Burn Page 21

  Sara’s fingers appeared between his knees, clutching at the rock. Trot took hold of her wrist and pulled. “We can hold ‘em off from here,” he said as she sat in next to him. “We can punch and kick and send them falling back down.”

  “The girls,” Sara gasped. “Save the girls first.”

  Trot leaned forward and saw Angel ten feet below, the creatures were inches from Kay’s legs another six feet beneath her. “Climb!” He screamed. “Climb faster!” He grabbed onto Angel’s arm when she close enough, and Sara pulled on the other. They squished her into the shrinking ledge between them.

  Kay wasn’t going to make it. Finger nails had scratched into her calves and left her lower legs bloodied. Grey fingers wrapped around one of her ankles. She looked up helplessly into her mother’s eyes.

  “Give me that rifle,” Angel yelled. Trot twisted sideways and the girl worked it free from his back. She leaned forward, rested the metal barrel against the rock edge, and fired down. There was an explosion of pinky grey as the top half of one of the thing’s head disappeared. The fingers around Kay’s ankle let go. The creature fell into more below, knocking half a dozen away from the sky rock wall with it.

  Sara reached across Trot and tried pulling the gun away. “Don’t shoot that thing again. You could hit Kay!”

  Angel pushed her back. “Maybe. Or them things could drag her down.” She took careful aim and blasted another one away. It toppled away, crashing into more. Kay was almost within Trot’s reach. Angel fired the rifle again, and they felt the sky rock shudder.

  A tremendous deep thump—a hundred times louder than the rifle shots—sounded out around them. They looked up and saw a thousand tons of falling snow. Trot found Kay’s fingers and pulled. His other hand grabbed into her hair. He threw his back into the rock and heaved. The avalanche roared over them, blocking out the sky for what seemed like eternity.

  The light returned. Trot opened his eyes and scratched Kay’s hair away from his nose. They looked down and watched as the snow continued its rumbling descent. It crashed into the distant trees, enveloping entire forests along the way. Not a single creature was left clinging on the rock below them. They had all been torn away and carried down with the avalanche, buried deep and frozen once again.

  Angel picked snow from her ears. “I reckon we know now why they called it Boom Reach.”

  Chapter 40

  Getting down took a lot longer than climbing up. Twenty feet of loose snow had come to rest on the rocky roof of the Jewel Room. Each of them plopped down into it near the end. They slid the rest of the way off and sat in a shivering huddle by the front entrance.

  “I ain’t never climbing no fucking sky rock again in my life,” Trot said. The girls stared at him. None of them had ever heard him swear before. His eyes opened wide and he clapped a hand over his mouth. Sara started to laugh. Kay and Angel joined in.

  They found a small storage room inside filled with food and blankets. They ate and warmed up. The rest of the afternoon was spent burying what remained of the dead monks deeply into the snow.

  The four finally gathered in the Jewel room and watched the sun set over the peaks west of Victory Island. Kay wrapped a second blanket around her shoulders to fight off the evening’s growing chill. “Do we take them books that are left below and head for the island?”

  “May as well,” Trot answered. “Ain’t no one left to pay.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go there anymore,” Sara said. The island looked like a black stain in the grey lake’s center. “Hank was desperate to get there… Not sure I want to be anywhere a cryer needs to be. We’ll wait for Lawson and the others. Let him decide.”

  “We should know soon then.” Angel pointed down the stony path. Two horses and two riders were climbing their way up.

  Sara had seen a lot of Lawson’s ugly faces. She had seen him beaten and bloody, swollen and bruised. She had seen him scared, and she’d seen him angry. The look on his face now made her feel cold inside. Utter defeat. Despair. Grim.

  Cobe looked worse.

  “The others?” Kay asked.

  The Lawman shook his head. “We had to put Jenny down… And Willem…” He fell silent.

