Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  Over the woman’s shoulder, Luke could see a man who looked like the restaurant’s manager coming toward them.

  “Yes, to find you. You’re the other one — the other one who needs to hear the word.”

  She stooped and reached into the shopping bag. Took out a small pamphlet and held it out to Luke. Before he realized what he was doing he’d taken it from her.

  “Read it,” she said. “You need to know.”

  The manager was right behind her, now. “We can’t have you soliciting here in the store, ma’am,” he said.

  And the woman shuffled off, without even taking the time to answer the manager, or to explain herself to Luke. He watched her leave, and then turned to the manager, hoping for something like an explanation. The man only shrugged, confused as Luke was, and went back to his work.

  Two minutes later, his wallet fell onto the table in front of him with a loud thunk that nearly frightened Luke half out of his wits. He looked up and saw Andy grinning at him.

  “I did it,” the boy said, “I did it. Take a look inside.”

  Luke picked up the wallet, opened it; inside were crisp green slips of sturdy-looking paper with the number 20 written in every corner. Ten or so of them. “That’s money, isn’t it?”

  Andy let out an exasperated groan. “Yeah, that’s money. You, mister, you’re rich — you know that?”

  Luke didn’t remember being rich. He said as much. And said, “How’d you do that? I thought you needed some kind of a number.”

  “Well — maybe not rich. But you got more money in that account than anybody I know ever seen.” He grinned even wider. “I figured your special secret number out. It wasn’t that hard.” He handed Luke a folded slip of sweat-damp white paper; Luke unfolded it and saw inside a four-digit number that the boy had scrawled.

  “How did you manage that?”

  “Your driver’s license, there. It’s only got two numbers on it that you’d use often enough to know them by heart: your address and your zip code. I tried them both, then tried them backward. It turned out to be your address, last number first, first number last.”

  “Huh,” Luke said. “I’ll be. What do you know.”

  “I know I’m hungry, that’s what I know. And there’s someplace over in Rockefeller Center where I’ve always wanted to eat. And you can take me there. Then we can go get you some decent clothes . . . and then, well, we’ll see.”

  “Okay,” Luke said. “If that’s what you want, why not.”

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Nineteen

  NORTH-CENTRAL TENNESSEE

  The creature set a hard pace for Ron, and a long and steady one. It was a peculiar route they took; west-northwest, to Ron’s sense of things, and they walked all but as straight as a bird would travel. So straight, in fact, that they ignored all but a couple of the roads and trails they came upon. Still, their way was surprisingly clear; the going was as easy as though they were traveling along a trail or walking along the shoulder of a highway.

  The thing that surprised Ron most, though, was the fact that he was able to keep up with the creature in the first place. And for so long — they walked all afternoon, through the night, and when the sun rose they were still going. He kept expecting to get tired, or hungry, or maybe to drop with sudden exhaustion. He didn’t, though. When the sun rose Ron felt as good and as fresh as he had when they’d started off the afternoon before.

  More then once as they went Ron got a deep, unsettling feeling in his gut — an absolute certainty that they were being followed. They’d walk out into a quiet dusty expanse of ground, where their tread made no noise, and behind him Ron would hear the sound of . . . not the sound of footsteps, exactly, but the sound of something moving. And he’d turn too quickly for whatever it was to hide, so quickly that his neck hurt from the motion, and try to see whatever it was behind him.

  There’d be nothing. No one would be anywhere in sight. No one but the creature, and Ron himself.

  They paused about an hour after dawn near the top of a hill, where the creature checked his bearings against the sky and against the terrain below them. That’s what Ron thought he was doing, anyway; the creature didn’t say and Ron had no way of being certain on his own.

  “Why . . .” Ron thought about his question, rephrased it. “Why did the explosion change you so much? How did you end up looking . . . so different?”

  The creature looked up, away from the broad, gentle valley below them. Looked at Ron. And for what must have been the hundredth time Ron felt the small hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Not from fear, or from any of fear’s close cousins; more from — something like awe. Something like the awe he felt in church sometimes when he was very young, when he’d look up and see the so-real wooden Christ staring down at him, his carved face full of pain and suffering and compassion and love. Even then Ron had known the story of Jesus dying horribly on the cross so that he could Atone For Our Sins. And he’d look up and see the Christ in such awful and everlasting pain like that, and all he’d be able to feel was gratitude and love and mystery and awe, and he’d think, I love you too, Jesus, I love you too.

  Yes, he thought. That was exactly what he felt when the Beast looked at him.

  The creature almost seemed to see that as Ron felt it, and when he did he looked away — almost embarrassed. Almost as though it were a thing he ought never to let himself hear. And then he put his hand on Ron’s shoulder, and lifted Ron’s fingers to his goatlike face with his free hand . . .

  And Ron was small, so very tiny, in a room so stark and bright and white — it was Bonner’s laboratory, Bonner’s laboratory seen from some impossible and alien perspective. The creature’s perspective.

  The Beast’s perspective.

