Fire (41 page)

Or maybe something else altogether.

After Luke’s eyes had spent a moment adjusting, it was more than enough light to see by.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Andy’s voice — twenty yards away? Thirty? It didn’t matter exactly how far. What mattered was that they’d found him.

Don’t look, Luke told himself. There isn’t any reason to look. Whatever it is he’s talking about, I don’t want to see it. All I need to do is walk across this room, grab his hand, and drag that boy out of here — kicking and screaming or not.

There wasn’t any way to avoid looking, of course — not if he didn’t want to break his neck.

And he saw —

— saw in the dim light dinosaur bones, whole skeletons with ropy-veined flesh growing on them like some terrible fungus. And wholer, half-formed things he didn’t want to put a name to. Blood, everywhere, oozing from the things. Flesh dripping away where it lost its hold on bone.

Something shifted off in the corner to his left. Luke heard it moving slowly, unevenly, saw only the least hint of shifting chiaroscuro as it went. A shadow much to be the boy’s. Even from that vague seeing he knew that whatever the thing was, it was carnivorous. Carnivorous and hungry and becoming more alive with every second that passed.

He shuddered. He still hadn’t figured out exactly where Andy Harrison was. He had to find him and get all three of them the hell out of there.

“He’s over there,” Christine said. She pointed ahead and a little to the left; Luke looked in the direction she pointed and saw a shape that could have been a boy. It was Andy — he turned when he heard Christine speak, and turning moved him into the light. Not far enough to see clearly, but far enough to recognize.

“Yeah,” he said — said quietly, almost in a stage whisper. “I’m over here. C’mon over, and be quiet, too — it’s feeding. Don’t want to scare it off.”

Feeding? What was feeding? Luke wanted out of that room more than he could have imagined was possible. He crossed the dozen yards between himself and the boy more quickly than was safe, given that he couldn’t see the floor well enough to have much idea what he might step on or trip over. Twice his feet nearly went sliding out from under him when one or the other of them managed to find its way into something thick and viscous. When he was a couple of feet away his ankle caught on a thick, fleshy bone; if Christine hadn’t caught his arm he’d have gone flailing head over heels into the jumbled mass of God-knew-what on his the right.

“Look at that, huh,” Andy said. He was staring off at the back left corner of the room, the same corner where Luke had seen the hint of something moving a few moments before. “Don’t get to see nothing like that at the Bronx Zoo, do you?”

The angle of light was different from here; where before the thing in the corner had been grey shadow in the blackness, here it was . . . not clear, exactly. But plainly visible.

“It’s a pterodactyl,” Andy said. “Seen one of them in a book, too. Flying dinosaur.”

The thing stood upright on two feet, like a man, but otherwise it was nothing like a man — its head was long and sharp, crested with a leathery grey peak. And where a man would have had arms the pterodactyl had wings like a bat’s, with sharp-fingered claws at the center of their forward edges.

And it was eating — gnawing and grinding at the bloody-fleshy bones of the half-formed things around it.

Luke put his arm on Andy’s shoulder. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Aw, relax,” Andy said. “I want to see what it does with the bones when it’s done with them.”

“Let’s go, I said.” Luke’s voice was louder and angrier than he meant it to be; mean and noisy enough that it embarrassed him. “This place is dangerous. If we don’t get out of here soon, we won’t get out at all.”

And two things happened at once:

The first was Andy Harrison, saying, “Mr. Luke Munsen, sometimes I’d swear you were a weenie —”

The second was the pterodactyl, looking up at the sound of Luke’s voice, and seeing them, and screeching. And bolting after them, as though live game were infinitely preferable to the taste of half-dead meat.

“Oh fuck,” Andy said. “Now look what you’ve done.” And he took off, running for his life toward the door at the far end of the room.

Luke and Christine were only a moment behind him.

“That thing is fast,” Andy said. They were in another corridor, long and better lit than the Reptile Room had been. “But we got one thing going for us: flying things don’t get on too well indoors. You ever seen a pigeon got itself inside? It’s a sad sight.”

If Luke had ever seen such a thing, he had no memory of it. He didn’t say so; he was too busy running to spare any breath on speech. How the boy could be so long-winded and still keep a pace Luke could barely match was beyond him.

