Seed (36 page)

“It was like this country’d forgotten itself when I got home from the war,” Doss spoke at the ground. Her voice sounded like someone else’s. “Forgot it ever existed. US of motherfucking A. It wasn’t there anymore. There was just Neil.”

She thumbed the drip anew, let herself drift. Thought of her father sitting on the one-bod rack in his little cinderblock apartment. Sipping myconal, chewing his algae-stained fingernails while he listened vacantly to weather reports issuing from the one working speaker of his handheld. He listened the way Doss had watched snow drift down through the pit’s rusted ceiling grate. There, but not there.

“I loved this country.” She pressed a palm to her good eye, damming the tears that formed there. A vision of Emerson filled her mind. “He looked so good in a suit.”

After a while she felt Gomez watching her. She lifted her head. His face puckered around the complicated scar on his cheek and he eyed her narrowly down the length of his nose. Like he was peering into the distance and couldn’t make out quite what he saw.

“You got to pull your shit together, Boss.” His hand emerged from his pocket, holding the string of finger bones. He worried them under his thumb like a rosary. “You the nastiest bitch I ever met. Fucking act like it.”

He turned and spit. Thrust his chin out towards the young soldiers. The fifteen members of his Ranger chalk, the ones who had survived the attack on the Designer’s plantation, the ones held in reserve, had segregated themselves. They worked away from the others, standing in straight lines of five, doing squats, their vibe elite.

“Know what they call themselves?” Gomez asked. He flipped the strung bones into his palm and aimed a finger at Doss’ burned left hand, where white and coffee skin mottled. “They call themselves the Burning Hand.”

The young Rangers dropped and did pushups. The price paid for some minor fuckup. Then they rose and began to jog together along Riley’s perimeter fence. Beyond the fence, migrants hustled to tarp their fields with scraps of plastic and canvas before the storm came on—fields fat with crops ready for spring harvest.

….

Alyosha’s laughter sounded like a snake on sand. Doss thumbed the morphine drip, striving for perfect blackness. Instead, snow drifted slowly down through the rusted ceiling grate, smothering.

She spoke Emerson’s name, and he appeared. He gave her a tranquil smile. Ran thumbs along the lapels of his Kev-weave blazer.

“You know,” he told her. “I think you’d make a great mother.”

Doss woke. Standing in her quarters beside the small cot, IV stand gripped with both hands. She sensed the storm somewhere overhead, tornadoes moaning across Riley’s flats.

She straightened. Held up her hand and regarded the IVs taped there. After a long moment, she ripped the tape away, gingerly pulled the tubes from her skin. The holes bled. She ignored it and checked her watch: 03:24. More than an hour until reveille.

Her feet moved. She opened the door, stepped out into the hallway’s linoleum silence.

Found Jake curled up asleep on the floor, a dark fetus in shined, army issue boots. He started awake, eyes staring wildly around for a second before they found Doss.

“Boss Momma!” He leapt to his feet, saluting. Doss waved a vague hand at her eyebrow.

“How long you been there?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Doc let me out of medical sometime after dark.” He stared forward, soldierly and righteous. Doss placed a hand on his thin shoulder.

“I’m sorry about Casanova.”

“Duty, Boss Momma.” Jake’s chin dipped and he somberly touched fingertips to the red
La Chupe
band tied around his bicep.

“You did well out there,” Doss told him. “As well as anybody I’ve ever seen.” The tips of Jake’s ears glowed red in the hallway’s fluorescents, but his eyes didn’t waver from attention. “How do you feel?”

“Good to go,” he said.

“Good.” Doss considered her feet for a moment, tried to recall where they’d been taking her. “Get me Gomez,” she ordered. “Then roust Chen. Tell him to replace the jammer on the radio tit once the storm’s past. I want zero coms with D.C.”

“Copy that, Boss Momma.” Jake took two quick steps down the hall, then halted, turned on his heels and marched back the other direction. “Shit’s that way,” he said, followed the finger with which he pointed.

