Fire (37 page)

So he sat at the table, and he smiled politely when Joey — or Joseph or whoever the hell he was now — introduced him to the boy and to Major Janet Carver’s other two assistants. One of those two was a civilian, like Joey; the other was a naval lieutenant who still looked a little wet behind the ears. Almost like he’d just managed to get himself out of Annapolis in the last couple of weeks. (Bill had never had an awful lot of respect for junior officers, even if they were officers. Sure, an airman had to follow their orders. And he had to treat ‘em like they were somebody special. But no one ever told Bill that he had to believe in a lieutenant who was ten years younger than he was.)

All of which was pretty darned peculiar, when you got right down to it. Here they were, officers, enlisted men, civilians. Even a child. And they were all sitting at the same table for dinner, like it was some kind of a family meal or something.

Weird.

When he’d sat through all the introducing he could possibly take, a corporal came in wheeling a meal cart. Handed out plates and glasses and trays, set a tall pitcher of iced tea in the center of the table. And took the one empty seat for himself. When he was done Joey introduced him as their supply clerk, which in English probably meant that he was the Major’s private secretary.

And for a long time they were all kind of quiet, what with eating and all.

Major Carver — Major Janet Carver — had turned out to be some kind of an MD type doctor, along with her being a major and all. Which made her rate pretty highly in Bill’s book. It was almost like she had rank twice over. First thing she’d done after Joey had taken him to her was show him to her doctor’s office and give him a real physical. Pretty damned thorough one too — the kind of physical that always left Bill feeling kind of embarrassed. So to speak. Even when it was a man-doctor giving it to him. Anyway, while he was in there getting his self all probed and looked at and explored, Major Carver told him a little bit about what she did for the Air Force. Which was research. And about what he was doing there — most of which he could have guessed at. Except for the part about there being other people who’d come back to life, just like Bill had.

Maybe there’d been a hint of that in that stuff Joey said about packages that were actually people. Maybe. If it was anything it wasn’t much more than a clue. Major Carver came right out and said it: miracles were happening all over the east half of the country. People coming back to life when there hadn’t been enough of them left to give a proper burial. Cripples getting right up and walking, graceful as you please. Sick people sitting up in their hospital beds and acting like there’d been nothing wrong with them in the first place.

And the Air Force wanted to know about it. Air Force, hell: the whole damned Pentagon wanted to know. And they were going to find out too, by studying Bill and the two other people who’d been brought here.

Bill had to admit that it pleased him to be such a center of attention. He wasn’t sure how much he liked being classified. Which was the other thing Major Carver had said — all three of them had been classified top secret or some such. Which wasn’t at all as though they’d given Bill a jumped-up security clearance. More like they’d made him into one. Which meant that, as of now, he couldn’t go out and take a pee in the woods without an armed escort. And he could completely forget about talking to anyone outside the research project.

Which he could expect to go on for months. Years, maybe.

That was the part he didn’t like especially.

Though it wasn’t like there was a damn thing he could do about it.

Someone at the far end of the table coughed; Bill looked up, automatically, to see —

The boy was glowing again. Glowing, damn it, glowing.

Blink.

And not glowing at all. Not doing anything but being a boy.

He’s touched, Bill heard himself thinking. He’s touched, and you can see it because it’s touched you too.

Which didn’t make a damn bit more sense than the words Bill’d heard in his head before. He frowned, shook his head. Bill was seeing things. Hearing things. Under the circumstances it was kind of understandable, and that was all there was to it. The thing to do was ignore it; sooner or later his head would clear and the world would go back to normal.

So he looked at his food. Set himself back to the task of putting it down — which was getting to be a considerable task, since Bill was beginning to lose his appetite. And that was a shame too, when you considered that dinner was some kind of a beef stew on top of egg noodles, and was a high cut above your everyday Air Force chow.

The beef was a little on the rare side. Rare stew beef? That was kind of screwy, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was. Oh well; it wasn’t bad. Just the opposite. Exotic and peculiar and kind of nice.

