Rootless

by Chris Howard

  Eventually, I heard the squealing of latches, the sound of steel on steel, and my eyes watered as daylight poured in like ice water.

  Sal’s arms were locked tight around my waist and I pried him off as I slithered to the doorway. I tried to stagger to my feet. But one by one, the pirates appeared. Silhouetted black against the setting sun. I counted their mohawks, their broad shoulders, the hips laden with pouches and guns. There was too many of them. Way too many.

  I fell out of the truck and the mud was slimy on my face. Dark and sweet and wet. I let the stuff ooze inside me, tried to breathe it in and scrub the stench of the truck from my mind.

  Bodies were stacked around me, on top of me, and I felt hands clutching at me, tapping frantic on my back. Spinning up, I could see it was Sal again, reaching for me. I stared up at the glimmering sky and wiped spit from my mouth, tried to croak some words to the kid, to comfort him.

  But no words would come.

  Between the two trucks, the pirates had racked up at least a hundred bodies, and god knows where they’d gotten them all.

  The ones who couldn’t wake or walk were picked up or dragged as the rest of us limped forward, following the pirate who’d caught me, the one who strutted like she was the biggest badass ever seen, her tall rubber boots splashing in the mud.

  Alpha. That’s what the others called her. And I reckoned that was the word stitched crooked in the back of her fuzzy vest, too.

  I took Sal by the hand and led him through the slop, doing my best to stand upright, doing my best to see where in the hell we were going.

  The air was as sticky as the mud and it pressed your skin, daring you to breathe it. The sun was low now, puke orange, but the day showed no sign of cooling. And it was still. No wind. No flutter or breeze. So we’d dropped south, I reckoned. Somewhere south of the forty.

  Up ahead, an ancient settlement sat on stone stilts above brown water. There were bridges and walkways strewn between flat buildings, everything crumbling and patched with plastic.

  The pirates pushed us up a ramp that led over the slime and deep inside the settlement. A rubbery banner frowned over our heads.

  “What’s it say?” I said, nudging at Sal.

  “Old Orleans,” he muttered, glancing up at the curly letters. I stared down through the slats and stone, watched the water move like sewage.

  It was like being stranded in the devil’s own shantytown, the world dissolving below you, leaving you in the refuse of days gone by.

  Buried a half mile inside the town was another ramp, but this one led downward. The pirates kicked and prodded us into a watery corral, then they yanked rusty chains to pull the ramp over our heads, blocking out the near darkness of the sky.

  I peered around at my fellow prisoners as they splashed and sat and buried their faces. I felt at my arm, the flat end of the nail solid beneath the festering wound.

  “What are we gonna do?” Sal whispered. But I just peered up at the walkway, listened as the women went stomping away.

  Somewhere in the enclosure a baby began wailing, and the whole world seemed to silence at the sound of it. Then the ramp started to lower again and we scurried from its path. A single pair of boot heels swaggered down the ramp, and I spotted the pink vest and the broken nose, watched as Alpha found the baby and took it in her arms. The infant fell silent as Alpha rocked it upon her hip, hushing and cooing the child and bundling it in rags. Weren’t something you’d think would look right. But it did. And her tenderness sure stuck out in a place so ugly and torn.

  “You people are safe here,” Alpha said, and the whole place froze still. “For now. Some of you will be traded. The rest will be set free.”

  A murmur rippled through the enclosure, then cut short. I wanted to say something, shout out loud, but all I did was watch as Alpha held the baby close and strode up the ramp away from us, leaving those who could manage it to holler and beg.

  Traded. That’s what she’d said. Traded like an old world Benjamin or piece of salvage, a jug of water or a gallon of juice. But what was our value? I stared at the filthy bodies surrounding me, the ragged bits of skin in the moonlight.

  What good were we to anyone but ourselves?

  It made me get to wondering if this was how Pop had been taken. But him and me had been out near Vega, the other side of the cornfields, and pirates don’t go messing where GenTech is at. Besides, all the racket they made, I would have heard pirates coming. Whoever stole Pop away had been stealthy. Because Pop had heard voices, but I never heard a damn thing.

