“Silent on the nègre, eh?” Zachary, aiming, steadied his shotgun in both hands. “Let’s see just what pet-filth you’re riding around with, how about we?” He backed one step away. “Jakey, Rob,” he said over his shoulder, “be ready to disarm. Jakey front. Now lower your gun all careful-like and step back slowly, darling. Rob, you cover her while I take a look-see.”
Two of the men — ones motionless until now, bruised and swathed in leather and bandages — moved nearer. One clutched a half-handled sledgehammer in gloved hands, the other carried an old Magnum revolver of some kind. That one was a fool, or panicked, Sophie could see: it looked like the revolver’s cylinder lock hadn’t even been clicked fully home, he couldn’t fire a single shot until he did so. And the eyes of both men were doubtful, strange.
Neither of them want to kill me, Sophie realized. The man with the half-sledgehammer was staring at the back of Zachary’s head.
He wants to kill Zachary. Sophie processed this. He doesn’t believe I’ll be so stupid as to open fire this close to fuel. He wants me for his own.
How many miscues were there to interpret here? Did it matter? Very soon, the situation was going to explode and any chance of Sophie’s interference in her own foreordained Fate would shunt off into a grisly end. It was time to act.
Making certain that Zachary was still watching her while he turned his body to let Jakey and Rob slide by, Sophie lowered her own gun completely, again into the utility pocket of her armored suit. She showed her outspread hands, but while she did so she moved back away from Silas to stand behind the H4’s open driver’s door. Perhaps due to the sudden crowding, Zachary did not question this.
He told me to back away.
Zachary held out a hand, one again off the shotgun, and Petey ran into it his arm. Rob ran into Petey.
“What you want, boss?”
“Wait. We’ve two, now. Thinking aloud, see. Changed my mind.” Zachary pointed his barrels at Sophie’s gun. “Not in the pocket. Don’t you sheath that buzz-saw away and think we’re grand again, darling. You put that thing far away right now.”
He doesn’t know exactly to handle this. The men, they’re doubting him.
“All right,” she replied. “Where should I put the gun?”
“Inside the routier.”
“Then watch me. I’m going to pull it out by the cord. My fingers are going nowhere near the trigger.”
“I’m watching.”
Sophie made a delicate, slow-moving show of lifting the gun back out of the pocket, with two fingers on the handgrip. She handled it as if it were a time bomb, one she didn’t know how to defuse.
And isn’t that exactly what it is?
Bending into the H4, she lowered her gun onto the driver’s seat and detached the cord from the suit.
“Bon. Now move,” said Zachary. “Round the door, close it a little with your hip, hands up on the front fender and look away.”
There was almost silence, all the men were listening. The only voices, the men in the back were coughing in the still-running H4’s fumes.
He didn’t tell me to turn off the ignition. He must think that will keep us from shooting. Does he think Silas has a gun? And what about when Rob sees? When he sees Silas with the pistol…
Sophie realized in that moment that there was no way out. She was going to die.
As she turned to move out toward the H4’s front, there was a huge bang outside followed by a wailing, girlish shriek.
What in the Hell?
The screaming went on and on. A girl? The screaming was getting closer, and quickly. Sophie looked back. The effect on the men was as if liquid fire had been poured over their heads. Jakey went rigid, Rob flinched and looked back to Zachary for reassurance. Zachary had bared his teeth. The others behind Zachary backed away, cursing and gripping their weapons. The younger derelicts were silent, the eldest began arguing with one another. Somewhere, somewhere inside, guards had been overpowered.
This is the only moment, Sophie realized. Only chance we’re ever going to have.
There were many screams then, dozens. Girls were shrieking, old women sobbing. A babble of women’s voices arose over the wind:
“Help us!”
“There! They’re in the fuel bays!”
“Save yourselves!”
“You hear?”
“Her car! Her car is working?”
“God! Help us, they’re raping us!”
“Don’t let them touch you!”
“Kill yourself! They—”
Two seconds had passed, if that. Rob had made his choice and moved in toward the open passenger door, and was staring down in horrified disbelief. He managed, “What the — ?” And that was all.
The barrel of Silas’ pistol was shoved between Rob’s scabrous lips, up against his teeth.
All of what happened next, the frenetic, chaotic splicing of simultaneity, Sophie never quite understood. She revisited the scene every night, in nightmares, a reluctant somnambulist forever exploring the same dread ground of an eternal trauma which refused to fade away. The Mercy Ground, she called the fuel bay ever after.
But what all took place in the next moments? There were so many people to behold, so many nightmares, intricacies of gore and chaos. And the girl.
Oh, the horror of the girl.
In the same second that Silas’ pistol swept up and chipped Rob’s teeth, a young teenaged woman stumbled around the corner of the fuel bay. She was naked, emaciated, blistered and splattered in dried streaks of oil and blood. Some kind of ghastly, filth-trailing head-cage — made out of a bicycle wheel, with some of the spokes half-torn out and then turned into barbs, surely to restrict the movement of her throat — was chained around her neck and face. A black leather leash dangled from this contraption and trailed out behind her, dripping blood. One of the young woman’s eye sockets was badly patched over, and there was very little hair left on her head. Most of it had been yanked out in tufts, the gaping sores stitched over and cauterized.
She had once been beautiful. Now, she was gaping and her mouth was a perfect O of mortal terror. She shrieked, the barbs piercing her neck and letting out trickles of blood as she did so, “Help me! They’re torturing us! Take me! Take me, God, oh God!”
Jakey was grabbing the girl then, wrestling her to the ground. More women were rushing into the fuel bay’s open hollow, sobbing and screaming, and most of the men were turning around with weapons upraised to throttle them.
Sophie was a split second away from jumping into the running H4 (Open doors be damned, get out of here, get out), away from the human maelstrom of rage and limbs surging just behind her, when Silas pulled the Luger’s trigger.
V-7
THE CRIMSON BLOSSOM AND THE AMBER
Crack. Deafening.
Rob’s face shrank, imploded.
There was no other way to describe it. It was as if a black hole, a tiny cosmic singularity, had formed inside his mouth, its sudden impossible swell of crushing gravity sucking the rest of his head’s bone, teeth and fleshly matter inexorably in toward a single point. There was only a faintest haze of blood clouding in scarlet mist around the entry wound, but with the upward angle of Silas’ weapon, half the contents of Rob’s head sprayed up over the clamped tops of the fuel hoses.