Carry the Flame (10 page)

In a world so rife with sin and early death, he was lucky to have a master who honored his supple touch and willingness to please, scarcely believing that men such as he once paraded their iniquity for all to see. Sin, Hunt often told him, must be private and spoken of to no one. He compared it to a contagious disease that must be quarantined, lest it spread. Confession, his master also said, was a denial of God's complete knowledge of our every thought, a practice of Papists, of which few—thanks be to the Father and Son—survived.

His Piety, who would have been the one to hear such confessions, had offered Esau the same stern commandment: “Confess only to God. Speak of sin to no man, if you want forgiveness from the Almighty.”

Esau was twenty-two, and could expect to live a long life—another fifteen, twenty years if he was fortunate and served his master faithfully. Hunt was much older, thirty at least, and his master's interest in his slave's body was already lessening.

Maybe he makes slaves wherever he goes. As long as they're not females.
Wicca was the worst way to die. Hallucinations and fevers, murders and suicides. Worse even than the water wheel.

“I asked what happened to me,” Hunt said.

“You fell in the chapel, right in front of His Piety. They took you to the doctor. He worked on you for three hours. How do you feel?”

Hunt ignored his query. “When was this?”

“Three days ago. You have been sleeping most of the time. I've given you water twice.”

“Water,” he repeated ruefully. Then he asked for his radio.

Esau hurried to a shelf below the window, carefully carrying an old solar powered Sony to Hunt's bed. It was his master's most prized possession, one of the few on the base. Maybe in the world.

“Keep it low,” Hunt said.

Esau nodded, guessing his master's head hurt horribly from all the bites and scratches.

He pushed a button on the smooth metal surface, and a tiny green light brightened. A second later a man's voice reached them: “ . . . House has been evacuated. The President is hunted. The White House has been evacuated. The President is hunted.” The same words over and over, year after year.

But it soothed his master to listen to this man from another world. He turned on the radio whenever he returned. But how did the voice survive?
By a miracle?
Or was solar power also replaying the message from up in the sky, where satellites were said to circle round and round the globe in endless orbits for all of time?

Months ago he'd watched Hunt press a different button, “Scanning the spectrum,” he called it.

“What are you looking for?” Esau had asked.

Hunt stared at him in a new way, and he felt a threat as real as swords and fire. But then his master said, “Radio Tierra.”

Esau nodded, never asking what Radio Tierra was; and Hunt never told him or searched the spectrum again in his presence.

Now he asked him to shut it off, and Esau carried it back to the place on the shelf where the sun shined the longest.

When he tried to return to his master's side, Hunt waved him away. Esau retreated to his wooden stool by the window, sitting for only a moment before a hard knock rushed him to the door. Before he opened it, he looked at Hunt, who moved his hand weakly in approval.

His Piety swept past Esau without any acknowledgment, not even a secret one. His Piety often ignored him when others were about. An Elder waited in the hall holding something by his side. From the strain on his face, it must have been heavy; but Esau could see little of it at a glance, and didn't dare stare.

Turning, he saw His Piety standing over his master, studying him, not speaking.

Hunt nodded to show the prophet respect. His Piety remained silent, then waved to the Elder, who entered, shocking Esau with his burden.

“You have survived a great trial for a most sacred reason,” His Piety announced to Hunt. “The most sacred reason of all for a man of this life. You must find the demon, and you must tear it from the arms of the heathens any way you can. There is no greater glory to God than to bring the two-headed beast back to us, for we are the ones endowed by heaven with the power to destroy it forevermore. But if you don't return with the beast of hell, this will be your last mission.”

His Piety glanced at the Elder, who handed him an old and grossly chipped army ammo case. His Piety held it out, but turned his head away, as if the dented green box radiated evil, even in his most blessed hands.

Hunt, weak as he was, tried to pull away; and Esau had to restrain himself from rushing to his master's aid.

Without looking down, His Piety unbuckled a metal clamp, setting off a sharp metallic ring. He reached out his hand, and the Elder laid a knife from the sacristy across his palm. The blade was silvery like the chapel sword. Carefully, His Piety opened the lid, and Esau saw sunlight passing above the open case, dark dust whirling in the air. The sight made him feel as weak as his wounded master.

Hunt turned away. His Piety warned him not to. “
You
must see this.” The prophet also lowered his eyes to the case, using the knife's shiny surface to scoop up a soft black mound. He executed this step precisely, then spilled the ash back into the case slowly. The sunlight stirred with dark motes, and Esau feared that the witch's remains were slinking into the room.

“There can be no other way, Soul Hunter. I will be forced to have you covered with the ashes of witches, all of you by all of them, and then they will be burned again with you. There will be no salvation. There cannot be. I'm sure you understand that.”

His Piety spoke with the weariness of a prophet who bore the responsibilities of this life and the next.

