From the Fire IV (6 page)

“The really pathetic thing, see, is on both sides of town, outside? 
The highway.  The air got sucked out of the sky, and all these people, they
asphyxiated.  Didn’t get burned, they just drowned without air, if you know
what I’m saying.  Shockwaves blew all these people into piles and waves, like
corn and heaps of crumbled chaff.  Course those motes of chaff they large,
they’re all heads and hands and pieces stuck in still-tied shoes.

“Many those unburned bodies, they’re over to west and east of
town, but it’s … I don’t know.  It’s beautiful, if you can understand me in my
blasphemy.  No?  They’re all laid out like patterns made by the wind, like a
painting made from the dead.  A painting for anyone looking down from the sky.

“A painting by the Archangel.

“Okay.  So I was going, coming along to you.  Rain starting then,
yeah.  But things aren’t as wet or cold as you might think.  Lot of the
scavengers and flies and such?  All dead, people aren’t rotting so much as
they’re drying out.  All you see when you’re driving, threading through all
those cars with the hugging people piled up squished between them, worse thing
there is the bodies with the gases.

“Sun brighter, when the winds snuffed out.  For a time, he more
crimson and laughing down on Black Hawk.  This before the burning.  Bodies
bloating and popping, sometimes you’ll be driving and you’ll see a pile of the
dead, twisting and contorting and their mouths opening to the sky.  Like they’s
moving.

“There’s no such thing as zombies, I tell you that right now.  Just
those dead drying out and their gases, their rotting and their last breaths all
releasing themselves.  Some of them
do
move ‘fore they rot all away.  It’s
like a mist, some of it with the rot in it that you can see.  Red crystals in
the air, ever rising.

“And through the cracks in your windshield, you taste it, too.

“Made me drive right through that ruin all right quick, let me
tell you.  Ain’t much left to my burned-out car now, but with me at the wheel
she’s a battering ram.  Yeah, two frantic stops for business but still, I made
it through.

“And then there’s here.  Up in the cave.  Those people out in your
waterfall, your secret tunnel, your shaft and your ladder down?  I think I
follow those damned souls almost all the way here.  You see, I followed that
police car.

“That’s right.  Who you name Pete, remember, he was alive back
then.

“I saw the wink of his car’s tails.  Up in the distant cinder-light,
that rising crystal mist, as I was first coming down into Black Hawk.  They, in
his car, was on the other side.  As I was descending and forcing my way in,
that car he was going up 119 the other side of town.  You’d think you couldn’t
ever see something like that, miles away.  Not even with the dark alight and
Black Hawk all in twilight after storm.

“But that police car, he was pushing dead cars aside, glittering
in the red come down in a rain from out that bloody sun.  He was pushing the
dead aside and making waves, making a wake in the wreckage, moving slow. 
That
what I saw.  The hollow of almost-clean upon the road.  I’m sure I even saw
little specks, half-burnt-up people, come hobbling out of that car to siphon
gas from other wrecks.

“Yes, he had several people in that car with him.

“I decided they were wise, you see.  Not only was it a police car,
but whoever those people was, they’d
survived
.  How many specks got back
in that car, after they siphon and leave one of their own tumbling out behind
upon the road?  I don’t know.  I decide I’d follow them, but not close.  Not so
close that they might see.

“Oh, no.  The living, you can’t trust no one now.  You need other
people, but there’s no one you can trust.  We, you and I, we may be nearly the
last two good souls to breathe.”

* * * * *

“All right.  We can talk about that.  You’re right, I hiding that
from you.

“Not as many died as I care to say.  No.

“Thirteen times from out of Denver, I meet the living.  It goes
like this.

“You roll down your window and hold your breath, you call people
by names.  If you don’t know their name, you just pick one.  ‘Mike?  Mike, is
that you?’  See, because the
real
people, they’ll talk to you and scream
for help.  But most of the people ain’t real, most of them are
things
.

“Most of these
things
, the once-people still crawling out
there, they ain’t men or women or kids no more.  They’s of the Beast, the human
is all burned out of them.  They’s the hollow men.

“There’s nothing inside them not burned away, but hate and hunger
and rape and desperation.  See, the most primal needs, the instinct of the
dying?  They kill as much as they can, before they die.  That’s the hate now
born inside of them, eating them alive.

“They eat everything that moves.  They’re
worse
than
zombies, they’re the living.  This ain’t no fantasy, this is the real horror. 
What people really are, when all that civilization is burned away and there’s
only agony, no hope?  Hate, that’s all that they are.

“I don’t stop for most, especially after one.  I see a girl
stooped in the breakdown lane, where US-6 become CO-119.  Yeah.  Not older than
ten, she was eating another soul.  Yes, that is what I am saying.  And she ‘look’
up at me, my engine sound.  Her eyes were all blown out.

“I tell you, if ever you hail the crawling, you call out a name
and they don’t rise and answer, you drive away.  Fast as you can.  You run, you
shoot if you have to.  They’s of the
Beast
.  They howl and chase and
kill you now, if ever they still can move.  It’s like the world is full of
devils now, and all of them devils are dying, and their only hope left is to
kill you, to drag you down with them before the end.

“Oh, I know my mythology.  That’s what keep us sane to read, that
fantasyland when I was in ‘Nam, me and Frankie Kilbride.  Yeah.  They say
Charon, old Ferryman of Hell?  He demand a gold coin from the dead for the
comfort of the waters, the comfort of the netherworld.  The damned without any gold
to pay him for, old Charon he leave them on the shore forever, forever to know
pain and to know what they become.

“I believe, truly I believe those of the Beast now are upon that
shore.  They standing there, poor as they can be.  Like that girl eating her
daddy or someone by the highway.  And we, the living souls? 
We’re
the
gold.  You know what I’m saying?  These things, they will kill you if they buy
any peace from taking you down with them.  I do believe that.  That’s all now
they ever have.

