Carry the Flame Read Free

spill down and an inferno would engulf them. But her hand couldn’t remain on the metal long: the child she’d been holding blindly to her left screamed above the howling and started to slide away. Jessie pulled her back with enormous effort.
    The metallic screeching ceased a beat before another gust slammed them, and the group shifted en masse toward the rear of the trailer. The wind was agonizing, like a wall of tornados drilling them with dirt, dust, and pebbles hard as buckshot. But it brought no gas, no fumes, and they pressed ever closer together, their every breath suffused by the now sulfurous smell of the dead.
    Jessie’s hold on the girl who’d almost been swept away made her hand ache and the child cry, but she never relented as shrieking wind slammed the group backward again and again, eternal seconds of biting terror. She feared the pummeling would drive them out from under the trailer’s narrow cover and tumble them like weeds through the charred forest.
    Instead, her back struck one of the big rear tires. Arms throbbing, she held three or four girls—she couldn’t tell exactly—and felt others forced against the hard axle. She pitied them, heard their agony, but as much as she could tell, the hellacious wind had not yet torn apart the group.
    But where’s Bliss?
    Jessie moaned when she remembered Jaya jumping out of the van, sensing right away that back at the obsidian wall the two of them had planned a rendezvous in what they hoped would be rain.
    To dance in it?
    She rolled her head in despair. They know better. Every child in the camp had been warned about heat storms. And this one had uncovered the tank’s tracks, and brought the stench of burning bodies.
    She could smell the dead, taste the bitter waste, and then her ears filled with the harsh clanging of metal tread and the deep rumble of an engine powerful enough to move the armored tank’s massive weight and howl louder than the screaming wind. The earth itself began to shake beneath her, and she knew the machine that had laid those tracks was only feet away, rolling closer with every second.

Chapter Two
    E very living element—and every slab of steel that surrounded Jessie—vibrated violently. The air itself rang with bedlam. Another screech rose from the gasoline tanker, right above her head; and she thought surely this time the armored tank would rip the trailer in two and that she and the girls would be smashed or burned to death in the next instant.
    She jammed her back against the big tire, as if a sudden stiffening of muscle and bone could thwart 100,000 pounds of cannon and guns, flamethrowers and grisly murder.
    But the metallic screech stopped, fast as a wince in the overriding darkness. The earth and tanker truck still shook, but not as severely, and in seconds that played against an infinity of fear, the harrowing engine noise of the armored tank was swallowed by the wind and soot still lashing the trailer’s struts and ladders.
    She stayed bunched-up with the girls between the rear wheels, ears ever alert for the tank.
    In a daze of dread and fatigue she noticed three lulls in the storm, gazing at a night sky brilliant with a band of chalk-white stars burning with grace notes of unseen mercy. But three times the wind wiped the heavens from her eyes, leaving her with a renewed fear of the tank: Where was it? What were they doing? Waiting for daylight so they can murder us without blowing up the gas?
    At dawn the storm lifted and the sky blazed blue as the oceans at the dawn of the century, when the most tranquil turquoise waters masked the bleached rot of coral reefs.
    She uncurled herself from the girls’ sleepy limbs and found a strip of freshly chewed-up earth alongside the gasoline tanker. Above the tracks she saw two deep horizontal scrapes, one near the front and one that passed right above where she’d huddled. The latter extended to the end of the tanker and explained