Carry the Flame (7 page)

He stopped at an imposing steel gate before slumping over the teardrop-shaped gas tank, much as he'd had to escape the ravine. Closing his eyes, he rested his shredded cheek against the tarnished metal, fully exposing the knife wound, wretched bites, and claw marks on his shoulder blade and both sides of his spine.

Countless dust storms had shaded the white brick entrance, and letters had fallen from a sign that once greeted soldiers and their families:
WE C ME T FORT MC AU EY
. Small, less heavily dusted ovals hinted at the insignia of the units that had been based there, leaving a gap-toothed grimace on a dead institution still hated by believers for permitting sodomites and mud people, Muslims and Sikhs, Catholics and Jews, and Pagans and apostates of all kinds to rise in the ranks, to actually
command
white followers of the True Faith. And then the fallen, wicked and wounded, wondered why a nation so cursed and abominable, a world so reviled by the righteous, had been harrowed by the Lord's sharpest plow.

Hunt had been present on the morning six years ago when His Piety swept his robed arm toward the dirty brick and said, “Let it crumble! Let it rot like the temples of antiquity, the heathen horrors of Thebes, Jerusalem, and Rome. No rag of religion was too filthy for them.”

Now, briefly rested, he lifted up and saw that the gate hadn't opened. “Help,” he yelled, sinking back to the gas tank without finishing his plea. He spotted the head of a Pixie-bob in the fuselage staring up at him, its body sheared off in his mad flight from the pack. Hunt kicked the face weakly and almost dumped the bike when his legs began to buckle.

He wheeled into a shadow before recognizing that it fell from the ninety foot cross that rose above the base, and could be seen and venerated for miles. The last of the oxy-fuel had been used to weld it entirely from broken, burned, and otherwise useless weapons—rifles, handguns, cannon barrels, bayonets, bazookas, and tank parts. Even the face of Christ had been commanded from helmets, the body from the twisted tread of a blown up Abrams tank. The tortured looking figure appeared eerily real and full of wrath.

True Belief cannot be beat.
Hunt repeated those words like a prayer, and they sustained him for another minute till a
creak
lured his eyes back to the gate. Five slaves, chained together, pressed their emaciated frames against the thick metal bars. Once, the gate had cooperated at the touch of a finger. Now it ran on the raw efforts of men too feeble-spirited for True Belief, who lived out the last weeks or months of their wastrel lives in servitude to the Alliance, each of their brows crudely and quickly tattooed upon arrival with an inky S—the black Curse of Cain for those whose white skin tried to hide their dark cause.

He stood, straddling his Harley to push it past the infidels, his back burning and red as flame. He found the kick stand and staggered off the bike. One of many guards patrolling the walls caught him and held him while another rushed forward.

They hurried him from the entrance, his body slipping from the weak foundation of his feet, fully weighting the arms of the men beside him. They passed the slave quarters, once a mesh run for the base's canine corps. He asked if Damocles had returned—or thought he had; the guards didn't answer, and he wasn't sure he'd heard his own voice.

He took air to try again when two more guards ran up with a stretcher and then scurried off with him. “My back!” he screamed from the sudden pressure of lying on the rock embedded inches above his buttocks. The guards rolled him on his side, giving him a view of two dozen slaves shackled to the spokes of a massive wheel whose hub was a turbine rescued from a dam. Their chests were chained to long steel girders that once held power lines for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and they trudged in circles in twelve hour shifts to draw water from a well. Teams of guards drove them with whips, truncheons, and the constant threat of machetes.

Concentric stone paths had been built around the hub after generations of slaves wore shin-deep ditches in the dirt. The hard surface added only more misery to their high mortality. Nearly every day a slave succumbed to heat, exhaustion, or hunger, hanging from his chains like a rag, bare feet bleeding on the long reddened rocks until hauled away for a proper beheading.

From what sounded like a great distance, an urgent voice said he might die and should be taken to the infirmary; but a commander insisted that His Piety wanted to see him in the Great Chapel.

