Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  And besides: if the man was actually capable of such a thing, there was nothing Luke could do to stop him. And it wasn’t his responsibility, anyway.

  Luke told himself all those things. He didn’t believe them for a moment.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Twenty-One

  WASHINGTON

  Monday evening the plague came down to Washington from New York on the Amtrak Metroliner.

  At nine o’clock the man who brought it down — he’d been sitting three seats away from Luke Munsen when Luke coughed out the soda that’d got itself into his lungs — at nine o’clock on the Washington Beltway the man who carried the infection tossed the butt of his cigarette out the window of his Buick.

  And the butt fell to the ground not thirty yards from where Graham Perkins’s body still hung.

  The Vice President’s body was a hard case. Hard enough that all by itself it had closed off half of the Beltway.

  Sunday afternoon the governor of Maryland had called out the National Guard to clear the streets, and especially to clear the highways. For the most part, the Guard had accomplished what it had set out to do; most of the riots had lost their steam by Sunday. But the mob that’d lynched Graham Perkins still surrounded him, and that mob was still angry enough that it wasn’t about to let him go. Worse, the mob was still growing. Perkins’s bodyguards had killed or maimed several hundred people before the mob had finally managed to do them in, and each man killed had ten friends who wanted to avenge him.

  And Monday morning, when the Guard had got around to trying to clear off the Beltway, they found a mob more stubborn than the rest, one that didn’t listen when someone got on the bullhorn and told them to go home. It took the guard four hours just to clear off half the highway, and when that was done the commander sighed, exasperated, and told his men to split what they had in half and route all the traffic through on the eastbound arm of the highway.

  The mob wasn’t going anywhere, he said, and it wasn’t worth killing civilians over. Eventually, they’d have to calm down and go home.

  That was when, finally, a corporal had noticed the Vice President hanging from the lamppost.

  Within half an hour the real army had shown up and taken over. Not that they’d done things a bit differently; even a vice-presidential corpse wasn’t worth killing people over — no more than a highway was.

  At eight o’clock on Monday night, when the infected man had tossed his cigarette butt out onto the pavement, the army and the mob were still facing each other, stalemated. Half an hour later the wind shifted, and about the same time a car’s tires had hit the butt just so, and sent the thing popping up into the air, shaking loose tiny bits of microscopic life —

  And ninety seconds later the infection was spreading through the crowd, and within three minutes it was in Graham Perkins’s corpse. And it began rebuilding him.

  Not that it was any use.

  Oh, it managed to put him back together, all right. His corpse was nowhere near as badly mangled as Luke Munsen’s, or even Ron Hawkins’s.

  But the corpse of Graham Perkins still hung from the nylon noose that’d killed him. And as the microbes began to bring him back to life and back to consciousness, the noose began to strangle him again.

  Now and again the wind would shift Graham Perkins, or someone passing would jostle him, and sometimes the movement would ease him back blissfully down toward death. And sometimes it wouldn’t.

  Three times as he eased up again toward life Graham prayed to God to let him die, and die for good. His prayers went unanswered.

  ³ ³ ³

  BROOKLYN

  Because of the riot, the boy steered Luke through an entirely different subway route on their return to Brooklyn. Or mostly different, anyway — somewhere down in south Manhattan they switched to the train that ran to near the gate of the cemetery, the A train. This time the transfer was more complicated — it meant walking through a confusing set of tunnels, some of which were badly lit, and some of which seemed to have lost their lighting altogether. The boy, thank God, knew his way even in the dark, and none of the three strange men who lurked in the dark parts of the tunnels seemed inclined to threaten them.

  This time the A train they rode in was as quiet and as clean as the F train they’d taken on the last leg of the trip into the city. Or nearly as clean, anyway. It was air-conditioned, too, which was an enormous relief after the stifling heat in the dark tunnels.

  When they were on the train and sitting, the boy looked at the bag under Luke’s arm. “So,” he asked, “where you going to go?”

  Luke blinked. He hadn’t even considered the question; the truth was that it hadn’t even occurred to him to consider it.

  “Go. . . ?”

  “Yeah, go. You can’t just keep going back to that graveyard, you know. It ain’t right. You aren’t dead any more. Cemeteries aren’t a fit place for living people to stay.”

  Luke pictured the cemetery; there was a powerful appeal in that image. More than he was comfortable admitting to.

  “Maybe you’re right. But where in the hell am I supposed to go?”

  The boy spent a long moment staring out the dark window across from them. He shrugged. “A hotel, maybe? You could stay with us if you wanted to, but it’s kind of tight already.” He chewed on his lip. “Hotel wouldn’t work, either. Just about all hotels these days want you to have a credit card to check you in, even if you plan on spending cash. And if you had any, whoever killed you must have took ‘em.”

