Carry the Flame (14 page)

Esau heard footsteps, then the Elder opened the inner door. He studied the slave, then lowered his gaze to the floor. Esau glanced down, too, worried that his filthy feet had tracked up the carpet.

“Go in. His Piety wishes to see you now.”

The slave had been summoned to His Piety many times, but had been ushered into his office proper only to pleasure him. Otherwise, His Piety spoke to him through the open door. But after the urgency of all he'd heard, he could not fathom that he'd been beckoned to “help” the prophet.

He felt this more strongly when he stepped through the doorway and found His Piety's personal slave standing by the wooden statue of the naked boy. The lithe, girlish looking blond youth did not acknowledge him, and Esau figured he'd been there the whole time. He held the most trusted position for a slave, and Esau guessed the boy was also among the high-born.

His Piety had moved from his desk to an ornate, hand-carved chair. Not as grand as the cathedra in the chapel, and made of a much lighter colored wood, but as thickly padded.

“Come here.” His Piety directed Esau to a spot in front of him.

The slave lowered himself and bowed his head. The prophet offered his hand, and Esau kissed his bulbous gold ring. He had kneeled before His Piety many times, but never to place his lips on anything so hard or tolerable as the ring.

“Look at me,” the prophet said. Esau raised his eyes. “You will accompany your master when he is strong enough to chase the heathens. You will see to his welfare and help in any way you can.” His Piety paused, as if to lend the fullest possible meaning to those last few words. “You have been loyal to him and to us, so if his mission succeeds—and it
must—
your loyalty will be rewarded: you will return a free man with all the rights and privileges of a True Believer.”

Esau realized he must have looked as stunned as he felt because the prophet nodded and repeated his promise. Then he added, “Hunt will have his orders. Yours are simple: aid him, and make sure he survives, even if it costs you your own life. The Lord will grant you bliss forever if you perish protecting him. I have seen this in my visions, so you know it's true.” But Esau could not help hearing the Chief Elder's mockery of the prophet's visions. His Piety smiled. It didn't look kind. It looked cunning, and that also made the slave uneasy.

“A free man,” His Piety said once again, “but do not underestimate the challenges you'll face, and know that Hunt will be told to kill you if you fail him in any way.” The prophet leaned forward. “One more thing. You will not speak of this to anyone before you are freed, or I will kill you myself in the name of the Father and Son.”

“Yes, His Piety. Thank you. May I fulfill a request of my master by passing along a message to you?” His Piety nodded. “He asked me to tell you that he is ready.”

“Go. Leave.” His Piety shooed him away as if it were beneath him to hear such important information from a slave.

A free man,
Esau said to himself as he left the office. He'd never heard of a slave being freed. Or of a man like him even offered such a reward. And that stopped him after he exited the anteroom because no matter the heresy, no matter how sinful it made him feel, he could not refrain from wondering if the reward was a chimera. His first inklings in the office now loomed larger and darker. Maybe that's why he'd never heard of a slave becoming a free man. Maybe they were promised freedom, sworn to silence, and then summarily killed. That scared him more than chasing a demon and fighting heathens.

As he started toward the chapel entrance, he saw Hunt walking toward him.
You can tell him.
Esau desperately wanted reassurance the reward was real, then reminded himself that His Piety had vowed to personally kill him if he spoke of it to anyone.

His master brushed past him without a word, and while Esau assumed he was hurrying to a summons of his own, Hunt's aloofness heightened his anxiety.

Moments after he returned to Hunt's room with food, Abel knocked on the door again, telling him to go to the front gate. This time the messenger boy did not escort him, and Esau walked as fast as he could, heart beating loudly in his ears.

He spotted Hunt's motorcycle by the entrance. Attached to it was a sidecar rigged like an iron cage and provisioned for a long journey.

Esau realized they would be leaving right away. He hadn't been permitted off the base in years, and then only for a few hours of wall building. His elation soared when Hunt rose from the other side of the big bike, tossed a wrench into the sidecar, and pointed to a small pile of clothes on the motorcycle seat.

“Put them on. I don't want you looking like a slave. You'll start looking like a free man now.”

