Rootless

by Chris Howard

  “You know how big this’ll blow?” I asked, watching her hands working a short fuse, her fingers full of fury.

  “Big enough,” she said. “The rest we slap on a live fuel line. Then I suggest you get above deck, fast as your friends can move.”

  “What about the other folk? The rest of the prisoners?”

  “You want to waste time down here, go ahead. I’ll be trying to save the rest of my people. Alpha included.” She let her eyes linger on me a moment longer, watching to see what I was going to do. But there was no way she could read me. Because I had no idea my damn self.

  Jawbone reached down the front of her pants and retrieved a gold lighter. She flicked the thing open and waved it at the fuse.

  “Ready?”

  I backed up. Stumbled and fell. Then I rolled over and leapt to the back wall, the crazy girl with the bombs coming right on behind me.

  I heard the blast an instant before I felt it. And when I did feel it, the shock wave lifted me off my feet and hurled me at the wall. I crashed into steel. Choked on smoke. The heat scorched my throat and I crouched there with my eyes watering.

  I staggered up and bent forward as the smoke lifted. I screamed for Jawbone. But she was already gone.

  Out on the walkway I peered through the patches of smoke, panic setting in as I realized I’d no idea which direction Jawbone had headed. I called her name again, loud as I could, but other voices had risen up now, and the screams all joined together.

  I sprinted back into the cell, grabbing Zee and her mother, suddenly furious with their lack of speed. But then I saw Zee’s face. She was choking up, and each time she coughed a little splatter of blood sprayed on her hands and dripped down her chin.

  “Listen,” I said, trying to get her to breathe. “They got this room full of books in this city. We get out of here and you can just sit there and read each one.” She blinked at me, wiping the blood off her fingers.

  “Makes you feel better,” I said. “Remember?”

  I turned to Hina. “You gotta run.” I pointed in the direction Harvest had disappeared. “At the end of the walkway there’s a ladder. Go up. Far as you can.”

  “What are you going to do?” Zee said, her mother pushing her forward.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” I lied. “Start running.”

  I watched them for a moment. Then I turned and bolted down the corridor, heading deeper into the hull.

  I slammed at the cell doors as I ran alongside them. But it was useless, each one was padlocked shut. My best guess of our location made me figure any sort of fuel lines would be at this end of the transport. And I knew if I thought the juice was this way, then Jawbone would be betting the same thing.

  I’d no idea what I’d do if I caught her. No plan. No options left. But there had to be a better way. A better answer than letting all these lost souls disintegrate in the bowels of this horrible ship.

  Hands reached through the bars at me, swiping and clutching. Voices begged me to stop.

  “Jawbone,” I screamed, like the name had torn its way outside me. And for a moment I saw her. But then she was just blowing right through me, sprinting back down the walkway as I sprawled on the floor.

  She turned and called back, never losing her pace. “It’s too late,” she yelled. “I found a hot spot. Run with me.”

  “Better do what the lady tells you, little man.”

  I spun around at the voice. Crow’s voice.

  He reached through the bars and gripped my neck in his hand, dragging me to my feet and pulling me close.

  I stared into the cell and the whites of his eyes. I studied his beard, his dreads, limp now, all matted with filth.

  Crow grinned his glittery teeth through the blackness. “You get out of here, little man, you catch up to Frost, you say hello to him for me.”

  I nodded, the watcher’s hand warm and rough, squeezing my windpipe. Then he let go and my feet dropped back to the floor.

  “I and I be seeing you,” Crow said. “In the next one.”

  I scrambled down the corridor and away from him. Not ever once turning back.

  When the first charge blew, it made a broken sound. A crack, then a boom. I was almost at the damn ladder, had almost made it. I felt the heat as I slid forward, and I watched the fireball tear down the tunnel behind me like it was being sucked through a straw.

  The flames rolled like the sun, and I tugged at the low rung of the ladder, heaving myself up as the air itself seemed to melt.

