Fire (25 page)

Which is not to say that the sense that guided Luke was omniscient, or even reliable. If it had only given him the tiniest alert, if he’d even begun to look down as he walked into that clearing, Luke would have seen the wound in the earth where the grave was — there’s something spectacularly ominous about an open grave.

Even more so a grave so old as that.

His sense of things wasn’t strong enough, certainly, to shake Luke from his distraction — which is why he stumbled at the edge of the woman’s open grave and all but fell into her rotted, empty casket.

Even as he slipped down toward it Luke knew that it was the grave of the woman he’d first seen yesterday. It had to be. The broken dirt was exactly that old, dried the way it would be exposed to sun and air for most of a full day. And more . . . there was the sense of her about this place, the sense of a body tied for years and years to a piece of ground.

Luke only barely managed to catch himself, to keep himself from falling by wrapping his arms around the only thing available.

Which was the woman’s headstone.

It was a tall, high monument stone — almost more a monolith than a monument. It was cut from soft white marble, her name set into the stone with fat brass capitals made from brass or bronze or some such material that had begun to green with corrosion. Streaks of that green stained the white stone; it almost seemed the mark of some impossibly alien coppery blood.

Christine Gibson

The letters down below that were carved into the stone — they were smaller, almost unnoticeable because of the size of the woman’s name.

1814–1891

in warm and eternal memory

Luke used his grip on the monument to lift himself up away from the edge of the open grave. It was shallower than any grave ought to have been — not more than a couple of feet deep, to Luke’s eye. Even if he had trouble remembering things like the fact that graves are by tradition six feet deep, good sense said they needed to be deeper than this one.

Maybe the ground above it had worn away over the years. That made at least a little sense. The monument at the head of the grave would have likely settled down into the soil at about the same rate as the erosion. The soil around the grave was pushed up and out, as though it hadn’t been dug away, but lifted aside. Lifted by the lid of the casket.

Lifted aside when the woman rose up out of her grave.

Luke imagined himself waking that way — waking in a coffin closed dark and buried in the ground. The idea of it was enough to make him shudder . . . Luke wasn’t especially claustrophobic, but even so he could understand the fear of small places. Especially places as small as a coffin.

There was a litter of faded-rotted silk scrap mixed with the bits and pieces of pine straw and dry humus around the grave’s edge. Some of that silk, Luke saw, had once been an elegant evening dress. Near the foot of the grave were the cracked and dried remains of a pair of patent-leather shoes.

He still hadn’t looked down into that grave. He was afraid to, for no reason he could put a name to. But just as he knew to be afraid, he knew that to let that fear rule him would be much worse that anything he might be afraid of. Luke steeled himself, looked down into the grave —

And saw her.

Saw the woman with whom he’d spent the night before.

Her eyes were open; she was awake and alive. And she was as naked as she’d been when he’d first seen her. And more modest: her hands were folded over her breasts, as they must have been the day she’d been buried.

She blinked when she saw Luke looking at her.

And smiled.

In his mind’s eye Luke saw the fiery red insectlike thing again, saw its brightness build in intensity until the thing exploded.

That explosion was his doing, somehow, and Luke knew it. And he was just as sure that sight below him was a result of the explosion.

“Hey mister.” The voice of a young boy — Andy Harrison’s voice. “Mr. Luke Munsen Jesus — where you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

Luke looked up from the grave, shook his head, trying to clear it. The boy couldn’t possibly see Christine Gibson from where he stood. Which was good, Luke guessed. Or was it? Luke was too confused to make sense of anything.

“Where. . . ?” Luke coughed. “Noplace. Just around here.”

It was Andy Harrison; Luke saw the boy coming through a part in the shrubbery off to his left.

“It figures,” Andy said. “You want to find a dead man, you go look in the graveyard. I should have expected it.”

“Uh,” Luke said. Partly it was a wince; partly a result of an absence of words.