A free man.
Someone else had spoken the words. Someone else knew. It felt confirmed.

Esau picked up a pair of pants and shirt. Beneath them—astonishingly enough—he found a pair of boots. He'd never even owned a pair of tire-tread sandals.

But what about the S?
Before he noticed what he was doing, he rubbed his brow, as he had two hours ago.

“No one can see that until they're close,” Hunt said. “And no one's getting close unless I want them to. Grow your hair. It'll disappear.”

Grow my hair.
Slaves had to chop it off with knives. Maybe he
would
be freed.

He rushed to a latrine and changed. The pants felt odd, but he loved them. The shirt, too. He stepped from the privy to put on his boots. Then he carried his filthy skirt to Hunt, who was watching slaves in chains trudge out of the gate, as he himself once had.

Hunt threw the skirt at the slave master, shouting, “Give it to one of them, or keep it for yourself. You never know.”

The man's face reddened but he merely nodded at Hunt, whose easy authority could not be questioned by a guard. Had he known Soul Hunter's meek origins, his envy might have flared into open resentment of the blond man's prerogatives.

More than two decades ago marauders had taken Hunt slave in a murderous raid. The five-year-old arrived at the base roped at the neck to other boys. Hunt had no memory of his parents and never would. His Piety claimed him at the gate below the giant Jesus on the cross, drawn to Hunt as a serpent is to the eggs of its own kind, gleaming in the dark deracinated barrens of childhood.

Hunt was a handsome boy with a wedge-shaped torso that grew more sculpted and appealing with the passage of every year. His Piety took him as a lover at once, a secret stain on the prophet's soul, already blotted with the blood and semen of other boys.

Hunt loathed the old man's incessant urges, ending his sexual enslavement in his mid-teens when he could claim the imperatives of his own body by forcibly forestalling those of his putative master. The abrupt rejection left His Piety standing in silence, quivering with anger, desire, and the most powerful longing of all—for the youth of another, and the youth of his own so long passed, conflating the two, as they often are, in the abject blur of aging.

No threats were ever spoken, no words arose from the secrets His Piety and Hunt had shared. The young man quickly claimed the mantle of Soul Hunter by tracking down escapees, violating the youngest and weakest—often for sex, sometimes for the unencumbered pleasure of their pain. He returned all of them to the base bound by the neck, as he had been. Boys, girls, men and women—bony, starved, and broken from the their encounters with him—were then slowly incinerated in the unshakable grasp of posts and chains, wood chips and coal.

Hunt watched them scream and writhe and die, ruing not their grim demise but his own lingering iniquity, a sinuous haunting from high above where the sky came alive with heavenly claws. For days after the burnings he whispered hurried prayers of contrition, not for his violence or their gruesome deaths, but for the pleasure he'd taken with the young: memory sharp, selective, unforgiving.

But when his latest boy had lain naked and savaged in the dusty ravine, blood pooling above his pale buttocks—and Hunt had realized that the Lord alone, not his parents or His Piety, had placed him on earth to confirm the final depravity of others—he'd gleaned a blink of eternity's most consoling gaze, the sacred sanctions and godly injunctions that left him purer, stronger, and more empowered than ever.

He kick-started the old Harley and slapped the seat for Esau to get on. The slave straddled the cracked leather, found the foot pegs, and wrapped his arms gently around his master's scabbed and bandaged body, hand brushing a pistol in Hunt's belt.

Two guards waved them through the gate. Hunt gunned the engine. A cool wind soothed Esau's skin, stealing up his pants and shirt. He felt christened by the righteous spirit of God, as if the Lord had answered his prayers and most fervent pleas in an infinitely resonant voice, filling his inner emptiness at last. In these suddenly pristine moments he felt unbeholden to men or boys or the desires of the flesh, and thought to ease his light hold on his master and lift his cheek from Hunt's warm back, but couldn't.

He blamed his failure on the motorcycle's speed, faster than memory itself—or so it seemed to Esau as he gazed upon a world unshaken by walls, gates, or gun towers. But it wasn't speed that kept his arms and hands on Hunt, or the impediments of a rough road. It was the mystifying force he felt only for the man he held.