  I crawled into the pipe as the fire surged and ruptured, the force of it pushing me higher, propelling me up, burning the soles off my shoes.

  Top of the ladder, I rolled onto the walkway. Black and smoking. Flames spiraled through the darkness as I leapt to my feet.

  I kicked off my melted shoes as I sprinted back into the cockpit, and right away I could see through the window why the ship had seemed so empty of crew.

  They were out there. All of them. An army, like Jawbone had said. An army of gray men in gray plastic jackets. And each one of those men looked exactly same. Even from a distance, I could see it. Their faces as identical as the clothes they wore. The same hairless skull. An army of copies. A thousand King Harvests.

  They were crawling over Old Orleans, rounding up pirates or mowing them down. It was a war zone. Chaos. And there in the cockpit was Zee and Hina. Waiting on me.

  But Jawbone was straddling the control panel with a gun in her hand. And pinned beneath her was Harvest himself. The one man who might hold all the answers. The one man who knew where the slave ship was bound.

  Jawbone fired before I could even holler. Before I could do any damn thing at all. She had the pistol rammed under Harvest’s chin, and the bullet splattered bits of his brain across the sparkle of the control panel, his blood spraying at the monitors and levers and knobs.

  Someone was screaming and I realized it was my own voice, the sound rising out of me with no warning.

  Jawbone stared at me, brushing the bits of skin out of her hair as she leapt off the console. “Relax, Banyan,” she muttered. “The man wasn’t worth crying for.”

  She lowered her gun too soon and the cockpit door sprang open, and a man who looked just like Harvest came sliding in with the rain.

  He was packing artillery and he let the bullets fly, unloading a round clear into Jawbone until her little body ripped and shuddered and was pinned lifeless against the console. Then the man was done with her. And he turned on Zee.

  I leapt across that room like there were two of me, one standing still, watching. The other nothing but speed.

  I slid into the man, knocking him from his feet as he squeezed at the trigger and his gun pointed at the ceiling and drilled it with holes. Suddenly, I had hands helping me. Zee and her mother. The four of us all tangled together like our bodies had been joined and only one brain could rule.

  I scratched and clawed at the man’s waxy skin, yanking and squeezing at that gun until it was in my hands, my finger on the trigger. I got on my knees and sank the weapon into his face, making sure he could see it, making it all nice and clear.

  “Where did you come from?” I screamed at him, scaring the girls clean away.

  The man just stared at me. His features bloodless and blank. He looked like Harvest. Hell, he was Harvest. But he wasn’t. Not quite. Not in the eyes.

  “Where do you take them?” I said, leaning down into him and forcing the gun at his cheek.

  “He can’t tell you.”

  I spun around. My mouth open. It was Hina who spoke, and I’d never heard her make even a sound.

  “What do you mean he can’t tell me?”

  “They can copy the body,” she said. “But not the mind.”

  I stared down at the man. I glanced at Zee, then back at Hina. “How do you know?”

  Her gray eyes stared deep into mine. “Because your father told me.”

  I didn’t know what to say. But it didn’t matter. Because right then the transport cracked and
moaned beneath us, the cockpit shuddering as somewhere deep in the hull, the fuel tank began blowing itself to pieces.

  The second explosion threw the four of us to the ceiling, pinning us there as the floor reared up. The control panel flared and each window shattered. I lost track of my prisoner. And then I lost Zee. Hina, too.

  I scrambled and bounced as the transport shook, broken glass puncturing my skin, smoke billowing around me. I plunged forward, picking my direction based on nothing but the sound of rain. There it was again. I could hear it. Closer now. I stretched an arm forward. And then I could feel it, slippery and warm on my hand.

  My body wriggled into daylight and I rolled on my back, the platform all warped and quaking. The plank that had led off the deck was long gone. But as the transport swayed, it reached close to the city walls, bashing at concrete and knocking it loose.

  I squatted amid the steam and sparks. I peered back into the rubble and saw limbs moving.

