Seed (11 page)

“Shit.” He looked from the woman to Brood and back, then his lips stretched over his gums and he rasped out laughter. “Shit,” he said again, and turned serious. He pointed his gaze at the small group’s water truck—so rusted it looked like it had been dredged from the sea floor. “You out?”

“Just about,” the woman said. They eyed each other. A hiss of static came from the Ham in the woman’s truck. Wind kicked dust out of the trees. Finally Hondo’s dreads swayed as he nodded.

“
homito
.” He gestured at Brood.

Brood reached into the footlocker, withdrew a jar full of water and tossed it to the woman, who snatched it deftly out of the air. She uncapped it and drank, long and desperate, throat flexing. Paused eventually to breathe, then kept drinking. When the jar was empty she held it up to Hondo, childlike with both hands.

“Got any more?”

“Shit,” Hondo mused.

“Shit,” Pollo echoed.

They filled a galvanized gallon bucket and gave it to the woman. She gave it to her people. She policed it, making sure no one drank more than their share before passing it on. Her hands trembled as she passed Hondo the empty bucket.

“Thanks,
amigo
,” she told him.

“
De nada
.”

“They got any food?” called a boy with a black ponytail. He was Brood’s age, maybe a little older.

“Shut up, Raimi,” the boy with cornrows told him.

“Billy…” the ponytailed boy started to say, but the cornrowed boy gave him a hard look and he went quiet. The woman stared up at Hondo, held out her hands like she had no cards left to play.

“Well?” she asked. “Can you spare any food?” Hondo’s dreads swiveled from side to side.

“I could skin up that dog for you, you want,” Brood told her. The dog, panting at the woman’s feet, canted its head to one side as though considering the idea. “That’d get you a few miles at least.” The woman went rigid.

“Touch my dog, I’ll skin
you
.”

“Just a suggestion.”

The woman turned to Hondo. Her face softened.

“I’m Anna.”

“
Mucho gusto
.” Hondo’s tone made clear his indifference.

“You could roll with us. We could help each other.”

“You mean we could help you,” Brood said.

“Where you headed?” Hondo asked.

“Kansas.” The woman tilted her head towards the truck’s cab, where a distorted voice now squawked from the HAM. “We’re going to find the Corn Mother. She’s building a permanent colony. Going to recrop the entire state.”

“We heard.” Hondo gave the woman a sympathetic look. Motioned at the road north. “We heading that way.”

“Nothing up that way but snow and more of this…” The woman held up her hands and with a sweeping look took in the surrounding forest, grey and empty.

“They’re not levitating,” Pollo mused. His eyes came alive—something long sunken rising to the surface—and stared at Brood. “Satori don’t carry them.”

“You could come with us,” the woman insisted. Her eyes, scared now, pleading, pinned Hondo. Hondo shook his head. The woman stepped forward, hands reaching. “Please,
amigo
.” Hondo leveled the shotgun at her face.

“Ain’t your
pinche amigo
, girl.”

“Don’t,” the girl in the shades called. She sounded tired. Both she and the corn rowed boy raised their rifles.

Everything froze like that. The woman reaching. The mouth of Hondo’s shotgun parked the width of a bead of sweat from her nose. Pollo, emergent, staring at Brood.

A gust of wind peppered them with needles of sand. Brood rubbed his eyes. Reached once more inside the footlocker. Produced a jar of pickled radishes. He tossed it to the woman, who caught it tightly in both arms.

“We ain’t going with you.”

“Please.”

Brood cranked the throttle. Hondo staggered as the wagon lurched forward. The woman said something else, but her words evaporated beneath the motor’s whine. Brood pulled hard on the tiller, steering the wagon in a wide u-turn and away.

“Please!”

They kept rolling. After a moment came the mosquito buzz of a bullet winging past, followed by a single rifle report. Brood looked back. The woman sat on her knees, the jar cradled close to her chest. Beside her stood the girl in aviator shades, now slowly lowering the rifle from her shoulder. Brood raised his arm, extended his middle finger.

“Ain’t floating,” Pollo mumbled, his eyes vacant again. He wrapped his arms around himself, bringing the snake close, and began rocking back and forth.

….

The air turned cold that afternoon. White clouds built over the mountains. Brood tasted metal in the wind, then the snow came.

