Fire (30 page)

Luke thought of the way that the old woman smelled, and shuddered. He didn’t want to smell like that — didn’t want people thinking about him the things that the smell made him think of the old woman. He picked up the check, stood. “Do I take this up to the counter?”

Andy looked around. “Yeah, looks like it. Don’t forget to leave a tip.”

“Tip. . . ? Oh, yeah — a tip.” Luke took out his wallet, opened it.

“Figure twice the tax.”

“Right,” Luke said, as though he’d known it all along, even though he hadn’t. He took two bills from his wallet, dropped them on the table; walked across the room and paid the woman who stood behind the register.

Andy led him up to street level, to a shop that looked and felt too expensive. It wasn’t, though; the money in his wallet bought him shirts and slacks and underclothes, and when he’d paid for it all there was still plenty left over.

“What now?” he asked the boy. They were standing outside the door of the clothes shop; the plastic shopping bag under Luke’s left arm was bulging and almost uncomfortably heavy.

“I don’t know. You want to do a little window shopping, maybe?” Andy started walking north along Fifth Avenue; Luke followed him.

All around them were shops filled with fur coats and jewelry and chocolates too expensive to eat. “You want to buy a window? Is this really the place to buy it?” Even if they could find a shop that sold window glass, he thought, if they bought it here they’d pay three times what it was worth.

Andy sighed; exasperated. “Not shop for windows. Shop at them — window shop. Like wandering up and down the street, looking in the windows at things you want to buy but can’t afford. And sometimes wondering why people who have money spend it on things like they have in some of these places.”

“Uh.” Luke looked out toward the far end of the street; there were tall, full trees up ahead. The Avenue seemed to lead into a park a few blocks from where they stood. “Does that mean we can’t buy anything?”

Andy shrugged. “You can if you want. Shouldn’t, probably. Spending money sort of goes against the spirit of window shopping.”

Luke thought about it for a while; it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Was the boy joking with him again? Maybe. And maybe not. He sure looked serious. He always looked serious. Luke decided that he’d play along, or play it straight, anyway; it was a good response to a joke, and if Andy wasn’t joking, then maybe window shopping was something he could learn to enjoy.

They went four blocks before the boy actually paused anywhere long enough to get a good look inside any of the store windows. The shop that finally did catch his eye wasn’t one of the expensive-looking ones; just the opposite, in fact. The place was worn and tacky-looking. It had a big, dirty five-color plastic sign that read
U
PPER
M
IDTOWN
C
AMERAS
and below that
$
AVE! BE$T
P
RICE$ ON FIFTH AVENUE!
The store’s two windows were crowded floor to ceiling with cheap computers, adding machines, radios, tape recorders, typewriters . . . even cameras, but not many of those. There were little hand-written signs all over the place, describing the merchandise — all of them said sale!, but not a one of them had a price on it.

Off to the left there were televisions, three of them all playing to the same station — what? There, on the screens, what. . . ? Luke recognized the face of that man . . . from somewhere. And that, that — creature beside him. . . ! Luke didn’t know why, but the sight of the thing, even just seeing it there on the screen . . . gooseflesh, all over his back, his neck, his upper arms. Luke knew that man. And something in his gut was certain that it knew the creature, even though the truth was that he’d never seen anything like it before. They were standing on top of a hill surrounded by forest, and the man looked angry and belligerent — furious, in fact. Looking at the man’s expression, Luke was glad that he was nowhere near him.

A piece of the image on each screen cut away, and suddenly there was a man dressed in dark robes in the screens’ lower corner, speaking to him like a newscaster. The man looked nothing like a newscaster.

Andy was watching the screens now, too, from over Luke’s shoulder. “What’s he saying?”

The boy looked up at him indignantly. “How am I supposed to know what he’s saying — I can’t hear through that glass any better than you can. Do I look like I can read lips?”

Luke felt himself blush. “Sorry. I guess you don’t.”

