Blightborn Read Free Page A

talking about dirt, and Cael used that time to let his mind wander and think about Gwennie and her sweet-smelling soap and the smooth roundness of her freckled skin on the rare occasions that they managed to find time together and get each other out of their clothes—
    But one thing he knows for sure is that the processing plants make one helluva lot of waste. Silage and starchy soups and chemical syrups—anything that can’t be used from the corn is pumped out of the plants in rivers of gray-brown slurry that end up in massive, concrete holding tanks, which are eventually filled up, capped, and buried.
    He’s seen them up close before when he was out scavenging with his crew. Bubbling muck crawling. A stink that’s both sweet and sickly, wrong in a way that the mind knows but can’t properly put together.
    They’re going to pass over just such a river in . . . about thirty seconds, he figures. He points, calls it out: “Slurry river ahead!” Lane gives him a shrug, and Rigo peeks between the fingers of his hands.
    Lane says, “Should be all right. Tracks go over it on a trestle.”
    “Maybe we should slow down anyway,” Rigo says.
    “I said we’ll be all right, so we’ll be all right,” Lane yells.
    “I’m kinda scared.”
    Lane waves him off. “That’s life in the Heartland. Besides, being scared usually means you’re experiencing a life worth living, so shut your jabber-jaw and enjoy the—”
    “Oh shit,” Cael says.
    He doesn’t need to explain.
    They all see it.
    The chrome reflects the sun; the black steel just eats it. Ahead it’s a small thing, a dark square in the distance. If it were only a stationary object, Cael wouldn’t feel as if he was about to piss his britches. But it’s an auto-train, one of the motorvator locomotives. Which means it’s coming fast .
    Which means it’s going to meet them on the bridge.
    Rigo yells one word: “Traaaaaain!”
    Cael and Lane move fast, grabbing the cornstalk oar-poles and jamming them against the hard earth—the stalks are tough but brittle, and they begin to disintegrate as soon as they meetthe dirt. Cael tosses his and grabs his rifle—he thrusts it into Lane’s hand.
    “We gotta bail,” he says to Lane.
    Lane’s eyes go as wide as moons.
    “Tuck and roll,” Cael says, and gives Lane a hard shove off the raft.
    His friend disappears into the corn—the stalks shudder and shake; he sees a glimpse of Lane’s heels, and then he’s gone.
    Rigo babbles a steady stream of entreaties: “Lord-and-Lady-Lord-and-Lady- Lord-and-Lady .” Spit so fast the words start to lose meaning.
    “We gotta jump!” Cael yells.
    “I don’t want to jump.”
    “On three! One . . .”
    “I don’t want to jump!”
    “. . . two . . .”
    “The food! We need the food!”
    Rigo reaches for the bag.
    “. . . three!”
    Cael leaps backward off the raft.
    Rigo jumps, too, getting hold of the bag’s strap as he does so—
    But the strap catches on the front corner of the raft.
    The raft launches out onto the trestle over the slurry river. Cael catches sight of Rigo still clutching the bag-strap, dangling over open air as the raft hurtles forward—
    And then Cael’s world goes dizzy, spinning end over end as his shoulder hits the ground, and he rolls forward, crashing through cornstalks that reach for him and slice him with quickcuts of thin leaves. The ground beneath him starts to slope, and he begins to roll. Cael reaches for stalks, but his hands fail to find a grip. In the back of his mind he realizes why the ground slopes suddenly downward. I’m heading for the slurry.
    But then his hand finally catches a stalk, fingers hooking into the brace roots and halting his fall—
    His legs dangle over the edge of a crumbling earthen lip, a crusty berm of dry ground bulging with broken stalks and tentacular roots—
    Cael looks up at the trestle extending out over the river, one hundred feet up from the churn of chemical molasses—
    He sees the train