Rootless

by Chris Howard

  She pointed at the hatch, gesturing that she wanted to go outside. The moon was up now, white on the cornstalks.

  “We can’t,” I whispered. But she nodded. And I wondered if this meant she had something to tell me. About my father. About the trees.

  I popped the hatch open, nice and quiet, and I breathed in the fresh smell of crops as I poked my head through.

  Straining to listen, I climbed out of the wagon and held the hatch so Hina could come beside me. I stared around at the night, thinking about the locusts and that awful noise they made, thinking how Hina had better make this real quick. But she surprised me by clicking the hatch shut behind us.

  “Come with me,” she whispered, taking my hand. And then she led me inside the corn.

  Our footsteps made a dry, cracking sound. We squeezed past the stalks until we found a sort of clearing, just enough space that we could stand facing each other. All I could hear was the thump of my heart. It was stupid being out there. I knew it was dangerous. But if Hina had something to tell me, I reckoned it was something I needed to hear.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “I remembered where it came from,” she said, and as she spoke she lifted her shirt off her belly, showing me the leaves and branches of that beautiful tree. I could see her pulse through her stomach.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said. “When you climbed that machine and the swarms came. But you’re strong, like your father. And I remembered it. How they sent me to find him. To bring him back home.”

  I went to speak, but she talked right over me, all the while stroking at the colors tattooed on her skin.

  “He wanted to stop it,” she said. Her voice was like she’d just come awake. “All of it. And now I have to warn you.”

  “What?” I said. “Warn me about what?”

  But Hina just closed her eyes. Her fingers still caressing the tattoo tree but the rest of her like she was sleeping, standing on her feet but caught in a dream. And for a moment everything was silent. Everything was still. But then I heard the footsteps come crunching toward us. Closer and closer. Someone stepping through the corn.

  The poacher’s face looked like it had once been broke open and then pieced back together wrong. He stood before us. An ugly shadow beneath the bright white of the moon.

  “Get away from her,” the man said. But I was frozen, like I was tangled up in the plants. “Move,” he said, and this time he pointed a shotgun at my head.

  I stepped aside, the gun following my every move, waving just inches from my face. I went to say something, but the man cut me off.

  “Keep your mouth shut, boy.”

  He shone his flashlight over Hina, top to bottom, his mouth hanging open and stringy with spit, his eyes bulging out of his head. He blinked as he jabbed the flashlight at her skin, like he was testing whether or not she was real. Then he stared at me again and pushed the shotgun under my jaw.

  The man turned his head and waved his flashlight in a figure eight. He knocked four times at a cornstalk.

  “How many are there?” he said.

  “Ain’t no one else,” I told him, my voice as shaky as the rest of me.

  “In the car?” He jabbed the shotgun deeper. “How many in the car?”

  “It’s empty,” I said. “Broken.”

  “You lie.” He sneered. “But it’ll do you no good.”

  I heard more footsteps in the crops, and the poacher gestured for me to start walking. I pushed Hina in front of me, keeping my hands on her shoulders and trying to block her from the poacher as he stabbed his gun at my spine and shoved us back toward the wagon.

  When we stepped onto the service road, about twenty poachers stepped onto it with us. They slid through the stems and appeared in the night, like they’d bled right out of the crops. Some of them didn’t even carry guns, just knives or hacksaws. They wore clothes made of corn husks, and all their feet were bare.

  I studied the shriveled bodies and the faces in the moonlight. Dead eyes. More scars than teeth.

  The poacher behind me prodded his gun at my head, pushing me against the wagon as he tried to peer inside it. Then he took the butt of the shotgun and pounded at the roof.

  “Come on out,” he roared.

  The rest of the poachers had circled the car now. Heads stooped and weapons raised. The man pounded on the wagon again.

  “We don’t want you,” he yelled. “Just the car and what’s in it. So come on out. Or your friends here are gonna suffer.” He stared at Hina as he said it and I felt her tremble beside me.

