The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  He hugged the sides of the buildings, moving at a near run, his eyes searching all around. Behind them they heard a rumble and a loud explosion. Katy and Poppy, all the others—would any of them survive?

  Before them stretched a jumble of broken concrete blocks where a freeway overpass had collapsed, and Rafe led Madrone from block to block, ducking behind them for cover. They were almost through to the other side when they heard a voice call “Halt!”

  About thirty yards ahead, five guards stood, aiming laser rifles straight at the two of them. Rafe shoved her down behind a pile of stones, dove for a dirt mound nearby, and fired. Bullets ricocheted around them, and a laser beam raised a fountain of dust.

  “Move!” he yelled. “Keep low.”

  She ran, crouched close to the ground, choosing a route by pure instinct. Around her she heard more shots, then silence.

  “Come on!”

  Rafe was running now and she followed, terror helping her match his speed. A building loomed up before them, its entrance blocked by nailed boards. Rafe grabbed at them, pulling hard, and they swung aside to reveal a concealed doorway. Quickly they ducked inside, replaced the boards behind them, and ran down an empty, dusty corridor.

  At the end of the hallway, a narrow stair led down to a basement. They picked their way through the dark until they came to a trapdoor. Rafe pulled it up and motioned her down. She felt for the rungs of a metal ladder and began climbing downward. He followed close behind, shutting the door above them, cutting off the last of the dim light. Feeling her way rung by rung, she descended in the dark, wondering as she went how deep this hole was, how long she could control her shaky arms.

  Finally her leading foot hit solid ground. Carefully she let go of the ladder, backing away just far enough to let Rafe descend. She took hold of his shirt as, sure as a bat, he found his way through the pitch-dark corridors.

  After a long time, she began to see light ahead, a dim glow that glared alarmingly in her dilated pupils. They emerged through an archway into a broad expanse of concrete, supported by pillars of cement and steel, some long-forgotten structure of the old world. Madrone couldn’t quite imagine what it had been built for. In some areas, curtains were hung between the pillars to mark off private spaces. In others, the curtains were raised and she could see little camps, with rugs and pillows and blankets. In the center, a small fire burned, and the concrete ceiling above was marked with soot. Around her were unimproved areas, vast expanses of gray flooring marked only by flecked, ancient paint in parallel diagonal lines.

  “Welcome to Heaven,” Rafe said.

  He led her to the fire, where chairs and couches were arranged in a rough but comfortable circle. They joined the group that was sitting there, brewing a kettle on the flames.

  Madrone couldn’t tell by looking if the person tending the kettle was female or male, but her voice was high-pitched and melodious as she looked up at Rafe and spoke. “What’s happening?”

  “The rats got smoked out. Bad news.”

  “All of them?”

  “Seemed like it. I saw some of the kids get hit, and Littlejohn, from the hills; they splashed his brains all over the pavement. We may have lost Gaby, too.”

  Littlejohn, Madrone thought. She couldn’t yet feel his death. It seemed too sudden. How could he be one minute, and not be the next, not be alive, not be somewhere stalking the thirsty canyons? Maya, madrina, did I do something wrong? Was I not vigilant enough to stay out of the Bad Reality?

  “I told Hijohn it was stupid to have all those people gather in the same place,” Rafe went on. “The bigsticks brought in a copter.”

  “Where in hell did they get a copter?” someone asked from behind her.

  “They got a warehouse full in the Valley. Can’t fly unless the weather’s real clear, though,” said the woman with the kettle.

  “That one won’t fly again,” Rafe said. “Neither will a lot of rats and hillboys, poor soulless fuckers. I saved the healer, though. This is her.”

  “Hello,” they said.

  Madrone’s eyes were beginning to be accustomed to the darkness. She was surrounded by a group of the most physically striking people she had ever seen. They were all young—she doubted that any were older than twenty, especially in this climate, which aged people so rapidly. Almost all were as blond as Rafe, with the same long limbs and slender bodies, and nearly androgynous, the boys soft-skinned, the girls hard-muscled. They could have been cousins. Or, she thought, it was more like a breed of show dogs—greyhounds or Afghans. There were a few redheads, and several girls with flowing black hair and skin golden as the inside of ripe plums. Three or four of the group were dark as gleaming shadows, with sculpted muscles that reminded her of Isis.

