Seed (3 page)

“I ain’t. But you are.”

“
Sí
.” He watched Pollo’s face, and marveled at the calm focus the boy possessed when his personality managed to navigate to the surface. “You stay here until I come get you. Keep your head down.”

“
Entiendo
.”

Brood touched the top of Pollo’s shaved head, a gesture that bordered on the religious, and settled himself against the fence. He forced himself to breathe slowly, inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth, just as Hondo had taught him, letting the fire in his nerves spread through his limbs, bringing his body awake, sharp as a hunger pang. He held a hand out flat: steady as a motherfucker.

Hondo appeared, a dreadlocked shadow moving silently along the warehouse’s curved side. He stopped ten paces from the
Chupes
, crouched, raised his hand. Brood saw the thin curve of the carving blade.

He stood. The bow squeaked slightly as he pulled the string back to his cheek. He sighted down the arrow through the crosshair sight at the
Chupe
closest Hondo. A little high at this distance, a hair to the right to compensate for the bow’s leftward push. Hondo signaled, a short chopping motion.

Brood exhaled…released.

The bow emitted a whip-snap sound, echoed an instant later by the arrow cracking into its target. Brood reached for a second arrow, nocked it, sighted on the second
Chupe
. Exhaled. Released. Another crack, and this time the
Chupe
twitched. Brood heard a gurgling sound. Hondo moved now, smooth as a viper.

“
Chale
!” Brood hissed.

He nocked the third arrow, sighted it, released just as Hondo reached the second
Chupe
. The arrow cracked home. The
Chupe
twitched once, and sagged. Hondo turned and held up his hands, like: what the fuck? Brood smiled, grabbed his quiver.

“Wait here,” he told Pollo, and vaulted the fence.

Hondo glared as Brood trotted quietly up beside him. “Thought I told you not to put an arrow up my ass.” The old man stood over the
Chupe
closest the door, the one he had been about to knife. Two arrows protruded from the overfed boy, one from the throat, a second from his cheek just below the eye. Both had pinned him to the concrete wall. Another arrow protruded from the center of the first
Chupe
’s forehead—no wonder he hadn’t made a sound.

“Move a little faster and I won’t have to,” Brood whispered.

“Shoot a little straighter, motherfucker, and I won’t have to.”

Brood grinned. Pulled the .32 from his back pocket and stuffed it into the waist of his canvas pants beside the hooked blade, then nocked another blunt arrow.

“You ready?”

Hondo unslung the Mossberg. He pistol-gripped it in one hand, held the carving blade in the other. Paused long enough to let out a supernaturally long breath, then nodded.

Brood stepped to the doorway and peered inside.

A fire built of shredded tire rubber burned fifty meters away at the center of the warehouse’s concrete floor. Farming equipment sat parked around the building’s convex perimeter. Combines, threshers, fertilizer trucks, all rusted out. Fossilized monsters in the fire’s vague illumination, prehistoric, covered by a century’s dust.

“Count six asleep around the fire,” Brood said. Slumbering bodies wrapped in burlap and canvas. He wrinkled his nose at the stench of dysentery. “One awake.” A red-scarved
Chupe
sitting in a plastic chair and drinking from a ceramic pot. “That’s it. Couple AKs on floor. We go fast and quiet, we should be good.” Brood raised the bow. Hondo placed the flat of the carving blade against Brood’s arm, halting him.

“Wait ’til he sets that pot down.”

The
Chupe
took another long swig. Golden liquid ran from the corners of his mouth. Corn mash. He set the pot down. Brood exhaled. Released. The arrow thudded home. The
Chupe
grunted, keeled over. Hondo ran past. Brood dropped the bow, pulled the .32 and his blade, and followed. Quick, silent steps, the rubber souls of tire tread sandals padding across the concrete. He felt fast, light, the weight of the flack jacket forgotten.

They worked quickly, slitting throats.

