Fire (52 page)

Found one, turned it —

And wished immediately that he hadn’t.

The walls of the shelter were lined with shelves, and the contents of those shelves had destroyed themselves. Five shelves of cans whose contents had rusted through and bled out onto the boards that held them in a mess of rust and goo turned to something like cement. The sacks of flour and cereal were worse — consumed completely by mealy bugs that were everywhere now, dead and dried, long since starved to death when they’d consumed everything there was to consume. Most of all the bugs’ corpses were piled in the gutted sacks, but they peppered the floor pretty thoroughly, too, and the piles of clothes on the shelves on the far wall showed signs that the mealy bugs had tried to eat them, too. And failed, mostly. Though not before they’d done enough damage to leave the clothes useless.

Dead things all around him. Scores and scores and scores of dead things.

The bacteria. My God, the bacteria. Would the bacteria even have an effect of insects? It had worked on the trilobite in Luke Munsen’s office, sure, and that was something like an insect. On the other hand, from what Ron knew of the reproductive habits of insects, he suspected that if the bacteria was going to resurrect them then the world would already have been buried in flies and mosquitoes, and a plague of roaches could only be a day or two away. It couldn’t be. But say — just say that it could. If the starved bugs in the shelter started coming back to life . . . what would they eat? What was there to eat? Nothing. They’d already consumed all that they could inside that room. The only difference now was that Ron and the creature were there, and God only knew if mealy bugs could become hungry enough to acquire a taste for flesh.

“We’ve got to —” Ron said, and he backed away “— got to get out of here. I don’t think it’s safe.” He was so unnerved that it was hard to get the breath to speak, and the words came out in a whisper. And that was a good thing as it turned out, since that was exactly the moment when he heard the sound of heavy boots treading on the metal plate above their heads.

And he froze — both of them froze. Ron held his breath for a long moment then slowly, gently so as not to make a sound, he let it out.

We’ve got to go in there. Go in and close the vault shut behind us. They can’t figure out where we’ve got to yet, but as long as we’re here in the shaft they can use that radio to track us. Sooner or later they’ll look in here.

He waited two minutes, until he was sure that the soldiers weren’t too close by, looked up at the creature and pointed into the shelter. Stepped forward carefully, careful not to make a sound. A moment later the creature was in the tiny room beside him, and Ron eased the door closed and swung its bolt home behind them.

Once it was shut he figured it was safe to talk quietly.

“We’ve got to get across that bridge, don’t we? That’s why we’re here, right? And it’s also why there are so many of them above it, isn’t it?”

The creature nodded. If we can get there we’ll be safe from them. I can’t tell you why. Or how. I can’t see it clearly.

“Then we’ll have to do it, somehow or another. It’ll be better once it’s been dark for a while. Harder for them if they can’t see to shoot at us.”

The creature shook his head. It isn’t possible any more. That much I do know. Black things wait now. Horrible ones.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s possible or not. We can’t just walk out there and let them have us, and we can’t just curl up inside here and play dead. If you have as much foresight as you seem to, you ought to know that. The only time things are really hopeless is when you decide to give up hope.”

The creature shrugged. That isn’t what I see.

He didn’t offer any further argument.

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Tom the dog didn’t hang out by the shaft and mope. He might have been a dog, but he had more sense than that. On the other hand, he didn’t just wander off and attend to his own business, either. There were soldiers all around, hard-eyed, hard-hearted, wicked people wandering everywhere in the woods. From the moment he set eyes on the first of them he knew that they were somehow a part of his mission.

He wasn’t sure, at first, exactly what it was he was supposed to do about them. Something, though. Something. It wouldn’t do to let them get away. So Tom followed the first pair he happened on, shadowed them quietly and unnoticed as only a half-feral dog can track.

Whatever it was they were after, Tom thought, they weren’t going to get it on his watch. No sir.

He watched those men for most of an hour, waiting to see what it was they were up to.

