Seed (7 page)

“Just the three of them.”

“Nobody en la casa?”

“Don’t see nobody.”

“Weapons?”

“Nope.”

“Okay.”

Brood and Hondo donned flak jackets, still wet from where they had scrubbed away the morning’s blood. Hondo propped the Mossberg within easy reach against the water tank. They rolled wordlessly up beside the three boys.

“’Sup?” Brood said. The three
Chupes
shuffled their feet in the dirt, abashed, expectant. Hondo motioned at the cargo netting and together he and Brood uncovered the barrels. The three boys gawked.

“Goddamn,” Whiteboy said. As Brood and Hondo duck walked one barrel to the wagon’s edge, he smiled like he’d just seen the sun for the first time. “Ya’ll don’t fuck around.”

“Don’t fuck around,” Pollo echoed from the stationary bike. His legs churned slowly on the pedals. His head hung low to his lap so only the top of his shaven brown pate touched the world. The smallest of the three boys aimed a finger up at Pollo.

“He ain’t right, is he?”

Brood silently met his gaze, flat and unblinking. After a moment, fear crossed the small boy’s face. He took a step back.

“Don’t be rude, Todd,” the third boy said. “He ain’t no wronger than you.”

Todd stared at the ground. White dust rose around him as he shuffled his feet. Then he sucked his lip and squinted greedily up at the wagon.

“That all corn?”

“Nah,” Brood told him. “All kinds of shit.” He sank a hand into the seed and lifted it to show the boy. It trickled through his fingers, flickering like gold in the high sun. A tiny disk caught on the tip of his index finger, crossed by a tiny, perfect barcode—not a lazed counterfeit, but smooth, sunken into the seed’s flesh, an expression of its very DNA. Brood held it up. “Cucumber,” he said. Todd reached up, touched the tip of his finger to Brood’s thumb and the seed stuck to him. His eyes crossed as he brought it close to his face.

“Hard to believe this li’l fucker turns into a cucumber.”

“Lots of cucumbers,” Whiteboy corrected. “Help ’em with the barrel, Todd.”

They wrestled the barrel to the ground and the three
La Chupes
gathered around it like it was a fire on a frozen January night. Brood watched as they dug their hands into it and laughed.

“Why you stealing from your own gang?” he asked after moment.

“Defecting,” Todd said, buried up to his elbows in seed.

“Fuck, Todd.” The other boy glared.

“What?” Todd withdrew his hands and raised them, as though he held two question marks. He looked from Whiteboy to the other ex-
Chupe
. “What?”

“Gotta make a living,” Whiteboy said. The swirled tats on his face creased as he squinted at Brood. “Barely eat with
La Chupe
.”

“Striking out on our own,” Todd offered. “Starting our own gang.” The third boy shook his head and turned away in disgust. “What?” Todd said. “Maybe they’d like to join. You know?”

“
Gracias
,
amigo
.” Hondo’s face crinkled with mirth. “Maybe next time.”

“What kind of vehicle you got?” Brood asked.

“Got nothing,” Whiteboy said. “We carrying it.”

Hondo gave Brood a long look. Brood scanned the distance. The empty brown of north Texas badlands stretched as far as he could see.

“Alright.”

“
Diviértase con eso
,” Hondo told Whiteboy.

“Yeah, we will.” Whiteboy eyed the wagon. “Sure you don’t want to come with us?”

“We got to be up north,” Brood said. He pictured himself working a long furrow atop the Ojo ridge. Pushing corn seed three knuckles deep in dark soil. Rosa Lee following close behind with a ceramic jug, the long curves of shoulders growing dark under the sun as she poured each seed a birthing drink. Desire squeezed Brood’s heart, made his skin burn. “Soon.”

“Yeah, well.” Whiteboy smiled. He turned and together the three ex-
Chupes
gathered themselves around the barrel of seed. They began inching it awkwardly north.

“Hold up.” Brood pulled a tarp free from a stack of milk crates and rummaged. Pulled free a mason jar full of pickled radishes. He filled a second jar from the spout on the water tank and handed the two jars down to Whiteboy.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Whiteboy said.

