Carry the Flame

by James Jaros

  “Not everything,” His Piety countered. “They don’t have the North yet, and the Dominion has fought off every attempt to take it.”

  “Don’t they need gas? They’re not living on sunshine,” the Elder said. “I’ve never figured out what they’re doing up there.”

  “I don’t think they’re using gas,” His Piety said, also sounding perplexed. “They just trade in it. There’s been no word of it up there, and no shipments have gone north for as long as I can remember.”

  “Well, we need whatever they’re using, because we sure don’t have it. We’re down to a grand total of eighteen hundred gallons underground.”

  “That’s enough to go after the tanker,” His Piety said.

  Another lengthy pause followed, and just when Esau thought he’d have to creep back to the door, His Piety spoke up.

  “That’s why we must give Hunt everything he needs. But hire the others, too. Make sure they know that traitor, Burned Fingers, is still with the heathens. That should get their blood running.” Esau heard a smile in His Piety’s voice when he spoke of the marauder named Burned Fingers. “And make sure they also know the reward for killing all the heathens will be more than anything they’ve ever seen. But they must bring back the heads as proof. I want to see every last one of them—except for the demon’s. I want that beast alive. Only the demon gets to come back. So first they’ll have to negotiate for the beast. They can offer them safe passage—if they hand that creature over. Then, after they have the demon, they can go to work.”

  “What if they won’t give it up?”

  “They won’t sacrifice everyone for the demon. Would you?”

  “I wouldn’t even countenance a demon, His Piety. But they’ve taken the demon with them.”

  “Because they worship demons. But I want that beast back here.” Esau heard His Piety pound his desk again. “There can be no escape this time, or any excuse. The demon must be cleaved and burned. That’s all our Lord asks of us. Nothing more. If we can’t protect His kingdom on earth, what can we do? Now bring me the slave.”

  “What if the demon is killed?”

  “That is unlikely,” His Piety said with great precision. “It survived the tank and fire. But if God in His wisdom wants the demon to die out there, then both heads must be brought back—still attached to the body. That is critical. All True Believers must see the beast and know the evil is real.”

  Esau heard footsteps, then the Elder opened the inner door. He studied the slave, then lowered his gaze to the floor. Esau glanced down, too, worried that his filthy feet had tracked up the carpet.

  “Go in. His Piety wishes to see you now.”

  The slave had been summoned to His Piety many times, but had been ushered into his office proper only to pleasure him. Otherwise, His Piety spoke to him through the open door. But after the urgency of all he’d heard, he could not fathom that he’d been beckoned to “help” the prophet.

  He felt this more strongly when he stepped through the doorway and found His Piety’s personal slave standing by the wooden statue of the naked boy. The lithe, girlish looking blond youth did not acknowledge him, and Esau figured he’d been there the whole time. He held the most trusted position for a slave, and Esau guessed the boy was also among the high-born.

  His Piety had moved from his desk to an ornate, hand-carved chair. Not as grand as the cathedra in the chapel, and made of a much lighter colored wood, but as thickly padded.

  “Come here.” His Piety directed Esau to a spot in front of him.

  The slave lowered himself and bowed his head. The prophet offered his hand, and Esau kissed his bulbous gold ring. He had kneeled before His Piety many times, but never to place his lips on anything so hard or tolerable as the ring.

  “Look at me,” the prophet said. Esau raised his eyes. “You will accompany your master when he is strong enough to chase the heathens. You will see to his welfare and help in any way you can.” His Piety paused, as if to lend the fullest possible meaning to those last few words. “You have been loyal to him and to us, so if his mission succeeds—and it must—your loyalty will be rewarded: you will return a free man with all the rights and privileges of a True Believer.”

  Esau realized he must have looked as stunned as he felt because the prophet nodded and repeated his promise. Then he added, “Hunt will have his orders. Yours are simple: aid him, and make sure he survives, even if it costs you your own life. The Lord will grant you bliss forever if you perish protecting him. I have seen this in my visions, so you know it’s true.” But Esau could not help hearing the Chief Elder’s mockery of the prophet’s visions. His Piety smiled. It didn’t look kind. It looked cunning, and that also made the slave uneasy.

