Fire (48 page)

I’ve got a lot to atone for.

The telephone rang in the next room; Herman disappeared to answer it. He reentered George’s room a few moments later, beet-red and eyes bulging with anger.

“They’ve escaped me,” he said. And left, shutting the door behind him without another word of explanation.

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SOUTH KOREA—AT THE EDGE OF THE DMZ

It took them most of half an hour to get around the mountain, and during that time half a dozen rockets hit close enough to send them to the ground for cover. Their luck wasn’t all bad, though; when they finally did get around the turn of the mountain the land was scarred but still, and the sound of rockets was just an echo in the distance.

We don’t have to go all the way into the DMZ, Bill thought. We’re out of range here. There isn’t any sense going any farther.

It was an enormous relief.

There was a thin, clear spring flowing along the mountainside not a dozen yards from where Bill stood when it occurred to him that they could stop running. He looked at the boy and told him that they might as well clean themselves up and reconnoiter a little. And walked to the spring and fell to his knees and rinsed the muddy grit from his face and hands in water so cold and so pure that he could almost taste it through his skin.

When he was done he sank back onto his rump and let out a long slow sigh. There was still shelling off in the distance someplace. Well, maybe not that far in the distance. Right here the world was clean and lush and beautiful, and for the life of him Bill couldn’t begin to imagine anything that could be important enough to get killed over. Much less to kill. The boy was wading in the spring that wasn’t any deeper that the tops of his feet, chasing after water bugs or tadpoles or some such. Even the zombies seemed more alive here, somehow. The woman — God she was beautiful — her especially. She still hadn’t said a word, but her eyes . . . they were more nearly alive now. Not just staring off into space mindlessly. She was watching Jimmy, watching Bill, too. Was she coming out of her funk? Yes, Bill thought. She was. Another hour, maybe two, and the shock of rebirth would have faded enough for her to realize where she was. Bill realized that he was looking forward to that moment, and the realization surprised him. Though it shouldn’t have. Of course he was looking forward to it. She was beautiful; even if there had been nothing else to draw him to her, her beauty alone would have done it.

And there was something else that drew them together. Something that Bill had seen three times now, but still didn’t understand:

The glow.

The glow that Bill, the woman, and the boy all shared.

Bill smiled, basking in the sight of her. And the question rose up out of him before he stopped to think that there was no way she’d be ready to understand it yet.

“Who are you?” he asked her. And saw from the change on her face that she either understood or almost did, saw her begin to try to answer —

And that was when the first shell managed to reach this side of the mountain. And sent an avalanche of dust and stones and larger, slower things rolling down toward them.

“Christ,” Bill said. They had to get going again. The big rocks, the boulders rolling down from high on the mountain, weren’t going to come close enough to be a problem. The next rocket would come closer. Maybe too close. They had to keep moving if they were going to stay out of range. He stood; nodded to the boy, the woman. “Okay,” he said, “let’s get back at it.”

There was no way Bill could have known for certain that they were heading straight toward the North Korean lines. After all, he wasn’t any psychic; he didn’t know the future. If he’d thought just a little farther ahead, he could have guessed it. After all, Allied lines were behind them. That was obviously where the shelling was coming from. And it only stood to reason that they were trying to hit something. Which had to be the North Koreans. Bill couldn’t have known that the NKs had fallen back to their fortified positions on the far side of the DMZ, but he could have guessed that, too: it was the only reasonable place for them to retreat to.

To be fair to Bill, he wasn’t the only one who didn’t realize how far the NKs had retreated. If the Americans and South Koreans to the south had known, they wouldn’t have bothered shelling territory the enemy had already given up.

Bill didn’t think far enough ahead to realize any of those things. Maybe he might have if he’d paid a little more attention, back in basic training. They hadn’t taught him a whole lot back then about strategy or logistics, but they’d taught him some. Which was more than he’d learned in the years since, years that he’d spent mostly marking time. Fueling planes; working cleanup details. Grunt work that you didn’t have to think about to do.

