Firechild (10 page)

Buena suerte!
Luck had smiled again—or maybe not. He couldn’t guess what was happening back in the town to jolt the street and raise that smoke and frighten lawmen into flight. He shook his head and started walking up the hill the way they had fled. Behind him, another car came fast from the town. He dropped into the weeds and watched it pass. Another police car, red lights flashing. In pursuit of the fugitives? Or joining their flight?

When it, too, was gone beyond the ridge, he left the road and climbed toward the trees. Another car came howling from the town, then a line of them behind it.

He walked on, hoping they would have no time for him, till he heard tires screaming and turned to see a blue sedan veering off the highway as if to follow him.

Again he fell flat. It raced past him, up a side road he hadn’t seen. Watching from the weeds, he saw it lurch to a stop in front of the house. The driver ran inside. Minutes passed. Behind him on the highway, he heard tires shriek again, heard the slam and jangle of a collision, then a hollow boom. Yellow flame exploded in the valley below, where a car had gone off the bridge. He heard far screaming. Nobody stopped to help.

When he looked again, people were running out of the house on the hill. A woman and two small girls. The woman carried clothing in her arms. The larger girl dragged a piece of luggage too heavy for her. The smaller carried something, perhaps a doll. They tumbled into the car. It came skidding back down the hill and spun into the traffic too close to another car, which braked and lurched and rolled into the ditch.

The woman drove on. A man crawled out of the overturned car. A young woman followed. They tried to roll it upright. Failing, they climbed back to the roadside and stood waving desperately. Nobody stopped.

Back at the house, a garage door was rising. A red pickup shot out. It stopped. A small boy in jeans ran after it. A dog came from somewhere and jumped after the boy into the pickup. It roared past him to the highway, slowed as if to stop for the waving couple, lunged ahead before they could reach it. They ran on in the ditch, the woman limping.

Why the panic? He shaded his eyes, peering back toward the town. Thicker smoke had veiled the grain elevator and those far tower buildings. It had begun to spread a low brown cloud against the sky, but he found nothing more alarming, nothing that should have frightened people from this isolated dwelling.

He turned again to frown at the stream of refugees. Should he follow? Not yet. Whatever the terror, it could hardly be anything deadlier than the chair waiting upstate. He walked farther from the road and stopped again to watch the house and the town and the speeding cars. Nothing moved around the building. Smoke floated slowly higher over the town. Smaller clouds boiled up along the highway, where he thought more wrecks were burning. The passing traffic thinned and finally ceased.

He walked on toward the dwelling. It was cream-colored brick, the grass around it neatly mown. Red roses bloomed beneath the windows. No sound came from inside. He tried the doors and windows; they were locked. He went on to peer into a wooden shed sagging into ruin beside the windmill tower. The dirt floor was stacked with rusting farm equipment, but the absent owner had been no farmer. Weeds grew high in the abandoned field beyond a sagging barbed-wire fence.

The windmill was out of use, replaced by an electric pump. Vanes were gone from the motionless wheel, staves broken from the side of the empty wooden water tank on a platform beside the tower. He climbed the old wooden tower to look back again toward Enfield.

Smoke had blotted it out. The highway was empty until a lone motorcycle burst out of the smoke. It came past him, driven fast. Two people on it, a woman with a small child clinging behind her. A police car stopped them on the ridge, red lights flashing. The woman waved her arms, as if protesting. They turned at last, raced past him again back toward the town. He lost them in the smoke and heard another engine throbbing.

Searching for it, he found a brown and green military chopper flying from the north as if circling the town. It hovered over the cop car and then came on to sink again toward the house. He dropped flat on the platform, hoping not to be seen.

“Warning!” He caught a hoarse electronic bray. “Enfield area is under emergency quarantine. Perimeter is closed. Entry and exit forbidden, on pain of death. Warning!”

The chopper drifted on, the bullhorn fading.

In the winters, his father had trapped coyotes in the hills above San Rosario. He used to pity the caught animals, limping on broken legs to drag the trap to the end of the chain and crouching there, snarling, waiting to be clubbed to death. Even if they gnawed their feet off to get away, they could never run well enough to overtake game again. They were going to die.

