This Burning Man (Future Arizona Book 1)

by Kris Holt

  They checked me when I approached, noted the gun, made no attempt to take it.

  'Is Padre Reyes here?' I asked.

  They pointed me through the tables where the priests sat and somewhere in among the general confusion of bodies, I found my way to a small section in the back where the older holy men had been placed. Four men, none younger than eighty years old, and each with his own direct hotline to God.

  'Padre,' I said, addressing my old mentor.

  'What?' The second man, sitting just behind Padre Reyes, had a nose that took up most of his face. It was swollen and flattened, like it had been punched a lot, or inflated and then punctured. It still managed to hold in place a pair of old, twisted spectacles that were probably more about habit than allowing their wearer to see straight.

  Padre Reyes turned around and shushed him. 'Phoenix! It's you!'

  'Padre. It's good to see you. I was worried that you might have stayed in the compound.'

  'Stayed in the compound? After they turn our town's spiritual landmark into this monstrosity? Never!'

  'They're calling this thing the Burning Man,' the second priest said.

  'It's appalling,' another of the priests, an old black man with a long grey beard, said. The final one of the group was the oldest of all, completely toothless, staring into the middle distance and drooling slightly with a distant smile on his face.

  'True, Father Christopher,' Padre Reyes said. 'Ay, I'm suffering in this heat.' He tried to fan himself with the corner of his robe.

  'What?'

  'I said, it's hot!'

  'It's what?'

  'Padre,' I said, 'we don't have time for this.'

  'We don't!' The old man took my hand and tugged on it furiously. 'Phoenix, this Burning Man is a travesty! You can see the desecration from miles around!'

  'Padre, you have to listen to me,' I said. 'This is more important. This is life or death.'

  'Now there's a choice to go offering to an old man.' The black priest wheezed and began to laugh. Padre Reyes just gaped at me.

  'Boy, this is more important than life or death, don't you see? We can't let them get away with it!' The enraged old man pointed at the sky. 'Do you know what He might do to this town for allowing this desecration to go unchallenged?'

  'Burn us all in fire and brimstone,' I replied automatically.

  Padre Reyes shrank back into his chair. 'If you can't take this seriously, then you should go.'

  I checked myself. 'Fine. I'll challenge it. In fact, I'll go speak to Mayor Belasco right now.'

  'Demand he restores the Fallen Cross,' the Padre said. 'And that he orders prayer and penance from the entire town!'

  'I will do all of that,' I said. 'And in return, when my friends come, you have to go with them. It's the only way for you all to be safe, do you understand? Tell them my name – tell them you know Phoenix. There'll be at least two of them – a big fat genius guy and a skinny, young woman with long braids...'

  'A woman?' The padre scoffed. The three other men all sat up in their chairs at the mention of that word. 'Get on with it! There's no time to be chasing women!'

  'Where are these women?'

  'Shut up, Father Hernandez. I'm trying to talk this young fool into making them restore the Fallen Cross!'

  'Besht hurry,' the oldest priest said in a scratchy, high-pitched tone, pointing through a gap in the crowd in the distance. 'Shey're out there underneash it righ' now, playing abou' wish torchesh.'

  'What? Where?'

  He might've been as gummy as a stuffed gator, but the old man wasn't wrong. A pair of Hole Town's finest were shoving one another drunkenly round the base of the statue, waving torches like baseball bats. 'If shey ain't careful, shey'll shet fire to the whole shebang.'

  The good thing was, at a sprint it took me less than a minute to get from the back of the Church's edifice to the base of the Burning Man. The bad thing was that by the time I got there, the fire had already been burning for thirty seconds.

  Chapter 33 – Old Friends

  'Get your dumb asses down from that platform!'

  Just about the best thing you could say about being underneath the Burning Man was that from here, you couldn't see its ugly face. The base was a raised concrete platform that they'd bolted the outer shell to. Inside, a wooden scaffold showed where they'd worked on the reconstruction. Mostly though, what was left within was waste wood, debris, and dust. Whoever worked on this had used it as a dumping ground for whatever spare materials they needed rid of.

  I had my pistol up and raised. The night was so light and warm that it was charging even as I held it up. What I hadn't banked on was that alcohol and lack of brains are two sure-for-certain indicators of blind courage, and these two men were about as blind as it got.

  'Blondie! Fuck me, man, it's been ages. How are the kids?' The first man tugged at his crotch, as if I needed reminding of what he was talking about.

  If there was anyone I wanted to see less right now than Waylon goddamn Boggs, it was his angry, joyless brother. Right on cue, Opie stepped out from the mess with a face like a puckered ass. Above them, angry flames were already climbing up the wooden skeleton, turning it and the metal outer shell black.

  'What in hell have you two idiots done?' I said.

  'What?' Waylon looked up to where the fire was spreading upwards and shrugged. 'Oh. Well, we was just havin' a little fun. Accidents happen, you know.'

  'I oughta haul your wise ass down to the station,' I said automatically.