  Cobe rode ahead of him and showed them the bundle in his arms. Trot and Angel helped him down with the body wrapped in blankets. They laid it gently to the ground. Sara knelt down and pulled the cloth away from Willem’s face. His skin was as white as the snow, the hollows of his cheeks grey.

  The boy’s eyes opened.

  He whispered her name. “Sara? We made it to Victory Island?”

  “Yes… You made it.” She leaned down and kissed his forehead. His skin was cold against her lips. “Good boy. Close your eyes and go back to sleep.”

  He did as he was told.

  Sara looked up at Lawson. “What happened?”

  The Lawman stepped down from his horse and squatted next to her. “Jenny… We found them—we found her… eating his arm. He should be dead.”

  Cobe finally spoke. “But he isn’t.”

  Sara pulled the blanket away. Another one was wrapped tightly around his shoulders. She undid the knot at the center of his chest, and Lawson lifted the boy so she could work it free. An eight-inch protrusion was sticking out from the raw stump of his shoulder. It ended with a thumb and four tiny fingers.

  “His arm,” Kay gasped. “It’s growing back.”

  Lawson shifted Willem’s body over. A second arm had begun to grow from his left shoulder. “He should be dead,” the Lawman repeated. “But he ain’t. He’s one of them now… Willem’s a cryer.”

  Chapter 41

  They dragged him from corridors constructed of steel into tunnels hewn out of rock. He could hear the tops of his feet dragging through the dirt and scraping over stone, but could no longer feel the skin rubbing away. He’d been beaten, his bones broken. It was, Hank imagined, the shittiest way a President of the United States had ever been received on foreign soil.

  His torturers dumped him unceremoniously into a cell—a rocky hole in the ground with bars on top—and left him there. Hank sat, crouched and aching, staring at the rough stone wall eighteen inches from his face. It was full dark in this claustrophobic prison, but Hank’s superior vision could make out the darker patches smeared on the granite. Others had been brought here before, and judging from the amount of dried blood in front of him, they hadn’t been pulled out alive.

  He hadn’t thought things through well enough, he realized this now. Hank should have stayed on the mountain with the others and learned more about Victory Island instead of setting off on his own.

  There are rules here. Generations of tradition and ancient laws must be adhered to.

  That’s what the woman had said when Hank arrived floating to the rocky shore on a felled tree. Hank had given her the old leather-bound dictionary he’d taken from the library in Boom Reach, hoping it would be enough to smooth things over. He had been wrong. Men carrying metal clubs appeared and beat Hank savagely. He’d tried to tell them who he was, and how far he had travelled. They beat him harder. Hank explained of his centuries beneath the earth, stored away cryogenically. They broke his ribs and fractured his arms.

  Someone started to scream a long way off. Hank listened as the distant wails weakened, and trailed off into pathetic echoes.

  “I am the President,” Hank whispered to the rock wall. “I am the leader of the free world... Your leader.” He had said that to them, too, and they’d beaten him unconscious.

  Hank Odell closed his eyes and repeated the words your leader over and over. He didn’t require sleep. Whatever they had introduced into his body during the years he’d been frozen had done away with that human requirement. But sleep came anyway. It sped up the process of healing his broken body. The cuts and gashes sealed over. Bones fused back together.

  Something warm and wet began dripping onto the top of Hank’s skull. He thought he could hear someone calling his name from a long way off. He opened his eyes and l
ifted his head into bright orange light.

  “Wake up, Hank. You’ve slept long enough.”

  Someone big was standing above him holding a torch. The fire flickered through the bars, blinding Hank. He was more than big; he was gigantic—a block of muscle seemingly carved from the stone tunnel itself. The dripping continued. It plopped against his forehead, rolled down the bridge of his nose, and into his mouth. He tasted blood and spat it out.

  “Show some gratitude,” the voice said. “I figured you’d be starving by now.”

