Seed (20 page)

Doss and Fiorivani exchanged a glance. The cowboy nodded emphatically. Doss gestured and Fiorivani ripped the tape off the big man’s mouth. The cowboy sputtered, trying to form words.

“Pratt,” he said. “We grabbed her near Pratt.” He started to say more but Doss waved a hand. Fiorivani ripped a fresh strip from the role of tape and mashed it against the cowboy’s lips. Doss stepped forward, knelt before the landrace girl.

“Honey, do you know where the Designer is?”

The landrace girl smiled. “My name is Dry Grass, not Honey.”

Doss let out a long breath, a thin strand of patience drawing taut. “Okay,” she said, conjuring each syllable slowly. “Dry Grass. Do you know where the Designer is?”

“Pihadassa?” The girl’s gleaming pate swiveled slightly, indicating she didn’t. “We split into three groups when we landed. My group went south. Pihadassa took her group west. The advocates found my group. We thought we could fend them off.” The symmetry of her features cratered as the memory twisted her face. “We could not. Only Rat and I got away.” She glanced at the cowboy, who watched her with wide eyes, no doubt calculating the odds of his survival with every word she spoke. “I miss Rat,” she repeated, and tears welled in her eyes. “He was my mate.”

Doss gently insisted. “Where is the Designer?”

“I do not know. I do not imagine she is anywhere. Not if the advocates found her, too.”

A loud beep sounded from Doss’ fatigue pocket. She blinked, holstered the .45, drew forth the flexpad. It beeped again in her hand. She unfolded it.

A face, square as a piece of steak, peered out from the translucent screen. He wore a
Chupe
red scarf tied over his head.

“Tsol,” she said. He showed teeth.

“Agent Doss. Such a pleasure.”

“It speaks.” Dry Grass’ eyes went wide. Her mouth formed a circle and she reached out to touch the flexpad. Doss stepped away.

“Rippert gave you this line” she guessed. Tsol’s smile broadened.

“I’m his favorite little warlord.”

“I’m a little busy at the moment.”

“Indeed. My kids tell me you’re enjoying Wichita.” He chuckled. “They’re good kids. Two of my favorites. Did they deliver my package?” He waited. Doss said nothing. “I’ll take that as a yes. The digit’s previous owner didn’t give it up quietly. I wanted to assure you of that.”

A clear bottle of something appeared in the feed, obscuring Tsol’s face as he upended it. He swallowed, seemed for a moment to be close to retching, then held the bottle up, toasting.

“Indiana’s finest. So I’m told. Tastes like you’d expect anything from Indiana to taste.”

“Right.” Doss began to fold the flexpad.

“I know what you’re looking for, Agent Doss.” Doss hesitated. Tsol gave her a shrewd look. “Just north of a littled town a hundred miles west of you. Burdock.”

They regarded each other for a moment through the screen. Then Doss folded the flexpad closed and stuffed it into a hip pocket. She glanced at where Fiorivani towered over the cowboy, and shrugged.

“West.”

“What about him?”

Fiorivani pointed a sandaled toe at the cowboy, who shook his head and pleaded mutely through the tape.

Doss thought of Emerson. A man so full of decency it had sometimes enraged her to be around him. It’d occurred to her that it was his decency that appealed to her. If a man like that could stomach her…

She glanced at the two children, who stared vacantly back, and decided decency in this situation was simple. She drew the .45. It hissed twice and the cowboy’s chest burst. He went still.

Doss holstered her piece, cut the tape binding the two children and the Satori girl. They didn’t move. Doss pointed at the door.

“You can go.”

The boy shook his head. “
Chupes
’ll fuck us up.”

“They won’t. I promise.”

“They feed us,” the girl said. Doss started to say something else, but the girl’s implacable stare stopped her. She turned and walked out the door.

Outside, night had fallen. Lightning strobed the prairie as the storm rolled by to the north. Thunder growled. Dry Grass emerged from the room. Leaned against the upper walkway’s railing, turned her face into the electric wind, completely unconcerned with her nakedness.

“I like the storms,” she said. “They’re alive.” She’d left the collar in the room.

