Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet (31 page)

  
“I am here, little one.” he said. 

  
“S … Sa….”

  
Her voice suddenly broke and her eyes widened.  She began to cough, loud
rasping, guttering coughs, turning her face to the side and burying her face
into the sheets.  He almost dropped the candle as he moved to cradle her
jerking little head.

 
 She coughed more harshly than ever before.  After a while, the coughs tempered
to a strained, lung-shot wheeze and when the little head leaned back onto the
pillow, he saw a rust-coloured stain on her lips.  The same stain was on his
fingers.  He lifted back the sheet, and it was stained red – with blood. 

  
Naomi’s eyes shut again.  She reclined and passed out. 

  
“What have you done to her?” he snarled, turning menacingly toward the hermit.

  
“I have not done anything…”

  
He rushed forward and seizing the hermit by the collar of his robe and thrusting
him up with a bang against the door, snarled: “WHAT HAPPENED TO HER!”

  
His shaking fists pressed against the hermit’s chest and his eyes bulged madly from
their sockets.  The hermit stared back into the mad, persecuted eyes, and with an
air of sincerest sorrow, muttered: “It’s cancer.”

  
Saul’s chest stopped heaving mid-breath. 

  
The hermit lowered his eyes.

  
“It is in her lungs.”

  
He searched the depths of the hermit’s gaze for any glimmer of a lie.  It had
to be a lie.  Then, the memories summoned up; nights when he would wake with
her coughs and shivers, the chronic illness, her loss of colour.  His fists
allayed.  He staggered back to the bedside and fell to his knees.

  
“No…” 

  
“She took a turn for the worse a few days ago.”

  
“Treatment,” he mumbled.  “She can get treatment…”

  
“Treatment costs money.  Money I don’t have.”

  
He fell silent again and looked away.

  
“Do you…?”

  
“No,” he muttered.  “They took everything.”

 
 The hail beat against the windows and the thunder broke the heavens again. 
The defenceless little head trembled in his arms.

 
 “She is…
dying
,” he gasped in disbelief.

  
“Yes.”

  
“No,” his voice trembled.  He touched his forehead against hers.

  
“She doesn’t have much time.”

  
“Not like this.” He felt her skin cold in the palms of his hands as he cupped
them around her pale face, trying to imbibe his own life into her.  “…Not like
this.”

  
He would give his own life.  He would give anything –
do
anything.  Any
pain but this. 

   It could not end like this.

  
Several days of unrest in the South Bolivian Republic finally led to a Council
resolution the previous day declaring the former Plurinational State an enemy
of the UMC.  The sharp rise in martial demand sent a plethora of fresh calls
for tenders through West Wing, and contract brokers in the Vanguard were on
full alert, vying to secure the best deals with the PMCs.  Commissioner Eastman
had been drawing up the final clauses on one of the many bulk contracts that
had gone through his office that day, when the door suddenly opened. 

  
By the time he looked up, the entrant was already seated across from him. 

  
“Martial Vartanian,” the commissioner greeted with a nod.  “Welcome back.”

  
His reply to the greeting was a glare as grim a death. 

  
“I need money.”

  
The commissioner’s eyes dilated.  His hands slowly withdrew and the illuminated
touchboard dissipated from the crystal surface of his desk. 

  
“How much?” he asked.

  
Saul reached into his inner pockets, took out a folded piece of paper and laid
it on the desk.  The seal of the Commission Medical Branch was on the back.  
Eastman eyed the piece of paper with interest before leaning forward.  He
unfolded the paper, took a long look and gently laid it back down on the desk.

 
 “That is a lot,” he said, frankly.

  
“I need it.”

  
The commissioner nodded.

 
 “Very well …  You know what you have to do.”  Eastman straightened up in his
seat.  His hand disappeared beneath the desktop and when it reappeared, it was
holding a thin, red file with the seal of the Vanguard on the front.  “The
contract just opened up,” he said, laying the file on the desk.  “The assignment
is in thirty days.”

  
“I need the money
now
,” he rumbled.

  
“We’ll request an advance from the PMC.”

  
Eastman’s eyes gazed over his laced fingers. 

  
Saul turned his glare from the commissioner to the bright red file sitting on
the desk.  He knew that hard copies of martial contracts were kept in a
separate room, which meant that he must have selected the assignment in
advance.  He slowly picked up the file and opened it.  He did not have to read
past the first lines of the first page for his suspicion to rouse anew.

  
“The mission location,” said Eastman, “is one I believe you are familiar with…”

  
His eyes centered on a single word, in bold lettering, on the top of the page:

“
KAMCHATKA
”

  
The alarm went off at 0900: four short bleeps and a brief pause recurring. 

