The Fifth Sacred Thing (71 page)

Madrone roused herself and led the group into the next phase of the exercise.

“Now find an anchor for this state, a place you can touch, as you breathe, to bring you back, a word you can say, an image to hold in your mind. Concentrate, make it strong.” She gave them a moment and then began a soft whispered chant to guide them into trance, down toward the level where emotions translated to plays of color and sound and energy. Yes, she could see Katy’s rage there, red lights flickering over a brown ball of pain. She could hear it, like a vibration, a thrumming that seemed to penetrate from outside her.

Rafe was out of trance, alert, worried. Something was wrong.

“Come back now,” Madrone said. “Use your anchors. That’s right. Bring yourselves up and out.”

A shadow fell cold on the back of her neck. “Copter!” someone screamed. Everyone began to run frantically around the courtyard. A red stain blossomed on the heart of a child, she opened her mouth to scream and blood streamed out. Then Madrone heard the gunfire, ripping through the canopies, tearing into flesh and stucco and the tender bodies of spindly plants.

“Inside!” someone yelled.

“No! Don’t get trapped!”

But they were already trapped. Madrone could see troops emerge from both passageways into the square. She tried to run, but there was no place to go. Where was Katy? And Poppy? The gunfire was loud in her ears. She expected that, at any moment, the red blossom would burst forth in her. A laser beam hit the canopies and they burst into flame, filling the air with smoke and drifting pieces of ash. She was beyond fear, only saddened, somehow, as she watched bullets rip through the brave, struggling plants along the wall. So much work, so much care. All gone.

Then someone grabbed her arm and jerked her roughly into motion. It was Rafe.

“Come on!” he yelled, grabbing her arm as he pulled her over to the far edge of the courtyard. He shoved her behind him. She could see armed soldiers in a passageway so narrow that only one could fit through at a time. As the first soldier emerged, Rafe let something fly from his hand with a subtle, almost casual motion. Madrone heard a thud, and the soldier fell, a knife through his heart. While she stood, shocked, Rafe grabbed the laser rifle that clattered to the ground, shot the next two soldiers who emerged, and tossed a second rifle into the hands of Littlejohn, who dropped to his knees and began firing at the fuselage of the helicopter.

“Let’s go!” Rafe shouted at her. The soldiers had dropped back from the corridor.

“Katy!” she screamed, but he grabbed her arm and pulled.

“You can’t help her. And it’s you they really want.”

Behind her, she heard a dull moan and a sharp crack. She turned, to see Littlejohn twist and fall, the side of his head shattered, flecks of bone and brain plastered to the wall.

“Come on!” Rafe grabbed her arm. They squeezed down the narrow passageway, emerging behind a spray of laser fire from Rafe’s rifle. The soldiers were stationed behind a barrier directly outside the opening, waiting to pick them off. Rafe halted. Inside Madrone’s gut, liquid fire churned. We’re still trapped, she thought. We’ll never get out of here.

Then behind them they heard a whine of metal in air and a thundering crash. The helicopter went down, bursting into flames in the courtyard. She could feel the heat behind her and hear screams.

“Outa here!” the lead soldier yelled to his men. “Take cover before the fuel tank explodes!” The soldiers turned and ran around the corner, to another entrance. Rafe held his fire, and when they were gone, Madrone followed him into the street.

He hugged the sides of the buildings, moving at a near run, his eyes searching all around. Behind them they heard a rumble and a loud explosion. Katy and Poppy, all the others—would any of them survive?

Before them stretched a jumble of broken concrete blocks where a freeway overpass had collapsed, and Rafe led Madrone from block to block, ducking behind them for cover. They were almost through to the other side when they heard a voice call “Halt!”

About thirty yards ahead, five guards stood, aiming laser rifles straight at the two of them. Rafe shoved her down behind a pile of stones, dove for a dirt mound nearby, and fired. Bullets ricocheted around them, and a laser beam raised a fountain of dust.

“Move!” he yelled. “Keep low.”

She ran, crouched close to the ground, choosing a route by pure instinct. Around her she heard more shots, then silence.

“Come on!”

Rafe was running now and she followed, terror helping her match his speed. A building loomed up before them, its entrance blocked by nailed boards. Rafe grabbed at them, pulling hard, and they swung aside to reveal a concealed doorway. Quickly they ducked inside, replaced the boards behind them, and ran down an empty, dusty corridor.