  Luke shook his head. “And I’ve already used enough of your hospitality. Maybe the cemetery is the best place. For now, anyway. Sooner or later I’ve got to try and find my way back to my life — whatever the hell that means. At least I’ve got the address on my driver’s license.”

  Andy lifted an eyebrow at him; the expression looked pretty silly on his twelve-year-old face. “Really, you don’t want to go back to that cemetery. It ain’t good for you.” He paused. “Hey — I got an idea. I got a hide-out — don’t go there too much any more. It’s still a good place. A good apartment in an old condemned building that the junkies and the bag people never figured out how to get into. You can stay there. There ain’t no furniture, but it’s still got to be better than sleeping on top of other people’s coffins.”

  Luke wasn’t sure that it would be, but all the same he said “Why not?”

  So that’s what they did when they finally got off the subway: Andy led Luke back through Bedford-Stuyvesant, past the boy’s own tenement, to a building three blocks farther down. It was the only structure still standing on that particular block; vacant lots littered with rubble bordered it on every side.

  “It’s even got a shower that works,” Andy said as he led Luke around the far side of the tenement. “The water isn’t hot, but it’s water, anyway. I was here the day the man from the city came to shut the water off. Man spent three hours looking for the valve that’d do it, and he never did find the thing.” The boy stopped beside a boarded-over basement window, bent down, as though he meant to examine it.

  No — he didn’t just examine it. He slipped his fingers under the base of the plywood . . . and lifted it, exactly as though he were opening a window.

  “I used to know old Mr. Stevens, who had the basement apartment here before he died. Used to visit him sometimes. And I used to see him open this window all the time — it was all he had for a window on this side of his apartment, and the landlord never got around to replacing it after the glass got busted.” The boy squatted down, slipped through the opening. “After Mr. Stevens died, and the city closed the building up, they probably thought this window was already boarded up. But it wasn’t. It was just a board doing duty as a window.”

  He was staring up at Luke from inside the building, now. “So,” he said, “are you coming, or aren’t you?”

  “Guess I must be,” he said. “Her
e, take this.” Handed the boy the bag of new clothes, slipped down in through the open window.

  Inside the building was powerfully dark — so dark that for a long moment Luke was afraid to move for fear of stumbling.

  “You coming or not?” The boy’s voice, from the far end of the room. Or Luke thought it was a room, anyway; he couldn’t see well enough to be sure.

  “Give me a minute,” Luke said. “Let my eyes get used to this.” By the time he said it, of course, he could see . . . well, not see, really, but his eyes could make out enough of the chiaroscuro to tell that the floor was bare and smooth. And that Andy stood in a doorway fifteen feet away, waiting for him.

  “Well, hurry up. Don’t want to spend all day just walking up a few stairs.”

  “All right, all right.”

  The stairways weren’t quite as dark as the basement had been; there was a skylight high overhead, and more light came through the open doors of the apartments. They’d walked up four full flights of the stairs when Luke asked the boy why they were going all the way to the top of the tenement.

  “You could probably use one of the other apartments,” Andy said, “but I don’t think you’d want to. Bunch of sloppy people lived in those places — they left their garbage all over the place when they moved out.”

  “Ugh.”

  “This way — in the front on the right.” The boy was already in the apartment before Luke cleared the last of the stairs. “I haven’t been here since I was ten, but it hasn’t changed any.”

  The apartment was a little dusty, but otherwise it was clean, and the wide windows that faced the cemetery lit it very well. There wasn’t any furniture, but there was an old army blanket in the corner by the left window.

  “There was a broom around here someplace, wasn’t there? Yeah — I left that thing in the kitchen. Here it is. Get this place at least half-way decent for you.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that —” The boy was already doing it, and quickly, too; sweeping in broad swift strokes that stirred the dust almost as much as moved it. It took him three minutes to get most of the dust out into the hallway; when he was done he took the army blanket out into the hall and shook the dust from it.

  “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I got to go back home, let my Momma know that I’m all right. I’ll come back for you in a couple of hours and we can get you some dinner.”

  “Yeah — sure. I could use a little bit to catch my breath.”

  Andy tossed the blanket back into its corner and ran off down the stairs; he was gone before Luke even had a chance to get used to the idea that he was leaving. Luke sighed.

  The boy rattled him — definitely rattled him. He wasn’t sure whether that was the fault of the boy’s rambunctious nature, or whether it might just be part of the way the world still seemed strange to Luke. Not that it made any real difference; Luke liked the boy, and he enjoyed his company, even if Andy did leave him feeling out of phase with the world.

  Luke sighed again, and looked around the apartment. There wasn’t much to see, of course; white walls made of chipped plaster. Tall, wide windows that let in the sun. The blanket, on the floor in the corner; the broom leaning against the door jamb. In the kitchen there were empty cabinets hanging open and a rusted old hulk of a refrigerator that looked as though it might attack Luke if he tried to open it.

