Blight Page 11

  The sat phone beeps.

  “Ha!” Alder’s face brightens. He punches in a number. Digital static burbles on the other end, loud enough for me to hear, and then a two-tone chime. Alder lets it ring, and ring, and ring.

  “They’re not picking up.” His face clouds over.

  “They’re probably still on the run.” If I were them, I’d want to put as much distance as possible between me and ground zero. I take the phone from Alder and turn it off. “You can try again later. Now we have to move.”

  We walk in silence for a time, our breath muffled by the masks.

  “You still going to turn yourself over to AgraStar?” Alder asks.

  I shrug. What else am I going to do? Like hell am I becoming a shirk again.

  “You really don’t think they’ll make you . . .” Alder points two fingers at his head and makes a shooting motion. “Disappear?”

  I glare at him. “What do you care?” They won’t. They can’t. If I bring them good intel and promise not to talk, surely they’ll trust me. I’ve always been a reliable asset.

  Alder raises his hands in surrender. “Whatever.”

  The perimeter fence approaches, and the kudzu forest beyond. Fire has burned away all the creeping vine and reduced the trees to blackened skeletons for as far as we can see. Once we’re past that, we’ll be in a no-man’s-land of jackers, shirks, and delusional separatist farmers who think they can outlast everyone.

  “Do you think they got it all?” I ask. “The blight?”

  “Hope so.” Alder’s eyes flicker over the smoldering forest. “Looks like they burned, what, a mile, mile and a half out past your perimeter?”

  “What are you going to do?” I watch him. He keeps his head up like I do—alert. Always scanning the horizon for trouble.

  “Head south,” he says. “Find the Deacon.”

  I swallow the blood in my mouth. “AgraStar’s headquarters is south, too.”

  “Meaning?”

  I look away. “The road’s less dangerous with someone to watch your back. We could sleep in shifts, keep watch. . . .”

  Alder smirks. “You trust me to watch your back?”

  “About as much as you trust me.” I look him over. We’ve both had plenty of opportunities to kill each other by now. “I’d take you over a band of jackers, anyway.”

  He snorts but doesn’t say anything. We walk in silence past a collapsed section of the border fence and through the charred field separating the compound from the forest. Evening is finally coming on, the sun low and muted, looking out at us from behind the haze like a red eye.

  Alder stops at the burned-out tree line. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “We stick together part of the way. Till our paths split. No farther.”

  .9.

  MARIGOLD

  CALENDULA OFFICINALIS

  We camp in a copse of trees about four miles beyond the perimeter gates. The sky has gone dark, and the smell of smoke still lingers in the air, even this far away. At least we seem to be outside the blight zone, though, and I’ve stopped coughing up blood.

  I drop my pack next to an elm. “You’re sure no one will find us here?”

  “If they do, it’ll be my people,” Alder says. “We’ve used this spot as a hideout before.”

  “Hmph.” I inspect my almost-empty water bottle. I’m too tired to argue, much less keep walking. My legs are shaking with fatigue, and the forest is starting to jump and blur.

  “I’ll take first watch,” Alder says.

  “Fine.” I collapse by the tree and grab a protein bar.

  “Give me one?” Alder says.

  I narrow my eyes and toss one to him. “Didn’t you bring anything with you?”

  “Just that.” He nods at the rifle. “I didn’t think I’d be more than a few hours behind everyone. I thought I’d, you know . . . catch up.”

  “You hunt?” I tear into the bar, ignoring the unspoken words between us. I thought I’d kill you quickly.

  He rolls a shoulder, a kind of shrug. “Yeah, but unless we see a deer, that’s not going to do us much good. Blow a rabbit or a squirrel apart.”

  “Traps would be better,” I say, my mouth full. “In case we need that for other things.”

  Alder looks away. He has to know as well as I do what’s out here on the roads. The kind of men who aren’t afraid to attack a company tanker won’t bat an eye at a single rifle.

  “Yeah,” he agrees. “Quieter.”

  I ball up the protein bar wrapper in my hand. It’s gone too quickly, and now I’m thirsty. I finish off my water, shaking the last few drops onto my tongue.

