Fire (15 page)

Of all those who died in that fire, in fact, only Bill Wallace left enough of a corpse to gather up and bury. Three days after the fire, General Simpson, the base’s commander, had those remains gathered up for burial in a quietly obscure corner of the base.

And he gave Bill Wallace a hero’s funeral.

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Chapter Twelve

QUEENS BOROUGH, NEW YORK CITY

When Luke Munsen had finally resigned himself to the bus ride, he took a seat a few chairs up from the back door and made himself as comfortable as possible. That was a lot less comfortable than he’d have liked to have been; the woman in the seat behind him smelled powerfully of something that wasn’t exactly urine, or sweat, or feces, but made him think of all three. There was some other scent mixed into her melange, too, but try as he did Luke couldn’t place that smell. The mystery of it unsettled him most of all.

The bus’s driver took them to a freeway of some sort. Luke thought, at first, that he recognized it as the route that led from La Guardia to Kennedy airport, in the south part of Queens, but then they took a turn onto some other highway and for a too-long moment Luke was lost again.

He didn’t get his bearings back until he saw graveyard all around him, and when he did he heard himself grunt involuntarily with fear.

The Interboro Parkway. He’d come this way by accident once, back when he was still in school. It led from the Grand Central Parkway out through this graveyard — a cemetery so large that it seemed to stretch to the horizon — and came to an end abruptly on the border between East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant, a place so endless and so poor and so crowded that it made Luke feel cold and dead inside just to think about it. That day he’d come this way was years back, but the place had given Luke nightmares that still came to him sometimes. And that was in broad daylight, on a cold, clear winter day, in a year when there were jobs enough that no one was unemployed unless he wanted to be. It was a time when you could get lost in a place like Bed-Stuy and come out of it alive, and even unmolested. Especially if you moved quickly and kept your business to yourself.

But today. . . ? Luke shuddered. When times were hard Bed-Stuy was nowhere you wanted to be. Not by accident, not without a Sherman tank. If the rest of New York was hiding its head in the sand, Bed-Stuy would be out on the streets, tearing its already-ruined self to dust.

The highway was just as he remembered it, but worse. It wound its way from Queens to the worst part of Brooklyn through the graveyard in great, looping curves, gentle turns, but not so gentle as to allow anyone to drive safely at great speed. The bus’s driver didn’t have much concern for safety; he kept the gas pedal jammed down onto the floor. More than once Luke thought that the traction of their tires would betray them, that they’d all go skidding-sliding off into the cemetery. That might almost have been a good thing. The graveyard was quiet and eerie, almost beautiful in its way. The trees were dense and thick and full, the grass that covered the open ground was a deep, rich green. The stones themselves were old and ornate, elaborate and ancient looking. If he hadn’t known that the driver was taking them down into hell, Luke might even have enjoyed the ride; the place reminded him of the make-believe haunted houses he’d seen in amusement parks.

As they drew closer to the highway’s end, Luke began to see people off in the distance, turning over gravestones, setting fires. One man trying to destroy a mausoleum with a heavy iron pipe.

I’ve got to hide. To pretend I’m not here. The way I’m dressed, if any of those people see me they’ll kill me. Every liberal bone in Luke’s body wanted to believe that wasn’t so. He wouldn’t have raised a hand against a man because of the color of his skin — he wouldn’t — but he was certain that the people in Bedford-Stuyvesant would kill him because of his. And if they didn’t kill him because of his skin, they’d kill him because of the too-nice clothes he wore. He blushed at himself when he realized what he was thinking; there was definitely something bigoted about the whole chain of ideas. The people in Bed-Stuy were poor, hungry-hungry poor, and all but a few of them were black. But was he wrong? Would they kill him? God, he hoped that he was. He didn’t want to die, even though he’d begun to see his fate written on the highway. Twice while he’d been in school he’d had to transfer from the Brighton-line shuttle to the A train, and that’d meant getting out of the subway and walking half a block along Fulton where it was at its worst. He’d seen the way the young men watched him, stared at him like he was a side of beef all ready to butcher and roast. And those had been good times. Even when the world was kind to them, the people in Bed-Stuy were poor and hungry enough to look at the rest of the world like they were cattle. And just now times were as far from being good as they’d been in Luke Munsen’s life.

