Rootless

by Chris Howard

  Crow thumped me once in the gut then left me on the rubber floor of the forest. I didn’t dare get up. I just waited as the watcher spun the wheels on my flowers, stepping carefully about the understory and flicking a switch to set the LEDs blinking. One of the wheels was squeaky as it spun and Crow shook his head. “Needs oil,” he said, as if he was talking to himself. “But you do good work.”

  Crow had his dreads wound inside a hat that looked about a hundred years old, and I spotted the scar burned on the back of his neck — a red lion. The mark of a Soljah. Me and Pop had built for those Rastas, up in Niagara. It’s as good a spot as any and prettier than most. And I had no idea how you’d go from being a warrior in Waterfall City to being a watcher for a bastard like Frost.

  “You heard of Zion, little man?” Crow said, and he spun at the wheels again.

  I just nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me so I went ahead and tried speaking. “Yeah,” I muttered. “Of course.”

  “You reckon the trees there are made of metal? The flowers got squeaky wheels?” Crow squatted next to me.

  “Doubt it,” I said, wondering if he’d hit me again.

  “Me too.” The watcher smiled. “So you believe what they say? Build a boat big enough and you’ll see Zion?”

  “A boat?” I hadn’t figured Crow for the religious type, and it pissed me off for some reason, him questioning me like that. Either he could beat me or turn me in, or he could just go right on to hell. “I seen the Surge,” I said. “Ain’t no boat big enough.”

  “No boat big enough. But that don’t mean the place don’t exist.”

  I tried sitting up and my ribs ached.

  “So where’d you get the picture?”

  Crow laughed that deep rumble of his. “Miss Zee likes you, I think. She likes you.”

  “The photograph. Where’d you get it?”

  “What she show you? Trees?” Crow smiled when I stayed silent. “Course she did. Look familiar?” He drew a shape across his torso. “Like the tattoo, no? Spooky. Right?”

  I didn’t know what to say. The son of a bitch was just toying with me and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

  “Look,” he said, standing tall. “You’re cool, little man. Crazy cool. But mess with Frost or Miss Zee or any of mine, I gotta break you. Understand? Just keep to building. Or I’ll break your ass in two.”

  I understood, all right. But for good measure, Crow kicked me so hard in the balls that I howled my guts out and smashed at the dirt. Then he just left me there, sniveling on the ground as the LEDs twinkled. And in the house, I could hear Zee wailing as that mean junky bastard went grunting and shouting and slapping his fists.

  Frost railed on for another half hour and then the house fell silent. I watched until the lights blinked out of the windows. And by then I’d decided what I was going to do.

  Just didn’t see any other option. Sure, I was scared of Crow. And Frost. Scared of being caught and beat. Scared of being thrown out. No job meant no money and not enough juice to go finding more work. But I had a picture in my pocket of my father — wrapped in chains but still breathing, and somehow surrounded by what looked like a stand of real trees. That image burned through every thought in my head. It was damn near all I could see. I knew there’d be no calm without answers. And Zee was the only one who might give them to me.

  I went round and round, thinking about Pop, thinking about the photograph. And then thinking about that skinny lass who’d dumped all this on my lap.

  Now don’t be a damn idiot, I tried to tell myself as I stared at the house. But I figured if I could sneak Zee out while the others were sleeping, I just might get her to the ocean and back before sunup. And if she showed me the rest of the photographs, I’d start getting some answers. Find out where that camera had been.

  I put the wagon in neutral and rolled it silently to the street then halfway down the block, parking it against an iron fence. I stood in the dirt road and studied the steel buildings all bulky in the blackness. Rich-freak homes grown out of the rubble of whatever had gone before.

  I hugged the side of Frost’s house when I scooted alongside it. And when I got around back, I hopped onto the porch and waited in the dark.

  Nothing. No sound. No action anywhere.

  Wasn’t till I started creeping up to the door that the damn thing opened and Crow stepped out on the porch.

  I ducked back, pressed down flat in the darkness as the watcher strolled to the steps. He had his headphones on and I could hear the music leaking from his ears. He stopped and stood there, just a few feet from me, humming along to some tune.

  I didn’t breathe or move or do anything. I just waited. Frozen. Until finally Crow drifted down the steps and disappeared into the lot.

  I wondered if he might look for me in the forest. I wondered if he’d notice the wagon was gone. But then I crouched up and darted across the porch and I slipped right on into the house.

  The hot metal walls amped every sound as I groped my way through the gloom. I cut down the hall in one direction and found a room that was full of pots and pans and boxes of corn. Fresh corn, still on the cob.

  I spun back the other way, searching for stairs, figuring Zee would be sleeping on the top story. That’s where I’d first seen her anyway, staring at me out the window. But I was starting to realize I’d no idea where the girl would actually be.

  A silvery light was spilling into the hall at the far end and I made my way toward it. The silver glow was leaching from under a plastic door, and the door creaked as I pushed it wide. I peered into the room.

  My heart thought twice about beating.

  It was Frost. Not six feet from me. But he was passed out. Asleep. His face was planted on a desk full of binders and books and I’d never seen that much paper. On one side of the desk was an empty pipe and on the other was a pouch full of crystal, and I wondered if Frost ever went a whole day clean.

