Fire (45 page)

And suddenly the question of how the Beast could take so much abuse and still run was moot. Because he pitched over face-first into the dirt. And he didn’t move at all.

Ron just kept running, as though his life depended on it — and the likely truth was that it did. Partly he ran because he was afraid, and partly he ran because the Beast had asked him to when he was still alive. And most of all he ran because his mind went grey and there wasn’t any other thing he could think to do.

³
³
³

Chapter Thirty

SOUTH KOREA AT THE EDGE OF THE DMZ

Bill Wallace woke from the dead for the second time needing to go to the bathroom in the worst possible way.

He made such a rush for the door marked
lavatory
, in fact, that he didn’t even notice the holes in his uniform, nor the crusted bloodstains that covered it.

Nor did he notice the chaos in the laboratory all around him; the pressure in his bowels was too desperate for him to notice any of the dozen things that ought to have seized his attention. And when he finally got into that lavatory, finally got his bloodstained pants down around his ankles — it only got worse. Much, much worse. The cramps! As though there were something alive inside him, and it was clawing its way toward freedom through his low gut.

Which was when he remembered dinner. Remembered eating half a bowl of stew. The other half of which had come to life right there as it’d floated in the gravy.

Dear Lord — Dear Lord in Heaven, I’m going to give birth to a cow.

For a moment he almost imagined it was so. Until he looked down at his belly and saw that it wasn’t especially misshapen or distended, saw that there was no room inside him for a cow or a bull or even a calf. And thank God for that.

The cramps were still there, still pressing and hurting inside him even if there wasn’t any possibility of Bill giving birth. And they stayed with him. Pushing, lurching, pain working its way down and around inside Bill. Five minutes when he ought to have been screaming in agony, only he couldn’t scream, because his jaw was clenched tight to hold in the pain, and if he let go of it for even a moment Bill knew that he’d come loose at the seams. . . .

Until finally it started to make its way free from him.

Which was even more painful. A sensation so intense, in fact, that Bill blacked out under its intensity.

And came to, not long later. Right as rain and feeling so well that at first Bill suspected that he’d dreamed the sensation of giving birth —

Which was when he got up from the throne and saw the four perfect cubes of living beef. Floating in the toilet water. And flushed them away out of disgust before it occurred to him that this was exactly the kind of thing that the Major wanted to know about. Well, to Hell with that; there wasn’t time for research if they were getting themselves overrun by communists. Bill fastened his bloodstained trousers, buckled his belt that had gone stiff as his blood had dried on it.

Outside, in the lab, that boy was glowing again. He was the only one besides Bill who was awake and alive, though the Major was moaning in gentle agony off against one wall — she was alive but nowhere near awake yet. And Joe, off against the wall opposite, had too much complexion for a real corpse. And then there was the dead policeman, who lay on the ground near his chair, still wide-eyed and drooling. There were bloodstains all over his torn hospital smock, but Bill could see that the wounds underneath them were healed over. Still, the dead policeman didn’t really count as being alive again, since he hadn’t really been completely alive in the first place.

“Hey!” the boy shouted. “You stop that! You stop that now.” At first Bill thought he was shouting at him, but when he turned he saw the boy glowing and shaking his hand that had one finger bleeding, little droplets of the red stuff spattering on the walls and ceiling. The boy had his back to Bill — he was over by that table where Bill had had to check out all the different dead things, back before the commies showed up and killed them all. What had he got his finger caught in? What was he shouting about?

And then Bill saw.

Saw that the boy was playing with
monkey
. Who wasn’t too dead any more. Matter of fact, old
monkey
wasn’t dead at all. Not even remotely.

He was sitting on the lab table holding his dish above his head as though he were about to throw it at the boy. Making screeching noises that sounded even more threatening. Blood from the boy’s finger all over his lips.

“You put that down, now,” the boy said. “It isn’t nice to throw your dishes around. You might break something. Or hurt somebody.” Bill was right behind the boy, now; before either the kid or the
monkey
realized what was going on Bill had reached right over the boy’s head, grabbed the dish out of the
monkey
’s hands. Which made the little beast screech so loud that Bill nearly jumped out of his own skin to hear it.

