Appleseed Read online

  Despite John’s occasional bombs, Houston burning forever wasn’t what he’d wanted—but now that the city was empty, he did want it gone, as if it’d never been.

  “I stopped to dismantle a fuel station in South Dakota,” Cal continues, “taking apart the pumps and sealing the tanks before spending the night inside. In the morning, I woke to a truckful of Bundys parked outside, going through my Jeep. I saw one holding up my clothes, watched them figure out what they’d found. A woman, traveling alone.” She smiles, leans back, crosses her muscular arms. Cal, no damsel. Cal, a fighter who quit the country’s wars only to end up in this new one instead. “I knew it wouldn’t take them long to figure out where I was. I snuck to the nearest ledge, lifted my rifle into position.”

  “Cal,” John says softly, “I don’t need to hear this.”

  “You asked how I found this place. This is how I found it.” Cal mimes firing her rifle, three-round bursts taking each of the four men surrounding her Jeep in order, Cal working left to right, only the last man reacting in time to reach for his weapon. “There was a map in the truck’s glovebox. They were scouts, sent from Nevada to look for supplies, possible outposts. They’d marked this bunker in pencil, so I figured it was a new discovery: if they never made it back to base no one else would know it existed. That afternoon I started working my way here, looping the long way around in case I was followed.” She smiles again, her big teeth shining in the dark. “And also so I could leave a path for you.”

  Finished eating, they sit quietly, John rapping his knuckles on the table, knocking to open a door inside himself. “How’d you know where I was?” he asks, which is not quite the question he meant to ask. What do you want? he might’ve said.

  Cal laughs, husky, deep-throated. “You didn’t want to find me, old goat?”

  “You know I did,” John says, flushing, moving away as she leans forward, her hands pushing across the table. “But what if I hadn’t seen your blazes?”

  “Then I’d be fed and showered and unfucked, and you’d be as dirty and stinking and sad as ever.” She pushes her scraped food tin away. “But you’re right. There’s more. It’s time to go back east, John. Time to go see your girl.”

  Eury Mirov, Cal’s enemy; John’s too, if he believes what he’s supposed to believe. Defending Eury to Cal has always been pointless, the anger she put in Cal permanent, scarring; Cal fought for Earthtrust too long, did too much she regrets. John’s woken her from screaming nightmares that left them both gasping and terrified in their tent pitched on some windswept plain, the back of John’s truck beside an empty highway, a dusty bed in an abandoned motel, some cramped room swept free of the carapaces of starved cockroaches.

  Earthtrust—it’s always Earthtrust. John tells Cal about Yellowstone, about the strange wolf he saw there and about the drones taking away the dead bison, the last living juvenile heaving in the dirt. “What were they doing?” he asks. “What could they possibly have wanted?”

  Cal unrolls a laminated topographical map of the West, its mountains and rivers bounded by the borders of political divisions now defunct. “I don’t know,” she says, gesturing at the reset country marked with fresh scribblings of permanent marker, colored pen. “But I met Noor in Montana a month ago. She reported seeing Earthtrust dronedozers gathering up fallen trees draped in tents of invasive moths in one place, dredging dry lakes in another, the machines moving right down the middle of empty riverbeds. Everywhere she went, everything dead or dying was being gathered up, taken away.”

  “For what? What do they want with dead, stricken trees? Earthtrust barely even builds with wood. Almost every building in the VACs is printed concrete, extruded plastic.”

  Cal throws up her hands. What good are his questions, which they can’t possibly answer?

  “At least Noor’s all right,” John says. “Where are Mai and Julie?”

  Cal fills him in: Mai is back at Earthtrust, returned to the Ohio VAC’s medical clinics, the only one of them who never directly resisted the company, the only one who’ll be a citizen of the United States the next time they all meet. As for Julie—“You heard about the Cochiti Dam explosion?” Cal asks, rising from the table to pull back a tarp tacked to the wall, revealing a stack of crates—supplies or weapons or both.

