Fire (24 page)

Luke wasn’t afraid any more. Wary, maybe. He had a sense of himself, but not an unshakable sense. When he saw her hand reach out for him he hesitated. He might even have said no, but he heard the need in her voice, and it wasn’t sexual — just plain human empty loneliness. He didn’t have it in him to refuse that kind of need; it wasn’t threatening, and anyway he felt too damn much of it himself to deny it in anyone else.

She led him a long way through the cemetery, to a quiet place where Luke could hear the sound of a stream burbling — though when he looked to find the water he saw no sign of it. God knew what that meant. Twice along the way to that place they crossed service roads; tiny, badly paved things that made Luke think of someplace deep in the backwoods. One time they even had to pass through a tall archway that told them they’d moved from one cemetery to another, though for all Luke could see it made no difference.

She hardly spoke at all along the way — the only time she did speak was when they passed a eerie monument sculpted in the form of a withered, bone-thin little girl. The woman stopped and frowned when she saw that, and she said, “Yes, this is that place.” Said it so softly that even in the hush that surrounded them Luke only barely heard her.

When they reached the woman’s destination she lay herself down on the reclining slope of a grassy knoll, and after a while Luke lay down beside her. And a long while after that they both drifted off to sleep.

He woke when the moon was high overhead. It was a full moon, more than light enough to see by, and there were people laughing hard somewhere far off in the distance. The woman was sitting up, leaning over him. Looking into his eyes.

“Make me warm,” she said. There wasn’t any mistaking her meaning.

Luke . . . Luke wasn’t inclined. She attracted him. There wasn’t any question of that. But the desire he’d felt for her had faded away hours back. Perhaps that was because he felt too much for her, too much sympathy and pain — he’d long since guessed at the nature of the bond that was between them.

Or maybe the absence of desire was just because of the doughy fog that followed him up from sleep.

Maybe. It wasn’t a thing he could be certain of, not even while he felt it.

He responded anyway, because of the bond he felt for her — even though it didn’t seem right, or even good. Maybe he shouldn’t have done it. But how could he not have? She needed him, honestly needed him, and Luke wasn’t made of anything cold enough to let him ignore a need like that.

Whether it was the right thing or not, it worked out well enough. And better than that. Luke reached up, and kissed her, and after a moment his heart followed him into the kiss . . . and after that the night was a perfect-warm moonlit blur.

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MONDAY

July Eighteenth

EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL

Transcript of a conversation between

Herman Bonner and our agent.

Recorded the evening of 7/18.

H.B.:I’ve failed, Tim.

Agent:Failed, Dr. Bonner? I don’t understand.

H.B.:Yes, failed. Roll up your window. The wind . . . bothers me. I need a President. We need a President. Paul Green was critical to our plans —

A.:I did my best with him, Dr. Bonner. Followed your instructions to the letter. And it went just like you said. I put the . . . preserved . . . appendix into the nutrient bath with the germ culture you gave me, and just like you said, it grew. And kept growing until it was the President, whole and untouched as though he’d never died. Absolutely incredible, even if. . . . How did you get ahold of his appendix, anyway?

H.B.:I took it from his desk. (Laughs.) Paul was such a sentimentalist. After the operation he had it sealed in alcohol and used it as a paper weight.

A.:Ugh.

H.B.:I had little hope of resurrecting Paul. I do not count the mindless, vegetal thing we grew as my failure. I suspected that there was too little of his self to resurrect preserved in the refuse of that operation. It was necessary to make the attempt, but neither of us can be faulted for the result.

A.:Then how did you fail?

H.B.:I failed just now. At Arlington. While you waited for me in this car.

A.:I still don’t understand. What were you trying to do there at the cemetery?

H.B.:I was trying to find a President to replace the one we’ve lost, of course. Last night I sprinkled the graves of seven great men with the bacteria that would recreate them from their remains. And today I returned, and. . . .

(Five minutes of silence on the tape, here.)

A.:(Tentatively.) What happened when you went back to the cemetery?

