Botanicaust Read online

  It took all of his effort to look away.

  “Tula,” she said, and pointed to herself.

  She pointed to him and he knew she wanted a name. He didn’t want to give any part of himself to these people. He pointed to Awnia and made rocking motions with his arms. “Where is her baby?”

  He hadn’t lowered his voice, and Awnia looked up. At the sight of Tula, the screaming began again, the outright frantic panic of losing her child.

  Tula turned and spoke to the woman in low, gentle tones. She offered her a lump of something, but Awnia batted it away, words tumbling from her mouth over and over. “Baby … baby, baby… baby.” That word seemed universal, for Levi understood.

  Another Blattvolk, a male draped in jewelry, came into the room, and the two green people argued before he swung an arm toward the woman prisoner. A strange device in his hand must’ve held a tranquilizer, because Awnia dropped to the floor of her cell.

  The Blattvolk exchanged sharp words, and there was no mistaking the sneer on the man’s face. He stalked down the exit hallway, and Tula bent over Awnia’s slumped body. After a few moments, she sighed and returned to Levi’s cell.

  “Draw.” It was the same word she had used before with his notebook, only now she held a flat, rectangular box through the bars.

  Rising to his feet, he approached and accepted the box. A small plastic stick rested in an indentation at the top. Unlike the drawing sheet she’d given him before, this machine was like a notebook. How he longed for something to draw with. This thing seemed a perversion of his longing, the sheets wiped so effortlessly clean.

  “Whas ear name?”

  Why did she care what his name was? Would talking to her speed his descent into Hell, or slow it down? He had no desire to offer his captors anything. He kept staring at the notebook.

  The Blattvolk who called herself Tula reached between the bars and removed the pencil from the box. A series of squares appeared on the screen, and she touched the tip of the pencil to the first one.

  Levi nearly dropped the device.

  The familiar visage of Sarah’s face had appeared, each pencil stroke indelibly burned into his brain from the day he had created the drawing. She appeared to be staring off the screen toward the Blattvolk woman, a minute smile playing at the corner of her lips.

  “Sarah.” He whispered before he thought.

  “Sarah.” The Blattvolk repeated. Again she touched the pencil to the screen and another of Levi’s drawings appeared. This time, the chubby face of Josef, his fist curled against one cheek as he slept.

  “No.” He thrust the notebook at the woman. Each breath seemed to require his complete attention. He stumbled onto the cot, wrapped his hands around the back of his neck and lowered his head between his knees.

  God was a cruel deity to torture him so.

  Vitus returned the tranquilizer to the compartment near the prison door. That woman’s screaming had disturbed him for the last four hours. He’d had enough of Tula’s little pet project. Ninety nine percent of the time adults were not viable converts, and why she insisted on wasting precious resources on these two was beyond him.

  Well, not really. She was a convert herself. She obviously had a soft spot for these pitiful excuses for human beings. And she’d pulled every trick in the book to keep these two alive after determining they were not a family unit. When he sent her the euthanization form, she dredged up some old policy stating all prisoners were granted ten days to prove worthiness for conversion.

  Absolute waste of time.

  However, her parting words a few moments ago hung over his head. “I’ll take this to the Board, Vitus. It’s unethical.”

  The Board was all about ethics. Like these animals deserved any ethics. Conversion was a privilege, not a right. If they converted every cannibal out there, humanity would end up no better than when the Botanicaust had occurred in the first place. Ungoverned greed had caused the planet’s downfall, and cannibals were nothing if not greedy. More food. More time. More space.

  No, the Conversion Department’s job was to screen potential converts and make sure only the most useful entered Haldanian society. Converts had to earn back the cost of conversion. The Board needed to recognize that. Tula kept letting marginal personalities pass conversion requirements.

  He pulled up her statistics on his computer screen. Seventeen percent reversion rate. Three percent required euthanization after conversion. Her numbers were barely within tolerances. One more failure and she’d be due for a reprimand.

  Maybe he could help that along.

