Burn (7 page)

Chapter 10

You are a little soul, bearing about a corpse.

—Epictetus

Manuelito Kax strained the thin straps of his homemade harness and pulled his rickety cartful of treasures over the tree trunk half-buried in the muck. Though the light of dawn was just now making his way clear, Manuelito had been wrestling his cart through this thick red mud for several hours. He would beat everyone to the generous bounty of the flood. His sister, Lupita, and the two
deficientes
walked ahead, choosing the easiest route for him and his fat-tired cart.

“Yours will be the only cart up here,” Lupita called back. ‘The others have the bicycle tires and they cannot challenge this mud.”

Manuelito grunted. He was proud of his cart with the “Mitsubishi” chrome strip along the side. The automobile tires were heavier, truly, but they never went flat and they never got stuck. Well, except for that time in the river, but he was young then and knew nothing of the weight of fast water. He could not fault his cart for that.

Manuelito’s cart had a bucket each for broken glass, bottles, plastic, aluminum, steel, iron. He had three buckets for brass, but he didn’t fill these as often as he used to since the army went to caseless ammunition. And he had his
caja
with the German padlock nailed underneath his cart for his very important finds and his money.

Up ahead, howler monkeys raised their morning ruckus in an uprooted ceiba tree. The
deficientes
pointed out something in the mud to Lupita. She stepped up for a look, then jumped back. Whatever Roberto had in his hand she slapped out of it, and her wave to Manuelito was an urgent one.

He slipped out of the traces of the cart, and for a moment he felt like cottonwood floating on air. He trotted up to join his brothers and sister, who gathered around several clumps of hair twisted up with sticks and mud.

“Have you found the deads already?” he asked. “You knew they would be here.”

“No, skinny one, not the deads. Just the hair of the deads. And look, Roberto picked these up because they shine in the light.”

Manuelito knelt close to Lupita’s feet and flicked at the pile of shiny scales with a stick. They were shiny, truly, but they were not metal, not plastic, not scales of the fish.

“Fingernails,” he whispered. He placed the end of his stick under the nearest clump of hair and flipped it over. “A scalp.”

Other clumped scalps, fingernails, teeth and bits of bone led up-valley, towards the great farm at the foot of the dam.

Manuelito and Lupita found bodies in the streets of La Libertad almost daily, many with their hands cut off or their tongues cut out or the ones he didn’t like for her to see with their penises jammed in their mouths, but never had they found something like this.

“It must have been the weight of the water,” Manuelito said. “Truly, as I have learned, the moving water has a great weight and a great force. We will find the rest of them up there.”

He pointed up-valley with his chin, his face displaying a confidence for his sister that his belly did not feel.

Roberto pointed at something else shiny in the mud and snatched it up.

“Careful, quiet one,” Manuelito said. “Remember what the mines look like. The
tigres.”

Even Manuelito was startled when the U.S. soldier leaped out of the bushes at them.

“Halt!” the figure ordered in Spanish. “You are not authorized to proceed. Go back the way you came. Your identity has been established and you will be arrested if you proceed.”

The soldier repeated his message in English.

Roberto and Ricardo hid behind Manuelito and Lupita, who both laughed nervously behind their hands.

“It surprised me again,” Lupita said.

“Me, too,” Manuelito said.

His attention turned from the larger-than-life figure in front of them to the tree trunks nearby.

“There!” Lupita said, pointing at the base of a small ceiba tree. “I saw it first. It’s mine!”

Manuelito smiled. No matter who found the Sentry; their whole family shared in all profits. Yet it was a point of pride. Manuelito himself had only captured six Sentries in six years, and they sold well at Saturday market. Lupita pried the sensor-transmitter unit from the tree while Manuelito dug the small staging plate from under the leaves on their trail. The Sentry delivered its message one more time before Manuelito could shut it off and lock it safely inside his
caja.

“Such a toy might scare the
deficientes
or the mountain
indios,”
Lupita said, her small chest puffed out, “but they don’t scare me.”

