Carry the Flame (12 page)

Burned Fingers shrugged. “We don't know, so we go,” he said, repeating the very words he'd used weeks ago at the start of the journey.

Jessie switched her M–16 to “full auto,” as Bliss picked up her shotgun. Even Hannah popped the cylinder to check the bullets in the revolver Jessie had loaned her.

“Drive slowly,” she heard Burned Fingers warn Brindle. To Maul, he said, “You've got to keep back a hundred yards. And both of you keep your windshield armor down.”

“No kids in the van,” Jessie said, returning to the group. When the tallest blind girl, Angelina, stopped burping a baby to argue, Jessie added, “I'm sorry, but the van's going first. We don't know what we're facing, and we're not going to lose you to a land mine.”

Angelina rolled her milky eyes in disgust. Jessie couldn't blame her. It was hard enough to care for a baby in the van, much less while perched blindly on the tanker.

Then she flashed on them marooned in the desert days from now, the van destroyed by a mine, Brindle dead, the truck unable to move forward without them acting as human mine sweepers—and unable to retreat for fear of the Alliance and whatever arsenal they'd sent after them.

Bury your goddamn fear,
she scolded herself, knowing the admonition had the half-life of a smile at a time like this.

“She's right,” Burned Fingers said. “Everybody's got to ride on the truck except for Brindle and a good pair of eyes up on the van to look for any signs of trouble.”

“I'll do it,” Bliss volunteered. So did Jaya a second later.

Jessie almost refused her daughter, but couldn't. It would have meant consigning the risk to someone else. Nobody's kid could be exempt, but two of them at a time?
No way.
Before she could speak up, Burned Fingers nixed the idea.

“In rotation only,” he said, failing to hide his amusement over Jaya's eagerness to share any duty with Bliss, even the most dangerous. “And every hour we need a fresh pair of eyes to take over. They get tired and lazy in the sun. Jaya, we don't want you riding shotgun, either. The van's just for Brindle and whoever's pulling lookout duty.”

Bliss patted her boyfriend on the back, then climbed onto the board that Erik had strapped to the roof. Her sandaled feet hung over the windshield armor, her eyes already studying the great unknown that stretched out before them.

Jessie ushered the younger girls to the tanker trailer knowing it would be a challenge to find perches for all of them and that few would prove comfortable. After seeing the bones, the children had ceased their exuberant talk of finding fences—or the real treasures they hoped lay buried in the sandy soil, like swing sets and bicycles. She considered their loss of enthusiasm a blessing: running fearlessly around a killing field would have been foolhardy. Yet as she looked at Bliss atop the van, her unease returned in full, and she had to forcibly remind herself there had been no evidence that mines or IEDs had been used in the massacre. But she found it unnerving and almost unconscionable to seek relief in bullet-riddled bones, especially those of children, and this made her desperate to get the caravan's girls on board—as if clinging to the tanker could save them.

The solace you seek reflects the world you see.
She couldn't remember where she'd heard or read that—it had been many years ago—but those were her thoughts when she spotted the oldest girls, Teresa and Bessie, digging up a long sheet of metal.

Jessie was about to shout when they turned it upright, revealing a blue sign that said:
OHIO WELCOMES YOU—TO THE HEART OF IT ALL!
The large white lettering was superimposed over a smaller outline of the state, and was as poignant a remnant of the past as she could have imagined at that moment. As a child she had spent most summers at her grandparents' beach house at Cape Hatteras. Hardships already were a part of her life, but everytime she and her mother made it past the fading Welcome to North Carolina sign, she always brightened with the promise of playful waves and sand castles, beach tag and long summer evenings talking and laughing and watching the surf—and forgetting the world caving in all around them.

Now she walked toward the two girls, overhearing red-haired Bessie ask Teresa if Ohio had been one of the states, or a country.

“It was beautiful,” Jessie said softly, more to herself than to Bessie, and more about the country as a whole than the state.

