Days of Burning, Days of Wrath

by Tom Kratman

  Her face suddenly lost its color. “You wouldn’t sell me?”

  “Couldn’t possibly; we need you. There’s one other possibility, if that should arise,” Khalid said. “I could rent you.”

  “Rent me?” Alix’s face grew paler, still. “You mean like a whore?”

  “Yeah. Look, it may not come up but . . .”

  “But we’d best be prepared.” She thought about it for a moment, then said, “Won’t work. I don’t think I can. I’m lesbian, I don’t even know how. If I tried to fake it, they wouldn’t suspect us; they’d just flat know I wasn’t anybody’s sex slave . . . or slave who’s also available for sex . . . or whatever.”

  “Right,” Khalid agreed. “Screws that theory up. Anybody?”

  Fritz looked carefully at Alix. “You already have kind of a deep voice. Are you willing to give up your hair?” he asked. “I mean just about all of it?”

  Her hand flew defensively to her golden locks. “Why?”

  “Because, with a few shouting exercises to blow out your vocal cords, and a little dirt rather than makeup, we can make a boy out of you. I have an extra rifle in the trunk of my car, too.”

  “You want to make a boy out of me . . . a boy?” The giggles took up where they’d left off, in long-lost and highly doubtful Leinenfeld. “A boy? Hey, look; if we stop at a whorehouse, can I have a girl, too?”

  “Let me go ransack my closet,” said Khalid. “How are you with a needle and thread?”

  “My cover was as a tailor,” Tim said, before Alix could answer. “I can do for that. I even have the needle and thread.”

  “Just as well,” said Alix. “I’m utterly incompetent with needle and thread.”

  Gasoline was more or less impossible to obtain from a filling station, what with the loss of the electric grid.

  While Tim did some important modifications by hand to some of Khalid’s clothes, Khalid and Fritz drained both Fritz’s and Tim’s autos for more gas. They still didn’t have quite enough for a full tank.

  “And we may just need that full tank,” Khalid said.

  Fritz looked up and down the street. “We’re ‘Muslims,’” he said. “At least everyone thinks we are. These cars belong to ‘infidels.’ We’ll just take what we need.”

  “Works for me,” Khalid agreed. “Go back to my place and get us a few containers. Anything that we can seal and that can hold more than a couple of liters will do.” Without another word he walked to his own car and removed a jerry can, crowbar, and a short piece of hose from the trunk.

  They met again next to a large black sedan, a Sachsen luxury model. Fritz dropped about half a dozen small plastic containers on the ground.

  “Can we burn premium gas in your car?” asked Fritz, doubtfully.

  “It will be diluted by normal gasoline, I think,” replied Khalid, slipping the end of the crowbar into a crack between the car and the filler cap cover. “I think we could run it anyway, even if all we had was the high-end stuff. Not my forte but, from what I understand, the only problem with premium in a car that takes regular is that premium is actually less powerful.”

  A Sachsen man, older, going to fat and balding, came storming out of a house very near to the big black sedan. The man’s eyes widened when Fritz unslung his rifle and took aim at him, saying, “Go back inside, old man; the gasoline isn’t worth your life. And neither is the little bit of damage we’ll do to your car.” The Sachsen bolted back into his home.

  “We can get away with that here,” Khalid opined, while pushing on the crowbar to tear open the cover, “with the pussified city folk. But there are people out in the country whose fathers and grandfa thers picked up everything imaginable from the battlefields of the Great Global War and stashed it away against a day of need.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Khalid fed the hose into the car’s now open tank, then bent and applied enough suction to start a flow. Spitting out a small quantity of gasoline, he fed the hose into his jerry can and waited while the fuel transferred.

  “I think there’s enough here to fill my can, at least twice over, and those containers.”

  “Wow,” said Khalid, when he saw Alix dressed out properly in men’s clothing. “I’m impressed.”

  The woman’s hair was cropped off much shorter. And the clothes were masculine. It helped that she didn’t have a lot in the way of breasts that needed hiding. But the big difference was in what she’d done to her face. That was amazing.