  
He sat up and brought his legs over the side of his bed, scouring his eyes with
the back of his wrist.  For a while he stared blankly at the clouded sky with
the ringing alarm in the background.  In the corner of the room, the computer
display still showed the threads of correspondence from the previous days.  
When he recalled what day it was, he heaved a sigh, rose from the bed and
breasted the sunbeams with due ambivalence.  The alarm switched off.  He picked
up his cell and the display lit up.  A flashing notice intimated that the email
he had been expecting from the Commission had arrived.  The heading read:

“
Tenancy
Expiration – Notice of Eviction
”

  
He pressed the “Delete” button, dropped the cell on the table and entered the
en
suite
. 

  
As the water poured over his face, he mulled over his own soul, as most do who
stare down death.  This newfound anxiety was the strangest feeling of all. 
Death, it seems, only perturbs insofar as life is worth living.  Hope breathed
fresh fear into him.  It was not that he did not want to die so much as he felt
obligated to live.  For Naomi’s sake, and her sake alone, he was committed to
life.  The water stopped running. 

  
He dried off and got dressed. 

  
He picked up a small stack of papers on the lounge table on his way out and,
after a fleeting glance, folded the papers and tucked them into his coat.  He
stood in the middle of the hall, looking around the house, each corner rousing
a different memory which replayed before his eyes, and as he walked out the
front door, his last thought was that something – some insubstantial thing –
had been forever imparted to those walls.

  
The door shut.

  
Hands pocketed and head low, Saul Vartanian walked amid the foot traffic down
the sidewalk.  Dawn had not yet broken.  A low-passing airship cast its light
over the whole street and a row of passing autocabs sent the tail of his coat
swaying in a dusty breeze.  He passed a dreg in one of the narrow alleys off 5
^th
Street, huddled up by a trash container, likely dead, but he did not stop to
check.  Sodom Sanitation would pass soon… 

  
He stepped up to the door of “Number 1, Block 8,” knocked three times, paused,
and then two more knocks, as the hermit had instructed (for reasons Saul did
not ask him to specify, being no stranger to caution himself). 

  
The door opened. 

  
“Good morning,” the hermit greeted from the gloom of the doorway. 

  
“Today is the day,” he replied

  
“I know.” 

  
The hermit stepped aside, holding open the door. 

  
He entered and the door closed. 

  
The hermit’s countenance was as solemn and his eyes just as grave as that first
night they had met.  Since then, they had seen one another more than a few
times, but seldom spoken.

  
“How is she?” he asked.

  
“See for yourself. .. She’s in her room.”

  
There was a brief silence, after which the hermit sauntered past him.

 
“Wait.”

 
The hermit stopped in his tracks and turned again, with his usual air of
omniscience.

  
“You have done … a lot for her,” he faltered.  “…cared for her…”

  
The hermit assented with a bow of his head.

  
“The last time I trusted someone with her…”

  
“I know,” the hermit nodded.

  
He was unable to heave his heart into his mouth, but the hermit seemed to feel
his thoughts. 

  
“I may not come back,” he murmured, darkly.

  
“You will,” the hermit answered.

  
“But, if I do not …  Promise me that…”

  
“I will.”

  
There was silence.  He looked up at the hermit, wanting to say something else,
but did not say it and looked away.

  
“It does not change anything I had told you,” the hermit spoke as he mounted
the first stair.  “You should know that.”

  
There was foreboding in his voice, and the two men regarded one another a
solemn moment before the hermit turned and walked away.

  
He ascended the stairs and stopped outside the door to the first room.  The memory
of the last time he walked through the door brought a swift rush of dread which
held him in suspension a minute before he gently nudged the door open.  A
dust-speckled daylight shone in through the window across a floor littered with
crumpled balls of paper.  In the middle of the room, under the sunbeams, the
little figure was lying semi-prostrate on her front, her legs swinging back and
forth, her right cheek pressed to the floor. 

  
When the door clicked shut, the little golden head rose with a start.

  
“Saul!” 

  
Naomi rose from the floor and ran toward him at once, throwing herself into an embrace. 
When the little arms yielded, he knelt down and cupped the little face in his
hands, studying her.  Her skin, though still pallid, had recovered some of its
lustre, and her golden hair was streaked with thin, short threads of white. 

  
“Hello, little one,” he said.  “You look well.”

  
The girl threw her arms around him again.

  
“I missed you,” she whispered, trembling with relief.

  
“I told you I would come back.”

  
She loosed her embrace and stepped back.  Her large eyes glowed and her little
cheeks were full to bursting with her smile.  He picked up one of the crumpled
balls of paper on the floor and stood up.

  
“I asked Grandpa to come with us today,” she said. “To the place…”

  
“Who?” he asked, unfolding the little ball of paper.

  
“The old man,” she answered.  “He doesn’t have a name.”

  
“So I am told.”

  
“But he’s good,” she said.  “
I
think he’s good.”

  
He drew out the crumpled ball of paper, and saw inside what looked like the
beginnings of a portrait.  It was far from a finished piece, but the likeness
was one he easily recognised.  Then he caught sight of a lone sheet in the
middle of the room where she had been lying just before he came in. 

