Seed (22 page)

“
Vamonos
!” he yelled. He ran, slipping across greasy clay, a heavy wrench in one hand. The others ran beside him, all holding old rifles or pistols.

“Oh shit,” Raimi exhaled when they reached the camp. One wagon had been obliterated—nothing where it’d sat but a deep cavity in the broken asphalt, already collecting water. The other two wagons lay on their sides. Anna drew to a halt and stood surveying the obliterated camp.

“Don’t think we’ll have to shoot anybody,” she concluded. She lowered the hunting rifle she carried, slung it over a shoulder and stepped over a body that had been pounded into the earth, as though it had fallen from very high up. Other bodies lay about, some of them in pieces, mixed in with crumpled chassis parts.

Billy wheeled his rifle around one-handed. He gestured at the crater.

“Shit, I hope their food wasn’t on that wagon.”

Brood saw movement. A woman sat near one upended wagon, her arms wrapped around a toddler. Their eyes shone white through a plaster of blasted mud. Both watched Brood blankly as he approached, as though they’d been frozen in time the moment before the blasts.

“Here it is,” Jorgen called from the other wagon. “Seed, too.”

Anna stepped up beside Brood. Looked from him to woman and her child, then around at the destruction. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

“A good plan. None of us got hurt.”

Brood watched the woman and her toddler. They gazed back, silent, empty. Ghosts staring into the stunned predawn. Brood figured it was something like what Hondo had seen, those years before when he’d found Brood and Pollo. Two starved boys withering in the Oklahoma sun, broken by the refugee road. Something churned in Brood’s gut, like hunger but worse. A terror he couldn’t quite fathom. A darkness at the center of things, a shifting of the scales. Hondo had left them water.

“You don’t need their seed,” Brood told Anna. “Leave it.”

Anna’s gaze lingered on the woman and child. She seemed to make a hard calculation of her own, then nodded.

“Half the food, too,” Brood said.

“Jorgen,” Anna called.

“Yo.”

“Leave the seed.” She hesitated.

“Fuck that.” Billy stalked up beside them. Propped his rifle on his hip as he regarded the muddy tableau. “Fuck them,” he decided after a moment. Anna ignored him. She turned to Jorgen, who moved to her side. He slid an arm over her shoulder, quietly took in the catatonic woman and child.

“Bad luck,” he said, and shrugged like that was all it was. Behind him, Raimi and Viv had laid out a heavy tarp and begun filling its center with jars of canned Satori vegetables.

“How much food we got?” Anna asked. Jorgen let out a breath between tight lips as his face pinched with mentation.

“Four days,” he guessed. “A week if we stretch it real hard.”

“Alright.” Anna looked at the two survivors. “Leave a little for them.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“Alright. You’re the boss.” Jorgen leaned in close. They kissed, briefly but deeply. Then he turned and joined Raimi and Viv. Anna turned to Brood, eyed him like a tool she’d just figured out how to use.

“The Mother was right about you.” Smiling as she said it.

“Give me your rifle,” Brood told her. Anna’s eyes narrowed. “Give it,” he insisted, and held out his hand. “They can maybe hunt.” Anna hesitated, face pinched with calculation, then slowly unslung the rifle. She laid it reluctantly into Brood’s upturned palm. Brood knelt.

“
Lo siento
,” he said, and placed the rifle gently before the woman and her child. They seemed to neither hear nor see him, just stared into the night.

….

He sat huddled in the rear wheel well of Anna’s truck, a seized-up CV joint pieced out on a tarp before him. There was nothing in the world except heat and wind and dust. Topsoil turned the day a perpetual brown dusk, as though all of Oklahoma had risen in a wave and folded over on itself. Grit caked the insides of Brood’s lips beneath the rag through which he breathed. His lungs felt like two muddy turds in his chest.

He dipped his fingers into a jar of yellow corn oil, spread it on a rag and wiped it into the worn grooves of a small differential. The metal glistened for an instant, then went dull again, caked with dust.

