Carry the Flame

by James Jaros

  “I’m so thirsty,” she pleaded.

  “We have water but it’s back at our caravan.”

  “How far?”

  “Not too,” Jessie fudged.

  With help from Bliss and her, the twins started out of the ravine, Kaisha’s eyes still closed.

  “Is Augustus your father?” Jessie asked when they’d reached level ground. She thought the girls must be the twins whom he’d said so little about. Now she understood his secretiveness: his daughters could become fodder for cults, and targets of their savagery.

  “You know him?” Leisha demanded. “Where is he?” She looked around as if she might find him among the boulders.

  “He’s with us back at the caravan,” Jessie said. “He’s okay. You’ll see him soon.”

  Their father had a burn so prominent that she’d noticed it at first glance, the shape of a cross he’d branded on his chest where a gold or silver one might have hung from a chain before the collapse; afterward, precious metals and gemstones—and innocence itself—were readily surrendered for food and water.

  That’s what she needs as soon as possible. Jessie’s eyes were on Leisha. But not her sister, not if she’s in shock. Kaisha’s head hung as limply as the hand by her hip, which hadn’t moved. Jessie figured that each twin controlled the leg and arm on her side of their body. Biologically, that would make sense; but it made a quandary of providing aid if one girl could be in shock while the other was alert, if that was even possible.

  As they started up the long gradual slope to the caravan, she automatically scanned the barren landscape and hillside for Pixie-bobs. Another reason to get back to those vehicles—as soon as possible.

  Had they been white and not conjoined, the Alliance would have wanted the prepubescent twins for Wicca-free sex, once their menses began. But as Augustus had said, zealots didn’t want African-American girls because they carried the “Curse of Cain,” as the Alliance called it. But she also remembered him saying that the zealots never left you alone for long because “they’re always seeing something you got.” Even if it was lives they could end and a community they could slaughter. In the end, black skin hadn’t saved his girls from abduction—and it singled out his people for murder.

  The twins walked slowly with a rolling gait, Leisha wincing with every step.

  Jessie wondered where she would place them on the caravan. Three blind girls and the babies whom they cared for already occupied the seats in the van that weren’t piled high with crates of food, and the perches on the tanker truck could never accommodate burn victims comfortably.

  Just get back as fast as you can. Their small group was an open, easy target that would never survive a Pixie-bob attack. Though no words were spoken, she saw Burned Fingers also surveying their surroundings from the scout position in front of them, his bare back glistening in the sun.

  He’d borrowed her M–16, not that it would spare them if the feral cats attacked. He might kill a dozen, but even gunning down three times as many wouldn’t slow a swarm of them.

  He called Jaya to his side; the boy was lagging numbly behind Jessie, Bliss, and the twins. But he came to life with a big “Thanks” when Burned Fingers handed him his sawed-off.

  “I can’t shoot that and this,” Burned Fingers said of the weapons. “And right now our job is to protect the womenfolk,” he added with a hick accent that he affected sometimes for a laugh.

  Jessie smiled, but Bliss wasn’t amused. She hefted her shotgun up to her hip as if to say that she didn’t need his help. If Burned Fingers noticed, it might have reminded him that only three weeks ago the girl had almost killed him while trying to save her father.

  “He touch you?” Jessie overheard him ask Jaya. “Because what he did was wrong,” Burned Fingers went on. “Wouldn’t matter whom he did it to—boy, girl, man, woman—it was wrong, but I’ve got to know something . . .”

  Jessie leaned forward, openly eavesdropping and almost certain of the question he was about to ask—the only one that really mattered.

  “Did he put it in you?”

  Jaya shook his head.

  “There’s no shame in it for you,” Burned Fingers said, “but you have to be completely honest for everyone’s sake.”

  Jessie glanced at her daughter, who looked pained.

  Jaya shook his head again. “He was going to, but you yelled at him and he ran away.”

  “He’s going to be running from me all his life,” Burned Fingers said. “If he ever comes anywhere near us, I’ll hunt him down and kill him.”

