by Chris Howard
We fell bundled together, my hand locked on her wrist as I pushed her beneath me. She threw the key as best she could and then rolled on my back, beating me as I dug my hands through the snow, searching.
I found the plastic tag and shoved it down the side of my boot, ignoring the woman slapping and screaming at me, her face all wet and stretchy.
“You need to come with me,” I told her as I staggered to my feet. “I’ll get you out of here, I swear it.”
“To do what?” she shrieked, her voice wretched. “To burn like everything else?”
“No,” I said, and I leaned into her, taking her shaky, wrinkled hands in mine. “To regrow the world. That’s what you want, isn’t it? But not just for GenTech. Not like this.” I jutted my chin in the direction of the compound. “Those bodies in there are people. They’re somebody’s sister or father. They’re somebody’s son.”
She stared at me and I had no idea if she was buying it. But it was too late now. My diversion had done its trick. And up on the ridgeline, the agents were lined up and panicked, pointing their gloved hands and their stupid hoods down at the fire that was rolling below them.
Zee scampered up beside us and we hunkered down in the snow, watching the agents above. I heard gunshots on the other side of the hill and felt my insides crawl. What was Frost doing? What had happened down in the bunker? Was Alpha free yet? Or was it too late? Would I always be too damn late?
“What now?” Zee said.
“I’m getting over that ridge.” I pulled out the nail gun and balanced it on the snow, aiming up at the agents. “You with me?”
“I’ll come with you. But you can’t shoot your way through them. Let me talk to them.”
“No,” my mother said. “I’ll talk to them.”
I stared at her.
“Your father was right,” she said. “You’re more free than he ever imagined. But if you want to break him out of here, then you’re going to need my help.”
“You’ll betray GenTech?”
“I don’t care about GenTech,” she said as she started up the hillside. “All I ever cared about was the trees.”
I shoved the gun back in my belt and we staggered to the ridgeline, where my mother yelled at the agents and commanded them to move.
“Get down there,” she told them. “Salvage anything that’s not yet burned. Any stick or twig or leaf. I’ll need it. All of it.”
“But there’s been a breach,” said one of the men. He pointed down the hill, where gunshots were bouncing at the walls of the bunker, cracking open the night. A lone gun was firing out from between the steel doors. Just one gun. Just Frost.
“We’ll make do with what troops are down there,” my mother told the agents. “Besides, we can always harvest more people. We won’t get more trees.”
The agents began down the one slope and we set off down the other. I was leaping and sliding and forgetting to breathe. At the bottom, I gave Zee the key and the nail gun and told her I’d meet her in the Orchard.
“We’ll get the Producer ready,” my mother said. “Make the tank mobile. Ready to move.”
“Be quick,” I told them. And then I was running again, heading straight for the bunker full of bodies. My mind was stuck in one zone and it wasn’t ever going to shift. Because the trees mattered. More than anything.
Except for one thing.
I sprinted right through the line of agents with my hands in the air and my jacket gone and my clothes ripped and smoking.
“Don’t shoot,” I kept yelling, running straight at the rifle that was stuck out of the bunker’s doors. If it was Frost, he’d see me, recognize me. And it had to be Frost. Had to be.
“Frost,” I shouted, feeling bullets hit the frozen ground near my feet. But the bullets were coming from behind me. From the agents.
I hit the snow and slid into the bunker, feet first, my hands still in the air and my face staring up at the barrel of a gun.
“Where the hell have you been?” Frost said, grabbing me by the scruff of my neck and pulling me inside.
“What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened. What use is an army you can’t wake up?”
I stood. Stared past him. All the bodies were still stretched out, limp and cold.
“What time is it?” I said.
“Past four, you idiot. Closer to five. What took you so damn long?”
“Didn’t you switch it off?” I pointed at the vat of poison that hung from the ceiling.
“Switch it off? How the hell do you switch it off, genius?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one’s supposed to be a freaking employee.”
I ran straight into that field of bodies, staring up at the big purple vat and the cables that ran out of it and plugged into every arm in sight.
Then I just started yanking at the cables. I grabbed as many as I could in one hand and began tugging them free.
The cables popped loose and I tripped, fell facedown in flesh. I stumbled up, began running again, pulling the cables from out of their sockets, searching the faces for the one face I knew.
“Banyan.” It was Frost. “They’re storming the building. I can’t hold ’em, kid. I can’t hold ’em.”
I ran through the bodies, kicking at them, shaking the cables out and knocking them loose.
“Wake up,” I screamed, needing help, now more than ever. Knowing I couldn’t ever do this alone. “Wake up.”
I tore out cables and kept on moving. I was halfway through the field. And I’d not found Alpha.
Not a soul had stirred.
Gunshots cracked at the doors. Frost was swearing and shouting.
And then I did find my girl. But every part of me screamed that I’d arrived too late.
“Alpha,” I whispered, tugging the cables out of her and scooping her body all floppy in my arms. “Come back,” I said, rocking her against me. I was crying and trembling and the world broke as the loss of her snapped into place.
I’d waited too long. Tried to do too much. And I reckoned saving her was all that ever should have mattered.
