Burn (16 page)

Chapter 21

Whatever you do, you must drive the enemy together,
as if tying a line of fishes, and when they are seen to be piled up,
cut them down strongly without giving them room to move.

—Miyamoto Musashi

President Claudia Kay O’Connor pulled at the side panels of her body armor, smoothing the wrinkle that chafed under her shoulder holster. She put her hands flat on the dining room tabletop, leaned across a chocolate White House and looked Agent Robideaux in the eye.

“I’m going to church,” she said. “People expect it of me—for Easter, and for Mark.”

“Give them a new Vice-President,” Robideaux said. “Make your announcement today, but from the Camp. They will forgive you a Mass.”

“It isn’t a matter of forgiveness,” she said. “They need confidence in authority right now. The public needs to see their President fulfilling the office while managing her grief as a spouse. They need reassurance, and not by word, but by action.”

“The Gardeners have been dying in whole congregations,” he argued. “Somebody used their own ritual against them. We don’t want to take any chances in case they decide to take on Catholics next. . . .”

“John Kennedy went to this very church whenever . . .”

“My point exactly, Ms. President,” Agent Robideaux interrupted. “Look what happened to him. Father Delahunty’s already up at the Camp, you can use the chapel there. You’re a widow, Ms. President; you want some privacy.”

Claudia agreed with Robideaux at the last. She approved “Worm in the Apple” status for troops abroad, collaring her defenses and snubbing them up a short leash. This would be an unmistakable sign that she anticipated trouble from within and intended to deal with it boldly. She hoped that most of her armed forces would make it back home before all of the airplanes in the world fell out of the sky.

The
Nixon
was serving its eleven hundred hands an Easter mess in an unusually calm Bering Sea when Chief Petty Officer Dean Welch burst into flame. He had waved off the ham, being a vegetarian, and took another swig of water while waiting for the yams. The EdenSprings label had shown up clearly in the security recording transmitted through a DIA relay to Naval Operations.

“We should organize collection centers,” Dwight Olafson said. “Get the Guard out at fire stations, city hall, with big bins. . . .”

“Not a chance,” General Gibson interrupted. “First, if you treat it like it’s dangerous and then stockpile it, sabotage is inevitable. You create the need for troops that you don’t want to spare.”

“But we have to get control of that stuff,” Dwight blustered, “and it’s everywhere. It’s in every refrigerator in the goddamned White House, for God’s sake.”

“What do you suggest, General?”

“Tampering warning and product recall,” he said. “Warning symptoms are high fever and sudden death. Offer immediate on-site, full-price rebate for every EdenSprings container. We’ll want to follow up on those empty ones, so they have to complete a questionnaire to get paid. Entered right there at the check-out counter, flagged for our Sidekicks. We get some quick baseline demographics cheap.”

An hour later FDA issued a tampering warning and recall against all EdenSprings bottled waters. None of the leadership of the Children of Eden remained alive to protect this action against their second most profitable export worldwide. The President joined Father Delahunty and a small press cadre for a photo-op mass in the Camp David chapel. That was where she heard of the death of Speaker of the House Dell X.

“Burned to death at a barbeque on the Carolina coast,” Advisor said through her earpiece. “State is being briefed now, and will remain under cover at Langley.”

“Mike Mandell,” she said.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Advisor said. “Next in line.”

Claudia O’Connor rapped her knuckles on the table.

“Swear Mike Mandell in as Vice,” she said. “Announce new State at check-in one hour from now. I’m asking Cady, then Root. Get Mandell for me; I’ll be in Communications.”

Chapter 22

Pestilence will walk the earth
and many will denounce
the great gods,
form packs of unbelievers
causing illness to descend
with even greater fury
on the heads
of the afflicted Maya.

—Chilam Balam (translated by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno)

Ricardo Kax led the only survivors of his village out of the dark jungle to the road that would take them to the city. Their clothes smelled of burnt meat and hair, and everyone except Ricardo was crying. Most of their group had never been to the road before, and the fast traffic so close by and the imminent darkness terrified them almost as much as the horror of their families, and their entire village, burning up before their eyes.

Ricardo looked carefully up and down the road. Maria wailed and ran in a circle, holding her burned arms away from her body. She had held onto her father even as he melted, and only let go when his smoldering body slumped into a stinking hot sludge. Her hair, like Roberto’s, was melted to her head in a clump. Ricardo had walked to town many times with his brother, Manuelito, but never alone. The doctor was in town. People who help were in town.

“This way,” he said, taking Roberto’s hand. “We go this way.”

