That was when Clone noticed Kate standing there in the crowd. Face stricken, a thin trickle of blood down her chin from a bitten lip.
He blushed.
‘Enough,’ said Axl and stepped forward. Even though he knew that now wasn’t the time.
The lieutenant reached for the little handle and Axl repeated himself. Only this time he had the revolver in his hand, hammer thumbed back and muzzle pointing straight at her face. No, not nasty enough. With a shrug, Axl lowered the target to her stomach. Seventy-six hours was how long it took to die from a gut wound and where momaDef was concerned Axl reckoned that was too quick by half.
‘Look around you,’ the lieutenant said. Not that Axl needed to. His whole upper body was covered with a rash of tiny red laser dots, right down to two in his gun hand. One look at Kate told Axl the dots were all over his face too. Raghead measles was what PaxForce called his symptoms. And in most cases RhM proved fatal.
It was a straight stand-off, the kind that used to get labelled Mexican before everyone got prissy.
‘What good does this do?’ Axl demanded, jerking his head towards Clone. Even to Axl the words sounded too loud.
‘He’s going to tell me what I want to know,’ momaDef admitted, after leaving a gap long enough to tell Axl she’d debated not answering his question at all.
‘Look at him…’
The lieutenant did, reluctantly.
‘. . . what can that tell you?’
‘Where to find Father Sylvester.’ The lieutenant said it like he was stupid.
Behind him, Axl almost felt Kate freeze, her tension so obvious it was a wonder momaDef didn’t put her up there in the chair.
‘You see,’ said the lieutenant, ‘Father Sylvester is here and this man is going to take me to him, aren’t you?’
Nailed to his chair, Clone nodded, carefully not looking at Kate.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
...In the Society of Wolves
It looked like some picnic, thought Kate. The kind she and Joan used to take in the hills behind Castel Gandolfo when Joan was still alive. Lavender and rosemary suffusing the warm breeze as they rode across scrub-covered slopes and through ancient, thousand-year-old olive groves.
But that was then and this was frightening.
Hooves sank into cold mud or struck sparks from stones as the horses headed up track towards El Escondido. It was drizzling, but Kate had grown used to that. Surprisingly the lieutenant rode less well than Kate would have expected.
Kate didn’t ride at all. She walked behind with Axl glued to her side like someone had splattered them both with a goo gun, not that paxForce grunts carried anything that non-lethal.
Around the time the horses had finally arrived, the black woman with the thin, twisted dreadlocks gave a signal for her troops to find some target that wasn’t Axl. Kate didn’t know what the signal was, just that one minute Axl’s body and face were breeding red dots like lice, next moment all the dots were gone.
Kate was shocked at how relieved she felt.
Now she followed Clone, defMoma and the horses past rough juniper scrub and through the darkness of a rhododendron tunnel, under the twisting branches that closed out the sky over her head as if they were petrified worm-casts.
The high-falling foss splashed away to her right, water plummeting down the valley side to the pool below. And the slight wind blowing down the tunnel into her face hung heavy with the smell of damp earth. Any hound following after their party could track them by the stink of horses and the sour undercurrents of blood, shit and fear.
Kate shivered. For herself and for the huge naked man who stood in his saddle and rode straight-legged up ahead. They were tramping down the dead. Ground fine, unviralled and spread thin it might have been, but the earth beneath their hooves and feet had still once been flesh. But then, was that so different to back on Earth? Except there the dirt was carapaced over with concrete or marble and sterilised by history.
‘What?’ Axl asked.
What was she thinking? Kate almost said, ‘about anything but Clone’. Instead she shrugged. ‘That this is all meat. . .’ She nodded at the track and the leaf-encrusted mud glued to her boots, then jumped at the touch of his fingers on her wrist.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘There’s nothing to understand,’ Kate said crossly. And there wasn’t. Life happened and then someone got left to clean up the mess. Someone like her. How difficult could comprehending that be?
Just before the track climbed the steepest part of the lower valley towards Escondido it branched off, the main track kept on up to the ramshackle monastery, a narrower path headed downwards again through undergrowth towards the mute roar of falling water.
‘Through there?’ momaDef demanded when Clone reined in his horse.
The big man nodded, jerking his heavy chin towards the narrower path.
‘You go first,’ momaDef told him. ‘Any problems I’ll shoot you, understand?’
What the tongueless Clone grunted might have been agreement but sounded more like an insult. And then he kicked his bleeding feet heavily into the flank of his horse and crashed away through the bushes, remembering just in time to duck as he went under a snaking branch.
‘Dumb fuck.’ momaDef was after him even before her fat sergeant had realised what was happening. It took the handful of conscripts a second to work out what the sergeant was shouting about and then they jogged after the fat woman, snubPups snagging on every branch despite being held tight to their chests like regulations demanded ...
Get lucky, thought Axl, kill each other. Which would at least save him the effort. Not that he was bothered by the grunts. But taking out defMoma, momaDef and Colonel Emilio was going to be a pleasure if the chance ever arose.
Tracking Clone was effortless. He’d signposted his passing in branches on both sides of the path which were snapped back to white bone and in leaf mould churned deep with hoof-marks.
All the same Axl took his time, not wanting Kate to reach Clone too early. Because whatever the lieutenant would do to the big man when she finally caught up with him was likely to be slow and nasty. . . And Axl wanted to avoid Kate having to watch that. There was enough anguish built up behind her troubled dark eyes already. He’d seen the way her head jerked and her shoulders hunched every time someone mentioned the dead pope by name.
By hanging back Axl hoped to stop Kate seeing Clone tortured and killed. Only, when Kate and he finally reached the mountain pool, it seemed the lieutenant had blown her chance to do either. Clone took the dive himself, taking momaDef with him, from a point on the path that dropped fifteen metres into the ice-cold waters of the foss pool below.
All of this Axl put together as he and Kate walked down to the water’s edge. He based it mostly on bloody footprints he’d seen back up the path. That had been where Clone dismounted to whip his horse into the distance, the man’s spoor track climbing the path’s upper edge just high enough for him to be able to turn, hide in bushes on the slope above and hurl momaDef off her horse down into the foss pool as she galloped past.
Primitive undoubtedly, but hard to counteract.
But putting it together from clues wasn’t really necessary, obvious ones or not. Because the fall suddenly imprinted onto Axl’s vision. The roar of the tumbling waterfall mixing abruptly with crashing synth, the fierce exaltation written on Clone’s face. Then a splash, silence and the darkness of deep water.
Axl shook his head quickly. He’d arrived at the edge of the foss and the huge sergeant was waiting for them.
‘You did this.’ She stood in front of Kate, her words stripped raw with emotion, and that emotion wasn’t just fury. Tears filled the woman’s eyes and real sorrow was in her round face. A muscle tugged at her jaw with almost cartoon-like regularity.