  Hank watched the figure squat down, the torch held high over his head. He was dressed in a single-piece jumpsuit that stretched and clung to his powerful physique, jet black in color with a silver zipper running from collar to crotch. Hank remembered seeing the white variety a millennium ago. The ABZE doctors had asked him to wear one shortly before the freezing process. Hank had insisted on being frozen nude with his tailored suit and silk tie left nearby. He had gotten his way.

  Hank stared into the man’s eyes, two deep blue orbs suspended in a mask of grey covered in scars. “Yeah, I could eat something if you’re offering.”

  “That’s better.” The man dropped a piece of raw red meat through the bars onto Hank’s knees. “I hope you like liver.”

  Hank touched the still warm organ. Blood oozed out from the sides and ran down the tatters of his dress pants. “What kind of liver, what animal?”

  “The only kind of liver available to us... human.”

  Hank smacked it away with the back of his hand.

  “That was rude, wasteful.”

  “I won’t eat my own kind.”

  “That’s good. Exactly what the President of the United States would say.”

  Hank stared back up at him. “Then you believe what I say? You know that’s who I am?”

  The figure shrugged and placed his torch against the rock wall out of Hank’s sight. “You could very well be the President.” He sat cross-legged at the hole’s edge. “You might be the King of England, or Santa Claus. So long as you follow my rules everything will be fine. My number one rule is that you eat what the rest of us eat. We eat human flesh.”

  “I won’t do that,” Hank replied quietly. “I may look like one of you, but I still have my civility.”

  The man smiled without showing emotion. “We are very civil down here. We’ve established a culture and a civilization that has lasted a thousand years. You will become more like us, more than you are now. You will eat human flesh, and you will come to enjoy it. Or, you will remain in this dark little hole for the rest of your life, and we both know that will be a very long life indeed.” He stood back up and retrieved his torch.

  Hank called out as he began to walk away. “Wait! Who are you? How many people are here?”

  The man didn’t come back into view, but Hank heard him reply. “I’m the man you came looking for. I’m Kelvin Eichberg, and I’m your world now, Mr. President.”

  Hank found the cooling liver down in the dirt between his ankles. He pushed it up through the bars and tossed it after the man. Hank heard his steps recede down the corridor, the light faded with him. He sat in dark silence for another few minutes, smelling the copper scent of blood stained on his fingers. It made his mouth water. Would it be such a terrible thing to lick his fingers clean?

  No. I am a man. Not a cannibal.

  The screams in the distance started up again.

  Hank closed his eyes once again and settled his forehead against his knees. He didn’t need to sleep, but he didn’t want to remain awake either.

  He awoke with a start. Warm fluid was gushing over his head, running through his hair, streaming into his eyes, and pushing in between his lips. The copper stench had returned with a vengeance. Someone was pouring blood on him from above. It was beginning to pool around his feet and buttocks, rising, rising. The blood continued to flow, up past his stomach, pressing in on his chest. He sloshed around in the fluid, trying to readjust his legs in the cramped space so his knees were touching ground instead of his rear end and the bottoms of his feet. The blood accumulated around his neck and kept on rising.

  Hank clawed for the bars, feeling clumps of organs and other visceral matter swimming in the thick stinking soup of human haemoglobin. He wrapped his slippery fingers around metal and heaved himself upwards, thrusting his lips into the last bit of air possible.

  The downpour suddenly ended. Hank gasped for oxygen and the blood spilled into his open mouth. He spat it out, and continued breathing in through his nose, the only part of him besides his forehead and eyes not submerged. He could feel his hands beginning to slip on the bars. Hank would only be able to hang on so long. Soon his strength would fail him, and he would sink down.

  He heard a voice, muffled and far away. No, not far, close. Someone was speaking less than six feet away, but it was difficult to make out what they were saying with the blood pressing in on his ears. Hank blinked the red film from his eyes and saw Kelvin Eichberg squatting down above him. He was holding a heavy black hose in his hands. A final stream of dark red liquid was trickling onto the ground and running into Hank’s cell.

