Rootless (10 page)

I’d not hardly opened my eyes and I was throwing up what little was inside me. My head swirled, and I clutched the mud as if I could stop the earth from moving. I felt hands on me, stroking the hair from my eyes. I was wriggling around and shivering, my skin all thorny and pricked.

“He’s burning up,” Sal yelled, his voice piercing through the blur.

The pain howled in my arm, and I reached slippery fingers to where the nail had worked its way deep.

Eyes closed. Eyes open. It didn’t matter. My guts twitched and I heaved again, and not a single drop squeezed out.

In a different world, I could hear the ramp cranking down amid a stampede of boots and voices. Then the smell of old leather filled me with nausea as hands grappled hold of my shoulders and grabbed at my feet.

“How many more days we got to keep them?” said the woman at my legs, her fingers sharp on my ankles.

“I quit counting,” the voice right above me shot back, and the sound vibrated through me as the pirate woman sank my head against her
chest. Her breath reeked like smoke she’d swallowed a thousand years prior. “Flip him,” she said. “He’s gonna lose his lunch.”

Lunch.

The word jabbed at me as they turned me facedown and rushed me up the ramp. And I could almost taste burned corn and warm water, feel the breeze atop a finished forest. Me and Pop and a meal fit for kings. My old man trading me kernels so as to double my rations. And if I died now, then there’d be no one to go looking for him. No one to care.

In the distance there was music, a guitar stopping and starting and the sound of women singing. I strained my ears to listen. Blinked my eyes open.

I was stretched on a lumpy cot beneath a corrugated ceiling, little bits of sky poking through the metal, revealing the pink of a sun giving up or a sun coming back.

I shivered. Ran my hands on my tender skin. Naked. I clutched my stomach and it felt swollen and sticky. I tried to raise up my head but a hand eased me back.

“Rest,” the girl said.

It was her. Alpha. The one who’d plugged me with the nail in the first place. I struggled against her and felt at my arm. The wound was bandaged now, the skin puffy.

“Pulled it out,” Alpha said as I squinted up at her. “Can’t have you dying on us.”

“Shouldn’t have shot me, then,” I whispered, feeling a searing pain up the back of my skull.

“You tried to shoot me first, bud. Remember?”

She swabbed a damp cloth at my chest and I tensed as the water dripped and tickled. I remembered how this girl had looked with the baby on her hip — like someone who hadn’t had all the sweetness beat out of her. And then the pain came tearing at my eyeballs again, and I blacked out hard and cold.

Went on like this for hours. Rolling back and forth on the cot, coming to, then passing out again. The voices quivering in the distance, singing and laughing. And Alpha returning to bathe me and check on my wound.

The holes in the ceiling became plugged with night, then turned pale with morning. And I didn’t think of my pals down in the mud pit. Not even once.

I’d been left alone and was drowsy and spent when the door came open and a new girl came in. She pulled a sheet across me and sat beside me on the cot.

“Alpha tells me you’re a tree builder,” the girl said. She looked young, and much too small for a pirate.

“Used to be,” I muttered, turning away from her. “Lost all my tools.”

“I don’t think it’s the tools that matter. Either you are something or you’re not.”

I stayed silent.

“Let me see your hands,” she said, not giving me much choice in the matter. She studied my fingertips, felt at my palms.

“I want you to build something for us,” the girl said, looking satisfied. “To finish something.”

I tried to sit up on the cot but was too weak, so I just blinked
at her. She was handsome, in a stern sort of way. Her braided hair was blond, and cleaner than it had any right to be in a town so full of filth.

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“You can call me Jawbone. Though most here call me Captain.”

“Thought Alpha was in charge.”

“Alpha answers to me.”

“You don’t look much like a captain.”

She smiled, all patient and shit. I started to say something else but she cut me off.

“You should feel honored. Your work will leave quite the legacy.” The girl spoke smart, like she’d been schooled or something, not grown up here south of the forty.

“You’ll have to excuse me not giving a damn,” I said.

“I imagine you give a damn about one thing. Yourself.”

“You can imagine all you want.”

“If you build for us, then you’ll go free.”

I stopped cold at that, felt my guard slip.

“Another few days and King Harvest will be here,” she went on. “You can be part of our trade with him. Or not.”

Build or be traded. Easy enough choice.

“I got a friend, though,” I said, surprising myself with the word. “Little fat kid, down in your pit.”

“You can take my terms or reject them. But they’re not to be altered.”

