Carry the Flame

by James Jaros

  When the tanker and van were retaken, the last of the unholy herd carefully slain, he would walk the boy and girl to the most sacred killing field. There he would claim his final earthly reward for keeping watch on the path to Cain’s children, where fire had burned the accursed—and now drew the murderous plunderers to their pending destruction. Richer rewards still would await him in heaven.

  So he swore off the girl’s bare chest and the boy’s punishing appeal. He would not force them to commit the obscenities that had spared him Wicca disease—and ravaged so many of the sodomites who’d ended their lives in his hands. The righteous had named the virus after the demon females—witches all—who had set the sickness loose on a world full of unsuspecting men. These were good fathers and brothers of faith, though females were the first to fall, as God in His infinite wisdom had so justly decreed. The Lord had granted immunity to only a tiny percentage of men. Most of the others, even believers rich with prayer and constant pleading, were cursed with the plague and seethed with vicious hallucinations—grotesque visions that triggered murderous and suicidal impulses before the stricken killed others, themselves, or perished in the agonizing grip of the disease.

  The only way to have sex and appease God Almighty was to wed girls right after menarche. For their first twelve periods, they knew their own immunity—and the only purity of their otherwise damnable lives. Or—and now Hunt breathed audibly and gave himself pause—he could pierce his own soul by having sex with boys, yes, boys, who had not known the deadly pulse of penetration, who had kept themselves clean for the likes of him.

  No, you won’t. Promise me you won’t.

  Resolve precious and slippery as semen, he hurried the last few steps to the wagon trail and untied a tarp that covered the old Harley 74 and a side car, and a rattly trailer with five gallon gas cans lining the outside like an ammo belt. Rising behind the battered red cans on one side was a faded picture of a fly fisherman defaced by black graffiti.

  The trailer’s roof had been cut off with a blowtorch, the top of each side sculpted into pikes. The rear was open, the bed almost filled with matching, century-old aluminum and Plexiglas telephone booths laid next to each other.

  Hunt had just enough room to edge between the booths. Even with the tarp, thick dust had coated the glass. He swept it away with his hand, feeling contaminated by the nearness of his touch to the twins. They were conscious, but he wasn’t sure whether one could be awake and the other asleep.

  He reviled the very sight of them. Not just the devil’s black skin or the burns on their body. No, he reviled far worse than skin color or scars or identical dark eyes. He reviled a fact so fearsomely present at first glance that he’d known in the same repulsive instant they had to be resurrected from their near death—and the imminence of hell ever after—so he could take them to the base and parade them before His Piety.

  Parade what? He studied them. The Devil’s own seed?

  So many mysteries with these two, beginning with their number.

  Bliss awoke with an arm wrapped around Jaya, the other resting as peaceably on her shotgun. The storm had forced them to seek cover in a ravine or canyon, visibility horrid by the time they stumbled down there.

  A thick layer of dust coated their bodies, but she figured it had kept them safely hidden. Even so, she listened intently before lifting her head and brushing off her face. Carefully opening her eyes, she spied the day’s first light, faint and swift, stealing across the sky.

  A dun layer draped the boulders that rose around them on three sides, softening their appearance. She realized with a start that they were lucky to have found a trail and not stepped off the edge.

  She lifted her shotgun knowing that she didn’t dare work the action till she’d blown away every last particle of dust. I’ll huff and I’ll puff, she smiled, and I’ll blow your house in.

  Thinking of candles, she counted fingers on her hand and realized it was her birthday. Fifteen! You made it. How many times in just the past few weeks had she thought she’d be killed? And here she was—more alive than ever—with a boyfriend.

  She eyed Jaya resting under the powdery blanket, prizing him as the most joyous gift of her life. The hard length of him still felt hot in her hand, and his presence lingered from the long glorious minutes when her mouth, full and heavy and rich with want, made her so crazy that she’d almost ripped off their clothes in the dust and dirt and sweat and stones. But Wicca had stopped her as surely as it had shut down procreative sex among the tiny percentage of the world’s population that had been spared the pandemic.