  “You want anything?” one of them asked. “Water? We got plenty, from an illegal line we run. Food? We got things down here you’ve maybe never tasted. Chocolate. Sex? Someone’ll happily do you. What do you like? Men? Women? Kids? There’s some great young ass running around this place.”

  Madrone wasn’t sure she had heard what she just heard, so she pretended she hadn’t. What she wanted was to cry, to lie down and not rise up again, to be able to feel Littlejohn’s death and mourn him, to be home with Bird and Nita and Holybear and Sage, and Maya downstairs writing her memoirs. She wanted Katy and Poppy to suddenly, miraculously, appear in this place. Heaven. Maybe she, like so many others, was already dead?

  “Water,” she said. “Are you making tea? I’d love some tea.”

  They brought her tea on a silver tray, in a cup that, she noted, was real Wedgwood china, as fine as anything Johanna had collected in her affluent days. Somewhere in the back they had an actual refrigerator, from which they brought her cream, and someone produced a plate of delicate, buttery cookies. The tea was fragrant and, as she sipped it, she recognized a taste she had forgotten from her childhood, when Maya used to sneak her a sip of her afternoon Earl Grey. Imported black tea. What reality had she stumbled into?

  As she looked up from her teacup, she noticed that a crowd of small children had gathered from the corners of the vast space and were staring at her curiously. Like the older ones, they had big eyes and fine bones, delicate, appealing, as if the best specimens of mostly the white race had been collected to match the china.

  “Where do you get this stuff?” Madrone asked. “Like the tea and cookies?”

  “Raids,” said Michael, who could have been Rafe’s twin. He had stopped coming to the training, but Madrone recognized him from the early weeks.

  “But where does it come from? Are the Stewards still trading with Asia and Europe and Africa?”

  “I don’t know,” Michael said. “We just steal it.”

  “I know,” a young woman said. She had the darkest skin Madrone had ever seen, violet-tinged, velvety in the dim light, and she wore only a white silk skirt that barely covered her ass. Her features were perfectly sculpted, and her long hair was blond and silken. Is it real? Madrone wondered. Is it a wig, or is she the result of yet another breeding program?

  The woman tossed her head back, making her hair shimmer in the dim light, and smiled suggestively at Madrone. “I used to belong to a man in the shipping trade. They still come in from overseas, the big boats, when the storms don’t get them. But all this stuff is very rare and precious now. Couldn’t buy it for a year’s ration of water. Makes it more fun to steal.”

  Madrone listened to them chatter on, about prizes they had collected on raids and what they most liked to eat. It distracted her from the great, hollow, terrible feeling inside that threatened to well up and drown her. Was Katy dead? No, that was wrong, wrong. She should be ready to birth, to bring forth life, not death. And I’ve made her last days unhappy and separated her from Hijohn. Maybe if he’d been with us, he could have saved her. Maybe.…

  The curtains parted, and Gabriel came in. She was breathing hard, sweat dripping down the perfect planes of her face, her calla-lily skin flushed with pink.

  “You made it,�
�� Rafe said. “Celestial!”

  “Lemme have some water,” Gaby said.

  “What happened after we got out?”

  “Copter blew, man, burned the place. All charcoal, now. Lotta people got out, some didn’t. Littlejohn got shot. Dead. They caught Katy and that Angel kid and took them somewhere. Caught me too, but I got away from them.” She grinned.

  Madrone sat, silent. She ached inside. Littlejohn had always been kind to her, always tried to help her. And he had known Bird, was a link to him. Now Bird seemed even further away, so remote he might never have existed. But grieving for Littlejohn seemed a pleasant indulgence, a luxury appropriate to a different world. In this world, El Mundo Malo, what was happening to Katy and Poppy?

  “Can’t we do anything for them?” Madrone asked. “You go on raids all the time—can’t we steal them back?”

  Rafe shrugged. “Where will they be, do you think?”

  “They might send Katy to the breeder pens,” Michael suggested.

