Rootless

by Chris Howard

“And who knows what else might be growing?”

  “Well, wherever there is, you’d have to stay put. Locusts keep to the cornfields, but they might make an exception, you give them a new place to nest.”

  “Find Zion and I’d never leave. Never.”

  “Not if they chain you to the damn trees.” I thought about Pop. And then I stared across at Zee. “I need you to tell me about the coordinates.”

  She smiled, but not at me. It was like she’d gotten something she wanted, and she sank back into her seat. “I’m not telling you anything else, tree builder. But if you want my help, then you can do what I say.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “It means we’re a team. We work together as long as it makes sense. One of us needs to do our own thing, the team’s over. Right then.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Works fine for me.”

  “Then step on it. Crow will be in shantytown this morning.”

  I slammed on the brakes, though the shacks were still a good ways in the distance. “Crow?”

  “Yeah. Today’s when he drops my mother off with the Tripnotyst.” She stifled a cough. “Her weekly appointment.”

  “You want to talk to Crow?”

  “No.” Zee shook her head. “I want to get my mother back.”

  “We can come back for her later,” I said, thinking about my dad and the old Rasta’s warning. “Race this crowded, we need all the head start we can get.”

  “We’re not leaving her behind, tree builder. Frost’s got her shattered and strung out on crystal, but she’s still my mother.” Zee glared at me. “And we’re gonna need her if we’re gonna find us those trees.”

  The tattoo. That’s what Zee said we needed. But that’s about all she would say about it.

  I left the wagon stashed at the scrap farm and the guy there told me he’d keep his eye on it. I didn’t tell him I had a freaky old Rasta buried in the back of the car. Didn’t tell him I was planning to go kidnap me someone else, neither.

  Zee was dressed in one of Pop’s old shirts, my extra goggles hiding a good part of her face and an old rag wound around the rest of it. I padded an extra bit of cloth against her nose and mouth, doing what I could for her busted lungs.

  I’d never walked that stretch of shantytown before, and it wasn’t so much that it looked different than it did through the car window, but I swear it smelled twice as bad. The wind had started up and the sand blew hot and stinky. Still, I was grateful for the camouflage.

  “So what the hell’s a Tripnotyst?” I said, my mouth all full of grit.

  “Supposed to help you remember things.” Zee’s voice was muffled by the rags, and almost drowned completely by the wind.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged her skinny shoulders. “I remember everything. Most stuff I’d rather forget.”

  “Then what’s your momma forgotten?”

  “If we knew that, she wouldn’t be going to the Tripnotyst. But Frost reckons her tattoo’s from the same place as that photograph.”

  It was the tent I’d seen Crow emerge from just a couple days before, back when I was killing time and waiting for my water tank to fill.

  We loitered out of sight, hidden behind a stall selling salvaged plastic toys shaped like animals. Folk trading for memories of a time before the Darkness and the locusts and the barren new world.

  “You think he’s in there?” I asked Zee. But before she could reply, we watched the tent flap roll up, and Crow came strolling out with his shades pulled on and his headphones plugged in.

  We ducked behind the stall and peered around the side of it, studying Crow as he rolled on by. I tried to guess where he was going, what thoughts were buzzing inside those big old dreadlocks.

  “Now’s your chance,” Zee whispered, shoving me forward. “Get my mom out of there. Tell her you’re with me.”

  “What about the Tripnotyst?”

  “Tell him whatever you have to.”

  “And what are you gonna do?”

  “I’ll keep watch, idiot. Make sure Crow doesn’t come back.”

  I waited till the watcher was out of sight and then I sprinted to the tent door. I glanced back and saw Zee huddled between the water tanks at the drinking station. And then, before I could think anymore about what I was doing, I yanked off my goggles, eased up the tent flap, and plunged into the dark.

  Inside that tent was as black as any place I’d ever been. The plastic flap fell behind me and suddenly the street seemed a mile away. I blinked, searching for light. Then I just stumbled forward with my hands stretched out ahead of me.

  There was a gurgle of static, a buzz of electricity. And was that music? I strained to listen. No. Just the drone of machines.