They holed up at the leaning remnants of a gas station. Brood gathered dry-rotted juniper and built a fire in the corner of what had been two walls. He passed around a jar of eggplant, which canned had the consistency of axle grease. They scooped out black globs with their fingers and sucked them. Pollo tried to feed some to his snake, which coiled and rattled.

“You keep that thing away from me,
manito
,” Brood told him.

“
Esta bien
, Carlos. He’s
friendly
.” Pollo held the snake up as though to show Brood its true, benevolent nature. It rattled and struck. Brood flinched and Pollo laughed, eyes bright and fixed on the cracked concrete wall behind Brood’s head.

“Ain’t kidding,” Brood said. “I ever see that thing out of your hands I’m gonna stomp it and eat it raw.
Entiendes
?”

Pollo’s face darkened. “No, you ain’t. You
good
, homie.”

“
Claro
.” Brood looked to Hondo. The old man still wore his flak jacket. He hadn’t spoken since they’d put the beleaguered caravan behind them. He sat staring into the fire, the Mossberg cradled upright in his lap, his cheek pressed to its barrel in way that made Brood feel lonely.

“
Por qué tan pensativo
,
viejo
rata
?” he inquired. Hondo kept his eyes on the oscillating firelight.

“Sometimes I pray.” He aimed the words at the flames, as though he’d rather they burned up than touch the world. The confession hung in the air. “Those poor motherfuckers,” he said after a moment. “Desert going to take them. They going to watch each other die, and ain’t nothing none of them can do about it.” He spread his hands open on his lap and stared down at the tough leather of his palms. “Didn’t used to be like that.”

“I pray,” Pollo sang. Maybe the boy meant it, maybe he was simply parroting. He’d settled by the fire and now stirred charcoal with spit in his clamshell. As Brood watched, he began etching something with his needle along a bare hipbone. His snake lay coiled in his lap, soaking up heat.

“Momma prayed,” Brood said. She’d prayed incessantly at the end. Staring up at the empty white sky, watching day turn into night and back again. Fever had burned through her, beading her skin with sweat and turning it yellow as the Oklahoma hardpan on which she’d lain. Her mouth had been stretched open when Brood had awakened that final morning. Her face wrapped her skull like leather, as though her last breath had pulled taut a thread, drawing her flesh tight as it escaped. She’d bloated in the heat. Her eyes had milked over and flies had covered them. Brood gazed flatly at Hondo in the oscillating firelight. “Can’t say as I do, though.”

“That shit today,” Hondo said. “I’m sick of it.” Brood tossed a piece of juniper on the fire and settled in beneath his blanket, using his flak jacket as a pillow. The snow had quit and stars shone through the clouds.

“Ojo Caliente,” he said quietly.

“Ojo Caliente,” Hondo agreed. Brood closed his eyes, tried to conjure Rosa Lee’s face. Instead he recalled the fear in the
gringa
’
s
eyes as they’d rolled away from her. Bitterness gripped him.

“Who the fuck got a
dog
?”

….

The weather had cleared by morning. The air felt clean. The sun warmed Brood’s face as they ascended further into bone-picked foothills. Pollo held the snake in his cupped hands and clucked at it happily while Hondo quietly sang old
corridos
at the wagon’s bow. If the road held, they’d make Ojo sometime the next morning.

It was afternoon when they smelled the cook fire. The road cut low through a swath of dead juniper between two long, low ridges. They rounded a bend and found two boys sitting beside a fire pit they’d built in the road’s center.

They wore red sashes tied over their heads, red splashes on their FEMAs. Hondo swore, made chopping motion with one hand.

“
Alto
!”

Brood killed the throttle, but it was too late. The
Chupes
rose to their feet, faced the wagon. One of them put fingers to his mouth and whistled. The sound pierced the dead forest like a stiletto.

They swarmed over both ridge tops. Thirty-odd
Chupes
, brandishing machetes, iron rock bars, clubs and five or six AK-90s, banana clips curling obscenely forth. They yelled and whooped, red sashes flying. Pollo rose to his feet and moaned. AKs barked, spitting up droughted clay all around the wagon. In seconds,
La Chupes
had surrounded them.

“Kill that fucking motor,” one of them ordered. A spindly girl with strings of teardrops tattooed down her cheeks. She eyed Brood down the smoking barrel of an AK. Brood switched off the motor.

Hondo’d stood, but hadn’t bothered to grab the Mossberg. He wheezed quiet laughter.

“Fuck you laughing, old man?” Brood asked. Hondo shook his dreads and held up empty hands, black gums gleaming.

