Carry the Flame (16 page)

Jessie risked lifting her hand to block the sun from her eyes. Apparently, this was permissible because some of the slaves did it, too, and no one was struck. A few miles straight ahead she made out an enormous shelter the color of sand. It blended so smoothly with the surrounding desert that she hadn't spied it from afar. But a palace?

The flat roof looked six or seven acres large, big as the ones that enclosed stadia early in the century, and rested on scores of pillars. The area below the roof was open, but so densely shadowed she could not see into its blanketing darkness, certainly not from that distance.

On the west side of the structure, farthest from where they stood, scaffolding had been erected along a thick corner column. As they walked closer, she saw more dark-skinned men scurrying up the sides bearing heavy-looking sacks on their backs. When they reached the roof, they unloaded bricks.

So they've got water, she concluded quickly. A lot if they can spare it for this.

The procession plodded on in silence until they came within a hundred yards of the shelter.

“We have the biggest shadow in the world.” The Mayor put up his hand to stop them, then pointed to the darkness. “Every day we build the shadow bigger, blacker. It is black as coal, as you can plainly see. Someday it will be as big as the desert, bigger than the dreams of the pharaohs. But only America has such greatness now. Already people come from faraway lands to see our shadow and fighting pits.”

What people?
Jessie asked herself.

“We host the world,” the Mayor said. Then he repeated himself, as if it were a marketing slogan. “We have clay and water that never stops. We have all we need to build such magnificence.”

In the foreground, the tip of a guard tower poked a couple of feet from the sand, confirmation that the looming edifice—this bizarre effort to manufacture shade, as if it were a real commodity—was built on the foundation of a huge prison. The wiles of madness, she thought as her eyes turned back to the Mayor.

He ordered the guards to take the children to a nursery, and all the adolescent girls to his chamber. “Prepare them as I like.”

“Don't you
dare
touch them,” she screamed. She tried to bull her way to the Mayor, knowing how futile her words sounded and how easily she could be crushed. But she could not stand by in silence while the children were taken away.

Four guards grabbed her almost immediately.

“You are a fighter, woman,” the Mayor said. “That is what I thought. Take her to the most special pit. And the burned man, too.”

Guards dragged them both away. Jessie glimpsed the edge of the brittle-looking roof before they forced her into the shadow. She whipped her head around frantically, trying to assess as much as she could as fast as possible. Were there interior walls? Support beams? Dormitories? An armory? Lockups? An obvious bedroom? But her sun-strained aging eyes couldn't adjust to the darkness quickly enough. She might as well have been blind.

“Jump!” a guard shouted in her ear, startling her.

“What?” She couldn't see the ground. She was so frightened she could barely feel her feet.

Guards grabbed her arms and twisted them painfully behind her back.

“Don't do this!” she screamed.

They hurled her forward. All she could grab was air as she plunged into a steamy rank emptiness that could have been as deep as inner earth, for all she could see or feel. But even in that horrific instant of falling—with her heart thundering in her ears—she heard furious claws rising from the blackness below.

Chapter Ten

H
arrowing screams erupted in the heat. Little Cassie gripped a truck ladder so hard her hands felt soldered to the steel. Slowly, she raised up on her toes, peeped over the top of the tanker trailer and saw her friends running wildly from a horde of armed men swarming down the dune, most with burn tattoos of horrible swords and snakes on their backs and chests. Their
faces.
They looked scarier than the marauders who attacked her camp, killed her mom, and crushed to death her only sibling, Jenny, with a jeep.

Cassie leaped to the sand, landing on all fours, and bolted. Just seconds ago they were petting her Pixie-bob kitten in the shade of the truck, or playing monkey bars on the trailer, waiting for Jessie and Burned Fingers to come back. Now the kitten was lost, and all of them were screaming, “Run, run,” and dragging one another away.

But they were caught in the open, and Cassie worried that the crazy-looking men would start shooting any second. Then she remembered Burned Fingers saying nobody with half a brain killed a girl these days. And Maul and Brindle and the other grown-ups would never use their guns in the middle of a mess like that. From what she glimpsed through the opening under the trailer, the raiders were plenty brutal without bullets. A big one threw Ananda and M-girl to the ground, then kicked and stomped them.

The vicious attack made Cassie run even faster. Her tiny chest heaved so hard she thought it would tear open. But she wouldn't give up. Although everyone called her “little” Cassie, the nine-year-old towhead was fast and wily enough to have wiggled away from horrid people at the Army of God. But the sand made every step a struggle.

Hard for them, too, she could see with another glance back at the raiders, still chasing down the caravaners. Augustus and his daughters were getting clubbed to the sand. So were the Gibbs kids; their red hair looked like three fireballs blazing in the sun. And Solana was huddling with Imagi. The Down syndrome girl had bundled herself into a ball and was screaming.

Where are
you
going?
Cassie demanded of herself. If she hadn't been so frightened, the question might have slowed her. She couldn't spy a single rock or dead tree to hide behind. Nothing but an endless empty sheet of desert. Then she saw it.

