Under the Empyrean Sky (25 page)

Barnes staggers sideways and launches a punch—but it’s a telegraphed attack. Cael ducks low, slams a boot right into Boyland’s knee.

The big lug howls and falls over.

Cael steps in, draws the slingshot. A ball bearing is twisted up in the pocket, the sling drawn so far back he can feel the muscles in his arm burning for release.

“Back down,” Cael says, a spit-bubble blowing and popping on his lips as he speaks. “We’re done here. Gwennie’s been mine, and she’ll always be mine. I ever see you lay a hand on her, I’ll put one of these into your mouth and down your fat throat. Now do
you
understand
me
, Bar—”

A warbling blast hits Cael from the side. The slingshot drops to the ground. The ball bearing rolls away. A foot steps out, kicks it away like it’s a rattlesnake about to bite.

The sonic strike mixes up Cael’s insides—he gets up on his hands and knees and barfs onto the street. Retching. Dry heaving. He looks up through watery eyes to see Boyland backing away.

Then a face stoops down in front of his own.

Pally Varrin.

“Hey, Cael,” Pally says, twirling his sonic shooter. “Saw you trying to murder the mayor’s son there. That’s a no-no,
in case you didn’t realize.” He gets closer. “I did enjoy it, though. Same as I’m sure you enjoyed dunking me at Harvest Home.”

“Gwuh—”

Pally just puts a boot between Cael’s shoulder blades and pushes him down. Holds him there while Cael hacks and sputters.

Pally waves off the onlookers. “Go on home, everyone. I got this taken care of. It’s handled. It’s handled! Go drink something, you skunks!” The Babysitter points to Boyland. “And you. Barnes. Shoo, we’re done here. I didn’t see nothing.”

And that’s that. Barnes shoots Cael one last look before hauling ass down the street. He goes to get Gwennie while Cael is left with nothing but arms and legs that feel like overcooked noodles and a stomach that’s doing barrel rolls inside his torso.

Pally just laughs as Cael passes into darkness.

PART FOUR

THE NOOSE

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

All the cops have wooden legs

And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth

And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs

The farmers’ trees are full of fruit

And the barns are full of hay

Oh I’m bound to go

Where there ain’t no snow

Where the rain don’t fall

The winds don’t blow

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

—“The Big Rock Candy Mountains,” Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock

THE LORD AND LADY BLESS US AND FREE US FROM OUR BONDS

CRUNCH.

Mayor Barnes bites into an apple. Juice runs into his beard.

The sodium lights buzz.

“It’s a very good apple,” he says.

Arthur McAvoy sits across from the mayor, trembling from what he’s seen. For a while there he felt like a raw nerve, watching his fellow garden tenders falling to the sonic blasts and thrum-whips of the Empyrean guardsmen in their emotionless black horse masks. The thrum-whips coiled around arms and necks and feet, the whips vibrating
so fast and so completely they bit into the flesh and left the hobos screaming as their teeth ground against one another and the blood ran red. The sonic blasts knocked them to the earth, too, causing their bodies to seize up so bad some of them broke their arms or legs by going so dreadfully rigid.

The guardsmen dragged the others up to the surface of Martha’s Bend. Pop heard them call in for an “extraction barge,” which meant his people were going to be taken away. Snatched up out of the Heartland and taken up above. Marlene. Jed. Homer. All taken away.

Those who had the Blight…

They did not fare so well.

The Blighters’ bodies have been dragged outside to be burned.

All while Barnes eats an apple.

Crunch crunch crunch
.

“You want a drink?” Barnes asks while picking apple skin from his teeth.

“I do not,” Arthur says through stiffened lips.

“How’s your hip?”

“Hurts.”

“I bet.”

The mayor himself hit Arthur right in the bone spurs with a beatdown stick. Now the bone spurs are like a beacon
drawing a loud frequency of radiating pain.

Just the same, Barnes pulls a flask of whiskey and two telescoping metal cups. He opens both little cups and holds them together with one hand as he pours with another.

“Go on now. Have a taste. Here I’m offering you two fingers of thirty-year whiskey. What kind of a man refuses an offer like that?”

Arthur takes the cup, runs a thumb along the rim, and then spills the contents on the ground.

“I don’t drink anymore.”

“Ah,” Barnes says. “So you’re
that
kind of man. Lots of things you don’t do anymore.” The mayor snorts. “Perfectly good whiskey. Well, whatever. Let’s get down to it, then. We can each admit that I’ve got you bent over the barrel?”

Arthur tenses. “You do.”

“The Empyrean’s not going to be happy about all
this
.” Barnes gestures to the underground burrow that they almost didn’t discover. But once they found the holo-flick theater and saw the tree growing there in the center, it was all over. The guardsmen blasted a hole clean through the glass stage and came pouring in through the breach like fire-biters out of an anthill. A few of Pop’s gardeners managed to escape on rail-rafts. But Pop and the others stayed behind to rescue what seeds they could and got caught or got dead because of it.

We all should have run. Let this one go.

Too late now.

“They might not be happy,” says Barnes, “but me? I’m happy as a squirrel with a nut, old friend. This has been my dream for a long time. To catch you doing something…
sticky
. Something the McAvoy of old would have done. Shame about you, really. You were being groomed, smart fellow that you were. Science minded. Engineer—wasn’t that it? Fast-tracked to the Big Sky. Maybe even make your own flotilla one day. Have your name on one of them floating behemoths. Whatever happened with that anyway?”

“You know full well what happened.”

The Empyrean had pulled the rug out from under that program. Back then Heartlanders had a way off this rock and out of the fields—the truly gifted got a shot to apprentice on one of the flotillas, gain a life up above rather than down below. But at some point the Empyrean decided it just wasn’t worth the time or the money. What was it that had come across the Marconi?
We regret to inform you at this time that, due to a superfluity of talent, we have temporarily shuttered our apprenticeship program. Please check back in six months.