  I felt wires underfoot and dropped down and groped at them, crawling along with the cables until I hit something solid. Walls and edges. Some kind of container, about twice my size. I stood up and felt around at it. I stuck my ear to the wall of the metal box, and through the hum I heard voices.

  Then something else.

  I spun around. Faced back the way I’d crawled in. I heard the sound again. A tiny scrape. And suddenly, just a few feet from me, a lighter caught and flamed, puncturing a hole in the darkness.

  The flame spat and flickered, coloring the tent with an orange glow, and I watched the flame kiss the end of a pipe, smoke and cinders hissing as the pipe was puffed and chewed. Before the lighter cut off, I had enough time to try and read the eyes staring at me.

  But those eyes were impossible to read.

  “Welcome back, Mister Banyan,” said Frost, chomping at the pipe like it was breakfast. Then he snuffed out the lighter and all I could see was the crystal making patterns in the darkness as Frost made his way toward me.

  Frost was a whole lot faster than I’d expected. He was juiced on his pipe and moved like a blur. His fingers clawed the dark as I bounced and ducked. Spun. Rolled away. He was too fast and too damn big and he sealed all my exits as he tumbled down upon me.

  I was trapped. Pinned to the ground with my face in the dirt, my back feeling like it might snap in two. Frost just sort of waddled atop me and sat there. He shoved the crystal pipe at me, the flame crazy in my eyes.

  “Did you need more supplies, Mister B?” Frost said. “Or did you get your grubby little hands on something else?”

  I struggled but it was useless. My muscles barely twitched when they should’ve been beating his fat ass into tomorrow. He was sweaty and reeked and I wanted to gouge his eyes out, shove his ugly teeth down his throat.

  I cried out. Tried to drain the fury from inside me.

  “Quit your whining.” Frost whacked me on the head.

  I screamed again, loud as I could. He sat off me and rolled me over, pinned my chest with his flabby knees. He was sucking at his filthy pipe, and the crystals were bright enough I could see him draw a knife with his right hand just as he pulled my shirt open with his left.

  It all happened at once. The thin blade pressing at my belly and the tent peeling apart behind me. Sunlight illuminating the ugly look in the fat man’s eyes.

  “Stop,” a voice screamed from the doorway. Zee’s voice.

  Frost stared away from me and squinted at the gash of daylight. I felt the knife still pressed at my belly, breaking the skin now. Breaking my freaking skin.

  “You can’t,” Zee said, and she let the tent flap fall thick behind her. “Let him go,” she hissed through the void. “The trees,” she said. “The trees.”

  Frost kicked me in the head as he got to his feet. He thumped over to the corner and fired up a neon strip that hung from the ceiling. The tent pulsed with a cruel white light, and the walls bulged inward as the wind howled outside. Frost pointed his knife at Zee.

  “Talk,” he said.

  She ran up and pushed me over, everything happening too fast for me to glimpse her face, catch her eyes. I just felt her hands upon me, groping at me, digging in my pockets. She coughed as she stok
ed up the dusty floor.

  “Here,” she said, trying not choke. And as she backed off me, I rolled on my side and watched Frost staring at the photograph, his eyes all stoned and wide.

  “It’s his father,” Zee whispered.

  “How’d you get this?” Frost jabbed the picture with his knife, his face scrunched and twitchy.

  “His father,” Zee said. “Think about it.”

  Frost thumped at the steel box. There was a clank, then a clicking sound, and then damned if the box didn’t start to open right there in front of us.

  Frost probed his thumb at the bowl of his pipe, working up the crystal. Then he shoved the picture in his pocket and turned to the skinny broad with the gypsy earrings who was climbing out of the steel box like it’d just given birth to her.

  I had a clear shot at the door and bolted for it. But Frost was too fast and seized the back of my neck with his pudgy claws. He dragged me across the dirt with my legs kicking, shoved me toward the steel container.

  The gypsy woman was jabbering and waving her arms around, and her wrists shook with shiny bangles, her hands aflutter in the neon light. Frost just ignored her. He lifted me up like I weighed nothing and he threw me down inside the box, right on top of the woman I’d come looking for.