“Then you’d better let me sleep,” I told her. “I’ll start building once the heat wears down.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” the girl said, standing. “I’d like nothing more than to free all of them.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Because King Harvest requires we meet our quota. One way or another.”

At sunset, I was strong enough to stand, and I took to the walkways with Alpha on one side of me and Jawbone on the other.

We worked our way wordlessly through Old Orleans, pausing only when I needed to rest, my arm still swollen and aching, my whole body drained to its core. I’d lean up on the metal railing and study the strange, dustless sky or examine the foundations of buildings that had once stood tall. The brown water sat stagnant below us, filling the air with a dampness as sour as it was soft.

The pirate women gazed at me as I passed them, some of them winking or smiling, their faces blurring into one. Jawbone walked with her mouth stern and the women gave way as their captain hustled by. But Alpha joked with her compadres, slapping at their outstretched hands.

In the distance, I heard generators growl and the music started again, guitars crashing and drums surging and each one fighting the other for control.

“Here we are,” Jawbone said finally. We were right in the middle of the city and on the edge of a clearing, an empty stretch of concrete and mud. And in the middle of that clearing was what they’d brought me to see.

I stopped dead and felt dizzy just trying to take in the sight of it.

It was incredible work. Stunning. Even though the years had caked everything in rust.

A low canopy of copper ferns mingled with cypress. Palm leaves, carved from tin, dangled from crooked spokes. The shortness gave the forest a softness, a sweetness I’d rarely considered, always striving for the biggest, tallest trees, always climbing as high as the scaffold would take me. But the lack of height had another purpose. It served to accentuate what had been built at the center.

I stumbled as I stared up at the unfinished statue. I fell against jagged shrubs, and Alpha grabbed me, pulling me so I could lean against her.

“What do you think?” said Jawbone, peering with me at the rusty masterpiece.

I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t say anything.

“Can you finish it?” Alpha asked.

I nodded.

I could finish it. Or at least I would try. Because there, in the middle of the forest, rising up a hundred feet high, was something prettier than any tree I’d ever seen. A statue of a woman with arms spread wide and one leg lifted like she was dancing. And not just any woman, either. I knew it even though the head was unfinished and the hair was missing. I knew it deep down in my bones.

The statue was the tattoo woman. Zee’s mother.

Frost’s wife.

Whoever had built the statue had got the proportions perfect, not selling her short by making the boobs too big or the legs more curvy.
They’d been true to the slope of her shoulders, the delicate way she held up her neck. But what really got me, what blew me away, was how they’d captured the tree.

They’d built a separate installation for it, then woven one statue with the other, bending the steel branches so they gripped the woman’s waist, the leaves hanging loose so they’d turn in the breeze, shimmering where all else was rust. I studied their texture.

Brass. Of course.

Thin and shiny and perfect. And I knew I’d have never thought of brass. Not in a million years.

“Used to light up,” Alpha said. “Switch different colors, till the wiring got messed.”

“Where’d it come from?” I pushed myself forward.

“Came from right here,” said Jawbone. “We had a craftsman. An artist. This was before I was born. Back when the pirates were still united. When we fought as the Army of the Fallen Sun.”

“And this army had a tree builder?”

“He built the forest here, some others we lost in the lowlands. Swamps, people would have called them. Once upon a time.”

“But what about the woman?”

“She was found not far from here, down near the South Wall. Our women say she came from the Other Side.”

“You ever seen the Wall?” Alpha said, and I nodded, picturing the memory screen. “Then you know that’s impossible.”

“Myth. Legend.” Jawbone waved her hand in the air. “The story goes that she was beautiful and the tattoo she wore was more beautiful, still. Our tree builder fell in love with her, began building this to
honor her. And I like to think, to honor all women. Just as he’d honored life through his building of trees.”

“But he didn’t finish?”

“No. He and his muse vanished. Just before the city was destroyed by the Purple Hand.”

“GenTech?”

“It was the end of our resistance. And that’s where the story ends. Until you. Finish the statue, and you’re free to leave the city.”

I stared up at the curves of the woman and the steel limbs of the tree. “What else do you know about the tattoo she wore?”

“There were numbers on it,” Alpha said, and Jawbone rolled her eyes. “They say if you could play those numbers in Vega, you’d strike it rich.”

I watched the tarnished brass leaves turning. I’d never heard about pirates fighting GenTech. Never thought anyone but the Soljahs had tried to make a stand. It made me wonder what else might be buried out here beneath the plains. What battles had raged on the mud? What cities had sunk under the sand?

