Seed (25 page)

CHAPTER 15

t was so much more than just the suit. Emerson was fundamentally an optimist. What some regarded as the end of times, the climate apocalypse, he saw as nothing more than a brief glitch on the implacably upward trajectory of human progress. Listening to him talk was like watching the crowd give up amens at one of the sweltering Georgia tent revivals Doss’ mother had taken her to. It made her hot.

Emerson had liked to fuck her rough. He’d pulled her hair and bit her neck. Grabbed her by the throat and fucked her hungrily, like his life depended on it, like there was nothing anybody could want more. When they were done he would lay on his side, his arm under her head, and lightly trace constellations with an index finger among the cigarette scars on her back.

And Sienna Doss would let him.

She woke sweating, wet, empty. The smell of a cook fire came to her, and the stink of home-stilled corn diesel that hung perpetually around the dead cowboys’ truck. Dry air turned her lungs to dust, made her cough, and she remembered: fucking Kansas.

She lay on a wool blanket spread in the dust beside the cowboys’ truck. They’d driven it from Wichita. Two days across the brown flats of southern Kansas, empty but for the occasional crooked postage stamp of green Satori crops rising from drought-stricken soil. The lean-to settlements of migrants adjacent to these plots had vibed like civilization, had seemed almost permanent, rooted. But Doss knew these were the ones who had run low on canned stores, who had been forced to plant too early, too far south. Come May the temperatures would hit a hundred and twenty, and even the robust Satori yield would wilt. The migrants had watched Doss and her crew roll slowly by in the cowboys’ truck. Some silently nodded. Doss had nodded back. It’d felt like an acknowledgement of what they all knew: the migrants had reached the site of their graves.

“Morning, Boss Momma.”

Doss sat up, found Jake squatting beside a small fire in the nearby crook of a concrete foundation. He wore cutoff fatigue pants, his red
La Chupe
sash tied over his head. He watched her, a skinned jackrabbit spitted on a length of rebar in one hand, a K-ration cracker in the other.

“Why aren’t you at the blind?” she asked.

“Big lieutenant got it under control.” Jake set the rabbit across the fire, popped the cracker in his mouth and chewed contentedly. “Looking for his sister.”

“El Sol say we stay with you, Boss Momma,” Casanova said. Doss saw only the top of his head as he spoke. He sat cross-legged in the dirt a few paces away, poking intently at Doss’ flexpad. He’d discovered a cache of porn on it during the drive from Wichita. The unpurged files of some cabinet staffer who’d used it before the military had co-opted it. Or perhaps it had been Rippert’s. Whatever, Doss figured it was good for morale.

“That’s right,” Jake said. “We stay with you.” He poured the saved juice from a spent K-ration bag over the rabbit. It hissed in the fire. “Breakfast be ready in ten.”

Doss rose, stretched, regarded the two young
Chupes
. Tough boys, but boys all the same. Orphans who had found a mother.

She opened the valve on the truck’s water tank and stuck her head beneath the lukewarm stream, then cupped her hands and drank. Her hair stuck to her face and she tied it wet into a tight ponytail, then fished through her blanket until her hands closed on the holstered .45 and her radio. She inserted the radio’s earpiece, throated the mic.

“Lieutenant,” she said. A pause.

“Boss,” came Fiorivani’s hushed voice.

“Report.”

“Not much. I see…” Doss imagined the big man curled fetus-like inside the camo’d womb of the small blind they’d set at the edge of the Designer’s valley. Imagined him leaning forward, fitting his face to the molded rubber end of the spotting scope. “Migrants toiling in the fields. Many weird clones. Also toiling. And…yes, there she is, that creepy fast bitch slinking around the dome.”

“The advocate,” Doss prompted. Satori’s combat design, according to her briefing files. A genetic aggregate of predators, honed to kill, stuffed inside the barest human camouflage.

“Affirmative.”

“Any sign of the primary?”

“Negative on the primary, Boss.”

“Alright. I’ll relieve you in an hour.”

“No hurry, Boss. I’m a tick in shit.”

“I think you mean pig.”

“Whatever. I know only happiness.”

“Out.” Doss turned to the
Chupes
. “Stay here.”

