Rootless (4 page)

The roads were mostly vacant as I steered through the night, heading east toward the ocean. We left all semblance of the city and the shantytown sprawl, and soon the only lights we saw were the odd scruffy settlement or lonely passerby.

Closer you get to the coast, the more nothing there is. Been that way forever. Folk stopped building too close to the Surge a long time back, afraid of everything they had breaking off and slicing into the water. That was the risk in heading out that way, seeing as you never knew when the land might crumble, the cliffs disappear.

“You always sleep in that room with your momma?” I said, spooked to the bone that Crow was going to find Zee missing.

“Not always,” Zee said. “But it helps her sleep.” She’d been snapping pictures with her camera, but they were smudged and dark and she shoved them in the bag at her feet.

I watched the old stone road as it droned beneath the wagon. “And how often you think Crow comes and checks on you?” I said, not being able to quit thinking about it.

“Now and then.”

I tried to picture Crow passed out and snoring. Done for the night. I mean, you got to think positive. That’s what Pop would have said.

I fired up the CD player on the dash and gave it the half dozen thumps it took to play the disc jammed inside. The music made me feel a bit better. I clicked to this track near the end, a song about dead flowers and some girl called Susie. My dad used to drum the steering wheel and we’d holler the chorus at each other.

“And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave.”

Better build heavy roses, Pop used to joke. Otherwise folk would steal them.

I stared at the bag at Zee’s feet — the bag full of pictures. And I thought about that photograph in my back pocket. The photograph of my old man bound up in chains.

I cranked down on the accelerator.

It wasn’t two hours and I knew we were almost there. I could tell by the way the spray reached up and blocked out the stars. I turned down the music and started to get worried the cliffs had worked their way inland. But when I pulled up, I could see the same stretch of fence, the old lot full of cars like corpses, the trash that gripped at the earth. Pop had taken me out here once. Back when I’d asked about Zion.

“Here we are,” I said. “My half of the deal.”

Feeble metal signs hung on the fence, warning you from getting too close. But when I cut the engine, Zee hopped out of the wagon wearing a wild-ass grin. I had to run out after her, tackle her down in the dirt before she got too near the edge.

“What are you doing?” She blinked at me with angry eyes, her body coiled tight.

“You got to be careful,” I said, getting to my feet and helping her up. “Let me see how stable it looks.”

I brushed her off and she wheezed and cussed and hid her face like she was ashamed of something. Like she hated me seeing her all choked up and weak. I had her wait as I stepped to the edge, surrounded by that great rush of noise, moaning and howling like the baddest wind you ever known.

I’ve heard it said people used to come to the coast for fun. The beach, people called it. They’d play around in the water and the ocean was just tame as could be. Breaks rolling in just a few feet tall.

Few feet tall?

I stared down at the waves clawing at the cliffs. Higher than any building in Vega. Spinning around like liquid twisters, a thousand stories high. Huge walls of water, pounding and breaking and making my ears hurt. The spray rose up and stuck in my nose, and out there past the breakers I could see the whole world rising and falling, carving in on itself like someone had just pulled the plug.

Something about the moon, people said. Something happened to the moon and brought it closer. I guess it didn’t used to fill up such a big chunk of sky. But it wound up close at the end of the Darkness. There was twenty years of night and when the sun came back, that moon was so close it made the ocean go crazy as hell.

I almost drowned once. Tying chains for a river willow and I slipped off the bank, and no matter how hard I thrashed I kept sinking. Everything muted. Ready to burst. Pop pulled me out of the yellow slime, but I never could face the water after that. Never could learn how to swim. I mean, the Surge would fill you with dread if you could somehow breathe underwater. But for me it was
even worse. Even high up as I was, it made my heart hammer at my bones.

I gestured to Zee, had her step closer. Some days you’d not get to the fence, the spray was so bad.

But today was Zee’s lucky day.

She peered down through the wires, and her eyes grew as wide as the waves were tall. The spray beaded up on her skin, and her mouth hung as she stared down at that frothy stampede, the rise and fall of that giant swell.

“I don’t believe it,” she shouted above the noise of the water. “It’s all like this?”

“They say the west coast’s even worse.”