  Ron was the Beast, and he was in Bonner’s lab, and he was so tiny that the poor creature couldn’t have been more than a day old, or two days, maybe, and he was strapped down too tight to even squirm, strapped to something that Ron knew was an operating table, even if the creature hadn’t, then.

  And Herman Bonner had a scalpel in his hand. And the blade was coming down toward him.

  “No,” Ron shouted. “Please — enough, enough. Don’t show me any more.”

  And the vision stopped.

  “My God,” he said. “He did that to you with a knife.” How much surgery would it have taken to make a creature born to look as the Beast did now — impossible, but so natural and obvious that his uniqueness seemed more an oversight of evolution than an aberration — how much surgery would it have taken to make a creature that looked so right into a thing as unnatural and alien as he had been?

  Only two afterbits of the vision were still rolling toward him — gently, as though the creature had tried to stop them, but couldn’t. The first was a sense of repetition, as though the same horror had taken place over and over again. And the second was the ghost of pain. Incredible, vivid pain, from a great distance.

  “And he didn’t use an anesthetic.”

  The Beast looked at him uncertainly, as though he were uncertain what exactly an anesthetic was, and then he nodded.

  Ron felt himself shudder.

  “Someone needs to lock that man away, lock him up and not ever let him loose.” And Ron was thinking worse things; he wanted to do to the man more hurt than he’d just seen — felt — done to the creature.

  The Beast must have seen that in Ron’s heart the same way he saw all those other things, because his half-animal face suddenly went sad and grim, and he shook his head. Whatever Bonner’s sins were, Ron would only bring evil on himself by trying to set things even.

  It was true, too, and Ron knew it. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. Even so it’d do my heart good to see him run over by a truck.”

  The creature didn’t seem to approve of that, either, but he didn’t make a point of showing Ron what he felt.


  There was something else, too — the creature’s reversion to his natural form. That was obvious, Ron thought: he remembered the strange bacteria Luke Munsen had been working on. The bacteria that wasn’t supposed to have any effect on people, wasn’t supposed to bring anything back to life — and did, anyway. Somehow it had got loose in the explosion at the lab, and that was why he was alive now when he should be dead. He wasn’t a scientist, but he’d gone through basic college biology last year. He knew what DNA was. He knew what Luke was working with. He didn’t understand the bacteria, but he understood enough of what it was supposed to do to realize what had happened to the creature. Every creature carries a blueprint of itself inside its cells, inside its genes, and Luke’s microbes were meant to weed out that blueprint and rebuild from it. And that rebuilding had recreated the Beast in the form he was born to have.

  Mechanical noise from somewhere not too far away. Slapping, sputtering noise. Like a machine gun. Or a helicopter. Ron looked up and out, toward the noise, and saw that it was a helicopter.

  A helicopter in the middle of nowhere, at an ungodly hour of the morning.

  And it was coming straight toward them.

  “What the — ?”

  Ron looked over at the creature, and saw an expression on his face that almost looked . . . impatient. Certainly the look wasn’t a look of surprise. Had the creature known the thing was coming?

  Well, Ron thought, he seemed to know when a lot of things were coming.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Why is it here?”

  The creature didn’t answer.

  The thing was closer, now — close enough for Ron to see the symbol painted on the helicopter’s side.

  He recognized that symbol. It was the same symbol that had been on the comic book the old woman had given him. The same symbol that those crazy fundamentalists used when they bought air time on television.

  On the spine of those books in Herman Bonner’s office.

  A cross, bright white against the green-black of the rest of the helicopter. Off-center and high on the upward arm of the cross was a delicate circle — a halo, almost. And through the circle a dove was flying.

  Peculiar stuff.

  When they used that symbol on television, the background was always stark black, and the TV screen somehow managed to produce a color for the cross that to Ron’s eye looked brilliant — whiter, somehow, than white.

  The helicopter was closer now, much closer, and it wasn’t slowing down. Two hundred yards? One hundred? Maybe even closer than that.

  And weren’t those crazy circle-dove-and-cross people the same church that the President belonged to? Had belonged to, Ron corrected himself, remembering the report he’d heard yesterday on the car radio — the report about the President getting himself killed in a plane wreck. Ron wasn’t certain about the word church, either; was it appropriate to call something a church when most of the flock attended via the television sets in their living rooms? Whether they were a church or not, they were big. Big and everywhere. Once or twice Ron had even heard that they owned a lot of stock in some of the country’s largest corporations. He hadn’t taken those rumors very seriously . . . but still, it was possible. It wasn’t hard to see that they took in a lot of money from their television ministry. That kind of money could buy all sorts of things.

  Like helicopters.

  Ron kept wanting to think that it was some kind of a mistake, that the helicopter was out here in the middle of nowhere flying toward them . . . just by coincidence. But if that was so then why was it coming at them so directly? It didn’t seem likely to Ron that they were just intent on being neighborly enough to say hello.

  And if they were here because of Ron and the creature, then how in the hell had they found them — so far from where they’d been last night? So far from anywhere at all. How, for that matter, had they even known the two of them were alive?

  It was too strange for Ron. Too improbable. Everything was these last few days.

