They descend into the earthen tunnel. It starts to slope further, and someone has dug out part of the ground and buried flat-level stones, creating a set of makeshift steps so you don’t slip and go tumbling down. It gets darker and darker, but soon the light appears: buzzing sodium bulbs strung up in the distance.
They cross over a set of rails. Like for a train but smaller. A mine cart maybe, Cael thinks.
The tunnel bends.
They go with it. And there, ahead, is another vagrant.
This one is a woman. Her dirty red hair is braided in a crown above her head, her cheeks made orange by smudges of dirt. She’s got on a dress, a rich-lady’s dress like you might see on a mayor’s wife; but it’s been modified—the skirt torn at the knees, the sleeves shredded, bands of leather wrapped around the wrists. The dress was once pretty, Cael imagines, but now it’s ruined—like everything the hobos touch. The woman stands there, writing on a chalkboard hanging on the wall, marking off Xs and question marks and other symbols Cael doesn’t know on a big, taped-off grid—he sees words at the top and along the side of the grid such as yield and f1 and f2. She doesn’t see Cael there yet.
“Hey, Jed,” she says, marking off another X and comparing it to a paper in her hand. “Heard we found some kids messing around up above. Got two of them, but did you find the—”
“Marlene,” the hobo says, and clears his throat once, then again more loudly.
She looks up. Eyes go wide. “Oh.”
“Ma’am,” Cael says, figuring that, hobo or no, a lady still deserves a modicum of respect. After all, your sister’s a vagrant, isn’t she?
The one called Jed swallows hard. “You’re, ah, you’re gonna want to get the boss for this.”
“The boss,” she says, spaced-out. Staring at Cael’s slingshot. Then she snaps back to it. “The boss. Right.”
She drops the chalk and runs off.
“Jed, huh,” Cael says. “Well, lead on, Jed. Let’s find my friends.”
Cots. Tents. Tables.
Vagrants everywhere. Cael does a quick count—two dozen. Maybe more. Two are milling around an old brass coffeepot with a circle of blue flame flickering underneath. Another handful are lugging bags of something dark and earthy—could be soil, Cael thinks, but the color’s off. Another sweeps the floor. All of them dressed in the telltale rags and repurposed clothing that separates a hobo from every other Heartlander. It’s like they want to look different, Cael thinks. Like they’re proud of it.
The lights bathe everything in a muddy yellow glow. Cael glances around and sees several other tunnels shooting off from this room. These people are like groundhogs, he thinks. Or ants. They’ve dug a burrow, and now they live here. Hiding away from everyone else.
Someone finally notices Jed and Cael.
A big hobo—skin as black as night, body built like a grain silo—cries out in alarm and draws a small sonic shooter from a holster at his hip.
“No, no, no!” Jed yells, waving his hands. “Don’t shoot, Homer, don’t shoot.”
Cael’s pulse is kicking now like a cranky horse, and the adrenalin shoots through him in a cold saline rush. He draws the ball bearing back farther, the tubing on his slingshot tightening with a creak. “You shoot me, I shoot him. I just came for my friends.”
“Jeezum Crow, Jed,” Homer mutters, shaking his head. “Asked you to do one thing, and you bring this to our door.”
“Just go get the kid’s friends, okay?”
Homer doesn’t holster the sonic shooter, but he backs around a table and winds through a cluster of cots, disappearing down one of the side tunnels.
“What the hell are you people doing down here?” Cael asks.
“You’ll see,” Jed says, “if the boss wants you to see.”
Someone moves off to Cael’s left. Another woman. Matronly. But tough, too. Broad hips and broad shoulders. Skin weathered like saddle leather. She’s got something behind her back.
A small hand-shovel.
Cael shoots her a look. Nods toward his slingshot. “Drop the shovel, ma’am.”
The woman rolls her eyes and then shows the shovel and lets it clatter to the ground. But the shovel isn’t the problem. Not anymore.
It’s her hand.
Or what passes for a hand.
It’s like Poltroon all over again. Her fingers are vines, though her thumb is human. Her vine-fingers—leafy, green, whispering against one another—drift and twitch.
Oh, Lord and Lady, no.
