Carry the Flame (45 page)

When she did, she reached up, and saw Steph trying to help, too. She was so grateful she could have cried. They hauled her up as Jester tried to grab her again. Then the older girls rolled a lethal-looking boulder at him, but it bounced to the side and landed in the water, harmlessly splashing him.

While Cassie tried to catch her breath, the other girls hurled rocks at Jester, hitting him several times, hard. But to the terror of all three of them, he not only weathered the barrage, but scuttled up the vast steps even faster.

Miranda dragged Cassie to her feet and they all ran toward the garden cavern. Cassie felt like a sluggard compared to the older girls. Miranda stayed by her side, but urged Steph to run ahead. When Steph hesitated, Miranda shouted, “If you can do it, then
do
it.”

Run fast?
Cassie knew she couldn't have at that moment, but she saw Steph take off.

When they reached the cavern moments later, Miranda yelled at her: “Now
you
go! Run for your life.”

The older girl turned toward the onrushing Jester, reached into a wide bed of tall tomato plants and grabbed two rocks.

“Come with me!” Cassie shouted at her. “Go!”

Miranda screamed without turning back.

She couldn't leave Miranda here, she thought. Not by herself, with nothing but a couple of stones. Dizzy with fear, Cassie ran to the bed, planning to grub for rocks, but found a small pile right away. They'd been left there in the meticulously tended garden. After retrieving as many as she could in two hands, she returned and stood, pale and trembling, next to Miranda.

When the older girl threw her rocks, Jester slowed and ducked. She missed, but Cassie threw, too, and hit him in the leg. It didn't appear to have any more effect than stoning him back at the plunge pool had, but then he took another step toward them and Steph jumped from behind the tomato plants and drove a punji stick into his neck. She did it with such force that the sharpened bone went through Jester's body and stuck out on the other side.

He staggered, spun around and clawed at the wound. Spotting Steph, his eyes widened. “You! You!” he gasped at the mute girl.

She wasn't silent anymore: “Fucker!” she shrieked, pulling another sharpened bone from the bed and ramming it like a spear into his gut.

Miranda dragged Steph away from Jester when he started to fall forward. The girl kept screaming at him as he jerked on the ground, spasms that ended seconds later.

“He hurt me!” Steph screamed, sobbing so hard her whole body shook. “He . . . hurt . . . me . . . like . . . nobodyshouldev erbehurt,” she finished in a furious torrent of words.

She dropped to the ground and curled up, wailing with such anguish that tears sprang to Cassie's eyes.

Miranda wrapped herself around Steph and rocked her, whispering, “It's okay now.”

“No, no it's not,” Cassie said, gripping Miranda's shoulder.

The girl sat up, staring at Jester.

“No, over here,” Cassie screamed, pointing behind her to a Komodo dragon. The beast had a grotesque neck wound and mangled leg, but was dragging himself toward them.

“Oh my God! Get up, Steph.” Miranda pulled the grieving girl to her feet, and the three ran.

But Tonga never even looked at them. The reptile trudged up to the meat that didn't move, stripping off most of Jester's back and a buttock with his powerful jaws.

A tortured cry rose in the cavern. The girls paused and looked back, watching Jester make a feeble attempt to push the Komodo away. The giant lizard ripped off Jester's arm with his teeth.

M
orning sun burned by the time Teresa and Bessie led the children to the top of a dune that bordered the wrecking yard. Most of them remembered seeing the stacks of smashed-up cars on their march to the City of Shade. When they looked back now, only a middle section of the city still stood. Dark smoke billowed from all parts of a huge rubble pile that had been a massive structure just hours ago.

Several of the children said they could still hear screams, but Teresa gaily insisted they were listening to the souls of birds singing. Bessie agreed, whistling beautifully until none of the children heard any other sounds at all.

Hot and weary, they descended the dune to the fourth row. When Teresa spotted the trailer door hanging open, she asked Bessie to stay back with the kids.

“Only if you'll take the gun,” Bessie said, trying to hand her the .32.

“You keep it. You have them,” Teresa replied, casting a glance at the line of children.

Bessie shook her head. “We haven't see anything for two hours.
Take it.
It's ready to go. Or let me handle this instead.”

“I'll go.” Teresa took the pistol, feeling ultimately responsible, as she always had, for the safety of any children in her care.

She approached the trailer warily, slowly opening the door all the way. Bright morning light swept across the sand that had gathered over years on the wooden floor, exposing the body of a woman who had been savagely knifed to death.