  The helicopter was much too close, now, and still coming at them. A second, three seconds, ten seconds away. Ron pictured himself skewered on the helicopter’s skids, or maybe even hacked into chunks of warm bloody meat by its rotor, and found himself possessed of an overwhelming compulsion to run for his life. Until the Beast set his arm on Ron’s shoulder again, and suddenly he knew that everything was going to be all right, that all he had to do was stand steady and unafraid, and the powerful machine would go by them without doing any harm.

  Something was charging up the hill toward them, Ron saw in the corner of his eye. Or maybe it was charging toward the helicopter. Ron stood steady, calm; the creature’s touch made it easy to be easy about the world. He looked down and saw . . . Tom the dog? What was the dog doing here? And Ron would have sworn that the dog’s expression looked self-righteous and protective, even though he’d have sworn a moment before that a dog’s expression couldn’t convey that much.

  Ron remembered then: the sense that something had been following them. That explained the dog, easily, but what about the helicopter?

  It didn’t matter what the explanation was; the helicopter was too close now for Ron to care about anything like that. It was all but on top of them. Close enough, if he reached up and out, to touch the foremost tip of its right landing skid. It had slowed, too, to the point where it was barely even moving.

  And the dog crested the hill and lunged, insanely, at the painted steel flank of the helicopter.

  Ron’s eye followed the arc of the dog’s leap, saw the poor thing smash himself, and his eye couldn’t bear to look at that too closely; it continued along the same arc, past the cross-and-circle emblem, toward the open door of the helicopter —

  Where he saw the video camera. Focused on him — no, focused on the creature.

  And suddenly he remembered the way the Mountainville paper had reacted when they’d first got word of the creature. And he knew that however the people in the helicopter had found them, they were here to turn Ron and the creature into a spectacle. Or worse than that, they meant to start a witch hunt.

  “Oh Christ,” he said, mostly under his breath. Not loud enough for any microphone to hear under the helicopter’s racket, anyway. Then, louder, “Go away. We don’t need any trouble.” When he heard himself he knew that he hadn’t spoken loud enough for anyone else to hear him. He was about to start shouting at them, maybe even try climbing up into the helicopter and take that camera from them, when he felt the creature’s touch on his arm, and he knew that if he did it would only make things worse than they already were. Likely, he realized, it was exactly what they wanted — good footage of an irate madman attacking the television screen.

  A moment, two moments. The dog was crumpled in a heap, whimpering in pain. And Ron realized that the dog needed comfort, that he probably wasn’t seriously hurt, but he needed attention, and that need was more important than anything the cameramen or the helicopter might do. And the creature was already moving toward Tom, and Ron began to do the same. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the cameramen shrug his shoulders; before he got close enough to pat the dog’s head, the helicopter was moving out and away from them, as though it had lost interest entirely.

  They didn’t want pictures of the Evil Creature comforting a hurt dog, Ron thought. It would spoil their theater.

  Tom the dog wasn’t that bad hurt at all, though his pride seemed to be severely bruised. The creature was stroking the coarse fur of the dog’s back already, and Tom began to pant sheepishly. Ron bent down and kneaded the loose fur just behind his ears, and after a moment of that the dog began to look as though he’d never been hurt at all.

  Ron grinned and shook his head. The dog, he was convinced, was a ham — maybe even more of a showman than the cross-dove-and-circle types who were tracking after them with television cameras. That was just as well; the dog was obviously on their side (if side w
as the appropriate word) and the other side seemed to have it all over Ron and the creature as far as showmanship went. They needed whatever help they could get.

  Thought about that for a moment, and realized that it was more than a little paranoid. All the people in the helicopter had done was take some pictures of them; there wasn’t any call to go and draw sides. Certainly not yet. Maybe the fundamentalist types didn’t mean any harm.

  Not that Ron believed it for a moment. Still, getting confrontational too soon would only make matters worse.

  “You okay, boy?” he asked the dog. “What are you doing following us so far? What’s got into you?”

  Tom looked up at Ron soulfully, but he didn’t answer the question. Not that Ron had expected him to.

  The creature stood, moved away from them. When he was five yards away he stopped and waited purposely, as though he meant that they needed to get going again.

  Ron looked back down at the dog. “Think you can walk, huh, Tom? You might as well walk with us instead of skulking along behind.”

  The dog was still looking up at him earnestly; he didn’t move a muscle when Ron asked the question. So Ron got up, and began to act as though he were going to leave without him, and the dog certainly understood that — he was on his feet and following before Ron was three paces away. He walked without a limp, too, which made Ron suspect that attacking the helicopter had caused the dog less harm than it’d seemed at first.

  The walk wasn’t anywhere near so long this time. Not more than a couple of miles, in fact — out across the valley that had been below them, over the far hill, and into a small town.

  As they descended toward it Ron caught sight of the helicopter again, on top of another hill that lay to the west of them. It was far enough away that he couldn’t see the people inside it. He didn’t have to be able to see them to be certain that they were watching. He touched the creature’s shoulder and pointed to show him, but the creature wasn’t concerned. Not any more concerned than the dog would have been.