Fire (63 page)

No one had to tell Ron what those missiles were, or what they were for.

Like . . . like pregnant birds, Ron thought, and almost laughed to himself at the idea, in spite of its absurdity. And wrongness, too — no pregnant bird could carry its womb above its spine. It would defy the architecture of vertebrate anatomy. He’d seen something like those planes before — photographs of the Space Shuttle in Newsweek, bolted on top of a 747 being flown cross-country. That much he understood; you strapped one vehicle on top of another when you couldn’t get the first to fly. When you wanted to put it someplace, but couldn’t get it to go there under its own steam.

And they weren’t just relocating those missiles. They could do that with a truck — the things weren’t so wide like a Space Shuttle that you couldn’t get them onto a highway. It had to be that the missiles weren’t working for one reason or another, and someone wanted to use them anyway. Who? Someone never meant to have his hands on such engines of destruction — else they’d be used as they were designed to be. The people who were supposed to be entrusted with such things would know how to work them as they were supposed to work, and how to fix them when it became necessary.

Thick black electric cables ran out from the forward doors of the jets, up into the missiles’ warheads. When Ron looked closely, he could see the bolts that would hold them fixed in place against the wind. Those were there to ignite the bombs, Ron thought. They had to be. These planes weren’t bombers — they were kamikaze planes. On a far more destructive scale than that of the original kamikazes.

Atomic bombs. Someone wants to destroy the world.

That was an exaggeration, certainly. Twenty atomic warheads couldn’t destroy the world by themselves.

Could they?

There wasn’t any way for Ron to answer that question. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, anyway.

Without realizing what he was doing, Ron had wandered out onto the runway. He walked among the planes impossibly jury-rigged and sewn together.

This is why we’re here, Ron thought. This is what drew Luke to this place. We’ve got to stop these things, before they can get off the ground.

He turned to Luke, to tell him that he understood.

The man was nowhere in sight.

Off in the distance there was an endless-looking caravan of cars and pickup trucks and vans pouring in through one of the gates of the base. Ron thought he could see men in uniform in the backs of the pickups. At this distance it was hard to be certain exactly how they were dressed.

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Chapter Forty-Five

NEAR ST. FRANCIS, KANSAS

It took Leigh Doyle hours to get to St. Francis from the overgrown field. Two hours? Three? After a while she lost track of time. One road became another and another, and there were no street signs. Maybe there had been once. If there had then someone had moved them. Maybe teenagers out on a drunken ride. Maybe a scrap-metal collector adding to his hoard.

She found St. Francis, finally, by accident — when the rutted dirt road she drove on gave out behind a convenience store. Where she decided that it was time to give up her pride and get some directions. Pulled her rent-a-car around to the front of the store, to the parking lot — and saw through the dusk the glow of the Lake of Fire. The glow that consumed the entire eastern horizon. Leigh parked, got out of the car . . . and found herself transfixed by the aurora, unable to do anything but stand and stare.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Who? Oh. The clerk. Standing behind the counter, inside the store. Talking to her through the glass doors that hung open to admit the warm, dry summer air.

“Um.” She blinked, trying to clear her head. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “That’s where the bombs fell, isn’t it?”

“Sure is. What a night! You should have been here. Or maybe you shouldn’t have.”

She looked at the man — or was he a boy? He looked very young. Cocked an eyebrow at him. Found herself drawn to glance back at the bright horizon; resisted the pull. “Tell me,” she said. “I’ve been away . . . since it happened. Away from the country.”

The boy (man? young man?) smiled. He had a handsome smile; easy, relaxed, hiding nothing. “What’s to tell? Boom! in the middle of the night, and light so big that everybody with his eyes open for thirty miles around goes blind, and the noise so loud that went on so long. And I get up out of bed expecting to see the Angel Gabriel here to tell us it’s the end of the world. After a while the light that’s bright as day fades down to dusk, and in the morning everything facing east is bleached like from a dozen summers. And there’s a gouge in the ground,” he nodded toward the Lake of Fire, “big as the Great Salt Lake. It isn’t full of water; it’s full of fire.”

