Earth Thirst

by Mark Teppo

  The ringing of the bell is both a tribute to the dead and a warning to Escobar.

  I'm not done yet.

  FORTY-THREE

  Along a flat stretch of road that runs along a ridge, I stop and look back toward Cusco. There's a haze of dirt stretching back toward the city, and sunlight glints off the metal bodies of a line of cars. There's too much dust to be sure, but it looks like a couple of Mercedes G-class wagons.

  Secutores won the fight at the plaza. That doesn't bode well for Arcadia. When was the last time we lost a fight with humans?

  Ahead of the caravan, weaving wildly around the sharp turns of the switchback up the side of the ridge, is a dark blue sedan. I watch it approach. I can't outrun it on my bike, and I'm more than a little curious as to who is leading this charge. The sedan roars over the top of the ridge, catching a little air, and slews dangerously close to me before it comes to a stop. The passenger side window comes down and I look in.

  “We really don't have time for you to stand there and gawk at me,” Mere says.

  “It's just good to see you,” I say, and I mean it. Her face and neck are streaked with dirt and blood, and there's a gleam in her eye that speaks of too much adrenaline in the last hour, but it's definitely Mere, vibrant and alive. On the passenger seat is a handgun, a model I've seen Secutores carry. I leave the bike by the side of the road—ringing the bell one last time—and climb into the car.

  “What's with the bell?” she asks as I move the gun out of the way and settle into the seat.

  “When was the last time you rode a bike with a bell?” I ask.

  “Fair point.” She drops the car back into drive and puts her foot down on the accelerator. She watches the road while I examine her more closely. Some of the blood is coming from a gash in her neck, and there's a couple of bruises forming under her right eye. Her knuckles are scraped, and there's another gash along the outside of her right forearm.

  “What's the other guy look like?” I ask.

  She glances over at me. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “I killed Alberto Montoya.”

  “What? I thought you said you killed him in Santiago?”

  “I did. I took his head off, Mere. That should have done it. But he was on the helicopter, almost as if he was waiting for me. And he looked, well, he looked perfect. As if nothing had happened to him.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “As far as I know, it isn't. Tissue decay starts as soon as you separate the head from the body. You can't grow—” I stop. I was going to say that you couldn't grow them back together, but I suddenly wonder if that's worth the effort. What do I know of Mother's process. We go into the ground and we come out again, but who is to say that what goes in is the same that comes out again? What if Escobar's efforts to grow his own Arcadians is exactly what Mother does? She grows an exact copy of each of us.

  “What?” Mere asks.

  “We thought that Escobar was growing his own, right? What if that is exactly what he did? What if he's grown more than one grandson?”

  “Clones?”

  “Every piece of fruit from a tree is a clone, Mere. As is every flower. Nature's been doing it for centuries.”

  “How long does that take?”

  I think of strawberry plants, shooting out runners that double and even triple the size of a harvest every year. “Not as long as you think,” I say.

  “Here's something else that has been bothering me,” Mere says. “How old do you think Escobar is?”

  “Several centuries,” I say, thinking of the Incan sculpture in the lobby of the Montoya building.

  “How is Alberto his grandson? Either Alberto is as old as Escobar, or he's been making babies.”

  I think of the familial resemblance between the two men and I shake my head. “Neither,” I say, recalling something Escobar said. “Both.”

  “It can't be both,” Mere says.

  “I saw it right away and said as much to him, but he laughed it off, but I was right. Alberto is a younger version of him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Mere whispers.

  “Yeah,” I say, my hands tightening around the butt of the gun. “Where did you get this?” I ask, shaking off the enormity of what Escobar is doing.

  “Our mutual friend,” she says.

  I pop out the magazine and press down on the top round. “It's been fired a few times,” I note.

  “Yep,” she says grimly. The car bounces across a series of potholes, and I wait until it settles down again before I put the magazine back in the gun.

  “Did you get him?”