Teresa backed away, then thought to latch the door to keep scavengers out. She didn't know the form they took in the desert, but there were always scavengers.

“We can't wait in there,” she said softly to Bessie, handing the gun back. “Someone's been killed. It's really bad. We've got to find a safe place for these kids, as far from here as we can get and still be in the yard.”

In an adventurous voice, Teresa said to the children, “Let's go all the way out to the end of these cars so we can see just how big this place really is.”

“Why? What's wrong?” asked one of the three Gibbs kids, as flame-haired as her mother.

“Nothing's wrong,” Teresa said.

“Then why did you jump away from that door like you got
bit
?” the girl asked, sounding as peckish as her mom.

“I just thought it would be nice to be outside after being cooped-up in that pit all the time.”

“You're lying.”

“Would you please just be nice?” Teresa said to the girl. She could have wept, after what she'd just seen, and now this?

They had started back up the row when they heard a loud engine. Teresa looked for a place to hide the kids, but it was too late: a motorcycle with a sidecar slowed at the end of the row. The driver looked at them and turned.

“You can put the gun down,” Teresa said to Bessie. “That's Bliss's friend on the back.”

The driver braked. His leg had bled through his pants, and Teresa glimpsed an S burned into his brow. She wondered what that meant.

“Who is he?” Bessie asked, the gun by her side.

Before Teresa could confess her ignorance, Jaya climbed gingerly off the bike. His leg was bloody, too, but he ignored her inquiring gaze and pointed in the direction of the city, asking what was going on.

“Who's he?” Teresa asked, glancing at the driver.

“Esau,” Jaya replied. “He was a slave at the Alliance.” Then he introduced him to her and Bessie and told them about the Russians.

“If they didn't get you, what happened?” Teresa stared openly at their wounds.

“The guy who owned this bike is what happened to us,” Jaya said. “But we killed him. Now will you tell me what's going on over there? Is Bliss okay? The others?”

“Everyone in the pit got out, and they're fighting. But I don't know about Bliss. No one's seen her. The people from here,” Teresa glanced at the stacks of wrecked cars, “are blowing the place up.”

“I've got to go there,” Jaya said to Esau.

“Tell them we're in the last row, not the fourth one,” Teresa said. Then she whispered, “We'll be hiding. A woman was murdered in the trailer. That'll mean something to them.”

T
he Mayor, blind and bound and still moaning, tried to bolt when he heard Chunga. But without his eyes, he wasn't as agile or as fast as he'd been in the tunnel, and he never broke free of the furious slaves pushing him toward his office. The starving Chunga was still thrashing around behind the door, as if the beast sensed the meat just beyond the barrier.

“How the hell are we going to get him in there without getting eaten ourselves?” X-ray asked Burned Fingers.

“Chunga might do the work for us,” the marauder replied. “He stuck his head right through a wall when Jessie and I were in there, and he would have eaten us alive if we'd given him half a chance. So let's give him an opening and see what he makes of it.”

He and the slaves had escorted Jessie and the girls safely out of the city before forcing the Mayor to his office. X-ray told Jessie to alert the wrecking yard people about the men still fighting for them under the last section of roof.

“The only question I have,” Burned Fingers went on, “is if you guys have enough firepower to kill the beast once he does his job. You'll never get a heart shot in that space. And keep in mind that I need some ammo from you.”

“We've got plenty,” X-ray assured him. “We've been collecting guns and bullets at every turn. We'll fill him so full of lead he won't be able to lift his mangy ass, plus he'll be weighted down with a couple hundred pounds of him.” The slave nodded at the Mayor.

Burned Fingers found it notable that after trying to flee, the Mayor had not resorted to begging for his life, sparing them any maudlin speeches. The marauder liked to think that when his time came, he'd also handle himself with dignity.

Opening the wall, he realized, even a little, was risky, but not as dicey as opening the door. The tactic seemed to work: As soon as a slave pounded through the drywall, the dragon's head exploded into the hallway, craning his neck as far as he could.

X-ray and the other slaves pushed the Mayor toward his pet. The beast chomped the man's torso, ripping off a large chunk of his chest and back in a savage swipe. The Mayor fell bellowing to the floor in a flood of blood as the beast ate his flesh.

When Chunga's meal tried to crawl away, the lizard looked down, as if sizing up his prey in the most literal sense, and clamped his jaws fully around the man, lifting him up as Tonga had the young woman in the circus wagon.