  Only after she and Jaya had settled last night, satisfied by touch and taste, had she begun to feel watched. So eerie a sensation that she’d stared into the blackness and scolded herself. No one can see you. You can’t see two feet in this.

  But the grim feeling returned now. She looked at a rock wall rising right behind them, and knew that anyone could spot them from above. She wasn’t thinking of her mom, but Jessie came to mind immediately.

  You’ve got to get back. She’ll go nuts if she finds out you’re gone.

  Gone where? The question scared Bliss. How long had they stumbled around, oblivious and aroused, seeking a refuge for touch—and her first intimations of love—in a land of blood and fire?

  Bliss looked up again, searching for a familiar marker, and saw orange blaze everywhere at once. She sat silent and astonished, an ancient eyeing an eclipse, a child of storms and stony seas.

  The forbidding sky had come alive with ghosts and spirits and strange colors. Evil doings all. His Piety would know their foul portent, but Hunt rose from the dust, spitting its filthy taste from his lips, already certain that Satan’s fiery breath had gripped the air he breathed, like the dark one’s madness gripped the soul and twisted it into a raging fist of sin.

  Eyes retreating from the sky, he returned to the twins, fearful and clinging to each other, and looked at the dog locked in the booth beside them. The beast’s eyes lit up, so ready to do his duty that there could have been two of him.

  The metal muzzle would have to remain on the creature till his bark posed no threat. A “hound of Hades,” His Piety had described the dog. “We have dominion over the beasts, and we rule their animal ways.”

  It was true, it was in the Bible, like God Himself, and he knew it was a fool’s damnation to think otherwise. To deviate from scripture was to be a de-vi-ant. To suffer as one. Look at the world. Look at it. There could be no disagreement. True Belief protected him from himself, made him turn from temptation. Yes, you will. Do not doubt it.

  The boy and others no less despicable were the reason for the “Sealing of Sight.” The tainted ones looked right at you, so boldly, so coldly, it was like they could read your secret thoughts, making the plucking of eyes essential for the saving of souls.

  No less had been claimed for the “Deformation of Faces,” a sacrament conducted on the Risen Day of Easter for all the women who flaunted their beauty by enticing worthy, reverent men from the greater glory of God.

  Hunt had long believed it unfair to disfigure only females; surely, from what he’d known, the faces of the boy and his conniving lot deserved far worse for the abominations they caused among God-fearing men. But he’d never spoken of extending the sacrament. Not a word to anyone. Only to God Almighty in the fever clasp of his most private prayers.

  He unlocked the booth and gripped Damocles by the muzzle, shaking the hound’s long pointy snout, then slipping his finger through the cage to check his teeth, white as right. “Getting excited, boy? Huh? You got a mission, too.”

  The sleek leggy beast stood and bristled with pleasure, muscles rippling down his long dark back and flanks. “I’ll take this off,” he said, and gave the muzzle another hard tug, “when we’ve got them good and ready.”

  What else are you going to take off?

  Shaking off Satan in the day’s first sun, he chained the dog to the trailer. From a corner pike he took down a ball of rusty barbed wire and
cut a length long enough to bind the boy’s hands. He repeated the effort three times, for feet and hands must be bound on both of them, as they were on the twins.

  He checked the lengths again, and considered cutting them to give the boy and girl crowns. The twins had worn theirs well, pretend crowns for their pretend Jesus. That’s whom they’d been praying to when he’d found them in the smolder. True spawn of the Devil, they’d been hard to burn.

  “You have no claim on the Son of God,” he’d bellowed as he’d wrapped wire around the twins’ heads, a coronation that did not end until their brows bore the same red streaks as the One True Son. “So you must pray for forgiveness.”

  Damocles pulled hard on his chain. The dog wanted to do his duty. His master stared at the telephone booth that had kenneled him, and now waited to be filled.

  Like you, the most disturbing demonic voice taunted. Just like you. Filled with the red heat of your animal dreams.

  Hunt cocked the Colt’s hammer.