Four
Chupes
never knew they’d died. A fifth stirred, rose to an elbow and spoke somnolent words at Brood. Then he seemed to register what was happening. His eyes went wide and he reached for a rusted AK that lay nearby. Brood extended the .32, fired three shots fast into the boy’s chest. The
Chupe
fell back into his blankets like he’d never awakened. The last
Chupe
leapt to his feet, startled by the gunshots. He was older, near Hondo’s age. His mouth made a perfectly surprised black circle in the center of a grey beard as he watched Hondo swing the Mossberg his way. The gun shrieked. The man rag-dolled away from the fire and lay still.

Brood blinked in the Mossberg’s ringing aftermath. “Thought you said there were girls,” he said.

Movement sounded behind him. He turned to find the
Chupe
he’d shot with the arrow still alive, squirming. High cheekbones, the dark mottling of burn scars. The
Chupe
went still as Brood moved to stand over him. The arrow quivered his chest as he struggled to breathe.

Brood stuffed the pistol and knife back into his pants. “Sorry, homes, I need that arrow.” He placed a foot atop the
Chupe
’s belly and gripped the shaft. He started to pull, but the big
Chupe
moaned in a way that made him feel all twisted inside, so he stopped and stepped back. Flecks of pink foam speckled the boy’s lips. “Got you in the lung,
ese
.”

“Richard.”

“What?”

“Richard. My name’s Richard.”

“Richard.” Brood considered the sound of it. Decided perhaps it was right that one’s name be used when one was close to death. “You ain’t got long, Richard. I can take care of you, you want.” He drew the inverted blade and held it up for Richard to see. Richard stared at it for a tortured heartbeat, then closed his eyes and shook his head. “Alright,” Brood told him, and felt strangely awkward, as though he were invading the
Chupe
’s privacy. “Alright.” He left the arrow where it was and moved to where Hondo stood by the fire, stuffing fresh shells into the Mossberg.

“Don’t see nobody else. Thought you said there were girls.”

Something slammed into Brood’s back. He tried to turn, but his body didn’t respond. Instead he fell forward. Cracked concrete moved up to meet him. Pain erupted along his spine, spread through his ribs. He heard gunfire then, the unmistakable clang of an AK roaring out from some recess among the farming machines. Hondo yelled something, but the shotgun sang, drowning out his words.

Brood found himself staring into the dead eyes of a
Chupe
whose throat he’d cut. He tried to get his body to move, tried to breathe, and failed—just lay there gasping like a fish on a stone.

The gunfire went on for a long time, ripping the air, before abruptly ceasing. Footsteps approached, scratching across the concrete from where the AK had fired. The pain felt distant now, like watching someone else get punched. Brood felt calm.

A rough hand gripped his shoulder and turned him over. Brood heard a moan, realized it came from inside his own body. A
Chupe
stood over him, so astonishingly well fed that a pink lip of flab edged the perimeter of his chin as he gazed down at Brood. An AK with a broken stock dangled recklessly from one hand.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” He smiled as he spoke, and the words sounded tough. But beneath the low-pulled red scarf, his eyes looked sad and scared.

Brood found himself mesmerized by the boy’s flab, wanted to reach up and touch it, prove to himself it was real. He opened his mouth to say something, but now the pain hit him. He let out a wet sob. The
Chupe
’s lip curled in disgust. He raised the AK. A sharp pop rang in the air. It didn’t hurt—not at all. For an instant, the
Chupe
seemed confused. He turned, angry, looking for something. Another pop. His forehead opened like a dropped melon. He fell.

“Carlos?”

Brood smiled at the intimate sound of his real name. Pollo’s gaunt face filled his vision. A face consisting almost entirely of concavities, deprivation. It made Brood sad, like he hadn’t really looked at his brother—hadn’t really seen him—in a long time.

“Pollo…” Brood said. The boy peered down, eyes wide and curious, fully there, connected…his rodential fist clutching Hondo’s tiny pistol.

“Carlos, get up. I found the seed. There’s lots.”

