Carry the Flame (5 page)

“You going to have fun now, boy? You gonna have fun?”

“Don't do this,” the girl said. Shaky voice.

The dog issued a deep growl, not loud but marked by an urge for savagery.

“You hear my hound? He knows your words.”

The dog clawed the earth and jammed the metal muzzle against her smooth skin, like he was trying to bite through the brittle looking cage.

She cried out once. Hunt didn't care. Eyes fixed on her and the dog.

Oh, he wants them so bad.
Hunt raised his eyes skyward.
Should I, Lord? Should I?

Penance was always the burden of belief, the sweet reprise of victory over the fallen.

Yes, my son, you should.

H
ansel whined.

“Shut him up,” Burned Fingers hissed.

Jessie signaled the dog and returned her attention to the Pixie-bobs, now a teeming mass of brown and gray and black fur. One hundred of them? Two hundred? No idea. And she also didn't know whether to start shooting—or hope that the notoriously ravenous creatures would awaken slowly to the needs of their bellies.

“Let's keep going,” Burned Fingers said in a calmer voice. “High ground never hurts.”

Jessie heard her breath quicken as the hill steepened. Slow going, but the cats were starting to stretch, familiar feline behavior that made them appear slightly less nightmarish.

She eyed the crest about two hundred yards away, hoping that if they could slip over the top, the P-bobs would forget about them. Out of sight, out of mind? Something like that. But mostly she hoped to see Bliss and Jaya alive and unbroken down below.

And if they're not there?

Then she'd take her rations and stay behind. But she'd make Ananda go with the others. If she found Bliss and Jaya, even days from now, the three of them would trek after the lumbering caravan, and trust that it was hampered by uphills all the way to arctic Canada—and that they themselves would not be set upon by Pixie-bobs, panther packs, or roving bands of brain-fevered men.

But the gathering P-bobs looked like they could break any promise of survival.

“G
ood dog. Yes-yes, good boy.” Hunt fed out the chain so Damocles could root at the boy's pretty features. Almost girlish, but not, which made them even better. A fair-haired boy.
That's what they call them, the blond ones with skin so pure you could just tear it apart with your teeth. And him trying to turn away, like that's gonna stop Damocles.

“His muzzle's coming off. It's what has to be. You don't understand but I do. We're part of something here, and it's bigger than you or me.”

Speaking softly, but there was no point in explaining. Still, he'd tried. His conscience would allow no less.

“If you're smart, and I mean smarter than you've been in your whole heathen lives, you'll do nothing but pray. Damocles knows. He
knows
a true soul. But no matter what
he
does, you better do nothing but pray because if you try to fight the Lord's will, Damocles will go crazy with vengeance. It's only right and just. You'll see.”

He bent over his dog. “You want me to take that off, boy? Do you? Do you?” His master's touch incited the beast. Sinewy muscles rippled in the sun. Froth speckled his flews. And another fine growl—deep and rich and deadly—unsettled the air.

“What you gonna do now, Damocles? You gonna help me? You gonna help the Lord?” He worked the muzzle's leather straps, tight knots he couldn't tear apart fast enough, fingers mean as fever sores.

The girl's eyes were on them.
She's got herself a pretty face, too. Yes, she does.
“And don't you forget it,” he said to the dog.

When he undid the first knot, he could have sung a thousand hosannas. Only one slipped from his mouth. The boy looked at him and closed his eyes.

Living in your own world. Can't take this one, can you? And you don't even know the half of it. Do you? But you sure will. I keep my promises. God above knows it's true, and so will you.

He yanked off the metal cage and slapped the dog's snout with the meat of his hand. The animal growled louder.

“No, Damocles.” A sharp, whispered command. The dog quieted, shuddered.

Then he slapped him again. “You like that? You want some more, do you?” Slapping him two more times. Getting him all worked up.
Got to do your duty. God's watching. God's watching.

