were turned completely around in the stirrups. His accomplices, the old one and the fat one, were no better. Shattered femurs poked through torn jeans, and flies crawled in the old
Instead they complained of the injustice of being hung for raping whores and driving off
In her dream, even the horses looked as though they had ridden from the gates of hell. Their eyes were burning coals, and when they snorted and threw their heads back in protest at the burdens they were forced to carry, they spat long fiery tendrils of magma that burst into dirty blossoms of oily black and orange flame upon hitting the ground.
Sofia was angry. Not with the road agents. Not these ones anyway. They would soon be on their way to punishment. Her anger was directed at her father, and she was angry in the way that only a teenager could be with an adult. She had saved his life last night, at considerable risk to her own, and for this she was rewarded with a whipping the likes of which she could not recall from her childhood.
Didn’t he understand that she was capable of protecting herself? What if she’d had her Remington with her the day the family had been attacked? She could’ve picked off the agents from the hilltop. Maybe she could have shot down the men who assaulted Mama. She just wanted to be somewhere safe, with all of her family still alive and untouched by the evils of the road agents. Not standing under a tree in the middle of a wasteland, surrounded by wailing women who had not been strong enough to defend themselves. She wanted everything back as it had been.
Part of her hoped that this retribution might draw a line under it all.
Of the three dead men they had captured and strung up for execution, for some reason she took a particular dislike to the fat one in the middle. There was just something gross and upsetting about even looking at him; something deeper than the surface detail of the maggots seething in his wounds, of a giant worm nosing blindly around in the bloody crater on the side of his head. It was something deeper and more elemental than that: a sense of his complete evil. Maybe it had something to do with knowing what he had done to the captured women. They had not spoken about it in detail, of course, but in her dream - a very distant and rational, but disconnected part of her understood this was a dream - Sofia had a very good idea of the indignities visited on the Mormon women.
While none of the ghouls her father prepared for execution had been at their homestead, they were of the same type - they were monsters. And according to Papa, they all worked for the same end and the same man anyway. This devil in Fort Hood called Blackstone. It was he who should’ve been bound and trussed up on one of those Satanic mounts with a noose of rusted razor wire around his neck, but she kept those thoughts to herself. She knew the Mormon women were uncomfortable around her, finding her hunger for vengeance unseemly and disturbing. But Sofia did not care. She put it down to their being Mormons. She was a Catholic, and in its heart the one true church believed in the redemptive value of blood sacrifice. Also, it quietly regarded all outsiders as marked for purgatory at the very best.
The agents, however, they were going straight to hell. And as awful as she expected it to be, she wanted to watch them go. How annoying then that she should miss the drop of the gross one in the middle because she had rushed - or floated, really, this being a dream - to the side of the girl called Sally Grey, who had fainted under the taunts of the youngest of the condemned.
‘
Sofia did not pause for a moment’s thought. She hurried over to Sally to see if she might help. Indeed, in the dream, she flew quite literally to her side, as an angel might. But no sooner had she taken her eyes off the road agents than she heard a few harsh words and a horse whinnying, just before a sharp, collective gasp from the small gathering and the sudden snap and thrumming of the hanging chain being jerked tight. She was aware, somehow, that the razor wire her father had wrapped around their necks had morphed into thick, rusted chains, each link cruelly barbed with fangs of sharpened bones taken from the bodies of the innocents these men had killed. She turned her head quickly to see the giant troll’s body swinging dramatically and his legs kicking and jerking while her father looked on.
The eldest of the road agents appeared as a desiccated husk, a puppet of dry bones and wolf hide. He laughed at Papa, a sound like thousands of rats scurrying through a darkened basement. And the more he laughed, the stronger he seemed to grow, and the weaker and more translucent became her father. Fading away, fading away until a terror took her by the throat, a fear that he might be laughed out of existence altogether.
It was all too much to understand, and Sofia didn’t know why they hadn’t simply shot these men down like rabid dogs when they first had the chance. She had even offered to do the work herself if the others didn’t have the stomach for it. What was the problem?
If they had just shot them down; if they had just shown these agents the same lack of mercy they had shown the victims. If only she had been stronger. Her father would not be fading away. Papa would not be …
In the dream she screamed, but no sound came from her throat. All she could hear was the laughter of the dead man.
In her hospital bed, she screamed, and a nurse came running.
*
Her second awakening, late on Friday night, came easier. She emerged from a dreamless darkness into a soft, drugged consciousness. She remembered, in great detail, but with no feeling, having awoken earlier. Screaming, howling and clawing at her bedclothes, swinging her damaged fist at a male nurse who tried to calm her down. She remembered the sting of a hypodermic, and a sense of panic as darkness rushed up to meet her. But she was not panicking now.
She knew Papa was dead. The police officers who had come to the loft had told her that. She knew it, and yet between her and that knowing stretched a great gulf over which she could only barely glimpse the oceans of sadness that waited to claim her. But she could no sooner swim over to that grief, through the thick numbness of whatever drug they had given her, than she could have her father back. Sorrow enclosed her, but it was a loose fit. Like a dark heavy coat, a man’s coat, worn by a child playing dress-ups.
Her room was empty aside from herself. The North Kansas City Federal Medical Center had a surplus of rooms to go around. She could smell steamed vegetables and chicken, a thin almost metallic aroma. Like iron filings at the back of her throat. A television suspended from the ceiling was tuned to one of the three channels provided by the Armed Forces Heartland Network. It appeared to be the music video hour. She thought she recognised the band, some Wave Punk thing from Germany. Apart from the hall light, the flickering images on the TV screen provided the only illumination in the room. Full dark had fallen outside, and a high wind moaned as it rushed around the hospital buildings, rattling her window in its frame.
Papa was dead, and Maive gone with him.
The only people she had left in the world, or at least in this part of it. She thought of Trudi Jessup, who had been so kind to her on the trail, and Adam, whom she liked very much. But they were both gone now. Trudi back in Seattle, and Adam living somewhere in Canada with relatives.
Her head felt as though it had been packed in cotton wool soaked in sleeping gas or anaesthetic, or something. She was not groggy so much as numb. She stared out the window overlooking darkened hospital grounds. Through the blowing snow she could just make out the lights of the Cerner Corporation Campus, where the Heartland Territorial Government had set up. After their initial arrival in KC, they had spent a week on the former office campus going through a series of health checks, interviews and screenings not all that different from the ones they went through for the homestead program in Texas. They stayed in a hotel room at the casino down the road, a musty, depressing room still marked by the stains of the departed.
She was transfixed for a moment by the reflection of the TV screen, which seemed to hang in the air outside her room. It floated in the darkness, seemingly as disconnected from consequence and meaning as she was.
Given the view, not to mention her familiarity with the hospital, she realised she was probably five or six floors up, facing towards the east. On a good day you could see the restored power plant from up here.
Sofia tested her freedom of movement. She wasn’t hooked up to any drips or restrained in any way. A chunky