“But we are generous,” he went on, “and we want you to succeed.
I
want you to succeed. I want you to have all the glories of heaven. We will make sure you have the tools you need to bring back the demon. We will even let you give them the gas, if they'll give us back the beast. They will have a choice, and so will you: heaven or hell.”

“The gas?” Hunt asked in a husky voice. “You would give them the gas?” He spoke with his eyes still darting from the witches' ashes, as if to escape their evil claim. His Piety snapped the case closed.

“To get the demon, you will tell them the gas is theirs and that they are free to leave. The heathens are heading to the Bloodlands, that much is clear, though they cannot know what the desert holds for them, and there is nowhere to hide. We are alerting our allies. They will take the tanker after the demon is ours. We offer a great reward for the gas, but none so great as the one you will receive when you return with that beast of hell.”

“Will I have the tank to help me?”

“The tank engaged them and failed,” His Piety said matter-of-factly, as if he would not dwell on this. But Esau was astonished.
Failed? The tank?

Then His Piety smiled and leaned closer to Hunt. “We will have the holiest of ceremonies planned for your return with the demon. Our prayers and hosannas will be heard in heaven, and the screams of the demon will shake the earth for days and days—and echo in hell for all eternity. The demon's agony will warn Satan's creatures of the fate they'll share if they should rise from the flames.”

His Piety handed the ammo case back to the Elder, pausing before returning his attention to Hunt. “Please don't make me condemn you to the flames. An eternity in hell.” He shook his head. “You would never know the infinite glory the Lord bestows on all True Believers. But if you bring back the demon,” his words brightened, as if infused with the Spirit, “all of paradise will be yours for all of time.”

Esau lowered his gaze when His Piety and the Elder left. He closed the door and took a steadying breath before turning back to Hunt.

His master looked past him numbly, seemingly battered by what he'd heard. He swatted feebly at the dark motes still stirring above him.

Then Esau saw his master's eyes lock on the radio, and though Hunt made no sound when he moved his lips, Esau read them easily because he'd heard the words so many times: “The White House is evacuated. The President is hunted.”

Chapter Seven

A
ugustus stepped carefully around the charred remains and rubble, as if fearing to desecrate the dead. Leisha and Kaisha trailed a few feet behind, still clothed in Burned Fingers's shirt. Everyone else on the caravan waited back by the truck out of respect for the lone survivors of the religious settlement.

No one spoke. The younger girls looked especially haunted as they watched. Even the babies in the arms of the three blind girls were quiet. A quick count showed more than seventy African-Americans killed, including scores of women and children. Nothing moved but the hearts of the aggrieved.

Everyone had agreed that Augustus's actions at the Army of God earned him and his children the right to stay with the caravan and settle in the North, but not everyone agreed to stop and let them pray over the massacre. Burned Fingers had been outspoken in urging them all to keep going, but Jessie shook her head once and nothing more was said. They would grant Augustus and his girls time for their sorrow.

The missionary's wife—the girls' mother—lay among the murdered, flames having rendered her indistinguishable from the others. Jessie felt their loss. Less than a month ago Burned Fingers and his marauders had massacred almost all the adults and most of the children at her camp. Seeing the slaughter now filled her with memories of Eden so sudden that her legs weakened. She lowered her eyes, though she found no relief in the armored tank tracks. The steel tread had chewed up the earth and spit up chunks of hard-packed dirt everywhere she looked. Pitifully easy to imagine the beast backing up, the two-man crew coolly repositioning the flamethrower and cannon, coldly impervious to those who must have pleaded or prayed or screamed, caring only for the blunt efficiency of industrial death.

Raising her gaze from the tracks of the killers to the butchery they'd left behind expunged the last tremors of revulsion that lingered from Burned Fingers's merciless slaying of the tank commander. Even this many years after the collapse, Jessie sometimes wished for a world simple enough to condemn violence, to appraise it rationally and from a cosseting distance; but the final opportunity for that had been squandered—along with the hope of survival for most of humanity—only a few generations ago. From a historical standpoint, the collapse came in a blink after a long slow buildup of toxic waste in the sky, land, and water. But once the breakdown began it proceeded at a ferocious pace, an insatiable animal rising from the filth with a maw colossal enough to eat the earth. With its arrival every pretense of peace vanished, and what remained of the world and humanity was plundered by the rapacious and profane.

Unlike her own camp, Augustus's had no wall to hide the horror, to offer even the illusion of resistance in the aftermath of murder. With agonizing ease, she saw that the smoke that had first signaled the slaughter was but a hazy reflection of the sharply defined terror below.

She expected the air to shift, to carry the acrid rot to her, as it had when she'd seen those black clouds boiling from a ridge only a few days ago. But it didn't. At this distance the air was as unmoving as death itself, though she guessed Augustus and the twins were drowning in the carnage, not only the odor and the shattering proximity of death, but the utter absence of sound where children had once played and adults might have broken the stillness with laughter or the ringing promise of prayer.

