Fire (53 page)

We’re going to make it. We’re really going to make it. The idiots in those helicopters don’t know how to aim. That was probably it exactly, he thought. Whether any of those people knew how to use a gun or not, they’d never used anything like those guns before — let alone used them to shoot from a moving gunship.

We really are going to make it.

The creature was still running, not slowing down at all, in spite of his wound. All three of them — Ron, the creature, and the dog — were moving quicker, in fact, now that they were going down hill. Another half a mile, just another half a mile, and we can duck off into the scrub on the other side, and to hell with whether they can track us or not. It just won’t matter. Which was maybe a little overoptimistic, but it helped him run so he thought it anyway.

They were only a hundred yards from the far edge of the bridge when one of the helicopter pilots figured out what the problem was. And changed tactics so radically and thoroughly that neither Ron nor the dog nor the creature had a chance.

Ron began to realize something was wrong when he heard the shooting stop. He looked up, over his shoulder, and saw a helicopter carefully — ever-so-slowly, ever-so-carefully — lower itself between the bridge’s cables and begin descending toward him.

No, not toward him. It eased right over him, without even hesitating. Ron looked up as it passed, and saw that there weren’t more than five feet of clearance on either side. It was crazy. Crazy. If the pilot wasn’t careful — if he didn’t really know what he was doing — they’d move a little too far to one side, or a breeze would catch them, and the rotors would hit one of those cables and the helicopter would go down hard and maybe take the bridge with it, too.

It was going to work. He knew that in his gut. Maybe it’d end up killing the helicopter and crew, but all the same it’d work.

When they were three yards behind the creature — not more than a dozen feet in front of Ron — they started firing. At that distance, with those guns, it might as well have been point-blank. The creature tried to make himself a more difficult target — dodged right and left, stopped suddenly so they’d overshoot — but it wasn’t much use. Ninety seconds after they’d started shooting at him from so close, the creature was a great bloody mass of raw flesh falling to the pavement, and the helicopter had slowed to a crawl, hovering not more than a couple feet from the bridge’s surface, and they were still pouring bullets into his corpse.

Tom the dog lunged at the helicopter, attacking its skids and clawing long, bright-metal scratches in the gunship’s paint. The scratching made a wicked fingernails-on-the-blackboard sound so loud that Ron could hear over the rotors and the shooting. It didn’t make a whole lot of difference to the helicopter’s pilot. Or the gunner.

Ron Hawkins screamed with rage, and he was right behind the helicopter, now, ducking aside to keep from being chopped to death by the rear rotor, and in his rage he reached down and grabbed the helicopter’s near landing skid —

And with the strength that came to him in rage and fear and concern, the same strength that lets a mother lift an automobile off her dying child —

He lifted the near side of the helicopter.

Throwing it off balance. Sending one of the overhead rotors into one of the massive cables that suspended the bridge; disabling it completely, but not before the force of sideways lift pulled the helicopter out between the cable it’d hit and the next.

And the helicopter went out, over the river, and plummeted down into it like a stone.

With Tom the dog still attached to the skids by his biting mouth.

He had a moment. Just a moment. Time to lift the creature’s corpse up onto his shoulder, carry him away —

Helicopters, all of them by the sound of it, moving close —

God. God in heaven so much blood so much shredded meat and skin Ron felt ill from the sight and touch and smell and over there his leg, the Beast’s leg barely even connected to itself —

Wait. Over there by the leg. A tiny scrap of metal there beside the fragments of shattered bone.

The radio transmitter.

If they could get away from here, they’d be free.

If there was really much chance of that — Ron looked up, over his shoulder and he braced himself to lift the creature’s corpse, looked because it sounded as though all the helicopters were about to descend on him at the same time and start shooting —

And damned near, that was exactly what they did.

A complete and total lack of coordination.

