From the Fire V (10 page)

Two of the men — ones motionless until now, bruised and swathed in
leather and bandages — moved nearer.  One clutched a half-handled sledgehammer
in gloved hands, the other carried an old Magnum revolver of some kind.  That
one was a fool, or panicked, Sophie could see:  it looked like the revolver’s
cylinder lock hadn’t even been clicked fully home, he couldn’t fire a single
shot until he did so.  And the eyes of both men were doubtful, strange.

Neither of them want to kill me,
Sophie realized.  The man with the half-sledgehammer was staring at the back of
Zachary’s head.

He wants to kill Zachary.
  Sophie
processed this. 
He doesn’t believe I’ll be so stupid as to open fire this
close to fuel.  He wants me for his own.

How many miscues were there to interpret here?  Did it matter?  Very
soon, the situation was going to explode and any chance of Sophie’s interference
in her own foreordained Fate would shunt off into a grisly end.  It was time to
act.

Making certain that Zachary was still watching her while he turned
his body to let Jakey and Rob slide by, Sophie lowered her own gun completely,
again into the utility pocket of her armored suit.  She showed her outspread
hands, but while she did so she moved back away from Silas to stand behind the H4’s
open driver’s door.  Perhaps due to the sudden crowding, Zachary did not
question this.

He told me to back away.

Zachary held out a hand, one again off the shotgun, and Petey ran
into it his arm.  Rob ran into Petey.

“What you want, boss?”

“Wait.  We’ve two, now.  Thinking aloud, see.  Changed my mind.” 
Zachary pointed his barrels at Sophie’s gun.  “Not in the pocket.  Don’t you
sheath that buzz-saw away and think we’re grand again, darling.    You put that
thing far away right now.”

He doesn’t know exactly to handle this.  The men, they’re doubting
him.

“All right,” she replied.  “Where should I put the gun?”

“Inside the
routier
.”

“Then watch me.  I’m going to pull it out by the cord.  My fingers
are going nowhere near the trigger.”

“I’m watching.”

Sophie made a delicate, slow-moving show of lifting the gun back
out of the pocket, with two fingers on the handgrip.  She handled it as if it
were a time bomb, one she didn’t know how to defuse.

And isn’t that exactly what it is?

Bending into the H4, she lowered her gun onto the driver’s seat
and detached the cord from the suit.

“
Bon
.  Now move,” said Zachary.  “Round the door, close it
a little with your hip, hands up on the front fender and look away.”

There was almost silence, all the men were listening.  The only
voices, the men in the back were coughing in the still-running H4’s fumes.

He didn’t tell me to turn off the ignition.  He must think that
will keep us from shooting.  Does he think Silas has a gun?  And what about
when Rob sees?  When he sees Silas with the pistol ...

Sophie realized in that moment that there was no way out.  She was
going to die.

As she turned to move out toward the H4’s front, there was a huge
bang
outside followed by a wailing, girlish shriek.

What in the Hell?

The screaming went on and on. 
A girl?
  The screaming was
getting closer, and quickly.  Sophie looked back.  The effect on the men was as
if liquid fire had been poured over their heads.  Jakey went rigid, Rob flinched
and looked back to Zachary for reassurance.  Zachary had bared his teeth.  The
others behind Zachary backed away, cursing and gripping their weapons.  The
younger derelicts were silent, the eldest began arguing with one another. 
Somewhere, somewhere inside, guards had been overpowered.

This is the only moment,
Sophie
realized. 
Only chance we’re ever going to have.

There were many screams then, dozens.  Girls were shrieking, old
women sobbing.  A babble of women’s voices arose over the wind:

“Help us!”

“There!  They’re in the fuel bays!”

“Save yourselves!”

“You hear?”

“Her car!  Her car is
working
?”

“God!  Help us, they’re raping us!”

“Don’t let them touch you!”

“Kill yourself!  They —”

Two seconds had passed, if that.  Rob had made his choice and moved
in toward the open passenger door, and was staring down in horrified
disbelief.  He managed, “What the — ?”  And that was all.

The barrel of Silas’ pistol was shoved between Rob’s scabrous
lips, up against his teeth.

All of what happened next, the frenetic, chaotic splicing of
simultaneity, Sophie never quite understood.  She revisited the scene every
night, in nightmares, a reluctant somnambulist forever exploring the same dread
ground of an eternal trauma which refused to fade away. 
The Mercy Ground
,
she called the fuel bay ever after.

