Seed (39 page)

It clanged to a halt at an upper floor. Brood saw blue sky through open walls. The landrace’s shoulder dug into his gut. The stench of shit and rot made him wretch.

“You get used to it,” Juice mumbled. He steered them deep into a labyrinth of chain-link pens crowded with migrants. Some sat upright, watching with resigned faces as the landrace carried Brood past. Others lay stiff.

Landraces roamed the aisles, pushing carts piled with Satori vegetables or mops and buckets. In one pen, a landrace moved methodically from migrant to migrant with a bucket of hypodermics, needling shoulders. It seemed indifferent whether the migrants were living or dead.

Juice stopped in front of a pen, waved a hand before the gate. Its latch, a thick braid of muscle that looked like a tongue, seemed to sense him and relaxed itself. The gate swung open. The landrace carried Brood into the pen and dropped him heavily to the cold concrete floor. Juice stepped forward.

“They collect bodies tomorrow morning.” A blade flashed in his hands and he cut Brood’s bonds. “I’ll make sure you got senor shotgun by tonight.” He smiled, toothless, then turned and disappeared.

Brood sat up, leaned against the fence. Four naked bodies lay on the pen’s floor. None seemed to breathe. More bodies occupied the pen adjacent to him, along with two old white men who sat naked and cross-legged, playing cards. They nodded cordially to Brood. Brood nodded back.

“
Que onda
?”

They continued wordlessly with their game, as though death couldn’t come soon enough. Brood dug into his pants and pulled the pig sticker from its hidden sheath. With its tip he pried grit from beneath his fingernails. He waited.

….

Juice returned sometime after midnight, accompanied by a small whiteboy. They carried between them a stiff naked body, a girl. They opened the gate and set the body with the others, then Juice straightened, arching a kink from his back.

“Shotgun,” he told Brood, and nodded at a stitched incision running from the body’s throat to its pubis. “Don’t try getting at it until you’re inside.” He produced a hypodermic from a back pocket of his jeans, broke the seal and stepped forward. Brood stood, drew the pig sticker, leveled it at the needle.

“
Pero qué coño
?”

“They check your pulse, man. You got to be
out
.” Brood took a step forward. Juice backed up, made a placating gesture. The other boy fled the cage and turned to watch, his skinny fingers twining through the chain link. Juice held up the needle. “They take in the bodies at seven. You take this now, you wake up at 7:15. On the button, man. Inside.” Brood checked his watch: 12:03. He looked at Juice, who nodded, promising. “Good business is all about reputation,” he said. “My reputation didn’t get built by fucking people over. You want in there, you got to trust me.”

Brood put his face close to Juice’s, glared a warning into the tall whiteboy’s eyes. Then sheathed the blade, pushed up his t-shirt’s sleeve. Juice leaned forward, sank the needle into Brood’s shoulder, thumbed the plunger.

“Ow,
chingado
!”

“Sorry,” Juice said, then he was outside the pen. He watched Brood as the muscle latch wound itself tight around the gate.

Brood sat heavily on the concrete floor. He hadn’t meant to. Juice smiled.

“You’ll be fine, man. Trust me.”

“Fucking redneck.” Brood’s voice barely escaped his lips. His muscles felt like they’d deflated, gone numb. He found himself on his side, staring at the white back of a corpse. Figured he would soon know exactly how it felt to be one. Chill concrete pressed against his cheek. His eyes drifted, met those of one of the old white guys in the neighboring pen. Somewhere within the white grizzle of his beard the codger’s mouth curled into a smile. He mimed locking sealed lips, throwing away the key.

….

Brood dreamed of a snake. The snake that was the world, all glowing geometry, circling him, turning to ash. “Let the dead be dead,” it hissed, and Brood knew it meant him. It unhinged its jaw. Inside was blackness. It made wet, gustative sounds as it moved to swallow him.

Brood opened his eyes. Found a red sphincter the size of a bomb crater staring back at him. An orifice like the one in the Corn Mother’s dome, but immense. The stench of rot rose out of it.

A stiff white body came into view, sliding down an areolic funnel and into the maw, which flexed itself open to receive. The body disappeared. The opening emitted more gustative sounds.

