Carry the Flame

by James Jaros

  He kneeled behind the naked boy, talking of sin and absolution. Then he waited, holding his breath for a minute at a time—penance, penance—and prayed.

  When his resistance proved his faith yet again—when he had no doubt of his strength and consecrated these moments in the name of the Lord—he drew his knife and held the blade between his teeth. “You’ll know God, I promise,” he whispered. “In a minute.”

  Time corporal, time eternal.

  Time to taste the boy’s blood. He slipped his tongue past the steel blade, stirred the red pool, round as the sun at dusk, when it seared the horizon and raised monkey ruins of hell to the wicked imagination of man.

  The boy flattened, boring into earth.

  “No,” Hunt whispered again, but vow had been replaced by threat: “Don’t move.”

  He licked an ear, licked it again, shifted his head to the side so the sharp tip could thread through the boy’s light hair, score the back of his skull. You feel that? Sure you do. You’ll feel more, just you see. “That’s my mouth,” he said without removing the blade. “Think about that.” But the boy said nothing, quaking beneath him.

  A red line swelled. Hunt tasted that, too.

  Still trembling, he slipped his knife from his mouth and sat on his heels—blood on his teeth, copper on his tongue. His head rose to the sun and he closed his eyes, every cell alive. In the crystal light he knew the most sanctioned moment of his life, for God and all that He inspired spoke to him, and the message was as clear as it was reassuring: He must cast aside kindness—and sacrifice even his own righteousness here on earth—to confirm the boy’s depravity, his deserving of punishments most severe. But what stunned him most—what made him suddenly hang his head in eternal gratitude—was the understanding that he’d been doing this all along. Every act he’d ever committed with sodomites and heathens and errant brothers of True Belief had been part of the Lord’s plan. He was a spy in the realm of sin, an infiltrator of flesh, and need not have begged the Lord’s forgiveness for actions that He ordained.

  That’s right, My son. All that has passed was pure. All that will come is promised.

  From high above, Burned Fingers spotted a man hunched over Jaya. He would have gunned him down if the lead shot would have spared the kid, but at this distance his sawed-off was no more sure than his pistol.

  And he wanted so much more than the man’s simple death. With a single glimpse, he wanted to savage him with his hands, his blade, gut him like a gamecock because the rapist’s back revealed what his imagination had spared him—the final limning of his young son’s horrific sexual assault and murder by soldiers in Baltimore. Till this moment, Burned Fingers’s memory had moved no further than the gruesome scene’s dishabille: Cody’s torn clothes and naked, rumpled form lying near his slain, partially dismembered mother in a burned-out basement. But now the tense, predatory hunch of the man down below fleshed out the earlier, archetypal violence—and sparked a hell storm in Burned Fingers.

  He screamed “No,” which echoed off the rock walls, and ran toward an old wagon road that ended in the ravine.

  The rapist jumped to his feet and spun around, as if the fury were charging him from everywhere at once. Then he bolted to the motorcycle, bigger than Burned Fingers had thought looking through his field glasses. Large as an old Harley. The blond, darkly tanned man leaped on it, kick-started the engine, and hunched over the tank like he’d hunched over the boy.

  But he wouldn’t be moving anywhere fast, not dragging that trailer and side car up the steep road.

  Even as Burned Fingers placed the odds in his favor, the biker sprang off the seat and unhitched the ungainly trailer. Less than twenty feet away, Bliss, naked and standing, rummaged through her pants instead of putting the goddamn things on—or running away.

  Get down. If the guy turned, he could shoot her; Burned Fingers saw a pistol in his belt. But the fiend threw himself back on the loudly idling bike without ever seeing Bliss.

  Burned Fingers ran along the edge of the ravine, closing the distance to the road, warning himself not to blow up the gas tank when he shot the rapist.

  You want that bike.

  Did he ever. Nothing better for scouting, and nothing rarer. He was still riding big bikes about thirty years ago, and knew what they could do and how fast they could do it.

  He heard the engine growl, saw black smoke and dust rise behind the rear wheel, yet thought he’d have time to set up for a kill shot. He might even catch the hog before it crashed riderless into a boulder.