  The man hammered at the roof until the rear hatch lifted as if the pounding had popped it loose. Sal’s head stuck out and the poacher made a sound that was supposed to be laughter.

  “Shit,” the man said, pulling Sal out of the car by his ear. “Look at the size of this one.”

  It all happened so fast there was no time to think.

  A gun fired out the back of the wagon, and the bullet sank into that brokeface poacher, launched him back about five feet. Then the rest of the poachers fell upon us. Some of them heading for Sal, but most of them cornering me and Hina and wrestling us into the corn.

  It was chaos. A tumble of bodies charging through the crops, gunshots and voices screaming.

  But then the world stood still. The night turned black.

  And an ugly swarming sound filled up the air.

  I’d never seen people disappear like that. Those poachers spread thin and then vanished, like they’d found holes in the world to stay hidden inside. They were gone. Just like that. And me and Hina were ten yards from the road.

  I stumbled and thrashed through the crops, pulling Hina with me as locusts filled the air with a whining, desperate sound that filled your head and stopped you from thinking.

  I crashed forward, losing my balance for an instant, and then I was down in the dirt and lost and Hina’s hand was gone.

  I spun around and saw her.

  One last time.

  She’d stopped running. She was just stood there, staring at me, and I watched as that frothy cloud descended upon her, buzzing and biting and coming down slow. Consuming her. Her head, her beautiful head. The swarm seemed to suck her inside it. It went down past her neck and over her shoulders, spun down her arms and low down her chest, pulling her in like a twister on the plains.

  Her beautiful belly. That soft brown skin. The tree. All of it. Gone. Ravaged. Every root and branch and leaf. Every secret inside that now would stay hidden.

  And I howled at that swarm and the crops and the sky, and the stars should have quit because there weren’t no reason to be shining.

  The locusts were at her hips now, clawing their way lower. And I could have touched them if I’d just reached out my hand. But finally I felt my legs moving, pushing me backward. I was on all fours. And then I was running.

  At the wagon every door was closed. I punched at the windows, smashed at the roof. And I felt the locusts buzz closer, tearing through the air toward me.

  Alpha threw open the door as I felt the sharp mouths sink into my skin. I fell inside, pulled the door shut. But the locusts were still on me, gnawing my neck and the back of my skull.

  Crow pushed me to the floor and leaned over me, swiping at the locusts, crushing them with his fist. They bit at him, and he lashed and cried till the last one was dead. And then he just crouched above me, his fists all bleeding and raw and the windows black with that swarm pressing in at us.

  Then, finally, as the noise let up and the swarm drifted higher, I could hear the sound of Sal weeping. And Alpha’s voice, quiet and muffled.

  “What were you doing?” she kept saying. “What have you done?”

  I stared at her as the moonlight spilled in. Her face was slick with tears and her hands were clasped at her stomach, pressing at the bullet wound like she might squeeze the blood back inside her.

  Alpha gazed at me through a face full of pain. She was quivering with it. But her eyes were still sharp. Focused. The
veins on her neck twitched and her breath came short and shallow.

  “Banyan,” Crow said, but the word seemed to float past me. “Banyan.”

  He’d slid behind the steering wheel with his hands all mashed and bleeding. I stared at him, wondering what could possibly matter now.

  Then I sensed the night shift color again. Brighten. But not on its own accord. I stared through the windshield and saw three pods in the distance. Bearing down the road toward us, burning us up with their purple glare.

  Crow cranked on the engine and spun the wagon back around.

  “You’re gonna need to hold them off,” he said, and for the first time, everything about Crow seemed out in the open. And he was scared shitless. Just like me.

  I hauled Alpha into the back as Crow slid the wagon through a turn and began speeding back down the service roads. Undoing all the distance we’d covered. Losing ground all over again.

  I got Alpha set so she’d not be shaking around too much, and she was staying silent now, but her eyes told me all I needed to know. Her hands were slick with her own blood, and I tried shoving my hands against her wound but the blood kept coming and the blood would not stop.

