His fingers never pulled the trigger.
He caught a second’s glimpse of someone just beside him, whirled and saw the girl, Ellen Braisted, limping swiftly toward him with her barbed-wire amulet loose and catching at her feet. In her hands was an axe-handle club caught up from somewhere. She struck at Chandler’s head, with a face like an eagle’s, impersonal and determined. The blow caught him and dazed him, and from behind someone else struck him with something else. He went down.
He heard shouts and firing, but he was stunned. He felt himself dragged and dropped. He saw a cloudy, misty girl’s face hanging over him; it receded and returned. Then a frightful blistering pain in his hand startled him back into full consciousness.
It was the girl, Ellen, still there, leaning over him and, oddly, weeping. And the pain in his hand was the burning flame of a kitchen match. Ellen was doing it, his wrist in one hand, a burning match held to it with the other.
CHANDLER YELLED hoarsely, jerking his hand away.
She dropped the match and jumped up, stepping on the flame and watching him. She had a butcher knife that had been caught between her elbow and her body while she burned him. Now she put her hand on the knife, waiting. “Does it hurt?” she demanded tautly.
Chandler howled, with incredulity and rage: “God damn it, yes! What did you expect?”
“I expected it to hurt,” she agreed. She watched him for a moment more and then, for the first time since he had seen her, she smiled. It was a small smile, but a beginning.
A fusillade of shots from outside wiped it away at once.
“Sorry,” she said. “I had to do that. Please trust me.”
“Why did you have to burn my hand?”
“House rules,” she said. “Keeps the flame-spirits out, you know. They don’t like pain.” She took her hand off the knife warily. “It still hurts, doesn’t it?”
“It still does, yes,” nodded Chandler bitterly, and she lost interest in him and got up, looking about the room.
Three of the Orphalese were dead, or seemed to be from the casual poses in which they lay draped across a chair on the floor. Some of the others miglit have been freshly wounded, though it was hard to tell the casualties from the others in view of the Orphalese custom of self-inflicted pain. There was still firing going on outside and overhead, and a shooting-gallery smell of burnt powder in the air.
The girl, Ellen Braisted, limped back with the butcher knife held carelessly in one hand. She was followed by the teen-ager, who wore a smile of triumphand, Chandler noticed for the first time, a sort of tourniquet of barbed-wire on her left forearm, the flesh puffy red around it.
“Whopped ‘em,” she said with glee, and pointed a .22 rifle at Chandler.
Ellen Braisted said, “Oh, heMeggie, I mean, he’s all right.” She pointed at his burned palm. Meg approached him with competent care, the rifle resting on her good right forearm and aimed at him as she examined his bum.
She pursed her lips and looked at his face. “All right, Ellen, I guess he’s clean. But you want to bum ‘em deeper’n that. Never pays to go easy, just means we’ll have to do something else to ‘im tomorrow.”
“The hell you will,” thought Chandler, and all but said it; but reason stopped him. In Rome he would have to do Roman deeds. Besides, maybe their ideas worked. Besides, he had until tomorrow to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.
“Ellen, show him around,” ordered the teen-ager. “I got no time myself. Shoosh! Almost got us that time, Ellen.
Got to be more careful, ‘cause the whitehanded aren’t clean, you know.” She strutted away, the rifle at trail. She seemed to be enjoying herself very much.
The name of the girl in the barbed-wire anklet was Ellen Braisted. She came from Lehigh County, Pennsylva-nia, and Chandler’s first wonder was what she was doing nearly three thousand miles from home.
Nobody liked to travel much these days. One place was as bad as another, except that in the place where you were known you could perhaps count on friends and as a stranger you were probably fair game anywhere else.
Of course, there was one likely reason for travel.
Chandler’s own reason.
She didn’t like to talk about it, that was clear, but that was the reason. She had been possessed. When the teen-ager trapped her car the day before she had been the tool of another’s will. She had had a dozen submachine guns in the trunk and she had meant to deliver them to a party of hunters in a valley just south of McGuire’s Mountain.
Chandler said, with some effort, “I must have been”
“Ellen, I must have been,” she corrected.
“Ellen, I must have been possessed too, just now. When I grabbed the gun.”
“Of course. First time?”
He shook his head. For some reason the brand on his forehead began to throb.
“Well, then you know. Look out here, now.”
They were at the great pier windows that looked out over the valley. Down below was the river, an arc of the railroad tracks, the wooded mountainside he had scaled.
“Over there. Chandler.” She was pointing to the railroad bridge.
Wispy gray smoke drifted off southward toward the stream. The freight train Chandler had ridden on had been stopped, all that time, in the middle of the bridge. The explosion that blew out their windows had occurred when another train plowed into itevidently at high speed. It seemed that one of the trains had carried some sort of chemicals. The bridge was a twisted mess.
“A diversion, Chandler,” said Ellen Braisted. “They wanted us looking that way. Then they attacked from up the mountain.”
“Who?”
Ellen looked surprised. “The men that crashed the trains … if they are men. The ones who possessed me and youand the hunters. They don’t like these Orphalese, I think. Maybe they’re a little afraid of them. I think the Orphalese have a pretty good idea of how to fight them.”
Chandler felt a sudden flash of sensation along his nerves. For a moment he thought he had been possessed again, and then he knew it for what it was. It was hope.
“Ellen, I never thought of fighting them. I thought that was given up two years ago.”
“So maybe you agree with me? Maybe you think it’s worth while sticking with the Orphalese?”
Chandler allowed himself the contemplation of what hope meant. To find someone in this world who had a plan.’ Whatever the plan was. Even if it was a bad plan.
He didn’t think specifically of himself, or the brand on his forehead or the memory of the body of his wife. What he thought of was the prospect of thwartingnot even defeating, merely hampering or annoying was enough!the imps, the “flame creatures,” the pythons, devils, incubi or demons who had destroyed a world he had thought very fair.
“If they’ll have me,” he said, “I’ll stick with them, all right. Where do I go to join?”
It was not hard to join at all.
Meg chattily informed him that he was already practically a member. “Chandler, we got to watch everybody strange, you know. See why, don’t you? Might have a flame spirit in ‘em, no fault of theirs, but look how they could mess us up. But now we know you don’t, soWhat do you mean, how do we know? Cause you did have one when you busted loose in there.”
“I don’t get it,” said Chandler, lost. “You’re saying that you know I don’t have a, uh, flame spirit now because I did have one then?”
“Chandler, you’ll catch on,” said Meggie kindly, suppressing a smile. “Can’t have two at a time, you see? So if you’re the fella you are now, and the same fella you were before, you got to be honest-in-the-flesh yourself.”
Chandler nodded thoughtfully. “Anyway, Chandler,”
the girl added, “we’re going to take time off to eat now.
You just make yourself at home. Soon’s we start the synod up again we’ll see ‘bout letting you in.”
Ellen Braisted asked, “Can I help with the food?”
Meggie looked at her patiently and she corrected herself: “Meggie, can I help with the food?”
“Not this time, Ellen. Just stay out of the way a little.”
Ellen took Chandler’s arm and led him to a sunporch.
All over the house the Orphalese were putting themselves back together again after the fight.
They didn’t seem terribly upset, neither by their wounds nor their losses. They had. Chandler thought, a collective identity. The survival of the community was more important than any incidental damage to its members.
After three years of increasing alienation from a life he could not understand or accept, Chandler found that trait admirable. He liked their style… .