Her face was wet from the spray hitting her, but I was pretty sure she was crying, too. Her face wasn’t all crumpled or anything, but her lips were pinched real tight. I reached out and took her hand.

“Come on,” I said, and I tugged her back to the wagon.

Zee didn’t want to leave right away and I was in no rush to find out what was happening back at Frost’s place, so I turned on the light inside the wagon and we sat in the front seats, our clothes all damp and salty.

“You’d never get across,” Zee said, her eyes still staring at the blank space where the stars should’ve been. I followed her gaze.

“Nope.”

“So how do we get out?”

“Out?”

“Somewhere better.” She said it so quiet I could barely hear her, like the words had hardly worked their way loose. “The Promised Land.”

“Right. Zion. Across the water.”

I felt bad for mocking her. She slumped in her seat and balled her eyes up and then she let the tears come loose. She was real quiet about it. But somehow that made it even worse.

“The rest of the pictures,” I said, not knowing what else to do. And besides, a deal’s a deal.

“Fine.” Zee tried to clear her throat. She held her bag open and I grabbed it, rummaging through a stack of photos of the sky and Frost’s metal house, Zee’s mother and Sal. Even pictures of me, wiring up the understory.

But that was it.

I stared at her.

“Screw it,” she said. “It’s not my fault.”

“Screw it? Screw you. You got me out here for nothing.”

“It’s all I’ve got. It was Crow’s camera.”

“But the trees?”

“Came with the camera. Crow fixed it and that picture spat out. You are going to give it back?”

“What the hell do you think?”

She twisted around in her seat and hacked on a cough. “You have anything to read?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m upset, and when I’m upset I like to read.”

“Must be nice,” I said. I figured she wasn’t worth getting angry with, but at the same time I was fuming. Crazy girl had me all the way out here for nothing. And who could I ask now about that picture, about my old man who’d been taken and the trees that weren’t supposed to exist?

I threw a bag of popcorn at Zee and fired up the wagon, turning it around to begin the long climb from the coast.

“‘GenTech’s been putting Superfood on the table for more than a hundred years.’” Zee read it off the bag like the words were going to make her quit crying and coughing, like it was a story that would calm her right down. “‘Through good times and bad, we’ve found a way to feed people. Corn. It’s what’s for dinner.’”

“Yeah,” I said. “Breakfast and lunch, too.”

“I read books,” she said, wiping the tears off her face. “From when there were laws and governments. And there used to be a thousand companies making the food.”

I’d heard that. But it makes no sense — everyone could have just grown food for themselves.

Zee was quiet for a bit, shaking the bag of corn and gazing out the window.

“So where else have you been?” she said finally.

“I’ve been around.”

“Vega?”

“Almost.”

“Far south?”

“Never seen the Wall, if that’s what you mean.”

“What about north?”

“Built trees in Niagara.”

“And past that?”

“Ain’t nothing past that,” I said. “Nothing but the wastelands. Lava and steam.”

“The Rift.”

“That’s what they call it.” I stared across at her. “I’m telling you to drop it. Nothing grew back after the Darkness. Nothing but corn. You ever seen a locust?”

Zee shook her head.

“Better hope you don’t never do,” I said, like I’d seen one. “They’ll rip your skin off faster than you can piss your pants.”

“Then Zion’s far off. Or hidden, somewhere safe.”

“Grow up,” I said, wishing to hell she’d quit chirping on about it.

“So how do you explain the picture? The trees and that sky so clear?”

“Ain’t no explaining it,” I said. “That’s why I gotta find out how Crow got the camera.”

“He got it from people he used to work with.”

“A watcher job?”

“No. He used to work for them. For GenTech.” She said it like it was the most normal thing in the world. But how do you go from being a Soljah to a GenTech agent, and then wind up as a Steel Cities watcher?

It didn’t make sense. No one hates GenTech more than the Soljahs.

“Crow worked for GenTech?” I stared at Zee. “You sure?”

She held up a stack of photographs and showed me the back of each one. The GenTech logo in purple ink.

“Don’t mean nothing,” I said.

“You’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t. Not now I’ve seen the Surge. They’re crazy. The pair of them.”

“Who?”

“Crow. And Frost. They’re as bad as each other. Build a boat big enough. Frost and his stupid coordinates.”

