Carry the Flame (4 page)

Like you,
the most disturbing demonic voice taunted.
Just like you. Filled with the red heat of your animal dreams.

Hunt cocked the Colt's hammer.

Chapter Three

H
ansel pointed his nose skyward and sniffed hungrily at the broiling air. Jessie snapped her fingers, signaling the brindle back down to the dust. He was a mastiff-bloodhound mix, with the latter's keen sense of smell, though she doubted any creature could snag Bliss or Jaya's scent from air scoured by the brutal gusts that had buffeted the region. Even the nauseating odor of burning bodies had grown faint.

She and Burned Fingers were guiding the gimpy dog down a slope where the storm had heaved aside countless tons of dust as if they were no more weighty than weed pollen. She couldn't fathom how the teens could have moved into the hellish wind. Augustus knew the area, and he agreed; but human reasoning wasn't helping Hansel, whose frustrated snout seesawed right back up, signaling a message of his own—that he hadn't picked up the scent.

Sudden gaps in the earth also slowed their search, forcing them to climb or crawl around sheared-off sections of blistered roadway that rose like crumbly cliffs or sank like the proverbial stone. Heat had burned-up so much water—entire rivers, lakes, and inland seas had evaporated, only to dump back down in ruinous, raging storms—that the planet's friable crust was rising and falling “like some fat lady on a fucking trampoline,” in Burned Fingers's prickly account.

But even the three-legged Hansel appeared fleet-footed compared to yesterday's pace when they'd maneuvered the gasoline tanker, with its 50,000 pound payload, around these geological disturbances. The truck had inched up the ridge like a marooned mollusk, giving Jessie ample time to note all the shadowy recesses where they could be ambushed. No less aware of her surroundings now as they worked their way back down the ravaged road. The same crushing concern for security had them assign Maul, the big bald truck driver, to organize all the adults and children into a defense of the caravan.

Defense against what exactly?

Against anything.
Jessie answered herself with the worst sense of certainty—the kind born of known threats, like the tank and unforeseen enemies, human
and
animal.

Maul had broken out the RPG immediately, and he enlisted the children's help in making gas bombs. In the right hands, the RPG could be effective against a tank; but Jessie remained openly dubious about the homemade bombs.

“You better believe they'll work,” Burned Fingers snapped, stepping around a gaping hole. “The Germans used to call our tanks ‘Ronsons' because they burned up so fast.”

“ ‘Ronsons'? What are you talking—”

“Old cigarette lighter. ‘Lights the first time every time.' Remember?”

“No. And I doubt we're looking at some vintage World War Two tank.”

Burned Fingers snorted, swore. “You wouldn't believe what I've seen rolling around. I almost got flash-fried in one of them.”

“I've heard.”

Hansel still hadn't picked up a trail. The only tracks that hadn't been scrubbed away by the storm were the deep, knifelike cuts of the tank tread, which they'd veered from minutes ago. Even so, with every step Jessie worried that it would roar over a hilltop and storm toward them, flamethrower blazing.

She found little relief in turning her thoughts back to Bliss, imagining her daughter and Jaya lying broken-boned—or worse—at the bottom of a “road failure.” That was a term, she realized with a wince, much too quaint for the grotesque conditions.

When she and Burned Fingers did step through patches of dust, it felt light as spider silk on their feet—but carried useless scents from miles off.

Burned Fingers jabbed his sawed-off at Hansel. “Looks like Stumpy the Wonder Dog can't buy a break.”

She rubbed his ruff. “I doubt he's hearing much, either.” Though given the rapacious creatures that had survived the collapse, she didn't find the silence entirely unwelcome. But she did wonder aloud whether firing off a round was advisable. “Bliss might hear it and at least know—”

“No,
don't
do that,” he said, glancing everywhere at once. “The critters will think it's a dinner bell and we're the buffet.”

His warning had her looking around, too—and switching the M–16 to full auto with the first thought of panther packs and Pixie-bobs.

To spare herself another surge of anxiety, she seized on how hard it would be for any animal to hide after the winds had flattened the charred forest in a swath so wide that she could see no end to the destruction. Extreme weather? Her ancestors hadn't a clue.

