Burn (18 page)

Chapter 26

And the smoke of their torment ascends up for ever and ever;
and they have no rest day nor night.

—Revelation

Major Ezra Hodge carried a duffle of supplies to Pier 9 in La Libertad’s filthy harbor and dropped it at the feet of a heavily armed Costa Bravan security detachment. This was regular army, not those Pan-Pacific mercenaries that he’d been forced to hire to cover Casa Canada. None of the five uniformed faces looked older than twenty, and none smiled.

A corporal reached out his hand and demanded,
“Papeles!”

Hodge handed over his diplomatic passport, military ID and visa without comment. Martial law had everybody jumpy, and in Hodge’s experience it paid to be calm, quiet and to have the right stamps in the right squares. The corporal spat, handed back his papers and waved him through without a salute. Just days ago Hodge might have had this kid busted so low that sewage treatment would look like good duty, but today he just smiled and nodded as he passed.

They’ll be dead in a day or two,
he thought.
What does it matter?

Hodge activated the security gate with his Agency card. A lot of other people had the same idea—the crowded harbor was the site of frantic activity as several hundred people pressed against the fence and gates, coveting the forbidden boats inside. The chosen few who had the right rank or the right papers busied themselves making their boats ready for open water. These vessels ranged from rowboats to forty-meter yachts. Hodge himself stopped at the
Kamui,
a fifteen-meter schooner that the DEA used for sting operations and the DIA used for entertaining dignitaries. He unlocked the cabin and tossed his duffle inside.

The boat was spacious and comfortable, much nicer than his bachelor apartment in Zone Four. It had a double bed and toilet fore and aft, as well as fold-down bunk space for six more people. The cabin smelled of stale beer and mold. He cracked a pair of portholes and mopped his sweaty brow on his sleeve.

Before doing anything else, Hodge opened his antidote kit, removed the vacuum-sealed injector and unwrapped its rice-paper cover. The message inside read:

All nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy judgments are made manifest

He unfastened his pants and slipped them down to get at his hefty thigh.

One shot to go.

Hodge swallowed the cherry-flavored paper and positioned the injector over the thickest part of his thigh. It hair-triggered, and startled him so that half of the antidote sprayed onto the deck.

More than half!

The Angel assured him that even one drop in his body was plenty. Still, this GenoVax hit the victims’ bodies like a dirty nuke—what if this antidote didn’t have a chance to diffuse? Would chunks of him—whole limbs and organs—rot in place in a matter of seconds? He had a sudden vision of himself as a modern leper, forever slinking from doorway to doorway in the cover of darkness.

As though there would be anyone alive to see.

Rena Scholz would be alive, and she would see. Hodge eyed the spare kit, the one he saved for Rena Scholz. He could make up the difference by splitting a shot with her. She was playing the whore to Toledo now. The part was unlike her, but she played it superbly.

She keeps him talking,
he reassured himself.
It’s business.

That’s what the spook business had in common with whores and journalists. Hodge smeared the evaporating antidote into the teak with his boot and forced his gaze from the spare kit.

I’ll get Solaris to loosen up the quarantine,
he thought.
Then at least she won’t be paired with Toledo all the time.

Hodge had seen familiarity breed before, in the liaisons between his coworkers. Some of those fornicators and adulterers were Gardeners, and he would be happy to watch these hypocrites burn in the flash of the sword.

Meanwhile, Scholz, Solaris and the rest of them pursued their useless gesture of cementing a cap onto every access to ViraVax. It saddened him, in a way, because now he had to admit that the Angel was truly gone, and the handle of Flaming Sword snugged firmly in his own grip. And he would ride out the storm, comfortable and secure offshore aboard
Kamui.
A few thousand million rotting bodies was going to make terra firma pretty unattractive for a while.

“Compost for the Garden of Eden,” Mishwe had told him, nonplussed.

Hodge’s drive through the city to the harbor had revealed the glittering edge of Flaming Sword. Dozens of fires raged unfought, including two hospitals and the Jesuit university on the hill overlooking the embassy. This last sight gave him great pleasure. The Jesuits were the Marine Corps of the papists, and their deaths would be occasion for much despair among his enemies.