“Coordinates?” I said. My foot had eased off the accelerator and I pulled off the road as the wagon ground to a halt. I stared at her. “What coordinates?”

“That’s why they’re working together, hunting their prize. Crow’s been searching for years. That’s what he did for GenTech, I guess. Chasing rumors and clues.”

“Clues to what?”

“The trees,” Zee said, staring at me through the darkness. “The last trees on earth.”

What if it existed? The idea jammed inside me. What if it was real? A place where wild things grew. Not just a photograph. Not just a trick or a dream. Trees. Real trees. Real enough that people were looking for them. That GenTech was looking for them. And somehow my father had wound up in their midst?

I suddenly thought about Frost’s house, my understory of squeaky wheels. And if there were trees out there with roots getting deeper and limbs reaching high, then what good had it been building forests out of crappy bits of tin?

I climbed out of the car and a rotten salt wind blew off the Surge and stung the dust around me. I felt sick. Swallowed whole. And I wished to hell I could just sleep. Shut myself down, shut myself up. But all I could see behind my eyelids was my old man’s face.

I kicked the back wheel of the wagon. It just didn’t make any damn sense. None of it did. And though Pop was coiled up in chains in that picture, it made me almost bitter that the folk doing the taking hadn’t snatched me up, too. I’d been just left here in the dirt with the junk and the hungry. I kicked the wheel again. Then I slammed a fist at the wagon and damn near broke my hand.

“Stop,” Zee cried, staring at me across the roof of the car. “We got to figure out what to do.”

“Do? I’m gonna drop you off, that’s what I’m gonna do.”

“Then what?”

I stared back at the Surge. Then I looked west where the land crumbled like bits of cornbread. And I imagined soil bound with roots and wood for the burning and shade from the sun and a rest from the wind. And I pictured Pop, the metal chains wound around him, strapping him to the tree. Why? What was he doing there? It didn’t matter. If it were me in trouble, I knew my dad would come running.

“How long you had that camera?” I said.

“Crow tracked it down a few months back.”

“And who was it he got it from? I mean what was their name?”

“I don’t know. Want to ask him?”

“I will if I have to.”

Zee went to say something but the words got knocked out of her. She fell as the wagon slumped and the ground rumbled and the world split wide open.

“No,” I whispered, staring back at the ocean.

Zee’s holler rose up like a siren but I didn’t need another warning. I yanked open the door and jumped behind the wheel, cranking the engine as the ground let out a sigh and compressed again beneath us.

The road sank about fifteen feet.

“Get in,” I yelled, reaching across and tugging Zee into the car, slamming down the accelerator.

I stared into the mirror, watched dirt rise like smoke across the night. Another boom and the wagon slipped, but I floored it, willing
it to keep going. Zee was kneeling up on her seat now, spun around to stare behind us, watching as the cliffs disappeared in the distance, gasping each time a new chunk of earth got gobbled by the furious Surge.

For years the cliffs had stayed where they were. But now they were hollow. Broken. And the world was collapsing.

Zee kept squealing till her lungs got choked. Then she was coughing. And when she weren’t coughing she was begging me to go faster. As if I weren’t thumping at the engine, fast as it would go.

Hard to see now. Dust filling the darkness. I could feel the road stodgy beneath the wheels. Dirt any deeper and we’d have been swimming in it.

Swimming.

I thought about that watery death, clawing its way closer. And I knew swimming wouldn’t help you, but not having the option still made it so much worse. I could almost feel the water in my lungs already, my chest tightening, just as it had all those years before. My limbs useless. Everything squeezing shut.

I stared straight ahead, tried to blink the fear out of me. But then Zee cried my name like I’d pinched her.

“What?”

“I think it’s stopping,” she called. I strained my ears to listen above the sound of the wagon. Was that it? Silence?

I stomped at the accelerator. Far from convinced.

But another few minutes and the dust began clearing, and what was left of the road had stayed where it was. I wound my window down, stuck my face out in the night.

The Surge felt far away. In the distance.

But then the ground began ripping apart right in front of us. A huge gash, breaking open the road and getting wider. As if the world had grown so weary it was tearing itself to pieces, slicing its brittle remains into shreds.