Fire (28 page)

It was too strange for Ron. Too improbable. Everything was these last few days.

The helicopter was much too close, now, and still coming at them. A second, three seconds, ten seconds away. Ron pictured himself skewered on the helicopter’s skids, or maybe even hacked into chunks of warm bloody meat by its rotor, and found himself possessed of an overwhelming compulsion to run for his life. Until the Beast set his arm on Ron’s shoulder again, and suddenly he knew that everything was going to be all right, that all he had to do was stand steady and unafraid, and the powerful machine would go by them without doing any harm.

Something was charging up the hill toward them, Ron saw in the corner of his eye. Or maybe it was charging toward the helicopter. Ron stood steady, calm; the creature’s touch made it easy to be easy about the world. He looked down and saw . . . Tom the dog? What was the dog doing here? And Ron would have sworn that the dog’s expression looked self-righteous and protective, even though he’d have sworn a moment before that a dog’s expression couldn’t convey that much.

Ron remembered then: the sense that something had been following them. That explained the dog, easily, but what about the helicopter?

It didn’t matter what the explanation was; the helicopter was too close now for Ron to care about anything like that. It was all but on top of them. Close enough, if he reached up and out, to touch the foremost tip of its right landing skid. It had slowed, too, to the point where it was barely even moving.

And the dog crested the hill and lunged, insanely, at the painted steel flank of the helicopter.

Ron’s eye followed the arc of the dog’s leap, saw the poor thing smash himself, and his eye couldn’t bear to look at that too closely; it continued along the same arc, past the cross-and-circle emblem, toward the open door of the helicopter —

Where he saw the video camera. Focused on him — no, focused on the creature.

And suddenly he remembered the way the Mountainville paper had reacted when they’d first got word of the creature. And he knew that however the people in the helicopter had found them, they were here to turn Ron and the creature into a spectacle. Or worse than that, they meant to start a witch hunt.

“Oh Christ,” he said, mostly under his breath. Not loud enough for any microphone to hear under the helicopter’s racket, anyway. Then, louder, “Go away. We don’t need any trouble.” When he heard himself he knew that he hadn’t spoken loud enough for anyone else to hear him. He was about to start shouting at them, maybe even try climbing up into the helicopter and take that camera from them, when he felt the creature’s touch on his arm, and he knew that if he did it would only make things worse than they already were. Likely, he realized, it was exactly what they wanted — good footage of an irate madman attacking the television screen.

A moment, two moments. The dog was crumpled in a heap, whimpering in pain. And Ron realized that the dog needed comfort, that he probably wasn’t seriously hurt, but he needed attention, and that need was more important than anything the cameramen or the helicopter might do. And the creature was already moving toward Tom, and Ron began to do the same. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the cameramen shrug his shoulders; before he got close enough to pat the dog’s head, the helicopter was moving out and away from them, as though it had lost interest entirely.

They didn’t want pictures of the Evil Creature comforting a hurt dog, Ron thought. It would spoil their theater.

Tom the dog wasn’t that bad hurt at all, though his pride seemed to be severely bruised. The creature was stroking the coarse fur of the dog’s back already, and Tom began to pant sheepishly. Ron bent down and kneaded the loose fur just behind his ears, and after a moment of that the dog began to look as though he’d never been hurt at all.

Ron grinned and shook his head. The dog, he was convinced, was a ham — maybe even more of a showman than the cross-dove-and-circle types who were tracking after them with television cameras. That was just as well; the dog was obviously on their side (if side was the appropriate word) and the other side seemed to have it all over Ron and the creature as far as showmanship went. They needed whatever help they could get.

Thought about that for a moment, and realized that it was more than a little paranoid. All the people in the helicopter had done was take some pictures of them; there wasn’t any call to go and draw sides. Certainly not yet. Maybe the fundamentalist types didn’t mean any harm.

Not that Ron believed it for a moment. Still, getting confrontational too soon would only make matters worse.

“You okay, boy?” he asked the dog. “What are you doing following us so far? What’s got into you?”