“What now, Boss Momma?” Jake called up from below.

“Yeah, Boss,” Fiorivani said. “What now?”

Doss eyed the cowboys’ truck. It sat canted hard to one side, and pinged, the sound of an overheated motor cooling in the night air.

“West,” she said.

“Shit,” Jake grinned. “I told you so.”

“Roger that.”

CHAPTER 13

rood woke to the sound of a dog barking. A small wind turbine whined somewhere close and for a while he thought he’d fallen asleep in his mother’s greenhouse. In a moment she would come and carry him to bed. But it was too cold to be San Antonio. And there was a girl, naked and warm against him.

All at once he remembered the world. Dread, absent for that one instant, sank into his body, as integral as bones. He opened his eyes, saw his breath.

“You’re awake,” the girl said. They lay wrapped in a wool blanket on broken checkers of linoleum, what had once been a grocery store on the outskirts of some little Oklahoma shithole. A white beam of sunlight cut across the room from a high window.

“Fucking hate Oklahoma,” Brood said. He bet they weren’t fifty miles from the spot where his mother had died.

The girl rose to an elbow and smiled at him, missing teeth. The girl who’d worn the aviator shades. She was slightly younger, thirteen, maybe fourteen, so skinny he could see blue veins beneath the translucent skin of her cheeks. Her eyes, without the shades, pointed in slightly different directions, and Brood didn’t know which one to look at. But she had frizzy hair the color of ripe corn and she was warm, and she seemed to like getting naked.

Brood couldn’t remember her name, so he kissed her. She tasted like dust. He slid a thigh up between her legs. She pushed her hips close. He felt bones. He ran a hand down her back, his index finger ticking over each protruding vertebrae.

“Wait here,” he told her. He kissed her on the forehead, extracted himself, stood.

“Where you going?”

“Nowhere,
chica
.” His canvas shorts lay in a heap on the floor. He pawed through them, retrieved something from a hidden pocket, then stood naked for a moment in the sunbeam. It warmed him, made the wound in his side tingle, but in a good way. The infection had receded. The hole had almost healed shut.

“Probably hit eighty today,” he said. For a week the caravan had holed up in this shell of a strip mall at the little town’s edge. Snow had been so thick the night before he couldn’t see a foot out the door. “Probably be one ten tomorrow.”

“You’re so skinny,” the girl said. “Nothing but bones. Maybe the Corn Mother can fatten you up when we find her.”

They’d changed course, backtracked, changed course again in the week after they’d picked Brood up. He thought of Anna, sitting in the helicopter bubble cab of the lead truck. Holding broken headphones to one ear while she tuned the dial on the ancient Ham mounted with wire to the dash. Trying to divine the Corn Mother’s sacred location as her people grew hungrier.

“Ain’t no Corn Mother,” Brood said. “Just a ghost you all chasing around the prairie.”

“We,” the girl corrected. “We chasing.”

“
Supongo
.” Brood smiled at her. “No need to fatten me up.
Más rápido que un
rattler.” He pointed at her, one eye closed, his hand a pistol. “I can put an arrow through a rabbit’s eye at a hundred meters. On the run.” He watched the girl to see if she was impressed. She smiled kindly. Her hunting rifle lay pieced out and rolled up in a cloth on the floor nearby. He’d seen her nail a rabbit at a quarter mile. He lowered his hand. “How come you missed me that night?” he wondered.

“Didn’t want to kill nobody. And we been watching you all that day.” She lifted a coy shoulder. “I liked you. It was cute the way you talked to your brother.”

Brood held his breath, swallowed hard. Pushed a palm against one closed eye, as though he could physically force thoughts of Pollo out of his skull, thoughts of what his own life now had become. He was nothing,
espiritu enojado
, a hungry spirit, a mouth wandering the dust, trying to feed itself. Emptiness swelled in his chest. His body tightened against it, locking it inside. After a moment he registered the girl, still watching him. He slid under the blanket beside her.

“You’re skinny,” he told her, and his voice quavered. He swallowed again, stuffed the emptiness down, down, down inside. Ran a hand up the girls ribs, over her breast. “Way skinnier than me. Here.” He opened the fingers of his other hand. The girl’s eyes widened.