The dog knew about pain and pleasure, sin and grace.
More than they'll ever know.
How you had to keep the balance true. The whole universe, every dark corner of it, teetered on a point so fine that the eyes could never see it. Only the soul, and only in God's heavenly grasp. Right where the blinding blackness met the infinite burning brightness of the Almighty, Satan warred with the Lord over a golden throne that could never be shared. And it came down to every man, woman, even babies—
Yes, girl babies, special ones. Guardians from God, but real as saints and miracle wonder—
to keep the fiery claws of hell from raking out the eyes of angels, the light of kings.

It came down to him.

He looked at the two of them stretched out on the ground. His role was clear. It had always been so.

God and man.

He squeezed Damocles's head to his breastbone, felt the dog's moist heat, his squirming animal hide, and spoke sacred words to him that no demon could bear.

Then he fed out the chain, faster this time.

S
unlight now coated the whole hillside, gnawing Jessie like a parasite. She and Burned Fingers were only feet from the summit. He lowered himself to his hands and knees, and she settled next to him. No telling what might be crawling up the other side, but could it be any worse than the Pixie-bobs? They'd stopped their stretching, and at least forty of the cats were studying them openly.

“Hurry,” she whispered to Burned Fingers.

He unwrapped his field glasses, raised it to his eyes and looked down. “It's a good-sized ravine.” He glassed the periphery. “But I don't see a goddamn track.”

She peeled her eyes from the cats and peered over the hilltop. “Wouldn't be any with all that wind.”

“But no one's come out since it stopped blowing.”

“Can you see down into it?” She had decent vision—good enough to keep one eye on the brightly lit P-bobs, but not strong enough to see into those shadows.

“Nope.” He shifted his elbows for a different angle. “I can make out some rocks, but it's too deep to see anything below the wall closest to us.”

She swore softly. She could march down there fully exposed or wait to be eaten by those cats. All their creepy yellow eyes were fixed on them, making her decision easy: she stood with the full intention of heading toward the ravine, but Burned Fingers pulled her back down.

“Not so fast,” he said in a hushed voice. “Let's give it a few minutes and watch.”

“A few minutes! Look behind you.”

“I'm seeing a section that's catching some sun now,” he said, ignoring her panic. “It looks like a motorcycle hauling a trailer, but the goddamn thing's open in the back, and it's got a couple of those old telephone booths crammed inside. One's open, the other's chained up.”

“Oh, Jesus, did you hear that? And would you
look
at what I'm saying.”

The first yowls rose up the hill. Like a baby crying.

D
amocles lunged at the boy. Fair skin, fair hair, fair game.

“Temptation, temptation,” Hunt whispered, sunlight spilling into the ravine, more every minute. He fancied them nude on the ground, hot sun moving over them like a big warm hand, patting their fine round fannies, heating them up, turning them pink as pink can be. Getting them ready.

The hound strained so hard on his chain that the links snapped as loud as his jaw.

He wants a piece of him. Don't I know.

“He's getting closer, boy. Better take off your old shorts or I'm going to let him do it for you.” Saw his dog shaking, the boy shaking in his clothes. “He'll take your skin, you don't do what I say.”
More than skin, God's will be done.
“Yeah, Damocles, you like him. Don't you, boy? I can tell. You do.”

Oh, dear Jesus, not that.

Damocles tearing into the boy's back, ripping at it, lifting the weight of him off the ground.

“Stop him! Please.”

Boy begging, moaning bad, hiding a scream. Hunt needed the hound worked up, fever frenzy, but not biting crazy. Boy blood made his dog mad. He looked it now, with pink foam dripping down. And trying to break the chain, digging up deep lines of dirt.

He worked hard to hold him back. Dog's claws caught the girl's leg and tore it down to her ankle, sure as a razor. But she lay still. No shaking from her. No moans. Not even now. Nothing moving but the blood curling around her toes.

