IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 39 Aunt Soskia's Warehouses
Monday, May 25, continued We reach a fenced-off row
of warehouses no different from any other such complex along the quay. Lucinda works the combination on the gate,
but the door to the warehouse office needs a key. Chulan draws a lock-pick
from her hair and her braids tumble down her neck as she bends to her
work. "Get over here,
Kanarik," she says. "You'll
need to know this." And then she whispers
the mysteries of pins and tumblers to our dancer while she feverishly works the
lock till it clicks open for us. We
enter a waiting-room, much to my disappointment--and fear. How long must this take? At the inner door Chulan
turns to her student and say, "Now you try." Kanarik nibbles her lip with those big teeth
of hers and looks helplessly at me as if I could rescue her. "Go on," I tell
her, though I dread the delay inevitable in inexperience. Lucinda nods grimly, too, so Kanarik crouches
over the lock. She might as well pick at
my nerves, one by delicate one, with her exaggerated care. When it finally pops open I exhale so loudly
that Lucinda scowls at me. In a flash the twins streak
ahead of us into the office, but we follow swiftly behind. Now!
Now comes the hour of destruction.
Gleefully we dump file after file of war research, we throw ourselves
into cabinets and knock them over with satisfying crashes, tearing at great
handfuls of paper and laughing, overturning racks of blueprints, dumping
trashcans, hurling bud vases and coffee-cups with cute sayings on them to
shatter against walls. Oh, the wild sound of the
laughing, shrieking children! Aichi
dives into the pile with abandon as though we had raked together autumn
leaves. She tosses a shower of crumpled
papers up into the air, swinging her braids around in ecstasy. Then, when she abandons it for other games
Imad pisses on the heap till Lucinda slaps him. "You dirty little
idiot! They won't burn as well that
way." So he contents himself with
spraying obscene graffiti about the Meritocracy high up on the walls where the
fire might miss. I had no idea that he'd
stashed away a can of fire-red paint for the occasion, all this time; heaven
knows where he even got it. Juvenile delinquents,
indeed! I smash up models--prototypes
for tanks and other machines of destruction--in a gaiety of violence I hurl
them into glass cabinets full of trophies and plaques of scientific
achievement. Cultural
immersion--Lovequest has demanded this of me, that I join up with the bad boys
and the wanton girls and become myself a delinquent. I drink hard and I smoke and I vandalize and
fight hand-to-hand to the death! Now Lucinda dispatches
Chulan, Fatima, and Kanarik to pick locks to all the warehouses within the
compound and I join them, for Til in her wisdom has taught me this art,
too. How hard to hold back, to take the
time and concentration to delicately disturb each little pin without
simultaneously losing all the prior ones, while my friends still romp and riot
in the office and the laboratory. I
listen to things smash amid appreciative laughter and try to keep focused on
what I'm doing. We find the fuel--a great
cylindrical tower of it. Reverently
Fatima reaches up to the spout to touch the oil, then brings a fingertip
towards her lips. "Stop that!"
Lucinda snaps and shoulders her away. Fatima's ears turn
pink. "But it's stapleseed
oil--it's good for you." "Not after they screw
around with it." She studies the
system of valves, what sequence we'll need to turn it on. As she climbs up a ladder she explains,
"They load it up with engine-conditioners and other gunk by the time it gets
to the tanks. All of that stuff is
poison." I gaze up at an enormous
tank of ruined food. I can smell its
rich and nutty aroma, and it never goes bad.
Only a heavy load of antioxidants could fend off rancidity in the Charadoc's
heat--must be a veritable fountain of youth.
All that--polluted for the engines of war. With a howl of fury I break
glass and grab out the axe from the nearby fire-emergency box. Then I hack through the valves so that they
gush and can never turn off--each in their nice, neat, little sequence. The golden oil gurgles out across cement
while we all run to pile up wicks and channels of documents and other trash,
balsa model fragments, blueprints, maps, and graphs. Lucinda barks out instructions as fast as she
can--thank God the oil flows slower than water--and when I get the gist of her
intent I do the same. We herd it into
thick snakes of fuel, rippling to every warehouse full of tanks, the finished
and the prototypes, to labs, to workshops, oh how we scramble with our armloads
of paper dripping crumpled trails of the work of evil men, all of it coldly
encoded in black and white numbers as though it held science alone. "Hey! Stop!
Who are you people?"
