Fire (35 page)

The camera had caught Bill too; and all he’d done was try to lift a couple of sixes of beer. And try to take a baseball bat out of the hands of a man who was crazy enough to use it. Which wasn’t to say that he wouldn’t have done a lot worse if he’d had the opportunity. If it’d been Ron there, or Joey, Bill would have been all over the clerk’s ass. How could he not have? It was the right thing to do. Down in his gut he still couldn’t understand how or why it was that Ron and Joey had had to go to jail for doing something that was right. Sure: Bill’s lawyer had explained it to him, back when he was still in the hospital — explained how when you’re doing something against the law and somebody gets hurt, it’s all your fault. Like you’d gone in meaning to kill somebody, almost, even if you hadn’t. Bill didn’t get it. All he knew was that the way things turned out, Ron Hawkins and Joey Harris had gone to jail, and Bill had come out of it with a clean enough record to get him into the Air Force. For all he knew, they were still in there too; in all the years since then he hadn’t had the heart to check up on either of them. Which was, maybe, the thing that made him feel most guilty of all.

He tried not to think about the look on Ron Hawkins’s face, the last time he’d seen him. Which was in court, when they’d hauled Bill in to testify at Ron’s trial. Right at the end of that trial that’d only lasted, what, three hours? Maybe not even that long. Maybe a little longer, but not by much, for sure. The judge had hit his wood hammer on his high desk up there in the front center of the courtroom, and he’d said that Ron was guilty with this belligerent and meanhearted look on his face. Guilty of armed robbery, and of assault with intent to kill. Which made even the prosecutor look a little surprised, and kind of pleased. And then that judge had said that Ron was going away for fifteen years to life.

And Ron had looked — well, Bill had seen a look almost exactly like that once before. When he was twelve, and him and his mom took the dog to the vet, and the vet put this rubber glove on his hand, and put a little KY jelly on it. And proceeded to explore the dog’s bohunkus with his fat-long middle finger. Bill had expected the dog to try to squirm or get away or something, but Bill and his mom had their hands on the dog’s shoulders, and the thing had known it didn’t dare try to go anywhere. It got this look on its face: wide-eyed, and violated, and offended, and . . . betrayed. Bill thought that the other part of the look on the dog’s face was betrayal, but even to this day he wasn’t certain.

Anyway, that was the look on Ron Hawkins’s face, the last time Bill had seen him: violation and offense. Betrayal. The understanding and certainty that he was thoroughly and utterly doomed to slide down into the deepest hell there is on earth. His eyes had bugged out, just like the dog’s, and his mouth had fallen slack and open. And he’d turned to look at the public defender who’d done him so little good. . . .

Bill didn’t want to think about that look any more. Not that he had any choice; at that moment in his existence there was nothing else for him but the memory of Ron Hawkins falling down toward hell.

So he just relaxed and learned to live with it for that last hour before the plane finally found its way down in between the shoulders of the mountains there at the edge of the Korean DMZ. And after he’d lived with it for a bit, Bill Wallace decided that maybe there were a few things that haunted him. Sometimes, anyway. When the world got too quiet.

Well, he thought: the answer was to keep the world from getting quiet.

Right. He was being sent off to be a junior assistant guinea pig, and he was under orders to keep his mouth literally, totally, and completely shut. And somehow he was supposed to keep things from getting too quiet. Fat chance.

And then the plane fell down through a curtain of clouds that looked as though it never parted, sailed down between mountains that seemed too sheer and too close together to ever allow a plane to land, and in a moment it had landed anyway, on a runway nestled impossibly between the hills.

For a while things were anything but quiet.

The crew got out without saying word one to Bill, which was kind of what he’d expected. At least they had the courtesy to leave the door open for him.

That wasn’t the interesting part, of course. The interesting part came a few moments later, when he climbed the stairway down out of the plane. And saw the man who’d came to meet him. Who was dressed in a sweater and a tie and a lab coat. Wearing a badge that said he was a civilian research assistant.

And Bill Wallace (or Roe or whoever he was, now) recognized that man.

He’d known him most of his life, in fact.