  Chapter Three

  Hansel pointed his nose skyward and sniffed hungrily at the broiling air. Jessie snapped her fingers, signaling the brindle back down to the dust. He was a mastiff-bloodhound mix, with the latter’s keen sense of smell, though she doubted any creature could snag Bliss or Jaya’s scent from air scoured by the brutal gusts that had buffeted the region. Even the nauseating odor of burning bodies had grown faint.

  She and Burned Fingers were guiding the gimpy dog down a slope where the storm had heaved aside countless tons of dust as if they were no more weighty than weed pollen. She couldn’t fathom how the teens could have moved into the hellish wind. Augustus knew the area, and he agreed; but human reasoning wasn’t helping Hansel, whose frustrated snout seesawed right back up, signaling a message of his own—that he hadn’t picked up the scent.

  Sudden gaps in the earth also slowed their search, forcing them to climb or crawl around sheared-off sections of blistered roadway that rose like crumbly cliffs or sank like the proverbial stone. Heat had burned-up so much water—entire rivers, lakes, and inland seas had evaporated, only to dump back down in ruinous, raging storms—that the planet’s friable crust was rising and falling “like some fat lady on a fucking trampoline,” in Burned Fingers’s prickly account.

  But even the three-legged Hansel appeared fleet-footed compared to yesterday’s pace when they’d maneuvered the gasoline tanker, with its 50,000 pound payload, around these geological disturbances. The truck had inched up the ridge like a marooned mollusk, giving Jessie ample time to note all the shadowy recesses where they could be ambushed. No less aware of her surroundings now as they worked their way back down the ravaged road. The same crushing concern for security had them assign Maul, the big bald truck driver, to organize all the adults and children into a defense of the caravan.

  Defense against what exactly?

  Against anything. Jessie answered herself with the worst sense of certainty—the kind born of known threats, like the tank and unforeseen enemies, human and animal.

  Maul had broken out the RPG immediately, and he enlisted the children’s help in making gas bombs. In the right hands, the RPG could be effective against a tank; but Jessie remained openly dubious about the homemade bombs.

  “You better believe they’ll work,” Burned Fingers snapped, stepping around a gaping hole. “The Germans used to call our tanks ‘Ronsons’ because they burned up so fast.”

  “ ‘Ronsons’? What are you talking—”

  “Old cigarette lighter. ‘Lights the first time every time.’ Remember?”

  “No. And I doubt we’re looking at some vintage World War Two tank.”

  Burned Fingers snorted, swore. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen rolling around. I almost got flash-fried in one of them.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  Hansel still hadn’t picked up a trail. The only tracks that hadn’t been scrubbed away by the storm were the deep, knifelike cuts of the tank tread, which they’d veered from minutes ago. Even so, with every step Jessie worried that it would roar over a hilltop and storm toward them, flamethrower blazing.

  She found little relief in turning her thoughts back to Bliss, imagining her daughter and Jaya lying broken-boned—or worse—at the bottom of a “road failure.” That was a term, she realized with a wince, much too quaint for the grotesque conditions.

  When she and Burned Fingers did step through patches of dust, it felt light as spider silk on their feet—but carried useless scents from miles off.

  Burned Fingers jabbed his sawed-off at Hansel. “Looks like Stumpy the Wonder Dog can’t buy a break.”

  She rubbed his ruff. “I doubt he’s hearing much, either.” Though given the rapacious creatures that had survived the collapse, she didn’t find the silence entirely unwelcome. But she did wonder aloud whether firing off a round was advisable. “Bliss might hear it and at least know—”

  “No, don’t do that,” he said, glancing everywhere at once. “The critters will think it’s a dinner bell and we’re the buffet.”

  His warning had her looking around, too—and switching the M–16 to full auto with the first thought of panther packs and Pixie-bobs.

  To spare herself another surge of anxiety, she seized on how hard it would be for any animal to hide after the winds had flattened the charred forest in a swath so wide that she could see no end to the destruction. Extreme weather? Her ancestors hadn’t a clue.