He would have to rescue Rena Scholz soon; already the streets were clogged with roadblocks, patrols, abandoned cars and buses. Command was breaking down; he had seen one soldier leave his station to hijack a car at gunpoint, while an entire patrol carried armloads of electronics out of a broken storefront.

I’d better have her back here before those communion wafers kick in from Easter Mass.

Hodge thought about moving
Kamui
upcoast, in case the mob at the fence broke through, but then realized he would have no way to get to Rena Scholz. He had been out on the boat twice before, with a hired crew, and he knew nothing about sailing. But he knew navigation, and he was confident that he could handle the boat well under power. The fuel gauge showed both tanks of diesel full, and he had plenty of propane.

Hodge started the propane freezer and stocked it from his duffle. The cabinets and stowage already held enough sealed goods to keep four people fed for months. Fishing gear was in place and in good condition.

He hurried topside and topped off his freshwater tanks, then locked up and rehearsed his approach to Scholz as he negotiated the difficult trip back through the tormented city to Casa Canada.

Chapter 27

Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them;
and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.

—Jesus

Grace Toledo knelt beside a trembling Nancy Bartlett in the open-air church of Santa Ana. Grace tried to recapture some of the spiritual calm that she remembered from her Catholic girlhood—a difficult chore with the horrors of the past few days eating at her. She had not made her Easter duty in years, but her life was crumbling around her so she was willing to try anything for hope. Spiritual focus was hard when she shared the kneeler with Nancy Bartlett, who was a bundle of tics and tremblings. Nancy’s condition gave Grace Toledo one more reason to hate her ex-husband, and she did so knowing full well that hatred had no place in the house of God.

Father Free, on loan from the Archbishop’s office, presided over this unusually solemn Easter Mass. Father Free had been a friend of her ex-husband’s for over twenty years, and the ill feelings she held towards Rico spilled over to include Father Free. Besides, she was divorced, and this church no longer welcomed her to its bosom.

Grace was as proud of her friend Nancy as she was hateful of her ex-husband. Nancy’s suppressed memories had burst through in a rush, triggered by the kidnappings and the security camera replays of all those burning bodies out at ViraVax. After being sedated into a night’s sleep, a very shaky Nancy Bartlett had ridden the embassy limo with Grace to greet their children as they were released from their isolettes. Grace’s pallor and waves of trembling did not stop her from a loving reunion with Sonja, whom she had borne and raised as a daughter but knew now as her double, her clone, her beautiful unauthorized self.

Grace agreed with Nancy that the children did not need to know the truth about Red Bartlett’s death; they were burdened with enough emotional garbage already. But Grace was sorely burdened, and hateful, and completely unforgiving. She avoided glancing up at the wafer as the Sanctus bells rang in the Great Mystery.

Grace’s reverie was broken once again by the scream of sirens outside on Camino Esperanza.

Something big must be up,
she thought.
They’ve been doing that all morning.

The revelations about ViraVax had triggered a civil war between the Catholics and the Children of Eden, a two-day bloodbath that she hoped would resolve now that Garcia had resigned. The embassy expected trouble, since the interim government hadn’t had time to secure itself and there was some question about the loyalty of the military. Fires burned throughout La Libertad, but they burned the heaviest in the outlying districts, the Gardener districts. All the whispers said that the Catholic underground was getting even for twenty years of genetic manipulation at the hands of the Children of Eden. Grace looked around at the fearful crowd packing the board-and-batten church, and hoped that it wasn’t so.

If not us, then who?

Ambassador Simpson told her that the Gardeners were burning the Reichstag, setting fire to their own to whip the survivors into a rage against the Catholics. Much as she hated the Gardeners, she refused to believe that anyone would burn their own families in their beds as a political ploy.

Tapes of the ViraVax Meltdowns had been bled off the webs and played for nearly twelve hours on every screen in the country, and across the world. Another whisper claimed that the Innocents had been a ViraVax engineering project, and that one made sense. No Gardeners birthed Down syndrome children, yet they were eager to take them all in.

