“We’ll help,” Dean said suddenly, moving in front of Rankine to help Bodie lift one of the poles.
Dean was the only one of the companions to offer, and in fact the only one who could now, as the sec men had the poles under their control. Ryan noted with interest the look of alarm that crossed Harvey’s face as he looked at Jenna, and the flash of anger that crossed hers. Alien, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to this exchange.
“Thank you, son,” was all the baron said. In the face of this, Harvey had little option other than to let Dean continue, although it seemed to make him considerably jumpy.
The sec men, with Dean, made off the way they had come, the crowd parting to let them pass.
They took the first junction and headed off for some time. The atmosphere grew hotter, and Dean felt the sweat bead on him, his clothes begin to cling.
“What’s that?” he gasped, the hot air searing his lungs.
“Furnace,” Bodie replied in a short breath, the fat sec man also feeling the heat.
They arrived at the furnace room, a system of old boilers looted from the remains of aboveground and linked together to form a system of lighting and hot water. By the careful use of a piping system, it was feasible to run the boilers at a high temperature and yet use very little fuel. They used the trees from the forest above as wood, and it seemed that the wood fibers were densely packed in the mutie stumps…
Dean was aware that Harvey’s lecture was intended to distract him from the task of taking the chilled children from the poles and placing them in the fires. This was done via a metal palette that led into an oven probably taken from a predark crematorium.
Dean would have looked on the sec man’s lecture as an attempt to distract him from the horror in front of him if not for the fact that the sec chief had to surely have been aware after the raid that Dean had seen such things before. The youngster thus reasoned that it was a distraction for something he wasn’t supposed to see. But what?
Dean had his suspicions and feigned interest while the sec men took the corpses from the poles. It wasn’t an easy or pleasant task, as the poles were impaled through the entirety of each body, and it took a considerable effort to pull the poles from the corpses. Several times, the sec men stopped to vomit, and at those moments Dean was glad for Harvey’s distraction, even if that wasn’t his original intention.
When the corpses were all removed, the six of them were laid on the palette, and Dean took the opportunity to help Jake and Bodie push the palette into the fires.
For the first time, laid out as they were on the metal surface, Dean was able to get a good look at the bodies. All of the children had blond hair and blue eyes.
It struck a chord, something he had learned at the Brody school. Something his father and Mildred had talked about from predark days.
It was that something that had made him want to accompany the sec men here, to confirm what had been bugging him the whole way back, when the corpses had been too dark, too distorted, too contorted to view properly.
Blond hair. Blue eyes.
The image of the corpses disappearing and charring in fire was somehow horribly familiar.
Chapter Nine
“So you have been inside the place of legend,” the gruff and amiable baron said with a twinkle. “Never held with the way all those old stories were turned to myths. Old tech is what led us to skydark. Why be so crazy about something that got us into shit like this?”
Ryan indicated a certain degree of agreement. “Thing is, Baron its not what happened then…it’s what we can do with it now if we can get our hands on it. If a baron like yourself had access to it.”
The one-eyed man left the phrase hanging in the air as he took a bite from the cooked bird’s leg that he held. They were now all seated at the long table, Alien and Jenna holding court while Harvey and Downey sat with them. On the other side of the table were lined the companions, Dean having returned with the sec men from the furnaces and so far holding his tongue on what he had seen.