Leigh tried to imagine herself there at the edge of a nuclear holocaust, waiting for the second coming. And pressed that image away from her heart.

“Lots of us around here were sick for a while, after the blast. Lately I’ve been getting better. And some of those who lost their sight can see again.”

Leigh thought of the stories she’d read in the papers on the plane from Finland. Stories of resurrection and miraculous healing happening all over the world. Thought of the telephone call that had come from a man who’d left behind nothing on this earth to resurrect. Maybe, she thought, the Angel Gabriel was coming for them — coming to announce the end of the world. She bit her lip. It was a crazy idea. Leigh knew that the world was a more rational place than that, even if she did write for the National Interlocutor. And especially so; working with material that bordered on fantasy made Leigh uneasy about her grip on the world. Because of that uneasiness, she overcompensated, and cast a skeptical eye on things that give most people pause.

She cleared her throat. “I need directions,” she said. “To St. Francis, Kansas. Can you point me there?”

The young man smiled again. “I could, I guess. There isn’t really any need. ‘Cause you’re already here — this is St. Francis.”

Leigh blushed. “Oh.”

“Anybody in particular I can point you toward? You here to visit?”

“Ah — no. Passing through. You could steer me toward the county road — the one that runs along the South Fork Republican River.”

The young man pointed east. “Take 36 here a hundred yards. It’ll be your second left. You sure you know where you’re going? The county road is only barely passable; comes close enough to the Lake of Fire that you could toss a penny into it from your window. You’d have to toss it pretty hard, but you could do it.”

“I know,” she said, “I know.” And then she was thanking the man; getting in her car. Waving good-bye, starting the engine, leaving. Ten minutes later she made that final right turn, onto
OLD ROAD
, a grassy, dirty thing that very nearly wasn’t a road at all. Half a mile more and there was no farther she could go, because the road fell away over a bluff that overlooked the Lake of Fire. And just as the President had asked her, Leigh Doyle shut off the engine of her car, rolled down the window, and waited for the obvious to come to her.

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CHEYENNE COUNTY

That monster was one cool guy. Better than any old Frankenstein, or Dracula — even cooler than the living mummy they got to see in the museum back in New York.

Or, at least, that’s what Andy Harrison thought. Look at him there, Andy thought: standing in the middle of a graveyard, whispering down into the ground. Oh, sure, he wasn’t making any sound. Whispering was the word for it all the same — it wasn’t like he spoke any words or anything, but you could hear his voice in your head if you listened real hard. Hear it even if he meant you not to. And Andy could hear it even now, when he was trying to talk to the people coming to life down inside the graves — when that old monster wasn’t trying to let himself be heard by anyone on this side of the dirt. It wasn’t easy, but Andy could hear it when he tried.

Be calm, the creature said. He was staring hard down at that grave where they’d heard the little kid crying just a little while ago. Press yourself up through the soil. It isn’t hard.

They listened to him, too. Already there were two dozen people who’d crawled up out of the graves because the monster had told them how. Mostly they were sitting on the ground or on their tombstones, staring off into space and looking dazed and confused. Andy wondered if there was anything the monster could do about that. It seemed an awful shame to him — people getting to be alive all over again, and even though they were alive they were dead to the world. Andy kind of suspected that there wasn’t anything the monster could do about it. The kind of confusion that was all over those faces wasn’t anything that was the matter with a person’s body — it came from shock, from adjusting to important things that had suddenly changed. Andy had seen it before; it was the kind of thing you saw a lot of out in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Especially on the faces of junkies and crack-heads. There wasn’t anything anybody could do about that kind of shock but get used to the world all over again.

Except for the shock, though, most of them looked pretty normal. Or healthy, anyhow. It was hard to think about people as being normal when they were filthy with dirt from head to toe, and so pale and pink-skinned as though they’d never-ever been out in the sun. (Which, of course, they hadn’t — at least not since they’d got to be alive again.)

The thing that made them look strangest of all was the way they were dressed.

