Fire (40 page)

“Sweet Jesus,” and she was off again, running across the room. Heading for the wall phone this time, which wasn’t much use since she couldn’t seem to get through to anyone on it. After a moment she hung up the phone and came back to the table. Stood there awhile surveying the various dishes. (
pig
was even larger, Bill noticed. And wasn’t that dim light in
monkey
’s eyes a little brighter?) “We haven’t got much time,” she said. “It’s the North Koreans out there in the halls. Has to be. God knows what they’ll do when they find us.”

Bill frowned. “North Koreans, ma’am? What on earth are they doing over here?”

The Major sighed, shook her head. “They’ve been looking for an excuse to invade the South for thirty years. And with the trouble at home, they’re probably assuming that we’re in no shape to respond to them.” Her face was angry; her hands knotted up in tight little fists. “They’re wrong, of course. The Army — the Marines and the Air Force — all of them are keyed up and ready for a fight. The North Koreans may be able to overrun us here in the DMZ, but we’ll be in Pyongyang before the week is over.” She sighed again. Smiled, just a little. “Meanwhile we’ve got to get our notes off to Washington. The computer link is up, even if the phones are out. Give me your notes, William. Joseph, do you have anything to add that isn’t on the computer already?”

“It’s all in there, Major Carver.”

“Good. If they come for us before I’m done, don’t try to fight them. We’re researchers, not infantry. Much more valuable alive than dead. Even alive in enemy hands.”

When the North Koreans kicked the door open five minutes later — just as the major was finishing — they didn’t bother asking for surrender.

Two of them burst in, all but simultaneously. And in a moment all five of them were dead: Bill, Joey, Major Carver, the boy, and the drooling policeman.

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Chapter Twenty-Seven

BROOKLYN

It was long after dawn when they got back. Whatever sleep Luke may have lost he didn’t miss; he felt as rested when they were done as he had after his nap the afternoon before.

Andy was waiting for them on the stoop outside the abandoned building when they got to it. “Where you been?” he asked, mock-belligerent. “I been waiting around for you all morning.”

“Went for a walk,” Luke said. “Waiting? I didn’t know I was supposed to be here.”

“Well, of course you were. I was going to show you around the City today. Museums, that kind of stuff. All tourists are supposed to go see museums when they come to New York.”

“Huh. I’m a tourist?”

“You aren’t from around here, are you? I think we would have heard about it if there was anybody like you around this city. If you aren’t from around here, then you’re a tourist.”

Luke blinked. “Well. I guess I am, then.”

Andy looked up at Christine Gibson. “You can come, too, if you want. I bet you’d like the museum, too.”

“I . . . I’d love to,” she said. There was something in the sound of her voice, Luke thought, that seemed like a shadow of something she didn’t want to say. He didn’t know what it could be.

So the boy led them back down into the subway, and out into New York, which in the course of a single evening had lost every iota of the sanity it had spent days regaining. Andy couldn’t have known it, of course, but the last place in the world he should have taken them was back into New York.

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They took yet another route this time — all the way on the A train to
COLUMBUS CIRCLE
, then a dozen steps across the platform to the K local. Two stops more and they were coming up across the street from the Museum of Natural History.

They were too early to go inside when they got there, so Andy suggested that Luke could take them all out to breakfast at “one of those yumpie places over on Columbus.” Luke was just a little apprehensive at the suggestion, though he didn’t care much one way or the other about the money. The word yumpie — well, it made him nervous. It sounded familiar, but he had no exact recollection of exactly what a yumpie was. Was it some obscure, Middle Eastern creature — like a camel, perhaps? The idea of eating strange game for breakfast didn’t appeal to Luke. Well, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t feeling especially hungry anyway, though he would have enjoyed a meal. If the food the restaurant served didn’t appeal to him, he’d just have coffee.

Coffee Luke remembered, and clearly. Coffee was important.

When they got to the restaurant, its menu was pretty conventional. A little on the fancy side, maybe, but certainly not exotic. There wasn’t a single yumpie dish on it. Or none that Luke recognized as yumpie, anyway; though Andy’s Eggs Benedict were covered with a strange, yellowish sauce that looked as though it could have been made from a yumpie purée. Luke ordered eggs and toast for himself, to stay on the safe side. He noticed that Christine did the same.