“The Blight,” Cael whispers. Suddenly he feels sick and dizzy and scared. He hears Rigo’s voice in the hollow of his mind: Told you this was a bad idea, Captain.
“We’re good people,” Jed says.
“You’re Blighters. You’re sick.”
“Not all of us. We’re not bad people.”
Cael remembers the things Poltroon said: The Blight. It talks to me. I can hear it inside my head. It hates us. Hates who we are. Like a child who hates its parents.
Suddenly, a distant squeaking fast approaching. Homer emerges from the same side tunnel, this time pushing a rusty wheelbarrow with a half-flat front wheel. Piled into the wheelbarrow are two bodies: Lane and Rigo.
They’re dead.
Cael can’t breathe. He feels the adrenalin turn to poison panic—a high-pitched whine in his ears, a sense of vertigo threatening to knock him to the ground.
But then Rigo moans and his arm flops over the side, hitting the metal wheelbarrow bucket with a dull bang.
What should he do? Cael can’t think. His friends are… unconscious. Maybe hurt. Trapped in an underground lair full of contaminated Blighters and homeless wretches.
The big hobo shrugs impatiently. “Well? You said you wanted your friends. Here they are, boy. It’s like dinnertime, ding-ding-ding. Come and get ’em.”
Cael steps out from behind Jed. His hands are shaking. He repoints the slingshot at Homer as he steps forward into the middle of the room. He can feel all eyes on him. He spies another Blighter off to the side: a man whose whole neck is green, veiny, textured like the underside of a leaf.
“Step back,” Cael says to Homer, gesturing with the slingshot. “Go on. Move away.”
Homer holds up both hands and shakes his head. “You’re asking for trouble, kid.”
They won’t let us leave here, Cael thinks. They know we could spill the beans. Bring the Empyrean down on their heads. Shit!
Cael lifts up a knee, nudges Rigo’s hand. “Rigo. Rigo.”
“Muh,” Rigo mutters. “Muh grub whuh wee.”
“Wake up.”
“Fuh. Nuh now.”
Damnit.
Cael starts formulating a plan: he’ll point the slingshot at Jed again, make Jed push the wheelbarrow back down the tunnel and up through the cellar doors. By then, Lord and Lady willing, Rigo and Lane will finally have stirred.
But he never gets to enact that brilliant plan.
Because the boss is here.
Cael hears someone call his name.
“Cael?”
He looks over his shoulder.
And there stands Pop.
THE LORD AND LADY’S GARDEN
“THEY SAID THEY saw some kids up in town, but I had no idea,” Pop says. “Though I should’ve figured it was you.”
Cael’s not sure what to say.
“You… have some questions,” Pop says, sitting at a small table made of a board lashed to a couple of old barrels. Cael sits on a chair that’s really just a barrel cut in half.
“Pop, I feel like I’m dreaming. But I’m just not sure yet if it’s a good dream or a bad one.”
Pop says nothing, just pushes a tin cup of coffee toward Cael.
Cael takes it. It’s cool down here in the burrow, and the steam from the coffee rises like ghosts from a fresh-dug grave.
“Pop, there’re hobos down here.” Cael lowers his voice. “And Blighters.”
“I know, son.”
“That ain’t right.”
Pop
forces a smile. “It’s okay, son. They’re nothing to be scared of.”
“I didn’t say I was scared—”
“I know, I know, but these are people just like us. Given a bad turn of the worm, any Heartlander at any time could become one of them. The Empyrean doesn’t like our tax bill or we get three strikes against our Tally, and we get booted out of town on a Remittance Order, too. You know a Remittance Order used to pay?” Pop takes his own cup of coffee, sips from it. “It’s true. They used to pay you a small stipend—a remittance—to get out of town. That practice is long gone, but the name stuck, I guess. Anyway. Point is, you get a raw deal from the Empyrean—or worse, you wake up one morning and find a scaly patch of plant fiber or a leaf growing up out of your chin whiskers—and that’s it. It’s not your fault. It’s piss luck is all.”
Like Poltroon, Cael thinks. He didn’t ask for what happened to him.
Cael tells his father everything. It comes spilling out of him like water from an overturned bucket. He tells Pop how he’d been seeing Gwennie, how they found the garden and then went out in the piss-blizzard to collect more of the harvest. He tells Pop about Poltroon, too. About what he was. What he said. And how he ended up ground up in his own machine—suicide by harvester.