The Sentries didn’t scare Manuelito, either. But the presence of a Sentry delivered another message, loud and clear: this had been no ordinary farm beneath the dam. Manuelito’s heart beat a little wilder at the anticipation of something more valuable than farm implements to fill up his cart. And something more dangerous than a Sentry to protect it.

Manuelito had just stepped back into his harness when Roberto and Ricardo found the steel bottles.

“Ma’lito,” Roberto called, lifting the shiny cup over his head. “Sí o no?”

Once again, the boy dropped his traces to inspect his brother’s find.

“What is it?” Lupita asked.

“It looks like a little bottle to keep hot things hot,” he said, turning it over in his hands. He rapped his begrimed knuckles against the top. “Stainless steel, I believe!”

“Look, Manuelito . . . a hundred of them!”

Indeed, many of the small metal containers poked out of the mud ahead of them. Ricardo and Roberto had already gathered an armful each. They dumped them onto the back of the cart and went looking for more. Lupita cleaned one of them with a stiff brush and tried to open it. After struggling with both ends, she handed it to Manuelito.

“Open it, skinny one. Maybe you have the hands.”

Manuelito hefted the bottle and liked the feel of it in his hand. He shook it and heard only the barest rattle inside. Some writing was etched into one end, but he understood only one word: “ViraVax.”

“This is the company that makes the vaccinations, the
medicinas,”
he said. “Maybe this is the
medicina
that will make the
deficientes
normal.”

Lupita laughed.

“Maybe it will turn clay into gold and pebbles into diamonds.”

“You laugh,” Manuelito said, and nodded towards Roberto and Ricardo. “I have heard it myself. They are working on such a thing.”

“You can’t open it, can you?” she said. “You’re too skinny.”

Manuelito snorted his disgust.

“You never see past your nose. If the package is stainless steel, what must the cargo be worth? If it is a
medicina,
perhaps it loses value when it is opened.”

Lupita rolled her eyes and helped Roberto unload another armful.

“No one bids on an unknown cargo,” she said. “One has to know what something is to know its value. One has to open the package to identify the cargo to know its value.”

Lupita cleaned another canister and handed it to Roberto.

“Open it,” she said. “Twist the top, so.”

She put his hands in the right place and showed him what she wanted. Roberto grunted, but nothing happened.

“No, amor,” she said. “You have to twist
hard”

Roberto bit down on his tongue and put all his effort into it, and the top twisted off. Manuelito hurried over to see what was inside. He took the canister from Roberto and pulled out a very cold rack of small blue bottles. Something was inside the center of the rack to keep it cold; already it was covered with a frost that appeared from the air like magic. The little glass vials contained a beautiful blue liquid, and Roberto reached out a finger to touch one.

“No, amor,” Lupita said. “Don’t break. You are very strong to open this bottle for us. What do you think, skinny one?”

“I think we should keep them closed. They are supposed to stay cold, so perhaps they lose their value if they warm up.”

He replaced the rack of vials and snugged down the lid.

“And how will we know their value? And how will we sell them?”

“When we return to La Libertad, I will speak with the pharmacist, Juan-Carlos. I will bring one of the blue bottles. If they have no value, we can sell the containers for people to keep cold things cold.”

“Ice cream cold,” Ricardo said.

“Yes,” Manuelito said, “ice cream cold. So, we fill the cart here with the bottles. Perhaps Mama can sell them while we come back . . . Roberto, no!”

Roberto had another canister open, and he pulled out the nesting-basket for the little bottles. He lifted them to the light and then cried out and dropped them. He shook his hand in pain and looked to Lupita for relief.

“Caliente”
he said, around the fingers in his mouth. Then he offered them for her to see.

“Not hot,” she said. “Cold. Very cold. Now, see. You have broken some of the
medicinas.
Some sick people won’t get well now. Leave the rest alone, just bring them to the cart. We’re not going to open them anymore.”

Ricardo was squatted down beside the blue rivulet that ran into one of their wheel-ruts. He poked at it with a finger.

