Seed (32 page)

It smiled.

Doss saw frank admiration. For a moment, she almost believed the thing to be a beautiful woman.

Clawed hands gripped her. The remaining advocates tore at her like sharks feeding. They smiled and laughed. They broke her drop suit off in pieces. One sank its teeth into her suddenly bare arm. Another struck her in the face with its fist. The inside of Doss’ skull turned red. She saw hot blue sky, half-filled by the fat ass of Lewis’ zep.

It reminded her…

She reached a hand up to her neck. Found the chord. Let fingers follow it down until they touched hard plastic. She clutched the remote like something holy against her sternum.

Thumbed the dead-man button three times, hard.

Somewhere, miles away, she could almost hear the thunk-and-clack as the rail gun on her zep’s belly chambered a block of depleted uranium and swiveled, coming to bear on her coordinates. She smiled.

CHAPTER 20

rood dreamed fire. He saw the faces of those he’d loved. His mother. Hondo Loco. Viv.

Pollo.

An ember of pain seared through him when he saw his brother’s face. Intently blank, staring into some off-center space, eyes pushed away from Brood’s like magnets unable to meet their same charge.

Something tickled Brood’s face. He tasted smoke. Felt soot permeate his being. Something tickled his face again, persistently.

He opened his eyes: blackness. He moaned. Everything hurt.

He tried to touch the wounded places…Couldn’t move his hands, couldn’t move his feet.

Something wriggled in the darkness beside him. Intuitively he understood it to be a small dog. Anna’s dog. It whined and licked his face again.

“
Perro
perro
perro
.” His voice rasped as he cooed at it.

He lay there and breathed, gathering his senses. Nylon upbraided his wrists. He recalled Jorgen, Anna, the fuckstick: he was tied up. A seam of light grew apparent along the ground. He lay beneath something.

Patiently, he began working his hands free. Thirst charred his throat. His mind and time tilted in the dark. The smoke smell began to frighten him, made him feel as though his lungs had been packed with ash. Finally his hands came free.

Pain forced him to move carefully. He felt deep bruising, basically everywhere. The entire left side of his body felt as though it had been cooked for days under the sun. The bullet wound over his hip ached. He probed it, found it hadn’t reopened. All his joints worked. Nothing seemed broken.

He sat up, hit his head on something. Ran his hands along it, discovered a corrugated truck bed…
overhead
. The dog wiggled urgently, licking him.

“
Sí
,
sí
,” he told it. “We going.” He stroked it. It felt hairless and wet.

He heard a roaring sound, like thunder but constant. It reverberated, filled the entire world, then faded.

Detritus lay all around him. His hands found things as he crawled. Engine parts. Electronics components. A small kitchen knife, which he tucked into the waistband of his canvas shorts. Lengths of pipe. He was under Anna’s truck. He found the tarped edge, moved along it until he found a flap, squeezed through and rose shakily to his feet.

The world had gone grey with ash. He stood ankle-deep in soot. Caravan trucks, trailers, wagons lay scattered, upended and crushed. Anna’s truck lay on its back like a giant dead insect. Tendrils of acrid smoke rose from its undercarriage.

Yellow heat blisters covered Brood’s left side. He touched one, and the skin sloughed. He moaned. The dog wiggled against his shins. He looked down.

A sob caught in his throat. The dog had been horribly burned. Skin had peeled away, exposing spine, ribs, skull. An oily sheen covered what skin remained. The dog wagged a tail that no longer existed, and panted at Brood. Like any friendly dog. Like it had no idea.

“Fuck,
perro
.” For some reason it reminded him of Pollo. “
Perro
perro
perro
.” He took the kitchen knife from his waistband and knelt. The dog licked him and wiggled happily. Brood pet it and cooed at it, told it “Good doggy, good doggy.” He cut its throat. It didn’t seem to notice. Brood kept petting it as it bled. It wiggled happily under his hand until it went limp.