  She shakes her head, her eyes straying to the rearview mirror. I twist in my seat and look out through the back window. “Did you wing him, at least?”

  “Definitely.” She grins.

  I set the safety and put the gun, barrel down, in one of the cup holders in the center console. “I guess we don't need to have a talk about how to use a handgun, do we?”

  “No,” she says, “I got that covered.” The grin comes back. “Much to Belfast's surprise.”

  “Escobar has Phoebe,” I tell her. “That's who his team was after. That's who they've been after all along.”

  “So it really wasn't about you?”

  I shake my head, smiling a little even when I see that she's giving me a hard time. “Escobar wanted tissue samples from Nigel to create a counteragent, right? He wants Phoebe for the same reason. You saw how she managed to survive exposure to sunlight and sea water. If he can figure out how to replicate the genetic coding and modify it to be resistant to the weed killer, his Arcadians will be immune.”

  “And it's going down at Moray,” she says.

  I nod. “Or it's a big hole in the ground that Escobar has filled with enough high explosives to atomize you, me, and all of the bad guys following us.”

  “Well, let's hope I'm right and you're not,” she says as the car crests another hill and we see the white shape of Tyvek-wrapped scaffolding rising out of stony landscape.

  * * *

  Moray is a series of concentric rings and while I had thought it would naturally lie in one of the many tiny valleys between the hills, the site is actually out in the middle of a plain. There's a high fence around the site, topped with razor wire. The fence has been lined with opaque weather-guard, keeping prying eyes out, and inside the fence, there are several frames of buildings under construction, and they're the white shapes that rise up like shrink-wrapped dinosaur skeletons. Behind the main structures, there's a landing pad for a helicopter and the Dauphin-class chopper that I was on briefly is sitting on the pad.

  “Here we are,” Mere announces, easing up on the accelerator pedal. The car bumps along the road, slowing down as we approach the fence. Mere runs a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face. There are stress lines around her eyes and across her forehead, and I can hear the accelerated beat of her heart. She's holding it together amazingly well, considering the situation. “Why did you save me?” she asks quietly. “That night in the warehouse.”

  “Because I wanted to,” I reply.

  “It wasn't an order that you were following?”

  “No,” I say. “I did it under my own volition.”

  “That's out of character for you,” she says, her fingers fumbling with the scar at the base of her throat.

  “I don't regret doing it.”

  She looks at me. “Thank you.”

  “You're welcome,” I say, my throat tight.

  Her teeth gnaw at her lower lip. “Promise me that you'll kiss me again,” she says. “When this is over.”

  “You kissed me,” I remind her.

  She throws me a shy smile. “All right, I'm going to kiss you again when this is all over.”

  “I'd like that.”

  “Good,” she says. She stares intently at me, as if she is memorizing my face. “I'd like to laugh about what we've done.”

  “Me too,” I agree.

  * * *

&
nbsp; We don't bother being clever or coy. Mere drives up as close as possible to the installation, and we walk the rest of the way to the metal door set in the fence. Over the door, there's a security camera mounted atop the fence. Someone knows we're coming, and as we reach the door, we distinctly hear the locks cycle.

  I go first, and as the door shuts behind Mere, the locks reengage. We're standing in a temporary tunnel, made from white plastic wrap stretched over a wire frame, and there's only one direction to go. “Kind of like a cattle chute leading to the slaughterhouse,” Mere opines. I don't disagree with her. That is the one drawback about walking in cold to a hostile installation. You get the overwhelming sense that this approach is a bad idea.

  Still, it is much easier than any number of assaults I've done over the last three millennia and, considering the way we went to the penthouse in Santiago, I suspect Escobar likes letting his prey wander in without any trouble. I can't decide if this is a terminally stupid way of doing things or an expression of supreme confidence.

  When you get right down to it, he's gotten everything he wanted. He certainly seems to be the one in control.

  Well, minus a grandson or two.

