Fire (20 page)

He had to go up, he decided. Not straight up — even if it was stable above him, which didn’t seem likely, it’d be like climbing through a jungle gym in the dark. Dangerous. The thing to do was stay on his hands and knees, stay with the ground or the floor or whatever it was below him, and try to bear upward.

It would work. It would have to.

Twice as he crawled across the chamber his hands reached into something wet that wasn’t water — something too thick, too slippery to be water.

The upward slant of the ground led him into another crawlway, this one a good deal wider than the one he’d awoke in. A couple of times he had to crawl or twist himself over debris that blocked his way, but mostly the path was pretty clear. And after a while, he spotted light up ahead of him. The light helped a lot; just knowing it was there made him move more quickly and with more confidence. He was out pretty quickly after that; less than an hour after he’d returned to life, Ron Hawkins was standing on his feet again, in the light and air, rejoining the world of the living.

His car was still parked in the far corner of the parking lot. The institute’s main building was a wreck behind him. There wasn’t a soul in sight — not even a guard, in the booth — and his car was still sitting there as though nothing at all had happened. If he got into it and drove home now, he wondered, what would happen? It was day out — look at the sun: it’s midday, for God’s sake — which meant that he’d been among the missing since late last night. Did they even realize that he’d been in the building? Did they think he was dead — ?

That was when he noticed his uniform.

Which was soaked with blood. Dried blood, now, for the most part. More blood than Ron had ever seen in one place before. His blood, and he knew it. He wanted to tell himself that it couldn’t be his blood, that he was fine, he felt fine, and how could it possibly be his blood? It had to be somebody else’s.

His gut knew that it was his blood.

Knew it.

It couldn’t be, he thought. Bleeding that much would kill a man. And he was alive, wasn’t he? He was alive. Ron didn’t have the first doubt about that.

The blood must’ve come from someplace else — like that stuff he’d got on his hands as he’d crawled out of the rubble.

When he looked at his hands he saw that they were covered with some thin, oily fluid. God knew what it was, but it wasn’t blood. He tried to wipe the stuff off, onto his slacks, but they were too crusty with scab-dried blood to absorb anything else.

I’ve got to clean myself. This is disgusting.

He found the spigot on the side of the administration building still working, and used it to clean himself as much as it was possible without a bar of soap. When he was done he walked out to his car and changed into the clothes he kept in the trunk for those nights when he felt like going out after work.

And felt human again, at least to a degree.

He stretched and sighed and opened up the car and sat on the front seat trying to figure out what he was supposed to do next. Going home was the obvious thing, but for no reason he could identify it didn’t seem exactly right. Cleared his throat, in spite of the fact that there was nothing to clear from it.

Reached up above his head and took the shirt and slacks from the roof of the car, where he’d found them. And looked at them.

There were neat, regular tears along one side of the shirt, as though some massive set of claws had tried to poke through his ribs.

Or as though his ribs had broken and burst out through his chest, tearing his shirt.

No. It was a crazy idea. He felt fine.

He tossed the crusty clothes onto the seat beside him, put his hands on the steering wheel. Tried to think. Not that it was any use trying.

Without even thinking about it, Ron turned the ignition far enough to let the radio come on.

The little comic book was still on the dashboard, where he’d tossed it days ago. He leaned over the steering wheel, reached across the dash, picked the leaflet up. It was warm to the touch — warm enough that for half an instant the sensation spooked Ron — but that was because of the way the windshield trapped the sun, forced it down onto the dash. Nothing strange. Nothing to worry over.

There was something wrong with the radio. Instead of the news, the only sound it made was a long, monotone whine. It was off station, somehow, Ron assumed. He’d never understood how it was that radio stations wandered away from their frequencies like that, but he knew it happened. He reached down, twisted the dial . . . peculiar. The whine wasn’t an off-station whine at all. It was a pure, clear tone, something someone was broadcasting on purpose. Like that high-pitched noise that the radio stations always sent out when they were doing the “This is a test. This is only a test,” business — when they were testing the emergency broadcast network.