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll work at night. Right through till the sun gets hot. I’ll need a scaffold, though. And my tools. Every bit of scrap you got. You got spare hands, I can use them. Wire can clean the rust right off that metal, and you should keep at it long after I’m gone.” People think you just build up some trees and you got yourself a forest. But you got to tend it. Just like everything else.

“Alpha will help you any way you need. I’ll send others as necessary.” Jawbone extended her little hand and I shook it.

“Your lucky day,” Alpha said, nudging my ribs as Jawbone slipped
away. Then Alpha handed me the nail gun, fixed me with a grin. “Best be careful, though,” she said. “Don’t want that luck running out.”

“What was the name of the woman?” I said, still staring up at the statue. “The woman from the South Wall?”

“Hina,” Alpha said. “That’s what we call her, anyway.”

“Hina,” I said to myself, like I was trying to see if it fit. And now she wasn’t just someone’s mother or somebody’s wife, a map or a statue.

Now she was someone with a name.

I left the face blank. Only not. I figured if I was building something for all women, then I should somehow try to reflect each one of them. And that’s what I did. I broke glass and mirrors into pieces the size of my hand, then glued those chunks all across the metal sheets I’d beaten to the shape of her cheekbones and the fullness of her lips. I put the shiniest blocks in diamond patterns where her eyes should’ve been and I cast her gaze downward as I soldered the face to the frame my predecessor had left behind.

I worked through till sunrise and left the head coated in a plastic tarp, exhausted as I slipped down the side of the scaffold that Alpha and me had set the evening before.

At the bottom of the final ladder, Alpha was stretched on her back, staring up at the statue. She spread her arms and moved her legs, mimicking Hina’s pose as I dropped from the scaffold. I ran my fingers at the wound on my arm. Seemed like this pirate girl could act more like a girl or more like a pirate. And I reckoned the girl was a whole lot more to my liking.

“How’s it coming up there?” she said, eyeing me.

“What do you think?”

“I think we got ourselves a real tree builder, that’s what I think.”

I stared at her as she stared at the statue. And for a moment, I wondered what she’d do if I was to try running right then. I’d not get far, I reckoned. Even if I could make it to the city walls, there was no way I’d get over.

“You born in this city?” I said, collapsing onto the dirt beside her. She rolled over so she was looking at me, and I studied her eyes for the first time. Before I’d been sort of blinded by the mohawk or the way that she moved, but her eyes were golden and brown and real pretty, too. Like sunlight on a muddy river.

“What’s it to you, bud?” Alpha said, and I’d nearly forgot I’d asked her a question. Hell, I was still gazing into her eyes like a damn fool.

“Just wondered if you’re a local girl.”

“Why? Where are you from?”

“Nowhere,” I told her. “Nowhere at all.”

That day I hardly slept worth a damn. I kept waking to the strange sounds of the city, wanting to head back to the forest but then drowsing off again. Slipping in and out of dreams like I was waiting for something. And I reckon I was waiting on Alpha to come get me. But Alpha never showed.

At sunset, I made my way outside, figuring a route that put me right above the mud pit. With the ramp raised up, you could hardly see the bodies twisted below, but I squatted on the walkway, checked to make sure I was alone, and then stared down at the squirming rags.

“Sal,” I hissed, peering under the railing. “It’s Banyan.”

A face glanced up from the shadows. The scrawny dude I’d spoken with before. “Got better, did you?” he called.

“You seen my buddy? The fat kid?”

I heard Sal calling, scrabbling into view. “Banyan,” he yelled. “Banyan.”

“Right here, kid.”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting free.”

His face turned red and tight and he clenched his fist at me. “What about me?” he screamed, and I stood to make sure no one was paying attention to his ruckus.

“Keep your voice down,” I hissed. “Someone’ll come.”

“Don’t you forget about me,” he yelled as I sauntered away, and I could hear him calling after me. “Don’t you forget, tree boy. I got the number. The number you need.”

When I reached the forest, I got caught up in my tracks again. In patches, the trees were still rusty. But many were now sparkling in the dusk.

I watched the women working at the leaves and branches, scraping with wire and steel wool, just as I’d said. Alpha hooted and whooped at the sight of me.

“You like it?” she called, her whole body coated in sweat. And the forest looked great, but I tell you, that girl looked even better. She strutted and shook on the scaffold, her body like a smokeless fire. Her skin slippery and gold.

A pirate with green hair said something to Alpha that made all the women bust out laughing, and they kept staring at me as I pretended to be busy, checking their work. My face burned up red as they watched me. And that just made them laugh even more.

