Carry the Flame

by James Jaros

  “May I go for your food?” Esau asked.

  Hunt stared at him. “What did you learn while I was sleeping?”

  “Learn? Only to worry that you wouldn’t be standing like this ever again. I’m so glad you’re—”

  Hunt abruptly waved him silent. “You know what I mean. Was I talking in my sleep again? I was delirious. I had a fever, sweats, nightmares.”

  “You said very little.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You called out my name twice.” You said you loved me. Only me. But Esau always imposed careful limits on his most outrageous lies.

  “What else?” Hunt asked impatiently.

  “You said something about the president being hunted, and the White House.” Another lie, intended to bolster the first one. “Like on the—”

  “That’s all?” Hunt interrupted again.

  “That was all you said.”

  “Because—”

  A sharp knock cut Hunt short. One of His Piety’s favorite messenger boys bowed until he saw that it was a slave opening the door. He peered past Esau, speaking directly to Hunt, who braced himself against a delaminated bureau.

  “His Piety wants to see your slave.”

  Hunt appeared surprised, but told Esau to go. When he turned to leave, though, Hunt called him back and ordered the messenger boy to close the door and wait in the hallway.

  “Tell him I’m ready,” Hunt said quietly.

  “Are you sure?” Esau did not want him to leave, and he had been back such a short time.

  “Did you hear me?’ Hunt glared at him. “I am ready.”

  Esau apologized profusely, bowed, and backed away. Hunt sat heavily on the bed.

  The slave trailed the messenger boy down the hall, hoping His Piety did not want to take his pleasure with him. The prophet’s touch curdled his skin. But thankfully, the man was extremely old, fifty-four, and most of the time pleasure was only a memory for him, his attempts to achieve it brief and—for His Piety—disappointing.

  Esau worried mostly about his master leaving him to more able-bodied men for weeks or months. While a few demanded sexual favors for themselves and friends, most expected him to work at hard labor on little sleep. The slave couldn’t say which burden he loathed more, only that he’d known a great blessing when His Piety ordered him to stay by his master’s bedside. The thought of returning to much harsher obligations made him frantic. And if Hunt were killed—or came back without the demon and was burned to death—his own prospects would darken precipitously.

  The messenger boy, Abel, stayed two steps ahead of Esau until they left the building. Within minutes they passed bony men, burned black as Africans by the frightful sun, digging a new latrine with picks and shovels. The odor was nauseating. An unfortunate few pounded the fill with bare hands and rocks to try to stop the waste from bubbling up when the hard rains fell, a cruel trick of the murderous earth that none of the True Believers understood.

  Bathrooms in private quarters, like Hunt’s, had been looted lifetimes ago for plumbing that could be cut, pounded, and forged into valuable weapons—spears, knives, swords, axes, spiked balls on chains—anything that could stab, maim, cudgel, and kill.

  Half a block away, Esau and Abel came upon more slaves carrying armfuls of rocks to patch a residential cul-de-sac. The blacktop had eroded so widely that most of the surface had been replaced. It appeared rough and painful to walk on.

  “Do you know why His Piety wants to see me?” Esau asked Abel softly, so he would not be overheard. The messenger boy looked around warily and shook his head. Slaves were not permitted to speak to one another, but when they could, they often did. The punishment was not severe. Slaves might be lashed or forced to suffer a half day of labor without water, but they weren’t burned or stoned to death for brief conversations.

  Esau had heard that Abel was born of “high blood,” as were a number of other slaves who were rarely rebuked for minor infractions. They were reputed to be the offspring of Elders or His Piety, but parentage was rarely bruited about because that was a grave transgression for any slave of any lineage.

  The messenger boy glanced around again. “It’s not to help His Piety,” he told Esau. To “help” the prophet was slave code for servicing his flagging desire. “The Chief Elder is with him. They’ve been talking all morning.”

  Both slaves quieted when they spotted four hooded girls in long dark gowns ahead. Their bare feet were tied together with frayed rope, causing them to stagger as they tried to keep up with two old men in boots who were herding them into an alley paved with specially sharp stones.

