Seed (21 page)

“We stand around the dish. Equal spaces. I count to three. When I hit three, we lift. Together.” Billy suppressed a smile. Sunshine turned Jorgen’s blond crew cut white as he turned and snickered up the sleeve of his stained denim shirt.

“Got it,” Billy said. “We spin around three times…”

“Oh, fuck you guys.”

Billy and Jorgen laughed. Then Billy spotted Brood. He went silent and his face darkened. Brood grinned.

“
Que onda
?” He stepped out of the building’s shadow and stretched ostentatiously, letting the sun warm his bare torso. Billy’s eyes wandered between Brood and Viv. He turned to Raimi.

“Let me ask you a question, since you know so much about pies. Can a pie have four pieces?”

“Course,” Raimi said. “It’s a circle. It can have as many—”

“Get your skinny ass over here,
Cholo
.” Billy motioned at the dented satellite dish. “Take a piece of pie.” Brood stepped up, his bare feet punching holes in the melting snow. He cautiously placed a finger against the dish’s edge, making sure it wasn’t too hot, then sidled up and gripped it with both hands. Raimi counted.

“One. Two.
Three
!” Gallons of newly melted water sloshed as they lifted.

“
Dónde
?” Brood asked.

“There.” Raimi jerked his chin at where the two trucks sat nose to nose, half buried in snow drifts a good fifty yards across the lot. A tiny plastic funnel no wider than his hand stuck from the opening atop the water truck’s rusted tank, perhaps fifteen feet off the ground.

“Got to be fucking kidding me, homes.”

“Why don’t you just use a hose and siphon it?” Viv suggested. Brood and the others paused, looking at one another. They set down the dish. Viv shook her head. “Idiots.” She turned and stomped off across the lot. Jorgen grinned.

“She ain’t wrong.”

“A complete lack of foresight ending in failure.” Billy narrowed his eyes at Raimi. “Imagine that.”

A sharp whistle pierced the air. They all turned, found Anna headed their way, short legs pistoning through the snow. The dog loped up to her and barked, bouncing happily. She whistled again and it went quiet and heeled.

“I’m sure you could do much better, Billy,” she said as she approached.

“I’m sure, too,” Billy replied, but now he didn’t sound very sure.

“You.” Anna pointed at Brood. “Come with me.” She turned and pressed once more through the snow, back the way she had come. As Brood moved to follow, Billy reached out and gripped his arm. He leaned close enough for Brood to see the acne-pitted geography of his face. Brood smelled something sour and hungry emanating from his skin.

“Viv’s into you,” he said. “The second she ain’t, you be rotting in a ditch.” Brood took in the older boy’s broad frame, the ropes of thin, underfed muscle. His wound throbbed. He felt weak. He smiled pleasantly up into Billy’s face.

“You talk a lot.”

….

Anna prodded delicate fingers around the puckered red dot above Brood’s hip where Richard’s bullet had pierced him. The swelling had disappeared, the bruising had turned the color of corn mash.

“Sensitive?” she asked. Brood shook his head.

“
Poquito
. Not bad.”

“One more shot of Cipro, just to be safe.” Anna turned. Brood watched the eagle, made of multi-colored plastic stones, sewn into the back of her denim vest as she bent through the chopper bubble’s open door, rooting for something.

She’d cleared snow away beside the lead truck and set up a long metal worktable in the sun, and beside it a metal folding chair. Atop the table the Ham radio hummed hotly. A cinderblock-sized hunk of aluminum hooked to a block of stacked lith bats, whose cords ran through a converter, up a high PVC pole. There, in an impossibly blue sky, whirled the blades of tiny wind turbine.

Anna emerged with a steel box, red with a white cross on it. From this she pulled a hypo gun into which she loaded a vial half-full of amber liquid. She pressed the gun against Brood’s side. It hissed, a quick bee sting, and he winced. She peered at him then, searching, the creases of long years on the road mapping her face.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Okay.
Gracias
,
Madre
.”

“
De nada
.” Anna repacked the hypo gun, put the med kit back into the cab and withdrew something else. She glanced around, made sure nobody saw, and placed a handful of dried apple slices in Brood’s palm. Brood bit into one. It tasted alive. Anna smiled, pressed a finger against her lips. “Don’t tell anyone where I keep my treats.” She watched with obvious satisfaction as Brood chewed. After a moment she asked, “What happened to your brother?”

Brood stopped chewing. He started to say something, then simply shook his head. Anna rubbed the back of her neck beneath her grey ponytail.