  But while racing up the road, the biker jerked a metal bar, cutting the side car loose, accelerating even faster. At the same time, Bliss pulled something from her pants and startled Burned Fingers by chasing the bike. He tried to shout a warning but the engine noise drowned him out.

  She stopped anyway, only to rear back and throw the sharp rock that she’d shown him at the obsidian wall, burying it in the biker’s lower back. Blood burst from the crude wound.

  But the believer never slowed, leaving a dense funnel of oily exhaust in his wake.

  Burned Fingers, breathing hard, smelling fumes, neared the road as the bike rose from the ravine. He didn’t spot the rider immediately because the guy had flattened his dark torso against the tarnished tank and propped his chin on the front of it, making a clean kill shot all but impossible.

  As the bike raced for the open space ahead, Burned Fingers dropped his sawed-off and yanked his bone handle knife from its sheath. Then he launched himself at the man, hacking murderously at his back, striking bone—hoping it was spine—before embedding the blade in flesh and spilling to the ground.

  The motorcycle wobbled. Burned Fingers jumped up and gave chase, hoping the frame wouldn’t bend or the precious wheels collapse when it crashed.

  But the rider pulled himself upright and sped away—with the knife stuck in his thick trapezius only inches from his neck.

  What the fuck!

  Burned Fingers pulled out his revolver and shot at him, the bike, tires—any target that would dump the rider on the ground. But the guy was racing through a series of boulders, showing less of himself with every second. Jessie opened up with her M–16 from a few hundred feet away—with no more success.

  In the ravine, Bliss grabbed her shotgun from the jettisoned side car and, still naked, started running up the road.

  “Put your clothes on!” Burned Fingers shouted. “Bastard’s gone!”

  He dusted off, second-guessing himself furiously. He should have unloaded the sawed-off on him. Fuck the bike. But he hadn’t been able to resist its allure—or its great promise. It would have been a tremendous help to have a fast, nimble two-wheeler for guiding the caravan. He’d made the wrong call for all the right reasons.

  And he’d forgotten about the Pixie-bobs.

  Hunt roared down a paved road gapped enough to scuttle the motorcycle and swallow it whole, leave him mangled, dying, eaten by carrion birds. The sun-clawed surface wound past a second boulder field before curving behind the hill that rose above the ravine.

  The agony in his back wrapped around to his chest and groin, like the rock and knife were eating their way right through him. A rock. They were savages. He didn’t dare pull it out—too close to vertebrae—any more than he’d yank on the blade. The doctor would see to the weapons, the Lord to his well-being.

  He took the shoulder of a road through a valley formed by steep, drought-stricken hills. The pavement itself was another wasteland, but the side looked mostly unriven. He rode the cycle faster than he’d ever dared, gripping the throttle tightly, gritting his teeth, anything to escape the sharpening pain.

  He didn’t notice Pixie-bobs until they rampaged down the slope to his left, trailing streaks of silt so fine that they hung in the air like smoke.

  His pain fled, body triaging threats, veins fat with adrenaline. He pushed the Harley harder, risking sudden splits in the crumbly surface and rocks that could condemn him to a gruesome death. But better to die from a crash t
han to be taken down by this pack. Even the screaming engine couldn’t drown out the death call of the cats.

  In a blur he did come upon a hole so deep that he caught no sight of the bottom as he launched over the void at a harrowing speed, the shadow of man and bike disappearing into blackness. Clearing the threat, he gave thanks, but a terrifying yowl tore his eyes from the sky to the cats now springing off the eroded remains of a retaining wall. Two of them lunged at him from feet away, fell short and were trampled.

  A numbed memory reminded him they were sprinters, good only for the predatory pounce; but they’d sustained their charge for a minute at least—though terror always wound a tight clock—and were still exploding at him.

  The one in the lead, ears pinned back like all the rest, bounded over a chasm and landed on his shoulder, bit off his ear, clawed his cheek, and tore open his neck—and in such rapid succession that he almost dumped the bike.

  He pulled the beast from his flesh and threw it aside, flinching as another one jumped for his leg. He jerked his boot off the foot peg and watched the Pixie-bob flail before it fell under the rear wheel with an audible thump.