Hadn’t that first bite of stew been crumbly and well-done, cooked half to death the way stew usually was? It had. Bill remembered it clearly enough. Even if he had been a little distracted when he’d dug in, the memory of taste and texture was still clear.

The bite after that one was right on the edge of being raw.

What was wrong with the cooks here? Well, they were in Korea. Maybe they had a Korean cook working down in an Air Force kitchen someplace in this maze. Bill had never ate any Korean food, but he’d had take-out Chinese, and that had certainly been an alien experience. Hadn’t been raw, though. Kind of what you might call lightly boiled — and definitely cooked through, no matter how alien it was.

Listen to what I’m thinking, Bill thought. And this time it was no question but he was thinking for himself. If anyone was listening to me he’d’ve thought I was one of them red-neck racist types like you find up in the hills.

By this point Bill was finding himself pretty agitated. Partly for obvious reasons, partly for ones he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He took him a good look at his half-cooked stew, pushed the bowl away, looked up and around the dead-quiet table —

And there that boy was again, glowing brightly-as-you-please.

And, being agitated and all hep up about the raw stew, Bill had his mouth open before he could manage to put a stop to himself.

“You cut that out,” he said to the boy. “What’re you doing taking a shine that way?”

The words fell onto the quiet table like rocks falling down out of a sack of gravel.

The boy looked up from his dinner — his stew didn’t look half-cooked, Bill noticed — and smiled at him cockeyed like he didn’t quite know what he was talking about. He’d stopped glowing again by this point, of course. Now that everybody at the whole darned table was staring at the both of them.

“Cut what out, Mr. Corporal Roe? What kind of shine you mean?”

Bill sighed. Embarrassed. He could feel hot pressure in his cheeks like they were turning red. “Nothing. Not nothing. Just a little off my feed from flying across that ocean, I guess.”

None of them were eating any more; everyone at the whole damned table was staring at him. And not just like he was crazy, either. Though there was some of that. Mostly they were staring at him transfixed, like . . . like he was something in one of their experiments. Which, Bill reminded himself, he was. Up till that moment Bill had felt a lot more like an airman who’d pulled himself weird duty than he’d felt like a rat in some scientist’s laboratory.

Major Carver coughed. “ ‘Taking a shine,’ Corporal Roe?”

Bill frowned. Blushed. There wasn’t any sense in discussing it. Or, maybe more to the point, there was a lot of sense in not discussing it. Bill didn’t want to get himself dissected like some laboratory rat on account of him being crazy enough to see things.

Not that the Major-doctor woman was about to let it go.

“Did you see something, Corporal Roe? Do you think you’re hallucinating?”

Bill wasn’t completely uneducated; he had his high school. Couldn’t have got into the Air Force without it. He knew about “hallucinating” — it was seeing things, like what happened to those dumb kids who took that LSD acid stuff, or ate some of those magical mushrooms. He’d almost got involved with that nonsense himself, back when he was in high school.

Bill sure didn’t want to get himself busted out of the Air Force on some drug charge.

“No ma’am. Not hallucinating. Just my eyes acting a little weird, kind of.”

“What, exactly, did you see, Corporal?”

Bill looked away. Looked at his stew, because it was in front of him and it was something he could stare at. There wasn’t any getting away from a question that direct. Not without insubordination. Or lying. And he knew that this wasn’t any kind of situation where he ought to be telling any lies.

“Well, ma’am. It was kind of like I looked at the young fellow there, just out of the corner of my eye. And when I looked at him, just for this little moment, it was like he was glowing.”

The silence was so thick that Bill could have heard dandruff falling on his shoulder. And it went on forever.

“It could have been a trick of the light, I guess,” Bill said. “You all got some kind of screwy light bulbs in this room, maybe?” Which was maybe a good question to ask, and Bill knew it, because he knew that someone had taken the trouble to install some kind of easy-on-the-eyes light-bulbs in here, just as they had in the hall.

More silence.

“No, Corporal. There isn’t any way that the light here could cause you to hallucinate.”

