Rootless - Howard Chris - Страница 24

“He’s okay?”

“Not for long.” I peered back at Zee’s mother again. The woman my father had loved. I had questions for her. But no time now to ask them.

“Banyan,” Zee whispered. “I heard they run a meat trade. In the Electric City.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard it.”

These folk were too scrawny, I told myself. But then I reckoned they could be fattened up if they got stuffed full of Superfood. Didn’t make sense with what the Rasta had told me — the trees, the boat across the ocean. But none of that made much sense, either.

I pulled myself loose of Zee but she followed me to the cell door. “What do you think his next move is?” I said to Jawbone.

“Depends how big his army is.”

“So what’s the plan?”

She smiled a little, her eyes gleaming in the dull green light. “The plan’s the same as it’s always been,” she said. “Since old Harvest parked his ship too close to my city.”

Jawbone pulled off her soggy boots and plucked a string of wires from inside them, spilling her wares across the floor.

Explosives. Whole reel of them.

“Hope you’re ready for a fight, tree builder,” Jawbone said, staring at me. “We’re going to gut the bastard from the inside out.”

Zee gathered up the rest of the people in the cell, shuffling them tight to the far wall as I helped Jawbone set a small pack of plastics on the door.

“You know how big this’ll blow?” I asked, watching her hands working a short fuse, her fingers full of fury.

“Big enough,” she said. “The rest we slap on a live fuel line. Then I suggest you get above deck, fast as your friends can move.”

“What about the other folk? The rest of the prisoners?”

“You want to waste time down here, go ahead. I’ll be trying to save the rest of my people. Alpha included.” She let her eyes linger on me a moment longer, watching to see what I was going to do. But there was no way she could read me. Because I had no idea my damn self.

Jawbone reached down the front of her pants and retrieved a gold lighter. She flicked the thing open and waved it at the fuse.

“Ready?”

I backed up. Stumbled and fell. Then I rolled over and leapt to the back wall, the crazy girl with the bombs coming right on behind me.

I heard the blast an instant before I felt it. And when I did feel it, the shock wave lifted me off my feet and hurled me at the wall. I crashed into steel. Choked on smoke. The heat scorched my throat and I crouched there with my eyes watering.

I staggered up and bent forward as the smoke lifted. I screamed for Jawbone. But she was already gone.

Out on the walkway I peered through the patches of smoke, panic setting in as I realized I’d no idea which direction Jawbone had headed. I called her name again, loud as I could, but other voices had risen up now, and the screams all joined together.

I sprinted back into the cell, grabbing Zee and her mother, suddenly furious with their lack of speed. But then I saw Zee’s face. She was choking up, and each time she coughed a little splatter of blood sprayed on her hands and dripped down her chin.

“Listen,” I said, trying to get her to breathe. “They got this room full of books in this city. We get out of here and you can just sit there and read each one.” She blinked at me, wiping the blood off her fingers.

“Makes you feel better,” I said. “Remember?”

I turned to Hina. “You gotta run.” I pointed in the direction Harvest had disappeared. “At the end of the walkway there’s a ladder. Go up. Far as you can.”

“What are you going to do?” Zee said, her mother pushing her forward.

“I’ll be right behind you,” I lied. “Start running.”

I watched them for a moment. Then I turned and bolted down the corridor, heading deeper into the hull.

I slammed at the cell doors as I ran alongside them. But it was useless, each one was padlocked shut. My best guess of our location made me figure any sort of fuel lines would be at this end of the transport. And I knew if I thought the juice was this way, then Jawbone would be betting the same thing.

I’d no idea what I’d do if I caught her. No plan. No options left. But there had to be a better way. A better answer than letting all these lost souls disintegrate in the bowels of this horrible ship.

Hands reached through the bars at me, swiping and clutching. Voices begged me to stop.

“Jawbone,” I screamed, like the name had torn its way outside me. And for a moment I saw her. But then she was just blowing right through me, sprinting back down the walkway as I sprawled on the floor.

She turned and called back, never losing her pace. “It’s too late,” she yelled. “I found a hot spot. Run with me.”

“Better do what the lady tells you, little man.”

I spun around at the voice. Crow’s voice.

He reached through the bars and gripped my neck in his hand, dragging me to my feet and pulling me close.

I stared into the cell and the whites of his eyes. I studied his beard, his dreads, limp now, all matted with filth.

Crow grinned his glittery teeth through the blackness. “You get out of here, little man, you catch up to Frost, you say hello to him for me.”

I nodded, the watcher’s hand warm and rough, squeezing my windpipe. Then he let go and my feet dropped back to the floor.

“I and I be seeing you,” Crow said. “In the next one.”

I scrambled down the corridor and away from him. Not ever once turning back.

When the first charge blew, it made a broken sound. A crack, then a boom. I was almost at the damn ladder, had almost made it. I felt the heat as I slid forward, and I watched the fireball tear down the tunnel behind me like it was being sucked through a straw.

The flames rolled like the sun, and I tugged at the low rung of the ladder, heaving myself up as the air itself seemed to melt.

I crawled into the pipe as the fire surged and ruptured, the force of it pushing me higher, propelling me up, burning the soles off my shoes.

Top of the ladder, I rolled onto the walkway. Black and smoking. Flames spiraled through the darkness as I leapt to my feet.

I kicked off my melted shoes as I sprinted back into the cockpit, and right away I could see through the window why the ship had seemed so empty of crew.

They were out there. All of them. An army, like Jawbone had said. An army of gray men in gray plastic jackets. And each one of those men looked exactly same. Even from a distance, I could see it. Their faces as identical as the clothes they wore. The same hairless skull. An army of copies. A thousand King Harvests.

They were crawling over Old Orleans, rounding up pirates or mowing them down. It was a war zone. Chaos. And there in the cockpit was Zee and Hina. Waiting on me.

But Jawbone was straddling the control panel with a gun in her hand. And pinned beneath her was Harvest himself. The one man who might hold all the answers. The one man who knew where the slave ship was bound.

Jawbone fired before I could even holler. Before I could do any damn thing at all. She had the pistol rammed under Harvest’s chin, and the bullet splattered bits of his brain across the sparkle of the control panel, his blood spraying at the monitors and levers and knobs.

Someone was screaming and I realized it was my own voice, the sound rising out of me with no warning.

Jawbone stared at me, brushing the bits of skin out of her hair as she leapt off the console. “Relax, Banyan,” she muttered. “The man wasn’t worth crying for.”

She lowered her gun too soon and the cockpit door sprang open, and a man who looked just like Harvest came sliding in with the rain.