Burn Down the Sky by James Jaros

Author:James Jaros [Jaros, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-04-30T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

African Drought, Warfare, Bring Final Collapse, Untold Dead

Chinese murdered en masse at leased farms in Sudan

UN African conflict report

Top Pentagon Command Killed in Coup

Army divided, president hunted

Stars and Stripes

The howl didn’t sound human.

Jessie ducked behind the marooned cargo carrier, peering from under the rear door, which hung open and cast a sharp, oblong shadow on the riverbed. Coxwell mirrored her movements. Both had their weapons ready, but neither aimed them; the source of the eerie wail was too hard to pinpoint. It came at them from everywhere at once, like an excitement of ghosts. Even in this heat her skin felt chilly, clammy.

Twenty feet behind her, Bliss and Hannah crouched on the sand, exposed as the scattered river rocks. When Jessie raised her hand to move them, Coxwell whispered, “Not a word.”

The howl remained as unearthly as ever. Jessie waited for the creature to take a breath.

Hansel bellied toward them on three legs. She remembered when Eden trained their dog to do that. “G.I. Bowser,” they used to joke. Nothing funny now. Least of all her agonizing over Eden.

The howl stopped, drawing her eyes to the nearest riverbank. It perched about eighty feet away in the fractured shade of dense, dead trees. She scanned the shadows, spotting a skell who stared into the distance, a flap of skin hanging from his incinerated chest. If her basic knowledge of medicine meant anything, he’d die soon.

“You see that?” Coxwell nudged her with his stump. She forced aside thoughts of his maggots—and the ones feasting on her own infected wound.

“You mean him?”

“The other ones. Right below him.”

Her sight dipped to a dozen or more dead skells who were piled at the bottom of the bank. They looked like they’d been gunned down. Drag marks in the sand led to where they’d fallen.

The air shifted and an odor assaulted them so furiously it was impossible for Jessie to believe that only seconds ago they’d breathed easily. Coxwell covered his nose with the crook of his elbow, and Jessie’s hand rose to her face. She smelled the cougar meat she’d eaten, but cooked animal couldn’t compete with the rotting remains of dead humans.

“I want him alive,” Coxwell muttered.

“You think he can talk?”

“I think he can tell us something about this.” He indicated the bombed truck with a sweep of his stump. “Like where they get supplies for this kind of action. I want whatever they got.”

He waved up Jaya, the smooth-faced boy whom Bliss had eyed, and Brindle. In the absence of the howl, their footsteps sounded loud in the sand. Bliss followed them to the truck seconds later.

Coxwell took Jaya and Brindle on a dash to the bank, which still left them a good sprint from the skell, who continued to stare vacantly into the distance. He appeared as insensate as the corpses below him until he raised a can and poured liquid on the bodies. Then he struck a flint. That’ll never catch, Jessie thought, he’s too far above them. But one of the sparks ignited, either from the fumes or from the methane of rotting flesh.

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