  Jessie’s spine prickled. A ruthless finality in Burned Fingers’s icy tone promised death as much as his actual words, a fitting outcome, perhaps, of decades of earnest killing. But his message must have moved Jaya, who teared up and spat, “I hate him.”

  “And you’ve got the right. You hear me? You’ve got the right to hate him.” He nodded at the boy’s swollen eyes. “There’s no shame in that, either. Go on. We’ve all had to at some point.”

  You? But she doubted her curiosity about Burned Fingers would ever be satisfied.

  “That man’s a rapist,” he said to Jaya, “and you can bet he’s raped others and that he’ll keep on raping if he gets half a chance. I’m promising you, he’s a dead man from this day forward.”

  Jessie was shocked to find herself choked up by his kind words and fierce vengeance against men who used children and draped their debauchery in the vestments of religion. In the last few minutes he’d seethed with anger, offered compassion, and sworn the worst of violence, roiling contradictions that reflected what she’d gleaned of his complicated past: Oxford humanities scholar who could quote The Waste Land at length and recite ringing descriptions of the competition between gods and mortals from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; renowned resistance fighter in the final days of the collapse who’d commandeered an army tank and turned it on rampaging soldiers until they burned him with white phosphorus; murderous marauder in the lawless years that followed; and now, late in life, a shrewd and intrepid fighter who helped lead the attack to free the girls from the Army of God and destroy the zealots’ formidable outpost.

  But his background was no more odd than the circumstances that led all of them to this point at this time with these girls.

  “Leisha, has your sister spoken at all?” Jessie asked.

  The twin shook her head. “Not since the tank came. It was crushing everyone, and it shot that fire at us. That’s all I remember, and then he came.”

  “He?”

  “The one with the box.”

  Telephone booth, but she wouldn’t be likely to know about an antique supplanted by wireless technology in the early years of the century. All of it refuse now, electronic parts scattered by the trillions across the planet, dribs and drabs and vast waste dumps of chips and screens and candy-colored wires bleeding their toxic innards into the earth.

  “Does Kaisha’s skin that’s hurt on her side feel like yours?”

  “No, it’s different in different places, but we’re both burned.”

  “I know it’s awful, but you’ll feel better when we can get you a place to rest.” Jessie peered past her. “Bliss, try talking to Kaisha.” Her daughter held the girl’s slack arm. “She might be in shock. See if you can get her to respond.”

  “I’m Bliss,” she said to Kaisha right away. “It’s kind of a funny name, I guess, everything considered.”

  No reaction.

  “Kaisha’s one of the prettiest names I’ve ever heard of,” Bliss carried on. “How old are you? I turned fifteen today.”

  Still no response, but Jessie flinched; she’d forgotten about the birthday, and though she’d had ample distractions, she vowed to herself to make it up to her firstborn.

  “How old are you?” she asked Leisha.

  “Thirteen.”

  “You’re teenagers.”

  Leisha nodded shyly. “So my dad’s up there?” They’d just walked beyond the curve of the hill and spotted the far-off caravan.


  “He sure is.” Jessie could barely make out a black man darting from behind the tanker. He began running down the slope. “That’s him. He sees us.”

  “Kaisha, it’s Dad!”

  The silent twin opened her eyes for the first time. “Daddy!” she cried out so loudly that Burned Fingers hushed her.

  The girls tried to walk fast and stumbled, then Leisha reached for Kaisha and they held hands as they hurried.

  Burned Fingers and Jaya stepped aside for Augustus.

  “They’ve got burns,” Jessie warned, but he must have seen this because he slowed and let them take the lead in drawing him close.

  He kissed their round cheeks and held each of their faces in turn, shaking his head in open wonder. His hands hovered over their back, careful not to touch what he could not see; but it was clear that he wanted to hold them, to sweep them into his grasp and never let go. “You’re alive,” he said. “Alive.”

  “Daddy, Daddy,” Kaisha whispered, as if to say of course in the midst of so much turmoil.