  The only serious flaw in her disguise was her feet; she was still wearing the office pumps she’d had when she’d been grabbed.

  “I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Alix admitted. “I’m already kind of horse-faced . . .” Seeing Khalid was about ready to argue that, she went on, “No, I am and I know I am. But I figured thicker eyebrows couldn’t hurt. For those I had my regular makeup pencil. The scruffy beard won’t bear much scrutiny; it’s just boot b lack stippled on with an otherwise dry sponge. Well, that and some hair from . . . well, I’m not a natural blonde as you may have observed . . . once. I’ll probably have to reapply it twice a day but what I have on now ought to get us out of the city.”

  “We’re still missing something . . . something . . . aha! We don’t have a pass for you.”

  “Can we forge one?”

  “Maybe. Not my forte, but . . .”

  “I’ve had the basic course,” Fritz said. “And half these motherfuckers are barely literate in their own languages.”

  “Okay,” Khalid said, “You get to work on that and I’ll try to scrounge something that will do for a keffiyeh for her. I think I’ve got a tablecloth somewhere.”

  The trunk could have held the packs well enough. Instead, they’d put in more food and a couple of twenty-liter bottles of water, then half buried Alix in the back seat under two of their packs plus one they’d made up as her own.

  Everybody had their rifles not only in plain sight but to hand. That wouldn’t be remotely suspicious to the people they were trying to avoid. The roads were surprisingly clear of burned-out automobiles, given that burning cars had become the explicit expression of Muslim loathing of Taurans and everything they stood for and believed in.

  The answer as to why the roads were clear wasn’t long in coming. Khalid, who was driving, had to stop to allow a large gang of male slaves to pass under guard, with their flabby and pale bodies exposed to the weather. An overseer, who could easily have passed for one of Khalid’s cousins, before his first visit to the plastic surgeons, pointed. Instantly, a dozen of the slaves trotted over and began pushing a wrecked car off the road.

  “Remember,” said Tim, “most of the Muslims here aren’t Arabs, but a mix of people from Noricum, from Anadolu, and even home grown. Not only do they have a different work ethic from Arabs, they’re also much more inclined to tidiness, even when they have to do the work. Better beep, though, or they’ll start to suspect you’re an unreverted Sachsen.”

  Khalid duly did beep, repeatedly and impatiently, causing the crowd of slaves to part ways to let the car through.

  He called to the overseer, in passing, “Brother, are all the roads clear or are there some I should avoid?”

  “I can’t speak to very far outside of town,” the overseer shouted back, “but until you reach the outskirts just stay on the main roads and you should be fine.”

  “Il hamdu l’Illah!” Khalid returned, then returned his attention to the road, lest he run over some of the newly minted slaves.

  Looking at the broken-spirited, terrified slaves, Alix muttered, “Is it any wonder I’m a lesbian when the men of my country are such pussies?”

  “It’s not all of them,” Tim opined. “Some remain pretty tough.”

  “Yes,” she sighed, “but they’re all prisoners in Balboa or penned into one corner of Santa Josefina . . . which is why we’re trying to get the finance minister to release the gold to free them.”

  She had a sudden horrid thought. “But what if the swine won’t?”

/>   “Not a problem,” Khalid said. “I’ve had that course.”

  “You’ve had the interrogation course?” Tim and Fritz asked together.

  “Just the truncated one—no live subjects—but it was taught by Mahamda, himself.”

  “Live subjects?” Alix asked.

  All three together answered, “You really don’t want to know.”

  The car continued on until reaching downtown. There, Alix noted two popular lesbian spots, Sappho and Chapstick, had been gutted and burnt. She pulled the keffiyeh Khalid had found for her over the face, put her head down, and did a pretty fair job of not showing she was crying. Except for her shaking shoulders, the others would never have known.

  The woman stayed like that until, after the cart had rolled another mile or so, she heard Fritz say, “Jesus, it’s a slave auction.”