H.B.:I freed them from their graves. They owed me their lives, damn them! But of the four who woke with their minds intact, none would abide my will. Not even one.

A.:Oh.

(There is no small measure of fear in our agent’s voice at this point, but Bonner does not seem to hear it. This is especially peculiar in light of the fact that Bonner seems to have a sixth sense about these things; every other agent we have planted in his camp has disappeared, thoroughly and untraceably.)

H.B.:Now, while I think of it. There is something we must discuss.

A.:What’s that, Dr. Bonner?

H.B.:(Hesitates.) I know that I can trust you, Tim. Know, in fact, that there is no one else I can trust as I can trust you — not even Reverend George. You alone have faith enough never to doubt me. What I am to say to you now you must share with no one, not even the Reverend. Do you understand me?

A.:Sure, Dr. Bonner. If you say so, I won’t tell another living soul.

H.B.:Good. You understand, don’t you, Tim, that in order to save this world we must destroy it — totally and utterly? You understand that only a world that no longer exists is utterly free from evil?

A.:(A pause. The fear is showing through the agent’s voice again.) Never actually thought of it in exactly those terms. Now that you mention it, though, it does make an awful lot of sense. Still — how could we do a thing like that? We only have a couple dozen missiles, and even those aren’t working just now. Not nearly enough to blow up the world.

H.B.:They’ll be enough. You’re going to help me.

A.:(Confused.) Me? Gosh, Dr. Bonner, I don’t know anything about blowing up the world with a couple-dozen nukes. I’m only a computer technician. Until you helped me find Jesus I was just a tech for the Air Force. I had good clearances, because I used to do maintenance down in the silos, but —

H.B.:Yes. Exactly. I have a plan. Listen closely: this earth is made of geologic plates — plates that are, in comparison to the size of the planet, relatively thin. And these thin plates float atop a vast sea of molten rock. No?

A.:Why, sure. It’s the kind of fact you pick up if you listen close in junior high.

H.B.:And these plates are unstable, are they not?

A.:I seem to recall something along those lines. Guess I wasn’t listening that close, back in school.

H.B.:What I need from you are the exact locations of the world’s most unstable spots — the twenty spots which, if they all were simultaneously struck with atomic explosions, would send the world’s crust falling in against itself. We must bathe this world in its own molten fire. And cleanse it.

(There is something unsettling about Herman Bonner’s voice as he speaks these words. He does not sound entirely human.)

A.:Oh Jesus.

H.B.:What?

A.:Nothing, Dr. Bonner. Just a little confused. How am I supposed to get ahold of this information? I’m really not a geologist. Just a computer tech.

H.B.:Your clearances give you access to all sorts of information in the Air Force’s computer network, don’t they? Surely you can find what you need to know.

A.:(A long pause.) I guess they do.

H.B.:Good. Begin the moment we return to Lake-of-Fire. Work as quickly as you can.

A.:Yes sir. Oh, damn — a detour. We’re going to have to get off the Beltway. Hope the access road will get us where we’re going. Well, it’s not like we’ve got any choice — they’ve got it blocked off with tanks. Dr. Bonner, can I ask you a question?

H.B.:Certainly.

A.:You — you’re not really just a person, are you? I mean . . . you aren’t human, are you?

H.B.:(Pleased.) No, Tim. I’m not. (Grunts.) What is that — there on the side of the road?

A.:You mean that man crawling around on his hands and knees?

H.B.:Yes, that man. Stop the car. Pull up alongside him.

A large Post-It note covers the bottom of the final page of the transcript. It reads as follows:

General, we have to stop this man. Stop him now. I know that we don’t want to get involved in fighting here on American soil. I know that there’s no one to give us orders, and that we have no standing orders to cover situations like this. We don’t have a lifetime to sit around contemplating the moral and ethical questions: this guy is crazy. And he’s serious. And there’s a reasonable chance that this scheme of his — the one that involves bombing along the Pacific ring of fire and the Mid-Atlantic ridge — there’s a chance that it just might work. I sure don’t want to be around to find out the hard way. Send in a couple of divisions now. Take these people out, put the whole lot of them under arrest before it’s too late.