Because the man who waited for him in the jeep was Joey Harris.

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BROOKLYN

The crowd finally finished filtering away a little after midnight, and Luke and the woman were alone again. She stood waiting for him, leaning against the kitchen wall, when he came back from saying good-bye to the Harrisons.

“Will you love me?” she asked him, smiling.

Luke nearly choked on his own tongue; he wasn’t ready for the idea, much less the question.

“I . . . I don’t know.” He looked for anything at all say, just to keep from having to answer her. “Have we known each other long enough for that?”

Her smile went wistful, patient. “I think we have. The circumstances allow for changes in the ordinary rules.”

Luke looked at his feet; he could see in the candlelight that his new shoes were already scuffed. “You haven’t even told me your name,” he said. There was something more there; the words hurt as he said them.

“I’m Christine,” she said. “But you knew that, didn’t you? And you’re Luke. Luke Munsen.”

He had known — known since he’d read her headstone when he’d almost fallen head first into her grave. That wasn’t the point — or, at least, it wasn’t the point as Luke had intended it.

“I guess — I don’t know. I think it’s too soon for me to say. Can we ease off a little? This is making me uncomfortable.”

She nodded, just as patiently as she’d responded to everything else. “Would you like to come with me? I’m going to take a walk.”

Luke rubbed his chin the with back of his hand, coughed. “Sure,” he said. And blew out all but one of the candles, and used that one to guide them from the building.

They walked a long distance and back again that night, talking hardly at all, and what little was said was trivial; a comment about a strange façade; maybe a warning when the pot holes in the sidewalk looked too dangerous. Once Christine remarked on the strange color of the moon.

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Chapter Twenty-Three

WASHINGTON

It wasn’t until two a.m., when he woke from death for the sixth time, that Graham Perkins realized where he was.

It was so obvious that it amazed him that he hadn’t figured it out until then.

Graham Perkins was in Hell.

A very special Hell, he decided as he tried desperately to drag air in through his disfigured throat. A Hell for those who can be held accountable for the deaths of millions.

The realization gave him a measure of comfort — the first he’d felt since he’d come back to life five hours before. If he was in a Hell where he’d die a thousand times for each of the deaths on his conscience, then there was justice in that. Rightness. And hope too; if he suffered hard enough and long enough, might not his own suffering atone for the suffering of others? It was possible, just barely possible.

Graham tried to calm himself, to bear his torment with dignity. Grace. Grace as in God’s grace. Was it a bad thing to think of God, here in the deepest pit in Hell? Graham wasn’t sure. His faith had never been strong enough — he realized that now. He’d never studied God’s word carefully enough — never read the Bible, rarely gone to church. If he’d even listened to religious broadcasts — the sort of thing Paul Green was so involved in — if he’d even bothered to watch a few revival shows he’d know the things he needed to now.

Maybe Paul Green had been right.

Maybe God was a thing a man needed to devote his life to. I love you, God, he thought. It was as much a plea for mercy as it was a sentiment. More so, perhaps. I should pray.

Yes.

He started with the Lord’s Prayer, and wound his way through every one of the half-dozen prayers he knew. He was beginning his third Hail Mary when the wind shifted his weight, and he began to die again.

Grace failed him then. Hard as he tried to preserve his dignity — the dignity of prayer — his body only grew more desperate, and before he could stop himself he was struggling, arms and legs flailing wildly as he hung from the noose. Hands clawing at the high-test nylon cord that held him. And all he could think was I’ve failed you, God, I’ve failed I’ve failed I’m sorry.

Not that it made a damned bit of difference.

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SOUTH KOREA — AT THE EDGE OF THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE

Bill Wallace’s first impression of the DMZ was no impression at all. The runway where he’d landed was like the runways at home — long, thin tracks of concrete or asphalt or some such, running parallel with strips of grass. When the jeep began to move he got a glimpse of the base, and it was an Air Force base, and it looked like any other base that’d been built in the forties or fifties. The land it was built on was all at right angles to itself — steep hills that turned to mountains if you stood back a few feet and looked up — which made it pretty distinct from Whiteman, back in Missouri. That was true enough. On the other hand, Bill had been to the Air Force Academy, out in Colorado (not as a cadet, but he’d been to the place all the same), and it was enough like this place that if he hadn’t known where he was he could have mistaken the one for the other.

