Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  And that wasn’t a fair comparison, and Ron knew it: Tom was a decent dog, and a good one, but he didn’t have the sense . . . well, the truth was, he didn’t have the sense God gave a dog. The creature, on the other hand — Ron suspected that the creature just might have more of a mind than he had himself. The idea was sobering, but it didn’t threaten him especially. There was too much good about the creature for Ron to find him a threat. Even if the creature was smart, even if he was smarter than Ron was . . . there was something innocent about him. Something that hadn’t been marked by the world, in spite of anything Herman Bonner might have done to him.

  Ron thought there was, anyway. It didn’t escape him that a certain amount of the assumption came from his ego’s need to reassert itself. After all: innocence gave the creature naïveté, and in Ron’s own opinion he himself was anything but naïve.

  “They’re trouble, you know,” he told the Beast. “Those people over there mean us nothing but harm. You especially — if they mean me wrong it’s only because I’m with you.”

  because I’m with you

  Ron heard his own words echo in his ear, and knew that the creature was asking if he was afraid — asking if he felt a need to get himself out of harm’s way.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not afraid. Not afraid enough to be scared away, anyhow. But I am worried for you. Why are you walking right into the middle of trouble? There isn’t any need for it.”

  The creature didn’t give any answer, except to shake his head and look away.

  The town was a small one, almost too small to call a town. It looked prosperous; the two-dozen houses and the three or four stores were old enough to be weathered, but if any of them were in bad repair, Ron couldn’t see it.

  They were still fifty yards from the edge of town when the old man spotted them.

  He was sun-worn and leathery skinned, and he looked old only the way a man who’s worked all his life with his hands can look old, but there was nothing frail or unhealthy about him. He wore denim overalls and under them a faded flannel shirt, and a grimy baseball cap with an advertisement for a motor oil distributor.

  At first he didn’t seem to react to them in any special way. About the way Ron would expect anyone to react, seeing strangers come into town on foot, and at an hour that was too early for sensible folk to be awake, let alone traveling. He looked at Ron warily, set a careful eye on the dog . . .

  And then he saw the Beast.

  And then he reacted. God did he react.

  He looked, for a long moment, like the impotent victim in a bad horror film — terrified out of his mind, in danger of death from a heart attack as much or more than he was from whatever peril he’d laid eyes on. And he screamed, of course — long and loud and hard enough that by the time he was done there wasn’t much chance that anyone in the town was still asleep. And then his scream drifted off and away, into the hills, and the bug-eyed terror receded from his face. And he began to . . . to see the creature, not just to see the alienness of his physical body but to see him the way Ron had first seen him just before the explosion that had killed them both.

  And he took off the baseball cap, and fell to his knees, and begged the creature for forgiveness.

  And the Beast walked up to him, and shook his head, and held out his hand to help the old man to his feet.

  The old man took the creature’s hand with a look of such immense gratitude that it embarrassed Ron to see it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Can you ever forgive me for not knowing you when I saw you?”

  The creature looked at both of them, and they both knew that there wasn’t anything to forgive.

  “It’s an honest mistake,” Ron told the man. “Anyone could make it. Besides . . . he isn’t anyone you ought to know. It wasn’t God who put him on this earth. I don’t think so, anyway.”

  The old man shook his head nervously at Ron. “But he is — can’t you see that? He is.”

  “No. Honest. He’s something special — special isn’t even the right word — but I’m pretty sure that all the special about him isn’t anything his maker intended. I think I can tell you that for a fact.”

  The old man just kept shaking his head, telling Ron how wrong he was.

  There were more people out on the street, now; two or three dozen of them, at least. Most of them were staring — some terrified, some agape. But there wasn’t a one of them, not a single damned one in the whole town, that didn’t clearly know the creature for an omen. Each one of them, Ron thought, likely saw him as an omen of a different future. There was no way you could set eyes on the Beast without knowing that his existence meant something powerful and important about the future of the world.

  The old man was holding his cap down by his hip, now. “The two of you look as though you’ve been traveling all night,” he said, and then he noticed the dog. “Three of you, that is. Sorry. Can I take you down to the café here and buy you a little breakfast?”

  Even after walking all that way — and most of it in the dark, at that — Ron still wasn’t especially hungry. He hadn’t eaten and hadn’t been hungry, either, in all the time since he’d found himself woke back to life yesterday morning. It was a peculiar thing, and more than a little unsettling. Still: even if he didn’t feel a need for food, there was something . . . something sensually appealing about the idea of a good meal. He looked over at the creature, and when he nodded Ron told the man they’d be much obliged.

  The café, well, the café was almost more a diner than it was a café, except that instead of being housed inside some silvery trailer that wasn’t going anywhere it was in an old cement-block building that looked as though it might once have been home to a garage. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of dozen tables inside it, and small tables at that, but even so most of the town somehow managed to follow them inside. By then there wasn’t a one of them who hadn’t realized that the creature was something special and important and good, and they were all hushed quiet and reverent as though they’d somehow found themselves in church.

