Fire (13 page)

He might never have died if he’d just curled himself back up inside his seat and slept out the rest of the day.

But Luke Munsen was rattled. All he could see was that he’d got himself into someplace dangerous, and that he had to get himself away, get to someplace safe and secure and . . . sheltered. The idea of it almost made Luke laugh — here he was, fearless Luke Growl-in-the-Faces-of-Fire-Breathing-Congressmen Munsen, burying his head in the dirt in the middle of a disaster. But what was he supposed to do, hike out to Scott’s place on the Upper East Side, go on with his weekend tour of New York as though nothing had happened? Not likely. Chances were better than even that Scott wouldn’t even be there when Luke got to Manhattan; the man had probably got his car out of the garage and got himself way the hell out of the city early last night, when the news had first begun to sound like real trouble.

I should have listened to that news. If I’d listened to the news and done what was sensible I’d be home now. Listening to the radio and trying to decide whether I wanted to try to get to the lab at a decent hour.

God. I wish.

The truth was, of course, that if he hadn’t had a ten o’clock flight to make, Luke Munsen likely would have been in his lab the night before way into the small hours of the morning. And he would have died in the explosion that killed Ron Hawkins and the Beast.

He had no way of knowing that. He had, in fact, no way of knowing of the explosion.

Nor any way of knowing that his work had already begun to spread a plague.

So he set off across the broad, vacant runway, ignorant of his fate and far less afraid than he ought to have been.

In the near distance, just beyond the fence that set off the runway, he could see shabby houses, dingy apartment buildings. Cheap-built hotels that weren’t cheap at all. Yes, this was La Guardia; Luke recognized the seedy, half-suburban architecture of this part of Queens.

It was an hour and a half before he saw another living soul. Forty-five minutes of that time he spent on the grounds of the airport, trying to get out.

The terminal buildings themselves were empty and locked up as tightly as they could be; locked far too well for Luke to get inside them. The runways were all fenced away from the streets outside. The fences were tall and topped with razor wire; the gates Luke could find were all chained and padlocked. Finally, in desperation, he looped his briefcase handle through the shoulder strap of his carry-on bag and climbed the fence in a spot where the razor wire had rusted through and fallen away. When he was nearly to the top of the fence the strap over his shoulder came loose and both his bags fell to the ground. He was about to go back for it when the palm of his left hand snagged in a jagged, rusty flaw in the chain link, and suddenly he needed something to be furious at, and the only thing he could think of was the bags that had dropped, and he said to hell with them, I don’t need those goddamned clothes, those papers, anyway.

The truth was, of course, that he didn’t. Luke Munsen didn’t live long enough to need another change of clothes. He certainly didn’t live long enough to need those papers.

Five minutes later he was on the far side of the fence, outside the airport. Heading toward the nearest of the hotels, which wasn’t too hard since the hotels were the only buildings in this part of Queens that were more than a couple of stories tall.

The hotel was locked up as dead and dark as the terminal had been. It took him another twenty minutes to find out that the three others he could spot were just as closed.

Where in the hell is New York hiding? Has the whole city run away from itself?

It just wasn’t possible — New York was too big a place to evacuate overnight.

Everyone must be holed up in his apartment, hiding under the bed.

The way I ought to be.

He looked out onto the deserted highway that ran past the front of the closed hotel. What am I going to do now? Hitchhike to Manhattan? Hitchhike — hell, there’s no one on the road to give me a ride, even if people did pick up hitchhikers in this state.

That was when he saw the bus. Far away, a pinprick in the western distance. A battered New York City bus, and even from here it looked to Luke as though the thing had driven all night through the fires of Hell.

THE FIRES OF KANSAS

Literally: the thing was scarred by fire. Scarred by graffiti, and rocks. And when the bus got close enough for him to see it clearly Luke was certain that some of those words on the side of the bus weren’t written in paint at all.

No. Those words, he thought, were written in blood.

BUS TO HELL

I’m going to die if I get on that bus. I know it. I won’t live three hours.

He was right about that, too — almost to the minute.