  “Nah, not ready to pop as she is. They don’t want just anything coming out of those pens. They’ll take her to the Research Center, do some experiment on her,” Rafe said.

  “Where is that?” Madrone asked.

  “Up at the university. In the Medical Center.”

  “And Poppy?”

  “She’ll never make it back to the pens,” Gaby said. “That Stewwie big-stick’s bound to make a private deal somewhere.”

  “Who with?” Rafe speculated. “Who likes ’em fresh caught and has the cash to buy off a bigstick?”

  “Marichal, up Spring Canyon. Stebner, down by the beach. Or any of the widescreen men.”

  “Nah, they’re all buying on the up-and-up these days, strictly government issue. Too much spotlight for them.”

  “Could be anybody,” Gaby admitted. “But let’s send the scouts out to check the most likely. I’m just in the mood to do it to somebody after that.”

  “We got some new guns,” Rafe said. “Might as well put them to use.”

  The scouts were small and brown and ordinary looking, fed on the bounty of the Angels for their usefulness. They were dispatched, and Madrone settled back with the others to wait.

  “Tell us about the North,” Gaby said. “I like to hear your stories.”

  “I’m not sure I can talk about it right now,” Madrone said. “I’m too worried.”

  “Did you hear the army’s issued a proclamation of victory?” Gaby said.

  “Do you believe them?” Michael asked.

  Gaby shrugged. “Stands to reason they’d win, if the North don’t got no army.”

  “We don’t—we didn’t. We didn’t want to starve people in order to support it,” Madrone said.

  “Never bothered anyone around these parts,” Rafe said. “And a lot of good it done you now.”

  “Tell us your stories anyway,” Gaby pleaded. “Even if it’s all blown up and burned down, I like to hear how it used to be. It’ll pass the time while we wait for the scouts to come back.”

  “So would sleep,” Rafe said.

  “Ah, come on.”

  I can’t bear to tell my fairy tale now, Madrone thought. I don’t believe it anymore. But Gaby looked so eager and so young, almost innocent for a moment, like any child wanting a story. Reluctantly, Madrone began.

  “In the North, water runs freely through the City in open streams, where ducks can bathe and kids swim and catch fish. Nobody owns anybody else, and everybody has enough to eat and drink.…”

  The pink mansion was set among green lawns, surrounded by a high stone wall, electric fencing, and a security system worthy of an unpopular head of state. As raiders, Madrone considered, the Angels lacked the hillboys’ caution and finesse, but they made up for it with sheer nerve and complete ruthlessness. After word came back that a new Angel child had been purchased at Stebner’s, Rafe and Michael and Gaby and Madrone had hiked all night through the deserted streets, reaching the beach resorts just before dawn. They were out long after curfew, but Rafe simply shot any guard who challenged them. To disarm the alarm system, Michael tossed a live cat into the electric fence. As it screamed and spit and writhed in agony, one of the guards came out to turn off the system and remove it. As soon as it was disarmed, Rafe shot him.

  “Wait here, till we call you,” Michael said. “If we don’t come out, get yourself back to the hills.”

  She was only too happy to wait. They frightened her, almost as much as the soldiers and the Stewards. They killed so calmly, so coldly. All right, Madrone thought, huddling between the wall and a large evergreen, it’s true that I don’t want to see it. I’m a hypocrite. I want to save Poppy and I won’t challenge them on their violence, because how can I? Their violence saved my life. And look what’s been done to them—not that it condones murder but it does explain their lack of empathy. Still, if killing has to happen I prefer it to happen out of my sight, so I can pretend I have no part in it.

  She heard a few shots, but mostly silence, and then Gaby gave a short whistle and called her name.

  “Over the wall. It’s okay, now.”

  Madrone hoisted herself up, the rough stones providing purchase for her hands and feet. She pulled herself over the top and leaped down, landing in a crouch.

  “Come on,” Gaby said. Her face looked grim and Madrone began to be even more afraid.

  The living room in the mansion was enormous, white-carpeted, lined with windows that overlooked the ocean, glinting pink and gold and rose as the early light glowed through the low fog. Rafe seemed almost lost in the expanse of luminous walls and low couches. He was bending over something, and looked up as Madrone entered.