A big man runs at us, so I whip around and shoot him before I even have
time to think, but somehow I have time to watch him fall, in his white coat and
spectacles, pens falling from his pocket and rolling all over the walk. I have time to see his blood flow into the
oil before I remember that I have to hurry and herd the stuff and not let
myself think about somebody who probably wasn't even armed. So what, Deirdre? What kind of man grows so tall on what food
in a country where children starve to death every day? What kind of man helps build the machines
that crush those children under treads and blows their homes away? Make sure the fuel flows to each and every
warehouse in this godforsaken concrete wasteland, where soulless men like him
draw schematic dooms for those they will not see! (I tell myself this, over
and over and over.) The hugest hanger stands
empty—I shudder to think what it might have housed—or hopefully, what they
merely planned to have it house. We
pass it by, for better prey. "Now!" Kief
shouts in triumph. He lights a cigar and
deliberately tosses the match into a rivulet. "No!"
Lucinda screams, but too late. Fire
flows much faster than oil, blazing streaks of death rushing all too soon to
their destinations. We shrill in fear
and run in all directions, but we have webbed the place in death. I grab Lufti under one arm and Kiril under
another as I leap a river of flame to safety with all the lift that I can grasp without a flit, then frantically beat the sparks
out of my skirt as my legs sting. Then I see Teofilo, slowed
down, his reactions off. He tries to
leap a pool of oil before it ignites, but he can't gauge timing or distances--the
entire pool explodes all at once, hurling him like a ruined model of a man
flailing into the air. Kief turns in
horror and tries to run for him, but he slips in oil--I barely drag him free
before that, too, goes up in flame. While
I shove my shoulder under Kief’s, Imad and Gaziley run to Teo, and between them
they grab up the charred remains that still shriek in pain. I take on half Keif’s weight as he struggles
to run; he tore a muscle or something in his fall. A maze of walls of fire
light up the night in gold behind us, outrunning anything on legs as we streak
towards the safety of the piers.
"Boom!" Aichi shouts as we hustle her out the gate, her eyes
big with fright and excitement.
"Boom!" BOOOOOM! The first warehouse goes up. Then another, then another--an entire
necklace of fireballs explode while we run and stagger and slip, a hot wind
half-propelling us stumbling towards the waterfront in a roar so loud that
Teo's howls vanish under its weight, we can't even hear our own lungs gasp in
the greasy smoke. Then the hot metal
starts to rain down and we shrink against the sides of buildings, hoping for
protection. "After
them!" I hear the shout behind
us. Bullets whiz past my ear--I whip
around, lose Kief, and shoot figures that lumber out of the smoke, one, two,
three, they fall behind me, four, five, then I scramble to catch up with the
others who shoot to cover me, then I run back to fetch Kief who curses me for
dropping him and leaving him there. We run through the thick,
oily smoke, trying not to cough on it, trying not to even gasp too loudly,
hoping that it hides us, hoping that it hides the bodies that I shot even
more. Or maybe not more--my back feels
naked when it comes to guns—clothes, even packs, don't mean jack to lead. Smoke can hide but it can't shield, not worth
anything next to... ...bullets! Again I hear them, again I turn and shoot,
shoving Kief away. Now I hear a shot
smash a hole very near me into wall--fool!
They'd shot at random till my return fire led them right to me! I peer through smoke, half-blinded by the
roaring wall of flame that every so often belches and growls with new fury over
yet another exploding fuel tank.
There?...There! They move in slow
motion to my speeded sight, mere eddies in the fouled air, but I nail 'em, I knock
two down, then try to remember how many shots I took and how many bullets this
brand of rifle carries. But I think I got them
all--did I get them all? Don't wait
around to find out! Grab Kief and go! I didn't get them all. I didn't get half of them. Lufti and Damien did, and Aichi. It just felt at the time that they all fell
to my shots. It just felt...my God! We make it to the
waterfront. Teo still lives. Quickly I splash cold saltwater onto his
burns while he gasps like dying, to stop collateral damage, but what if we got
here too late for that but never mind, in haste I wrap him up in warm wool
serapes before the shock gets any worse, maybe it can't get any worse, but I
need to try, but he passes out from the pain of simply being touched. "Let's get him and
Kief to Madame's,” Lucinda finally says.
"She'll give us shelter." I hear everyone stop
breathing for a moment—even Teofilo.
Fatima quietly asks, "Is there any other way?" "None that I can
see," Lucinda sighs. "Not
now. Come on, it's not far." “I know,” Gaziley
groans. “Not far at all.” |
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