Fire (49 page)

“What?”

“You heard me. Are we going to get some lunch or not?” The boy’s voice was definitely impatient. Stubborn, too.

This is ridiculous. A small boy stows himself away in the trunk of my car, announces his presence once we’ve gone too far to turn around and take him home. And then he starts making demands. If I had any good sense I’d ignore him. He wasn’t ignoring him. Over there on the left was a small green sign that said
Gas-Food-Lodging
and after all, wouldn’t it be nice to get off the road for a bit. A cup of coffee, some lunch — yes, he thought, it’d be nice. Besides, it’d give him a chance to decide what to do with the boy before they got any farther from his home.

“So?”

Luke turned on his blinker. “Okay, okay — let’s get some lunch. And while we eat you can tell me what you’re doing here.”

Andy harrumphed and finished crawling up out of the trunk. Once he was clear he reassembled the back seat and made himself comfortable.

As he pulled off the interstate, Luke tried to figure out how the boy had managed to stow himself away in the trunk, and why. The last time he’d seen Andy was . . . he’d been there in the crowd that had said good-bye to Luke and Christine, hadn’t he? Or had he? So many faces all crowded around; it was hard to be sure of anything. He’d definitely seen him a few minutes before that, when his mother had decided that she had to call out the entire neighborhood to see them off. And there hadn’t been a moment after that when either he or Christine hadn’t been right there in the car. . . .

No wonder she was laughing. She’d known the boy was in the trunk all along — she’d just been waiting for him to show himself.

Luke shook his head; he felt more than a little stupid. He turned to Andy. “How do you feel about Denny’s?”

Turned back, to watch the road, and saw through the rear-view mirror when Andy raised an eyebrow. “Who’s Denny?”

“Denny’s is a coffee shop. A whole chain of them, kind of like McDonald’s — only with waitresses. And a bigger menu. They have them all over the country.”

“Not in Brooklyn they don’t. It sounds okay, long as you think it’s an okay place to eat. And anyhow, when’d you start remembering so much? Just two days ago I had to tell you what a McDonald’s was. Now you sound like an authority on the subject.”

“I —” Suddenly, and for no reason he wanted to name, Luke felt his gut press hard against itself. He didn’t want to cope with that question. Didn’t want to think about it. “Yesterday, I guess. After the museum.”

After the dream.

“Well! Doesn’t that just go to show you? Getting yourself killed in a place full of monsters is good for something.”

Luke didn’t respond — he didn’t want to encourage the boy to drag them into anything like that again, even if it did seem as though he might have a point.

Instead, he tried to sort out the events since he’d woke in that museum. Luke had woke from the dead for the second time there in the Museum of Natural History — woke up clear-headed and remembering things about himself that he’d thought lost forever. Human things: the apartment where he’d lived for the last seven years. The way his father smiled when they all sat down for dinner on a holiday. His first big date, back in high school. Work was still a fuzzy thing, and so were all sorts of small details — the banister in the museum’s stairwell had seemed an incredible and intricate device. He remembered college clearly, and graduate school, too — though if he’d learned a thing in either place he had no clue of it. But he woke that afternoon without the feeling that he was about to walk into the sort of commonplace trouble that toddlers learn to avoid, and there’d been few moments since his first resurrection that Luke hadn’t felt that peculiar dread hanging over him.

Christine and the boy had both begun to stir by the time Luke was sitting up. He looked around, remembering where he was as the last bits of his strange dream faded away from him. He tried to focus on that dream; it was only moments away from him in time, but it was already fading away from him in the familiar way that all dreams do. There was a comfort, there, even if it was another loss — if only because it was so familiar.

One thing was with him, clear and unquestionable and demanding. The need to go. To move on — westward. There was an image attached to the need, too: the image of a vast lake made of flame and magma.

“Hey,” Andy said. He looked groggy, as though his eyes couldn’t quite yet focus on the world around them. “That was fun. You want to do it again?”

Luke groaned and shook his head. “No,” he said, “don’t even think about it. We’ve got to get you back home to your folks, and then I’ve got to head on. There isn’t time for me to stay here any more — there’s something I need to do.”

