Under the Empyrean Sky (The Heartland Trilogy)

by Wendig, Chuck

  “Such accusations really hurt me,” Boyland says, and then the other two in his crew whoop with laughter. But Boyland keeps a straight face. “I’d never do that to you. It’s just—you’re reckless, McAvoy. One day, if you’re not careful, you’re gonna get yourself killed.”

  “That a threat, buckethead?”

  Boyland just laughs.

  In a flash Cael has his slingshot in his hand, a ball bearing palmed into the pocket. But Lane’s got a steady hand on Cael’s chest and a look in his eye that says, You really want to go stirring up that soup pot right now?

  Boyland winks, says, “That’s right, McAvoy, listen to your girlfriend.” Then the captain of the Butchers makes a lasso motion with his index finger. Mole turns the sails toward the wind, and Felicity cranks up the props—the land-yacht goes drifting off, faster and faster, until all they can see again is the wall of corn before them.

  As they walk side by side, Rigo limping between the other two, Cael watches a pair of pink-brown moths—corn borers by the look of the wings—flirt and frolic in midair, a mad dance as they circle ever closer to the corn. Bad idea. A nearby stalk shudders suddenly, and a leaf uncurls and lashes out, slicing one of the moths in half. Two wings separate from the body and drift down to the ground. The other moth, still alive, hightails it the hell out of there.

  A corn leaf tickles Cael’s ear, and he pulls away. “I hate this shit. Stupid plant. Stupid crop. Damnit.”

  Rigo shrugs. “I dunno. Been like this long as I can remember.” He hobbles along on his one good leg.

  “Corn’s how they control us,” Lane says. “It’s like your pop says, Cael. Corn wasn’t like this back when he was a kid. Used to be you plant the seed, that’s where it grew. Now it goes everywhere. Got a mind of its own.”

  Way Pop told it, the Empyrean crossbred the corn with a handful of other plants: kudzu, flytraps, some kind of nightshade. Called it Hiram’s Golden Prolific. Right now, Cael couldn’t give a whit about any of that.

  “We’re out of money!” Cael says. “Guys, we don’t have anything left. Spent all our damn ace notes on those hover-panels. Now they’re just a pile of junk.” Like the stuff we scavenge.

  Cael swats at a corn leaf, but it doesn’t seem to care. It twists toward him, and he grabs it and rips it off. The stalk recoils as though in pain.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Rigo says. “We always do.”

  Cael’s not so sure. But it’s his job to figure it out. He’s the captain of this crew. He’s out here every day earning ace notes—or trying to—for his brat sister, for Pop, for his poor, bed-ridden mother. Responsibility, he decided long ago, sucks. It sucks the shine off a brand-new motorvator. If only they got lucky, just one time…

  “Those hover-panels were our ticket,” he says. “Our way to beat the Butchers. To find that one big haul and set us up for life.”

  Lane makes a pssh sound. “It doesn’t work like that. I told you. You have to put it out of your mind, Cael. Out here it’s all just different shades of brown. You’re like those people who count on the Lottery year after year.”

  “Hey, shut up,” Rigo says. “The Lottery’s the real deal.”

  “The Lottery’s bullshit,” Cael says. “But my plan isn’t. Whoever has the ace notes has the edge. The mayor’s on the Empyrean’s teat, and that means he gets the biggest mouthful of milk—and that means Boyland’s got a taste, too. But how do you think Boyland the Elder got to be mayor? I bet he bought his way in. And if we had enough money—”

  Lane claps him on the shoulder. “Cool your heels, dude. One day at a time.” He offers Cael a hand-rolled cigarette, but Cael waves him off—he doesn’t smoke any of that ditchweed. “Let’s just focus on getting Betty back up and running.”

  “Gwennie will know what to do next,” Rigo says.

  Cael cocks an eyebrow. “Gwennie’s not the damn captain.”

  “But she’s the first mate.”

  Lane adds, “And let’s be honest: she’s the brains of this operation.”

  Cael gives him the stink-eye. “We need someone to send a tow-tractor out there to haul Betty back to the barn. And we need to do it soon, because if we leave her out there too long, the damn corn’s gonna grow up all over her. Then we’ll have to pay for a chop-top to go out along with the tractor just to chain-saw through the stalks.”

