Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [2]
Wading deeper into the growing madness, she fights her way after them. The car fire has spread, and one of the hawthorn trees becomes a column of flame, its widening plume of smoke a dark banner rippling ominously over all their heads. Alli coughs, her lungs burning. A young woman hits her in the face, a boy drives his elbow into her side in his panic to get away from the militia. The armed men wield metal truncheons, which rise and fall in concert like a thresher in a field of wheat. She gasps and continues on, reeling and in pain, but she will not allow Liridona out of her sight. But the fog, a metallic brown from gunpowder, garbage, and the grit of the streets, thrusts itself against her like a living thing. She is buffeted by the currents of running people. Screams find her as insistent as the tolling of bells from the cathedral, which seems to watch indifferently with its elongated El Greco face.
Alli loses sight of Liridona altogether, and her heart beats even faster in her chest as she plows her way through the mob, nearer now to the mass of truncheons lifting and falling, to the sprays of blood and bone, to the tilted bodies, to the cries of pain and terror.
Then she spots one of the men, his tall frame sinister as a bat, rising for a moment above the heads of the students. Her way lies directly in the path of the militia. There’s no time to circle around, so she plunges ahead until she is close to the line of truncheons, advancing en masse like a phalanx of Roman soldiers. On hands and knees, she makes herself inconspicuous, crawling through the melee, squirming through the legs of the militia until she eels her way through to the other side.
Regaining her feet, she looks around, sees the men pushing Liridona around a corner. They are no longer in the plaza. She is on the fringe of the mob, running as fast as she can toward the corner. Running with her heart in her mouth, running toward the sudden roar of gunshots that spurts at her like sleet from around the corner.
“No!” she cries. “No!”
Hurtling around the corner, she is jerked off her feet. She stares into monstrous eyes. One is blue, the other green. They regard her as if each has a separate intelligence, both cold as permafrost.
For a moment, she is paralyzed by those eyes, or, more accurately, the twin intelligence behind them. And she thinks, Not him, anyone but him. Then, from somewhere out of her sight, she hears Liridona weeping, and, like glass shattering against stone, the spell breaks. But the instant she tries to struggle free, the barrel of a gun is shoved into her mouth.
“Once again, quiet,” a voice like a constricting iron band says. “Before the end.”
The air shivers.
PART ONE
BLOOD SPORT
One Month Ago
You can’t have a pact with God and with the devil at the same time.
—The Skating Rink, ROBERTO BOLAÑO
ONE
Washington, D.C.
“SHE’S DEAD.”
These words, spoken by his daughter, jerk Jack McClure out of sleep.
Covered in sweat, he turns in the darkness of his bedroom. “Emma?”
The faintest cool breeze stirs the hair on his head.
“She passed by me a minute ago, Dad. Or is it an hour?”
Hard to tell, Jack thought, when you’re dead.
“Emma?”
But the ghostly voice was gone, and he felt the sudden lack of her. Again. A great abyss on whose edge he teetered like a drunk reeling out of a bar. He drew a breath, gave a great shudder, and lunged for his cell phone. Punched in the number of Walter Reed Medical Center and heard the familiar voice of the night nurse.
“Mr. McClure, how odd you should call at this moment. I was just about to dial your number.” She cleared her throat and when she began again her voice had taken on a formal, almost martial tenor. “At two fifty-three this morning, the former First Lady, Lyn Carson, expired.”
“She’s dead.” The echo of Emma’s voice caused