Rootless

by Chris Howard

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “Don’t know,” Alpha said, and I could hear the sound now, faint but growing louder. The sound of an engine, something moving. A vehicle out on the plains.

  “The forty?” I asked, standing beside them.

  “No.” Alpha cocked her rifle, jutted her head. “Forty’s that way. This is out of the south.”

  “From the south?”

  “That’s right, bud. And if I had to guess, I’d say it’s coming straight out of Old Orleans.”

  Soon as we could see it, we knew it was too big to try messing with. It was taller than it was wide and the whole thing seemed to be spinning, a broad beam of light arcing off the front side, setting the mud flats ablaze.

  “We should get down,” I said. “Take cover.”

  “Take cover in what?” Alpha said.

  “In the ground.”

  We woke Sal and Hina and had them stretch flat on their bellies as we scooped at the clay and smeared it upon them. Then we dug in the dirt and laid ourselves flat, painting our faces and squirming down till we were drenched in the soil.

  Alpha stretched the rifle out, pointed it right at the vehicle that was now just a hundred yards away. It was trundling and buzzing right along, angling itself to the right of us, heading northwest, I reckoned. And I hoped with all I had it’d just keep passing by.

  “You ever shot a gun before?” Alpha shoved one of the pistols in my hand. “One that ain’t full of nails?”

  I shook my head, and she grabbed the gun back and showed me how to pull the safety off and get the thing ready to fire.

  “There’s one more of those,” said Crow. “I’d say it best go to someone who can use it.”

  “Forget it, Rasta,” Alpha muttered, and then we lay there, still and silent as the engine grew louder and the vehicle spun close.

  There was this moment when that big moving shadow seemed to alter its course right for us, and I couldn’t understand it, but that’s what it did. We’d not made a move or a sound and it was dark as all hell out there, but I swear it seemed like the thing was coming dead on. Damn near was going to be right on top of us.

  “Give him the gun,” I said to Alpha, fear seizing me up inside.

  “What?”

  “Give him the gun. It’s no use if we’re dead.”

  I heard her scrabble for the last pistol and then she threw it at Crow. And now all three of us were armed.

  Crow clicked off his safety. But then the vehicle turned again, steering itself westward, the engine screaming and grinding and us just watching as the thing sailed by.

  It was a wheel. A giant wheel. Giant tire tread churning up mud as it rolled through the night. And inside of that wheel, suspended so as not to be spinning, was a cockpit built for a few dozen people.

  There was only one thing big enough to spin wheels like that one. Only one thing I’d seen, anyway. The Harvester transport. The Ark. And that’s where this damn thing had come from. No doubt in my mind. Some kind of escape pod. Get out clause. Transport all blown to hell and that wheel just rolling free, moving fast, jetting off in the night.

  “Holy shit,” I said, sucking myself out of the mud, staring into the distance where the Harvest wheel grew quiet and its torch beam got small.

  “Give it up, Rasta,” Alpha said, and I turned to see Crow shoving his pistol in what was left of his pants.

  “I ain’t no Rasta, sweet thing,” he said. “Not technically speaking. But I do believe in the Promised Land.” Crow grinned, patting the butt of the gun. “And we all be heading there together. Ain’t that right, little man?”

  The mud turned to sand and the sand turned into the forty, and when we hit that old strip of tarmac we turned west.

  “The wagon’s this way,” Alpha said. “If it’s still out here at all.”

  Dust clouds picked up around dawn and for an hour we had to hold on to one another as we choked and stumbled through the dirt. And then, when the winds quit, the sky just started cooking. Sweat ran down my face and stung my eyes all grimy and swollen. Both canteens were dry. But the five of us just kept on walking. Looked like we were made out of sand.

  My old brown wagon had dissolved into the dirt, and it wasn’t until we were almost to it that I spotted the thing, half-buried in the earth.

