Fire (68 page)

The cabin held a lot of appeal.

But Graham had a duty, and there was no denying it. He was President. He’d taken responsibility for that job when he’d signed on to run for the Vice Presidency, and it wasn’t the sort of responsibility you could deny once you’d taken it on yourself.

Out there — Graham saw tiny flashes of light through Herman’s window. And again the sound of gunfire. Out on the landing field.

If that was where the trouble was, then Graham had to go to it. It wasn’t a thing he wanted to do, but he had to go there even so.

And he did it, too. Graham was proud of that fact. Most of his life he’d shied away from the things he didn’t have the heart to face. But a President was more than just a man, he was more than just a politician: a President had no right to be a coward, and even if he was afraid Graham Perkins didn’t let that fear rule him.

It was a big step. A big enough step to change him, all by itself. It cleared his head, just to begin with, but it did more than that, too. By the time Graham Perkins got out to the runway and found it empty his heart was a stronger thing than it had ever been in all the years he’d been alive. And because it was strong, when he found the runway empty and void of whatever trouble he’d set out to pursue, he didn’t skulk back to his room and hole up, the way he might have an hour or two before.

Instead he looked around until he found where the trouble had gone — to a field maybe a quarter of a mile away.

And he followed it.

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Ron Hawkins wasn’t the least bit inclined to give up a fight. Especially not a fight like this one — where not just his own future hung on the scale, or even the future of Luke Munsen and his friend, but — when you got right down to it — the future of the whole damned world.

He also knew that there are situations where a man has to surrender and bide his time. Not give up, exactly. Give in, and wait for an opportunity to present itself.

If this wasn’t one of those, then nothing was.

They were surrounded, just the three of them. And not just surrounded by a dozen men, or even a couple dozen. Surrounded by hundreds of men — thousands. With odds like that, and only Ron among the three of them armed with a single gun, it wasn’t even possible to go down fighting. (Oh, sure, he could take a few of them down. Maybe as many as a dozen — it was a machine gun, after all. But with that many men, sooner or later they could just walk over him, and Ron didn’t have any trouble figuring that out.)

So when the trucks and the jeeps finally managed to surround them — when they were still at least thirty yards from the fence — Ron threw down the gun and put his hands in the air, because if he could keep himself alive maybe he could figure a way out of this. Luke and his friend did pretty much the same thing. Maybe their reasoning was similar, and maybe it wasn’t.

That was when Herman Bonner stepped out from between two jeeps, leering at them.

What in the hell was Herman Bonner doing here? Last Ron had seen of him he was in Luke Munsen’s lab, planting a package that turned out to be a bomb.

That was what he was doing here — that package was where all of this had started. And somehow Herman Bonner was the source of all the events that’d happened since. He’d started this long nightmare back then, and now here he was at the core of things, putting an end to them.

Or an end to Ron, at least. And Luke. And Luke’s friend, whoever he was.

“Herman, let’s put an end to this,” Luke’s friend was saying, all but echoing the words inside Ron’s head. “What do you want from us? Why not let us be?”

And Herman Bonner’s eyes got all righteous and bulging. “Demon! Demons! You steal the form of my dearest friend — our murdered shepherd — and now you ape his voice as well! You will learn, now, demon. You will learn that a creature up out of hell can die an excruciating, horrible, and eternal death!”

And Bonner turned toward the man at his right, and for just half a moment Ron saw surprise on his face, as though the man were closer than he expected anyone to be, and perhaps as though he wasn’t the man Bonner had expected. Bonner hid the surprise quickly, but once he recognized the man beside him there was concern in his eyes that he didn’t make any real effort to mask.

When the man spoke to Bonner he spoke in a soft voice — but not a voice too quiet for Ron to hear.

“They’ve disabled half the missiles, Dr. Bonner,” the man said. “Maybe more. I’ve only had a moment to look at them, but from what I can see it’ll take me days to get them wired back together again. A couple look like they might not take too much effort. Some of them — I don’t know that they can be fixed. The electronics are awfully delicate. There isn’t much I can do for a broken circuit board. Not with the equipment I’ve got here.”