  “That’ll cost ace notes,” Lane says.

  “Ace notes we don’t have,” Rigo points out.

  “We’ll have to scrounge.” Cael sighs. “Or take out a loan from the maven.”

  Lane shakes his head. “That’s how they get you. They get you stuck in the mud, and every time you try to pull out… the deeper you sink.”

  Cael’s about to tell them both to shut up, because none of this is helping—but then his eyes catch movement. The other two don’t see it, but that’s why Cael’s the head of this crew: he’s got vision like a hawk. Or an owl. Or some kind of hawk-owl hybrid that the Empyrean scientists are probably working on just for shits and giggles.

  “Shuck rat!” Cael hisses. Then he breaks from the other two, his slingshot already out of his back pocket and in his hand a ball bearing ready to fire.

  THE SHUCK RAT’S LITTLE SECRET

  CAEL CRASHES THROUGH the stalks. The rat darts ahead of him, squealing.

  This shuck rat is, like all shuck rats, fat—but that doesn’t mean it can’t run. These rats have longer, leaner legs: they can stand up at the stalk like a dog begging for food, their long tongues searching out low-hanging cobs to pull close so they can get a nibble. Cael sees a flash of the rat’s banded tail, a tail that looks like the Carruthers rat snake, a serpent introduced about ten years back in order to control the population of shuck rats. Back then the shuck rat’s tail was pink and wormy. Then the snake came along, and a year or two later, the rats start popping up with a different kind of tail. The tail confuses the snake, makes the snake think it’s chasing one of its buddies, and so it gives up the hunt and the rat gets away. (And as a result, the snake has to change its food source, which means the Carruthers rat snakes decided to go ahead and eat up all the birds.)

  The thing about survival, Pop always says, is that it’s not about who’s fastest or strongest but who can adapt to changing situations.

  Right now, Cael aims to disprove his father’s words and show this rat who’s stronger and faster. Killing this shuck rat will put food on the table tonight and maybe tomorrow.

  Cael sees another glimpse of the rat’s tail and shoulders his way through the corn, chin to his chest so as not to cut himself up further. He’s got the slingshot in his hand, a ball bearing from an old, broken-down motorvator pinched between thumb and forefinger in the pocket of the sling. His forearm is tensed.

  The rat darts right, then left, zigzagging. Cael struggles to keep up.

  He sees a flash of gray—how’d the rat get over there?

  He hurries after it. Then another flash of gray to his right. How the hell?

  Then he realizes: he’s tracking a pair of them.

  Dinner for days! His mouth waters, and he bounds after the animals.

  Cael skids to a halt as he sees the two rats come together in a clearing. He has the slingshot drawn, the ball bearing ready to let fly, a second metal marble already tucked in the palm of his hand—

  And he stops. His jaw slackens: a look his father calls his “flycatcher” look.

  “Whoa,” he says, a smile spreading across his face.

  One of the rats squeals—a sound that always cuts to Cael’s marrow when he hears it, like fingers on a chalkboard but so much worse because it’s coming up out of the throat of a howling, screaming mangy-ass rat—and bolts for the margin of the clearing. Cael’s so stunned that he misses the shot, but the second rat isn’t so lucky. Cael’s brain catches up with his hand, and he opens his thumb and forefinger. The metal marble thwacks the rat in the head.

  The rat gives him one last sad look before toppling over.

  Cael laughs. Then h
e calls to his friends. Because they’re going to want to see this.

  The first thing that draws Cael’s eyes are the red bell peppers, fat and swollen like breasts. They hang so low they’re almost touching the ground. But soon his eyes move to see the bulging green beans, the jaunty onion tops, the round cabbage so richly purple it matches the iridescent back of a caviling grackle bird.

  “Ohhhh” is all Rigo can say.

  Lane is more verbose. “It’s a garden. A glorious, no-shit, shouldn’t-be-here, how-the-hell-can-it-survive garden.”

  Cael laughs, nudges the dead shuck rat aside with his foot, and grabs a red pepper. He twists it, and it pops off the plant. Then he takes a deep bite.

