Seed (6 page)

“We’re breached!” Emerson yelled.

Doss came to with her hands still gripping the wheel, her jaw still set. The Lobo rode a straight line. Wind howled from a hole somewhere in the back. Emerson had his hand down behind the seat where the assignment had been.

“Status,” Doss demanded.

“Think he shit his pants.”

“That mean he’s dead?”

“Nope.”

“Too bad.”

“Yep.”

“Okay.” Doss breathed. Angled the Lobo along the concrete barrier, aiming for the right end of the truck near where the boy with the AK stood. He fumbled now with a second magazine as he tried to reload his rifle. Doss kept the accelerator floored. The speedometer rolled higher. 190 kph. 210. 240. Emerson swore. The refugee with the cinder block let fly as they rocketed past him. The block crashed into the center of the windshield. The world disappeared as thick plexi turned into a galactic pattern of white impact rings.

The Lobo hit the truck. Everything turned to searing white noise.

It was like being in the vortex of a crashing wave—a wave of twisting, shrieking metal. Doss felt her body wrenched in impossible directions. Twice she saw blue February sky and black asphalt blur together. She saw the refugee boy standing upside down on the pavement—
above
her—his eyes wide and his mouth shaped like an “O.”

Then, silence.

The Lobo’s nose had curled up like a black steel tongue in front of her. The windshield was gone. Doss realized, after several seconds of trying to figure out what it meant that the sky was above them, that they were upright, faced back the way they had come along a trail of broken plexi, gouged pavement and miscellaneous fluids. She hoped vaguely that the nuke’s containment had held.

The truck they’d hit was nowhere to be seen. Refugees streamed after them, a score or more. Doss saw muzzle flashes. The insect buzz of a bullet nearly touched her ear. Some distant part of her pressed the clutch, tried to find a gear. It caused angry metal to grind.

She noticed Emerson beside her. He had pulled an emergency handheld from the dash and was shouting into it. Blood ran from beneath the black hair at his temple. Doss could not make out what he said. She tried again to find a gear. Emerson shook her.

“We’re out of commission,” he yelled. “We gotta run.” She nodded, more because it seemed like an appropriate response than because she understood what he was saying. He sat there watching her. He looked so worried.

“You’re bleeding, baby.” Doss smiled, reached out to touch the trickle of blood at his temple. Emerson cuffed her.

“On task!”

All at once the world grew dense and hard. Bullets whined around them, pecking against the Lobo. Doss blinked, nodded. She turned to the back seat to find Tsol watching her intently, grey eyes wild.

“You alive?” He gave one mute nod. A wide smile gripping his face. “Okay. Gotta go. Stay close behind me or Agent Emerson, understand?” Another nod. “Good. Out.”

Doss moved to open her door. It was gone. She stepped out, immediately collapsed. She rose, steadied her legs. A bullet tore at her Kevlar sleeve. Migrants came on, closer now, only thirty meters away. A fierce hiss came from the opposite side of the Lobo as Emerson fired his Ingram. Two migrants disappeared in a cloud of red mist. Another hiss, another migrant went down. Doss reached back into the Lobo, pulled a single mag grenade from the dash compartment. She thumbed the grenade’s safety switch, waited a few interminable seconds as the gang of refugees drew within range.

“Emerson, fire in the hole!” She pressed the fire button and hurled the grenade in a high arc. Pulled Tsol behind the Lobo, pushed him down, bent herself over the top of him. Emerson joined them an instant later.

Metal fragments came first as the grenade’s electromagnet switched on, propelling its steel casing away in a perfect sphere of hypersonic razors. They cracked against the Lobo and arched overhead, evidenced by a thousand molten friction contrails and the firecracker peppering of tiny sonic booms. Next came the sound, a frozen bell shattered under a hammer.

Then came the screams.

Doss peered around the Lobo. The migrants had momentarily halted their charge. Those not shredded staggered in confusion. She looked east towards New D.C. The zeppelins hung impossibly far away.

“Can’t stay here,” she told Emerson.

“There.” He pointed at a mostly intact strip mall a hundred meters beyond the concrete barrier. They would have to cross a hideously exposed stretch of broken parking lot, but it was their only choice.

