Under the Empyrean Sky
Read Under the Empyrean Sky Online
Authors: Chuck Wendig
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Lifestyles, #Farm & Ranch Life, #Nature & the Natural World, #Environment, #Science Fiction, #Dystopian
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 by Chuck Wendig
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
Request for permission should be addressed to:
Amazon Publishing
Attn: Amazon Children’s Publishing
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
www.amazon.com/amazonchildrenspublishing
The lyrics on
page 1
and
page 67
are from “Harvest-Home Song” by John Davidson. Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed.
A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895
. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895. The lyrics on
page 149
are from “John Barleycorn” collected by Robert Burns in 1782. The lyrics on
page 287
are from “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” by Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, written in 1895 and first recorded as a song in 1928.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN-13: 9781477817209 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1477817204 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781477867204 (eBook)
ISBN-10: 1477867201 (eBook)
Book design by Sammy Yuen
Editor: Marilyn Brigham
First edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Ben and Michelle, who are my Heartland
3 GODSDAMN YOU, BOYLAND BARNES, JR.
4 THE SHUCK RAT’S LITTLE SECRET
6 PISS AND WISHES, BROKEN DISHES
14 THIS LITTLE SQUEALER WENT TO MARKET
15 A PROPOSITION, THICK AND FOUL
21 THE LORD AND LADY BLESS US AND FREE US FROM OUR BONDS
22 THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE CORN
PART ONE
THE DISCOVERY
The pleasure of a king
Is tasteless to the mirth
Of peasants when they bring
The harvest of the earth.
With pipe and tabor hither roam
All ye who love our Harvest-home.
—“Harvest-Home Song,” John Davidson
THE RACE
THE CORN REACHES
for the land-boat above it, but the corn is slow and the cat-maran is fast. The stretching, yearning stalks hiss against the boat’s bottom, making a white noise that sounds like pollen coming out of a piss-blizzard.
Betty
, which is what Cael and his crew have nicknamed the long and lean cat-maran, sails buoyed by a pair of crackling hover-panels. Cael stands at the boat’s fore, leaning on one knee, staring out at the line where blue sky and green corn merge.
Fifty yards to their left is Cael’s opponent—a front-heavy, fat-chested yacht with a quartet of billowing red sails pregnant with wind. At the fore of the boat stands Boyland
Barnes Jr., the captain of the Boxelder Butchers. They’re the number one scavenger crew in Boxelder.
Cael’s crew, the Big Sky Scavengers, is number two.
But not anymore.
Boyland looks over, offers a dismissive shrug before making a jerk-off motion with his hand. His land-yacht eases forward yard by yard, outpacing
Betty
slowly but surely. Boyland’s got a pair of small propellers in chrome cages posed at the back of his yacht—not cheap, but they give him a boost. Boyland’s money
always
gives him the boost.
Cocky prick,
Cael thinks.
Boyland laughs, a pissy squeal that doesn’t match Boyland’s broad chest or bucket-shaped head. Cael just waves. Then he takes the pair of blue-lensed goggles from atop his head and snaps them tight over his eyes to protect against the coming wind.
The Butchers have propellers. Wind power. Fine.
The Big Sky Scavengers have something else. Something
better
.
Cael gives Lane the signal.
Lane Moreau. Tall, lean, like a reedy tree shaken of leaves. Lane is
Betty
’s helmsman. Knows every inch of her. He plucks the pinched ditchweed cigarette from between his lips, pitches it over the side of the boat in a pinwheel of embers, and then reaches down and yanks hard on a
newly installed lever sticking up next to the control panel. Cael feels
Betty
’s belly vibrate. The sound of the hissing corn is lost beneath the grinding of gears as his brand-new hover-panels tilt down and back—
A coruscating ripple of light bursts from beneath
Betty
, and she suddenly leaps forth like a horse with a nettle screwed hard in its ass.
Lane holds the ship’s wheel with white knuckles. He howls like a hound.
Awoooooo
.
Rigo, the third mate in their crew of four—though today they’re one light, what with Gwennie off getting ready for tomorrow’s Harvest Home festival and the Obligation Day ceremony—hunkers down in the middle of the boat with a tube of maps under one arm, looking ashen and queasy.
Cael can already see, in the distance, the prize glinting in the sun: a defunct motorvator. Now just a flinty, metallic mote far off—but getting closer.
They heard the rumor this morning: someone spotted a rogue thresher out there, dead in the corn. Off its program. Off the grid. Didn’t belong to anybody in Boxelder, either—must have come a long way from another town before its battery finally took a shit. That means it’s ripe for the picking.
That’s what Cael and his crew do. They pick. They
scavenge
.
That motorvator, they’ll butcher it for spare parts, sell what they find. Provided they get there first—and Cael’s pretty sure they’re going to beat the corn off Boyland’s cob on this one. Getting there first means getting first pick—same way the strongest, biggest vulture gets to have first bite of whatever dead thing it might find.
You get to the junk, you get the prize. You get the prize, you earn the ace notes from the Mercado maven. Easy peasy, cool and breezy.
It won’t be long now. They’ll be there in no time. Ten minutes. Maybe less.
Betty
pulls ahead. Faster, faster.
And Boyland’s land-yacht drifts farther behind.
Cael’s heart leaps in his chest. They’re going to beat the Boxelder Butchers. Beat them like disobedient urchins. He throws a glance back at Boyland, who stands at the fore of his boat, big, meaty fists on his hips. But something ain’t right.
Boyland is smiling.
He gives a signal of his own: a fat thumb thrust up.
Felicity, his first mate, whips out a box with a long silver antenna. She pulls her conductor’s cap tight over her tangled mane and then stabs a button on the box.
Atop the land-yacht’s crow’s nest, the third in their crew—a little towheaded ragamuffin way too young to be
doing this gig—claps and laughs so hard his pale cheeks go red.
A flush of cold saline ices Cael’s blood.
Something’s up
.
He realizes too late: he shouldn’t be looking at them. He
should
be looking ahead.
Rigo sees before any of them. He cries out, “Bounce it!”
Cael turns heel-to-toe and sees a rusty thresher bar from a defunct motorvator suddenly spring up out of the corn, rising over the stalk-tops. Lane hears Rigo’s command and slaps a button on the side of the console, and the hover-panels shudder and emit a hard pulse, giving
Betty
a boost meant to carry them up and over.
But they’re too late.
Betty
runs fast over the threshing blades.
Then comes the sound of shearing metal and shattering glass as Cael’s world goes ass over chin.
