Parable of the Sower (36 page)

“What’d you think they were?”

“I didn’t have a chance to think about them. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Harry, did you guys strip the dead?”

“Yeah.” He gave me a thin smile. “We got another gun—a .38. I put some stuff in your pack from the ones you killed.”

“Thank you. I don’t know that I can carry my pack yet. Maybe Bankole—”

“He’s already got it on his cart. Let’s go.”

We headed out toward the road.

“Is that how you do it?” Grayson Mora asked, walking next to me. “Whoever kills takes?”

“Yes, but we don’t kill unless someone threatens us,” I said. “We don’t hunt people. We don’t eat human flesh. We fight together against enemies. If one of us is in need, the rest help out. And we don’t steal from one another,
ever.”

“Emery said that. I didn’t believe her at first.”

“Will you live as we do?”

“…yeah. I guess so.”

I hesitated. “So what else is wrong? I can see that you don’t trust us, even now.”

He walked closer to me, but did not touch me. “Where’d that white man come from?” he demanded.

“I’ve known him all my life,” I said. “He and I and the others have kept one another alive for a long time, now.”

“But…him and those others, they don’t feel anything. You’re the only one who feels.”

“We call it sharing. I’m the only one.”

“But they… You…”

“We help each other. A group is strong. One or two people are easier to rob and kill.”

“Yeah.” He looked around at the others. There was no great trust or liking in his expression, but he looked more relaxed, more satisfied. He looked as though he had solved a troubling puzzle.

Testing him, I let myself stumble. It was easy. I still had little feeling in my feet and legs.

Mora stepped aside. He didn’t touch me or offer help. Sweet guy.

I left Mora, went over to Allie, and walked with her for a while. Her grief and resentment were like a wall against me—against everyone, I suppose, but I was the one bothering her at the moment. And I was alive and her sister was dead, and her sister was the only family she had left, and why didn’t I just get the hell out of her face?

She never said anything. She just pretended I wasn’t there. She pushed Justin along in his carriage and wiped tears from her stony face now and then with a swift, whiplike motion. She was hurting herself, doing that. She was rubbing her face too hard, too fast, rubbing it raw. She was hurting me, too, and I didn’t need any more pain. I stayed with her, though, until her defenses began to crumble under a new wave of crippling grief. She stopped hurting herself and just let the tears run down her face, let them fall to her chest or to the broken blacktop. She seemed to sag under a sudden weight.

I hugged her then. I put my hands on her shoulders and stopped her half-blind plodding. When she swung around to face me, hostile and hurting, I hugged her. She could have broken free. I was feeling far from strong just then, but after a first angry pulling away, she hung on to me and moaned. I’ve never heard anyone moan like that. She cried and moaned there at the roadside, and the others stopped and waited for us. No one spoke. Justin began to whimper and Natividad came back to comfort him. The wordless message was the same for both child and woman:
In spite of your loss and pain, you aren’t alone. You still have people who care about you and want you to be all right. You still have family.

After a while, Allie and I let each other go. She isn’t a chatty woman, especially not in her pain. She took Justin from Natividad, smoothed his hair, and held him. When we began walking again, she carried him for a while, and I pushed the carriage. We walked together, and there didn’t seem to be any need to say anything.

On the road, there was a fair amount of foot traffic in both directions. Still, I worried that a big group like ours would be noticeable and locatable, no matter what. I worried because I didn’t understand the ways of our attackers.

Sometime later when Allie put Justin back into the carriage and took the carriage from me, I moved to walk with Bankole and Emery. Emery was the one who explained things to me, and she was the one who spotted the smoke from the first fire—no doubt because she was looking for it. We couldn’t tell for sure, but the fire looked as though it might have begun back as far as where we had stopped at the oak copse.

“They’ll burn everything,” Emery whispered to Bankole and me. “They won’t stop until they’ve used up all the ’ro they have. All night, they’ll be burning things. Things and people.”

’Ro, pyro, pyromania. That damned fire drug again.

“Will they follow us?” I asked.