Hunt closed his eyes, certain that God Almighty had saved him for a hallowed death; and though filled with agony and pain, he glimpsed the white imminence of heaven, regretting only the loss of Damocles and the base in all its splendor—worship, water, food, slaves, and a bounty of girls who would bloom into wives. The most anointed beauties were culled every two months from stock at the fortresses pledged to the Alliance. He was to take a bride within a year. While most of the time the Lord's work would keep him far from her—and forced to confirm the depravity of soul dead men—he would vow a blessed fidelity to whatever female His Piety arranged for him. The need to procreate was paramount. It was in the Bible, and often on his lips as an unbidden reminder.

The guards carted him past rusting cyclone cages packed with old men in filthy white robes, survivors of the attack on Zekiel's compound. But they'd failed to protect their leader, an esteemed man of God and prophet. Neither did they protect their gas, girls, and the sacred trust the Alliance had placed in them. Each would be chained to a witch and burned slowly to death, their ashes falling together to force their souls into hell. Every burning at the base included a witch, and many were to be found, cunning creatures spreading Wicca, for no God of man would abide such a curse, such a dark seed of sex and deviltry. It was a lesson to the men of the Alliance that no price—surely not earthly life—was as painful as eternal death on the arms of a Pagan.

As the guards ferried him up the steps of the Great Chapel, he thought of the sodomite and could not help but wish the boy were dying, not he. Even more grievously, he worried that the Lord world banish him to hell for failing to bring His righteousness down on the naked sinner.

But I was going to, dear God, and You must know it's true. You know my heart. I cut him once and I had the knife
in my hand.

He forced his eyes open and squinted at the marble steps, embedded mica glinting on a path as hard and bright and shiny as his faith.

“Water,” he called. His Piety would want him to tell what he'd learned, and his throat had known only red sweat for hours.

A guard gave him a bota made of black hide. A trickle washed his hollow belly and gave him the strength, after a pause, to swallow three more times before resting the water by his side.

For the first time since the base entrance, a shadow fell across him, opening his eyes fully. Cooler air settled on his skin, and he saw another familiar cross—golden and gleaming—filling the broad space behind the chapel altar. Just below it, suffused by the glow, His Piety, round and bald and bearded, sat on an elaborately carved bishop's chair rescued long ago from a cathedral. The tall back rose above the prophet, whose wide bottom reclined on burgundy velvet padding, his arms on burled walnut rests. On both sides of him stood the Elders of True Belief, six men in white gowns as stained from use as their skin had been darkened by the sun. They formed a daunting V that received Hunt on the stretcher.

“Stand in the presence of the Lord,” His Piety ordered.

The guards hoisted Hunt by his arms; he still could not find his footing.

His Piety nodded approval and spoke to him in a low voice. “Tell me what you found.”

“Damocles? Did he come back?” Hunt gasped.

His Piety shook his head solemnly, working his jaw. A nut? Hunt wondered. He favored them, crushing a precious reserve with the three teeth that hadn't rotted from his braces, cemented into place a month before the collapse.

In the first days of the rebellion, the wires protected his mouth during a vicious beating by infidels who tried to raid his church—widely accused of hoarding. His Piety decided to keep his braces because he expected more battles with rebels, and added protection of any kind felt like a wise idea to Frank Louch, as he was known before the visions. Later, orthodontic tools weren't available; a lone attempt to remove the braces with pliers loosened a tooth, but not the wires. So they stayed on, a sign of privilege that he hid with silence until the sanctuary of the base was won.

But without proper care, most of his teeth shriveled to blackened nubs and cracked apart, leaving small decayed chunks to clutter the wires. His suffering continued for years, pain that he offered up to the Father so many times that he was forced to recognize his own sainthood.

His most prominent survivor was a dark tusk that protruded from his lips and attested to the original need. He tried to keep his few teeth and wires clean, causing the latter to flash strangely in the mote-stirred streams of sunlight that flowed into the chapel. His mouth looked like a cage from which vicious prisoners had escaped.

His Piety stopped chewing. “If you sent your dog, you found the gas.”

“I did, His Piety.”

“Tell me where you saw it.”

He glanced at the black bota, asking permission with his eyes, which His Piety granted, pursing his lips. Hunt sipped, and with his throat refreshed, told His Piety the location of the tanker and van.

