Fire (34 page)

Luke flinched. “Don’t say that. Please. I’m hearing too many things like that tonight.”

She smiled, nodded; she even almost seemed to understand the problem. “It happened to you too, didn’t it? You were . . . not alive before too, weren’t you?”

He nodded.

The fingers of her right hand teased the cloth belt of her sun dress.”I think I knew that from the moment I first set eyes on you, even in all that awful confusion. It’s like a bond somehow. I feel it when I see those others out there, all those ones who are still confused. It’s much stronger when I look at you.”

“What is it — what do you think it is? What makes that feeling?”

She shrugged. “Maybe we all knew each other in heaven, and don’t remember any more. Is there a special tributary of the Lethe for people who return to the living?” She smiled when she said it, and Luke knew that she’d told a joke, even though he’d missed the punch line. “I don’t know. Maybe it is . . . something like that. It has to be, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does,” Luke said, and then the both of them were quiet for a long while. “Who were you — back before? Who are you? Did I know you, maybe, or know of you?”

She shook her head. “No. I’d remember if we’d met. And all of that life is behind me now. Let it rest.”

“I don’t remember very well — a lot of things I don’t remember at all. I think it might be because of the way I died. Andy Harrison told me about that.”

“You said my name,” the boy hollered from across the room. “I heard that.”

Luke turned, looked up at him. “You did, huh? Didn’t know I’d spoke about you loud enough for you to hear.”

“I heard. What you saying about me, Mr. Luke Munsen?”

Luke smiled. “Horrible things, you can be sure of that.”

“I bet. I bet.” The boy turned away, fell back into heated conversation with his father.

“He’s a good kid,” Luke said. “A little unsettling, but good. He’s the first living soul I saw after . . .” And the words fell away again, as though he’d never had them. After what? God knew what; Luke didn’t.

After he was alive again.

“Yes,” she said, as though she understood more than he’d said. “That’s important, isn’t it?”

As soon as she’d asked the question, Luke realized that it was important. “I think it might be. God only knows what that means.”

She nodded; so gravely that it almost seemed silly. And before he could stop himself Luke was laughing — not quite out loud, but it shook his expression and shook his shoulders even though he tried to stop them. After just an instant she was laughing too, and then there wasn’t any need for Luke to hold it back. The two of them doubled over laughing so hard that the room was watching Luke again. And Luke didn’t even care.

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TUESDAY

July Nineteenth

Broadcast over the ABC

television network on

the afternoon of July 18.

(Theme music.)

Stay tuned for a special live bulletin from ABC news.

(Twenty-seven seconds of silence.)

This ABC News special bulletin is coming to you live from the headquarters of ABC itself, in New York City. Violent protesters, as yet unidentified, have attacked this building and are at this very moment heading toward the studio from which this broadcast emanates. Their intentions are still uncertain, but we have heard gunfire, and we are no longer able to reach the security personnel on the building’s ground floor.

The protest started about twenty-five minutes ago, and at first it was raucous but fairly conventional. Fifteen minutes ago this office received frantic calls, when our security personnel first sighted machine guns among the crowd. New York City police were called at that time, but we are unable to tell whether or not they have responded, since the phone lines to the security desk died almost immediately.

What?

Dear God, they’re in the hall.

The newscaster stares away from the camera for fourteen seconds, terrified, until finally we hear the sound of a door shattering. We hear the sound of a machine gun —

No!

— and the newscaster screams before the channel goes dead.

From the Good News Hour,

broadcast on the Voice of

Armageddon Television Network,

7:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time,

Tuesday, July 19.

Bust-shot of anchorman; behind him is a map of Russia. Superimposed over the map are a red hammer and sickle and the words
GOG AND MAGOG
.

The forces of evil continue to gather strength in the nations of Gog and Magog, which still insist on referring to themselves as the Union of Russian Socialist Republics. Armies are massing in the South and Central Asian portions of that fearful nation.

A window opens up in the upper-right corner of the screen — inside it is grainy video footage of a riot in Red Square.