Or not dressed, when you got right down to it.

Which was to say that for the most part they were naked.

Oh, most of them had clothes — some clothes, at least. Fancy stuff, like you’d wear for a wedding, or to go to church or to the theater.

The kind of fancy clothes people get buried in. (Which made Andy think: Hey, what are those undertakers trying to do — turn heaven into some kind of an opera? And he got a good chuckle out of that, even if it did make Christine look at him pretty funny.) Fancy coffin clothes, only they’d all gone to rot, and they were falling off of all of them — all except that man over there, who’d got himself buried in a polyester leisure suit. Andy made a note to himself about that: when the time came for him to get himself buried — if it ever did come, what with death turning so transient lately — when his time came, he’d make sure they buried him in something plastic. No way he was going to come back to this earth buck naked. Not Andy Harrison, no sir.

Andy scratched his head, tried to figure if there was anything he could do about the problem. Realized that there wasn’t, because they were in the middle of nowhere, and Luke was the only one who’d brought any clothes, and his were all used and seriously sweaty. Shrugged, and turned his attention to something else.

Which, as it turned out, was the dog.

That dog was pretty all right, Andy had decided. Tom was his name, wasn’t it? Yeah, Tom — though to Andy’s way of thinking, all dogs were named dog, first name, middle, last. Tom the dog was staring at Andy. Which meant, Andy guessed, that the dog had finally got bored with watching holes in the ground dig themselves.

Well, then, heck. If the dog could stare at him, Andy could stare back at the dog. Which he did: stared at the dog wide-eyed and intense, and tensed up his body like he was about to pounce.

“Dog,” he said, pretending like he was some kind of a snarling cat, or maybe just an angry squirrel. “Dog — I’m gonna getcha!”

That set Tom the dog off real good.

Real good. The dog barked loud and high, half in challenge and half in fear. And took off running toward Andy about as fast as Andy had ever seen a dog run. Not to say that Andy had seen that many dogs, growing up in Bed-Stuy and all. Andy turned and ran from him, dodging between the gravestones and changing direction just enough to throw the dog off. And when, in spite of his ducking and dodging, the dog was almost right behind him, Andy stopped dead in his tracks, turned around, lunged toward the dog. Shouted “Boo!” and the dog shrieked in terror — shrieked, yelped, and took off in the opposite direction.

Andy laughed and laughed and laughed — doubled over laughing and finally lost his balance completely. Fell onto the ground with its broken dirt and holes that had mostly filled back up with dirt as the dead people crawled out of them. Still rolling with laughter and now the dog was on top of him, licking his face, and rolled into one of those half-open graves, trying to get away from the dog’s too-long slimy tongue. Which left him covered with dirt that caked up where the dog’s licking had wet his face.

Looked up, and saw the monster staring down at him.

A look on his face. . . . A puzzled look, Andy thought it was. Like he was stretching inside, trying to think in a way that he didn’t usually think.

Andy stood. Brushed away some of the graveyard dirt that covered him. Looked around, and every grave that he could see was a pit of sifted earth, and behind that a headstone. Which meant that the monster was done — he’d done it. Actually gone and woke the dead. Or at least every one of them that he could find.

The monster was still staring at him — his strange, alien face all scrunched-up and intent.

Ron . . . Hawkins? Ron Hawkins? Made a sound that was like a sigh, but wasn’t a sigh at all. The one who traveled with me.

A pause. The monster was waiting for an answer, Andy thought. As though he didn’t really know what a name was, and wanted Andy to let him know if he’d got the concept right.

“Yeah,” Andy said. “That’s his name. He told me.”

Where has he gone? Has something happened to him? He isn’t nearby.

Andy frowned. “He went off with Luke Munsen, a long while back. When you were still sick — but not too much before you woke up.” He pointed. “Went that way. Don’t know how far. Didn’t say. Though maybe it couldn’t have been all that long a way. Luke took off at such a pace that there wasn’t any way he could go too far before they both ran out of steam.”

The monster shook his head; he looked grim.

No. Not far. I know where they’ve gone.

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