“Definitely a state,” Teresa said, eyes quickly back on the sign. “What's this?” She brushed sand and dust from the word Ohio, baring a big X gouged into the name. A deeply etched
CITY OF SHADE
appeared right above it.

Burned Fingers hustled up beside Jessie. “The ‘City of Shade welcomes you'?” she said to him. “Ever hear of—”

He cut her off with an explosive expletive. “That was the nickname of a huge hellhole that used to be a penal colony. It was a privately run place where all the psychos, sex criminals, and completely insane people were dumped, but what I heard happened . . .”

Here it comes, she thought. There's always a kicker with him.

“ . . . was when the rebellion started, the army shipped thousands of political prisoners there, figuring they wouldn't last a week, and I'll bet they didn't. Then, when everything fell apart, the inmates supposedly took over the asylum.”

“What about Wicca? It must have wiped them out by now.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Look out there. There's nothing. It's pretty damn isolated, just like you were in that dead reservoir.”

“But we practiced strict abstinence, and got away before it got really bad in the cities.”

He snorted. “They got away, too, even if they didn't want to. I'm not saying they didn't get hit with the virus. I'm just saying that the army might have done some of those crazies a favor, sending them out there. I haven't heard of that place in years, and all I really remember was to stay away from it, no matter what. I never even knew where it was exactly. Who would?” he added, shaking his head at the endless unmarked stretches of sand.

And here we are.

“But look at these bodies,” she said. “Everybody's dying out here. They must have, too,” once more finding perverse relief, rather than simply fear or anguish, in the bones they'd found. But she was driven to seek any kind of comfort from the horrific prospect of encountering men brutal and insane enough to have survived the Hobbesian world Burned Fingers had just described.

“I hope you're right, and this thing,” he nudged the sign with his foot, “is some asshole's idea of a joke, but I wouldn't bet on it, and I wouldn't count on them being dead. They . . . had . . . water,” he said, pronouncing the words slowly, like a death sentence. “Enough for a big prison colony. I heard it was the size of Rhode Island. And they didn't have kids.” He nodded at the boneyard. “So I don't think they're the dead ones, at least not here. I'm figuring them for the pythons who pounced on whoever went past. Looking at this, I'd say they had a steady stream of meat.” '

“People?” Jessie blurted. Teresa and Bessie dropped the sign and stared at him.

“Yeah, people, and whatever food they carried,” Burned Fingers said. “Those bones were picked clean.”

Like the toll tenders.

On the way to the Army of God, Jessie and her companions had to pay panther meat to pale, torchlit men who'd taken armed control of a long mountain tunnel. To have refused would have risked being slain and eaten themselves. The uneasy journey to daylight turned ghastly when they spied the tenders' ample collection of human skulls and curtains strung with the smaller bones of hands and feet.

She eyed everyone on the tanker truck—the younger girls, adults, Jaya and Erik, Augustus and his twins—and flinched at what this hoard of humans would mean to savages.

And then she looked past the caravaners to the tarnished gasoline tank itself, and knew that as long as they needed fuel, they would be hostages to guns and might and the unhinged desires of men. But without the gas, they were dead.

Almost everything had changed for the worse in the past hundred years, but as Jessie walked to the truck she knew they now faced the grim possibility that some of the most monstrous crimes of the century had taken place in the vast unmarked graveyard they had just entered.

Chapter Eight

H
unt struggled to sit up in bed, setting off a
crack
sharp as a broken tooth. Esau wasn't sure whether it issued from his master's tired, clawed body, or his rickety headboard.

The slave rose to help him, but Hunt waved him off, fumbling with the frayed blanket. A crusty bandage fell from his cheek and landed on his lap, exposing dark scabs tough as snake jerky. A tangle of them converged into a thick wound on his jaw, like the parched tributaries that once flowed to great rivers and reservoirs. He reached for the stained bandage, grimacing when he knocked it on the floor.

