Fire (19 page)

Which was why Graham Perkins died one of the most horrible deaths imaginable, dangling from a spike at the edge of the highway for three hours, struggling, eyes wide open. Screaming a scream that came from his throat as a faint hiss that no one could have heard four yards away.

After three hours, the exertion and the lack of air finally stole his mind away from him. The last half hour of his life, at least, was filled with gentle black oblivion.

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Chapter Fifteen

MOUNTAINVILLE, TENNESSEE

Late that afternoon — about the time that the nation’s Vice President was finally strangling to death at the edge of a highway — something collapsed in the deep basements of the ruin that had been the Mountain Institute. And when that basement gave way, the rubble that crushed the bodies of Ron Hawkins and the Beast sifted down into the void.

And left the corpses unburdened.

And the peculiar infection in their dead flesh set to finishing the task it had already begun: recreating life from the dead.

By midnight the work was half finished. And on Sunday morning Ron Hawkins woke from the dead in a dark hollow deep inside the ruin. And yawned and stretched as though he’d never died.

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BROOKLYN

Recreating Luke Munsen was a task at once simpler and more complex than the rebuilding of the dog, the creature, or Ron Hawkins. After the fire inside the bus had finally died away, his body had been set out on the grass inside the cemetery, and it had been left undisturbed. The infection had been deep inside him, even before he’d died, and because of that there were parts of Luke that had been rebuilt almost as quickly as they’d been destroyed.

The problem with remaking Luke was that he hadn’t just died — he’d died and then his flesh had cooked long and slow inside the smoldering bus.

Most of him the microbes could rebuild from the DNA blueprint inside all his cells. If that were necessary. What it couldn’t do, what it couldn’t find anywhere in the blueprint or in Luke’s corrupted flesh, was the chemical memory that had been Luke Munsen. His character. The mind that the fire had cooked away from his brain. Some of it was still there, of course; the fire didn’t roast him thoroughly enough to destroy it all. Long stretches of memory and desire remained inside him, still intact. And the deepest, most important facts about Luke — the ones so essential to his nature that they permeated every iota of his being — those were indestructible.

Indestructible or not, the Luke inside Luke Munsen was violated by the fire, and violated more horribly than the weathered junkie who killed him could ever have violated his physical self.

And because his deepest self had been so violated by death, Luke Munsen was alive and whole physically long before he was able to wake from the dead. What he did instead of waking was dream — dream long and hard through the memories that still remained to him as his unconscious struggled desperately to reconstruct some semblance of itself.

And the thing he dreamed most clearly of all was the day of his grandmother’s funeral.

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He was sixteen that year. He remembered the day clearly, and in detail, in spite of the destruction of his mind, in spite of the fact that it was a day he’d rather have left behind him forever. His mother had cried and cried that day, but she’d cried most of all when there were people around to see her grief. And those times when she thought that there was no one to see her, her eyes had been dry and predatory.

Luke Munsen had loved his grandma, and the idea that she wasn’t anything but food for the worms had made him deep and quietly sad. And seeing his mother turn Grandma’s funeral into an opportunity for theater had made him ashamed for his mother and for himself.

Then the funeral service was over, and everyone was in black limousines, twenty of them, and they were riding across three counties to the cemetery where his grandpa was buried, and the now-open grave beside it, meant for her.

The ride took forever and a year, and all the way what Luke wanted was to be alone, to be alone and cry where he wouldn’t have to be theater. He couldn’t be alone because the only way out was to demand that the driver stop the car and let him off, and that would have been a scene worse than anything his mother could do, and he knew it. He never minded making scenes, not at that age, not if he had a mind to make them and thought he was right, but he loved his grandmother and he respected her, and he wasn’t about to shame her, not even if she was already dead.