  “This way,” I shouted. “Follow my voice.” I kept yelling as I pried my way back into the remains of the cockpit. I caught Hina in my arms and tugged her free. “Where are you?” I screamed for Zee. “I can’t see you.”

  No answer.

  “Zee?”

  It was useless. I hollered again. But we were all out of time.

  I grabbed Hina around the waist as the transport toppled. She strapped her arm across my shoulders as I ran and jumped.

  Must’ve been a good ten feet and it felt like twenty. We hit the wall and it broke powdery beneath us, but it held as we sank our arms across it, our feet scrabbling up the concrete blocks.

  The transport let out a groan as it tumbled to the mud, and it sank and flamed and split. Gashes all down the side of it. The top all full of holes.

  The rain had quit and the air crackled with gunfire. I crouched on the wall and stared down into the city, where the pirates had clogged the walkways but the Harvesters showed no sign of retreat. Middle of the city, I could see the walls of the mud pit, the ramp still raised. And beyond it was the forest of cypress and fern, and the woman in the middle of it, still dancing above the rest of the world.

  I don’t know who detonated the generators. But those juicy suckers damn near scorched the sky. Was like the clouds themselves were burning, and I heaved in the black fumes as I staggered into the middle of the forest.

  Hina didn’t weigh much, but I dropped her like a sack of stone when I reached the statue, everything taking too long as I scrambled in the undergrowth and wrestled the panel free. She was barely conscious as I dragged her to the foot and squeezed her up through its entrance.

  I groped in the mud where I’d left my tools. I found the nail gun and loaded that sucker full. I stood. Stared back at Old Orleans and watched it burning. I needed to find Sal. Get that damn coordinate for the GPS and get the hell away from this city.

  But I had to do something first.

  I had to find Alpha.

  One good thing about a world made of stone and steel, that world can’t burn for long. Once the fire had eaten through the juice, it fizzled into fuming stacks, molten piles of rubber and plastic. But the smoke was almost worse than the flames had been. Black and toxic, steaming in the brown water.

  Just like the fire turned to smoke, my sprinting turned to stumbling. I had the nail gun held before me and my shirt pulled across my face. The concrete was doing a real number on my feet now, shredding me to pieces one step at a time.

  I stopped running, stared ahead through the streaky blackness. Coming out of that smoke were two of Harvest’s commandos, a pair of washed-out twins with vacant stares, sub guns rattling before them as they darted through the fumes.

  I dropped to one knee and steadied the nail gun in both fists. My first shot hit before they’d even spotted me. But it didn’t do much good. The nail just lodged in the one man’s shoulder and it didn’t slow him down a damn bit. I fired again, higher this time, though aiming at the head left less room for error. But I hit him square on.

  Nailed him, you might say.

  The guy went down with a choke but his buddy was ripping off a quick round in my direction. I rolled too hard across the walkway. Lost my grip at the edge. And then I was tumbling down into the darkness, disappearing beneath the city.

  I lost the nail gun on impact, splashed into the mud and just kept on going. Heavy and deep and holy shit I wasn’t stopping.

  This weren’t mud, it was water. And I wasn’t swimming.

  I was drowning.

  Almost drown once and then try drowning a second time. It’s so much worse than the first. I knew what was coming before it even happened, my mind one step ahead of my body as my eyes started pulsing too hard and my throat seized up. My limbs thrashed. Twitched. And then stiffened.

  I didn’t want to give up and keep sinking, but after all your shit stops working, there ain’t much else you can do. I’m not going to tell you my life went flashing before me, because it didn’t. Something about the way my arms stretched out, though, it’s crazy, but I swear I felt like I was dancing. And I never danced once in my whole lousy life.

  It was like I became her for a moment. Hina. The statue. And then my feet started kicking all over again. As if my heart had just remembered to beat.

  Didn’t do any good though. Just another round of pushing and splashing. But I got a hand out the top of the water and for a moment I felt the air and tried to hold on. Then I was sinking again. Darkening. I know I blacked out for a second because there was a moment where nothing happened but a murky drift.