  The tunnel ends, and we step out onto the edge of the first ring of the Moray installation. The original Incan site is a series of concentric circles, terraces upon which these farmers could plant a variety of crops. These rings dominate the area inside the fences. Off to our left are two of the construction frameworks, and one looks like it is a half-finished laboratory. Not dissimilar to the one built on Rapa Nui. As we approach the edge of the first ring, more of the lower rings are revealed, each one about ten meters below the previous one. Each terrace reveals a progressively more bizarre landscape.

  The second terrace, just below where we stand, is filled with healthy citrus-bearing trees. Bizzaria, I expect. An enormous grove of the rare chimera.

  The next ring is home to several dozen squat wooden structures. Not large enough to be sheds, but not terribly small either. “Hives,” I realize. “They're beehives.”

  Below, stands of miro threaten to overreach their ring. Most of them are at least ten meters high. “When did you say Hyacinth Worldwide moved in on this place? Two years ago?”

  “Thereabouts,” Mere says.

  “Miro don't grow that fast,” I point out. “Nor do Bizzaria.”

  “And what are those?” Mere asks, pointing at the fourth ring.

  The trees look like poplars, tall and slender, with pale bark. But they're too short, and their crowns are all wrong. The tree are about five meters tall, and the last meter splits into a quintet of branches. Each branch extends a few meters out from the trunk, bending back toward the ground, and each has a single bulbous pod growing from the end. The pods are different sizes, the largest appear to be thicker than the actual main trunk itself.

  The fifth ring looks like an optical illusion. The tall fronds that fill every available centimeter of space on this ring look like kelp, and appear to move with the same liquid grace, but these plants are not underwater, nor is there any localized wind at that depth. In several places, the large pods from the previous layer have pulled free of the parent tree and have tumbled down onto the bed of swaying fronds. The pods, pale yellow in color on the tree, are darker within the leafy embrace of the fronds, as if they are absorbing the tint from the purple leaves.

  “This is how they're made,” I tell Mere. “This is where Escobar has been growing his grandsons.”

  Down at the very bottom, in the midst of an extensive collection of computer equipment, is a long slab on which a figure is strapped. A pair of technicians are focused on their screens, monitoring various signals and processes. A maze of cables and conduits run from beneath the slab into the workstations and into the walls of the pit.

  Feed tubes.

  “It's Phoebe,” Mere says.

  “They're going to drain her dry,” I say. She's going to feed the fern layer, which will, in turn, pass along a series of nutrients and genetic triggers to whatever is growing inside those pods.

  Escobar's next generation of Arcadians. They don't need Mother. They don't need Arcadian soil. They're unaffected by Secutores's weed killer.

  Perfect soldiers.

  FORTY-FOUR

  “What do you think of my little project?”

  Mere jumps at the sound of Escobar's voice, but I had heard him coming. He's wearing a light gray suit with a lavender shirt. His tie is a deep burgundy—quite close to the same color as the fronds down on the fifth ring—and the tiny detail stitched into the silk is a pair of interlocked circles. The chimerae sigil.

  “We're going to stop it,” Mere says, raising the pistol she got from Belfast and pointing it at Escobar.

  “Stop what?” he asks as he strolls to the edge of the rings and looks down. “It's already done.”

  “What? What do you mean?” she asks.

  “Your friend has already contributed to the project,” he says. “I've drained all of her blood, and it's being passed to the seedlings as we stand here. There's nothing you can do. She's already gone.”

  I stare down at the still figure on the gurney. “I can take her back to Arcadia,” I point out. “Mother can bring her back.”

  “Arcadia is closed to you. Both of you,” Escobar reminds me. “They won't let you in.”

  I shrug. “Maybe I can get them to reconsider.”

  “Maybe,” he muses, “but it will take some time. Time she doesn't have.” He purses his lips. “You failed, Silas. You failed in every way.”