He felt trapped like those coyotes, dodging something deadlier than his father’s club. That guarded perimeter had become his own strong chain. Even if he somehow broke it, even if he managed to escape the law and the chair, even if he somehow got back to San Rosario, he would still be a hunted animal, crippled for want of friends or money, still a three-footed coyote.

Watching the empty road and the distant chopper, he decided to stay where he was. At least till he learned why people had run. He climbed down the tower. With a rusting hammer he found in the shed, he pried a screen off a back window, broke the glass, and climbed into a bedroom. It had belonged to one of those little girls; clothing she’d had no time to pack lay tossed on the floor, the doll’s bed was empty beside her own.

He explored the house. The boy’s room: the walls were covered with posters of planets and the moon; model spacecraft hung from the ceiling. A larger room with pink curtains and a huge water bed; he sat on it to feel the waves, grinning when he thought of his hard cot in the jail.

An office desk stood in an alcove off the hall, the door of a wall safe ajar. Searching hopefully, he found no money. A badge in the wastebasket carried a photo with a number and a name.
Guadanolo, Rudolph, CPA. Comptroller, EnGene, Inc.

In the den, a
M*A*S*H*
rerun was on the TV. It stopped while he stood there. Blank for a moment, the screen came lit again with an empty desk under a rainbow arch lettered
ENFIELD
TODAY.
A thin little man in a dirty sweatshirt limped to the desk.

“I’m Marty Marks—” He was out of breath and trembling, half his face streaked with grime and blood as if from a fall. “Trapped here alone in the tower newsroom. Reporting what I can. Which is pure hell! Hell I never imagined! Fires burning out of control. Panic in the streets. People dropping dead—I can’t guess why. All I can do is tell what I see. As long as I can talk.”

Marty Marks told what he had seen. Fire and panic and sudden death. Nothing he said explained anything. He had been alone all afternoon, since the rest of the staff ran or died. He had fallen on the stair, climbing to the tower room—people were dead in the elevator. Rasping out the story, he kept pausing to peer anxiously behind him. Abruptly, he stood up.

“Excuse me, folks. Got to use the bathroom. And get another gander. Be right back—if I live that long.”

He left the picture, but Pancho Torres sat a long time in Rudolph Guadanolo’s easy chair, watching the empty news desk, trying to understand what he had heard, to decide what to do. Was he still too close to Enfield? Or was he safer here, where others might fear to come?

He held his breath to listen. No sound except the TV humming faintly. But the killer,
la muerte,
would it be soundless? He pushed on again through too much silence to find the front door of the dwelling. He opened it cautiously, peered outside. He saw nothing moving— but would the killer be visible? Dread spurred him back to climb the windmill again. The cop car had vanished from the ridge. The road lay empty. Thicker smoke veiled the town and that tower studio.

“Por qué?”
He shrugged. Why watch, when he had no notion what to watch for?
De nada.”

He went back to the house. Inside, the fragrance of food drew him to the kitchen. Two loaves of fresh-baked bread had been left to cool on the counter. A baked ham, glazed with pineapple slices, was still warm in the oven. Golden oranges in the refrigerator, and cold beer! He sliced the ham and bread to fill a plate, opened a beer, carried them back to sit in Rudolph Guadanolo’s enormous chair and watch the humming TV.

A feast unknown to the Enfield county jail, yet he ate it almost without tasting. For Marty Marks soon came back to rasp another jittery report. Watching from windows and the terrace, he had seen fires burning nearer, panic grown madder, unseen death knocking more people down.

“No cause I could see.” A baffled shrug. “No damn sign of anything to kill ‘em.”

Pancho Torres left Marty Marks babbling in his panic and went back to climb the windmill again. The sun was already setting. It lent a lurid tinge of red to the smoke over Enfield, but the nearer landscape seemed strangely peaceful. The highway wrecks had burned out. The little valley lay green and still, a few spotted cattle grazing toward the road.

