The Rift - Howard Chris - Страница 35

I stared down at the saplings. I swear the quiet in that crater rippled across the stone walls.

“Safe,” the Healer said. But I couldn’t look at her.

I turned to Alpha, then Zee. I glanced up at Crow.

“There’s seven,” he said. “You got more than you need.”

I scowled. “How do you know how many I need?”

“It’s a trade,” said Zee. “We give up a tree, and we get a mammoth. And then we’ll be on our way.”

Just like that. I mean, there you have it. I was the sort of brother you just leave behind you, no problem at all.

“How about you take the one tree?” I said. “And I keep the rest here.”

“Come on, man.” This was Kade. “Don’t be greedy. You have your girl. You have what you want.”

“Give us four, Banyan,” said Crow. “And you can keep three.”

“No. You can have three. One for each of you backstabbers. And that’s the last damn offer I’ll make.”

“But what puts you in charge?” The words sounded like they were acid on Kade’s tongue.

“You want to ask these people what they think? They could keep them all and not show you the way. All I have to do is say the word, and that’s how it goes down.”

“So why don’t you?” Kade said.

“Because I’ll be glad to get rid of you.”

“Fine.” Crow’s voice boomed. “We take three.”

I turned back to the clump of saplings.

My mother had told me they’d spread once they got going. Four of them, here with the silver mud, they’d multiply and grow up real good. And I had Alpha beside me. We just needed the Healer, needed her to find a cure for my girl.

I stepped towards the tiny bundle of trees. But my guts gripped tight. “I don’t know,” I whispered, my back still to the others. “I don’t think I can do it.”

“Do what?” asked Kade. Snarled up and impatient.

I stared down at the twiggy mess of limbs and the muddy, used-up chunk at the base of them.

“I can’t break up the bones of my own father.”

I tried not to think about it, but how could I not? Where was Pop’s guts? His heart? Had it all shriveled inside him and disappeared?

“It’s trees, bud,” Alpha whispered, sounding about as sick and tired of me as she could. “You can’t think of it like a person. It ain’t your dad anymore.”

“Then you do it,” I said, turning to her. “You break off three of those saplings and give them away.”

“Fine.” She strode forward, cracking her knuckles. And I started to get sick. Tears blurred up my eyeballs. My chest thumped with each hollow beat of my heart.

She was right, though. It was trees now. Not a man any longer. Not Pop.

I tried to stare at the mud pit, but I couldn’t. Just kept thinking of how what was left of my old man’s hand had stretched out of that mud, holding a busted tree towards me.

Alpha was on her knees now. Her hands separating the saplings, uncoiling them from the copper wire and rooting through the limbs, trying to find which ones to spare.

“Stop,” I called as she went to twist-snap a sapling.

Everything hung suspended.

Alpha turned to me, her fingers still deep in the thick of things. Her hands all covered in mud.

“I should do it,” I said, taking a step forward.

“It’s all right, bud.”

“No,” I said. “No, it’s not. But it should fall to me.”

I waited till she’d stepped aside, then knelt down to that stump with the shrubby crown. I glanced back at Crow, and his eyes were hard to read. Then I found Zee, and there were tears streaming all down her face.

I looked to the Speaker and her beautiful sister. I studied the Elder, her face like the earth, all cracked and riddled with unspeakable age. And then I stared up, high up out of the crater. I stared out of the earth and kept my eyes on the sky. I never looked down the whole time I did it. I just felt for the first weak spot, a place where there had once been a hip and a socket, but now the muscles were puny and withered and stubbled with bark. I felt up to the base of the sapling. The thin roots of the limb that had sprouted from Pop’s leg. I kept my eyes skyward. Yanked hard and twisted.

And then I pulled the tree free from the rest.

The Kalliq gasped in unison, making one big whisper as I broke the tree free of my father, and the blood spurted six feet in the air. The blood sprinkled and splattered, and I felt it upon me. Hot and red. Pop’s blood, and my blood—the same blood that flowed in my veins.

But I didn’t falter. Didn’t stumble. Still staring up at the top of the crater as the blood ran warm down my face. And when finally I could make a sound, my scream wasn’t of anguish. It was fear, through and through.

Because here they came. Descending into the crater and trapping every one of us. A hundred King Harvests. Goggled faces and gray rubber suits. Guns glued to their fingers and opening fire. Coming to shatter the one place on earth I’d wanted to be.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

There were so many of them. It was like Harvest had an endless supply. And here they were, marching behind bullets, all black boots and dead eyes. Never slowing. Just twisting around the inside of the walls as they descended, like greedy arms reaching down towards us.

There was a rush and a riot. Half the Kalliq stormed up the steps to face the onslaught, charging mammoths before them, and the rest of the tribe ebbed inside the passages, hunkering down for the fight.

The Elder took the lonely sapling from my hand, easing it from my fingers as bullets swarmed and drilled the walls around us. And the Healer knelt beside me, bundling the remaining clump of trees in an old plastic pack, winding the saplings into a thin coil, ladling gray mud inside the bag, then drawing it shut.

There was a moment when our eyes met. Me and the Healer. Just this moment, no longer than two beats of my heart. Then I smeared Pop’s blood from my face, my hand blocking my vision for a second, and when I saw her again, the bullets were pounding into her body and making her quake.

I called out. Tried to grab her. But she slipped on the rocks and away from me, just as her smile had slipped from her lips and smashed all hope on the way down.

I grabbed the trees and swung the pack onto my shoulders. The Kalliq were surging up the great spiraled ledges, rushing to meet the battle. More than fifty mammoth riders. Then more like a hundred. The beasts pouring out of the side tunnels, stampeding upwards. Purple fur flying towards that army of gray rubber suits.

I stumbled to the rock wall. Ducking for cover. Then I felt Crow’s hands on me, pulling me close. And as I fell against him, I watched Alpha swoop up a bow and a sheath full of arrows from one of the Kalliq who’d fallen.

She aimed and fired high at Harvest’s troops on the ledges. Still breathing. Still fighting.

But if the Healer was gone, there’d be no hope of a cure for my girl.

The Kalliq were trying to stem the flow of Harvesters. There were so many pale gray troops, with so many guns, but the mammoth hide was too thick for their bullets. And the beautiful beasts reared up on their hind legs and charged up the rock ledges, their tusks bent low, trumpeting and trampling and shaking the walls.

Stones rained down and smashed into clouds of dust as the havoc unfolded, the battle raging on and pinning us beside the pit.

“Where’s Kade?” Crow called above the bullets and battle cries. I glanced about but couldn’t see that redhead bastard anywhere. And where the hell was Zee?