The Mayor's head protruded from one side of the beast's mouth. His screams weakened; his lungs had been severely punctured. Burned Fingers thought the Mayor might catch a break with a quick beheading, but the tyrant wasn't that lucky. The reptile jerked him around in his mouth until the Mayor's head and upper body disappeared into the beast's long throat. His legs, like the young woman's, kicked, but not for long.

The slaves stared as if struck. Only Chunga's swallowing violated a daunting silence.

Burned Fingers leaned toward X-ray and said he'd be taking his leave. The slave handed him a pouch full of bullets.

“These work?” X-ray asked.

Burned Fingers eyed a shell. “Perfect. I'll bring you back whatever's left.”

“Thanks.” X-ray clasped the marauder's shoulder. “It's not going to be easy, but what you're doing is a good thing.”

Burned Fingers headed off as the first shots tore into the dragon. A surprisingly charitable impulse had him hoping the Mayor was dead and wouldn't find himself half alive in the throat of a dead beast.

When he reached the large cell with the bone bars, he saw a staggering display of madness. The diseased women, undoubtedly incited by the violence all around them—and the virus's own demonic instigations—were brutalizing one another or themselves. Only the straggly-haired teen came forward.

She slipped her arms through the bars as rage boiled dangerously close and threatened to sweep her away at any second. But this time she wasn't begging for food.

Burned Fingers nodded and glanced at his gun. He had the one bullet left in the cylinder. He wouldn't reload just yet. He would give the girl something that had been saved, even if it was a lethal remnant of the long ago.

He cocked the hammer and raised the revolver. She gave him what might have been a smile. His burned index and middle fingers curled around the trigger, and he wept for the first time since finding the massacred bodies of his wife and son in a burned-out basement in Baltimore.

And then he did what had to be done, for the grateful girl and all the others, just as he had so many times before.

Chapter Twenty

N
oon. Small fires still burned across much of the destroyed city, but the last wave of the extermination had slowed. The screams were quieting.

Jessie had not taken part in the systematic incineration of the wounded and injured. That task was directed by a woman named Sam, and carried out by people ruthlessly reclaiming the desert so they might survive in the caverns below it.

Instead, Jessie and her oldest friend, Solana, had spent the morning accounting for everyone on the caravan. Astonishingly, only Maul had been killed. The other losses—Erik's dog, Razzo, and a Pixie-bob kitten—paled so much by comparison that Jessie felt more gratitude than grief when she considered their absence.

The cavern people had not fared so well. They'd lost three men, and a mother who'd been murdered by a guard, who then tried to kill little Cassie. She said his name was Jester. Esau reported that a guard by that name had been ordered by the Mayor to find Cassie, under penalty of death. The guard had, indeed, died—at the hands of a cavern girl and a mortally wounded dragon.

What a way to grow up, Jessie thought.

As soon as Solana headed for the caverns, where all the children had been taken, a slave named X-ray ran up to Jessie.

“I have to apologize for something that happened with Bliss under my watch.” He told her about letting Jessie's oldest daughter execute a guard who had brutalized her in Section R and tried to rape Ananda. “I had no idea she'd just turned fifteen. I just found out this morning. Your kid claimed the right to kill him, and I figured she was of age. I never would have—”

“It's okay,” Jessie interrupted. “I'm just glad you were there to help her and Ananda.” The guard who died was the same thug who delighted in bragging to her about what he'd done to Bliss.

“They're just kids,” X-ray said, shaking his head.

He returned to the ruins, helping other freed slaves open a stairway to a huge supply of wood stored underground. Pyres needed to be built.

Jessie gazed at her daughter, carrying rubble to men who were building an open, cross-shaped tomb in front of the smoking ruins. It was easy for her to see how Bliss could be mistaken for an adult. Her older daughter was tall, strong, and deeply responsible. Nonetheless, Jessie waved her over.

Bliss jogged up, and her mother asked how she was doing.

“I saw X-ray talking to you, Mom. Don't worry. I'm fine. I wouldn't be if I'd let him live, but he wasn't my first kill. Remember that. And I got my hands on that bastard right after he tried to rape Ananda. No way I was going to let anybody else kill him.”

Her father's daughter,
a little voice said to Jessie.
Mother's, too,
it added a moment later. But it saddened her to consider how Bliss had come of age. Minutes ago X-ray had said, “They're just kids.” Jessie wasn't sure that was true about Bliss. She feared her girl's youth vanished on the day she learned that her father had died, when she'd beaten her fists against her belly and might have pounded the last of her childhood to bits. Jessie wished she could soften her with love, but the loss of innocence seemed as irretrievable as the loss of life itself.

“So you're okay?” she asked.