“Luck,
ese
.”

….

At first they travelled only at night, rolling slow with the deep cycles bats. Hondo sat up front, calling out directions while Brood handled the tiller. In the predawn they’d kick in the Hercs, making real miles westward for a couple of hours, then pull far off the road and shelter the day under a camo net.

Pollo disappeared those days while Brood and Hondo napped or swatted languorously at flies. They listened to prairie saints blather on an ancient dented Ham radio with dials the size of Brood’s fists. Neither of them cared much for Jesus, but sometimes the prairie saints dispensed news. Rumors of what caravans were where, of what wells were finding water.

Pollo always returned at dusk, once with a tiny wild dog to spit over the fire, another time with a rattlesnake longer than he was tall and as thick as his thigh. They cooked most of the snake, enough meat for all of them for three days. The rest of the meat Brood cut into sections and pounded flat with a stone. He salted it and spread it to dry on a rock. The nights froze them while they rolled, but during the day February sun hammered down, hot enough to dry the snake in a single afternoon.

“Ain’t worry keeps bad shit at bay,” Hondo told Brood on their fourth morning out of Amarillo. Brood, his arm draped over the tiller, kept squinting over his shoulder into the rising sun. They’d transferred all their water to five fifty-gal drums they’d slung under the wagon, and hidden the seed in the water tank. Hondo sat against it, a man roosting on his hoard, jostling as the wagon rolled. “Foresight. A good plan. A little luck. That’s all you need, young homey.”

“Maybe,” Brood squinted east. Rusted-out pump jacks and storage tanks, the last evidence that people had once carved a living out of the dry plains, had faded as they’d moved into New Mexico and the endless sagebrush of deep desert. Massive steppes loomed around them now, ghostly in the early light. A prairie saint droned on the Ham, talking salvation, the second coming. Talked about the Corn Mother, some bitch up in Kansas who’d come out of Satori and was going to save everyone.

“Maybe,” Pollo sang from his perch on the stationary bike, his voice slow with concentration as though he were trying to decipher some hidden meaning in the sound. He’d wrapped a scrap of wool blanket over his shoulders. His skinny legs churned on the pedals.

“They think we gone north with the herd,” Hondo said. “They thought otherwise, we’d know by now.” He absently dug something out of the ulcerous patch on his cheek and held it up on a dirty fingernail to examine it, then stuck the fingertip in his mouth and sucked. “We be dead.”

“Alright.” Brood cast a challenging eye at the old man. “We keep rolling.” Hondo met his gaze, and smiled.

“
Bueno
.”

“Alright.” Brood halted the wagon, switched the motor over to the Hercs.

They rolled into the day, making good time along the broken freeway. Mean white sunlight charged the bats—hooked through a converter to PV paint slopped over the wagon’s every flat surface—almost as fast as the wagon’s motors drained them.

“I like this stretch,” Brood said. Nothing but freeway, angling ever westward through picked-bone desert, marked every hundred miles or so by the crumbling shells of abandoned gas stations. As if the best civilization had ever managed here was to pass through on its way to somewhere else.

“Bandit country,” Hondo agreed. He killed the power to the Ham and connected its cable instead to an ATM interface Brood had jerry-rigged to a car stereo amp and an ancient hard drive the size of a brick. A moment later the shrill vocals and heavy beats of mid-century Chinese dub spilled from a speaker cone bolted to the wagon’s edge. Hondo settled back down, propped his dreads against a big twelve-volt battery and folded his hands priestly on his bony chest.

“Beats,” Pollo noted. Brood bobbed his head.

“What I’m talking about.” He leaned into the tiller, and with the beats passed miles.

CHAPTER 5

ercy’s body trembled. Balanced atop her extended toes, she seemed to occupy the exact center of the entire formless prairie. Every tendon, every strand of muscle sang with focus as she watched the tendril of ocher dust billow from the horizon.

Pihadassa smiled. She reached out, ran fingers lightly along the tense arc of the advocate’s neck. The woman started. Turned, hissed—then smiled. Pihadassa breathed a centering breath, let herself fall down the advocate’s helix. She diagnosed the war there. The need to lash out barely reined by the need to submit.

