Carry the Flame (6 page)

“And you?” Jessie asked pointedly.

“He clawed my leg. Jaya got the worst of it.”

“Forget the dog,” Burned Fingers said as he raced up. “Where the hell are those cats?”

Jessie studied the top half of the hillside—all she could see from the ravine—but spotted only a few cat tracks, and the footprints that she, Burned Fingers, and Hansel had left. “Where
did
they go?”

“Long as they're gone,” Burned Fingers said without conviction. “Let's move.”

“Wait a second. Can't you see?” She put her hand on Jaya's shoulder. “We'll have Hannah take a look at those bites,” she said to the boy. “Come on, get dressed.”

Burned Fingers reached down, offering his scarred hand. Jaya took it without expression and pulled himself up.

“You'll survive,” Burned Fingers told him. “People have dogs licking their wounds all the time to get better.”

And a lot of them get sepsis,
Jessie almost said, checking herself because Burned Fingers was trying to give Jaya hope. At least he wasn't giving him grief.

“Mom,” Bliss said uneasily as she backed away from the trailer, “there's something in that thing.” Her eyes were on the telephone booth wrapped in chains.

“Some
thing
?” Burned Fingers said, drawing his sawed-off and advancing slowly.

Jessie raised her rifle and watched him lift up on his toes to look through the Plexiglas from a few feet away. He holstered his gun.

“What?” she asked, lowering her own weapon. She heard something shift inside the booth. It's alive, she thought. Whatever it is.

“You might want to prepare yourself,” Burned Fingers said as he hurried to strip off the chains.

“For what?” she asked.

“Just a sec, and keep an eye out.”

He glanced at the hill, but Jessie's gaze hadn't left the booth. She stepped toward it, impatient with his reticence; but Bliss shook her head and gripped her mother's arm.

Chapter Five

“I
t's okay,” Jessie whispered to Bliss. She hurried to Burned Fingers, who was reaching down to open the telephone booth, disturbing dust from the folding door. One of the twins blinked away the grit. The other girl's eyes were closed. Both had dried blood on their foreheads.

They were crammed together, yet Jessie also noticed pretty round faces that could have defied any talk of famine. And the one who'd blinked revealed rich brown eyes with flecks of gold so radiant in the strong light that they might have been dancing in their delicate orbit.

What Jessie did not see was their most strikingly distinctive—and unsettling—feature.

She watched Burned Fingers offer his hand to the alert twin. When she struggled to stand, he asked if her sister could help.

The girl stroked her twin's face, saying, “We can get out now, but we have to get up.” Though the silent girl's eyes did not open, she climbed to her feet with her twin—and astonished Jessie.

“See what I mean,” Burned Fingers said softly.

The twins were joined along the length of their torso, which wasn't much wider than a typical adolescent girl's midsection, normalcy greatly underscored by their single pair of arms and legs. But the familiar features of their body made them appear that much more unnerving because they bore the unmistakable look of a two-headed human.

Conjoined twins,
Jessie reminded herself. Siamese twins before the nomenclature changed.

She helped Burned Fingers guide them from the booth and trailer, realizing as they moved gingerly from their prison that in a land rampant with superstition and hardship, the twins' survival itself might be more stunning than their conjoinment—and a tribute to Augustus and his people.

Their clothes were burned off. Maybe torn off, too, she thought in a flood of revulsion. All that remained was a singed waistband holding a flap of cloth from a pair of pants or shorts, or possibly a skirt. Impossible to tell.

“Here, put this on,” Burned Fingers said, handing over his shirt. Jessie draped it over their shoulders, fastening the two surviving buttons. It hung past their hips.

“I'm Jessie. And this is Burned Fingers.” She tried to temper the uncommon with the ordinary before cringing over his nickname, which she knew must sound strange to any untuned ear—and quite possibly alarming to girls who looked like they'd survived a conflagration. But they didn't react and she didn't explain, instead introducing Bliss, who managed a smile, and Jaya, standing steps away. “What are your names?”

“Leisha,” she said. “And Kaisha,” she added with a nod at her quiet sister.

“Is she all right?” The girl's eyes were still closed.

“All right?” Leisha shook her head and rolled her eyes till they showed almost nothing but white. “They
burned
us! A tank burned up everyone. It was shooting fire at us. And we ended up in that.” She twisted her head to glare at the booth, neck cords tight as winch lines. Then she gestured toward her legs. “They hurt so bad,” an outcry that raised her hand to her charred hair. She clutched a fistful, drawing Jessie's attention to her scalp, burned pink in small patches and spotted with crimson dots, as if the sky had rained blood. Jessie spied splatters on their sides and thighs, and ash clinging to their arms and caked to the insides of their elbows. The girl's fist dropped from her head, opening to hair that had crumbled in her grip and looked like lint.

