The Rift - Howard Chris - Страница 32

“Look at this.” I scooped up a handful of algae. “Down in these caves, they got wild things still growing. What? You don’t like the smell?”

“I like the mammoths.”

“There you go.”

“Riding on its back, felt like I had real legs again.”

I wondered if that’s what had gotten his spirits up. Because Crow had been holding us back on the way up the mountains, slowing us down in the snow and ready to quit, but now he sure seemed fired up to keep moving south.

“They can heal you.” I pointed at the Healer as she tended the saplings. “She can work magic.”

“Maybe. But that’s no reason to stay here. There’s a whole world be needing those trees.”

“You mean Niagara needs them. Your world.” I stood up. “Not mine.”

I felt the Healer’s hands on me as I pushed through the steam and made for the exit. When I spun around, she was right there at my side. Hard to look in her eyes, though, all of a sudden, as if she was building some sort of wall to keep something from me.

“Must come,” she whispered, tugging at my vest. “You must see.”

“What about him?” I shrugged back at Crow.

“He rests.”

I lowered my voice. “But you can make him better. Right?”

“Come,” she said again, and I realized she’d lost all trace of her smile.

The Healer led me inside some sort of vault full of old world salvage. Cave stuffed with junk the Kalliq had rustled up from the depths or pried out of the ice. Hell if I know where they’d found all of it, or what they wanted it for. It was good scrap for tree building, but not worth burying in the ground.

The Healer found a flashlight on the floor and poked it around the place, illuminating the wreckage of a forgotten world. I couldn’t figure the rhyme or reason to what it was they’d collected. Some stuff was so rusty, I couldn’t even tell what lay underneath. There were old game machines and speakers, a fleet of motorcycles. Engines without cars, and cars without engines.

“What is all this?” I said, feeling the Healer’s eyes upon me. “What is it you want me to see?”

She took my hand and led me deeper into the tomb, following the beam of her flashlight as it danced upon the iron and copper, the steel and chrome. Damn fine salvage, some of it. Pop would have rubbed his hands together and called it the jackpot. Was a time I’d have done the same thing myself.

The vault was wider than I could see, and many times longer. We walked all the way down to the deepest-dark end. Then the Healer had me stop in front of what looked like a makeshift coffin, a box nailed together out of corrugated tin.

“Hold,” she said, handing me the flashlight. She got down on her knees, unfastening the hinges that latched the box shut, and when she peeled back the lid of that coffin, I damn near dropped her flashlight.

There was a woman in there. I could see the whole body. Her shoulders, her hips, and her legs. I could see her belly and face, her hands at her sides. All of it preserved, and solid as stone.

But it weren’t stone. It was wood. Knobby and thick and channeled, everything covered in scaly bark.

I sank down to my knees, slowly illuminating the dead woman with the beam of the flashlight, one piece of her at a time. And she was dead, all right. All the way through. There weren’t nothing growing. Nothing green or breathing.

“Who is she?” I whispered, glancing at the Healer.

“She is poison.” The voice came from behind me. I spun around with the flashlight and found the Speaker, scowling amid the junk. The woman turned to her sister and spat words in her own language. But the Healer just stayed crouching beside me, still staring down at the dead thing in the box.

“It is disease,” said the Speaker.

“No.” The Healer got to her feet and fastened the lid to the coffin back in place.

“It killed her.” The Speaker stepped closer, her eyes drilling holes into mine. “It is death.”

“Where did she come from?”

“She arrived here. Starving and injured. Wearing this.” The Speaker strode past the coffin and rummaged at the stacks of old scrap behind it until she found a fuzzy GenTech suit. Then she pulled out a long piece of plastic—a crappy white sheet, just like the ones GenTech had thrown over us when they’d dragged us to Promise Island.

“So she escaped,” I murmured, staring down at the closed-up tin box full of GenTech meddling.

I tried to imagine what the woman had once looked like, where she’d been from, who she had been. Now she was just a relic. A refugee of a warped experiment.

“When?” I said. “When did she get here?”

“Almost all seasons have passed. She came like you, in winter. Before the world melted last spring.”

Had she been one of the people my father had saved? Had she been set free by my old man before he got wrapped up in chains? Must have been. Hell, maybe she’d been one of the first to flee Promise Island after Pop’s uprising got started. Maybe she’d escaped with that old Rasta, the one me and Zee had stumbled upon all the way back at the Surge.

I thought about that old Rasta, the bark stitched on his belly.

“How’d this happen?” I asked, staring at the coffin, picturing the dead body inside.

“She was normal.” The Speaker tapped at her face. “Same. Here.” She pointed at her belly, then her arms and her legs. “Here. And here.”

“No bark?”

The woman turned around. Jabbed a hand at her mid-back, right near her spine. “Disease,” she said, turning back to face me.

So she’d been patched up. Patched with bark, like the old Rasta near the Surge had been. Fixed with GenTech science. Like Crow.

Like Alpha.

“Then what happened?”

“It spread.” The Speaker glared at me like the whole thing had been my fault. “In the spring.”

“Spread?” I said. “The bark spread?”

“Yes,” the Healer said softly.

The Speaker drew a line from her mid-back till it wrapped around her hips. She traced her fingers over her torso until her hands found her neck and her face. And then she made a strangling motion, covering her mouth and gouging at her eyeballs, squeezing her nose shut and plugging her ears. When she let her hands drop to her side, her face had turned brittle and breathless.

Just like drowning, I thought.

The bark would spread and pinch and seal you inside it. Then you’d drown, surrounded by the air you could no longer breathe. And the people you could no longer touch.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I ran out of that vault and sprinted blind through the steaming black tunnels.

The spring, they’d said. The woman had come, wrapped in purple fuzz and white plastic, and when the world began to melt, the small patch of bark on her back had spread. Like a disease.

I tried not to picture it. But I couldn’t stop the vision putting its claws in my heart. I grew thick inside, like the bark on that dead woman’s body, and the image stiffened inside me. Choking me as it poured down my throat.

I imagined Crow stood tall in the springtime, the bark from his legs wrapping up his waist and then strapping itself to his chest. It would coil around his lungs and fuse itself together, stitching his mouth shut as his arms fell like heavy branches.

No idea where I was running now. I just pounded on through the tunnels, shoving aside the merry Kalliq who bounced along and got in my way. The steam in my eyes. The stench of mammoth shit wafting up to greet me. It all made me feel so useless and sick.