  I broke into a run and exhausted myself, my pistol jabbing me as I jogged down the road, the sun burning like winter wasn’t ever going to come. My skin was crispy and my limbs were sore but you can bet I had the biggest damn grin on my face. No soul’s ever been more happy to see a junky old pile of metal. I could hardly believe it. My old jalopy. Still there, waiting on me like a friend I didn’t deserve. And it was only after a half day of digging we came to realize the wheels were gone.

  We’d worked right through the afternoon and I’d discovered early that the inside of the car had been stripped. All the doors were open and the corn and juice had been taken. The passenger seat had been yanked right out and someone had peeled the nylon off the inside of the doors. But the engine seemed as intact as I’d left it looking, and we worked brimmed with hope until Crow scooped out around the first wheel and found it missing. I clawed the dirt out from beneath the rest of the car and uncovered the same sad story. Sons of bitches may as well have hauled off the whole damn thing. What good’s a wagon without wheels?

  “So what do we do now?” Sal said, plopping down in the dirt. The sun had done the kid no favors — beneath the dust, his bloated face was a chapped shade of purple, blisters puckering his skin. Still, he was nothing next to Crow. The watcher’s burns had shriveled and glazed in shredded patches, like he’d decided to just unpeel his flesh and start over.

  “We wait,” Alpha said. I’d given her my dad’s old sombrero and she’d punched a whole through the lid so her mohawk stuck out the top. You’d think I’d have minded, her messing up my old man’s hat. But I didn’t. I liked seeing her wear it.

  “Someone comes along, we take their wheels off ’em,” she said. “Shouldn’t be too long. Not this time of year.”

  “Guess you’d know, pirate.” Crow grinned.

  “If it goes against your moral code,” she said, “then you can make a better plan.”

  “Moral code?” Crow leaned back on the wagon and it shifted beneath him. “What moral code?”

  I’d only salvaged a few of my tools in Old Orleans. Just some spanners and ratchets, a spare set of fuses. But I’d grabbed the telescope. The thing was on the heavy side but I figured it might come in handy, and it came in handy now, all five of us hunkered down and sweating inside the wagon, Alpha checking the road through the scope.

  One of the scavengers had tried to pry out the microwave and they’d tried so hard, they’d messed up the wiring. I got it patched back together, but the water was a tougher fix. The tank had been drained empty.

  “One bit of good news,” I said to the others. “We got corn and juice buried on the side of the road.”

  “Yeah,” Sal said. “And we got the pictures.”

  “What pictures?” Crow was stooped and squashed in the back of the wagon, his frame much too big for the space.

  Sal pointed at Hina, gesturing at her belly like the woman was no more than a picture herself. “We got shots of each one of them. Every leaf. Her whole body.”

  “We need water, though,” I said, not liking the way the conversation was heading. Hina crossed her arms across her stomach and gazed at the floor.

  “How you get those pictures, little man?” Crow stared at me, eyes bugging off his melted face.

  “You left them behind.” I shrugged. “With your boy.”

  “I didn’t leave no one behind.”

  “Just wanted me to keep the house safe,” said Sal, peering up at Crow. “Right?”

  Crow didn’t say a thing. He was too busy glaring at me and I couldn’t figure out what had gotten him so worked up. Then he turned his gaze on Hina, and I imagined he was thinking that if we had the GPS numbers, then we did
n’t need the woman. But Frost had headed off with Hina and Zee along for the ride. Did he need them for something? Why else would he have brought along two more mouths to feed? Even mouths as pretty as theirs.

  “Banyan,” Alpha said from behind the steering wheel, her eye pressed at the telescope. “We got company.”

  Could have been anyone. Just a slate gray cruiser with a flatbed trailer off the back, rolling out of the west in no particular hurry. I wondered if they’d already seen us, but I doubted our wagon looked like any reason to slow down.

  I peered through the telescope at the tinted windows, tried to imagine what face was staring back at me. Then I studied the tires, the good thick tread. Off-road tires. Oversize. They’d be perfect. But they weren’t mine. And here I was getting ready to take them.

