The Flame Never Dies (9 page)

Finn turned to Eli. “Go finish your funeral. We'll keep them off you.”

“Five of you against a dozen? You sure you can handle it?” Eli asked, already backing toward his gathered community.

“Even if we were half-asleep and hungover.” Devi held up her hand, already glowing with the flames ready to burst from her palm in response to the approaching horde.

“Let's confront them before they get into town,” I said. “That way we can retreat if we need to without drawing them toward either the funeral or the courthouse.” If there was one thing I'd learned from several months of training with Anathema, it was that she who chooses the venue has the advantage.

We piled back into the SUV, then drove directly south, ignoring the cracked and crumbling streets for the more direct, off-road route. But we were too late to stop the horde from entering town. We found them barreling down a residential street in a neighborhood near the edge of the long-abandoned suburb.

Adrenaline fired through my veins as Maddy slammed on the brakes and the SUV skidded to a crooked stop in an overgrown field just outside the neighborhood. We poured from the vehicle and took off toward the degenerates. I'd never run faster in my life. I didn't gasp for air and my lungs didn't burn. I
became
speed and strength, and every bit of both was aimed at the monsters galloping toward us, most on all fours.

There weren't twelve. There were fifteen.

Their arms were too long, their legs too thin and knobby. Torn clothing flapped in the wind as they ran. Dirt streaked their grayish faces. Grime matted their hair.

I could smell them almost as soon as I could hear them, panting like dogs on the scent of prey, misshapen feet and hands pounding against the ground, heedless of abuse from grass burrs and rocks. Several of the degenerates drooled, spittle flying from loose lips and rotten teeth.

Maddock got to them first, his left hand blazing and ready. Devi and I were still several feet away when the first of the demons lunged at Maddy and Reese. Reese caught one by the throat, and while it tore at his sleeves, hissing and screeching, he shoved his glowing left hand at the chest of a second. The frying demon seemed suspended there, arms seizing, jaw opening and closing, knees bent as if they'd no longer hold him up.

When that one hung limp, Reese pulled his hand back. “One!” As the body crumpled to the ground he shoved his still-glowing palm at the chest of the deformed and snarling woman he had by the throat.

On my left, Finn stopped running and lifted his rifle with his uninjured—yet nondominant—right hand. He rested the barrel on his left forearm to steady it, then peered down the sight and fired.

The shot echoed all around me and I turned just in time to see a degenerate crumple to the ground.

“No—” I shouted, skidding to a halt.

“I'm taking gut shots,” he said. “Just slowing them down for you. Go!”

I raced toward the nearest degenerate, my hand already beginning to warm with the flames that would burn it from its deformed and decaying human host.

Maddock leapt up from a body on the ground. “One!” he called as another pounced on him. Devi pulled the monster off him and shoved her glowing hand at its back, and in the second before a woman with long, straight blond hair reached for me, I realized that all the degenerates were dressed alike.

Their clothes hung on them strangely, thanks to their mutated, angular physiques, and some were more threadbare, torn, and stained than others, but every last one of them wore gray jogging pants and a white T-shirt.

The blond host's knobby hand tangled in my hair, and I screamed as she jerked my head toward her mouth. I shoved my left hand at her chest and flames flared between us. She screeched, and her hand fell from my hair as her body dangled—seemingly weightless—from my burning palm.

When the demon crumpled to the overgrown grass, I turned and quickly assessed the fight. Reese, Maddy, and Devi were each frying demons of their own as more galloped bizarrely toward us from the neighborhood adjacent to the field. A crack like thunder rang out from behind me, and the degenerate racing toward me fell backward into the knee-high grass.

“Thanks!” I shouted to Finn, and was rewarded with another crack. A third demon dropped farther away, and I squatted next to the closest one, which was hauling itself toward me hand over hand because its left leg had been blown open by Finn's bullet.

I'd dispatched the two closest of the incapacitated degenerates and was headed for a third when something hit me from my left side, driving me to the ground.