One of the helicopters lowered itself right into the rotor of another, and all holy hell went loose; the rotors shattered and went hurling off into the dark — but not before they ruptured the fuel tanks on the upper gunship, and suddenly the kerosene that had been inside the tanks was afire, and then it was exploding. Before the first helicopter could finish plummeting into the river the second was a spectacular ball of flame, and the explosion, like some fiery contagion, rocked the swarming gunships, sent them reeling into each other and set them afire.

Ron lifted the creature’s carcass onto his shoulder and ran, before he could be caught up in the burning and fiery convulsing going in every direction.

The creature was heavy. Heavier than Ron would have imagined, even knowing his size; it was hard to move at any speed at all, carrying him. Ron did his best, but the truth was that even though his body went through the motions of running, he could have walked faster. Which was a bad thing, since some of the helicopters were plummeting onto the roadway too close behind him~, and debris was flying everywhere and he could feel bits of fiery metal digging into the skin of his back. He needed shelter, needed to get the hell out of the way and needed to get there now. Needed to find a place to hide and wait while the creature’s body rebuilt itself. Not that there was a building anywhere close enough. Over there, down below the bridge where it ran over the river bank. Railroad tracks — a whole damned railroad yard — and a freight train sitting idle with its boxcars wide open. It wasn’t the best place in the world, but it’d do.

He hurried as much as he could off the bridge, doubled back to the railroad yard. Barely managed to keep from stumbling as he crossed over a dozen sets of tracks, running toward a car with the words
PACIFIC AND SOUTHWESTERN RAILROAD
stenciled in wide pale letters on its side. Lifted the creature’s body up onto the bed of the car through the half-open sliding door. Climbed inside himself, and dragged the corpse farther into the railroad car, but not out of the light that shone through the doorway.

And looked at the damage. Really looked at it for the first time. It was a grisly sight, blood everywhere — not just on the corpse, but all over Ron, too, so much that it made his clothes heavy, wet, and slick — fragments of bone spearing out through pulpy rags of torn skin and shredded flesh. And worst of all, that leg. There hadn’t been time to feel ill while he’d been carrying the creature away from the bridge, but now — he felt his stomach churning again, trying to force up food when he hadn’t eaten.

Most of the creature’s body — his skull not excepted — was pulped and mutilated, but still more or less in place. But his leg, his left leg was torn clean through half-way up the thigh; all that held the lower part to his body was a wrist-thick rope of meat and skin along what had been the outside of the thigh. Maybe, Ron thought, he should press the two ends back together. That didn’t seem wise. Just to begin with, they wouldn’t fit properly — there was a good four inches of meat and bone missing between them. They weren’t meant to fit together, not directly, and God knew what kind of harm he could end up doing by trying to graft them together. That big vein over there, for instance. Ron didn’t even see what it was supposed to attach to on the lower part of the leg.

No, he decided. Whatever it was that had resurrected himself and the creature back at the institute — the same thing that had resurrected the children at that camp — whatever that was, it knew what it was doing. Knew? Whatever. Anyway, it was best not to interfere. Ron sat down facing the doorway, rested his back against the wall.

After a while Tom the dog, soaked and filthy but not much the worse for wear, jumped up into the boxcar, snorted, and found himself a warm corner to curl up in.

A long while later Ron fell asleep again.

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Chapter Thirty-Five

LAKE-OF-FIRE, KANSAS

Herman was cursing in a language that George Stein had never heard before.

George had never figured out exactly where Herman Bonner had come from, why he’d come to the United States, or even why he was as driven as he was. Hearing him curse unintelligibly got George thinking about all those questions all over again. Not that this was the time to ask. George Stein was at Herman Bonner’s mercy, and he knew it. There were people here in the Lake-of-Fire complex who owed their allegiance more to George Stein than they did to Herman, but there was no one but Herman who knew George was alive. He could scream at the top of his lungs and hope that someone might hear him, but it wouldn’t do any good. Herman had taken pains to have his suite of rooms sound-proofed when they took the base over. At the time it had seemed a little strange to George, but it certainly wasn’t anything he was going to make a fuss about. Back then there hadn’t been any point; he’d trusted Herman.