The sidecar rattled next to him, heavy with the implements of carnage. He'd thought of escape often, but never anticipated the maelstrom sweeping him from the life he loathed.

To hunt heathens in the name of God. To kill them all. To fill a cage with the dangerous fury of a two-headed demon from hell.

To know the sacred blessings of a True Believer.

Chapter Nine

T
he caravan trundled deeper into the Great American Desert, past mounds of large human bones—femurs, ribs, mandibles—and smaller ones that looked like the cracked, bleached joints of a vast bloodless body. But from Jessie's seat up on the back of the tanker trailer, the desert they claimed hour by hour looked no different from the wasteland they left behind. The caravaners were in the graveyard of the Midwest, “the heart of it all,” as the old Ohio welcome sign said, now littered with the debris of bludgeoning, crushing, shooting, chopping. The sands offered few burials, save what the earth itself spared when driving winds and torrential rains swept the bones to new places of rest. Migratory in death as they had been in life, they appeared from the depths blanched and ghostly, as haunting as the vanished territory they claimed.

Jessie and Burned Fingers no longer stopped to examine the remains. The children didn't need to see any more cruel evidence. Their nightmares were a contagion that gripped the youngest girls before waking others with the same feverish sweats and chills.

But no matter what the caravaners did, they were never far from the bones. Last night, after stopping to bed down, Jessie idly scooped up the smooth surface only to find more of the dead—the clustered skulls of infants and toddlers under a thin layer of sand.

The bones' ubiquity followed from all she knew of the collapse. With the disappearance of 65 million midwesterners, the remains she spotted, for all their rigid horror, provided but the tiniest glimpse of everyone who perished. And the bones could never account, in the most precise sense of that measured word, for the untold millions of refugees who died crossing the broiling vestiges of the Midwest for the East and West coasts, the Gulf or Great Lakes, seeking the cool fiction of water in a rapidly heating world.

Why are
we
alive?
That question gnawed at Jesse as they rolled over a gentle dune and saw another outreach of emptiness.
And for how long?
Her eyes roved the dead, and she knew that these people, whose bones they now trampled, must also have wondered about their survival—before they succumbed, if not to murder and cannibalism, then to starvation or thirst, accident or disease.

Five days ago the girls had found the welcome sign with City of Shade scratched over the word Ohio. Five days without a single cloud, and five brief nights to absorb cooling sand and tumultuous dreams—and consider the threat of an old penal colony overblown, the idea that inmates had literally taken over the asylum absurd. “They died, too. Everything died,” Jessie murmured as she looked up from yet another tangle of bones, shattered points sharp enough to have clawed away the absent flesh.

“Hold on,” Burned Fingers shouted from atop the truck cab, a grueling roost every bit as hot and exposed as the one she claimed about fifty feet behind him. Jessie winced when he jumped from the lumbering vehicle, as if she felt the impact in her own creaky knees. But he was already scurrying away, studying the sand.

Maul stopped the truck seconds later, and Jaya, up on the van ahead of them, reached down and pounded the door to signal Brindle.

Ananda and M-girl spilled from the side of the trailer, hand in hand, as they had been since surviving the Army of God. Ananda nuzzled her girlfriend, a sign of romance that made Jessie smile. The two had been inseparable growing up in the camp, though the gentle tones of intimacy didn't sound until Ananda, three years younger than M-girl, approached adolescence. Jessie had also heard each of them use heroic terms to describe how the other saved her life after the abduction, admiration almost as necessary for love as physical attraction. M-girl still bore scars from pulling Ananda from flames when the zealots tried to burn her as a witch.

“That's how I knew how I felt about her,” M-girl had told Jessie shortly after the start of the journey. “I would have died for her.”

You couldn't ask for a greater love for your daughter. And while the joy the girls shared made Jessie happy, as a biologist she recognized the early onset of physical affection reflected severely shortened life spans, no longer now than in the Middle Ages when young brides were common—and may have been necessary for the propagation of the species.

