Fire (39 page)

Well, it hadn’t, and he wasn’t going to be able to figure out why himself. He scribbled on his pad:
cow — looks the same as it did at dinner
. Which didn’t sound any too scientific, but the Major would just have to understand about that, since Bill wasn’t any scientist.

The next dish was
pig
, and it was a different matter altogether.
chicken
and
cow
had both looked . . . well, butchered. Looking at them you could still see nice clean edges where somebody had took a knife to the meat. The
pig
stuff was different — it didn’t look at all like something you’d see at the butcher’s counter. Not at all. More like some kind of a bleeding, stringy-red slime-mold you’d expect to see growing at the bottom of a vat. Very disgusting. How did you go about describing a thing like that on one line of paper? Bill wasn’t sure. So he put down
large mess
on the line beside
pig
. And hoped he’d be able to explain to the Major later on, when she asked about it.

Beside
pig
was
cat
, and it was even more disgusting than
pig
was. It wasn’t just dead — it was dead dead. And whole, too, where all the other dishes had just been hunks of meat.
cat
looked like he’d spent a good six years soaking in formaldehyde — and it was formaldehyde; Bill knew the smell of it well enough to recognize it anywhere — it looked like it’d spent a good six years pickled in that stuff. There was a long slit down the center of the thing’s belly, like someone way back when had cut it open to take a look inside.
cat
, Bill wrote,
very dead
.

Disgusting as
cat
was,
monkey
did worse things to Bill’s stomach. Not that he looked worse — nothing could have looked much worse than
cat
did — but he looked just about as bad, and the fact that he looked like a tiny caricature of a human being made it pretty hard to take. With the skin of his chest slitted open and hanging loose that way, he almost did look like a man, a tiny little bare-chested fellow with his suit jacket hanging open. How long have you been sitting in that vat of formaldehyde, huh, little guy? For half a moment, looking into its cute little wide dead eyes, Bill was half afraid that it was going to answer. It didn’t answer, though — it just kept staring dead-eyed at Bill, like it was the world’s best poker player.

Monkey: as dead as
cat
. Maybe deader.

Then here was the dish marked
dog
, only Bill didn’t see any dog in it all. Just this oversize drumstick, which Bill (who wasn’t any butcher, truth to tell) would have took for a turkey leg if it weren’t for the label.
cat
and
monkey
were clearly laboratory animals, dissection stuff like the frog they made Bill chop to bits back and junior high. But dog, here — dog looked a lot like
chicken
did. Which is to say that dog haunch looked like it’d come out of somebody’s refrigerator, same as the drumstick did. These Oriental types here in Korea, they were dog eaters, weren’t they? Bill thought he remembered hearing a couple of airmen come back from here, telling horror stories about it. Ugh. He wasn’t too sure how much more of this he could take. Not that it mattered whether he could take it or not; he was an airman and the Major had told him this was what he had to do and he had to do it. No two ways about it. So he looked real close at that haunch of
dog
, and he saw how the open bloody wound end was just like the
pig
, lots of little fibrous tentacles growing up out of the meat. And he wrote that down.

It got a little easier after
dog
, which was a good thing. A plate with a dried up dead
roach
on it, and even if it was a little gross Bill’d sure seen worse.
carp
wasn’t anything but a fish fillet. Two plates full of shriveled up stuff marked
brine shrimp
and
planarian worm
. A
frog
and a
lizard
, both of which looked like things that had got themselves mooshed out on the road. A busted-open
clam
, which Bill looked at and tried to figure out what he was supposed to be able to say from looking at it. Two hunks of meat, marked
horse
and
sheep
, that looked like they were fresh in the butcher’s case. A dead
spider
.
mouse
and
rat
, both of them clean and lily white like lab animals. Little blots of blood on their backs where someone had taken the trouble to sever their spines. And a headless
rabbit
that was probably from a lab, too.

When he’d made his notes on the last of them, Bill turned away from the lab table and let out a long breath. The big round-face clock there on the wall by the door said that it was twenty after twelve, which meant that he had a good twenty minutes before he had to make another round and start over with
chicken
. Twenty minutes. Time enough to have a cigarette. If he had any, which he didn’t, since he hadn’t had a chance to get by a commissary in a lifetime or so.

“Joey,” he said, about a second and a half before he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to call him that any more, “you got a couple smokes I can bum?”

Joe was sitting in front of a computer terminal just then, pounding away on its keys. “Quit three years ago,” he said. Without bothering to look away from the computer screen. “Sorry.”

Damn.

“You’re welcome to one of mine, Corporal Roe. There in my purse, on the chair. Help yourself.”

Which brought the Major up a couple more points in Bill’s book. It wasn’t often when he’d been offered a cigarette by an officer.

“Thank you, ma’am. Much appreciated.”

There they were, just like she’d said: a gold-and-red pack of Winston 100s sticking out of that little side pocket on her hand bag. Beside the cigarettes were three packs of matches; Bill took a cigarette and one of the matchbooks, started to light up —

“You’d best step outside to smoke it; God knows what the combination of smoke and formaldehyde would do to your lungs.” There wasn’t even a hint of reproof in her voice — just a little concern.

“Yes ma’am. Thanks again.”

It was a plain relief getting out of that room, with all its smell and presence of death. Already he was beginning to wonder if maybe there wasn’t some way to get out of having to look at all that dead . . . stuff. The thought of looking in on that disgusting mass of
pig
again did a lot to make sweeping runways look appealing. Maybe being a scientist wasn’t all that much fun after all. There was an idea: maybe he could volunteer to do something else, something a little more in the line of work airmen ordinarily did. Maybe he could volunteer to tidy up that runway he’d come into this base on, for instance.

Ha — fat chance of that. The major wasn’t likely to appreciate the suggestion; the whole reason he was down here inside this mountain was because he was too classified an object to allow to be seen in the light of day.

