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Some of the Best from Tor.Com

Tom Doherty Associates

He lay restless in the dark, a boy on the precipice of manhood or a man freshly plunged over the other side, he couldn't say which and maybe it didn't matter. Change troubled him: a snake shedding its skin, a locust shucking its husk. He was fifteen years old. The crops withered in the fields that summer and savage winds scoured the land, rocking the old house to its rafters. His father's father had laid its foundations and cultivated the rich prairie in the first great wave of homesteaders to sweep westward, and it had come to the boy's father in his turn. Someday, he supposed, it would fall to him, motherless and alone, the only son of an only son.

That was a season of mysteries. Day after day, a slow tide of humanity streamed down the rutted track that ran not two hundred yards from the boy's door, driven alike by hope and despair. Before them California and the dream of a better life, behind them drought and devastation. Sometimes strangers tarried to talk with his father. You might as well come along, they told him. The land's all played out. There's nothing here but waste. His father just hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, hawked, and spat into the dust. Come west, they whispered then, a queer light coming into their faces, we hear rumors of —

Nonsense, the old man said, turning back to his fields. But the boy lingered, transfixed. They were strange tales he heard. He couldn't countenance them. He was too much his father's son. Yet they fixed and fascinated him all the same, and now, as the wind hurled dust at his window and he plummeted toward sleep, his dreaming mind took them up anew.

His name was Tom Carver.

Rumors of angels trembled the air.

* * *

His feet decided for him, the day Tom left home.

It was nothing he had planned, nothing he would have said he wanted, though in that strange season — the third year of the drought — who could say for sure what anyone wanted? In the first year, the corn had produced a meager harvest. In the second year, the sheaves grew crisp and brown, and if you stripped back the ears, the kernels were scant and stunted. In the third year —

In the third year, disaster. The sun scorched the land into submission. Vast clouds of rolling dust swept out of the north, so thick that a man caught outside without a mask might well choke. In April, the storms came. In May, in June, in July. When the gale died, grit filmed every surface; you could draw your finger across a countertop and puzzle out your name. The boy and his father emerged to fields of bare stalks, tangled in parched ruin upon the plain. The boy's father hunkered down to crumble sere earth between his fingers. He kicked at the broken stalks. He cursed, and Tom, who had never heard his father curse, flinched as he had sometimes flinched at the silence that ruled that house.

Pap, Tom called him, just Pap:

Mulish and gaunt, with pale, appraising eyes, a fight-broken nose that had never been properly set (before Tom's time, though not so hard to imagine), and big hands, callused with labor, his knuckles scarred from fighting too with the recalcitrant, second-hand tractor against which he'd nursed a perpetual grievance since he'd purchased it somewhere (Tom never knew where), riding it home at dusk, belching blue smoke into a green evening sky a decade gone. He was a man of grievances, Tom's father, grievances against the tractor, against the sky when it withheld rain and when it poured forth a deluge, grievances against the earth itself.

Tote the water, he told Tom between the dust storms. Slop the pigs. Hoe the garden. And Tom toted water, slopped pigs, hoed the withered garden, imagining a mother almost beyond the reach of memory. With a kind of fatal obstinance, his father unclogged the tractor and plowed under the dead stalks. Soil that had once turned up black and moist under the blades lay itself in barren furrows upon the earth. In mid-July, a rare and narrow rain spat from the sky. The next day, they re-seeded. Sputtering, the tractor dragged the rusty planter across the dead land, spilling handfuls of corn from the buckets and covering them over in a single hypnotic motion. Ten yards alongside, Tom drove a plodding mule-drawn wagon loaded with bulging sacks of grain. When the buckets ran empty, he reined up and climbed down to refill them. It was hot work. It might never have rained it was so dry, and they had tied scratchy bandanas around their faces against the dust. They'd eaten two hours ago by the arc of the sun in the flat colorless sky, leaning in silence against the wagon and washing down gritty bologna sandwiches with the last of the cloudy water Tom had pumped up from the well in the baking dawn. Thirst clawed at his throat.

"Ain't it hot?" he said, heaving down a burlap sack the next time they stopped. He slit open the sack and tilted it clattering over the first of the buckets. "Ain't it hot, Pap?"

His father grunted.

"Let's go get a drink of water," Tom said.

"Reckon we'll finish this field first."

Squinting, Tom studied the prairie. He wiped a forearm across his brow, then dragged the bandana down around his neck. Five or six more passes by his calculations, another hour's work. It was like an oven out there. The mules stood sweating in the heat. They might as well have been burying stones for all the good it would do.

"We need to water the mules," he said, though he knew the mules had another hour of work in them.