He didn’t flag the bus down — he had enough self-control to keep himself from that — but he stepped out toward the curb, to watch it, and the driver stopped for him.

No, he thought, I can’t do this. He tried to turn and run from the thing, but his legs ignored him. He wasn’t in control of himself any more, not consciously. Something from deep in his id ruled him, some bit that lived in absolute terror of the emptiness in the streets. The bus was something horrible, his id knew that. But there were people inside it, at least, people that for all it knew were the last left alive in the world.

As the door opened the driver turned and smiled at Luke vacantly. The man’s face was . . . wrong. Vacant wasn’t the word to describe him; there was expression on the driver’s face. Just not any expression Luke had ever seen on a human face in all his life. Like the expression he always expected to see on the face of an alien when he saw science fiction movies on television — only TV aliens were never that alien. Almost always when you saw those movies you got the impression that the costume designer was thinking about a dog or a horse or some bug, and not an alien at all.

Luke coughed. “I need to go to Manhattan,” he said. “Does this bus go there?”

Luke waited for an answer with one foot on the bus’s first step and the other still on the pavement. The driver didn’t say a word — he just kept staring at Luke, strangely and quietly, his face painted and glowing with an expression that Luke could not understand.

A shout, from somewhere inside the bus: “Are you coming or ain’t you? Get on the goddamn bus or get off of it. We ain’t never going to get there, you keep us standing here in the middle of Queens.”

Without even thinking about it, Luke stepped forward and up, and before he even knew what was happening the bus’s door had slapped closed behind him, and the driver was slamming the transmission into gear, and they roared out and away so hard that the force of acceleration slammed him into a rail.

Oh my God — what have I done?

The bus was still accelerating.

For a moment he imagined that the bus somehow was bound for hell, imagined that he’d already died and reached some bizarre afterlife. And if this bus is going to hell, does that make New York purgatory? Even with circumstances as bad as they were, that thought nearly managed to drag a laugh out of him. No. I’m not dead, and I’m not on a bus to hell. That’s crazy thinking. Things are bad enough already; the last thing I need to do is go out of my mind.

The man behind the steering wheel was definitely a New York City bus driver. He had on an MTA bus driver’s uniform, and even though he was bone-thin and very tall it fit him perfectly. His jacket was filthy and torn in places, but unquestionably authentic. The man, Luke thought, was just in shock — that was why the strange expression, the filth, why he ignored Luke’s question. Why, for that matter, the man was out here driving his bus today in the first place. That had to be it — the man was in shock and driving his bus aimlessly through the city.

Maybe, Luke thought, this was for the best, even if the driver was crazy. Sooner or later they’d have to end up someplace where the hotels were still open. It might take all day to end up in a place like that, but even if it did that had to be better than trying to walk to Manhattan. Which was the only other thing Luke could think of doing. He sighed, and relaxed a little; grabbed hold of the support pole near his left hand and climbed the last two steps to the floor of the bus.

Once he had his footing he reached into the back pocket of his slacks, digging for change to pay his fare. But when he finally had the money in his hand he saw that the fare box had been vandalized, and that there was no way to put the quarters into it.

“Should I give this to you,” he asked the driver, “or — or what should I do with it?”

The driver ignored the question, just as he’d ignored the others Luke had asked.

Jesus. What am I doing?

This is crazy — just plain crazy. I’ve got to get off of this thing. He reached up and over, pulled the cord that made the
stop requested
sign light up over the driver’s head. “I’d like to get off, I think. If that’s okay.” The driver ignored Luke, and the sign, too. Worse than that, the man pressed even harder on the gas pedal, and the bus began to accelerate again.

I could yank him out of that seat, and stop this thing myself. The man was slight enough that Luke thought he could probably do it, even though he was pretty far out of shape himself. I’d probably end up wrecking the damned bus — No. The only thing to do is sit this out and see where I end up. If nothing else, he’s got to run out of gas sooner or later. Make myself comfortable and try to enjoy the ride.