  “There isn’t any call to be so quiet,” Ron said. “Neither one of us is going to think bad about you if you talk.” And someone laughed at that kind of involuntarily, and then there was a sort of general chuckle that passed around and through the room. It wasn’t long after that before the room began to sound like a celebration. A powerful celebration — kind of the sound Ron would have expected on Christmas day in the living room of a family with two dozen children.

  The waitress brought them coffee, and she was about to hand them menus when Ron ordered for both the creature and himself: eggs and potatoes and toast and bacon and a couple of fat glasses of orange juice from the squeezer he saw up by the counter. Breakfast the way it ought to be, at least according to Ron. Even Tom the dog got food: a couple of minutes after the waitress had taken their order the cook came out of the kitchen with a thick long ham bone; the dog, who’d parked himself dutifully beside the creature, took the bone greedily, as though it were his due.

  A small boy with a bad limp walked up to the creature while they were waiting for their food, and asked the Beast to cure him.

  “I busted my leg right well last summer,” he said, “and the bone never grew back together like the doctor down to county hospital said it would. You can heal me, can’t you? I can tell you can. Nobody got to show me twice.”

  The creature looked at the boy, and Ron hurt for him having a boy need him like that when there was nothing he could do. He could feel the creature’s pain, he thought — but maybe that was just Ron confusing his own hurt with the Beast’s.

  “Sure would be nice to be able to go hiking down by the crick again,” the boy said.

  “Son,” Ron said quietly — too quietly for anyone but Ron and the creature and the boy to hear — “son, the creature isn’t Christ. There’s nothing he can do that’ll cure you.”

 
The boy looked at Ron, and looked nervously back at the creature, and for just a moment his eyes looked angry and resentful. That didn’t last very long; part of the . . . whatever it was about the creature was a thing that calmed and soothed. Ron had a hard time imagining himself doing things he wouldn’t be proud of in front of the creature.

  “He’s awful special, I just know he is. Don’t even have to look at him to know that. If there’s anything or anyone in this world that can fix my leg, I know it’s him.”

  “I —” Ron choked on his words, and lost them. He looked at the creature, but his animal face was unreadable. Then two things happened, both at once: a woman came from the far side of the room, calling, “Jerry!” —

  And the creature reached out for the boy, and he hugged him, plain and simple hugged him, and there wasn’t anything that looked like cure in the hug, but there was love, and sympathy, and gentleness. And then the woman was there with them, and she was crying, whether from hurt or from frustration Ron couldn’t say, but she was saying “I’m so sorry,” with a deep drawl, and the creature pulled her into his hug and they just stood there like that for the longest time. After a while she sniffed and took her son by the hand and said that she thought she should leave them to their breakfast, and she went away, the boy limping beside her. Ron almost expected to hear her scold the boy, but she didn’t.

  Then the waitress came out of the kitchen with their food, and when the creature saw what was on his plate he didn’t seem to have much stomach for it. He picked a little at the toast and the potatoes, and he drank the juice, but he left the eggs and bacon alone. He didn’t make any special show of distaste, though, and Ron ate his own breakfast with a great deal of pleasure.

  When he was finished eating and sipping at his coffee, the old man at the table beside them — the one who’d invited them to breakfast — offered Ron a cigarette, and he took it and thanked the man, and that cigarette and that cup of coffee were just about the best Ron had ever had in his whole life. As he smoked and sipped he and the old man talked quietly about nothing at all.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Twenty

  WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, JOHNSON COUNTY, MISSOURI

  The base commander, General Simpson, wasn’t happy to see him. Not even remotely.

  He gave Bill time to clean himself of the scent of embalming fluid and get himself a uniform, and then the commander sat him down in his big office with its furniture that was nice enough that it might have been civilian.

  And he frowned. And went back to the paperwork on his desk, leaving Bill with nothing to do but sit there upright in his wooden chair and stare at the wall. For most of half an hour, or maybe longer. It was still hard for Bill to say about time; being dead all that while had left him disoriented.

  However long it was, it was long. Longer than an airman can wait comfortably. Which is pretty darned long, when you consider that to Bill’s way of thinking most of what the whole darned Air Force does most of the time is wait for there to be somebody who needs shooting at or shooting down or to have a bomb dropped on him. And most of the time there’s nobody around who fits that particular description, so most of what the Air Force does to earn its keep is standing around and looking tough and waiting. Bill thought. Of course, he also thought he was pretty good at sitting around and waiting himself, and even if he was waiting now pretty successfully, he wasn’t very comfortable about it.

  “Son,” the general said, finally — pushing aside the papers on his desk, folding his hands. Frowning again, like an uncle who was disappointed in his favorite nephew. “Son, I don’t rightly know what you’re doing alive right now. I don’t know how it is that you’re healthy and whole when two days ago we had to pour what was left of you into that coffin. I do know one thing: you’d’ve done all of us a big favor if you’d managed to keep yourself dead.”

  He paused, as though he wanted to hear what Bill had to say for himself. Which he didn’t have a thing to say, of course.