“You take him, I’ll cover.”

Emerson nodded, grabbed the assignment by the forearm and rose. Doss pulled her Ingram from its sling, slapped his back with the flat of her palm.

“Now.”

Emerson and Tsol began to sprint. Doss stepped out from behind the Lobo. A few of the migrants had noticed the agent as he darted across the freeway, assignment in tow. They raised their rifles. Doss leveled her Ingram and began firing short bursts. Two migrants flew apart, ceramic bullets exploding inside them. The others ducked and covered. Doss fired a final burst and ran after her cohorts. Over the barrier, down the median, onto the parking lot. She heard the far-off throb of chopper blades—the cavalry.

She hadn’t gone fifteen paces across the lot when bullets began to smack into the asphalt at her feet. Ahead of her, Emerson staggered and grunted as bullets struck his broad back. He pushed the assignment forward, regained his footing and kept running. Doss stopped, turned, fired a long burst at the migrants lined up now along the barrier. A bullet smacked into her Kevlar blazer as she tried to reload. Pain lanced through her side and her legs buckled, dropping her to her knees. An RPG sailed past her head. It exploded somewhere behind her. The concussion steamrolled her.

She stared at the cracked pavement in front of her face. She had skinned herself on a hundred empty lots like this, playing with her sister outside tent cities from Chicago to Atlanta. She knew that if she cried, Olivia would laugh. Sienna Doss resolved not to cry. She stood.

A bullet hit her shoulder and she staggered. Gunfire roared from the freeway. Several refugees made their way down the median, firing as they came. Doss turned and saw Emerson and Tsol both down, side by side, thrown by the RPG. They struggled to rise. Blood exploded from Emerson’s leg. Doss heard him scream.

“Neal!” She stumbled towards him. The assignment gained his knees and sat there dazed, shaking his head. Emerson writhed. The chopper’s thud drew closer. Doss looked from Emerson to Tsol and back again. “Fuck.” She staggered to Tsol, pushed him flat and lay herself over him. He pressed his lips against her cheek.

“I am fated,” he whispered.

“You’re shit.”

Bullets rained down.

CHAPTER 4

ondo’s wagon—the wooden flatbed of a twen-cen cargo truck chopped free from its cab and driven by a series of electric motors geared to the back wheels by three heavy drive chains—jounced and rattled as they rolled west out of Amarillo along the broken track of the old interstate. Hondo sat at the front, calling directions to Brood, who heaved at the tiller welded to the rear differential, steering them around the worst of the freeway’s craters. They made perhaps five miles per.

Brood shivered under his zarape in the morning chill. Flexed his bruised ribs beneath where the AK bullets had buried themselves in his flak jacket. Every few minutes he glanced behind them. Nothing back there but the slowly expanding pearl glow of predawn, smeared by smoke from a single early cook fire.

Pollo sat on a stationary bike situated at the wagon’s center beside the 300-gal water tank. He’d stripped naked and his legs churned on the pedals, topping off the charge on a row of four Hercules batteries the size of five-gal buckets—scavenged two springs previous from an abandoned tank at Fort Bliss. Beefy as fuck. Brood glanced behind them again. Still nothing.

It wouldn’t last. The three fifty-gal barrels of seed, wrapped in camo netting, rocked back and forth on the wagon’s deck in front of him. People didn’t forget a haul like that, especially not
La Chupes
.

“I’m good for some speed, homes,” Brood called when it grew light enough to see the road. Hondo stood and unhooked the stack of ancient solid-core twelve volts off which they typically ran the motors. The wagon halted and he ran a cord from the Hercs through an adapter Brood had jerry-rigged from an old stereo amp, and plugged that into the motors. Immediately the wagon jerked forward. Hondo made his way back, joining Brood at the tiller. He pushed the throttle forward. The wagon built speed, the Hercs pushing serious amps from barium nitrate cores.

“
Rápido
, Pollo,
rápido
!” Hondo yelled. Pollo peddled faster; Hondo kicked the throttle up further. The motors whined. Pollo gave a delighted shriek as the wagon banged along at a solid thirty miles per. Hondo laughed. Together, he and Brood hauled on the tiller, wending down the freeway, putting real distance now between them and Amarillo. He slapped the cargo netting and laughed again.

