Rootless - Howard Chris. Страница 12

I saw trees. Everywhere. Great labyrinths of shiny metal. Every forest me and Pop had ever built. All our trees grown tall and unruly and not a rusty spot between them.

At the center of the trees, my father was a hundred feet high, perched atop a strip of scaffold. And I was on his back, buried in a blanket, the fabric tied to his shoulders and wrapped around his waist.

My father was building. He was hammering out finishing touches. Bending at metal so the sun caught right. I felt his arm swinging the hammer, watched sweat beading on the back of his neck. When he welded steel joints, I saw hot sparks fly. And as he descended the ladders, I bounced and jostled and giggled.

On the ground, my father stared up at the canopy and I stared at it with him, listening as the wind blew tunes through the branches, watching as the breeze shook rhythm from the leaves.

I heard the gypsy’s music again.

And then I was older. Curled up in the back of the wagon, eating popcorn and listening to my father read.

He told me stories of faraway places that had once existed. Tales told by countless fathers before him. Stories of bears and wolves and salmon and streams. The smell of wood on a fire. The sound of birds singing and the brush of their wings.

My father spoke me to sleep and I dreamt of waking to a real forest, our trees grown shaggy and breathing.

Bark and moss and twigs and spiders.

And in the dream I tried to wake my father so he could see the trees, but the sky grew fierce with the sound of locusts. And when silence returned, every tree was thin and crippled. Black and cold. And as the wind blew, the trees began falling upon us, each one of them tumbling and snapping, until I began catching the trees and planting them in ashes.

The music rose again. And with it, the trees I had planted all faded, and me and Pop were sat in the dust out past the cornfields. We had our backs to the corn, and we watched Vega glittering in the distance, like a light someone forgot to switch off.

One more day and we’d have reached the city. But then it was night and Pop was waking me, telling me there were voices outside. And the dust storm was raging and sucking the sky inside it, and I wanted to go find Pop but I was too damn scared. And it was too late when I finally crawled out of the wagon. There was no trace left after the storm had quit. No footsteps or shadows. Just dirt stretching ahead of me, all the way to the walls of the Electric City.

Pop was gone.

Taken.

Vanished like grass.

I could see myself twisted in the back of the wagon. My face smudged with dirt and swollen with tears, all of me shaking as it sunk in how alone I was now and always would be.

And the rest was all blank.

When I opened my eyes again, I felt damp and shivery. The goggles were gone and I was back outside the steel box, piled in the corner of the tent with Frost’s boot heel digging in my ribs.

“That was it?” Frost said. “All of it?”

“Everything,” said the gypsy.

I blinked up at the two of them but lay still, trying to figure out some plan to escape.

“He’s no good to me,” Frost spat. They’d been watching the screen inside the box, the lid flipped open, but the Tripnotyst punched the thing closed, sealing my memories back inside.

“Usual payment?” Frost said, and the gypsy grinned as Frost pulled a pouch from his back pocket and threw it on the dirt. Then Frost squatted close to me and pulled the knife up to give me a good look at it. The dirty pearl handle had been patterned once but was now worn smooth. The blade shimmered in the neon light.

“Old man ran off and left you, did he?” Frost faked a frown.

“He didn’t run off,” I said, teeth clamped tight. “He was taken.”

Frost laughed. He ran a stubby finger along the edge of the blade. Then he knelt on my chest and put his hand on my face, forcing me down as I struggled against him.

“Tell you what, Mister B. I catch up to that old man of yours, I’m gonna give him your best regards.”

“Leave him,” Crow boomed behind us, his voice like thunder as he burst into the tent.

Frost paused, the blade pressed at my windpipe. I tried not to breathe.

“Any news?” Frost said, staring up at Crow.

“Aye. There’s one in Vega. And the truck’s ready to go. So leave the boy. Miss Zee is back and you don’t want his blood on your hands.”

“You know what, watcher?” Frost struggled to his feet. “You’re absolutely right.”

He threw the knife to Crow.

“You do it,” Frost said, stomping out of the tent. “And maybe next time you won’t be so careless.”

I glanced around the tent. The Tripnotyst was nowhere to be seen. And neither was Zee or her mother.

Just me and Crow, then. Just like old times.

Crow shook his head as he came over to me. I scrabbled to my knees, glancing toward the street but keeping an eye on the watcher as he stepped closer. I took too long to make a move and there was no move anyway. And then Crow was right above me, fingering the knife and bouncing the weight of it in his hand.

“I told you not to go messing, little man.” Crow was still shaking his head, making out like he was real solemn about having to kill me. “So why you want to go messing for?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Should’ve stuck to building,” Crow said, staring at the door to the tent. He held the knife above his head and then cast it down. The blade spun and blurred, and then it sank into the dirt beside me.

Crow squatted down and yanked the knife from the sand. He wiped the blade on the fabric woven through his beard and he fixed me with his brown eyes. Then he pulled his shades down and stood.

“See you in the next one, little man,” Crow said as he stepped to the door, and I watched as he threw the flap open and disappeared into daylight.

Couple seconds, maybe. That’s how long I lay there with my heart beating a hole through my chest. Then I shot up and bolted to the door. I slid on the sand and tugged at the tent flap, pulling it high enough I could peer out at the world.

Everything was still there — sun, dust, and wind. I pulled my goggles on and choked on the dirt clouds. I could see strugglers down the street, scurrying away as a truck bellowed and smoked and grew small in the distance.

“Come on out.” The Tripnotyst was lounging in a plastic hammock on the corner, smoking a crystal pipe.

“That how he pays you?” I said, scrambling up and striding over. I pointed at the pipe full of poison.

“Good shit, my friend. But there ain’t enough to be sharing.”

“He ever go in there himself?” I said.

“Fatty?”

“Yeah.”

The Tripnotyst shook his head. “Just the pretty lady. And her girl.”

“Zee?” I said. She’d either betrayed me in the tent or she’d been trying to buy us some time. Either way, I was on my own again. “What did she see?”

“Listen, friend. I might be high as one of your metal treetops, but I don’t go dishing out beta on clients. Not to bums with no way of paying.”

“She see the Wall, too?” I said, squatting down next to him.

“The Wall?” The Tripnotyst laughed, then he started coughing. “That’s just the start, brother. Now give up. And relax. Neither of them girls make a damn bit of sense anyway.”

“How much is it?” I said. “For a session.”

“More than you can afford, bro. I don’t deal in forests.”

“What about a book? Would you take that?”

He studied me for a moment. “Depends on the quality,” he said. “And the size.”

“You can read?”

The Tripnotyst nodded, his eyes glazing over now from the crystal. “What you want to remember?”