Fire (56 page)

Christine and Andy were both beginning to wake. She yawned, covering her mouth, lifted her hands to her eyes to rub away the sleep; the boy opened the door beside him and stepped out to stretch his legs.

Luke got out and set the pump to fill their gas tank.

“We going to eat breakfast soon? I’m hungry. Growing boy’s got to eat, you know.”

“Not yet,” Luke told him. “No time. We’ve still got a way to go before we can relax again.”

The boy grunted. “Now what do you mean by that, Mr. Luke Munsen? What’s such a big hurry?”

Luke frowned, shook his head. “Damned if I know. But it’s real enough. This is a bad time to stop. Wouldn’t even have stopped for gas if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary.”

The boy shook his head and smiled ruefully. And then, after just a moment, the smile disappeared, and Andy’s eyes seemed to glaze over. Strange, Luke thought. Not all that strange — more likely than anything else it meant that he wasn’t getting enough sleep. Luke wasn’t a parent, and he didn’t know much about kids, but he did know that they needed their sleep. Which was just as well — the more Andy slept, the less likely he was to drag all of them into trouble.

Luke turned to watch the pump’s meter. The tank would be full, soon. Already it had taken in as much gas as it had the last time he’d filled it — there. The pump-valve disengaged; the tank was full, or nearly full. He grabbed the pump handle, squeezed the grip to top off the tank. He let the valve disengage three more times; decided that he was wasting time he didn’t have. Put the pump handle back into its socket, put the cap back onto the gas tank, and went to pay.

When he got back to the car, Andy Harrison was gone.

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LAKE-OF-FIRE, KANSAS

Killing Herman Bonner didn’t work.

Not even for a moment.

George Stein hadn’t expected it to — hadn’t expected it to leave Herman dead for long. Even as shaken and numb as he was, he wasn’t stupid: if that bacteria, the stuff that kept reviving him and putting his body together when Herman took it apart, if that stuff had infected him, it had infected Herman, too. George could kill him, but he couldn’t kill him for long.

Still. Still. It would leave him dead for a time. And more important was the act of murder itself. George Stein was a religious man, and a good man, he liked to think. And he knew that intimate murder was perhaps the vilest sin one man could commit against another. And he knew that few things in his life had soothed his soul the way that murder did. It should be a foul thing, he knew — squeezing and squeezing Herman’s thin, wiry neck, feeling his thumbs press deep into the man’s arteries and windpipes. Watching the skin of Herman Bonner’s face redden deeper and deeper, shift finally toward a blackish ocher. His eyes bulge out spasmodically — but not just involuntarily. Herman’s bulging eyes, his contorted features — they were a mask of terror, not just involuntary movement.

And it was good, because Herman Bonner had hurt him, and violated him in ways that George Stein had never imagined that he could be violated. Until he felt Herman go slack and dead, and George Stein began to come back to his senses, and as soon as he did he was ashamed of himself.

He had a lot to atone for. And, it seemed, every day there was more.

That was when he remembered St. Louis.

Dear God, he thought, Herman’s sent them out to destroy that city. I’ve got to stop them, stop them —

He looked down at Herman, and saw him still and cooling, discolored, tongue protruding. He was dead, no question. George let his hands relax, stood to walk into the other room, where he’d call somebody and get that damnable thing stopped. . . .

He didn’t get very far. Before he was even fully erect Herman was all over him, alive because he’d never died, he wasn’t human, he wasn’t something you could kill — and he was furious. . . .

And strong. Stronger than any man his size could possibly be. Before George Stein even knew what was happening Herman Bonner was picking him up and throwing him across the room, and he was flying through the air until his neck and the back of his head smacked all his weight into the opposite wall, breaking his neck.

It was a long time after that before George Stein was alive again.

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INSIDE THE KOREAN DEMILITARIZED ZONE

Bill didn’t die, the way it turned out. Not precisely. Nor, precisely, did he survive. Two of the three bullets that tore into his abdomen burst and destroyed vital sweetbreads. Those wounds by themselves would have killed him over the course of hours, if it weren’t for the microbes thriving in his blood; as it was, they were no real threat.