Herman was cursing because of what they’d both just seen on the closed-circuit television — the closed-circuit feed from the video camera on the helicopter. Herman had come up here to watch it with George — God knew why he wanted George to see it with him, but he did — and together they’d watched that poor fool and that pathetic, innocent Beast get themselves torn to ribbons as they tried to cross the Mississippi.

They’d managed to kill the Beast, all right. Only it hadn’t worked out exactly the way Herman had planned. Before they could kill his companion and retrieve the corpses the poor fool — the one Herman kept calling a floor-sweeping imbecile — the poor fool managed, alone and unarmed, to destroy an entire battle squadron of helicopter gunships. And walk away, unscratched. From the way Herman was cursing, George suspected that there weren’t any more helicopters to replace the ones he’d just lost. Not military ones, at least.

The richest part of the whole scene was that they’d been able to watch it even after the last of the helicopters had plummeted into the river. The first wreck — of the helicopter that had mutilated the Beast with gunfire — had somehow managed to snap the camera clean off the side of the gunship. It had fallen onto the pavement intact and still broadcasting. And shown them all holy hell flying loose as the gunships burst against one another.

After just a little while the scene had grown ominously still.

George was still watching the screen. It was still, and quiet, and watching it gave him good reason not to pay attention to Herman’s cursing. Well, maybe not good reason. Reason, anyway. It didn’t show much, now that the fireworks were over. A railroad yard, dim and deserted; one train in the foreground, but it was dark enough that it might have been abandoned there. In the distance, the river — so wide, so vast that even as background it consumed half the screen.

Still and serene as a painting.

Beautiful, in a way.

Herman’s fury was reaching new peaks; he was staring at the video screen now, too, and he was beginning to look as though he might assault it. George almost grinned at the idea, in spite of his unease — the image of Herman trying to destroy a television with his bare fists was a comical one.

That was motion, there on the screen, wasn’t it? It was too dark in that spot for the camera to convey the image clearly. Hard for George to be certain what he was seeing, if he was seeing anything at all. He leaned closer on the edge of the bed Herman had chained him to, trying to see more clearly . . . Herman saw him doing it. Grunted suspiciously. And stooped to stare right into the picture tube. He’ll blind himself that way, George thought, and then thought, well, then, that’s fine. When he realized what he was thinking, he wasn’t proud of it. It was a vindictive sentiment as much as it was a desire to deprive Herman of a measure of his capacity to work harm. George Stein didn’t want to have to think of himself as a vindictive man, even though he knew there were vindictive elements inside him.

“What’s that?” Herman asked. His voice was frayed at its edges, and there was more than a little about it that sounded unhinged to George. “What have you seen? Tell me, damn it!”

George shrugged. “Hard to say. Thought I saw something move.”

Herman turned to face him, looked hard into his eyes. “You saw something. I know you did. It won’t go well for you if you try to hide it. You know, George. You know, I’ve always wanted to hurt you — really hurt you. You’d hurt so well, I think.” George felt himself blushing — felt strange and embarrassed, almost as though he’d been propositioned. How could he have known a man so many years, and not known this about him? He suppressed a shudder; it didn’t seem wise to let it show. There was something sick about that man. Powerfully sick, and even evil.

“It’s there on the screen right now, Herman. Look for yourself. A figure — a man, maybe? — running through the railroad yard.”

Herman turned, looked, still only a handful of inches away from the screen. And spat onto the carpeted floor beside the set. “It’s him. The janitor. Carrying my Beast. Can’t you see that from there? Are you blind? Or were you lying to me?”

“Lying to you, Herman? Lying to you about what?”

“You know.” He didn’t say those words loudly, or with any threat in his voice. He said them in a voice and in a tone that George had always imagined the prophets using — maybe even Christ himself. Herman sighed. Stood, stepped away from the television set. Walked over toward the window, and stood as close to it as he’d been to the picture tube. He stood that way, still as a statue, for the longest time. Staring out into the dark.

The plane is out there, George Stein thought. The one that the fools have strapped the missile to. The one Herman told me they’re going to drop on New York City.