  “I killed your grandson a couple of times,” I point out.

  “I will grant you that,” he admits. “And it looks like you have survived a visit to the salt baths. That's quite impressive. They've been a most effective place to dispose of certain… aborted experiments.”

  “‘What doesn't kill you makes you stronger,'” I offer.

  “Yes, that hoary aphorism of Nietzsche,” Escobar sighs. “One he didn't subscribe to himself.”

  “Happens to be true in a couple of cases,” I say. “Me and Phoebe, for example.”

  “Yes,” he says. “She was a most perfect specimen.”

  “Is,” I correct him.

  He looks at Mere and shakes his head. “Even for one of her soldiers, he's quite single-minded, isn't he?”

  “It's one of his most annoying traits,” she admits. She is still pointing the pistol at him, though her arms are starting to tremble.

  “Put the gun down, my dear,” Escobar says.

  Her only response is to tighten her grip.

  “I don't mean to be so pig-headed about this,” I say, looking down at the figure in the pit. “but I'm just trying to be helpful.”

  “Helpful? How?” He swivels his head around to look at me.

  “Well, are you sure she's dead?” I lift my arm and wave.

  He doesn't look away from me, which is too bad because I'm pretty sure the figure on the gurney moves in response.

  I've been thinking about the gun case and the sight of Phoebe sitting calmly in the car. She knew what was coming. She knew Escobar was going to try to snatch her. Maybe she had even done something to alert both Secutores and Escobar that we were in the hotel. I don't really know, but the end result is that Phoebe got herself to Escobar's laboratory unscathed.

  Escobar wanted to create a chimera, a new strain of Arcadian that was resistant to the weed killer, and Phoebe was never going to accept protection from the Grove. So what was she—a self-proclaimed steward—going to do about the weed killer? She was going to get the counteragent spliced into her own DNA.

  If all Escobar had done was drain her blood, he hadn't killed her. Not yet. She was going to be incredibly thirsty and quite weak, but she wasn't dead. And whatever was growing in those pods was going to be organic enough for her to feed from. And given that it would be a mix of her own blood, the counteragent, and whatever other genetic modifications Escobar was putting into his clones, she was just going to be gett
ing the equivalent of a highly oxygenated blood transfusion.

  Brutally efficient. Just like Phoebe.

  “My science is quite exact,” Escobar snaps.

  “I'm sure it is,” I say, stepping back from the edge of the rings so that Mere doesn't wonder what I'm talking about and come to look too. “So, what's in store for us?”

  “What makes you think I have any plans for you at all?” Escobar asks.

  “Well, you got what you wanted.” I nod toward the Incan terrace farm. “You've kicked me around a bit, rubbed my nose in things, and got my head all twisted around. What does killing me now serve?”

  “Are you suggesting you might have some use?”

  “I don't know what's really true about your relationship with Arcadia, but I know that at least one person there knows what you're doing. That may not have been part of your plan, but they're going to come sniffing around now that they know about the weed killer. Oh, yeah, sorry, I told them about that. They're going to be quite worked up about the humans having a weapon that can actually kill us.”

  “You're going to make a deal, aren't you?” Mere says. “You're going to make Arcadia bow to you. You're going to make them beg you to save them, and they'll be so panicked, they'll accept anything you offer. It's a classic scenario. Allow a threat to develop and then swoop in with a perfectly reasonable solution. God, you'd think people would have figured it out after the US government used it on its own citizens after 9/11.”

  Escobar raises his shoulders slightly as if the idea is interesting but not enough to fully capture his attention. “What do I need of Arcadia? I have been without them for more than two hundred years. Why would I want them to embrace me again?”

  “Because you need their help,” I say.

  He laughs. “Their help? The combined umbrella of what my family controls makes more—in pure profit—every year than the entire accumulated wealth that every Arcadian has squirreled away. I could hire every single private military contractor on this planet—today—without making a dent in my cash reserves.”