  “Oh, God” was all he allowed of prayer or imprecation before two more landed on his back, ripping at his bloody skin, and a third clamped its claws around his left arm and sank its needle teeth into his elbow. The onslaught almost drove him off the shoulder into a dry riverbed to his right.

  In a fearsome effort he tore the Pixie-bob from his arm and hurled it to the dirt. Wind whipped blood from his eviscerated elbow as he registered the full savagery of the cats on his back.

  A series of fast, furious bites by his shoulder blade made him risk another lunge; but when he grabbed the creature’s head, it bit the meaty base of his thumb, boiling pain through the whole of his hand.

  He tried to release the animal but it bit down harder. Frantically, he shook his hand till a chunk of palm started tearing loose. Sensing release, he beat the beast against the side of the Harley till the flesh tore away completely and the cat fell off, still gulping pulpy tissue.

  He throttled hard despite the cat feeding on the muscle next to his spine. Then the claws climbed higher, and he knew the P-bob was trenching up his back, ripping him open.

  He told himself he could take the pain. Just thirty more seconds and the pack would have to give up and he could kill the cat eating him alive. But the beast was wrapping its legs around his skull, clawing his scalp, brow, temples, and lips. With its warm belly pressed to the back of his head, its musk ripening the fast flowing air, the Pixie-bob ripped his face from the corner of his eye to his bloody nub of ear.

  When it tried to claw him again, he turned to the side, fearing the loss of sight above all else, and spotted the mass of Pixie-bobs slowing, watching, as if waiting for the cat shredding his skull to bring him down. Then the creature’s hind leg jammed the knife handle, driving the blade sideways in his wound. A scalding agony erupted, and he violated all precaution by braking. The bike swung around, tires smoking, till it left him facing the pack a hundred yards away.

  In a blazing panic he dragged the cat off his head, peeling its claws from his face. Holding it away from his body, suffering it still, he yanked the blade from his trapezius and stabbed the beast repeatedly, finally impaling it on the knife. He raised the squirming, squalling feline high above his head and shook it violently, torturing it. The creature’s piercing screams formed an unearthly chorus with the idling bike.

  He flung the body from the blade and watched it fall hard on decayed pavement twenty feet away. It clawed the ground with one paw, couldn’t rise up, lay writhing on the pebbly remains of asphalt, a seizure-gripped clump of bloody fur.

  The pack stared, winded as one. He jammed the knife in his belt and raced off, wounds burning and throbbing as adrenaline drained away in the red sweat of passing miles.

  He thanked the Father with prayer, mumbling the words over and over, spit and blood spilling from his lacerated lips—along with a stark earthly injunction: Hold on. Hold on. To the bike. To life. To the supreme knowledge that the Lord would not let him die after he’d unveiled—and chained—unshakable evidence that the fallen angel Lucifer had staked his claim to the abiding sun.

  His Piety had warned of the coming signs, this one above all others, when the Curse of Cain would appear as beast and griffin, cruel grotesqueries and demon seeds. When the signs would herald Holy War.

  There would be no Rapture, no hand of God plucking believers from the scourged earth to His heavenly abode. Not yet. Not with hell’s creations crawling from ash.

  Jessie ran down into the ravine, Hansel hopping gamely behind her. Bliss was pulling on her pants, blood crusting her foot. Jaya sat naked and unmoving on the ground. He looked drugged or concussed. Then she saw blood on his back, a lot of it, and skin that looked grated.

  “What happened?” she asked Bliss.

  “That asshole put a dog on him. Pretty much said we were dead if we moved. And he prayed a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.” She cinched her belt and kneeled next to Jaya, stroking his cheek, handing him his chopped-off pants.

  “And you?” Jessie asked pointedly.

  “He clawed my leg. Jaya got the worst of it.”

  “Forget the dog,” Burned Fingers said as he raced up. “Where the hell are those cats?”

  Jessie studied the top half of the hillside—all she could see from the ravine—but spotted only a few cat tracks, and the footprints that she, Burned Fingers, and Hansel had left. “Where did they go?”

  “Long as they’re gone,” Burned Fingers said without conviction. “Let’s move.”

  “Wait a second. Can’t you see?” She put her hand on Jaya’s shoulder. “We’ll have Hannah take a look at those bites,” she said to the boy. “Come on, get dressed.”

