Rootless

by Chris Howard

  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?”

  “It’s not for me,” I said, standing up. “But give me two hours. I got someone ready to trip his balls off.”

  When I got back to the scrap farm, the Rasta was sitting on top of my wagon and singing a song about Babylon. Old One Eye raised both eyebrows at me as I walked back to where I’d stashed the car. I just nodded and smiled like this was business as usual. Then I climbed on top of the wagon with my new crazy pal.

  “I need you to tell me where you saw my father,” I said. “I need you to remember things.”

  The Rasta stopped singing and stared at me. “Oh, I remember, man. Promised Land. Across the ocean.”

  “But how’d you get there?”

  The old guy just grinned and pointed north, then south, east, and west. “The King.”

  “The King,” I muttered, and I studied the Rasta’s wrinkled face. “We gotta take a trip,” I said. “You and me.”

  “Right on, sire. Right on.”

  I helped the old man to his feet and the two of us balanced on top of the wagon, sticking out of the rust and scrap that stretched all around.

  These people were like tickets, I thought. Zee’s mother with her tattoo. The Rasta with his skin made of bark. And though Frost figured the woman was his golden key, I reckoned this old fool might prove more valuable. And Frost didn’t even know the Rasta existed.

  Not yet, anyway.

  I thought about Zee and wondered whose damn side she was on. Guess I hoped she was on Frost’s side, tell you the truth. Because if she wasn’t, that girl was in a whole world of trouble.

  The sun was setting by the time I got back to the Tripnotyst’s tent. I peered through the door but was wasting my time — the gypsy was right where I’d left him, sleeping the crystal off, wound up inside his hammock and covered in dust and debris.

  I shook him awake and he pulled his shawl over his shoulders, shivering at my touch. “Want another fix?” I said. I held my book at him. “You can read it or trade it.”

  The gypsy sat up and snatched the book. “‘The Journals of Lewis and Clark,’” he read off the back cover. “‘The first report on the West, over the hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future.’” The gypsy stared at me. “True story?”

  I shrugged.

  “This buys you one trip,” he said, standing. “One.”

  “Fine,” I told him. “One’s all we need.”

  The old Rasta’s eyes grew huge as the door to the steel box began sealing us inside. Me and him were squeezed together, facing up at the blank screen.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’re gonna love it. Just do what the man tells you is all.”

  The Rasta made a hollow smile and the Tripnotyst sneered at me from the other end of the box, his face telling me just how big a waste of time he thought this would turn out to be.

  “Direction?” he asked, the blue light flashing on above us.

  “Zion,” I said. “The Promised Land.”

  “Pick one.”

  “The Promised Land, then.”

  The gypsy punched it in on his keypad as I pulled the goggles onto the Rasta’s head.

  “Relax,” I told him as music bathed the inside of the booth, but then the Rasta’s face drooped and his tongue wound out and I knew it had started.

  I leaned back and stared up at the screen on the ceiling.

  Blank.

  I glanced at the Tripnotyst, but he just held a hand at me and punched something else at his control panel.

  And then it began.

  The trees were starting to look familiar — the tattoo, the photograph. And now this.

  The Rasta’s memory swam across the screen, and I watched the leaves rustle and the limbs flow as the trees bent back and forth. I stared down at the base of the white trunks and peered high in the branches. But I saw no one. Nothing but forest.

  When the trees faded they were replaced by water, and I should’ve seen that coming, but the sight still blew me away. The water stretched as far as the horizon, and it was calm enough you could count the ripples upon it.

  Deep, still water. Soaking up the sun with the color of night. In the water, the Rasta watched his own reflection and his face was younger, his beard shorter, less patched with gray. A face appeared beside him. A hairless face. Pale skin taut on ja
gged bones. And that face kept multiplying until I could no longer see the water, and even the Rasta’s reflection was squeezed from view.

  The screen went white. Blank again but for a single word. A word even I could read. The word plastered on every box of corn, every bottle of liquor. Every gallon of fuel. Same word that grows across each kernel of corn, purple letters embedded in those juicy, yellow stumps so you can never forget who grew them.

  The word seemed to buzz on the screen but then stayed still, glimmering at me till the screen turned black.