In her quarters, Doss stripped off the medical gown. Dug a med kit from one cupboard, from it produced gauze and transdermals. Two of the derms she pressed to the skin of her neck. The rest she shoved into a fatigue pocket for later. She wrapped gauze over her Nu Skin. Gritted her teeth as she very carefully pulled a clean white t-shirt over her head. She waited until the burning sensation grew tolerable, then dug the flexpad from her pocket.

Checked coms, found positive sat link. Cycled through contacts, found the one she wanted, pressed the tab labeled “Transmit.” The com light blinked. Seconds passed. Then Tsol’s square face appeared, pudgy from sleep.

“Agent Doss,” he mumbled, and rubbed his cheek with a thick hand. “My guardian angel.” A girl’s voice murmured incomprehensibly from his end and he turned. “Shut up. Go to sleep.” He turned back to Doss. “To what do I owe—” His eyebrows shot up as he took her in. “Jesus. I heard you got chewed up out there, but—”

“Be quiet and listen,” Doss ordered. “I need a favor.”

….

“Some of you are Rangers,” Doss hollered over the tarmac. “The rest of you will be Rangers soon enough.” Forty-two kids stood tall before her, drop suits like negative-space statues, matte surfaces sucking up thin morning sunlight. Gomez’s Ranger chalk, plus two more chalks he’d just outfitted, each chalk two soldiers larger than the standard thirteen, because there simply weren’t enough to form a fourth chalk. Gomez and Jake stood at the formation’s head, her bloodied veterans, her leaders.

Her own drop suit chafed her burns where padded sensors met her body, responding to signals from her muscles. Nano-hydraulic joints worked with barely audible sibilance as she folded her arms behind her back and began to pace.

“The history of the Rangers is a proud and storied one,” she called to the young soldiers. “It’s a history most of you don’t know. One most of you couldn’t give a hot shit about. No reason you should. This country’s not what she once was. But one thing I know you care about. Food. Our food has been poisoned. Corrupted with the Tet. The solution to this is simple. But not easy.”

A haze of ocher dust blew across the sun. Doss planted her feet, faced her Rangers. A cold feeling wound up her spine as she took in the blank faces watching her from within open-visored helmets. The faces of children who knew only two things: when they were hungry, and when they weren’t.

“Satori,” she told them. “The poisoned well. We must go to the well, and we must clean it. Today, we begin training. Ten days from now, we jump. We will take Satori for our own.”

She unfastened her left gauntlet, withdrew her burn-mottled hand and raised it, fingers spread, for her Rangers to see. At her feet sat a can of red paint she’d scrounged from a storage closet.

“This country’s not much anymore. But she’s what we have. And right now, you’re all she has.” She picked up the paint can and moved wordlessly through the ranks.

In front of each Ranger she stopped, dipped her hand into the paint, pressed her palm to black armor. When she was done, all the Rangers wore the dripping red imprint of her left hand on their chests. She finished with Jake and Gomez, then Gomez stripped off his own gauntlet. He dipped his hand into the bucket and stepped close, searching Doss’ face as he pressed the paint to her chest.

“I guess we ain’t heading back to D.C.?”

“Fuck D.C.,” Doss said. “Fuck Rippert.” Gomez’s scarred face crinkled with pleasure as he stepped back. Doss turned to her troops, wondered vaguely if any of them would survive—figured probably not. She raised her red palm to the sky.

“We are the Burning Hand!”

“Burning Hand!” They answered as one, proud and hard. It was the saddest thing Doss had ever heard.

CHAPTER 23

he kids at Riley took Brood in and made him look like a soldier. Like them, he pretended to be one.

He did morning PT on the cool tarmac. He marched and did pushups when he missed steps or didn’t know left from right. They gave him duty in the cafeteria, washing trays, which suited him. He secreted into apron pockets scraps of food the spoiled soldiers didn’t want. Handfuls of canned corn. Hunks of prepackaged chicken fried steak soaked with gravy. Vacuum sealed pieces of vanilla cake. Cardboard pints of milk. These he smuggled into the locker that sat at the foot of the cot they’d assigned him in a group barracks, where he lay there awake at night, marveling at the sleep sounds of these boys and girls who slumbered deep, unafraid of their surroundings.

