Fire (51 page)

“And you?” she asked. “Can you walk?” She nodded toward the far side of the clearing. The hardness melted from her eyes as the subject changed, and what was there now was nothing but concern. Concern for Bill that made him feel shy and warm inside, and to hell with the pain in his gut. “They’re going to march us north. Can you walk? For miles?”

Bill gritted his teeth. Carefully brought his fingers to his abdomen, probed at the edges of the wounds. And found to his surprise that they were far less tender than he’d expected — he was healing even more quickly than he had before. “It won’t be a problem,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

That was when the NK lieutenant came back and started barking orders. Which weren’t any more comprehensible than anything he’d said before, but after a moment his grunts were prodding Bill and the other three with their bayonets, and there wasn’t much question about what they wanted. They were marching them out toward the dirt road. And once they got there, they’d head north, toward the NK lines.

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They hadn’t gone three miles when the NK lieutenant broke his leg.

It was the stupidest thing, the way it happened. About twenty minutes after the shelling had started up again — nothing heading in their direction, but wherever it was going was close enough to make a godawful racket. They’d just gone round a big bend where the road swerved to avoid a mountain, when one of those shells hit ground a damn sight closer than any of the rest had. And the lieutenant, still walking, looks over his shoulder to get a fix on exactly where the hell it hit dirt. Doesn’t spot it right away, and keeps walking — and then whump, down he goes like a sack of potatoes. It was a real sight; Bill only barely managed to keep himself from laughing. The lieutenant barked again — real shrill this time, like he was in some genuine pain — and everyone stopped, and Bill got a good look at exactly what the hell had happened: the idiot had tripped over a long, thick root. A root that the bulldozer hadn’t torn loose, but just pressed flat — and not even all that flat. Damn thing stretched across the road like a trip wire thick around as a man’s wrist.

Which was when Bill saw the NK lieutenant’s leg. Which wasn’t just busted, but broke so bad that the bone stuck out of his shin white like a candy cane when you suck all the red stripes off it. Except that there was still a lot of red, red blood, but it was oozing down out of the wound and through the center of the bone where it was broke.

Quite a sight. Awful grisly, too.

The lieutenant was howling, now, screaming bloody murder as he caught sight of the bone and the torn flesh poking out of the leg of his trousers.

How in the hell had he managed to get a break like that, just tripping over some stupid root? Bill couldn’t imagine, but there it was in front of him, no denying it had happened, and there wasn’t anything else in the lieutenant’s general vicinity but the root and the road and one hell of a lot of dust. Bill shrugged, inwardly; the man had a talent for self destruction, he guessed.

What in the hell were they going to do about it? That leg needed splinting and taping. And quick. And if the lieutenant was going to go anywhere he was going to need a stretcher. And somebody to carry it. Well, Bill thought, it wasn’t his problem. All he had to do was sit back and enjoy it —

And that was the moment that the cavalry finally decided to come over the hill.

Well, not over the hill, strictly speaking. It came round the bend in the dirt road, and it wasn’t cavalry in the traditional sense of the word, but a division’s worth of tanks, and infantry right there with them. It was a relief, plain and simple: one little turn in the road and suddenly he wasn’t a prisoner any more and he wasn’t stuck between lines any more and —

And the NK lieutenant, his eyes all wide and crazy with pain, was shouting orders. And he was picking up his AK-47 from where he’d dropped it on the road. And he was turning around and shooting at an oncoming division of tanks, like he seriously believed he had a chance of taking it out by himself —

And then the rest of the NKs were shooting, too —

And all Bill had time to think before the Americans opened fire, all he could think before he died for the third time was shit —

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OUTSIDE CHESTER, ILLINOIS

Hours, Ron thought. Hours and hours. He’d been running for so long that his sense of time was twisted in on itself and all but lost.