His father said nothing, merely sat on the idling tractor and stared out across the field, to the fence line. Change worried Tom: snake and locust, shedding the husk of a former life. He was fifteen now.

Fifteen. And what he did next he did without thinking. He started walking. That's how simply it began — he started walking — with a few steps down the lane between the newly planted rows of corn. He just walked. The tractor backfired behind him as his father eased it into gear. The house, faraway against the enormous vault of sky, drew closer: a silhouette, stamped dimensionless and black against the horizon; a model, a toy; a house at last, the only house he'd ever known: the broken fence and the derelict barn where pigs rooted in the fruitless earth, the corroding pump where he bent to the lever until at last the pipe coughed and cleared its throat and spat a gout of water. A rusty stream guttered forth. Tom splashed his face. He drank deep from cupped palms, then deep again. Slaked at last, he started to walk. His feet carried him down the arid drive to the road, and without thought, but with a kind of distant awareness of his boots scuffing the dust and the whisper of the desiccated weeds that grew by the road and the faraway grumble of the tractor fading at last into silence behind him, Tom turned west.

The silence of the prairie rolled down over him. Some time later — how long Tom could not say — the choked rumble of an engine loomed up behind him. A battered truck jolted past, its cargo lashed under a ribbed tarpaulin. Tom swung himself up, worming his way deep into the labyrinth of scarred furniture, crates, and mothball-smelling cardboard boxes. Sunlight suffused the canopy with a crepuscular glow, and with the canvas fluttering overhead, he wondered for the first time what it was that he had done.

If you weren't careful, you could walk yourself right out of your life.

* * *

Tom's stomach woke before he did. Rich aromas crowded the air — corn bread, and salt pork simmering in pinto beans — and his dreaming mind conjured up a fleeting image of his mother, little more than a shadow on the threshold of memory. In the next instant, he was alert, or nearly so, back sprung and sore from the splintered planks of the truck bed. He thought of his father firing up the old tractor and wondered to what end his feet had brought him.

Hunger snaked him through the maze. He clambered over the tailgate and dropped to the ground. A fire snapped somewhere invisibly, bronzing the side of a neighboring truck, packed likewise with a teetering mass of household goods. Down the flickering alleyway between them — Tom could have stretched out his arms and lay his hands flat against either vehicle — he glimpsed a temporary encampment: two or three wagons and half again as many beat-up trucks and cars, parked nose in among a scattered grove of towering cottonwood and oak. In the rough circle between, a handful of children chased each other in some game impervious to adult logic, their clamor flitting in the dark. Their fathers here and there hunkered in circles, lean and grim, peering out from under their hats as they drew sticks through the dust or smoked hand-rolled cigarettes.

Tom made no move. He just stood in the shadows, staring the length of the narrowing lane and scheming how he might get some of the beans and corn bread to quiet his belly. He didn't see the boy — he couldn't have been more than five or six — until he heard the pent-up splash of urine — he could smell its pungent tang — just inside the shadows at the other end of the alley. Tom shrank into the dark. He might have passed unseen had his heel not caught a root, sending him staggering into the truck with a thump. The boy's stream halted abruptly as he gazed wide-eyed at Tom down the narrow alley between the trucks. Then he reeled away, his fly still unbuttoned, screaming, "Mommy, there's a man back there, there's a man —"

The clatter of spoon and cook pot, the rustle of skirts, a harried voice: "Now what are you going on about, Charles —"

"There's a man —"

Calmly: "There's no one there. You've just scared yourself, that's all —"

"There's A MAN —"

Tom might have made his escape then, but he couldn't bring himself to move, pinioned alike by panic — the boy wouldn't stop screaming — and hunger. A second later, the opportunity had passed. A woman's shadow loomed up in the narrow space between the trucks, her flyaway hair and thin face half-lit by the unseen fire. "See, there's nothing there at all," she was saying, and then her gaze fell upon Tom. "I see," she said, and then, calmly, to Charles, "Go fetch your father."

The boy stood there, unmoving.

"I said get your father," the woman snapped, and this time the boy darted away into the circle of light. Alone, they just stood there, Tom and the woman, she at her end of the alley, he at his. Finally, he worked up the spit to speak. "My name's Tom, ma'am. Tom Carver. I don't mean no harm. I'm just hungry that's all."

"We're all hungry, aren't we, Tom Carver," she said, and he could see the truth of it in her face, in her thin lips and in the bony orbit of her single visible eye, in the sharp jut of her cheekbone, edged by flame.

"You figure you'd find something to eat poking around back here?"

He said nothing.

"Answer me, now."