She shrugged. “There are a lot of us, and you killed some of them. I think they’ll take their revenge on other, weaker travelers.” Another shrug. “To them we’re all the same. A traveler is a traveler.”

“So unless we get caught in one of their fires…”

“We’ll be okay, yeah. They hate everybody who isn’t them. They would have sold my Tori to get some more ’ro.”

I looked at her bruised, swollen face. Bankole had given her something for her pain. I was grateful for that, and half-angry at him for refusing to give me anything. He didn’t understand my numbness and grogginess back at the copse, and it disturbed him. Well at least that had faded away. Let him die three or four times and see how he feels. No, I’m glad he’ll never know how it feels. It makes no sense. That brief, endless agony, over and over. It makes no sense at all. I keep catching myself wondering how it is that I’m still alive.

“Emery?” I said, keeping my voice low.

She looked at me.

“You know I’m a sharer.”

She nodded, then glanced sidelong at Bankole.

“He knows,” I assured her. “But…look, you and Grayson are the first sharers I’ve known who had children.” There was no reason to tell her she and Grayson and their children were the first sharers I’d known period. “I hope to have kids myself someday, so I need to know…do they always inherit the sharing?”

“One of my boys didn’t have it,” she said. “Some feelers—sharers—can’t have any kids. I don’t know why. And I knew some who had two or three kids who didn’t have it at all. Bosses, though, they like you to have it.”

“I’ll bet they do.”

“Sometimes,” she continued, “sometimes they pay more for people who have it. Especially kids.”

Her kids. Yet they had taken a boy who wasn’t a sharer and left a girl who was. How long would it have been before they came back for the girl? Perhaps they had a lucrative offer for the boys as a pair, so they sold them first.

“My god,” Bankole said. “This country has slipped back two hundred years.”

“Things were better when I was little,” Emery said. “My mother always said they would get better again. Good times would come back. She said they always did. My father would shake his head and not say anything.” She looked around to see where Tori was and spotted her on Grayson Mora’s shoulders. Then she caught sight of something else, and she gasped.

We followed her gaze and saw fire creeping over the hills behind us—far behind us, but not far enough. This was some new fire, whipping along in the dry evening breeze. Either the people who attacked us had followed us, setting fires, or someone was imitating them, echoing them.

We went on, moving faster, trying to see where we could go to be safe. On either side of the highway, there was dry grass, there were trees, living and dead. So far, the fire was only on the north side.

We kept to the south side, hoping it would be safe. There was a lake ahead, according to my map of the area—Clear Lake, it was called. The map showed it to be large, and the highway followed its northern shore for a few miles. We would reach it soon. How soon?

I calculated as we walked. Tomorrow. We should be able to camp near it tomorrow evening. Not soon enough.

I could smell the smoke now. Did that mean the wind was blowing the fire toward us?

Other people began hurrying and keeping to the south side of the road and heading west. No one went east now. There were no trucks yet, but it was getting late. They would be barreling through soon. And we should be camping for the night soon. Did we dare?

The south side still seemed free of fire behind us, but on the north side the fire crawled after us, coming no closer, but refusing to be left behind.

We went on for a while, all of us looking back often, all of us tired, some of us hurting. I called a halt and gestured us off the road to the south at a place where there was room to sit and rest.

“We can’t stay here,” Mora said. “The fire could jump the road any time.”

“We can rest here for a few moments,” I said. “We can see the fire, and it will tell us when we’d better start walking again.”

“We’d better start now!” Mora said. “If that fire gets going good, it will move faster than we can run! Best to keep well ahead of it!”

“Best to have the strength to keep ahead of it,” I said, and I took a water bottle from my pack and drank. We were within sight of the road and we had made it a rule not to eat or drink in such exposed places, but today that rule had to be suspended. To go into the hills away from the road might mean being cut off from the road by fire. We couldn’t know when or where a windblown piece of burning debris might land.

Others followed my example and drank and ate a little dried fruit, meat, and bread. Bankole and I shared with Emery and Tori. Mora seemed to want to leave in spite of us, but his daughter Doe was sitting half asleep on the ground against Zahra. He stooped next to her and made her drink a little water and eat some fruit.