“No, Ricardo!” Manuelito said. “Leave it, it’s broken. Let’s fill up the cart and go home. Then I will get you an ice cream.”

“Ice cream!” Ricardo said, and his face brightened. “Ice cream!”

Ricardo sucked the blue drop from his fingertip and turned back to the mud with his brother to look for more.

By the time the cart was full, Manuelito Kax was feeling lightheaded and queasy. He blamed it on his eagerness to get up so early and go to the flood. He’d only eaten two tortillas and a handful of beans, which usually got him through the day. But today he had worked harder than usual, wrestling his cart over debris and through the red muck that the valley floor had become. Mosquitoes and the botflies had swarmed him since daybreak. And his head hurt.

His cousin, Luis Ochoa, spotted him as they approached the village and came running to see what he’d found.

“Hey, skinny one, did you see many deads?”

“No,” Manuelito shook his head, and lost his balance. He grabbed the traces of his harness to steady himself. “No, Luis, just parts of the deads. And don’t call me ‘skinny one.’ You know my name.”

Luis helped him pull the cart the rest of the way to his house.

“You have many fine steel jars back there, cousin. You know, the soldiers turned everybody else back. Once again, you’re the only one to come home with something.”

“I have another Sentry,” Manuelito gasped. “And a few bottles. Soldiers . . . they chased me back to the road.”

“Oh, yes, they’re everywhere up there. They wear the space clothing and listen to no one. A Sentry, and these jars—truly a rich day for you, cousin.”

Luis stopped his chatter a moment and looked around.

“Where is Lupita?” he asked. “And the
deficientes?”

Manuelito waved a hand to indicate the track he’d just followed.

“Back there,” he said. “The brothers have to look at everything, and she teaches them.”

“She should help you with the cart.”

“She cares for the brothers; it is much more work than this cart, my cousin. There, you see? They’re coming now. I feel unwell. I want to unload the cart and lie down.”

“What was it like up there? Besides the soldiers. Did you see other gleaners?”

Manuelito shook his head as he unfastened his harness.

“No one,” he said.

He stood still for a moment, drenched in sweat, feeling the relief of the weight. He took a deep breath to steady himself, and smelled the dozen charcoal fires of his neighbors cooking corn tortillas. From each house came the
pat-pat-pat
of tortillas being formed between a woman’s palms. He heard the
clink
of steel as Luis examined the jars.

“Lupita!”

The shout was in his mother’s voice, and Manuelito had barely the strength to turn and see that Lupita had fallen in the path, and the brothers were trying to help her up.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back, looking up at the shimmering leaves of the ceiba tree. His head buzzed, and people gathered around him, one face swimming into the other. Though they handled him, Manuelito felt nothing. But he saw, very clearly, a quetzal high in the tree. It cocked its head to see him better, ruffled its iridescent wings, and swung its long tail free of the branches. It preened a moment, then cocked its head at him again.

Manuelito heard snatches of his mother’s voice crying:
Corre, Luis
. . .
una enfermera
. . .
la farmacía
and, finally,
la bruja.

I must be sick, indeed,
he thought.
Mama never calls for the witch woman,

Then he felt like he was floating, upward, towards the quetzal, and all around him he was lit by a blue glow, the same rich blue that spilled from the silver bottles. And then he was not.

Chapter 11

No man can escape his destiny; and he should next
inquire how best he may live the time he has.

—Plato

Vice-President Carl J. Carlson smelled Death as soon as he boarded
Eagle Two,
and when he triggered his safety harness he felt his leather recliner become a coffin. The Vice-President smelled Death every time he flew, which, even this early in the campaign, was almost every day. Today it smelled sour, that moldy washrag sour of his childhood. His nose had its fill of Death just an hour ago, on the smoke-laden air that stuck to the remains of a Children of Eden compound in Tennessee. Death’s thick perfume clung to fire trucks, the blackened clothing of rescuers, to the breath of a glad-handing mayor.