Tom saw the man at her back then, striding out of the light to drop a hand across her shoulder. "That's enough now, Lily," he said, a biggish man, six foot, maybe six-one, heavyset. "You head back over to the fire," he said, "Charlie's waiting," and just like that all the ferocity dropped out of the woman, the way wind will drop suddenly out of a billowing sheet, leaving it limp on the line. And Tom saw something else, too — it was maybe the first true insight of his adult life. He saw her ferocity for what it really was: terror at being out here on the road, under the sky, with no roof to call her own. Terror for her family, for the man she loved and the son she'd maybe longed for, only to see it all crumble into dust.

The woman — Lily — did as the man said. As she turned away the light fell across her face. She was younger than Tom had thought, and prettier, and tired. He didn't think he'd ever seen anyone who looked so tired.

The man leaned against the neighboring pickup, the heel of one boot resting on the running board. He glanced away like Tom wasn't anything that concerned him at all. Taking a cigarette from behind his ear, he snapped a match alight on his thumbnail and smoked in silence. Tom could smell the smoke in the flickering yellow light.

"I seen you on the road back there," the man said at last. "You hook a ride in the bed of the truck?"

"Yes."

"Yes, sir."

"Yes, sir," Tom said.

"What's your name?"

"Tom Carver, sir."

"You run away, Tom?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, what'd you do that for?"

"I don't know," he said. But what he thought of was angels. Rumors of angels — westward, always westward, just beyond the nearest curving of the earth — trickling back, whisper by whisper, down the long migratory sweep of the continent.

Nonsense, the boy's father said inside his head.

The man snorted laughter. He drew on the cigarette. The brightening cherry cast into relief cragged features: deep-set eyes, a jaw blue with stubble. "Well, hell, son, who ever does?" He shook his head with another snort of laughter, fatalistic but not unkind.

"Not much charity on the road these days. You must be like to starving by now."

Tom's voice cracked. He hated himself for it. "Yes, sir."

"You aiming to steal something?"

"Pap taught me better than that."

The man sighed and straightened. He exhaled a stream of smoke from his nostrils and ground his cigarette under his boot. "Well, I reckon we can spare a bowl of beans, anyway," he said. "C'mon, now."

* * *

The woman was angry. She ladled Tom's beans into a cracked porcelain bowl in clattering and resentful silence, but the man — his name was Frank Overton — didn't seem to notice. He leaned against the truck's fender and spooned beans into his mouth, staring into the darkening circle where the children had lately begun to drift back to their parents, and their own sparse meals, and sleep. But Charlie didn't sleep. He huddled under a blanket and stared at Tom, wide-eyed, clutching a tarnished silver chain in his fist.

The woman — Tom supposed he ought to think of her as Mrs. Overton — sat by the boy, caressing his hair and lulling him into sleep. The woman wouldn't look at Tom. She curled herself against the boy's back, and after a time she too slept. A fingernail paring of moon entangled itself in the cottonwood trees.

Overton wiped out the dishes with a rag and stacked them in the cab of the truck. Afterward, he resumed his place against the fender and smoked.

He didn't look at Tom, but he didn't seem to mind him either.

Finally Tom worked up the courage to speak. "Where are you heading?"

Overton took his time answering. "West," he said finally.

"Everybody's going west."

"Nowhere else to go."

"You got a job waiting?"

Overton laughed without looking at him. "No. Picking peas maybe."

Tom was silent after that. He moved closer to the dying fire. He wanted to lay down, but he was afraid to. The moon hove up out of the trees and climbed the ladder of the sky. Finally, Tom stretched out. Overton didn't say anything.

Tom lay awake for a long time, staring into the flames and thinking of Pap, wondering if he too was sleepless on this first night with his son walked away into the blazing afternoon, wondering too when he would give up on the farm — or if he ever would — and drift west, another ripple in that relentless tide sweeping across the prairies. Somewhere in the night he drifted off, and Frank Overton threw a rough woolen blanket over him. Curled up against the fire like that, Tom looked like a child, not the man he was striving to become.

* * *

Overton prodded Tom awake with a boot in the gray dawn. He surfaced out of a dream of his mother: her voice a soft contrast to her work-roughened hands, nothing more. Not much of a dream at all really, he thought as he sipped a cup of strong coffee Mrs. Overton had boiled and strained — still clattering with unspoken fury — over the fire. That was it for breakfast, coffee — even Charlie had some. As for Tom, Overton had passed him a cup without expression, as though he had done so a thousand times in the past.

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Excerpted from Some of the Best from Tor.Com by Ellen Datlow, Claire Eddy, Melissa Frain, Liz Gorinsky, George R. R. Martin, Patrick Nielsen Hayden Ann Van Wheeler. Copyright © 2013 Kai Ashante Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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