Seed (12 page)

“I had a son,” Hondo said.

Brood blinked. “You never said nothing.”

“Nothing to say.” Hondo eloquently lifted one shoulder. “Didn’t like him much. He was lazy. Real stupid, too. Made me sad.
Me daba verguenza
, like I couldn’t believe he came from me, you know? I was real mean to him.”

“Sandals,” Richard repeated. Hondo kept his eyes on Brood.

“Wish he’d been like you,
mijo
.”

“That’s real nice.” Richard smiled and nodded like everything was good. Like he had patience to the moon. He pointed the blade at Hondo’s nose and spoke slowly. “Take off your goddamn sandals, old man.”

Hondo glanced down at his feet, pursed his lips as though considering. Then squared shoulders, pushed dreads back with a palm and looked calmly at Richard.

“No, young
puto
, you ain’t getting my sandals.”

Richard glanced around at his
Chupes
, then tilted his head to the side and gave Hondo a beseeching look. Hondo stared back, intractable.

“Alright,” Richard said. He stepped back, slid Brood’s blade into the waist of his torn denim pants. Then snapped fingers and pointed at Hondo.

Hondo’s head whipped to one side like he’d been slapped. It spit red mist. He dropped like a sodden rag. Blood pooled instantly on hard clay around limp dreads. Brood saw something white, thought it was skin, then realized it was
inside
Hondo’s skull. Bunny’s older brother peered over his AK’s sights, smirking as he admired his work, the crack of his AK still reverberating in the inert desert air. Bunny cussed appreciatively.

Pollo went quiet. A spatter of blood the shape of a bird covered his cheek. Brood watched his own hand slowly rise, watched his thumb wipe the blood from his brother’s face.

“Bacilio,” he whispered

“Get his fucking sandals,” Richard ordered. Hondo’s body jerked as the
Chupe
girl with the teardrop tats knelt and yanked his sandals free. Richard took a step towards Pollo, who had wrapped tattooed arms around himself and now trembled. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Please,” Brood whispered.

“He got Tet.” Richard withdrew the blade once more, placed it gently under Pollo’s chin and lifted the boy’s face.

“No,” Brood pleaded. His hands shook at his sides. He noted with strange detachment that he couldn’t feel his own skin. “Told you back in Amarillo, homie. He just like that.” Richard squinted at Pollo down the length of his arm. His face went sour with distaste.

“Nah, he got Tet. We’re taking him.” He motioned to the teardrop girl, from whose hand Hondo’s sandals now dangled. “Tie him up. Get him on the wagon.”

Brood lunged.

His fist found the wound on Richard’s chest. His teeth found skin, tasted hot blood. Richard screamed and the two of them went down, Brood on top. He sat up, rained down punches. Richard’s hands pressed against his face. Brood snapped his teeth at them. Something hit his back. He snarled, bit down on a finger. Something hit his head—the world exploded,
La Chupe
red.

He found himself on his back. Richard stood over him. Pain distorted the big
Chupe
’s face. He held the hand of his bad arm to his neck, which trickled blood. In his other hand he held a small pistol. He glowered at Brood, brought the pistol up, fired.

Brood felt a thunderclap inside his body. Felt like he’d been ripped in two. Pollo cried out, an unwavering howl as though he’d just burst into flames.

“Jesus, would somebody shut him up?”

Breath refused to come. Richard turned and walked out of sight. Pollo’s squeals muted as someone covered his mouth. The wagon’s motor spooled up, whined high as some
La Chupe
cranked the throttle too hard, then faded, tires crunching over the cracked earth, back the way Brood, Hondo and Pollo had come. With it receded the pitiful sound of Pollo’s wail. Rage filled Brood for an instant. Then pain buried him, localized now to his left side. His body curled involuntarily around it.

The
Chupes
dispersed, chuckling. All except Richard, whose face reappeared overhead.

“Does it hurt?”

Brood tried to speak, couldn’t. He nodded. Richard winced, whether at Brood’s pain or his own, Brood couldn’t tell. He held something up for Brood to see: the hooked blade. It winked white in the sunlight.

“You want me to take care of it?”

