Fire

by Alan Rodgers

The clerk, of course, hadn’t been any match for two guys, not even with him having a baseball bat. Especially since he was all caught up in pounding and pounding on Billy. But he hadn’t given up without a fight, either, and before Ron and Joey got themselves and Billy out of that place the clerk was almost as bad a mess as Billy was.

  Still, they did manage to get Billy out of there. They had to break down the door, and Ron didn’t like to think about what they had to do to the clerk before he finally stopped coming at them. Breaking down the door set off half a million alarms, ones you could hear and ones that you couldn’t, and they only got a mile in the pickup before every cop in that part of the city tried to pull them over at the same time.

  Ron wasn’t a minor any more, and the mess they’d made of the clerk had turned a little drunk-stupid shoplifting into a major felony. Ron had gone to jail, hard and fast and for a long time. Not just to jail, but to the state penitentiary.

  Even that Ron could have learned to live with. Five years would have marked him, but it wouldn’t have broken him.

  What broke him was the six-foot-six-inch bodybuilder who spotted Ron on his third day in the prison. The man told him that he wanted Ron, wanted to know him the way the Bible uses the word. Ron hadn’t wanted any part of that, and he’d said so. He hadn’t taken any pains to be polite about the way he said it.

  That night the body builder somehow got himself into Ron’s cell. And the man beat him. And beat him. And when he was done he raped Ron, but by then Ron wasn’t awake to know about it any more.

  He woke up in the prison hospital, with both his body and his spirit broken.

  The prison chaplain, a Catholic priest, visited Ron in the hospital, and for some reason he decided to make a special case of him — to put a special effort into trying to talk a little sense into him. And because Ron was beaten and broken, for the first time since he’d been a small boy he actually paid attention to the good advice he was getting.

  The priest gave Ron direction that he was still living by. And when he saw Ron straightening out, he’d helped him get the sort of lawyer that could get you out of any kind of trouble, and three months after he’d gone into the penitentiary he was free again, doing scut-work to keep himself fed and going to high school at night.

  It’d been long and slow uphill since then. Slow but steady: in another year he’d graduate, and it’d all begin to come together.

  He thought about Bonner, and bombs at the institute, and the nuclear missile that he could almost feel hanging somewhere up there in the sky above him. The way things were going, maybe all these years of sailing into the wind, trying to make something of himself — maybe they were all for nothing.

  Ron was lying in bed already awake and thinking about wasted effort when the radio alarm kicked in and the morning news began to come through the speaker.

  The news was even worse than he’d imagined . . . so unsettling that it made his own problems seem not very important at all. The President — the same man who’d worn that angelic smile through eighteen months of campaigning — the President had declared martial law. The Army, Navy, and the Air Force were all on some incredible kind of alert. Everyone was scared; up in New Jersey, in Newark, people were rioting in the streets.

  The Speaker of the House had called Congress into session at midnight, and they’d finally got impeachment proceedings started. It was moving along, but there was no way it was going to happen quickly. Not quickly enough, anyway. And sometime during the night the President had ordered the Marines to arrest the Speaker and a dozen other senators and congressmen.

  The Marines had ignored him.

  That, Ron thought, might just be the worst thing of all. Crazy as the President obviously was, he was necessary. Or some President was necessary, anyway. Without him the country was paralyzed. Maybe the mail could still get delivered, but what would happen, Ron wondered, if the Russians decided to bomb us right now — would the people who had to fire the missiles listen to the President any more than the Marines had?

  Ron felt himself shiver, even though the room was sweaty-warm. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to live in a world where you had to think about things like that.

  Not that he had any choice. Except maybe the choice of killing himself before the bombs had a chance to kill him, and that wasn’t any choice at all.

  He shook his head and turned off the radio, before it could tell him anything else he wasn’t awake enough to hear. The thing to do — the only thing to do — was to live through the day like it was any other day, and pray to God that things didn’t get any worse than they already were.