  “There’s a creek another half a mile in,” Alder says. “We can head that way in the morning. Follow it down to the Catawba River, even.”

  “The Catawba bends southeast,” I say, stifling a yawn. Atlanta is southwest. “I’d rather stick to the road.”

  “Suit yourself.” Alder leans against a tree and pulls out the sat phone. “You want some sleep, now’s your chance. I’m waking you up in four hours.”

  “Like you can even tell time in the dark,” I say. But if Alder has a comeback for me, I don’t hear it. I’m fast asleep.

  I come awake with something clamped over my mouth. Alder’s hand. I buck and kick, but he holds me still.

  “Shh,” he hisses in my ear. “Down by the road. Look.”

  I stop fighting, but my heart pumps hard against my chest. Several sets of headlights burn white through the underbrush, and the steady sound of engines idling fills the night. Alder removes his hand.

  “Yours?” I whisper.

  He shakes his head, barely visible in the glow of the headlights.

  Someone’s moving through the weeds by the road. Then the sound of a man pissing in the grass.

  “Hurry it up!” A shout from the truck—a woman. “We’ve got to get the sweep started by oh-six hundred.”

  “I’m comin’. I’m comin’,” the man mutters.

  I squint through the brush. 0600? Sweep? She sounds organized, professional.

  The man in the grass is a silhouette against the headlights, but then he turns, and I glimpse the logo on the back of his flak jacket. A four-pointed starburst, the bottom half growing out of two stylized leaves like an ear of corn. I have that same symbol carved into the rubber treads of my boots. It’s engraved on our rifles and printed on our produce stickers. AgraStar.

  Alder grips my arm.

  “Don’t,” he whispers. He’s seen it, too.

  I know I should run to them, wave my arms, identify myself. Some instinct is keeping me down on the forest floor, though. I should be flooded with relief, but all I feel is dread. Quarantine. I scan the convoy waiting on the road. No medic wagons or personnel carriers that I can see. Everything out there is an armored vehicle. That means every person carries an automatic rifle on his or her back that makes Alder’s bolt-action look like a child’s pellet gun. Whatever they’re doing, they aren’t on a rescue mission. Expendable. Alder’s words echo in my mind.

  “Let’s go,” Alder whispers in my ear.

  “No, stay still,” I hiss back. “They’ll move on any minute.”

  “Did you hear that?” The man by the road sweeps his flashlight over the underbrush. Alder and I hit the dirt.

  “Leave it,” the woman calls. “It’s probably a groundhog or something.”

  His machete glints in the moonlight as he pulls it from his belt.

  “Hey, pig pig pig!” he calls, wading into the brush.

  Shit. I glance at Alder. He jerks his head at the deeper woods behind us, and I nod. We start crawling backward, slowly, quietly.

  “Hucks, come on.” Boots hit the asphalt, and the woman’s voice gets louder.

  A stick snaps beneath my knee.

  I freeze and look at Alder. His eyes are big, like a deer’s. Flashlight beams sweep over us.

  “Run,” Alder says.

  We jump up and bolt through the underg
rowth.

  “There!” someone shouts. “In the woods.”

  The forest explodes. Splinters fly from the trees as bullets hit them. I duck and run forward at a crouch, close behind Alder. The gunfire follows us like a terrible rainstorm. The forest is darkness and hook-thorned vines, branches thrashing out and whipping my face, snatching at my clothes. Alder threads us through it as fast as he can. My blood is pure adrenaline. I match his pace, heedless of the thousand scratches and cuts from the undergrowth.

  “This way.” His breath is harsh. We run and run, jumping deadfall, dodging saplings, half blind. The gunfire fades behind us.

  Alder slows as we enter a less-dense tract of trees. We don’t speak, our breath the only sound between us. The forest opens onto a moonlit clearing. A shape rises out of it, huge and looming, draped in kudzu vines, a denser dark than the sky. A house. Or what used to be a house.

  Alder pulls the vines away, uncovering an open doorway and complete darkness beyond. “Careful,” he says. “The floor’s caved in near the back.”

  I duck under his arm and walk slowly, feeling ahead with the toe of my boot. The floorboards are slightly soft and spongy with rot.

