“When someone goes—it’s always to Them?”
“No,” and her face lost its smile. He noticed her dimples by their absence from the corners of her mouth. Her lips were thin, pale. Her hands trembled and he didn’t think it was the cold. “A very little one goes sometimes—it is not known why. And the very old ones. When it is time, each of them goes. And when a new one is born someone always goes. When Madame Elizabeth had her baby, I thought it would be my turn for sacrifice, And it was.” Michael Rourke closed his eyes, opened them, focusing on the toes of his combat boots. “How many people live at the Place?”
“One hundred,” she answered.
“About a hundred, huh?”
“Exactly one hundred.” It was the first time he had heard her use any word even similar to exactly.
“What do you mean—exactly a hundred?”
“There are never more than a hundred—except for a few hours after a young one is born. Sometimes there are less than a hundred, but then new ones are born.” “Exactly a hundred. Young and old, male and female?”
“Yes—why do you take such interest, Michael?”
Cannibals lay outside the Place. Inside, he realized, there was likely something much worse. Systematic genocide with willing victims. He reached out his left arm, putting it around the girl’s shoulders, drawing her close against him as they sat beside one another on the rocks. “You’ll be safe, Madison,” Michael Rourke almost whis- pered. “Safe.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
John Rourke ran his bare fingertips across the ground—it was the faintest of tire impressions. He stood to his full height, stiff still from the cryogenic sleep but feeling his strength return. He didn’t look back. “Michael’s been this way. He must be following a straight northwesterly course.” “He cannot—the mountains,” he heardNatalia interject. ‘ ‘It doesn”t matter which way he picks around an obstacle—he’ll pick up the same course on the other side. If we lose all track of him, Paul can go one way, you and I the other,” he told her, pulling on his gloves against the cold, turning, walking back toward the bikes. Natalia stood beside the jet-black Harley. Paul rode his own bike. The blue Low Rider Rourke had taken from the Brigand camp was the machine Michael rode. “You’ve gotta remember,” Rourke told them, mounting the Harley, putting his dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses back to cover his eyes. “I taught him land navigation—I taught both of them. But this is his first time any great distance from the Retreat. He’ll be smart enough to stick to the basics, even if it means going out of his way a little. Anyway— he’d stick northwesterly because he’s trying to pinpoint that crash site or whatever it was.”
“The messages on the tapes—or whatever they were. Could you figure out the language?” Paul asked.
Rourke looked at Rubenstein, feeling Natalia mounting the Harley behind him, feeling her arms circle his waist. “Yeah. It was some sort of computer message. I’d need the access code to figure it out.”
“The Eden Project?” Natalia’s voice asked from behind him. Rourke twisted in the saddle, looking at her. “No, this is something else. I don’t know what— not yet. But if something crashed out there, well, we’ll see,” and Rourke shoved the CAR-15 back on its sling, gunning the Harley, feeling the machine as it vibrated under him. “Let’s go, Paul,” he called. There were still a few hours of daylight. After the cryogenic sleep, he would not feel he needed sleep, but he was tired from the exertion. So long without exercise or proper nutrition.
He let out the Harley—to follow his son.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“I have never eaten flesh—it is forbidden. Them, they eat flesh.” Michael looked at the jerked beef stick in his right hand. “Used to be, I remember it a little— before the Night of The War—“
“Between the angels?”
“No, there weren’t any angels involved.” He smiled, watching how the glows from the firelight played across her little girl face. “But before the Night of The War, you could go places—fast food restaurants they called them. You could get hamburgers and chicken sandwiches and fish sandwiches. I always liked hamburger. But there aren’t any animals now. When the Eden Project returns, they should bring back animals and after a while, there should be meat again. But it’s a delicacy now.”
He extended the jerked beef stick to her—Annie had processed some of the less appealing cuts of meat in the freezer into jerky. The darkness around them was cold, forbidding, but it was warm near the fire in the shelter of the rocks. He had given up on reaching the Place before dark, and had not wanted to come on it after the light was gone. He had worried over the fire, that guards from the Place might see it, or the cannibals. But the cannibals would be glutted and he had beaten them off once. And Madison had told him there were no guards at the Place.
She sat close beside him and he gnawed away a piece of the jerked beef. “Come on—I can’t see where it’s against your religion.” “The angels eat flesh?”
He avoided the remark. “This isn’t flesh like you’re thinking of. The people I call cannibals—
the ones you call Them— they eat other people, the flesh of other people. This is the flesh of cattle. They were raised specifically to be eaten even-tually. That was their function.”
She licked her lips. She had eaten half the supply of dehydrated fruit and vegetables he had brought as trail food, the fruit and the vegetables from the garden. It had been only the last few years that they had actually gotten the fruit trees to bear, pollinating the trees themselves. She had eaten five of the fingers of cornbread Annie had sent with him. “I will try the flesh.” “That’s a girl.” Michael felt himself smile. He handed her the beef stick. He watched as gingerly she placed it near her mouth. “Think of it as meat—like hamburger or something.”
“Hamburger,” she repeated, touching the tip of her tongue to the rolled stick. Her tongue moved as rapidly as the tongue of a snake was supposed to move. He had read of snakes, seen thousands of them in a very famous movie his father had the videotape of. But the comparison to a snake was wrong somehow, he thought. Her tongue moved like the wings of a hummingbird. He remembered actually seeing one during the times he and his sister had been on the trail with their mother after the Night of The War. Her tongue moved like that. He asked himself why he was watching her in such detail. She placed the stick of beef in her mouth. Her nose wrinkled up a little and he laughed as she struggled to tear the bite she had taken from the stick. She handed it back to him.
He watched as she held it in her mouth. “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to—I just wanted you to try it.”
“It—is—is very tasty, Michael.”
His arm was around her. He watched her mouth as she chewed, her throat, the movement there as she swallowed. “Why do you know so much about angels and archangels and so little about hambur-ger?” It was a stupid question, the way he put it, he realized.
She smiled, the firelight in her eyes, changing the shade of the blue there. “We read the Holy Bible. The Families—they read other things sometimes. But we read the Holy Bible and the Holy Bible is interpreted for us by the Ministers.” “Who are the Ministers?”
“The heads of the Families—men from each of the Families are the Ministers. It is always this way.”
She shivered in his arm and he couldn’t quite understand that because she was very healthy seeming and she was dressed more warmly than he, the sleeping bag she had used as a coat earlier when they’d walked now swathed around her beside the fire.
He held her more closely against him.
“Do these Ministers—do they tell you about other things, besides the Bible?”
“Oh, yes, they tell us everything that we need to know.” “Have you ever wondered if there’s maybe something you needed to know that they didn’t tell you?”
“But the Ministers know best for us.”
“You’re beautiful, Madison.”
She looked away. “You joke with me. I am not beautiful. Madame Elizabeth Cambridge is beauti-ful. Miss Genevieve Vandiver is beautiful. I am—“ “I said you’re beautiful. May I kiss you?’
She raised her eyes, looking at him, the fire making shadows there one instant, the shadows gone the next.
“But you are an archangel and I am only a Madison.”
“Then there shouldn’t be anything wrong if I kiss you,” Michael Rourke told her.
“I have never—I am not a breeder.”
“A breeder—a breeder?”
“Only some from the Madisons can breed and I was not selected.”