He put his money back into his pocket and took a look at the interior of the bus. It was a grim sight — grimmer, even, than the outside had been. There was the graffiti, of course, and the three seats that hung slack and broken from the wall. A two-foot gap in the floor near the well of the left-rear tire.

The sight that hurt worst of all was the people. The wreckage of the bus was nothing compared to them.

Luke had seen people like them before. They were homeless, bag ladies and derelicts. Junkies. Twenty, maybe thirty of them. There weren’t many people like that in Tennessee, but Luke had seen them all the time during the three years he’d spent in New York getting his doctorate. Now that he was looking at them, Luke thought he could smell them, in spite of the air rushing through the bus’s open windows.

Over there, five seats from where Luke stood, was a one-eyed woman who looked like she’d steeped for months in her own filth. Her socket was unpatched, open to the air; corruption oozed out of it and leaked down toward her nose. Two bulging plastic garbage bags lay on the floor near her feet, the contents of one of them spilling out, littering three feet in every direction.

A half-naked man clutching an empty bottle of Ripple had splayed himself across the floor and fallen unconscious. Crusty-dried vomit clung to the hair of his chest; his pants were half unzipped and stained badly with urine.

I don’t belong here, damn it. I don’t. I’m whole. I make a decent living. I’m doing something with my life.

There was an enormous woman sitting in two seats near the back door of the bus. She weighed four hundred pounds, to judge by the look of her, and her skin was as white and viscous-looking as the underbelly of a fish. Too much of that skin was showing; her clothes couldn’t possibly cover all of it.

Don’t think about it. If I think about this I’ll go out of my mind.

³ ³ ³

Chapter Eleven

WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE JOHNSON COUNTY, MISSOURI

Damn those Russians, Paul Green thought. Damn each and every one of them to the deepest pit in hell.

How on earth was he supposed to have a war with Russia with those people throwing a revolution? It was exasperating. Infuriating.

Just now the plane was descending, getting ready to land and refuel at some damned Missouri Air Force base or another. It was good to be in the plane. Here in Air Force One Green was connected for the first time in days to the hub of the nation’s defense apparatus. They still ignored his orders, but when he sat in this plane they could not keep him from hearing.

That’s how he knew about the Russians, and about everybody else. The Russians had tried to launch their nuclear arsenal as soon as they’d seen his two missiles heading at them over the Arctic Ocean, and their luck had been even worse than his own: not a one of their warheads had got more than a mile from its silo. Most of the missiles had exploded inside their silos, in fact; all of their missile bases had been destroyed, and destroyed with them were a third of the Russian Army and most of the Russian Air Force.

I should’ve expected it. They told me about this, too. The NSC man who’d briefed him last had gone into detail about the subject. The Russians didn’t have good technical people, not in any numbers. Lots of good Ivory Tower-types, theory people. But no technicians. Not even on the lowest levels; they had to import their electronics from places like Singapore and South Korea. The Defense Department had a throttle on that — even the stuff coming out of Singapore — and they managed to keep the Russians from getting anything much more complicated than a video game machine. The Russians still bought the stuff, and bought it in quantity. Those game machines were the best they could get, years ahead of anything they could produce themselves.

And, of course, the situation in the Russian Army’s missile silos was exactly what you’d expect, given the circumstances. There was complicated stuff inside a missile’s guidance system, and while they did manage to patch the things together, their maintenance people tended to do more harm than good. There was even one story that had managed to find its way into the Western press, about a technician (if you could call him that) who’d tried to clean rat droppings out of a missile’s guidance system with a water hose.

In a fit of fury after the bombs had blown up in their faces, what was left of the Russian Army had turned on the political apparatus and marched into Moscow. Even those divisions stationed in Transcaucasia were making their way back home — though it wasn’t certain that they’d make it; a whole trainload of Russian infantrymen had died in Ingushetia, killed by a bomb that exploded as their train wound through the mountains. Intelligence wasn’t at all certain about that bomb; there was considerable suspicion that it hadn’t been a bomb at all, but an antiaircraft rocket launched at the train by a renegade unit of the Russian Army.