Five bodies full but the wagon zipped along pretty good. I wasn’t in much mood for talking and was glad to be behind the wheel again. Gave me something to focus on — plowing through the dirt clouds, keeping steady against the winds. Dodging the deep sand and ditches. This road led to Vega. It’d take us right through the corn, and right past the place where my father had been stolen away.
Took the whole day to reach the cornfields and when we did the sun was red behind them. The wind had mostly quit and we watched as the crops appeared on the horizon — a thin strip of yellow against the colors of evening sky.
No one said anything. We all just stared.
The plants stood dense and tall and ordered, running as far as we could see from north to south. They barely seemed to sway in the breeze.
When my father had taken me west, we’d stopped in the cornfields, camped on the side of the road beneath the crops. It was dead of winter, good crossing season, and Pop had dug in the snow and pulled up a plant, shown me roots that plugged right into the ground. He told me a tree’s roots could reach a mile deep, that the corn was nothing, just a fluke made by people who’d done nothing but play a trick on nature. Except nature got the last laugh, I guess. If that’s what you can call a never-ending plague of locusts eating every damn thing in sight. I don’t know that you can. But those people had done such a good job of twisting the corn into something indestructible, here it still was, food and fuel and a gold mine for the ones who owned it.
The cornstalks became silhouetted black against the sky as the sun sank farther from view. And I pulled the wagon off to the side of the road, right at the point where the plains gave way to crops.
We stood out of the car, our feet in the dirt but our eyes on that dusty wall of corn ahead. The thirty-foot plants.
GenTech designed the corn to withstand frost and drought, bad winds and big temperatures. Hell, if the crops flooded, I reckon that corn could probably grow arms and swim. The one living thing the locusts couldn’t feast on, the one thing to grow back after the Darkness. And now nothing could kill it. All GenTech had to worry about was poachers, and it was hard to imagine the poachers even made a dent, burrowed in their underground colonies, hidden from the locusts and the agents, buried away from the sun.
These crops on the edge were full grown and just turning ripe. You could see the biggest cobs near the top, where the thick leaves rustled. Another week and GenTech would have the dusters down here, blading one crop and reseeding for the next.
You can’t steal the corn for planting, on account of the purple logo on the kernels. People steal the corn, they eat it. Hungry people. People like us.
“The perimeter’s the safest spot,” Crow said. “Locusts nest on the insides, keep to the core. And agents figure most folk ain’t got the balls to do their poaching out near the open.”
“So what’s the plan?” I said, annoyed at Crow being the expert.
“What plan?” Crow laughed. “All we need right now is a knife.”
Alpha had a blade stashed down her boot, so we pushed into the first rows of plants, looking for food, all pressed up in the cornstalks because they plant that stuff so damn close together. Beneath all the dust, the leaves were dark green and crunchy. I tapped at a stem and it made a hollow sound, like a tube of plastic. Hardly even felt like a living thing.
Alpha climbed Crow’s back and settled in on his shoulders, sawing her blade at the ears of corn, dust raining down as she worked. Crow had his big hands clasped on those pretty thighs of hers, holding her in place, and something about his fingers pressed tight on her skin made me feel all queasy inside.
“Can’t you go a little faster?” I called up at her.
“Going as fast as I can, bud.”
“You should keep watch, little man,” Crow said. “Out by the wagon. We’re not gonna spot no agents all bunched up in here.”
He was right, but it pissed me off to admit it. Pissed me off him calling me little man all the time, too. Little man? Son of a bitch. We can’t all be seven-foot watchers.
I forced my way back through the plants, their lousy leaves all covered in sand and whacking me in the face. And I was about to bust free when I stepped right on top of Sal.
Kid was on all fours, trying to eat his way through a stem, really gnawing at it but getting nowhere. “I’m so hungry,” he said, taking a break to stare up at me, spit hanging out of his mouth.
“Just don’t you get lost in here,” I said, stepping over him and pushing my way outside.
Hina hadn’t joined us in the cornfield. She was sat in the dirt, arms around her knees and her head bent on her shoulder. She was facing away from the sunset, staring east where the sky was nothing but black.
I sat down next to her, our backs to the corn.
I saw goose bumps on Hina’s shoulders and thought of taking my shirt off to give it to her, but I had the bark tied on my skin, so I left my shirt right where it was. She trembled a little in her thin top, and there was a distance in her eyes that reminded me of my father. That faraway look that said no matter where you were staring, you were seeing some whole different world.
“Gonna eat soon,” I said. Hina didn’t say anything but I thought I caught her glancing at the car. “I know,” I said. “Gonna be kind of cramped. Once we enter the cornfields there’s no going outside the wagon. But all goes well we should be through these crops in a day or so.”
“And then what?” she said, startling me. She never spoke enough for her voice to be something I got used to.
“Well, then I reckon we’re gonna find us your trees.”
She smiled, but it was a thin, bitter shape. “They’re not my trees,” she said, her hands going to her belly.
“You remembered anything?” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like about my old man.”
“Just bits and pieces.” She stared east again, scratching at her arms. “Guess I’m no good to anyone without the gypsy’s memory box.”
I watched her blink three times before a tear rolled out and ran down the side of her cheek. I thought I ought to say something. Do something. But I didn’t know what.
“You find your father,” Hina whispered. “Then you can ask him what happened.” I felt her lean against me, and I suddenly wished I’d kept that picture of Zee to give her, this woman with a brain like a broken sieve. But I just sat there, leaning against her, until the others came crashing back through the crops.
Hina went rigid and I stood, turning to watch Alpha come busting into the open with a whole stack of corn in her arms. Crow came after her, stupid big grin on his face.
“We gonna eat good tonight, people,” he boomed. “Miss Alpha ain’t a pirate no more. She’s a poacher.”
“Ready to head south?” Crow said as I jumped behind the wheel and fired up the wagon.
“South?”
“Follow the perimeter until you see the fourth service road. We’ll follow that west and start winding our way through the maze.”
“The least watched way.”
“That’s right, little man. Crow here gonna steer you right on through.”
I pulled off the road and the wagon sank into the sand as I pointed us south. I flicked the lights on, but Crow had me turn them off again.
“Just go slow,” he said, leaning over my shoulder and peering with me through the windshield. “We’ll see the service roads. Night as clear as this.”
We drove silent through the dark, nothing but the soft hum of the engine, and cruising south somehow felt like we were going downhill.
The first service road surprised me.