Under the Empyrean Sky by Chuck Wendig Page A

the garden being way out in the corn like that, it’s easy to lose your bearings. The corn distorts the sense of where you are and how to get back. Made doubly worse when it’s night and
triply
worse when the sky is raining down golden dust into your eyes and mouth and nose.
    Still. They have to push on.
Have to
.
    He yells louder. “Lift! Push! Lift! Push!”
    Cael sees Wanda’s face. Hers is the visage of worry. She knows something’s up. She just doesn’t know what. He hates that soon she’s going to find out.
    Then Lane yells, “We’re just about on top of it!”
    The garden
.
    They ease the pinnace forward until all forward momentum ceases, though the wind still rocks it back and forth like a cup caught in a river’s grip.
    Cael slides the oar-pole back in its socket and goes to the edge of the boat. “Stay here,” he yells. “I’m going to take a look.”
    “Wait!” Wanda says, grabbing hold of his arms. Her expression is pleading. “Where are you going? Please let me come.”
    Cael doesn’t say anything. Instead, he gives Lane and Rigo his own pleading look. The two of them come from behind her and—gently, oh so gently—pry her off him.
    He leaps over the edge of the boat and drops ten feet into the corn. Stalks crash under his feet, the greenery thrashing beneath him. When he rolls off, the damaged stalks quickly spring back up, shuddering. Again the corn reaches for him, the filaments of corn silk squirming like tentacles in the storm.
    “Spotlight!” he yells.
    A cone of bleary yellow light—jaundiced like the pollen drift and a stone’s throw from being totally worthless—illuminates Cael. For a moment he thinks,
This can’t be it.
He doesn’t see the garden. No clearing. No plants. Nothing.
    But then he catches sight of a red pepper hanging plump and lusty—a pepper where none dangled yesterday.
It really is aggressive. More aggressive than the corn.
    Cael plucks the pepper, hands it up.
    It’s Wanda who takes it.
    “Is this what I think it is?” she hollers over the storm.
    Cael says nothing. He eases forward, flagging them to nudge the boat alongside him. Rigo uses the spotlight to highlight the trail of vegetables. As they drift forward, the wind keening, the pollen stinging, Cael stoops again and again, fetching vegetable after vegetable. A tomato here. Apepper there. A scooped shirt full of pea pods. A bundle of some crinkly leafed green that smells crisp and clean when Cael gives it a twist and wrenches it up out of the earth. All the while the corn reaches for him—pulling a leaf along his skin, drawing a bead of blood—but none of that matters. It’s here. The garden. The garden means ace notes. The ace notes mean buying a proper future for him and his family and his crew. He thinks of the flash in Gwennie’s eyes when she told him she stole that chicha beer and suddenly wishes like hell he could see that same flash right now.
Damnit, Cael.
    He kicks the stalks aside and keeps moving.
    It isn’t long before he comes upon a small trail of strawberries. Lush, each as big as a baby’s fist. He can’t help it—he kneels down, pokes through the strawberries until he finds one mostly shielded from the pleach of corn leaves. He dusts off the pollen and pops it in his mouth.
    He damn near faints. It’s
that
good.
    He hands everything else he grabs up to Wanda.
    They’ve gone a hundred yards when Lane yells down, “Cael, you need to see this.”
    “Not now!” Cael yells.
    “Yes.
Now
.”
    Muttering, Cael clambers back up into the boat.
    Lane is pointing off the bow.
    At first Cael doesn’t see it. But then the wind eases and the cloud of pollen parts—Cael sees something out there, glinting. Then it’s again swallowed by the drift. Cael scowls. “The hell am I looking at?”
    “Martha’s Bend.”
    Martha’s Bend was a town like Boxelder once upon a time. Before Cael and them were even born. Now it’s a dead town like so many others. For reasons that run the gamut