So he sat there as the limousine rolled across three counties, ashamed and grieving to himself, listening as his mother talked about his Grandma’s will in a hungry tone she couldn’t quite disguise. Luke’s mother went on about all the time and care she’d lavished on Grandma these last few years, and he thought how maybe that was true, but even then, young as he was, he thought it was repugnant to want money because you’d given someone your time and love.

Then they were pulling through the gates of Grandma’s cemetery, and he thought at first that it was an incredible relief because at least he could get far enough away from his mother that he wouldn’t have to listen to her or see that look in her eye any more.

It wasn’t better. It was worse, much worse. The limousine drove slowly for five minutes through what looked like bare fields of sickly, short-mown grass — no graves, no shrubs, almost no trees, just sun-scorched green-brown grass — and then it pulled to a stop beside three old trees that looked almost grotesque against the dead meadow.

The Hearse was parked in front of them. Fifty yards away there was a red and yellow tent pavilion planted in the field. Beside it was a folding mechanism made of canvas straps and aluminum poles, just the right size for Grandma’s coffin.

Where are the graves? he thought as he got out the door of the limousine, faster than was polite but not fast enough to be rude. And then he saw them.

They were flat, all of them, all of the headstones were flat and set into the ground so that a lawn mower could pass over them with out damaging its blade. No careful trimming, just mechanized eternal care.

It was cheesy cheap and petty in the worst possible way.

The priest who’d given the funeral service saw him standing there, looking lost and sick and appalled, and he must have thought Luke was confused because he stopped to speak to him.

“Her grave is over there,” the priest said, pointing to the pavilion. His voice was gentle and quiet, with the smallest hint of an Irish brogue. Luke wanted to talk to him, because he needed to talk to someone, especially someone with a voice that gentle and that sane. He didn’t dare. Not that day. He knew if he did he’d make so much noise, make such a scene that he’d be a disgrace. It was Grandma who was dead; it wasn’t a time for Luke to be demanding attention. Not then.

So he nodded, and he thanked the priest, and he crossed the narrow gravel road and walked toward the pavilion.

And that walk was the worst horror, right then — worse, even, than twenty minutes later when they finally lowered Grandma into the ground. The graves were so close together that Luke could picture the dead holding hands without stretching as they rested, and the soil was set so badly above each grave that as he walked his feet could feel the outline of each coffin in the earth. And he knew that if he could ever bring himself to visit what was left of Grandma in this place, his heels would feel her coffin, too.

He didn’t watch as they lowered Grandma into the ground. He tried to relax and let his eyes focus on the grass. He was numb enough by then that he could have watched if he’d decided to make himself, but he didn’t want anything more to remember from that funeral than he had to have. He heard the sound of the rope and pulley as it lowered her, and he heard the sound of dirt and other things spattering on the sleek black-painted wood of her casket.

As soon as he heard people moving away from the grave Luke turned and started to leave himself. Before he got three steps he felt his mother’s hand on his forearm, stopping him, taking his attention. Luke looked up from the uneven ground and back at his mother, over his shoulder.

“You should know,” Mom said. She pointed off to her left, at half a dozen unused graves with smooth, uncarved granite markers. Luke turned to look at them more closely. “Your grandmother bought those for the rest of the family, back when papa died. If you ever need them, they’re in the family.”

And Luke couldn’t help himself any more; he didn’t scream and he didn’t shout, but he yanked his arm away from her and ran from there for all that he was worth. He didn’t even run to the limousine — he went for the nearest open gate and left the cemetery on foot. Late in the afternoon he took a bus back to town, and when he got home he went to his room without saying a word. And no one said a word to him about it, not a single word.

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SUNDAY

July Seventeenth

From page 6 of the special

July 17 edition of the

National Interlocutor.

MIRACLE MEAT!

Shoppers in Mountainville, Tennessee, may think twice before going to the grocery store anytime soon — after all the pork in the local supermarket’s meat freezer sprouted strange, gooey hair and grew into pigs!