Andy stood at the edge of the clearing. From there, Luke thought, he’d be able to see that it was open. It wasn’t likely he’d be able to see down into it. “Have you been raising the dead again, Mr. Jesus? You ought to leave these cemeteries alone, you know. They’re real pretty just the way they are. You go raising all those dead people up out of their coffins, this place’ll have more craters than the moon does. I saw the moon on TV — it ain’t a handsome place. It’d be a shame to have a view like that out our front window. It’s the only good view we got, after all. The back windows don’t look out on anything but the airshaft.” He held out a pair of sandals. “Here, put these on. They’re my Daddy’s, but if you adjust the straps they should fit you all right. Can’t have you going around barefoot like this, can we?”

Luke groaned. “I’m not Jesus, damn it.”

He crossed the clearing, took the shoes from the boy. Slipped his feet into them, bent down and fussed with the straps until they seemed comfortable. All that while frowning at himself; he’d said the words a lot more forcefully than he’d meant to. Almost harshly. Before he spoke again he paused and made himself calm down — not that it did much good. “I just spent the whole night performing sinful acts with a woman I’d never seen two days ago. God’s son would never commit a mortal sin, would he?”

Andy frowned. “Heck,” he said, “that isn’t any surprise. Jesus loves people — my Momma says that all the time. Why should a Luke Munsen Jesus be any different?”

Luke was all but speechless; he was appalled at himself for saying what he had to a boy as young as Andy, and even more appalled by the boy’s answer. When he could finally speak he said, “Andy — honest. I’m not Jesus. Really, I’m not. Please don’t call me that . . . it almost makes me feel like I’m pretending to be something that I’m not.”

The boy just shrugged. Shook his head.

“Come on,” he said. “We got to get going.” Something deep and loud rumbled far off in the distance. “You hear that? if we hurry up and run, maybe we can make it.”

He grabbed Luke’s hand, and before Luke knew what was going on, the boy was leading him out of the cemetery at a dead run.

“Make what? Where are you going?”

“To the subway. They finally got it running again.”

Subway? The image of a train roaring through a tunnel, and Luke was in the tunnel, too close to something that big, that fast, that loud —

“Hey — don’t slow down. You’ve got to run if we’re going to get there before the train leaves the station.” Suddenly they were out of the cover of graveyard trees, bolting across the street without even pausing to check for traffic — not that it mattered; there wasn’t a car anywhere in sight.

Luke was far out of breath, and confused, and a little afraid. “Why — ?” he asked, or tried to — mostly the question got lost in his gasping for breath.

“Why what? Come on, run. We’re going into the city. Don’t you remember?”

Luke didn’t remember anything of the sort, of course. And his memory of the events since he’d first reawoke the morning before was careful and clear. He tried to say so, but it was hard to find the wind to speak.

Out onto a short block, under a monolith of overhead train tracks — when he saw it he almost thought the boy was going to make him bolt up the four flights of stairs to that train’s platform, but he didn’t, they just kept running under the dark corroded steel girders, out into a large, ugly plaza, again without bothering to check for traffic. And this time they should have been wary of cars; there weren’t many of them, but the half dozen that were moving through the plaza were moving at speeds that pavement that rutted couldn’t support. Twice as they ran cars came perilously close to running them down. They weren’t hit, though; God knew how they got so lucky, but they did. Finally they were on the plaza’s far side, darting down a stairway that led into the ground —

— dim incandescent light, the reek of urine, and . . . something else, something dead and fermented —

— they ran through a vast underground corridor with concrete floors and filthy tile walls and iron bars caging everywhere. It was a wonder of some sort, Luke thought, a spectacle of the kind that the whole world would remember. It had to be. Or . . . or maybe it just seemed that way, maybe if he remembered more of himself it wouldn’t be so spectacular.

The sound of roaring, exactly the sound of roaring in his vision a few moments before, but louder and more real.

Fifty yards along the concrete floor, and then they were at a bank of turnstiles, filthy corroded painted-iron things that stood between them and the stairway that led down to the train. Andy paused and fished a pair of strange, two-color coins from his pocket, put them into two of the turnstiles, and motioned Luke through. Then they were running again, down the stairway to the train platform.

The train was just coming to a stop when they got there. After a moment doors opened all along the side of the train that faced them, and they stepped into a car that was all but empty, took seats not far from the door.