The groggy look in Andy’s eyes went away very suddenly. “Oh yeah? What’s that? You want some company?”

Christine was looking at Luke uneasily. Had she had a dream like Luke’s? Or was she afraid that he meant to leave her behind? There wasn’t any need for that, Luke thought — if she wanted to come along with him, certainly she was welcome. Andy was another matter altogether. He was young enough that he needed looking after, and besides, Luke couldn’t really take him away from his parents. And even if he could have, he wouldn’t have wanted to. He was a good kid. But he was a lightning rod for trouble. Luke didn’t know what it was his dream was sending him toward, but he knew in his gut that it would be dangerous — dangerous enough that he couldn’t expose the boy to it in good conscience, let alone allow him to run headlong into the worst of whatever waited for them, dragging Luke and Christine with him.

“No,” he said. “You’ve got to stay here with your folks.”

Andy started to protest, but Luke shook his head and frowned, and that had quieted him. And Luke had actually believed that that had been the last of it. Looking back, he decided, he should have known better.

Luke stood up, brushed the dust from his slacks. Noticed the bullet hole in his shirt, crusted with dried blood. Shrugged because there was nothing he could do about it.

“So,” the boy said, “how you going to get where you’re going? Airports are all still shut down, you know. Trains, too — not even the buses in the Port Authority are running.”

Luke turned, looked down at the boy. Shrugged. “I hadn’t thought that far, to tell you the truth.”

“You want to buy a car? My Uncle Tim’s got an old junker he’s been trying to sell for months. I bet he’d give you a real good price.”

They were going downstairs, now; just ahead was a painted steel door that looked as though it led out of the building.

“You think the car’ll hold up to cross-country driving?”

“Sure. It may be a junker, but it’s a great old junker. Uncle Tim’s handy with a wrench — kept it up real good.”

What am I doing — buying a used car from a twelve-year-old boy. It’s ridiculous. And stupid.

“Come on, I’ll show it to you once we get back home. Maybe Uncle Tim’ll even loan it to you if you promise to bring it back. He ain’t been doing anything with it lately but moving it from one side of the block to the other so they can sweep the streets.”

Luke had ended up buying the car — Andy’s uncle had only wanted a few hundred dollars for it, and there was enough in Luke’s account that even a few hundred dollars didn’t make much of a dent. Even so, Luke wasn’t sure he was getting much of a bargain; the car looked as though it might not have the three thousand miles of life in it that he needed. Well, he’d thought, regardless: this is what’s available. And he’d bought the car. Three hours later he’d gathered up the clothes he’d bought two days before, and he and Christine were getting in the car and heading off as the crowd waved to them.

He and Christine had never even discussed whether or not she was coming, and she never asked why he felt the need to go. There were a few moments when he hadn’t been certain whether she meant to come or not, and he meant to ask her if she wanted to but there wasn’t time and they weren’t alone and the question was just too damned awkward anyway. And in the end, when he was ready to leave, she’d been in the car, waiting for him. And even if he hadn’t understood why he’d been glad she was there.

Now it turned out that Andy had stowed away with them, too. It wasn’t even remotely a thing he was glad of. He was worried for the boy, and worried about him. What he had to do, he decided, was . . . what, drive him all the way back to New York? There wasn’t time for that. There’d been too much urgency about his dream. He could try to send the boy back to his folks. Or try to, most likely with no result; even if he’d known of a handy airport or bus station where he could take the boy to send him back, the buses and the planes were still out of service.

It was a problem. Enough of a problem that Luke was still working it over and over in his mind when he pulled into a parking spot in front of the restaurant and turned off the old car’s ignition.

When they were inside sitting in a wide booth, waiting to place their orders, Andy had looked up from the menu (he had it turned to the page with the ice-cream sundaes) and he’d said, “So, where’re we going?” And he’d grinned eagerly, mischievously.