“How?”

Brood’s jaw clenched. All his muscles tightened, tried to deflect the memory, keep it somewhere outside his body where he wouldn’t feel it. He gazed over the snowed-under remnants of the little town. It looked almost like nothing had ever been there—just the hollowed out strip mall and the steel frame of an office building. White smoke curled on the horizon. The cook fires of another caravan.

“
La Chupes
found us,” he said. “They thought Pollo had the Tet.”

Anna nodded. Abruptly she turned and whistled. Brood saw movement across the parking lot. The dog. It emerged from the shadow of a doorway and hopped through the snow along the strip mall’s edge. Anna whistled again and the dog stopped, hunkered in another doorway, utterly still, barely visible.

“Smart dog,” Brood observed.

“Smarter than most humans. They’re bred to herd sheep.”

“How come you don’t eat it?” Brood asked. Anna fixed him with a hard look.

“Because we’re civilized.”

Across the parking lot, the tall man named Jorgen trudged through the snow and settled beside a small fire, where a hollow-looking woman and small girl huddled together beneath the old portico of a vacant storefront. He pulled a Satori carrot from beneath a fold of burlap, produced a small knife and began cutting the carrot into sections. Carefully, like it was gold.

“It’s a
dog
,
Madre
,” Brood said. “You get miles off that meat.”

“That dog is my friend.” Anna leaned with one hand on the table and placed the other on a defiantly cocked hip. “I don’t eat my friends.” Anna stared. The moment hung. Finally she turned and whistled.

“Viv likes you,” she told Brood, her eyes on the dog now loping through the snow towards them. “Maybe you could stay with us.”

“Got nowhere else to go,” Brood admitted. “Don’t think her bro would be happy about it if I stayed, though.”

“Billy.” Anger touched Anna’s face and she looked at Brood. “He’s not much help to her.”

“
Qué quieres decir
?”

“Viv, hon. She has the Tet.”

“Nah.” Brood shook his head. “She ain’t stiff or nothing.”

“She is. Watch her at night.”

Brood searched his memory. Found Viv there, working her shoulder in circles, easing a cramp. The emptiness welled up inside him.

“She know?” he asked.

“She’s known for weeks.”

“What about…” Brood’s mind froze with the thought. His hands went involuntarily to his chest, as though he might detect the Tet worming its way through him, cranking his muscles tight, stiffening his joints.

“You’re fine,” Anna told him. “It comes from Satori.” She aimed her eyes pointedly at where Jorgen squatted beside the fire with the woman and her daughter, parsing out small hunks of carrot to the woman and girl. “You get it from eating, not fucking.”

“How you know?”

“The Mother told me.”

“The Mother?” Brood looked at Anna like she’d spoken gibberish. “Whose mother?” Anna smiled.

“The Mother. She tells me all kinds of things. Maybe you’ll get to meet her.”

Brood made a mental head count of the small troupe. There was Anna, Jorgen, Raimi and Billy. The strange woman and her daughter, who spoke neither English nor Spanish, and whose names he didn’t know. Himself and Viv. That was it. No one he hadn’t yet met. No Mother.

“
Esta loca
,
Madre
?” he inquired, and quickly held up a diplomatic hand. “It don’t bother me none if you are. Just like to know, you know?”

Anna laughed. She whistled over her shoulder. The dog halted, stood rock still in the snow fifty feet away.

“I keep my family alive,” she said. “Beyond that, what difference does it make?”

Viv settled herself at the fire with Jorgen’s group. Her smile flashed at Brood beneath the aviator shades as she reached out to tickle the girl. Tiny laughter rang across the lot. It sounded strange, incongruous with the hunger pressing down on them all, heavy as time.

“How long she got?” Brood asked.

“Who knows? It’s different with everyone.” Anna’s hand settled atop the Ham. “The Corn Mother came from Satori. If I can find her, maybe she can help.”

“Hope ain’t nobody’s friend, though,
Madre
.” Brood hawked and spit something black into the snow. The hint of a smile touched Anna’s face. “You laughing at me,
madre
?” he asked.

“Absolutely not, hon,” Anna said, her tone making it clear she was. “It gives me comfort to see you make her happy. I think it does Billy, too, even though he won’t say it.” Silence held them for a beat, then she said, “You don’t strike me as the farming type. How’d you and your friends get by?”

“We’re traders,” Brood told her. Anna nodded.