When the doors had closed and the train was moving again, Andy sighed and looked up at Luke. “Usually you can’t hear a train when it’s that far away,” he said. “Not even a beat-up, noisy one like this. It’s so quiet these last few days — since everything got so crazy. This train must have been two, maybe three stops away when we first heard it. That’s quite a distance.”

Luke nodded, even though he didn’t understand enough of the context to make sense of what the boy was saying. Besides, it was loud in the train, and louder because the windows were open, and it was hard even to be sure of what the boy had said. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going? And even better, tell me why?”

Andy frowned. “Don’t you remember — we talked about it last night. Going to take you into the city, get you some money. Get you some clothes that fit you right. And then you can take me out to lunch for giving you a hand.”

Luke blinked. “I didn’t talk to you last night — I haven’t seen you since yesterday afternoon.”

The boy looked pained and thoughtful for a moment, and then, suddenly, his expression brightened. “Yeah, that’s right. But I was going to talk to you about it, only I couldn’t find you. I sure meant to tell you. Not my fault you had to go sneaking off into the cemetery to do dirty stuff.”

Luke thought about that. “I guess it isn’t. Still, it would have been nice to get a little warning.”

Andy was digging into one of his pockets again. “You forgot your wallet again yesterday, back at our place,” he said, and handed the wallet to Luke. “You always leave important stuff behind like that?”

“Um,” Luke said. He took the wallet, opened it, saw the picture of himself that it wasn’t comfortable seeing, and closed it again. The question made him uncomfortable, too — even more uncomfortable than the picture had. Maybe that was a clue to something from his past, he thought; maybe he did tend to misplace important things. It was possible. But it didn’t feel right. No, he decided; it wasn’t right. The discomfort was some other thing . . . something . . . he didn’t know. There was something important he was leaving behind, leaving more and more of it every moment, and it wasn’t just his past.

Something. Something obvious, something he knew about — he was sure that he knew if he could only just . . . just . . . something. Something he knew about that he couldn’t put his finger on.

“Don’t you ever answer a question when somebody asks it, Mr. Jesus?” The boy looked put out and upset, but Luke suspected it was more in fun than real offense. He wasn’t sure. “Momma says that about Jesus — she says it all the time. ‘Andy,’ she says, ‘God works in strange and mysterious ways. He doesn’t always answer what you ask him. You remember that, child.’ Momma sometimes talks a little crazy, but that always seemed kind of sensible to me.”

Luke started to answer, but then he realized that his voice couldn’t carry over the thundering sound the train made as it moved through this part of the tunnel. The boy’s voice carried, but it was shrill, or at least higher in pitch than Luke’s was. Besides, Luke didn’t have an answer for the question; when he thought about it he realized it wasn’t the sort of question you were supposed to be able to answer. So he shrugged, and smiled, and pointed at the window and pointed at his throat, hoping that the boy would understand that it was too loud for Luke to talk. Andy seemed to; he nodded when Luke pointed.

Luke stood and looked out the window, trying to get a look at the tunnel they moved through. It wasn’t much use; most of the light out there came from the windows of the train — it might have been light enough to see by if he were out in the tunnel, but it certainly wasn’t light enough to see out by. His eyes were used to the brightness of the light inside the car, and they couldn’t focus on the vague light that shone through the window. Well, maybe he could see out there a little bit — or maybe not. It was only a glimpse or two, and always whatever he saw was gone so quickly that Luke wasn’t certain that he’d seen it. A wild nest of wires, covered with soot — though it could have, just barely could have been some wildly enormous spider. A girder, covered with layers of dust as thick as mold, or maybe it was covered with mold. A dirty pipe that looked as though it had once been bright red. Or was that a handrail in an abandoned station? Luke wasn’t sure. Twice it grew bright as they pulled through white-tiled stations without slowing, and Luke began to wonder if they ever would stop.

Then the train pulled into a third station, and Luke heard the screech of the brakes engaging suddenly, felt himself almost pulled off balance by his own inertia. He sat back down as they slowed, and turned to Andy. When the train was stopped, and relatively quiet, he asked, “How far are we going? How long will it take?”