  
“Your latest work,” he said, picking up the more complete rendition of the same
image – his own.  “Is that who I think it is?”

  
“It’s … not finished.  I … I want this
one to be perfect.  It has to be.”

  
He gave the picture back to her.

 
 “That reminds me,” he said.  “I brought these for you.” 

  
He reached into his coat, drew the small collection of papers.  Naomi took them
with a beam of delight, but her smile quickly faded when she looked through the
drawings and came upon the unfinished blood-blotched picture of Celyn.  The
forsakenness came upon her in the form of a gentle sigh which suddenly reminded
him why he had come.

  
“There is something I must tell you,” he said to her.

 
 He lifted her up off the floor and sat with her on the edge of the bed with
her on his lap.  Then, averting her eyes, he said: “I must go away for a while.”

  
The great, gleaming eyes looked up. 

  
“Where?” she asked.

  
“Somewhere far away.”

  
“I can come with you…”

  
“No,” he avowed sharply.  “Where I must go, you cannot come.”

  
“But, you’ll come back.,” she said.

  
He was silent.

  
“Saul … you’ll come back,” she said again.

  
“Yes,” he said.  “I will come back.  I always come back.”

  
“You promise?”

  
“I promise.”

  
I promise
…

 
“
You think too much.
”

   The memory dissolved.

  
He tore his eyes away from the view beyond the small aperture and turned toward
the voice that woke him from his reverie; the hawk-eyed brigadier with the
snakish features.

  
“I said, you think too much.”  The brigadier took out a flask and unscrewed the
top and raised the flask to his lips and drank.  “You’ve been staring out that
window since we left.  What’re you thinking about?”

  
“… Home,” he replied, looking away again. 

  
The giant metal belly of the buldroog grumbled with its heavy, bawling haul
over the rugged terrain.  Most of the other martials had dozed off in their
seats.  The stiff exoskeletons of their gear held them upright: tired heads
dipping with the jounces of the trundling droog. The grips around their guns
did not loosen with sleep.

  
He looked out of the small aperture of ballistic glass.  The front of the
sidelong truck had been with them since the convoy departed, advancing and
retreating over the view of the land, the high and solitary, snow-tipped
mountain with the swirl of cloud over the peak and the orange blast-furnace
sky.  The month’s battle had been brutally bloody, even by the usual degree. 
To his memory, the Eastern Russians were far more tenacious than the Westerners
in the face of unequalled carnage.  Flashbacks returned: of bodies tearing to
pieces, vaporising in a blood-cloud, and of the sounds -- the salvos,  the
explosions, and the hailing rounds.  The long, hulking droog struck a fissure
in their path and the sections of the vehicle lifted one after another.  All of
a sudden their path was encrusted with broken tarmac.

  
“Looks like we’re coming into the city,” rasped the hawk-eyed brigadier.

  
In the approaching distance there appeared the shadowy outlines of the
buildings against the backdrop of the setting sun.  The canyon to the northwest
ebbed away and in its place surfaced a long and high protuberance of black
dunes.  The shape was strange.  He narrowed his eyes.  The sun gleamed over the
black ridge, lighting up an eerie mist. 

  
“Got me a new prescription,” the brigadier spoke again, drawing his
attention.  

  
In his hand, the brigadier held an open neural canister.  He rolled some of the
tablets straight into his mouth as if he were drinking from a flask.  A swell
went down his snake-like throat and he exhaled pleasurably.

 
  “You wouldn’t think that you could be out in the middle of a combat zone,
hell all around, and feel nothing but this constant
orgasm
all up here
(he held a finger to his temple) just going, and going, and going, and going.”
He lifted his head, closed his eyes and exhaled with almost sexual relish.

 
“It’s all I can feel right now,” he said with a raspy snicker.

  
Saul looked away and did not speak.  They were now moving through the heart of
the city. 

  
“Not much of a talker, eh comrade?” sneered the brigadier.

  
He shot a cold glare in the brigadier’s direction.

 
 “How far are we from Fort Gen?” he asked.

  
“…About another hour.”

  
The instant the answer came, something caught his attention: something brief
and barely visible, through the aperture just beside the brigadier’s head.  A
tiny burst of light appeared at the top of the middle tower of three red tower
blocks, which one might have easily mistaken for the glare of a window, except
it was too bright. 
Too bright.
  Then there appeared another flash in
the next block, and a third in quick succession. 

  
Time stood still.

  
“GET DOWN!”

  
A split second later came a thunderous
BASH!

  
He was hurled out of his seat.  Everything went white. Through the barely
conscious blur he felt the ground quake again and again with successive
explosions until there was nothing but a high-pitched squealing in his ear.  When
he came to, he realised that he was lying on the vehicle’s ceiling with blood
dripping from his split scalp.