  “GenTech,” I muttered. “GenTech.”

  “I don’t know if it matters,” the gypsy said, punching at the control pad and shutting down the machine. “But Promised Land didn’t do much for him. Typed in Zion to set him adrift.”

  I stared down at the Rasta, still splayed out inside the box. Then I set to shaking him, shoving around at the old guy and pulling off his goggles. But the Rasta wasn’t going to wake up.

  Not ever.

  I could tell by the way his tongue had turned limp and his eyes were rolled back in his head.

  “No you don’t,” I whispered. But it was useless. I tugged his eyelids closed and dragged him on my shoulders, and I was glad the gypsy had his back turned because all of a sudden I busted out crying as I stumbled for the door.

  I moved like I was floating and my throat got thick. I breathed in the stench of the Rasta’s dreadlocks and felt his body, stiff and warped. It was my fault — forcing the old guy into that box. It had been too much for him. He was dead and I’d killed him. Must have been the oldest person I ever had seen.

  And he’d known my father. Somehow. In some insane way. They’d both been taken someplace together.

  And now the Rasta was dead.

  But this was the gypsy’s doing. That’s what I told myself. He was the one that should’ve known better. The damn freak had ripped me off.

  So after I’d stuck the body in the back of the wagon, I quit sniveling and wiped my face with a rag. And Pop always said I was a builder, not a fighter. But Pop weren’t there, was he? So I grabbed my nail gun and strode back into the tent.

  “You killed him,” I said as the Tripnotyst spun around to face me. I held the nail gun up at him. “You junkie son of a bitch.”

  “What the hell you gonna do with that?”

  “That’s up to you,” I said. “I can pump you full of nails. Or you can give me back my damn book.”

  On the sand flats outside of town, I burned the Rasta, and the stench about made me sick. But not as sick as I’d felt carving the bark out of the old man’s belly.

  It’d been about an inch thick and his skin grew thin beneath it. I had to shave the wood off in pieces and ended up with one good chunk. The other scraps I burned and I listened as they popped and hissed and I watched as they smoked and flamed. Then I drew on the sand with the ashes and waited as night fell heavy upon me.

  The bark was soft and spongy and I ran my fingers on it, rubbing the last bits of flesh from beneath it. Skin and bark. A piece of man and a piece of wood. It turned my guts, tell you the truth. But I couldn’t stop fiddling with it.

  I leaned back in the dirt and stared across to the city in the distance. It was a warm night, no wind blowing and the air about as clear as it ever would get.

  I peered up at the stars, thinking about Pop. I felt the piece of bark between my fingers, knotted and rough and smooth. And I figured if that chunk of wood was as close as I was going to get to a real tree, then I was about as sorry a son of a bitch as you could find. I had clues up the ass. Knew I did. Just had to find some way to piece them all together. And by the time the fire died, I knew I had to head west.

  West was where my father had been stolen away from me. Out past the cornfields, near Vega — the city juiced off the corn GenTech keeps hoarded. And the Electric City was where it sounded like Frost and Crow were now headed. There’s one in Vega, Crow had told Frost. But one what? What could help them find the trees they wanted so bad to sell?

  Zee was right. Folk would pay a fortune for a forest. The last trees left growing. Food and fuel and who knew what other riches? It was either a place without locusts or the trees there could somehow withstand them. And either way, everyone would want in.

  Thing is, no one could pay like GenTech. Not even close. Not even Crow’s old tribe in Niagara, though they make good off the water they sell. Sure, some say the Salvage Guild’s still got a load of old world prizes, but I doubt it’s as much as the stories make out. GenTech, though, they could make a man rich if he had the right information.

  Or they could get the information they wanted and then cut that man’s throat.

  The last job we worked together, before Pop took us out west, we’d watched a client get dragged from her own home, and this agent with a giant scar said the woman was scum, said she’d been bootlegging corn all throughout the southeast. He took his spiky club to her till her screams turned to silence, and when it was over, Pop made me finish the woman’s plastic pine and we buried her beneath it. When I asked him what bootlegging was, Pop said it was just another word for getting yourself killed.