  “You flag them down,” said Alpha. “I’ll be on the other side of the wagon. Waiting.”

  “Right,” I muttered, concealing the pistol down the back of my pants. “What about the others?”

  Alpha glanced at the rest of our crew. “Stay down,” she said. “But keep the hatch open. And be ready.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said Crow, cocking his weapon. “I’m ready every second of the day.”

  I popped the hatch and climbed out, wondering how I was going to get out of this one with a new set of wheels but without having to shoot somebody. I got the hood up and faked messing with the engine again, thinking about the last time I’d done that and how it had played out.

  The cruiser crept up the road behind me, the tread of its tires clacking at the tarmac. Out the corner of my eye, I could see the barrel of Alpha’s rifle, pointed right across the engine, angled straight into the road.

  Wasn’t long before the growl of the cruiser was at my shoulders, brakes tapping and squeaking to a stop. I turned around then, watched the wheels make their last rotation before they eased to a standstill. I stared into those black tint windows. I grinned and waved. And then I just stood there and waited.

  Seemed like a month and nothing happened. I glanced at the trailer, but the thing was almost empty. If they’d gone west looking for salvage, then they’d not done too good a job.

  “Banyan,” Alpha whispered from behind the wagon. “Go say hello.”

  She was right. Standing around was getting me nowhere. So I amped up the grin and waltzed up to the driver’s door. And I’d almost reached the cruiser when the window slid down a crack.

  I stopped dead.

  The window buzzed a little lower. And the smell. Oh, man. The smell was so bad it made my belly squirm.

  “Hello?” I called, not wanting to move an inch closer. “Got a little engine trouble here.”

  I heard a voice croak something from behind the wheel, but I still couldn’t see a face through the shadows. I acted like I was scratching at my back but really I was getting the pistol ready. I took a step closer and was sweating like crazy now, and that combined with the sick feeling in my stomach and that awful stench wafting over me, I felt like when I was ill in the mud pit, back stuck in that filthy fever.

  I went to say something, but before I got the words out, I saw the driver’s face bobble into the sunlight.

  His skin was almost green and his eyes had clouded over, the marks on his face were like moldy bits of corn. The man was trying to speak but his mouth was too thick with spit, his lips too cracked and bleeding.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  Then I shouted for Alpha.

  She came running up behind me as I covered my mouth with my shirt and stepped closer to the cruiser. I peered in at the rest of the man’s body — his clothes soiled with sweat, his right arm missing below the elbow. He’d tied his shirt beneath the stump and it was soaked black with blood that was still dripping. I almost puked right then, but that was nothing next to the far side of his neck. The skin gnawed all the way to muscle. Bits of bone poking through.

  Alpha groaned behind me.

  “What is it?” Sal squeaked from the wagon. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing,” I shouted. “Don’t you come out here.”

  Crow, of course, was already on his way.

  He hollered at the stink then made a sound like he was laughing. “Not bad,” he shouted, throwing open the doors to the cruiser. “Today be our lucky day.”

  “Lucky?” I muttered, staring inside at the carcasses stacked on the rear seat. It was the man’s family, I guess. Three smaller bodies and a bigger one. Nothing left to bury but bones and patches of hair.

  “That’s right, little man. Lucky.” Crow held his nose as he slammed the doors shut. “Got ourselves a new set of wheels and didn’t even have to kill no one to get it.”

  He was right. We’d take the wheels, though not the cruiser, not as greased with death and poisoned as it was. But as the man went to switch his engine back on, to keep on toward who knows where, I felt Crow shoving me in the rubs.

  “Spoke to soon,” he said. “You better take care of business.”

  I snatched the pistol from out the back of my pants. But that was as far as I got with it. Sure, I’d waved the nail gun around before, even taken out one of the Harvesters with it, but there was some new thing needed now to pull a trigger in cold blood. And I remembered what my father had told me. About me being a builder. Not a fighter.