But what all took place in the next moments?  There were so many
people to behold, so many nightmares, intricacies of gore and chaos.  And the
girl.

Oh, the horror of the girl.

In the same second that Silas’ pistol swept up and chipped Rob’s
teeth, a young teenaged woman stumbled around the corner of the fuel bay.  She
was naked, emaciated, blistered and splattered in dried streaks of oil and
blood.  Some kind of ghastly, filth-trailing head-cage — made out of a bicycle wheel,
with some of the spokes half-torn out and then turned into barbs, surely to
restrict the movement of her throat — was chained around her neck and face.  A
black leather leash dangled from this contraption and trailed out behind her,
dripping blood.  One of the young woman’s eye sockets was badly patched over,
and there was very little hair left on her head.  Most of it had been yanked
out in tufts, the gaping sores stitched over and cauterized.

She had once been beautiful.  Now, she was gaping and her mouth
was a perfect O of mortal terror.  She shrieked, the barbs piercing her neck
and letting out trickles of blood as she did so,
“Help me!  They’re
torturing us!  Take me!  Take me, God, oh God!”

Jakey was grabbing the girl then, wrestling her to the ground. 
More women were rushing into the fuel bay’s open hollow, sobbing and screaming,
and most of the men were turning around with weapons upraised to throttle them.

Sophie was a split second away from jumping into the running H4 (
Open
doors be damned, get out of here, get out
), away from the human maelstrom
of rage and limbs surging just behind her, when Silas pulled the Luger’s trigger.

V-7

THE
CRIMSON BLOSSOM AND THE AMBER

Crack. 
Deafening.

Rob’s face shrank, imploded.

There was no other way to describe it.  It was as if a black hole,
a tiny cosmic singularity, had formed inside his mouth, its sudden impossible
swell of crushing gravity sucking the rest of his head’s bone, teeth and
fleshly matter inexorably in toward a single point.  There was only a faintest
haze of blood clouding in scarlet mist around the entry wound, but with the
upward angle of Silas’ weapon, half the contents of Rob’s head sprayed up over
the clamped tops of the fuel hoses.

Bandages flew in streamers, gouts of oiled hair tumbled up in
spirals.  Ghost-white chunks of skull, each with yellowish curds glued poorly to
the inside surfaces of their triangles, sprayed high like deadly shrapnel,
rebounding off brick and bouncing down onto the plastic carry-alls strapped
over the H4’s roof.

There was a burst of some animalistic scent, moist and raw. 
Something smelled like fragrant cheese.

The slug’s hot remnant ricocheted out over someone else’s head.  The
oldest of the other men shouted out, his face an almost comical twist of shock
and revelation,
O!
  And the nailed-through piece of lumber this man had
been holding dropped between his feet, bounced, then angled outward in the air.

The nearest other man, it may have been Morty, tripped over the
rebounding board and into the screaming blood-girl.  They both fell over in a
tangle of limbs, one clawing, the other shielding.

Another man was erratically aiming a vintage green Springfield
carbine — a  moment earlier, perhaps he had been trying to decide if he could
very carefully shoot the blood-girl in the face — while two filth-caked naked
women, one very old, were lunging toward him with broken fingers, their
fingernails turned into searching claws.

That was the last vision etched into Sophie’s memory.  The next
she knew, she had pushed her submachine gun further over to the passenger seat
and was in, one leg trailing, clutching the H4’s wheel.  Without thinking she
shunted out of park, hoisted her left leg in.  In her panic she fisted the
stick over to four-wheel instead of drive.  Her right foot stomped down on the
accelerator.

The engine roared, hacked and roared louder.  The H4 lurched
forward out of the bay with men and women running after it.  Someone shrieked
and fell, perhaps slipping in Rob’s blood and gore or stumbling over his body. 
Perhaps Sophie had run part of him over, with her back wheel.  She didn’t know.

Even over the engine the babbling voices were rising, shouts,
cries of panic and rage: 
“Stop her!  Don’t shoot!  Please!  Christ, Zeke —
Stop!  Don’t let them get away!  Fuck!  Get out of the way!”

But there was a louder voice, a trill of lust, a goddess song.  Patrice
was chanting in Sophie’s head,
Yes!  Finally!  You see?  A bicycle wheel
with razor spikes.  That, my love, is what happens to all the bad girls in a
world destroyed by men.  Face in a cage.  Raped and dead alive and dead and
dead
and dead!
  All dead, all dead …
cackling.  But more solemn than
this rose Sophie’s own conviction, in silence and commandment:

Save the girl.