  But I found out about bootleggers. They’re good people. Brave. The rare kind of rich folk that try and help others. They give corn away or sell it off at a discount, and GenTech doesn’t like that at all.

  As I sat there thinking, I started to figure those trees mightn’t be for sharing, anyway. Maybe they were just somewhere to run and stay hidden, not to be stamped with some logo. Just a place to forget all you’d left behind.

  Hell, maybe the trees were Zion. The Promised Land that everyone spoke of and no one could find. Grass and animals and clean water and air just right for breathing. Just like in the stories. But I told myself none of that could matter. Not yet. Because no future would matter unless I could save my old man.

  Everyone’s got to have something to believe in, that’s what Pop always told me. He’d spent his whole life trying to make the world worth living in. And I was damned if I was going to let him die someplace alone.

  My guts were all set to take off, drive west, but I needed supplies if I was heading onto the plains. I needed corn and juice and I had not a single cent to pay with.

  And that’s why I figured I should make one more visit to the Frost residence.

  I loaded up the nail gun till the thing was fit to burst. Brightest, shiniest nails I had. Three-inch spikes. I buried the piece of bark in my pocket so it was close to me. And then I drove back to Frost’s place. Before sunup.

  I checked the house from a distance with the telescope I’d gotten for showing off canopies. Then I strode up to the storage shed on the side of the house and I shot the lock through with the nail gun. Inside, the bio kit where Crow brewed their juice was missing, and that meant they’d gone west already. Just as I’d thought.

  I found a bucket of fuel and five more like it. Then I ran to the back of the house and thumped at the door, hanging at the side of it with my gun ready — just in case I was wrong, just in case Crow or Frost came rushing outside.

  But the night stayed silent. I knocked again, beating the steel door like a drum, hitting it so hard I thought my fist might break.

  Still nothing. No one.

  I pulled the wagon around and took the blowtorch and carved a hole big enough to just slice the locks right off the back door. Then I kicked in what metal was left and pulled my goggles up and I ran through every room in the house with my nail gun ready.

  Empty. Each damn room. Frost’s study had been completely ripped clean.

  I filled my arms with bags of popcorn and threw them in the back of the wagon with the buckets of juice. I buried my book and the piece of bark in a box of nails, and when I had everything packed, I pulled the wagon into the lot and tucked it out of sight amid the stacks of scrap metal.

  The sun was almost up and I’d not slept for two days and as many nights, and I took the nail gun and a hot bag of corn and wound my way up to the bedroom where I�
�d found Zee. I stretched out on the bed, a real bed, and I ate the corn before sleeping a little.

  But when I opened my eyes, Sal was sat on the bed beside me. And my nail gun was clamped tight in his sweaty hands.

  The sun had already cooked the house rotten and I was sticky on the sheets. I stared up at Sal and gazed at the nail gun, and you can bet that I didn’t even blink.

  “What the hell you doing here?” I said, eyeing his chubby finger on the trigger of the gun.

  “This is my house, tree boy. The question’s what are you doing here?”

  I grinned at him, tried to give him the sense we were friends, like maybe he was crazy for forgetting how much he liked me. But Sal didn’t smile back. He just squirmed around on the blankets and fidgeted with the nail gun.

  “You know, Sal,” I said. “I guess I just needed a good night’s sleep before I set to finishing that forest of yours.”

  “Sleep, huh? You needed some juice, too?”

  “Was running a little low.”

  “And some corn?”

  “Right.”

  “Just a filthy big thief, aren’t you?”

  I started to say something but Sal jumped off the bed and pointed the nail gun between my eyes.

  “Easy,” I whispered, freaking out about now. “Easy.”

  “My dad hired you to build some trees, that’s all. Not run off and steal our supplies.” The kid pointed the gun up and let one loose, clanging a nail against the metal ceiling. That got him laughing, and he fired off another shot as he yelled, “You know what the red spot’s for? The big cross in your forest?”

  I shook my head.

  “My daddy’s going to be planting a real tree right there in the middle of your copies.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You bet it’s so. And we’re going to be more rich than you could even imagine.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can imagine a fair bit.”

  “Then try imagining how much GenTech’s going to pay when my dad has real trees for selling. Real trees. Not like your stupid statues.”