Esau caught his nod and rushed from his stool by the dusty window. The slave crouched by the bed, a sharp smell scouring his nose. He snatched up the dressing and dropped it into a wicker basket whose reeds had split and unwound in dozens of places, giving it the dazed look of a prickly desert plant.

When he turned back, his master's eyes, flat as sunlight, stared out the window. Or at a reflection of his exposed skin? Esau had overheard the doctor tell Hunt he'd have scars. “Bad ones.”

Like my S.
The slave's fingers rose to the big black tattoo branding his forehead. Much as he hated the inky symbol of enslavement, he found himself cringing more over Hunt's disfigurement. His master had been so handsome, so different from His Piety and the other old goats who demanded his attention. But as soon as he thought ill of the prophet, Elders, and acolytes, Esau flooded with guilt and turned his eyes inward to his festering soul, begging forgiveness from the Almighty.

He listened for the calm words of God, wanting to hear them.
Just this once.
Emptier than ever, he looked back at Hunt, who now faced him fully, and saw that the doctor hadn't lied. Scars blighted most of his master's features, absent only where another bandage covered his brow. Esau had been so shocked by those bone-deep claw marks that he couldn't help imagining a Pixie-bob wrapped around his own skull, trying to rip out his eyes. His master was lucky to have survived with his sight.

No, not luck,
the slave scolded himself again.
Providence. The Lord's will be done.
Repeating to himself what the prophet had told them all.

“Water.” Hunt's voice sounded phlegmy from sleep, but stronger than since he'd collapsed in the chapel. “Then food. Protein. Whatever looks good.”

Good?
Esau didn't think any of the provisions looked good. Fewer traders had arrived in the past month, and yesterday two of them showed up badly blistered from hauling hand carts with wooden wheels, not the small jeeps and trailers they'd used for years. Slaves had whispered of fuel shortages.

He had even heard fierce rumors of a breakdown in Alliance power. He feared any upset. His circumstances could be so much harder, and he saw this whenever he looked at slaves who were worked to death on the huge water wheel, or saw broken, wailing men waiting to be burned or beheaded for real or imagined offenses.

There were other signs of trouble. No new slaves had been delivered in weeks. At the same time, Esau had noticed a lessening in the hardships endured by some of them—and a rise in their boldness. These were mostly modest displays, like working slowly or murmuring to one another. But even these small acts of defiance normally would have warranted a whip or truncheon.

Only the shipment of girls continued apace.

His master slowly worked his legs out from under the blue blanket, fabric so thin the slave spied skin through the weave. Hunt's gown bunched-up around his hips as he hung his legs off the side of the bed, planting his feet on the floor. He moved his toes tentatively, then stood, leg muscles tightening as his hem fell.

He thought Hunt still looked stronger and more alluring than most of the naked younger men whom His Piety selected as models of chaste and healthy manhood. Their likenesses were carved into wooden statues that adorned the prophet's spacious home, which once housed the base commander. And a life-sized figure filled a corner of His Piety's chapel office. He'd used the statue when Esau was first brought to the base in chains to tell him about his body, starting with his thighs.

“Flex those muscles, like this,” His Piety had pointed to the figure, “so I can see what you've got.” The prophet touched each part of Esau's upper leg, touting them in turn. “This is
Rector femoris
, and over here,” his thick fingers dug into Esau's flesh, “you have
Vastus medialis
. And this,” he probed so painfully that Esau gasped, “is
Vastus lateralis.
And these are the adductors,” spoken as he ran his hand up the inside of the slave's leg, pausing to fondle him. When Esau frowned from the man's clumsy touch and the stench of his panting, His Piety squeezed the slave's testes and calmly said, “Please don't ever do that when I am taking the time to minister to you.” Then, more sternly—and with a hard tug—he added, “I
mean
it.”