  His teeth puncture the tough skin with a pop, and his mouth floods with the pepper’s juices. It’s sweet and bitter at the same time. Wet, crisp, crunchy—as refreshing as anything he can remember. Cael closes his eyes, listens to the corn rustling and whispering. Feels the warm sun at the top of his head and the cool breeze brushing across his brow. A moment of bliss. Then he’s jolted out of it as Rigo hops over and snatches the pepper from his hand. His friend takes a big chomp.

  Rigo breaks into a spasming dance of happiness. “Oh my gods oh my gods oh my gods, it’s so good. It’s like, it’s like—it’s like one of the Lady’s angels is tongue-kissing me right now.” Rigo cups his hand around the back of the angel’s invisible head, and his tongue waggles in the open air.

  “You’re an asshole,” Cael says, laughing.

  “Not just an asshole,” Lane says. “A weird asshole. Really weird.”

  Rigo’s eyes roll back in his head, and he continues his blissed-out hobble-footed boogie.

  “A garden,” Cael says. “A garden.”

  Gardens like this just don’t grow anymore, not unless they’re grown in a greenhouse on board an Empyrean flotilla. Around here—around everywhere in the Heartland—the only thing people are allowed to grow is corn. And they don’t so much grow it as manage it, since corn grows anywhere it damn well pleases now, whether it’s up through a barn’s floorboards or shooting through cracks in those old asphalt roads that haven’t yet been shellacked with plasto-sheen.

  You can’t even get the seeds for other crops. The Empyrean control all seed distribution, and they no longer distribute any seeds to anyone down on the ground. Not that it would matter. The ground here is so degraded by erosion and chemicals, the only thing that grows is the corn. Cael heard the ground used to be grade A, river-bottom soil: a deep, rich topsoil that soaked up rain like a hungry sponge. But this ground rejects the rain (when the rain comes at all) like everything’s covered in a sheet of oiled leather.

  Food like this just isn’t something farmers see anymore.

  “What I don’t get,” Lane says, “is how the corn hasn’t squashed this stuff. The corn doesn’t let anything grow.”

  Hiram’s Golden Prolific is not a fan of competition.

  “This isn’t random,” Cael says. “Someone planted this. Right?”

  Rigo wipes pepper juice from his chin. “Not necessarily. Maybe a caviling grackle stole a seed bag from one of the flotillas. They bring stuff down here sometimes—last week Henry Duggard’s dad found a little grackle nest in his silo, and half of it was made of shiny thread and marbled buttons.”

  As Rigo’s talking, Lane pokes his head through the corn on the far side of this little patch. “Guys. Guys. Look at this.”

  They hurry over and look.

  Ten feet through the corn, another pepper plant grows.

  And ten feet after that, a tomato plant has gotten cozy with a cornstalk, a plump green tomato hanging in the shade.

  It keeps going. A trail of vegetables.

  “I wonder how far it goes,” Cael says, truly in awe.

  Rigo shrugs. “Seems to be just as aggressive as the corn. Maybe this is some high-class Empyrean biology.”

  Lane heads back into the clearing. He kneels down, reaches out with lean fingers, and plucks a green bean. He bites it in half. He doesn’t lose himself in a fit of delight like Rigo, but he breathes slow and deep.

  “The question of all questions is,” Lane says, “What do we do about this?”

  “What do you think we’re gonna do with it? Have a food fight? Make little red-pepper puppets and put on a show for the shuck rats?” Rigo says. “We eat it!”

  Lane clucks his tongue. “That’s your response to everything.”

  Rigo flicks Lane in the ear. Lane puts Rigo in a headlock and noogies the shit out of him.

  “You guys said it,” Cael says. “We need ace notes. Here are our ace notes. This is it. This is our ticket. We harvest these vegetables; they’re better than gold.”

  Rigo, turning red in Lane’s headlock, scowls. “This food isn’t legal. We get caught with this, the Babysitters—”

  “So we don’t get caught with it.”

  “No, no, I like where you’re going with this,” Lane says. He noogies Rigo again.

  “Ow ow ow ow.” Rigo wriggles free and hobbles to the left. “Dude. Ow. My head feels like it’s on fire.” He turns to Cael. “Guys, you remember a few years back when Jessie Redstone raised a couple squealers in her barn and didn’t feed them corn? Need I remind you what happened when the Babysitters found out?”