Hunt yearned for more, just like the hound, but dragged him to the girl. The boy was driving the beast insane.
Blood on his back. Blood on his back.
He kept repeating those words. Exorcism or incantation? Wasn't sure. Couldn't say. Medieval and wrong, but wicked strong. The whole of the sun spilled in, a curtain rising, and he saw bone through the bite, and red rivers running to the boy's armpit, ribs.

He forced the dog's sniffer to the girl. “She smells
good.
You want her? You want her? You,” he wheeled on the boy, fast as a lash, “take them off.”

But Damocles didn't much care about the boy now, sniffing all the way up her baggy pants.

There he goes,
snuffling, rooting at her, raising dust between her legs, motes spinning madly in sunbeams. The hound wouldn't hardly let her go. And the boy, newly naked in the sun, fanny warm and pink as he'd hoped.

“You, too,” he said to her, voice reedy with all kinds of need.
“Take them off.”

He pulled the beast off her, man and dog jerking like flames in rain, and grabbed a green cloth collar.
Green for go. Green for I found them. Bring guns, men. Bring back the tank.

The beast drooled, strained to see the girl. Hunt snapped his fingers so hard the air rang for seconds, sharp sound keeling on stone.

But the dog's eyes stayed on her. Hunt grabbed his jowls, got his stare.

“Home,” he commanded.

Damocles sprang loose, unburdened by desire, racing around boulders, never looking back. Up the road, still sprinting.

Hunt watched him vanish, then looked back at the naked boy and girl, arms and legs open to the earth. A magnitude of filth.

He would offer them the blessings of True Belief.

But first he would favor himself, as he had the hound, with release from the only chain that bound him.

H
ansel could not take his eyes off the Pixie-bobs. The spectacle must have been shocking to the canine: scores of cats stretching their open mouths into the air, yowling louder with every passing second. As Jessie reached over to make sure he stayed close to the ground, she spied a sleek white and gray dog bolting from the ravine.

“Over there,” she said to Burned Fingers, pointing to a shockingly fast sight hound tracking up dust. Looked like a Borzoi. Or a saluki or whippet. More likely a mix, maybe of all three.

“Your rifle,” Burned Fingers said, urgent as a heartbeat.

She handed it over. He aimed the M–16, but the dog sprinted into shadows and reappeared only in ghostly sporadic movements.

“I can't get a fucking fix on him.”

“Why kill him? What's the point?”

“Because he's a messenger dog. Like the pigeons. Heard of them? And there's only one message anyone's sending.”

“Holy shit.” The truth of it slammed her. “Is there any way to catch him?”

“Nope, not even if I had that bike down there. Those dogs can move around this country faster than anything.”

Burned Fingers grabbed his field glasses, but the dog had disappeared. “We've got to get down there and find out what's going on. That trailer's cutting off my line of sight. All we can do is get our asses in place and hope to hell we're not spotted.”

It can't be any worse than them.
She'd returned her eyes to the cats, and they greeted her attention by starting up the hill. Not fast, not in piranha mode, but with unmistakable intention.

“You see that?” She nodded at them.

“Sure do, and it doesn't make me want to hang around.” He turned back to the bare hillside that loomed over the ravine. “We've got to separate, not for them but for whoever's down there. And we've got to run,” he said, standing. “No straight lines. Keep them guessing the whole time.”

She dragged herself to her feet and commanded Hansel to heel. Burned Fingers was already barreling down the hill. She glanced back one more time at the advancing Pixie-bobs and took off, bearing right before cutting back sharply after the first few steps—running poorly because of a gunshot wound to her thigh. It caused her serious pain for the first time in days, but mostly she felt as exposed as the sun, the land, the sorry plight of humankind.

Chapter Four

H
unt stared at the boy's pinkening rump, trembling. Blood from Damocles's bites pooled at the base of the kid's spine, brimming as if it might spill into the cleft, the only shadow that still defied the sun.

His mouth moistened, longing even the brute heat couldn't burn to ash.

He didn't looked closely at the girl. Not once. His refusal marked his penance, eagerness to show the Lord strength and resolve, his true spirit soul. And he'd seen all he wanted of her clawed leg and foot, her horrible body.