  He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  A shower. It’s time to take a shower. He always took a shower first thing in the morning; it was hard to wake up without one. A shower, and then a big cup of coffee, and then maybe something to eat. Or maybe not — sometimes Ron wasn’t hungry in the morning, and cooking was more effort than Ron liked to go to when he wasn’t hungry.

  Half an hour later he was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee to percolate. It was eight o’clock, which meant that the morning shift had already been at work for most of an hour. It was time he finally broke down and called the morning supervisor, to let her know about the cleaning cart in the men’s room and the trash dolly in the hall outside Bonner’s office. He’d meant to be up early enough to have called them already, even though that meant being awake four hours before he usually got out of bed. But last night, when he’d reset the alarm, he’d seen 6:15 a.m. there on the glowing dial, and the thought of it had made him feel ill. He’d said the hell with it, and pressed the hour button one more time, and fallen back against his pillow.

  Now it was late enough that the morning shift had probably already found the two carts, and seen everything from last night that hadn’t gotten done. It wouldn’t do a damn bit of good for him to call, but if he didn’t do it the morning supervisor would bitch to Ralph Hernandez, and he’d have a lecture waiting for him when he got in at four o’clock. Or maybe he wouldn’t; what with the bomb scare last night, there were certainly extenuating circumstances.

  Still, I ought to call. The morning guy may not get into the bathroom until after lunch. Somebody could trip on that cart and break his neck.

  He would call, Ron decided. Soon. After his coffee, probably.

  The glass thimble on top of the percolator began to flicker brown, which meant that the coffee was ready — probably. Ron’d been using the same damned aluminum percolator for a year and a half now, and he still couldn’t get it to make the same cup of coffee twice. He got out of the chair and poured himself a cup, opened the refrigerator, got out the cream, and lightened the coffee.

  Coffee.

  He’d feel alive again soon, he knew. No matter how bad this cup was. He’d been drinking so much coffee for so long that it’d become a negative option: he didn’t feel awake at all until he’d had a cup or two, and when he didn’t make himself coffee on Saturday morning he usually spent most of the day studying and dozing off.

  He ought to call in.

  Marge King was the morning supervisor. She was a severe woman, and Ron didn’t like to have any more contact with her than he could avoid. That was at least a part of the reason he was putting off this call; Ron dreaded the idea of talking to Marge. Especially when the first thing she’d ask him would be why he hadn’t called earlier. And then she’d berate him for leaving the cleaning cart in the bathroom in the first place — he should have parked it in the closet before he went to get the trash. If he didn’t call, if he just let it go, maybe the morning guy would figure out what was going on, and maybe he’d find the carts when he needed them, and maybe there wouldn’t be any trouble at all.

  Ron sat down and stared into his coffee. Put in a couple of sugar cubes, stirred it.

  Stared at the telephone, looked away.

>   Looked anyplace else at all; the walls, the kitchen window.

  And that was when his eye caught on the little comic book the old woman had given him last night. He picked it up and opened it without even thinking how it was probably the last thing in the world he wanted to be reading. Before the fact settled through to him it was already too late — the leaflet was strange and seductive and frightening just the way a horror movie is. He couldn’t have put it down any more than he could have walked out of Dracula before he had a chance to see the end.

  The comic book told about the Apocalypse, which came at the end of the world, and the Rapture, which was something that came afterward. Ron had heard about the Apocalypse more times than he wanted to think about, and the Rapture sounded familiar, too, but he wasn’t sure where he knew about it from.

  The pamphlet didn’t help too much as far as making things clearer went. It talked a lot about this Rapture a lot, but it didn’t go as far as saying exactly what it was — though it did seem like maybe Rapture was something that involved people, living and dead, going on up to heaven after the world had got blown to pieces by nuclear bombs.