Pop listens the whole time, nodding, making all the right sounds. When he hears about Poltroon, it seems to strike him deeply. “We could’ve offered him a place here.”
“Pop, the Blight… if what he said was true, you can’t trust these people.”
“What he said is true, son. The Blight is a sickness; don’t mistake what I’m telling you. But we’ve found a way to stave off its worst effects, to halt its march toward taking over the victim’s body.” Pop takes another slow, delicate sip of coffee, almost as if he’s drinking it as part of an Empyrean tea service rather than here at a barrel table in an underground bunker full of hobos and vine-heads. “Besides, the Blight victims have a very special gift that comes with their curse.”
“Gift?”
Pop nods. “Come on; I’ll show you.”
“Welcome to the garden.”
Splayed out before them is a massive underground chamber. Cael figures it’s easily as big as the acreage of their own homestead. Everything is bright: humming ultraviolet lights hang from above, bathing everything in a warm glow. Row after row of tables line the room, and on these tables are wooden boxes cut into grids—each square about a foot on every side and filled with soil. The boxes are planters, and Cael spies tomatoes and beans and peppers. A red flash of strawberry. An orange butternut squash shaped like a dog’s head.
The front half of the room is the model of scientific order. Everything in neat boxes, everything kept to the grids.
But toward the back half of the room the garden descends into chaos. Wildness has taken hold. The boxes are bulging; some are broken outright. Roots dangle from beneath the tables. The plants are thick, robust stalks—the tomatoes that hang are bigger than a baby’s head. The peppers are thick, swollen with asymmetrical lumps and curves. At the far side of the room, the plants have left the boxes entirely—they’re climbing up and growing out of the walls. They ascend toward the ceiling and push through the earth, clearly seeking proper sunlight.
Two Blighted women—one with a tail-like vine emerging from the waistband of her trousers, another with an ear that looks like a knob of cauliflower—tend to the plants, misting them with water, tying stalks to stakes, stroking the leaves with gentle caresses.
Pop goes out, stoops down to whisper to one of the kneeling women. She hands him something wrapped in a cloth, and he returns to Cael with a handful of strawberries so big they could be small apples.
“Here,” Pop says. “Taste.”
Syrupy sweet. A rush of pink juices. The smell is intoxicating: a sharp, earthy sweetness. It stains Cael’s hands red.
Cael hears a footstep behind him, followed by a “Whoa.”
He turns to see Rigo and Lane—both looking groggy, like the morning after Rigo’s father pickles himself with fixy—flanked by the big hobo.
“Thanks, Homer.”
“You got it, Pop,” Homer says with a deferential nod.
Cael’s not sure he likes other people calling his father Pop, but he doesn’t have time to worry about that right now.
“You okay?” Cael asks his two friends.
“Feels like I’ve got shuck rats fighting over a corncob inside my skull,” Lane says. “But yeah.”
Rigo nods, too, but in a barely-paying-attention way. Instead, he steps up next to Pop, eyes goggled out, staring at the garden of order descending into chaos, of sanity tumbling toward wild, unfettered growth. “Holy smokes.”
Pop hands Rigo a strawberry. Lane, too. They both bite in, and Cael wonders if that’s what he looked like: eyes rolling backward, head lolling about on the neck. And the sounds: nngh, mmmph, ohhhhhguhhh.
“What you see here,” Pop says, “you can’t tell anyone. Not Gwennie, not Maven Cartwright, not a single soul up in Boxelder. Not yet.”
Cael stares out over the garden. He sees brown roots—like roots from a pear tree—and realizes they’re beneath the holo-flick theater. “What do I see here, Pop?”
Before Pop can answer, Lane pushes to the front. “It’s the future. Isn’t it, Mr. McAvoy?”
Pop nods. “I think so.”
“Your dad’s sticking it to the man.” Lane laughs and pops his knuckles. “Bad. Ass.”
“We thought we’d provide a safe haven for hobos and Blight victims,” Pop says, “and in the process grow some proper food. Start putting it out to those families in the Heartland we know need a boost—not to sell, but to eat.”
“But you could be rich,” Cael says. “We could be rich.”