The others followed in a line, stumbling along the roadside and crying. Maria fell down and Daniel, the dark one, tried to help her up. She screamed all the more, and thrashed at him, bloodying his nose.

Ricardo wanted to help her, but it was getting dark and Manuelito told him that the wild pigs came out at dark and the wild pigs would tear them up with their teeth and their sharp little feet.

Many cars passed but none stopped. They were all going the wrong way, anyway. A few honked at them and shook their fists, frightening the younger ones even more. Ricardo saw a flatbed truck coming out of a muddy drive across the highway. He remembered the time he and Roberto and Manuelito rode to the market in the back of such a truck. He stepped out into the middle of the road and waved his blackened arms.

The empty truck’s back tires smoked and bounced along the road as it came to a stop in front of him.

“Mierde, peloto!”
the driver shouted. “You want to die so bad?”

Then he looked closer.

“Mother of Jesus! What happened?”

“Doctor,” Ricardo said. “Doctor,
por favor!”

The driver and his passenger got out to look at them. For one moment, everyone stopped crying.

“Where are you from?” the driver asked.

Ricardo pointed back towards their village, towards the column of smoke flattening above the trees.

“They burn up,” he said. “Mama, papa, Manuelito . . . they burn up.”

“Was it the army?” the passenger asked, his eyes narrowed. “We don’t want no trouble with the army.”

“They get sick, burn up,” Ricardo said. He pointed towards town. “Doctor, doctor, doctor . . .”

“All right, all right!” the driver said, his hands in the air. “We’ll get you all to a doctor. But what happened? People don’t just burn up.”

Roberto, who never spoke, stepped up and said, “They fall down. The fire come all over them. They burn up.”

Ricardo didn’t want to waste time talking. Maria and some of the others looked very bad, smelled very bad.

“Doctor, doctor, doctor . . .”

“Okay, okay,” the driver said. “Get in and hold on back there; it’s a rough ride.”

The men helped the worst of the injured into the back of the truck. It took both of them to carry Maria, who no longer screamed but whose skin slid like soap off her wrists and ankles where they picked her up.

The men were both afraid, Ricardo could see that in their wide eyes and their fast talk. The passenger man threw up after lifting Maria into the truck. Ricardo did not want them to be afraid. He wanted them to look at the burns and say, “Hey, foolish one, this is nothing. We will do this and this and this and you can all go home.”

But there was no home, and he hadn’t been able to keep his uncle’s pigs out of what was left of Manuelito.

Through the cab window he saw the men gesturing at each other. They would glance back at him and the others, shake their heads and drive even faster.

Ricardo rocked back and forth and focused on the road unraveling behind them. The back of the truck smelled like the big dead horse that he and Roberto had found one time. It was dark now, and everyone shivered with the wind. Maria shivered so hard that her feet knocked into his back, and she breathed very, very fast and when he turned around she looked at him with only the whites of her eyes.

Ricardo was the first one off the truck when they got to the hospital. He helped his brother, Roberto, whose hands were burned from trying to help Lupita. The passenger man helped, too, while the driver ran inside for the doctor. They left Maria in the truck. She lay limp and quiet, eyes half open, her skinless arms covered with dirt. Already the flies had found them all.

The doctor people came running out of the hospital, some of them pushing the skinny beds on wheels. They led Ricardo and the others inside. Four of them lifted Maria out of the truck and covered her with a sheet.

Everyone was shouting, asking questions, crying or screaming so that Ricardo couldn’t understand anything. He stood back and watched them cutting off shirts, poking needles into arms, washing them all down with cold water.

It seemed like everyone was shouting questions at Ricardo.

“Was there a fire?”

⁴
’No, no fire.”

“A bomb?”

“No, nothing.”

“Gasolina? Un quimico,
a chemical?”

“No, no! They get sick, they fall down, they burn up!”

A man in a suit interrupted.

“They’re all
deficientes.
You won’t get anything from them. Get the army to send somebody out to their village and see what’s going on there.”

Ricardo held his hands to his ears to stop the noise and he closed his eyes against all the faces shouting in his face.

Suddenly, all of the shouting, crying and screaming stopped. Ricardo opened his eyes and saw the truck driver stagger through the doorway, holding his belly.

“Por favor”
he said, to no one in particular. “I believe I am sick. I feel . . .”

The truck driver grasped at one of the green curtains between the skinny beds but he couldn’t hold on. He sat on the floor with a
thump
and knocked over a tray full of things. All of the air went out of him as he toppled over onto his side, and the air that came out of him smelled like Maria. The hollow-eyed survivors stepped back as the rescue team moved to help him.