She wandered down a row of decayed building foundations. Slipped behind one and came to a pile of crumbled cinderblocks. Her toilet. She checked for snakes, dropped her pants and shat. Then moved to an open patch of hardpan. Jackrabbits skittered through the grass around her.

She started with yoga, then did pushups and, holding a cinderblock over her head, squats. Followed that with supersets of burpees and crunches. She worked until blackness closed around the edges of her vision, until her limbs went noodly and vomit rose, a teaspoon of white bile from her empty stomach. She retched, then stood, a warm flood of endorphins blotting out the visceral dream memory of Emerson.

The sun rose behind her. She spread her arms, watched her shadow encompass the little ruin of a town. It looked like it had been abandoned since the days of Egyptian pharaohs. Foundations protruding like tombs from a sea of grey cheat grass. The tiny town of Burdock, barely a memory. For one clear instant Doss understood it made no difference whether or not she Fucked Up. She could do everything right, could be perfect, and the world would still go whatever way it wanted.

“Gear up,” she told the boys, back at the truck. “Bring water.”

She donned desert camo Kevlar vest, tied a Kevlar scarf around her head, grabbed her M-8 and extra clips from the truck. She bent, snatched the flexpad from Casanova’s hands, folded it, stuffed it into a fatigue pocket.

“You need breakfast, Boss Momma.” Jake, grinning, handed her a hunk of scorched rabbit meat stuck to the tip of a rusty kitchen knife. “Boner appetite.”

….

Two miles of naked cheat grass prairie lay between them and the Designer’s valley. They moved fast and kept low. Still, Doss felt the crosshair tickle of bad exposure on the back of her neck. A half-hour brought them to a long low ridge, atop which sat a line of dilapidated vehicles, backlit like bison carcasses against the morning sky. The discarded trucks and wagons of migrants who had found the Designer’s valley. The smell of water hit Doss, clean and sharp.

Her flexpad beeped.

She cursed, withdrew it, unfolded it. Tsol’s face peered at her, flat and square as a totem head. He smiled.

“Camouflage becomes you, Agent. You look like a sidewinder. Or some sort of nasty desert tick.”

Doss saw plush red pillows, something that looked like peacock feathers. Heard the faint tinkling sound of a young woman’s laughter, the quiet thump of bass.

“Busy,” Doss said. She folded the flexpad and knelt to gather her bearings, scanning the ridge for the blind.

“El Sol!” Wonder hushed Casanova’s voice. “That was El Sol!” Jake shushed him. He pointed to a cottonwood stump three hundred meters off, where a deep gully cut the ridge.

“There,” he said. Doss rose and led the boys towards it.

The flexpad beeped again. Doss hissed through her teeth, folded it open.

“The prairie is so magnificent,” Tsol mused. “Don’t you think, Agent Doss? I’m in Dakota right now. I don’t know which one.”

“South,” came a girl’s voice.

“South Dakota. Not that it matters. I’m on the prairie. Like you, Agent Doss. I am where I am fated to be.”

“Two kinds of people believe in fate,” Doss told him. She reached the gully’s lip, sank to her rump and slid down. “The arrogant and the weak. I have no patience for either.”

Tsol’s laughter crushed the flexpad’s feeble speakers, emerged as an abrupt hiss of static weirdly out of sync with his bobbing Adams apple. He showed both rows of teeth, distorted and gigantic on the flexpad’s flat plane.

“Guilty as charged, Agent Doss. On both counts, I think.” For a moment he seemed proud of this. Then his face turned serious. “The prairie was barren like this once before, Agent Doss, long ago. They called it the Dust Bowl. All the soil blew away. It blew east, all the way to old D.C. People had to migrate then, just as they do today. But Roosevelt saved the prairie. Do you know how he did it?” Doss said nothing. She motioned to Jake, who produced a gallon jug of water from his backpack. “He planted.” In the flexpad, Tsol beamed. “Trees. Thousands of rows of trees. From Texas to Canada. It was one of the biggest undertakings this country’s ever seen. And it worked. Trees saved the soil. The rains came and the prairie grew again.” Casanova leaned close to Doss, his face rapt as he peered down at El Sol. “Do you know what my fate is, Agent Doss?” Doss uncapped the water jug, took a long swig. Then:

“Some pissed off migrant plants an AK round in your brain after you rob his mother into starvation?” She shrugged. “Just a guess. You have anything interesting to tell me?”

