Under the Empyrean Sky (The Heartland Trilogy)

by Wendig, Chuck

  It is what it is. If they find something here today, good. Maybe it’ll afford them some small comfort in the coming days. Maybe it’ll be enough to stop Mayor Barnes from disbanding the crew.

  Lane loves his friends. He may not show it well all the time, but that’s because…

  Well. He has to be a little standoffish. He doesn’t want them to know the real Lane Moreau.

  So, that’s his mission here: keep the crew together. At any cost. Rigo and Cael are his family, and even though they don’t know everything about him, they know more than anybody else.

  Lane sees the Dewberry ace note emporium and suspects that’s as good a place as any to start.

  He ducks inside the door, ready to hunt and pick.

  First thing Rigo does is run over to the MOM: the Monetary Offset Machine by the bank. Folks would walk up and put cash into the machine, and it would spit out a number of ace notes based on the current (and probably crappy) exchange rate. Rigo remembers when they used to have one at the Boxelder bank. He also remembers when they came and tore out the machine. And later, when they repurposed the bank as the Tallyman’s office. What was it the Empyrean had said? Something like, “The Empyrean is best equipped to handle the financial accounts of those strong and stalwart citizens of the Heartland, citizens who shouldn’t have to worry about such petty and paltry details.”

  The MOM is stylized, showing off the art deco earmarks of Empyrean design: vertical chrome, now rotten with rust, culminating in hard-angled edges; the celadon buttons—once polished Bakelite, now cracked and chipped; the faceplate where the Empyrean sigil—the winged horse known as the pegasus—still sits. (The old Empyrean logo plates are worth quite a few ace notes, not only for the eyes of jade and ruby but because Empyrean citizens are frequently collectors.) But what troubles Rigo is the bent metal opposite the hinges.

  Somebody had already jacked open this thing. And stolen all the ace notes inside.

  Curious.

  The Empyrean, probably. Cleaning out the banks before closing off the town.

  Just the same, Rigo reminds himself to come back here and pry off that pegasus seal.

  For now he moves on. Across the street, he sees an old liquor store—it’s called Busser’s Booze, which makes him wonder if there’s any relation to the Boxelder Busser. Both being in the booze business can’t be a coincidence, can it?

  Rigo pushes his way inside.

  Cael cuts through the alley, metal chain-link fence rattling as he runs his hands along it. He steps out onto a second, smaller street—and there, right across from him, is an old hologram theater, the marquis leaning hard to the right, crooked letters still announcing the holo-flicks they were playing the day the Empyrean came in and shut down the town: Nightshaders and The Day of the Dark Sun and Asmo’s Road. Cael’s too young to have ever seen a holo-flick; but when he was little, Pop would tell him about them, often at bedtime. His father would paint such a picture, he could imagine the holograms playing out in front of him as they once had for Pop.

  At first he thinks to bypass it. Much as he wants to go inside, see the old candy cases and the theater-in-the-round where the hologram played out onstage, he knows there won’t be anything worth much in there.

  But then something catches Cael’s eagle eye.

  The N in Nightshaders is poking out. Just slightly. Casting a shadow.

  And behind it is a curl of green. A shoot or tendril. Showing off a few little leaves.

  Maybe the theater is a good place to start.

  Dewberry’s appears entirely untouched.

  Lane can’t believe it.

  Jeans folded up on shelves. Dresses on racks. Dapper white suits displayed on the wall. On the other side are dishes and pots and mugs and silverware. Beyond that, fishing poles, skinner knives, tents. Anything a Heartlander could want is here, and suddenly Lane regrets that Boxelder is too small to ever sport an ace note emporium like this.

  All of it is covered in dust and spiderwebs. Motes of pollen float in beams of light.

  This is heaven. Lane truly feels as if he’s been swept up in the Lord and Lady’s embrace, held between them and carried aloft to their mountain manor house in the sky.

  With joy in his heart, he goes flipping through racks of clothing.

  A seersucker with leather elbow pads.

  A pair of black trousers with red suspenders.

  A cable-knit sweater. A gingham blouse. Blue socks. White fedoras.

