Seed (17 page)

“Told you,
homito
. Happy pack you full of buckshot as have you anywhere near me.” He thumbed off the safety, a bone-snap sound in the dry night air.

Brood stopped, set the empty water jug down and pointed at the Mickey Mouse shirt. Laughter croaked from the man’s throat.

“
Cojones
for brains, little
ese
.” He lowered the shotgun, stood and offered his hand. Brood reached to take it. The man cuffed him hard on the temple. Brood fell and the man kicked him in the stomach. “
Cállate
!”

Brood cried out and Pollo moaned loudly. Brood felt his brother’s tiny hand gripping his wrist, pulling him. They fled together into the darkness.

They snuck back shortly after dawn. The man lay asleep beneath the wagon, shotgun beside him, Mickey Mouse logo still tight against his torso. Brood silently helped Pollo up onto the wagon, then climbed up behind him.

Immediately Brood gravitated to the assortment of batteries, some lithium, some deep cycle. He knew electrics. His mother had taught him. He traced his hands along fat rubber wires running from bats to electric motors, to a converter connected to thick photovoltaic paint slopped atop the water tank at the wagon’s center. A portable charge detector hung on a leather thong from the tiller. Brood took it and began testing circuits.

An hour or so later the man rose with a start beside the wagon. Dust flew from his dreads as he gazed wildly around. Brood and Pollo sat against the water tank. They’d filled the water jug once more and Pollo cradled it tightly in his arms. He hummed a strange and directionless tune as the man stared. Brood stared back, chewing a dried apricot he’d found in a footlocker near the tiller.

“Thought you was a goddamn shark walking around on my boat.” The man pressed a hand to his head as though to squeeze out the dreams. “Fuck you want, little cuz?”

Brood pointed at the Mickey Mouse shirt. He tried to explain that his mother had given it to him, but his mouth refused to form words.

“
Madre
,” Pollo said. He rubbed his cheek along the jug’s textured plastic. “She give Carlos that shirt.” The man gave them a dark look.

“
Tu madre
,” he said.

“Lupia Maria Escadero,” Pollo intoned, and this seemed an answer in the affirmative.

The man lowered his head. Dreads hid his eyes. He rested hands on jutting hips and for a few seconds seemed to do some hard mental lifting, then his mouth turned bitter and he shook his head.

“Can’t take you on, young homies.”

Brood didn’t move. He kept his gaze level, implacable. The man shook his head. In one quick motion he stripped off the t-shirt, revealing sun-leathered ribs. He tossed the shirt into Brood’s lap. “There. Even up.” He waved a hand. “Now get the fuck off my wagon.”

Brood pointed silently at the rewired batteries. The man’s withered face narrowed. He clambered up onto the wagon and crawled about on all fours, face close to the wires. Finally he looked at the boys.

“You do this?” he asked. Brood nodded. The man eyed them sidelong. “
Cuántos años
?”

“
Cinco años
,” Pollo sang, and then, staring into the sky above the man’s head, began chanting the words over and over. “
Cinco anos
.
Cinco años
…” Brood held up eight fingers.

“
Me llamo
Hondo. Hondo Loco.” The skin around his eyes crinkled. He seemed relieved.

“
Me llamo
Bacilio,” Pollo said. “
Mucho gusto
,
rata
.”

Brood tried to speak, failed, shook his head.

They rolled north that morning through churning dust devils and past the bodies on the roadside. Hondo stood at the tiller, singing songs to himself in a way that reminded Brood strangely of Pollo. Brood and Pollo sat at the bow, knees curled up under their chins. Every so often Pollo quietly sang:
Mama Lupia
. Tears traced clean tracks through the dirt on his cheeks.

“
Dónde
Vamos
nosotros
,
Carlos
?” he asked the air near Brood. Brood stared at the prairie stretching hot and empty before them, and shrugged.

“You pensive, homes,” Hondo called from the tiller. “Brooding and shit. You let me know when you think up something useful.” Without turning around, Brood raised his hand and gave Hondo Loco a thumbs up.

….