Those few of the righteous who live captive within the confines of the evil empire have taken to the streets in an attempt to bring down their evil leaders. So far their efforts have only succeeded in shifting the power among the heathens.

Meanwhile, at the gates of the fair city of Jerusalem, Arab surrogates for the evil empire continue their relentless attack on the forces of the righteous. This report by our Good News Hour reporter Carl Tappan, live from the city of Jerusalem. . . .

Footage of jet aircraft taking off from a desert runway; as the jets fade into the distance cut to a dead battlefield — smoking hulls of Russian tanks in the foreground. Off in the distance we see a long, steady series of explosions.

Can you tell us, Carl, exactly how it is that the infidels are already within fifteen miles of Jerusalem? How is it that Israel has fallen so far and so quickly?

A new voice — this one is thick with an drawl that sounds like Kentucky, or maybe southern Indiana.

David, the Israelis were caught off balance by the direction the attack came from. Their border with Jordan is a long one, and for better than twenty years it’s been peaceful. They didn’t expect the Jordanians to attack — and as a matter of fact, they didn’t. Even if they had, the Jordanian army isn’t large enough to pose much of a threat to the state of Israel. Who could have expected the Syrians and Iraqis — who’ve long been bitter enemies — to mount a joint attack? And even more unexpectedly, to mount it not by way of the Golan Heights, but by first attacking the Jordanians? The fact is, David, that no one here even considered for a moment the idea that there might someday be Syrian soldiers crossing over the Jordan River. They managed to make that crossing less than three hours after they blitzed over the Syrian border with Jordan, and managed to catch the Israeli Army so badly unprepared that most of the West Bank was lost before the Israelis could rally back. The Syrians and Iraqis aren’t gaining much more ground right at the moment, but the fighting here isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination. There’s some fear, in fact, that the Saudis or possibly even some of the gulf states may reinforce the Arabs. Colonel Qaddafi, in Libya, has already offered them his help — though so far his offer has been ignored. Right now the fighting is so intense and the outcome is so unsure that any new forces on either side could tip the balance completely.

The scene shifts again, to a small town in the rural south. Clearly visible in the foreground is a microphone marked with the letters abc.

Thanks, Carl. Now to Dean Grant in Tylerville, Tennessee, for this report.

David, strange things are happening down here in the South. Frightening things, that seem to indicate that we are indeed on the threshold of apocalypse. There’s a cemetery here in Tylerville where people are rising up out of their graves even as I speak. Crippled children are healing spontaneously. And the whole town is waiting for translation expectantly — absolutely and unshakably certain that it’ll come any moment.

And David, I think they may be right. Billy Wilson, here, is one of the ones who lived through this miracle.

The camera pans again, to focus on a brown-haired, freckled boy. He may be nine years old; he may be ten.

I was an awful mess, the boy says. He bends down, rolls up the left of his blue jeans. There is nothing in any way remarkable about his leg. My leg was all knurled up and twisted around inside. He put his arms around me and now I can run just like I was any boy. Even been swimming a couple times. I tell you, boy, it’s something.

Who’s that, Billy? Who put his arms around you?

I can’t tell you. Kind of like a creature, kind of like an animal and kind of like a man. With a weird face like a goat’s, and hair all over him, and he stood up and walked just like a man would. He was kind of like Jesus, all . . . holy like that. He told us he wasn’t any Jesus, and how can you not believe somebody like that when he tells you something? I can’t, tell you that. Jesus or not, he was somebody special. He put miracles on all the people here, on me, on everybody sick in this town. Even did that for the dead ones in the cemetery: when he was gone a few hours they started rising right up out of their graves. Resurrection! Boy, it’s something.

Superimposed over the boy’s forehead, now, are the numbers 666
.

We cut momentarily to a clip of a manlike, goatlike creature. When we return the boy is looking at a photograph.

Is that the one who healed you, Billy — the Beast from Revelation? The Antichrist?

That’s his photo, all right. I wouldn’t never have called him that.

Return to studio.

Thanks, Dean. There’s frightening news for all of us: not only has the Antichrist come to earth, but decent, innocent people are falling under his spell. These are perilous times in which we live, aren’t they, my friends?