  I was sprawled out on top of Zee’s momma but she didn’t move a muscle. My face was buried in her belly, pressed up against the tattoo tree, and I could breathe in the smell of her skin. I squirmed up, but Frost forced me down, keeping me inside that steel coffin and yelling at the gypsy woman to get back inside it with me.

  “Your wife’s still in deep,” the gypsy said.

  “Then leave her sleeping. But hook up the young punk here and tell me what you see.” Frost pushed the gypsy in on top of us so we were squashed tight.

  “What direction?” the gypsy called, and Frost held up the door for a moment.

  “His father,” Frost whispered, staring down at me. “Everything he’s got.”

  There was barely room to breathe, let alone move. The inside of the container was bathed in a blue glow and I was jammed against Zee’s mother, wriggling my way upright.

  I squatted against the ceiling and that was as tall as I was going to get. The gypsy sat across from me, cross-legged and stooped, and I realized the gypsy wasn’t a woman at all — it was a man. Dressed up in a skirt and everything. Stubble on his chin, chest as flat as dirt.

  “You’re the Tripnotyst?” I said, like an idiot.

  The gypsy just winked at me as he tapped a control pad, a few of the buttons giving him trouble as he jabbed and poked with spindly fingers.

  What air was in there was stale and thin and I felt about as strangled as when Frost had sat on top of me. I glanced down at Zee’s mother, her tattoo eerie in the electric blue.

  The woman’s face was shut down, her muscles loose and her jewelry dusty. Her eyes were guarded by a pair of goggles, the lenses made of old wires and bits of metal.

  “Put those on,” the gypsy said, his voice as reedy as he was.

  “What you gonna do?”

  “Just put the goggles on. Ain’t neither of us got a choice about it.”

  “You gonna drug me up?” I said, staring at the limp body beside me.

  “Going under or not, that’s up to you. But once you start remembering, you’ll most likely want to shut down.”

  The gypsy had me lie back on top of Frost’s wife. I tugged the goggles off her and started yanking them down over my own head.

  “Try to relax,” said the Tripnotyst, which was about the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. I struggled with the goggles, my elbows whacking at the steel walls. And then I glimpsed the patterns drawn across the blue ceiling.

  I stopped working at the goggles and just squinted up at the image that was stretched above me, floating and shaking, drifting in and out of focus on the screen.

  It was a wall. A massive, cement wall. A thin section close to the ground had been scribbled on, blackened with graffiti, but the top of the wall was all hidden by clouds.

  I knew it was the South Wall, though I’d never seen it before, not even in pictures. It runs all the way across, from the Surge on one side to the Surge on the other. Was built before the Darkness, to keep people in the south stuck behind it.

  “Put your goggles on,” the gypsy said.

  “It’s the South Wall,” I whispered. “Ain’t it?”

  “Nope.” The gypsy punched a switch and the image disappeared from above me. “It’s just a memory.”

  The goggles sealed tight and pinched my skin, blocking out any drop of the blue light. My face felt sticky and I tried to keep the panic within me, but I was blind now. Blind as well as trapped.

  “Keep your eyes closed,” the Tripnotyst said. “Less you want to lose your eyeballs.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath as a thousand tiny spikes pricked my eyelids. I yelled out in horror but the needles stopped right where they were, not coming any closer, just locking me in place.

  “Don’t move,” the gypsy said, his thin voice softer now, almost soothing.

  Then music started. Strange, pulsing music. Gurgled beats and squelching bleeps and belches. The sound of bells rose up from the medley and I felt like I’d been stuck inside a wind chime, ringing and spinning and all blown to pieces.

  “Welcome to the vibration of sound,” a voice said. It was the gypsy’s voice, but it had changed, each word booming now, bathed in echo. “Relax and let it ferry you away.”

  Every part of me screamed to stay present, but I felt myself unraveling, the music opening me. Untying me. I tried to focus my thoughts on Frost, on escape, on getting myself out of this weird coffin and setting myself free.

  Free.

  That was how I felt as I slipped into nothingness. Better than sleep, better than dreaming. I tried to fight the feeling for a moment, but then I gave up.

  I mean, who doesn’t want to be free?

  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.