  That was enough to bring her head back out of the keffiyeh, though she kept low, watching as the car passed what appeared to be several hundred women and girls—and some of the girls looked young, indeed—standing on various platforms while prospective buyers wandered around, inspecting the merchandise. The inspections tended to involve the girls and women having to show off their wares, to disrobe, on demand. Many, Alix saw, not allowed to keep their bodies covered, instead covered their faces out of shame.

  “Didn’t take them very long to set things up,” Tim said.

  Fritz replied, “It wouldn’t; they already had the blueprints for this kind of thing.”

  Perhaps five miles outside of the city, they came to an apparently abandoned town, Dudenhausen, which was right down the road from Babenhofen. There was no bypass; the road ran right through the middle of town. They could see damage on the outskirts, a bunch of blown out, shattered windows, a number of burnt-out homes with fires that were still smoldering.

  There’d obviously been some fighting there but just how much they couldn’t say without entering it. And Khalid especially didn’t want to drive into a town where the occupants might just shoot first and ask questions later.

  “Tim, take over the driver’s seat and wait here. Be prepared to run for it with or without us,” Khalid said. “Fritz, come with me. Alix, keep your head down; we haven’t a clue what’s in there.”

  Warily, with one man on each side of the main street taking turns overwatching each other, the pair moved from house front to house front up Hauptstrasse. At any second, each of them expected to be met by a hurricane of fire, based on both the bullet holes and the damage, which grew more serious the deeper they passed into the town. Instead, a steady breeze blew from behind them.

  Finally, at the last house—rather the burnt-out ruins of the last house—before the town square, they stopped. They had to stop, after all, Fritz was vomiting and Khalid felt like it.

  The town square was piled deep with corpses, four or five hundred of them, Khalid suspected, maybe more, and with flies buzzing and lapping at the blood from innumerable wounds. There were buildings around the square, some damaged and some not. To the exterior walls of each, corpses had been nailed through the wrists and the feet. There were several dozen shot dogs, as well.

  “They were alive when they went up there,” Khalid judged, pointing with his chin at one of the victims. “Wounded maybe, but alive.”

  “All men,” Fritz noticed. “I wonder where . . .”

  “Slave market,” Khalid answered. “I suspect some of those women and girls we saw on display were from here. Come on.”

  They walked around the pile of bodies to the burned-out church that stood on the other side. The wind mostly kept the stench of the bodies away. At least it did until they reached the church. There they stopped, taking in the nailed-shut main entrance, the collapsed roof, and the walls from which the stained glass windows had somehow burst.

  “I suppose we have to look, don’t we?” But I think I already know what we’re going to find.

  Rather than try to pry off the bar that sealed the main door, they walked around the side and scrambled up to where they could peek in. What they saw . . .

  “Dear God,” Fritz said, tonelessly.

  What they saw were several hundred small to tiny burned bodies, twisted into a fetal position, piled like the charcoal they resembled, deep on the floor of the church. Some antaniae were tearing burnt strips of meat from the corpses.

  Khalid let himself fall back to the ground. It was then that he noticed the bullet marks that scarred the stone frame of the window.

  “What . . . who?” Fritz wondered.

  “Some of the women, I suppose,” Khalid replied. “The older ones who weren’t worth the trouble of trying to sell. Boy children who weren’t quite pretty enough for the market. Herded in, then burnt alive, with rifles and machine guns posted to drive back any who tried to escape.

  “Come on, let’s go back to the car.”

  The way out was quicker than the way in. Khalid was pretty sure there was no one left alive in the town to worry about.

  “Switch off, Tim,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

  With a shrug, Tim got out of the car and walked around to the other side. Khalid got in around the same time, and, seeing everyone had settled in, began to drive. Once past the first block, instead of following Main Street, he cut right, went two blocks, and then left to parallel Main Street and avoid the scenes at the town square.

  Even more than his normal very Sachsen appearance, Fritz was ghastly pale, Alix noticed. She also noticed that Khalid’s route made essentially no sense whatsoever.