  “A free man,” His Piety said once again, “but do not underestimate the challenges you’ll face, and know that Hunt will be told to kill you if you fail him in any way.” The prophet leaned forward. “One more thing. You will not speak of this to anyone before you are freed, or I will kill you myself in the name of the Father and Son.”

  “Yes, His Piety. Thank you. May I fulfill a request of my master by passing along a message to you?” His Piety nodded. “He asked me to tell you that he is ready.”

  “Go. Leave.” His Piety shooed him away as if it were beneath him to hear such important information from a slave.

  A free man, Esau said to himself as he left the office. He’d never heard of a slave being freed. Or of a man like him even offered such a reward. And that stopped him after he exited the anteroom because no matter the heresy, no matter how sinful it made him feel, he could not refrain from wondering if the reward was a chimera. His first inklings in the office now loomed larger and darker. Maybe that’s why he’d never heard of a slave becoming a free man. Maybe they were promised freedom, sworn to silence, and then summarily killed. That scared him more than chasing a demon and fighting heathens.

  As he started toward the chapel entrance, he saw Hunt walking toward him. You can tell him. Esau desperately wanted reassurance the reward was real, then reminded himself that His Piety had vowed to personally kill him if he spoke of it to anyone.

  His master brushed past him without a word, and while Esau assumed he was hurrying to a summons of his own, Hunt’s aloofness heightened his anxiety.

  Moments after he returned to Hunt’s room with food, Abel knocked on the door again, telling him to go to the front gate. This time the messenger boy did not escort him, and Esau walked as fast as he could, heart beating loudly in his ears.

  He spotted Hunt’s motorcycle by the entrance. Attached to it was a sidecar rigged like an iron cage and provisioned for a long journey.

  Esau realized they would be leaving right away. He hadn’t been permitted off the base in years, and then only for a few hours of wall building. His elation soared when Hunt rose from the other side of the big bike, tossed a wrench into the sidecar, and pointed to a small pile of clothes on the motorcycle seat.

  “Put them on. I don’t want you looking like a slave. You’ll start looking like a free man now.”

  A free man. Someone else had spoken the words. Someone else knew. It felt confirmed.

  Esau picked up a pair of pants and shirt. Beneath them—astonishingly enough—he found a pair of boots. He’d never even owned a pair of tire-tread sandals.

  But what about the S? Before he noticed what he was doing, he rubbed his brow, as he had two hours ago.

  “No one can see that until they’re close,” Hunt said. “And no one’s getting close unless I want them to. Grow your hair. It’ll disappear.”

  Grow my hair. Slaves had to chop it off with knives. Maybe he would be freed.

  He rushed to a latrine and changed. The pants felt odd, but he loved them. The shirt, too. He stepped from the privy to put on his boots. Then he carried his filthy skirt to Hunt, who was watching slaves in chains trudge out of the gate, as he himself once had.

  Hunt threw the skirt at the slave master, shouting, “Give it to one of them, or keep
it for yourself. You never know.”

  The man’s face reddened but he merely nodded at Hunt, whose easy authority could not be questioned by a guard. Had he known Soul Hunter’s meek origins, his envy might have flared into open resentment of the blond man’s prerogatives.

  More than two decades ago marauders had taken Hunt slave in a murderous raid. The five-year-old arrived at the base roped at the neck to other boys. Hunt had no memory of his parents and never would. His Piety claimed him at the gate below the giant Jesus on the cross, drawn to Hunt as a serpent is to the eggs of its own kind, gleaming in the dark deracinated barrens of childhood.

  Hunt was a handsome boy with a wedge-shaped torso that grew more sculpted and appealing with the passage of every year. His Piety took him as a lover at once, a secret stain on the prophet’s soul, already blotted with the blood and semen of other boys.