Every murmur they ever made to their god had perished. She could almost hear their pleas as she stared at their ruin, scarcely believing that even the missionary would say this massacre of innocents was according to His plan. But her belief in the Kingdom of God and all His saints—always
His, His, His—
had died in her early twenties, when evidence of heavenly indifference could not have been greater—or more brutal—for
His
stillness. She had found her faith—and no little comfort—in faith's weighty absence.

Augustus walked to the center of the devastation and dropped to his knees, openly bereaved.

His girls did not stray from the periphery, holding each other as they, too, lowered themselves to the scorched earth. A wail rose from the tear-streaked twins, enveloping all who watched, a keening so acute it twisted Jessie's gut, an ache so deep it could have been a volvulus.

Without Jessie noticing, Bliss and Ananda took her in their arms to form a tight huddle. This is what she believed in, the primal comfort and sanctity of family.

Augustus climbed to his feet, weary in the shoulders, yet he raised his hands to the sky, and though Jessie could not hear his words—or even if he spoke—she knew he was beseeching his god for the reason He had forsaken his kin. The man could have been a Canaanite, a revenant of the Old Testament imploring the Lord to end the land's lingering curse.

Jessie pulled her girls so close she could hear their breathing, and in this profound physical intimacy she knew that when children die, we murder god. We must. We become executioners—reluctant or otherwise—of our most tended delusions.

Augustus's hands dropped to his sides and he walked among the dead whom he'd loved so long. He appeared barely sentient, but bent over and picked up a metal cross. A foot long at least. Maybe the cross for the steeple of the church he'd said they planned to build.

He shook his head, flipping the relic aside. She heard the weight strike the earth, and saw him turn from the crown of ashy dust that rose in his wake. After walking several steps he surprised her by retrieving it, brushing it off with his big hands. He looked at his daughters, and their eyes met his, climbing higher when he lifted the cross above his head and began to turn slowly in a circle, blessing the fallen with a prayer that strengthened with every step. His face glimmered with tears in the dusky light, and he didn't stop moving till he faced his girls again. They rushed to him, and he embraced them gently, their burns so recently dressed.

Behind their backs, which faced the caravaners, he held the cross like a shield.

The three of them walked back, holding one another closely.

“I wish we could give them a proper burial,” Augustus said. Before Burned Fingers could object, he added, “But I know we can't. You don't sacrifice the living to honor the dead.”

“Is that in the Bible?” Ananda asked him.

“Not that I know of,” Augustus said. “But it's in here,” he tapped right above his heart, “so I know it's true.”

“You gave them a lot,” Jessie told him gently. He looked at the cross he still carried but said nothing.

She cleared her throat. “You have a well, right?” she asked.

He led them to the far side of the settlement, where they found more dead crowding a hand pump that never could have saved them. She, Augustus, and Burned Fingers took turns on the long iron handle until every jug, jerrican, and stomach was full.

“It's just like when it rained,” Ananda said quietly as they walked back, raising the specter of happier times when everyone in their camp had danced in the rare downpours and drank all they could, when clouds brought holidays from sun and grit and thirst.

Jaya and Erik formed a makeshift table from a long board they'd scavenged from the debris, setting it up so the truck blocked the view of the desolation. Jessie glanced at Augustus and his girls, and felt horrible about having to feed the caravan so close to the source of their grief. But if they didn't have dinner now, they'd have to eat in the dark—and risk luring all kinds of predators.

Brindle, Gilly, Bella, and Imagi loaded the table with two crates of food, one that had yet to be opened. Imagi drummed the board and clapped happily, and Jessie couldn't help wondering if her Down syndrome, in this world, was actually a blessing.

“I d-don't kn-know what th-this s-s-stuff is,” Brindle announced after prying open the sealed crate. “Some k-kind of m-m-mystery m-meat. B-But it's b-b-been smoked, and it s-smells ok-ay.”

Probably more lizard, Jessie thought. Or some kind of reptile.

The flavor came back to her slowly; more than twenty years had passed since she'd tasted it. “Chicken?” she exclaimed. She stared at the knife she used for eating. “I don't believe it.”

“It's really
good,
” Ananda said, putting aside a book of letters that she and Burned Fingers had found in an abandoned house not long after her abduction. A father had written them to his daughter on her birthday about the big events of her life in the past twelve months. But in the last letter—before all the blank pages—he said there were “problems” in the country.

Ananda loved to reread them, even though they bored holes in her heart with their portrayal of a world filled with orchards, movies, soccer games, dances on a real stage, summer concerts in a grassy park—so many wonders—horses, skiing,
snow!
—that she'd spent days daydreaming about them all.

