Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  Below this, written in a finer, more careful hand:

  We have noted your suggestions, and expect to decide whether or not to act on them in the near future.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Eighteen

  WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, JOHNSON COUNTY, MISSOURI

  Bill Wallace woke just in time to avoid being late for his own funeral.

  What woke him, as it happened, was the trundle, rock, and push of pallbearers’ shoulders ever-so-slightly out of sync as they carried his casket from the base chapel to Bill’s open grave. It was another few groggy moments after that before he got enough of his wits about him to realize that he wasn’t in some sort of a dark room, nor waking in the dark part of the night. There was time, in fact, for his bearers to set the coffin into its sling and the base chaplain to set well into Bill’s eulogy before Bill tried to roll onto his side.

  He knew something was distinctly wrong when his head and shoulder pounded into the casket’s wooden lid. Knew, even if it was too dark to see; even the smallest bunk in the most crowded Air Force barracks had more room in it than that. Still, it wasn’t a thing to panic over. He was disoriented, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember where he was, but life in the Air Force was like that sometimes: it woke a man up in tight spots that he couldn’t quite remember getting into in the first place.

  Which was about when he heard exactly what the chaplain was saying, somewhere not far away at all. Heard his own name, being taken in the past tense. Three times in the same sentence.

  He remembered: slowly, uncertain, like the memory of a bad movie he’d seen months before. Remembered murdering his own President, knowingly and with malice aforethought. Which had to be about the biggest sin a soldier could commit, even if he did think he was doing it for the good of the world.

  And began to remember that he’d died while committing that murder.

  That was when Bill Wallace panicked.

  Panicked big time.

  Screamed loud and long and hard enough to wake the dead; squirmed and writhed and pushed every which way, trying to find the way out of whatever the hell kind of a hole he was in —

  Not a hole. Not a box. Not a room.

  A coffin.

  And started pounding on the lid above him. Shouting. Demanding that someone let him out. Screeching like a teenage girl at a horror movie. Not that it did any good; some fool had gone and nailed the damned thing shut. It was a good twenty minutes of scratch and pry and thunder inside that box, hammers working loud and ungentle to free him, before Bill Wallace saw the light of day in his new life. By then his throat burned and tasted bloody, like the raw steak he’d eaten once on a dare.

  ³ ³ ³

  BROOKLYN

  It was morning, and Luke woke alone with his shirt still beside him on the grass where the dead woman had thrown it the night before. Where was she? He looked around, saw no sign of her. There wasn’t any sense in looking for her; he knew in his gut that she wasn’t anywhere nearby. He didn’t need any physical evidence to be certain of it. For half a breath Luke almost began to suspect that she’d been a dream — a succubus, maybe, created by his imagination.

  That was just more nonsense. She’d been real, real as the grass burns their lovemaking had cut into the skin of his back.

  He picked up the shirt, shook the loose bits of dry grass from it. Put it on, buttoned it. Found the denim slacks where they lay crumpled on the far side of him, and put them on.

  Wherever she was, he decided, he’d see her again soon. Decided? No, not decided. It was something that was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not. Whether he planned to find her or not, he’d see her. He knew that it was going to happen as surely as he knew his way out of the cemetery, even though he’d only been through it once before, even though the walk to this place had been so full of distraction that he barely remembered it.

  Luke was beginning to know things like that, and it didn’t occur to him that it might be anything strange. He didn’t remember enough of his past to see the idea as he would have just a few days before — see it as something absurd. Embarrassingly silly. The truth was, of course, that he wasn’t just beginning to know things — Luke had always had little intuitions, and sometimes he’d even had prophetic dreams. And he’d ignored them, dismissed them exactly because they embarrassed him.

  When he left the quiet knoll he had no sense of where he was going, nor any sense that he moved purposefully. Even so, he walked almost directly to the part of the cemetery that faced the tenement building where the Harrisons lived, and walked there by a route far more direct than the one by which the woman had led him to the knoll the afternoon before.

  Which is not to say that the sense that guided Luke was omniscient, or even reliable. If it had only given him the tiniest alert, if he’d even begun to look down as he walked into that clearing, Luke would have seen the wound in the earth where the grave was — there’s something spectacularly ominous about an open grave.

  Even more so a grave so old as that.

  His sense of things wasn’t strong enough, certainly, to shake Luke from his distraction — which is why he stumbled at the edge of the woman’s open grave and all but fell into her rotted, empty casket.

  Even as he slipped down toward it Luke knew that it was the grave of the woman he’d first seen yesterday. It had to be. The broken dirt was exactly that old, dried the way it would be exposed to sun and air for most of a full day. And more . . . there was the sense of her about this place, the sense of a body tied for years and years to a piece of ground.

  Luke only barely managed to catch himself, to keep himself from falling by wrapping his arms around the only thing available.

  Which was the woman’s headstone.

  It was a tall, high monument stone — almost more a monolith than a monument. It was cut from soft white marble, her name set into the stone with fat brass capitals made from brass or bronze or some such material that had begun to green with corrosion. Streaks of that green stained the white stone; it almost seemed the mark of some impossibly alien coppery blood.