  It’s just too much. He’s got to try on something. Something here has to fit him. He’s heard girls call him “willowy,” which isn’t really a compliment, but he’ll take it. Not that he needs girls to compliment him. And Francine… well. He doesn’t want to think about her. Or any girls. The Heartland doesn’t understand certain things, after all, and he just doesn’t want to open that door.

  Lane starts slipping out of his pants, his shirt. He wipes his hands and brow, as he doesn’t want to sully these clothes or get dust stuck all over his skin.

  He skips a new shirt and goes right for the seersucker jacket—it’s a white suit with lavender pads and faint gray vertical stripes. He slips it on, bare chested.

  But then, pulling back the jacket, something is revealed—

  A little curl of pale green snaking up the center chrome of the rack.

  Lane drops down to one knee and follows the coiled vine—as thin as a carburetor wire—down to the floor where it has poked up through the carpet.

  “Strong little guy,” he says. Like the rest of the garden.

  He hears a scuff behind him: a footstep.

  Lane wheels, expecting to see Cael or Rigo standing there.

  But all he sees is a white cloth and a black-gloved hand descending toward his face.

  His mind goes sideways. Everything fuzzes at the margins. He wills his knee to move, but all it does it give out beneath him.

  Rigo ducks behind the counter of Busser’s Booze, looking out over the empty crates and collapsed shelving. He thinks suddenly of his own drunken father (“I drink because you make me,” he can hear his old man say) but puts that out of his mind. Don’t be scared. Stay in the moment. Let’s get rich.

  Most of the booze is gone. Broken brown and green glass is everywhere. An old metal icebox sits in the corner, rust eaten but in pretty good shape. The floor beneath it is scratched up—ruts and furrows dug out of the wood. A light fixture above has a shattered bulb now home to a family of long-limbed cellar spiders.

  If Father were here he’d be sniffing along the shelves for a taste.

  There he goes again, thinking about him. Hard not to in a place like this.

  Rigo wonders suddenly: How long has his father been a drunk? At first Rigo thinks, Forever, he’s been a drunk since the day I was born; but he suspects that’s not really true. The memories are few and far between—they’re gauzy and uncertain, as if Rigo is staring through the greasy bottom of an old drinking glass—but he recalls his father being clean shaven, bright eyed, even smiling. Before the booze nibbled away at his soul, one drink at a time.

  He used to hide it from Rigo. Successfully at first, but over time he got sloppier. He had a little cubbyhole behind the pellet stove in the root cellar, a space carved right out of the rock and dirt and concealed behind an old, moldy dartboard. Always a bottle or two back there. And a pair of glasses, as though someday he might be drinking with somebody instead of drinking alone.

  Then one day his father just stopped hiding it.

  Hiding it.

  Rigo has an idea.

  He totters to the back of the liquor store, brushing aside cobwebs. He heads to the icebox—but it’s not the icebox he’s interested in. It’s the marks on the floor. Those furrows in the wood lead out from the base of the box. As if it’s been moved. As if it’s been moved many times over the course of months, even years.

  Rigo sucks in a breath, wraps his arms around the box, and begins to groan and croak as he shimmies the box away from the wall.

  An open
ing in the wall is revealed.

  “Holy moly,” Rigo says. Then crawls through the hole.

  The entire theater is a garden.

  The plants have pushed up from underneath, tearing through floorboards and shredding carpet. Tomato plants grow up through a shattered candy case. Grape vines hang from the ceiling beams like a giant’s beard. Cael races through the double doors, sees that row after row of theater seats are torn asunder, springs exposed and made a part of various garden plants—again he spies glimpses of green beans and long, tapered red peppers and other leafy vegetables he can’t identify.

  In the center, the round stage with its glass plate—on which the holo-flicks were once projected from above—sits shattered, and up through the center grows a narrow-trunked tree.

  From its boughs hang fat-bottomed pears.

  Dozens of them.

  A hundred maybe.

  Cael has to have a taste. Has to.

  He runs to the stage, hungry to taste the first pear he’s eaten in almost a decade.

  He doesn’t notice that someone has come into the theater behind him.

  Micky Finn’s Botanical Gin.