  “Sal,” I screamed, and I could hear Crow shouting at me. “Sal.” I grabbed the kid by his neck. “Quit sniveling, you little shit. You gotta help.”

  I pulled off my shirt and had Sal shove it deep in Alpha’s stomach, stemming the wound that kept gaping and frothing like some sort of mouth. Then I yanked the piece of bark off my torso and placed it over the shirt, strapping it in place so tight I was scared it might stop her from breathing.

  Sal fingered at the bark.

  “Leave it alone,” I told him. “Take one of these.”

  I handed him one of the pistols I’d snagged from the pod.

  “Come on,” Crow bellowed, and I yanked up the rear hatch with Alpha behind me, and Sal at my elbow, ready to shoot.

  “Fire,” I yelled, and we let it rip. Just squeezing the triggers, letting off a round of those fancy bullets, a round that seemed like it might never end.

  The GenTech pods didn’t fire back at us. They just kept on coming, our bullets puncturing the purple steel but not slowing them down a damn bit.

  “The glass,” Crow called. “Aim for the glass.”

  I tried. Kept trying. But it was too hard to point straight, what with the wagon swerving every which way as we bounced through the sand.

  Finally, I cracked one of the windshields and sent that pod reeling into the crops. The others opened fire now, keeping their bullets low, aiming for our tires.

  “Keep shooting,” I said to Sal, but he held his gun up. Empty. I handed him what was left of mine and reached for Alpha’s rifle in the front of the wagon, stretching my arm out across her crumpled body, groping through the dark.

  But my hand never found the rifle.

  The duster appeared out of the crops in front of us like a wall of steel teeth. Crow seized up the brakes but we hit. We hit hard. The wagon never stood a chance. Those duster blades ripped right through the engine and gobbled it in pieces, clamping down every inch and dragging it inside the belly of that giant metal beast.

  The blades chopped through the steering wheel, and Crow’s thighs exploded as the metal ripped them apart. I grabbed his arms and yanked what was left of him into the rear of the wagon.

  But the duster kept coming.

  Sal was gone, I remember. Like maybe he’d been hurled out the back on impact. Or maybe he’d scampered free. And Alpha was out cold. I dragged her on top of me with one hand and clawed toward the open hatch with the other. The sound of the duster was something beyond noise. So loud it seemed silent. Or perhaps I’d already gone numb.

  Crow pulled his bleeding stump along with his fingernails. The three of us moving too slow. But then we reached the hatch. Pushed through.

  My wagon thrashed and spun into tiny chunks behind us and I remember gazing back down the throat of the duster, watching my old life being digested and sorted into scraps. And the duster seemed to keep eating my wagon, long after everything had stopped moving, even after the blades had stopped spinning, after every engine shut off.

  And in the same way, I don’t think there was a time I stopped screaming. Crow all bloody and twitching, and Alpha all gone beside me.

  I wailed and hollered and I wished I was dead.

  Then the duster fired up a torch beam and brought that light down upon us. The color of a bruised purple sun. And the headlights of the pods all fused together, making things as bright as they were bad.

  I heard footsteps. Doors opening and closing. I heard voices. Then they were taking Alpha from me. They had blood on their suits. Purple and red. And I couldn’t stop them from taking her because they were taking me too. Needles jabbing at me, breaking my skin.

  “Hold still,” someone yelled. As if I was moving. Then I could hear Crow screaming and it was exactly what the Darkness must have sounded like. The twenty years of night.

  “Not again,” Crow roared, till his voice split in two. “Not again.”

  When I came to, I wished to hell I hadn’t. I’d lost Alpha. And Crow. Sal and Hina.

  They’d been replaced by strangers.

  We were on a road, and I knew that immediately. Being on the road’s in my blood, I guess. It’s hardwired into me. I felt the shake. The unpeeling feeling. I tried lifting my head but only my eyes would move. Drugged. Strapped in place. And back on the road, staring at the brightest sky I’d ever seen.