  'You oughta,' Waylon agreed. ''Cept, there ain't no station anymore, is there? And you...well, you remind me. Ain't you the criminal these days?'

  There was a ripple of noise and I turned to see a crowd building behind me. Most were looking up, but the ones at the front were keen not to miss out on any drama down at floor level. If there were any of Di Vio's men still in the town, they'd be finding out about this pretty quickly, and that put me in a bit of a delicate position, to say the least.

  'That's right, folks,' Waylon Boggs said, 'this here dangerous criminal is wanted by the town! Doesn't it just make you sick? He's willing to defy the law to come here today, invade our party and set light to our brand new mascot! I tell you now, it's a damn shame, is what it is!'

  Waylon had enough going on in the short-term to be a decent showman. It wasn't hard to imagine him in a wool suit and tie, hawking nerve tonic from a cart to dimwitted farmhands out in the wastes. Actors have long believed that the show must go on, but sometimes things have gotta stop before they get out of hand. While his attention was focused on the audience, I swung my mom's pistol barrel-first into the back of Waylon's head and knocked him out cold. If only it had been that easy last time.

  Regardless of their feelings about me and my supposed criminal status, Hole Town still loved theatre and there were a few cheers as Waylon landed on his face in the dirt. What I hadn't bet on was Opie finding courage somewhere in his britches. I looked up straight into the barrel of his gun.

  'Fuckin' sonuvabitch...' he spat, and that was all he got, because someone standing nearby grabbed his arm and used it to swing him round into the platform. He landed unconscious next to his brother, sweet as you like.

  'Thanks,' I said to my savior, who was hunched low inside a dark jacket. I'd half-expected it to be Cass or Mar, turning up again at a very handy moment. What I didn't expect was to look into the hard eyes of Sergeant Carter.

  'Sergeant?' I said.

  'Not any more,' she replied, taking my arm and leading me into the crowd. In our stead, the fire continued to climb up the Burning Man.

  'What in hell are you doing here? I thought you cleared out when the Army left.'

  'Army don't need me no more,' Carter said, no longer meeting my eye. 'They're on the other side of the world, fighting with bombs they're aiming from space. Ain't nobody caring about one pair of boots on the ground. Besides, this felt wrong. These mercenaries aren't our friends. I'm afraid for the town.'

  'You ain't wrong,' I s
aid.

  'What do you know?'

  'Nate Di Vio's men have cleared out. They're all heading back to the reservoir under the Mount. They think that the world is gonna catch fire on sun up.'

  Carter's brow clenched. 'But that's crazy!' she said.

  'Is it?' I replied. Sweat was flooding down my cheeks, my arms, my back. From the dark pools of her clothing, I could tell that Carter was suffering the same. 'Have you ever seen a night like this one – a night that's so hot, so bright, it could be a day?'

  Carter said nothing, but she was thinking hard and I could see the doubt in her eyes. At the same time, I was remembered how complete her authority had been when she was uniform, leading the way. Things had changed. A few short weeks had been all it took to turn the world on its head. Now, we were all rebels in disguise.

  'We live in a desert,' she said finally. 'You're gonna have to do better than that.'

  I held up my gun so she could see it clearly, tapped the green light running along the barrel. 'This is a solar cell. It charges under light – specifically, daylight. And yet, it's charging now, though it's supposed to be the middle of the night.'

  Carter's face was grim. 'This still ain't much to go on.'

  'Unless you've got a telescope handy, I'm giving you all the proof I can. Di Vio's men are all set to head out to the mountains. They're going to ride the crisis out there while the rest of us burn.'

  'Goddamn it. I knew those assholes were up to something. And that must be why there are so few of them here.'

  I nodded. No-one had come to attend to the fire.

  'When I was exploring earlier, there was a pool of them guarding vehicles at the far end of the bowl. I saw the Mayor down by the water tower. He was saying that he was going to speak to them, find out why they're not patrolling like they should be.'

  'Save him a trip,' I said. 'Find him and tell him that we need to get everyone over to the Mount as quickly as possible. We have a guy sorting the transport right now.' As I finished speaking, I looked out into the desert the way we'd come here. There was a dust cloud forming in the distance.

  'Transport?'

  'It's gonna be fast, like lightning fast. It's gonna have to be to get everyone in the town to the mountains before sun up.'

  Carter's face was a joy. 'And where is this transport?'

  'You'll know it when you see it,' I said, crossing my fingers behind my back. Not for the first time, I was silently acknowledging Gregor's role in delivering the whole town before he'd even done arrived on the scene.

  'You're asking too much,' Carter gasped. 'Mayor Belasco's not gonna believe me if I tell him that the world's gonna end.'

  'Then don't tell him that. Tell him that we found out Di Vio's men have gone rogue, decided to take the water for themselves. Tell him that they're sending an army here from the town. Remind him that he'll need people he knows he can rely on to help him take everything back. Which is where we come in.'

  Carter followed my eyeline to where the dust was boiling on the horizon. 'Storm?'