“We” aren’t going anywhere, Luke had wanted to say. That wasn’t the thing to say — or it wasn’t anything he wanted to say before he’d actually decided what he was going to do. And besides, he didn’t have an answer to where he was going. So far something deep in his gut had guided him at every turn. First through that confusing webwork of wide, crowded highways that surrounded New York; now for hundreds of miles along Interstate 70. There was a map of some kind in the glove box, but there hadn’t yet been any need to consult it.

Whatever it was guided him purposely — Luke was certain of that. He hadn’t driven this part of the country since he’d been in college, and even with the memory that had come back to him his recollection of driving this area was very dim. He did remember enough geography to know that he was heading toward Kansas from New York about as directly as was possible.

“Hey, Luke Munsen — why don’t you wake up and tell me where we’re going?”

“I’m not honestly sure. All I know is that I’ve got to get there.”

Andy giggled and rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “What kind of an answer is that? I tell you, Luke Munsen, you’re pretty darned strange sometimes.”

Luke felt himself smile in spite of himself. “I guess I am.”

There was one other alternative — an alternative he hadn’t even considered. He could just leave the boy behind, let him find his own way back to Brooklyn. Right. Abandon a twelve-year-old boy in the middle of nowhere. Luke felt a guilty inward shudder for even letting himself think about the idea. No matter what they were heading into, it was better than letting the poor kid try to shift for himself five hundred miles from home.

“How’re you going to get anyplace if you don’t know where you’re going? I don’t know about you sometimes, Mr. Luke Munsen.”

Luke looked up and saw their waitress standing at the edge of the booth where they sat, waiting to take their order. She was a relief, in a way, since she gave him a good excuse to duck out of the conversation. And at the same time he found himself a little embarrassed at the idea that she might have overheard them.

“We’re having a little trouble with the meat this week,” she said. “You might want to order fish. Or cheese.”

Luke looked at the woman carefully, tried to figure out what she meant by trouble. There wasn’t any clue in her expression.

“That’s okay. I want a banana split.” Andy said. “With extra whip cream and chocolate. And an extra large Coca-Cola, too.”

The waitress turned to Luke, raised an eyebrow as if to ask whether he thought it was wise to let the boy order that much dessert without a meal beforehand. Luke shrugged; it didn’t seem to him that a banana split and a soft drink could do much harm to a child who’d already lived through death. He ordered a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich for himself, and Christine asked for a sandwich of some kind or another — the names on the menu were all silly enough that it was hard to tell what some of the sandwiches were without reading the descriptions.

When the waitress was gone Luke looked out the window beside him, at the parking lot, and tapped his fingers softly on the wood-grain formica of the table top. He didn’t know what he was heading toward, didn’t know what would happen when he reached it, but there was a deep feeling in his gut — a certainty, almost — that it would be very bad. And since the boy had appeared that foreboding had become even worse — darker and more certain.

He turned, looked the boy in the eye. “What am I going to do with you?”

Andy rolled his eyes again. “Whatever you want to do, I guess.”

Luke frowned, shook his head just slightly without really meaning to. “No, I’m serious. This is too dangerous. It’s not right for you to be with us. And there isn’t time to take you all the way back home. Do you have any relatives in this part of the country? Anyone we can leave you with? And if you don’t, what in the heck are we supposed to do with you — drop you off at an airport and let you wait until the planes start running again?”

Andy sighed. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m supposed to be here.”

“Oh, come on. Supposed to what? That’s nonsense.” Luke lifted his right hand to his face, tried to rub some of the tension out of the small muscles just above his eyes. “Be real, Andy —”

Christine coughed. “He is, Luke.”

It wasn’t the first thing she’d said since they’d left New York. Not quite. It was the first time that she’d actually said anything substantial.

“He is supposed to be here. Wasn’t he in your dream?”

Luke felt uneasy, unsettled, as though the world were pressing in on him. He could see the waitress coming from across the room with his coffee, and he knew that as soon as she got there the question would fall into the space between moments and he wouldn’t have to answer it. And that sounded like a good thing — a very good thing. But it wasn’t right.

“No. He wasn’t.”

“He was in mine. There’s something important that he has to do.”

And then the waitress set his coffee on the table, and asked them if there was anything else she could get them, and by the time they’d all said that there wasn’t, the unease had faded away.