back about five feet. Then the rest of the poachers fell upon us. Some of them heading for Sal, but most of them cornering me and Hina and wrestling us into the corn.

It was chaos. A tumble of bodies charging through the crops, gunshots and voices screaming.

But then the world stood still. The night turned black.

And an ugly swarming sound filled up the air.

I’d never seen people disappear like that. Those poachers spread thin and then vanished, like they’d found holes in the world to stay hidden inside. They were gone. Just like that. And me and Hina were ten yards from the road.

I stumbled and thrashed through the crops, pulling Hina with me as locusts filled the air with a whining, desperate sound that filled your head and stopped you from thinking.

I crashed forward, losing my balance for an instant, and then I was down in the dirt and lost and Hina’s hand was gone.

I spun around and saw her.

One last time.

She’d stopped running. She was just stood there, staring at me, and I watched as that frothy cloud descended upon her, buzzing and biting and coming down slow. Consuming her. Her head, her beautiful head. The swarm seemed to suck her inside it. It went down past her neck and over her shoulders, spun down her arms and low down her chest, pulling her in like a twister on the plains.

Her beautiful belly. That soft brown skin. The tree. All of it. Gone. Ravaged. Every root and branch and leaf. Every secret inside that now would stay hidden.

And I howled at that swarm and the crops and the sky, and the stars should have quit because there weren’t no reason to be shining.

The locusts were at her hips now, clawing their way lower. And I could have touched them if I’d just reached out my hand. But finally I felt my legs moving, pushing me backward. I was on all fours. And then I was running.

At the wagon every door was closed. I punched at the windows, smashed at the roof. And I felt the locusts buzz closer, tearing through the air toward me.

Alpha threw open the door as I felt the sharp mouths sink into my skin. I fell inside, pulled the door shut. But the locusts were still on me, gnawing my neck and the back of my skull.

Crow pushed me to the floor and leaned over me, swiping at the locusts, crushing them with his fist. They bit at him, and he lashed and cried till the last one was dead. And then he just crouched above me, his fists all bleeding and raw and the windows black with that swarm pressing in at us.

Then, finally, as the noise let up and the swarm drifted higher, I could hear the sound of Sal weeping. And Alpha’s voice, quiet and muffled.

“What were you doing?” she kept saying. “What have you done?”

I stared at her as the moonlight spilled in. Her face was slick with tears and her hands were clasped at her stomach, pressing at the bullet wound like she might squeeze the blood back inside her.

Alpha gazed at me through a face full of pain. She was quivering with it. But her eyes were still sharp. Focused. The veins on her neck twitched and her breath came short and shallow.

“Banyan,” Crow said, but the word seemed to float past me. “Banyan.”

He’d slid behind the steering wheel with his hands all mashed and bleeding. I stared at him, wondering what could possibly matter now.

Then I sensed the night shift color again. Brighten. But not on its own accord. I stared through the windshield and saw three pods in the distance. Bearing down the road toward us, burning us up with their purple glare.

Crow cranked on the engine and spun the wagon back around.

“You’re gonna need to hold them off,” he said, and for the first time, everything about Crow seemed out in the open. And he was scared shitless. Just like me.

I hauled Alpha into the back as Crow slid the wagon through a turn and began speeding back down the service roads. Undoing all the distance we’d covered. Losing ground all over again.

I got Alpha set so she’d not be shaking around too much, and she was staying silent now, but her eyes told me all I needed to know. Her hands were slick with her own blood, and I tried shoving my hands against her wound but the blood kept coming and the blood would not stop.

“Sal,” I screamed, and I could hear Crow shouting at me. “Sal.” I grabbed the kid by his neck. “Quit sniveling, you little shit. You gotta help.”

I pulled off my shirt and had Sal shove it deep in Alpha’s stomach, stemming the wound that kept gaping and frothing like some sort of mouth. Then I yanked the piece of bark off my torso and placed it over the shirt, strapping it in place so tight I was scared it might stop her from breathing.

Sal fingered at the bark.

“Leave it alone,” I told him. “Take one of these.”

I handed him one of the pistols I’d snagged from the pod.

“Come on,” Crow bellowed, and I yanked up the rear hatch with Alpha behind me, and Sal at my elbow, ready to shoot.

“Fire,” I yelled, and we let it rip. Just squeezing the triggers, letting off a round of those fancy bullets, a round that seemed like it might never end.

The GenTech pods didn’t fire back at us. They just kept on coming, our bullets puncturing the purple steel but not slowing them down a damn bit.

“The glass,” Crow called. “Aim for the glass.”

I tried. Kept trying. But it was too hard to point straight, what with the wagon swerving every which way as we bounced through the sand.

Finally, I cracked one of the windshields and sent that pod reeling into the crops. The others opened fire now, keeping their bullets low, aiming for our tires.

“Keep shooting,” I said to Sal, but he held his gun up. Empty. I handed him what was left of mine and reached for Alpha’s rifle in the front of the wagon, stretching my arm out across her crumpled body, groping through the dark.

But my hand never found the rifle.

The duster appeared out of the crops in front of us like a wall of steel teeth. Crow seized up the brakes but we hit. We hit hard. The wagon never stood a chance. Those duster blades ripped right through the engine and gobbled it in pieces, clamping down every inch and dragging it inside the belly of that giant metal beast.

The blades chopped through the steering wheel, and Crow’s thighs exploded as the metal ripped them apart. I grabbed his arms and yanked what was left of him into the rear of the wagon.

But the duster kept coming.

Sal was gone, I remember. Like maybe he’d been hurled out the back on impact. Or maybe he’d scampered free. And Alpha was out cold. I dragged her on top of me with one hand and clawed toward the open hatch with the other. The sound of the duster was something beyond noise. So loud it seemed silent. Or perhaps I’d already gone numb.

Crow pulled his bleeding stump along with his fingernails. The three of us moving too slow. But then we reached the hatch. Pushed through.

My wagon thrashed and spun into tiny chunks behind us and I remember gazing back down the throat of the duster, watching my old life being digested and sorted into scraps. And the duster seemed to keep eating my wagon, long after everything had stopped moving, even after the blades had stopped spinning, after every engine shut off.

And in the same way, I don’t think there was a time I stopped screaming. Crow all bloody and twitching, and Alpha all gone beside me.

I wailed and hollered and I wished I was dead.

Then the duster fired up a torch beam and brought that light down upon us. The color of a bruised purple sun. And the headlights of the pods all fused together, making things as bright as they were bad.

I heard footsteps. Doors opening and closing. I heard voices. Then they were taking Alpha from me. They had blood on their suits. Purple and red. And I couldn’t stop them from taking her because they were taking me too. Needles jabbing at me, breaking my skin.

“Hold still,” someone yelled. As if I was moving. Then I could hear Crow screaming and it was exactly what the Darkness must have sounded like. The twenty years of night.

“Not again,” Crow roared, till his voice split in two. “Not again.”