Andy talked all through the meal — talked even while he was eating, whether there was food in his mouth or not. Mostly he told cruel, funny stories about other children in the school he attended, and in spite of himself Luke found himself laughing at them.

They were almost ready to pay the bill and head on to the museum when Luke heard the sound of gunfire, and the enormous plate-glass window shattered into a hundred thousand pieces that covered them and their table and everything nearby.

Christine and the boy both screamed; Luke probably would have screamed himself if he hadn’t been too confused and afraid to think of it. There was more shooting as Andy dragged all three of them down toward the floor; it shattered the rest of the restaurant’s windows. And plastered the maitre d’ to the far wall, where the blood leaking out through the hole in his chest turned the white shirt of his tuxedo slick crimson.

Andy yanked a table onto its side, and the three of them huddled behind it. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “But where in the hell are we going to go? Where’s that machine gun?” He peeked over the top edge of the table, ducked down again more quickly than Luke’s eyes could have focused. “Holy shit,” he said. “You got to see this!”

Another hail of bullets; one of them hit the table in front of them — and burst through, tearing a hole the size of Luke’s fist in the thick wood. And the bullet kept going, too — into the plaster of the wall behind them. Luke felt it pull at his hair as it burst past him. Sharp bits of splintered wood bit into the soft skin of his cheek.

Andy’s dark skin seemed to pale. “This table ain’t going to do us a damn bit of good,” he said. “We got to get over there, into the corner, by that brick wall.” It was the one place along the restaurant’s front that hadn’t been floor-to-ceiling glass. “Stay low, and go as fast as you can, before those police start shooting again. I didn’t even know that the police in this city owned machine guns. They own ‘em, all right. Just don’t know how to use ‘em.”

And he bolted out from behind the table, across the room. Luke took off a few steps behind him —

And nearly tripped over the corpse of a woman with a bullet through her neck when he looked out onto the street and saw a vicious-looking reptile the size of a three-storey house, eating a man in a policeman’s uniform.

Tyrannosaurus rex, Luke thought. He had no idea where the words could have come from. Were they a name, maybe — a name for the reptile? It seemed likely.

The policeman screamed as the reptile bit off his arm and spat it out; more bullets, going in every direction — most of them aimed at the dinosaur, few finding their mark. Even the ones that did hit home didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

“Don’t just stand there, Luke Munsen — you want to get yourself killed?”

Bullets, spattering holes in the plaster board wall behind Luke; and suddenly he was running again. Three beats and he was huddled beside the boy, hiding in the small shelter that the section of brick wall afforded. Luke hadn’t even caught his breath before Christine was huddled with them.

“How about that, huh?” Andy said, “A dinosaur on Columbus Avenue. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Um,” Luke said. He was having trouble appreciating the novelty; he was still afraid for his life.

“He’s winning, too. It don’t seem to make any difference at all, no matter how much they shoot him. Look at that — those cops are going to be dinner!”

And what happens, Luke wondered, When it gets done with them? Will it come over here and make a meal of us?

Behind them, Luke heard someone groan, heard the sound of movement. He looked back and saw the maitre d’, impossibly, lower himself from the wall the bullets had pasted him to, and begin to crawl back toward the kitchen.

“That’s a tyrannosaurus,” Andy said. “I seen one of them in one of the books at school. Man, they are bad.”

The dinosaur screamed loud enough to rattle the brick wall as machine gun bullets dug into its head, bursting its left eye. Bloody, rheumy pulp rained down everywhere.

“Meanest dinosaur ever made. It could kill anything alive. Did, too — they were always hungry.”

Suddenly the creature was turning tail and running away, south down Columbus Avenue, screaming all the while. The police — those of them that were still alive and whole — followed as best as they could, but before they’d covered thirty paces the dinosaur was four blocks away.

