Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [46]
“We have to leave right away,” she whispered. “Right now.”
“Shhhh,” he soothed, tightening his arms to steady her. “That’s enough for tonight, little one.” Right now, she had said. At once he thought of Tessa.
Chapter EIGHT
ALTHOUGH LOGAN TOM hadn’t expected to be able to track down the slave camp—hadn’t even been certain, in fact, that it was there—he stumbled on it almost without trying. Daylight was failing and darkness closing all about the countryside as he drove west out of Iowa into whatever lay beyond—he couldn’t remember and didn’t care to stop long enough to check maps that no longer had relevance—when he saw the glow of the watch fires burning on the horizon like a second setting of the sun. Crimson against the pale shading of twilight, the glow drew his attention instantly, signaling its presence in a way that all but invited him in for a closer look. He had seen this glow before—in other times, at other camps—and he realized quickly enough what it was and drove toward it.
Darkness had fallen completely by the time he arrived at a dirt road that led in from the main highway, driving the S-l 50 with the lights off and the big engine idled down to a low hum. As he approached, the watchtowers and the barricades took shape and the slave pens became recognizable. The glow emanated from a combination of lights powered by solar generators and pillars of flame rising out of fire pits. The latter gave the landscape a hellish and surreal look, as if devil imps with pitchforks might be prowling the countryside. The camp was huge, stretching two miles across and at least as deep. It had been a stockyards once, he guessed, that had been turned by the once-men and their mentors to a different use. The odor of cows and manure and hay was strong, although he knew that the smell could be deceiving and its source something else entirely.
By the time he cut the engine, still well back from the watch-towers and their lights, he could hear the mewling of the prisoners. He sat motionless in the AV, ashamed and enraged by the sounds, unable to stop himself from listening. He could make out shadowy forms moving back and forth behind the fences in the hazy glow of the lights, a listless, shuffling mass. Humans become slaves, become the living dead, made to work and to breed by the once-men and their demon masters. It was the fate decreed for all who weren’t killed outright during the hunts. It was the punishment visited on humans for their foolishness and inaction when the collapse of civilization began, and it was horrifying beyond imagining.
But, then, he didn’t have to imagine it. He had seen it so often that it was burned into his memory. It haunted him in his dreams and in his waking. It would not let him be.
He wondered for the first time what he was doing here. He had come looking for the camp in the way he had looked for such camps for years, a Knight-errant in search of injustice. He had done so without thinking about it because this was what he was given to do, all he knew to do to try to set things right. He would attack the camps and free those enslaved. He would kill the once-men and their demon masters. He would disrupt the breeding operations and destroy the slave pens. He would do whatever he could to right just a little of what had been turned so terribly wrong.
But his purpose in coming to this particular camp was unclear to him. He had been given a task already, one monumental importance. He was to find the gypsy morph and identify it, then serve as its protector as it led a small band of humans to a place where humanity would rebuild itself in the wake of an approaching cataclysm that would finish what the demons had begun. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with that task; Two Bears had made it clear that the future of humanity was riding on whether or not he was able to carry it out Such responsibility did not allow for deviations or personal indulgences. He could not afford to risk himself in an attack that was in essence, both. However terrible it was to do so, he must pass by this camp