  “Come on, bud,” Alpha said, stepping past me to fire a shot through the driver’s skull. “It’s just putting him out of his misery.”

  She was right. The guy had been all out of time. But that didn’t make killing him weigh any less heavy. He’d been just pushing down the road, I reckon. Just trying to do the right thing. And now he was slumped over his steering wheel. Dead.

  “What happened to them?” Sal whispered, running up. His hand clutched at me, and his legs wobbled as he stared into the car.

  “Locusts,” said Crow.

  “It should be too cold,” I said. “It should be good crossing season.”

  “Should be, little man.” Crow opened the driver’s door and wound the window up, then slammed the door shut to seal the stench inside. “But should don’t mean shit.”

  He was right. It don’t.

  And it weren’t long before Sal went and threw up all over my boots.

  I worked the rest of the day getting the wheels off the cruiser and rigging them up to my wagon. I even salvaged two extra tires off the dead man’s trailer and I strapped them across our roof. The water in their tank smelled bad and tasted worse, but it kept a hungry mouth from getting thirsty.

  The sun was dropping and the wind had stayed down, and we were all famished by the time we uncovered the stash Sal and me had buried. I had to keep Sal from shoving all the corn in the microwave so we could cook it and eat it all right then.

  “Gotta pace ourselves,” I told him. “Got a ways to go yet.”

  But how far were we heading? I’d no real idea. To Vega, first. That was the plan. We had to get ourselves a GPS by trading something. Or someone. I watched Hina as she chewed her rations and licked her fingers clean. But you can’t go trading people, I thought. You do that and you’ll end up the one not worth a damn.

  Still, we’d have to do something. Without the GPS gadget, we couldn’t plug in the numbers that were supposed to lead us to the Promised Land. My father and the trees.

  By nightfall, there was only one thing left to be dug back up — Zee’s bag where I’d squeezed my book and the bark, along with the camera and pictures.

  I’d deliberately worked around the spot, kept it hid. Problem was, Crow was always around. Always paying attention. And I reckon that made him a real good watcher, but right now it just made him a huge pain in the ass.

  “We got to be careful,” Alpha said as I siphoned off the last of the cruiser’s water. “Now he’s got his wheels, what’s he need us for?”

  “He needs the numbers.”

  “So he takes the woman.”

  I glanced over at where Hina was sitting. “I can’t get through to her,” I said. “
But she knows things. She knew my father.”

  “Just keep focused on finding those trees.”

  “She ain’t distracting me.”

  “Good.”

  “She’s got nothing on you.”

  Alpha eyes flashed, and for a moment it was like I could feel the electricity howl inside her.

  “You sure know how to make a girl feel special,” she said.

  “Oh, you’re special all right.”

  “Yeah?” She laughed. “For how long?”

  “Stick around,” I said.

  “No one sticks around, Banyan. Not for a feeling. Not in the end.” She was grinning when she said it, but I saw her smile disappear as she turned to walk away.

  I’d pieced the engine back together and had the wagon ready, but I let them all rest awhile longer. I paced the tarmac with my telescope in one hand, my gun in the other.

  Alpha was stretched on the sand and sleeping, and as I watched her I wondered what it’d be like to stroke that crazy mohawk of hers. Or run my fingers across her dirty pink vest. And then I thought about just lying beside her, resting my face on her dusty skin.

  It was a clear night and the big old moon was low. The stars looked so close you could touch them. I stared up at the sky, half looking for one of those satellites Sal had said were still up there. Then I shuffled closer to the wagon, to see how the crew was getting on.

  Hina and Sal were curled beneath the wagon, huddled in their usual position, her wrapped around him like a mom who’d not realized her baby had grown too big too quickly. I thought about how Sal had talked about Zee when she was living, how he’d gotten crude, said she wasn’t his sister. And Hina sure as hell wasn’t his mother. But he looked pretty peaceful there, all curled up against her. And I figured as little as I knew about love and such matters, that poor chubby bastard must have known a whole lot less.