Fire (38 page)

Three minutes later they were in that long white corridor again, walking a lot slower than Bill was comfortable walking these days. Especially when he was under orders. There wasn’t much to do about it; Joey was the one who knew where they were going. If Bill went on ahead of him he’d be sure to end up in the wrong place.

“Don’t you think we ought to get a move on? The Major sounded in some kind of a hurry, I’ll tell you.”

Joey let out a long breath; slowed almost to a stop to think about the question.

“She gets that way sometimes. I don’t see that there’s anything to be done about it.”

Which struck Bill pretty strangely, even if he wasn’t quite certain what it meant. “How’s that?” he asked. He hadn’t seen an awful lot of Major Janet Carver. What he had seen of her had impressed Bill rather highly.

“I don’t get it,” Bill said. “What’re you talking about?”

A silence that went on for longer than it ought to have, and Joey had this weird look on his face, like he was about to say something. For a minute Bill thought Joey was actually going to answer the question; but then his expression changed again, as though he’d thought better of it. “Never mind,” Joey said. And after that he didn’t say another word until he opened the door to the policeman’s room.

When they got there, Bill saw that there was one thing about Joey that hadn’t changed: he still got all slick and sweaty when he was nervous. And it was nervousness that had him in such a sweat, too. Bill could see it in his eyes, the lines on his forehead and around his mouth. All over his face. At first Bill thought that maybe it was because of the conversation they hadn’t quite had, just a few moments before. No: look at the way Joey hesitated, not wanting to open the door. What on God’s earth was in there, to make him shake like that?

“You going to be okay, Joey?”

And Joey snapped. “Don’t call me that, damn it!” His voice was shrill. Or as shrill as a baritone ever gets. Just shy of hysterical. “My name is Joseph. Or Joe, if you have to. I’m not seventeen years old any more, and no one, no one, calls me Joey.”

It gave Bill more than a bit of pause. He was about to say something sarcastic, something biting — and then he stopped himself. It wouldn’t do for him to get into a tizzy, too; not if Joey was about to slip a cog. “Sure, Joe.” The word tasted strange on his lips. “Joseph. Whatever you want. What’s in that room? What’s got you all hep up?”

And Joey or Joseph or whoever the hell he was stopped dead in his tracks. Stopped moving, stopped trembling, everything. Let out a small sound that sounded as rattled as every other thing else about him. Turned, looked Bill in the eye.

“There’s a man in here,” he said. “A policeman who got his head blown off in a riot in New York City. And he’s alive.”

That didn’t sound all that frightening to Bill; he’d been dead himself not even two days ago. It wasn’t worth interrupting over.

“There was a picture of him, right when it happened: the TV cameras, from ABC. Live on the networks. Right before the crazies took over the place. One minute he’s a cop, armed with nothing but a night stick. Trying to stop a riot when the rioters are armed with machine guns. The next minute there’s blood and bone and brain-meat flying everywhere, and the cameras are getting all of it, taking it in and sending it out into the air.”

Joe took in a breath. Let it out slow.

“I was watching the satellite feed when it happened. ABC, just a couple of minutes before it went down. I saw it, damn it — I might as well have been there. And three hours later someone notices that something is breathing inside a body bag.” Bill saw Joe clench his jaw. Reach forward, set his hand on the doorknob, turn it. Press the door just far enough open that Bill could tell the room inside was pitch black. “I saw him, damn it. I saw how he died.”

Joe finished opening the door. Reached in and turned on the light. Stopped again.

“There’s something else, too,” he said. And waited for Bill to ask him what he meant.

There was something here — something wrong. The way Joey was acting, that was it. None of the things he was talking about — none of the things he’d told Bill about — seemed like anything that ought to make anybody tremble before he went into a room. Let alone Joey, who took it real easy when he heard how Bill used to be alive. “Yeah? What’s that, Joe? What else?”

And Joey stepped back, toward Bill — to one side and away from the door. Kept his arm extended, holding the door open.

“See for yourself.”

And Bill saw the man.