“Come on,” I kept saying. “Come back.” I pinched her eyelids up and I kissed her. But nothing. I felt for her pulse. Weak and slow. But still beating. Still there.
Her skin was a pale shade of green, and I felt the bark on her belly where they’d stitched her together, and that wood was throbbing like it was surging full of life. I took my hand and I pushed there, kneading my fist in her stomach like I might loosen up the juice inside her. And when she still wasn’t moving, I just put my head on her belly and I held her and wept.
I heard the gunshots outside getting louder, the voices of the agents. Close. Real close. But then there was a new sound. An odd drone that howled louder as it turned human and broke into words.
Voices. All around me. Moaning out in confusion. A chaos of babbles and bluster. The sound you make coming back from the dead.
They were with me. They were with me.
A hundred voices, and one more was all I needed to hear.
“I love you,” I said, squeezing Alpha tight.
“I know, bud,” she whispered, but it sounded just like she was singing. One of her old world songs, maybe. Or a new song, all of its own.
Must have been a hell of a way to wake up. Come around to the sound of gunfire and people screaming, a fat man and a skinny kid trying to shove a rifle in your hand.
It was Alpha that led the charge, of course. You should’ve seen her. Raising up her gun with a battle cry that turned the whole bunker silent and put the whole world to shame.
“We gotta outgun them,” I told her. “Push them back. Then make for the boat. The lake’s just over the ridge behind us.”
“What about you?”
“I’m gonna get what we came here for. But I’ll meet you there. At the boat.”
“No,” she said.
“I’ll be there. I promise. But you gotta get these people free.”
She kissed me t
hen. Just for a second. And I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone.
“I’ll meet you there,” I told her.
“Okay, bud. Just make sure that you do.”
I shoved a gun at someone whose hands were empty. Then I made for the doors, where a bunch of naked bodies were working their weapons and forcing the agents to find cover, forcing them back through the night.
Squatting behind my front line, I studied the twenty yards or so to the Orchard, gearing myself up to make a run for it.
But then Frost’s fist was clamped tight on my arm.
“Where you heading?” he said.
“Heading for the tree.”
“Not without me, you ain’t.”
So we waited there together, watching the agents being driven back, biding our time till a break in the shooting. Then, staying low, we hustled out into the night.
We bent in at the wall of the bunker as we scurried through the darkness, just moving one foot after the other, till we were almost there.
A bullet hit the snow with a thud. Then another. Closer.
Frost raised his rifle as he jiggled along, ripping off a quick round in the direction of the agents. I sprinted straight for the steel dome and bounced against the door, pounding my fist till the door slid open.
I leapt forward, Frost barging in behind me, and we fell in a pile on the concrete as the door sealed tight behind us.
The overhead lights had been shut off and the gold lamps of the tank lit the room like an electric sun. My mother had shed her thick layers and was busy moving the tank with a control pad, punching at keys that made the wheels beneath the tank start to twitch and turn. Zee was stood by the door. Frozen. Staring at Frost.
“Hello, Zee,” the old bastard said, his face dripping with a grin. He stood up, and she shrank away from him.
“We gotta hurry,” I said. “Is it ready to go?”
“Almost,” my mother said. She flicked a switch on the wall and a hollow black box began to come down off the ceiling, dropping toward the tank like a metal cloak.
“Banyan,” Zee said, her voice shaking. “What the hell is he doing here?”
“I’m taking you home,” said Frost. “You and the tree.”
I got up to the tank and started pushing it so it would be in line with the descending black shell. But in the glass I could see Frost reflected behind me. And before I’d spun around, I knew what had happened.
Son of a bitch had his gun on me.
“It’s over, Mister B,” he said. “It ends now for you.”
“No,” I whispered. But it was too late.
Last thing I saw was his pudgy finger squeezing down on that trigger. Then a flash of light made me blind for a second. And when I could see again, there was blood in the air.
The bullet had hit.
But not me.
She’d leapt in front of me at the last possible moment. And it was the last thing my mother would ever do.
I held her in my arms as we sank to the floor, me still breathing but all the life seeping out of her.
“What have you done?” I whispered, my voice like someone else speaking.
“Keep him safe” was all she said, every bit of her fading, her voice all in pieces. She started croaking and wheezing and she jabbed a finger at the glass tank behind me, and its golden light glowed and flickered in the wide blackness of her eyes. She wanted to say something more but I could tell circuits had been ripped loose inside her, and her mouth twitched and gurgled and I started to cry. And too late, I started to tell her I was sorry. But she was gone. Her thin shoulders cold already. Her skin stiff to my touch.
I stared at Zee crouched in the corner. Then I watched Frost lift his rifle back up, and he’d never dropped his smile.
“Now, tree builder,” Frost said, pointing the gun at me again, “it’s your turn to die.”
But before Frost could pull the trigger, Zee unloaded the nail gun into the side of his head, one nail right after the other, striding closer to her target as he crumbled and fell. And all of a sudden it was over. Frost was dead. Punched full of holes.
Except I knew it wasn’t over. Not quite.
Not yet.
