Fire (62 page)

“Help them understand that it’s all right, that they’re alive and fine and that nothing will happen to them, just as long as they stay calm. All they have to do is press their way out, press out and dig up through the soil. And soon enough they’ll be free.”

It wasn’t true, of course. There wasn’t any way to be free of that deep a grave soon enough. But the screams from the graveyard were spreading from one to another like an infection. If they panicked it’d be worse, much worse. She knew because for just a moment before the soil above her had finally opened away into daylight, she’d felt that panic. And she couldn’t bear to hear it coming from the throats of others.

She was out of the car, now, outside and on her feet and opening the door beside the creature. Taking his hand, helping him out of the back seat — with only half his cooperation — leading him to the graveyard.

“Make them calm,” she said. She could hear panic in her own voice as she spoke. “Please make them calm.”

The creature nodded, looking down at the dry grassy soil. Uneven ground, where Christine could pick out the shapes of coffins where the dirt had settled around them.

And he knelt, set his hands on the ground. Still and quiet for so long that the boy and the dog both stood still to watch and Christine almost began to lose heart, lose hope —

Then the screams began to quiet. Slowly. And all at once they faded, and the only sound was a small child buried somewhere in the earth and crying.

“We need to help them out,” she said. Looked around, fretting. So many graves.

The boy groaned. “How we going to do that?” he asked. “We haven’t got any shovel. I can tell you there ain’t one in that trunk. What you want to do, scrape them all open with our fingernails?”

She didn’t have an answer.

“All of those people in the graveyard back in Brooklyn got out pretty good on their own. Probably easier to push your way out of the dirt than it is to dig your way into it.” Scratched his head. “Course, none of them started screaming, either. What do you think started that here? Pretty strange, if you’re asking me.”

She wasn’t sure what to say or think; she could feel the panic easing, but it was still in her blood.

“You okay? You don’t look so good, you know.” He waited for her to respond, but before she could find the words the boy was talking again, about another subject entirely. “Maybe it’s him that set them off.” He nodded toward the creature again. “All sick like he was, and hurting so. Kind of like how when one person starts pushing in the subway all the rest of them get crazy, too? You know what I mean?”

Christine didn’t know. The fact was that all the experience she had of subways had come in the last week — they were something that had happened to the world in the time that she’d been gone from it. She found them strange, and incredible, and more than a little frightening. If the boy wanted to use them to prove his point, it’d end up lost on her. Christine didn’t say any of that; she wasn’t comfortable admitting her ignorance. Instead, she nodded.

“That’s exactly what it is, I bet you.” He walked over to where the creature still knelt on the ground. Set his hand on the creature’s shoulder in a way that was somehow almost fatherly — Christine had calmed enough that the sight was almost comical. The creature looked up from the ground, into the boy’s eyes. “You’ve got to calm yourself,” Andy said. “Make yourself stop hurting. You’re scaring people — almost like they can feel it, too. Huh?”

Yes. The creature nodded.

A few feet away — not far from where the creature knelt — the soil was stirring as the first of the graveyard’s dead began to rise up out of the earth.

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OUTSIDE THE GATES OF LAKE-OF-FIRE

“I need a cigarette,” Ron said. “Damn it do I need a cigarette.”

Luke didn’t pay him any mind. He was too busy staring at the tall, tall chain-link fence — the one with three feet of razor wire on top of it. Trying, Ron guessed, to figure out how they were going to get over it.

Ron didn’t like it one bit.

Come on, he thought. There had to be some sort of an alarm on that fence. No matter how high it was — no matter what kind of meanness they put on top of it — this far in the middle of nowhere no fence could be secure without someone standing guard in front of it. Unless it had one hell of an alarm system. Forget spies and saboteurs — they’d have teenagers sneaking around here on weekend nights, cutting the chain-link with tin snips and necking beside the silos.

And if there was an alarm, it wasn’t likely they’d get a hundred yards inside the base before there were soldiers — or whatever they were — all over them.

And what was the point of that?

No point at all. No point that Ron could see.