“Get him onto this bed!”

“Jesus! He has a great fever. . . .”

“His shirt’s on fire!” someone shouted. “Get it off. . . .”

“Mierde!
It’s not his shirt, it’s his body. . . .”

“Get some water down here. . . .”

“. . . fire extinguisher . . .”

Then Ricardo looked outside and saw the passenger man slump against the door of his truck. He slapped at himself as he collapsed, steam rising out of his misshapen face. Ricardo bulled his way through the gathering crowd, out the back door and ran to a park across the street where he could finally get some air.

Chapter 23

It is not the healthy who need a physician, but they who are sick.

—Jesus

Father Free accompanied Yolanda Rubia through the darkened Restaurante Cuzcatlán, the purifying smell of bleach wafting around them like cheap incense. The restaurant belonged to the
Todos Santos Cooperativa
that Father Free had started when he finished his tenure at the academy. Father Free’s only earthly pride lay in the success of the
cooperativa
. A handful of hard-working people had turned several abandoned waterfront buildings into livelihood for more than a hundred. Besides Restaurante Cuzcatlán and its private bar, their holdings included a small vegetable and chicken farm on the outskirts of the city, a fishing boat, two tour boats, a carpentry shop, a mechanic’s shop and a guesthouse. The idea and organization were Father Free’s. The silent startup money was Yolanda Rubia’s.

Father Free called the superprivate bar the “National Security Alumni Club,” but the ex-agents who frequented the place called it “Spook’s Bar and Grill.”

“We have heard nothing for hours, Father,” Yolanda was saying. “I am thinking perhaps it is the equipment.”

They left the restaurant by a secret door in the back and hurried behind the freshly painted building to a drab three-story structure of metal and wood next door. The low-tide smell of the harbor mixed iodine and seaweed with the inevitable smell of the death that high tide leaves behind. Sometimes, when the world was too much for him, Father Free slept in the office behind the bar where he could be lulled to sleep by the
slap-slap
of waves and the
clink-clink
of rigging against masts. Tonight, if he slept at all, would be such a night.

Yolanda pressed a key on her Sidekick, and a lock
snicked
open. Father Free pushed the door aside and Yolanda secured it after them.

“It’s not the equipment,” Father Free said. “El Oso has his own agenda. It was a mistake to trust him with an Agency mission.”

“You have never liked him, Father. His team is our best, and they were a half-kilometer from the target when we needed them. Could it be that even judgment such as yours can be colored?”

“Perhaps,” he admitted. “Even priests are human.”

He could not tell her how strongly he was reminded of this truth as he followed her lithe form up the stairs to the bar. Father Free was fifty years old, and he had never experienced sex with a woman. Or with a man, for that matter, but it was the occasional woman who had him burning under his collar in his youth. Now, when he thought of it at all, he studied the matter more out of a scientific curiosity than anything else. Never lack of opportunity; many women in his life had made that clear. But he had not fallen, would not fall, which made sex one less threat that he had to face in a dangerous country in a dangerous time. No drunken, machete-wielding boyfriends pounding his door at midnight—he heard enough confessions to know where to cut losses.

And the danger was real. President Garcia’s government was of the type that disapproved of the poor getting a hand up. Garcia and his kind were more inclined to step on their fingers. From the center of the city, near the U.S. Embassy, came the
pop-pop-pop
of small-arms fire to punctuate this point.

The darkened bar, too, smelled of bleach. He could make out the legs of chairs sticking up like dead animals atop the tables. He drew a cold, dark beer from the tap for each of them. They clinked their glasses and stood, looking into each other’s eyes, as they sipped off the top. Yolanda was one of the few women who would meet and hold a priest’s gaze. Women would flirt with a priest, tempt him out of his cassock more as a trophy than a man. Yolanda was not one of these.

“A good batch,” he remarked, savoring the astringent aftertaste of the
cooperativa’s
fine hops. “Perhaps we should attempt to improve the sacramental wine. Every priest in Central America would be profoundly grateful.”

Yolanda laughed.

“Father, you’re always thinking. You should have been in business.”

“I am in business,” he said. “My Father’s business. But I see no reason for the people to suffer while they prepare themselves for Glory.”

A pair of shadows moved behind the bar’s huge mirror, and a sudden shaft of light filled a rectangle of wall.

“There you are,” a woman’s voice said. “We were worried.”

“A busy time,” Father Free said with a sigh, and set down his glass. “Now, let’s have a look at that machine.”