A few seats up and across the aisle there was a ragged man with a grizzly white beard who glared at Luke hungrily. Luke tried to ignore him, but it wasn’t much use. Even when he couldn’t see him, he knew the man was there.

A woman screamed somewhere far away, out among the headstones. Luke looked hard out his window, trying to spot her, but she was nowhere to be seen.

He was sweating.

His arm brushed against the glass vial in his breast pocket, and he took it out to check on the remains of the trilobite. It was still dead — still nothing more than the powdery grey ash it’d been since last night. In spite of his fear. In spite of the dream he’d had last night. Something in his heart was certain that the ash would resurrect itself any moment now — but that was obviously wrong. If the bug was going to resurrect itself, it would have at least started to change by now. The thing had to be dead — permanently dead.

He thought of the dream again. There was something prophetic in that dream, something certain — too certain to deny, even for a man who’d never taken such things seriously. He pictured the strongest part of the vision again: the image of the trilobite setting the whole world afire. If that was really so, if that really was something that was going to happen, then Luke was somehow going to be responsible for the destruction of the entire world. Maybe I deserve to die, he thought. The idea made him sad, but not completely afraid. Resigned. If he was the cause of some kind of a holocaust, his heart told him, then he did deserve to die.

The man with the grizzly white beard stared at Luke even more intently now. The vial, Luke thought, seemed to fascinate him. Luke had a sudden and senseless fear that the man would somehow scry out the vial’s contents; he tucked it back into his breast pocket quickly, before the man could get any better a look at the thing.

It’s over, he thought. This, right here, right now — it’s some kind of an ending. He didn’t understand the thought; if anyone had been inside his head to ask, he wouldn’t have been able to tell where the idea had come from. Still, he didn’t doubt it. He knew. The realization was that sudden, that sure — so real that he didn’t even think to question it.

The bus rounded a final bend in the graveyard highway, and the road opened up into a fork. South and to the left was Penn Avenue, which led down into East New York. Fulton Street, the right-hand fork, ran eastward into the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant. It didn’t matter, Luke thought, which way the bus turned; either direction would lead them deeper down into hell.

But the driver didn’t turn either way; he didn’t even stop at the traffic light where the highway bled out into the fork. Instead, he kept the gas pedal pressed to the floor, and drove the bus straight into the tall brick tenement straight ahead of them, killing himself instantly, and smashing the bus into a strange tube of broken glass and twisted metal.

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Luke woke twenty minutes later. There was a hand on his shoulder, and a voice in his ear, and his insides hurt — hurt bad as though someone had beaten him with a tire iron.

It was a boy’s voice — twelve years old? Ten? Thirteen? Somewhere around there. “Mister, you got to wake up. You’re alive — I know you are, you’re talking in your sleep — and you got to wake up because it isn’t safe for you to be here. There’s people around here who’d skin you alive just to have a white man’s hide hanging on their wall.”

Luke tried to open his eyes, but it was a hard thing; the light made the pain in his gut more real, and opened up new pains in his head and neck.

“Come on, Mister. You can get up. I know you can.”

Luke forced his eyes open, forced them to stay open this time. “I’m here,” he said. “I’m okay.” He was a long way from being okay, and he knew it.

“Okay, now, okay — can you sit up? If you can sit up I think you’re going to be just fine. You ain’t got nothing bloodied open, nothing twisted out of shape so as I can see it. If you can sit up, then it means that all your insides still hang together right. Go ahead, Mister — that’s it, now. Try and sit up.”

It hurt to move — hurt so bad that hurting wasn’t the word for it. Luke Munsen didn’t have a word for pain like that; he’d never lived that kind of pain before. Please, God — let me die now, before I have to hurt any more. Please.