Fever gripped Brood the first night. His body burned while the desert around him froze in the dark. He woke screaming every few minutes. Each time the silence of the dead forest made him moan with terror. He closed his eyes against it, sank back into sleep.

Dreams shattered him. Hondo rose and peered down at him, dead eyes blackened with hemorrhage, face broken, dreads matted with blood. Pollo, up to his neck in an enormous pile of golden seed. Swimming his arms, trying vainly to stay afloat, drowning. The echo of his long moan hung in the air. Brood’s mother lay on her back beside him, stiff. Her death grin gleamed in the cold starlight. Her teeth parted and she tried to sing lullabies—emitted only the sound of empty wind bending itself over long Oklahoma hardpan.

Thirst forced him finally, completely, awake. Grey dawn light made the forest seem insubstantial, a memory he couldn’t quite grip.

He sat up. Pain made him vomit. He checked his wound. A poultice of pressed clay, which he barely remembered applying, had staunched the bleeding from two holes above his hip bone. A through and through, around which spread a deep flush. What was bruising and what was infection Brood couldn’t tell, and he figured it didn’t matter. It would all be infection soon enough. He crumbled more clay in his palm and pressed it home, shivering under a wave of pain and fever.

Hondo lay nearby. A dry black stain haloed the parched clay around the old man’s dreads.

The body’s stillness terrified Brood. He crawled over to it, reached out to touch it as though he might somehow bring comfort. His fingers drew up short, hovering a few inches from one leathery shoulder.

“
Chale
!” He spoke this at the corpse, astonished at the utterly totality of its death. “Fuck, Hondo.”

Pollo’s snake lay curled nearby, crushed and discarded by the
Chupes
, its white belly exposed to the sky. Brood gathered it in his hands. Leaned back on his knees and, with no one around in the crushing vastness to see him, wept.

“
Sale vale
.
Sale vale
.
Sale vale
.”

After a time his eyes cleared. The sun rose above the trees, baking him. He realized he’d pissed himself. Unthinking, he pushed a foot forward, braced himself against the pain, stood.

He collected pieces of roadside junk. A blue vinyl tarp, strips of which he tore up and tied around his feet. A ten-foot strand of barbed wire. A tin can. A broken jar. A piece of some ancient car’s rearview mirror. Pollo’s snake hung limp from his fingers.

The roar of a snowmelt wash roiling out of the Sangre de Cristos drew him. He knelt in the mud beside it and sank his head into water cold as an electric shock, but did not drink. Instead he piled up a small mound of dry crabgrass. He fiddled with the convex jar bottom and the mirror until a tiny white spot of sunlight smoked and the crabgrass caught with near-invisible flames. Then he added dry juniper branches until a steady fire crackled, and set water to boil in the tin can. He used the jar’s sharp edge to gut the snake, which he set to cook on a flat rock beside the fire.

When the water had boiled, he splashed his wound gingerly. Crumbled more clay in his palms, pressed it home. Pain had become as much a part of his body as breath. As such, Brood ignored it. He drank the rest of the water. Refilled the can and put it back on the fire. He ate half the snake, even though the fever had stolen his appetite. The water boiled and he drank again.

His mind fell adrift in fever. Regular waves of heat and chill rolled up his back. When he returned to himself, the fear had left him. He figured he may as well die walking.

The sun hammered him. He tried not to think of the dark adobe rooms of Ojo Caliente, of Rosa Lee wrapped naked around him in the cold waters of a stream’s deep eddy. The Tewa would run him off or shoot him if he arrived a beggar. So he turned east, away from Ojo. Towards the desert, burning white as a muzzle flash far below, and the caravan track of the old freeway.

His feet moved him through the day. Then it was night. Visions came to him in the dark. Snakes under foot. A giant black spider skittering beside him down the rocky slope. A raven perched on his shoulder.

“I pray,” it whispered with Hondo’s voice.

“Then you pray for me,
Chimuelo
,” Brood replied.

Pale light filled his head. He thought he’d died, entered the realm of
espiritu enojados
, become one of them, a hungry ghost, no longer even a mouth to feed. Then the sun rose. He found himself standing amid dead sagebrush on the broken remains of an asphalt lot, staring at the sun-faded logo of a cartoon coyote. It adorned the rim of an old truck stop portico that had collapsed over the rusted shells of a dozen gas pumps.