Tom looked up at Ron soulfully, but he didn’t answer the question. Not that Ron had expected him to.

The creature stood, moved away from them. When he was five yards away he stopped and waited purposely, as though he meant that they needed to get going again.

Ron looked back down at the dog. “Think you can walk, huh, Tom? You might as well walk with us instead of skulking along behind.”

The dog was still looking up at him earnestly; he didn’t move a muscle when Ron asked the question. So Ron got up, and began to act as though he were going to leave without him, and the dog certainly understood that — he was on his feet and following before Ron was three paces away. He walked without a limp, too, which made Ron suspect that attacking the helicopter had caused the dog less harm than it’d seemed at first.

The walk wasn’t anywhere near so long this time. Not more than a couple of miles, in fact — out across the valley that had been below them, over the far hill, and into a small town.

As they descended toward it Ron caught sight of the helicopter again, on top of another hill that lay to the west of them. It was far enough away that he couldn’t see the people inside it. He didn’t have to be able to see them to be certain that they were watching. He touched the creature’s shoulder and pointed to show him, but the creature wasn’t concerned. Not any more concerned than the dog would have been.

And that wasn’t a fair comparison, and Ron knew it: Tom was a decent dog, and a good one, but he didn’t have the sense . . . well, the truth was, he didn’t have the sense God gave a dog. The creature, on the other hand — Ron suspected that the creature just might have more of a mind than he had himself. The idea was sobering, but it didn’t threaten him especially. There was too much good about the creature for Ron to find him a threat. Even if the creature was smart, even if he was smarter than Ron was . . . there was something innocent about him. Something that hadn’t been marked by the world, in spite of anything Herman Bonner might have done to him.

Ron thought there was, anyway. It didn’t escape him that a certain amount of the assumption came from his ego’s need to reassert itself. After all: innocence gave the creature naïveté, and in Ron’s own opinion he himself was anything but naïve.

“They’re trouble, you know,” he told the Beast. “Those people over there mean us nothing but harm. You especially — if they mean me wrong it’s only because I’m with you.”

because I’m with you

Ron heard his own words echo in his ear, and knew that the creature was asking if he was afraid — asking if he felt a need to get himself out of harm’s way.

“No,” he said. “I’m not afraid. Not afraid enough to be scared away, anyhow. But I am worried for you. Why are you walking right into the middle of trouble? There isn’t any need for it.”

The creature didn’t give any answer, except to shake his head and look away.

The town was a small one, almost too small to call a town. It looked prosperous; the two-dozen houses and the three or four stores were old enough to be weathered, but if any of them were in bad repair, Ron couldn’t see it.

They were still fifty yards from the edge of town when the old man spotted them.

He was sun-worn and leathery skinned, and he looked old only the way a man who’s worked all his life with his hands can look old, but there was nothing frail or unhealthy about him. He wore denim overalls and under them a faded flannel shirt, and a grimy baseball cap with an advertisement for a motor oil distributor.

At first he didn’t seem to react to them in any special way. About the way Ron would expect anyone to react, seeing strangers come into town on foot, and at an hour that was too early for sensible folk to be awake, let alone traveling. He looked at Ron warily, set a careful eye on the dog . . .

And then he saw the Beast.

And then he reacted. God did he react.

He looked, for a long moment, like the impotent victim in a bad horror film — terrified out of his mind, in danger of death from a heart attack as much or more than he was from whatever peril he’d laid eyes on. And he screamed, of course — long and loud and hard enough that by the time he was done there wasn’t much chance that anyone in the town was still asleep. And then his scream drifted off and away, into the hills, and the bug-eyed terror receded from his face. And he began to . . . to see the creature, not just to see the alienness of his physical body but to see him the way Ron had first seen him just before the explosion that had killed them both.

And he took off the baseball cap, and fell to his knees, and begged the creature for forgiveness.

And the Beast walked up to him, and shook his head, and held out his hand to help the old man to his feet.