Brood was trying to make sense of this when something gripped his neck. He felt himself lifted. Up and out towards the slick funnel. He twisted, batted at a bulky arm, which abruptly dropped him. He gained his feet, turned, found himself staring into the startled pack animal face of a muscled landrace.

“Not dead?” it grunted.

“Fuck no, I ain’t dead.”

The landrace retreated two steps. Brood tried to orient himself. He stood in a circular cavern, big as a zep’s bladder, except— the whole thing flexed, pulsating, alive. The snake-scaled floor throbbed beneath his sandaled feet: a massive heartbeat. Pale skin walls, aglow with some sort of internal luminescence, trembled to its rhythm.

He was inside. The stench made him ill. He bent and vomited. Then checked his watch: 7:42.

“Fuck, Juice.” It felt like no time had passed.

The shocked landrace waved its hands, huffing, as though it were not sure whether to capture Brood or comfort him. They regarded each other beside a short convoy of bone wagons, each stacked with half a dozen corpses. A pair of landraces stood beside each wagon, grabbing bodies and heaving them with disconcerting ease over the funnel’s lip.

Finally the landrace made up its mind. It gave two loud grunts. The other landraces, totaling a dozen, ceased their funereal work. They grouped together, turned flat black eyes to Brood. They hesitated for a second, seemed to make some silent and collective decision. Then moved forward.

Brood reached a hand down his pants, pulled out his blade, leveled it at the landrace who had grabbed him. The landrace halted, chuffing. Brood wagged his finger at it and hopped atop the wagon from which he’d just been hauled. Some of the bodies had gone rigid, others bloated. He began turning them over.

The landraces didn’t like this. They came at Brood fast, barking, hooting. Brood’s hand punched into the belly of a bloated body. A cloud of foul gas enveloped him. He wretched, pulled his hand free. Kept searching.

Found the girl’s corpse face down on the bottom of the pile. A landrace grabbed his ankle. He kicked its head. Rolled the girl’s corpse face up. Desperation made him snarl as he swiped the pig sticker with one quick motion down the stitches in the body’s torso.

The girl’s abdomen blossomed open, revealing injection-molded carbon. Brood reached in and pulled. The Mossberg came free with a sucking sound.

A landrace gripped Brood’s leg with crushing strength. It yanked him from his feet. Brood rolled to his back, leveled the barrel, three inches from the thing’s bovine face. Squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

The landrace hauled him towards the wagon’s edge. Brood pulled the trigger again. Nothing. He turned the Mossberg belly up, saw the empty mag port.

“Fuck, Juice!”

He grabbed the corpse’s ankle. The landrace pulled him off the wagon and Brood took the corpse with him. The other landraces gathered.

They punched Brood, kicked him, tore at him with big workers’ fingers. A tornado of hooting, muscled chaos. Brood saw wild eyes, rimmed with white. Thick lips peeled back, baring yellowed teeth thick as his thumb. He buried himself beneath the corpse. His hand slipped once more inside it. Felt along the cold foul slick of the abdominal wall. Touched factory-hardened carbon.

He pulled the drum mag free and curled himself fetal around it. His body went numb under the impact of too many blows. His bones sang like a tuning fork. His hands worked until the mag slipped home with a hard click. He jacked a round. Closed his eyes, turned the shotgun skyward and fired.

The Mossberg roared, tearing holes in things. Brood fired again and again, blindly away from himself, until the violence ceased. When it did, he opened his eyes.

He lay at the center of a ring of gore. Four landraces lay about him, their bodies drastically reduced in mass. Blood guttered from horrible wounds. The other landraces had cleared away. A few staggered in dazed circles, hands pressed to damaged places. The rest watched Brood, faces blank with stunned incomprehension.

Brood climbed to his feet. He held the shotgun in the air, jerked his chin at the landraces.

“
Vivir y appender
.” He could barely hear himself. The air around him felt bruised. His body trembled. He leveled the gun with one hand, grabbed his crotch with the other, taunting. “Who’s next?” The landraces stepped back. “That’s right. Ain’t as stupid as you look,”

Movement caught his eye. A wall at the chamber’s far end trembled. A seam appeared, then widened. The wall yawned open, wide enough to fit three of Hondo’s wagons side by side.