“Child,” she chided. Mercy sank immediately to her haunches. Her raptor’s arms encircled one of Pihadassa’s bare legs. Her tongue unfurled, touched its warm tip to Pihadassa’s bare knee, then her head sank between her shoulders, the way a dog’s might.

“Mother,” she whined. Her eyes shot again to the horizon. A migrant caravan, heading their way. “Let me have them, Mother.” Pihadassa stroked the soft edge of one of Mercy’s ears.

“No.” She gazed down into a wide, shallow valley that lay before her. Her landraces worked there in pairs. Mates, laboring side by side. Furrowing the valley’s contour with tools made from bits of cannibalized zep frame, or simply using their hands. Sweat shone on their sun-browned skin and they exuded contentment in their toil, fulfilling a base instinct to labor. An instinct Pihadassa had built into them.

A brown stream, thick with spring runoff, meandered the valley’s length. In the embrace of one of its curves near the valley’s center grew a ring of geodesic bone work. The nascent frame of a new dome, just large enough to support her landraces, a few hundred people. Just large enough for her to do her work.

The valley’s beauty swelled in Pihadassa’s chest, and she smiled. It was a good spot, fecund. It was the future.

Mercy whined again. The agonized sound of suppressed need.

“No,” Pihadassa told her again. “They will come here. You will let them. They will help me make my children.” She pinched Mercy’s ear. The advocate emitted a low growl, part pleasure, part pain. The smudge of dust on the horizon grew.

….

Sumedha slept, folded in flesh. The city’s deep pulse throbbed the length of his body, soothing him, speaking its love. It whispered to him, told him the secret names of its exquisite children. Names even those children, living for the pleasure of service, did not know. It told him of the Fathers grumbling, how they turned, restless in their amniotic sacks, riding the visionary edge of perpetual sleep. It whispered of the skin stretched over its dome, contracting in the cold night wind cutting down out of the Rockies. Whispered of the warbling chorus sung by the wind turbines churning in their cartilage sockets out on the plain; of the corn digesting hot in its subterranean guts. Sumedha listened, rapt, dreaming the helix.

Or perhaps the helix dreamed him. It turned like slow prayer in his mind. He broke it apart, adding and subtracting, piecing it back together. A limitless puzzle that could never be wholly solved, but that could shape a solution to any problem. His faith was thus: Ask the question and the helix would answer. Life would answer. He felt his way along the helix’s length, not analyzing, merely intending. The helix sometimes recombined itself, independent but in sync with him, a rebellious dance partner at whose insights he could only marvel.

Such moments were rare—and tonight was one of them. He lay thoughtless, hearing the city’s dream and holding the helix in his mind for long minutes, nearly weeping at its beauty. Then, like all things, it would pass. He let it go and approached it anew, watching it turn and break of its own accord. He felt a voyeur, as though the helix had been recombining itself alone in a hidden part of his mind long before he had stumbled upon it to watch. It showed him things, pointed in revelatory directions. The particulars of transcendence, whole evolutionary culminations. But when he reached to comprehend, the visions evaporated. So he relented, breathing his way deeper, letting the dream come to him on its own terms. The helix danced, twisted, spun. Abruptly stilled itself and beamed epiphanic light through Sumedha’s nervous system—

Pihadassa had gone.

Sumedha woke. The warm skin of his bed reluctantly parted, releasing him. He sat there, struggling to comprehend in his waking state what he had just witnessed. The floor’s pale fur caressed the soles of his feet. The bed undulated invitingly. He stared across the small sleeping alcove at the flushed and puckered lip of Pihadassa’s bed, ever ready to enfold Pihadassa’s smooth dark weight. He longed for her. So often they had risen together and sat opposite one another in this alcove. Naked, a mirrored pair, the male and female of primate unity. A whole.

“I want to have a child.”

She had said this upon emerging from her bed, face clouded with sleep. Dream noise, Sumedha had thought.

“No,” Sumedha told the empty chamber, performing the memory, looking for clues. “You do not. Bearing young is not an imperative you are designed for.”