  I peered at the strangers to the right of me, the strangers to the left. Their eyes were closed and I told those faces to just keep on sleeping. Ain’t nothing to see up here anyway.

  No more corn. The world had changed.

  New smells now. Familiar smells.

  Plastic. Steel and juice.

  Ah, yeah. Juice. The smell of the road. Lifeblood to every set of wheels that’s rolling.

  When the first building passed over my head, I thought it was nothing but a shadow. I thought maybe I’d blinked. But those buildings kept popping into my sky, flashing past me, more and more of them until the buildings took over and the sky disappeared.

  Endless shades of black and gray and silver. You never seen so many windows. Like glassy eyes. Buildings so high, they bent like a landscape, arcing all together, slivers of steel in plastic sleeves, pointing at the sun.

  Then pointing at the moon. But then even the moon got blocked by the buildings. Even that massive old moon.

  I could smell the fumes off the bio vats. The greasy stink of hoarded corn being brewed into juice. And that juice must have flowed through pipes as wide as ancient rivers, all tunneled through the streets like veins.

  When the lights came on in the city, it made the drugs feel even stronger. First the windows sparked up, but that was nothing, just a simple orange like something burning. It was the fizzy billboard glow that got me. Lights of every color, you couldn’t even try to count them. They never flickered, but they spun and I spiraled, orbiting in light like I was drowning in stars. It made it hard to swallow, and I chewed at my tongue and my cheek. Signs flashed at me. Saying what? Who cared? Not me. Couldn’t read those suckers anyway.

  Until the last one.

  All the wealth in the world and this is what they do with it. Tall buildings and lights that burn twice as bright and all night long. So much juice, you’d wonder how there was any corn left for eating. But I’m sure they were eating plenty in that city that don’t sleep.

  No sleeping in Vega. No rest for the wicked.

  But I thought maybe I could drift off now, the buildings disappearing, the lights going out. We were being sucked under the ground. Deeper and deeper. Yeah, just go to sleep, that’s what I wanted. Except, that last sign I’d spotted, it bothered me. Because I hated to think it might be the one word I could read, like it was the only word that mattered.

  GenTech.

  I don’t even want to tell you what it was like down there. It was a place the sun did
n’t shine and no wind whispered.

  They kept the lights low, and that was the one nice thing they did for us. They had a system, I guess. Though I had no idea what it was.

  But of course they had a system. This was GenTech. They knew what they were doing. They knew what they wanted.

  Sick bastards. Dressed in purple and marching about with their clubs raised high. And I don’t know what they needed those clubs for. Most of the prisoners were still unconscious, and the ones like me were too drugged numb to fight. We were just bodies. Not even people. We were bodies that pissed and puked and moaned as the agents picked through our limbs and faces and dragged each victim one by one to a staging area in the middle of that nasty black hole.

  I reckoned this was the lowest point to which all else tumbled. The end of the road for all those lost souls who’d been taken. The people plucked from the dust and sold off by slavers. The people like my father and the old Rasta and Alpha’s mother and now me.

  It was GenTech. In the end, it had always been GenTech. The purple fist crushing the last gasp from our crusty lungs.

  But for what?

  On the outside, I could still barely move my fingers. But inside I was a full-on riot. My mind not working right but all looping around. And I thought again about the damn story about a meat trade, that the rich freaks in Vega liked to mix up their meals. But if it was meat they were after, then why were those agents testing each of one us by taking our blood? Because that’s what they were doing — sucking the red stuff into small plastic tubes.

  From what I could tell, there were two possible things that could happen once the agents ran their tests. Two options for all the bodies that had been taken.

  First option was the agents grabbed your blood and ran the test, and then off you went. Gone. No idea where you were dragged to. But it was better than the alternative. Much better.

  Because the second option was the agents grabbed your blood and ran the test, but then they just looked right through you.

  And then they burned you.

  Middle of the staging area they had some furnace sunk in the ground. A pit full of flames.