“I'm getting by. I found out they gave Jaya to the Alliance.” Bliss turned from Jessie. “I've got to stay busy.”

But she never made it back to her work detail. A motorcycle roared toward them, and a young man on the back waved madly at Bliss. She started running, screaming Jaya's name over and over, abundant and fervent with a life she had thought was lost. She reached for him long before her arms finally embraced the young man she loved so fiercely.

Jessie didn't believe Bliss could ever remain unaffected by all that she'd endured, but this had to help: her daughter and Jaya pressed their foreheads together, as if to let their eyes reclaim the heart of the other, and then they kissed.

She'll soften,
Jessie assured herself.

Her gaze settled on the men building the tomb. It was for the bodies of the Russians killed trying to escape the city. Sam's idea. Jessie agreed that it could put an end to the Alliance. For years, after a battle the zealots would gouge crosses into the skulls of their victims, then dump the bodies into cross-shaped tombs open to scavengers of all types. It was a final insult to an enemy—and the Alliance's most notorious signature.

The Russians had been just as merciless with the Alliance allies who resisted their recent takeover of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Sam figured the Russians would view the murder of their advance party—and the flaunting of their dead comrades in an open grave—as revenge, and launch an equally vicious attack on Alliance headquarters at the old military base. Who else could have murdered their men? Now that the City of Shade had been leveled, its inhabitants massacred, all the cavern people could disappear into their Eden. They no longer needed to turn the wrecking yard into a Potemkin village. And the Russians weren't likely to meet much resistance when they unleashed their vengeance at the base. The Alliance was short of fuel, food, and mercenaries, many of whom had been crushed or otherwise killed in the past eighteen hours.

“She's going to be all right.”

Jessie started when Burned Fingers spoke. She'd been staring so intently at the transformation of rubble into a tomb that she hadn't heard his approach.

He nodded at Bliss, who was looking at Jaya's wounded leg.

“I hope so,” Jessie said. “What she's been through—what all of them have been through—would be a lot for anyone, and they're so young.”

“Not that young. They're not kids like we were. The world wouldn't let them. That's the biggest crime.”

He always surprised her when he said something like that. Endeared himself, too, which amazed her most of all.

“How long do you think we can tempt fate by leaving our vehicles up here, if we take a break in the caverns?” she asked him. “We could all use some R and R.”

“Three days. That would be safe, and that's assuming the Alliance could even muster a force at this point, which I doubt.”

“The Russians?”

“Even longer. But they're definitely on their way. They didn't send an advance party this far for nothing.”

“We'll have to wangle an invitation.” Jessie looked at Sam, who was still overseeing the last of the extermination. “She's a real iron lady.”

“She's had a tough go of it. Her husband was killed last night right in front of her. And her girl was taken by the Alliance a few years ago and murdered when she tried to escape. That's what I picked up from one of the guys on the work crew. To me, she seems like someone just barely hanging on.”

“I didn't know.” Jessie closed her eyes for a moment and took a steadying breath. Then she walked over to Sam, who was studying the small pitiless fires with an unwavering gaze.

“I just heard,” Jessie said to her. “I'm sorry. I lost my own husband a few weeks ago.”

Sam's face cracked, and then the woman who had appeared so stalwart—“a real iron lady”—crumpled.

Jessie caught her, but the sudden weight of accumulating grief brought them both to their knees. Jessie held her tightly, feeling Sam's throbbing pain as clearly as she saw the smoke horrors still clinging to the sky.

S
am and the others did invite the caravaners to stay for R and R, welcoming them to a wondrous world of whimsical rock formations and stunning colors sharply at odds with the blanched desert above them.

They flocked to the clear-flowing river right away, weaving through a forest of turquoise-colored stalagmites and stalactites. Jessie watched adults and children alike smile, most for the first time in weeks. They bathed and played in the water and ate fresh food, before helping to clear away the detritus of battle that had reached all the way down there.

They started with the engorged body of the dead Komodo, flushing it from the caverns through the opening in the plunge pool.

Then nine-year-old Denton announced that he knew something else “really big” that had to go. He led them to the punji stick cavern where he had hidden after being separated from Miranda and Steph in the dark. The black-haired boy pointed to a corner where a large man had crashed through the ceiling and died.

Burned Fingers identified the body as belonging to the frizzy-haired marauder named Pie. After he provided an unexpurgated obituary, that body was flushed from the plunge pool as well.

But a solemn service was held for Maul; Miranda's mom, Helena; Yurgen; and two other cavern men. Each body was laid on a separate pyre.