It was the third bullet that brought Bill to the border land between life and death, and held him there for hours. It struck him in the stomach as the force of the first two threw Bill toward the ground — struck, because of the incline of his fall, at an angle. An angle that sent it through Bill’s center, instead of toward his spine. And instead of lodging in the hard muscle of his back, as the first two bullets had, this third round sunk itself down into the cavity that held his heart.

And that was the first thing that killed Bill: a heart attack, brought on by bruise and laceration of his heart. Not that Bill knew the first thing about it; by the time the heart attack killed him, he was already insensate, deep in shock.

The second thing that set out to destroy Bill was the acid in his stomach. Which that same third bullet had set loose into his middle abdomen. Where it began to digest his insides, just as though they were food.

Again, it wasn’t any damage the microbes couldn’t have undone. By the time his heart was ready to attempt to restart itself, five minutes after the heart attack, the peritonitis had done its damage, and the repair had barely begun. And as the blood began to surge through the great arteries in his abdomen, the one nearest his stomach — weak and corrupt from self-digestion — burst. And sent blood gushing all through the space between Bill’s sweetbreads.

And Bill died again, instantly.

Still: in its way the burst artery was a blessing. The blood that flowed from it was more than enough to absorb the stomach acid, and even as Bill died an ounce of it was clotting around the bullet hole in his stomach. If it hadn’t been for the bullet beside his heart Bill would have begun to recover immediately.

The bullet was lodged beside Bill’s heart. And when, twenty minutes later, his body tried to restart itself again, that bullet killed him all over again. And killed him for the stupidest reason: Bill’s heart was more than strong enough to throb with a gumdrop-sized knot of lead crouched beside it.

It wasn’t the presence of the bullet, in and of itself, that killed Bill for the third time in less than half an hour: what killed him was a tiny nick in the bullet’s skin. A nick that scratched at the membrane of his heart, tearing it with every beat. Again and again, ever so slightly. Until, after a little less than two dozen beats, the scraping became too much and Bill’s heart seized up for the third time.

And the process of rebirth started all over again.

It went on like that, with Bill living and dying and living and dying, for most of three hours.

Never in all that time did Bill’s brain starve completely for lack of oxygen; the intermittent beating of his heart was just enough to hold him just above the edge of brain death.

And lying for hours in that place that wasn’t life and wasn’t death, Bill Wallace began to dream.

Just as Luke Munsen and Christine Gibson had dreamed not long before.

And just as the life that sustained him wasn’t entirely life — just as Luke’s and Christine’s dreams had not entirely been dreams — the visions that came to Bill were something other than mere seeings.

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At the very beginning of the dream, Bill was alone in a dim room that was lit by nothing but the candle on the desk in front of him. He sat at that desk, writing a letter with a fine-tip ball-point pen on unruled white paper.

His first awareness was that he’d been writing for a long time. So long, in fact, that he had no memory of ever having started.

He did know what he was writing: a letter to his long-lost love.

Which was a peculiar thing indeed, since he hadn’t had a steady girl since he’d been nineteen. And while she’d been a swell girl, he hadn’t loved her then and knew that he didn’t love her now.

It’s strange here, he wrote, and no fun at all. But if everything goes right I’ll be home soon, and then. . . . Please remember always that I love you very, very much. And miss you more than I know words to say.

And then the dream fell out from under him, and the desk and the letter and the girl he loved but didn’t know were all gone, just as though they’d never been.

From the moment the new dream began, Bill knew that he wasn’t alone inside it.

Here, looking at him quiet and expectantly, was the beautiful Asian woman. Her hair the color of the onyx his grandma gave him when he turned eighteen. Skin that seemed the color of gold when you mixed it with copper, but wasn’t that exactly, because nobody really had skin that looked like metal. Her lips so thin, so fine; and her eyes almost the same blue-black color of her hair, but brighter.