  Boxes upon boxes of it.

  Rigo squats, hunkering down and squeezing his way through the small opening he discovered behind the icebox, and peers into a secret stash of spirits.

  He does a quick count: thirteen boxes. An unlucky number any other time, but now, Rigo thinks, the number’s run of bad mojo has petered out and flipped to the other side.

  Rigo’s sour feeling is gone; the snakes inside his stomach turn to butterflies, and they loosen a giggle that bubbles up and out of his throat. Cael is right. They’re going to be rich.

  Even better—

  Cael didn’t find this.

  It’s not that Rigo wants to take anything away from his friend, his captain. This whole endeavor was Cael’s idea. But Cael’s always the one who finds the good stuff. It’s as if he has an eye that won’t quit. Meanwhile, Rigo’s always left looking for scraps.

  Not this time.

  He pumps his arm and does an awkward two-step victory dance.

  The boxes, then.

  The Micky Finn Botanical Gin logo shows a dapper shark wearing a center-crease trilby hat on his head, with a sprig of blue juniper berries clutched in the broad, needle-toothed grin. The shark is winking, not so much as if he knows something you don’t but rather as if you and he know something the rest of the world does not. The brand’s motto is Micky Finn’s: The Toothiest Gin.

  Rigo pops the top off one of those crates and sees nine cork-tops staring back at him, each sealed to the glass with blue wax. The bottles themselves are a pale blue—the color of the shark, the color of juniper berries, the color of the sky just after a rain.

  He takes out one of the bottles. The gin within sloshes about.

  Rigo’s forgotten all his anxiety. These are old spirits. The old boozers at Busser’s Tavern are always going on about the brands they used to drink back in the day: Spalding & Wolboch’s Vodka, Corazon Brandy, Jack Kenney Whiskey, something called Kin’s Tucky Bourbon. All Heartland-made but popular enough on the Empyrean flotillas to keep the on-the-ground distilleries in business. Of course, someone up there figured out how to make this stuff in a lab, which means they don’t need the Heartlander brands anymore. Rigo remembers being a kid when they made selling booze illegal. You can still make it; you just can’t sell it. These days, it’s all cheap fixy and chicha.

  These bottles are prime stuff. Maven Cartwright will have no choice but to recognize their skills and pay out a few decks of ace notes. He tries to imagine the look on his own father’s face—“See, Father? I brought you something, something you really want.” For a moment, Rigo is lost in his reverie. What will everyone say? “Oh, did you hear? The Cozido kid found a stash of Micky Finn gin. That’s right. Haven’t seen Micky Finn’s in a dog’s age. No, no, you heard me right. Little Rodrigo was the one who found it. The Big Sky Scavengers, sure, sure. I bet Mayor Barnes is none too happy about that. Makes his son look bad, don’t it? Hell, three cheers for Rodrigo Cozido! I hear even his father was proud.…”

  But wait.

  There’s more.

  The dust patterns on the floor—these boxes have been moved.

  Recently.

  The pried-open bank machine. The furrows by the icebox. And now this disturbed dust.

  Rigo hunkers down low, gets his shoulders behind the boxes. They don’t move easily; but while he’s not strong, he’s got some bulk (Father calls him a “fat little tamale”), and he’s able to push several boxes at one time. He runs his fingers along the floor—

  Along the edge of a door. A trapdoor.

  A rope knot sits recessed into the wood. Rigo works his stubby fingers around the knot, pulls it up—and the trapdoor opens.

  A tunnel awaits. Dirt walled. But lit—bathed in the sodium glow of lights strung up along the side. And in the middle of the tunnel: a set of iron tracks. Like train tracks, fixed to cross tie slats buried in the hard-packed earth.

  Rigo dangles his head upside down through the hole. He sees the tunnel go about fifty feet one direction, then turn. He grunts, shifting his body so he can look in the other direction—

  And ends up face-to-face with a strange man.

  The man is jowly. Fat cheeks lined with ill-shorn beard bristle.

  From his nose grows a thin spiral curl of a vine.