Instead of heading sideways, toward the sea or the high mountains and away from the fighting, Bill Wallace led the four of them straight into the hands of the enemy.

That took a while.

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What came first — before Bill and the boy Jimmy and the two dead people fell ultimately and disastrously into the grip of the North Koreans — what came first was the awful business in the DMZ. And worse things at the edge of it.

Carnage. Utter and awful and powerful carnage.

The near edge of the DMZ lay only a couple hundred yards beyond the base of the mountain, and there were two striking things there by the bunkers and the barbed wire and the barricades. Least of them was the amazing forest — dense and thick and untouched as a virgin jungle — that lay just beyond the line. Bill had heard tell of that forest, from airmen returned after duty in Korea. Wild things lived in it, things that man had long since hounded out of the rest of Asia. Big cats. Bears. Wild dogs so feral you couldn’t tell them from wolves. One guy, back at Whiteman, told Bill about standing watch on the line at six in the morning, and right there not ten feet from him in the dawn light was a full-grown deer no bigger than a rocking horse nibbling at the fine leaves on the low branches of a tree.

For all that, for all the wonder of it, the forest just didn’t seem too important compared with the carnage at the near edge of it.

Carnage? No, that was too mild a word. There wasn’t a word that Bill could think of that could begin to make the sight real.

And the smell — the smell came to them before the sight, before they passed through the stand of pine that hid that part of the line from their view. Sour/sweet, like a hair burning, rancid wax — and some other smell that brought Bill back to the coffin he’d woke in just days before.

He saw the bodies when they were still in among the pines. So many, so close that in places they covered the ground like a carpet. American uniforms, South Korean, North Korean. Thousands, thousands — more than the eye could begin to count. Most of them piled up on both sides of the barricades, but not all of them. A few scattered, farther back. And there, near the spot where the barricades had been bulldozed to make way for supply trucks: bodies lined up neatly in front of the wall of a barracks, and an even string of bloodstains and bullet holes on the wall. As though the fifty Americans and South Koreans there had been lined up and executed by a firing squad. Which could only have happened if they’d surrendered.

By the time they reached the first of the bodies, the smell was so intense that it gave the boy a case of the dry heaves. The shelling was getting close again, but Bill stopped, waited; put his arms around the boy’s shoulders to help him through it. Which didn’t seem to help much, but Bill hoped that it was something. After a while, when the boy was closer to still than he was to convulsing, Bill said, “C’mon, Jerry. It won’t be any better until we get past it.” He looked up, saw that the oriental woman looked kind of green at the gills, too. Nodded to her. “You too.” And she seemed to understand. The policeman’s eyes were as dead as they’d been the first time Bill saw him.

Then they were moving again, picking their way through a sea of corpses toward the road the invaders had cut through the barricade. Bill did his best not to see them, even if he did have to look down to keep from stepping and stumbling on the dead. When he tried hard, hard as he could, he could just barely manage to look down at the sight of endless death without telling his heart exactly what it was his eyes had taken in. Once the boy did stumble, but Bill caught his arm, stopped him from landing down among the corpses. Which was a victory of sorts, a small triumph over the infinitude of death and destruction.

The last half-dozen yards were the worst. The bodies were piled especially high and thick there. Pressed and bunched together, from the look of them, by the same bulldozer that had broken down the barricade and cleared a trail through the forest. Too close together to walk around them; so close that there was no way to get by without walking over the bodies, stepping gingerly on a carpet of putrefying flesh. More than one of those corpses was crushed, pulped to the point where it was hard to be absolutely certain that it’d once been human.

It was too much. Too much. Bill almost turned back, headed into the shelling and the sound of gunfire in the distance. Would have done it, too, but he had a duty to the boy — had it because the boy was a boy and Bill was a full-grown man — and heading back into the shelling was sure death, and Bill knew it. And not just death: getting hit by one of those shells would give them the dead policeman’s fate. Whatever it was that had brought them back to life would bring them back again. Even if there was nothing but a mindless mass of flesh to restore.