  “His Piety’s Memorial Drive,” Abel snickered. Esau didn’t risk a response. The messenger boy didn’t appear to notice and went on, “They’re new ones. They got here yesterday. They’re really beautiful. I got a good look at them on my way to get you.”

  Esau stared at the girls, trying to feign interest, but with Wicca infecting men who had sex with unclean females—and who could ever be sure of their history? An Elder had gone mad with the disease after having sex with his eleven-year-old bride—the slave considered his desire for boys an act of God’s benevolence. Not that he’d ever admit so aloud because the Alliance forbade all same sex contact, which made seeking out men and boys both exciting and dangerous to him. Only True Believers—men of presumed virtue—acted with impunity. And only His Piety had pretended to teach Esau about his body when he raped him.

  The slave saw Abel steal repeated looks at the girls, but why did he bother? Their shapes were hidden under the loose garments, their heads turned forward under floppy hoods. But Esau had never experienced the fervid way that lust for a girl could direct and dominate almost all of a young man’s impulses. What he did feel certain of was that even as a high-born, Abel’s desire was hopeless. These children were reserved exclusively for True Believers, the free men of God who had their choice of the youngest, purest females who passed through the front gate under the steely gaze of the towering, all-knowing crucified Christ.

  The new crop, like the scores of girls who had come before them, had been shipped to the Alliance from fortresses aligned with it. Every girl marched or dragged onto the base was destined for the bed of a man two or three generations older—and just as fated to disappear from his withered arms after her first twelve periods, when sexual activity would make her a likely carrier of Wicca.

  What happened to the girls afterward was a secret no one, to Esau’s knowledge, had ever revealed.

  As they neared the chapel, an Elder approached from their right. Abel’s eyes widened, as if he’d been caught touching himself—another grievous sin for a slave—but the old man passed by mumbling to himself. A lot of them mumbled. Esau had heard them claim they were praying, but sometimes their words made no sense, or they were complaining to themselves about food or bedding or His Piety’s choice of a wife for them. As if they had cause for complaint.

  Abel led Esau to a kneeling platform on the far side of the chapel steps. Every slave had to lower himself to the sharp stones and broken glass, then bow before a steel cross anchored in the rocks. Only after clasping his hands in prayer for a full minute to beg God’s forgiveness for his impure thoughts and depraved body did Esau dare relieve his throbbing knees. He had seen slaves thrashed for standing too soon, which was not a minor offense. A separate kneeling platform hidden behind the chapel received all females. He rose, pleased to see small cuts on his knees, proof of devotion that His Piety often checked.

  After climbing the marble steps, Esau held the chapel door for Abel, another unspoken obeisance to the high-born. He followed Abel down a wide hallway that wrapped around most of the building. Decades earlier the carpet had been a deep, rich blue: “Like the cool sky of heaven that awaits all True Believers,” His Piety had proclaimed from the pulpit last year. But when Hunt volunteered Esau for chapel cleaning, Esau discovered mice droppings in every square inch of the knap, though he’d glimpsed the creatures themselves only a few times. They b
red prodigiously, but were hunted by snakes that nested in the chapel’s foundation. On three occasions serpents slithered across the altar during services, and each time slaves were forced to hunt them down. Many were bitten when they attacked the nests. Some died. And the snakes always returned.

  His Piety’s office stood across from a wall separating the chapel from the work area. Esau and Abel were permitted to enter the anteroom without knocking. Opening the door set off a bell’s pleasing tinkle. It was the sweetest sound Esau had ever heard, and always provided the visit’s lone pleasure. He and Abel stood just inside the door, where they awaited the Chief Elder, who was His Piety’s closest aide.

  A pew long enough to sleep both slaves pressed against the wall to their left, but neither of them sat on it. That convenience was for True Believers. The unfairness gnawed at Esau, even though resentment and envy of the elect was a serious sin. But sometimes he couldn’t help himself. True Believers violated his body at will, yet he dared not sit on the pew because it would somehow sully the sanctity of wood?