Grass scratched my face, and hands tore at my clothing. Teeth snapped an inch from my forehead as a balding man with sagging grayish skin tried to rip me apart in his frenzied search for my soul. I shoved him with both hands, and my left burst into flames, immobilizing him as he thrashed above me.

By the time I threw the empty shell of his host off me, the action was over. Footsteps pounded closer as Finn came to check on me, and when he pulled me upright, I found Devi smirking at me. “I got four,” she said.

“So did Nina,” Finn pointed out.

“The ones you incapacitated don't count,” she insisted, and I didn't bother to argue.

“What's wrong?” Reese asked as I knelt in the grass next to the monster I'd just vanquished. I turned the body over, looking for some kind of label or insignia on its clothing, but I found none. Devi came closer, curious, but Maddock backed away from the corpse, his forehead furrowed.

“They're all wearing—” The sudden thunder of hooves stole my voice. I looked up to see nearly a dozen horses galloping toward us across the overgrown field, each carrying a man, woman, or child wearing a cowboy hat. The riders were mostly thin and dark-skinned, wearing sun-bleached, dusty clothing, their faces shielded from the sun by their wide hat brims. Most wore pouches over one shoulder—openmouthed satchels made of stitched-together strips of leather.

Cowboys.
The thought seemed absurd—according to my former history teacher, Wild West cowboys hailed from even deeper in our past than shopping malls and hand-held telephones. Yet there they were, in saddles and stirrups, staring down at us without a hint of horror over the corpses littering the ground around us.

“Did we miss all the excitement?” Eli was the first to dismount, but the moment his boots hit the ground, he turned to help an elderly man from his horse. The man wore a gray hat with a diamond-shaped fold at the top, but visible beneath the brim was a head full of tight white curls. I recognized him as the man who'd been leading the prayer at the funeral.

“Yes, there weren't that many—”

A young girl in a faded pink cowboy hat suddenly reached into her pouch and pulled out an unedged butter knife. She hurtled it toward me, end over end. My pulse spiked and I dropped to the ground. My friends gasped all around me.

A thud echoed at my back, and I turned to see the knife embedded up to its scrolled silver hilt in the eye of a degenerate still bleeding from a gunshot wound.

I stood, stunned, staring at the dead demon.

“You missed one.” The girl grinned. Her horse snorted and tossed its head.

“Holy shit!” Devi knelt next to the degenerate. The man with the white curls scowled at her language, and I might have subtly tried to censor her…if I hadn't been too busy staring in utter awe at the demon that had just been dropped with unerring accuracy by a child twelve years old at the most.

The girl dismounted with ease and led her horse behind her while she knelt to look at one of the demons we'd exorcised. “What happened to his chest?” She looked every bit as awed by the still-smoking hole as we were by the knife-through-the-eye trick.

“We exorcised them. Awesome, right?” Devi stood and glanced around at the bodies.

“Indeed.” The man with the white curls stepped forward and pushed his hat back on his head, revealing a dark, age-lined face and deep-set brown eyes. He studied the nearest exorcised corpse. “The Lord has delivered a glorious victory today, and that is worthy of celebration. As is the return of our lost sons Tobias and Micah, long may their souls rest in peace.” He gave Eli a gregarious pat on the back, and the sentinel's smile swelled as the others dismounted.

“The Lord didn't deliver this,” Devi mumbled beneath her breath. “
We
did.”

Reese wasn't quite so subtle. “Those souls were—”

I elbowed him before he could derail their celebration with the facts.

“So, the Lord's Army is really more like the Lord's Cavalry, right?” I said, and the man with the white curls laughed out loud.

“I suppose it does look like that. Our mounts will graze on their own, and fuel's hard to come by out here, so the horses make sense for us.” He turned back to Eli. “Will you introduce your new friends?”

“Isaiah.” Eli led the man—obviously the tribe's elder—toward us. “Brothers and sisters.” He aimed a grand gesture at the others, to include them. “This is Maddock, Devi, Nina, Reese, and Finn. Grayson, Anabelle, and Melanie are…somewhere.” Eli glanced around for them, visibly disappointed by their absence.

