Under the Empyrean Sky (20 page)

Cael straddles the man, draws back the pocket of his slingshot as far as it’ll go, a ball bearing pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He draws a bead between the man’s eyes.

“I’ll kill you if you hurt them,” Cael says.

“They’re all right.”

“Prove it. Take me to them. Unless you want this metal marble buried in the meat of your brain.”

“No, no, I’ll show you. I swear. Don’t kill me.”

Cael nods. “Then show me.”

THE BURROW

THE SLINGSHOT POINTS
right to the base of the vagrant’s brain as he walks forward. Cael makes it clear that if he lets fly, the ball bearing will kill the stranger lickety-split—it will sever the brain from the spinal cord, and the curtain will close for this hobo’s one-man show. Cael doesn’t know if that’s true, but it sure sounds good, and he’s angry enough to be convincing.

The vagrant leads Cael down another alley, this one between a motorvator garage bay and a little old café with a half-collapsed awning. Halfway down, the hobo stops.

“Here,” he says, nudging a ratty blanket with his ragged boot.

“Go on, then.”

The vagrant stoops over with a grunt and, with his good arm, pulls back the blanket; beneath it is a corrugated tin door like you might find leading into a farmhouse root cellar. He gets his dirty, callused hands under it and lifts while Cael stands back, one eye aiming over the pinched slingshot pocket.

A doorway—dark and breathy with the scent of fresh earth—leads down.

“You better not be leading me into some sort of trap,” Cael says.

“No,” the hobo says. “Though once you see what’s down here, I don’t rightly know what happens next.”

They descend into the earthen tunnel. It starts to slope further, and someone has dug out part of the ground and buried flat-level stones, creating a set of makeshift steps so you don’t slip and go tumbling down. It gets darker and darker, but soon the light appears: buzzing sodium bulbs strung up in the distance.

They cross over a set of rails. Like for a train but smaller.
A mine cart maybe
, Cael thinks.

The tunnel bends.

They go with it. And there, ahead, is another vagrant.

This one is a woman. Her dirty red hair is braided in a crown above her head, her cheeks made orange by smudges of dirt. She’s got on a dress, a rich-lady’s dress like you
might see on a mayor’s wife; but it’s been modified—the skirt torn at the knees, the sleeves shredded, bands of leather wrapped around the wrists. The dress was once pretty, Cael imagines, but now it’s ruined—like everything the hobos touch. The woman stands there, writing on a chalkboard hanging on the wall, marking off
X
s and question marks and other symbols Cael doesn’t know on a big, taped-off grid—he sees words at the top and along the side of the grid such as
yield
and
f1
and
f2
. She doesn’t see Cael there yet.

“Hey, Jed,” she says, marking off another
X
and comparing it to a paper in her hand. “Heard we found some kids messing around up above. Got two of them, but did you find the—”

“Marlene,” the hobo says, and clears his throat once, then again more loudly.

She looks up. Eyes go wide. “Oh.”

“Ma’am,” Cael says, figuring that, hobo or no, a lady still deserves a modicum of respect.
After all, your sister’s a vagrant, isn’t she?

The one called Jed swallows hard. “You’re, ah, you’re gonna want to get the boss for this.”

“The boss,” she says, spaced-out. Staring at Cael’s slingshot. Then she snaps back to it. “The boss. Right.”

She drops the chalk and runs off.

“Jed, huh,” Cael says. “Well, lead on, Jed. Let’s find my friends.”

Cots. Tents. Tables.

Vagrants everywhere. Cael does a quick count—two dozen. Maybe more. Two are milling around an old brass coffeepot with a circle of blue flame flickering underneath. Another handful are lugging bags of something dark and earthy—could be soil, Cael thinks, but the color’s off. Another sweeps the floor. All of them dressed in the telltale rags and repurposed clothing that separates a hobo from every other Heartlander.
It’s like they
want
to look different
, Cael thinks.
Like they’re proud of it.

The lights bathe everything in a muddy yellow glow. Cael glances around and sees several other tunnels shooting off from this room.
These people are like groundhogs
, he thinks.
Or ants. They’ve dug a burrow, and now they live here. Hiding away from everyone else.

Someone finally notices Jed and Cael.

A big hobo—skin as black as night, body built like a grain silo—cries out in alarm and draws a small sonic shooter from a holster at his hip.

“No, no, no!” Jed yells, waving his hands. “Don’t shoot, Homer, don’t shoot.”

Cael’s pulse is kicking now like a cranky horse, and the adrenalin shoots through him in a cold saline rush. He draws the ball bearing back farther, the tubing on his slingshot tightening with a creak. “You shoot me, I shoot him. I just came for my friends.”

“Jeezum Crow, Jed,” Homer mutters, shaking his head. “Asked you to do one thing, and you bring this to our door.”

“Just go get the kid’s friends, okay?”

Homer doesn’t holster the sonic shooter, but he backs around a table and winds through a cluster of cots, disappearing down one of the side tunnels.

“What the hell are you people doing down here?” Cael asks.

“You’ll see,” Jed says, “
if
the boss wants you to see.”

Someone moves off to Cael’s left. Another woman. Matronly. But tough, too. Broad hips
and
broad shoulders. Skin weathered like saddle leather. She’s got something behind her back.

A small hand-shovel.

Cael shoots her a look. Nods toward his slingshot. “Drop the shovel, ma’am.”

The woman rolls her eyes and then shows the shovel and lets it clatter to the ground. But the shovel isn’t the problem. Not anymore.

It’s her hand.

Or what passes for a hand.

It’s like Poltroon all over again. Her fingers are vines, though her thumb is human. Her vine-fingers—leafy, green, whispering against one another—drift and twitch.