Nothing else was moving. The air felt cooler. He had eaten again, and he didn’t have to run. Not yet, anyhow. Marty Marks seemed strangely far away. If thousands had fled from the dying town and thousands more had fallen in the streets, he found that he didn’t really care.

“No importa,
” he muttered.
“No hay hace nada.”

Nothing mattered anymore.

Nothing could, after all they had done to him. After the bullets that left Hector torn and screaming on the prison wall. After Deputy Harris and the Enfield county jail. After too much of too many gringos.

They hated and despised him, hated and despised all his people—humble, hungry people who had to break their cruel laws to sneak into their ugly country and slave for little pay at the hard and dirty and dangerous jobs they were too good to touch. A rotten race, rotted with too much money and too much ease and too much pride in their own stuffy righteousness. A ruthless race, defying the world with their frightful nukes and corrupting his own misused people with the billions they paid for illegal drugs they needed to endure their rottenness.

He couldn’t really care, not even what happened to him. For he was the trapped coyote. Even if he gnawed off his foot and somehow got back to San Rosario—

“Nada. Todo por nada.”

Nothing to hope for anywhere. Nothing whatever. His father dead of want and toil, his mother of some illness the
curandera
couldn’t cure. He had sent money to Jose and Estrella when he had money, but they hadn’t even written since he went to prison. Eduardo, the fat
haciendero
now, Eduardo would probably alert
la policia
if he ever did get back.

He had no reason to run. Not just yet. Whatever demon had escaped from hell to kill Enfield, it was no worse than Enfield had earned for itself, no worse for him than the jail and the chair upstate, surely no worse for anybody than the nukes sitting in their pits, ready to kill the world when a computer went wrong or some loco punched a button. He went back inside to open another beer and watch that empty desk on the TV screen.

14

To Sting the

Glavni Vrag

A
nya Ostrov’s reports brought Boris Shuvalov from Moscow to take command of the KGB response. Traveling as Tass correspondent Yuri Yerokhin, he was accredited to the Soviet Mission at the United Nations and assigned to cover debate on a proposed U.N. resolution for international control of all genetic research.

A driver waited at Kennedy to take him straight to the Manhattan headquarters of Roman-World-Mart, Inc. Arrangements had been made for Anya to meet him there. He found the office suite deserted while attorneys for the company and for Julia Roman battled over the liquidation of World-Mart and funding for the new Soviet-American foundation. A security man escorted him down empty corridors to the top-floor boardroom and asked uneasily if he had heard anything new about “the Enfield holocaust.” He hadn’t.

Anya was late. He swept the room for hidden bugs, using an electronic detector built into the small tape recorder he carried in a black attaché case. Finding none, he sat down to scan the
New York Times
for anything about the disaster. He found long columns of alarmed editorial speculation and hollow-sounding ap
peals for public calm, but no more facts than Tass had reported.

He looked at his watch and walked the floor and stood at a window, looking far down on Fifth Avenue and across at the sunlit towers beyond it, wondering how soon the genetic monster might come to empty the buildings and stop the racing traffic forever. Unless it could be tamed—

He shook his head and walked the floor again.

An ugly assignment. He hadn’t asked for it, or really been persuaded by Bogdanov’s assurances that the Center would remember his service to the party and the people. The risks were too enormous.

The CIA and the FBI and military intelligence were swarming everywhere like dug-up ants. The American immigration officers had grilled him too skeptically about his background in biology and his experience in journalism, as if they already suspected his true mission. His U.N. cover was flimsy, and he was sweating before the guard brought Anya in.

Her long-limbed allure had always tempted him, but now she looked travel-worn, her greenish eyes hollow, her face pinched and pale. She offered her hand and tried to smile, but he stood scowling until the guard was gone.

“You’re late!” he snapped at her then. “Have you got the files?”

“I’ve tried everything.” She sank into a chair. “I’m afraid we’ll never get them.”

“Fail, and you’ll regret it.”

“The world will regret it.”

“Forget the dramatics,” he advised her sourly. “You aren’t playing Chekhov.”

She was fumbling into her bag. “At least I have one more report from Scorpio.”