The old man took the creature’s hand with a look of such immense gratitude that it embarrassed Ron to see it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Can you ever forgive me for not knowing you when I saw you?”

The creature looked at both of them, and they both knew that there wasn’t anything to forgive.

“It’s an honest mistake,” Ron told the man. “Anyone could make it. Besides . . . he isn’t anyone you ought to know. It wasn’t God who put him on this earth. I don’t think so, anyway.”

The old man shook his head nervously at Ron. “But he is — can’t you see that? He is.”

“No. Honest. He’s something special — special isn’t even the right word — but I’m pretty sure that all the special about him isn’t anything his maker intended. I think I can tell you that for a fact.”

The old man just kept shaking his head, telling Ron how wrong he was.

There were more people out on the street, now; two or three dozen of them, at least. Most of them were staring — some terrified, some agape. But there wasn’t a one of them, not a single damned one in the whole town, that didn’t clearly know the creature for an omen. Each one of them, Ron thought, likely saw him as an omen of a different future. There was no way you could set eyes on the Beast without knowing that his existence meant something powerful and important about the future of the world.

The old man was holding his cap down by his hip, now. “The two of you look as though you’ve been traveling all night,” he said, and then he noticed the dog. “Three of you, that is. Sorry. Can I take you down to the café here and buy you a little breakfast?”

Even after walking all that way — and most of it in the dark, at that — Ron still wasn’t especially hungry. He hadn’t eaten and hadn’t been hungry, either, in all the time since he’d found himself woke back to life yesterday morning. It was a peculiar thing, and more than a little unsettling. Still: even if he didn’t feel a need for food, there was something . . . something sensually appealing about the idea of a good meal. He looked over at the creature, and when he nodded Ron told the man they’d be much obliged.

The café, well, the café was almost more a diner than it was a café, except that instead of being housed inside some silvery trailer that wasn’t going anywhere it was in an old cement-block building that looked as though it might once have been home to a garage. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of dozen tables inside it, and small tables at that, but even so most of the town somehow managed to follow them inside. By then there wasn’t a one of them who hadn’t realized that the creature was something special and important and good, and they were all hushed quiet and reverent as though they’d somehow found themselves in church.

“There isn’t any call to be so quiet,” Ron said. “Neither one of us is going to think bad about you if you talk.” And someone laughed at that kind of involuntarily, and then there was a sort of general chuckle that passed around and through the room. It wasn’t long after that before the room began to sound like a celebration. A powerful celebration — kind of the sound Ron would have expected on Christmas day in the living room of a family with two dozen children.

The waitress brought them coffee, and she was about to hand them menus when Ron ordered for both the creature and himself: eggs and potatoes and toast and bacon and a couple of fat glasses of orange juice from the squeezer he saw up by the counter. Breakfast the way it ought to be, at least according to Ron. Even Tom the dog got food: a couple of minutes after the waitress had taken their order the cook came out of the kitchen with a thick long ham bone; the dog, who’d parked himself dutifully beside the creature, took the bone greedily, as though it were his due.

A small boy with a bad limp walked up to the creature while they were waiting for their food, and asked the Beast to cure him.

“I busted my leg right well last summer,” he said, “and the bone never grew back together like the doctor down to county hospital said it would. You can heal me, can’t you? I can tell you can. Nobody got to show me twice.”

The creature looked at the boy, and Ron hurt for him having a boy need him like that when there was nothing he could do. He could feel the creature’s pain, he thought — but maybe that was just Ron confusing his own hurt with the Beast’s.

“Sure would be nice to be able to go hiking down by the crick again,” the boy said.

“Son,” Ron said quietly — too quietly for anyone but Ron and the creature and the boy to hear — “son, the creature isn’t Christ. There’s nothing he can do that’ll cure you.”

The boy looked at Ron, and looked nervously back at the creature, and for just a moment his eyes looked angry and resentful. That didn’t last very long; part of the . . . whatever it was about the creature was a thing that calmed and soothed. Ron had a hard time imagining himself doing things he wouldn’t be proud of in front of the creature.