At the end of the hallway, a narrow stair led down to a basement. They picked their way through the dark until they came to a trapdoor. Rafe pulled it up and motioned her down. She felt for the rungs of a metal ladder and began climbing downward. He followed close behind, shutting the door above them, cutting off the last of the dim light. Feeling her way rung by rung, she descended in the dark, wondering as she went how deep this hole was, how long she could control her shaky arms.

Finally her leading foot hit solid ground. Carefully she let go of the ladder, backing away just far enough to let Rafe descend. She took hold of his shirt as, sure as a bat, he found his way through the pitch-dark corridors.

After a long time, she began to see light ahead, a dim glow that glared alarmingly in her dilated pupils. They emerged through an archway into a broad expanse of concrete, supported by pillars of cement and steel, some long-forgotten structure of the old world. Madrone couldn’t quite imagine what it had been built for. In some areas, curtains were hung between the pillars to mark off private spaces. In others, the curtains were raised and she could see little camps, with rugs and pillows and blankets. In the center, a small fire burned, and the concrete ceiling above was marked with soot. Around her were unimproved areas, vast expanses of gray flooring marked only by flecked, ancient paint in parallel diagonal lines.

“Welcome to Heaven,” Rafe said.

He led her to the fire, where chairs and couches were arranged in a rough but comfortable circle. They joined the group that was sitting there, brewing a kettle on the flames.

Madrone couldn’t tell by looking if the person tending the kettle was female or male, but her voice was high-pitched and melodious as she looked up at Rafe and spoke. “What’s happening?”

“The rats got smoked out. Bad news.”

“All of them?”

“Seemed like it. I saw some of the kids get hit, and Littlejohn, from the hills; they splashed his brains all over the pavement. We may have lost Gaby, too.”

Littlejohn, Madrone thought. She couldn’t yet feel his death. It seemed too sudden. How could he
be
one minute, and not be the next, not be alive, not be somewhere stalking the thirsty canyons? Maya,
madrina
, did I do something wrong? Was I not vigilant enough to stay out of the Bad Reality?

“I told Hijohn it was stupid to have all those people gather in the same place,” Rafe went on. “The bigsticks brought in a copter.”

“Where in hell did they get a copter?” someone asked from behind her.

“They got a warehouse full in the Valley. Can’t fly unless the weather’s real clear, though,” said the woman with the kettle.

“That one won’t fly again,” Rafe said. “Neither will a lot of rats and hillboys, poor soulless fuckers. I saved the healer, though. This is her.”

“Hello,” they said.

Madrone’s eyes were beginning to be accustomed to the darkness. She was surrounded by a group of the most physically striking people she had ever seen. They were all young—she doubted that any were older than twenty, especially in this climate, which aged people so rapidly. Almost all were as blond as Rafe, with the same long limbs and slender bodies, and nearly androgynous, the boys soft-skinned, the girls hard-muscled. They could have been cousins. Or, she thought, it was more like a breed of show dogs—greyhounds or Afghans. There were a few redheads, and several girls with flowing black hair and skin golden as the inside of ripe plums. Three or four of the group were dark as gleaming shadows, with sculpted muscles that reminded her of Isis.

“You want anything?” one of them asked. “Water? We got plenty, from an illegal line we run. Food? We got things down here you’ve maybe never tasted. Chocolate. Sex? Someone’ll happily do you. What do you like? Men? Women? Kids? There’s some great young ass running around this place.”

Madrone wasn’t sure she had heard what she just heard, so she pretended she hadn’t. What she wanted was to cry, to lie down and not rise up again, to be able to feel Littlejohn’s death and mourn him, to be home with Bird and Nita and Holybear and Sage, and Maya downstairs writing her memoirs. She wanted Katy and Poppy to suddenly, miraculously, appear in this place. Heaven. Maybe she, like so many others, was already dead?

“Water,” she said. “Are you making tea? I’d love some tea.”

They brought her tea on a silver tray, in a cup that, she noted, was real Wedgwood china, as fine as anything Johanna had collected in her affluent days. Somewhere in the back they had an actual refrigerator, from which they brought her cream, and someone produced a plate of delicate, buttery cookies. The tea was fragrant and, as she sipped it, she recognized a taste she had forgotten from her childhood, when Maya used to sneak her a sip of her afternoon Earl Grey. Imported black tea. What reality had she stumbled into?