CHAPTER 2

his is corn.” The mountain of seed, piled high as the spine of the nearby dirigible, glowed molten gold in the late afternoon sun. Pihadassa extended a long hand from beneath her simple cotton shift and waved languidly at the pile as though caressing its aura. A single helix, repeated a hundred million times, once for each individual kernel, danced in her head. A vision of uniformity, not a chromosome out of sync. “It can withstand temperatures as high as one hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit, as low as negative twenty degrees.” A sine wave appeared in her mind, temperatures rising higher each summer, growing colder each winter. “Not anomalous extremes. I speak of sustained heat and cold. It needs one-tenth the water of the corn we produced six years ago.”

The Special Liaison to the President seemed not to care. He grunted absently, sucked his lip, scuffed the sole of one gleaming leather boot impatiently against the tarmac. He kept glancing at the dirigible’s pilot, who leaned in her black drop suit against the craft’s rear hatch, arms crossed, exuding indifference.

“This,” Pihadassa explained patiently, “is the best corn I have ever made. It will resist climatic flux worse than what we have seen. Worse than what we project for the next decade.”

Ten Satori landraces—her children—worked the corn pile. Muscle rippled beneath skin the color of fecund soil as they leveraged stocky bodies against the sinew cords of a skeletal pulley crane—a bone raptor rising beside the pile.

“Corn,” Pihadassa repeated. The Liaison’s sharp face turned her way. He pointed a hard smile at her.

“Your goddamn clones were supposed to be gone by the time we got here.” His lip curled in distaste around the word “clone.”

The deep folds of the Liaison’s coat fascinated Pihadassa. A cotton and maize weave, a dense thread count. It bespoke a concentrated resource expenditure. Satori seed flown halfway across the continent. Rows of grow lights burning in the subterranean fields of New D.C. Water drawn in from the Chesapeake, desalinated over algae diesel fires and pumped down furrows of seaweed foam flown in from Newfoundland. Crops harvested, their fibers ginned and spun into fabric, sewn and tailored. All for the sake of primate preening.

This, while spring migrants gathered already outside the bone-and-skin length of Satori’s outer wall. They camped around detritus fires in the brick remnants of old Denver, wore old FEMA paper refugee suits. Turned their hungry eyes towards the broad back of Satori’s dome, which enclosed the steel, brick and plexi of what had been downtown. They watched as the dome’s winter fur sloughed away, exposing acres of pink skin. Watched as Satori children brought seed through the dome’s luffing gates and piled it high on the tarmac, where it awaited the government zeps.

“You need not worry about my landraces,” Pihadassa assured the Liaison. “The Fathers will discover soon enough that I have gone.” Pihadassa’s Satori children released cords; the crane’s yellowed jaws plunged deep into the corn seed.

“They’ll tell the Fathers
I
was with you. My people can’t be connected to your defection.”

His people. A government whose only real function was to distribute seed to a populace in a state of permanent migration. Seed provided exclusively by Satori, and which Satori could easily distribute on its own. A government afraid of its own obsolescence.

“To whom else would I run?”

“What’s obvious and what Satori can prove are two different things.” A scar moved above the Liaison’s eyebrow. Anger flexed in his jaw. Pihadassa noted the broad structure of his cheekbones. She took a long, meditative breath.

The Liaison’s helix unfurled in her mind, a map of his past and future. Solid musculature and military bearing belied bones not quite as dense as they should have been. A thin heart wall that would open up and cut him down before he was old. The offending chromosomes had unfurled, vulnerable as a hangnail along the helix’s length. They might have remained latent if not for childhood malnutrition. A pity. Otherwise the Liaison was solid, strong. Pihadassa wished she could bring him along, could breed him. Sometimes all nature needed was a little management. Perhaps she could convince him to give her a sample.

“You need not worry about my children,” she said, and smiled. “They will not relay any information to the Fathers. They are going with me.”

The landraces heaved. The crane’s head rose, swiveled to one side. Its jaws opened, vomiting seed into the beds of wooden carts with a sound like static. Five other Satori children put thick shoulders to bone and leather yokes, hauling the carts up the dirigible’s rear ramp.