The emergency broadcast network?

Ron twisted the dial, searching for the sound of a human voice, or music, or something. Anything. Anything normal and ordinary at all. His hand moved so fast that he ended up skipping over half a dozen clear stations too quickly to hear what was on them. He made his hand steady, turned the dial back — and heard a man recite the station’s call letters and say that it was half past noon on Sunday. A moment later a record started, something rich and complex and classical that Ron didn’t recognize.

Well, it was ordinary radio, and that was a relief. Classical music wasn’t anything you expected from an Emergency Broadcast station.

Wait: Sunday?

No. That wasn’t possible. It was Friday — it had to be. It was Friday, because last night, before the explosion, he’d gone to work and it had been Thursday evening. Ron knew that. He hadn’t been asleep any three days. Two days, whatever. He had enough of a sense of time to know what he’d lived through.

He glanced over at the blood-crusted clothes he’d woke in, and refused to even consider the possibilities that forced themselves at him.

Whether he wanted to consider the evidence or not, his gut was already beginning to understand what he didn’t want to believe.

If he’d been dead for three days, there was no way his sense of time would be able to tell him that the time had passed. The same way a clock that’s had its cord unplugged has no way of knowing that hours have gone by when it’s plugged back in.

It’s the end of the world. Just like in that comic book. It’s the end of the world, and the dead are rising from their graves.

And I’m one of the resurrected.

No — it’s got to be a mistake. The man on the radio made a mistake, that’s all. It’s Friday, and the man’s tongue slipped as he spoke.

He opened the comic book, leafed through it, trying to get his mind away from the radio and the clothes, and half a dozen other things that he didn’t even want to give name to.

The comic book.

Its crude drawings and ill-chosen words had something powerful about them, now, in a way that they hadn’t when he’d read the book the other day. Like prophecy, somehow — like somehow the man who’d written the thing had seen what was coming.

No, that’s wrong. It really is wrong.

The music stopped, and a news report came on the radio.

And as Ron listened to it, the whole world seemed to tumble down around his ears. It was Sunday. No question about that. Thursday evening — about the same time that the building had exploded around Ron and the Beast — the President had tried to fire off the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Only a few missiles had actually been launched, and of those few all but one had been aborted and landed harmlessly in the ocean.

The one missile that hadn’t fallen into the ocean hadn’t gone where it was supposed to, either — it had fallen in Kansas, and now there was an enormous crater where there had been two whole counties. As the news had hit, people had started rioting in the streets.

Not just a few people, but millions of them.

Yesterday one of the mobs had found the Vice President, and they’d lynched him and left his body hanging along the side of a highway.

The army kept trying to get through and cut him down, so that the poor man could be given a decent burial. The soldiers hadn’t been able to get close enough to reach him, not even with their tanks — well, maybe they could have with the tanks, if they’d really tried, but Ron got the feeling that it would have meant killing more people than anybody had the stomach for. Whether they were a mob or not, the rioters were civilians, not soldiers, and it definitely sounded like the army didn’t have the nerve for shooting down crowds of civilians who were only armed with sticks and rocks. Not over a corpse, anyway.

The news faded away — the man was still talking, actually, but Ron didn’t have the heart to pay attention to any more of it — and Ron found himself reading his way through the comic book again. It wasn’t right. Yeah, the world was ending, and a lot of the things that the comic book told about were happening. Some of the things that happened were so exactly the same that it was unnerving. Even so, the pattern behind the events was wrong. Almost as though someone important had read this same comic, and he was making the events that the comic book described take place . . . but all he could do was ape bits and pieces of the story. The bombs. The riots. The Beast-creature.

Ron turned to the page with the picture of the two Beasts on it. There was an eerie similarity between the first of them and the creature from Bonner’s lab — a powerful similarity, as though the creature had modeled for the drawing. Maybe it had, in fact. But modeled badly. The thing on the page looked like an abomination against God — or it tried to; the artist didn’t have the craft to make it truly an abomination — but the Beast from Bonner’s lab, unnatural and unsightly as it was, wasn’t any abomination against God. Even a casual eye knew that it held no evil.