At first there was nothing special about him at all. A dark, kinky-haired, sallow-skinned Hispanic. Puerto Rican, from the look of him; or maybe he was a pale Negro. Staring off into space absently. Prone abed but wide-eyed and awake. His face was slack, vacant; at first Bill thought that was the face of a man at the far end of exhaustion.

And then he got a second look.

And saw that the void behind the man’s eyes was deeper and more impenetrable than tiredness or contemplation.

Saw that there was nothing behind those eyes at all.

“Trouble is,” Joe was saying, “That man isn’t really alive at all. Gives me the creeps in the worst possible way.”

Dead, vacant eyes.

“No,” Joe said, “that isn’t saying it right. I could live with the creeps. Being around the walking zombie makes me sick with myself, right down to the core.”

Sick with himself: that was exactly what Bill was feeling. Dead down inside, like the fever he had when he was twelve that made him so tired that he wanted to let go of the world and slip away and die.

“‘Walking zombie’? He can actually walk?”

“Not very well. There’s just about enough of him left that if you take him by the arm and drag him, he’ll follow you. Not very well; sometimes he just stops, and there’s nothing you can do to get him going again.”

Bill stood, still as stone, staring. There was nothing else he could do. “Have I got this right? We’ve got to share a room with this thing for the rest of the night? And maybe longer?”

“That’s right.”

Bill shuddered. “Okay, then. Might as well get to it.” He crossed the last few steps to the man’s bedside, pulled away the sheets, took the man’s upper arm. Tried to pull him upward, or maybe get him to sit himself up. It wasn’t much use; the body was enough like putty that when he lifted the arm that arm itself was the only thing that moved.

“We’ve got to lift him out of bed ourselves,” Joe said. “Once he’s on his feet you can get him to walk. He won’t get there on his own.”

“Oh,” Bill said. This job was going to get unpleasant. There was an odor in the air, here, close to the man who wasn’t entirely alive. A smell like — like filth, and worse than that. The smell that skin gets when it chafes against itself too much for too long. Sick, sweet, sour. Decay.

Joe crossed the room, went to the far side on the man’s bed. Bent and took his arm. “We both need to lift at the same time. Now,” he said, and they heaved that man, all jellylike mass of him, to a sitting position. Where Bill held his back steady while Joe pulled his legs around so that they hung over his edge of the bed. “Come around, and help me get him to his feet.” Bill did, and a moment later they were leading the dead man from the room — Bill holding his left arm, Joe holding his right. It was a little tricky getting out the door, what with three abreast like that, but they managed.

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Chapter Twenty-Six

WASHINGTON

All Graham could think as he crawled down the embankment was God loves me, God loves me and He forgives me. In spite of all I’ve done. Already the constriction in his throat was beginning to ease; he could feel blood pulsing up through the fat veins of his neck. Even his larynx — which just a few moments before had felt as though it’d been crushed permanently and hopelessly out of shape — even his larynx seemed to be reforming itself.

There was gunfire all around him, and blood. Old blood, scabrous and brown, and fresh stuff, too, that made his trembling hands and knees feel as though they’d slide out from under him. People screaming in pain as they died violent deaths.

I’m still in Hell, he thought. God has freed me, but I’m still in Hell. I’ve got to crawl up, out of here. Crawl my way free of here and find God. God wants me and needs me — why else would he set me free? God’s waiting for me, somewhere not far away at all.

The only path that led away from the place, of course, wasn’t a path up out of Hell at all.

Just the opposite. It led down, down the embankment and through the gaping ruin of a chain link fence.

That fact should have told Graham Perkins something. He should have known what he was doing, even as addled as he was. Should have known that he wasn’t escaping from Hell, but crawling down into another, deeper and more subtle ring of the inferno.

Whether he ought to have known or not, he didn’t. When he was free of the broken fence he edged along the sidewalk, certain that sooner or later he’d find heaven, or purgatory, at least. He kept crawling for a whole block and a half, wearing his hands and knees raw and red with his own blood.

And then the limousine spotted him.

The driver braked suddenly as soon as he began to pass Graham — suddenly enough to add the sound of screaming rubber to the chaos on the Beltway. A moment later the back door eased open, and a man stepped out.