There Luke was, staring at the hyperthyroid chain-link fence, transfixed as though it were the Oracle at Delphi. Half a dozen times since they’d started away from the wreck of the old Dodge, Ron had spoken to him. And near as he could tell Luke hadn’t heard a word he’d said, not even once.

So now what? Any moment now Luke was going to come up with a stupid and dangerous idea for getting past that fence. Something that’d get them into shit deep enough for swimming in. And Ron would have to follow him. He’d come far enough along already that he had an obligation to see this through to its . . . conclusion? End? Whatever was coming. Ron wasn’t in the grip of a vision the way Luke so obviously was. His gut still knew that they were heading toward something with finality. Death, or maybe real rebirth. It was best to stay with Luke, and be what use he could. Important things were on the verge of happening. If he had a contribution to make, Ron thought, he wanted to make it.

“We have to climb it, I think,” Luke said. “The wires ought to be over there, in the ground a few inches on the other side. Which means that we can’t dig under it without disturbing them. And if we had wire cutters — which we don’t — we’d set them off when we went through. But if we climb up to the top, and jump down, the jump can carry us clear.”

Luke waited for him to answer, but Ron didn’t say a word.

“So? What do you think?”

Ron cursed. “I think you’re out of your mind. What do you expect me to think?” Looked away; looked up and across at the fence. “What about the razor wire up there?”

Luke shrugged. “Just be careful of it. Push it aside. Isn’t sharp in every direction.”

Right.

There had to be a better way to get inside. An old gate, maybe — chained shut and unwatched. A neglected spot where the fence had fallen of its own accord. Something — anything. Before he could say anything Luke was already halfway up, moving fast and determined toward the crown of razor wire, and when Ron told him to wait up and give the whole business a little more thought, Luke just ignored him.

“Come on, Luke. This is crazy. Wait up.”

He was up toward the top of the fence now, carefully widening a gap in the wire.

“You’re going to break your neck, jumping down from there.”

“So? Are you coming or not?”

Not, Ron thought. But he braced himself and started up the fence anyway. It wasn’t a time for taking a stand over no issue at all. Besides, he wasn’t really afraid of getting hurt trying to climb over a fence. Worse things had happened to him over the last week. His real objection, as much as he had one, was to getting himself hurt for no good reason.

He was half-way up when Luke Munsen lifted himself up over the razor wire and jumped; Ron saw the cuff of his slacks catch in the nest of sharpened wire, and for a moment Luke was falling askew toward the ground, heading toward a hard fall on one leg, and something was going to break, and —

No, Luke landed rolling, hard and grunting but not disastrously. He grabbed his knee and rocked back and forth, hugging it for the longest while. It wasn’t disjointed and there wasn’t any blood, and in a moment, Ron knew, he’d be well enough to walk. Had to be.

Ron wasn’t that lucky.

Oh, he got to the top well enough. But that wire — it frightened him. Intimidated him. So where he should have kept calm and made himself the master of it, he shied from it, tried to press it away from him with the tips of his fingers.

It was a serious mistake.

Ron pulled the gap wide with his left hand, heaved himself up and onto the rail at the top of the fence —

And the wire slipped.

Slipped just a bit. That bit was enough; one of the thin-sharp razors molded into the wire slid into the soft flesh of his thumb and split it wide, wet-bloody and burning painful as it dug a gouge out of his thumbnail from the underside.

And Ron swore. And pulled his hand away, instinctively, to lift it to his mouth to suck the blood from the wound — except it never got that far. Because as soon as he let go of the wire it sprang back, returning to its original position — and where it wanted to be was where Ron’s shoulder was now. Razors dug through his shirt and into the meat of his upper arm, shredding flesh and skin, and the wire was cutting and wrapping and digging all around him, folding him into a bird’s nest of knife-sharp metal.

And Ron didn’t think; he jumped.

That was his second mistake.

What he should have done was calm down in spite of that pain and the fact that his own blood was leaking out all around him. Calm down, and carefully but firmly take hold of the razor wire and press it away from him. And, once it was under control, hold it down with the sole of one shoe while he jumped.