  I finally gave up standing and sank down in the sludge. Sal slumped beside me, waiting, I’d no doubt, for me to tell him how come we were pinned inside the leftovers of a city, trapped by buildings rooted in mud.

  “They’ll take him for sure,” a raspy voice said behind me, and I spun around to a beady set of eyes. The man’s head was smudged silver in the moonlight, his cheeks hammered hollow and thin. “The fat one,” the man whispered, staring at me.

  “What you talking about?”

  “He’s young. And there’s plenty of him.”

  “For what?” Sal said in a small voice.

  The scrawny dude scrunched up his shoulders. “For whatever they like.”

  “Shut it,” I said, turning away. “Don’t you listen to him.”

  But Sal was already sobbing, his fists squeezed tight.

  I felt at my arm where the nail stung and throbbed, and I knew much longer and I’d have to claw the damn thing out with my fingers. At sunrise, I told myself, pulling away from Sal and hunkering down to sleep. I needed to rest, if I could. I couldn’t do anything now. Not until the sun came up.

  But when the sun came up, I was caught in a sickness, wrapped inside a fever that painted the brown world red.

  I’d not hardly opened my eyes and I was throwing up what little was inside me. My head swirled, and I clutched the mud as if I could stop the earth from moving. I felt hands on me, stroking the hair from my eyes. I was wriggling around and shivering, my skin all thorny and pricked.

  “He’s burning up,” Sal yelled, his voice piercing through the blur.

  The pain howled in my arm, and I reached slippery fingers to where the nail had worked its way deep.

  Eyes closed. Eyes open. It didn’t matter. My guts twitched and I heaved again, and not a single drop squeezed out.

  In a different world, I could hear the ramp cranking down amid a stampede of boots and voices. Then the smell of old leather filled me with nausea as hands grappled hold of my shoulders and grabbed at my feet.

  “How many more days we got to keep them?” said the woman at my legs, her fingers sharp on my ankles.

  “I quit counting,” the voice right above me shot back, and the sound vibrated through me as the pirate woman sank my head against her chest. Her breath reeked like smoke she’d swallowed a thousand years prior. “Flip him,” she said. “He’s gonna lose his lunch.”

  Lunch.

  The word jabbed at me as they turned me facedown and rushed me up the ramp. And I could almost taste burned corn and warm water, feel the breeze atop a finished forest. Me and Pop and a meal fit for kings. My old man trading me kernels so as to double my rations. And if I died now, then there’d be no one to go looking for him. No one to care.

  In the distance there was music, a guitar stopping and starting and the sound of women singing. I strained my ears to listen. Blinked my eyes open.

  I was stretched on a lumpy cot beneath a corrugated ceiling, little bits of sky poking through the metal, revealing the pink of a sun giving up or a sun coming back.

  I shivered. Ran my hands on my tender skin. Naked. I clutched my stomach and it felt swollen and sticky. I tried to raise up my head but a hand eased me back.

  “Rest,” the girl said.

  It was her. Alpha. The one who’d plugged me with the nail in the first place. I struggled against her and felt at my arm. The wound was bandaged now, the skin puffy.

  “Pulled it out,” Alpha sa
id as I squinted up at her. “Can’t have you dying on us.”

  “Shouldn’t have shot me, then,” I whispered, feeling a searing pain up the back of my skull.

  “You tried to shoot me first, bud. Remember?”

  She swabbed a damp cloth at my chest and I tensed as the water dripped and tickled. I remembered how this girl had looked with the baby on her hip — like someone who hadn’t had all the sweetness beat out of her. And then the pain came tearing at my eyeballs again, and I blacked out hard and cold.

  Went on like this for hours. Rolling back and forth on the cot, coming to, then passing out again. The voices quivering in the distance, singing and laughing. And Alpha returning to bathe me and check on my wound.

