We headed north again.
Four
We didn’t talk as much this time. Tiredness and an awareness of our increasing proximity to Mister Big kept us quiet. And the problem with being quiet was that there was only the fire noise to distract me from my thoughts.
First, we drive them from their homes in fear of their lives. Their prayers are in vain.
The voice didn’t spook me this time. I didn’t exactly welcome it, but I expected it.
We cover up traces of their passage so they can’t be tracked. We get them to a new place, a hidden place. A safe place. We introduce them to their new home. Their new duties.
The voice spoke English, but with Spanish inflections, Spanish rhythms. And now I recognized it. My cousin Rudy, Carnelian, dead nearly forty years.
He’d died about the time my mutant powers manifested. During the couple of years before that, he’d visited me several times when on vacation. He swore me to secrecy and told me about working for Vulcan. He made it sound great—money, travel, groupies, beating up costumed do-gooders. He made it sound like the heroes were the extension of overbearing parents and schoolteachers. It wasn’t until years later that I realized he had been anticipating that I’d manifest super-powers. He was selling me on the supervillain lifestyle to make it easier to recruit me later.
How did he know? Vulcan—the original one, the one he worked for—was an expert, among other things, on human mutation. Rudy must have mentioned some of the weird things that started happening to me when I was twelve, like the time I was hit by a car and wasn’t hurt. Vulcan had probably told him to get a cell sample from me and concluded that I was on the mutant track.
Rudy ... great guy. If you ignored the fact that he was a career criminal. Not a misunderstood outcast, not a guy pursuing an ethical code in defiance of a corrupt culture ... he was just a money-loving crook.
First, we drive them from their homes in fear of their lives. Their prayers are in vain.
“Hold up a minute.” I took off my pack, which now held only the fire extinguisher, supplies and a few tools not wrecked by the EMP attack, and left it on the creek bank. I hopped up onto the east bank and headed to the tallest, sturdiest unburned tree I could see. I climbed as far up as it would hold my weight.
It was far enough that I could see through the treetops to the east and west.
Maybe two hundred yards in each direction, the fire ended.
I slid down again, snapping some of the smaller branches as I descended. Conrad and Hathor, now at the tree’s base, ducked away from the shower of wood that preceded me.
I landed and straightened. “What I didn’t realize until now is that this isn’t really a fire. It’s a gauntlet.”
Conrad cocked an eyebrow at me. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that there’s only enough fire around us to keep the settlers moving north. We’re basically in a tunnel of fire.”
“And if we get outside it ...” Conrad looked down at his mud-caked legs. “We could run.”
“Yeah.”
“Mike, let’s run.” He looked east and west. “We no longer have the tent. Can you get us through the fire?”
“Hathor, yes. She can ride on my back. But you ... Even at my full running speed, we’d come too close to burning stuff. You’d roast.”
He looked me in the eye and gave me a doggy grin. “Your backpack. It’s the same material as your suit, yes?”
“Uhh ... now I’m the idiot.”
So that’s how we did it.
I left my pack with Conrad. Hathor climbed up on my back, arms around my neck and legs around my waist. It wasn’t that I thought she’d burn in her suit if she walked out on her own, but that I was sure if we weren’t in physical contact we’d lose track of one another. If a burning tree fell over on me, it would bounce off. If one fell on her, she’d be trapped or killed.
So I ran hell for leather eastward. On this run, I grazed trees, ran headlong into a few when flame or smoke were too thick to see through. But I never stopped. I kept my arms up like a boxer’s, sweeping away branches that might have slammed into Hathor.
Then the fire was behind us. The smoke thinned and the temperature dropped.
I left Hathor there and went back for Conrad. At the creek bed, I fitted him into my backpack, encouraged him to hyperventilate for a minute, then tied the flap down and swung the pack on my back. With the cross-strap broken, I had to hold on to the shoulder straps as I ran. But no part of Conrad was wrapped around my front, so it didn’t matter how hard I hit things. Moments later, I crashed out of the fire line a few dozen yards north of Hathor’s position.
And then we could indeed run.