Translation:
We’ve got our own smart people now, and we don’t need you.

Temporarily. What a joke. That’s what they said when they closed the schools, too.

“Oh, right. I do remember now. You know what else I remember? I remember you taking off like a shot.” The mayor whistles low and slow, slaps his hands together. “Like a cat with chiggers biting his tail. And you went and took Filomena with you.”

Filomena. His wife. Of course it would come back to this.

“You stole her from me,” Barnes says.

So, there it is, then.

“She made her choice.”

The tendons stand out in the mayor’s neck as he leans across the table.

“It wasn’t
about
choice,” he spits. “We don’t get choice in these matters. We don’t follow our godsdamn hearts like a… a butterfly chasing flower petals on the wind, Arthur. She got the envelope. She got the letter. She was Obligated to
me
.”

“And yet she chose
me
,” Arthur says.

“You left. You left town. And don’t think we don’t know why you went, or where you went, or who you went with. You took her from me, off on your little adventure. You have any idea what that put me through? My Obligated bride, snatched away from me by some anarchist… some godsdamned anarchist punk?” He slams the metal cup down on the table, collapsing it with the flat of his hand. “You took her! You sonofabitch.”

The mayor’s nostrils flare like a bull’s.

Which is what Filomena called Barnes, wasn’t it?
A snorting bull.
She thought he was crass. Thick and dumb. Common in all the worst ways and none of the best. All reasons why she chose the mayor’s opposite in Arthur.

“Your fault she’s sick. Taking her out of town to the far-flung corners of the Heartland.”

And beyond
, Arthur thinks. His mouth forms a tight and bitter line. “That’s all ancient history. Go and appreciate the wife you have.”

“And what a wife she is! Got an ass like two hogs wrestling under a quilt. A sour face like she’s always smelling an updraft of shit somewhere. My son’s mother is not my wife. Legally, yes. In the eyes of the Empyrean,
yes
. But in my heart?” He angrily thumps his chest. Then he foregoes the cups, takes a long pull of whiskey straight from the flask, swallowing it with a growl. He wipes his mouth and says, “In my heart, it’s Filomena.”

For a little while the mayor just stares. First at Arthur, and his eyes drift as he looks off at an unfixed point in the distance.

Behind Mayor Barnes, two of the Empyrean soldiers come from separate corners and meet in the middle. They face away from the Heartlanders, but Arthur can still hear the taller of the two say after taking off his horse helmet
that he found another Blighter hiding in the garden and pulsed her with the sonic rifle. He says they’ll need to bring in something to “take care of” the garden. A flame-tosser, maybe. Or a couple of boom-cube explosives that’ll collapse the whole burrow, bring down the town above with it.

Outside, someone yells.

A cry of alarm by the sound of it.

Barnes doesn’t seem to notice. Just keeps staring. Licking and sucking his teeth as he does. The mayor mutters, “You had your shot, Arthur. Now I’m bringing you down.”

Then Pop hears it: the sound of footsteps. Coming fast. The ground even shakes a little.

The two guards have just enough time to give each other a look before Homer—bruised, bloodied, the whites of his eyes gone entirely red—barrels into the room like a wild horse fresh from branding. The guards react—but they’re too slow.

Homer snatches the sonic rifle off the back of one guard and pushes him forward with a hard knee. Then he takes aim and lets fly with a pair of sonic blasts—the one without the helmet takes it to the face. He cries out and gurgles at the fluids fast accumulating in his throat. The other drops to the ground, given over to a shuddering seizure.

The mayor spins, standing up so fast he almost falls
backward. From down the other hall, Arthur hears voices—more guards, alerted by the blasts.

Barnes is no fool. He shrieks like a barn owl and dives behind a cot as Homer raises the rifle.

“Go!” Homer yells to Arthur. “Run!”

Arthur hops up. He can’t move fast—the spurs in his hip shoot a lightning bolt of misery all the way down to the tips of each toe—but he hobbles along toward the escape tunnel.

Voices rise behind him. A commotion. He throws a look over his shoulder and sees Homer kick over a table. The huge hobo staggers behind it and starts taking shots over the edge. Four more guards emerge from different tunnels. A thrum-whip catches the table and starts vibrating with the telltale high-pitched frequency and—
vzzzt!
—cuts the whole table in half.

No time now.

Arthur limps toward the tunnel opening.

Homer stands.

A thrum-whip catches the big vagrant around the middle. He screams. Pivots. Points the sonic rifle
at
Arthur, and for a moment Arthur doesn’t understand—

But then a sonic blast hits the earthen frame of the tunnel gateway, collapsing it with a pulse of shrieking sound. Clods of dirt fall. Dust kicks up.

There, leaning against the wall, is a rail-raft.

Arthur, with a grunt, turns it over and places it upon the rails. The magna-cruxes buoy the raft, letting it bob atop the tracks.

As he throws himself on it, he hears Homer scream one last time and then—

Nothing.

Oh, Homer
.

Arthur blinks back tears, snatches an oar-pole off the wall, and begins pushing the raft forward—left side, right side, left side, right side—until he’s firing like a bullet down a barrel.

The Boxelder jail isn’t much to look at. A square room, all cinder block and mud. Its one window is just above the too-small plywood door at the fore. The whole place sits at the south end of town down a footpath that leads up a small, dusty berm where the corn doesn’t grow.

The jail has two cells separated by sheets of plasto-sheen, the plastic perforated by a series of little holes so the “guest” doesn’t suffocate while waiting for justice to be delivered by the Empyrean. The plastic cells don’t have doors, exactly—they have hatches at the bottom where you crawl in and out like a dog on his belly.