Which was No Good, of course. Tom the dog didn’t doubt that for an instant. And then, finally, he saw it: saw the thing he’d known was there to watch for. The men were climbing the hill, the one that Ron Hawkins and the special creature had crawled down inside of, the hill with the split-level house on top of it. They were climbing the hill toward the house, walking right over the metal thing that covered the hole. Only this time, instead of walking right past it, one of the hard-eyed men stopped and looked right down at it.

And seemed to recognize it.

He called to his companion, pointed at the metal thing.

Tom the dog wasn’t stupid. Not him.

He knew what they were about to do. They were going to pick up that funny metal thing, just like Ron and the creature had, and they were going to crawl right down inside and get his people.

Get them, and do horrible things to them, with guns. The thought of it made him furious, angry and defensive and selflessly courageous the way a bitch is when something threatens her pups — even though Tom wasn’t ever going to be any mother and neither Ron nor the creature was a young dog.

And Tom went tearing out of the underbrush, lunged for the throat of the nearest soldier. And damn near got it, too — the man only barely managed to shove Tom away from him before the dog’s teeth dug into the soft flesh of his throat, but he did manage, he shoved Tom away, threw him right on top of the weird metal thing and then the man and the other one, too, both of them had their guns out and they were shooting and shooting Tom, and Tom was dying right on top of the metal thing, blood all over the place.

Well, dying wasn’t that bad, Tom decided. It’d happened to him before, and it hadn’t caused him all that much trouble.

When they were done, and Tom lay there half-dead on the metal thing with the blood still leaking out of him, neither of the men seemed to have much taste for examining the metal thing any more. And that was fine with Tom the dog, even if he did hurt like all kinds of hell.

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After a while Ron cleared himself a spot on the floor — swept aside the tiny corpses of the mealybugs so that he could sit on the floor without feeling them crushed underneath them. The creature was less careful when he sat down. Which made Ron’s stomach a little queasy; there was nothing between the creature’s rear end and the dead insects but his hair and his hide.

They sat that way for hours, waiting for the soldiers to lower their guard, waiting for the darkest part of night. After a long while Ron fell asleep for the first time in days — the first sleep he’d had since Sunday morning, when he’d crawled out of the ruin that had been the institute. He dreamed foul dreams of an endless army of bugs, consuming the flesh from his bones while he was still alive and screaming. When the dream woke him — heart slamming around inside his chest, sweat soaking his clothes and dripping on the floor — when he woke and looked around the mealybugs were still as dead as they ever had been, and the creature was staring listlessly at the floor.

“How long have I been asleep?” he asked; the words come out rough with the sleep in his throat.

The creature looked up away from the floor, looked at Ron. His eyes looked dead and glassy. Hours.

“It’s time to go, then. Are you ready?”

The creature nodded.

“Okay, then: as soon as we get outside, we run for everything we’re worth, straight toward the bridge. If we move quickly enough they’ll have trouble tracking us. Shouldn’t be able to see us too well in the dark, either — not well enough to get a bead on a moving target. When we get to the bridge, we just keep running. It’ll be lit, most likely, and they’ll be able to shoot at us. With a little luck they won’t get a good look at us until we get there. We made it across that other bridge this morning, didn’t we? In broad daylight, too. We can make it across this one.”

We can try.

Ron stood, opened the vault door. “You’ll have to go first, to lift the lid up there. Don’t wait for me when you get outside — it’ll only make you a better target. I’ll catch up.” He stepped back from the door, so that the creature could get past him. A moment later he was shutting off the light in the fallout shelter and swinging the door shut behind him. Turning and turning the bolt until it swung home. Climbing up the ladder through the shaft that the creature was already clear of, out toward the starry night sky.

By the time he was on his feet and running, the creature was already a dozen yards away, running toward the bridge with the dog beside him trotting with an awful limp, and two of the helicopters had broken away from the ones over the bridge. Shooting at the creature, even though he was still far out of range and impossible to see — guns already blazing spots of blue-white fire in the night. Ron heard the bullets wreaking havoc in the forest all around him, but not a single one of them came anywhere near the creature. Let them waste their bullets, Ron thought. Let them empty their guns out now, and maybe by the time he and the creature were on the bridge, the soldiers would be too busy reloading to kill them.