  The silver light was oozing out of an old television set, and for a moment I watched the gray chips swirling on the screen. But then I saw the maps.

  They were huge and crinkled, plastered on the wall. And there was a ton of them. Marked up in ink and labeled. Big chunks of green pointing at each other across patches of blue. Someone had drawn a crude picture of the tattoo tree and taped it in the middle of the wall. I inched closer, straining for a better look. But I heard a door squeaking shut and I froze.

  Footsteps. A voice singing.

  Crow. Back inside the house.

  I left Frost drooling in his pile of paper and I backed up into the hall. I stopped. Listened. I tried to focus myself. Breathe. But it was like my brain wasn’t working. My thoughts were all stuck in the same gear.

  I tried the next door. The last door. And there, spiraling up into the shadows, was a tower of metal stairs. I yanked my shoes off and laced them together, and then I slung them around my neck as I ran upward, soft and quick.

  The top floor was even hotter and I was sweating now, wiping my hands on my shirt. I found a room with a tub, another with an unmade bed. Three more rooms. All empty. Bare steel walls shiny in the dark. But then I found a room that wasn’t empty.

  Jackpot.

  Zee was curled up and her momma was stretched out beside her. Neither of them had much on, it being so hot and all, and right away I could see Frost had bruised Zee up pretty good. But there was something else wrong with her. I watched as her chest rose and with each breath she made I could hear the gurgling sound of things growing tight inside.

  I could hardly believe it.

  She was cooped up in this house. Out of the dust. But that wheezing sound, there’s no mistaking it. Only crusted lungs make a noise like that.

  I spotted the momma’s tattoo sticking out, like a flame of color. I crept closer and studied the roots and branches bending across the woman’s belly. And as I looked, I noticed something about the leaves I’d not seen before. Each leaf had a number on it. A long number, printed in tiny black ink.

 
; Zee blinked herself awake and stared at me, a big grin on her face as her eyes grew wide. She grabbed a bag off the floor and crept over to join me, and she was beaming at me the whole time like I wasn’t in the worst place on earth I could be.

  We tiptoed down the stairs and crept along the hall, listening to Frost snore and sputter. Crow was down the far end, still singing, rattling at the pots and pans. But then we were out the door, on the porch, bolting around the house and out on the street.

  Zee was still grinning as she sprinted toward the wagon, though I could hear her broke lungs all straining and squeezed. I still had my shoes around my neck and they were bouncing and jiggling, whacking me in the face. And I kept thinking about Crow checking each room in the house and him finding Zee missing.

  And how, if that happened, there’d be no going back.

  The roads were mostly vacant as I steered through the night, heading east toward the ocean. We left all semblance of the city and the shantytown sprawl, and soon the only lights we saw were the odd scruffy settlement or lonely passerby.

  Closer you get to the coast, the more nothing there is. Been that way forever. Folk stopped building too close to the Surge a long time back, afraid of everything they had breaking off and slicing into the water. That was the risk in heading out that way, seeing as you never knew when the land might crumble, the cliffs disappear.

  “You always sleep in that room with your momma?” I said, spooked to the bone that Crow was going to find Zee missing.

  “Not always,” Zee said. “But it helps her sleep.” She’d been snapping pictures with her camera, but they were smudged and dark and she shoved them in the bag at her feet.

  I watched the old stone road as it droned beneath the wagon. “And how often you think Crow comes and checks on you?” I said, not being able to quit thinking about it.

  “Now and then.”

  I tried to picture Crow passed out and snoring. Done for the night. I mean, you got to think positive. That’s what Pop would have said.

  I fired up the CD player on the dash and gave it the half dozen thumps it took to play the disc jammed inside. The music made me feel a bit better. I clicked to this track near the end, a song about dead flowers and some girl called Susie. My dad used to drum the steering wheel and we’d holler the chorus at each other.

  “And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave.”

  Better build heavy roses, Pop used to joke. Otherwise folk would steal them.

  I stared at the bag at Zee’s feet — the bag full of pictures. And I thought about that photograph in my back pocket. The photograph of my old man bound up in chains.

  I cranked down on the accelerator.

  It wasn’t two hours and I knew we were almost there. I could tell by the way the spray reached up and blocked out the stars. I turned down the music and started to get worried the cliffs had worked their way inland. But when I pulled up, I could see the same stretch of fence, the old lot full of cars like corpses, the trash that gripped at the earth. Pop had taken me out here once. Back when I’d asked about Zion.

  “Here we are,” I said. “My half of the deal.”

  Feeble metal signs hung on the fence, warning you from getting too close. But when I cut the engine, Zee hopped out of the wagon wearing a wild-ass grin. I had to run out after her, tackle her down in the dirt before she got too near the edge.

  “What are you doing?” She blinked at me with angry eyes, her body coiled tight.

  “You got to be careful,” I said, getting to my feet and helping her up. “Let me see how stable it looks.”

  I brushed her off and she wheezed and cussed and hid her face like she was ashamed of something. Like she hated me seeing her all choked up and weak. I had her wait as I stepped to the edge, surrounded by that great rush of noise, moaning and howling like the baddest wind you ever known.