Tsol raised what looked like a fat grape between a thumb and forefinger and popped it into his mouth. His eyes went half-lidded as he chewed.

“Inch by inch, row by row,” he sang. “I’m going to make this garden grow.” He smiled. The girl giggled in the background. “I’m going to save this world, Agent Doss.” His eyes widened, showed white above his irises. “For the peop—”

Doss folded the flexpad closed. She passed the water jug to Jake.

“Let’s go.”

They crawled single file along the gully’s dry bottom until they crested the ridge. There they came to a screen of low-slung desert camo netting. It smelled like piss.

“
La Chupacabra
,” Doss whispered.

“Red sash,” came Fiorivani’s voice from behind the screen. Doss and the two boys slipped into the blind. They found the big man propped on an elbow, face pressed to a spotting scope mounted on a short tripod and aimed downslope through the netting. A Longshot lay beside him, the front of its fat barrel propped on a bipod and pointing the same way as the spotting scope.

“I’d avoid that corner.” Without taking his eyes from the scope, Fiorivani pointed at a muddy spot. “Pair of mudfish came up here to have their breakfast. Sat about ten feet away. I had to take a leak.”

The two
Chupes
worked their way around the Longshot’s awkward length and settled themselves into the corner farthest from the one Fiorivani had indicated. Doss withdrew the flexpad, tossed it to Casanova. He opened it deftly with one hand and began rapidly tabbing at it with the other.

“Water,” she said. She took the jug from Jake’s pack and handed it to the lieutenant, who took it and gratefully drank. Dirt streaked his face and even in the blind’s shade his eyes looked glazed. “Head back to camp,” Doss ordered him. “Get some rack time.” Fiorivani shook his head.

“Negative. I’ll stick for a while if you don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Got snacks?” Fiorivani asked.

Doss pointed a thumb at Jake’s pack, then situated herself against the Longshot. Thumbed its power switch. It came alive with a quiet but lethal-sounding electric hum. She put her face to its scope.

Below, half a kilometer away, lay the Designer’s shallow valley, maybe three hundred meters across. A small stream wound along its bottom, bloating every so often into a series of ponds that shone like coins in the morning sun. Furrows raked the valley’s contours. Beneath each pond grew a different crop. Strange landraces—some statuesque, some squat and muscular—wandered the rows side-by-side with migrants. Doss pinned their faces with the Longshot’s scope, scanning for the Designer’s smooth dark face and placid almond eyes.

“No sign of the primary,” Fiorivani told her. Doss settled the Longshot’s crosshairs on the dome. The round living heart at the valley’s center—a tiny replica of the living dome that covered old Denver. Its skin had tanned in the days her small band had surveilled it. A green tinge edged its eastern side, chlorophyll surfacing in the early sunshine. Doss spotted a place near the dome’s top where the skin trembled, rhythmically. A pulse.

“That thing freaks me the fuck out,” she mumbled. Nobody said anything and she knew it freaked them out, too.

They waited. The sun climbed. They began to sweat. They sipped water, chewed burned rabbit meat. Flies buzzed.

“El Sol like you, Boss Momma,” Casanova declared late in the morning.

“Lucky me.” Doss had the Longshot trained on the woman outside the dome’s concave wall. She wore FEMAs and sat with weird grace on her haunches.

“You could be his woman,” Jake agreed. “He treat his women good. Like from the old world. Everybody know. He treat them like
ladies
.”

“Uh-huh.” A migrant boy crossed Doss’ scope a few paces from the woman. The woman’s lips peeled back, bared barracuda teeth. Her tongue flicked out like a snake’s. Wide nostrils flared.

Doss mentally ticked down the bullet points in the flexpad’s file on the Satori combat designs. Genetic splices drawn from multiple sources, mostly predatory. Increased bone and muscle density. Enhanced senses of smell and sight. Enhanced strength and speed. Originated as a government military contract, but rejected due to the designs’—Doss relished the phrase—”unpredictable disposition.” As Doss watched, the combat design raised her face and seemed to stare straight into the Longshot’s scope. Doss saw pale, wolfen eyes, irises that were vertical slits no wider than a fingernail. Skin tingled the length of Doss’ spine. “That bitch is a killer if I’ve ever seen one.”