She watched M-girl share her water ration with Ananda, as she herself did every day. Her daughter had shown the first signs of an unquenchable thirst about a year ago. But their generosity was leaving Jessie and M-girl parched—and Ananda was still weak.

Recently she also complained of dizziness. Jessie tried hard not to think about the most likely threat to Ananda's life. Her girl had survived so many horrific dangers it seemed insufferably unfair that a disease conquered a century and a half ago might slowly kill her. But its simple remedy hadn't been available for decades. And to think she had worried for so long about Ananda becoming involved with Erik, or some other boy, and possibly contracting Wicca.

Her daughter laughed with M-girl, and spilled water from her cup. Be careful, Jessie wanted to yell, but Ananda looked so stunned by the sand's dark bloom—and offered such an anguished apology to her partner—that her mother said nothing.

We'll find more water, Jessie thought as she climbed off the trailer and started after Burned Fingers.
We have to.
Food stocks would last another six weeks, but none of the caravaners would live long enough to eat them if they didn't find water.

The sand felt noticeably fine. Jessie sank into it with each step, worried that a bone shard would pierce her sandals. Hansel struggled on his three legs, and Razzo sniffed in fits and starts. Watching him, she wondered if along with so many other remains, they'd already driven by—or over—the City of Shade.

Burned Fingers looked up as they headed toward him. He stood well off to the side of the truck, pointing to large paw prints in the sand. “I couldn't believe the size. That's the only reason I saw them.”

Much larger than a man's foot. That's what Jessie noticed first. And there were four of them, front and hind, with claws apparently several inches long; the fine grains blurred the most telling details. Some of the tracks appeared to have been brushed over, leaving foot-high berms on each edge of a serpentine shape, which narrowed at the end.

“That's a tail,” she said to Burned Fingers. The realization registered with empirical clarity, as if she were looking at casts of dinosaur bones in a long ago laboratory.

“A big one,” he said.

What didn't register with such professional equanimity was the sum of all these clues. The dogs were also plenty agitated. The fur on Hansel's neck stuck out like quills, and Razzo buried his snout in the sand, sniffing furiously. She ordered them back to the truck. She and Burned Fingers didn't need hounds to track a beast this huge, and she didn't want them near any creature that might be able to eat a big dog in a single bite.

“Ever hear of
Varanus komodoensis
?” she asked as they followed the tracks up a long rolling hill.

“Jess, it's been forty years since I studied Latin, but I'm guessing—”

“You used it yourself when we saw the first bones:
hic sunt dracones.
”

“Oh, Christ,” he said, shaking his head and swearing with noticeable restraint. “The last thing we need are those goddamn things.”

Komodo dragons had escaped zoos decades ago, along with other ferociously carnivorous creatures. But lions and tigers and polar bears were ill-equipped to survive the rapidly deteriorating environment, while the giant lizards might have been uniquely suited to prosper in the heat.

What Jessie was certain of was the immense danger of letting a dragon take them by surprise.

The beasts could eat eighty percent of their body weight—four children or two adults—and ran as fast as dogs. They were no more native to North America than puff adders or elephantiasis or a host of other horrors that had arisen in the tropics, then spread widely with the warming.

Her eyes shifted back to the tracks. The morning light, soft as it would get all day, cast a deceptively harmless looking orange glow that made the sands look like the enticing photos of the Sahara Desert she'd seen as a child. But she found nothing inviting about the Komodo's paw prints disappearing over the short crest. She checked her M–16 to make sure it was on full auto.

“I can't say I'm real fond of anything with the word ‘dragon' in its name,” Burned Fingers said. “You think we're safe up on the truck?”

She shook her head. “They can stand on their hind legs. They could tear a kid right off the side, or us on top.”

Burned Fingers raked his gray hair with his good hand. “They run in packs?” he asked.

“They didn't use to.”

“We used to say the same thing about panthers and P-bobs.” He and Jessie were still moving, but they lifted their eyes to the crest, as if fearing the beasts would come storming over it any second.

“But Komodos are lizards,” she said. “The world's biggest, and they've always been at the top of their food chain.”

“
How
big?” Despite his emphasis, he was still keeping his voice low. “I only saw one in a zoo, and that was a
long
time ago.”

