Fire (16 page)

He limped a little as he walked toward Luke; if the wreck of the bus had harmed him in any other way, it didn’t show enough for Luke to see. The limp was slight enough, in fact, that it could have been from an old injury.

“Give it to me.”

“What do you mean? Give what to you?”

Without even thinking about it, Luke tried to clutch his briefcase, and realized that he didn’t have it any more. It was gone — left behind on the runway at La Guardia. Already he regretted losing it; there’d been important papers in that briefcase, some of them things that would be hard to replace. Things that he’d need Monday, when he testified for the Congressional committee.

What am I thinking? This man looks as though he’s going to kill me, and I’m worrying about a Congress that may not even exist any more. And if it does exist, it won’t be worrying about me on Monday.

But it did bother him. Not because of the hearings, or the trouble he’d have replacing the papers, or anything like that. It was more like . . . almost as though he was losing bits and pieces of himself. This far from home, it was almost like losing bits of his identity. First his bags, back when he was climbing the airport fence. Then losing control of his destination, when he got on the bus. And now this man wanted something more from him.

Luke knew what the man wanted. He wanted the one thing that Luke didn’t dare to let go of, the one thing he had that was more precious than the self that he thought he was losing.

The vial.

“You know what I want,” the man said. “I can see that all over your face. Give it to me now, and maybe I won’t hurt you.”

The man was close, now, close enough that Luke could smell him — bile, sweat, waste. The scent of something dead for a long time, and left exposed to the air. From here Luke could see tiny bugs — fleas, he thought — climbing around in the man’s beard and through his hair.

“No,” he said. “I won’t give it to you. You can’t have it.” He pressed his hand against his breast pocket, to protect the vial — and felt nothing. An empty pocket. Before he even realized what he was doing, he said, “I don’t even have it any more. If you want it, you’ll have to go find it.”

There was a crazy-wild look in the man’s eyes. He shook his head, smiled wide enough to show that he was missing teeth. “You’re lying to me.”

“No. Not lying. I don’t have it.”

The man cursed, slammed his hands against Luke’s shoulders, pounding the upper part of Luke’s back hard into the wall. The man was stronger than he looked, stronger than ought to have been possible. “Where is it?” the man asked. “I saw you — on the bus you put it into your pocket.” Hands, groping — patting Luke everywhere. “Where did you move it to? Where?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

Probing down into his groin, between his testicles — Luke tried to pull away, disgusted, and the man’s fist slammed into his bruised, soft-swollen gut. That brought the hurt back more powerful than it had ever been. His body went limp everywhere, legs collapsing underneath him. All his muscles putty. Even the ones deep inside him; gases swirled around inside his intestines, moving of their own accord. His bladder emptied itself into his shorts. For a moment something deep inside him almost thought it was funny: that would keep the man’s hands out of his privates. Then he caught another hint of the man’s smell, and it wasn’t funny at all any more. Filth wouldn’t stop this man.

Nothing would.

The man cursed again, bent over, and lifted Luke’s limp body up onto his shoulder; carried Luke out the door of the tenement, across the street, into the cemetery. As he walked the man’s arm and shoulder dug deeper and deeper into Luke’s abdomen, bringing him higher and brighter into an ecstasy of hurt. Luke kept expecting to pass out — how much pain could he feel, he wondered, before his mind slipped away into some dark corner of his self? — but he didn’t black out, not until they were in the cemetery, and the man with the white beard let him drop, back-first, onto the ground.

When his head cleared, a few moments later, he was lying in the grass, mostly naked, and the man was tearing through his clothing one piece at a time. He tried to sit up, to tell the man to get away from him, but that wasn’t any use. His body wasn’t listening to him any more. And if it had been, the bearded man would only have ignored him.

From where he lay he could see a handful of tombstones, a scraggly tree and a handful of tall shrubs, and, over the shrubs, over the shoulder of the bearded man, the highest floors of the row of tenements that the boy had led him to. A woman with a Bible in her hand stood on the fire escape of the tallest building, and Luke could hear her shouting out at the world:

“Prepare yourselves,” she said. Her voice was thunderously loud, it seemed to Luke — but at the same time it didn’t seem as though she were shouting. “Prepare yourselves! The end of all you’ve ever been is upon us, and the wrath of the Almighty awaits your sins!”

Not shouting at all — in fact, just the opposite. For all its thunder, her voice was gentle and soft and comforting.

“Listen, listen to the words in the Good Book: ‘And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of her fornication.’ — You look in your hearts, children, and you tell me the true name of Babylon in our time! You tell me!”

Automatically, Luke felt the muscles of his throat trying to answer, in spite of the fact that he had no answer for her. The only sound his throat made was a faint grunt, or maybe a cough — partly because there were no words on his lips, partly because he didn’t have the strength for speaking.

“That’s right, children, that’s right — Babylon is this city we all live in. And the end is at hand for all of us.”

The bearded man had Luke’s slacks off, now, and he was carefully ripping them to shreds, as though he expected to find some sort of a secret pocket hidden in among the seams.

“The time of prophets is coming, and it’s already foretold here that you and I will be found wanting! — ‘And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts to one another.’”

The woman charged on to some other idea altogether, but Luke’s mind snagged on that last one. Back when he’d been in grade school, in catechism class, they’d studied the Book of Revelation. It had never made any sense to Luke, not even when the nun explained it all, but he remembered the passage the woman was reading. And she was leaving something out — about those prophets. The people weren’t celebrating because the prophets were dead and left to rot away in the streets. It was more like . . . like they were having Christmas — or maybe it was celebrating Easter — because three days later the prophets were going to rise up, come back to life, and lead the people from their misery. Or something like that, anyway; it’d been a long time since catechism class, and Luke hadn’t gone to mass in the years since high school.