  “But they’re children! You have to give me more time!” Tula blocked the door to Vitus’s office. He’d just sent her the euthanization orders for Rhomy and Nika.

  Vitus sat at his desk illuminated by a circle of light from the fiber-optic daylight emitter in the ceiling. His crystal jewelry winked flashes of color as he checked off items on his gamma pad. He didn’t bother to look up. “You’ve been spending all your energy on the new captives. We can’t keep feeding all these prisoners.”

  Guilt rose over Tula in a wave. “Rhomy is ready for conversion. She showed me a drawing of herself as a convert the other day.” Opening her gamma pad, she started filling in conversion forms for the girl.

  “If you say so.” Vitus rose. “I have a Board meeting now, Sertularia. If you’ll excuse me.”

  Tula frowned. Vitus hadn’t used her given name since he’d first taken the position as the Conversion Department Supervisor and learned she was a convert. “You’ll approve it? You never give in to a conversion so easily.”

  “Just get them off my roster.”

  A moment of hesitation might mean the end for the two children. “I’ll get both girls into gene therapy this afternoon.” She would have to give them a little more attention during their Integration sessions, but Albert would help her.

  “Make sure you get me the forms.” His words seemed like an afterthought as he pushed past her and out the door. She wondered what the Board meeting was about to have him so distracted.

  As long as the girls converted, she didn’t care. She wasn’t quite sure they trusted her enough to lie still for the gene therapy, yet. Conversion would be so much easier if sedatives didn’t interfere with the cellular uptake of chloroplasts. Then they wouldn’t have to feed the prisoners so much, and maybe Vitus would get off her back.

  But that was only a dream. She sighed and pulled up her bank balance on her gamma pad. The only way to get through to these girls would be their stomachs. She’d better take a trip to the candy maker. But first to get the forms files before Vitus changed his mind.

  As she filled out the telomerase acquisition forms, the dispatcher in Burn buzzed her com. An emergency on the Reaches required a genetic psychiatrist immediately. She sighed and pressed her tired eyes with finger and thumb. “Can’t you get Patris out there?”

  “He says he’s in the middle of a tricky Integration session. Someone needs to get out there fast. The Team Leader is threatening to put Bats down if things get any worse.”

  Bats was one of Tula’s first adolescent converts six years ago. He would be eighteen, now. If the Team Leader was threatening extermination, things must be bad. “Is this Bats’ first Burn run?”

  “He’s been at it a month. But this is his first Encounter. I’ll let them know you’re on your way.”

  Tula hurried to the skimmer yard, leaving the shadow of the Liebert building behind. The solid, concrete structure housed the offices of the Board and rose above the underground labs of the Conversion Department like a fortress. The other office buildings along the three-block walk to the skimmer yard were single-story, extruded nuvoplast, designed to allow sunlight in at every angle. Clear roofs housed a photovoltaic bacterial layer between two nuvoplast sheets, filtering out ultraviolet light and converting it to power the city. One-way, reflective privacy screens bounced sunlight back onto the paved street.

  Nearby, an open end in the fence around the city swarmed wit
h construction crews erecting a new residential expansion. Too low to keep out cannibals, the fence served to prevent tumbleweeds from entering and seeding the city with toxic plant material. The five-mile buffer of the Burn, plus the daily patrols, kept the cannibals in the Reaches at bay.

  The full spectrum daylight tickled Tula’s skin. She spent so much time in the underground lab or under glass in the Gardens, any UV exposure made her skin itch immediately.

  Rubbing the pink scar on her arm, she thought about Bats. Even long-time converts sometimes saw something that reminded them of their past, and they regressed into pre-conversion mentality. Reversion was the technical term. Some attacked fellow Haldanians, some collapsed into tears or catatonic stupors, and others tried to escape into the desert. If she couldn’t talk Bats through this, he’d have to be put down, and she didn’t want that. But they couldn’t have converts relapsing to cannibalism, either.

