Fire (47 page)

Someone at the far edge of the crowd threw a gooey wad of chocolate picnic cake at the man; it struck him just above his left eye.

And the man reeled, more out of surprise than because the cake did him any harm, and as he reeled his arm twitched, and two rounds from his machine gun burst out into the crowd.

And the bloodbath started.

Maybe — just maybe — the firing of those two rounds was an accident. All the same, as soon as he’d fired them and the first three children died, his men were firing too.

The truth was, of course, that they had to fire. Where any ordinary crowd would have bolted and stampeded away at the sound of gunfire and the sight of bloody-gory death, the children surged forward, into the sights of the guns. Does the creature do that to them — do they love him enough to die for him after only seeing him for a few moments? Ron looked in his own heart, and realized that he’d have done the same thing. Hell, was doing the same thing; even now he was trying to get at the soldiers, to put himself in front of the guns. Partly he tried to do that out of concern for the children, of course. He didn’t want them dying to protect him.

He looked over at the creature, three yards away in the crowd, and saw him wild-eyed and panicked, trying even harder than Ron tried to put himself in front of the guns. He wasn’t making any more progress than Ron was. The dog had fallen out of the creature’s arms, somehow; Ron hoped that it wasn’t getting trampled in the crush.

If the soldiers hadn’t fired their guns and kept shooting, they’d have been overwhelmed in a moment. As it was they nearly were anyway; only the press of falling bodies kept the mob of children from surging forward and pulling the guns from their hands. The bodies of children piled at the soldiers’ feet and piled higher, until finally they began to form a barricade.

It went on that way for a good three minutes before Ron saw the first of the dead children rise. The boy was at the very bottom of the heap, but at the edge of it, too, so he didn’t have to struggle too hard to unbury himself. The soldier in front of him — the one in charge, who had chocolate smeared all over his forehead and matted in his hair — watched dumbstruck as the child freed himself and rushed toward him. So dumbstruck that the boy had the gun out of his hands before the man got his senses back.

Luke Munsen’s bacteria — the stuff that resurrected us. It’s here, already. Spreading faster than we’re walking cross-country.

The soldiers didn’t cope too well after that. There were children — angry, violent children — all over them, ripping the guns out of their hands, dragging them down to the ground and keeping them there. Beating them, once they were pinned. Ron saw one boy jump feet-first onto the face of a soldier; the man’s nose broke, and instantly there was blood everywhere, and when the boy stepped away Ron saw the man’s left eye hanging out of its socket and his jaw gaping wide and slack at an angle that meant the bone inside was completely shattered. He tried to scream, but with his jaw such a mess all the sound he could make was a nerve-wracking gurgle.

“Throw them in the lake!” someone shouted. And Ron saw the man with his eye out of place hoisted up in the shoulders of a dozen children. He looked around and saw the others lifted, too, and the crowd started melting away toward the pond at the far end of the clearing. All of them — all of them that were alive enough to walk — were trying to help carry away the disarmed soldiers.

When the last of them filtered away Ron and the creature were left standing alone in a bloody field scattered with the half-alive bodies of wounded children.

None of them seemed especially interested in the creature any more.

“I don’t understand,” Ron said. “How can they . . . just wander away from you like that? Five minutes ago it looked like they wanted to build a church around you. And now they’ve all wandered off, and there isn’t one of them looking back.”

The creature didn’t answer that; he only shook his head and turned west. The expression on his face was grim and defeated and hopeless. Guilty.

Nine hours, he told Ron. We have nine hours before more of them come to hunt us.

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Chapter Thirty-Two

LAKE-OF-FIRE, KANSAS

George Stein woke from the dead in chains.

He woke clutching his chest, trying to close over a wound to his heart that had killed him.

And what his hand found when it reached into the wound was no wound at all; the skin over his sternum was as smooth and unbroken as it had been the day he was born, and the breastbone itself firm and strong and unhurt. For a moment, before he felt the chain bolted to his ankle, he almost thought he was waking from a bad dream.