Oh, Lord and Lady, no.

“The Blight,” Cael whispers. Suddenly he feels sick and dizzy and scared. He hears Rigo’s voice in the hollow of his mind:
Told you this was a bad idea, Captain.

“We’re good people,” Jed says.

“You’re Blighters. You’re sick.”

“Not all of us. We’re not bad people.”

Cael remembers the things Poltroon said:
The Blight. It talks to me. I can hear it inside my head. It hates us. Hates who we are. Like a child who hates its parents.

Suddenly, a distant squeaking fast approaching. Homer emerges from the same side tunnel, this time pushing a rusty wheelbarrow with a half-flat front wheel. Piled into the wheelbarrow are two bodies: Lane and Rigo.

They’re dead.

Cael can’t breathe. He feels the adrenalin turn to poison panic—a high-pitched whine in his ears, a sense of vertigo threatening to knock him to the ground.

But then Rigo moans and his arm flops over the side, hitting the metal wheelbarrow bucket with a dull bang.

What should he do? Cael can’t think. His friends are…
unconscious. Maybe hurt. Trapped in an underground lair full of contaminated Blighters and homeless wretches.

The big hobo shrugs impatiently. “Well? You said you wanted your friends. Here they are, boy. It’s like dinnertime,
ding-ding-ding
. Come and get ’em.”

Cael steps out from behind Jed. His hands are shaking. He repoints the slingshot at Homer as he steps forward into the middle of the room. He can feel all eyes on him. He spies another Blighter off to the side: a man whose whole neck is green, veiny, textured like the underside of a leaf.

“Step back,” Cael says to Homer, gesturing with the slingshot. “Go on. Move away.”

Homer holds up both hands and shakes his head. “You’re asking for trouble, kid.”

They won’t let us leave here
, Cael thinks.
They know we could spill the beans. Bring the Empyrean down on their heads. Shit!

Cael lifts up a knee, nudges Rigo’s hand. “Rigo.
Rigo
.”

“Muh,” Rigo mutters. “Muh grub whuh wee.”

“Wake up.”

“Fuh. Nuh now.”

Damnit
.

Cael starts formulating a plan: he’ll point the slingshot at Jed again, make Jed push the wheelbarrow back down the tunnel and up through the cellar doors. By then, Lord and Lady willing, Rigo and Lane will finally have stirred.

But he never gets to enact that brilliant plan.

Because the boss is here.

Cael hears someone call his name.

“
Cael?
”

He looks over his shoulder.

And there stands Pop.

THE LORD AND LADY’S GARDEN

“THEY SAID THEY
saw some kids up in town, but I had no idea,” Pop says. “Though I should’ve figured it was you.”

Cael’s not sure what to say.

“You… have some questions,” Pop says, sitting at a small table made of a board lashed to a couple of old barrels. Cael sits on a chair that’s really just a barrel cut in half.

“Pop, I feel like I’m dreaming. But I’m just not sure yet if it’s a good dream or a bad one.”

Pop says nothing, just pushes a tin cup of coffee toward Cael.

Cael takes it. It’s cool down here in the burrow, and the steam from the coffee rises like ghosts from a fresh-dug grave.

“Pop, there’re hobos down here.” Cael lowers his voice. “
And Blighters
.”

“I know, son.”

“That ain’t right.”

Pop forces a smile. “It’s okay, son. They’re nothing to be scared of.”

“I didn’t say I was scared—”

“I know, I know, but these are people just like us. Given a bad turn of the worm, any Heartlander at any time could become one of them. The Empyrean doesn’t like our tax bill or we get three strikes against our Tally, and we get booted out of town on a Remittance Order, too. You know a Remittance Order used to pay?” Pop takes his own cup of coffee, sips from it. “It’s true. They used to pay you a small stipend—a remittance—to get out of town. That practice is long gone, but the name stuck, I guess. Anyway. Point is, you get a raw deal from the Empyrean—or worse, you wake up one morning and find a scaly patch of plant fiber or a leaf growing up out of your chin whiskers—and that’s it. It’s not your fault. It’s piss luck is all.”

Like Poltroon
, Cael thinks.
He didn’t ask for what happened to him.

Cael tells his father everything. It comes spilling out of him like water from an overturned bucket. He tells Pop how he’d been seeing Gwennie, how they found the garden
and then went out in the piss-blizzard to collect more of the harvest. He tells Pop about Poltroon, too. About what he was. What he said. And how he ended up ground up in his own machine—suicide by harvester.

Pop listens the whole time, nodding, making all the right sounds. When he hears about Poltroon, it seems to strike him deeply. “We could’ve offered him a place here.”

“Pop, the Blight… if what he said was true, you can’t trust these people.”

“What he said
is
true, son. The Blight is a sickness; don’t mistake what I’m telling you. But we’ve found a way to stave off its worst effects, to halt its march toward taking over the victim’s body.” Pop takes another slow, delicate sip of coffee, almost as if he’s drinking it as part of an Empyrean tea service rather than here at a barrel table in an underground bunker full of hobos and vine-heads. “Besides, the Blight victims have a very special gift that comes with their curse.”

“Gift?”

Pop nods. “Come on; I’ll show you.”

“Welcome to the garden.”

Splayed out before them is a massive underground chamber. Cael figures it’s easily as big as the acreage of their
own homestead. Everything is bright: humming ultraviolet lights hang from above, bathing everything in a warm glow. Row after row of tables line the room, and on these tables are wooden boxes cut into grids—each square about a foot on every side and filled with soil. The boxes are planters, and Cael spies tomatoes and beans and peppers. A red flash of strawberry. An orange butternut squash shaped like a dog’s head.