Someone was shouting, somewhere in some vague and distant tunnel; the sound of it was barely recognizable from where Bill stood. And was that noise the clatter of a machine gun going off? It was. Best to tell the Major about it. He looked around for an ashtray to put the cigarette into. Saw none and quashed the butt on the tile floor. Wincing as he did it — Bill had cleaned enough floors in his time in the Air Force to know how much trouble it was to get rid of a cigarette scar. Opened the door to the lab, went inside.

“Major Carver, ma’am —”

“Not now, William. This is a critical moment, and I’m very busy. I need you to check up on your dishes right away.”

“But Major —”

“The dishes, William. Now.”

It was an order, plain and simple. Stated in a tone of voice that ought not to be ignored. So Bill said “Yes ma’am,” and he got his pad from where he’d left it by the Major’s purse. And he went back to the table to check on his charges.

Which were even more disgusting now than they had been before.

chicken
hadn’t changed all that much; it was maybe a little more raw-looking around the edges.
cow
hadn’t changed at all.
pig
, on the other hand —
pig
was another story altogether. If Bill hadn’t’ve known it was a piece of meat, if he hadn’t seen it before when there was still the chance to recognize it, he’d never have figured out what it was. It looked like some kind of an amoeboid mass from a science fiction horror movie, all crazy strands of bloody fibrous ook heading off in every direction. Pulsing. And growing almost visibly; not long ago it’d been a tiny hunk, no bigger than a half dollar, and now it took up a full fourth of the plate it sat on. I probably ought to tell the major about this, too. I bet she still isn’t in any mood to listen.

Bill glanced across the room; the major was at that computer terminal now, typing away even more furiously than Joe had been a little bit before. Nope. There wasn’t any sense interrupting her. Not if Bill didn’t want to get his head took off. He shook his head, went back to work.

Cat
hadn’t changed a bit; he still looked like something that should have long since been put to rest. But
monkey
—
monkey
was a sight that gave Bill a wicked case of goose flesh. There was a thin slick of fresh blood of the open flesh of his chest, and the tiny little veins there were pulsing. The loose chest skin that’d looked so much like a dinner jacket just a little while back had begun to fuse itself back onto the rib cage. And the glassy eyes that had been so dead were darker — not yet alive but neither entirely dead.

The haunch of
dog
was growing, too. There was a great, fibrous mass — like the mass of
pig
— growing out to meet its nonexistent hip. And it wasn’t just growing, it was alive — as Bill watched the leg twitched at the knee.

He made his notes, moved on.
roach
,
carp
,
planarian worms
,
brine shrimp
,
frog
,
clam
,
sheep
,
spider
,
mouse
,
rat
,
rabbit
— none of them had changed in any way that Bill could see. horse was a little redder than it had been, but not that much redder; it hadn’t changed even as much as
chicken
.

The strangest thing — the thing that sent Bill running over toward the Major and her computer terminal, and to hell with how she felt about being interrupted — the strangest thing was
lizard
.

Which wasn’t in its plate any more.

lizard
had got up and walked away; it was half-way across the table, prowling furtively. Looking at
roach
with a light in its eye that struck Bill as being distinctly hungry.

³³³

“What is it, William? What’s so important that you insist on interrupting me?” Major Carver wasn’t pleased with Bill at all. Not in the least.

“It’s the lizard, ma’am. It’s got up and walked away.” Boy, did that sound stupid; Bill was beginning to feel like a character in a bad TV show.

“What lizard, William? What kind of a lizard are you talking about?”

Bill coughed. “The lizard that you asked me to watch, Major, ma’am. I don’t know that I can tell you exactly what kind of a lizard it was — I know you had that plate labeled there in Latin and all, but those foreign words don’t make much sense to me.”

And Bill could see on her face how the idea finally reached home inside her: curious and then unbelieving and then surprised and finally panicked. Which was a pretty strange expression to see on the face of an officer, and Bill would’ve said so to anyone who cared to ask.

“Where is it, Corporal? Are you absolutely certain that you didn’t brush it off the plate yourself?” She was already up out of her seat there by the computer terminal and running half-way across the room.

“No chance of that, ma’am. And even if I had knocked it off the plate, there’s no way I would could have moved it all the way over there by the roach without knowing that I’d done it. And moving it wouldn’t have made a dead, dried out lizard alive enough to nibble on that bug like that.”

She was standing over the
roach
plate now, staring wide-eyed at the lizard. Wide-eyed and afraid.

“No, Corporal. I don’t suppose it would have.”

The sound of shooting was closer now. Close enough to hear right through the laboratory’s closed door. And wasn’t that a larger explosion? A fragmentation grenade, maybe? It was. The Major didn’t seem to hear it at all. Bill stole a glance over at Joe, who was hunched over the lab table at the far end of the room. And just as oblivious to the sound out in the halls.

“Ma’am. . . ?”

The Major didn’t answer him right away; the look on her face said that she was too wrapped up in thinking about the lizard to notice much of anything else.

So, louder this time: “Ma’am. . . ?”

“What now, Corporal? Has another of your pets decided to get up and walk away?”

“They don’t ordinarily conduct live ammunition exercises down here in these tunnels, do they?”

The Major scowled. “Of course they don’t. Why should you ask such a question?”

The woman Major was definitely getting furious with Bill, and he knew it. Wasn’t there some saying about people who had to give bad news, and that you ought not to get rough with them? Somebody, Bill thought, ought to tell it to the Major. Just so long as it didn’t have to be him.

“Because there’s people shooting off some automatic weapons out there in your hallway.” There it went again — another grenade? And closer, too. “Or not far from your hall, anyhow.”

That one only took an instant to sink through. Probably because of the sound effects.