  Burned Fingers broke in: “Sorry, Augustus, but we’ve seen Pixie-bobs.”

  The missionary looked at him with alarm, then drew his daughters’ hands to his lips and kissed their fingers. Not letting go, he walked backward. Tears streaming, he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and gave thanks to his god. “Come-come, we’ll take care of you,” he told them. “It’ll be okay now.”

  Jessie wished that were true. She returned to scanning the hillside and the slope behind them, hating those piranhas of the apocalypse.

  Less than fifty feet from the caravan, her fear of the felines was crushed by a rumble. She knew what it meant before she turned, even before the twins shrieked in panic. They’d heard it at their camp, and she had endured it the night before and seen its menacing tread marks this morning.

  The tank was a dark outline in the distance, but it grew larger and louder every instant, roaring up the slope. Worse—if that were even possible—the engine noise had alerted hundreds of Pixie-bobs, and they were swarming down the hillside that spilled onto the grade.

  Tortured by his wounds, Hunt rode his aged Harley in near delirium up a winding, broken highway to Alliance headquarters in a former army base. It squatted on a bluff above a wide bend in a dead river riddled with rocks and military wreckage. Red sweat still blurred his vision from the blood streaking his face and head, forcing him to navigate the last several hundred yards of rubble-strewn road with unusual care.

  He stopped at an imposing steel gate before slumping over the teardrop-shaped gas tank, much as he’d had to escape the ravine. Closing his eyes, he rested his shredded cheek against the tarnished metal, fully exposing the knife wound, wretched bites, and claw marks on his shoulder blade and both sides of his spine.

  Countless dust storms had shaded the white brick entrance, and letters had fallen from a sign that once greeted soldiers and their families: WE C ME T FORT MC AU EY. Small, less heavily dusted ovals hinted at the insignia of the units that had been based there, leaving a gap-toothed grimace on a dead institution still hated by believers for permitting sodomites and mud people, Muslims and Sikhs, Catholics and Jews, and Pagans and apostates of all kinds to rise in the ranks, to actually command white followers of the True Faith. And then the fallen, wicked and wounded, wondered why a nation so cursed and abominable, a world so reviled by the righteous, had been harrowed by the Lord’s sharpest plow.

  Hunt had been present on the morning six years ago when His Piety swept his robed arm toward the dirty brick and said, “Let it crumble! Let it rot like the temples of antiquity, the heathen horrors of Thebes, Jerusalem, and Rome. No rag of religion was too filthy for them.”

  Now, briefly rested, he lifted up and saw that the gate hadn’t opened. “Help,” he yelled, sinking back to the gas tank without finishing his plea. He spotted the head of a Pixie-bob in the fuselage staring up at him, its body sheared off in his mad flight from the pack. Hunt kicked the face weakly and almost dumped the bike when his legs began to buckle.

  He wheeled into a shadow before recognizing that it fell from the ninety foot cross that rose above the base, and could be seen and venerated for miles. The last of the oxy-fuel had been used to weld it entirely from broken, burned, and otherwise useless weapons—rifles, handguns, cannon barrels, bayonets, bazookas, and tank parts. Even the face of Christ had been commanded from helmets, the body from the twisted tread of a blown up Abrams tank. The tortured looking figure appeared eerily real and full of wrath.

  True Belief cannot be beat. Hunt repeated those words like a prayer, and they sustained him for another minute till a creak lured his eyes back to the gate. Five slaves, chained together, pressed their emaciated frames against the thick metal bars. Once, the gate had cooperated at the touch of a finger. Now it ran on the raw efforts of men too feeble-spirited for True Belief, who lived out the last weeks or months of their wastrel lives in servitude to the Alliance, each of their brows crudely and quickly tattooed upon arrival with an inky S—the black Curse of Cain for those whose white skin tried to hide their dark cause.

  He stood, straddling his Harley to push it past the infidels, his back burning and red as flame. He found the kick stand and staggered off the bike. One of many guards patrolling the walls caught him and held him while another rushed forward.

