Carry the Flame (44 page)

Jester sheathed his knife and ripped off his boots. “I'm coming to get you iddy biddy bitch.”

He jumped, thrilled by the fall and eager to claim his prize.

B
liss didn't have a gun, so X-ray insisted she travel in the “middle of the herd.” That was the reason she didn't see the head of a man protruding from a rubble pile until the slave stopped to check if he was alive. They'd found two other guards and two marauders trying to drag their broken bodies from the roof collapse. The slaves had dispatched them with a minimum of firepower.

“So is he dead or what?” asked a man with a spade.

“He's blinking,” X-ray said.

“Our turn, then,” said the man. Two slaves with picks pressed their way forward.

Bliss turned from the ghastly beheading, accomplished with powerful thrusts of the trenching tools and met with a single word of approbation—“Good!”—from one of the others.

Signaling for quiet, X-ray led them into a part of the city that looked familiar to her. Daylight seeped into the crannies, and she saw large canvas drapes about fifty yards away. She remembered the last time she'd been in the Mayor's bedroom: her attempt to reclaim her mother's M–16 from him had failed, but not before she tried to scratch out his eyes—and yanked his scrotum so hard he'd sent her to Section R.

Now, X-ray led a contingent of four slaves that stormed the chamber. Bliss, trailing behind, heard him yell, “Freeze or you're dead.”

She rushed in to see the white guard holding the Mayor in front of him. X-ray and the others had stopped the pair only feet from Ananda, who pointed a gun at them. Bliss was so happy to see her sister that she could have wept. But as soon as Ananda saw X-ray, she pointed the gun at
him.

“No!” Bliss shouted, jumping forward to block her sister's aim. “He's a good guy.”

Ananda brightened at the sight of Bliss, but then said, “Good guy! Look at my goddamn legs. He hurt me.” Her legs bore numerous cuts and were coated in dried blood.

Bliss moved toward her little sister as the armed slaves backed the guard into the bureau. With four guns pointed at him, he surrendered the knife. They tied his hands behind his back. Others dragged the dead African aside.

“You're right,” Bliss said to Ananda. “He did hurt you. But he didn't kill you, and he's on our side. It's another one of those squirrely deals.” She figured her sister would understand. After all, Burned Fingers had saved Ananda's life—after violently abducting her.

“I'm really sorry,” X-ray said to Ananda as he checked the Mayor's binding. “I knew something was up, but I couldn't give anything away by giving you a break.”

Bliss gently peeled Ananda's fingers from the gun, a nicely weighted Colt single-action revolver. A real prize. “Whose is it?”

“
Mine,
now,” Ananda said pointedly.

“But before?”

“The guard's.”

“Sweet.” Bliss checked the load. Sweeter still.

“That's
my
gun,” Ananda insisted. “I got it. Not you.”

“How about you let me borrow it, and then I promise we'll talk to Mom, and whatever she says goes? And fix your pants.”

Ananda looked like she would have argued more, but reddened when she saw that her drawers were stuck down around her crotch.

Bliss walked up to the guard.

“Is he the one?” X-ray asked her.

“That's him.” As they'd made their way through the city, she told X-ray about Section R. The hairy-faced slave, Moore, had chimed in, saying he'd heard the guard bragging about turning her into a porn queen—a death that rivaled Wicca for cruelty.

Now X-ray directed the slaves to move themselves and the Mayor away from Bliss and the white guy. “Let her do this. The guard's got it coming. If she needs help, she'll ask for it. Right?”

Bliss nodded, turning to the man who'd made her life so miserable. “Why were my sister's pants pulled down?”

He shrugged. “Talk to
him,
” the guard said, glancing at the Mayor.

“That is a lie,” the Mayor replied indignantly. “I told him to stop.”

“Ananda?”

“The guard!” her sister said, pointing defiantly to him.

“Get on the floor,” Bliss ordered the prisoner. The moment he hesitated, she shot out his knee. “Who the fuck do you think you're dealing with now?” she yelled at him. “Some girl you've got chained-up? Get
down
!”