  At the yard, she turned a wary eye on the sand skimmer before she signed for it. “Are you sure this thing will get me there and back?” she asked the attendant as he handed her an ignition fob. The usually clear nuvoplast body of the skimmer was milky white, a sign the photovoltaic bacteria sandwiched between the layers was not functioning.

  “There’s still enough juice in the battery for a day run. The mechanic will replace the fluid after you get back.”

  Raising her brows in doubt, Tula climbed inside and started the vehicle, listening intently to the nearly silent electromagnetic engine. She did not have time to be stuck on the Burn. If she didn’t get the girls into gene therapy today, Vitus would put the euthanization paperwork through himself.

  The skimmer felt unresponsive as she turned onto the street heading out of town, and she was about to turn around, worried the battery wouldn’t last, when she realized the last driver had left the tires in sand mode. She flicked the switch, but the skimmer’s stance remained wide and flat. Great. No street tires and no recharge. Not even the joy of full sunlight on her skin, since the milky nuvoplast diluted the intensity.

  She passed the last string of convert barracks in slow motion. It was already feeling like a long day.

  Levi picked up the gamma pad the Blattvolk woman had left and toyed with the plastic pencil. His fingers itched to put down his thoughts on paper even as his vision swam with hunger. He didn’t feel the pangs in his gut anymore, and he hoped the end would come soon.

  One cell over, Awnia sat catatonic on the cement floor next to the cage door. Her eyes were puffy and red, her naked arms and face covered with scratches where she had torn at herself in despair. The last time the Blattvolk brought the food canisters, she hadn’t risen to claim her share.

  Of its own accord, Levi’s hand traced the lines of an infant’s face on the pad. He looked down through hazy vision and swallowed. This was not Josef. This was Awnia’s child. Did the baby even have a name? He’d never heard her speak one. Just baby.

  With deft fingers, he fleshed out the drawing, and when satisfied, he held the gamma pad against the bars toward Awnia. “Baby,” he said, his voice raw from disuse. “Baby,” he repeated before skidding the device across the floor to her. He couldn’t get her baby back, but perhaps the drawing would be of some comfort, as his drawings had been when Sarah died.

  For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. Then she crawled toward the gamma pad. A small gasp escaped her lips and she grappled through the bars for the device, immediately cradling it against her breast. Rocking the gamma pad to and fro, as if it were her child, she mumbled words he didn’t understand.

  After a time, her rocking slowed. She pulled the plastic pencil from the indentation and stared at it with beetled brows. He thought she might try her hand at drawing. But she didn’t. Clenching the implement in her fist until her knuckles grew white, she locked eyes with him. Sharp words exploded from her lips, and he was glad he was not in the same cell with her. She returned to the spot on the floor next to the cage door, but her posture was no longer limp. Instead, she seemed coiled, rigid.

  When the next food canisters arrived, Awnia remained sitting until the Blattvolk man drew next to her. With lightening speed, she grabbed the man’s wrist and yanked him forward, smashing his body against the bars with a strength that belied her small size. The tray and remaining canisters clattered to the floor as the man shrieked.

  Levi lurched upright toward the bars. “No!” But there was nothing he could do.

  The Blattvolk’s green face paled as blood fountained down his naked chest. He jerked away, the pencil protruding from a spot above his collarbone. Gasping, the man shouted toward the stairs.

  The Blattvolk pulled the pointed plastic from his flesh and flung it to the floor. His gasping turned to sharp words as two other Blattvolk arrived. One carried the device used to subdue Awnia before. Within a heartbeat she was prone, eyes rolled back in her head. Opening the cell, the two newly arrived Blattvolk gripped Awnia by her arms, and dragged her from the prison room. On their way out, Levi caught a single unmistakable word.

  Euthanize.

  Tula set one foot on the cracked, red-brown desert floor and immediately ducked back inside the skimmer. The salty tang of seared flesh mixed with the scent of flashed weeds churned her stomach, pushing bile up her throat. Unwanted memories tore through her, flashes of a past best kept forgotten. Add to that the dizzying effect of the unfiltered UV, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to drive the skimmer back.