He kneeled behind the naked boy, talking of sin and absolution. Then he waited, holding his breath for a minute at a time—penance,
penance—
and prayed.

When his resistance proved his faith yet again—when he had no doubt of his strength and consecrated these moments in the name of the Lord—he drew his knife and held the blade between his teeth. “You'll know God, I promise,” he whispered. “In a minute.”

Time corporal, time eternal.

Time to taste the boy's blood. He slipped his tongue past the steel blade, stirred the red pool, round as the sun at dusk, when it seared the horizon and raised monkey ruins of hell to the wicked imagination of man.

The boy flattened, boring into earth.

“No,” Hunt whispered again, but vow had been replaced by threat: “Don't move.”

He licked an ear, licked it again, shifted his head to the side so the sharp tip could thread through the boy's light hair, score the back of his skull.
You feel that? Sure you do. You'll feel more, just you see.
“That's my mouth,” he said without removing the blade. “Think about that.” But the boy said nothing, quaking beneath him.

A red line swelled. Hunt tasted that, too.

Still trembling, he slipped his knife from his mouth and sat on his heels—blood on his teeth, copper on his tongue. His head rose to the sun and he closed his eyes, every cell alive. In the crystal light he knew the most sanctioned moment of his life, for God and all that He inspired spoke to him, and the message was as clear as it was reassuring: He must cast aside kindness—and sacrifice even his own righteousness here on earth—to confirm the boy's depravity, his deserving of punishments most severe. But what stunned him most—what made him suddenly hang his head in eternal gratitude—was the understanding that he'd been doing this all along. Every act he'd ever committed with sodomites and heathens and errant brothers of True Belief had been part of the Lord's plan. He was a spy in the realm of sin, an infiltrator of flesh, and need not have begged the Lord's forgiveness for actions that He ordained.

That's right, My son. All that has passed was pure. All that will come is promised.

F
rom high above, Burned Fingers spotted a man hunched over Jaya. He would have gunned him down if the lead shot would have spared the kid, but at this distance his sawed-off was no more sure than his pistol.

And he wanted so much more than the man's simple death. With a single glimpse, he wanted to savage him with his hands, his blade, gut him like a gamecock because the rapist's back revealed what his imagination had spared him—the final limning of his young son's horrific sexual assault and murder by soldiers in Baltimore. Till this moment, Burned Fingers's memory had moved no further than the gruesome scene's dishabille: Cody's torn clothes and naked, rumpled form lying near his slain, partially dismembered mother in a burned-out basement. But now the tense, predatory hunch of the man down below fleshed out the earlier, archetypal violence—and sparked a hell storm in Burned Fingers.

He screamed “No,” which echoed off the rock walls, and ran toward an old wagon road that ended in the ravine.

The rapist jumped to his feet and spun around, as if the fury were charging him from everywhere at once. Then he bolted to the motorcycle, bigger than Burned Fingers had thought looking through his field glasses. Large as an old Harley. The blond, darkly tanned man leaped on it, kick-started the engine, and hunched over the tank like he'd hunched over the boy.

But he wouldn't be moving anywhere fast, not dragging that trailer and side car up the steep road.

Even as Burned Fingers placed the odds in his favor, the biker sprang off the seat and unhitched the ungainly trailer. Less than twenty feet away, Bliss, naked and standing, rummaged
through
her pants instead of putting the goddamn things on—or running away.

Get down.
If the guy turned, he could shoot her; Burned Fingers saw a pistol in his belt. But the fiend threw himself back on the loudly idling bike without ever seeing Bliss.

Burned Fingers ran along the edge of the ravine, closing the distance to the road, warning himself not to blow up the gas tank when he shot the rapist.

You want that bike.

Did he ever. Nothing better for scouting, and nothing rarer. He was still riding big bikes about thirty years ago, and knew what they could do and how fast they could do it.