  Hunt loathed the old man’s incessant urges, ending his sexual enslavement in his mid-teens when he could claim the imperatives of his own body by forcibly forestalling those of his putative master. The abrupt rejection left His Piety standing in silence, quivering with anger, desire, and the most powerful longing of all—for the youth of another, and the youth of his own so long passed, conflating the two, as they often are, in the abject blur of aging.

  No threats were ever spoken, no words arose from the secrets His Piety and Hunt had shared. The young man quickly claimed the mantle of Soul Hunter by tracking down escapees, violating the youngest and weakest—often for sex, sometimes for the unencumbered pleasure of their pain. He returned all of them to the base bound by the neck, as he had been. Boys, girls, men and women—bony, starved, and broken from the their encounters with him—were then slowly incinerated in the unshakable grasp of posts and chains, wood chips and coal.

  Hunt watched them scream and writhe and die, ruing not their grim demise but his own lingering iniquity, a sinuous haunting from high above where the sky came alive with heavenly claws. For days after the burnings he whispered hurried prayers of contrition, not for his violence or their gruesome deaths, but for the pleasure he’d taken with the young: memory sharp, selective, unforgiving.

  But when his latest boy had lain naked and savaged in the dusty ravine, blood pooling above his pale buttocks—and Hunt had realized that the Lord alone, not his parents or His Piety, had placed him on earth to confirm the final depravity of others—he’d gleaned a blink of eternity’s most consoling gaze, the sacred sanctions and godly injunctions that left him purer, stronger, and more empowered than ever.

  He kick-started the old Harley and slapped the seat for Esau to get on. The slave straddled the cracked leather, found the foot pegs, and wrapped his arms gently around his master’s scabbed and bandaged body, hand brushing a pistol in Hunt’s belt.

  Two guards waved them through the gate. Hunt gunned the engine. A cool wind soothed Esau’s skin, stealing up his pants and shirt. He felt christened by the righteous spirit of God, as if the Lord had answered his prayers and most fervent pleas in an infinitely resonant voice, filling his inner emptiness at last. In these suddenly pristine moments he felt unbeholden to men or boys or the desires of the flesh, and thought to ease his light hold on his master and lift his cheek from Hunt’s warm back, but couldn’t.

  He blamed his failure on the motorcycle’s speed, faster than memory itself—or so it seemed to Esau as he gazed upon a world unshaken by walls, gates, or gun towers. But it wasn’t speed that kept his arms and hands on Hunt, or the impediments of a rough road. It was the mystifying force he felt only for the man he held.

  The sidecar rattled next to him, heavy with the implements of carnage. He’d thought of escape often, but never anticipated the maelstrom sweeping him from the life he loathed.

  To hunt heathens in the name of God. To kill them all. To fill a cage with the dangerous fury of a two-headed demon from hell.

  To know the sacred blessings of a True Believer.

  Chapter Nine

  The caravan trundled deeper into the Great American Desert, past mounds of large human bones—femurs, ribs, mandibles—and smaller ones that looked like the cracked, bleached joints of a vast bloodless body. But from Jessie’s seat up on the back of the tanker trailer, the desert they claimed hour by hour looked no different from the wasteland they left behind. The caravaners were in the graveyard of the Midwest, “the heart of it all,” as the old Ohio welcome sign said, now littered with the debris of bludgeoning, crushing, shooting, chopping. The sands offered few burials, save what the earth itself spared when driving winds and torrential rains swept the bones to new places of rest. Migratory in death as they had been in life, they appeared from the depths blanched and ghostly, as haunting as the vanished territory they claimed.

  Jessie and Burned Fingers no longer stopped to examine the remains. The children didn’t need to see any more cruel evidence. Their nightmares were a contagion that gripped the youngest girls before waking others with the same feverish sweats and chills.

  But no matter what the caravaners did, they were never far from the bones. Last night, after stopping to bed down, Jessie idly scooped up the smooth surface only to find more of the dead—the clustered skulls of infants and toddlers under a thin layer of sand.

  The bones’ ubiquity followed from all she knew of the collapse. With the disappearance of 65 million midwesterners, the remains she spotted, for all their rigid horror, provided but the tiniest glimpse of everyone who perished. And the bones could never account, in the most precise sense of that measured word, for the untold millions of refugees who died crossing the broiling vestiges of the Midwest for the East and West coasts, the Gulf or Great Lakes, seeking the cool fiction of water in a rapidly heating world.