“Seeds!” A dozen of them, plump lentils resting like tiny eggs waiting to hatch in his palm.

“No,
chica
. I soaked them.” They’d grown fat with juice and aminoes. He pointed at their nascent tails. “They sprouts now.”

“Where’d you get them?”

“Raimi gave them to me.”

The girl gave a sly smile. “He
likes
you,” she said.

“Yeah, he’s okay.”

“No, he likes you. Everybody knows he likes boys. He wants you to be his little bitch.” Brood considered this for a moment, decided it was possible and laughed. The girl knitted her brow. “He shouldn’t have gave you seed. That’s for planting.” Brood held the sprouts close to his face.

“Hope they ain’t frozen.”

The girl carefully took one between a thumb and forefinger, placed it like a fat emerald on her tongue. Her eyes grew distant with pleasure as she chewed. Brood tossed a few into his own mouth. They were perfect. Tasted like he imagined sunlight would taste. His body, cratered by vitamin deficiencies, instantly began sucking nutrients from them, a sort of electric feeling in his gut. He let the rest drop into the girl’s hand. “Our secret, Bev,” he told her. She gave him a cold stare.

“
Viv
.”

“Viv. That’s what I said.” He held her chin between his thumb and forefinger, forcing her eyes to meet his—he was pretty sure. “Promise. That
culero
Billy’ll give me all kinds of shit if he finds out.”

“Our secret,” Viv nodded.

“Okay. Don’t know what his problem is. He ain’t liked me since he first saw me.”

“He just don’t like stray dogs. You’re another mouth to feed.” She furtively placed another sprout in her mouth. “And he’s my brother.”

“
Coño
.” Brood stared at her. Shook his head, marveled at his own stupidity. “No wonder.” Viv laughed, a leering sound.

“Don’t worry. He only looks mean. Once Anna takes you in, you’re family. Anna’s big into family.” Viv propped herself on an elbow, let the blanket fall away. Her hair frayed out like lightning. She gave Brood a look with implications. He leaned in to kiss her. She leaned away.

“Who’s Rosa?” she asked. For an instant Brood let himself imagine it was Rosa who lay there, dirty blankets tangled around her. But to think of her was to think of Hondo. And to think of Hondo was to think of Pollo. He shut his eyes. “You talk about her in your sleep,” Viv said. “She’s your girl, huh.”

“Not no more. She won’t have no beggar.” Brood met Viv’s eye. Then her other eye. She looked away.

“My eyes are broken. I know it.”

He reached out, cupped her face in his hand, felt malarial heat in her cheek. He made her face him, met each eye in turn, forcing her to endure it.

“
Nada roto
,
chula
.
Muy bonita
.”

She grew hotter against his hand. She aimed an eye at him, reminded him of a crazed bird.

“I can see why she dumped you,” she said, and her eye travelled down his body. “You’re so skinny.” She pushed the last sprout into his mouth. Then her hand moved south, wrapped itself around his cock. “Don’t look so sad. I like skinny boys.”

….

They emerged from the store to an explosion of blue sky. Deep snow covered the flat acreage of an old parking lot fronting the strip mall. Three men stood nearby, warily eyeing a huge satellite dish they’d propped over a fire and filled with snow to melt.

“Think about it like a pie,” Raimi said. He had long black hair hooked behind his ears and the front of his FEMAs were soaked through, evidence of the problem at hand. “Three pieces. Three of us lift. On three.” Billy ran a hand over cornrows, seemed to concentrate for a minute, then shot a sly look at Raimi. He winked at the third man, Jorgen, who was tall and wore shredded jeans.

“You lost me there,” Billy said. “On what?” He looked again at Jorgen, who kept his face straight.

“On three,” Raimi said.

“You count to three, then we lift on four?”

“No, we lift on three.”

“Right. You count to three, then we lift.”

“We lift when I
hit
three.
On
three.”

“So do you mean on two?”

Raimi took a step back, pushed a strand of long black hair delicately behind an ear. He raised a hand, shading his eyes from the brittle post-storm sunshine, and began patiently to explain himself once more.