There were only three yards left to go when the boy froze up. Stopped dead in his tracks with one foot on a dead captain’s face and another in the groin of an enlisted man. He didn’t scream, he didn’t shout. When Bill turned back to see him he wasn’t sweating or trembling or crying; his face wasn’t a mask of fear or disgust. The only thing in his eyes was a sort of dead-eyed shock — and that was just maybe the worst possible thing, because it made the boy look so much like the vegetal policeman. . . .

Who hadn’t changed at all. For all the difference in the policeman’s face, they could have been in Oz, walking through the field of poppies. Bill stole a glance back at the woman, expecting her to be the same, or nearly so — but she wasn’t. She stood behind the cop, and her face was a sweat-slick mask of disgust and self-loathing, and seeing her so beautiful, so deep in agony, Bill almost lost what little determination and self-control he had left to him, only barely managed to keep himself from turning tail and running into the sound of blasting death on the far side of the mountain.

But he didn’t. At the very heart of things, he couldn’t. For all that he’d have denied it any day that anyone cared to ask him, at his deepest root Bill had too much backbone in his soul to fold under pressure when others depended on him. And instead of turning tail and surrendering to death, Bill reached over, lifted the boy in his arms. And carried him the last ten feet to the bulldozed trail that led into the forest.

The woman and the dead policeman followed, only a couple steps behind them.

It went quickly after that; Bill felt only a moment or two pass in the time it took to follow the trail into the forest through the shattered barricade. The last of the corpses wasn’t more than a dozen yards beyond it. A little father and he let out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding back. Set the boy back on his feet. Turned to the woman to be certain that she hadn’t lost her mind.

“Are you okay?” he asked her, though he didn’t really expect an answer. He got one that surprised him.

The woman nodded. “I will be,” she said. She said it in English, spoke with an accent so American that to Bill’s ear it sounded like no accent at all. She lifted her hand to her forehead, wiped away the sweat that was trying to run into her eyes.

“You’re sure?”

She hesitated, nodded again. “Yes.”

The boy was trembling, now — which Bill supposed was for the best, since it wasn’t like being froze up with shock. Bill stooped, took a good long look into his eyes. There were tears in them, now, big fat wet ones that rolled wide down the boy’s cheeks. “How about you? You going to make it, Jerry-boy?”

“Nothing wrong with me, Corporal Bill.” Which was a lie, plain and simple. Bill reckoned as how it was a brave lie, and he didn’t challenge it.

“Think you’re up to walking?”

“Uh-huh.”

So Bill patted him on the back, and told that boy that he was a trooper straight out of hell, and they started off again down that path. Which was actually more of a dirt road, when you got right down to it.

He led them about a half mile, far enough to get clear of the stink of death, before he headed off the trail, into the woods. A couple minutes’ walk, there — far enough to keep them from being spotted from the road — and he found a clearing where there was time and room to sit and rest and lick the wounds inside their hearts. And he had them sit, and they rested there on the grass in the warm afternoon sun for half an hour, listening to the sound of rocket shells in the distance.

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Chapter Thirty-Three

I-70— NOT FAR FROM ZANESVILLE, OHIO

Luke and Christine were in Ohio already when Andy pressed the back seat of the car out of joint and poked his head out of the trunk.

“So,” he said, “when are we going to stop for lunch? I am seriously hungry.”

The racket and the sound of the boy’s voice were sudden enough that Luke swerved out of his lane and very nearly ran up onto the median. When he had the car under control again he shook his head and glanced back at the boy sternly. “What are you doing here?” he asked. Not that he needed an answer. “You stowed away in there? Dear God, your mother must be hysterical. We need to get to a pay phone, call her. Let her know you’re all right.”

Andy sighed theatrically; Christine, in the front seat beside Luke, looked as though she were trying to choke off a fit of hysterical laughter. “Momma knows,” he said. “You think I’d just take off without telling her?”