Written in Fire

CHAPTER 42

Luke Hammond stood in the darkness and watched men burn alive.

He had been a warrior his whole life, and long ago he’d recognized that no good man could have been the places he had been, seen the things he had seen, done the things he had done. It didn’t matter that he had fought for his country, for his children. It didn’t matter that he possessed discipline and restraint. There was a beast, a slavering, rotting, smiling thing that smelled of sex and sweat and shit. Every man sensed it. Most lived and died without spending time in the beast’s company, without tasting that terrible freedom or knowing the beauty that grows in horror. There were no words to convey it, because it came from a place beyond words, before words.

Good men would never acknowledge that fire is most seductive when it is out of control.

But the people in those windows knew that now. Win or lose, live or die, that knowledge would never desert them. It could be ignored, forced down, loathed, but that wouldn’t change its essential truth. The men screaming as they burned knew it too.

It was not romantic. It was not moral. It simply was.

Luke had expected that as soon as the line was broken, as soon as some of the Sons had made it past the defenses and into the city, the will of the defenders would snap. He’d been wrong. Even as scores of his men broke the lines, as the militia penetrated the city and the sounds of battle rose from every block, the people in the windows fought. They fought with the will of people protecting their homes and their children, and Luke honored that in them.

The Sons continued to charge, firing as they ran, leaping the bodies of their comrades. In the windows, rifles flashed, bottles rained down. The street was bright now, and the beast lurched from flame to flame, slavering and laughing.

Discipline and restraint did not make him a good man. But they had allowed him to live with the beast for decades. As chaos flared around him, Luke was calm. He moved in a low crouch, choosing his steps carefully, the rifle held low. As his heart screamed to rage, he kept his finger off the trigger. He moved to the edge of the light cast by the gasoline fires and knelt down. He ignored the bullets snapping off the concrete around him, the smoke that brought tears to his eyes, the smell of cooking meat, and he watched.

The defenders had set up barriers in the windows and fired from behind them. But not every barrier concealed a target. It might be a shortage of manpower, but he suspected instead a shortage of weapons. The abnorms had put too much faith in their technology, taken too much comfort in their invisible wall. Once it was breached, they were vulnerable.

He watched and saw that though there were many windows, many barriers, the number of defenders was quite limited. Their strength was an illusion. They would fire from one window, stop as soon as they drew attention, and move to a different one. He doubted there were more than a handful of snipers in each building. The only reason they had held on as long as they had was that they weren’t facing an organized army—they were battling a horde.

Luke raised the rifle to his shoulder. He watched a man in his fifties empty a magazine, then drop from sight as bullets streamed upward. Luke waited.

When a muzzle flashed at a different window, he exhaled, sighted, and fired once.

The man jerked. Staggered. Fell across the barrier.

Luke waited.

From the neighboring building, another Molotov flew, the glass sparkling. He ignored it, ignored the blast of fire and the screams. Waited.

A woman rose like a cobra, a rifle in her arms. He recognized her. He had seen her earlier through the binoculars. She was even prettier up close. Or perhaps it wasn’t the distance; perhaps it was that since then she had experienced a facet of life she’d never suspected. Had embodied a savagery that had no place in her parenting or her parties.

Like Luke, she had seen the beast. Like him, she had made her offerings to it. Were she to live, no doubt she would be horrified at what she had done; the screams of burning men would haunt her midnight hours. But there would be a part of her that missed it. A secret, unacknowledged quarter that would revel in the moment she had held the raw stuff of life in her hands.

Were she to live. But having seen the beast granted you no protection from it.

Luke framed her face in the sights of his rifle and pressed the trigger.

The round took her through the forehead.