  Christine Gibson

  The letters down below that were carved into the stone — they were smaller, almost unnoticeable because of the size of the woman’s name.

  1814–1891

  in warm and eternal memory

  Luke used his grip on the monument to lift himself up away from the edge of the open grave. It was shallower than any grave ought to have been — not more than a couple of feet deep, to Luke’s eye. Even if he had trouble remembering things like the fact that graves are by tradition six feet deep, good sense said they needed to be deeper than this one.

  Maybe the ground above it had worn away over the years. That made at least a little sense. The monument at the head of the grave would have likely settled down into the soil at about the same rate as the erosion. The soil around the grave was pushed up and out, as though it hadn’t been dug away, but lifted aside. Lifted by the lid of the casket.

  Lifted aside when the woman rose up out of her grave.

  Luke imagined himself waking that way — waking in a coffin closed dark and buried in the ground. The idea of it was enough to make him shudder . . . Luke wasn’t especially claustrophobic, but even so he could understand the fear of small places. Especially places as small as a coffin.

  There was a litter of faded-rotted silk scrap mixed with the bits and pieces of pine straw and dry humus around the grave’s edge. Some of that silk, Luke saw, had once been an elegant evening dress. Near the foot of the grave were the cracked and dried remains of a pair of patent-leather shoes.

  He still hadn’t looked down into that grave. He was afraid to, for no reason he could put a name to. But just as he knew to be afraid, he knew that to let that fear rule him would be much worse that anything he might be afraid of. Luke steeled himself, looked down into the grave —
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  And saw her.

  Saw the woman with whom he’d spent the night before.

  Her eyes were open; she was awake and alive. And she was as naked as she’d been when he’d first seen her. And more modest: her hands were folded over her breasts, as they must have been the day she’d been buried.

  She blinked when she saw Luke looking at her.

  And smiled.

  In his mind’s eye Luke saw the fiery red insectlike thing again, saw its brightness build in intensity until the thing exploded.

  That explosion was his doing, somehow, and Luke knew it. And he was just as sure that sight below him was a result of the explosion.

  “Hey mister.” The voice of a young boy — Andy Harrison’s voice. “Mr. Luke Munsen Jesus — where you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

  Luke looked up from the grave, shook his head, trying to clear it. The boy couldn’t possibly see Christine Gibson from where he stood. Which was good, Luke guessed. Or was it? Luke was too confused to make sense of anything.

  “Where. . . ?” Luke coughed. “Noplace. Just around here.”

  It was Andy Harrison; Luke saw the boy coming through a part in the shrubbery off to his left.

  “It figures,” Andy said. “You want to find a dead man, you go look in the graveyard. I should have expected it.”

  “Uh,” Luke said. Partly it was a wince; partly a result of an absence of words.

  Andy stood at the edge of the clearing. From there, Luke thought, he’d be able to see that it was open. It wasn’t likely he’d be able to see down into it. “Have you been raising the dead again, Mr. Jesus? You ought to leave these cemeteries alone, you know. They’re real pretty just the way they are. You go raising all those dead people up out of their coffins, this place’ll have more craters than the moon does. I saw the moon on TV — it ain’t a handsome place. It’d be a shame to have a view like that out our front window. It’s the only good view we got, after all. The back windows don’t look out on anything but the airshaft.” He held out a pair of sandals. “Here, put these on. They’re my Daddy’s, but if you adjust the straps they should fit you all right. Can’t have you going around barefoot like this, can we?”

  Luke groaned. “I’m not Jesus, damn it.”

  He crossed the clearing, took the shoes from the boy. Slipped his feet into them, bent down and fussed with the straps until they seemed comfortable. All that while frowning at himself; he’d said the words a lot more forcefully than he’d meant to. Almost harshly. Before he spoke again he paused and made himself calm down — not that it did much good. “I just spent the whole night performing sinful acts with a woman I’d never seen two days ago. God’s son would never commit a mortal sin, would he?”

  Andy frowned. “Heck,” he said, “that isn’t any surprise. Jesus loves people — my Momma says that all the time. Why should a Luke Munsen Jesus be any different?”

  Luke was all but speechless; he was appalled at himself for saying what he had to a boy as young as Andy, and even more appalled by the boy’s answer. When he could finally speak he said, “Andy — honest. I’m not Jesus. Really, I’m not. Please don’t call me that . . . it almost makes me feel like I’m pretending to be something that I’m not.”

  The boy just shrugged. Shook his head.

  “Come on,” he said. “We got to get going.” Something deep and loud rumbled far off in the distance. “You hear that? if we hurry up and run, maybe we can make it.”

  He grabbed Luke’s hand, and before Luke knew what was going on, the boy was leading him out of the cemetery at a dead run.

  “Make what? Where are you going?”

  “To the subway. They finally got it running again.”

  Subway? The image of a train roaring through a tunnel, and Luke was in the tunnel, too close to something that big, that fast, that loud —

  “Hey — don’t slow down. You’ve got to run if we’re going to get there before the train leaves the station.” Suddenly they were out of the cover of graveyard trees, bolting across the street without even pausing to check for traffic — not that it mattered; there wasn’t a car anywhere in sight.