Why was she here? This was Bill’s dream, not hers. And when Bill looked at her he knew that she was no dream-phantom; the people in his dreams were never so exact nor so mysterious as the woman who sat there on that grassy hill beside him.

The boy, Jerry Williams, was playing on the summit of the hill beside theirs. And somewhere invisible in the distance was another presence that Bill thought he recognized — though where he recognized it from he couldn’t say.

The black-eyed woman was smiling at him.

“Who are you?” she asked him. “Why do I know you?”

Bill blinked. Frowned.

“You followed me,” he said. “From down in the tunnels. You remember, don’t you? We were all together. You and me and the boy and that dead man. We walked a couple of miles together. Out around that mountain. Into the DMZ.”

Now it was her turn to frown. “No,” she said. “Of course I remember that. How could I forget the explosions? That man. That same man who killed me. The bodies. . . !” She looked away. “No. I’ve known you longer than that.”

Bill shrugged. “News to me. First I saw of you was in the laboratory, there — just when you was beginning to wake up.”

Her lips pursed; she looked uneasy. “Who are you, then? Have I seen you . . . in the news maybe? On television? In the papers?”

Bill thought about that: it was possible. Just barely. He hadn’t been around to see it himself, but it was pretty likely that he’d made the papers as the man who’d killed the President. It wasn’t anything he wanted to talk about if he could avoid it. “Could be. I might’ve been in the papers round about a week ago. Any idea,” he hesitated, because the question he was about to ask was one that struck him as indelicate, “any idea how long you been dead?”

It was indelicate, too. Had to be, to judge by the way it made her expression so distant. Made her warm black eyes look cool and still as lake water in the starlight.

“No,” she said, finally. “It’s summer now. I died in early spring. When the trees first began to green with soft small leaves.”

And for the longest time she didn’t say another word. Didn’t make a sound, in fact, until Bill got tired of the emptiness in the air and spoke up himself.

“You got any idea where we are?” he asked her. “Any idea what we’re supposed to be doing here?”

The woman shook her head. God she was beautiful.

“Maybe we should get up. Walk around a little. See if there’s anything else here besides us and the boy and the hills and the grass.”

She hesitated again before she answered. “If you’d like.”

They were down in the low between their hill and the boy’s when Bill’s foot twisted out from underneath him and sent him stumbling into her. For a moment he thought he was going to end up throwing both of them into the grass — but the black-eyed woman was amazingly strong; she caught him up in her arms and before he could understand what was going on she was holding Bill gently as he’d try to hold a child.

Gently as he’d hold a lover.

Her arms were wrapped around him. One reached between his neck and right shoulder. The other supported him from the ribs below his left arm. Her hands met, one above the other, at the center of his spine.

His arm was around her waist; Bill could feel the firm soft skin of her waist through her silk blouse.

There was a dance like this, he thought. And wondered if he’d pulled that dance up out of memory, into his dream. Bill wasn’t enough of a dancer to be able to name it, but he’d seen it before, in movies.

“You’re stronger than I’d realized,” he said.

She laughed. “This is a dream,” she said. “A dreamer is always as strong as he lets himself believe.”

Bill wasn’t any too sure what she meant by that. It didn’t matter, much; his head was too full of the sight of her looking so beautiful down into his eyes. He wanted to reach up and kiss her, and — and do whatever felt natural after that. He held back because he didn’t know if that was what she wanted, and he wanted her so bad that he didn’t know that he could take it if she told him to stop.

And then all of the sudden it didn’t matter, because she lowered her face and kissed his lips ever so light, so dry like a feather that the electric power of it sent a chill that washed all through him.

So wonderful, so basic and necessary and needful that Bill wondered how he’d managed to go through an entire life without ever living though that kiss before.

And two things happened, the one right after the other:

The boy screamed, up on the hill before them.

And night fell sudden as a curtain over the sky that had been blue and bright as noon.

“What?” Bill felt the word rise up out of his throat involuntarily. Suddenly he was standing, looking up a hill that was far taller than it had been only a moment ago. The woman he loved was beside him —