Well, okay: maybe not. The land here was different; greener and more alive. Wetter. The pines that grew on the sheer hillsides were more lush and closer together than the trees tended to be around the Academy. And even though the dirt was brown and sandy and leached, it was nowhere near as sterile as the dirt in Colorado.

Joey Harris hadn’t said a word to him when he’d seen him.

Oh, his eyes had bugged out a little. And there’d been this expression on his face: partly recognition and being generally glad to see him after a lot of years. Partly shock, and surprise. And partly fear, as though he’d set eyes on a ghost — as though he’d heard that Bill had died, and how.

All the same he hadn’t said a word. Which meant that he was under the same orders that Bill was, not to speak with him and not to attract any attention in public.

Bill was definitely ready for this state of affairs to come to an end. He wasn’t sure how much more he could take of being shunned, even if he was under orders that amounted to it.

Joey took the jeep left around a corner; right, right, and then left again up a street so sheer it might have been a cliff. This base was like the Academy, Bill thought. The street plan was every bit as senseless and confusing. Four hundred yards without a turn, and then the buildings dropped away and they were moving along a loopy, curving road that bisected an enormous field marked by pocks and odd debris, shell-shocked from the war. Half a mile and the road straightened out again, and they were moving through undeveloped land along the base of a hill that was nearly large enough to call a mountain. And just when Bill thought they were going to drive out into the wilds forever, the alien brush and the dense pine-woods opened out on the left, to reveal a lone, squat, cinder-block building. Perched at the base of the hill like some unnatural blemish on the earth. Surrounded by its own electrified security fence, with its own security booth — and the booth was manned by two airmen, each of whom had a machine gun in hand. Which might not have been an awful lot of security, if you didn’t consider that it was on an air base in the middle of the DMZ, and surrounded by so many soldiers and airmen that Bill had a hard time imagining them all in one place.

The nearer of the two recognized Joey; hit a switch that caused the motorized gate to swing open. Nodded them through.

“We can talk now, I guess,” Joey said. “If we aren’t secure here, there isn’t anyplace for three thousand miles in any direction where we would be. How the fuck are you, Billy? I thought you’d —” He coughed. “— well, I thought you’d bought it. You sure don’t look like somebody who’d got himself killed in a kerosene explosion. Was that an exaggeration? Or was it somebody else who killed the President — somebody with your name?”

Bill felt his jaw clench, his stomach churn. He wanted to talk, all right. He didn’t want to talk about this. “No. That was me. What do you think I’m doing here?”

Joey shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. All I know is that you’re the third classified . . . ‘package’ we’ve got in today. Very classified. All three of them people, all of them being rushed around and treated like they were some entirely new form of radioactive material. The dazed black man from New York. The boy from Tennessee. And now you. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want; the Major’ll brief me soon enough. Just hasn’t been time yet.”

Bill grunted. “I’d better not,” he said. “Orders.”

Joey nodded. “No problem.” He parked the jeep not far from the windowless building’s only door. Climbed out, waved his hand to tell Bill he should follow.

“Last I saw you,” Bill said, pulling himself from the jeep, hurrying to catch up, “you looked as though you were going away for a long while. What are you doing here? How did you ever end up in a place like this?”

He grinned. “Yeah. I would’ve, too.” He stopped a moment; hesitated before starting toward the door again. “After they sent Ron away I finally broke down and called my grandpa, asked him to get me a decent lawyer. Grandpa’s got that kind of money. And he said he’d do it for me too — so long as I got back in school and stayed there till I graduated college. And then he fixed it with the judge so that I had to keep that promise and stay in school, or I would go to jail. And fixed it so that when I finished it’d all come off my record.” He laughed a little, which partly sounded hollow and partly sounded real. “Still not sure whether I should hate him for running five years of my life or thank him for running it well.” He looked away, off toward the east, where it was almost possible to see the Sea of Japan through the scrub. “Both, I guess.”