  “What are you trying to keep me from seeing?” she demanded.

  “The road up ahead isn’t suitable for vehicles,” he lied.

  “Bullshit! Take me there!”

  “Alix, you don’t want to . . .”

  “Take. Me. There.”

  Crap. If I don’t take her she’ll assume it’s even worse than it is. I suppose I’d better. Shame she’s too bright to fool.

  Reluctantly, he turned the wheel to head toward the town square. Once there, he stopped but left his motor running.

  At first, the big pile in the center made no sense to Alix. She had no frame of reference for it. Then she made out a pale arm, maybe beginning to turn a little greenish. Leaving her borrowed rifle behind, she opened her door and jumped out of the car. Suddenly, the whole scene became clear. She saw the bodies. She smelled the bodies. She split the air with her scream.

  At her scream, Khalid, Fritz, and Tim likewise exited the vehicle.

  She turned on them.“ You bastards did this!” Alix exclaimed. “You . . .”

  “No, they didn’t,” Khalid said. “Oh, I had a part in it, as I already admitted, but Tim and Fritz had different jobs.”

  “I did targeting, actually,” Fritz admitted. “My tailoring shop was useful for keeping tabs on your military,” added Tim.

  “And you?” Alix accused, turning her full fury back on Khalid. “How many guns did you smuggle to my country?”

  Khalid didn’t answer right away, thinking on it. “Two or three thousand, I suppose, to Oppenheim and its environs—”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Maybe seventy thousand, all told, here and there. Well, maybe eighty thousand. Hmmm . . . are we counting hand grenades, machine guns, and mortars?”

  “Bastard!”

  “How many tons of bombs did your Luftstreitkraefte drop on our country?” Khalid asked. “How many piles of dead did your bombs leave?”

  “That was different, That was—”

  Khalid cut her off. “That was using the means at your disposal to win a war. So is this. And so was my smuggling arms. The difference is that your planes were dropping bombs in an optional war in support of aliens and a homegrown, bureaucratic tyranny, while this was necessary in order for a genuine republic to survive.

  “So tell me, how hard did you fight against the invasion of my country?”

  Alix looked at the pile of corpses, buzzing with flies, and thought, but did not say, Pretty obviously, not hard enough.
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  “What is your country?” she asked, trying to change the subject. “Are you not Moslem?”

  “No, I am not,” answered Khalid. “I told you when we first met that I am a Druze.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Our greatest foes, and those we must chiefly combat, are within.

  —Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

  Tauran Union Defense Agency Headquarters, Lumiere, Gaul

  Though two of Terra Nova’s three moons provided close to half illumination, the office suite, itself, was near enough to pitch black as, indeed, were the entire headquarters and, except on the streets, the city in which it found itself. It was believed that the main power plant for the city had fallen. Into this pitch darkness, Jan Campbell had awakened with a start from a fitful and miserably uncomfortable sleep, back propped against the wood paneling lining the dressed stone wall of the building. She thought it was raining.

  “Wha’ . . . what?”

  She’d taken the pitter-patter of bullets striking exterior stone for rain, for a moment, as she’d taken the reports of far-off rifles and machine guns as some kind of thunder.

  “Here they come again!” repeated Corporal Dawes, raising his rifle to his shoulder after pulling a careful nighttime watch from a partially blocked, glassless window. His shout was loud enough to wake the dead, in the confined spaces of the headquarters building, which was just about enough to get the other Anglians and the Gallic woman, Turenge, on their feet and racing to their firing positions.

  Is this the fourth attack or the fifth? Campbell asked herself. She didn’t remember. Shaking her head to clear it, she shouldered her own rifle, then used the muzzle to push aside the ad hoc curtain stretched across the window. She could hear bullets impacting the stout and solid stone of the place. Some even entered the long-since-destroyed windows, flying across the office space to bury themselves in the wood of the opposite sides. She’d have been frightened of the bullets, perhaps, but for two things. One was that she was an officer of the Anglian Army, hence had traditions to uphold. The other was . . .