Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [1]
“Will you help us get to the ferry for Brindisi? In Italy we’ll be safe.”
“You’ll never be safe.”
Alli is undeterred. “Please. We have nowhere else to turn.”
Another cough explodes from behind Liridona’s mother. All at once, the door is almost wrenched off its hinges and Liridona’s mother is shoved out of the way to make room for a huge, hulking man dressed in a sleeveless undershirt and pajama pants. His darkly bristled cheeks and close-set eyes give him the appearance of a wild boar.
He spits heavily, then, stepping out into the street, he peers beyond them, looking both ways. “Foolish girl!” His hand lashes out, striking Liridona across the face. “Go back to where you belong. You’ll get us all killed!”
As Liridona cowers, Alli shoulders past her. “This is your daughter.”
The boar-man glares at her.
Liridona flinches, then bursts into tears. “I tried to tell you,” she sobs.
Alli says, “She’s your child, your flesh and blood.”
He takes one more look around. “Christ!”
He hurriedly steps back into the shadows of the doorway and slams the door in their faces.
Alli pounds on the door with her fist, but to no avail. She is about to try to find another way in when her gaze is drawn to the eastern end of the filthy street. The sun, rising, spills its light along the cobbles like liquid fire. Out of that dazzle emerge two men armed with handguns. The instant they realize they’ve been seen they sprint toward the two women.
Alli grabs Liridona by the back of her shirt, whirls her around, and pulls her along. Liridona stumbles after her as they run in the opposite direction. But they are already winded from their long run, and the two men gain on them at an alarmingly rapid clip.
Up ahead, Alli hears the chiming shouts of sounds like a demonstration. Changing direction, Alli heads them toward the boiling knot of students occupying a nearby plaza ringed with rugged hawthorns and lindens. Like the trees, banners rise ahead of them, calling for bread and clean water, decent sanitation, heat and light. Power! Power Now!
Young people are everywhere, piling into the plaza, fiercely determined expressions on their faces as they begin to chant in unison. The raw, seething power of youth shakes the lindens like a sudden storm, and it seems as if hope is rising as inexorably as the flowers of spring.
Grabbing Liridona by the hand, Alli plunges into the maelstrom of bodies. All around them, the air shudders with the angry shouts of the demonstrators. Fires are being lit, fueled by the garbage piled in the gutters. Acrid smoke swirls, mingling with a fog that seems to have risen from the sewer grates, overrunning the streets and the plaza like an army of vermin.
A great shout erupts as a group of about ten young men rock a car back and forth, harder and harder, until, with their combined strength, they upend it. The massed shout gains hurricane force. There the car sits like a turtle on its back. Someone opens the gas tank.
At almost the same moment, the morning trembles to the high-low wail of police sirens. Everything starts to happen in double-time. A length of rag is inserted in the car’s gas tank, its visible end lit; the mass of humanity seems to hold its breath.
The car explodes just as the militia appears, pouring out of fog-bound streets into the plaza. Harsh orders, magnified through a portable amplifier, are fired like flares over the heads of the protesters. Then guns are fired, and the melee commences.
Among it all, Alli and Liridona dodge and sidestep their antagonists, sweeping aside fluttering banners, leaping over the fallen, trying to keep themselves from being trampled by the mob, which flows first one way, then another. A clear line of sight is all but impossible, eyes tear from the smoke and debris.
It is then that the two men appear out of the blur of bodies and faces. They grab Liridona and, as Alli tries to attack them, one of them slams the side of her head. She staggers, loses her grip on her companion, and, slammed by rushing bodies,