Fire (67 page)

In a moment they’d be out of this place. They could give Ron Hawkins a hand, and then they could find a place to hide and figure out what it was they were supposed to be doing. They’d think of something. It’d all work out.

Luke told himself that, but he didn’t have a whole lot of faith in it.

And when he turned the bend in the hall that the sign pointed toward, he saw Herman Bonner waiting for them, grinning. His arms crossed. Blocking their way.

He was alone.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Bonner said. And he started toward Luke, bloodlust shining in his eye —

Luke was still running. Right toward the man. And he didn’t slow and he didn’t stop — he threw up his arms like a football lineman. Slammed into Bonner, knocking him over.

And just kept going.

³
³
³

Chapter Forty-Nine

CHEYENNE COUNTY

They were walking, now, along a bluff above the shore of hell.

That was what it seemed to Christine, at least. Out beyond the bluff was a pit of shattered glass and white-molten rock that seemed to stretch out to forever. Which was an exaggeration, maybe — maybe it was only the size and shape of a lake.

A lake of fire.

“Tell me now,” Christine said. “There isn’t much time. I can feel it. What do you expect of me?”

The old woman smiled. “I only want you to be yourself.” It was a strange smile, unsettling. It made Christine feel as naked as she’d been the first time she’d met the woman. “Remember the pendant that I gave you. You still have it, don’t you?”

Automatically, Christine’s hand went to her breast. She drew the stone up out of her blouse, to look at it, to see it —

And when she looked up again, the old woman had disappeared.

Just as she had the first time Christine had met her.

Disappeared utterly, totally, and without leaving behind a trace of her passing.

And she’d left Christine alone at the gate of hell.

³
³
³

LAKE-OF-FIRE

A dozen planes.

There were at least a dozen more planes to disable before Ron could get himself the hell away from here. Get the hell away from those half-dozen assholes with their machine guns who weren’t positive he was on the airfield, weren’t sure where he might be, but kept firing at shadows. Twice they’d come close to hitting him, but mostly they kept pounding holes in the planes.

And in the missiles.

That was the part that scared Ron. Scared him seriously. One of the bullets had hit squarely on the warhead of a missile while Ron was only a few feet away from it, and the shell of the thing had shattered in a thousand directions, and something cracked inside the mechanism and for a moment Ron had seen himself devoured by a shell of fire hot and infinite as the sun —

Then the cracking sound was gone, and the bomb hadn’t gone off, and after a moment Ron realized that he was still alive, and that he just might continue to be alive. It was enough of a relief that he almost lost his grip on the plane’s fuselage. Breath leaked out of him in something that wasn’t quite a sigh.

He managed to keep his grip. Barely. When he looked back up at the warhead he saw the bullet had torn lose the jury-rigged wiring for him.

Which left eleven planes. Or was it ten? He kept losing track of the count.

He eased himself down the cable that he’d used to climb up onto the plane. Let himself drop onto the runway. Stood still for a long moment, taking a good look around, spotting the fools with the machine guns so that he could avoid them.

Noticed that he wasn’t hearing gunfire off in the woods any more. Which meant that the irregulars out there had either finally killed each other off, or figured out that Luke and Ron weren’t out there any more. Or maybe it just meant that they’d run out of ammunition. It wasn’t likely good news: as long as they kept themselves busy out there, there was no way for them to join up with the idiots here on the airfield. If enough of them showed up here, they just might be able to find him — even in the dark, with so many planes to hide among.

Shouting. At the far end of the runway. Up there by the first plane he’d disabled. Whatever that meant, it wasn’t good. The last thing Ron needed was more trouble. Or was it bad? Whatever it was, it’d got the attention of the irregulars. That wasn’t a thing Ron was going to complain about — it left him free to run directly toward the next jet, instead of skulking around carefully the way he’d had to since they’d first spotted him.

Up. Hand over hand along the cable that ran toward the next warhead. Both hands gripped around the wires where they went into the missile. Pull and yank them back, toward him. Out of the rocket’s shell. Down again.