They shaved his head, gave him tough cargo pants, green army tees, uniform shirts, and boots. These were the best clothes Brood had ever had, except for the boots, which blistered his feet. He ditched them for sandals, which he fashioned the way Hondo had taught him, from scraps of old tire he found out back of one of Fort Riley’s out buildings. They formed easily to his toes and didn’t stink when his feet sweat.

“Better not let Jingo see that.” Bullion, the food prep specialist and Brood’s supervisor, was short, black, wore his hair as a tight mohawk. A magic marker skull and crossbones adorned the front of his white apron.

Bullion liked Jesus. An old Ham radio sat on one shining steel shelf in the kitchen. It hissed with static and the railings of some prairie saint, calling out from the barren heartland to all believers. Bullion’d stood beside Brood behind the cafeteria serving line’s steaming bins and aimed a spatula, with which he served factory-made chicken nuggets, at Brood’s feet. “Jingo fuck you up, he sees that.” His face bore an expression of serious concern.

“If I see
what
?”

There had stood Jingo, injection-molded tray proffered across the hot-bin partition, awaiting mashed potatoes. He was tall, white. Two inverted Vs on his sleeve meant he was important. The high-and-tight crew cut and the way he fixed his lips tight to his teeth and put his nose in Brood’s face—this meant he was an asshole. “If I see what?”

He stalked around the partition, eyed Brood’s feet with disgust. The cafeteria, full of feeding kids, went silent. Jingo yelled things about regulation dress, about good soldiering. He reached out and, very deliberately, pushed Brood.

Brood punched him in the throat. The tall boy dropped, gasping. Brood calmly withdrew a long steel ladle from a stainless bin full of steaming gravy, and clubbed Jingo once across the temple.

The soldiers left Brood alone after that. They didn’t mind when he showed up for morning PT, and when he did his cafeteria duty. No one complained when he disappeared either.

He spent his time wandering Fort Riley. He strolled empty halls with echoing concrete floors. Sat alone at the peeling laminate tables in empty meeting rooms, surrounded by flaking sound-proof baffling. The place felt like a memory of itself. Its silence soothed him.

He found a section of officers’ quarters, abandoned and unlocked. Private rooms with only one cot in each. Dust had accumulated to geological depths upon each tightly made cot, each metal desk, each nightstand and sink. He chose a room far from the other kids. There he stashed the duffle full of Semtex beneath the bed.

At night he shoved the metal chair under the doorknob and lay on the cot with his fingers laced behind his newly shaven head. Memories haunted him. The mother and child, stunned by Semtex and caked in Oklahoma mud. Brood tried to pretend they’d made their way north, found a planting ground and people to be with. Tried to convince himself, too, that Pollo was still alive, living somehow beneath Denver’s great dome. Even though he knew it was impossible.

“Let the dead be dead,” he whispered to the silence. It was a wise notion, but Brood knew he didn’t have it in him.

….

The hard-faced sergeant approached one morning after PT. Brood sat on the tarmac, away from the other kids, letting the early breeze cool the sweat off his skin.

“Getting in shape, homes?” The sergeant came to a crisp halt, backlighting himself in Brood’s sun.

“Something like that,” Brood told him. The sergeant surveyed the distance between Brood and the other soldiers.

“You’re not the mixing type, I guess.”

“I guess not.”

The sergeant nodded like he understood. Took something from his pocket, began shaking it in one hand. A can of chewing tobacco. He opened it, placed a fat pinch in his mouth, then offered it to Brood. Brood shook his head.

“
Gracias
.”

“You look like a soldier,” the sergeant noted. “All shaved up and shit. Found a ride to Denver yet?” Again, Brood shook his head.

The other kids began dispersing, off to their duties, their racks, or wherever kids pretending to be soldiers went when they had free time. The sergeant stood there, audibly sucking his tobacco.

“Fuck you want, cuz?” Brood demanded.

Scars twisted in the sergeant’s face as he grinned. His eyes remained flat. Brood slid a hand behind his back, wrapped his fingers around a pig sticker he’d found in a storage room. The sergeant laughed.