On the broad hills bookending the ridge, only nine tree trunks had been stout enough to survive the windstorm. To Jessie, the limb-stripped basswoods, buckeyes, and maples looked like lonely black sentinels, aggrieved and tormented by the devastation surrounding them. She missed autumn so suddenly she ached. That she'd once driven rural highways splashed with color was nothing less than astonishing to her. That her girls would never see such simple wonder—the beauty of an astonishingly vibrant world—made her eyes pool with helplessness.

With a blink and a wipe she turned from the niggardly stand and saw that they'd dropped about a hundred feet of elevation. At this remove, the rear of the tanker truck could have been a tarnished oval hovering in space.

Burned Fingers put out his hand to stop her and pointed to another oval—a large shadowing on the land at two o'clock on the directional dial. “See the sun? That shadow makes no sense unless it's a depression of some kind. And you know what else? That would be a good place to duck into.”

“Then why aren't they on their way back?”

“Cause they might have fallen into that thing. It's got to be deep, or we'd be able to see the bottom of it. Maybe it was a lake, or maybe the earth just yawned and opened up. No telling. But I'll tell you one thing, we're not coming at it head-on. Anything could be waiting down there. You see those hills?” He pointed to his left. “We'll take the valley running through there. We can climb out when we get close and get a good look down. See what's stirring.”

“W
ake up, dear heart,” Bliss whispered to Jaya. Only then did she remember her dad waking her mom with the same endearment on the day of the massacre. She tried not to think about her dead father because the memory that haunted her most—and made her feel murderous every day—was of her dad chained like a wounded animal to the front of Burned Fingers's truck.

She took a breath, hoping to wipe away the ravening image, and rubbed Jaya's smooth tummy, feeling a trail of down that lured pleasing sensations back to life. Briskly, she withdrew her hand and grabbed her shotgun. “We've got to get moving.”

“What's going on?” He sat up quickly, brushing dust from his face and hair.

She shushed him and whispered, “It's morning. We've got to get back. They're going to be really worried.”

They stood, Bliss with her hand on his shoulder to keep his sleepy head below the rocks that had provided them sparse shelter. She saw the ravine walls clearly now. Higher than she'd thought. The area was larger, too, about a quarter mile wide and a good half mile long, with boulders big enough to hide man or beast. And so quiet that she worried that even her whispered words had been overheard.

She put her finger to Jaya's lips. He nodded, and silence encircled them, sudden and chilling as a shriek. Then she pointed her shotgun to the top of the barrier, all but saying,
We're going out there.

Jaya nodded again, this time fully awake.

H
unt crept soundlessly in the dust outside the U-shaped rise that hid the boy and girl—and all the deviltry they'd committed before God and man.
God and man.
So holy, so true. In those few biblically blessed words he knew that there could never be any question of his importance to the Almighty. If God knew the movement of every ant—
And he does,
never
doubt it—
then what of a lone man who served Him with such devotion?

Smite me, Lord, if I am wrong.

He and the Almighty shared the kinship of divine retribution, for he was a sharply tuned instrument of the Lord, a silvery flute in the land of the fallen. A deadly weapon in the hand of a God-given man.

Now and always, bless me, Lord, in Thy name.

Hellfire and hallelujahs rang in his ears, lit up his eyes, blue as unscarred sky. He coiled like a serpent and waited for the harlot who'd bared her chest—and for the boy who'd made him burn. In seconds too precious for temporal time alone, they would expose all their weaknesses of the flesh to him. Of the
flesh.
He relished the mysterious rising sap of that word, of a world so forbidden that he felt like Adam in the Garden, Satan casting spells with the beaming apple of sex. Hunt felt it warm and hard and—beneath its wild scarlet skin—teeming with the sweetest juice a man could ever taste.

After all the brazen sins of the boy and girl, committed in the presence of God the Father—and in the unslakable sight of his own mind's eye—their surrender felt as ordained as finding the twins in the cindery ash. He would take the violators into the Lord's custody, and the hound would do his swift duty. Then he would bear the heathens to the base, adding legend to his name.