It had been morning when they’d left behind the scene of the massacre at the summer camp, and now it was dusk. And all that time he and the creature and the dog had run. As quickly as they could — or maybe it was as quickly as Ron could. The creature ran always a few paces ahead of him, and more than once Ron had seen him look back at him nervously. He didn’t actually go so far as to tell Ron to hurry — he knew Ron was doing his best — but he was worried about the time they were making, Ron could see that. Well, Ron was running as fast as he could — his body could probably move a little faster if it had to, but every time he tried to speed up . . . after a few yards he felt the world fading away around him, felt himself blacking out because his lungs couldn’t possibly draw in enough air to cope with running that fast for any length of time. Even as it was he could feel himself on the edge of dizziness.

They were in a half-suburban area — mostly undeveloped woods, but built-up enough that there was always a house in one direction or another that you could see through the trees. They turned, to avoid a hill, and suddenly the trees thinned and Ron could see a river up ahead, big and wide and muddy-looking. And a bridge — for a moment Ron almost thought they’d been running for hours just to loop back around on their own trail. Until he saw the river below the arching towers of the bridge. And realized that wide as the other river had been, this one was powerfully wider. Wide as an inland sea.

The Mississippi. My God — the Mississippi. How long have we been running? And how fast? We’ve crossed the state of Illinois — crossed it at the narrow tip, sure, but crossed it all the same.

There were more than a dozen helicopters swarming above the bridge. Maybe more. Three or four others hovering above the river’s near bank.

Too late. The words came from the creature. Too late. He slowed to a walk, stopped.

Three helicopters broke away from the ones above the bridge and moved toward them.

And the creature just stood there, looking defeated. Waiting for them to take him away, or kill him, or do God-knew-what it was they intended.

“No,” Ron said. “You can’t just give up. You’ll get yourself killed. Get both of us killed.”

There isn’t any hope. Black, horrible things wait for both of us.

“Like hell they do. Nothing’s happened till it’s happened. I won’t let you give up.” The helicopters were getting close; Ron looked around, looked for cover. There was plenty of it, of course — the trees were thin enough right above them that he and the creature could easily be seen from the air, but there were places they could hide only a few yards away. Which wouldn’t get them safe for long, of course. Not as long as they could be tracked by radio. What they needed, Ron decided, was a forest dense enough to block the radio transmitting from inside the creature’s leg.

Not that there was any such thing.

It was an idea, anyway. At least he was still thinking.

He put his arm on the creature’s back, pressed hard enough to get him moving again. The wounds were all but healed, now. “Come on. Let’s get out of sight.” And the creature followed him, even if he was still filling the atmosphere around them with despair.

Radio. Radio. How to hide from radio? Then he remembered what happened to the AM receiver in his car every time he drove under a concrete overpass. We need to hide . . . under something massive. Like the bridge over there, or somebody’s basement or — Christ, I don’t know. He wasn’t even sure that a basement would be enough to hide them from the radio. And if it wasn’t, and they were found, there wouldn’t be any hope of running. They’d be cornered. And even if they could hide, they couldn’t hide forever.

They were on the side of the hill, now, under the cover of a tall pine. Overheadthe first of the helicopters roared by low enough that the wind of its passing made the tree’s trunk sway.

The dog cowered and whined at the sound of it.

A dozen yards farther up the hill was a brick split-level house. It had to have a basement, Ron thought. Or he hoped it would. The only choices he could see were running and going up to the house and asking the people who lived in it for sanctuary. They’d help the creature. Everyone they’d come across had wanted to help the creature. Everyone but the people who were trying to kill them, anyway. And running was hopeless in broad daylight with the creature dispirited.

Ron looked at the creature, pointed toward the house. “They’ll help us,” he said. And started uphill, running from tree to tree for cover.

He was only half-way there when he stumbled over the iron man-hole cover and fell face-first into the pine straw that covered the ground.

That’s what he thought it was at first: a man-hole cover. And what was a man-hole cover doing out on a hill in the middle of nowhere? Even under the circumstances it was a curious enough thing that he took a moment to examine it as he picked himself up. And, of course, it wasn’t a manhole covering at all.

How could it have been?

It wasn’t a man-hole covering, but the surface cap of a bomb shelter.

That was clear from the words stenciled in raised iron:

THORNDYKE MFG
.