Conrad took point, keeping the fire line fifty or a hundred yards to our left, while Hathor and I trailed behind. Conrad headed, by a combination of sensory superiority and instinct, through the most thinly-grown patches of trees, giving us the opportunity to get up to and maintain a good travel rate. With Hathor, even carrying all her gear, it was clear that she’d spent years running for exercise. Me, I was the lumbering guy I always had been, but now, with no mud to slow me, with my pack almost empty, I trotted along tirelessly and had no trouble leaping low obstacles such as fallen trees and boulders.
Unwanted thoughts still sloshed around in my head. Cousin Rudy and all his talk about Vulcan’s tactics. Bodies lying twisted and dead in the streets of Juarez, their smell still in my nostrils twenty-five years later. The feel of them under my hands as I crawled, out of my mind with fever, looking for parents and sisters I would never see again. Dita’s doll, Dita’s damned doll.
Hathor was the first to notice a change—in our surroundings, not in me. “I feel someone. Ahead and to the left. A couple ... maybe ten... a lot of people.” At last there was some emotion in her voice, a note of victory.
Conrad was next. After another couple hundred yards he stopped, vibrating like a hunting hound, his nose quivering as he stared west, then north. When Hathor and I caught up to him, he pointed west. “The fire ends there. But I can hear more ahead. A big patch of fire due north. What’s it mean?”
“That’s where the settlers are going to die.” I know I sounded pretty glum.
Conrad and Hathor looked at me like they were suddenly wondering if I was about to reveal that I knew this little fact because I was really working with Mister Big.
I ignored their sadly natural suspicion and knelt. I swept fallen taptree leaves and other mulch away, revealing bare, coarse soil beneath.
I drew a big circle. “That’s the fire zone ahead of us, the one you’re hearing.” I drew a straight line, a long one, from the south straight up to that circle. “The creek we’ve been following.” With one finger from each hand, I drew lines paralleling the creek most of the way to the fire zone, leaving a gap of only a foot between the ends of those parallel lines and the fire zone. “And here are the two fire channels flanking the creek. Right this moment, the settlers are probably along the creek a few hundred yards. The fire channels are being laid down by Mister Big or his people ahead of them as they advance. The settlers will be driven right to the fire zone. Mister Big, whoever he is, will drop a burning tree or two behind them, and they’ll be trapped to burn alive.”
Hathor shook her head, unsure. “Why?”
“Don’t know yet. But I recognize the tactics. Mister Big is using legacy equipment and tactics of Vulcan. The original Vulcan used to kidnap whole villages this way, especially from South Seas islands or isolated areas in Asia and South America, trapping the populations in cavern systems. His aim was to make little enclaves of worshipers, their gadgets and books taken away, living on hydroponics and greenhouse crops, so that in a generation or two they’d be illiterate, simple, and purified of the ‘stain’ of modern society.”
“But the original Vulcan is dead.” Conrad frowned and his voice was more growly than usual. “Of old age. Body identified by tissue typing. And the new one is a robot. Not interested in humans at all unless they get in his w
ay ... which those settlers couldn’t have. So what’s going on?”
I shrugged. “I’m guessing that Mister Big is one of his old power armor goons like my cousin Carnelian. A bunch of them survived Kilauea, trapped in their suits, saved by their suspended animation systems. Twenty years later, Vulcan dug them out, used new genetics techniques to give them superpowers, convinced them that they were now in synthetic bodies, no longer human. He was crazy as hell by then and his people all left him. Some of them rejected their brainwashing and turned things around for themselves. Some of them stayed ... distant from humanity.”
“Sociopaths.” Then Hathor’s voice turned low, sympathetic. “You understand about that distance, don’t you?”
I ignored her. “So here’s what we’re going to do.”
Conrad scowled at me. “I’m still leader.”
“Yeah? Okay, what are we going to do, Conrad?”
He paused. “I’m going to listen to your suggestion. And then decide.”