There were other people from the bus lying on the ground, but none of them looked anywhere near as shaken as Luke felt. Behind him, the remains of the bus were afire, burning so hot that Luke could feel the warmth of the flame on his face even from here. Some of that warmth, he knew, came from the sunburn he’d got last night, when there should have been no way to get a sunburn. There were more people than this on that bus. Are they all out of there already. . . ? Or are they still inside, burning to death? He tried to get up off the ground, to get into the bus, to help get those people out of there. He tried but he could barely stand, much less get up and run.

“That’s it, Mister. We’re going to get you to a doctor now. My Daddy’s got a car. He’ll get you to a doctor, that’s for sure. The big hospital toward downtown is still open today — I heard that from the men down at the fire department. Every other big building in the city closed up for the duration, and that hospital’s still taking people in. Must be some brave kind of doctors in there, I’ll tell you. If you can just get yourself as far as our building, my Daddy’ll help you from there. Don’t you worry, everything’s going to work out just fine.”

Luke tried to speak, but when he did the only sound that came out was a grunting noise, and the force of his breath hurt him so bad that he lost his balance, had to rest his hand on the boy’s shoulder to find it again. When he tried to speak again, he held his voice to a whisper: “There were people on that bus — we have to do something. Help them. Save them.”

The boy looked confused for a moment, as though the whole idea were strange and unreal to him. “Mister — look at that bus. Look at that fire. It’s hot, hot hot. If there’s anybody still inside there, he’s already too dead for you or me to do him any good.”

Luke’s heart refused that at first; he heard himself stutter at the boy wordlessly in a low voice. He took a step toward the fire, another step, felt the heat of the fire move toward him in a shifted breeze, so hot that it dried his hair almost to the point of singeing.

The boy’s hand, tugging at his sleeve.

“Mister, really, if anybody’s still in there, there ain’t anything either one of us can do for him.”

Another gust of heat, and Luke felt himself dizzy — felt his knees buckle out from underneath him. The boy caught him before he could finish falling, and his thin, wiry arms pressed in the parts of Luke that were broken, and that brought the hurt back into him, and in the pain and in the daze there wasn’t room for anything or anyone else. Not even room for Luke himself; when the boy led him away from the bus, he followed mindlessly, his mind blank and empty as the cloudless sky above him.

The walk was a short one — only half a block northwest along the street that bordered the cemetery — but for Luke it was an endless journey, each second split by agony into a thousand tiny, powerful shards. Each fragment of time so full of sensation that the sense of it was the sense of an hour.

There were young men (older men, too, but not so many of them) everywhere on the street, looting those stores whose windows weren’t shuttered with metal. Not even the protected shops were completely safe; on the corner there were six men, busy with crow bars, peeling away the store’s steel shutter one strip at a time.

Then, finally, the boy stopped, and led him to the doorway of a tenement building whose first storey was an abandoned bodega. Led him into the building’s entryway, where for a terrified moment Luke thought that the boy was going to lead him up the stairs.

Then he turned and let go of Luke’s hand.

“You wait here, Mister. Me and my Daddy’ll be down to take you to the hospital in just a minute.” The boy left, up the stairs, without even waiting for Luke to answer.

It’ll be over, soon. The boy and his father will come down, and they’ll take me to the hospital, and they give me something for pain. And fix me. I’ll wake up in a few days, and all of this stuff will be gone away.

Luke leaned against the wall, breathed lightly, and made himself as still as he could. When he was still, he could make the pain . . . not go away, not exactly. But he could feel it like it was somewhere else, almost like it was somebody else’s pain that he was borrowing for a moment. Almost all the pain was in his gut — not just his gut; his whole abdomen, from low pelvis to sternum. There was pain in his head, too, some sort of a swollen knot. It didn’t hurt anywhere near as bad as the trouble lower down, but that had to be where the dizziness came from.

The sound of the door opening. The boy. . . ? No, he’d gone in the other direction. Up the stairway. Luke opened his eyes, turned . . . and saw the filthy, greasy, glowering old man, the one with the grizzly white beard who’d stared at Luke on the bus. The man who’d seen the ash vial.

“You have something,” the man said. His words were so indistinct that they almost seemed to have melted together; there was a spray of spittle from his lips as he spoke. “You have something, and I want it.”