  She dug through the skimmer’s first aid kit for allelopathic suppression pills. The medication compromised the immune system, but helped the body resist chemicals in the bloodstream for a while.

  If only her shameful memories could be so easily suppressed.

  Staring through the windscreen at the blackened area outside, she drew a final breath of air inside the skimmer. As an afterthought, she grabbed the first aid kit before hurrying to get a briefing from the Team Leader.

  “We landed to check for survivors, and that one there was still gasping.” He tossed his head toward Bats crouched in the sand near a charred body. “He thinks he knows her. Says she asked him not to waste her once she dies. You know what that means.” The Leader glanced at the pink skin of her scar, and Tula flinched. Yes, she was a convert. But she didn’t remotely relish the thought of consuming human flesh. Or flesh of any sort, for that matter. But she was used to the insults.

  “Any survivors?” She peered inside the duster, hoping there might be more converts out of this catastrophe.

  The leader shook his head.

  Bolstering her senses against the smell of burned hair and skin, she approached Bats where he cradled the upper body of a woman in his lap. He mumbled in Cannibal dialect.

  Tula called to mind his name before Albert nicknamed him Bats. “Mbato.”

  He looked up at her with tawny, feral eyes. His pupils were fully dilated, in spite of the blinding sun — a common sign of UV overdose. Sweat beaded his olive green skin. The woman in his arms sucked in a rattling breath and he looked down again.

  “Mbato, would you like to take her with us? We can have the doctors look at her.” She knew the woman was too far gone to save, but if she could redirect Mbato’s thinking, maybe she could swerve him from reversion.

  “At least when we killed, we honored the dead.” He croaked in Haldanian. A good sign.

  Tula nodded. “We honor the dead in different ways now, remember?”

  His face twisted into a snarl. “We don’t honor them.” Spittle flew from his mouth as his eyes lanced fire. “We slaughter them without any concern for their spirits. We pretend we’re cleaning the world and then we leave their bodies to rot in the sun.”

  A shudder passed through Tula. The boy still believed in spirits. But then, who was she to judge? Sometimes she woke from slumber with the name of a half-remembered god on her lips.

  She dug a water pouch from the first aid kit, twisted off the top and put the opening against the woman’s lips. Bats’ visage eased a little.

&
nbsp; “Who is she?”

  Bats - Mbato - stroked what remained of the woman’s fire-frazzled hair. “Zutu. My sister. I never knew she had escaped … the flames.” He raised his face to look around at the scorched ground. Two more bodies sprawled among the smoldering shrubs.

  “We can take her with us. Take them all. They can find their final rest within the city graveyard, where you can visit them whenever you like.” Although the Haldanians didn’t officially believe in life after death, they still treated the bodies of their dead with respect. A tiny crematorium at one end of the city maintained a plot of land where families could inter the ashes of their loved ones, if they so wished.

  “That will honor her spirit?”

  “She’ll be very content there.”

  Bats hesitated a moment, then rose and lifted the woman in his arms. Tula breathed a sigh of relief, despite the sick smell in the air.

  “I wish you’d take the pills some of the time.” Tula pushed Mo away as he drunkenly sought her lips, the resinous scent of UV intoxication wafting from his breath. The privacy screens along the walls of her nuvoplast apartment blocked the final, blinding rays of the desert sunset. She had a headache from the allelopathic suppression pills, the skimmer had quit running just outside the fence, forcing her to walk back, and she hadn’t had time to get Nika into gene therapy before the techs went home for the night.

  And then there was Awnia.

  “I thought you liked the high, baby.”

  “Not every day, Mo.”

  He swayed over to the sofa and sprawled across the cushions in a pout. “Want to tell me what’s really going on?” He might be high, but he could still read her better than any person on the planet.

  Tula sighed and flopped backwards onto the sofa next to him. “The pregnant woman you brought in a few days ago attacked Faran today. She gets euthanized in the morning.”