He heard the engine growl, saw black smoke and dust rise behind the rear wheel, yet thought he'd have time to set up for a kill shot. He might even catch the hog before it crashed riderless into a boulder.

But while racing up the road, the biker jerked a metal bar, cutting the side car loose, accelerating even faster. At the same time, Bliss pulled something from her pants and startled Burned Fingers by chasing the bike. He tried to shout a warning but the engine noise drowned him out.

She stopped anyway, only to rear back and throw the sharp rock that she'd shown him at the obsidian wall, burying it in the biker's lower back. Blood burst from the crude wound.

But the believer never slowed, leaving a dense funnel of oily exhaust in his wake.

Burned Fingers, breathing hard, smelling fumes, neared the road as the bike rose from the ravine. He didn't spot the rider immediately because the guy had flattened his dark torso against the tarnished tank and propped his chin on the front of it, making a clean kill shot all but impossible.

As the bike raced for the open space ahead, Burned Fingers dropped his sawed-off and yanked his bone handle knife from its sheath. Then he launched himself at the man, hacking murderously at his back, striking bone—hoping it was spine—before embedding the blade in flesh and spilling to the ground.

The motorcycle wobbled. Burned Fingers jumped up and gave chase, hoping the frame wouldn't bend or the precious wheels collapse when it crashed.

But the rider pulled himself upright and sped away—with the knife stuck in his thick trapezius only inches from his neck.

What the fuck!

Burned Fingers pulled out his revolver and shot at him, the bike, tires—any target that would dump the rider on the ground. But the guy was racing through a series of boulders, showing less of himself with every second. Jessie opened up with her M–16 from a few hundred feet away—with no more success.

In the ravine, Bliss grabbed her shotgun from the jettisoned side car and, still naked, started running up the road.

“Put your clothes on!” Burned Fingers shouted. “Bastard's gone!”

He dusted off, second-guessing himself furiously. He should have unloaded the sawed-off on him.
Fuck the bike.
But he hadn't been able to resist its allure—or its great promise. It would have been a tremendous help to have a fast, nimble two-wheeler for guiding the caravan. He'd made the wrong call for all the right reasons.

And he'd forgotten about the Pixie-bobs.

H
unt roared down a paved road gapped enough to scuttle the motorcycle and swallow it whole, leave him mangled, dying, eaten by carrion birds. The sun-clawed surface wound past a second boulder field before curving behind the hill that rose above the ravine.

The agony in his back wrapped around to his chest and groin, like the rock and knife were eating their way right through him. A
rock.
They were savages. He didn't dare pull it out—too close to vertebrae—any more than he'd yank on the blade. The doctor would see to the weapons, the Lord to his well-being.

He took the shoulder of a road through a valley formed by steep, drought-stricken hills. The pavement itself was another wasteland, but the side looked mostly unriven. He rode the cycle faster than he'd ever dared, gripping the throttle tightly, gritting his teeth, anything to escape the sharpening pain.

He didn't notice Pixie-bobs until they rampaged down the slope to his left, trailing streaks of silt so fine that they hung in the air like smoke.

His pain fled, body triaging threats, veins fat with adrenaline. He pushed the Harley harder, risking sudden splits in the crumbly surface and rocks that could condemn him to a gruesome death. But better to die from a crash than to be taken down by this pack. Even the screaming engine couldn't drown out the death call of the cats.

In a blur he did come upon a hole so deep that he caught no sight of the bottom as he launched over the void at a harrowing speed, the shadow of man and bike disappearing into blackness. Clearing the threat, he gave thanks, but a terrifying yowl tore his eyes from the sky to the cats now springing off the eroded remains of a retaining wall. Two of them lunged at him from feet away, fell short and were trampled.

A numbed memory reminded him they were sprinters, good only for the predatory pounce; but they'd sustained their charge for a minute at least—though terror always wound a tight clock—and were
still
exploding at him.