But right now not even the sweetest heartache could compete with the taste of chicken. She'd never eaten fowl, though her mother had taught them about grouse so slow “you could hunt them with a rock,” and pheasants so pretty that people spent lifetimes painting pictures of them. Where
are
those pictures? Ananda wondered. What happened to them all?

And once, there had been geese and wild turkeys and dozens of species of ducks. Solana, sitting a few feet away and still recovering from deep machete wounds inflicted by a marauder, had drawn all kinds of birds in the dust for one of the camp's history and science classes; after the collapse, Ananda's mother said the two subjects never should be taught separately again. Solana was her mom's closest friend, an auntie to Ananda and Bliss.

The pretty, oval-faced woman sat across from Burned Fingers, long black hair falling over her back and shoulders, hiding most of the fat red scars. She had never spoken to him. Neither had Maureen and Keffer Gibbs, whose three children also had survived. Ananda watched Solana chew slowly, savoring her food. So were many others.

Jessie also noticed the rare pleasure people took in eating, even Callabra, the strong sixteen-year-old whose tongue had been taken by the beastly men at the Army of God. Jessie suspected that for the adults, it wasn't simply because the meat was immensely flavorful, especially compared to lizard loins. It was knowing that chicken actually existed somewhere.

Hannah confirmed her suspicion by asking Burned Fingers where the Army of God had gotten the meat. At his insistence, they'd taken considerable risks to abscond with all the food they could find at the fortress.

“Not sure,” he told the gray-haired nurse, who kept a six-inch steel spike hidden in her thick braid. “Those crazies were dealing with lots of traders, and I heard some of them came all the way down from New England and what use to be Canada. Look,” he turned to the others, “I hate to break this up but we've
got
to get moving.”

Gilly and Bella, best friends since early childhood, asked if they could take their portions onto the truck so they could make the meat last even longer.

“Sure, fine, eat on the go,” Burned Fingers said. “Used to be America's favorite pastime.”

“It was?” Gilly asked, stunned.

Jessie watched him spring to his feet without answering the girl's question, though he was quick to nod approval at Brindle and Jaya for immediately packing up the food crates; and he offered Erik a “Good move!” when the young man loaded the scavenged board onto the roof of the van.

The trailer rumbled when Maul fired up the truck engine; Jessie felt it all the way through her body as she perched on the walkway atop the gasoline tanker, once more studying the land they were leaving.

They followed the van up the slope, using heavy ramps to negotiate sudden eruptions or erosions of the road. They reached the crest with just enough light to give them the expansive view promised by arduous days of climbing out of a deep Appalachian valley.

All around them the air looked smoky, like the namesake mountains themselves. To the east they spied sheered-off peaks, blown up and bulldozed apart for the last veins of coal in North America. Entire mountaintops were blasted open so more 300-million-year-old fuel could be torn from the earth and burned into the corrupted sky, adding gigatons of carbon to the greenhouse gases widely known to have been heating up the planet. The crimes against nature—against humankind's own best interests—were staggering to Jessie, inconceivable, and for what? To eke out a few more decades of extortionate profits for a self-immolating economic and industrial system?

She noticed most of the caravaners staring at the scarred mountains, criminal evidence that would last eons—and the dismal legacy of the most reviled generations in history. Little wonder mobs hunted down and viciously executed aging CEOs and political leaders, then targeted media sycophants and phony populists who'd played their fellow citizens for fools—and paid dearly for their duplicity. Or that the graveyards of the wealthy were defiled, bodies exhumed in spasms of hatred. Nothing remained sacred. Lavish mausoleums, gold-plated banks, and marble-halled trading houses were all defaced with the rebellion's loudest cry:
KILL THE 1%$!,
red-painted graffiti that spoke dozens of languages as it traveled the world wielding its vengeance.

Ananda took her mother's arm, asking, “Are those lakes?”

“Sludge ponds,” Burned Fingers answered. “Must be solid poison by now. Let's hope it doesn't get windy.”

“Ponds?” Jessie said. “They look like the Great Lakes of Death.”

Below them, lost in the haze about twenty miles away, lay the border of the Great American Desert, endless and mostly flat, once home to tens of millions of bison, dozens of native grasses, an uncountable number of songbirds, and more than thirty Native American tribes.

After exterminating most of the flora, fauna, and First Nation's people, American settlers turned it into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world—by the short measure of monoculture. But temperatures rose disproportionately higher in the country's interior, a jump long predicted by climate scientists, and roundly denounced by farm-belt politicians and the Ph.D.'s they persuaded with all the perks of wealth. Their collective refusal to acknowledge the region's decline continued even as the Great Plains turned to desert, a despoilment accelerated by a finding long reported by hydrologists: the twentieth century was anomalously moist in much of the Midwest and western U.S.