“They're still at the courthouse.” I plucked Maddock's radio from his waistband and turned away from the rest of the introductions. “Anabelle?” I said into the radio, hoping that the smoke plumes had been enough of a distraction to keep the degenerates away from Grayson.

A second later she responded. “Yeah. You guys okay?”

“We're fine. The smoke was from a funeral, but it drew a small horde. You three get in the truck and head toward Eli's camp. We'll meet you there.” We shouldn't have left them alone. Not while Grayson was in transition.

I turned back in time to hear Eli explaining to his group that the term ‘Anathema' meant something different to us. “Something less…dishonorable,” he finished, and I stifled a laugh. “They're exorcists.
True
exorcists. They wield the Lord's fury in the palms of their hands.”

A murmur began among those still holding their horses' reins. Several craned their necks to see the burned-out bodies on the ground.

“Anathema, this is Brother Isaiah, our elder, and these are the most able among our soldiers.” Eli gestured to the rest of his group.

Maddock was the first to stick out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Isaiah.”

“The honor is certainly mine,” Isaiah returned.

“And this is my niece Joanna,” Eli said, as the girl in the pink hat knelt next to the demon she'd dropped. The moment she looked up, I realized she was Tobias's sister. The resemblance was uncanny.

“How old are you, kid? That was one hell of a throw,” Devi said.

“Eleven.” Joanna pulled her dull knife from the corpse's eye, then wiped the gore on its gray pants. “I'm the best in my age group.” She didn't seem to be bragging; she was simply stating a fact.

Eli took his hat off and wiped sweat from his forehead with a faded red handkerchief. “She
is
the best,” he confirmed. “But there are several ready to give her a run for her money. Some even younger.”

“I've asked the rest of our group to meet us at your camp,” I said, extending my hand for Isaiah to shake. “Is that okay?”

“It would be our pleasure. We'd love to hear how you wield the Lord's holy flames”—Isaiah held up his empty left hand—“in the palms of your hands.”

Maddock was noticeably quiet, but Devi shrugged. “I'm not sure that's actually what we're doing, but we'd be happy to demonstrate if an opportunity comes up.”

“Oh, one always seems to.” Isaiah gestured for Joanna to mount her horse, while he pulled himself up into his own saddle with shaking hands. And suddenly, though I was in desperate need of a soul, I hoped Isaiah wouldn't be ready to let go of his anytime soon. Any man who held the respect of his people—not just their fear—for so long must have been worthy of the position. “We don't have much to offer in the way of refreshments, but what we do have, we will gladly share.”

“I suspect we could help out on that front,” Reese said, and I shouldn't have been surprised. He may not have liked Eli or shared his faith, but he wasn't selfish.

“We'll join you in a few minutes,” I said to Isaiah, and Finn glanced at me in surprise. Maddock was already holding the keys to the SUV.

“What was that about?” Devi demanded as the horses galloped toward the columns of smoke still rising into the afternoon sky.

“These degenerates are all wearing the same clothes.” I knelt next to the one Joanna had dropped with her knife. “And the clothes are too new.” The hosts should have worn a wide variety of clothing. Jeans. School slacks and blouses. Church cassocks. Their clothes should have labeled them as former students, police, teachers, or doctors. Or even nomads.

And their clothing should have been in much worse shape. Yes, the degenerates we'd just exorcised were deformed in the typical ways and covered in dust and grime, but their clothes were only ripped, rather than shredded. They were dusty, rather than matted with mud, blood, and gore.

Something was…strange.

Reese knelt next to me. “They almost look like uniforms of some sort.”

“That's it!” I stood so suddenly my head spun. “Jail uniforms.” The jogging pants and T-shirts looked just like what prisoners at the New Temperance jail wore. Except that these didn't have the words
New Temperance Jail
printed on the back. “They're generic jail uniforms.”

“They were prisoners?” Devi's tone bled skepticism. “From where?” There was no more federal prison system of the sort the United States had had before the war, but each city had its own jail. “Verity's the closest city, right? And we're still…what? Half a day away?”

“At least,” Finn mumbled, and I noticed that he'd backed away from the monster to stand near Maddock, his rifle aimed at the ground.