Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  And if there was someone behind all of it, that person had to be Herman Bonner. Or someone close to him.

  No, he decided. That was crazy thinking. If he let himself start thinking like that, he’d go out of his mind — if he wasn’t half out of it already.

  Something strange — small hairs standing on end on the back of his neck, just below his ears. Almost as though an electric current had washed over the car. Ron looked up, trying to find some source for the sensation, trying to prove to himself that he wasn’t having hallucinations. . . .

  And saw the Beast.

  Ron might never have recognized the creature if he’d only had his eyes to see it with. He didn’t see it only with his eyes; when he looked up he saw the Beast with his heart and his gut and his back brain. And none of the deepest parts of him could ever fail to recognize it.

  No matter how its appearance changed.

  Not even now, when the creature was so incredibly altered. Altered so far that no camera could find the connection to what it had been just three days before.

  For now the creature was the second Beast from the Book of Revelation.

  ³ ³ ³

  When Ron could speak again, he said, “It’s you, isn’t it?” He asked the question even though he knew the answer. “How. . . ?”

  The creature misunderstood the question, and instead of telling Ron how it was that its appearance had changed so dramatically, it planted a vision in his head. In the vision Ron could see himself, caught up again in the explosion that had killed him. Ron felt the hairs on the back of his neck grow even stiffer; felt a missing part of him brought home. His unconscious mind had neatly clipped away all memory of that last instant of his life — his recollection had ended just as the explosion’s first roar had reached them. Now, seeing the moment again through the creature’s eyes, it was almost as though he’d never forgotten.

  It had happened too quickly for Ron to understand, but watching the scene as the creature watched it, the events all seemed lucid and self-evident. In the vision, Ron was looking into his own eyes — Ron was the Beast, his hairy arms wrapped around Ron, lifting him from the floor. All around them, the concrete walls of the building shattered into jagged artificial stones, and the floor under them went unsolid and unreal, and the air around them was made of fire and bursting dust. And there was something in that air. Something like an enraged swarm of insects, but smaller, far too microscopically tiny to see — but through the creature’s eyes they were visible somehow. Not because his eye would resolve a thing that small, Ron thought. The tiny things were visible because they were portentous, and the creature saw most clearly of all the ominous things that surrounded him.

  As the swarm swept over them, the building collapsed around and on top of them, and Ron watched his living body crushed and broken by a falling concrete strut. Saw his blood splatter and gush over the moving debris in which he lay. Saw his ribs burst up through his chest, saw them spear the bloody uniform shirt, like the sanguine claws of some impossibly gargantuan cat.

  An instant of pain, and then the vision went infinitely dark. For a moment Ron thought that it meant that the vision had come to an end, but it hadn’t. The deep dark went on for a time so long that Ron began to think it was as infinite as the dark itself —

  Until finally he realized that he was surrounded by an unnatural glow.

  A glow of just exactly the same hue as the swarm of microscopic portents.

  Somewhere at the far periphery of his awareness was another light, of similar color and shape, and Ron knew that the light was his own body.

  A catastrophe — a violent and terrible moving of the earth that surrounded them — and the glow began to grow brighter and brighter, until finally it seemed to light the darkness that surrounded him.

  And the vision ended.

  “That glow,” Ron said, “the swarm. It’s something from Luke Munsen’s lab, isn’t it? It’s the reason we’re alive now.”

  The creature nodded.

  Ron felt numb and quiet — his mind went blank and empty. He should have had a thousand questions to ask. And God knew there were things to be done. He couldn’t do any of those things; he felt too powerful a need to mourn himself. His mind was buried in a fog too deep for him to do anything but sit in the car, staring hard into the blistered plastic of his steering wheel as though it were a crystal that could tell him his future — or maybe tell him his past.

  The creature waited for him quietly all that time. Half an hour of the wait the Beast spent standing, patient, barely moving. Then he made a little sound that wasn’t quite a sigh, lifted his hindquarters up onto the hood of the car, and sat.

  When Ron had sat that way for an hour, the shock finally began to fade. He yawned and rubbed his eyes and stretched. Craned his head out the window and said, “Are you hungry?” The creature shook his head no, and Ron realized that he wasn’t hungry, either. He ought to have been hungry. He hadn’t eaten in days, since late Friday afternoon — he ought to be famished, in fact. He wasn’t hungry, or weak, or dizzy, or any of the things that he ought to have been from going without food for that long.

  He got out of the car, walked a few paces to bring the circulation back into his legs. “What are you going to do, now? Where will you go?” Ron asked. “I can put you up for a while, if you want. There’s room on the couch. It wouldn’t be a problem.”

  The Beast shook his head again, and he pointed west, and Ron knew without knowing why that he meant a long journey. A powerfully long journey.

  Ron looked down at the asphalt and thought about it for a moment — thought about the creature going away, going to some place that far away. It made him sad, and the sadness embarrassed him. There was something possessive about that kind of sadness; it meant he felt he was losing something that wasn’t his to lose in the first place. And Ron knew: the creature was a precious thing. But it — not it; the creature was a him, not an it — but he wasn’t anything precious that belonged to Ron, or even that could belong. So he stood there for a long time, staring at the ground, feeling sad and feeling worse and guilty for his sadness.