“Being rich doesn’t mean squat out here, son. Sure, maybe we’d make enough ace notes to climb to the top of the manure heap, but it’d still be us sitting on dung. Things need to change. And food is where that change starts. That’s how the Empyrean controls everything. We’re not allowed to grow real crops. We’re forced to grow an invasive corn species that isn’t even supposed to be eaten. The amount of corn it takes to make a single tank of fuel or sugar syrup for the Empyrean flotillas could have been enough corn—were it properly edible—to feed a single person for the better part of a year. And it’s killing the soil. Ten more years of Hiram’s Golden Prolific and our land won’t be able to support anything but the corn—if that. But they”—Pop stabs a finger upward—“don’t give a shuck rat’s right foot about us down here. They shut the schools. Killed off the livestock farms. We’re just slaves down here. Horseshoes for their pretty pegasus.” Pop takes a deep breath. “Besides, this is illegal. We start selling these plants, the flotillas will send down squadron after squadron of soldiers to clean house.”
“See?” Lane says, poking Cael in the ribs. “This is what I’ve been talking about, man. The rich don’t want us getting all think-for-yourselfy down here.”
Cael ignores his friend. “So, you can’t sell it. Now what?”
“Turns out we have a secret weapon.”
Lane grins. “I like the sound of that.”
Pop says, “We thought we’d tend a nice little garden, have some yield, sneak it to the Heartlanders, and at least make sure people were eating healthy. But this stuff…” He spreads his arms out so they can behold the chaotic majesty of the garden. “This garden will not be denied. The plants don’t need much sunlight. Or water. Or anything. They’re like Hiram’s Golden Prolific: These plants are aggressive. They’ll grow anywhere. They’re real competitors.” Pop points to the ceiling. “And they’re spreading. They’ve come up through the floorboards and carpets. Give it another year and this whole town will be a jungle of fresh fruits and vegetables. And as you know, it’s already left Martha’s Bend.”
“The garden trail,” Rigo says.
“Mmm-hmm. Heading toward Boxelder. And we’ve found other plants growing in other directions. The roots and tendrils have pierced t
he plastic blister. They won’t be stopped. Before long we won’t have to do anything at all—if we can keep this place hidden for long enough, the Empyrean won’t be able to stop the garden. It’ll be like Eden all over again.”
Eden: the garden where the Lord and Lady were born from the womb of the mother earth, from the bosom of the Heartland itself.
Just an old story, Cael thinks. But maybe not anymore.
“Where’d you get the seeds to grow this stuff?” Cael asks.
Suddenly his father pulls back. Cagey. Licks his lips. “Well, son. I have a… contact.…”
Lane blurts out, “It’s someone in the Sleeping Dogs, isn’t it?”
“An Empyrean double agent?” Rigo asks, still goggle-eyed.
Footsteps behind them. In a hurry. Homer and the woman from earlier, Marlene, appear in a worried panic.
“Pop,” Marlene says. “We have more uninvited guests up top.”
“More kids,” Homer says, shooting Cael an accusing look.
“What?” Cael asks. “We didn’t tell anybody!”
“Come on,” Pop says. “I better take a look myself this time.”
Pop leads them to a backroom in the burrow, and Cael is surprised to see projected on the floor a series of changing three-dimensional holographic images, each revealing a location from the town up above. Outside the motorvator garage. Inside the Dewberry emporium. Looking out from the MOM bank machine. No wonder the hobos knew Cael and his crew were in town. They were on camera the whole time.
Pop explains, “Martha’s Bend is—er, was—a more prosperous town than Boxelder. Got a bigger hunk of the Empyrean dole, too. That means Empyrean agents were watching. But they cut the feed long ago after they wiped the town clean. We just hooked the cameras back up and used the holo-flick projector to give us access.”
It occurs to Cael that his father is far smarter than he ever gave him credit for.
“What the heck happened to Martha’s Bend?” Lane asks.
Cael sees his father’s brow knit, same as it does whenever he doesn’t want to admit an unpleasant truth. But Lane doesn’t have a chance to press him, because as the holographic surveillance flicks through image after image, one registers real trouble:
Under the Empyrean Sky (The Heartland Trilogy) Page 15