Whatever kind of metal they’d made that fancy box out of, I was still scared a bullet could get through and smash the whole tank to hell.
That would end Pop’s trip back to the mainland real quick.
So we had to catch a break in the shooting before we took the tank out of there and made for the last hill, before we followed the trail that led up and over, before we could drop down and board the boat on the water below.
But the shooting was still raging. Back and forth. Neither side making much of a difference.
I sank back inside the Orchard but left the door open, the tank cloaked in the black metal and wheeled up against the wall behind me, out of the line of any shooter out there blowing up the dark.
Zee had pulled a jacket over my mother’s body, and the purple GenTech logo practically sparkled in the gloom.
“They’re cornered,” Zee said, glancing outside with me. “Trapped in the bunker.”
“Yeah. And they’re gonna run out of bullets before the agents do.”
“We need to do something.”
“I’m working on it.”
“We need to get Crow.”
“No, we don’t,” I said.
Because there he was.
The watcher was hobbling along on one leg and dragging the other behind him. He’d busted out of the other building and was cutting right toward the bunker, a sub gun in each hand and his head held high in the air.
He towered ten feet tall and his two guns drew the enemy’s fire, forcing the agents to scatter, and allowing the prisoners a moment to advance.
In that moment, the doors to the bunker burst open and a hundred naked bodies flooded into the night. Those who’d been sleeping now charged forward, fearless, surging like a wave of bones and skin.
The agents didn’t know which way to shoot — the giant tree man with wooden legs, or the shaved bodies with arms full of holes. And pretty soon, the agents were backed up against the far slope in their puffy suits. And we were winning.
For now.
I turned to Zee. “This is our chance,” I said. “We gotta get to the boat before they get reinforcements. There’s a lot more agents still at the burn.”
“What about all them?” Zee pointed at the uprising.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’re coming with us.” I grabbed the rifle out of Frost’s dead hands and I charged out into the battle.
I called for Alpha and I called for Crow, but all I could see was bodies and bullets in the night.
“Fall back,” I yelled. “Make for the boat. The boat.”
Some of the prisoners heard me and I pointed back at the trail that led to the water. “Get to the boat,” I told them. “Run.”
“Leaving so soon, little man?”
I twisted around and stared up at Crow. His damn legs were as tall as I was. “How you feeling?” I said.
“Oh, I been better. But I sure as hell been worse. Where’s Zee?”
“She’s over there. In the dome.” We took cover behind a crate of cargo as bullets drilled the ice around us.
“And Frost?” Crow said.
“He’s dead. Zee killed him.”
“Did she, now? Good for her.”
“We gotta get everyone back, though, to the lake. There’ll be more agents coming.”
“Then you better tell boss lady, if you wanting folk to move.”
Crow pointed and I spotted her immediately, and I wondered if planting trees and settling down was something that girl was ever meant to do. Because she was sure in her element, out here among the blood and fury.
Alpha had ripped up one of the GenTech cloaks and wound the purple fuzz around her. She had blood on her arm, a gash on the side of her leg, and she was kneeling dow
n in the snow, hands reloading her weapon while her eyes scanned the hill.
“We gotta fall back,” I yelled at her through the sound of the gunshots. “Alpha. Fall back. Now.”
She stood and hollered and I pointed behind me at the hillside, toward where the bio vat rumbled and steamed. And then we were running that way. All of us. Fast as we could move.
At the Orchard, I told Crow to keep moving — he was pretty slow and all, slipping along on his new pair of legs.
“We’ll be right behind you,” I told him. “Meet you at the boat.”
“Aye,” Crow said. “Be quick about it.” I watched him head up the hill with the others. Then me and Alpha ducked inside the dome.
“Who’s this?” Zee said, staring at Alpha.
“I’m his girl.” Alpha grabbed the control pad. “Who the hell are you?”
“She’s my sister,” I said, and then I had Alpha help me pry open a panel on the metal box, and I pointed inside the tank where the saplings were springing out of the green remains of my father. “And this is my dad.”
“Got yourself one weird family, don’t you, bud?” said Alpha, swinging the panel shut. And I guess she was right. But you got to take what you can get, I reckon.
You take what you can get.
We busted out of the Orchard with the tank cloaked black and wired up, and Alpha sat above it with her hands working the controller and the wheels spinning in the snow.
“Come on,” Alpha called, and she dragged Zee on top of the tank with her. But I paused a moment, then told them to go on.
I ran back into the Orchard. My mother’s body was still lying there, and I pulled the coat off her face. I watched her for a second with no part of me thinking.
It was like I’d seen her die two times over. Because she’d caught that bullet the same way Hina had stopped the locusts in the cornfields. They’d both given themselves up. Made their own ending. For me.
I thought of taking her body but decided against it. This was where she should lie, I reckoned. On this island she’d chosen. In this steel tomb. She deserved more of a burial, though. And I figured I should say something. But as I pulled the jacket back over her face, I could find no words that would do. All that came to mind was the song me and Pop used to sing, the song forever stuck inside the dash of our old wagon. The song about dead flowers and the guy leaving roses on a dead girl’s grave.