The one in the lead, ears pinned back like all the rest, bounded over a chasm and landed on his shoulder, bit off his ear, clawed his cheek, and tore open his neck—and in such rapid succession that he almost dumped the bike.

He pulled the beast from his flesh and threw it aside, flinching as another one jumped for his leg. He jerked his boot off the foot peg and watched the Pixie-bob flail before it fell under the rear wheel with an audible
thump.

“Oh, God” was all he allowed of prayer or imprecation before two more landed on his back, ripping at his bloody skin, and a third clamped its claws around his left arm and sank its needle teeth into his elbow. The onslaught almost drove him off the shoulder into a dry riverbed to his right.

In a fearsome effort he tore the Pixie-bob from his arm and hurled it to the dirt. Wind whipped blood from his eviscerated elbow as he registered the full savagery of the cats on his back.

A series of fast, furious bites by his shoulder blade made him risk another lunge; but when he grabbed the creature's head, it bit the meaty base of his thumb, boiling pain through the whole of his hand.

He tried to release the animal but it bit down harder. Frantically, he shook his hand till a chunk of palm started tearing loose. Sensing release, he beat the beast against the side of the Harley till the flesh tore away completely and the cat fell off, still gulping pulpy tissue.

He throttled hard despite the cat feeding on the muscle next to his spine. Then the claws climbed higher, and he knew the P-bob was trenching up his back,
ripping
him open.

He told himself he could take the pain. Just thirty more seconds and the pack would have to give up and he could kill the cat eating him alive. But the beast was wrapping its legs around his skull, clawing his scalp, brow, temples, and lips. With its warm belly pressed to the back of his head, its musk ripening the fast flowing air, the Pixie-bob ripped his face from the corner of his eye to his bloody nub of ear.

When it tried to claw him again, he turned to the side, fearing the loss of sight above all else, and spotted the mass of Pixie-bobs slowing, watching, as if waiting for the cat shredding his skull to bring him down. Then the creature's hind leg jammed the knife handle, driving the blade sideways in his wound. A scalding agony erupted, and he violated all precaution by braking. The bike swung around, tires smoking, till it left him facing the pack a hundred yards away.

In a blazing panic he dragged the cat off his head, peeling its claws from his face. Holding it away from his body, suffering it still, he yanked the blade from his trapezius and stabbed the beast repeatedly, finally impaling it on the knife. He raised the squirming, squalling feline high above his head and shook it violently, torturing
it.
The creature's piercing screams formed an unearthly chorus with the idling bike.

He flung the body from the blade and watched it fall hard on decayed pavement twenty feet away. It clawed the ground with one paw, couldn't rise up, lay writhing on the pebbly remains of asphalt, a seizure-gripped clump of bloody fur.

The pack stared, winded as one. He jammed the knife in his belt and raced off, wounds burning and throbbing as adrenaline drained away in the red sweat of passing miles.

He thanked the Father with prayer, mumbling the words over and over, spit and blood spilling from his lacerated lips—along with a stark earthly injunction:
Hold on. Hold on.
To the bike. To life. To the supreme knowledge that the Lord would not let him die after he'd unveiled—and chained—unshakable evidence that the fallen angel Lucifer had staked his claim to the abiding sun.

His Piety had warned of the coming signs, this one above all others, when the Curse of Cain would appear as beast and griffin, cruel grotesqueries and demon seeds. When the signs would herald Holy War.

There would be no Rapture, no hand of God plucking believers from the scourged earth to His heavenly abode. Not yet. Not with hell's creations crawling from ash.

J
essie ran down into the ravine, Hansel hopping gamely behind her. Bliss was pulling on her pants, blood crusting her foot. Jaya sat naked and unmoving on the ground. He looked drugged or concussed. Then she saw blood on his back, a lot of it, and skin that looked grated.

“What happened?” she asked Bliss.

“That asshole put a dog on him. Pretty much said we were dead if we moved. And he prayed a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.” She cinched her belt and kneeled next to Jaya, stroking his cheek, handing him his chopped-off pants.