“Ojo Caliente,” he said, the punch line to a sad joke.

Brood put a hand on Pollo’s shoulder. The boy trembled, moaned.

“He hit?” the
Chupe
girl demanded. “Goddamnit, we’re supposed to shoot
near
them, not
at
them. Who fucking did that?”

“He ain’t hit,
chica
,” Brood said. “He just like that.” The girl squinted up at Pollo, then at Brood. She pointed at the ground near her feet.

“Come down off there.”

Brood looked around at the glowering faces, the eagerly brandished weapons. So many of them.

“How I know you all don’t tear us up, we come down there?”

“Don’t matter.” The girl brought the AK up. “If you don’t I’ll just shoot your ass. Your choice.”

“You ain’t supposed to shoot us. You just said.”

An AK fired close by, three sharp rounds that sounded like a hammer hitting bone. Everyone jumped. In the stunned silence Brood looked down at himself, to Pollo, to Hondo. Saw no blood.

“Sorry!” called a young boy, maybe eight years old, sunburned and freckled. The AK in his arms made him look tiny. He stared wide-eyed at a furrow the bullets had just plowed into the dirt inches from his feet.

“
Bunny
!” A larger boy stood beside him, clearly his brother. He snatched the AK, thumbed the safety, shoved it back into the smaller boy’s chest. “Knew you was too young for a rifle.” Bunny seemed about to respond, but fell quiet as a deep voice spoke from behind the
Chupes
crowding the wagon.

“Get off the fucking wagon.” A big
Chupe
moved forward through the other gang members pressing around the wagon. He stepped gingerly, wincing each time his sandals touched the dirt. A makeshift rope sling bound his left arm close to his left side, where on his bare chest a spot of blood stained a fresh white bandage.

Brood recognized high Indian cheekbones, burn-mottled lips. Fear twisted in his guts.

“
Hola
, Richard,” he said. A name he’d last spoken when the
Chupe
had lain trembling on the warehouse floor in Amarillo, Brood’s aluminum arrow protruding from his chest. Brood figured first names were no longer appropriate, since the boy was no longer about to die. “
Hijo de puta
,” he amended.

Richard’s head bowed in greeting. “Bitches.”

“Fuck’d you find us?”

Richard’s eyes narrowed. A shrewd smile curled misshapen lips.

“You told me. Got some Tewa friends up north.”

Brood digested this for a second, then clenched his teeth and let out a long hiss. Richard’s smile broadened.

“No worries,
homito
,” Hondo said.

Brood shook his head. “Never seen anybody live through something like that.” Richard’s smile faded. His jaw tightened.

“Wasn’t what I’d call easy. Or pleasant.” He beckoned with his good arm. “Get down off that fucking truck, or I let these boys climb up there and chop you all to pieces.”

“It’s a wagon,” Pollo corrected, then began once more to moan, an empty sound that reminded Brood of a dead Ham station. Disconnected.

“Do it,” Hondo said. He hopped off the wagon, and stood before Richard, looking up into the big boy’s face. Brood cursed, and climbed down. Pollo followed. Richard leaned forward, put his face close to Hondo’s.

“I got one question for you, old man. I think you know what it is.”

Hondo didn’t hesitate. “Water tank.” Richard’s eyes moved languidly to the tank, then to the small freckled boy with the AK.

“Bunny, you ever want to touch that rifle again, you get your ass up there and see if my seed’s in that tank.” Richard moved close to Brood. Slipped his good arm around the small of Brood’s back, found the bone hilt of the hooked blade. Pulled it free and held it up, smiling as he inspected it. “Looks familiar.”

Bunny slung the AK over his back and climbed nimbly atop the wagon. He unscrewed the tank’s lid and stood on tiptoe to peer inside. His eyes widened; his mouth formed a black circle.

“Goddamn!”

“Watch your mouth, Bunny,” his brother scowled.

“That mean it’s there, Bunny?” Richard inquired mildly.

“Fucking hell,” Bunny affirmed.

“
Bunny
!” his brother growled.

“Good.” Richard stared down into Brood’s face. “Take off your sandals.” He waved Brood’s blade at Hondo’s feet, then Pollo’s. “You two. Sandals.”

Brood felt suddenly cold. He squinted in the sun, glanced around at the dead junipers, felt their silence. Knew his body would rot slowly here, uselessly, because there were no scavengers to feed on him. It made him strangely sad. He kicked off his sandals.