Brood wondered how bad it was to die of thirst, then figured he’d bleed out long before that happened. He hesitated. Then shook his head.

“Alright then.” Richard nodded once, a score settled, then turned and disappeared. Brood listened to his footsteps fade.

A few minutes later came the hum of a quiet motor. A shadow passed briefly overhead. A small zep, its side marked by smeared red paint, the letters LC. Then it, too, disappeared, and Brood knew only pain, the sound of his own labored breathing, the infinite blue of New Mexico sky.

CHAPTER 8

umedha watched the tattoo—a black cobra winding up Snake’s sternum between etched ribs—and wondered why a boy who had never seen a cobra would adopt it as his personal totem. Why, indeed, did people adopt totems at all?

“
La Chupes
bringing in tons of Tet bitches.” Snake waved his arms effusively when he spoke, in a way that seemed to have nothing to do with the rhythms of his speech. Sumedha kept a step between them as they walked the mud path between rows of newly constructed chain link pens.

The stench of dysentery and rotting meat assailed him. He stepped gingerly on bare feet, holding aloft the hem of his white shift, lest muck and filth stain it—the crude stuff of the world outside Satori’s clean, smooth flesh.

“More’n Snake can house,” Snake informed him, his voice high, not yet pubescent. He flicked a manic hand at the bodies. They packed the pens, some stiff with the Tet, others stiff with rigor mortis. Some, those yet to fully succumb to the Tet’s grip, leaned against the chain link and watched with despondent eyes as Sumedha and Snake passed, trailed by the Designer’s entourage:
six muscled Satori landraces, plus six riot-clad security, wild-born humans with military resumes.

Snake shielded his eyes from the late winter sun and motioned at a long row of collapsing steel-and-brick buildings a few hundred meters beyond what had once been a park—a park now covered by mud huts, corrugated tin shanties, a few tiny vegetable gardens, trucks sprouting solar panels and wind turbines at strange, makeshift angles. Yellow-FEMA’d migrants filled the squat. They sat around small fires, stewed rats and dogs together with Satori vegetables. Toyed with old radios, or simply lay there, too hungry and sick to move. Every so often they cast their faces towards Satori’s dome, as though waiting for it to awaken. It loomed over them, still patchy with late-winter fur, covering the whole of old downtown Denver. Perhaps, Sumedha mused, they hoped it would excrete seed straight from its pores. Snake motioned around them at the pens.

“Haven’t been able to keep ’em all in there since three weeks ago. They bringing more in every day. Look.” A multi-axle truck, emitting a bad grind noise, had just limped around a corner of the park. “They got a bad CV joint,” Snake observed.

The truck made its way towards them, towing a long trailer built high with rough-hewn boards. A cage on wheels. Faces peered out from between wooden slats. Sumedha turned to face his entourage.

“Bring carts,” he ordered the landraces. “Sort through the pens. Take the dead inside the dome and give them to Satori.” In unison, the landraces nodded and took off at a stiff jog, heavy shoulders rolling. A seam formed in the pink skin of Satori’s outer wall as they approached. Bone framework shifting, joints articulating, popping as the seam split and spread open before them. They entered and the gate sealed shut behind them.

“Snake gotta joke for you.” The boy tapped Sumedha’s shoulder with the back of his hand and winked, making a tiny star tattoo dance beneath one eye. “You know what the worst thing about fucking a girl with the Tet is?” Sumedha stared blankly into Snake’s face.

“No.”

“She stiffer than you are. You know what the best thing is?”

“No.”

“When you done you can stick tires on her and use her as a wagon.”

Snake grinned. Sumedha stared. Someone in one of the pens coughed. Snake’s smile faded. His shoulders sagged slightly.

“Never mind,” he said. One of Sumedha’s security detail snickered behind a black riot mask.

“This is completely unacceptable,” Sumedha said. Now it was Snake who stared. Sumedha pointed at the pens. “These people need shelter.”

“Why? They got the Tet. They dying.”

“Yes. But I need them to die of the Tet. Not dysentery. Not pneumonia. Do you understand?”

“What’s the difference?” Snake spread his palms in incomprehension. “Dead be dead.”