It sounds incredible, but that’s exactly what happened, according to store-manager Amy Casil. “All the pork in the case swelled up,” says Casil, “burst through the wrappings, and kept growing. We weren’t sure what was happening, but it looked like it might be dangerous. We evacuated the store right away, and then we called the sheriff’s department.”

Local deputies were busy elsewhere in Mountainville. They didn’t get to the store until late in the evening. What they saw when they got to the Mountainville Market left them skeptical.

“I don’t know anything about pork growing in the meat case,” says Mountainville Deputy Sheriff Louis Aronica. “When I got to the store there were half a dozen pigs rooting around in the vegetable bins. I don’t know how they got there.”

The pigs were later rounded up by the Mountainville Humane Society and taken to a local farm for safekeeping.

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Chapter Sixteen

BROOKLYN

So Luke Munsen woke from the dead lying on the ground in a New York City graveyard that seemed to stretch to the horizon, still remembering the dream of his grandmother’s burial, but without any context in which to place that memory or the dozen others that he still had. And he woke knowing for certain only these three things about himself:

His name, and the name of the town where he’d been born.

The fact that he’d died long and slow and horrible, but so full of resignation that dying hadn’t frightened him.

But the thing he knew most clearly of all when he woke from the dead was that he’d been responsible for the end of the world.

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MOUNTAINVILLE, TENNESSEE

Ron Hawkins woke in the deep, uncertain dark, whole and alive and complete as he’d ever been. Woke as though waking from a long, deep sleep — and in the dark and in the fog of waking Ron had five long, confused minutes where he had no clue as to his whereabouts and no memory of the circumstances that had led to his death.

When he finally did begin to remember, his first assumption was that he hadn’t died at all — that he’d been rescued somehow after the explosion, and that it was night and he was in some strange kind of a hospital. And he tried to settle himself down, to wait for a nurse or some such person to tell him where and why he was.

He didn’t settle down for long. Only long enough, in fact, to realize that he couldn’t be in a hospital, because he wasn’t in a bed — not in anything even remotely like a bed. It was broken rock underneath his back — broken rock and damp concrete. It meant that he was still somehow in the wreckage of the institute, that he’d somehow survived the explosion.

The whole idea was bizarre. Someone must have investigated after the explosion, Ron thought, and when they did they should have found him. If that was so — and reasonably it had to be — then what was he doing here?

Well, whatever the reason is that I’m still here, I can’t just stay here. I’ve got to get out.

That turned out to be more difficult than it sounded; when Ron tried to sit up his head hit rough, jagged rock. There was barely even room to move, much less sit. Where in the hell am I? How did I end up in a place like this, and still live through it? He reached back and up with his left arm, to see if there was room to move in that direction, but there wasn’t — six inches from his head was solid rock.

Groped right and left; there was barely room to spread his fingers on either side.

Ron began to panic. He’d never been especially claustrophobic, but . . . Jesus. No — he wasn’t feeling claustrophobic; a phobia is an irrational fear. Unreasonable. There was nothing unreasonable about being afraid — not here, not now.

I’ve been buried alive.

How deep was he? If there wasn’t too much on top of him, he could probably push it aside, crawl up out of it. That was dangerous — it could just as likely collapse on him and crush him. Maybe it would come to that; maybe he’d have to try digging his way free. It had to be a last resort. There was still the direction in which his feet were pointed; he couldn’t feel anything there. It wasn’t a direction in which instinct would let him comfortably or easily move, but he didn’t have a whole lot of choice.

It made him feel pretty stupid, too, squirming feet first along what amounted to a narrow shaft. At least there was room to move in that direction. Or there seemed to be, anyway. There was one bad moment when his right foot came up against something solid and unmovable, but then when he shifted to the left a little he found himself able to keep going. A moment or two after that Ron realized that his ankles were hanging free over some sort of a ledge; another moment, two, and he was pushing his chest out past the narrow space at the end of the shaft, moving out into a larger space. Much larger. Maybe it was a chamber of some sort; it was hard to be sure in the darkness.