“We might have to keep moving all night,” Allie said, her voice almost too soft to hear. “This might be the only rest we get.” And to Travis, “You’d better put Dominic into the carriage with Justin when he’s finished eating.”

Travis nodded. He’d carried Dominic this far. Now he tucked him in with Justin. “I’ll push the carriage for a while,” he said.

Bankole looked at my wound, rebandaged it, and this time gave me something for the pain. He buried the bloody bandages he had removed, digging a shallow hole with a flat rock.

Emery, with Tori gone to sleep against her, looked to see what Bankole was doing with me, then jumped and looked away, her hand going to her own side.

“I didn’t know you were hurt so much,” she whispered.

“I’m not,” I said, and made myself smile. “It looks nastier than it is with all the blood, but it isn’t bad. I’m damned lucky compared to Jill. And it doesn’t stop me from walking.”

“You didn’t give me any pain when we were walking,” she said.

I nodded, glad to know I could fake her out. “It’s ugly,” I said, “but not too painful.”

She settled down as though she felt better. No doubt she did. If I moaned and groaned, I’d have all four of them moaning and groaning. The kids might even bleed along with me. I would have to be careful and keep lying at least as long as the fire was a threat—or as long as I could.

The truth was, those blood-saturated bandages scared the hell out of me, and the wound hurt worse than ever. But I knew I had to keep going or burn. After a few minutes, Bankole’s pills began to take the edge off my pain, and that made the whole world easier to endure.

We had about an hour’s rest before the fire made us too nervous to stay where we were. Then we got up and walked. By then, at some point behind us, the fire had already jumped the road. Now, neither the north nor the south side looked safe. Until it was dark, all we could see in the hills behind us was smoke. It was a terrifying, looming, moving wall.

Later, after dark, we could see the fire eating its way toward us. There were dogs running along the road with us, but they paid no attention to us. Cats and deer ran past us, and a skunk scuttled by. It was live and let live. Neither humans nor animals were foolish enough to waste time attacking one another. Behind us and to the north, the fire began to roar.

We put Tori in the carriage and Justin and Dominic between her legs. The babies never even woke up while we were moving them. Tori herself was more than half asleep. I worried that the carriage might break down with the extra weight, but it held. Travis, Harry, and Allie traded off pushing it.

Doe, we put atop the load on Bankole’s cart. She couldn’t have been comfortable there, but she didn’t complain. She was more awake than Tori, and she had been walking on her own most of the time since our encounter with the would-be kidnappers. She was a strong little kid—her father’s daughter.

Grayson Mora helped push Bankole’s cart. In fact, once Doe was loaded aboard, Mora pushed the cart most of the time. The man wasn’t likeable, but in his love for his daughter, he was admirable.

At some point in the endless night, more smoke and ash than ever began to swirl around us, and I caught myself thinking that we might not make it. Without stopping, we wet shirts, scarves, whatever we had, and tied them around our noses and mouths.

The fire roared and thundered its way past us on the north, singeing our hair and clothing, making breathing a terrible effort. The babies woke up and screamed in fear and pain, then choked and almost brought me down. Tori, crying herself with their pain and her own, held on to them and would not let them struggle out of the carriage.

I thought we would die. I believed there was no way for us to survive this sea of fire, hot wind, smoke, and ash. I saw people—strangers—fall, and we left them lying on the highway, waiting to burn. I stopped looking back. In the roar of the fire, I could not hear whether they screamed. I could see the babies before Natividad threw wet rags over them. I knew they were screaming. Then I couldn’t see them, and it was a blessing.

We began to run out of water.

There was nothing to do except keep going or burn. The terrible, deafening noise of the fire increased, then lessened, and again, increased, then lessened. It seemed that the fire went north away from the road, then whipped back down toward us.

It teased like a living, malevolent thing, intent on causing pain and terror. It drove us before it like dogs chasing a rabbit. Yet it didn’t eat us. It could have, but it didn’t.