He didn’t think. He panicked, jumped straight into the thick of the razor-wire snare that surrounded him.

Later, he decided that he’d been lucky. It could easily have been a lot worse than it was.

The wire didn’t tear the skin off his face and chest, even though there was every reason that it should have. And it didn’t manage to cut his throat and tear his neck open, even though it ought by rights to have done that, too. It did leave him a cut-bloody mess from head to toe, and one long loop of wire wrapped around his left leg as he jumped and turned his outward leap to an arc that slammed him bloody-face-first into the fence. As he hit the fence the wire loosened, sprang free, and released him — leaving him free to fall head-first to the ground eight or nine feet below his skull.

He was lucky there, too, when it got right down to it. The fall only knocked him senseless — it didn’t split open his brain-case, crush his neck, or any of the other more interesting things that it could have done. And when he’d finished falling and his body lay still and face-down on the grassy Kansas soil, Luke Munsen came and helped him back to his feet.

“Can you move?” Luke asked. “Can you run? You’ve hit the trip-wire. If they’ve got people watching their security equipment, they’ll be here any moment.”

“Uh.” Luke was holding out his hand. Ron reached up, took it, tried to sit up, but the throb and the swirl inside his head were too much. His stomach clenched, dry-heaved; his body went slack and sank back toward the ground.

Then Luke was pulling him up, lifting him to his feet anyway, and Ron’s knees managed to lock instead of buckling, so suddenly he was standing in spite of himself.

Luke levered himself under Ron’s arm, set his own arm across Ron’s back. “We’ve got to try to get away from here,” he said. “Come on. You can try to walk, can’t you?”

And Ron could, he could try at least, and they started off. All but stumbling, at first — Ron with his knees locked and tottering from one leg to the other and over again, almost as though he were walking on stilts. He kept going, and as he went his balance and his sense began to come back to him. By the time they’d covered thirty yards he was walking under his own steam, and Luke gradually eased away and let him support himself.

“You set the pace,” Luke said. “We need to run, if you can. Move as quickly as your legs will let you.”

“Yeah.” The dizziness was clearing the way a fog clears as the sun warms morning air — fading gradually, but even as slow as it was it was a faster recovery than he had any right to expect. Soon, Ron thought, he’d be able to run. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”

And it was true: two minutes later they were moving at a quick trot, and the spot where they’d climbed the fence was out of sight in the woods, and somewhere back there and off to their left Ron could hear the sound of men moving through the woods, shouting.

“Let’s hope that none of them is much of a tracker,” Luke said. Ron grunted to answer him. How far did they have to go? he wondered. Wondered where Luke was leading them — not for the first time. And wondered whether there’d be as much cover along the way as there was now — a woods in the middle of Kansas when they’d seen nothing but grain fields for hundreds of miles was a real blessing. How much of a blessing like that could they expect? And why was the base here wooded in the first place? That one, at least, had an answer he could guess. The trees were here to keep prying eyes from having a clear view of the base. They’d been planted — and watered, too, most likely — by the Air Force.

They came to a trail that led through the woods, but Luke ignored it. Avoided it — actually turned them away, to the left, and led them into a thicker part of the woods at an off angle to the trail.

Three hundred yards; four hundred. Ron could still feel a little of the daze from his fall. Only a little of it, and even that was fading quickly. “Where are we going? How much farther?”

Luke ignored that question.

To be fair, there was good reason for him to ignore it.

Because that was the moment that the woods faded out around them, and opened out into the concrete runway.

A runway crowded with a score of airplanes.

Big, substantial planes — military planes, to judge by their markings and by their drab green paint, but shaped more like airliners than like combat planes. Transports? Ron thought that was the word for them.

The striking thing wasn’t whether or not they were transports, or their markings, or even the planes’ color.

The striking thing was the fact that there was a missile strapped to the top of each of them. Great, long missiles — each very nearly the length of the plane that bore it. Too large, certainly, to fit inside the plane.