Rootless (9 page)

I had the nail gun tucked at my waist and my shirt pulled down over it. And I kept faking at the engine as the pirates rumbled closer. They had music blasting, a regular party rolling up. The electric sound of guitars split the air as the first truck sank to a stop.

The wind went soft and the dust eased a little. I turned from my engine and made a big deal of peering up at the truck closest to me, flashing the dumbest grin you ever seen. I yelled out, about as loud and cheery as I could manage. Act like you got nothing to worry about. That was my plan.

Each one of those tankers had nine sets of wheels and a solid box on the back, guns spiky off the top and pointy out the side. I studied the lifted tires with rubber knuckle tread, the graffiti, and tinted windows.

The music stopped and the engines sighed, then fell silent.

I waded over to the truck closest, waving my hands in the air, and just as I reached the cab, its door came flying open and all I could see was legs.

Thighs. Holy shit. As strong as they were pretty. The girl leapt out of the cab and stared down her broken nose at me.

Seen one pirate, you seen a hundred. The mohawks and the rubber boots. Three-foot hair and six-inch heels. If she was older than me, there weren’t much in it, but her eyes showed the true mileage, if you know what I mean. A rifle of some sort hung loose off her shoulder. Goggles dangled from her neck, like the dust didn’t bother her a bit.

“Something wrong with your wagon?” the girl said, crossing her arms as she looked me over.

“The power converter.” I shrugged. “Think the fuse is fried.”

“Where you heading?”

“Vega.”

“Alone?”

“Why? You want to come?” I pushed my goggles up and squinted in the dust, as if I might match her in some way. “I could use a little company.”

The pirate threw her head back in the storm and laughed, her breasts rocking inside her fuzzy pink vest. Then she stepped closer to me and lifted my shirt up. “So what’s this for?”

“It’s a nail gun.”

“You always carry it shoved in your pants like that?”

“Not always.”

“Just a regular joker, huh?”

“Just stuck on the side of the road, sister,” I said. “Any chance you got parts for a trade?”

“Why? What you got in the back?”

One of the trucks began blasting its horn at us, voices yelled through the dust. But the girl just raised her hand to silence them. She threw open the back of the wagon, peering in at my bag of tools, the
scattered bags of popcorn. I was pretty sure I’d left enough in there to look realistic. Bit of food. Bucket of fuel.

“Grab that,” she said, pointing at the juice.

“What for?”

“You’re bringing it with you. Your tools, too.”

I reached for the nail gun. Panic coming over me. I tried to pull the gun up, point it at her, but the pirate just crushed her knee in my chest and I felt my arms go floppy. She grabbed the gun off the ground and shoved it at my arm, lodged a nail there so fast I’d no time to scream.

I staggered back. Fell. The pain surged through me like my arm had caught fire. My body writhed in the dust. The pirate girl snatched me up with one hand, grabbed my bag of tools with the other, and then she dragged me across the road to the back of her truck. My heels scraped through the dirt, my arm was ready to explode. I just stared back at my wagon, and for some reason, the worst of it was that hatch left hanging wide open, the car filling up with sand. Like the wagon had rolled its last mile and the world was telling me that nothing lasts forever.

Nothing, Banyan. Least of all you.

“Watch out, ladies,” the pirate yelled into the belly of the truck as a hundred eyes blinked shiny from its depths. “This one’s a charmer.”

She hoisted me up and hurled me inside the tanker.

And the tanker was full of bodies.

Nothing but skin and bones, wound tight with terror, painted in piss and vomit. They were slumped in puddles of sweat on the floor. Stinking like week-old shit.

Every lousy part of me screamed and jerked and hustled, and my arm pulsed and my head spun. But there weren’t no escape.

I screamed till my mouth was frothy. Tried to bolt. But the pirate pushed me back until I felt flesh beneath me, fingers clutching me, the slimy mob absorbing me in its gristle.

As the door slammed shut and sealed in the gloom, I squirmed and wriggled and gasped for air. The smell almost stopped me from breathing, but I fought to stay conscious, wrestled with myself to keep my eyes peeled.

For what?

Nothing to see but broken teeth and yellow skin. Nothing but bony flesh. I wound my way up to a wall as the wheels began moving. The music cranked on in the distance, and the squealing guitars knifed through the moans that whimpered out of my mouth and out the mouth of every sucker in there. Every now and then, a voice rose up or a fist pounded at the metal — one of the newer captives, I guess, one of the ones I’d seen stumbling on the road. But mostly the fear suffocated the sound out of everyone. It kept us pressed down, muffled in the dark.

What now? I thought. What next?

I shuddered. Broke out cold and sweaty. I was captive. The wagon would rust. And my book would crumble and the bark would fade and every one of Zee’s pictures would turn blank like bits and pieces of nothing that ever mattered anyway. And my father would fade, too. Just like a photograph. He’d be killed in the spring and I’d be killed before him and there’d be no one to remember either one of us in the end.

I turned my face to the wall and sobbed. I clutched the nail in my arm and wished only to be numb. There was nowhere further to drop.

But then it was worse.

Because then the truck stopped and the door groaned open a little. “This one with you?” a woman called in at me.

I couldn’t turn. Couldn’t look at all. I just felt Sal grab a hold of me and hold on tight, the poor little bastard screaming so loud I could barely hear the door clanging shut behind him.

They played the same damn album. Over and over. Cranking up the volume at all the same places until we got wherever it was we were heading.