“We need to get ourselves away from here,” Andy said. “The streets aren’t safe — none of them. No telling which way that thing will go next. Need to get ourselves behind some serious rock walls, like down in the subway, or . . .” He looked across the street, and the back side of the Museum of Natural History. There was a gaping hole on one side of the building, a little larger than the tyrannosaurus. Pretty obviously, it was where the dinosaur had come from. “Perfect,” Andy said. “That’s perfect.”

“You want to hide in there? Come on — what if there’s another one inside it? You’re out of your mind.”

“If there was another one, we’d have heard it already. You heard the kind of noise that thing makes. Don’t be a weenie, Mr. Luke Munsen.”

And the boy bolted out of the restaurant, into the street. Through the small park between the sidewalk and the museum’s back wall. And in through the hole in the museum’s wall.

“Oh, Christ.” Luke wasn’t eager to go out onto that street, much less into the museum and whatever trouble waited inside it. But he couldn’t just leave Andy to whatever fate waited for him inside that place; not if he wanted to be able to live with himself. He turned to Christine. “I’ve got to go in there and get him out of that place. You may want to wait here . . .”

“No,” she said. “I’ll come with you. I’m not afraid.”

There were a dozen bodies out on the street; all but two or three of them uniformed. At least a couple looked as though they might still be alive, and Luke would have felt an obligation to do what he could for them if Andy Harrison hadn’t set off into a place that put him in even greater need of help. There was still shooting in the distance, but none of it seemed to be coming toward them.

“Well,” he said, “let’s go.” And took Christine’s hand, crossed the street and the park at a dead run. They stopped when they reached the ruptured wall, and Luke hesitated for most of a minute before he led them in.

It was dark inside, and ominous looking; the only light came from an emergency lantern high up in the room’s corner. A storage room, from the look of things, Luke thought; there were orderly stacks of crates everywhere reaching nearly to the room’s high ceiling, many of them covered by dusty tarps. At the far end of the room was another rupture like the one Luke stood in front of.

There was no sign of the boy anywhere in view.

“Are you afraid?” Christine asked him. There was no malice in the question, and certainly no fear of her own. There was a little sympathy, and that embarrassed Luke. He didn’t like the idea that he was afraid where anyone else could see it, but the truth was that he was scared half out of his wits.

“No,” he said, “of course I’m not afraid. What’s to be afraid of?”

“Nothing is, I suppose. If you say so.” She smirked as she said it, and that only embarrassed Luke more. He climbed up into the rupture in the wall, and she followed, just a moment behind.

When they got to the far end of the room, into the broad corridor that led from it, they could see two more broken passageways marking the tyrannosaur’s path. “He’s probably down there someplace. That kid is crazy. Crazy. What on God’s earth is he trying to do — find more dinosaurs? He’s going to get all of us killed. Again.” He cupped his hands around his mouth, shouted: “Andy?”

There wasn’t any answer.

Christine frowned. “I think we’d better hurry.”

“Yeah.”

And they ran, down one corridor and then the next, and three others after that, following the trail of wreckage the dinosaur had left in its wake. It wasn’t a hard trail to follow; anything but. Three times they heard sounds of violence in the rooms off the corridors, and Luke called out Andy’s name, but there wasn’t any more answer than there had been the first time he shouted. Other rooms echoed with quieter, more ominous sounds. Luke kept his quiet when he heard them. They weren’t likely anything to do with Andy Harrison; Luke couldn’t imagine Andy in trouble and not making a racket.

They’d covered at least three hundred yards when they came to the last broken doorway. Beside it was a great brass plaque that read
REPTILE ROOM
; it was bent and hanging at an odd angle.

Luke hesitated again before he went inside. He knew there was something inside that he didn’t want to see — knew it without any evidence or reason.

And he was right.

Not that there was anything he could do besides go inside; he had an obligation to the boy, and certainly to the boy’s mother. He couldn’t just leave him there.

It was even darker inside the Reptile Room than it was in the corridors. The only light inside it came from the hallway, and from the hall at the far end of the room. If the room had ever had the sort of emergency lighting that most of the rest of the building did, something had destroyed it. The tyrannosaurus, maybe.