  And all the while the creature sat there, patient as stone, not even watching Ron — not watching him exactly. Certainly not staring.

  “Can you take me with you? Wherever you’re going, can I go along?” The question came off his tongue before he had any idea what he was saying, but when he’d realized what he’d said he didn’t feel a need to repent it. Not even if it meant that he was trying to own something that couldn’t be his. Not even if it meant leaving behind all the life he had.

  The Beast looked at him — really looked at him — and suddenly Ron was certain that the creature had known all along that he would ask, known that they would travel together as long as he’d known that there was a journey to be made. He caught the tiniest glimpse of that journey as the creature foresaw it, and it was long, and it held terrible things — frightening things. They terrified Ron, but they didn’t make him hesitate. And at the same time Ron saw the love he had for the creature that he couldn’t admit to, and seen from that perspective it didn’t seem so bad a thing. And he accepted it, even if he couldn’t understand it.

  “Well,” he said. “Okay. You want to get in the car? You want me to drive, right?”

  The creature shook his head again, and Ron realized that they’d be traveling on foot, and that struck him as crazy, just plain crazy. God made cars for traveling in, Ron was sure of it, and as soon as He’d done it distance walking had gone definitely and permanently out of style. If anyone had pressed him on the point he’d likely have admitted that his conviction was probably an exaggeration of the facts. But still.

  On the other hand: the circumstances themselves were a lot stranger than the idea of walking off into the afternoon sun. If the creature thought they needed to walk, there wasn’t any real reason not to.

  “All right, t
hen,” he said. “We can walk. Why not. I need to get a few things — a couple changes of clothes, and like that. And my apartment’s east of here, ten miles or so. It’ll take us till midnight just to get back where we started if we walk it. How about if I run out there in the car and meet you back here? Then we can get started.”

  A sudden, unshakable sense of urgency — urgency that wasn’t his own. A moment later, Ron heard the creature’s strange voice, heard it without any sound in his ears at all: You won’t need them. They’d weigh you down, and there isn’t time.

  “If there isn’t time, then why don’t you want to take the car?”

  Ron waited a long time for the creature to respond, but there wasn’t any answer, in his head or in his gut. So finally he shrugged and said, “Well — let’s get started, if you’re in such a hurry. No time like the present.” Ron meant the words to be sardonic, but if the creature heard them that way it didn’t show. He pushed himself from the hood of the car, stood, turned, and began walking from the parking lot. Almost like he’d been waiting for Ron to realize it was time to go.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Seventeen

  BROOKLYN

  Luke Munsen woke to life amnesiac, and almost absent of his self, but he woke remembering enough to accept what had happened to him. No — remembering is too strong a word. The parts of his past that had brought him back to life — the bacteria, the beating, the ash crushed into his skin — all of those were like an uncertain dream. When, for a moment, he tried to remember them more clearly, the memory slipped completely away from him, and he began to think he’d woke into some surreal afterlife.

  His hands had been folded over his chest, and there was a slip of dew-damp writing paper just beneath them. He was naked, or nearly so — someone had draped a sheet over his lower parts.

  Trees, everywhere. Gnarled, green-green trees, lush and beautiful as anything he’d ever seen in a Japanese garden. It was grass underneath him; he could feel it pressed into the skin of his back.

  Where. . . ?

  Dead: yes, he remembered that. Luke Munsen was dead. Or had been dead? No, dead. Luke was dead, and this was heaven, or hell, or something — a grassy place full of beautiful trees. He sat up, trying to see, to take in the eternity he’d woke into. . . .

  And saw a sea of graves that went on to the horizon.

  Of course, he thought, heaven is a place for the dead. Of course there are so many graves. It was only sensible — wasn’t a grave, after all, a dead man’s home, the one thing in this world (or any other) that he had a right to call his own? If heaven was a good place then it’d have to have graves. He thought for a moment of the macabre, grassy plain where they’d buried his grandmother. He’d had a grandmother, he was certain of that, he remembered her burial clearly. Though when he tried to picture the woman herself his mind’s eye showed him nothing. That cemetery had been a terrible place, an evil place, almost. A place for the mechanized care of the dead.

  This graveyard was something different altogether — it was beautiful, even. You didn’t have to be a living man to know that. This was a home for the dead, a place where you could have the sort of grave you wouldn’t mind coming home to. Luke could picture that: coming out here on a cool, moist summer evening, stretching himself out over his grave, and watching the stars from it. The thought brought something warm and comfortable to his heart, a kind of satisfied, easy happiness that he’d rarely known when he’d been alive.

  Death was a Good Thing, Luke decided. He had vague memories of a horrible death — or maybe they weren’t memories at all, but vague traces from another dream — but even if he’d had to go through something that bad to get here, it was worth it.

  He stood up and stretched, and the sheet fell away from him, and suddenly Luke felt as naked as he was. Which was strange, he thought — could nakedness even be a question in the afterlife? His mental picture of a man in heaven included a loose, flowing white robe. Luke wasn’t sure that was realistic, or even practical; this afterlife included grass and soil enough to turn white cloth filthy. All the same, he took a good look at the bed sheet that lay at his feet, checking to make certain it wasn’t a robe that the angels had left for him. It wasn’t, of course — nothing but smooth, grass-stained cloth.