Luke pictured prophets, ancient Biblical wise men, rising up from the dead like trilobites in his lab. And he wondered: would they be as hard to kill as the trilobite was? The whole notion was pretty silly — silly enough that Luke started to laugh without even thinking about the consequences, and brought the hurt back on himself.

Be still. I’ve got to be still, and live through this, and maybe the crazy man will get tired of me and go away.

The bearded man finished with Luke’s slacks and let them drop to the ground. There wasn’t much left of those pants; Luke wondered what he was going to do for clothes if he managed to get himself free. Well, he was alive, at least — he still had that much. So long as he was alive, did it really matter whether or not he had clothes? It wasn’t as though he’d freeze to death without them. This time of year, even New York was plenty warm enough, even in the middle of the night.

The man stooped, snatched Luke’s suit coat up off the grass. Started rifling the coat’s pockets.

When he got to the breast pocket, the manic look in his eyes turned wildly gleeful.

“You dumbshit,” the man said. “You had it in that pocket all along — but broken. I can feel it in there now, broken glass and powder.” He smiled so wide, so hard, that for a moment Luke thought his face would split in two. Lifted his finger up out of the pocket, to his lips, tasted the ash —

And screamed.

“You idiot! What kind of fucking junk is that? It ain’t no kind of junk — tastes like the ash from somebody’s goddamn cigarette! What fucking good are you? Tell me that — what fucking use are you, carrying around an ashtray like it was a vial of junk?”

The man had thought that the trilobite’s ashes were some sort of a drug. That was funny — or it would have been if Luke weren’t scared half out of his mind. The bearded man looked murderously angry — and he was crazy enough, Luke thought, that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill. Not if that was what he wanted to do.

“What is this shit — tell me that, huh? Why you carrying it around like this? I bet you saw me coming. I bet you did. Filled a goddamn crack vial with the stuff in your ash tray, just to get me into this kind of trouble.” The bearded man stooped over Luke, his face not more than half a dozen inches from Luke’s own. “Tell me, God damn it — you planned this, didn’t you?”

Even if Luke had been able to speak, he wouldn’t have known what to say.

“Look at this shit,” the bearded man said. He held the jacket to Luke’s face, so close that even though Luke’s breathing was faint, he could feel himself inhaling trilobite ash through the open breast pocket. “You tell me what that is.”

He didn’t wait for an answer; instead he poured the ash and glass into Luke’s face, and smeared it into Luke’s skin and eyes with his rough-skinned hand. When he was done he brought his fist down hard into Luke’s nose; Luke felt his nose break, felt shards of thin glass slide into the flesh of his cheeks. “I’m going to kill you,” the bearded man said. His fist came down into Luke’s face again and again, until the pounding was only a strange jarring in the bone of Luke’s skull, and then, finally, no sensation at all.

After a long while, Luke felt the bearded man lift him up onto his shoulder, and carry him away. He didn’t see. He couldn’t have seen — his eyes had ruptured. A good while after that he felt the heat and the impact when the bearded man threw his broken body into the still-burning bus.

The fire there was much gentler, now. Low enough and cool enough that it took most of twenty minutes for the heat to cook Luke to death. That death would have been a long, slow horror for Luke, but by the time it came for him he was long beyond fear or pain.

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Chapter Thirteen

MOUNTAINVILLE, TENNESSEE

The sun was coming up in Tennessee.

All night, smoke from the blazing fire at the Mountain Institute had bathed the carcass of Tom the dog.

And much of that smoke had borne a peculiar and virulent strain of altered bacteria — the strain that Luke Munsen had developed under contract to a natural history museum in New York. That bacteria infested everything in the general vicinity of the institute, now, and in Tom’s remains they found something especially to their liking: they’d infected what was left of him, and set about doing exactly what they were designed and intended to do: recreating the original from the genetic evidence in the remains.

So Tom the dog woke from the dead at six in the morning, howling with the pain of being eaten alive.

It was the ants. It was the ants that were doing it. The same ants that had carried away his flesh the afternoon before — dissected and harvested him, bit by tiny bit — those same ants had woke promptly with the dawn, and continued their work directly.

Tom was alive again, now. Alive and being eaten alive.

Recreating Tom was, for the bacteria, simultaneously a more difficult task and a simpler one than the recreation of a trilobite had been. On the one hand, a dog is a creature infinitely more complex than a trilobite; on the other, there had been far more of Tom’s remains for the bacteria to work with — there had been a great deal less work for it to do. Even given that after daybreak the ants were destroying Tom’s flesh almost as quickly as the bacteria could rebuild it.

And the ants weren’t taking away anything that vital, anyway. Mostly they were attracted to the bloody-open wound on Tom’s left flank; the flesh they took was skin and muscle from his lower back and thigh. Nothing that a dog couldn’t live without.

Even a dog that was already dead.

The real, critical damage to Tom was in his spine and skull — delicate, intricate bits of bone and membrane and ichor that the truck had shattered quite thoroughly. There were broken bones elsewhere, too, but they’d knit together long before his brain was anywhere near functional.

By five forty-five Tom’s spine had been whole, The major portions of his skull had been recognizable not long after.

And now, at six his brain — which the truck’s bumper had pulped and scrambled and pressed up into his sinuses — was functioning again, and Tom the dog woke thinking of evil, violent, vicious cats, who killed him with trucks, then brought him back to life with a pound of skin and muscle missing from his left hindquarter.

Tom woke, and he stood up on the three legs he had that could hold him, and he screamed with pain and shock and in indignation at his own existence. And because it was his instinct to run or to fight when there was trouble, and because there was nothing visible to challenge, Tom ran. That was certainly for the best, since the act of running shook free all but a few of the ants that infested him. And his upper leg began to heal over quite quickly.