  “What is this place?” I ask, rummaging in my bag for a flashlight.

  “Safe house,” Alder says. He lets the vines fall behind us. “Sort of.”

  I click on the flashlight. We stand in a large, open front room. The entire back half of it has collapsed, the floor giving way to a shallow pit. A portion of the ceiling has fallen through, leaving a clear view up into the second floor and the kudzu-wrapped rafters above. Floorboards and broken beams curve over from the upper level, as if the house is a waterfall frozen midstream. Particleboard covers the windows, but kudzu runners have crept in between the gaps and climbed the walls all the way to the ceiling.

  “Turn it off,” Alder says. “They could still be out there.”

  I press the flashlight’s head against my hand, so all it gives off is a dim, red glow. “How did you find out about this pl—” I turn to Alder.

  Blood covers the left side of his face from temple to neck. It soaks his collar and shoulder, dark in the red light.

  “They hit you.”

  Alder touches the wound gingerly. He winces, looks at the blood on his fingers. “I think it’s only a nick.”

  “Here.” I shove the flashlight at him and reach into my bag for the antibiotic gel. It would be better to clean it with water, but I’ve drunk everything in my bottle and Alder can’t have much left in his, either. Gel will have to do.

  “Hold still.” I squeeze out a glop and smear it over the cut. His skin is hot. I fish out the roll of self-adhesive gauze and begin wrapping it tightly around his head, over the wound, around again, until the blood stops seeping through. “There.” That’ll have to do.

  My eyes go to his, and I suck in a breath. His pupils are huge and black, like an animal about to pounce, or else be slaughtered. I don’t know how to read the intensity in them. I step back.

  He looks away. “Thank you.”

  I shrug and sling my bag down on the floor. Alder stands still, watching me. The hairs on the back of my arms and neck rise, but I try to ignore him and concentrate on finding my empty water bottle.

  “You could have gone to them,” he says.

  I shrug again. “Not without getting shot. I don’t have my tracker, remember? Stepping out of the forest right then would have spooked them.”

  He says nothing but keeps staring at me. I have the feeling that if I look up and catch his eye again, he’s going to wrap his hands around my neck and crush my windpipe or maybe do something entirely different and far more confusing. Eventually he turns away and balances the flashlight facedown on the floor. A small ring of light escapes around the edges, giving me enough illumination to find a dry spot to sit.

  Alder settles himself a few feet away and leans his rifle against the wall. He closes his eyes and rolls over on his side, his back to me. “Your watch.”

  I sigh and tilt my head back. A colony of mud dauber wasps have built their papery, fluted nest in the corner of the room, above my head. I get up and switch off the flashlight. Better to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I stand there, listening to the house’s stillness. I may have had only a few hours of sleep, but I’m wide awake, alert to every creak and sigh. Alder shifts, and then his breathing slows.

  I wander up the staircase to the second story, careful where I step. Moonlight creeps in around the leafy vines. All the rooms on the first floor are empty, but upstairs I find an abandoned iron bed frame with hearts and curlicues molded into the headboard, a pile of rotting clothes, and another room scattered with plastic bottles and broken glass. The walls are thick with graffiti. FUK COGBITCHES and BLACKTOPS R PUSSYS and BURN in big, sloppy letters. Alder and his people aren’t the only ones to use this place, then. I have the feeling their messages would be more spiritual, if they were the type to mark up a place at all.

  My body tenses before I know exactly why. From far away, the thrum-hum of a surveillance drone reaches my ears. I drop into a crouch. I used to wake in the night sometimes to the buzzing of them—a benign sound, almost comforting. But now I break out in an icy sweat and my head is full of fire. I can almost feel the plane’s cold electronic eye sweeping back and forth over the forest. Will the patchy roof and layers of kudzu be enough to mask our heat signatures? I press myself into the corner and hug my knees. I am small. I am nothing but a bobcat or a fawn. I am nothing to investigate further. For the first time, I’m glad my data band is gone. Without it, I am nothing but another animal, untethered and untraceable.

  I press my knuckles against my forehead. What’s wrong with you? Don’t you want them to find you? Don’t you want to go back? How can you expect them to trust you if you don’t trust them?