As Esau doubled over, the prophet shifted to the statue and caressed the figure's “gluteus maximus,” pronouncing the words in a quavering voice before turning Esau away, lifting his soiled skirt, and forcing it into the slave's trembling hands. His Piety moved his fingers from what he called the “gluteal crease” all the way up to the “natal cleft.”

“It's important for you to know the names of your parts,” he said to Esau's back, “because as a strong young man, you are made in the very image of God.”

What Esau heard next was the prophet's breath grow even quicker, and then it coated his buttocks, turning them moist. Seconds later His Piety licked him for the first time.

Now Esau watched Hunt check his footing before pulling his gown up over his head, seemingly indifferent to the slave's open appraisal.

“My clothes.” Hunt pointed to pants that had been laundered and folded for him.

“Can you wear them with that?” Esau glanced at a thick bandage on his master's shin.

Hunt unfurled the stained wrap, revealing more hard scabs, and held it out to him. Esau dropped the dressing into the basket as his master eased his pants over his wound, spurning any hands-on help.

“Get my shirt and boots.”

Esau gathered them up, excited by the feel of the soft fabric and the smell of old leather. He made no effort to hide his desire, which tented his skirt; but Hunt looked right through him, slipping on his sleeveless shirt.

“You may tie them,” Hunt said, offering his booted foot and a sly smile, his only acknowledgment of his slave's readiness to please. But Hunt made no other suggestion of interest, and Esau hurried to his knees, finding his master's eyes focused not on him but on the window once more.

The slave contented himself with the combat boots, considering his chore an honor. The boots were so rare, taken from a vastly diminished stock on the base.

When he finished, his master stretched his arms above his head, then bent them at the elbows like wings. Still holding them aloft, he twisted his torso from side to side, eyeing the mostly unscathed skin from his shoulders to his wrists; only his badly bitten right hand was still bandaged.

“May I go for your food?” Esau asked.

Hunt stared at him. “What did you learn while I was sleeping?”

“Learn? Only to worry that you wouldn't be standing like this ever again. I'm so glad you're—”

Hunt abruptly waved him silent. “You know what I mean. Was I talking in my sleep again? I was delirious. I had a fever, sweats, nightmares.”

“You said very little.”

“What
did
I say?”

“You called out my name twice.”
You said you loved me.
Only
me.
But Esau always imposed careful limits on his most outrageous lies.

“What else?” Hunt asked impatiently.

“You said something about the president being hunted, and the White House.” Another lie, intended to bolster the first one. “Like on the—”

“That's all?” Hunt interrupted again.

“That was all you said.”

“Because—”

A sharp knock cut Hunt short. One of His Piety's favorite messenger boys bowed until he saw that it was a slave opening the door. He peered past Esau, speaking directly to Hunt, who braced himself against a delaminated bureau.

“His Piety wants to see your slave.”

Hunt appeared surprised, but told Esau to go. When he turned to leave, though, Hunt called him back and ordered the messenger boy to close the door and wait in the hallway.

“Tell him I'm ready,” Hunt said quietly.

“Are you sure?” Esau did not want him to leave, and he had been back such a short time.

“Did you hear me?' Hunt glared at him. “I am ready.”

Esau apologized profusely, bowed, and backed away. Hunt sat heavily on the bed.

The slave trailed the messenger boy down the hall, hoping His Piety did not want to take his pleasure with him. The prophet's touch curdled his skin. But thankfully, the man was extremely old, fifty-four, and most of the time pleasure was only a memory for him, his attempts to achieve it brief and—for His Piety
—
disappointing.

Esau worried mostly about his master leaving him to more able-bodied men for weeks or months. While a few demanded sexual favors for themselves and friends, most expected him to work at hard labor on little sleep. The slave couldn't say which burden he loathed more, only that he'd known a great blessing when His Piety ordered him to stay by his master's bedside. The thought of returning to much harsher obligations made him frantic. And if Hunt were killed—or came back without the demon and was burned to death—his own prospects would darken precipitously.