She had to try to save the girl.

Immediately after firing his LCP, Silas had somehow managed to jolt
and sit up, turning himself over.  His fingers were bleeding where he had torn
some of his nails off, scrabbling upright.  The pistol went flying from his
fingers when Sophie hit the gas.

Silas almost fell out of the Hummer as Sophie veered left and away,
trying to circle so far out from the fuel bay that no man could find the time
to open fire as she sped onward.

Swerving out of the bay, she had no time to calculate risk or
repercussion.  There were only life and death.  There was a candy-striped concrete
bollard sheathed in dented gray aluminum to her left, it read in
stencil-painted letters, TRUCKS BEGIN TURN NOW / CLEARANCE ONL —

And that was all she saw.  Her open door and then Silas’ both
collided with the bollard, each slamming shut in turn with a thunderous
bang! 
Bang!
  Sparks showered and the aluminum alloy of the H4’s door panels
shrieked as the bollard’s plated side turned into a spangled wreck, an upright
jag that looked like a silver flower.

Silas cried out, his left arm twisted at an abrupt and misshapen
angle as the H4’s slamming passenger door hammered him in and down.

God, Sophie, you could have severed all his fingers.  You almost
killed —

Reeling, tilting.

The H4 was turning, a precarious and dismayingly gradual arc as
the wheels scrabbled over warped concrete, rubble and ruptured sandbags. 
Behind and to Sophie’s left, dozens of sprinting and hobbling skeleton-shapes
were chasing after the Hummer, half-envisaged through a cloud of fuel vapor,
smoke and incinerated rubber from the tires.  If the H4’s speed had not been
limited by the first gear of four-wheel, a complete accident and error, it
probably would have flipped and both Silas and Sophie would have been trapped
to meet their Fate.

Instead, Sophie had a moment to recalculate, to let her foot off
the gas.  She got the H4 into drive and running perpendicular to the onrushing crowd,
she was looking over her left shoulder as they all swept toward her in two blurred
striations:  one swarm of naked and bleeding women, the other of armed men. 
Between the two, the girl with the barbed cage around her head had somehow
gotten away from the man who had fallen into her.  Her belly was streaked with
fresh running slicks of blood.

Sophie fumbled away from the steering wheel with her right hand,
padding the passenger seat for the submachine gun.  It hadn’t yet fallen onto
the floor with her wild acceleration, because its utility cord was tangled in
the unused seatbelt which had flipped over the console.

Save the girl.

Sophie tried to both seize and ready the shifting submachine gun
without looking down, while staring out at the frenzied surge and crush of
people running toward her, gauging the distance between the H4 and the two
swarms, and the nearing girl.  She tried even more to steer, to correct the
veering course which had now aimed the H4 at a chained-down Greyhound charter
bus, and even to keep Silas from tumbling over.

She tried.

“Save me!”
  The blood-girl was
running straight for her, limping and clutching her belly with one hand, waving
her other twisted arm like a mutilated puppet’s limb free from strings. 
Twenty, fifteen feet away. 
“God, don’t leave me!”

And then, without meaning, without a fracture of comprehension or the
faintest visual sheen of ceremony, there was a
crack
and the top of the blood-girl’s
caged head erupted and became a crimson, gelid blossom, flowering open upon the
fluorescent-streamered wind.

* * * * *

Once, afar, in a mundane modern used-to-be world of elder years
and long ago, Sophie had been grocery shopping down in Cherry Creek and she had
seen a jar of bleached and fatty beef tripe perched up high in Whole Foods
Market shelving, pallid bovine stomach matter floating inside a crystalline jar
of cranberry jelly.

She had stood casually there in her khakis and her azure and
silken V-blouse, biting her lower lip.  Stood there musing in an unnerved,
deteriorating mimicry of silence. 
What in the Hell is that?  Disgusting.
 
Regarding the jar with detached fascination, she had not felt thirsty any
longer.  She had shakily put her covered latte down into its holder in the shopping
cart.  Revulsion had shivered up her throat, the inside of her cheeks, as she
realized this jar of exotic “food” poised upon the highest shelf on aisle nine
was the most revolting edible thing that she had ever seen.

A pair of young inebriated men, dressed gamely in CU Boulder
t-shirts and day-glo flip-flops, had been egging each other on, betting on just
which one of their worthy twosome was brave enough to purchase the jar, or at
least to take it down from the shelf, to open it and look inside.