Ten left. (Nine? Eleven? Those planes, over there, and to hell with how many of them there were.)

They were shouting at the other end of the runway. Didn’t he recognize one of those voices? Yes — he did. Of course he did. That was Luke Munsen’s voice. What in the name of God was Luke doing here? Why was he making a spectacle of himself? Even if they had lousy night vision, these irregulars weren’t the sort of people whose attention a sane man would want to attract.

Christ. There wasn’t time to worry about this now. Not when he was so close to done. What was Luke doing? Ron stole a glance down the runway. Saw the silhouettes of two men down there by the first of the planes. Who was that with Luke?

No time. It didn’t matter who it was — there wasn’t time to let it matter.

Back on the tarmac. Running toward the last of the transport planes. Jumping up toward the cable, getting ahold of it, climbing . . .

When he was near the top he stole another glance toward Luke and his companion. What were they doing? Purposely getting the attention of the irregulars, and now that they had it — running. Not running sensibly in among the planes or out toward the woods. They were running off across the open landing field, toward the next runway over.

Where they’d make even better targets.

They were going to get themselves killed.

Very soon.

Ron pulled the cables out of the warhead. Let himself drop back to the runway.

Spotted Luke and the man with him, whoever he was. Damn it — here Ron was, trying to save the world, and they had to go and try to get themselves killed. There wasn’t time for this kind of nonsense.

No time at all. The hell with them, he thought. If they wanted to get themselves killed, that was their business. Wasn’t like there was a whole lot Ron could do about it, was there? . . . Well, maybe there was. It didn’t matter. Saving the world had to come ahead of fishing a friend out of some boneheaded trouble he’d made for himself, didn’t it?

Didn’t it?

He thought about that for about ten seconds, cursing under his breath all the while. And realized that it didn’t matter what ought to come first. Realized that it didn’t matter what was at stake; he couldn’t stand back and watch and do nothing as a friend was hunted down and shot.

Saving the world would just have to wait.

Ron took off after Luke and whoever that was and the irregulars running with everything he had. There weren’t many times in his existence when Ron had run like he did then, and most of those times had been in the last few days.

Running for the love of life, in fact, was getting to be almost an ordinary occurrence. He’d certainly had enough practice to begin to get good at it. And he had an advantage over the irregulars, too: each of them was weighted down by a heavy machine gun, and by enough ammunition to blow up a bridge. A couple of them had other weapons, too — knives. Pistols. One of them looked as though he had a bayonet fixed to the muzzle of his gun, though it was hard to be sure of that in the moonlight.

Ron wasn’t carrying anything heavier than the shirt on his back. Which was why he managed to catch up with the bastards, in spite of the fact that they had a couple hundred yards’ lead on him when he started running.

They didn’t even hear him coming. Partly that was because he was a quiet runner and they weren’t expecting him. Probably just as much because they weren’t all that bright. They had to be pretty stupid: this was the same crew that had been fueling the jets and shooting at him in the dark — what kind of an idiot, Luke asked himself, goes around fueling a plane with a loaded weapon in his hands? And then is stupid enough to start firing the thing indiscriminately?

The one Ron caught up with first never really knew what hit him. He had his hands wrapped around his gun, and he was firing it every now and then while he ran, and Ron grabbed the gun’s shoulder-strap right out of the crook of the man’s neck, grabbed the gun right out of his hands. Which just happened to pull the fool right out from on top of his own feet, so that he went slamming back-of-the-skull-first right into the dirt. Ron didn’t really mean for his foot to come down square in the center of the man’s face — but when it happened it wasn’t something he regretted especially, not when he thought about the way that atomic warhead’s casing burst wide open only a couple of feet away from his head. Oh, maybe he did feel a little guilt — but not until he felt the man’s nose, and then his whole face, give in and press up toward his brain. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could feel good about.

It was about then that the man’s three friends noticed what was going on. By the time they did, of course, Ron had his finger on the machine gun’s trigger —

And the gun was out of ammunition.