  “You’ve already swallowed a lot of blood, Mr. President. Human blood. It wasn’t all that bad, was it?”

  “This isn’t... what I am,” Hank sputtered.

  “Yes it is. You are going to become what I want, one way or another.” Kelvin Eichberg stood and walked away.

  Hank held onto the bars. He breathed in with his nostrils and exhaled through his mouth. Blood bubbles rippled around his face. He sat there like that for another hour, waiting for his aching fingers to finally give out. They didn’t. More time passed, and Hank held on. Something popped in his left ear. A minute later the right one did the same. He could hear his fellow prisoner wailing again somewhere far away.

  The blood level was dropping. It was seeping into the cracks, draining down further into the earth beneath Hank’s feet. The minutes dragged by like hours. Hank’s entire face and head eventually became free of it. He finally let his fingers uncurl from the bars and allowed his body to sink down. The blood rippled around his chin, but he wasn’t going to drown in it.

  Seconds later Kelvin Eichberg returned and filled the small space back up again. There was more blood this time. Hank clutched at the bars and gasped for air. He could only manage to keep one nostril suspended above the surface.

  He could hear Kelvin’s muffled voice.

  “Drink up. Mr. President. There’s plenty more where this came from.” He left again, pulling his still-dripping hose with him.

  The blood seeped back into the cracks again over the next few hours, leaving Hank in a sticky, stinking mess. He so wanted to lick the remaining sheen of it off the rocks and suck the clots out of his clothes. If he hadn’t been so exhausted, he may very well have given into the temptation.

  Kelvin returned some time later, dragging his big hose along the way. He forced it between the bars and spoke. “Will you finally drink this blood I offer?”

  “Put hose… Put it… Put it up your ass.”

  The blood flowed in, and Kelvin left him in it to struggle for a third time.

  When he returned, the hose was nowhere in sight. Kelvin was holding another piece of red organ in his hands. He squatted and offered the dripping meat to Hank just inches above the bars. “This is part of the lung from a pig. Go on, take it—take it and I promise not to fill your hole again with blood.”

  Hank’s shoulders and arms were numb. He turned his wrist over and showed Kelvin the wrinkled palm of his hand. Kelvin let the organ drop. Hank tore at it with his teeth and swallowed the pieces without chewing.

  “Much better,” the hulking figure said. “Much, much better. Now you’ve learned how patient I can be, how forgiving. I have more here to give you, but I’ll allow that piece to digest for a bit, okay? In the mean time I would like to ask you a few questions, and I will expect nothing but the truth. Is that acceptable?”

  Hank continued to swallow and nod
ded his head.

  “Thank you, Mr. President. I’m so glad.” He crossed his legs again and settled into a more comfortable position. “It’s obvious you’ve spent a great deal of time in cryogenic suspension. When exactly were you frozen, and how long have you been… thawed?”

  Hank answered the first part of Kelvin’s question to the exact date and hour. He could only estimate how long it had been since he’d awoken. A week, perhaps two.

  “Where was your body stored, which facility?”

  “In Oklahoma, Lone Tree installation,” Hank answered.

  “I was unaware ABZE was freezing people there.”

  Hank was licking his fingers and sucking the little bits out from under his finger nails. “Lone Tree was constructed after you were put here. Its location was kept top secret. Most of the people working for your grand-father’s company weren’t even aware of its existence.”

  “Because the clients being frozen there were extra important, weren’t they?” He dropped another organ into Hank’s waiting hands.

  Hank ate half of it before answering. “The entire senior staff of the US government and over a hundred other world leaders were laid to rest there.”

  “So I take it the planet was falling apart. World economies had crumbled, war had broken out, and human civilization could no longer sustain itself.”

  “Worse than that.”

  He went on to tell Kelvin about the first round of limited nuclear strikes, the chemical warfare that followed, and the sun’s explosive discharges that crippled most of the world’s infrastructure. Hank kept the worst part—how he’d obliterated what was left back into the Stone Age—to himself.