IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 13 The Test of Blood
Tuesday, April 28, 2708,
continued "Who are you, and how many came with
you?" says the man with the gun pointed at me, there in that little
covered walkway between the dairy and the house. I say nothing. I allow fear to make me tremble. "Answer me!" He kicks me.
"Who are you?" "A, a thief! A hungry thief!" I allow my fear to flood my muscles with
adrenaline. "Mama wanted some
fodder to grind into flour for our bread." "You mean she wanted
cheese and butter to spread on it," he says with a chuckle. "Your kind's never satisfied with
grain." He laughs as my muscles
tense up...ready...ready... "Oh little girl, did you ever rob the wrong
dairy!" And he reaches out for
me... And I kick him back, spring
up from my crouch and whip around so fast he'll never know what broke his neck. And here I stand, heart
pounding. All the speeded reflexes that
that horrid experiment gave me years ago can't do a thing to shake the
paralysis of staring at a man I just killed.
Handsome. God damn it, he had to
be handsome. I shake for real, and not
all from fear of anything outside myself as I force my hand to pick up his gun,
still cocked and ready, and carefully ease it back to safe. One time...but no. I didn’t do that. Not really.
The Soul-Stealer lay dead at my feet, years ago. But Jake killed him through me, to save
me. He just used my limbs. The man had left me too weak to do it by
myself. I never before, by myself, fully
consciously...no. (Who knows what I did on my
rookie mission, though, under that battle-drug?) A bird quavers up and down,
up and down twice--the unseasonable mating call of the Green Nutcracker. I shove the gun into my skirt-pocket and drag
the corpse of my own making out of obvious sight, then run to join the others
in the barn. Tanks. I see four big, ugly tanks. Just looking at them I can feel what it must
mean to find part of your body under those bonecrusher treads. I join the others, to swarm with them
underneath the hulks in search of any wires that we might cross, screws we
might loosen, things not readily apparent till the last minute when you try to
make them run. I'm not sure, but I think
that this reconnection here might start a fire under the fuel tank. But just in case that doesn’t work, I also pry
the gears that control one set of treads slightly out of line, leaving the
other intact to really mess up the steering. Lord, but I wish I had some
plastic explosive--spies in books always carry an unlimited supply of the stuff
on their persons at all times, they just stick it wherever they please, and it
never goes off till precisely when they want it to. The weight of so much metal hanging over me,
inches from my nose, oppresses my brain; I sigh with relief when Fatima passes
on the handsignal to tell me to hurry up and get out of there. I join others at the silo
to load every pocket on me with handfuls of the bullets it contains, till the
weight pulls my skirt down to hiphugger level.
Then we return to the barn, trying to walk silently with all that weight
swinging awkwardly around us. "Hey! Who's in there!" We scatter like rats in the
sudden glare as bullets spray the barn.
Screams! But screams of fear, not
pain, thank God, none of us hit--ghosts cover for us, please, please, cover for
us! I take my pistol in both hands and
shoot where the other bullets came from.
Now I hear a scream on the other side, and my hair tries to rise. "The guns!" Kief
hisses. "We'll need what we came
for just to get out alive." They
still lie out there, hammocks half-folded around them. "Chulan and
Kanarik," Lucinda orders. "Get
out there!" Our nimblest little
soldiers dart out and in again, dancing between the blasts to snatch the ropes
of the hammocks back to where we can yank the guns in toward us. The fire drives them back, but out they trip
again, big eyes mad with fear and bravery.
And in, two ropes, but we need more.
Out again, as the straw flies right by Kanarik's reaching hand, in
again, as the bullets chew her footprints. And we have nothing to cover
them with till we get those guns hauled in, nothing but thin shreds of
ghosts. And nobody here knows that I can
move even faster than they can. Cursing
the temptation to leave them ignorant, I toss my pistol to Kief and join the
two girls, fear pounding in my ears. I
grab up all the ropes remaining, twisting like a dancer around a hot blast that
only I could dodge, and then I fling the ropes and me back to shelter faster
than I can breathe, while swinging pocketfuls of bullets slam into my legs to throw
me dangerously off-step. We haul the
hammocks in as fast as arms can pull. My
heart skips like a tarantella--even heightened reflexes can only go so far. Okay, now--now! We've got the guns, we can return fire. More screams add to the chaos--one of
ours? Blood spurts from the side of
Lufti's head--NO! But he keeps on
squealing as lustily as ever while Kiril grabs him back. Now we sling the guns between us and scamper
all different directions--I think I see Lufti running too, by some miracle, but
never mind, Miko and I barrel on out with the guns bouncing and jolting between
us, leaden pockets pounding against us with every step, as heavy as Malcolm
when we dash between wall and wall, from corner to corner then out across the
fearfully empty field and into the cool embrace of rainforest. We look for paths but there
are no paths. Our weapons and our
ammunition trip us up along with root and branch, while bullets tear through
leaves around us. "We the wanton,
wild vine," I hiss under my breath like a prayer, "shall thicken,
strengthen, intertwine..." and just then we stumble into an animal-track,
no wider than our feet, that can--barely--let us through. "Shall tangle path and sharpen spine,"
but not our path, pray God. "Made
tougher by want and pain." Creation
has to be on our side, God, doesn't it?
It'll let us through, not them? The going gets easier. We slow the pace. The sound of bullets still rings in our ears
long after the gunfire stops, but we'll be all right, we survived this
one. The woods that have befriended us
gradually become more familiar as we near our rendezvous point by the
stream. Leaf and blossom and tendril
have never looked so beautiful to me, shapes damasked on the black silk of night. We have survived. Suddenly Miko groans loudly
and collapses before me. "The
ghosts!" he moans. "The ghosts
directed the fangs!" Fangs--ohhh no. I catch just a glimpse of what might be a
jewel-viper slithering away from Miko's pierced and swelling leg where he rips
the pantsleg off. I tie the rags into a
tourniquet, then make the incision as I whistle, "Soldier down--send
help!" I bend to suck the poison
out. I try to remember whether that
bleeding gum problem I developed on the march to Home Base cleared up yet with
regular meals. "The ghosts,"
Miko whispers weakly. I can't gauge his
skin-tone in the dark, especially not under all that charcoal. I can't take the time to check his pulse. I have no way to tell how close we've come to
losing him. I just keep sucking and
spitting blood while it takes forever for anyone to chop through the jungle to
find us. (After the test of fire
came the test of blood. And I
passed. I kept Aron on my mind, I
focused in on him like he'd become my patron saint, while I shot my former
comrades, one, two, three, for standing in my way, for still wearing that
damned purple ribbon that they gave us when they impressed us into service from
the town we'd all grown up in--the ribbon that I'd outgrown, myself, to don the
mantle proper, the worst of all us four.) By the time the others find
us Miko had murmured "Ghosts!" for the last time long before, and he
already lies cold, and I've had plenty of time to learn that in the dark I'd
made my tourniquet and incision below instead of above the snakebite. No benign spirit guided me this time,
whatever Damien might say. So now I haul the body
back, on the hammock behind me, as the others distribute our share of the
rifles among themselves. Father Man will
have another grave to weep and mutter over.
Miko, if you hear me, please make sure I never make a mistake that
stupid again. |
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