The Rift - Howard Chris. Страница 36

“We gotta get out of here,” shouted Alpha, down to her last dozen arrows.

But where? Which tunnel? Which way was the right way to go?

Because that’s what it had to come to. I was hell-bent on nowhere, all over again.

Damn rocks kept tumbling down all around us. But I got low and crawled out through the rubble, bullets thudding into the mud pit beyond, arrows whipping high into the warring abyss.

I scrambled through the rocks till my hands were on the Healer. Then I held her in my arms, pulling her against me, shuffling her limp body back to the wall.

She beamed at me. Blood on her lips. She took my hand and pushed it into her chest. “Etsa,” she whispered.

“Your name?”

She nodded, then said, “Healer.”

“Banyan.” I pointed to myself. Tears welling up. My nose snotty.

“Banyan.” Her voice was like cut glass. “Tree King.”

She put her hand on my face, then went limp in my arms. Her tongue curled down her chin as her eyes rolled back. And another woman was dead on account of those trees.

“Bring her here,” the Speaker called from one of the tunnels. I saw her face through the cascading rocks.

“Cover me,” I hollered as I shot up and ran, the trees in the pack on my back and the Healer in my arms.

I reached the entrance to the tunnel as a pillar of rock crashed behind me, cutting me off from Alpha and Crow. I stumbled. Fell. Landed at the Speaker’s feet with the Healer held out before me.

“You must leave,” she hissed as she snatched up her sister. “Take your death, and go.”

“Tell me which way, and we’re gone,” I said. There weren’t nothing for me here now. No safe haven. No remedy.

The Speaker pointed behind me. Into the open. Right at the center of the mud pit. “You go down,” she said. “You hold on and hold your breath. Until you fall through.”

“Fall through to where?”

“Catacombs. Rivers of fire.”

“And then what the hell do we do?”

I heard a great howling moan and spun around to see a mammoth stumbling blind towards us, its eyes shot and bleeding, its body bouncing and shaking and ready to fall. And I remembered that beast I’d seen sacrificed. The mammoth with the messed up leg.

“Follow the heat,” the Speaker said, clutching my arm and pulling me to her. “Then you follow the howl.”

As I glanced back at the mud pit, it squelched and steamed. We had to go into it, down inside it. But for how damn long?

“You ever gone down there?” I asked her.

“You will travel beneath the Speak It Mountains.” The Speaker’s face was pure sorrow. “There it is I learned. And there, you will learn also.”

“Learn what?” I shouted over the sounds of terror descending from above.

The Speaker scooped her twin tighter, cradling her dead sister to her breast. “Long have I seen this. Long I have feared.”

I stared at the pit again, wondering how much slime we had to go through before we found the far side.

“The furthest peak you see,” she said. “Will point to your home.”

“Mountains? You sure? Under the ground?”

I heard Alpha screaming. She was somewhere on the other side of the rocks. Calling my name.

The Speaker clutched my wrist. “You will see. And learn. Speak your question to the winds.”

I took one last look at those twin sisters. The long, sweeping mane of the Speaker flowed into the Healer’s and forged a dark sky between them.

Then I stood, cinching the pack to my spine. And I turned and dashed through the blitz.

The walls were splintering into boulders around me, sealing shut the tunnels and sizzling the mud. I clambered up till I reached the top of a stony pile, and I spotted Alpha and Crow, not thirty yards from me.

But they were surrounded by Harvesters.

I slipped on top of the rocks, trying to hold steady and see what was happening. Trying to figure out something I could do. And as I toppled, I froze up on the inside—one of the troops was pulling off his mask and revealing the scars on his horrible face.

It was him. The original King Bastard. And I could see him talking to Alpha. Looked like he knew her. Like he recognized her from Old Orleans.

It seemed to happen in slow motion, him shoving his gun up into her chest. She had the bow in her hands. But no arrows. Nothing left to fight back with.

Crow tried to take a step forward, but Harvest shoved him in the gut, and he went down so easy. And then Harvest turned back to Alpha, jabbing his gun at her as he stroked a gloved hand on her cheek.

“No,” I screamed. I pulled the pack off my shoulders, held it high in the air. “This is what you want,” I called as Harvest spun around and saw me. “The trees. They’re here. Just you let her go.”

“You fool.” His voice was so loud, it seemed to blister at the edges. “You think you’re in a position to bargain with me?”

“I’ll give you what you want,” I shouted.

“I don’t need you to give it to me, boy. It’s mine already.” The tip of his gun stabbed Alpha’s ribs. His free hand grabbed at her throat. “I’ll take the trees and leave you all dead in this hole.”

“Let her go.” The words tore my voice open. “You owe us that much.”

“I owe you nothing,” he screamed, rage breaking across his twisted features. “And your suffering shall be severe.”

The fighting seemed to grow quiet above us. Like distant thunder. But the rocks still splintered and crashed, shattering and smoking the air.

“Hey, Harvest.” It was Kade’s voice ringing out. “I’ve got a sub gun ready to blow your brains out, you piece of shit.”

I spotted him crouched in the rocks below me, keeping his head down. His red hair coated in dust, and the sub gun poking through the debris.

Harvest pulled his gun off Alpha, his ugly eyes searching the broken stacks.

“That’s right,” Kade called. “Keep backing up.”

“You can’t win.” Harvest glanced up at me. “How do you plan to keep GenTech from their prize? They will hunt you down. They will find you and kill you. They’ll take back the trees, and you’ll have changed nothing.”

“And what would you do?” I yelled.

“I have an army. I can protect them.” He pointed at Crow on the ground. Waved his gun in the air. “Your friends are nothing. Savages and pirates. And you? You’re just a boy.”

“And you’re a dead man,” Kade shouted. “Unless you call this thing off.”

“Wait.” This was Zee. Her voice seemed to come out of nowhere. But then I saw her crawling through the landslide towards Harvest. And what the hell was she doing?

“We have to stop this,” she shouted. “We can’t just keep running.”

“No, no.” Kade’s voice got panicked. She was moving into the middle. Coming right between him and his man. “Move, sweetheart. Get out of the way.”

But she was blocking him. Blocking his angle. I watched the whole thing happen right in front of my eyes.

“We could work together.” Zee glanced up at me as she said it. Then she turned to Harvest, her hands held out before her. Her long, dark hair painted gray by the earth. As if she were suddenly old and frail as the falling rocks, and her eyes were the last thing young and pretty at all.

“Please,” she called, blinking at Harvest. “Make the killing stop. And we’ll join you. We’ll make a stand against GenTech together. The few can’t control the many, not now. Not if everyone—”

Her voice got cut before she could finish. Her pretty eyes got squeezed ugly as they bulged out of her head.

And Harvest kept emptying his bullets into her.

“No,” Kade screamed as he leapt out from the rocks and rushed towards Zee, unleashing his sub gun over her collapsing body, aiming right at Harvest. But the replicants were falling in front of their master, shielding his body with theirs.

And I stood there on the pile of rocks like I was floating above everything. My stomach churning and my lungs forgetting to breathe. The trees held high over my head. My sister dying on the ground below me.