“Good man.” On my crude dirt map, I indicated a spot off to the side of where the fire channels terminated. “We are here.” I drew a diagonal line from our position to the creek at a spot where the fire channels did not yet flank it. “You and Hathor head to this point. At the creek, head south. Get to the settlers. When you see my signal, a smoke flare, get the settlers up to speed, I don’t care how tired they are, and run up the creek to the point you get past the fire channels, then cut west. I’m going to delay the bad guys. Cripple them so they can’t pursue you.”
“No.” Hathor sounded determined. “It’ll only take one of us to lead the settlers. The other one stays with you.”
“Rookie.” I knew I sounded condescending. I meant to. It was a good idea to have her mad at me. “Which one of you stays with me? Conrad, who’ll burn up like flash paper if I confront Mister Big in the burn zone? Or you, the only one who can detect and contact rescuers at greater than shouting distance?”
Reluctant, they did as I recommended. Hathor shot me a look like maybe she wasn’t sure she had me figured out after all. Then she followed Conrad out of my sight.
I took off the backpack for the last time and tore its fabric into broad strips. I loaded the flare gun with a red-smoke round and then wrapped the gun in those strips, hoping they’d keep the smoke round from cooking off if I found myself engulfed in fire. Then I lumbered due west.
I reached the creek bed maybe thirty yards ahead of the fire channels. I was pretty sure Conrad and Hathor had already passed that point in their southward trip; I didn’t see them go by.
South of me, I could hear that familiar roaring and firecracker popping. Through the trees, I saw the fire channel on both sides of the creek. The south wind drove it forward, very slowly—not fast enough for it to pace a bunch of people on foot.
Moving quickly, I made myself a nest. I uprooted fern and wild grapethorn bushes, arranging them in a kind of hunting blind. I spent a minute looking for rocks. I found some good ones, roundish sandstone chunks about the size of human heads; they’d be pretty aerodynamic. In my nest, I knelt and put my improvised missiles and the flare gun down at my knees.
Only a minute later, the fire channel on the far side of the creek advanced.
It was creepy as hell. Suddenly the fire shot forward, stretching from where it had been nearly stationary, almost like it was a shower curtain made of fire being drawn across a hundred yards of trees by a fiery god. The roar of the flame got louder fast. I could feel the new heat the wall of fire brought.
The arsonist was on the other side, behind the wall of fire. I couldn’t see him, but I heard the burn roar get louder as the fire over there suddenly broadened to the west, making it too thick for normal folk to see or to run through with any hope of survival.
Another minute passed, and then I saw him—on this side of the creek, at the leading edge of the fire channel. At first, he looked like a white blur gliding through the fire toward me—a ghostly image, nine or ten feet tall, wrapped in flames.
I picked up the best of my throwing rocks in my right hand, the flare gun in my left. The flare gun, made for use in all sorts of environments, had a trigger guard large enough to accommodate my gloved hand. I had a bead on the clearest path to the sky and had been visualizing it over and over again. It would be damned stupid at this point to fire off the flare, have it hit a branch ... maybe dooming the settlers.
Then, as the ghostly figure got closer, I could see more of him. Male, human, maybe six and a half feet all, white. I don’t mean Caucasian—he was gleaming white like classic marble statues with all the paint worn off. He stood—rode, actually—atop a three-foot-high section of pure-white column like you’d see in the ruins of ancient Rome. The pedestal floated a foot or two above the ground.
He wore an abbreviated pleated tunic. It and the short, conical little cap on top of his head were also pure white.
Some of his other stuff showed more color. His belt and low sandals were yellow and metallic-shiny. They looked like they were made of braided gold cable. Hanging from the belt, seemingly stuck to it, were a gold square-headed hammer on one hip and a large pair of tongs on the other. And on his back was a huge brassy canister, twice as voluminous as the backpack I’d started out the mission carrying. A black hose ran from the top of the canister to a brassy nozzle carried in his two hands.
As I watched, he raised the nozzle and aimed it near me—right of me, directly alongside the creek. A beam, a coherent ripple of yellow-white energy, emerged, igniting the air along its path. Wherever the beam touched wood or underbrush, the plants broke out in fire, fully ablaze. The fire instantly spread out several feet in all directions of the beam. The wild grapethorn bush to my right and the tree beyond it ignited. The heat from the new fire was so intense it took an act of will for me not to flinch away from it.