“Well, I can, but that’s beside the point. He’s saying something about . . . about some kind of a beast, and a revelation . . . ‘voice of Armageddon’ — I don’t know. Weird stuff. I think he’s saying that the Beast from Revelation has showed up on earth. You know — 666, tattoos, everybody has to have his own credit card, all that stuff. It looks like he’s saying something about a radio station, too. And he wants everyone to send them all the money that they got.”

“Really?”

“Well — not exactly. He does want people to send him money, though. As much as they can possibly afford, and then maybe some more, too.”

The man Luke thought he recognized was looking right into the camera, now, and shaking his fist at it. Luke thought he might attack the screen, but then suddenly the creature put his arm on the man’s shoulder, and before anything else could happen the image on the screen changed completely, and they were watching the man and the creature walking into a small town. The people of the town seemed . . . terrified when they first set eyes on the creature, but after just a moment in its presence the creature seemed somehow to enchant them. Worn, tired-hearted people seemed almost to glow under the spell of that enchantment; one gnarled old woman, Luke would have sworn, seemed to grow younger as she looked at the goatlike thing.

And as each of the people in the town fell under the enchantment, numbers would appear on his forehead:

666

They weren’t real numbers; Luke could tell that just by looking at the screen. The numbers were something that someone in a television studio had superimposed over the faces of the townspeople. Even still, they chilled Luke’s heart.

“The man says that the creature there is the Beast from Revelation. He says it’s the next sign that we’re living through the end of the world.”

Luke stared, agape.

“Do you believe him?”

Luke shook his head. “What?”

“Do you really believe that that thing’s the Beast from Revelation? Do you really think we’re all going to die?”

“Uh —” Luke didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know. Maybe. Do you?”

“Nah.” Andy kicked the ground with the toe of his sneaker. “My Momma knows all about God and all of those things. She taught me pretty good. And she always told me, ‘Don’t you never trust nobody who wants to sell you God. God don’t charge admission — God loves you for free, or He don’t love you at all.’ And God loves wicked people, too, so it don’t make any difference at all.”

“What has that got to do with the Beast? I can see the thing with my own eyes. Even if the man just wants money, it doesn’t seem to me that he’s necessarily wrong about the facts.”

The boy shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe so. My Momma’s been talking about the end of the world a lot lately, too. But this guy — I don’t make a habit of believing what anybody has to say when what they really want is my money.”

The scene on the television screens changed again: they were walking away from the town, now, and the camera was zooming in on the creature and the man Luke thought he recognized.

“What’s he saying now? What are they doing?”

The boy stared hard at the screen. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit.”

He looked up at the street sign on the corner, grabbed Luke’s hand and dragged him away. Running. Around the corner and down a long, tall, canyonlike block.

“What? Why?”

“They’re crazy. Crazy.” Jogged to one side to avoid a thick-wet pile of dog droppings. “They’re taking over ABC. The television network. He’s telling everybody who’s watching to go to the ABC building and help take it over!”

ABC? Television network? It sounded familiar, but not familiar enough to make sense of. Taking it over how?

“I don’t get it. What did the man say?”

The boy cursed again. “He said that they were ‘commandeering the ABC television network in the name of God for the duration of this earth.’ And that the network would ‘henceforth be known as the Voice of Armageddon.’ The man’s saying that because the Beast is here, they can do whatever they think they have to. Something like that, anyway — hard to follow all that, just reading lips. Can you understand that?”

He couldn’t, of course. Not that Luke’s pride would let him say so.

He began to understand when they got to the end of the block, though; what he saw there was almost self-explanatory. Buses. Buses everywhere, so many of them parked in front of the dark-stone building with the black abc sign that there was no room for traffic to get by around them. Thirty, forty, maybe even fifty busses. And people carrying protest signs, and television cameras — none of those said abc; instead they all had a strange monogram with a cross and a circle and a dove.