  In silence he begged the Lord’s forgiveness for his heresy, praying that God would understand that he was hot and tired and plenty scared, still worrying about Hunt leaving and the days of hard labor that would follow. He didn’t know how many more he could survive.

  The Chief Elder opened the inner door to His Piety’s office. Esau glimpsed the prophet at his desk. A large cross hung from the wall behind him.

  “Wait right where you are,” the Elder said to him. He was a tall, gaunt man who peered at them through spectacles that contained only one lens, leaving his uncorrected eye watery and unfocused. “You,” he pointed to Abel, “wait in the vestibule.”

  The Chief Elder swiftly closed the half-light door, though little sunlight spilled into the anteroom because the glass had broken long ago. It had been replaced by plywood that was bowed and pulling away from the side of the frame, yielding a vertical opening a quarter inch wide. His Piety and his Elders always appeared to forget this when they talked in his office, and they often kept slaves waiting in the anteroom. But in Esau’s most resentful moods he considered it just as probable that church leaders found men like him invisible—wholly unworthy of heed—until they needed them. He’d also wondered whether His Piety and some of the Elders had trouble hearing. They often spoke in loud voices—or failed to hear themselves mumbling—and repeated their words even more boisterously if they believed they’d been misunderstood.

  Not that Esau had learned much from behind the poorly repaired door. Lots of loud whispers about the Gospels, especially Revelation with awed references to the “mark of the beast, 666,” and big man-eating mammals like leopards and lions and, most ominously, bears—“The symbol of Russia!”

  They sounded like men amazed by their own wisdom. But the slave’s musings about His Piety and the Elders seized him with panic, which he tried to purge with prayer, for he knew his thoughts would condemn him to hell. They were even more heretical than his master’s bewildering words about tumors and the drinking water’s chemical taste.

  This morning he heard little behind the door, and this intrigued him more than most of what had reached his ears in the past. Were they reading, praying, or whispering something so mysterious they’d drawn themselves closely together?

  He was sorely tempted to move forward, maybe just a step or two—nothing that would be immediately noticeable to the Elder were he to step back out. But if he was caught eavesdropping, he knew they would kill him. Spying on His Piety was a “capital crime,” and even a True Believer had been burned to ash two days before the last hard rain for listening in on the prophet.

  “He did it for Satan. None other,” His Piety had declared as he stood in the darkness, face flaring red and orange from the torch he wielded before them.

  The Judas chained to the stake behind him had shaken his head wildly and grunted, but a gag held and the prophet swept the flame over mounds of knee-high kindling that crackled loudly. In minutes the blaze burned the cloth from the trespasser’s mouth. It fell in a sudden incineration that shot out long tongues of fire, but the sinner could no longer deny his betrayal of God the Father and God the Son. He could only scream, a harrowing unearthly shriek from a hole in his melting face.

  Now, Esau leaned forward to draw himself inches closer to the door. He heard His Piety say, “It’s the Dominion. The Dominion.” The prophet sounded alarmed, and his voice lowered in an instant.

  Twice before the slave had heard of the Dominion, both times in hurried remarks by Elders who spoke as if it held the power of life and death over the whole planet. But what was it? Not God. They didn’t speak of it with reverence. They spoke of it with dread. And it was blasphemy to call thy God by any other name.

  Esau wanted desperately to slip closer to the door. Information was a slave’s only currency, tender that could buy favors of food, water, and work, that could ease hard labor, depending on the overseer.

  But you’re dead if they catch you.

  He studied the floor. Only carpet and concrete—no floorboards to protest his stealth.

  You can do it.

  Two steps. That was all he allowed himself. He no longer felt weak or hot, but alive enough for stealth. Actually hearing His Piety talk about the Dominion had made him move. Whatever it was, the Dominion scared the prophet, for surely, Esau thought, he had heard fear in his leader’s voice. But that confused him. His Piety scared people. His Piety had them burned, beheaded, blinded, stoned to death. His Piety frightened?

  Now he heard him say Hunt’s name, no doubt about it, and Esau’s feet eased forward, as if of their own accord. Then he thought of a ruse that might work. He’d creep to the door, and if it opened he’d fake fainting, like he’d fallen forward.

