Fire (54 page)

“The plane is fueling now,” Herman said. “Soon it will leave us forever.” He lifted his hand to his lips, coughed. “In the morning, I think. Some little time before dawn.”

George didn’t want to think about the plane, or about the bomb strapped to it. All those millions of people who lived in New York would die. Die horribly. It wasn’t George’s doing, and there was nothing he could do to stop it, but he bore a share of the blame for the destruction that was to come. Or thought he did.

There wasn’t any avoiding the subject, though. He stood, walked as far toward the window as his chain would let him. Lights were on, out over the runway. Smoky clouds of warm vapor were billowing out from the fuel tank, into the cool morning air. The transport, and the missile bound to it. Loops, loops, and loops of grey-metal cable tied them together; in places the cable was bolted into place. The arrangement looked secure, if it did look strange. He couldn’t picture the missile coming apart from the plane by accident in midair.

Couldn’t picture it coming free on purpose, either. Where would it go? Rolling off the wing?

“Herman,” George asked, “how is your pilot going to deliver that thing? How’s he going to get away once he’s done it?” George already had a suspicion as to what the answer was, and it made him feel even more sick with himself than he did already.

Herman snorted. “Really, George. The question doesn’t become you. . . . We have a volunteer, of course. What did you think? Do you want me to say it aloud? Well then, I’ll say it: we have a volunteer. A kamikaze pilot, all our own. He’ll fly his plane to exactly the right place, and then he’ll press his switch. And die gloriously to kill the infidels and pagans.”

George wasn’t sure how he was respond, or even if he should respond at all. “Yes.”

The image on the television screen was still again, now. The young man who’d carried the Beast had disappeared into a railroad car just as Herman had walked away from the set. And now what? Something was going to happen, any moment now. Something dramatic and important. George knew it with his gut — he could feel it like a spring turned tight and about to snap.

Herman seemed to sense it, too; he wheeled around suddenly to face George. Looked him in the eye, and hissed. “What? What is it now?”

George blinked, shrugged. Tried to stay calm, in spite of the fact that he felt . . . spooked. Almost exactly the way he’d feel if he’d found himself in an abandoned building in the darkest part of night, hearing sounds with no source he could imagine. “What’s what, Herman? You’ve got me at a loss.”

Herman made a noise that was almost a snarl; he was still staring into George’s eyes. He didn’t blink.

That was when he saw it, saw the thing so critical and important. A small thing, really. Small enough that if he hadn’t seen it it would’ve had no importance at all.

The television screen.

The train on the television screen was moving. Moving north, toward St. Louis.

“Tell me,” Herman said. He was prowling around the room, now. Looking closely at every little thing, inspecting every detail.

“I still don’t understand, Herman. Tell you what?” George tried to keep his voice as innocent as he could, but he wasn’t sure it was innocent enough.

Until the train had started to move, all the camera had shown of it was three cars. There’d been no clue as to which direction it might move in. If the train could get clear of the camera’s field of vision before Herman got a look at it, he’d have no way of knowing where it had gone. And that would be a very good thing. The Voice of Armageddon network had an important regional hub in St. Louis; the city was a lot more important to the VOA than it ever had been to ABC. Herman had all sorts of people at his disposal in St. Louis. If he knew that that was where the train was headed, he’d have a real opportunity to try to kill them again.

All George had to do to keep that from happening was not look directly at the screen. Wear a poker face, to keep from giving Herman any clue of what was about to happen.

Herman turned again, suddenly, maniacally. For a moment George thought he was about to stoop and focus directly at the screen, but then he saw that it wasn’t the screen that had his attention, but the window. He was looking to make certain that there was nothing wrong with his missile.

Through the periphery of his vision, George could now see that the car the young man had climbed into — the Pacific-Southwestern car — was the last before the caboose. The train was moving awfully fast. In a moment it’d be off the screen entirely.