“I'm so thirsty,” she pleaded.

“We have water but it's back at our caravan.”

“How far?”

“Not too,” Jessie fudged.

With help from Bliss and her, the twins started out of the ravine, Kaisha's eyes still closed.

“Is Augustus your father?” Jessie asked when they'd reached level ground. She thought the girls must be the twins whom he'd said so little about. Now she understood his secretiveness: his daughters could become fodder for cults, and targets of their savagery.

“You know him?” Leisha demanded. “Where is he?” She looked around as if she might find him among the boulders.

“He's with us back at the caravan,” Jessie said. “He's okay. You'll see him soon.”

Their father had a burn so prominent that she'd noticed it at first glance, the shape of a cross he'd branded on his chest where a gold or silver one might have hung from a chain before the collapse; afterward, precious metals and gemstones—and innocence itself—were readily surrendered for food and water.

That's what she needs as soon as possible.
Jessie's eyes were on Leisha.
But not her sister, not if she's in shock.
Kaisha's head hung as limply as the hand by her hip, which hadn't moved. Jessie figured that each twin controlled the leg and arm on her side of their body. Biologically, that would make sense; but it made a quandary of providing aid if one girl could be in shock while the other was alert, if that was even possible.

As they started up the long gradual slope to the caravan, she automatically scanned the barren landscape and hillside for Pixie-bobs. Another reason to get back to those vehicles—
as soon as possible.

Had they been white and not conjoined, the Alliance would have wanted the prepubescent twins for Wicca-free sex, once their menses began. But as Augustus had said, zealots didn't want African-American girls because they carried the “Curse of Cain,” as the Alliance called it. But she also remembered him saying that the zealots never left you alone for long because “they're always seeing something you got.” Even if it was lives they could end and a community they could slaughter. In the end, black skin hadn't saved his girls from abduction—and it singled out his people for murder.

The twins walked slowly with a rolling gait, Leisha wincing with every step.

Jessie wondered where she would place them on the caravan. Three blind girls and the babies whom they cared for already occupied the seats in the van that weren't piled high with crates of food, and the perches on the tanker truck could never accommodate burn victims comfortably.

Just get back as fast as you can.
Their small group was an open, easy target that would never survive a Pixie-bob attack. Though no words were spoken, she saw Burned Fingers also surveying their surroundings from the scout position in front of them, his bare back glistening in the sun.

He'd borrowed her M–16, not that it would spare them if the feral cats attacked. He might kill a dozen, but even gunning down three times as many wouldn't slow a swarm of them.

He called Jaya to his side; the boy was lagging numbly behind Jessie, Bliss, and the twins. But he came to life with a big “Thanks” when Burned Fingers handed him his sawed-off.

“I can't shoot that and this,” Burned Fingers said of the weapons. “And right now our job is to protect the womenfolk,” he added with a hick accent that he affected sometimes for a laugh.

Jessie smiled, but Bliss wasn't amused. She hefted her shotgun up to her hip as if to say that she didn't need
his
help. If Burned Fingers noticed, it might have reminded him that only three weeks ago the girl had almost killed him while trying to save her father.

“He touch you?” Jessie overheard him ask Jaya. “Because what he did was wrong,” Burned Fingers went on. “Wouldn't matter whom he did it to—boy, girl, man, woman—it was wrong, but I've got to know something . . .”

Jessie leaned forward, openly eavesdropping and almost certain of the question he was about to ask—the only one that really mattered.

“Did he put it in you?”

Jaya shook his head.

“There's no shame in it for you,” Burned Fingers said, “but you have to be completely honest for everyone's sake.”

Jessie glanced at her daughter, who looked pained.

Jaya shook his head again. “He was going to, but you yelled at him and he ran away.”

“He's going to be running from me all his life,” Burned Fingers said. “If he ever comes anywhere near us, I'll hunt him down and kill him.”

Jessie's spine prickled. A ruthless finality in Burned Fingers's icy tone promised death as much as his actual words, a fitting outcome, perhaps, of decades of earnest killing. But his message must have moved Jaya, who teared up and spat, “I hate him.”

“And you've got the right. You hear me? You've got the right to hate him.” He nodded at the boy's swollen eyes. “There's no shame in that, either. Go on. We've all had to at some point.”

You?
But she doubted her curiosity about Burned Fingers would ever be satisfied.