  Why are we alive? That question gnawed at Jesse as they rolled over a gentle dune and saw another outreach of emptiness. And for how long? Her eyes roved the dead, and she knew that these people, whose bones they now trampled, must also have wondered about their survival—before they succumbed, if not to murder and cannibalism, then to starvation or thirst, accident or disease.

  Five days ago the girls had found the welcome sign with City of Shade scratched over the word Ohio. Five days without a single cloud, and five brief nights to absorb cooling sand and tumultuous dreams—and consider the threat of an old penal colony overblown, the idea that inmates had literally taken over the asylum absurd. “They died, too. Everything died,” Jessie murmured as she looked up from yet another tangle of bones, shattered points sharp enough to have clawed away the absent flesh.

  “Hold on,” Burned Fingers shouted from atop the truck cab, a grueling roost every bit as hot and exposed as the one she claimed about fifty feet behind him. Jessie winced when he jumped from the lumbering vehicle, as if she felt the impact in her own creaky knees. But he was already scurrying away, studying the sand.

  Maul stopped the truck seconds later, and Jaya, up on the van ahead of them, reached down and pounded the door to signal Brindle.

  Ananda and M-girl spilled from the side of the trailer, hand in hand, as they had been since surviving the Army of God. Ananda nuzzled her girlfriend, a sign of romance that made Jessie smile. The two had been inseparable growing up in the camp, though the gentle tones of intimacy didn’t sound until Ananda, three years younger than M-girl, approached adolescence. Jessie had also heard each of them use heroic terms to describe how the other saved her life after the abduction, admiration almost as necessary for love as physical attraction. M-girl still bore scars from pulling Ananda from flames when the zealots tried to burn her as a witch.

  “That’s how I knew how I felt about her,” M-girl had told Jessie shortly after the start of the journey. “I would have died for her.”

  You couldn’t ask for a greater love for your daughter. And while the joy the girls shared made Jessie happy, as a biologist she recognized the early onset of physical affection reflected severely shortened life spans, no longer now than in the Middle Ages when young brides were common—and may have been neces
sary for the propagation of the species.

  She watched M-girl share her water ration with Ananda, as she herself did every day. Her daughter had shown the first signs of an unquenchable thirst about a year ago. But their generosity was leaving Jessie and M-girl parched—and Ananda was still weak.

  Recently she also complained of dizziness. Jessie tried hard not to think about the most likely threat to Ananda’s life. Her girl had survived so many horrific dangers it seemed insufferably unfair that a disease conquered a century and a half ago might slowly kill her. But its simple remedy hadn’t been available for decades. And to think she had worried for so long about Ananda becoming involved with Erik, or some other boy, and possibly contracting Wicca.

  Her daughter laughed with M-girl, and spilled water from her cup. Be careful, Jessie wanted to yell, but Ananda looked so stunned by the sand’s dark bloom—and offered such an anguished apology to her partner—that her mother said nothing.

  We’ll find more water, Jessie thought as she climbed off the trailer and started after Burned Fingers. We have to. Food stocks would last another six weeks, but none of the caravaners would live long enough to eat them if they didn’t find water.

  The sand felt noticeably fine. Jessie sank into it with each step, worried that a bone shard would pierce her sandals. Hansel struggled on his three legs, and Razzo sniffed in fits and starts. Watching him, she wondered if along with so many other remains, they’d already driven by—or over—the City of Shade.

  Burned Fingers looked up as they headed toward him. He stood well off to the side of the truck, pointing to large paw prints in the sand. “I couldn’t believe the size. That’s the only reason I saw them.”

  Much larger than a man’s foot. That’s what Jessie noticed first. And there were four of them, front and hind, with claws apparently several inches long; the fine grains blurred the most telling details. Some of the tracks appeared to have been brushed over, leaving foot-high berms on each edge of a serpentine shape, which narrowed at the end.