It had been a week since the raid. Anna had spent the bulk of that time in the cab of her truck, monitoring the Ham. Now the stolen vegetables were mostly gone, and the little caravan hadn’t yet left Oklahoma. Brood pulled the rag from over his mouth and spit.

Dust to dust. His mother had whispered it near the end, over and over.
Polvo eres y en polvo te convertirás
. He considered the phrase, felt the truth of it as he began piecing the joint back together. The dust would take them.

A hand touched his shoulder. He turned, found Viv’s goggled face peering down at him. She said something, but the wind stole her words. Brood gazed mutely at her. He tried to speak, but his mouth remained inert.

It had been like this since the raid. Like the silent weeks after his mother’s death, riding Hondo’s wagon. Words formed in his mind, but he couldn’t voice them. Viv leaned close.

“Ceremony,” she yelled. She started to walk away, then turned and beckoned. Brood rose and followed. He saw the stiffness in her shoulders now that he knew to look for it, the awkward reluctance of her knees to bend as she walked.

They’d already gathered in the truck’s lee, every member of Anna’s little tribe. They sat in a tight circle, wrapped in their blankets and tarps against the dust. The dog wiggled among them, moving from one to the next, receiving love. A fire—hunks of rubber tire and bits of laminate siding—burned at the circle’s center, belching black smoke.

Anna sat beside it, a ragged blue scarf tied around her face. She’d spread a blanket before her. On it sat an ancient bullhorn hooked to a frothing old twelve-volt battery. A gallon water jug. A dented steel pot. As Brood watched, she reached into the pot and withdrew a leather pouch. She held it up for everyone to see, poked fingertips inside withdrew what looked like a piece of shriveled tree bark. This she placed in the pot. Viv leaned close to Brood.

“They’re from down south,” she hollered in his ear. “The Mother doesn’t make them anymore. They’re extinct.” Brood poked her shoulder, raised shoulders and hands, miming confusion. “For talking to the Mother,” Viv said.

Anna rose to her feet and shed her denim vest. She unzipped her FEMAs, let them fall to her ankles. Stood there naked, a shocking white apparition in the blasting dust. She spread her arms. Her people beheld her. After several beats, she squatted over the pot and pissed. When she’d finished, she dressed, poured water from the jug into the pot and placed the pot against the fire. Occasionally she shook it, mixing its contents. The little tribe waited. When the fire’d burned low, she scooped out a handful of ash and moved around the circle. She knelt before each person. Pressed her index finger to the ash in her palm, then marked a dark comma on each waiting brow.

“Mother guide us,” intoned each person in turn.

Anna knelt before Brood. Ain’t much for praying, he tried to tell her, but nothing came out. He regarded her silently. She smiled.

“The Mother brought you to us. You brought us food. You brought us time.” She pressed her finger between his eyes. “Today we welcome you to the family.”

When she’d marked them all, she returned to the fire. She raised the pot, held it aloft like a religious artifact, letting her tribe bear witness.

She drank. Her face twisted, like the stuff burned. When it passed, she carried the pot to the small girl who sat on the opposite side of the fire from Brood. The girl’s face turned sour as she brought the pot to her lips, then she passed it to her mother, who sat beside her. Next came Jorgen. He drank, passed the pot on. Soon it came to Brood. He peered down into the steaming brew. It stank like diesel fumes.

“Drink,” Viv insisted. Brood looked around at the covered faces of the migrants around the circle. Felt their eyes on him, felt desperation, thick as the wind. Figured it didn’t matter one way or the other what he did. They were out of time, a family bound by dust. He silently intoned his own prayer,
Que se chinque
Oklahoma, and drank.

It tasted dark, like something fetid from out of a swamp. Bile rose, but he suppressed it.

“Welcome to the family, Brood,” Raimi called from down the line.

“Welcome to the family,” Viv told him. Brood passed her the pot.

Anna brought the bullhorn to her lips. A squeal of feedback cut through the wind, and then she spoke.

“Tonight we ask for guidance to our destination. Let us move to the light.” She paused and for a second the wind swallowed them all. “Let the dead be dead.”