  The holes in the ceiling became plugged with night, then turned pale with morning. And I didn’t think of my pals down in the mud pit. Not even once.

  I’d been left alone and was drowsy and spent when the door came open and a new girl came in. She pulled a sheet across me and sat beside me on the cot.

  “Alpha tells me you’re a tree builder,” the girl said. She looked young, and much too small for a pirate.

  “Used to be,” I muttered, turning away from her. “Lost all my tools.”

  “I don’t think it’s the tools that matter. Either you are something or you’re not.”

  I stayed silent.

  “Let me see your hands,” she said, not giving me much choice in the matter. She studied my fingertips, felt at my palms.

  “I want you to build something for us,” the girl said, looking satisfied. “To finish something.”

  I tried to sit up on the cot but was too weak, so I just blinked at her. She was handsome, in a stern sort of way. Her braided hair was blond, and cleaner than it had any right to be in a town so full of filth.

  “Who the hell are you?” I said.

  “You can call me Jawbone. Though most here call me Captain.”

  “Thought Alpha was in charge.”

  “Alpha answers to me.”

  “You don’t look much like a captain.”

  She smiled, all patient and shit. I started to say something else but she cut me off.

  “You should feel honored. Your work will leave quite the legacy.” The girl spoke smart, like she’d been schooled or something, not grown up here south of the forty.

  “You’ll have to excuse me not giving a damn,” I said.

  “I imagine you give a damn about one thing. Yourself.”

  “You can imagine all you want.”

  “If you build for us, then you’ll go free.”

  I stopped cold at that, felt my guard slip.

  “Another few days and King Harvest will be here,” she went on. “You can be part of our trade with him. Or not.”

  Build or be traded. Easy enough choice.

  “I got a friend, though,” I said, surprising myself with the word. “Little fat kid, down in your pit.”

  “You can take my terms or reject them. But they’re not to be altered.”

  “Then you’d better let me sleep,” I told her. “I’ll start building once the heat wears down.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” the girl said, standing. “I’d like nothing more than to free all of them.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Because King Harvest requires we meet our quota. One way or another.”

  At sunset, I was strong enough to stand, and I took to the walkways with Alpha on one side of me and Jawbone on the other.

  We worked our way wordlessly through Old Orleans, pausing only when I needed to rest, my arm still swollen and aching, my whole body drained to its core. I’d lean up on the metal railing and study the strange, dustless sky or examine the foundations of buildings that had once stood tall. The brown water sat stagnant below us, filling the air with a dampness as sour as it was soft.

  The pirate women gazed at me as I passed them, some of them winking or smiling, their faces blurring into one. Jawbone walked with her mouth stern and the women gave way as their captain hustled by. But Alpha joked with her compadres, slapping at their outstretched hands.

  In the distance, I heard generators growl and the music started again, guitars crashing and drums surging and each one fighting the other for control.

  “Here we are,” Jawbone said finally. We were right in the middle of the city and on the edge of a clearing, an empty stretch of concrete and mud. And in the middle of that clearing was what they’d brought me to see.

  I stopped dead and felt dizzy just trying to take in the sight of it.

  It was incredible work. Stunning. Even though the years had caked everything in rust.

  A low canopy of copper ferns mingled with cypress. Palm leaves, carved from tin, dangled from crooked spokes. The shortness gave the forest a softness, a sweetness I’d rarely considered, always striving for the biggest, tallest trees, always climbing as high as the scaffold would take me. But the lack of height had another purpose. It served to accentuate what had been built at the center.

  I stumbled as I stared up at the unfinished statue. I fell against jagged shrubs, and Alpha grabbed me, pulling me so I could lean against her.

  “What do you think?” said Jawbone, peering with me at the rusty masterpiece.

  I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t say anything.

  “Can you finish it?” Alpha asked.

  I nodded.