The Mayor smiled, even with a rifle muzzle jammed under his chin.

Bliss watched the guard drop down.

“Let's try this again: Why were my sister's pants pulled down?”

When he didn't answer, she shot him in the crotch. He rolled screaming across the floor and crashed into the armoire. The chain hanging from the handle fell onto his face.

“I'll need that help now,” she said to X-ray. “Can you guys grab his arms and legs?”

Four of them helped themselves to a limb and dragged him to the middle of the floor. Bliss pinned the guard's head between her ankle bones, bent over and shot him between the eyes, certain that she was treating him more kindly than he'd planned to treat her.

She looked up at the Mayor, who stopped smiling and shook his head rapidly. “You heard your sister. It was not me. I told him to stop.”

“And that makes you a good guy? Because you didn't fuck a twelve-year-old? You just sell them to men who do?” Bliss shook with rage. “I hate you, you bastard.” She wanted to shoot him, too, but couldn't. She'd made a deal with X-ray, and he had kept his word.

She turned around and walked into Ananda's arms. When her sister hugged her, Bliss saw that a big section of her braid had been burned away. She could not bring herself to ask about it. Not now. It was enough that her sister was alive and still sane after the City of Shade.

She gave Ananda another squeeze and nodded at the twins, who had not moved from the armoire. They appeared thunderstruck. “Are they okay?” she asked.

“Not really,” Ananda replied.

The heavy chain on the floor caught Bliss's eye. “Did they lock you guys in there?”

“For a long time.”

“We need to get them out. We've all got to stick together.”

While they tended to the twins, the slaves surrounded the Mayor, drawing lots to see who would pluck out his eyes. There would be only two winners, and nobody wanted to lose.

“You guys do
not
want to see this,” Bliss said to the younger girls.

“They shouldn't do that to him,” Ananda said vehemently.

“Don't try telling them that,” Bliss said.

The men wrestled the Mayor to the ground. His screams might have reached all the way to the wrecking yard.

“Now what are we doing to do to him?” Moore asked jovially.

“Kill him,” several slaves shouted.

“Kill him,” quickly became a chant, which X-ray quieted with a command.

“He's not getting off that easy,” the slave leader said.

Bliss and Ananda led the twins away from the armoire, and everyone left the room. Two of the slaves gripped the Mayor's arms, guiding the moaning man brusquely. The slaves with guns walked point, or guarded the flanks. Bliss and a thick-necked, rifle-toting man covered the rear, with Ananda and the twins in front of them.

Morning had broken, but the torches were useful for peering into shadows. Moore spotted a man and raised his weapon to shoot. The target dropped down, but not so fast that Bliss failed to recognize Burned Fingers.

“Don't shoot!” she yelled. “That's— Wait, that's my
mom!”

Jessie had stepped from behind the marauder at the sound of her daughter's voice. Bliss and Ananda raced to her and the three of them embraced. Bliss found herself crying as hard as when she'd heard of her father's death. She was thinking of him, too, feeling both relief and grief.

Bliss looked at Burned Fingers then. She kept an impenetrable wall between them. Her dad was dead because of him, yet she knew her mother had survived because of the marauder. Another squirrelly deal.

“Thank you,” she managed to say. He nodded.

X-ray had stationed two guards to protect them during the reunion. Now, as they approached him, he was briefing the others about the new arrivals.

“. . . and then they were both in the pit getting ready to fight the dragons when this one,” he pointed to Bliss, “jumped in to help them.” The slaves stared at her in open awe, which X-ray must have noticed. “That's right,” he added with a touch of pride. “She jumped into that thing and grabbed a sword, and stood back-to-back with her folks. So don't go shooting up this family.”

Folks? Family?
Bliss wanted to scream, and at any other time she would have. Now, she just winced.

Burned Fingers walked up to the Mayor, staring at his empty eye sockets, then turned to X-ray. “What are you going to do with him?”

“I'd like to feed him to his goddamn dragons.”