  Burned Fingers reached down, offering his scarred hand. Jaya took it without expression and pulled himself up.

  “You’ll survive,” Burned Fingers told him. “People have dogs licking their wounds all the time to get better.”

  And a lot of them get sepsis, Jessie almost said, checking herself because Burned Fingers was trying to give Jaya hope. At least he wasn’t giving him grief.

  “Mom,” Bliss said uneasily as she backed away from the trailer, “there’s something in that thing.” Her eyes were on the telephone booth wrapped in chains.

  “Some thing?” Burned Fingers said, drawing his sawed-off and advancing slowly.

  Jessie raised her rifle and watched him lift up on his toes to look through the Plexiglas from a few feet away. He holstered his gun.

  “What?” she asked, lowering her own weapon. She heard something shift inside the booth. It’s alive, she thought. Whatever it is.

  “You might want to prepare yourself,” Burned Fingers said as he hurried to strip off the chains.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “Just a sec, and keep an eye out.”

  He glanced at the hill, but Jessie’s gaze hadn’t left the booth. She stepped toward it, impatient with his reticence; but Bliss shook her head and gripped her mother’s arm.

  Chapter Five

  “It’s okay,” Jessie whispered to Bliss. She hurried to Burned Fingers, who was reaching down to open the telephone booth, disturbing dust from the folding door. One of the twins blinked away the grit. The other girl’s eyes were closed. Both had dried blood on their foreheads.

  They were crammed together, yet Jessie also noticed pretty round faces that could have defied any talk of famine. And the one who’d blinked revealed rich brown eyes with flecks of gold so radiant in the strong light that they might have been dancing in their delicate orbit.

  What Jessie did not see was their most strikingly distinctive—and unsettling—feature.

  She watched Burned Fingers offer his hand to the alert twin. When she struggled to stand, he asked if her sister could help.

  The girl stroked her twin’s face, saying, “We can get out now, but we have to get up.” Though the silent girl’
s eyes did not open, she climbed to her feet with her twin—and astonished Jessie.

  “See what I mean,” Burned Fingers said softly.

  The twins were joined along the length of their torso, which wasn’t much wider than a typical adolescent girl’s midsection, normalcy greatly underscored by their single pair of arms and legs. But the familiar features of their body made them appear that much more unnerving because they bore the unmistakable look of a two-headed human.

  Conjoined twins, Jessie reminded herself. Siamese twins before the nomenclature changed.

  She helped Burned Fingers guide them from the booth and trailer, realizing as they moved gingerly from their prison that in a land rampant with superstition and hardship, the twins’ survival itself might be more stunning than their conjoinment—and a tribute to Augustus and his people.

  Their clothes were burned off. Maybe torn off, too, she thought in a flood of revulsion. All that remained was a singed waistband holding a flap of cloth from a pair of pants or shorts, or possibly a skirt. Impossible to tell.

  “Here, put this on,” Burned Fingers said, handing over his shirt. Jessie draped it over their shoulders, fastening the two surviving buttons. It hung past their hips.

  “I’m Jessie. And this is Burned Fingers.” She tried to temper the uncommon with the ordinary before cringing over his nickname, which she knew must sound strange to any untuned ear—and quite possibly alarming to girls who looked like they’d survived a conflagration. But they didn’t react and she didn’t explain, instead introducing Bliss, who managed a smile, and Jaya, standing steps away. “What are your names?”

  “Leisha,” she said. “And Kaisha,” she added with a nod at her quiet sister.

  “Is she all right?” The girl’s eyes were still closed.

  “All right?” Leisha shook her head and rolled her eyes till they showed almost nothing but white. “They burned us! A tank burned up everyone. It was shooting fire at us. And we ended up in that.” She twisted her head to glare at the booth, neck cords tight as winch lines. Then she gestured toward her legs. “They hurt so bad,” an outcry that raised her hand to her charred hair. She clutched a fistful, drawing Jessie’s attention to her scalp, burned pink in small patches and spotted with crimson dots, as if the sky had rained blood. Jessie spied splatters on their sides and thighs, and ash clinging to their arms and caked to the insides of their elbows. The girl’s fist dropped from her head, opening to hair that had crumbled in her grip and looked like lint.