  The Cochiti Dam: forty-eight million cubic meters of earth and rock, almost nine thousand meters across the Rio Grande, just north of vacated Albuquerque. A month ago, someone set enough charges to blow the dam open, freeing what little river was left. It wasn’t supposed to be easy to crack an earthen dam that size, but in the end all it took was effort and time, plus explosives.

  “That was Julie?” John asks, already knowing the answer. Before the dam was built, the nearby banks of the Rio Grande had been inhabited by the Pueblo; the land the dam flooded was sacred, tended for generations, then abruptly condemned by bureaucratic language deployed to commit government-sponsored crime. This was land Julie’s ancestors had stewarded and protected; blowing up the dam couldn’t restore what they’d lost, but at least Julie could set free what remained.

  “Good for her,” John says, and means it. His family’s land had been stolen from someone else, further back than he could feel. Now it’s lost to him too, all its soil blown away, that once fertile earth that gave generations of humans purchase. “What are we doing here, Cal?” he asks, exhausted. He runs his hand through his unkempt beard, its embarrassing tangle. He’ll shave in the morning, indulging in one more shower before they leave, after he unloads the explosives and the rest of his tools from the truck. “What’s changed?”

  Cal returns with a tablet computer, a scanner wand trailing a fraying plastic cable gone yellow with age. At her touch, the tablet begins its slow boot-up process, its software burdened by a series of hacks and backdoor workarounds, bypassing security checks to keep the device from pinging home. “When we left Earthtrust, the Secession was ended, the Sacrifice had long since cleared Congress. I’d dragged people out of their houses, loaded them into trucks and buses heading east; you’d made sure the VAC in Ohio was up and running, putting your supertrees and your nanobees to work.” Cal’s face leans over the tablet, her profile lit electric by the screen’s glow: her chopped hair, the hard angle of her soldier’s jaw, the twice-broken nose hung above the toothy glint of her smile. “But we both knew the VACs weren’t the end goal, that Eury Mirov wouldn’t stop there. We decided we didn’t want the world she was bringing into being.”

  John nods, agreeing, but was that all he’d wanted? Was it always so simple as that? “I chose you,” he says. “Me and Julie and Mai and Noor, we all did. The others too.”

  “And because of that,” Cal says, “I’ve had to take responsibility for everything that happened. For everyone we lost.” And they had lost: a half dozen men and women who’d come west with them, then all the others who’d joined in the Sacrifice Zone, people who loved the land and wouldn’t be removed. The first year had been spent running from Earthtrust security forces intent on emptying the West, the next dealing with the ever-harsher conditions post-Secession, post-Sacrifice, amid the forever drought spreading beyond the Southwest. But as the community of rewilders swelled, caravanning in four-wheel-drive trucks and SUVs, it eventually became easier to protect each other and to do their work, everyone working together to dismantle larger infrastructure projects, to effectively scavenge abandoned city blocks. For a while, everything had gone right, or at least right enough. And then it hadn’t, not ever again.

  “I know, Cal. I’m not—” John pauses, not because he doesn’t know what to say but because he’s surprised to find out he means it this time. “I’m not angry anymore. We were always going to despair at the futility of it. And something was bound to go wrong, sooner or later.” One summer there were algae blooms on every reservoir, so that the water couldn’t be safely filtered or boiled away; always there was unbearable heat baking their tents into ovens, never mind their hotbox RVs, whose solar air conditioners kept freezing from overu
se. Three men drowned in a flash flood that washed away a camp in northern Arizona’s red rock canyons, an unfortunate accident; it was so easy to die of exposure, it was so easy to fall and break a leg no one knew how to set, to succumb to a burst appendix no one dared remove. When the group was half its largest size, it started being preyed on by bands of preppers and survivalists, attackers they could repel but not without cost. A family was separated by an Earthtrust raid that captured the mother and daughter, sending the father and son rushing after by motorcycle: better to be caught together than be free apart. A suicide set off a run of copycats until they were all watching each other warily, talking gingerly, trying not to fight as their health worsened, as their sunburns flaked, as their teeth loosened against the hard nubs of expired protein bars.