And Herman Bonner screamed with frustration.

“We need them all,” he said. “All of them! Do you hear me?”

The soft-spoken man had stepped back at least half a dozen feet; he looked terrified. “Yes, Dr. Bonner. You know I do the best I can I —”

Bonner turned toward the man on his other side — a grizzled, bloody-eyed man with lieutenants’ bars pinned to his Army-surplus camouflage coat. “There’s no time. It will have to do. It must.” Listening to the sound of the man’s voice, Ron was sure he was about to lash out, hit somebody. “Get the missiles that we still have into the air immediately, Lieutenant. Direct them toward our highest priority targets. Don’t waste a single moment.”

Before the Lieutenant had taken three steps Ron heard another voice, somewhere out of sight but not far away at all.

“Herman?”

From out beyond the ring of jeeps and trucks.

“That was you I heard screaming, wasn’t it, Herman? Hard to tell for sure, but it sounded like you. What’s going on? Is everything all right?”

Ron recognized that voice. He’d heard it — on television? Yes. And on the radio, too. At election time.

It was the Vice President’s voice.

Herman Bonner sighed. “Yes, Mr. President. Everything is fine now. We were attacked — by demons. We have them now. We’ve captured them, and momentarily we will execute them.”

The Vice President — or was he President now? Herman Bonner was calling him President, but Ron wasn’t the least bit sure that made it so — the Vice President stepped out through the circle of trucks, stood and looked Bonner in the eye.

“Execute them, Herman? How exactly do you go about executing a demon? Especially now, with God raising up the dead so fast that no one stays gone long enough to hold a funeral?”

Herman Bonner smiled.

“By casting them into the Lake of Fire,” he said. “Come! As President, it is an execution you must witness!”

Over on the runway the first of the planes was taking off.

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AT THE EDGE OF THE LAKE OF FIRE

After she’d waited at the edge of the Lake of Fire for most of an hour, Leigh began to worry. Was it safe here? Wasn’t nuclear radiation dangerous? Certainly the glow that came from the lake was radiation. And radiation was something that could kill you. Leigh knew that, even if she had been a lit major.

Maybe she had dreamed that phone call. Maybe she was going out of her mind. There wasn’t anything here in the middle of radioactive nowhere that required her presence, was there? Seriously and genuinely required Leigh herself? There wasn’t anything at all here, except the sound of the wind on scorched grass. And the glow. And the car. And Leigh.

She looked at the keys in the ignition. All she had to do was start the engine, pull away. . . . She could probably find a motel open down on I-70. Spend a quiet, easy night watching television.

Yeah. Anything was better than roasting herself slowly beside an atomic fire. Even television was appealing in comparison.

She looked at her watch. Thought about the phone call, the impossible phone call that had already sent her half-way around the world. How could she go that far, only to leave after an hour? Was the wait really that bad? No, not that bad. Tedious, maybe, but not terrible. She took a deep breath, looked at her own motives. Realized that the reason she wanted to go was because she was afraid. God knew what she was afraid of, but Leigh Doyle was afraid.

She sighed.

It wasn’t right to leave. Not yet.

Another hour.

At least.

And maybe hours after that.

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LAKE-OF-FIRE, KANSAS

The planes went up all at once, or nearly so. They took off one after the other on five separate runways, and inside of ten minutes there was only a single plane left of the airstrip. And that plane wasn’t flying anyplace; even from this distance Ron could see the flaps on its left wing hanging shredded and useless. Bullet holes all over that wing, and the fuselage behind it. One of those fools had done a good job on it while he’d been trying to kill Ron.

The technician explained it to Bonner and the Vice President as Ron and Luke and George Stein stood waiting. It would take days to fix the plane, the tech said. He was sweating nervously. Fixing that kind of damage wasn’t any small job, and besides they didn’t have the parts. Or mechanics. Or tools. Well, maybe the right tools were somewhere on the base, but the tech hadn’t been able to find them. Yes, the engines were working, working just fine. All the time he spoke he kept glancing nervously up at the departing planes, as though he didn’t really want to help blow up the world — but couldn’t find a way to avoid it.

