The Kill Society (Sandman Slim)(48)

“Wait,” I say, and take a flask from an inside pocket.

“Where did you get that?” says Wanuri.

“It was in a pile of dead Hellion junk.”

I unscrew the top.

“What is it?”

“Aqua Regia.”

“You’re going to drink now?”

“No. Gisco is. Everything from here to camp is going to hurt like a motherfucker.”

She looks at him.

“What do you say? You want to drink his poison?”

I hold the flask out to him.

“It tastes like dragon piss, but it’s about two hundred proof. It will help with the pain.”

Gisco takes the flask and tries a taste. Then coughs and spits a fair amount of it on his shirt. I hold him upright while he sputters.

“This isn’t sipping whiskey. Just hold your breath and swallow as much as you can.”

He makes a face, but doesn’t hesitate as he upends the Aqua Regia, taking three long pulls. Coughing and gagging, he shoves the flask back at me.

“Feeling any better?”

He breathes in. Lets his head fall back. He gives a thumbs-up. I push the flask back into his hand.

“You hold on to this. You might need more in a minute.”

Doris has my coat shredded in no time. Wanuri uses the panabas to cut the tree trunk into smaller segments. When they’re done, I grab Gisco by the shoulders and he grabs on to my arms. Wanuri and Doris splint his leg as fast as they can, but the next few minutes are all screams and a lot of fumbling, punctuated by curses and more screaming. Gisco isn’t a big guy, but it’s all I can do to hold him.

Finally, it’s done. Gisco isn’t moving.

“Is he all right?” says Doris.

I lay him down flat on the hillside.

“He’s fine. He just fainted.”

We use the rest of my shredded coat as a rope to lower him down the hill. When we reach level ground, I offer to ride with Gisco back to camp.

“No,” Wanuri says. “He’s my responsibility.”

We maneuver him onto the back of her bike, and me and Doris use the rope to secure him against her back.

I say, “You got your balance with him on there?”

“I’m fine,” she says, but I can tell she’s struggling. Still, Gisco is as safe with her as he’d be with any of us. And I know Wanuri would rather die than let anything else happen to the kid.

We abandon Gisco’s bike and ride back to camp flat out the whole way.

They must have heard us coming for miles, because there’s a whole reception committee when we reach the havoc. The Magistrate takes one look at Gisco and he and Johnny cut him free of Wanuri’s back. They use the drop door from a pickup truck as a stretcher to carry him wherever the messiah will lay hands on him.

Me and Doris get off our bikes, but Wanuri sits unmoving on hers.

Doris pats her back.

“Are you all right, dear? You did all you could,” she says.

Wanuri shakes her head and watches them carry Gisco away.

She says, “On top of everything else, I lost the Magistrate’s telescope.”

I hand it to her. She turns the telescope over on her hands. Looks at me.

I say, “I saw it before we started down, so I shoved it in my back pocket.”

“Is that dried blood all over your shirt?”

I look down at myself.

“Mine and some Hellion. I’m hard on clothes.”

“You’re disgusting. Go get something from the ice cream truck over there.”

She points into the distance.

“Thanks.”

She holds up the spyglass.

“Thank you,” she says again.

I head for the ice cream truck, stopping to throw my shirt into the bonfire. It breaks my heart a little. If we were in Pandemonium, I could wash the blood out of the thing. But it doesn’t work that way traveling in the desert. I watch the last Max Overdrive T-shirt I’ll ever see shrivel up and turn to ash. And my coat is gone, too. Two more connections to the world gone forever.

These days, when I think of Candy, she’s at the end of a tunnel a million miles long, and it gets longer every day. I can barely make out her face. Sometimes she waves. Mostly, though, we just look at each other until one of us looks away. This time it’s my turn, not because seeing her is like dying all over again but because I saw a way out of here. All I have to do is get Traven and make it through the L.A. ruins. From there I can find a way home. I know it.

Now I know things are starting to go my way when I get to the ice cream truck. Sure, the shirt is bile green, the lettering on the front is in Hellion, and it’s two sizes too big, but I grab it anyway. There can’t be that many Skull Valley Sheep Kill T-shirts in Hell.

With a little more searching, I find a frock coat made of basilisk leather. My bike pants are a little stiff with blood, too, but there’s no way I’m giving up those or my boots. Nothing else that reminds me of home gets away, no matter how fucked up.

I lost my flask back on the peak, so I track down the Aqua Regia crate and help myself to a bottle. Cherry totters in and out of the ambulance a couple of times bringing medical supplies to the Magistrate. Gisco isn’t screaming anymore, so maybe he got some of the laudanum. I walk by the motor home looking for Traven, but he isn’t there. I find him with a handful of other people watching the Magistrate doing open-heart surgery on Gisco’s leg. I’ve seen enough bodies cut up for one lifetime. I go over to the father and say, “We need to talk.”