  There was this dragon who was supposed to come down out of the sky, and he was supposed to try to kill a baby that was somehow like the Christ child, and trying to kill the baby’s mom, too. The booklet wasn’t actually going as far as to call him Christ — which seemed important somehow, but Ron was damned if he could figure out why.

  The dragon didn’t quite manage to pull off killing the baby or the mom, so instead it made the stars come down from the sky, and that was the nuclear war that was the end of the world — except it wasn’t the end of the world.

  So after the dragon blew up the world with bombs or stars or whatever they were, it made this nasty, many-headed Beast, just for spite or something like that.

  The creature — the Beast. . . ? The picture in the comic book looked unsettlingly like the thing in Bonner’s office. Ron had heard Bonner call the creature he’d made Beast more than once. He couldn’t, in fact, remember ever having heard the man call his creature anything else.

  The Beast was horrible and grotesque, and it had seven heads, and part of it was like a leopard, and part of it was like a lion, and its feet were like a bear’s. And if you hurt it, no matter how bad, no matter even if you burned off one of its heads, it’d just grow back.

  Ron thought of the wicked scar on the creature’s third neck, and he felt a deep, queasy-making chill run down the back of his neck toward his gut. Was Bonner trying to make a creature that would make people think it was the end of the world? Why he should bother, Ron couldn’t figure, since the President was doing a pretty good job of making the end of the world for real, and it was hard to imagine that anybody needed convincing. Maybe the way that creature looked was just a coincidence, but Ron couldn’t see that. Bonner was too careful, too punctilious, to do something like that by accident. Even if the man had come out and said it right to his face, Ron wouldn’t have believed it. Not for a minute.

  According to the comic book, that first Beast would create a second Beast which would look a lot more like an ordinary man, except that it would have horns coming out of its head. Covered with hair, too — and the thing in the picture in the comic book had a head like a ram’s. Then this second Beast, the one with the horns, was going to make everyone wear a number on his forehead. Ron didn’t like the sound of that at all — he thought about seeing Billy Wallace get a tattoo needled into his arm, back when they were both seventeen, and thought about how even though Billy was drunk, the needling had hurt him so bad he’d bit a hole clear though his lower lip.

  Ron didn’t want anyone tattooing anything into his forehead, no sir. Not him.

  The comic book said that in real life these Beasts and dragons would be things like the head of a church that the comic book didn’t like, or maybe they’d be the president of Russia or whatever he was called. (Ron was never too clear on that; the head guy in Moscow always seemed to have a different title, or a different set of titles, depending on who he was. Ron always kind of liked how Paul Harvey would call him the Head Red — but that wasn’t any real kind of title.) There weren’t people like that running any churches that Ron knew of, certainly not any of them that were big enough for you to think of them as being real. And Ron couldn’t picture the head of some church or even Russia having horns or being all that evil. Sure, sometimes bad people got into positions like that, but not generally that bad. Not in a big country where the government and the people knew how to cope with each other with any kind of decency. They said that Stalin was evil, and that Nixon was, but both of them were a long time back. The end of the world was going on right now, nobody had to tell Ron that. And the closest thing to evil that was part of running the world was President Green, and he wasn’t evil so much as he was bum-fuck crazy.

  So where, Ron wondered, was this Beast that the comic book was talking about? He thought about that for a minute and decided that that Beast wasn’t anywhere at all. He wasn’t even the poor thing in Bonner’s laboratory — Ron had looked the creature in the eye, and he knew it wasn’t some kind of an antichrist. It wasn’t that bad — it wasn’t evil. Hell, it wasn’t even bad at all, if you were asking Ron about it. There was a goodness about the creature, almost a saintliness.

  The comic book went on to tell about another war, after all the bombs had fallen the first time, where all the good guys fought against all the bad guys, in a big battle outside a village called Armageddon, which was really supposed to be Jerusalem, only maybe it wasn’t, because Armageddon was a real village in Israel, on the West Bank, and Ron had seen it on a map.