All I wanted to do was black out. Disappear. But I knew I had to stay awake and pay attention. So that’s what I did — eyes closed but my ears pricked. And I counted that album cycle through four times before the truck stopped. So I figured we’d been driving about four hours. And at this speed, off-roading it, I guessed that put the wagon at a day’s walk. If you knew the direction.

When the wheels stopped rolling, voices broke out inside the tanker, wobbling and whining, choking on bitter sounds. I tried to picture something safe in my head, something good, and I imagined I was back in the Tripnotyst’s memory box and trees were growing all green around me.

Eventually, I heard the squealing of latches, the sound of steel on steel, and my eyes watered as daylight poured in like ice water.

Sal’s arms were locked tight around my waist and I pried him off as I slithered to the doorway. I tried to stagger to my feet. But one by one, the pirates appeared. Silhouetted black against the setting sun. I
counted their mohawks, their broad shoulders, the hips laden with pouches and guns. There was too many of them. Way too many.

I fell out of the truck and the mud was slimy on my face. Dark and sweet and wet. I let the stuff ooze inside me, tried to breathe it in and scrub the stench of the truck from my mind.

Bodies were stacked around me, on top of me, and I felt hands clutching at me, tapping frantic on my back. Spinning up, I could see it was Sal again, reaching for me. I stared up at the glimmering sky and wiped spit from my mouth, tried to croak some words to the kid, to comfort him.

But no words would come.

Between the two trucks, the pirates had racked up at least a hundred bodies, and god knows where they’d gotten them all.

The ones who couldn’t wake or walk were picked up or dragged as the rest of us limped forward, following the pirate who’d caught me, the one who strutted like she was the biggest badass ever seen, her tall rubber boots splashing in the mud.

Alpha. That’s what the others called her. And I reckoned that was the word stitched crooked in the back of her fuzzy vest, too.

I took Sal by the hand and led him through the slop, doing my best to stand upright, doing my best to see where in the hell we were going.

The air was as sticky as the mud and it pressed your skin, daring you to breathe it. The sun was low now, puke orange, but the day showed no sign of cooling. And it was still. No wind. No flutter or breeze. So we’d dropped south, I reckoned. Somewhere south of the forty.

Up ahead, an ancient settlement sat on stone stilts above brown water. There were bridges and walkways strewn between flat buildings, everything crumbling and patched with plastic.

The pirates pushed us up a ramp that led over the slime and deep inside the settlement. A rubbery banner frowned over our heads.

“What’s it say?” I said, nudging at Sal.

“Old Orleans,” he muttered, glancing up at the curly letters. I stared down through the slats and stone, watched the water move like sewage.

It was like being stranded in the devil’s own shantytown, the world dissolving below you, leaving you in the refuse of days gone by.

Buried a half mile inside the town was another ramp, but this one led downward. The pirates kicked and prodded us into a watery corral, then they yanked rusty chains to pull the ramp over our heads, blocking out the near darkness of the sky.

I peered around at my fellow prisoners as they splashed and sat and buried their faces. I felt at my arm, the flat end of the nail solid beneath the festering wound.

“What are we gonna do?” Sal whispered. But I just peered up at the walkway, listened as the women went stomping away.

Somewhere in the enclosure a baby began wailing, and the whole world seemed to silence at the sound of it. Then the ramp started to lower again and we scurried from its path. A single pair of boot heels swaggered down the ramp, and I spotted the pink vest and the broken nose, watched as Alpha found the baby and took it in her arms. The infant fell silent as Alpha rocked it upon her hip, hushing and cooing the child and bundling it in rags. Weren’t something you’d think
would look right. But it did. And her tenderness sure stuck out in a place so ugly and torn.

“You people are safe here,” Alpha said, and the whole place froze still. “For now. Some of you will be traded. The rest will be set free.”

A murmur rippled through the enclosure, then cut short. I wanted to say something, shout out loud, but all I did was watch as Alpha held the baby close and strode up the ramp away from us, leaving those who could manage it to holler and beg.

Traded. That’s what she’d said. Traded like an old world Benjamin or piece of salvage, a jug of water or a gallon of juice. But what was our value? I stared at the filthy bodies surrounding me, the ragged bits of skin in the moonlight.

What good were we to anyone but ourselves?

It made me get to wondering if this was how Pop had been taken. But him and me had been out near Vega, the other side of the cornfields, and pirates don’t go messing where GenTech is at. Besides, all the racket they made, I would have heard pirates coming. Whoever stole Pop away had been stealthy. Because Pop had heard voices, but I never heard a damn thing.

I finally gave up standing and sank down in the sludge. Sal slumped beside me, waiting, I’d no doubt, for me to tell him how come we were pinned inside the leftovers of a city, trapped by buildings rooted in mud.

“They’ll take him for sure,” a raspy voice said behind me, and I spun around to a beady set of eyes. The man’s head was smudged silver in the moonlight, his cheeks hammered hollow and thin. “The fat one,” the man whispered, staring at me.

“What you talking about?”

“He’s young. And there’s plenty of him.”

“For what?” Sal said in a small voice.

The scrawny dude scrunched up his shoulders. “For whatever they like.”

“Shut it,” I said, turning away. “Don’t you listen to him.”

But Sal was already sobbing, his fists squeezed tight.

I felt at my arm where the nail stung and throbbed, and I knew much longer and I’d have to claw the damn thing out with my fingers. At sunrise, I told myself, pulling away from Sal and hunkering down to sleep. I needed to rest, if I could. I couldn’t do anything now. Not until the sun came up.

But when the sun came up, I was caught in a sickness, wrapped inside a fever that painted the brown world red.