“What a job!” He gripped the back of Brood’s neck. Spittle wheeled off his gums and landed on Brood’s cheek. “Proud of you,
homito
. Couldn’t have done this with nobody else.”

“Ain’t done yet,
chimuelo
.” Brood turned to look behind them. Hondo, surfing the wagon’s deck like it was welded to his feet, eyed Brood across the tiller’s rebar shaft.

“Worry ain’t nobody’s friend, boy. Ain’t never going to be done. Not ever.” He smiled and slapped the barrels again. “
Mas rápido
, Pollo!” He inched the throttle forward.

….

Brood was six when he’d done his first job with Hondo. It had been in southern Kansas. He’d stood naked with Pollo by the side of the road in the lee of a stack of rusted irrigation pipe. Caravans of wagons and piecemealed trucks slowly rolled past, heading north to their spring planting, electric motors clogged and grinding with dust.

Pollo’d been barely more than a baby, barely able to stand. Brood had wrapped his arms around his brother’s shoulders, tried to shield the boy’s vacant, drifting eyes from blowing sand.

Some migrants rode in the backs of trucks, crammed in amongst makeshift hydrogen cells, battery packs, solar panels. Most walked, leaning into packs strapped to their shoulders and foreheads, eyes squinting against the dust and the unyielding yellow sun. Women sometimes turned gaunt faces at the two boys, and sometimes the hardness in them relented. They’d reached calloused fingers deep into soiled orange FEMAs and canvas robes. Pulled forth a few precious Satori seeds or bits of jerked meat and tossed them reluctantly into the dirt at the boys’ feet. The regrettable price of keeping their own souls intact. Their men almost never looked, instead kept their chins jutting north towards the planting grounds of northern Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas—kept their tire-tread sandals churning wearily along the broken asphalt.

It had been late in the day when a solitary wagon halted beside the boys, its electric motor wheezing fast towards death. A white man in tattered t-shirt and jeans had climbed down. Smiled, scratched his beard anxiously—held out a handful of dried apple slices. Brood recognized the hunger in the man’s eyes. It hadn’t been for food. The wagon hauled a trailer over which had been flung a burlap tarp. A child’s sob came from beneath it. The man looked from the boys to the wagon and back. Shrugged, stuffed the apple slices into a pocket, stepped towards them.

“
Que pasa
?” Hondo’d said as he emerged from behind the stack of irrigation pipe. The man’s eyebrows had gone up in surprise. Then the world had shattered around the shotgun’s horrible shriek.

In the stunned silence that followed, Hondo had stepped casually over the man’s shredded body and Pollo had begun to slowly rock his shoulders from side to side. He squawked like a chicken.

They’d found three children in the wagon, two boys and a girl, all near Brood’s age. Hondo gave them each a handful of the dried apple slices scrounged from the man’s wagon and sent them on their way. North into the prairie where they would scrounge,
perros de basura
at the heels of some caravan.

“Saddens me, little homes,” Hondo told Brood as they’d rummaged through the battery stacks and heaps of rusted scrap metal on the man’s wagon. He’d held up a horsewhip with a frayed tip. “Didn’t used to be like this.” He tossed the whip onto the road and pulled back a piece of corrugated sheet metal, uncovering a crate full of sealed mason jars. He pulled one out and held it up to the light, peering through the cloudy glass at what looked like shriveled fingers. He smiled black gums. “Green beans.”

….

Around noon they cut the wagon off the freeway and aimed north across an arid flat, still etched with ancient irrigation furrows. The temperature had hit the high nineties and Hondo, who had stripped down to canvas shorts, switched battery packs. They rolled slowly so as not to raise dust and soon came to a wide draw. Down in it, concealed from the freeway, stood the sagging skeleton of a farmhouse. Exactly where the whiteboy had said it would be.

Brood pulled a pair of binoculars from a foot locker and scanned the house. Three boys stood in the house’s shaded lee. Tattered FEMAs, red
La Chupe
sashes. Whiteboy waved.