  On the broad hills bookending the ridge, only nine tree trunks had been stout enough to survive the windstorm. To Jessie, the limb-stripped basswoods, buckeyes, and maples looked like lonely black sentinels, aggrieved and tormented by the devastation surrounding them. She missed autumn so suddenly she ached. That she’d once driven rural highways splashed with color was nothing less than astonishing to her. That her girls would never see such simple wonder—the beauty of an astonishingly vibrant world—made her eyes pool with helplessness.

  With a blink and a wipe she turned from the niggardly stand and saw that they’d dropped about a hundred feet of elevation. At this remove, the rear of the tanker truck could have been a tarnished oval hovering in space.

  Burned Fingers put out his hand to stop her and pointed to another oval—a large shadowing on the land at two o’clock on the directional dial. “See the sun? That shadow makes no sense unless it’s a depression of some kind. And you know what else? That would be a good place to duck into.”

  “Then why aren’t they on their way back?”

  “Cause they might have fallen into that thing. It’s got to be deep, or we’d be able to see the bottom of it. Maybe it was a lake, or maybe the earth just yawned and opened up. No telling. But I’ll tell you one thing, we’re not coming at it head-on. Anything could be waiting down there. You see those hills?” He pointed to his left. “We’ll take the valley running through there. We can climb out when we get close and get a good look down. See what’s stirring.”

  “Wake up, dear heart,” Bliss whispered to Jaya. Only then did she remember her dad waking her mom with the same endearment on the day of the massacre. She tried not to think about her dead father because the memory that haunted her most—and made her feel murderous every day—was of her dad chained like a wounded animal to the front of Burned Fingers’s truck.

  She took a breath, hoping to wipe away the ravening image, and rubbed Jaya’s smooth tummy, feeling a trail of down that lured pleasing sensations back to life. Briskly, she withdrew her hand and grabbed her shotgun. “We’ve got to get moving.”

  “What’s going on?” He sat up quickly, brushing dust from his face and hair.

  She shushed him and whispered, “It’s morning. We’ve got to get back. They’re going to be really worried.”

  They stood, Bliss with her hand on his shoulder to keep his sleepy head below the rocks that had provided them sparse shelter. She saw the ravine walls clearly now. Higher than she’d thought. The area was larger, too, about a quarter mile wide and a good half mile long, with boulders big enoug
h to hide man or beast. And so quiet that she worried that even her whispered words had been overheard.

  She put her finger to Jaya’s lips. He nodded, and silence encircled them, sudden and chilling as a shriek. Then she pointed her shotgun to the top of the barrier, all but saying, We’re going out there.

  Jaya nodded again, this time fully awake.

  Hunt crept soundlessly in the dust outside the U-shaped rise that hid the boy and girl—and all the deviltry they’d committed before God and man. God and man. So holy, so true. In those few biblically blessed words he knew that there could never be any question of his importance to the Almighty. If God knew the movement of every ant—And he does, never doubt it—then what of a lone man who served Him with such devotion?

  Smite me, Lord, if I am wrong.

  He and the Almighty shared the kinship of divine retribution, for he was a sharply tuned instrument of the Lord, a silvery flute in the land of the fallen. A deadly weapon in the hand of a God-given man.

  Now and always, bless me, Lord, in Thy name.

  Hellfire and hallelujahs rang in his ears, lit up his eyes, blue as unscarred sky. He coiled like a serpent and waited for the harlot who’d bared her chest—and for the boy who’d made him burn. In seconds too precious for temporal time alone, they would expose all their weaknesses of the flesh to him. Of the flesh. He relished the mysterious rising sap of that word, of a world so forbidden that he felt like Adam in the Garden, Satan casting spells with the beaming apple of sex. Hunt felt it warm and hard and—beneath its wild scarlet skin—teeming with the sweetest juice a man could ever taste.

  After all the brazen sins of the boy and girl, committed in the presence of God the Father—and in the unslakable sight of his own mind’s eye—their surrender felt as ordained as finding the twins in the cindery ash. He would take the violators into the Lord’s custody, and the hound would do his swift duty. Then he would bear the heathens to the base, adding legend to his name.