Ahead of me, Jawbone dropped from the scaffold where she’d been working at Hina’s thigh.

“Hell of a job,” I told her as she came toward me.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “You, too.”

That night, I got all the rebar curved how I wanted and then welded it together just right. Way I did it, the hair was shorter than Hina wore it, but it’d work better that way, putting the focus more on her face.

I worked with Alpha beside me. She was good with the blowtorch, and the sparks shone in her eyes as the soot stained our skin. We welded till the sun was too high and then rolled back into the city, swelled by that good kind of tired when your body’s been worked to the bone.

“So you build a statue,” Alpha said, as I knelt to drink from a rusty pipe. “And then you never see it again.”

I splashed the dirty water on my face, the back of my neck. It was still early and the streets were empty.

“Me seeing them ain’t what’s important,” I said. “Just so long as somebody can.”

“And you make enough to keep drifting, one place to the next?”

“Better than robbing folk blind and hauling them off the forty.”

Alpha knelt beside me, cupped her hands under the pipe. “It’s called surviving, bud.”

“Gotta believe in more than that.”

She rubbed water over her arms, smeared the soot off her legs. “Like what?”

“Like what you leave behind.” I pointed back toward the forest. “The statues, they’re like stories. They keep things from getting forgot.”

“You believe what the Rastas say? That there’s still a place where real things grow?”

“I don’t know. They say it’s over the ocean. And I’ve seen the Surge.” I nearly felt bad for lying to her. For not telling her there were trees growing someplace. Trees people were fighting to find.

“So you like statues and stories,” Alpha said, making to stand. “What about old world songs?”

“Never had much in the way of music. Though I guess I never had many stories, either.”

“That’s what you get for just drifting.” She grinned. “Come on. You better stick with me.”

I scrambled up, and we started along a broken path. And as I followed behind her, I felt like I was being tugged toward something. Like how the needle on a compass points north.

In a far corner of the city, we reached a crooked stone building, and the dirty flag raised above it showed a falling yellow sun. Alpha banged at the door, then pushed it open, leading me inside.

“Captain?” she hollered into the silence. “You here?”

There was no answer. We were alone, out of the sunlight.

And we were surrounded by hundreds of books.

I stared around at the walls, the shelves full of pages and dust. All that paper. All those words.

A plastic desk sat in the middle of the room, and in the corner there was an old bathtub full of CDs. Piles of books had been stacked
like towers across the floor. It was beautiful. Cluttered and sealed off from the world. My old man would have loved it.

“Where’d you get these?” I said, rushing to the shelves and running my hands along the soft covers, the cardboard spines.

“They were passed down to Jawbone,” Alpha said. “Along with the right to read ’em. I’m not even supposed to come in here. But she’s a good one, the Captain. Reads to us all the time.”

“Yeah?” I grabbed a book and started thumbing at the pages. “You heard Lewis and Clark?”

“Don’t think so.” Alpha stared at the book in my hands. “You can read?”

“My dad used to.”

“Where’s he at now?”

I stayed quiet. I felt sort of pissed for bringing it up at all. It was none of this girl’s business. And even if the books had blown me away, wasn’t this just a waste of my time?

“Said you were heading to Vega,” she said.

“I am.” I slammed the book back on the shelf. “Once I get the hell out of here.”

“Don’t worry, bud. I’ll help you finish it. Soon as the sun goes down.” She came over and straightened up the shelf beside me.

“You could let me run now. If you wanted. You could show me which way to go.”

“What’s the rush? You got a girl waiting?” She said it half like she was joking.

“Ain’t got no girl, damn it. It’s my old man. He’s in all kinds of trouble.”

“Then I tell you what, you finish the statue like the Captain wants, and I’ll drive you back to the forty. First chance we get.”

“You would?”

“Sure.” Alpha leaned against the shelves and studied me. “Most folk are just busy trying to keep alive. Seems like you’re different, bud.”

“Thought you were just about survival.”

“I thought you said there’s something more.”

It was like she wanted to believe it. Or she wanted to believe in me, maybe. I picked up a book and glared at the cover, my brain all jumbled and fried.

“I know how it feels,” Alpha said, her voice soft. “My mom raised me here and left me here and I used to wish for a whole lot different.”

“And now what?”

“I quit wishing, that’s all. There’s folk who think the pirates are gonna come back together. Bring down the Purple Hand. But that’s just dreaming. I had a baby sister, and I used to whisper her promises and they all ended up lies.”