Landraces poured through it, too many to count. Satori’s heartbeat pounded three times against Brood’s feet. Blood pounded in Brood’s ears. He glanced, searching for exits. Saw only glabrous and unbroken skin, and cursed. Set his feet, coiled the Mossberg’s sling over an arm and brought the stock tight to his shoulder. Let out a slow, sniper’s breath. Muscle rippled as the landraces lumbered around the glistening crater in the floor.

“Carlos.” Pollo’s voice. It came from everywhere, filling the chamber. “There are too many, Carlos.”

“Pollo?” The name caught in Brood’s throat.

“There’s a ramp. Behind you.
Vamos
.”

“
Dónde estas
?”

“Do what I tell you,
mano
. Go to the ramp. Now.”

The landraces came. Brood fired into the mass and one went down.

“He sent an advocate for you, Carlos. She’ll be on you quick.” Brood heard the fear in Pollo’s voice. “
Apuro
,
hermano
.”

Brood turned and ran. Up a ramp that simply extended itself from smooth wall as he approached. He felt heat as he neared the wall, felt the industrial hum of gigantic metabolism. Heard the landraces scrambling behind him.

“
Izquierda
,” came Pollo’s voice. The vertical slit appeared in the wall to Brood’s left. Skin stretched. An opening formed. Brood slipped through and it closed behind him.

CHAPTER 26

sol’s people are go.” Chen’s voice hit Doss’ ear with analogue fuzz. It travelled an old-school line-of-sight radio frequency, bouncing off a drone flying figure eights at eighty thousand feet halfway between Fort Riley and Denver. An ancient frequency Doss hoped Satori wouldn’t monitor.

“Roger, Ops. Go drones.” Doss’ teeth refused to separate as she spoke. Six morphine tabs and eight Go Pills. She felt tiny beside the crystalline vibration of her own mind.

Fifteen blue dots went into motion on the heads-up display in her visor. Old drones, the one useful thing Riley had in abundance. They sprang from below radar twenty miles east of Satori. Tilted at near Mach into preprogrammed, high-G maneuvers.

“Drones are go,” Chen confirmed. The troop bay of Doss’ Falcon rattled as a drone rumbled close overhead. Gnats bent on distracting a massive beast. Gnats with heavy-det payloads.

Three of them abruptly transformed on Doss’ display—turned into red Xs. Then a fourth. And fifth.

“Ops,” she said. “Objective has some sort of air defense. Any bead on what that might be?”

“Negative,” Chen said.

Doss wasn’t surprised. The Satori files on her flexpad were scant. She’d dredged Riley’s files as well, and found fuck all. Who knew what sorts of weird shit the so-called Fathers had brewed up inside that dome.

“We’re still go.” Another blue dot turned into an X. Doss chinned her mic to open coms. “Everybody set.” She drummed gauntleted fingers impatiently along the fat black length of the breach gun she held in her lap. Four loaded barrels, each the diameter of her first, with a simple carbon-mold stock. As though anyone would be stupid enough to fire from their shoulder. “Remember,” she told her Rangers through the coms. “See what you shoot before you shoot it. Follow the chain of command. Our target is Satori’s central tower. We take the Fathers, we take Satori.”

“Burning Hand!” a Ranger cried over the radio. A prepubescent yelp, a child playing army.

“Burning Hand!” another answered. The rest chorused ardent
Hooahs
! Behind her visor, Doss smiled.

“All Falcons go.”

Her seat shimmied beneath her as all three Falcons, which hovered at ten feet off the prairie floor forty miles east of Satori, climbed just enough to clear their own tails. They pointed their noses skyward…

Punched burners.

Doss’ jaw stretched open under terrible Gs. The breach cannon pressed heavy against her armored chest. Her altimeter flickered faster than she could read—all except the ten thousand, which increased by about one every second. One of her young Rangers whimpered over the radio.

For eight seconds the Falcons burned. Then came a metallic bang as their bellies opened and they shat out their Rangers into the sky. Violent decel, reversed Gs. The world turned inside out.