“Let the dead be dead,” the small clan echoed as one. Ann began to sing, a lilting, wordless tune, crunchy with the bullhorn’s static. Other migrants picked it up and after a time Brood realized he, too, had begun humming the tune, but silently. The song turned sad. It pulled his mind like a long thread out of his skull—suspended it before his eyes. It looked like stained glass. As he watched, it shattered in a shriek of feedback.

He saw a snake, long as all the roads he’d travelled. It hissed, a sound like heavy rain on hardpan. He fell down its spiraling coils, down the hole out of which it rose. A hole straight to the world’s core.

Pollo came to him there, a skinny boy standing in a scorched forest. Ash fell like snow around him. Little stick figure animals danced across his skin, a parade of the dead. His empty eyes, old as the world, watched Brood. They were the snake’s eyes, Brood realized, and for some reason this broke him. He wept.

He saw Hondo Loco in the forest, too. He saw his mother.

Time passed, but strangely. He found himself dancing, a rattlesnake held tenderly in each hand. They coiled around his wrists. Their diamond eyes stared into his. He’d mesmerized them, or they him.

“These snakes in my hand,
Madre
,” he said to his mother’s bloated face. “
Son mi amor para usted
.”

“Let the dead be dead,” someone said, and his mother’s face turned to ash.

“Let the dead be dead.” Hondo Loco’s face turned to ash.

“Let the dead be dead.” Pollo’s face turned to ash.

They all blew away in the wind.

“Fucking
Cholo
,” he heard cornrowed Billy say. “Don’t know drug real from real.” From somewhere out on the prairie came the rattling tin sound of Viv’s laughter.

“Let the dead be dead.” Brood had never felt so alone.

….

He woke, walking. The rhythmic crunch of his sandals along worn asphalt, muffled by the occasional drift of powdery dirt, wore a groove into his mind.

The quiet struck him. The wind had ceased. The dust had dropped from the sky as though it had never existed, leaving the world so clear it seemed fragile—which was how Brood felt inside, empty as a shard of polished glass. And that was alright, he decided.

“Where the fuck are we?” he asked the person walking beside him. The sound of his own voice startled him. They were the first words he’d spoken since the raid.

Billy happened to be the person walking beside him. Dust wafted from him with every step as he walked hunched beneath the rifle slung over his shoulder. He leered at Brood. A strip of dirt caked the area around his eyes that hadn’t been covered during the wind, except for clean white crow’s-feet that made him look surprised.

“You just get back?” he asked. Brood blinked. Billy nodded. “First time’s like that for some people. Lose yourself, you know? My first time, I couldn’t remember my own name for a week.” His laughter felt like a washboard against Brood’s brain.

Anna’s rusted trucks lumbered a hundred paces ahead along the worn track. Behind them the road stretched, a grey thread across table-flat topsoil all the way to blue, blue sky. He saw Anna and Jorgen back there, marching hand in hand. They wore soft expressions. Viv and Raimi, the mother who spoke the strange foreign tongue and her daughter, they all walked easy, free of worry.

“Where are we?” Brood asked again. Billy angled his head up the road towards whatever destination awaited.

“Half a day out.” He eyed Brood. “You see the snake?” Brood thought about it.

“
Sí
, homes. I saw the snake. Saw the whole fucking world die.” He gave Billy a pinched look. “Half a day out from where?”

“The Corn Mother’s place. Friend of Anna’s is already there. Uncle Jessup. Anna got him on the Ham last night during the ceremony. Got directions.”

“So we…”

“Home,” Billy grinned. Brood struggled to comprehend this, and failed. He marveled at his own marching feet.

“Shit,” he managed. Billy laughed.

“Talk to the Mother, brother, and shit happens.” He watched Brood as they walked. A metal bead at the end of one cornrow glinted in the sun. Brood saw honesty in his face. “Welcome to the family, bro,” he said, and placed a hand on Brood’s shoulder.

CHAPTER 14

body fell. Twelve stories of silence, then a heavy clap as organs imploded and bones shattered.

“Love that sound,” Snake laughed. “Sound of work getting done.”