Andy looked back, over his shoulder. “It’s catching up with us,” he said. “We ought to turn off somewhere — flying like that, the thing’ll probably overshoot when we do.”

And, without giving any more warning, that’s exactly what he did — turned and slammed open a glass door marked with the words
EGYPTIAN ROOM
. Burst through and just kept going. Luke and Christine almost missed the turn themselves; the flying monster shot by, squawking with annoyance.

It didn’t gain them much, of course; they’d barely made another thirty yards before Luke heard the sound of the glass door bursting to shards behind them.

In front of them, a glass-enclosed exhibit with a sarcophagus — and beside it, inside the glass, was a man clothed only in strips of crumbling yellow linen. He looked confused and terrified; he pounded desperately on the glass that walled him in, trying to break free. It didn’t do him any good.

“Look at that,” Andy said, “the Living Mummy. I read about him in the comic books.”

Comic books? Mummies? Luke wasn’t especially clear on either one. All the same he recognized in the man behind the glass the same confusion he’d felt himself when he’d come back to life three days before. He wanted to stop and try to help the man out of his prison, but there wasn’t any time — not if he wanted to live. Besides, that case was made of something strong and thick, and it was bolted shut; he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get it open, even if he tried.

The ceiling was low, here, and the aisles were narrow — which meant that there was no way for the pterodactyl to fly. And it kept bashing into things, too, which slowed it down even more. The dinosaur’s troubles weren’t much of an advantage; already Luke was getting tired; he didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep going. And the pterodactyl didn’t look the least bit winded.

Behind them the dinosaur caught sight of the man trapped in glass, and decided he might make an easier meal. The living mummy screamed in mortal terror at the sight of the thing, but when it tried to attack him, it didn’t have any more luck getting into the enclosure than the man had getting free from it.

Andy ducked behind a partition, slowed down, stopped. “That’ll give us a couple of minutes,” he said, “but we got to think this through. Running away from this thing just ain’t going to make it.” He looked around, frowning. Then he saw the painted-steel door marked
EMERGENCY EXIT DO NOT OPEN ALARM WILL SOUND
, and his eyes brightened. “I got it,” he said, “got it. Oh, man, this is great, just wait till you see this.”

The door was on the other side of the room, narrow-wise, surrounded by a large collection of papyrus scrolls. The boy bolted across and waved to Luke and Christine, trying to get them to follow him. Luke glanced around the corner, saw that the pterodactyl was still trying to break through the reinforced glass, and still not having much result. So he went ahead and crossed the room, to see what the boy was getting at. When he was half-way there, he looked back and saw Christine shrug and follow.

“It’s like this,” Andy said. “You got to hold the door for me while I check inside here. Sometimes when you go into one of these you can’t get out again. Okay?”

Luke reread the alarm warning on the door, shook his head, and said he would. Andy pushed on the swing-bar, and a shrill siren began to sound — loud enough that it hurt Luke’s ears to hear it. He winced as he held the door open for the boy. What was he doing in there, anyway? Why didn’t they all just get themselves out of there, while the pterodactyl was still distracted? It didn’t make any sense. He looked in, trying to figure out what Andy was up to. The door led into a stairwell; Andy had gone up above him somewhere. Whatever he was doing, it was lost on Luke.

“It’s going to work,” Andy said, coming down the stairs. “Going to work just fine. These doors are plenty strong enough, and they open the right way. Both of you wait right here. Be ready to run — upstairs and through the open door on the next floor.”

And he went out, into the center aisle of the Egyptian Room, picked up something that looked like a bronze vase. And shouted: “Hey, you! Hey stupid monster!” Threw the vase, hitting the pterodactyl square in the head. “Why don’t you chase after somebody who can run, huh? What’s the matter, don’t like to work for your dinner?”

And took off like a bolt of lighting when the dinosaur came after him.

“Go,” he said to Luke and Christine. “Go on, upstairs. Hurry!”

And they went, in spite if the fact that Luke felt like he was abandoning the boy in a bad spot, and Christine probably did too. The door barely even had a chance to swing shut behind them before Andy slammed through. It didn’t even have that much chance to close before the pterodactyl bashed into it.