  “Yes sir.” Which wasn’t precisely — or even remotely — anything like what Bill had to say about the subject. He wasn’t one to address a general otherwise.

  “You know, when you were dead, you were a hero. Not a hero like we could tell anybody about it. Or even admit it to ourselves out loud — officially you had to be a criminal. After all, you were responsible — deliberately responsible, and we knew it — for the murder of President Paul Green of these United States.

  “We also knew that you did us all a favor. More than a favor: you gave your life to save the world from a holocaust. So long as you were dead, we could all live with those contradictions; vilify you at the same time we very quietly buried you with your own flag, which is a fitting thing at a hero’s funeral.”

  Bill could feel himself blushing. Partly because he was touched and honored; partly because he was ashamed and embarrassed. Also because he wasn’t quite sure what it was that the general was about to drop on him, but he knew that whatever it was it didn’t sound as though it were likely to be altogether pleasant.

  “But you are alive, and if God knows why or how, He isn’t telling. And because you’re alive we’ve got to do something with you. The obvious thing is to let you stand trial for murder. We can’t, of course. The Air Force and the country owe you something for what you’ve done; and putting you on trial would give the Air Force an even larger black eye than the one you’ve already given it. We can’t very well just leave you here, either — if word got out. . . .” The general coughed. Pushed a thin manila file-folder across his desk, toward Bill. “These are your duty papers, son. In your own way, you turned out to be an easier problem to solve than I might have expected. As soon as the brass in Washington got word about your unlikely resurrection, they had plans for you. Apparently you aren’t the only . . . phenomenon of this type that’s out there right at the moment. And just as you might guess, it’s a phenomenon they find themselves quite concerned over. To put it a little more bluntly: they’re doing research, and you’ve been drafted as a guinea pig. Go ahead. Take a look at your papers.”

  “Yes sir.” Bill reached tentatively forward, took the folder gingerly from its place on the general’s desk. Opened it. And saw that a man with another name was being reassigned to a research project.

  In the demilitarized zone.

  In South Korea.

  Bill was amazed, unsure of how he ought to react, even half in doubt as to whether the general had given him the right folder. He stared dumbfounded at the paper in front of him for a time that was long enough that the general probably took it as a sign of disrespect. Which wasn’t by any stretch a thing that he’d intended.

  “Yes, Private. We’ve changed your name. And we’re sending you to Korea. That’s where the Pentagon is having the research done: the political situation here in the States at the moment — well, let’s be frank. Unstable is a mild word for it. The Brass doesn’t want to take the chance of civilian government stumbling into this project. So they’re putting it in a place where we don’t have any civilian government. And if you don’t like having your name taken away, my apologies. There’s no room in this Air Force for PFC Bill Wallace any more; your name is Ted Roe for the duration. And if you have any sense you’ll use it for the rest of your life.”

  Bill wasn’t altogether certain that he’d be able to answer to somebody else’s name — he’d spent too many years answering to his own already to get used to another. He said as much to the general, who scowled and slapped his hand down hard on the wooden surface of his desk.

  “Take a good look at that name, Private. No, not Private: you’re Corporal Roe, now. And your middle name is William. You’re Theodore William Roe, and if need be you can tell people you answer to your middle name. And that’s the long and the short of it. When you leave this office you are to go directly to the airfield. Because you are now a highly classified property of the Air Force, between here and there you a
re to hold your head low, so as to avoid being recognized, and you will speak to no one. You will board your plane — it will be the only plane on the runway — and once aboard you are to speak to no one until you reach your destination, where appropriate personnel will be waiting to escort you. The only exception to any of this will be that you may speak once en route, but only to the extent that is absolutely necessary to avoid attracting undue attention to yourself. Are you clear on this?”

  Bill was clear, all right. Though he wasn’t especially enthusiastic. “Yes sir.”

  “In that case, Corporal Roe, you’re dismissed.” He stood up, reached across his desk to shake Bill’s hand. “It’s been my pleasure to be your commanding officer.”

  ³ ³ ³

  NORTH-CENTRAL TENNESSEE

  All told, they spent a little more than an hour in the roadside café. As Ron sipped at his coffee the people of town began to come up to them and ask them questions; not that he or the creature had any of the answers. Some of them asked about their future, or about the future of the world, and more than one asked them if God was still alive and if he loved the world. Ron was certain that he was and that he did, but not nearly sure enough to say so from the position of authority that they saw him in.

  The creature didn’t take it well at all. Not that he treated the townsfolk badly, or acted anything but a saint. But the fact that they needed and there was nothing he could do for them wore hard on him; Ron didn’t need any special vision to see that. They’d ask their questions and he’d touch their arms or hold them, and eventually they’d go away not knowing a damn thing they didn’t know before, or at least nothing they wouldn’t have known if they’d given it a little thought. They’d be happier, at least, anyway. After a while Beast began to cry — not pointedly histrionically sobbing or heaving or anything like that, just tears seeping kind of gently from his eyes in a way that didn’t seem to affect his behavior or his dignity especially.