  “He’s yours, Madrone,” Rafe said.

  At Rafe’s feet lay a man, trussed, naked, a gag tied tightly over his mouth, only his eyes looking out at her, terrified. He had shit with fear, and the stench mingled with the other smells in the room: blood and urine and vomit. Poppy’s broken body lay crumpled in a corner, like a discarded doll.

  Madrone stood, shocked into silence, her eyes distracted by the changing panorama of light and water that played in the distance.

  “He’s yours,” Rafe repeated.

  “What do you mean, he’s mine?” Madrone asked.

  “To kill,” Rafe said. “Take your time. Enjoy it.” He smiled, and Madrone suddenly remembered a kitten she’d had as a small child, who used to bring home gifts of half-dead mice, cocking her head with that same eagerness to please.

  She wanted to vomit.

  “No,” Madrone said. “Uh, thanks, but no. No, I don’t want to kill him.”

  “Take a look at Poppy, what’s left of her,” Rafe said. “You’ll change your mind.”

  I don’t want to look at her, Madrone thought, or I will be haunted for the rest of my life. But the room was full of Angel eyes, cold and blue, watching her. This is our life, they seemed to say. How can you heal us if you cannot bear to look at it?

  She made herself kneel down beside the small body, touch the cold flesh. Blood streamed from Poppy’s nostrils and the torn flesh between her legs. There were other marks on her that Madrone’s eyes observed but her mind refused to comprehend. She was going to be sick. Something opened in her mind, like a cover sliding off a well, and she was tumbling down the years to stand above another broken, bloodied female body. No, she thought, this is what I don’t want to see, what I cannot remember and still go on living: my mother, after the men got through with her, and I crept out into the silence, and I saw. Kneeling, she gently touched Poppy’s cold skin, as she had touched her mother’s face, hopefully, but she didn’t move. She didn’t move.

  She stuffed her fist into her mouth. Abruptly, she stood up.

  “The nerves close to the surface of the skin are most sensitive,” Gaby said. “But of course you know that.”

  No, Madrone wanted to scream, I know nothing about this. I know nothing about torture, nothing about death.

  “We should get out of here within the hour, to be safe. T
hat should be enough time to do it right.”

  “Maybe you want one of the boys to rape him first?” Gaby suggested.

  Madrone found herself nearly saying yes, just to buy time. The man was mewling behind his gag and shit was still leaking out his behind and she couldn’t look at his eyes without wondering if her mother had looked like that. She could almost grab the knife, to close those eyes, to stop the spreading of this pain and the staining of this carpet. Oh, she wasn’t making sense and she had to think, think.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t want to kill him. I’ve never killed anybody.”

  “It’s fun,” Rafe assured her. “You’ll get to like it.”

  “No, I can’t. I can’t.”

  I can’t shut it out, now. All these years I have held it down, because I didn’t want to remember her like that. I wanted to remember her face, and I can’t. I never could. Only now the blood, and the terrible cold stare of her eyes.

  Rafe laughed.

  “If you leave him alive, he’ll make more Poppies,” Gaby said. “He’ll identify you.”

  Like Poppy’s eyes. Like this man’s burning, fearful eyes could be, in a moment. Glassy and blind, his skin that clammy cold. And it was only fair, because his eyes had seen, had watched as his hands … no, she couldn’t think about that.

  “If it has to be done, you do it,” Madrone said. “But quick and clean. Don’t drag it out.”

  “Why not?” Rafe asked. “That’s the fun part.”

  “That’s what he did to Poppy,” Michael said. “Would you like me to describe exactly how she got those particular wounds?”

  “No,” Madrone said quickly.

  “She’d rather not know,” Rafe said, a note in his voice that scared her. “She’d rather keep her own hands clean. I know what you’re thinking—it’s what they all think. Leave it to the Angels; let them do the dirty work. They’re born with blood under their nails.”

  But I know too much. It’s what I can’t unknow that is killing me. And I would like to hurt him. I would like him to pay for what he’s done. I’d like them all to pay, all the torturers and rapists and the death squads. Diosa, Coatlicue, shall I become an instrument of your justice and clean the world for you?