Trophies of a sacred war. Tributes to the One True Son.

God and man,
beating on his breath like the wings of heaven's dove.

The blood of ages to bleed the blood of man.

J
essie and Burned Fingers avoided a damaged road that ran through the valley, walking down a riverbed of smooth round stones instead. Dust softened their steps; but their sandals, cobbled together from old treadless tires and lizard skin leather, left clear tracks.

She welcomed the shade of the hill. The valley was narrow enough to shelter them from the stark morning light, sunrise and sunset the only earthly constants that hadn't been mangled by the reckless generations that had left them this ragged world.

Goddamn them.

Nothing but scorn for the louts who ruled her country at the turn of the century. Those feckless politicians and their big money backers—and the supine media that exalted them all—could have saved billions of lives and millions of species; but in those first fifteen, twenty years, when simple steps could have averted this tragedy, they did worse than nothing—they created an illusion of safety and comfort while the world spun inexorably toward collapse.

Goddamn them.

The signs had been everywhere—oceans dying, Arctic melting, killer heat waves, massive crop failures, freakishly strong storms, the list went on and on—but her grandparents and most everyone else pranced about so childishly, so narcissistically, that they'd made Nero seem like an alarmist.

Goddamn them.

She could scarcely imagine the courage, the unerring instincts of those who did try to stop the genocidal consumption, who bombed and struggled for years to try to shut the maw of that beast—and were hunted and tortured and executed for their fearlessness.

Kids, mostly. Nineteen-, twenty-year-olds. Some even younger. A few older. Veterans, too. The first leaders of the rebel forces. They'd fought back, and Christ, they were killed with a ferociousness that exposed both the cruelty and underlying fear of those in power.

She wished the wastrels who'd persecuted them—who were so busy pointing their fingers and guns at others—had done the planet a favor and aimed at themselves instead.

“Ready to start up there?”

She had to ask Burned Fingers to repeat himself; but she didn't hear him a second time, because her eyes were drawn to dust-laden lumps on the slope to their left, like the ones she'd seen on another hillside less than an hour ago. And then she realized with a start that the protrusions were too precisely uniform for any boulder field that she'd ever seen.

“Does that look right to you? It looks too perfect.”

“Not
them,
” Burned Fingers said as the first Pixie-bob rose to its feet, kittenishly pawing silt from its face before turning its eerie yellow eyes on them.

In seconds the entire slope shifted.

B
liss failed to account for the sun's blinding strength, narrowing her eyes as she eased from the shadow of the boulder wall.

The instant she shaded them, a gun barrel pressed into the base of her skull. Another hand jerked away her shotgun, then clutched her throat with fingers so dry and callused they could have been covered in scales.

Choking violently, she glimpsed Jaya looking around wildly. He had no means of retreat, no firearm.

“You become a bully boy,” the man said to Jaya in a voice quieter than his threats might have allowed, “and I'll kill her. Then it'll just be me and you.” He lowered his eyes to the boy's chopped-off pants. “Then I'll kill you, too. I'll have to,” he added cryptically. “Be a good boy,” his tone softened, scaring Bliss even more, “and I'll let you live.”

He marched them about fifty feet to a motorcycle and trailer and pushed them away. She felt shade and looked back at him still in the sharp light, squinting hard. The lines around his cavernous blue eyes were deep, and drew his cheeks and nose up, as if the whole of him were fighting the harsh rays. But long ago he'd lost whatever battle he might have fought with the sun: his blond hair was bleached almost white, and his skin was dark and leathery. His voice sounded worn as well.

“Get on the ground, on your bellies. You have no cause for the heavens.” But that wasn't the only reason he wanted them facedown.

He kicked apart their legs and ordered their arms outstretched till they looked like they were trying to hold back the earth from committing another grievous crime. Keeping his gun on them, he edged over to the motorcycle and placed her shotgun in the side car. He looked pleased by his coup and prospects. Always alert, he led the chained hound to his prisoners and fed out the links slowly, building the beast's desire.