“There you go,” he said, and he set the dish on the far end of the table, far out of the
monkey
’s reach. Out of it for the moment, anyway; there wasn’t nothing to stop the
monkey
from scurrying across the table top and picking the darned thing up again.

“You didn’t have to do that, Corporal Roe,” the boy said. “He would have put it down. I know he would.”

“Huh. You know he was going to bite you like that? And if you did, how come you let him get his mouth near your finger?”

The boy frowned, but he didn’t say anything.

monkey
had backed a little ways away from them, toward the back side of the table, and now he was grooming himself. And grooming his, er, his. Privates.

The boy was still glowing. How could he glow like that and not know about it? How could he glow like that, and everybody else acted like they couldn’t see it?

“C’mon, son,” he said. “We need to give
monkey
over there a little privacy.” He put his arm on the boy’s back, led him toward the far end of the table. “What’s your name, son? I know you told me a while back, but my memory is a little strange these days.”

“My name is Jerry Williams, Mr. Corporal Roe. How come
monkey
is playing with his ying-yang like that? He’s going to pull it clear off if he doesn’t stop, isn’t he?”

Bill blushed.

Coughed.

“He’s just trying to straighten it out, Jerry. You don’t worry yourself over it, huh?” He looked around for anything that was interesting enough to get the boy’s eyes off of
monkey
.

And saw
pig
. And
dog
. And noticed
lizard
crawling around on the ceiling.

“He’s getting all red,” Jerry said.

“Say, Jerry! Will you look at that? Look at that plate there, the one marked
pig
. Look at how big that stuff’s got, huh. D’you see it before those commies came in and blew us all away?”

And the boy did turn, thank God. Just barely in time to keep from having to see that
monkey
erupt.

“Sure didn’t. What is that gross stuff?”

“I ain’t too sure. When it started out it weren’t nothing but a pork chop.”

monkey
was licking his fingers.

pig
was a great sprawling mass of stringy flesh that sprawled out and all over the table; so large, now, that the mass of it could have filled a basin.

“Really? That weren’t nothing but a pork chop?”

“Nuh-uh. Not one bit more when it started out. Give it another day or so and the damned thing’ll be a full-grown pig.”

This last was obvious from the condition of
dog
. Which had grown from a skinless, hairless, oversized drumstick of a haunch — grown into something that was very nearly a dog. Oh, it wasn’t whole yet. And the hair that covered the mutt’s skin wasn’t much more than down. Nonetheless it was recognizably a dog. Half-formed forelegs. Hollow, eyeless skull — Bill looked into those eyes and he could see the blood-red plasm inside growing to form a brain, glands, God knew what else.

“Dog wasn’t nothing but a back leg last night,” Bill said.

“Huh,” Jerry said. “That’s pretty cool, all right. Hey — you want to go take a look at that dead guy they wheeled in here last night? I bet he looks really neat. Aw, come on — can we?”

Bill shrugged, relented. At least it’d keep the boy from getting another look at
monkey
.

Jerry ran ahead into the adjoining lab, pulled the sheet off the corpse with the same enthusiasm most kids used for unwrapping presents under the Christmas tree.

The corpse wasn’t a corpse any more. It certainly wasn’t any “dead guy,” because it hadn’t ever been a guy in the first place.

She was a woman, an oriental woman with long jet-black hair and eyes that were even darker. Open, living eyes — off balance and confused, but powerfully alive.

“She’s beautiful, ain’t she?” Jerry asked. And she was beautiful. Just about the prettiest woman Bill had ever set eyes on, in fact.

And she was glowing, just like the boy.

“What is this?” Bill asked. “First you go and get yourself all lit up like a light bulb. Now her too. Tell me damn it — and stop acting like you don’t know what I’m talking about!”

The woman stared at Bill numb and dumb.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know, Mr. Corporal Roe. How come you’re all glowy like that?”