Brood stood, weeping. He spotted bodies now, most of them charred, some of them simply pieces. His feet shuffled forward. The stench of scorched meat made him gag. A few other people staggered about, either burned or covered with soot, Brood couldn’t tell. None of them seemed to see each other, or know where they were going. They simply walked, unblinking, their mouths agape, their eyes empty.

The roaring sound came again. The sweeping raptor lines of a military plane appeared through the haze. Fat jets swiveled at the tips of its delta wings. It hovered for a moment over the monolithic and smoking bones of a crashed zep a few hundred meters away, then it sped off and disappeared behind a wall of smoke that rose out of the valley.

Sweat ran in white streaks down Brood’s arms and over his bare chest, like a fever breaking. His feet moved; he thought of nothing.

He found himself down in the valley beside the stream. It had diverted along a line of black impact craters that ran the valley’s floor. Water, choked with shining ash, pooled in the craters. One crater occupied the space where the dome had been.

He walked the edge of what had been a cornfield. Its stillness frightened him. Stalks protruded now like lines of scorched bones from blackened furrows.

A woman stood at the field’s center. Mud and ash caked her ponytail. The plastic jeweled eagle on the back of her denim vest had melted in lurid streaks.

She stood gazing at one corn plant that still stood, perfectly intact, magnificently tall. Except it was black.

The metal falcon screamed overhead, disappeared again.

“Think it’s the army,” Brood said. “Maybe they give us a ride somewhere.” Anna didn’t look at him. She stared at the corn. “
Vamonos
,” Brood implored.

“Think I’ll stay here,” Anna said. Her gaze remained fixed on the plant.

She reached out slowly and touched it. The tip of her finger sank into ash. The stalk trembled and then, with a luffing sound, collapsed. A grey cloud lingered for an instant, then dispersed like an exhalation.

….

The dog lay where he’d left it. It looked like it had never been happy, or hurt, or anything at all. Brood tried not to look at it as he pushed his way back into the inverted bed of Anna’s truck. He rooted in the darkness, fumbling things through burned fingers. He found the duffle bag packed with its satchels of cold soft bricks. A hunting knife, along whose six-inch blade he could feel nubs of rust. He tucked that into his waistband beside the kitchen knife and kept rooting until his hands closed around an empty plastic water jug.

He dragged the duffle out of the truck, stood, slung it over his unburned shoulder. Roaring jets rattled his bones as the plane reappeared overhead. It circled the smoking zep. Hovered there, low and tentative, kicking up a cloud of ash, into which it slowly descended. A second jet could be heard somewhere out in the smoke, not far away.

Brood meandered through the strewn vehicles until he found what seemed to be a water truck laying on its side, its frame blackened and twisted. Fluid trickled from a crack that ran the length of one of the tank’s seams. It smelled swampy, but it was water. He put his mouth to the crack and sucked. Rust ground against his teeth. He didn’t care. Strength flowed into his limbs as he drank. When he’d finished, he took the hunting knife and slid it into the crack and pried at the seam until water guttered forth. He filled the jug.

“That’s my truck.”

Brood turned. A man stood there watching him with bloodshot eyes. He seemed somehow off balance. Brood realized he lacked an arm.

“My truck,” the man said again. He held something in his hand and gestured with it. The missing arm, still clothed in a scorched FEMA sleeve.

“
Lo siento
,” Brood croaked at him. The man nodded. He leaned against the truck as though suddenly weary.

“You go on, have a drink.” He wiped his forehead with the back of the detached hand. “Sure is a hot one.”

“Yes sir.” Brood stuffed the water bottles into the duffle.

A second jet shattered the sky overhead. It hovered over the zep and descended near where the other plane had landed. Brood shouldered the duffle and started in that direction.

“You have a good one,” the water truck man called. Brood didn’t look back.

The jets idled, black and sleek as vipers’ heads at the edge of what appeared to be a bomb crater, their nuke plants throbbing, a meaty sound in the haze. The front half of the zep’s skeleton seemed to have been severed at the crater’s lip, and carried away somewhere.