The messenger boy, Abel, stayed two steps ahead of Esau until they left the building. Within minutes they passed bony men, burned black as Africans by the frightful sun, digging a new latrine with picks and shovels. The odor was nauseating. An unfortunate few pounded the fill with bare hands and rocks to try to stop the waste from bubbling up when the hard rains fell, a cruel trick of the murderous earth that none of the True Believers understood.

Bathrooms in private quarters, like Hunt's, had been looted lifetimes ago for plumbing that could be cut, pounded, and forged into valuable weapons—spears, knives, swords, axes, spiked balls on chains—anything that could stab, maim, cudgel, and kill.

Half a block away, Esau and Abel came upon more slaves carrying armfuls of rocks to patch a residential cul-de-sac. The blacktop had eroded so widely that most of the surface had been replaced. It appeared rough and painful to walk on.

“Do you know why His Piety wants to see me?” Esau asked Abel softly, so he would not be overheard. The messenger boy looked around warily and shook his head. Slaves were not permitted to speak to one another, but when they could, they often did. The punishment was not severe. Slaves might be lashed or forced to suffer a half day of labor without water, but they weren't burned or stoned to death for brief conversations.

Esau had heard that Abel was born of “high blood,” as were a number of other slaves who were rarely rebuked for minor infractions. They were reputed to be the offspring of Elders or His Piety, but parentage was rarely bruited about because that was a grave transgression for any slave of any lineage.

The messenger boy glanced around again. “It's not to
help
His Piety,” he told Esau. To “help” the prophet was slave code for servicing his flagging desire. “The Chief Elder is with him. They've been talking all morning.”

Both slaves quieted when they spotted four hooded girls in long dark gowns ahead. Their bare feet were tied together with frayed rope, causing them to stagger as they tried to keep up with two old men in boots who were herding them into an alley paved with specially sharp stones.

“His Piety's Memorial Drive,” Abel snickered. Esau didn't risk a response. The messenger boy didn't appear to notice and went on, “They're new ones. They got here yesterday. They're really beautiful. I got a good look at them on my way to get you.”

Esau stared at the girls, trying to feign interest, but with Wicca infecting men who had sex with unclean females—and who could ever be sure of their history? An Elder had gone mad with the disease after having sex with his eleven-year-old bride—the slave considered his desire for boys an act of God's benevolence. Not that he'd ever admit so aloud because the Alliance forbade all same sex contact, which made seeking out men and boys both exciting and dangerous to him. Only True Believers—men of presumed virtue—acted with impunity. And only His Piety had pretended to teach Esau about his body when he raped him.

The slave saw Abel steal repeated looks at the girls, but why did he bother? Their shapes were hidden under the loose garments, their heads turned forward under floppy hoods. But Esau had never experienced the fervid way that lust for a girl could direct and dominate almost all of a young man's impulses. What he did feel certain of was that even as a high-born, Abel's desire was hopeless. These children were reserved exclusively for True Believers, the free men of God who had their choice of the youngest, purest females who passed through the front gate under the steely gaze of the towering, all-knowing crucified Christ.

The new crop, like the scores of girls who had come before them, had been shipped to the Alliance from fortresses aligned with it. Every girl marched or dragged onto the base was destined for the bed of a man two or three generations older—and just as fated to disappear from his withered arms after her first twelve periods, when sexual activity would make her a likely carrier of Wicca.

What happened to the girls afterward was a secret no one, to Esau's knowledge, had ever revealed.

As they neared the chapel, an Elder approached from their right. Abel's eyes widened, as if he'd been caught touching himself—another grievous sin for a slave—but the old man passed by mumbling to himself. A lot of them mumbled. Esau had heard them claim they were praying, but sometimes their words made no sense, or they were complaining to themselves about food or bedding or His Piety's choice of a wife for them. As if they had cause for complaint.