It wasn’t a dream, of course. None of it had been a dream. If he’d had any doubt after he realized that he was chained by the leg to an army cot, it evaporated when he saw where he was.

In one of the rooms that made up Herman Bonner’s quarters.

It only took him another moment after that to remember the strange reports from New York and from the mid-South. Stories about dead people coming back to life. Herman had hinted that he knew what caused them — he hadn’t come out and said it, but he’d made it pretty clear to George that one of the men in his laboratory had been working on a strain of bacteria that might have that effect, and that the germs might have got loose in the blast Herman had staged to free his ersatz Beast.

George had suspected something else, listening to Herman — something that Herman hadn’t hinted at, but that was right there between the lines when George stopped to think about it. Herman had known about that bacteria. He’d known it would get loose when he set off his bomb. And he’d known what kind of havoc it would create when it started to spread. Maybe he hadn’t known exactly what it would do, but he’d had a damn good idea of the consequences. And that infection was here, now, right here inside the gates of the base. Those strange microbes were inside George, else he wouldn’t be alive and healthy now.

Herman Bonner was up to something. Something bad enough that he’d never let George see more than a hint of it, and likely hadn’t let Paul Green see any more than that. And whatever he intended was dear enough to him that he’d murdered a man he’d known for years.

George shook off the chill in his heart and sat up on the edge of the bed. The chain was long enough to let him sit up, long enough even to let him stand up and walk half a dozen paces. Herman was nothing if he wasn’t generous with his friends.

Three of the rooms Herman had taken for himself had broad, tall floor-to-ceiling windows over the runway that faced out toward the Lake of Fire. The view was spectacular; and more than that. Thrilling, the way only something dangerous could be. Oh, the man with the Geiger counter — that Air Force technician Herman had taken under his wing when everyone else on this base had been . . . seen to — Herman’s tech had insisted that at this distance there wasn’t any danger from the radiation. Whether that was true or not, it defied good sense. How could a molten hole in the earth the size of two counties not be a danger? If it gave off light enough to brighten so much of the sky at night, how could it not be giving off radiation, too? Three evenings ago he’d visited Herman in this very room, and the only light they’d needed was the glow from the Lake of Fire. It had been dim light, true, and eerie, but it had been more than enough to see by. Well, it was giving off radiation, the technician had said. The five-headed missile that had landed fifty miles from where they stood had struck some kind of a nuclear research facility on the far end of the base. No one was sure exactly what sort of a facility it had been — it was classified so thoroughly that no one on this end of the base had known the first thing about it. But whatever it was was serious; there had been some kind of an apocalyptic meltdown, much worse than he’d have expected from an ordinary commercial nuclear plant. Still, the man had said. They were twenty-five miles from the crater the explosion had created, and twenty more miles from the Lake of Fire that burned at the crater’s heart. There might be a little visible light, but whatever hard radiation could reach them from forty-five miles away wasn’t anything they had to worry about.

Might as well fret that the lake would burn a hole straight through to China, and that the heathens there would invade them through it. And he’d laughed.

George hadn’t thought it was funny; he’d glanced across this room, to Herman, and seen that he wasn’t laughing, either.

It was late afternoon, now, and dim; the sky outside was thick with storm-clouds. Off in the distance the Lake of Fire was almost like a sunset in the wrong direction — but wider. No setting sun ever consumed so much of the horizon. He stood, walked as far as his chain-tether would allow him, so that he could glory in the beauty that the lake painted on the sky —

And as he moved forward he saw the plane.

It was in the foreground, right there on the landing field outside the building. Until he’d stood it’d been obscured by the bottom edge of the window’s view.

“Dear God,” he said. And didn’t even notice that he’d taken the Lord’s name in vain.

Out on the runway was a dark green plane — it looked enough like an airliner that George thought it might be a transport, but he didn’t know enough to be certain — and strapped piggyback to the top of it was a nuclear missile. The missile was nearly as long, end to end, as the plane itself.

