Zee scooted off the dash and wound herself against me, nuzzling her face in my neck and half crying, half laughing like a shanty loon. I’d never come close to being touched like that. I mean, a girl. Pressed against me. I could hear the broken sound of her lungs, and for a moment I wanted to wrap my arms around her. Tell her she was safe.

But the moment passed.

I shoved Zee aside and swerved the wagon. Because there, right in front of us, a lone figure stood in what was left of the road.

Our wheels spun to a halt and the dust rose in dirty pink sheets. I waited for the air to clear and stared back at where the road should’ve been. And I was about to crack my door open, when the man started from out of the dust like he was himself a part of it.

He had long, twisting dreads, painted gray by the sand. And buried beneath that swarm of hair was a face old as I’d ever seen, with a beard hanging heavy and long.

“Holy shit,” I whispered as the Rasta floated closer through the dirt clouds. It was the same old fool from shantytown, the same hockey stick held like a staff before him.

“Who is he?” Zee said, her hand on my arm.

We watched the man reach the front of the wagon and peer in at us, smiling with a set of big brown teeth. He started mouthing something and finally I got sick of just sitting there and I opened my door to climb out.

“What the hell you doing out here?” I yelled at the old coot.

“I and I be seeing the sunrise.” His voice was thin, like he’d worn it out. “Sun come up all the way from Zion this morning, bringing me news of the Promised Land.”

“You walk out here?” I stared at the man’s bare feet, so old they’d practically grown into a pair of shoes all their own.

The old guy nodded, smiling. “I sure be happy to see you, sire.”

“Why? You wanting a lift?”

The Rasta let out a burst of laughter. Just one quick roar. “You come here from the ocean, man. I see you. Spat like Jonas from the whale.”

I stared back at the sun crawling up the horizon, the spray of the Surge turning misty in the distance. “Listen, pal,” I started to tell him, but he cut me off, throwing his staff up at the sky and his voice all of a sudden booming so loud I jumped back at the sound of it.

“Jah has returned home, my lovelies. The roots that feed this giant tree. Sent ’cross depths of the ocean. Over hills and valleys of water.” The Rasta was almost singing the words, and he kept on with them as he ran to me and collapsed on the ground, dropping his staff at my feet. “Like the King before you, may you lead me back to that Promised Land.”

Zee was out of the car now, running around the wagon and kneeling down to the pile of twisted hair and rags, reaching her hand to steady the old man’s shoulder as he swayed around in the dirt.

“You’ve been there,” Zee said, half asking it but mostly saying it like it was fact. “The Promised Land.”

“Seen it with my own eyes.” The man stopped rocking and stared up at Zee with his brown teeth gaping as his face broke out in a smile. “And Jah touched me with his own hand.”

The Rasta sat back in the sand and reached to the rags across his belly, he fumbled around and finally pulled up his shirt. And there, stretched across his skinny ribs, the black skin had been transformed into something else. Like a sickness or something.

I stared at the man’s strange skin, bubbled and rough and hard. Zee had recoiled and was up on her feet, backing away.

“What the hell is that?” I said, kneeling down, trying to get a closer look. But I already had a pretty good idea of what it was, though it was not something I’d ever seen before. And I knew it wasn’t something that should be growing thick on human skin.

“Little slice of the Tree of Life, sire.” The Rasta grinned at me and tapped at his belly. A solid sound. Not like bones or flesh, but nor was it the sound of plastic, stone, or tin.

“It’s wood,” I said, staring in his huge eyes, and those eyes just smiled right back at me, as if they might tell a hundred stories between each blink. “It’s bark.”

“And Jah will free us when we all get back there, sire. When we build a boat that’s big enough.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. Then I stared at Zee. “You seeing this?”

She was just shaking her head, freaking out. Hell, it was a freaky sight. Closest thing to a real tree I’d ever seen, though. Bark. Real bark. Somehow embedded in the old man’s skin. I reached out and touched the knotted chunks and it was wood, all right. Just like in the old stories. Wood you could chop with an axe. Polish up or burn.

“Where the hell you been, old timer?” I said to him. “How’d this happen to you?”

“I’m a child of Zion,” he said. “Eaten of the Tree of Life and then turned from the righteous path. But you will lead me back there, for I am fearful no more.”

I pulled the picture from my back pocket and wiped it clear of dust. Then I held the photo to the old man and his eyes grew glassy.

“Jah, man,” he wailed, happiness splitting his voice in two.

“This,” I said, pointing. “This is my father.”

“Sure it be, sire,” the Rasta whispered. “If he still be alive.”

“Alive?”

“But it be winter. Usually spring before there’s killing.”

“What killing?”

“Murderers.” Tears beaded up on the old man’s cheeks. “In the spring. Murderers, the lot of them.”

“Your father?” Zee snatched the picture and shook it at me. “This guy’s your dad?”

“Yeah,” I said. I stood, wobbled to the wagon and leaned against it, steadying myself as everything spun inside. “It’s Pop.”

“The King” was all the Rasta would say. “The King.”

We drove in silence. Each one of us in a world alone. I’d fired up some corn for the old dude and he ate sprawled in the back of the wagon, wearing my dad’s old sombrero and drifting off to sleep.

I’d got nothing more out of him. He’d just babble on about the King and the Promised Land, and look solemn when I mentioned Pop.

Every now and then, I’d feel Zee stare across at me. She’d go to speak but then drop it. Hell, I don’t know, maybe she could hear my brain overheating, see the smoke coming out of my ears.

I glanced back at the poor freak in the back of the wagon, his head resting on my nail gun, his stomach made of wood. Something had happened to him. A mutation, maybe. But not like any I’d seen.

“Do you believe now?” Zee said finally.

“Believe in what?”

“Zion. The Promised Land.”

“I reckon there’s trees out there. Someplace the locusts can’t get ’em. But where?”

“I don’t know,” Zee said. “But I’ll go anywhere. Trade anything. Whatever it takes.”

I frowned, thinking. Up there in the distance I could see the edge of shantytown, the broken shacks blistered in the sun. And beyond those ragged streets was Frost’s house. The whole place would be in alarm by now. Their girl missing. The tree builder nowhere to be seen.

“You should have told me it was your father,” Zee said.

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Changes things, don’t you think?”

I rolled my eyes at her. But she was right. It changed everything. Pop was a half of myself that had always been there. And I’d become stretched and faded with that other half gone.

“You reckon that place is Zion,” I said. “But the way my dad’s chained up in that picture sure don’t make it look like paradise.”