“So you shoot them, and you purify.  They not answer to no name? 
‘Hey Mike’ and you get no answer?  Then the soul is gone, then you burn them
and send them down.

“I do it for you, if it need be.  I owe you all.  I do shoot well.

“Well, I was saying.  I followed that old police car, but never
too close.  I drove through that hollow vein in traffic and ruin they had
made.  See, they pushed a path for me.  Miles out, it’s not like you’re going
to lose somebody you’re tailing.  Worse problem is that they’re going to see
you, coming up behind.”

* * * * *

“One more living, I did see, after the eating girl.  Another soul.

“I see her rise up from the cornfield of the dead, where that
little wildflower airport used to be.  Athanasiou?  Pretty name.

“She a girl, she wave to me.  I open my car, yes.  To that one.  I
take her in for a night.

“Amelia was her name, she still a soul and she remember.  She had bottled
water and some bags of nuts from a vending machine, all tied up in a shirt, and
I the car.  Must have been eighteen.

“She start at once trying to take off her pants and she offer
herself to me.  I say keep that on, I only need food and drink.  She wary then,
like
then
it’s a trap.  It’s like that now.

“She told me things, after I refused her.  When I didn’t touch
her, she told me things she overheard in the airport at the end, things that I
won’t share with you.

“It’s the world.  Everyplace in the world is just like here now.

“But Amelia, she didn’t make it here.  And you, Mrs. S.-G., you
don’t
,
you don’t stop, even for any Amelia or any man like me.  You cannot tell how
people are going to react.

“Some I meet early on, when I was guilty still about the pregnant
woman and trying to help, they run up and hug you, ‘Oh thank God, you real,’
and they treat you like you’re their mamma and their daddy and their baby all
rolled up in one.  And they go to sleep crying tears of joy, and then they die in
the night.

“See, those ones, they was
waiting
.  They was waiting to
hear it was okay for them to let go.  But others, they give you the eye like
they going to kill you slow, only slow because they’re not hungry yet.

“And you don’t
know
.  You get Amelia giving you hugs, you
get an old woman giving you that feasting eye while she’s scoping you with a
rifle.  You just can’t assume anything anymore.  Best case, you’ve got to go
reign over those who you find as if you are the Queen o’ Death, you show them
you dominate, until your gun is in their mouth and they certain you’ve the
advantage.  And only then, if they know you strong enough to kill them, can you
ever
dare to show the weakness of compassion.

“Like you just did, those days ago.  Coming out there suited up in
the ladder-shaft, Queen o’ Death reflecting red right out of you, covering me
with some submachine gun straight out of James Bond?  You didn’t hold that
right, but you was close, my critical eye will tell you that right now.  See,
that was
good
.  You meant business, you the death dealer come to save
me.

“And now, you’re the nicest person left alive.  That I promise
you.

“So all right, if you understand.

“I follow that police car, I lose them up here on these old sweet
mountain roads, or what is left of them.  I took some wrong turns, after I laid
Amelia down on the road.  Best peace only I could give her, up above all the
others.  I saw no other living soul.

“One thing I did see, three deer walking out of the tattered
forest, one doe with her face without any fur, the other two behind with
milk-white eyes.  Those two behind, they had seen the sky, they were blinded. 
And this, this one with the face of velvet rose, she was leading them, blind
and all limping, they … oh.  Oh, I cannot tell you.

“Pray good thing I got lost, following that police.  Because
otherwise I would have been right behind them, caught up too close in that
canyon to know any better.  In that dead end up in here, if they see me right
behind, I don’t think it would have gone well for me.

“There was a gunshot.  They had thrown out a woman, I am sorry to
tell you.  Yes, here in your canyon.  First, I think they all might have stood
out and drunk to her like a farewell or something, there was liquor bottles
still upright in a circle.  She’s draped now over the water pump.

“Right after that gunshot, I was driving up close behind them,
just after they pull away.  Think the dust they kicked up peeling out, that
barely hid me.  They almost left a kid screaming there, that woman was his
mommy, I believe.  But in the end as they drive away, he limp-run and he got
back in.  They was sorting out who was living and who was dying, see.

“Somehow, they knew this shelter were here, and that it might not
be enough for holding everyone.

“So that police car, your Pete, he slow just a little and he go under
the waterfall.  I hid that night, sleeping in my own car with one eye open. 
Yeah, you really can do that after ‘Nam, I do assure you.  I hear things, shots
and screams, but I keep sleeping lest I die.  That I’m sorry.

“I come after them through the waterfall, day after, and that police
car is full of the dead.  Piled.  And the trunk was bulging, I don’t like to
think about that.

“But that police car, maybe it still run?  Its doors are open and
the water now pooling up over the floorboards.  Help me, I did see all those
dead.  I did reach in and pull out one shotgun before I come into your tunnel. 
Promise you, I left it by that fallen Good Man you name Sheriff Pete.  It his
gun, his car my guide to find you.  I honor him, that gun be his forever now.  Brother
mine, I honor him that.

“And here I am.  Think you can figure out the rest.

“No.  No, I do not want to.

“Getting tired.  So tired.  But Mrs. S.-G., no I will not call you
Sophie any longer ma’am, much more now you stop asking me, love.  I thank you. 
Now hear me to the last.

“When you leave this place, with me or without me, the dead out
there?  After poor Pete who I cover, well the bodies up in that cave, that
police car, the one by your SUV?  Lady, all I can tell you is look away.

“The Beast is terrible in his decay, no crime of man nor woman too
great for him to suffer and to show you.  Look away.  Ain’t no soul who should
have to see what those pathetic creatures became before the end.  Just you look
away ever after, say your grace, lest you be scarred forever.