Scrambling another fifty feet, she jumped over a ripple of sand no more than a foot high, landing in the lee of a form sculpted by wind.

She began digging like a dog, though for every handful she scooped between her legs, half a handful spilled back in. And she kept looking up, sure the gunmen would wheel around the truck any second and spot her. Each glance showed more of her friends thrown to the ground and beaten. Two gunmen whipped Brindle and the boys with chains.

Cassie pawed feverishly at the sand until she spotted the heavily booted foot of a man sprinting toward the rear of the trailer. A blink later Teresa burst from behind it, and then Cassie knew the man was chasing her.

But what could she do for Teresa? For any of them? As Teresa screamed, Cassie hurled herself into the shallow trench she'd dug.

Escape. Get help,
she told herself.
But where?

She brushed sand on top of her until she was almost covered. The ripple rose inches above the left side of her face. It looked like the smooth shapes she'd seen on the shore of the dead Gulf, and might hide her from anyone distant. But if they got close, she knew they would see her.

My footprints!
She moaned, feeling so stupid. Then, as if in terrifying confirmation, she heard someone racing toward her. She had to make a decision fast: stay or run?

The footfalls grew louder.
Two
someones. Her legs shook, so jellied she didn't think she could stand. She pleaded silently for the world to go away. All of it forever and ever.
Amen.
That last was all she knew of prayer.

Without shifting so much as a spoonful of sand, she rolled her eyes toward the ripple. All she could see was sand and the “damnable sky.” That's what nurse Hannah called it. The loudest footfalls sounded like they were on top of her, just feet away. A few more steps and—

BOOM.
The gunshot sounded like an explosion, and left her shaking hard enough to spill sand from her belly and legs. Someone fell, the impact so close it shook more sand from her skin. And the other footfalls were
still
coming.

She squeezed her eyes shut so hard she blocked the burning light and entered a dark place with sparkling pinpoints of color. Sometimes she did this for fun, to see the reds and yellows and violets of flowers she had never seen in the real world. She did it now to try to shut out the murderous threat drawing nearer.

“Get your ass back here, Jester,” a man yelled from afar. “You nailed him and we need you, or we're going to have to start shooting these bitches.”

The footfalls stopped so close Cassie was sure the man called Jester would see her or the dug up sand.

I'm a girl, I'm a girl. Please don't shoot.
Already rehearsing what she'd say.

“Give me a goddamn second,” Jester yelled back.

“No,
now.”

“I'm checking him for guns.”

Jester sounded close enough to grab her. This time when she looked toward the ripple, she saw a man with tan, leathery skin trying to roll someone over. He was struggling with the body, swearing, one grab away from her.

Cassie closed her eyes again, unable to bear the look on his face.
A killer.
She heard him grunting hard and held her breath, fearful that any movement would disturb the stillness. He swore and his footfalls receded, like the oily black tide of the Gulf.

She listened intently, still burrowed under a thin layer of sand.
Like the egg.
She and her sister Jenny had seen one on the shore, miraculous and white. They knelt and stared at it. Jenny wouldn't let her touch it. “It might be alive,” she'd said. “Let's leave it alone.” But even then the black tide was coming.

Now, Cassie thought that if the sand on her skin were a shell, no one would see her, no one would touch her—at least for a while—and she would have everything she'd need right by her side. Being an egg would be better than being a girl. Everyone wanted to touch a girl. But even that didn't worry her as bad as the one question that loomed above all others:
Who got shot?

Fewer screams reached her, and she finally dared to lift her head, but only a little, and so slowly that she felt individual grains of sand roll off her cheeks and chin and narrow chest.

She peered over the ripple. A man with a broad back and ammo belt stood by the rear of the tanker trailer, shading his eyes. He turned toward her and she dropped back down, feeling the hot sand scald the back of her neck. She didn't move, frightfully uncertain whether he'd seen her. The pain pulsed away.

No footsteps followed, and she was glad her hair was as light-colored as the desert.

“You two stay behind,” a man bellowed. He sounded like the guy who'd yelled at Jester.

No, don't stay. Go!

For ten minutes she didn't move, doing her best to ignore the itching that jumped around her body like sand fleas. But they didn't itch, she reminded herself. Not at first. They bit, especially fair-skinned people. “Because yours is thinner,” Hannah had explained. But no one ever told Cassie why sand fleas got to live, but not flowers.

When she could no longer endure the sun and itching, she raised her head again. This time little sand fell from her, and she saw that she'd lain almost fully exposed. No “camo.” That's what Brindle called using nature's colors to cover up. Except he stuttered so badly you had to listen forever when he tried to talk. “And don't finish his sentences for him,” Hannah had said. “Unless it's an emergency,” Jessie added quietly.

This sure is an emergency.
Cassie knew you could do anything you had to at a time like this.