Perilous times indeed.

And these phenomena aren’t confined to one town alone — similar dark miracles have taken place throughout Tennessee and Kentucky, and in the Northeast as well. The dead are rising in the morgues of New York City, and in more than one of that city’s cemeteries — graveyards so large that in many states they’d constitute whole counties by themselves. The dead are even coming to life in Philadelphia, Boston, and the nation’s erstwhile capital, Washington . . . though the phenomenon isn’t as common there as it is in New York or the mid-South.

In Oregon today the lower house of the state legislature passed a secession bill; if it passes in the state senate and is signed by the governor, Oregon would become the first state to secede from the Union since the Civil War. Federal authorities — those few still available — are refusing to comment on the measure.

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Chapter Twenty-Two

IN TRANSIT BY AIR OVER THE SEA OF JAPAN

Bill Wallace — he was still Bill Wallace in his own book, no matter what it was the Air Force decided to call him — spent most of the hours-and-hours-long flight to South Korea in a fugue, a half-state that wasn’t quite sleep and wasn’t quite wakefulness, either. He wasn’t tired, not especially. But there wasn’t much else to do; nothing to read. Nothing to watch but endless miles and miles of ocean and clear sky. Nothing to listen to but the steady thrumb of jet engines outside the plane’s cabin. No one to talk to, even if he hadn’t been under orders to keep to himself; he was utterly and totally alone in the plane’s passenger compartment. There was a two-man crew up in the cockpit, but neither of them had seen fit to ask him the time of day. Most likely, Bill thought, they were under orders not to talk to him, just as he was under orders not to talk to them.

Bill Wallace had never been especially susceptible to loneliness. Keeping to himself was a thing that came pretty naturally to him. Still, this was extreme; another day or two of this and he’d have a pretty clear idea of exactly what isolation was.

He sighed, yawned. Lifted his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as all that. Certainly if he were going to be a guinea pig the people who experimented with him would have to talk to him. Wouldn’t they? He hoped they would. And if they wouldn’t talk to him, then maybe at least they’d have a few good books he could read? Or a TV, anyhow. Something. Anything that didn’t amount to staring at the walls around him. Bill had had enough of that already.

More than enough.

So much, in fact, that he’d even begun to get bored with marveling over the miracle that allowed him to be alive when he’d already died. It was the only thing he’d had to think about on the trip out from Missouri, but even as incredible and wonderful as it was — literally, absolutely, and positively amazing — it wasn’t enough to sustain a trip this long all by itself.

Nothing was.

So Bill set himself back into his memories, and nibbled at the edges of those things that still . . . well, not haunted him. Bill wasn’t the type of guy who carried around things that haunted him. But there were things that didn’t go away; small aches like the pain in his left forearm that on winter mornings would take him back to the day he’d busted it, in a game of sand-lot football the year he was fifteen.

That football game was the least of the things Bill thought of at times like this. There were other things, memories that had a much larger claim on him. Things that very nearly did haunt him.

Like that night when he and Ron Hawkins and Joey Harris had tried to lift a couple of sixes of beer out of the 7-Eleven on Ridgedale Road back home in Mountainville, and ended up being attacked by a deranged store clerk wielding a baseball bat. Well, maybe not deranged; maybe the man was just at wits’ end from people shoplifting in his store so much. Whether he was deranged or unbalanced or just plain hep up, he’d beat Bill to within an inch of his life.

The ache from the broken arm was nothing beside the aches and pains the clerk’s baseball bat had made for Bill. Those aches and pains were morning things, and things that came to him in damp weather. They were nothing next to the guilt that found him at moments like this one. There’d been four people in that store that night: Bill, Ron, Joey, and the clerk. And of the four of them only Bill had managed to keep himself out of jail. Ron and Joey had gone away to the state penitentiary — sent there on the clerk’s testimony, and on the evidence of the store’s video camera. Even the clerk had spent a little time in the county jail for assault; the same camera that had put Ron and Joey away had recorded the things he’d done to Bill in considerable detail.