  The paper that had been under his hands when he woke was damp, and when he’d sat up it’d clung to Luke’s chest, pasted by sweat and morning condensation. And as he stooped to examine the sheet, it’d come lose and fluttered to the ground. Luke bent further, picked it up and read it.

  This is Luke Munsen, it read, to judge his name from the torn-up wallet we found not long after we found him. He was a stranger to us, but our son knew him for a few moments while he was still alive, and Andy says that Luke Munsen was a good man. May his soul rest in peace. — Mr. and Mrs. Robert Harrison.

  Even with as little real memory of the world as Luke had at that moment, it seemed a strange epitaph. Very strange. Not a bad epitaph, though; for all the peculiarity of the thing, reading it did something warm and soothing to Luke’s heart.

  He smiled and took a deep, yawning breath. The air was extraordinarily clean, just as he’d expected the air in heaven to be. It was heaven he’d awoke to, Luke decided. It had to be. Hell wasn’t anything this nice. What was he doing here? He knew that he was responsible for the end of the world he’d been born in. Luke knew that — it was as indelible a part of his soul as anything ever could be. And if he was guilty of a crime that grave, he had no business being here. Something was very wrong; someone had made a horrible mistake. That had to be it.

  Sooner or later, he decided, they’d have to realize what had gone wrong. And there was no sense at all in Luke bringing the mistake to their attention any sooner than was absolutely necessary. Let them figure it out for themselves.

  He heard children’s voices — or maybe they were the voices of adolescents — not far away at all, and suddenly Luke realized that he realized that he really was naked, naked and embarrassed. He grabbed the sheet, draped it over his shoulders as though it were a poncho. It wasn’t clothing, not even remotely, but at least it was something.

  What was that he was hearing? Cursing? They were cursing, whoever they were. Children cursing like good old boys who’d had a few brews too many. Luke was a long way from his religion, but even so he couldn’t imagine cursing in heaven. This wasn’t hell, it couldn’t be hell, or even purgatory — it was much too wonderful a place. Too decent a place.

  Which meant — which meant —

  Luke didn’t know what it meant. If it wasn’t hell, and it wasn’t heaven, and it wasn’t purgatory, then all that was left was the world, and hadn’t he destroyed that somehow?

  Well, it had to be the world. Maybe it was still in process of destruction. And if this was the world, then that meant that Luke was alive, either that or he was a shade. A ghost. — No, not a ghost; he was corporeal enough to have to worry about being naked, and why would a ghost have to worry about a thing like that?

  Which meant he was alive. Had to be alive.

  That couldn’t be — he remembered dying, remembered it clearly even if he couldn’t remember anything else.

  Or thought he remembered it, anyway.

  He wandered carefully in the direction that the voices came from, stepping gently over other people’s graves, staying close enough to the trunks of the trees to conceal himself.

  He began to be able to see past the trees when the street was still a dozen yards away. The cursing voices had come from those teenage schoolgirls over there, what were there, half a dozen? Yes, half a dozen of them, maybe a couple more, giggling and telling stories full of curse words.

  Schoolgirls from hell? Schoolgirls from hell in heaven? No, the whole notion was ridiculous. This wasn’t any afterlife Luke could imagine. Couldn’t be.

  Well, then, if he was alive, what was he doing alive? Alive and completely unhurt,
for that matter.

  Something vague at the back of his conscious mind . . . something about germs?

  A blank.

  And then, suddenly, an image that seemed to come from nowhere: some strange insectlike creature on a dark sphere, the creature cherry-red as though it were afire. And suddenly the thing exploded, and in explosion there was light enough to see that the sphere was the earth, and the force of the blast split the world asunder.

  Yes, that was it: a germ that was going to destroy the world — and that same germ was the reason Luke was now alive. That was it.

  Someone screeched, off to the left of the schoolgirls, and the scream seemed to go on forever. Luke turned and saw that the scream came from a small boy sitting on the stoop of a tenement building. The boy was staring at him, looking him right in the eye, and his face looked unsettlingly familiar to Luke.

  Screaming as though he’d seen a ghost. Maybe I am a ghost, and that’s why he’s screaming.

  Luke worked his right arm up out from under the sheet and waved at the boy. “Hey,” he said, “don’t be afraid.”

  The girls had spotted him, now, too, but they didn’t look afraid, so much — a little confused, but not afraid.

  The boy’s scream faded away, but he still looked scared half out of his mind. Luke stepped out, away from the trees. Toward the boy. “What’s wrong? I’m not anything to be that scared of, am I?”

  The boy just kept staring at him, transfixed, as Luke walked toward him. He didn’t say a word until Luke was almost close enough to touch.

  “I’m not anything that bad, am I?” Luke asked.

  And the boys said, “You were dead, horrible dead, and I saw you. I helped my Daddy carry you out to the graveyard. Your whole back side was charred away from the fire in that bus. You were dead, mister.”