  None of it rang true, and at the same time it did. The end of the world was the end of the world, and any way you wanted to tell it it was still the end. Maybe, Ron thought, you could kind of figure the way the world was now into the events that the comic book was telling about. Figure it like the way parents make up stories to convince a kid that a department-store Santa and another one outside asking for money don’t mean that Christmas is a big fib.

  You could figure it that way if you wanted — but you couldn’t make it so.

  The good guys, the comic book said, would win the battle outside Jerusalem — or Armageddon, or whatever it was — and when it was over all the bad guys would be thrown one at a time into a lake of fire. Then the good people would all go flying into the sky, flying to heaven like Superman, without any planes or helicopters or rockets or even wings. After that they could come back to earth any time they wanted, only the way the comic book made it sound you couldn’t imagine them wanting to, because heaven, after all, was heaven.

  The last page of the comic book — the inside back cover — was a list of things about What You Should Do To Prepare For The Apocalypse. Mostly it was things like giving money to the evangelist of your choice, and praying a lot, and trying to convert your neighbors to the Truth, and doing what you could to make sure that the unbelievers Got Theirs. Ron thought it was all kind of petty and small-hearted, even mean, but that could be because he was identifying more with the unbelievers than with the True Christians. In his book people were people, and what they believed and what they thought was precious had more to do with where they were born than with whether they were decent or not. Decent people acted decent, and they acted that way because they had backbone, and that was all there was to it. If there was a God, and he loved people more for their creed than for their decency, then Ron didn’t think he wanted to go to heaven anyway.

  Or, at least, that was the way he felt when he wasn’t thinking about dying himself, and having to face whatever was waiting for him.

  Ron looked at his watch; it read 9:17 a.m. The coffee in his mug was mostly gone, and the little bit at the bottom of the cup was icy cold. It was time, long since, to call in and talk to Marge King.

  The hell with it, he thought. I’m just not up to talking to her. Not now — mayb
e not ever. It meant he’d have to suffer through a lecture from Ralph when he got in at four, but right then he thought that a lecture from Ralph couldn’t possibly be worse than having to talk to Marge.

  His stomach rumbled, partly from hungriness, partly from tension. He certainly ought to be hungry — he hadn’t eaten since Burger King last night, and the stray had ended up eating most of that. He got up from the kitchen table and crossed the room to the refrigerator. There had to be something to eat inside it, or at least something to scrounge together. But there wasn’t. Wasn’t anything he had the stomach for, anyway. The cream for his coffee. A stick of margarine. A paper sack full of leftovers, but it’d been there for weeks, or longer — long enough that Ron couldn’t quite remember what was inside it. A covered cast-aluminum pot, whose contents were as much a mystery as the bag’s. A couple of oranges with mold spots on their sides.

  It was time to go to the grocery. Time to clean out the refrigerator, too, but that was the sort of job Ron preferred not to cope with. He’d go to the store, and then, when he got back, maybe take care of the high spots in the refrigerator before he put the groceries away. Doing all of that would take at least a couple of hours, and Ron was hungry now. So he got himself dressed, got in the car, and drove to Denny’s, which was what he’d meant to do the night before.

  ³³³

  If Ron had called in to work before he’d left the apartment, he would have saved himself a nasty surprise. As it was, he didn’t even know about the newspapers until he was half-way through breakfast.

  Ron was sitting there in Denny’s — dipping his toast into the yolk of his second egg and sipping at his coffee — when he looked up and saw that the woman in front of him was reading the Herald. He didn’t like to make a habit of reading over other people’s shoulders, which was rude, but before he even realized what he was doing he was reading the headlines and seeing the photo underneath them. The Herald’s always tended to do that to Ron — they were always so lurid and so overstated that it was hard not to read them. But even though he read them compulsively, at first they didn’t even register. That was probably because he’d expected something about the President, or the Russians, or about the nuclear bombs — the same as the headlines had been yesterday.