Sumedha closed his eyes, breathed. Snake’s helix spread open to his mind. Sumedha ticked his awareness along the switches, sensing the shape of the boy’s future. It wasn’t much. A suspect heart valve. A high probability for childhood stress to express itself as lymphoma. Sumedha opened his eyes, noted for the first time the slight but unmistakable grey tint to Snake’s skin: heavy metal poisoning. Snake’s immune system would crater long before any cancer presented. Sumedha spoke slowly.

“What if one of these people survived the Tet, but died of parasites, or exposure?”

“Then they be fucking dead,” Snake insisted. He crossed arms over the reared cobra head on his chest. “My point being.”

“Yes, but then I would not
know
if someone survived the Tet.”

The truck had backed its trailer up to a pen and now four boys, tattooed, malnourished and wearing red
La Chupe
sashes stood around, eyeing Snake, Sumedha, the security detail. Snake stared sidelong at the Designer, then held up a hand, palm forward as though to stop time.

“Hold on a sec. Snake gotta deal with these boys.” He turned and stalked though the muck to the trailer. Pressed his face to the slats and squinted inside. “How many live ones you got?” he asked one
La Chupe
. The
Chupe
’s chest puffed with primate bluster, which Sumedha took to mean he was about to lie.

“All of them,” he claimed. He leaned awkwardly on his left leg, hips strangely canted. Sumedha projected himself along the
Chupe
’s helix, saw genetic cratering brought on by malnutrition—felt pity, disgust.

“Shit,” Snake said. “I ain’t blind. Half of them bloating.”

The
Chupe
glared at Snake. Snake glared back, unbending. It fascinated Sumedha. Two complicated mammals reading in one another the signals of dominance, understanding only the summation. Finally the lopsided
Chupe
deflated.

“Half then. I’m guessing ten.”

“Fine,” Snake told him. A man inside the trailer cursed and spat.

“You can’t sell me! I’m not some piece of meat, boy!”

Snake ignored him. He pulled a pencil and pad of paper from somewhere down the front of his topless FEMAs and wrote on it.

“You boys unload your live ones into that pen right there,” he said, pointing with the pencil. “Keep the corpses. They your problem.” He ripped the page from the notebook and handed it to the
Chupe
. “Take this to Juice over in front of that building you just drove past. He give you your seed.”

“Your mother’s a whore!” the man in the trailer cried. Snake smiled at him. The star tat danced as he winked.

“That she was.”

Satori’s exterior wall flexed open once more with the snapping of bone-and-cartilage framework readjusting. Sumedha’s landraces reemerged with a score of their muscled brethren, towing bone carts. They began rooting through the pens. In pairs they dragged out bodies, heaved them onto the carts while Sumedha and Snake looked on. When they’d filled the carts, they towed them back through the outer wall.

“Satori fed these people,” Sumedha mused. “Now they feed Satori.” The symmetry pleased him. Snake stared, said nothing. The
Chupes
had finished herding their stiff-legged Tet captives into Snake’s pens. A metallic whine came from their truck as its motor spooled up. It ground slowly away, then halted and quit, apparently broken down. Sumedha gestured at the pens which, occupied now by only the living, seemed spare and empty.

“These people need better shelter.”

“It was your people built these cages,” Snake protested. “You tell me where to put them, that’s where Snake’ll put them.” Sumedha spread his arms, indicating an entire edifice of brick and steel, the edge of old downtown, which Satori’s dome had not subsumed.

“You need not limit yourself to one building. You may use—”

White light coruscated through Sumedha’s mind. He sensed impact, pressure squeezing every cell in his body. Gravity disappeared. The earth itself screamed.

Satori’s dome turned upside down, a pink flesh egg resting on soft blue sky. A security guard flew past it, limbs flung wide.

A helix rose in Sumedha’s mind. His own. It hung there, separated from him, glowing, then flew apart before a wall of fire.

Everything went still. Sumedha thought perhaps he rested, nascent in an amniotic sack deep in Satori’s womb, ready to be born. Pihadassa would be there awaiting him, newborn, her skin glistening with amniotic fluid.