  Everything west of the Mississippi was desert, and those who stayed became desert creatures, stronger, tougher, leather-skinned. Years of struggle eroded their community down to its core: Cal and Julie, ex-military, ex–Earthtrust security, veterans who’d served together for years; Noor, a white hat hacker from California who’d gotten stuck on the wrong side of the Secession, having been in Dearborn visiting family when the big one hit; Mai, their doctor, an obstetrician from Great Bend, an adventurer, one of the last to hike the Appalachian Trail in those impossible-to-recall years when voluntarily living in the elements was something people did for fun.

  And then there was John. Supposedly a brilliant programmer, an equally accomplished microbiologist. Not that he’d ever felt brilliant or accomplished, not while standing next to Eury, the only true genius he’d known.

  Now it’s Cal’s turn to look away. “It doesn’t matter if you forgive me,” she says. “I need you even if you’re angry. We knew some of what Eury had planned, knew what to watch for.”

  “You knew because I told you. Because I betrayed her.”

  “If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t know what’s about to happen.” Cal pauses, sets her jaw. “Pinatubo, John. Eury Mirov’s actually going to do it.”

  John’s been waiting for Cal to say this, but still he doesn’t quite believe it. “There’s no way the government will ever sign off—”

  “Don’t be naive. She administers half the country. The cities would starve without Earthtrust, and most of the rural areas too. The same is true abroad now. With VACs everywhere, she owns the only crops anyone can make grow. Who can stop her, if she decides to go forward? You said once that however Pinatubo turned out, it’d need a delivery system capable of reaching the stratosphere. Mai says Earthtrust’s built a huge facility at the Farm’s center, a tower topped by a twenty-story needle aimed at the sky. An injection point, just like you said.”

  “But Pinatubo was supposed to be a last resort,” he says, visualizing how Cal had gotten the news from Mai: from her post in the Ohio VAC, Mai sometimes passed messages to a sympathetic Earthtrust train engineer, who left them in a dead drop at the magrail terminus in Cheyenne. It was always Cal who risked going to look for Mai’s packages, never knowing when there might be a new one. What had Mai seen, back in Ohio? What did Cal know that she wasn’t saying? “We know Eury’s had the idea for the Tower for years. But that can’t be the most efficient way to—” Geoengineering on a global scale, locking the rising temperature in place for a generation, making a respite in which humanity could transition to a new economy and a new culture, then beginning the long work of repairing the planet. A future intended to start on the Ohio VAC, built on the land where he and Eury grew up.

  Despite Eury’s assurances, he’d never once believed Earthtrust would amass enough power to pull it off.

  Cal raises her hands in mock retreat. “Earthtrust doesn’t have to be an evil company. The Sacrifice Zone didn’t have to happen, the Secession didn’t have to be a bloodbath, the VACs don’t have to be surveillance states, they don’t have to force you to give up your citizenship to gain entrance. But all that happened on Eury Mirov’s watch. Maybe there’s reason enough to geoengineer the stratosphere too, but can we trust Earthtrust to do it right, for the right reasons?”

  Only now does John realize he’s the last one Cal needs to convince. Mai already in place. Noor and Julie meeting up, heading east together. The five of them made their plans for getting back into the Ohio VAC years ago. All they have to do now is carry them out.

  Cal leans forward, holding John’s gaze. “Are you in, John, as you promised you would be?”

  Her radiant intensity, her unwavering conviction—all of it overwhelms him. He has to look away so he can think his own thoughts, make his own decisions. “I’m tired,” he says quietly, after a moment’s pause. “But yes, I still believe.”

  “Good,” Cal says, as she wakes the tablet’s screen again, picking up the scanner wand. Maybe there’s nothing else to say, maybe she already knows all she needs to know about John, about what he’s good for, about plans he’ll agree to carry out. “Are you ready to reenter the world of the living?” she asks, then reaches for his right hand, splays it palm down on the table: every Volunteer, every Earthtrust employee, every refugee or prisoner, has an ID pebble embedded in the loose skin between their right thumb and forefinger. Before they’d broken their fellowship and gone their separate ways, Noor had crafted new identities in anticipation of this moment. John was to become Joseph, shortened to Joe, because keeping the first letter and syllable count ensured you’d react to your fake name when you heard it spoken aloud. Single, no children, a birth certificate and a national ID number that wouldn’t have held up to scrutiny ten years ago but probably would now, when there were so many refugees there wasn’t time for the processing centers to verify every last bit of information.