He might be a politician, but he was no fool.

The fire couldn’t have been an accident,
he thought.
These bodies
. . .
somebody set them on fire and let them run.

FBI investigators thought so, too, but the local medical examiner claimed they had not had time enough to know what they were looking at. The examiner was a big shot in the Children of Eden, and it looked like all of the dead were Gardeners, mostly Innocents.

One hundred and twenty retarded kids, another eighty
adults. Maybe twenty-five staff.

He shook his head to try to shake the memory of the pitiful remains of those children.

They called their compound “Revelation Ranch,” and someone had engineered a flash fire to burn them out.

The question was, did that someone kill them all first, with something chemical or biological, and then torch them as a cover? And what’s the immediate health threat to the neighborhood?

“Clever bit of engineering, eh?” asked Perkins, the obnoxious Toronto reporter. “Torching people without really doing too much damage to the structures?”

“Perkins,” Carl Carlson said, “maybe up in Toronto you’re accustomed to this sort of thing. Down here when somebody kills two hundred-plus people to
make a point
we take it seriously. They are not ‘clever engineers,’ they’re
bastards
, pure and simple.”

Perkins held up his Sidekick, its “send” light blinking.

“You’re on record, Mr. Vice-President.”

“Then strike ‘bastards.’ Make it ‘dickheads.’”

The Vice-President had flown halfway across the continent twice in one morning, and now he was off again without even the chance to kiss his wife.

“Don’t look so glum, Carl,” Mark O’Connor said. “The best is yet to come.”

Mark O’Connor was husband to President Claudia Kay O’Connor, and “The Best Is Yet To Come!” was the Knuckleheads tune that they sang for Carl that hot night at the convention when his name went up in lights. His name shimmered across the ceiling of the convention center, under the name “Claudia Kay O’Connor.” The party had duped him into thinking he’d be their Number-One Guy, then trapped him into playing life insurance for the first woman President of the United States.

“It was an obscene song,” he said. “We’ve been living it down ever since.”

“That was three years ago,” Mark said. “You’ve got those going-into-the-last-round campaign jitters, that’s all.”

He pulled an EdenSprings water from the refrigerator and offered one to Carl, who declined. Then he sat in his accustomed seat next to the Vice-President and triggered his harness just in time for the big push down the runway.

“Helps the ear-popping,” Mark said, taking a swallow. “My ears are taking a beating from all this flying.” He tipped back another swallow.

“You could talk your wife into taking her own team on the road for a while,” Carl said. “Her exposure always spikes the polls.”

“I hope that pun was unintentional,” Mark said. “And we’re keeping her under wraps as long as possible. That’s a security thing, and it was my call and I’m sticking . . .”

Mark’s left hand went to his ear, and he finished off his mineral water in three big gulps. His expression was one of intense concentration.

“You okay?” Carl asked.

Mark O’Connor pointed to his ear, made the “okay” sign, and continued to listen to whatever his Sidekick was telling him.

“You’ve been drinking so much of that goddamn water lately I thought . . . “

“Thank you, Jeff,” O’Connor said, “I’ll tell him.”

“Jeff Wheeler?” Carl asked.

Mark nodded.

“Jesus! What kind of disaster does he have for us now?”

The plane leveled off, and O’Connor got himself another bottle of water. He leaned over Carl in that way he had that made the Secret Service nervous.

“You won’t believe this,” Mark said. “Another Gardener compound torched, this one in Arkansas. A hundred and twenty dead. Somebody’s pissed at somebody.”

“We better have something for the sharks,” Carl said, nodding across the aisle.

Several Sidekicks sounded their tones among the journalists. The news was already on the wire, and O’Connor’s people didn’t have a statement for him yet. That was pretty goddamn sloppy interference they were playing. They’d better have something to say about it pretty damned quick.

As though reading his mind, Mark O’Connor handed him a slick, with big print, yet. The boys across the aisle started his way, but Carl waved them off while he read what the White House wanted him to say about this epidemic of fire.