A smiling man — and after Graham had taken a moment to absorb the smile, he realized that he recognized him.

From the White House. It was one of the men from Paul Green’s “kitchen cabinet” — though no one ever actually used that term. There weren’t many who knew about the dozen or so people who had special access to the Oval Office; certainly Green himself had taken pains to keep their comings and goings unnoticed. It was one of the few things Green actually had been discrete about. Likely that was because all of his cronies were deeply involved in the fundamentalist sect that the President had been a part of.

Graham even knew this one by name — they’d been introduced at a cocktail party a few weeks after Green’s inauguration.

Herman Bonner.

What was Herman Bonner doing here, in Hell? Herman was a Christian, just as Paul Green had been. It didn’t make any sense. Unless —

Unless maybe . . . unless maybe he was here to save Graham.

I’m redeemed, Graham thought as he took Herman Bonner’s hand.

And that was the moment that Graham Perkins lost his soul.

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SOUTH KOREA

Someone brought a tray of dead things around eight. At nine they brought a corpse.

Long about midnight the dead-eyed man started to drool.

That was plain and simple too much for Bill Wallace, and he said so out loud as he got up and walked away from the corner of the room where he and the boy had been told to sit and watch the dead man.

The major cocked an eyebrow when she saw him there staring over her shoulder, but then she got a glance at the way that thing was drooling like that, and she said, “All right, then Corporal. I take it you want to help us here?”

Which was a sincere relief. “Yes, ma’am. Anything I can do to be of service.”

She frowned. Took a good long look around the lab. “Do you see the table over there? The glass dishes set out on it? Yes, you do. Get yourself a pad and pen out of the cabinet” she pointed “near the door. Second drawer. Make yourself a list of the contents of each dish. It won’t be hard; they’re all labeled. I want you to check the contents of each dish every half hour, and note any changes that you see. If there are no changes, I want you to make a note of that, too.”

Bill took a long, hard look at the table. It wasn’t your regular sort of Air Force work she was asking for, but it didn’t sound too complicated.

“Got that?”

The dishes on the table were where Joey and the Major had put those giblets that the quarantine-suit people had wheeled in half an hour back. Well, that was a relief; for just a moment Bill had been afraid he’d have to go into the adjoining lab and keep an eye on that corpse they’d brought in on the stretcher. Bill’d noticed how Joey had to go in and check on it every little bit or so.

“Yes ma’am. No trouble ‘tall.”

Two minutes later Bill was standing beside the lab table, making his list. The work wasn’t that tough, Bill decided. And this was all there was to being a scientist? Bill pictured himself as some kind of a Dr. Frankenstein, decked out in a white lab coat and Coke-bottle glasses and one of them pointy little mustaches. Grinned. Maybe there was something to this business of getting yourself enough college to do desk work. A damn sight easier than runway sweeping.

The dishes were all labeled, just as the Major had said they’d be. Labeled twice, in fact: once with a common animal name that Bill didn’t have any trouble understanding, once in Latin that Bill couldn’t make sense of and could only barely recognize for what it was. The heck with that, he thought, scribbling on his pad; as long as he took down something understandable, there wasn’t any need to copy down those jumbled-up foreign letters.

The first dish was marked
chicken
, and there wasn’t much mistaking it. Looked like a drumstick sitting in that glass dish. Fresh out of your grocer’s freezer. Well, not exactly like that. But pretty darned close. There was dark, fresh blood seeping out around the open knuckle. And the skin on the drumstick there looked fuller, like Bill imagined the skin of a live chicken would look underneath the feathers. Not that he’d ever seen a live chicken, let alone a live chicken without its feathers. Mountainville, where Bill grew up, might’ve been a small place in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t any farm-town, and Bill wasn’t any farm boy.

The contents of the next dish were pretty familiar-looking — two cubes of the stew beef from dinner. Still covered with gooey-looking gravy, still leaking blood. It didn’t look as though it’d changed at all since dinner time. Which surprised Bill pretty thoroughly; it’d only taken twenty minutes for that stuff to uncook itself. Surely it would have changed more than that in the hours since then.