Carry the Flame by James Jaros

shadow that still defied the sun.
    His mouth moistened, longing even the brute heat couldn’t burn to ash.
    He didn’t looked closely at the girl. Not once. His refusal marked his penance, eagerness to show the Lord strength and resolve, his true spirit soul. And he’d seen all he wanted of her clawed leg and foot, her horrible body.
    He kneeled behind the naked boy, talking of sin and absolution. Then he waited, holding his breath for a minute at a time—penance, penance— and prayed.
    When his resistance proved his faith yet again—when he had no doubt of his strength and consecrated these moments in the name of the Lord—he drew his knife and held the blade between his teeth. “You’ll know God, I promise,” he whispered. “In a minute.”
    Time corporal, time eternal.
    Time to taste the boy’s blood. He slipped his tongue past the steel blade, stirred the red pool, round as the sun at dusk, when it seared the horizon and raised monkey ruins of hell to the wicked imagination of man.
    The boy flattened, boring into earth.
    â€œNo,” Hunt whispered again, but vow had been replaced by threat: “Don’t move.”
    He licked an ear, licked it again, shifted his head to the side so the sharp tip could thread through the boy’s light hair, score the back of his skull. You feel that? Sure you do. You’ll feel more, just you see. “That’s my mouth,” he said without removing the blade. “Think about that.” But the boy said nothing, quaking beneath him.
    A red line swelled. Hunt tasted that, too.
    Still trembling, he slipped his knife from his mouth and sat on his heels—blood on his teeth, copper on his tongue. His head rose to the sun and he closed his eyes, every cell alive. In the crystal light he knew the most sanctioned moment of his life, for God and all that He inspired spoke to him, and the message was as clear as it was reassuring: He must cast aside kindness—and sacrifice even his own righteousness here on earth—to confirm the boy’s depravity, his deserving of punishments most severe. But what stunned him most—what made him suddenly hang his head in eternal gratitude—was the understanding that he’d been doing this all along. Every act he’d ever committed with sodomites and heathens and errant brothers of True Belief had been part of the Lord’s plan. He was a spy in the realm of sin, an infiltrator of flesh, and need not have begged the Lord’s forgiveness for actions that He ordained.
    That’s right, My son. All that has passed was pure. All that will come is promised.
    F rom high above, Burned Fingers spotted a man hunched over Jaya. He would have gunned him down if the lead shot would have spared the kid, but at this distance his sawed-off was no more sure than his pistol.
    And he wanted so much more than the man’s simple death. With a single glimpse, he wanted to savage him with his hands, his blade, gut him like a gamecock because the rapist’s back revealed what his imagination had spared him—the final limning of his young son’s horrific sexual assault and murder by soldiers in Baltimore. Till this moment, Burned Fingers’s memory had moved no further than the gruesome scene’s dishabille: Cody’s torn clothes and naked, rumpled form lying near his slain, partially dismembered mother in a burned-out basement. But now the tense, predatory hunch of the man down below fleshed out the earlier, archetypal violence—and sparked a hell storm in Burned Fingers.
    He screamed “No,” which echoed off the rock walls, and ran toward an old wagon road that ended in the ravine.
    The rapist jumped to his feet and spun around, as if the fury were charging him from everywhere at once. Then he bolted to the motorcycle, bigger than Burned Fingers had thought looking through his field glasses. Large as an old Harley. The blond, darkly tanned man