Sam, still reeling from grief, spent most of her time with Miranda. Without a word having been spoken, the girl blended into Sam's family, along with Cassie. Both girls had lost their mothers to murder.

The littlest caravaner felt torn by her decision to stay with the cavern people, and cried at the prospect of never seeing Ananda, M-girl, Teresa, or any of her other friends again. But with Maul's death, Cassie's last strong link to her annihilated home camp near the Gulf had been severed; Miranda, wounded by her own loss, became an older sister to her. Steph, as talkative as any other child now that she'd killed her abuser, Jester, rejoiced openly when she learned that a new playmate had joined their pack.

None of the other caravaners were invited to make their home in the wonderland beneath the desert, but neither Jessie nor any of the adults begrudged their hosts' resolve to keep their community small and sustainable; it could not have withstood an immediate doubling of its population without risking its survival. The cavern people did take in the seven slaves who had survived the attacks on the city and killed the Mayor, while the travelers accepted Esau into their ranks.

Only Ananda felt sick with envy over Cassie's good fortune, and only because an endless supply of freshwater to slake her thankless thirst seemed like the greatest bounty of all.

Sitting on the riverbank, Ananda told her mother that the Mayor said she had diabetes. “The kind that kills you.”

Jessie nodded and allowed that she and Hannah had also talked about that possibility. “But Hannah said those symptoms could be caused by other things, and she's a nurse. We just can't test for it anymore.”

“But he was sure, Mom.”

“He was sure about a lot of things, hon, and look at his city now.”

But Ananda never saw the rubble on the desert again. A day later Jessie and Burned Fingers consulted with Sam, and decided that sending the children north through the caverns, with the river's promise of water, would be safer than having them cross the Great American Desert—the Bloodlands, as the Mayor called it when he first took them captive. The caverns ended where the old Lake Michigan, now barren, once lapped at the shore. Even if the Alliance were defeated by enraged Russians, Jessie and Burned Fingers had heard from Esau that the mysterious Dominion was the real force that wanted all migration north stopped. The desert might prove treacherous yet again. Better to keep the children far from harm, even if it meant having them travel paths through millions of human bones.

So each boy and girl was outfitted with a rudimentary pack of dried fruit, vegetables, and smoked snake. They would have to hike about five miles each of the next forty days to rendezvous with the caravan at what had been the U.S.-Canadian border before the collapse. That would be a rigorous pace for the children, dictated as much by the caravan's speed as the amount of food the kids could carry. But it was feasible, according to Sam, who had debriefed two young men who had explored the entire length of the underground passage several years ago. She casually noted to Jessie that the pair had never returned from a second exploratory mission, though she added, “They probably moved on to the Arctic. They'd talked about that. You know how guys can be, especially at that age. They're always looking for something better.”

Jessie could not imagine what could be better than the caverns surrounding them.

Sam's only cautionary note concerned several stretches of darkness in the cavern route—one that extended for more than ten miles—where the hikers would need torches. But the cavern ceilings had split apart in numerous places, assuring natural light for much of the journey.

“They'll be a lot safer down here,” Sam advised.

Safer, in no small measure, because they would not be anywhere near the fuel in the tanker truck, a nearly priceless prize for any takers.

Jessie, Burned Fingers, Bliss, Jaya, Esau, and Brindle would stick with the vehicles. Burned Fingers planned to ride the old Harley. Jaya would take over the wheel of the van, which would still ferry the three blind girls and the babies, along with most of the foodstuffs. Brindle would move up to the helm of the tanker.

Jessie, Bliss, and Ananda experienced a wrenching good-bye. The three hugged as tightly as they had after Bliss rescued her mother and sister at the Army of God by gunning down the sect's tyrannical leader. It agonized Jessie to let go of Ananda and watch her march off, but she consoled herself knowing the child would not suffer the hardships of the sun or have to fret over water for the duration of her trek. Hannah promised to keep a close eye on her health, and Augustus and the twins would also be nearby. M-girl and Imagi always stayed by Ananda's side, too. She would be watched over with great care by people who loved her dearly. And, though only twelve, Ananda had already proved her amazing mettle in battle.

An hour later Jessie and the other caravaners climbed the rope ladder to the blistering desert, prepared to resume their journey to the promise of verdant land, fertile farms, and freshwater in the Arctic. She eyed the ruins and tried to tell herself that the City of Shade would be the last terror they'd have to face, that the desert would yield peaceably to them from now on. But she could not put aside Esau's warnings about the Dominion's vicious determination to stop anyone from crossing the Bloodlands.