And then Herman was striding across the room, furious, his face filled with a thousand violent things George could see waiting for him. When he got to George, he lifted him by the lapels and shook him, shouted unintelligibly into his face. When the shout was done he calmed a little. “Tell me what it is you’ve seen, damn you! Tell me!”

And turned away for just an instant, trembling with frustration.

Turned toward the television.

The instant was enough to show him the train’s last car moving out of the camera’s field of vision.

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THURSDAY

July Twenty-First

A full-page ad, printed on page A-7 of the New York Times:

FELIX THE FURRIER

Hopes you’re having a good summer.

Special Notice:

Due to vandalism, we’ll be closed until next Wednesday.

We’d also like to state once and for all that there is no truth whatsoever to reports that our stock of mink coats came to life and attacked patrons at our Fifth Avenue store.

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It is past midnight in this part of Chicago. The stockyards and slaughterhouses — enormous places that ordinarily work day and night to fatten, kill, and pack the meat for most of the nation — are utterly empty of the sound of man and woman.

There is a reason for this.

Though no one is there to hear it, the din from the stockyards is deafening.

Early today someone noticed something strange in a meat-packing plant. Something frightening. And before the day was out the phenomenon had spread to every packing house in the city.

Two hours ago it reached the slaughterhouses. By then there was no one to see it; even the night watchmen had fled in fear.

The worst of it is that what they all ran from was only the beginning of the process. They ran from the sight of hams and pork butts growing wild bloody beards of flesh like alien mould. Ran from the seeping pig-blood on the floors that grew and grew deeper no matter how it was cleaned; blood that transformed the water used to clean it, just as Christ transformed his water into wine. Ran most of all from the sound of whole fresh carcasses wheezing headlessly with pain. Even the tenders and slaughterers and butchers of cattle took flight, afraid that whatever infected the pigs would soon contaminate the steers.

And now it is long after midnight, and the butts and the hams and the carcasses are no more; now there are only swine grown whole from the wreckage of their bodies.

They are hungry, these pigs. For millennia they and their forebears have been bred only to eat. They know nothing but the need for food.

The first to wake turn on the still-growing remains of their fellows, but this lasts only so long, and anyway the taste of swineflesh is oddly unsatisfying to a pig. They root around inside the packing houses, searching for anything that will fill their gullets.

There is nothing, of course.

One of them finds an old broom. Its wood, its straw, neither are to the pig’s liking — but they are something, anyway. Something to chew with teeth that could easily crush bone, something to press down into the yearning stomach . . . and as he eats another, larger pig comes round the corner. And sees the food that was the broom and charges, intent on taking it for himself.

And the smaller pig screams in fear and challenge and indignation.

Screams mightily.

The sound of that scream is startling; it sends pigs all throughout the packing-house running when there is nowhere to run —

Running into walls. And lockers. And doors.

The two that hit the front door of the packing-house are too much for it. Heavy wood shatters, bursts flying splinters in every direction.

And then the pigs are free.

Two dozen of them from that packing house? Three? Certainly no more. What others there might have been rest inside the bellies of their brothers. Tomorrow their remains will be excrement, worn from the trip through the gullet but not digested. And they will grow.

That is tomorrow. Tonight there are three dozen pigs free on the street, and they are hungry. They root at the weeds that grow from the cracks in the sidewalk, which are insubstantial. Sniff at the wood of telephone poles, but the wood is polluted with tar, and therefore unappealing. Three of them find the remains of yesterday’s newspaper; they make short work of it.

Then one of them catches scent of the stockyard, where there are cattle and so much food to fatten them. And charges off to hunt, like the wild boar who was his ancestor. The other pigs, seeing him run, follow. What follows can only be described as restrained chaos. The stockyards are fenced and walled with sturdy stuff; built strong to withstand the press and lurch of frightened bulls. The pigs, of course, do not know this. They charge, screaming blood-hungry the need in their bellies, ram their heads against the high, strong pen-walls. Pen walls that are cast from poured concrete reinforced with steel. Even the weight of a mature boar has no affect on it. But the strength of the walls effects the pigs: their screams of hungry challenge turn to wails of agony as skulls and snouts and jaws pulp against man-made rock.