“That man's a rapist,” he said to Jaya, “and you can bet he's raped others and that he'll keep on raping if he gets half a chance. I'm promising you, he's a dead man from this day forward.”

Jessie was shocked to find herself choked up by his kind words and fierce vengeance against men who used children and draped their debauchery in the vestments of religion. In the last few minutes he'd seethed with anger, offered compassion, and sworn the worst of violence, roiling contradictions that reflected what she'd gleaned of his complicated past: Oxford humanities scholar who could quote
The Waste Land
at length and recite ringing descriptions of the competition between gods and mortals from Ovid's
Metamorphoses
; renowned resistance fighter in the final days of the collapse who'd commandeered an army tank and turned it on rampaging soldiers until they burned him with white phosphorus; murderous marauder in the lawless years that followed; and now, late in life, a shrewd and intrepid fighter who helped lead the attack to free the girls from the Army of God and destroy the zealots' formidable outpost.

But his background was no more odd than the circumstances that led all of them to this point at this time with these girls.

“Leisha, has your sister spoken at all?” Jessie asked.

The twin shook her head. “Not since the tank came. It was crushing everyone, and it shot that fire at us. That's all I remember, and then he came.”

“He?”

“The one with the box.”

Telephone booth, but she wouldn't be likely to know about an antique supplanted by wireless technology in the early years of the century. All of it refuse now, electronic parts scattered by the trillions across the planet, dribs and drabs and vast waste dumps of chips and screens and candy-colored wires bleeding their toxic innards into the earth.

“Does Kaisha's skin that's hurt on her side feel like yours?”

“No, it's different in different places, but we're both burned.”

“I know it's awful, but you'll feel better when we can get you a place to rest.” Jessie peered past her. “Bliss, try talking to Kaisha.” Her daughter held the girl's slack arm. “She might be in shock. See if you can get her to respond.”

“I'm Bliss,” she said to Kaisha right away. “It's kind of a funny name, I guess, everything considered.”

No reaction.

“Kaisha's one of the prettiest names I've ever heard of,” Bliss carried on. “How old are you? I turned fifteen today.”

Still no response, but Jessie flinched; she'd forgotten about the birthday, and though she'd had ample distractions, she vowed to herself to make it up to her firstborn.

“How old are you?” she asked Leisha.

“Thirteen.”

“You're teenagers.”

Leisha nodded shyly. “So my dad's up there?” They'd just walked beyond the curve of the hill and spotted the far-off caravan.

“He sure is.” Jessie could barely make out a black man darting from behind the tanker. He began running down the slope. “That's him. He sees us.”

“Kaisha, it's Dad!”

The silent twin opened her eyes for the first time. “Daddy!” she cried out so loudly that Burned Fingers hushed her.

The girls tried to walk fast and stumbled, then Leisha reached for Kaisha and they held hands as they hurried.

Burned Fingers and Jaya stepped aside for Augustus.

“They've got burns,” Jessie warned, but he must have seen this because he slowed and let them take the lead in drawing him close.

He kissed their round cheeks and held each of their faces in turn, shaking his head in open wonder. His hands hovered over their back, careful not to touch what he could not see; but it was clear that he wanted to hold them, to sweep them into his grasp and never let go. “You're alive,” he said. “Alive.”

“Daddy, Daddy,” Kaisha whispered, as if to say
of course
in the midst of so much turmoil.

Burned Fingers broke in: “Sorry, Augustus, but we've seen Pixie-bobs.”

The missionary looked at him with alarm, then drew his daughters' hands to his lips and kissed their fingers. Not letting go, he walked backward. Tears streaming, he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and gave thanks to his god. “Come-come, we'll take care of you,” he told them. “It'll be okay now.”

Jessie wished that were true. She returned to scanning the hillside and the slope behind them, hating those piranhas of the apocalypse.

Less than fifty feet from the caravan, her fear of the felines was crushed by a rumble. She knew what it meant before she turned, even before the twins shrieked in panic. They'd heard it at their camp, and she had endured it the night before and seen its menacing tread marks this morning.

The tank was a dark outline in the distance, but it grew larger and louder every instant, roaring up the slope. Worse—if that were even possible—the engine noise had alerted hundreds of Pixie-bobs, and they were swarming down the hillside that spilled onto the grade.

T
ortured by his wounds, Hunt rode his aged Harley in near delirium up a winding, broken highway to Alliance headquarters in a former army base. It squatted on a bluff above a wide bend in a dead river riddled with rocks and military wreckage. Red sweat still blurred his vision from the blood streaking his face and head, forcing him to navigate the last several hundred yards of rubble-strewn road with unusual care.