Seed by Rob Ziegler Read Free Book Online

away from her. She’d known her fate then. She would die, but only after her soul disappeared, like Alyosha’s body under a dusting of snow.
    “I don’t either,” Tsol said, interpreting Doss’ silence as an answer. “At least not for most people. Most people, they live, they die. That’s it. They breed, get diseases, carve out some crops, beg, starve, whatever. The wind blows, the wind doesn’t blow. It’s all the same to them. There’s no difference between living and dying. But some of us… We are the wind.” His eyes filled the rearview. “I am fated.”
    “You’re a pissant gangster,” Doss told him. “A deluded one.”
    “Roger that,” Emerson agreed. Tsol leaned forward in his seat.
    “Gangsters sit by the roadside and rob people of their precious corn seed. I provide seed to forty thousand people. I lead those people south every autumn and north into the Midwest every spring. During the summer, the entire Midwest is mine .”
    “You keep your people hungry.” Doss kept her eyes flat on the road, face expressionless as she spoke. “You force them into line and make them come to you for seed. You’re a thug.”
    “Maybe.” Tsol gave her a diamond-hard smile in the rearview. “But the difference between me and your President Logan is merely one of scale. Have you read your Hobbes, Agent Doss? No? Well, Logan has, you can be sure. He prefers to have forty thousand hungry refugees whipped into line by a thug like me than to have them descend on New D.C.”
    Doss aimed them east down the 202. Philly’s deserted burbs spread out around them like crumbling termite colonies. They crested a rise and Doss saw the burned frames of two twen-cen cargo trucks draped across the road half a klick ahead.
    “Could be company,” she told Emerson.
    “You. Down.” Emerson reached back and shoved Tsol down behind the seat. The professional calm in his voice set Doss on edge. Adrenaline spiked her chest. For an instant her brain froze, then years of training took over. She let out a long breath through her nose. Adrenaline ebbed, flowed to her extremities. Her fingertips tingled.
    Things slowed down, details stood out. Late afternoon sunlight gilding the skin of two zeppelins that hung like fat maggots ten klicks out over New D.C. A crack in the concrete freeway barrier as they whipped by at 150 kph. The way the truck frames overlapped, creating a solid, obviously intentional blockade. The boy in FEMAs, maybe ten years old, kneeling behind the concrete barrier beside the trucks. The AK he brought level with his shoulder—
    “Definitely company!” Emerson bit the words out of the air.
    “Yep.” Doss saw another refugee to the left. He held what looked like a long piece of pipe on his shoulder. It flashed. Doss saw a cloud of smoke and fire blazing towards them, a black dot at its center.
    “RPG left!”
    “Yep.” She stomped on the breaks with both feet. Run flats shrieked against the pavement. The missile hissed over the Lobo’s nose, inches from the windshield. A cry issued from the back as Tsol crashed into the back of the driver’s seat. Doss saw the young migrant fire his AK spastically in their direction. Two other migrants stood beside him now. One fired a pistol and the other merely waited, a cinder block dangling from his hand. A sound like hard rain on pavement came as bullets disintegrated against the Lobo’s armor. Doss glanced left, saw the RPG shooter reloading. Another stood beside him, taking aim. She checked the rearview. Migrants flooded the freeway behind them. She noted at least three RPGs. “Shit.” Tsol peaked over the top of the seat.
    “ These would be gangsters, Agent,” he said. Doss was pretty sure she heard him laugh.
    She let the Lobo coast, down now to 110 kph. She considered her options—simple on this narrow band of freeway: reverse, or forward. Do not fuck up . The familiar mantra focused her in a way Go Pills never could.
    “Now’s the time.” Emerson’s