Rootless - Howard Chris. Страница 31

Alpha was stretched on the sand and sleeping, and as I watched her I wondered what it’d be like to stroke that crazy mohawk of hers. Or run my fingers across her dirty pink vest. And then I thought about just lying beside her, resting my face on her dusty skin.

It was a clear night and the big old moon was low. The stars looked so close you could touch them. I stared up at the sky, half looking for one of those satellites Sal had said were still up there. Then I shuffled closer to the wagon, to see how the crew was getting on.

Hina and Sal were curled beneath the wagon, huddled in their usual position, her wrapped around him like a mom who’d not realized her baby had grown too big too quickly. I thought about how Sal had talked about Zee when she was living, how he’d gotten crude, said she wasn’t his sister. And Hina sure as hell wasn’t his mother. But he looked pretty peaceful there, all curled up against her. And I figured as little as I knew about love and such matters, that poor chubby bastard must have known a whole lot less.

Of course, who I’d really come over to take a look at was Crow. He was sprawled on top of the wagon, his feet propped on one of the new tires I’d tied to the roof. I pretended I was just pacing the tarmac, but I was really trying to catch a glimpse of his face.

“Your sweet thing sleeping?” he said. I was on my fourth go-around of the pacing business, and Crow rolled on his side and stared at me. “Got yourself a real firecracker there, little man.”

“Take it easy.”

“Think you can trust her?”

“More than I trust you.”

“That all?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Sure it is. You take my advice, little man. Don’t go trusting no one but yourself.”

“That’s what you do, I guess.”

“Only ones I trust are the ones I know what they’re gonna do before they do it. Like you, little man, I can trust you pretty good. Real good, matter of fact.”

I started to say something, but he cut back in.

“Where are the pictures?”

“What pictures?”

“Pictures of the tree. The GPS numbers. The pictures Sal said you took from the house. I not seen you dig them up yet. Which makes me wonder what else you got buried.”

“I got a book,” I hissed at him. “That what you want to know?”

“A book?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Gets cold one of these nights, we can burn it.”

“We ain’t burning nothing. I call the shots.”

“Really?” Crow said, laughter in his voice. “Between me and the firecracker, I’d say you’re just firing on empty.”

I crawled beside Alpha and dug Zee’s bag out of the ground.

“What are you doing?” Alpha said, coming awake in a hurry.

“Nothing,” I told her. “Just go on and sleep.”

She rolled over, and I unzipped the bag and counted out the pictures of the tattoo leaves. I lay the pictures flat on the dirt so I could see that tree again, and then I gathered up the photos and slipped them in Alpha’s vest pocket.

Flicking through the rest of the bag, I found a picture of Zee and pulled it out, thinking I could give it to Hina. I studied Zee’s face in the photograph. And then I stared at the trashed bits of tarmac in the moonlight, the road people built when the world was still growing, before the earth was just rubble and stunted, before everything became punctured and blank.

I left Zee’s picture in the dust. Just didn’t see it doing Hina any good to pass it along. I reckoned some things you do best to remember. But some things it’s best to forget.

I tied the piece of bark around my waist with a plastic cord, and I had my back turned so none of them could see what I’d got there. Then I strode up to the wagon with the book in one hand and Zee’s camera in the other, and I shoved them beneath the driver’s seat.

I jammed on the horn, leaning on it way longer than necessary.

Sal and Hina crawled out from under the wagon with their hands over their ears. Crow stared at me from the roof, the giant moon bright behind him. And Alpha gave me a strange look as she came up, brushing the sand off the back of her thighs.

“Me and my wagon are taking off,” I shouted, yelling to all who’d listen, my voice echoing in the empty night. “You want to find Zion, then jump right in. You got other plans, that’s fine. I’ll leave your ass. Right here in the dust.”

Five bodies full but the wagon zipped along pretty good. I wasn’t in much mood for talking and was glad to be behind the wheel again. Gave me something to focus on — plowing through the dirt clouds, keeping steady against the winds. Dodging the deep sand and ditches. This road led to Vega. It’d take us right through the corn, and right past the place where my father had been stolen away.

Took the whole day to reach the cornfields and when we did the sun was red behind them. The wind had mostly quit and we watched as the crops appeared on the horizon — a thin strip of yellow against the colors of evening sky.

No one said anything. We all just stared.

The plants stood dense and tall and ordered, running as far as we could see from north to south. They barely seemed to sway in the breeze.

When my father had taken me west, we’d stopped in the cornfields, camped on the side of the road beneath the crops. It was dead of winter, good crossing season, and Pop had dug in the snow and pulled up a plant, shown me roots that plugged right into the ground. He told me a tree’s roots could reach a mile deep, that the corn was nothing, just a fluke made by people who’d done nothing but play a trick on nature. Except nature got the last laugh, I guess. If that’s what you can call a never-ending plague of locusts eating every damn thing in sight. I don’t know that you can. But those people had done such a good job of twisting the corn into something indestructible, here it still was, food and fuel and a gold mine for the ones who owned it.

The cornstalks became silhouetted black against the sky as the sun sank farther from view. And I pulled the wagon off to the side of the road, right at the point where the plains gave way to crops.

We stood out of the car, our feet in the dirt but our eyes on that dusty wall of corn ahead. The thirty-foot plants.

GenTech designed the corn to withstand frost and drought, bad winds and big temperatures. Hell, if the crops flooded, I reckon that corn could probably grow arms and swim. The one living thing the locusts couldn’t feast on, the one thing to grow back after the Darkness. And now nothing could kill it. All GenTech had to worry about was poachers, and it was hard to imagine the poachers even made a dent, burrowed in their underground colonies, hidden from the locusts and the agents, buried away from the sun.

These crops on the edge were full grown and just turning ripe. You could see the biggest cobs near the top, where the thick leaves rustled. Another week and GenTech would have the dusters down here, blading one crop and reseeding for the next.

You can’t steal the corn for planting, on account of the purple logo on the kernels. People steal the corn, they eat it. Hungry people. People like us.

“The perimeter’s the safest spot,” Crow said. “Locusts nest on the insides, keep to the core. And agents figure most folk ain’t got the balls to do their poaching out near the open.”

“So what’s the plan?” I said, annoyed at Crow being the expert.

“What plan?” Crow laughed. “All we need right now is a knife.”

Alpha had a blade stashed down her boot, so we pushed into the first rows of plants, looking for food, all pressed up in the cornstalks because they plant that stuff so damn close together. Beneath all the dust, the leaves were dark green and crunchy. I tapped at a stem and it made a hollow sound, like a tube of plastic. Hardly even felt like a living thing.