Not that there was a way to avoid it; the last of the planes was in the air. There wasn’t anybody in the world who could and would call them home.

If Bonner saw the technician’s dis-ease, he made no sign of it. None Ron could see.

All through the explanation (planes rushing thunderous into the sky) the Vice President stood staring dumbly at Herman Bonner. Eyes kind of glazed, expression slack. Watching him, Ron almost thought that there might be something wrong with the man’s brain.

Then the fireworks started. In the distance, at first. Roaring explosions and fiery clouds so bright that for half a moment Ron thought that the nuclear Apocalypse had begun at the edge of their horizon. Was that one of Bonner’s planes? Yes. It had to be. Then that first fireball faded, and he knew that it wasn’t any atom bomb going off. No atom bomb would burn that briefly. The explosion was the kerosene in the plane’s fuel tanks, set afire by God only knew what —

All at once there were dozens of anti-aircraft rockets at the edge of the sky and planes were bursting into balls of heat and light all that filled the whole horizon.

And Herman Bonner screamed.

Ron almost started screaming himself, for fear that one of the exploding planes would ignite the nuclear missile that it carried.

None of them did.

Not a single one.

Then it was still beyond the far edge of the runway, and almost pretty, the way the warm summer dusk flickered with the light of kerosene burning in the distance.

Until Herman Bonner stopped screaming, and spoke. Shouted, actually.

“General Thompsen! General Bruce Thompsen!”

There wasn’t any need to shout, of course. The general was right at Bonner’s elbow.

“Here, Herman.”

Bonner didn’t say anything. He looked too choked on frustration and rage to speak.

“The Army, Herman. Whole divisions of it camped just over the hill. We knew this could happen.”

Bonner tensed; for a moment Ron thought he was going to hit the man. But he didn’t. Instead his eyes got cold and hard. “Then we need to get more missiles, don’t we, General? And to get more missiles we need to move to another base. And to get there, we must first obliterate those who hem us in.” He gestured off toward the hills where the rockets had exploded. “Take your army — take every man we have here — and destroy them.”

“Yes sir.” Thompsen said.

And then he glanced at Ron and Luke and George Stein.

“Tim and I will see to them. You have guns for us?”

“Of course.” And the General. Nodded to an aide, who ran off on the errand.

That was when Ron realized that he was hearing the drone of a plane overhead. Had one of them gotten away? And if it had, what was it doing here, instead of heading off for points unknown? He glanced up, to get a look at it —

It was a serious mistake. Bonner and Thompsen both had their eyes on him just then; by looking up he drew their attention to the plane.

Bonner hissed. “Is it ours?”

Thompsen hesitated a moment, looking at it carefully. “No.”

“Then shoot it down.”

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IN TRANSIT BY AIR OVER EASTERN COLORADO

“I reckon that it isn’t,” Bill said. She looked at him kind of puzzled-like, which was understandable when you considered that the two of them had been there staring at each other for at least five minutes, and in all that time neither of them had said a word. “I mean, love isn’t the kind of thing you ought to lie to yourself about. Not even when you don’t understand it.”

She nodded. “Ah. Yes.”

After that they were both quiet again for a long time. And this time it was she who broke the silence. “What should we do?”

Bill stole a glance at the boy, who was watching the both of them with the kind of wrapped-up intensity most people reserve for campfires and lava lamps. “I don’t know. Relax. See what happens. Seems to me we shouldn’t push anything too hard.”

She nodded again, looking a little impressed. A little reverent, even, which made Bill real uncomfortable. How could a woman like that, some kind of a superwoman, look at Bill like he was one of the three wise kings? Mind, now, Bill wasn’t ashamed of what he was. Just the opposite, point of fact. He had his pride. He knew what he was, and wasn’t. And if there was anything Bill wasn’t, wise was it.

She was still looking at him like he was something he wasn’t when the navigator came out of the cockpit.

“Heard some noise from back here a little while ago,” he said. “Any trouble with the drop?”

Bill shook his head. Felt the whole world sway with the throbbing deep behind his nose. “Nah.”