And Bill looked at his hands, and saw that they were glowing. And looked at his reflection in the polished-steel cabinet and saw that his image bore no sign of the strange light.

Nor did the boy’s.

Nor did the woman’s.

Bill frowned, and shook his head. “Damned if I know,” he said, and maybe that wasn’t something you ought to say in front of a small boy, but it didn’t really matter because he said it under his breath so low that it was nothing but a mumble even to Bill’s own ears.

“What’s that, Mr. Corporal? What’d you say about how come we’re glowing?”

“No,” Bill said. “I don’t know.” Coughed. “I don’t know how come.”

The Major was groaning again out in the other lab.

monkey
screeched.

The mass of mostly-formed flesh that was
dog
howled mournfully.

Joe didn’t make a sound. God knew what it was that was keeping him so dead.

And that was when the first of the bombs hit ground above them.

And the walls and the floors shook like it was an earthquake, and the lights flickered, and ceiling tiles popped out of joint and came clattering down toward them; when Bill saw the biggest of the things head down toward Jerry’s head he jumped, caught the boy in a flying dive that sent both of them pounding into the floor. Where the damned ceiling tiles fell on the both of them, anyway. Not that it mattered much; as soon as the first of them klonked onto Bill’s head he knew from the feel of it that the tiles were made out of styrofoam or cardboard puffed-up-stiff like that. Didn’t weigh anything to talk about.

Great, Bill thought. Now I’m really making a fool out of myself. Or that was what he thought until he saw the fissure.

Up there in the rock, above the metal grid that had held the ceiling tiles. In all the hours since Joe had brought him down here, it was the first sign Bill had seen that showed him that they really were in something that might as well be a cave. Might as well be, hell — this place was a cave. Though from the look of the rock up there it was a man-made cave, cut into the rock that was the mountain with chisels and jackhammers and explosives.

And the fissure in the rock up there was getting wider, and longer, and the whole damned mountain was about to fall in on them.

Bill looked at the oriental woman. Looked at the boy. He looked scared half out of his mind, but the woman was still too dazed from the newness of her resurrection to react much to the explosion. Bill had to get them out of there — but how in the hell was he going to move a woman who was dead to the world? And what about the others, half-way between life and death out there in the other lab?

A slab of stone the size of a kitchen table split loose from the fissure and smashed into the floor.

Its near edge wasn’t more that ten inches from Bill’s feet.

There wasn’t time.

No time at all.

He had to get himself and the boy the hell out of that place while he still could. And if it meant leaving behind people who couldn’t begin to fend for themselves, then that was what it meant.

He stood, took off out of that laboratory at a run. Dragging the boy by the wrist.

It wasn’t until they’d made their way to the surface, not until Bill and the boy were catching their breath there on the side of the ravaged mountain, that Bill saw the Oriental woman and the dead policeman come up out of the ground. Following them.

And it wasn’t until they were just a few feet away that Bill realized that coming out here into the open was a horrible mistake. Because that was when the artillery shell hit ground not thirty yards from them. Most of the force of the blast blew out away from Bill and the boy and the two zombies, but even still the rain of dirt and rocks was all over them. In Bill’s eyes, his hair; one rock the size of an egg hit him hard in the place where his neck met his left shoulder.

He had to find cover. It wasn’t safe out here. Not with those flares of rocket exhaust out there on the horizon. Not with the sound of more explosions so close. Even if that one room down below had been about to give way, it was still safer down there than it was here.

Which wasn’t to say that Bill was planning to go back underground.

Because there wasn’t any way to get there any more.

Because the missile that had sprayed them with rock and dirt had landed square on the concrete hut that led down into the warren.

And blocked off the way down into the tunnels.

Another rocket hit ground ninety yards up-mountain.

Where in the hell are we going to go?

There was nothing anywhere in sight that looked like it would hold up to a few hours’ worth of shelling. Nothing but pine woods and countryside that was already beginning to look like the surface of the moon.