  Cal taps the tablet screen a few more times, reactivating John’s pebble before installing the rest of Noor’s hack, a deep-seated series of hidden subroutines John can summon with the right sequence of hand movements and purposeful blinks. A row of dim white lights winks on beneath the skin, each light the size of a pinhead: indicators barely visible through the epidermis, used to communicate basic notifications. John squeezes his thumb against the palm of his hand until four of the lights flash: orange, purple, green, blue; Cal, Julie, Mai, Noor.

  Only the five of them left, out of all those who’d gone west.

  During his retreat in the parklands, after he’d last left Cal, John had been alone, responsible to no one, or so he’d told himself: a sleepwalker, dreaming in the desert, despite the bombs and the makeshift bulldozing. Now, thanks to Cal, he’s awake again, his solitude broken, his connection to her and the others restored; now he’s ready, despite everything they’d done and everything that had already gone wrong, to do whatever it takes to try to make the world they want instead of the world they have.

  John squeezes his fist to watch the lights scroll their colors again; he opens his hand, then looks up to catch Cal’s stare, finally able to match the determination he sees there.

  Whatever else had happened, John had never wanted to abandon the world.

  C-432

  C-432 is unconscious, C is injured, C is dying, this C is going to die, and soon. Waking for the last time, tangled in his harness, the tarp full of frozen wood still spinning below him, he throws back his head and howls with pain, then regains his wits: too much noise might further unsteady the already tenuous crevasse. He’s battered and bleeding and his ribs are bruised or broken, but the worst danger is his right arm, pinned between the immovable wall before him and the fallen pillar that fell from behind, a slab that must still weigh thousands of kilograms. Every attempt to pull his shattered forearm free twists the stuck elbow, the pain producing a new scream he has to choke back before it can escape his chattering lips. He reaches with his good arm, his sharp teeth stilling his tongue against the pain as he slides the ice axe from its loops—thankfully he’s left-handed, or else he wouldn’t have been able to reach—and then strikes it awkwardly at the wall, just above where his elbow is pinned.

  The ice doesn’t budge, at least not where the pick
end of the axe bites the surface. But from above, C hears another ominous creaking. It’s impossible to predict the effect of striking the ice here, to know all the ways the reverberations might move through the crevasse wall above.

  C-432 is dazed and afraid, but the remainder has been mortally wounded many times. Now it instructs with calm, lucid brutality. If he cannot strike the ice, then the only other way to free himself is to turn the axe around, to switch from the pick end to the blade, then to put the blade to flesh and bone.

  He queries the remainder, begging for some other option.

  The remainder acknowledges his pain, but it will not offer false comfort.

  The remainder doesn’t care about C-432 any more than it did any of his predecessors.

  The remainder wants only to go on, in this body or any other.

  C-432 has lived longer than any other recent cycle, but that doesn’t mean he’s ready to die. After his escape, he drags himself away from the crevasse, one arm amputated below the elbow, the other dragging the heavy tarp, its plastic shot through with sharp shards of frozen wood and slick with steaming blood leaving a bright red trail brushed across the snow. His movements are awkward and pained, his vision swims and his legs wobble, but he can’t abandon the prize that cost him his forearm. The translucent photovoltaic bubble dips low at his approach, ready to ease his entrance; once aboard, he struggles to pull the tarp up after him, its weight nearly too heavy to heave one-handed into the bubble’s cramped space. There’s blood everywhere, so much spilled material he’ll have to replace, but that’s a problem for later. For now he has to concentrate at least enough to pilot back to the crawler. He steadies his severed limb in his good hand, holds the throbbing pulse above a makeshift tourniquet: how hot the skin is, how swollen the flesh, how much worse it will soon be. The AR command console swims in his blurring vision, but the craft sputters and starts to float; outside the winch remains secured to the ice, but C has no choice but to abandon it, hoping the crevasse won’t swallow it before he can return.