“Was Burned Fingers still with them?”

“I don't know a Burned Fingers.”

“You must. The one with burned fingers? He's in his fifties, gray hair. Shaves.”

Shaves?
Now he was certain he didn't know him; he'd met only one man who shaved, a trader of iron scrap rumored to have died in his sleep last year, a fate bestowed by the Lord on so few.

“You're gone from the base too much if you don't know about Burned Fingers.”

“His Piety, they stopped me before I could get close.” His words came quickly, and he felt the strength that a challenge often gave him, especially when His Piety questioned his heavy travel.

“Stopped you? From what?” the prophet asked, as if he knew what had occupied him.

“From taking prisoners for you.” He paused and looked into His Piety's blue eyes, mustering all his strength to speak clearly: “A demon.”

His Piety rose from the cathedra. The loss of formality startled Hunt, and he expected to be struck or thrown to the marble for his failure to bring back the demon. But instead His Piety leaned so close that Hunt had to struggle not to turn from his breath.

“Demon?” His Piety asked.

“Yes, His Piety. It was just like you said. A demon. A beast. That's what I saw.”

He began with the black skin and dark eyes, noses and lips, arms, legs—all the notices of normalcy—before he said, “And two heads.”

His Piety's eyes widened. Hunt struggled to raise his right hand, bloodied by those savage cats, and extended his index and middle fingers, like the sinners who once professed their love of a false peace; but this shaky V formed a sacred oath: “From
one
body.”

Silence. Barely a breath.

His Piety studied Hunt. “I have seen such a demon in my worship. I am not surprised.” He lifted his gaze to the band of sunlight right above him, as if to the risen trove of Christ. “Dear God, I am so humbled to be honored, once again, by Your gift of prophecy. Please grant me strength for such a sacred burden, and the courage to remain a strong vessel for Your divine message.”

He returned his eyes to Hunt. “The two-headed beast is a vile portent from the ashes of Hell.”

“I found the demon covered in ash.
Crawling
in it.”

“As I saw, as I saw.” His Piety sounded pained, sickened. The Elders looked on him with concern. One took his arm as if he feared the prophet would falter.

In a reverential whisper, Hunt described the demon's nakedness, hard haunches, and long African legs, a wholly faithful rendering; yet his increasing breathlessness and awe—his repeated emphasis on finding the two-headed beast crawling from the hot ash “with cinders alive on that black skin”—drew a consuming stare from His Piety and frequent nods from the Elders. Hunt's own skin came alive as if startled by demon breath, or the cool quiet of hushed angels—who could tell amid such madness? But it was real,
real
as sin and blood and lust.

And the sensation that coursed through him, that imbued him with a lightness of being he'd never known, also lessened the weight on his feet. He could have stood unsupported by the guards, but they were so stunned by his affirmation of evil—by revelations rarely accorded such lowly servants of the faith—that they took no note of the miracle between them: his sudden strength from the provocation of an evil distillate, dauntless enough to violate God's earth in material guise.

His wounds felt like they were closing, the hacked bones in his back healing. The pain grew most assuredly soft and pliant, letting him stand straight and raise his eyes to the cross, to feel in its purity all that could save him. As much as the heathens bloodied his body, their wanton violence was necessary—maybe even ordained by God—to forge in him a greater will for the fight to come. He saw all this in a vision, though not so blessed as the heavenly language known to His Piety, but sharply etched and filled with the calling that had long claimed him.

He felt the chapel teeming with spirits, a gathering of good, a gathering of evil, a cavalcade of grace and hate and—always—godly wonder.

His Piety moved to the cross, bowed his head till his beard splayed on his chest, and prayed aloud. His importunate words filled the chapel. The Elders of True Belief flanked him, his entreaty now their own.

The prophet raised his hands, and the billowy sleeves of his gold-braided gown cascaded to his elbows. “A demon has arisen from the depths of hell. Of this we can be sure. But why does it have two heads. Why?” He turned to look at them, not for an answer because his eyes never beckoned, but to pause, perhaps to consider.