  “Lord and Lady!” Rigo gasps, the blood rushing to his head, making him dizzy. He struggles to lift himself out of the hole; but the man growls, grabs Rigo’s head in the crook of his arm, and presses a dirty red handkerchief laced with stinking chemicals against Rigo’s nose and mouth.

  Rigo feels his whole body sliding through the trapdoor like so much dead meat.

  And then it’s lights-out for Rigo.

  The juice runs down Cael’s elbow. Floods his mouth. The pear skin has bite, but the creamy flesh is so soft and smooth it melts in his mouth like lard in a hot skillet.

  For a moment it’s enough to wash everything else away.

  He doesn’t think about Gwennie and Boyland.

  He doesn’t think about his fight with Pop.

  He doesn’t think about Mayor Barnes disbanding the crew or the Empyrean flotillas or the rest of his life with weird little Wanda. Or even his dream of striking it rich here in Martha’s Bend.

  He doesn’t think at all.

  He just enjoys.

  The moment is regrettably short-lived.

  He hears a footstep behind him—the glass projector stage shifts and crackles—and instantly Cael is whipping around with the half-eaten pear and chucking it like a baseball. The fruit whacks off the head of a filthy, rag-swaddled vagrant.

  As the pear rebounds, spraying juice and spinning away, Cael realizes he’s seen this vagrant before. The pot belly, the teeth like white stones. The raggedy red cap on his dirty head.

  This is the one Cael caught snooping through their stable.

  Something isn’t right. The realization has set him off-kilter—a keen frequency of dread runs through his every pore and follicle.

  “You,” Cael says.

  The hobo’s got something in his hand: a white cloth, like a table napkin. Soaked in something. Cael’s nose catches a scent hanging in the air: an astringent odor—harsh, biting.

  “Kid, don’t make this tougher than it—” But suddenly the hobo leans in, squints. “It’s you.”

  “The one with the slingshot,” Cael says, whipping that very thing out of his back pocket.

  “Wait!”

  He lets fly with a ball bearing—no pebble this time—and the vagrant staggers back, flinging up his arm defensively. The ball bearing cracks hard against the hobo’s wrist, drawing blood, probably chipping bone. The man staggers backward and tumbles off the stage.

  Cael takes a running leap over the hobo—Run!—but between the man’s yowls of pain he hears the hobo call after him.

  “We have your friends!”


  Cael skids to a stop. Breathes deep. Rigo. Lane.

  He pauses. Breathing deep again. The slingshot heavy in his hand.

  Cael turns and marches back to the vagrant, who lies on the floor cradling his wrist and wincing in pain. The chemical-soaked cloth lies off to the side like a fallen dove.

  Cael straddles the man, draws back the pocket of his slingshot as far as it’ll go, a ball bearing pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He draws a bead between the man’s eyes.

  “I’ll kill you if you hurt them,” Cael says.

  “They’re all right.”

  “Prove it. Take me to them. Unless you want this metal marble buried in the meat of your brain.”

  “No, no, I’ll show you. I swear. Don’t kill me.”

  Cael nods. “Then show me.”

  THE BURROW

  THE SLINGSHOT POINTS right to the base of the vagrant’s brain as he walks forward. Cael makes it clear that if he lets fly, the ball bearing will kill the stranger lickety-split—it will sever the brain from the spinal cord, and the curtain will close for this hobo’s one-man show. Cael doesn’t know if that’s true, but it sure sounds good, and he’s angry enough to be convincing.

  The vagrant leads Cael down another alley, this one between a motorvator garage bay and a little old café with a half-collapsed awning. Halfway down, the hobo stops.

  “Here,” he says, nudging a ratty blanket with his ragged boot.

  “Go on, then.”

  The vagrant stoops over with a grunt and, with his good arm, pulls back the blanket; beneath it is a corrugated tin door like you might find leading into a farmhouse root cellar. He gets his dirty, callused hands under it and lifts while Cael stands back, one eye aiming over the pinched slingshot pocket.

  A doorway—dark and breathy with the scent of fresh earth—leads down.

  “You better not be leading me into some sort of trap,” Cael says.

  “No,” the hobo says. “Though once you see what’s down here, I don’t rightly know what happens next.”