Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [66]
“Maybe you had better organize a search party to go down into the lower levels of the compound and find them.”
He emphasized each word without raising his voice, then threw the hapless Arlen down beside the chained prisoner. “Maybe I should arrange for you to change places with him. Maybe I will if you don’t find those children.”
Arlen crawled a safe distance away on hands and knees, then came to his feet and staggered off without looking back. Findo Gask let him go. In truth, he didn’t really care about the children. There were always other children. What he cared about was discipline and obedience. What he cared about was respect born of fear. Let them think he was soft or indecisive, and they would rip him apart.
There was danger of that happening as it was.
Where, he wondered suddenly, was Delloreen?
* * *
IT TOOK ANGEL a long time to get out of the city. She was too sore and too tired to move quickly, so beaten up from her encounter with the demon that she could barely put one foot in front of the other. If she was to meet resistance from another demon now, or even from a band of once-men, she wasn’t sure she had the strength to stand up to them. So she kept to the alleyways and shadows, skirting anything that seemed like danger, conserving what strength remained to try to catch up to Helen and the children.
More than once, she looked back to see if that demon from the hotel was following. She had never encountered anything quite so ferocious. That the demon was female only made it seem more odious made it feel as if it were a perversion of herself as a Knight of the Word, a monster with no other purpose than to destroy. She hoped she had killed it, but she didn’t think she had. Worse, she knew that if it lived it would come after her, probably with once-men to support it this time, probably with that old man as company.
When it did, she wasn’t certain what she was going to do to save herself.
If not for the stairway collapse, it would have had her. She had been lucky this time. She couldn’t expect to be that lucky again.
Behind her, black clouds of smoke billowed from the Anaheim compound. The demons had broken through the gates and were inside. The last of the defenders were being slaughtered; she could hear their screams rising with the smoke. She felt curiously numb to what she was witnessing, perhaps because she had grieved already or because she had endured it so many times already. Why hadn’t they listened to her? What more could she have done? There were no answers, and asking the questions only served to point up the futility of her efforts as a Knight of the Word.
She stopped a moment and looked back at the shattered landscape. It didn’t help knowing what was going on now inside the compound. The lucky ones would be killed; the unlucky would be taken as slaves. If there were any children left, they would be taken for experimentation. She hoped they had all gotten out. She wished she could go back to make sure. She wanted nothing so much as to save one more tiny life.
The ache and weariness washed through her in a sudden rush and she began to cry silently. She didn’t cry much these days, but every now and then she couldn’t seem to help herself. She grieved for those in the compounds, men and women who had struggled so hard to survive. She grieved for everything the world had lost, for the common ordinary things everyone had taken for granted, for what had once seemed so dependable and lasting. She had not been alive then, but she knew something of what it had been like from the stories the old ones told.
A few had been born in those times and remembered a little of what it had been like. But they were mostly gone, and the memories of the old ones now were much darker.
She wondered if she would ever be able to have memories that were sweet and treasured and welcome when they surfaced. They would have to be memories she would make later, she knew. Such memories would have to come from the future.
After a last look back across the broken