“They can get to be ten feet,” she whispered. “Three hundred pounds.”

“So I'm not going to be killing it with this,” he whispered back, lifting his shotgun.

“Nope, not likely.” She nodded once at her rifle to indicate the weapon of choice.

With sand burying their ankles, every step proved strenuous. At least once a day they'd had to dig out the wheels of the truck or van to keep moving.
Where did it all come from?
Sand took millions of years to form. It didn't just appear in a matter of decades.
It does now,
she corrected herself. Sandstorms were moving entire deserts around.

They slowed as they approached the rise. Silence enveloped them. The sand absorbed even the sound of their feet. Moments later they spotted the Komodo's characteristic white waste—from its inability to digest calcium in the bones of animals it ate. Jessie would have paused to study the excrement for signs of distinctly human remains, but they heard an agonized, indecipherable whisper.

She looked at the top of the rise, leaned forward and cupped her ear. “That's a woman,” she said softly.

A few more steps revealed a grisly scene. As unscientific as it sounded,
monster
was how Jessie thought of the Komodo in those first seconds. The dragon crouched in a depression about fifty feet away. Even from this distance they could smell the animal's vile odor. Its loose, thickly pebbled skin formed a ridge along the sides of its long neck and folded into a thick flap across its broad brow, giving it the appearance of a dense, stupid beast. A woman in her late teens or early twenties, with an extraordinarily pretty face, lay on her back near the Komodo's gaping mouth, her long blond braid splayed on the sand, the skin of her chest and stomach torn apart. Her eyes open, blinking.

The lizard was twice her length and easily three times her mass. Huge. Well fed, not emaciated like so many creatures these days. But it was no more animated than the woman, who was now so quiet Jessie heard her own startled breath.

Communicating with only gestures, she and Burned Fingers circled wide as they approached the dragon slowly. She wanted an easier kill shot, but kept her weapon aimed at its head the whole time she moved. She assumed a Komodo was as dangerous as any other large carnivore feeding on prey. If the beast tried to take another bite of the woman, or moved so much as one inch toward them, she'd do her best to empty the clip into its brain. At this distance, it could be on them in two seconds.

But the dragon didn't move. It didn't appear to notice them at all. She watched its body expand and contract with every breath, like a big bellows, and figured if it did stand on its hind legs it would tower over them T-rex style, though at “only” about half to two-thirds the height of the most feared beast of the late Cretaceous Period.
Of any period,
she added quickly to herself. Then she studied the Komodo, reminded that she'd felt plenty of fear in the late—and greatly diminished—Anthropocene.

As they angled closer—and the beast's stench grew stronger—the woman made eye contact with Jessie and said, “Help. Help me,” with unmasked terror.

“Can you hear me?” Jessie asked across the divide, daring to move no closer or raise her voice, even though she knew that Komodos had terrible hearing.

The young woman only repeated her plea. The dragon's gaze never shifted from a point right in front of its dull, reddish brown eyes.

“If we could get her to crawl away,” Burned Fingers whispered, “even a little, we might get her—”

Jessie cut him off with a head shake. “She can't move. They have venom that makes you go into shock and bleed.” She eyed the Komodo down her barrel. “But if I shoot that goddamn thing, it could fall on her.”

“You will not shoot that animal,” said a man with a strong Caribbean accent.

She and Burned Fingers spun around. A powerful looking African-American, appearing every bit as well fed as the Komodo, had crept up directly behind them. Wearing a clean white robe and hood, he stared at them through dark aviator glasses. Bandoliers crossed his chest, and he had a classic bolt action rifle aimed at them.

“That dragon is more valuable than you will ever be,” the man said without lifting his eyes from the barrel. “So put your guns down or die.”

Burned Fingers glanced at his sawed-off, and Jessie wished she'd spun around shooting; she might have killed the gunman before he could pull his trigger. But the last time she'd tried that, a marauder almost severed her femoral artery.

“Drop your weapons.” The man held his aim while a smile broadened his face, as if he relished the prospect of murdering them. His straight teeth looked especially white against his black skin.