Free Carry the Flame by James Jaros Page B

sodomites and mud people, Muslims and Sikhs, Catholics and Jews, and Pagans and apostates of all kinds to rise in the ranks, to actually command white followers of the True Faith. And then the fallen, wicked and wounded, wondered why a nation so cursed and abominable, a world so reviled by the righteous, had been harrowed by the Lord’s sharpest plow.
    Hunt had been present on the morning six years ago when His Piety swept his robed arm toward the dirty brick and said, “Let it crumble! Let it rot like the temples of antiquity, the heathen horrors of Thebes, Jerusalem, and Rome. No rag of religion was too filthy for them.”
    Now, briefly rested, he lifted up and saw that the gate hadn’t opened. “Help,” he yelled, sinking back to the gas tank without finishing his plea. He spotted the head of a Pixie-bob in the fuselage staring up at him, its body sheared off in his mad flight from the pack. Hunt kicked the face weakly and almost dumped the bike when his legs began to buckle.
    He wheeled into a shadow before recognizing that it fell from the ninety foot cross that rose above the base, and could be seen and venerated for miles. The last of the oxy-fuel had been used to weld it entirely from broken, burned, and otherwise useless weapons—rifles, handguns, cannon barrels, bayonets, bazookas, and tank parts. Even the face of Christ had been commanded from helmets, the body from the twisted tread of a blown up Abrams tank. The tortured looking figure appeared eerily real and full of wrath.
    True Belief cannot be beat. Hunt repeated those words like a prayer, and they sustained him for another minute till a creak lured his eyes back to the gate. Five slaves, chained together, pressed their emaciated frames against the thick metal bars. Once, the gate had cooperated at the touch of a finger. Now it ran on the raw efforts of men too feeble-spirited for True Belief, who lived out the last weeks or months of their wastrel lives in servitude to the Alliance, each of their brows crudely and quickly tattooed upon arrival with an inky S—the black Curse of Cain for those whose white skin tried to hide their dark cause.
    He stood, straddling his Harley to push it past the infidels, his back burning and red as flame. He found the kick stand and staggered off the bike. One of many guards patrolling the walls caught him and held him while another rushed forward.
    They hurried him from the entrance, his body slipping from the weak foundation of his feet, fully weighting the arms of the men beside him. They passed the slave quarters, once a mesh run for the base’s canine corps. He asked if Damocles had returned—or thought he had; the guards didn’t answer, and he wasn’t sure he’d heard his own voice.
    He took air to try again when two more guards ran up with a stretcher and then scurried off with him. “My back!” he screamed from the sudden pressure of lying on the rock embedded inches above his buttocks. The guards rolled him on his side, giving him a view of two dozen slaves shackled to the spokes of a massive wheel whose hub was a turbine rescued from a dam. Their chests were chained to long steel girders that once held power lines for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and they trudged in circles in twelve hour shifts to draw water from a well. Teams of guards drove them with whips, truncheons, and the constant threat of machetes.
    Concentric stone paths had been built around the hub after generations of slaves wore shin-deep ditches in the dirt. The hard surface added only more misery to their high mortality. Nearly every day a slave succumbed to heat, exhaustion, or hunger, hanging from his chains like a rag, bare feet bleeding on the long reddened rocks until hauled away for a proper beheading.
    From what sounded like a great distance, an urgent voice said he might die and should be taken to the infirmary; but a commander insisted that His Piety wanted to see him in the Great