Survivors had gathered, a dozen of them. They stood absently, as though they didn’t know where else to be, and gingerly touched one another’s burns. Brood scanned their faces, searching for Billy or Raimi or Jorgen or the foreign mother and her little girl. Saw none of them.

The crater was about fifty meters in diameter and Brood circled along its far side. The zep’s ribs, honeycombed titanium from which hung ribbons of shredded foil skin, stabbed into red sky.

He discovered the two soldiers standing beside the zep’s crushed cabin. A big
ese
and a tall black woman. Matte black armor, scorched and hammered, half-covered the woman. The
ese
’
s
armor looked smooth and intact. They regarded the cabin’s twisted chaos as though it were a puzzle.

“Nobody alive in there, Boss,” the man said. He held a bent helmet with gleaming visor tucked under one arm. A scar puckered his cheek.

The woman ignored him. She reached out with one hand and tugged at a titanium girder. Her other arm dangled uselessly. Brood saw blood trickling from gauntlet fingertips. The girder gave way with a metallic squeal.

“Give me a hand, Sergeant.”

The man reached out, seemed about to set his helmet on a flat length of titanium girder, then eyed it with pursed lips and simply dropped it. He spotted Brood.

“’Sup, homey?”

“
Nada
.
Como esta
?”

“
Muy
fucking
bien
,” the
ese
said. His scar made him look both mad and like he was about to laugh.

“You soldiers?” Brood asked.

The woman turned. Brood blinked. She’d been burned, like the dog. Armor dangled off her shoulder, exposing blistered flesh, a bloodied white tank top. Half her hair was gone. The other half afroed out in a perfect semisphere that made Brood think of an eclipse.

“That’s right,” she said. Teeth showed through burned lips, a permanent, melted sneer. Her enunciation had suffered. “Soldiers.” She turned back to the zep’s cabin and grabbed a sheet of bent steel.

“Look like you lost.”

A diamond flashed in one tooth as the
ese
grinned. He looked Brood up and down.

“Don’t look like you done much better, homie.”

“I been worse,” Brood said. The
ese
looked skeptical, then shrugged inside his armor.

“Sorry to hear that.”

“You with the jets?”

“That’s right.” Overstressed hydraulics in the
ese
’
s
armor wheezed as he pulled a hunk of steel the size of a small table free from the cabin. It teetered, then tipped and slammed with a thud into the dust.

“Why you do this?” Brood asked.

“We didn’t.” The sergeant pointed at a wrecked body, little more than a broiled torso, that lay not far away. Brood recognized the sharp features of the Corn Mother’s strange snake woman. “They did.”

“I see him,” the woman said, and then growled. She grasped a lip of bent metal with her good hand, grunted savagely, tore it free. Glass shattered as tension inside the cabin released too suddenly. The sergeant reached in, dragged free a body. A man. Brood saw grey hair, a uniform jacket. Brass stars on the shoulder. A cloud of soot rose as the sergeant let the body flop onto the ground. The man groaned.

“Fucking knew it.” The burned woman took the man’s face in her hand. “General Lewis. Are you in there? Look at me, General.” The man groaned again. Eyelids fluttered. “That’s it. Look at me, you sonofabitch.” The woman smiled, grotesque with her burns.

“He going to make it?” Brood asked. A sly smile crossed the
ese
sergeant’s face.

“Doubtful.”

“Those were your kids, General.” The woman sounded sad, her voice weirdly gentle. “Your boys and girls. You understand what I’m telling you, General?” The general gave a feeble nod. The woman stared down at him for a long moment. “Why?” she asked.

“Satori gave me seed. Enough for the future.” The general tried to say something else, but the strain proved too great. He let out a pained breath, then simply said, “My kids.” The woman pawed at her forearm, seemed to realize something was missing. Extended her hand towards the sergeant.

“Knife,” she ordered.

The sergeant drew a short dagger from a sheath on his forearm. Flipped it deftly in his armored hand and passed it to the woman handle-first.