  Luke was far out of breath, and confused, and a little afraid. “Why — ?” he asked, or tried to — mostly the question got lost in his gasping for breath.

  “Why what? Come on, run. We’re going into the city. Don’t you remember?”

  Luke didn’t remember anything of the sort, of course. And his memory of the events since he’d first reawoke the morning before was careful and clear. He tried to say so, but it was hard to find the wind to speak.

  Out onto a short block, under a monolith of overhead train tracks — when he saw it he almost thought the boy was going to make him bolt up the four flights of stairs to that train’s platform, but he didn’t, they just kept running under the dark corroded steel girders, out into a large, ugly plaza, again without bothering to check for traffic. And this time they should have been wary of cars; there weren’t many of them, but the half dozen that were moving through the plaza were moving at speeds that pavement that rutted couldn’t support. Twice as they ran cars came perilously close to running them down. They weren’t hit, though; God knew how they got so lucky, but they did. Finally they were on the plaza’s far side, darting down a stairway that led into the ground —

  — dim incandescent light, the reek of urine, and . . . something else, something dead and fermented —

  — they ran through a vast underground corridor with concrete floors and filthy tile walls and iron bars caging everywhere. It was a wonder of some sort, Luke thought, a spectacle of the kind that the whole world would remember. It had to be. Or . . . or maybe it just seemed that way, maybe if he remembered more of himself it wouldn’t be so spectacular.

  The sound of roaring, exactly the sound of roaring in his vision a few moments before, but louder and more real.

  Fifty yards along the concrete floor, and then they were at a bank of turnstiles, filthy corroded painted-iron things that stood between them and the stairway that led down to the train. Andy paused and fished a pair of strange, two-color coins from his pocket, put them into two of the turnstiles, and motioned Luke through. Then they were running again, down the stairway to the train platform.

  The train was just coming to a stop when they got there. After a moment doors opened all along the side of the train that faced them, and they stepped into a car that was all but empty, took seats not far from the door.

  When the doors had closed and the train was moving again, Andy sighed and looked up at Luke. “Usually you can’t hear a train when it’s that far away,” he said. “Not even a beat-up, noisy one like this. It’s so quiet these last few days — since everything got so crazy. This train must have been two, maybe three stops away when we first heard it. That’s quite a distance.”

  Luke nodded, even though he didn’t understand enough of the context to make sense of what the boy was saying. Besides, it was loud in the train, and louder because the windows were open, and it was hard even to be sure of what the boy had said. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going? And even better, tell me why?”

  Andy frowned. “Don’t you remember — we talked about it last night. Going to take you into the city, get you some money. Get you some clothes that fit you right. And then you can take me out to lunch for giving you a hand.”

  Luke blinked. “I didn’t talk to you last night — I haven’t seen you since yesterday afternoon.”

  The boy looked pained and thoughtful for a moment, and then, suddenly, his expression brightened. “Yeah, that’s right. But I was going to talk to you about it, only I couldn’t find you. I sure meant to tell you. Not my fault you had to go sneaking off into the cemetery to do dirty stuff.”

  Luke thought about that. “I guess it isn’t. Still, it would have been nice to get a little warning.”

 
Andy was digging into one of his pockets again. “You forgot your wallet again yesterday, back at our place,” he said, and handed the wallet to Luke. “You always leave important stuff behind like that?”

  “Um,” Luke said. He took the wallet, opened it, saw the picture of himself that it wasn’t comfortable seeing, and closed it again. The question made him uncomfortable, too — even more uncomfortable than the picture had. Maybe that was a clue to something from his past, he thought; maybe he did tend to misplace important things. It was possible. But it didn’t feel right. No, he decided; it wasn’t right. The discomfort was some other thing . . . something . . . he didn’t know. There was something important he was leaving behind, leaving more and more of it every moment, and it wasn’t just his past.

  Something. Something obvious, something he knew about — he was sure that he knew if he could only just . . . just . . . something. Something he knew about that he couldn’t put his finger on.

  “Don’t you ever answer a question when somebody asks it, Mr. Jesus?” The boy looked put out and upset, but Luke suspected it was more in fun than real offense. He wasn’t sure. “Momma says that about Jesus — she says it all the time. ‘Andy,’ she says, ‘God works in strange and mysterious ways. He doesn’t always answer what you ask him. You remember that, child.’ Momma sometimes talks a little crazy, but that always seemed kind of sensible to me.”

  Luke started to answer, but then he realized that his voice couldn’t carry over the thundering sound the train made as it moved through this part of the tunnel. The boy’s voice carried, but it was shrill, or at least higher in pitch than Luke’s was. Besides, Luke didn’t have an answer for the question; when he thought about it he realized it wasn’t the sort of question you were supposed to be able to answer. So he shrugged, and smiled, and pointed at the window and pointed at his throat, hoping that the boy would understand that it was too loud for Luke to talk. Andy seemed to; he nodded when Luke pointed.