  Proctor Agrasanto paid a special visit. Killed both of those piglets, put them in plastic bags, and shipped them away as if they were sick with something. Two weeks later, the whole farm burned down, and Jessie ended up on the spray-down line at Boxelder’s processing facility. A year later the sprayer nozzle got gummed up, and a stray jet of separator chemical hit her in the side of the face. Now she’s a permanent guest at the Grummans’ farm next door, laid up in their attic bedroom, breathing through a tube. Nobody talks about her anymore.

  “I got to see those piglets,” Rigo murmurs. “I snuck into her barn. Man, those little pigs were cute. They were pink. No scabs or sores. Running around like a couple of happy idiots instead of just lying there in their own mess.” He stares at a far-off point. “The bacon from those squealers would have been like nothing we’d ever tasted. Can we at least talk to your dad about this?”

  “Uh-uh. No way. Pop doesn’t need to know about this. We got our own thing going. This is crew business. Pop doesn’t get a vote.”

  “So,” Lane says. “We vote.”

  “Yep. And I say we sell it.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Wait,” Rigo says. “What about my vote? And Gwennie’s?”

  “She’s not here. And you’re outvoted.”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  Cael thrusts his slingshot into Rigo’s hand. Gives him a fistful of ball bearings, too. “Protect the garden. Lane and I are heading back to Betty’s wreck to get some bags. And the beacon emitter.” That way they’ll be able to track back direct to the garden. “We can’t harvest it all in one go, and Lord and Lady only know how far the trail goes. But this is a damn fine start.”

  “Hey, just don’t eat everything while we’re gone,” Lane says to Rigo, laughing.

  Rigo scowls.

  As Lane and Cael trudge back through the corn toward Betty’s wreck, Lane blurts out, “So. Gwennie.”

  Cael knows where he’s going with this. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Tomorrow’s Harvest Home.”

  “I said, Don’t wanna talk about it.”

  Lane snaps his fingers. “I bet she cleans up nice for her Obligation.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “It’s totally like that.”

  “It’s luck of the draw. Nothing I can do about it.” Cael scuffs the hard earth with a ratty shoe, kicking up a puff of dust.

  “You have, what, a ten percent chance? Not the worst odds. Better than winning the Lottery and getting a one-way ticket off the ground.”

  Cael stops. Meets Lane chin-to-chin. “If I have a ten percent shot, then so do you. You’re just as likely to end up with her as I am.”

  “Oh,” Lane says.
He gets quiet.

  “You didn’t think of that, did you?”

  “I actually didn’t think of that.”

  “Anybody you want to end up with?” Cael needles.

  “I don’t want to talk about it” is Lane’s retort.

  “Then we’re on the same page.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  And the two of them keep walking.

  THE BOXELDER BLUES

  LATER, THEY FIND themselves standing at the crux of the old, shattered Boxelder Road. Lane and Cael each carry a sack bulging with pilfered vegetables. It takes all their willpower not to sit down here and now and have a feast.

  The shuck rat will have to do.

  The old Cemetery Road crosses their path, with corn rising up on all sides. Rigo lives one way, and Lane lives the other. Cael has to walk through town to get to his house. The Cemetery Road has an enamel of plasto-sheen on it so the corn doesn’t grow up through it. The way the afternoon sun collects on the plastic coating gives it a glossy brightness; look at it the wrong way and you’ll catch a blinding eyeful of white light.

  They do their not-really-that-secret handshake: shake hands, then transition into locking elbows before moving into a manly, shoulder-clapping hug.

  “Godsdamn Boyland,” Cael says.

  “Godsdamn Boyland,” the other two say in unison.

  “Least we got the garden.” Rigo pats the side of one of the sacks the way you might the side of an old cow.

  “True,” Cael says. “I’m gonna head home first since it’s on the way, but then I’m taking these to the Mercado right after. Fresher they are, better we get paid, I figure.”

  “Then I guess we’ll see each other tomorrow,” Lane says.

  “You’re not coming to eat?”

  Lane’s got nobody. Father dead. Mother off in some town, Lord and Lady know where, serving as a Babysitter for the Empyrean. Sending a few ace notes and provisions home now and again. Lot of nights Lane ends up at the McAvoy place for dinner.