Ten dollars for a whiff, perhaps?  Twenty for a taste?

A little joking scuffle had broken out, and Sophie (she
remembered, guiltily, that she had edged her squeaky cart even closer to the
spectacle — not to admonish these overgrown boys who were almost soiling
themselves under muffled grunts and laughter, but simply to behold whatever
would happen next) had been nearby, with a brown paper bag of almonds held in
her latte-freed hand, when the tripe jar slid out from between twenty fumbling
boy-fingers and shattered, tumbling down in inexorable slow motion to its end,
where it exploded out in a wreath of fatty flesh, the glass shatter-void of the
jar designing a sudden, shrapnel-decorated gore-blot across the entire aisle
floor.

Clean up, aisle nine.  Darcy, clean up …

* * * * *

Half a second, this girl’s horrific death, and this absurd resurgent
image from the time before flooded Sophie’s mind.  She blinked, and large
pieces of the girl’s skull were still falling down through the greasy wind,
like pumpkin rind.

“Love of God, Sophie,
get us out of here!”

It was Silas’ yelling that snapped her back to reality.

She exploded, her face, her entire skull above the teeth.  Silas, her
head
exploded …

“— Out of here!”

She could barely hear him.  Hot and icy crimson washes of rage,
horror, disgust were still welling up inside her.

The H4 kept careening forward.  With her left hand she was tilting
the steering wheel a little, it was slick with a film of sweat.  The gun handle
was gripped in her right fist.

I’m going to throw up.  Pass out.  Can’t, can’t …

The girl’s almost-headless body actually took four more staggering
steps toward the Hummer before it collapsed, arms outspread, one leg up at the
knee and twitching wildly.  Sophie never forgot that, it haunted her forever.

The other women had slowed, the men were still running toward
her.  There were wails, shouts, even gales of brutish laughter as the headless
body fell.  Skull splinters and bone matter had splashed up the H4’s driver
door, up through the open window.  Hot blood and some kind of unseen fruit pulp
speckled Sophie’s cheek.

That’s when, turning left so that she could see both where she was
driving and the men charging toward her, Sophie managed to raise high the
submachine gun, cross her right arm over her chest and out the window, and pull
the trigger.

The other women had all fallen back, cowed, whipped, throttled and
guarded.  Seven men were looming over them, many more were running nearer to
the Hummer as it wheeled around through the scrap-yard.

There were dozens of men then, all armed.  Some were huge, others
frail, many limping.  Most were bearded, scabbed, ashen.  Hispanic, black,
white, bandaged beyond recognition.  Some were little more than children
themselves.

And where was Zachary?

Shots were being fired.  They had been, all along. Silas was
screaming.

One of the hulking men on the crest of the swarm had halted.  He
was beaming, gloating over the girl’s mutilated body.  Some other were pointing
at the guarded women or Sophie herself and hollering, their faces twisted in leers
of rage.

“She’s getting away!”

Sophie had never killed anything larger than a roach, a spider.  Aiming
as best as she dared to in that second, she selected the gloating man as her
virgin kill.

She intended to spray bullets left to right, to sweep the swarm of
men, to avoid hitting any of the women, to kill as many of them as she could. 
And why?  For slaughtering the girl, for imprisoning the women, for shooting at
her, for terror and torture, for the dread of shame and fear, for Zachary’s
mellifluous spite, for despising Silas for nothing but the color of his skin.

For everything.

There was no justice, only fury.  Vengeance both for horrors seen
and those imagined.  She did not need a good reason.  The fury was burning out
of her, the thrilling, electric spirit of Patrice was at last in resurrection, clawing
its way carnally and free, from the fire, screaming hatred of the men, a
horrible broken sound that carried even over the cracking of guns and the
auto-fire of the SMG.

Left to right?  No.  The bucking kick of the barely-braced gun
caused Sophie to fire an erupting stream of bullets in an arcing vertical
stream.  The first shots chewed ashy craters out of the pavement, the next went
between the grinning (then grimacing) man’s legs and ricocheting out into the
crowd of men.

Two men’s bodies surged up and then down, frantic puppets strung
up on the air on gouts of blood.  Pieces of the hand and arm of a third man sprayed
back into the fuel bay.  The next bullets caught the grimacing man himself up in
the thigh and then belly, stitching up under the ribcage, and swelled there.