And more silence still. And Bill was beginning to feel like he was under a microscope, and everyone was still staring at him. And his ears were ringing, and his hands were beginning to shake. And he pulled his bowl of stew back toward him and dug back into it, even though he wasn’t hungry any more and the stuff was pretty darned gross. Because if he didn’t do something, anything, right there and right then, Bill thought he’d go out of his mind. . . .

The first bite went plop right into his mouth without Bill even looking at it.

And that was a serious mistake.

Because the gravy-covered cube of beef in Bill’s mouth was raw.

Raw. And warm. And bloody and quivery as living flesh.

And Bill forgot all about the fact that the spotlight was already pointed at him. And he screamed, and spat that hunk of meat right back into the bowl he’d taken it from. Where it bled and pulsed, just as though it were alive.

That caused a real stir. It took the attention off of Bill and the fact that he was seeing things real thoroughly. Not quite as thoroughly as when, a few moments later, everyone noticed that their own dinners had turned just as raw as Bill’s.

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Chapter Twenty-Five

WASHINGTON

It wasn’t as simple as it should have been, of course. The crowd — which just a few moments before had been quiet and tired — was wide awake before the first soldier crossed the barricade. The mob might have been a bunch of untrained civilians, but all the same it fought well and hard — partly because they were furious, partly because none of Young’s men had the heart or stomach for killing unarmed civilians.

The worst of it was that the mob wasn’t unarmed. Every one of them had a rock or a two-by-four or a carving knife, and there were more guns, half a dozen of them, at least. Two soldiers were shot point-blank in the face, where neither their helmets nor their flack jackets could do them any good.

After that the men seemed to remember how to shoot, and the sound of their machine guns filled the highway.

And the bloodbath started.

A line of stray machine gun slugs hit the lamp post above the Vice President’s head; one of them cut through the cord that held him. No one saw that in the confusion. Not even the ones with the two-by-fours who’d been beating him a few moments before.

And the Vice President, confused and unnerved and gasping for air, crawled down the embankment, off the highway, away from the riot.

And no one noticed.

Not until the fighting was done, and bodies covered the pavement, and someone thought to identify the dead.

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SOUTH KOREA

What with all the commotion, no one ever did get around to asking Bill about the glow again. Which was just fine with him.

Major Carver had taken one good look at her bleeding stew, and she’d said something or other about biologicals and infection, and she’d told her corporal to quarantine them off right away. A moment or two later Bill had heard her mutter something to the effect that she didn’t expect it to do any good if they were dealing with something that virulent — was that the word she’d used? — and she said it quiet enough to give Bill the feeling that she hadn’t intended anyone to hear it.

Then she’d turned to the Navy lieutenant, and said, “Lieutenant Reynolds, Mr. Smith.” A nod to her other civilian assistant. “I want you to take one of these bowls to your lab, and I don’t want you to leave until you’ve isolated the agent responsible for this reaction. I’m serious. If you find yourself falling asleep on your feet, Corporal Conrad here will bring you a cot. Regardless, you’re not to leave — if you’re awake I want you working. Do you understand me?”

The lieutenant said, “Yes ma’am.” The look on his face was the look you expect from an airman who’s just been told that he’s got to sweep a runway by himself with a push-broom. Smith didn’t look much more enthusiastic.

And the Major had turned to Joey. “Gather up Mr. Rodriguez, the police officer from New York, and bring him to my lab. Take Corporal Roe with you, in case you need help. I’ll bring young Mr. Williams with me myself. There’s work to do — a whole night’s worth of work to do — but I want our subjects where I can keep an eye on them.” The major paused, huffed. “Don’t just stand there with your mouth open, Joseph. Get on with it.”

Joey closed his mouth. Shrugged. “Yes ma’am. If that’s what you want.” Kind of sarcastic-like — or maybe not sarcastic, exactly, but right there on the edge of it. Which probably would have got Bill busted down to private all over again, for insubordination. It was a mild reaction from a civilian who was being asked to put in overtime without being given any choice.