And then the sound of screaming and the smell of blood is everywhere in the streets, spreading like an infection among the slaughterhouses and the stockyards and the packing houses. Everywhere the animals stampede, pounding into the walls and the fences and the pens that hold them. And everywhere that a wall or a door or a cage is weak, animals are free. Pigs, most of them. Only the cattle in the stockyards are alive, and few of those walls give.

An hour, and these pigs have spread themselves everywhere in the city.

Two hours, and the first herd of them finds the patrons of an all-night diner.

And the pigs eat those patrons — five men, three women, plus the waitress and the cook.

Eat them alive.

Later, the pigs will find others. Many others. They will be eaten too.

That is the start of the terror in Chicago. Tomorrow the pigs will wake in Moscow; two days later they will wake in Beijing. Men will kill them whenever they appear, but when they do the pigs will only rise again, hungry, murderous, and strong.

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Chapter Thirty-Six

SOUTH OF ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

It was the creature’s death scream that woke him.

The sound of it pulled him up out of sleep all at once, gasping and terrified and wide awake, and he opened his eyes and saw fresh blood spilling out all over the floor of the car rolling toward the back end of the train. The wide artery in the creature’s legs spurting out its last few spurts, and the creature was dying all over again from the loss of blood that began as soon as his heart started beating.

Over in his corner, Tom the dog whimpered in sympathetic pain.

They were moving. Sometime while he’d been asleep they’d started moving, and that hadn’t even begun to wake him. Which meant that he’d been sleeping more deeply than he would have thought possible — he hadn’t felt that tired. Hadn’t felt tired at all, in fact. His body needed sleep, he realized, even if it didn’t demand it.

He crawled over toward the creature. Except for the leg . . . well, it would have been an exaggeration to say that the rest of him was healed. He was still black and blue and twisted out of shape and while the skin had grown over his wounds it was hairless, and there were places where it was thin enough to see through. Re-knit — maybe that was the word. His body had begun to re-knit itself.

Especially the leg.

That leg . . . Ron winced at the sight of it. It was growing back together. Half the flesh that had been ripped away was regrown. And the bone was growing back, too. But the gap was still wide enough that Ron could have put his fist through it. And that fat artery there — he still couldn’t see what it was supposed to connect to. It was less ragged than it had been, but it was still wide open; blood leaked from it steadily.

Ron still didn’t want to interfere. He didn’t know anything about bodies or doctoring. Chances were that if he did anything it’d cause more harm than good. If he didn’t do anything, the creature would bleed to death again as soon as his heart started beating. Ron bit his lip. Hesitated. And carefully as he could he pressed the lower leg up toward the stump. It didn’t fit, of course — but it left less of the creature exposed.

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ON I-70 IN ILLINOIS APPROACHING THE JUNCTION WITH I-55

Two things happened to Luke at once, right about the time he passed the sign that said
ST. LOUIS–36
.

The first was that his certainty abandoned him — abandoned him completely and absolutely. All the way from New York he’d known beyond any doubt exactly and precisely where he had to turn, where he was going. Seen the turns and curves in the highway with his mind’s eye hours before he was anywhere near them. And now, very suddenly, he was lost. Oh, sure: not lost completely. He was on Interstate 70 in Illinois, and the sign said that he was less than forty miles from St. Louis. And there was the map in the glove compartment if he needed it. But he no longer had any sense of going somewhere.

Maybe, he thought, it was time to pull over and wait. Maybe that was what his gut was telling him. Andy and Christine both were dozing. If he pulled over and rested his eyes for a while they wouldn’t even have to know about it. And he hadn’t had any sleep since he’d started driving, back in New York. Maybe he did need some rest.