“Freeway,” he told the raven, but the bird had disappeared with the night. Behind him, a raised track stretched across the desert. “
Sale vale
,” he said to the coyote, and crawled into the portico’s shade.

He lay on his back, trembling with fever. His wound stank and oozed puss. Red tendrils of infection had spread across his belly and chest. Thirst wracked him. He considered looking for water, but knew he could no longer move. Better, he decided, simply to close his eyes.

He woke to something wet pressing his cheek—over and over. It made a smacking sound. A dog whined.

“One of those fucking
Cholo
s
from the wagon,” someone said. A girl’s voice. Brood opened his eyes. Found the dog’s wet snout wiggling eagerly, inches from his nose. Someone stood over him. Brood squinted, discerned the tiny twin mirrors of aviator shades.

CHAPTER 11

he forearm lay, pale and stiff, atop the undulating surface of the bone-and-muscle worktable. Three ear-sized hooks lay beside it.

Sumedha watched as Minerva eyed the arm uncertainly. She’d grown three full inches since he’d given her the splice.

“How do you feel?” he asked her.

“Cold.” Taut muscle rolled under downy skin as she ran a tentative finger along one of the hooks. She crossed her arms over her breasts.

Sumedha turned to where Kassapa and Paduma stood, watching from the hallway outside through a transparent film of skin.

“Note the increased musculature.” He pointed to the girl’s arm, then at her hip. “Also increased height. Both indicate increased growth hormone. I have periodically changed the temperature of her pod over the last ten days, ranging from thirty-three degrees to one hundred and fifteen. Her body fat, hair growth and vascular efficiency have all fluctuated accordingly.” He turned back to the girl. “Satori. Operating table please.”

A second table articulated from the floor with the machine gun pop of shifting bone, cartilage, sinew.

“I don’t want it to hurt,” Minerva said. “It always hurts.”

“Lay down,” Sumedha ordered. Minerva hesitated. “Do not worry. I will make it painless,” he promised. Minerva nodded and lay on the table. “Satori, restraints please.” Fat digits extended from the table and gripped her.

“You told me—”

“I told you it would not hurt. It will not. Satori, general anesthesia.” A bone needle extended from the tip of one of the restraining digits and jabbed the girl’s neck. She cried out once, then went still as the injection took hold. “Satori. Amputation. Left arm, two inches below the elbow.” A skein of wet viscera unraveled from the ceiling. Coalesced into a single boneless cord that coiled and shifted as though it could barely contain the force of its own life. A flat head, all muscle and teeth, opened at its end, wide as Sumedha’s spread hand. The cord, an attentive snake, followed Sumedha as he moved to Minerva’s side. He took hold of it. It felt alive in his hand as he steered it towards the girl’s forearm.

“Cut…
here
.” Muscles flexed, teeth clamped down. Blood spurted, stark in the room’s pearl glow. Bone snapped. The arm broke off, easy as an aloe stem. The snake’s mouth held the arm for a moment, suctioning blood. Sumedha smiled.

“Satori. Epoxy please.” Another skein unfurled, this time forming a tube with a hollow end. Sumedha took the forearm from the worktable and held it up before the window for his two designer siblings to see. “This is the forearm of one of our workers born outside Satori. Wildborn. I harvested it this morning. It belonged to a male.”

Sumedha placed the dead arm to Minerva’s, stump to stump. Took one of the hooks from the worktable and deftly speared it through the flesh of each arm, joining them. Squeezed the hook closed, a metal link. He did the same with the two remaining hooks, then pulled the dangling tube over the arm’s length. The tube pulsed wetly, oozing amber sap, which soon encased the girl’s arm from shoulder to fingertip.

“Assistant.” The door flexed open and a thick, female landrace lumbered inside. Sumedha motioned at the severed arm. “Take that. Feed it to Satori.” The landrace chuffed, nodded. Picked up the arm and left with it cradled to her breasts as though it were her own child.