He heard the door to the room swing open behind him, but didn’t turn to see who it might be. Who else could it be but Herman?

“Remarkable, isn’t it, George?” Herman’s voice, all right.

George didn’t have an answer for him; he was still too appalled to speak.

“Our technician tells me that all of the rockets were too close to the blast that created the Lake of Fire. Not close enough to explode, but close enough that the electronics that guide them were destroyed. Hence the need to deliver them . . . a bit more directly, shall we say?” He smiled. “We considered removing the warheads and using the troop transports as makeshift bombers. Certainly that would be preferable to sending good, God-fearing men on suicide missions. Unfortunately, it happens that disassembling the missiles disarms the warheads completely — and quite irreversibly. Even as it is, detonating them is no small matter. They’re designed quite carefully not to detonate in any way other than the one originally intended.”

George swallowed.

“This is crazy, Herman. You’re going to get that plane to fly half-way around the world without stopping to refuel it? And if you do stop it, no one in his right mind will let it into the air again.” George didn’t know what sort of range planes like the troop transport had, but he couldn’t imagine it flying all the way into Russia with all the extra drag the missile would add. “And anyway, what’s the point of bombing the Russians now? They’re too busy fighting among themselves to be a threat to anyone else.”

Herman smiled. For a long while he didn’t say a word, and when he finally did speak George thought he’d changed the subject. “They’ve finally mobilized the National Guard in New York,” he said. “Even with all their . . . peculiar difficulties, they should be able to take the network headquarters from us in a day or two. Another thirty-six hours after that, and the ABC people can use the hardware in that building to take the Voice of Armageddon from us — or at the least to force it off the air.”

Herman was still smiling strangely. His smile had always been a thing that made George uncomfortable, but this was different somehow. It brought George not just the familiar mild discomfort, but dread. Herman Bonner had plans, and down deep in his gut George was certain that there was evil in those plans. He even began to wonder how he could possibly have known the man for so many years and not known that evil for what it was.

“The answer, of course, is to destroy the building. The Voice of Armageddon can function well enough without it, no matter how susceptible it may be to the equipment in that building.” Herman turned and stared wistfully out the window, in the direction of the Lake of Fire. “We don’t have access to that sort of ordinance.” He was beginning to chuckle in a way George found even more unsettling than the smile. “So what do we have access to?”

He wheeled around to look George in the eye, his expression demanding an answer. And George answered him, even though the only sound that would come from his throat was a whisper.

“Missiles. Atomic bombs. Dear God in heaven you’re going to destroy New York.”

Herman clapped his hands, exuberant. “Marvelous, George. Marvelous. You’ve always been a quick study; I’ve always prided myself on you because of it.”

George blinked, shook his head; there were hints of something in that last statement that he didn’t want to think about. Whatever it meant or didn’t mean wasn’t especially important when it stood beside the nuclear destruction of the nation’s largest city.

“Herman — Herman, listen to me. There isn’t any need for this. There isn’t any call for it. Have you lost your mind? This isn’t war against an evil empire. It isn’t forestalling Armageddon, or even taking its reins. It’s murder. The murder of millions and millions of innocents.”

Herman shook his head, just a little sadly. “No, George. Not murder — cleansing. Cleansing of the vile city that is Sodom to our time.” There was no passion in his voice as he spoke; George suspected that not even Herman Bonner believed a word he said. “You’ve softened, George. You’ve lost your vision. I saw that in you yesterday; it’s why I saw a need to dispose of you — and to keep you disposed.”

He’s lost his mind, George thought. Lost his mind completely. . . . Unless it’s me that’s changing. And realized that just maybe it was so. He felt a guilty chill at the possibility that he could have stood in a room like this one and reasoningly considered the destruction of the city of New York. He tried to imagine himself conspiring with Herman to set loose a nuclear holocaust on his own nation — and found that it was easier than he wanted to admit even to himself. How different had it been, after all, when he and Herman and Paul Green had sat down to plan the destruction of Russia so many years ago?