  'I hope so,' I said. 'and you'd best believe that it's on our side.'

  ---

  Carter was every kind of skeptical, I could tell, but the years I'd spent building a reputation as a hunter hadn't been in vain. Whether she believed the world was ending or not, she went off in search of the Mayor, to tell him that Hole Town was set to lose our water unless he could convince everyone to shoulder arms, jump on our invisible magic carpet and fly across the desert to safety.

  I stopped short of telling her to hold Waylon Boggs' head under the pipe at the water tower. His loud mouth might have come in useful, but she was going to have to sell that pokery herself.

  For me, that was one job done. I'd looked everywhere twice, and there was no signs of any of our people at the fairground site. Now I just had to grab Mar and Cass, and hope that Padre Reyes wouldn't be too unhappy that the Burning Man was literally on fire.

  That fire was pretty goddamned big by now too. The crowd around it was getting bigger, and people were pointing up the structure. I couldn't blame them. It was one hell of a show.

  People screaming. And then Mar, at my shoulder.

  'Phoenix! We've got to get up there!'

  'What?'

  'Look!' She thrust a pair of binoculars up to my eyes, and only then did I see what she and everyone else was pointing at.

  On the highest platform, where the climbing flames touched the eyes of the Burning Man, I could see Rat's face.

  Chapter 34 – Fire in the Sky, Fire in the Soul

  'Up, up!' I grabbed the crane's dangling chain and pointed at the sky, which seemed darker every second as the Burning Man belched out huge plumes of smoke. The crane's hook lifted fifteen feet off the surface before lurching sideways and nearly throwing me off. I clung tightly to the chain, knotted my arm around it.

  The wooden platforms inside the Burning Man were all ablaze. Even if I could have fought through the flames, there was no way they would've held my weight. There was only one other way to get up to Rat. Cassie had spent an eternity of seconds hotwiring the crane and testing the controls. I'd pushed back through the crowd, climbed on top of the gantry, and we were ready to go.

  Like being jerked upwards by an invisible arm, I gained purchase from nowhere and sprawled into the air. From then on, it was just me and the sky. I could hear screaming below, but my eyes were focused on the charred wooden bones and panel-beaten frame of the Burning Man. Fires hotter than hell crawled up its limbs and emerged from its belly. The stars dipped low, the wind blew. Somewhere up above, Rat was crying and calling out my name. Beneath me, stretching out ready in the event of a misstep, I could sense the open arms of God Himself.

  I'd just gotten used to the flight when somewhere below, gunshots rang out. Spinning on my tiny rising world, I had no idea who was fighting. Hang on tight, boy. It's just one more thing you can't do nothing about.

  Eighty feet up, gaps in the metal opened out big enough to climb inside, but smoke made it impossible to see if it was safe to do so. There was a whine as a bullet - aimed or stray, I had no way to tell - spun off the chain inches above my head. Keep climbing, keep climbing, embrace that good air. I'd already tried looking down once - when I stole a quick glance past my own feet, I began to get sick in my belly and turned my face up again quickly to make it stop.

  A hundred feet, more and still rising, too many storys to count. I was getting light-headed, but I could see the dome of the towering icon rounding off above me, the torn metal a jagged sneer beneath its devil eyes. On a level with my head, a raised platform came into view. At the end of that platform, I could see a small figure crouched down, facing away from me, a silhouette against the rising flames. Before I could reach across to climb off, the ascent stopped abruptly.

  The arm of the crane swung round in a wide arc and crashed twice into the shell of the effigy. The first slam surprised me, the second shook me clean off the chain and I fell loose. For a moment, there was the sensation of falling, and then the world turned upside down, along with my stomach. I didn't even have time to scream.

  The world rushed by, left, right, and I was seeing everything upside down. Glancing up, the tip of the crane's hook had snagged my trousers, right near my ankle. I was hanging in space with only a few strands of cotton between me and the last fall I'd ever take. Twisting around, trying to pull myself upright, I could see Cassie, a shadow in the distance far below, wrestling in the cab with one of Di Vio's greycoat goons.

  The crane lurched into life again, up, down, sideways, taking a dozen orders all at once as the pair below struggled over the controls. The hideous face of that damn metal golem swung into view and I bounced off the side again with a sound like the gong they bought out for tourists in Hole Town's eastern-themed brothels. At the same time, I felt myself slip lower as a couple of the remaining threads tore on my trousers.

  I could see what I thought was Mar, pinned down behind some barrels by gunfire. People were screaming and running,
and everything looked like a hot mess. Up here, the world just kept spinning, leaving me dizzy. The shell of the effigy roared around again and I tensed my body up, kicking away with my free foot, taking the impact and saving myself more bruises. A twang above signified another thread giving way. There was just one left. With an increasingly fragile grip on both the crane and my sanity, I turned in even more chaotic fashion, knotting myself around. Then the crane itself loosed, dropping me twenty-five feet in a single heart-stopping second before pulling me up short with a thump that scrambled my brain.