  Then I was being lifted. Hands clutched at my shirt and my pants, tugging me up through the gloom.

  My face broke the surface, but I still couldn’t breathe. My jaws were clamped shut and my eyes fluttered, water sticky inside me. I blacked out again. Came to on a stretch of mud. Then my lungs kicked back in like a frozen engine and I shuddered with every breath.

  The underside of the walkways formed a concrete sky above me, a patchwork of stone woven with steel. I tried sitting up but stayed resting. And Sal squatted there beside me, like he was waiting on me to speak.

  You never seen someone float like Sal could. Son of a bitch was unsinkable. Took him all he had to keep plunging down below the surface, groping around for the nail gun like I’d asked him, his feet sticking up in the air, then disappearing before he came up empty-handed. Over and over again.

  “I can’t find it.” Sal sputtered and gasped as he paddled back to the mud. “It’s too deep.” He stretched out on the bank and shook his head at me.

  I stared up at the city, feeling like I was just shit in its pants. I knew I had to get gone. Far away and quick about it. I thought about Pop. The trees.

  But then I thought about Alpha.

  “I’m heading back up there,” I said.

  “You’re insane. The women have gone loopy. And those men, you’ve never seen so many guns.”

  “Where’s the pit?”

  He pointed. “Full of water now. And bodies. You can’t go that way if you don’t know how to swim.”

  “Then follow me,” I said. “We’ll head back to the forest. From there I can double back around.”

  “There’s a forest?” Sal said as we began slipping through the mud.

  “Yeah,” I told him, glancing up through the slats in the walkways. “And that ain’t all.”

  Beneath the ferns, I found a pillar we could climb and I pushed Sal out of the mud, shoving at him till he was clear to the top. He stared at the statue of Hina like his brain had stopped working.

  “It’s her,” the kid whispered.

  “Wait till you get on the inside.”

  I pushed him off toward the statue, told him how to get up under its foot. And then I turned back to the city.

  The bullets had faded to a dribble. Just the occasional burst of gunfire breaking the silence. Smoke had cleared off the walkways, and as I ran through the mess, the clouds began to open again, washing away the remains, turning the piles of bodies in
to mush.

  At the center of town I’d still not seen a soul, and finally I began to holler for Alpha, screaming her name at the top of my lungs.

  I heard her long before I could see her, and when I saw her I barely knew who she was. She was stood atop the walls of the city, her legs wide and her head thrown back. And she was making a noise like a creature that had just figured out it could fly.

  I stared up through the smoke at her. She was like something you’d try to build, if you could. As if she represented something no words could say.

  She was slick with mud and her vest had been matted stringy, soaked with the blood of others. I watched as she raised both arms in the air, waving her gun above her head, still whooping that battle cry that no soul could have taught her.

  When I finally found nerve to call up, she spun and stared down upon me and I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.

  I ran up to her, though she stood still. And when I reached her, I held her the way I longed to be held. She folded into me and I gazed across the top of her, staring out at the plains where the remains of Harvest’s troops had scattered in the mud.

  The transport lay split and smoldering below us, and I studied the broken shell that just a day before had seemed to me like a city that could move.

  “This is the way the world ends,” Alpha whispered, her head slippery on my shoulder.

  “No,” I said, squeezing her against me. “There’s more.”

  It didn’t take much time to persuade her. As the rain poured down and the darkness gathered, I told Alpha everything. All of my secrets. All that I knew. I told her about the tattoo that pointed to a place that was different. A place that wasn’t just locked in an old story or stuck inside an old world song. I told her about my father. And I told her about the trees. About how beautiful they were and how they were more even than that. How they were something built for survival. Something that might put food on the table and burn bright the dark. And as I talked, I wondered if my father had once made a promise as he sat on the walls of this city, his arms holding the world through a woman, his eyes straining out at the mysterious night.