Rootless - Howard Chris - Страница 26

The underside of the walkways formed a concrete sky above me, a patchwork of stone woven with steel. I tried sitting up but stayed resting. And Sal squatted there beside me, like he was waiting on me to speak.

You never seen someone float like Sal could. Son of a bitch was unsinkable. Took him all he had to keep plunging down below the surface, groping around for the nail gun like I’d asked him, his feet sticking up in the air, then disappearing before he came up empty-handed. Over and over again.

“I can’t find it.” Sal sputtered and gasped as he paddled back to the mud. “It’s too deep.” He stretched out on the bank and shook his head at me.

I stared up at the city, feeling like I was just shit in its pants. I knew I had to get gone. Far away and quick about it. I thought about Pop. The trees.

But then I thought about Alpha.

“I’m heading back up there,” I said.

“You’re insane. The women have gone loopy. And those men, you’ve never seen so many guns.”

“Where’s the pit?”

He pointed. “Full of water now. And bodies. You can’t go that way if you don’t know how to swim.”

“Then follow me,” I said. “We’ll head back to the forest. From there I can double back around.”

“There’s a forest?” Sal said as we began slipping through the mud.

“Yeah,” I told him, glancing up through the slats in the walkways. “And that ain’t all.”

Beneath the ferns, I found a pillar we could climb and I pushed Sal out of the mud, shoving at him till he was clear to the top. He stared at the statue of Hina like his brain had stopped working.

“It’s her,” the kid whispered.

“Wait till you get on the inside.”

I pushed him off toward the statue, told him how to get up under its foot. And then I turned back to the city.

The bullets had faded to a dribble. Just the occasional burst of gunfire breaking the silence. Smoke had cleared off the walkways, and as I ran through the mess, the clouds began to open again, washing away the remains, turning the piles of bodies into mush.

At the center of town I’d still not seen a soul, and finally I began to holler for Alpha, screaming her name at the top of my lungs.

I heard her long before I could see her, and when I saw her I barely knew who she was. She was stood atop the walls of the city, her legs wide and her head thrown back. And she was making a noise like a creature that had just figured out it could fly.

I stared up through the smoke at her. She was like something you’d try to build, if you could. As if she represented something no words could say.

She was slick with mud and her vest had been matted stringy, soaked with the blood of others. I watched as she raised both arms in the air, waving her gun above her head, still whooping that battle cry that no soul could have taught her.

When I finally found nerve to call up, she spun and stared down upon me and I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.

I ran up to her, though she stood still. And when I reached her, I held her the way I longed to be held. She folded into me and I gazed across the top of her, staring out at the plains where the remains of Harvest’s troops had scattered in the mud.

The transport lay split and smoldering below us, and I studied the broken shell that just a day before had seemed to me like a city that could move.

“This is the way the world ends,” Alpha whispered, her head slippery on my shoulder.

“No,” I said, squeezing her against me. “There’s more.”

It didn’t take much time to persuade her. As the rain poured down and the darkness gathered, I told Alpha everything. All of my secrets. All that I knew. I told her about the tattoo that pointed to a place that was different. A place that wasn’t just locked in an old story or stuck inside an old world song. I told her about my father. And I told her about the trees. About how beautiful they were and how they were more even than that. How they were something built for survival. Something that might put food on the table and burn bright the dark. And as I talked, I wondered if my father had once made a promise as he sat on the walls of this city, his arms holding the world through a woman, his eyes straining out at the mysterious night.

“What if we don’t find them?” Alpha said, shivering in the rain as it mingled with the blood on her skin.

“Then I’ll keep building them,” I said. “Best as I can.”

She studied my face, like she was reading something.

“Where my dad was taken,” I told her. “Could be that’s where your mom got dragged off, too.”

“Been a long time, bud.” She stared down into the city. The pirates had begun to gather below us, waiting for a new captain to call.

“I don’t think they can come,” I said, looking down. “If you’re coming with me.”

“I’ll go with you, bud. They’ll call me queen of every pirate army, I come home with trees to grow and fruit to eat.”

I stared at her. Wanting her. And I wanted to be more than just her means to some end. I wanted to be someone with which she’d become rooted and tangled.

I leaned into her. And I would have kissed her. Never mind all the guts on the ground, never mind her face being covered in filth. I would have kissed her. Tried to, at least. But I heard a voice rise up from the city below us. And the voice belonged to no pirate.

“That you, little man?” Crow called through the darkness. “That you?”

My heart sank in my guts as I staggered back down into the city. It was pitch black now, the clouds plugging the stars and painting the moon. The rain had settled into a drizzle. Harvesters lay broken on the ground, and the surviving pirates were huddled in stooped patches. But Crow stood tall and wide, towering above everyone. And everything.

He’d lost his beard. All the hair on his head had been singed off, replaced by blood and blisters. His clothes hung off him, torn and frayed, as if he’d been trying to shed them but had given up halfway through.

Crow’s grin split the dark as I approached him. “Happy to see you,” he said. “Though you look about as bad as I feel.”

“You got out,” I said, as if saying the words might make me believe them.

“Aye. With bodies before me. And bodies behind.” Crow studied his hands, his forearms. “Can still feel the poor bastards sticky on my skin.”

“Are there more?”

“Don’t know. Was a mighty big split in the hull. But Miss Zee was in there. Her mother also.”

“How’d they catch you?”

“In the corn.”

“Poachers?”

“Agents.”

“Agents don’t grab folk off the road.”

“They do now.”

I thought about what that could mean — GenTech agents handing off slaves to King Harvest. And I thought about how it made heading west now seem a whole lot more dangerous, seeing as the cornfields are never short of those bastards in the purple suits.

“What the hell was he gonna do with all those people?” I said.

“I don’t know.” Crow shrugged. “But a ship that size, I’d say whatever he been doing it for, he been doing it a long time.”

“Wait,” I said, remembering what Zee had told me. “You used to work for GenTech. Before you worked for Frost.”

Crow laughed that low rumble of his. “Indeed I did, little man. Indeed I did.”

“You were looking for trees.”

He quit laughing and his eyes changed. “Looking?” he said. “No, I wasn’t looking. But they found me, you might say. And now I think you’d better take me with you.”

“Take you with me?”

“Miss Zee said you hell bent on finding the Promised Land, in which case you need what I need. Vega’s the only place you can find the GPS. So you best head west. And that being so, I’d say you need me.”