  Of course I do, I snap at myself. But on my own terms. In daylight, with intel to share. I don’t want them finding me in a half-rotten shack with a scavenger boy in the middle of the night.

  The sound recedes. I stand, every muscle stiff and aching. Is it really gone? I wait another fifteen minutes, listening in the dark, but the drone doesn’t return and no rumble of ground vehicles disrupts the chirp of frogs and crickets. I make my way back downstairs. Alder is fast asleep, his breath deep and even. I stare at his back. I could leave him here. No harm done. Disappear into the night and veer southwest, toward Atlanta. I’m better off approaching an AgraStar outpost without him. Besides, the longer I stay here, the greater the chance the patrol we evaded or a jacker gang will happen by. But Alder has the seeds, the resistant ones, and if I’m going to talk my way back into AgraStar’s good graces, I need something to bargain with. I need to prove I’m loyal.

  I kneel over him, barely breathing. The bag of seeds is in his jeans pocket. I reach for it, but Alder’s breath hitches. He moans, something animal, something that sends a brief shiver of pity through my chest. He rolls on his back, eyes closed tight, a frown pinching his forehead. I know he needs those seeds. His people need them to survive. But I need them, too. I finger the edge of the bag and slowly pull it from his pocket.

  It comes free with a whisper. I clutch it to my chest and freeze, certain Alder is going to open his eyes and see me. But he doesn’t.

  I stand and back away. Better if he doesn’t know, isn’t it? He’ll come after me if he knows. I crouch in a sliver of moonlight, open the pouch, and shake all the newly dried seeds into a plastic bag from my pack. Then I refill the pouch with seeds from the jar of Cherokee Purple I took back at the Kingfishers’. They look more or less the same to me. Alder might be able to spot the difference, but hopefully he won’t have a reason to examine them. Who knows, maybe the Cherokee Purples will end up being resistant, too.

  I stuff the bag inside my bra and cinch Alder’s pouch closed again. The moon has slipped away, taking my spot of light with it. Night is ending. I start to tuck the pouch back into Alder’s pocket. He’s skinny—all bones and muscle—and his pants are too la
rge, held up by an ancient belt patched with strips of duct tape. My fingers barely graze him, but suddenly he twitches in his sleep and cries out.

  “Eden!” He grabs my hand, and I freeze.

  Shit. His eyes are still closed. His face is dotted with sweat and crumpled in a frown. I start to pull away, but he says it again, soft and pleading this time.

  “Eden.”

  Something about the way he says her name sends pain through my whole body, as if his words have brushed up against a raw nerve. His fingers are strong, the skin smooth except for a patch of roughness around the heel of his hand. If I close my eyes, I can pretend it’s Ellison’s hand, which I’ll never hold. Ellison’s hand, which will never brush the hair from the back of my neck on a hot day, like I’ve imagined so many times. If I close my eyes, I can pretend I have everything I’ll never have.

  I sit there, pretending, as the light coming in through the kudzu softens to gray. Alder relaxes again. His fingers go slack and his brow unfurrows. I let his hand drop, and stand. Soon he’ll be awake, and I’ll be gone.

  I step out from beneath the vines overhanging the front door and adjust the straps on my backpack. Thick gray fog covers the clearing behind the house. I walk out into it. There must be a body of water nearby, with all the moisture in the air. And I heard frogs earlier. The ground grows soggy, sucking at my boots, and the pine trees are muted shadows. I come to a lake and stop. Small waves lap at the shore. The mist makes everything feel close and soft, and even though I know the fog and the soft slosh of water are the perfect cover for someone to sneak up behind me, I still feel safe—cocooned, hidden. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe if I squeeze my eyes shut, no one will see me.

  I kneel to refill my water bottle. Somewhere in the mist, a mourning dove calls out, its cry echoing over the water. A chill sweeps over me. “Eden.” And a wave of rage and loneliness hits. I sit down in the mud and damp grass. I could tear up my little plastic bag of seeds, ball it up and throw it out into the middle of the lake where no one would find it, and then we would all die. We would all be dead, and there would be no more scores to settle.