Girl made my dizzy. First she’d shot me, then she’d healed me. And now she was going to tell me the things that lay heavy upon her?

“Hard to be alone already,” she said. “Ain’t it?”

I looked into her brown eyes like she might blink me inside them. And the room seemed to turn for a moment, as if the world was trying to spin me toward her.

“I ain’t alone,” I said, losing my balance and knocking over a stack of books on the floor. “Not as long as my old man’s alive.”

I was exhausted all of a sudden, and I sank to the ground.

“What’s he like?” Alpha said, sitting beside me.

“He’s smart. Real smart. And he can be funny as hell.”

I wanted to say more, but I remembered the night Pop got taken. I pictured myself shut inside the wagon as the dust storm raged, strangers creeping around outside. I’d been frightened. Too frightened. And I’d just stayed in the wagon, safe, waiting on Pop to come back.

I put my head in my hands.

“I gotta finish that statue,” I whispered.

“Then you’d better go get some rest.”

She was right. Outside the sun was too high and too hot, and I let Alpha guide me back to the shack. She left me alone, and I sprawled on the cot. But my mind worked too fast to quit.

I kept picturing myself in that room full of stories, surrounded by the beautiful books. And where was my old man? Trapped and alone somewhere. No books. No pretty girls to make eyes at. Did he even remember the future we’d mapped out together? The forest we were going to build of our own? I imagined us in a house with ragged tin walls, surrounded by cast-iron branches and leaves we’d change in the fall and the spring.

Usually spring comes before the killing. That’s what the old Rasta had said. And now those words just stuck to my brain.

Murderers, the old Rasta had told me.

Murderers, the lot of them.

I headed back to the forest before the sun even started to drop. Told myself I had to stay strong. Had to keep my head in the game. Had to finish that statue, get Sal, and then get us to Vega and find that damn GPS.

It was near dawn by the time I’d wrapped the finishing touches. Alpha was working below, and the sun had just started to blur the horizon, painting the eastern edge of the earth with a smear. I watched the pink embers grow and hover, the sun bubbling up.

“Here it comes,” I yelled down. And I drew the tarp back from the face that was now cloaked in iron threads, watching as Alpha studied her thousand reflections in the splintered rays of dawn.

She pulled herself up the ladders and scaffold, moving effortless and alive. And when she reached the top, I could smell the taste of her sweat mixed with leather and steel.

“Can I touch it?” she said.

“Go ahead.”

She ran her fingers over Hina’s glittering face and tapped each one of her reflections, laughing when she glimpsed me behind her.

“It’s incredible,” she said.

“I like seeing you in it.” It was like the words got spoke before I’d thought them. Like my mouth had played a trick on my brain.

“That so?” Alpha turned to face me.

My skin prickled, being right up close to her. My bones felt heavy and loose. And my mind started racing and my heart beat fast, hard to know which was quicker.

“So,” she said. “You’re done.”

“I reckon.”

“You reckon.” It was like she was bitter about something. I started to speak, but she cut back in. “Relax, bud. I’ll get you back to the road and you can keep on drifting.”

“I ain’t drifting,” I shot back at her. “I got a father to find.”

Alpha laughed again, but her laugh had lost its juice. She went and sat on the edge of the scaffold and peeled off her boots, dangling her feet over the top of the forest. And I stood where she’d left me, staring down at where the ferns gave way to the crumbled old streets.

“So you’re always gonna live here?” I said. “In Old Orleans?”

“There’s worse places.”

“You seen ’em?”

“Not unless they’re between here and the forty.”

“So you never really been anywhere.”

“Where else is there to go?” She said it like she was all done talking, but I thought about the sprawl and the Surge and the endless miles of dirt between them. And I thought about the electric lights, the skyline of Vega, like concrete mountains all sparkled and bright. And above it all, just the steam rolling down and the ash blowing off the lava that pours out of the Rift.

“Niagara’s worth seeing,” I said. “The Soljahs got a whole city built behind waterfalls. It’s something to look at, anyway. Though with the water crashing, you can’t hardly hear yourself think.”

For a moment, I thought about telling Alpha about the trees and Pop and the old Rasta with the bark in his skin. The GPS numbers and the Promised Land. But how could I trust her? I reckoned she’d be loyal to that captain of hers, and there wasn’t room in this for an army of pirates. And besides, I didn’t want to become just Alpha’s ticket to something. She’d offered to help me out, get me back to my wagon. And it had been since Pop had been taken that I’d seen a helping hand.