  Across the room? Don’t be stupid.

  But he did move across the room, veering sideways so the opening along the frame wouldn’t give him away. He stopped but a single step from the door, hearing their whispers clearly. His Piety spoke with such urgency that it shocked Esau, and it was all about the Dominion. Whatever they’d said about his master was lost to him.

  “They’ll never let us go north if we don’t find a way to stop them,” the prophet said in a hushed voice. “And that will cost us much more than a tanker of gas.”

  “Their gas. Their tanker,” the Chief Elder responded as urgently.

  A hand struck a desk, startling Esau. Or was it a head? Had His Piety collapsed like Hunt?

  No, a hand. The sound issued again, a distinct pounding. It had to be His Piety. No one would defy him so.

  “Control the border.” The prophet spoke slowly, no longer whispering, as if he could brook no misunderstanding. “No one crosses the Bloodlands. That’s all the Dominion really cares about. We can’t let anyone get up there. There are no exceptions, not even for us. If we do our job, then we get to go. If we don’t, we’re not going anywhere.” Neither man spoke, and nothing stirred but the haunting, God-riven interludes that tormented them all.

  Esau put his hand to his lips, afraid to breathe, and felt the Elder’s eyes boring through the door. Then he imagined the man stealing up, only inches away. The slave wanted to move but couldn’t, not in such an unbroken silence.

  “So you want me to hire them?” The Elder’s voice rose from deep inside the office. Esau finally took air.

  “Not just them,” His Piety replied quickly. “Hire everyone you can. Promise them all the girls and gas they want. Give them gold, anything it takes.”

  “What gas? If we lose that tanker, nobody’s going anywhere. We’ll be promising gas we don’t have—and might not get back—to criminals, absolute thugs. Do you really want to do that?” Esau heard the Elder shudder, as if a cold wind were sweeping the room. “Or haven’t your visions shown what could happen if we make a deal we can’t keep?” Esau could scarcely believe the Elder’s impertinence. No, sacrilege: questioning His Piety’s visions. “We’re dealing with savages,” the Elder went on. “And where are we goin
g to get more gas if we don’t get that tanker back? There’s no more Reserve to count on.”

  What? Esau’s head jerked up. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve held the continent’s only inventory of gas, its very name revered by everyone on the base.

  “Russians,” His Piety said. “They’re pirates. Fools.”

  What did Russians have to do with anything? Esau had heard that bands of them had taken over Europe, not that anyone cared. It was supposed to be a land of endless winter, even the southern climes of Spain and Portugal.

  The slave got his answer when His Piety spoke again, this time much less dismissively. He might even have been shaking his head. “We always thought they’d sail right from Siberia. No one ever thought they’d come all the way across the Atlantic.”

  “That’s why they did it,” the Elder said insistently. “And they must have known they’d run into the Dominion up there. They sure didn’t run into much of anything at the Reserve. They moved into the Gulf and took it in less than a week, so that tanker is about all the gas we’ve got. And everyone’s going to want it.”

  “We’ll get the Reserve back. You’ll see.” But Esau thought His Piety might still be shaking his head.

  The slave leaned even closer to the door—and almost stumbled. To your death.

  “When? When are we going to get it back?” the Elder asked loudly. “If we don’t—and I have my doubts—our only hope for going north is driving away right now. The Russians are taking over the whole country just like they took over Europe, and now that they’ve got the Reserve, they’ve got all the fuel they’ll need to head north. That’s a nightmare. If they get up there and wipe out the Dominion, we’ll be wiped out. But what it means to us right now,” the Chief Elder’s voice thundered, “is we can’t count on getting any more gas. And if we don’t get it, we can’t share it. Then we’ll see how much loyalty there is out there.”

  They said nothing for several seconds. Esau imagined them deliberating, then used the last of his nerve to backpedal slowly, quietly, an eternity before he stood safely again. He was pleased he could still hear the Elder say solemnly, “With the Reserve, the Russians have everything.”