As she looked up from her teacup, she noticed that a crowd of small children had gathered from the corners of the vast space and were staring at her curiously. Like the older ones, they had big eyes and fine bones, delicate,
appealing, as if the best specimens of mostly the white race had been collected to match the china.

“Where do you get this stuff?” Madrone asked. “Like the tea and cookies?”

“Raids,” said Michael, who could have been Rafe’s twin. He had stopped coming to the training, but Madrone recognized him from the early weeks.

“But where does it come from? Are the Stewards still trading with Asia and Europe and Africa?”

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “We just steal it.”

“I know,” a young woman said. She had the darkest skin Madrone had ever seen, violet-tinged, velvety in the dim light, and she wore only a white silk skirt that barely covered her ass. Her features were perfectly sculpted, and her long hair was blond and silken. Is it real? Madrone wondered. Is it a wig, or is she the result of yet another breeding program?

The woman tossed her head back, making her hair shimmer in the dim light, and smiled suggestively at Madrone. “I used to belong to a man in the shipping trade. They still come in from overseas, the big boats, when the storms don’t get them. But all this stuff is very rare and precious now. Couldn’t buy it for a year’s ration of water. Makes it more fun to steal.”

Madrone listened to them chatter on, about prizes they had collected on raids and what they most liked to eat. It distracted her from the great, hollow, terrible feeling inside that threatened to well up and drown her. Was Katy dead? No, that was wrong, wrong. She should be ready to birth, to bring forth life, not death. And I’ve made her last days unhappy and separated her from Hijohn. Maybe if he’d been with us, he could have saved her. Maybe.…

The curtains parted, and Gabriel came in. She was breathing hard, sweat dripping down the perfect planes of her face, her calla-lily skin flushed with pink.

“You made it,” Rafe said. “Celestial!”

“Lemme have some water,” Gaby said.

“What happened after we got out?”

“Copter blew, man, burned the place. All charcoal, now. Lotta people got out, some didn’t. Littlejohn got shot. Dead. They caught Katy and that Angel kid and took them somewhere. Caught me too, but I got away from them.” She grinned.

Madrone sat, silent. She ached inside. Littlejohn had always been kind to her, always tried to help her. And he had known Bird, was a link to him. Now Bird seemed even further away, so remote he might never have existed. But grieving for Littlejohn seemed a pleasant indulgence, a luxury appropriate to a different world. In this world,
El Mundo Malo
, what was happening to Katy and Poppy?

“Can’t we do anything for them?” Madrone asked. “You go on raids all the time—can’t we steal them back?”

Rafe shrugged. “Where will they be, do you think?”

“They might send Katy to the breeder pens,” Michael suggested.

“Nah, not ready to pop as she is. They don’t want just anything coming out of those pens. They’ll take her to the Research Center, do some experiment on her,” Rafe said.

“Where is that?” Madrone asked.

“Up at the university. In the Medical Center.”

“And Poppy?”

“She’ll never make it back to the pens,” Gaby said. “That Stewwie big-stick’s bound to make a private deal somewhere.”

“Who with?” Rafe speculated. “Who likes ’em fresh caught and has the cash to buy off a bigstick?”

“Marichal, up Spring Canyon. Stebner, down by the beach. Or any of the widescreen men.”

“Nah, they’re all buying on the up-and-up these days, strictly government issue. Too much spotlight for them.”

“Could be anybody,” Gaby admitted. “But let’s send the scouts out to check the most likely. I’m just in the mood to do it to somebody after that.”

“We got some new guns,” Rafe said. “Might as well put them to use.”

The scouts were small and brown and ordinary looking, fed on the bounty of the Angels for their usefulness. They were dispatched, and Madrone settled back with the others to wait.

“Tell us about the North,” Gaby said. “I like to hear your stories.”

“I’m not sure I can talk about it right now,” Madrone said. “I’m too worried.”

“Did you hear the army’s issued a proclamation of victory?” Gaby said.

“Do you believe them?” Michael asked.

Gaby shrugged. “Stands to reason they’d win, if the North don’t got no army.”