AIR-RAID

WARREN

Just below the words was the round three-part fallout shelter symbol.

The creature was a few feet in front of him, looking back as he waited for Ron to get to his feet.

“Give me a hand with this, huh? — I think we’ve found our sanctuary.”

Another helicopter passed by above them. It seemed to pause for just an instant, and Ron had a momentary surge in his low gut when he thought the thing was going to hover up there and start shooting at them. Then it roared forward again; after a few seconds it was only another noise in the distance.

What. . . ? The creature stood beside him, now, looking down at Ron as he tried to pry the plate out of the iron circle it rested in. There was a hand-hold on the edge meant just for that purpose, but years of dirt and debris were settled into it, made it hard to get a good grip on the metal.

“It’s a bomb shelter,” Ron said. “The walls inside it ought to be thick enough that they won’t be able to track that thing in your leg. These things are always made of thick, reinforced concrete, lined with lead. Radio waves can’t get through it.”

Finally, the metal lid began to give. Slowly at first; it was heavy, and the sediment around the edge held it tightly in place. When he had it an inch out of the hole Ron slid his left hand under the crack, so that he could use both arms to lift, and as he did his right hand nearly lost its grip — he only barely managed to keep enough of a hold on the thing to keep from smashing his fingers. “Are you going to help me with this or not?”

And the creature stooped and lifted the iron lid out of the ground as effortlessly as Ron would have picked up a dinner plate.

“Christ. If it was that easy for you, why didn’t you lend me a hand sooner?”

The creature didn’t answer.

Where the lid had been now was a metal-lined shaft with a steel ladder that ran down along one side. And the shaft was made of lead, not iron — it wasn’t corroded, the way the iron lid had been, and it was soft enough that the lid had left deep scratches in it. Fifteen feet deep, or maybe twenty; it was hard to see, what with the sky getting dusky and light falling at an angle across the hill. “We’ve got to climb down in there. You coming?”

The creature nodded.

“Good. I’m going to go down. As soon as there’s room, you follow me — put the lid back on once you’re inside; if they come by this way on foot we don’t want it too obvious where we’ve gone.”

Ron lowered himself into the shaft, started to climb down the ladder. And saw Tom the dog staring at him cow-eyed and already looking abandoned.

There was no way they were going to get that dog down the shaft. No practical way.

“Christ.”

The dog could shift for himself, couldn’t he? It was the creature they were looking for, and maybe Ron, too. If the people who were chasing them even remembered that there’d been a dog with them, odds were they wouldn’t recognize him.

“It’ll be all right, Tom, boy. We won’t be down here forever.”

The dog snorted.

“Well, be that way. We’ll be back anyway. And don’t hang out right here waiting for us, huh? You might draw their attention to the place.”

The dog stared, poker-faced.

“The hell with you, then. No time to argue with you.” And he started down again.

He was only a couple of rungs from the bottom when he heard the creature climb in above him. Stepped off the last ring, on to the concrete floor at the base of the shaft, turned and saw a door that reminded him of a bank vault — massive and lead and instead of a doorknob it had a wheel like a steering wheel eighteen inches across. He put his hands on the wheel, braced himself, and threw all his weight into turning the thing; at first he only barely managed to budge it, but then finally it began to move and after a few inches it spun easily.

He looked up just in time to see the creature lower the iron lid onto the top of the shaft, and then suddenly it was terrifyingly dark. He forced himself not to think about the darkness, turned the vault-wheel around and around until finally the door swung inward.

There was no more light inside the bomb shelter than there was inside the shaft. Ron wasn’t sure whether he’d expected that there would be, or even whether he should have expected it. No one had been here for years, maybe even for decades; if anyone had left a light burning surely the bulb would have gone out by now. If they were lucky there’d be electricity — though he’d never heard of a battery that could hold its strength for years without maintenance, he guessed that there had to be such a thing, and if there was then a person who could afford to build a fallout shelter in his backyard could hardly afford not to have it. He stepped forward — behind and above him he could hear the creature descending — groped along the inside of the doorway for a light switch.