  I could finish it. Or at least I would try. Because there, in the middle of the forest, rising up a hundred feet high, was something prettier than any tree I’d ever seen. A statue of a woman with arms spread wide and one leg lifted like she was dancing. And not just any woman, either. I knew it even though the head was unfinished and the hair was missing. I knew it deep down in my bones.

  The statue was the tattoo woman. Zee’s mother.

  Frost’s wife.

  Whoever had built the statue had got the proportions perfect, not selling her short by making the boobs too big or the legs more curvy. They’d been true to the slope of her shoulders, the delicate way she held up her neck. But what really got me, what blew me away, was how they’d captured the tree.

  They’d built a separate installation for it, then woven one statue with the other, bending the steel branches so they gripped the woman’s waist, the leaves hanging loose so they’d turn in the breeze, shimmering where all else was rust. I studied their texture.

  Brass. Of course.

  Thin and shiny and perfect. And I knew I’d have never thought of brass. Not in a million years.

  “Used to light up,” Alpha said. “Switch different colors, till the wiring got messed.”

  “Where’d it come from?” I pushed myself forward.

  “Came from right here,” said Jawbone. “We had a craftsman. An artist. This was before I was born. Back when the pirates were still united. When we fought as the Army of the Fallen Sun.”

  “And this army had a tree builder?”

  “He built the forest here, some others we lost in the lowlands. Swamps, people would have called them. Once upon a time.”

  “But what about the woman?”

  “She was found not far from here, down near the South Wall. Our women say she came from the Other Side.”

  “You ever seen the Wall?” Alpha said, and I nodded, picturing the memory screen. “Then you know that’s impossible.”

  “Myth. Legend.” Jawbone waved her hand in the air. “The story goes that she was beautiful and the tattoo she wore was more beautiful, still. Our tree builder fell in love with her, began building this to honor her. And I like to think, to honor all women. Just as he’d honored life through his building of trees.”

  “But he didn’t finish?”

  “No. He and his muse vanished. Just before the city was destroyed by the Purple Hand.”

  “GenTech?”

  “It was the end of our resistance. And that’s where the story ends. Until you. Finish the statue, and you’re free to leave the city.”

  I st
ared up at the curves of the woman and the steel limbs of the tree. “What else do you know about the tattoo she wore?”

  “There were numbers on it,” Alpha said, and Jawbone rolled her eyes. “They say if you could play those numbers in Vega, you’d strike it rich.”

  I watched the tarnished brass leaves turning. I’d never heard about pirates fighting GenTech. Never thought anyone but the Soljahs had tried to make a stand. It made me wonder what else might be buried out here beneath the plains. What battles had raged on the mud? What cities had sunk under the sand?

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll work at night. Right through till the sun gets hot. I’ll need a scaffold, though. And my tools. Every bit of scrap you got. You got spare hands, I can use them. Wire can clean the rust right off that metal, and you should keep at it long after I’m gone.” People think you just build up some trees and you got yourself a forest. But you got to tend it. Just like everything else.

  “Alpha will help you any way you need. I’ll send others as necessary.” Jawbone extended her little hand and I shook it.

  “Your lucky day,” Alpha said, nudging my ribs as Jawbone slipped away. Then Alpha handed me the nail gun, fixed me with a grin. “Best be careful, though,” she said. “Don’t want that luck running out.”

  “What was the name of the woman?” I said, still staring up at the statue. “The woman from the South Wall?”

  “Hina,” Alpha said. “That’s what we call her, anyway.”

  “Hina,” I said to myself, like I was trying to see if it fit. And now she wasn’t just someone’s mother or somebody’s wife, a map or a statue.

  Now she was someone with a name.

  I left the face blank. Only not. I figured if I was building something for all women, then I should somehow try to reflect each one of them. And that’s what I did. I broke glass and mirrors into pieces the size of my hand, then glued those chunks all across the metal sheets I’d beaten to the shape of her cheekbones and the fullness of her lips. I put the shiniest blocks in diamond patterns where her eyes should’ve been and I cast her gaze downward as I soldered the face to the frame my predecessor had left behind.