Below this, written in a finer, more careful hand:

We have noted your suggestions, and expect to decide whether or not to act on them in the near future.

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Chapter Eighteen

WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, JOHNSON COUNTY, MISSOURI

Bill Wallace woke just in time to avoid being late for his own funeral.

What woke him, as it happened, was the trundle, rock, and push of pallbearers’ shoulders ever-so-slightly out of sync as they carried his casket from the base chapel to Bill’s open grave. It was another few groggy moments after that before he got enough of his wits about him to realize that he wasn’t in some sort of a dark room, nor waking in the dark part of the night. There was time, in fact, for his bearers to set the coffin into its sling and the base chaplain to set well into Bill’s eulogy before Bill tried to roll onto his side.

He knew something was distinctly wrong when his head and shoulder pounded into the casket’s wooden lid. Knew, even if it was too dark to see; even the smallest bunk in the most crowded Air Force barracks had more room in it than that. Still, it wasn’t a thing to panic over. He was disoriented, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember where he was, but life in the Air Force was like that sometimes: it woke a man up in tight spots that he couldn’t quite remember getting into in the first place.

Which was about when he heard exactly what the chaplain was saying, somewhere not far away at all. Heard his own name, being taken in the past tense. Three times in the same sentence.

He remembered: slowly, uncertain, like the memory of a bad movie he’d seen months before. Remembered murdering his own President, knowingly and with malice aforethought. Which had to be about the biggest sin a soldier could commit, even if he did think he was doing it for the good of the world.

And began to remember that he’d died while committing that murder.

That was when Bill Wallace panicked.

Panicked big time.

Screamed loud and long and hard enough to wake the dead; squirmed and writhed and pushed every which way, trying to find the way out of whatever the hell kind of a hole he was in —

Not a hole. Not a box. Not a room.

A coffin.

And started pounding on the lid above him. Shouting. Demanding that someone let him out. Screeching like a teenage girl at a horror movie. Not that it did any good; some fool had gone and nailed the damned thing shut. It was a good twenty minutes of scratch and pry and thunder inside that box, hammers working loud and ungentle to free him, before Bill Wallace saw the light of day in his new life. By then his throat burned and tasted bloody, like the raw steak he’d eaten once on a dare.

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BROOKLYN

It was morning, and Luke woke alone with his shirt still beside him on the grass where the dead woman had thrown it the night before. Where was she? He looked around, saw no sign of her. There wasn’t any sense in looking for her; he knew in his gut that she wasn’t anywhere nearby. He didn’t need any physical evidence to be certain of it. For half a breath Luke almost began to suspect that she’d been a dream — a succubus, maybe, created by his imagination.

That was just more nonsense. She’d been real, real as the grass burns their lovemaking had cut into the skin of his back.

He picked up the shirt, shook the loose bits of dry grass from it. Put it on, buttoned it. Found the denim slacks where they lay crumpled on the far side of him, and put them on.

Wherever she was, he decided, he’d see her again soon. Decided? No, not decided. It was something that was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not. Whether he planned to find her or not, he’d see her. He knew that it was going to happen as surely as he knew his way out of the cemetery, even though he’d only been through it once before, even though the walk to this place had been so full of distraction that he barely remembered it.

Luke was beginning to know things like that, and it didn’t occur to him that it might be anything strange. He didn’t remember enough of his past to see the idea as he would have just a few days before — see it as something absurd. Embarrassingly silly. The truth was, of course, that he wasn’t just beginning to know things — Luke had always had little intuitions, and sometimes he’d even had prophetic dreams. And he’d ignored them, dismissed them exactly because they embarrassed him.

When he left the quiet knoll he had no sense of where he was going, nor any sense that he moved purposefully. Even so, he walked almost directly to the part of the cemetery that faced the tenement building where the Harrisons lived, and walked there by a route far more direct than the one by which the woman had led him to the knoll the afternoon before.