  I’ve heard it said people used to come to the coast for fun. The beach, people called it. They’d play around in the water and the ocean was just tame as could be. Breaks rolling in just a few feet tall.

  Few feet tall?

  I stared down at the waves clawing at the cliffs. Higher than any building in Vega. Spinning around like liquid twisters, a thousand stories high. Huge walls of water, pounding and breaking and making my ears hurt. The spray rose up and stuck in my nose, and out there past the breakers I could see the whole world rising and falling, carving in on itself like someone had just pulled the plug.

  Something about the moon, people said. Something happened to the moon and brought it closer. I guess it didn’t used to fill up such a big chunk of sky. But it wound up close at the end of the Darkness. There was twenty years of night and when the sun came back, that moon was so close it made the ocean go crazy as hell.

  I almost drowned once. Tying chains for a river willow and I slipped off the bank, and no matter how hard I thrashed I kept sinking. Everything muted. Ready to burst. Pop pulled me out of the yellow slime, but I never could face the water after that. Never could learn how to swim. I mean, the Surge would fill you with dread if you could somehow breathe underwater. But for me it was even worse. Even high up as I was, it made my heart hammer at my bones.

  I gestured to Zee, had her step closer. Some days you’d not get to the fence, the spray was so bad.

  But today was Zee’s lucky day.

  She peered down through the wires, and her eyes grew as wide as the waves were tall. The spray beaded up on her skin, and her mouth hung as she stared down at that frothy stampede, the rise and fall of that giant swell.

  “I don’t believe it,” she shouted above the noise of the water. “It’s all like this?”

  “They say the west coast’s even worse.”

  Her face was wet from the spray hitting her, but I was pretty sure she was crying, too. Her face wasn’t all crumpled or anything, but her lips were pinched real tight. I reached out and took her hand.

  “Come on,” I said, and I tugged her back to the wagon.

  Zee didn’t want to leave right away and I was in no rush to find out what was happening back at Frost’s place, so I turned on the light inside the wagon and we sat in the front seats, our clothes all damp and salty.

  “You’d never get across,” Zee said, her eyes still staring at the blank space where the stars should’ve been. I followed her gaze.

  “Nope.”

  “So how do we get out?”

  “Out?”

  “Somewhere better.” She said it so quiet I could barely hear her, like the words had hardly worked their way loose. “The Promised Land.”

  “Right. Zion. Across the water.”

  I felt bad for mocking her. She slumped in her seat and balled her eyes up and then she let the tears come loose. She was real quiet about it. But somehow that made it even worse.

  “The rest of the pictures,” I said, not knowing what else to do. And besides, a deal’s a deal.

  “Fine.” Zee tried to clear her throat. She held her bag open and I grabbed it, rummaging through a stack of photos of the sky and Frost’s metal house, Zee’s mother and Sal. Even pictures of me, wiring up the understory.

  But that was it.

  I stared at her.

  “Screw it,” she said. “It’s not my fault.”

  “Screw it? Screw you. You got me out here for nothing.”

  “It’s all I’ve got. It was Crow’s camera.”

  “But the trees?”

  “Came with the camera. Crow fixed it and that picture spat out. You are going to give it back?”

  “What the hell do you think?”

  She twisted around in her seat and hacked on a cough. “You have anything to read?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m upset, and when I’m upset I like to read.”

  “Must be nice,” I said. I figured she wasn’t worth getting angry with, but at the same time I was fuming. Crazy girl had me all the way out here for nothing. And who could I ask now about that picture, about my old man who’d been tak
en and the trees that weren’t supposed to exist?

  I threw a bag of popcorn at Zee and fired up the wagon, turning it around to begin the long climb from the coast.

  “‘GenTech’s been putting Superfood on the table for more than a hundred years.’” Zee read it off the bag like the words were going to make her quit crying and coughing, like it was a story that would calm her right down. “‘Through good times and bad, we’ve found a way to feed people. Corn. It’s what’s for dinner.’”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Breakfast and lunch, too.”

  “I read books,” she said, wiping the tears off her face. “From when there were laws and governments. And there used to be a thousand companies making the food.”

  I’d heard that. But it makes no sense — everyone could have just grown food for themselves.

  Zee was quiet for a bit, shaking the bag of corn and gazing out the window.

  “So where else have you been?” she said finally.

  “I’ve been around.”

  “Vega?”

  “Almost.”

  “Far south?”

  “Never seen the Wall, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What about north?”

  “Built trees in Niagara.”

  “And past that?”

  “Ain’t nothing past that,” I said. “Nothing but the wastelands. Lava and steam.”

  “The Rift.”

  “That’s what they call it.” I stared across at her. “I’m telling you to drop it. Nothing grew back after the Darkness. Nothing but corn. You ever seen a locust?”

  Zee shook her head.

  “Better hope you don’t never do,” I said, like I’d seen one. “They’ll rip your skin off faster than you can piss your pants.”

  “Then Zion’s far off. Or hidden, somewhere safe.”

  “Grow up,” I said, wishing to hell she’d quit chirping on about it.