The Vice-President never got the chance to read his opinion on the Gardener deaths, and no one had the chance to ask him about it, either.

As the traveling team closed in for their questions and a statement, Carl noticed that Mark O’Connor smelled like Death. Mark hovered, slack-jawed, over Carl’s seat and the man’s breath smelled like goddam
Death
, and this wasn’t just the Vice-President’s usual in-flight death fantasy. This sour washrag was real.

Carl’s first thought, even to himself, was a wisecrack:
Jeez, no wonder his old lady keeps us on the road!

Mark shut his mouth, got a quizzical look on his face, then began scratching both his forearms.

“Mark?” Carl asked.

Agent Lampard, from Claudia’s team, reached out to steady Mark O’Connor, who slumped against the bulkhead and slid onto the carpet. His body settled like hot jelly in its clothes.

Two sets of hands grabbed Carl by the shoulders and pulled him back as he saw O’ Connor’s face melt from his skull. Steam puffed out of his bulging shirt-front, and then little blue flames danced on the dark liquid that leaked from the splits in his skin. Agent Lampard grabbed a fire extinguisher.

Everything moved in underwater time for the Vice-President.

“Get him out of here!” Lampard yelled, and pushed Carl back with a shove to the chest. Then he triggered the distress call on his Sidekick.

By this time, Mark O’Connor was just a smear of greasy black smoke overlaying an intense blue flame that Lampard sprayed with a pitiful little fire extinguisher. The other two agents pulled the Vice-President through the hatch to the cockpit, and Carl’s last glimpse into the passenger compartment showed Lampard and the Toronto reporter, Perkins, flailing at O’Connor’s burning body with their coats. By the time the cockpit hatch was locked behind them, Carl and the others were gagging from the stench.

Alarms buzzed on the cockpit console, and Agent Carver gasped, “Fire in the passenger compartment.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” the copilot muttered.

“Activating fire suppression,” the pilot said.

The pilot flipped a pair of toggles but the alarm persisted. The graphic on his screen showed the fire halfway up the aisle and already through the main deck. Fists pounded weakly at the locked cockpit door, and Agent Brown stopped Carl’s hand on its way to the latch.

“National Control,” the pilot said, “this is
Eagle Two
declaring an emergency. We have fire in the aft cabin.”

The Vice-President’s mind buzzed, and he realized he was hyperventilating. He cupped his hands around his mouth and concentrated on calming down.

These guys are good,
he thought.
They’ll get us down okay,

“Roger that emergency,
Eagle Two.
We are waving off traffic and you are clear to come around and land on Three.”

“Coming around,” the pilot said, and began a hard, banking turn.

I’m never going to be President,
Carl thought.

Then he felt himself flush with anger because first his party and then fate had cheated him of his lifelong goal.

So close. So goddamn close!

The anger that outwashed his fear felt good, made Carl feel like they might fight their way through this one, after all. Amid the flurried activity of the crowded cockpit, Carl couldn’t help seeing O’Connor’s face slumping from its bones.

“I’m losing hydraulics,” the pilot said. “I’ve lost port flaps.”

“He just burned up,” Carl heard himself saying. “He just . . . burned up!”

Then the plane shuddered, dropped suddenly, shuddered again and more alarms buzzed across the control panel.

“No port side landing gear, no nose gear,” the pilot said. Carl wished he could bring up the kind of calm that he heard in the pilot’s voice. The plane began to waggle and slew, and Brown pushed him down onto the deck and piled on top of him. He covered his head with his arms, felt Brown’s assault Colt grind into his left shoulder blade and heard Carver on top of Brown whisper a prayer under his breath.

The plane almost straightened out, but by then the hot, stinking fire was at the cabin door, centimeters from his head. Then their wingtip caught the taxiway and the pilot hollered, “Shit!”

Through the tremendous tearing of metal and tumble of bodies around him, the last thing the Vice-President heard was Brown’s desperate whisper at his ear: “God, please take care of my babies.”