“I might be able to help you.”

S
am assembled the caravaners behind a dune, out of sight of the city, and handed Bessie a .32 with a wooden grip. The big-boned redhead and her dark-haired friend, Teresa, had volunteered to escort the children to the wrecking yard. Bessie had said she knew how to shoot. She certainly appeared to know how to handle the semiautomatic, one of the precious few still working. Sam watched her pop the clip to check the load, snap it back into place, and rack the slide. Ready to shoot in about three seconds.

“On the fourth row,” Sam explained to the two young woman, “you'll see a truck trailer. It's the only one in the whole yard. Knock three times, then twice. Helena's inside. Tell her Sam sent you and that everything's going well. She'll take over from there.”

They trooped off with the kids, and Sam turned to the adult caravaners, a few more of them women than men. “We're going set mines to bring down this end of the city. Then we're spilling gas everywhere we see or hear survivors in the rubble. We burn them to death,” she said emphatically, waiting for any objections.

“Six of our people are in there,” said another redheaded woman, who identified herself as Maureen Gibbs.

“If we see them, we'll help them. But we have to press this extermination forward until it's done. We're doing this one section at a time, and then we move to the next one. We'll meet everybody blowing up the other end somewhere in the middle.”

Nobody had tried to flee the city since daybreak, but a squad from the wrecking yard still covered the perimeter.

“Why not just shoot the survivors?” asked Maureen's husband, Keffer.

“Because thanks to you guys, we have a lot more gas than bullets. And it's more effective. If one person's alive in the rubble, there's a good chance he's got a buddy or two down there with him.”

“Four of our kids are missing,” Maureen said.

“We're not shooting kids.”

“No, they're too valuable,” Maureen snapped.

Sam smacked Maureen's chest so hard she drove the woman backward two feet. “Get one thing straight: we're not them. We don't take kids to the Alliance
for any price.
And we're saving your lives
and
the lives of all your children.”

“I'm sorry,” Maureen offered. “It's been horrible. You don't know—”

“We
do
know.
I
know. That's why we're not taking prisoners, and the biggest mistake any of you can make is trying to stop us. They
all
die.”

“Okay,” Maureen said. “I'm really sorry.”

Sam saw nods of affirmation from everyone but the gracious African, whose head never moved. But neither did he object. She spotted a small cross burned into his chest, and figured he was religious. Maybe he'd just have to find his faith again later in the day, because now was the time to put hell to rest.

C
assie waited, and waited, to see if Jester could swim. She didn't think so. He hadn't jumped till she lured him into the water by standing on the rise in the middle that Miranda had pointed out. But if she was wrong, she knew she was dead.

“Drown,” she whispered.

But he surfaced in front of her with a gasp so shocking that she almost fell into the deeper water. He thrashed with a look of terror on his burned face. But she
could
see his face, which meant he could breathe.

Cassie pushed off the rise, swimming underwater, aided again by the current. But she ran out of air quickly—panic burned it up like a furnace—and had to struggle to take another quick breath.

In this uncertain manner, rising just enough to breathe when she had to, she moved away from the rise where Jester now stood. Had she looked back, she would have realized that the moment he jumped, she should have taken off, rather than marking so clearly where he could find footing. But she'd kept her head above water for as long as possible because she feared drowning—or getting sucked underground where the river disappeared for miles.

She felt the current strengthening, pushing her toward the gap that could kill her, and struggled mightily to a smooth round boulder just to the left of the dark opening. Hanging onto it, she glanced back and saw Jester hurling himself toward her, floundering right away.

“Drown, drown,”
she whispered again.

Cassie pulled herself onto the rock, feeling safer just as his hand rose from the water and gripped her foot. She jerked hard. He let go, but only because he needed both hands to keep from getting swept away himself.

She climbed halfway up the narrow chiseled steps, breath tightening as he pulled himself from the water with frightening speed and scrambled after her. She was so petrified at finding him gaining ground that for several seconds she didn't hear Miranda or see her outstretched hand.