Somone was behind this. Behind the comic book, the creature’s appearance, the explosion. The riots. Someone had to be.

The whole idea was strange and paranoid. It wasn’t any stranger than the fact that Ron was alive. Alive, and without a scratch on him.

Cold practicality sunk through the web of intuition and denial he’d wrapped himself in: how could he possibly have come through that explosion, come away from being buried in tons of debris, without so much as a stiff neck? Something was wrong. Unnatural wrong.

The second Beast on the page was a more . . . conventional-looking creature. And at the same time a more unsettling one. Unsettling because it almost looked like something sensible enough for evolution to have produced. Like something you’d find hidden in the deepest Andean jungle, or living quiet and unknown among the peaks of the Himalayas. It was shaped like a man, mostly, but it had a goat’s head, with great spiral-curving horns. And it was covered with thin, pale-grey fur like the hair of a goat. The skull was enormous, ram-shaped yet large enough to hold the brain of a man.

And no goat had eyes like that. They were a man’s eyes, or a woman’s — human eyes. Evil-looking, sullen, and somehow familiar. Ron bit his lip, squinted, trying to place those eyes, trying to remember where he’d seen them before . . . and realized, and felt the bottom fall away from his gut.

They were Herman Bonner’s eyes.

It was impossible, of course. What could Herman Bonner possibly have to do with the comic book? He was a biologist, an educated man — about as mean-hearted a man as Ron had ever met, nasty enough that Ron was willing to suspect him of anything.

The notion that he might have something to do with a comic book for religious fanatics stretched possibility beyond all reasonable bounds.

And still. They were Bonner’s eyes.

It was a coincidence, Ron told himself. It had to be a coincidence. Or maybe the similarity wasn’t as great as it seemed.

(There were connections. The creature. The creature from Bonner’s lab. And those books on Bonner’s shelves, books whose spines bore the same cross-dove-and-circle insignia that marked the cover of the comic book.)

There was something wrong with the whole damned world. Almost like a disease — a craziness disease. Ron had been alive a goodly while, and in all that time he’d never seen the world around him . . . moving like this.

(How could the creature from Bonner’s lab possibly look so much like the thing from the comic book if Bonner hadn’t made him look like that on purpose? Bonner could do that — designing living things was what a genetic engineer did.)

The world Ron had always lived in was a sensible place, a reasonable place. The things that were happening now seemed to have some guiding principle behind them — and there was nothing sensible about that.

And if there was someone behind all of it, that person had to be Herman Bonner. Or someone close to him.

No, he decided. That was crazy thinking. If he let himself start thinking like that, he’d go out of his mind — if he wasn’t half out of it already.

Something strange — small hairs standing on end on the back of his neck, just below his ears. Almost as though an electric current had washed over the car. Ron looked up, trying to find some source for the sensation, trying to prove to himself that he wasn’t having hallucinations. . . .

And saw the Beast.

Ron might never have recognized the creature if he’d only had his eyes to see it with. He didn’t see it only with his eyes; when he looked up he saw the Beast with his heart and his gut and his back brain. And none of the deepest parts of him could ever fail to recognize it.

No matter how its appearance changed.

Not even now, when the creature was so incredibly altered. Altered so far that no camera could find the connection to what it had been just three days before.

For now the creature was the second Beast from the Book of Revelation.

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When Ron could speak again, he said, “It’s you, isn’t it?” He asked the question even though he knew the answer. “How. . . ?”

The creature misunderstood the question, and instead of telling Ron how it was that its appearance had changed so dramatically, it planted a vision in his head. In the vision Ron could see himself, caught up again in the explosion that had killed him. Ron felt the hairs on the back of his neck grow even stiffer; felt a missing part of him brought home. His unconscious mind had neatly clipped away all memory of that last instant of his life — his recollection had ended just as the explosion’s first roar had reached them. Now, seeing the moment again through the creature’s eyes, it was almost as though he’d never forgotten.