And there were people with guns, too. The cameras stayed away from those people. In fact, the cameras were very careful to avoid the real violence — the shooting. The bodies heaped in the building’s courtyard. The man near the door who was gouging out the eyes of a security guard with the handle of his placard.

“Oh my God,” Luke said. The sound of breaking glass somewhere high up above, and a moment later there were bodies flying down onto the pavement, spattering unrecognizable a few yards away from the corpses of the security guards.

And suddenly he was afraid for his own life. And for the boy’s.

Luke put his arm around Andy, backed the two of them away from the carnage, crossed the street, all the while not even looking at whatever they were backing toward. Eyes transfixed by the violence and the death and the spectacle. Far across the way the cameras were focused on a screaming mob of fundamentalists who played to the camera, charging toward a part of the building where there were no doors nor any real fighting. Backing away, charging again.

Then someone came out the door of the building, and he shouted, “It’s done! We’ve got those heathens all cleaned out of here,” and the mob cheered and the cheer broke off of a sudden as the door of the nearest bus opened and a man came out of it.

A man in black robes.

The same man Luke had seen on the television a few moments before.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Luke said.

Murder. They were killing people for no good reason at all, and now the man was smiling self-righteously for the cameras. Luke had lost a lot of himself, but he sure as God knew that murder was a crime — not just a crime but the worst possible sort of crime. Not that there was a whole lot Luke or the boy by themselves could do about it — except get themselves killed, maybe. Luke had already lost enough of himself, just dying once; he wasn’t eager to lose any more.

The sound of sirens, coming toward them. Police, finally. How could they get through all this traffic? Luke heard the sirens turn, and start moving toward him. He turned to look around the corner and saw dozens of blue-and-white police cruisers moving too fast toward him —

— saw with the corner of his eye that the
ONE WAY
sign on the post beside him was pointing in the other direction, that the police cars with their flashing lights and bleating sirens were moving the wrong way on a one-way street. Not that it mattered; there wasn’t any traffic getting by the crowd of busses any more.

And the cameras swiveled to watch as the mob surged out onto the Avenue to overwhelm the police. All but two of the cameras, anyway; those two focused on the man in black as he marched triumphantly into the building.

The sound of screeching brakes and gunfire, coming from the Avenue, and Luke looked up and saw a policeman wielding nothing but a nightstick get his head blown off by a fundamentalist’s machine gun, and Luke’s body suddenly unfroze itself, and he grabbed the boy’s arm and ran back the same way they’d come —

And one last thing happened as he turned to run: his eyes passed over the bus that the man in black had emerged from. Luke saw another face there, staring out at him wide-eyed and horrified.

Luke knew that face. Knew it, and knew it was trouble in the worst possible way.

He tried to put a name to the face, and failed. Then something strange happened: a name welled up from somewhere deep inside him, from a place that he knew wasn’t memory.

Herman Bonner.

And something else, even more cryptic and unsettling, from the same place:

Herman Bonner wants to kill the world.

By the time Luke heard that he was halfway down the block, running for his life and for the boy’s. Running was the only thing he could do, he told himself. The whole idea that a man wanted to kill the world was silly. How could a man want to kill the world, and even if he could want to, how would he actually do it? He couldn’t, of course. Luke told himself that at least half a dozen times, even said it half out loud, under his breath so quiet that he hoped the boy might not hear him.

And besides: if the man was actually capable of such a thing, there was nothing Luke could do to stop him. And it wasn’t his responsibility, anyway.

Luke told himself all those things. He didn’t believe them for a moment.

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Chapter Twenty-One

WASHINGTON

Monday evening the plague came down to Washington from New York on the Amtrak Metroliner.

At nine o’clock the man who brought it down — he’d been sitting three seats away from Luke Munsen when Luke coughed out the soda that’d got itself into his lungs — at nine o’clock on the Washington Beltway the man who carried the infection tossed the butt of his cigarette out the window of his Buick.

And the butt fell to the ground not thirty yards from where Graham Perkins’s body still hung.