Oh, there were plenty of rounds on the first man’s corpse, of course. What good were they going to do Ron over there? What good could they do him at all, for that matter? — it wasn’t like he knew how to load a machine gun.

The three irregulars who were still alive were turning toward Ron, now. Their guns were drawn, and Ron could see one of them beginning to pull his trigger.

And what was there for Ron to do? He hit the bastard with the butt of his rifle. Hit him good, too — right below the ear and a little forward, breaking the man’s jaw right at the hinge as soon as he hit, and by the time Ron finished following through there were lots of teeth flying out of his mouth.

Not a pretty sight.

Especially not for the man standing next to him, who got two of those broken teeth right in the face. One of them actually stuck in the man’s eye, and while he was howling mostly with disgust and a little from pain Ron jumped on the third man, grabbing his gun —

And a moment later Ron had shot both of those last two. One of them while he was all but unarmed, and Ron thought that maybe that was cold-blooded murder and he tried not to think about it.

Which wasn’t all that hard, since there were a thousand headlights coming at them from every direction.

Ten thousand, maybe.

Luke and his friend were heading back toward Ron. Which was the last thing they ought to be doing right now. The fence was only a couple hundred yards away; if they could get over that the jeeps and trucks would have a hell of a time getting at them.

“No, damn it. Run. Go for the fence!”

Ron saw Luke look confused for a long moment before he turned back around and headed off. By the time he’d started Ron was running himself.

Not that it did any good.

³
³
³

Shooting. Off and on for most of an hour Graham Perkins had heard the sound of gunfire — and there it was again scratching through the softness of the summer night like the talons of a bird of prey.

Something was wrong.

No one had come to see him since late afternoon. Which meant that it had been hours since anyone had given him the medicine they used to ease his heart. For the first time since Herman Bonner had found him, Graham was feeling the worry and the tension that had followed him all through his life, and trailed beyond it.

It wasn’t good. Graham was President now. He couldn’t let himself sit back and do nothing but worry over things; it was a President’s job — his duty! — to act on the things that worried him. And Graham knew that his heart wasn’t ready for anything as precipitous as that.

Still. Still. A duty was a duty.

Herman was so good at taking care of these things. Herman ought to be here, Graham thought. If Herman were here, he’d know what to do about the sound of gunfire right outside his wall.

Herman wasn’t here. He was . . . where? His office, maybe? Likely that was so. Herman spent most of his time in the suite of rooms he used as both office and living quarters.

Well then, the answer was obvious. What Graham had to do was go up to Herman’s office and tell him about the gunfire. Once Graham had done that, he was sure, Herman would get those guns taken care of.

It was so obvious, in fact, that Graham wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

Graham began to wonder if it was such a wonderful idea when he saw how deserted the corridors were outside his room. It wasn’t just as though there was no one in them — which there wasn’t — but rather there was a cold emptiness in the halls, as though there wasn’t another soul in the entire building.

By the time he got to Herman Bonner’s office Graham Perkins was convinced that he was completely and utterly alone. And when he saw the broken door to Herman’s office, and the blood all over everything in the adjoining room, Graham became certain that the worst had happened. He wasn’t exactly certain what the worst might be — not even when he took a moment to reflect on the idea — but Graham Perkins was convinced of it all the same.

And if the worst had come to pass, then it was Graham’s duty, as Commander-in-Chief, to take the situation into his own hands.

Graham’s gut lurched when that realization came to him. The drugs might be fading, but they were still with him; he didn’t have enough of his wits about him to be a Commander-in-Chief. Graham knew that. And he knew that even if his head had been clearer, he wouldn’t have been ready for the Presidency: he still hadn’t sorted himself out of the events and images of the week past.

The truth was that he didn’t know if he’d ever get himself that sorted out. He didn’t know if he’d be able to do that sorting. And he wasn’t even sure that he wanted to do the sorting. In fact, when he thought of what he wanted to do what he thought of was a small cabin in the deep Vermont woods, not far from a stream. He owned that cabin — he’d owned it for most of ten years, since his grandfather had passed on and willed it to him.