“Thieves. That’s what I thought when we saw you on your wagon. A bunch of thieves.” Brood thrust his chin defiantly forward, remained silent. Anna stepped forward, reached out. Touched cool fingertips to Brood’s cheek. “The Mother told me you would come to us. She told me you would help us.” Brood caught a glimpse of fear, of need eddying just beneath the leathery surface of her personality. Her tone grew frank. “We’ve eaten the last of the food we canned last fall. We won’t last another week, let alone until we harvest. We won’t even find a place to plant before we starve. I need to find the Corn Mother. I need more time.” She brushed his cheek with her thumb, then let her hand fall until her finger aimed at Brood’s healing wound. “Am I your friend?” she wondered. Brood watched her narrowly, gave a noncommittal gesture of his hand. Anna inclined her chin to the east, towards the smoke of the distant cook fire. “How far you think that caravan is?”

“Six miles,” Brood figured. Anna looked him up and down.

“You a good thief, Brood?”

“Better than you,” he said, and then began to understand. He crossed his arms, eyed Anna down the length of his nose. “We don’t do no stealing from the hungry.”

“Who’s we?” The corner of Anna’s lip curled. She pinned Brood with a complicated look, then let her gaze wander the flat empty miles of shimmering snow. “There’s only us. Or there’s only you.”

She turned abruptly away. The jeweled eagle on her back winked in the sun. She whistled and the dog came running. It wiggled between her legs and under her hands. She reached into the truck’s cab and brought forth a piece of jerked meat.

“Good dog!” she cooed. It whined. She fed it. It lapped its tongue at her hands and she rubbed its white face. “Who’s a good dog!”

….

Brood pretended he was a clump of mud in the moonless dark. He slithered, wending around vestigial patches of melting snow, through wet clay, over asphalt.

It was a small group. Two families, as far he could tell. They’d circled three wagons—flatbeds like Hondo’s, with electric motors bolted to them—nose-to-tail, forming a vehicular fortress on the blank lot adjacent an empty, monolithic foundation. They huddled around a fire in there. Brood caught glimpses of them through wagon undercarriages. He smelled rabbit, and tomato sauce. He heard children’s voices.

He pulled the last soft brick from his knapsack. He knew nothing about Semtex, beyond that it blew shit up. When he’d asked where it had come from, Anna’d smiled and told him simply, “Dallas.” It felt dense in his hand, weighed too much for its size, like it had cut its own deal with the laws of physics. He placed it atop the concrete base of a dead light pole protruding out of the lot.

A wire dangled from the open back of an old walkie Jorgen had taped to the brick. Brood held his breath. Wound the stripped copper end around a hook in the detonator, a gleaming metal stick that protruded from the brick. Pinched the knob atop the walkie between thumb and forefinger. Held his breath. Turned the knob until it clicked. A tiny LED came awake on the walkie’s front. Brood exhaled.

It took a long time to crawl back to the ditch, where the others waited. As he moved, the fire inside the ring of wagons burned low. Voices went quiet, except for two men who muttered in the dark. Brood imagined he could see the palest implication of dawn to the east.

“You’re shivering,” Viv told him when he slid into the ditch beside her. She opened the blanket she wore and pulled Brood into the warmth she shared there with her rifle.

“Let’s get it done,” Brood said. He looked down the ditch at the line of faces, turned silently his way. Billy, Raimi, Jorgen and Anna. “Get on them like you mean it,” he whispered to them. “Loud and mean. Scareder they are, less likely we’ll have to fuck them up.” He nodded to Jorgen. The scrawny man held up a walkie and switched it on.

“Here we go,” he said, and thumbed the send button.

A flash lit the prairie. For a strobed instant, Brood saw one wagon hovering, an inverted V, its back broken.

The blast wave hit. A wall of blank violence that turned everything white. Then came the tornado howl of the sound wave. When it passed, Brood found himself against the ditch’s opposite side. Mud caked him.

“Jesus!” Billy shouted, blindly, rhetorically, at the space in front of him. “How much of that shit you use?”

“Here we go,” Jorgen repeated. This time Brood dove for the ditch’s bottom and covered his head. Jorgen changed the walkie’s channel, thumbed the button a second time.

Another blast, a digestive rumble Brood felt well up through the ground. Mud rained down.

“Last one!” Jorgen called. He thumbed the button. This time Brood heard within the concussion the shriek of twisting metal: the light pole upending, elevating, coming down on asphalt. Brood waited for the rain of debris to cease. When it did, he stood.