The bridge was a quarter of a mile away. That was Ron’s best guess of the distance, anyway. Most of the distance was downhill, too, which made running easier and faster. They’d end up coming up to it from the left, without even setting foot on the highway that led to it, if they kept going the way they were. That was just as well — the highway was pretty well-lit. If they had to run on that for any distance they’d be in trouble, since they wouldn’t even have the bridge’s struts and cables to hide them.

The helicopters flew past them, fifty, maybe sixty yards off to the left. A few moments later they were coming around again, firing into the woods on their right.

It’s going to work out fine. No matter what the creature thinks, it’s going to work out fine. In a little bit we’ll be on the bridge, and then all we have to do is get across it. Still running, Ron took a good look out at the bridge. It was long, and peaked — its center pushed high up above the water so that ships could pass under it. The really striking thing was its length — the river looked to be half a mile wide or wider here, and the bridge extended in onto the land for another quarter of a mile on either side of the water. No matter how hard they ran, no matter how fast, they were going to be targets for a long time.

Which meant, maybe, that the creature was right. That the whole situation was hopeless.

Ron felt a little of the life sag out of him. He kept running anyway. He had to; if he stopped for even a moment, he thought, he might not be able to get started again.

The helicopters came a little closer on their third pass — close enough that Ron heard the rush of air as a bullet passed too close to his head — but that was as close to the mark as any of them got.

Up ahead, the creature and the dog were climbing up onto the bridge approach, moving out into the bridge where there was light and all those helicopters with their spotlamps up above were swarming like wasps. The creature hesitated, looked back to make certain that Ron was behind him —

“Go on,” Ron shouted. “They’ll kill you if you just stand there!”

And right away he wished that he hadn’t said it so harshly, because there’d been something in the creature’s eyes. It was almost, Ron thought, as though he’d been saying good-bye.

There wasn’t time to think about that, or to think about what it meant. He had to keep running. They both had to keep running — all three of them did, though the dog didn’t seem the least bit winded. That was the only hope — if it was any hope at all. And running was getting hard, too. Ron’s lungs ached from the ragged pressure of his breath; his arms and legs, starved for oxygen, had begun to numb. Soon, he thought, he’d begin to feel dizzy.

He climbed up over the embankment at the edge of the bridge, lifted himself onto the roadway. Pushed his legs against the pavement, ran. It was easier going here — even if it was more dangerous, the bridge’s smooth surface was easier to run on. Not that he could possibly outrun the bullets that were showering down all around him, now.

A mile. God in heaven, an entire mile of this. From this perspective, the peak at the bridge’s center looked insurmountable; it almost seemed to rise up into heaven. Don’t think about it. Just run. If I think about it I might not be able to keep going, and if I stop he’ll come back for me and both of us will die.

With all the helicopters they had up there over the bridge, Ron had expected the run to be a constant hail of gunfire. It wasn’t; the gunships came through one at a time, slowly, moving steadily. And there were long pauses between the time when one would pass over them and when the next would begin shooting. Which made sense, of course: if they moved too close together they could end up shooting each other down. It wouldn’t save himself or the creature, Ron thought, but it was something.

Sooner or later, he knew, one of those bullets would hit him. More than one, likely. He’d covered fifty yards of bridge already, and not a one of them had hit him yet. That was luck, wonderful luck, but he couldn’t expect it to hold out. Better luck yet, the creature, up ahead of him, was still unhurt, and the people with the guns were aiming at him more than Ron.

But the luck did hold out. Ron got all the way to the bridge’s central crest before the first bullet struck home — struck the creature in the left arm, just above the elbow, tearing the flesh into something like ground meat and sending blood everywhere. In a way, though, even that wound was a blessing; the force of it sent the creature reeling off to the right, and exactly where he would have been a dense burst of gunfire dug a six-inch-deep gouge in the bridge’s surface. And even if it sent the creature reeling, it didn’t stop him. He caught himself, pulled himself back into balance, and kept running — all without losing a beat or losing his pace.