Jon Grimwood - redRobe

The huge clone’s arms had been held down and his wrists crudely nailed to the wooden back legs of the chair. His balls hung through the kicked-out chair bottom, tied round with string to make them protrude better.

Hooked through his ear lobes were a couple of thin wires that ran back to momaDef, who held in her manicured hands what looked like an old-fashioned music box with a handle on its side.

‘You are going to help me, aren’t you?’

When the naked man didn’t answer, momaDef cranked the handle five or six times between her first finger and thumb and Clone arched backwards in his chair, bloody wrists tugging against the nails as his leg muscles locked and the man tried to jerk upwards but couldn’t.

‘Stop…’

The lieutenant smiled when she saw Kate. And this time when she jerked the handle back into action, momaDef kept it turning until Clone juddered in his chair like a puppet.

‘Wait,’ Axl grabbed Kate and tightened his grip until Kate stopped struggling.

‘You can’t do anything,’ he told her fiercely, which was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. . . But that still didn’t mean Kate wanted to hear it.

Up on the cart Clone tumbled back into his seat and momaDef smiled breathlessly. She had a fine line of sweat beaded across her upper lip and damp patches under the arms of her otherwise immaculate T-shirt. Something told Axl it wasn’t from the effort of turning that handle.

‘Now, you are going to help me, aren’t you?’

Clone nodded frantically even before momaDef’s fingers wrapped themselves round the handle. But nodding wasn’t enough to stop her having one last spin. Round went the handle and a noise more animal than human hissed between Clone’s clenched teeth as muscles locked across his body and watery shit squirted onto the wooden boards beneath the chair.

That was when Clone noticed Kate standing there in the crowd. Face stricken, a thin trickle of blood down her chin from a bitten lip.

He blushed.

‘Enough,’ said Axl and stepped forward. Even though he knew that now wasn’t the time.

The lieutenant reached for the little handle and Axl repeated himself. Only this time he had the revolver in his hand, hammer thumbed back and muzzle pointing straight at her face. No, not nasty enough. With a shrug, Axl lowered the target to her stomach. Seventy-six hours was how long it took to die from a gut wound and where momaDef was concerned Axl reckoned that was too quick by half.

‘Look around you,’ the lieutenant said. Not that Axl needed to. His whole upper body was covered with a rash of tiny red laser dots, right down to two in his gun hand. One look at Kate told Axl the dots were all over his face too. Raghead measles was what PaxForce called his symptoms. And in most cases RhM proved fatal.

It was a straight stand-off, the kind that used to get labelled Mexican before everyone got prissy.

‘What good does this do?’ Axl demanded, jerking his head towards Clone. Even to Axl the words sounded too loud.

‘He’s going to tell me what I want to know,’ momaDef admitted, after leaving a gap long enough to tell Axl she’d debated not answering his question at all.

‘Look at him…’

The lieutenant did, reluctantly.

‘. . . what can that tell you?’

‘Where to find Father Sylvester.’ The lieutenant said it like he was stupid.

Behind him, Axl almost felt Kate freeze, her tension so obvious it was a wonder momaDef didn’t put her up there in the chair.

‘You see,’ said the lieutenant, ‘Father Sylvester is here and this man is going to take me to him, aren’t you?’

Nailed to his chair, Clone nodded, carefully not looking at Kate.

It looked like some picnic, thought Kate. The kind she and Joan used to take in the hills behind Castel Gandolfo when Joan was still alive. Lavender and rosemary suffusing the warm breeze as they rode across scrub-covered slopes and through ancient, thousand-year-old olive groves.

But that was then and this was frightening.

Hooves sank into cold mud or struck sparks from stones as the horses headed up track towards El Escondido. It was drizzling, but Kate had grown used to that. Surprisingly the lieutenant rode less well than Kate would have expected.

Kate didn’t ride at all. She walked behind with Axl glued to her side like someone had splattered them both with a goo gun, not that paxForce grunts carried anything that non-lethal.

Around the time the horses had finally arrived, the black woman with the thin, twisted dreadlocks gave a signal for her troops to find some target that wasn’t Axl. Kate didn’t know what the signal was, just that one minute Axl’s body and face were breeding red dots like lice, next moment all the dots were gone.

Kate was shocked at how relieved she felt.

Now she followed Clone, defMoma and the horses past rough juniper scrub and through the darkness of a rhododendron tunnel, under the twisting branches that closed out the sky over her head as if they were petrified worm-casts.

The high-falling foss splashed away to her right, water plummeting down the valley side to the pool below. And the slight wind blowing down the tunnel into her face hung heavy with the smell of damp earth. Any hound following after their party could track them by the stink of horses and the sour undercurrents of blood, shit and fear.

Kate shivered. For herself and for the huge naked man who stood in his saddle and rode straight-legged up ahead. They were tramping down the dead. Ground fine, unviralled and spread thin it might have been, but the earth beneath their hooves and feet had still once been flesh. But then, was that so different to back on Earth? Except there the dirt was carapaced over with concrete or marble and sterilised by history.

‘What?’ Axl asked.

What was she thinking? Kate almost said, ‘about anything but Clone’. Instead she shrugged. ‘That this is all meat. . .’ She nodded at the track and the leaf-encrusted mud glued to her boots, then jumped at the touch of his fingers on her wrist.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There’s nothing to understand,’ Kate said crossly. And there wasn’t. Life happened and then someone got left to clean up the mess. Someone like her. How difficult could comprehending that be?

Just before the track climbed the steepest part of the lower valley towards Escondido it branched off, the main track kept on up to the ramshackle monastery, a narrower path headed downwards again through undergrowth towards the mute roar of falling water.

‘Through there?’ momaDef demanded when Clone reined in his horse.

The big man nodded, jerking his heavy chin towards the narrower path.

‘You go first,’ momaDef told him. ‘Any problems I’ll shoot you, understand?’

What the tongueless Clone grunted might have been agreement but sounded more like an insult. And then he kicked his bleeding feet heavily into the flank of his horse and crashed away through the bushes, remembering just in time to duck as he went under a snaking branch.

‘Dumb fuck.’ momaDef was after him even before her fat sergeant had realised what was happening. It took the handful of conscripts a second to work out what the sergeant was shouting about and then they jogged after the fat woman, snubPups snagging on every branch despite being held tight to their chests like regulations demanded ...

Get lucky, thought Axl, kill each other. Which would at least save him the effort. Not that he was bothered by the grunts. But taking out defMoma, momaDef and Colonel Emilio was going to be a pleasure if the chance ever arose.

Tracking Clone was effortless. He’d signposted his passing in branches on both sides of the path which were snapped back to white bone and in leaf mould churned deep with hoof-marks.