I nodded. A beam weapon wouldn’t leave chemical traces of accelerants for investigators to find. This guy was trying to mask the fact that this was all the work of an arsonist. Yet with the narcissism of the classic super-criminal, he just had to perform his mission in full costume. Anyone seeing him, anyone capable of placing him at the scene of the tragedy, he would doubtless murder ... after some sort of self-aggrandizing speech.
I recognized him, and knew I’d been right. Under the name of Slate, this guy had been buried in Kilauea with my cousin. Unlike Rudy, he’d survived. Later, he’d taken on the name and motifs of Sethlans, Etruscan god of fire.
God. Pedestal. Now it wasn’t just the fire making me see red.
When I had a clear line of sight on him, I stepped forward and hurled the rock. I heard it hit, a clank like a hydraulic ram caving in the side of a Chevy, but couldn’t look—I aimed the flare gun toward an open patch of sky and fired. I dropped the flare gun and charged in the direction my rock had gone.
Blurs of motion—Sethlans off his pedestal, rolling forward, white-brass-white-brass, across the ground, his igniter beam playing over the trees to my left like water from a runaway hose. His pedestal, half folded over like a man taking a bow, tumbling too.
I got in front of the two-color blur and swung my fist at it, an undisciplined, all-out haymaker. It connected hard enough to jar my arm up to the shoulder. All of a sudden he was flying the other direction, smashing into the top of an unburned tree, disappearing into its leaves. I ran in that direction.
When I reached the base of his tree, he dropped out of an adjacent one, minus his igniter weapon, landing in full control of his movements.
We looked at each other.
I could clearly make out his features now: classic Roman brow and nose. Which meant nothing. The way he’d clanked when I’d hit him, when he landed, told me he was still a power-suit guy. His face was a mask, the features beneath it a mystery.
He spoke first. “I don’t know you.” His voice was musical, oddly mild, sort of what you’d expect from a remote god visiting human lands. His jaw moved up and down almost like a real mouth, no hinge visible, which was creepy.<
br />
“You used to run with my cousin Rudy. My name’s Miguel Estrada.”
“An-vil. You’re not on the planetary registry as a superhuman resident.” There was a weird, almost kindly note of admonishment in his voice.
I glanced over to where his pedestal had fetched up against a tree. My rock had caved it in. Sparks poured out of burst seams, threatening to catch the tree on fire. I didn’t think the pedestal would fly again.
I returned my attention to Sethlans. “What’s all this about? You’re going to rack up over a hundred murder charges—what’s the payoff?”
I heard him snort with amusement, though his face didn’t change expression. “What’s the old joke? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. Wait a second—I’m going to kill you anyway.”
“So tell me.”
“It’s all about taptrees, boy.”
“Taptrees.”
“Schwarz-Wiley taptrees are very, very bad. They get dry and spontaneously burst into flame. There’s a filmmaker from Earth over in Firstfall who’s going to make a documentary about this tragedy. A reenactment of the settlers making their desperate run for safety. Everywhere they go, they’re ringed by burning taptrees. Until finally they can’t go any farther. They huddle in their fear and misery. The mothers try to shield their babies’ bodies, but the fire gets them all. The sound of burning forest rises as their screams subside ... If only Black Forest had been terraformed with safe, ecologically responsible Gainer Genetics lichens instead.”
It took me a moment to find my voice. “Man, that’s an all-time low. A hundred and thirty-eight people are supposed to die for a publicity stunt? For the opportunity to call another company bad names in a few news cycles?”
“A hundred and thirty-nine, including you.”
I crooked a finger, beckoning him. “Bring it, old man.”
He brought it. He pushed off from the tree behind him and jumped at me.
I knew my strategy. Wait until he was committed to his jump or his charge, step out of the way, let him slam into the tree behind me, and start pounding on him while he was dazed.
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