In Costa Brava, most Catholic couples had recently come up sterile. Nobody doubted, now, the perpetrator of that curse. Dozens of Gardener homes for the
deficientes
went up in flames overnight, and Grace Toledo prayed for the poor, frightened Innocents who died there. Some said it was a well-coordinated firebombing, but no one had stepped forward to take the credit. Firefighting response had been suspiciously slow, in many cases nonexistent. Most of the firefighters were Catholic.

Grace bowed her head at the Sanctus bell that startled Nancy Bartlett. Grace had been a political Catholic, a check mark on the census to challenge the rising tide of the Gardeners. Today, she wished for more, and regretted that she could not receive communion with the rest of the faithful even though the priest dispensed a general absolution to his congregation. Though faithful in her way, she was divorced, and the sacrament of penance did not cover divorce. That most intimate bond with the church was closed to her now.

The time came for communion, and Nancy Bartlett whispered, “Come up with me. God knows what’s in your heart.”

Grace smiled and whispered back, “God knows what’s in my heart, so I don’t have to go.”

“No,” she insisted, “you come, too.”

Nancy took Grace’s hand and led her through the benches to the makeshift communion rail. A new calm seemed to wash over Nancy as she knelt before the picnic-table altar. The people of Santa Ana had no way of knowing that Grace was divorced, excommunicated, but Father Free would know. How could she bear the shame when he passed her by or turned her away?

Before she knew it, he stood over her with the wafer. He smiled warmly, nodded, and offered her the host. She opened her mouth for an old-fashioned communion, and he placed the wafer on her tongue with a blessing and a “Body of Christ, Amen,” in English. While she didn’t necessarily feel holier, she felt better about Father Free, and resolved to have a long talk with him as soon as this mess blew over.

She followed Nancy Bartlett back to their seats and knelt beside Nancy for a moment in silent reflection. Nancy Bartlett’s nerve-wracked body was still for the first time all day. Presently she sighed, crossed herself and patted Grace’s arm.

“Let’s go bury those bastards,” she whispered.

Grace choked back a laugh, and followed Nancy Bartlett out to the beat-up Lada taxicab that they shared for city driving. She would have to hurry if they were going to catch a flight out to ViraVax; the concrete pour was already started. The badly rusted car looked hopeless, but it fired up every day at the turn of an old-fashioned key.

Kind of like me,
she mused,
except it’s been a while since I had anybody’s key in my lock.

The old cab slewed in the gravel as Grace gunned it east, towards the Jaguar Mountains. The day was plenty hot, and she was glad the sun was behind them. She vowed to buy a real car with air-conditioning first thing, but she had to admit she enjoyed the anonymity of the cab.

“It’s like a tomb out here,” Nancy remarked. “I’ve never seen it so quiet.”

Sirens continued in the distance, in the heart of the city, but it was true; there was little traffic out here on Camino Ezperanza. Columns of black smoke formed an ominous cap over the city, and at Avenida Alcaine Grace saw firefighters hosing down a burning ambulance that had crashed through the front of a shoe store.

“No shooting and no roadblocks,” she said.

“Thank God for small favors.”

Nancy Bartlett clutched the dashboard with both hands, her eyes wide and fixed straight ahead.

“Did you see them?” Nancy asked.

“See who?”

“The two bodies beside that ambulance,” Nancy said. “They were . . . they were
melting.”

“No,” Grace said, and patted her friend’s arm. “No, I didn’t see them.”

And she hoped to God that Nancy Bartlett didn’t see them, either. She hoped against hope that it was stress, hallucination, lack of sleep. They drove the rutted back roads in silence towards Casa Canada, neither of them speaking.

They missed the last chopper out to ViraVax, and Grace was relieved. She had wanted to see the place sealed under a concrete slab, but she did not want to face her ex-husband out there. What she really wanted, in spite of the heat and humidity, was a long, hot bath. And time to think about what it meant to bear a child that wasn’t her child, but a clone of her through her ex-husband.

What will happen to Harry?
she wondered, in anguish.
Will I have to hate him, too?

The Pan-Pacific guards wouldn’t let her enter Casa Canada, so she let Nancy Bartlett off at the gate and watched her shuffle and jitter her way up to the house. One tire rubbed a fender as Grace turned the car around and headed towards the city, and the luxury of a long, hot bath.