“Get out that door,” he shouted to Luke. He was taking the stairs three at a time; down below him the dinosaur was struggling to press through the steel door frame. “Get out my way!”

“You’re out of your mind,” Luke said. He moved anyway. When Andy was on the second-floor landing he stooped and picked up the old brick he’d used to prop open the door, and threw it at the pterodactyl, hitting it squarely just above the eyes. Hit it hard, too — which wasn’t hard enough to do the monster any harm; instead of flinching it screamed, enraged, and finished pressing itself through the doorway.

Andy laughed.

“Got you now, sucker.”

Behind the monster, the door that led from the first-floor landing swung closed.

Andy stepped back, into the second-floor hallway, and pulled the stairwell door shut behind him.

Andy was still laughing; he got ahold of himself long enough to smile smugly. “Couldn’t just leave him there in Egypt, trying to eat the Living Mummy like that,” he said. “He might have got through eventually. And if it had that much trouble eating its way through a little bit of plexiglass, there’s no way it’s going to get through a reinforced-steel fire door. No way.”

The sound of the monster slamming against the stairwell door; the door and its frame shook a little, but not enough that it worried Luke.

“Fine,” he said, “just fine. Now let’s get ourselves out of this place. Get back to Bedford-Stuyvesant, maybe, where it’s safer. I’m not cut out for this tourist stuff. All right?”

Andy frowned. “You’re just no fun at all sometimes, you know that, Mr. Luke Munsen?” He shook his head. “Yeah, okay. Let’s get going.” Up ahead was a red-glowing
EXIT
sign, above a floor that looked as though it opened onto another stairwell. When they got to it the door swung open silently, as though its catch had been permanently disengaged.

And inside, staring out the window on the landing of the floor above them, was a policeman. He was facing away from them, but even from the angle at which they stood Luke could see that he carried a machine gun of the same make that the police fighting the tyrannosaur had.

Guns like that were dangerous — if you asked Luke, more dangerous than pterodactyls, maybe even more than tyrannosaurs. He started to back away quietly, easy as he could, afraid he’d startle the man —

“Hey,” Andy said, “look at that. It’s another cop with an Uzi —”

And the man jumped half out of his skin, and turned, and before anyone even realized what was happening the policeman was firing his gun reflexively.

Ten seconds later Luke Munsen and Christine Gibson and Andy Harrison were lying all but dead in the dim, tiled corridor, and the policeman was running toward another part of the museum, for fear that someone would learn what he’d done.

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It only took Luke Munsen a few seconds to die in the clinical sense. One of the half-dozen bullets that’d hit him had ruptured the major artery that linked his heart and his lungs; blood rushed out through it into his chest cavity so quickly and copiously that his heart lost the will to beat almost before it felt the shock of the bullet’s impact. And the moment that his heart stopped, Luke Munsen was dead.

Dead or not, his brain lived on a few moments longer.

And as he lay dead on the hallway floor, Luke Munsen had a vision. It began as his brain starved from the absence of oxygen, and when, an hour later, the microbes that had remade him once remade him for a second time, the dream continued with no interruption or transition that he could detect.

And his death and his life merged seamlessly into one another.

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In the dream, Luke was alive again for the first time, and he was in love. Or thought he was in love; he was fourteen, and tripping all over himself, and he felt a something that made him flush noticeably every time he got near that girl. If anyone had actually sat him down and asked him what exactly it was he wanted from her, he would have been uncertain of an answer. All the same, he would have told that someone he was in love — or might have told him that, if he were able to get far enough past his shyness to even apply words to the subject.

The point of the dream wasn’t love, or blooming erotic need, or the confusion of attraction and true bonding. The point was the way the confusion in his heart and in his blood made the spider web look, that morning in late fall.

Luke was in junior high, and he was walking to school the shortest way, only it wasn’t really the fastest because it led a mile and a half along sandy-dusty paths through brambles and thin woods, and it was hard to make anything like a decent pace when the ground sifted out from under your feet as you walked. That morning when he’d woke, there’d been thick fog everywhere, grey-blue-white outside his window, so thick and bright that it occluded the view completely.