  They hurried him from the entrance, his body slipping from the weak foundation of his feet, fully weighting the arms of the men beside him. They passed the slave quarters, once a mesh run for the base’s canine corps. He asked if Damocles had returned—or thought he had; the guards didn’t answer, and he wasn’t sure he’d heard his own voice.

  He took air to try again when two more guards ran up with a stretcher and then scurried off with him. “My back!” he screamed from the sudden pressure of lying on the rock embedded inches above his buttocks. The guards rolled him on his side, giving him a view of two dozen slaves shackled to the spokes of a massive wheel whose hub was a turbine rescued from a dam. Their chests were chained to long steel girders that once held power lines for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and they trudged in circles in twelve hour shifts to draw water from a well. Teams of guards drove them with whips, truncheons, and the constant threat of machetes.

  Concentric stone paths had been built around the hub after generations of slaves wore shin-deep ditches in the dirt. The hard surface added only more misery to their high mortality. Nearly every day a slave succumbed to heat, exhaustion, or hunger, hanging from his chains like a rag, bare feet bleeding on the long reddened rocks until hauled away for a proper beheading.

  From what sounded like a great distance, an urgent voice said he might die and should be taken to the infirmary; but a commander insisted that His Piety wanted to see him in the Great Chapel.

  Hunt closed his eyes, certain that God Almighty had saved him for a hallowed death; and though filled with agony and pain, he glimpsed the white imminence of heaven, regretting only the loss of Damocles and the base in all its splendor—worship, water, food, slaves, and a bounty of girls who would bloom into wives. The most anointed beauties were culled every two months from stock at the fortresses pledged to the Alliance. He was to take a bride within a year. While most of the time the Lord’s work would keep him far from her—and forced to confirm the depravity of soul dead men—he would vow a blessed fidelity to whatever female His Piety arranged for him. The need to procreate was paramount. It was in the Bible, and often on his lips as an unbidden reminder.

  The guards carted him past rusting cyclone cages packed with old men in filthy white robes, survivors of the attack on Zekiel’s compound. But they’d failed to protect their leader, an esteemed man of God and prophet. Neither did they protect their gas, girls, and the sacred trust the Alliance had placed in them. Each would be chained to a witch and burned slowly to death, their ashes falling together to force their souls into hell. Every burning at the base included a witch, and many were to be found, cunning creatures spreading Wicca, for no God of man would abide
such a curse, such a dark seed of sex and deviltry. It was a lesson to the men of the Alliance that no price—surely not earthly life—was as painful as eternal death on the arms of a Pagan.

  As the guards ferried him up the steps of the Great Chapel, he thought of the sodomite and could not help but wish the boy were dying, not he. Even more grievously, he worried that the Lord world banish him to hell for failing to bring His righteousness down on the naked sinner.

  But I was going to, dear God, and You must know it’s true. You know my heart. I cut him once and I had the knife in my hand.

  He forced his eyes open and squinted at the marble steps, embedded mica glinting on a path as hard and bright and shiny as his faith.

  “Water,” he called. His Piety would want him to tell what he’d learned, and his throat had known only red sweat for hours.

  A guard gave him a bota made of black hide. A trickle washed his hollow belly and gave him the strength, after a pause, to swallow three more times before resting the water by his side.

  For the first time since the base entrance, a shadow fell across him, opening his eyes fully. Cooler air settled on his skin, and he saw another familiar cross—golden and gleaming—filling the broad space behind the chapel altar. Just below it, suffused by the glow, His Piety, round and bald and bearded, sat on an elaborately carved bishop’s chair rescued long ago from a cathedral. The tall back rose above the prophet, whose wide bottom reclined on burgundy velvet padding, his arms on burled walnut rests. On both sides of him stood the Elders of True Belief, six men in white gowns as stained from use as their skin had been darkened by the sun. They formed a daunting V that received Hunt on the stretcher.