The truck started, startling her. It sounded so close. Close enough to crush her like that jeep killed Jenny. Now it was rolling. She could hear the trailer rattling and smell the exhaust.
You
have
to look.
A deep breath later she did rise up all the way and saw the van moving behind the truck, heading off around the dune. She also realized why two of the men had been ordered to stay: to drive the vehicles, not to search for her.

She didn't see anyone on the roof of the van or hanging off the trailer, but she ducked anyway. You never knew. When she could hardly hear them anymore, she sat up. They were gone. She stood, eyeing the emptiness. It was like the caravan had never been there.

“Not everybody's gone,” she whispered, too reluctant till now to lower her eyes to the sand and follow the tracks that came toward her. In an instant that wrenched her heart, she recognized the man lying facedown with blood on his back. Cassie shook her head violently.

Disbelief gave way to grief, and she lunged over the ripple to his side. Already weeping, she lowered her face to Maul's. “It's me, Cassie. Are you okay?” Throwing questions—hope—against the great weight of evidence. She'd known Maul all her life. He was like a trusted and deeply loved uncle. His daughter was slaughtered alongside Jenny in the attack on their camp, and after her own father was gunned down at the Army of God, Maul had cared for her like she was his own child.

He didn't answer her. She hugged him hard, as if she could squeeze life into his quiet body. She bawled loudly and sat on her heels, unforgiving of the world, even of her place in it, and so filled with loss she didn't care anymore who heard her: “Mom, Dad, Jenny, Maul.” Her own list of the dead, screamed to the sky.

She leaned back over him, coughing convulsively from crying. “Say something. ”

But only Cassie's agony rose from the desert floor: “Mom, Dad, Jenny, Maul. Mom, Dad . . .”

She pounded her chest with every name, bludgeoning the love that left her so bereaved.

J
essie fell at least fifteen feet in the darkness. Her arms and chest took the brunt of the impact. If the sand hadn't been deep and soft, she was certain she would have shattered ribs and possibly her pelvis. But the fall did knock the air out of her, and she clutched herself, unable to move at precisely the moment when the sound of those claws made her want to spring out of the pit and fly away. It wasn't the first time she'd wished for a different world.

She smelled the Komodo dragon's unmistakable stench, and knew it had to be near. She tried to roll over to reach into her pants for the flint knife she kept strapped to her thigh. After the guards grabbed her M–16, they did a poor job of searching her—and she would take any protection at this point, however risible. But when she attempted to move, she croaked loudly from the crippling pain, then cursed herself for marking her location so clearly in the blackness.

A
thump
sounded beside her, and despite the throbbing, she pushed herself away. But it wasn't the Komodo, it was Burned Fingers. He jumped to his feet, already recovered.

“Jessie?” he whispered.

“I'm here,” she managed softly. Her eyes were adjusting to the pitch, and she could make out Burned Fingers's silhouette once she knew where to look.

He kneeled beside her. “How bad are you hurt?”

“Not too. Where is that thing?”

“I'm not sure.”

The clawing had stopped when Burned Fingers hit the sand, as if the beast were waiting, too. Jessie dragged herself to her hands and knees, finally able to breathe. He helped her stand.

“I've got a small blade,” she said.

“Me, too.” He held his up, but she could barely see it.

She retrieved her knife, thumbing the edge without thinking. Sharp enough for surgery, according to Hannah. But Jessie knew nothing short of her rifle could stop a Komodo.

Burned Fingers walked the pit's perimeter, running his hands over the hard wall. His shadowy form looked like a hunter circling in the night. He stopped once to tap a surface. It sounded wooden. When he'd circled back around and stood only feet from her, his hands moved over what looked like a gate about eight feet wide and six feet high. Big enough for that monster, she thought.

Burned Fingers knocked again, and she saw he was trying to gauge the gate's thickness and strength. But the noise roused the saurian and it thundered immediately to life when the creature charged the barrier. The wood shuddered and metal hinges screeched like they'd shear off. Burned Fingers forced his shoulder against the gate and dug his feet into the sand. Jessie joined him.

With every thrash she felt the dragon's crushing weight and strength. When the lizard settled, they backed away and Burned Fingers pointed to a wooden bar on the door.

“That's the only thing keeping him in,” he said in a markedly soft voice.

“That was another gate over there?” she asked, nodding at the other side of the pit.

“Yeah, about the same size, but the smell wasn't so bad so I think it's empty. It's probably for the one in the wagon.”

Two
Komodos?
Jessie returned to thumbing her blade.
What good is that thing going to do you?
Then she thought of her carotid artery, and how she'd slit her neck before letting some giant goddamn lizard swallow her whole. She'd rather bleed to death from her own hand than die like that young woman.

The clawing resumed, rhythmic, relentless. It was as if the Komodo, as prehistoric as any creature that stalked the modern era, sensed that nothing—not wood or steel or even the hardest stone—could thwart its unshakable appetite for long.

“I think they're keeping that one hungry,” Jessie said, eyes back on the gate. A warm sticky weight slid over her foot. She jumped aside, stifling a scream.

“What?” Burned Fingers whispered.