  And there — on the opposite side of the door from the broom — the bag of clothes Luke had bought. Andy must have set them there; Luke had forgot to take the bag back from the boy once he’d climbed down into the building. That was the thing that needed doing; it was the whole reason for the trip in to Manhattan today. Luke needed to wash up and get into some clothes that were meant to fit him.

  The tub was nested with cobwebs and worse things, but cold water from the shower head rinsed all that away well enough. There wasn’t any soap, nor anything like a clean washcloth, and as it ran the water got so cold that Luke had to hurry out of it. All the same, it was a shower, and it left him cleaner even if it didn’t leave him clean. When he was done he stood in the bathroom for a few minutes, letting the warm mild early-summer air dry him slowly, and then he went back to the apartment’s living room, opened the shopping bag, and dressed himself. The clothes he’d bought weren’t all that different from the ones he’d borrowed; blue jeans, flannel shirts. Good black-canvas running shoes.

  Then he sat down on the floor, and he stayed there for a long while, staring out the window at the sky and the cemetery that stretched to the horizon. Eventually he realized that even though he wasn’t especially tired, his heart needed sleep; so he reached over and got the army blanket, bunched it up into a pillow, curled up on the floor and drifted away into the warm afternoon sun.

  ³ ³ ³

  At noon, when the mild summer sun was high overhead, Christine Gibson began to feel the rosy glow of a sunburn on her face and her breasts. And feeling it she knew that she could no longer lie resting in her open grave, but had to rise and leave. And find the life that waited for her.

  She sat up, opened her eyes. Blinked away the sun and the stray wisps of her hair that wanted to go everywhere. Out beyond the clearing, beyond the trees at its far end, the world outside the cemetery was waiting for her to discover its metamorphosis.

  Metamorphosis? Yes, Christine thought: that was the word that she wanted. She wasn’t sure yet how long she’d been . . . away. It had been a long time. So long that the weather had rounded the edges of her headstone, taken long strides toward washing her name from its surface. Time like that would metamorphose the world, she thought. The questions were how far, and into what, and whether the world where she was was a world where she could live.

  She stood, stepped out of her shallow grave. Started out across the clearing. It didn’t matter whether this was a place where she could live or not; Christine was alive and she was here and no one had given her a say in the matter. Except maybe suicide. Suicide was always a choice, even if it wasn’t a good one. Or it would be a choice if she could find a tool to commit it with. She tried to imagine . . . and couldn’t. It wasn’t even an option; she didn’t have it in herself to take her own life. She shuddered. Bad enough she’d had to die once — and the way she’d died! Dying again wasn’t a thing that appealed to her.

  Christine frowned, squinted as she stepped out from a knot of trees and the sun fell directly into her eyes again. She opened them after a moment, looking down to avoid the brightness . . . and saw her naked breast lit by the sun, exposed for anyone to see. She felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment. It was too much; she had to find clothes, and find them quickly. Almost, she began to wish that she’d taken the shirt that the man had loaned her — Luke Munsen. That was his name, and she knew it though she’d never been told and he’d never said it aloud. When she’d woke so early this morning — before it was even dawn — she hadn’t felt right about taking the shirt. She’d taken something from him last night, something that he hadn’t meant to give. And that taking weighed on Christine’s heart like an anchor. She couldn’t bear to take anything else from him after she’d done that.

  Which still left her on the thin strip of land between the cemetery and the street, naked and embarrassed. Unable to go forward and expose her nakedness any further to the light of day. Unable to go back, because it could leave her naked forever. And she might have stayed there forever, stuck permanently between progress and retreat. If it hadn’t been for the bag lady.

  Christine didn’t think of her as a bag lady. In her time there had been no such thing — not by any such name, at least. There’d been beggar-women. Even beggar-women as old as time, as this one was. And often they’d smelled as foul as this woman did. But the woman dressed in layers and layers of fine clothes turned to rags, carrying three great sacks filled what were so obviously all her mortal possessions — she was a new thing to Christine. Fascinating at the same moment
she was disgusting.

  The bag lady rounded a corner and spotted Christine; crossed the street and walked toward her as Christine stood paralyzed there at the edge of the cemetery.

  “I’ve brought the word,” the old woman said, puffing and out of breath from hurrying and from the weight of her load. “I’ve brought the word to you.”

  Word? Christine couldn’t begin to imagine what she meant by that. Which word? And how?

  The old woman was stooped over, now, fishing down through her great sacks of filth and ephemera. “Here,” she said. Stood, held out a leaflet. “This is it. This is the word I’ve brought you.”

  I’m supposed to take that from her, Christine thought. That’s what she wants, isn’t it? Yes, it was. Christine was still powerfully confused from her resurrection, but she wasn’t stupid.

  There was no reason for Christine not to take that leaflet. None that she could even begin to imagine. Still she hesitated; began to raise her hand to take the leaflet — and stopped.

  That was just as well, because in that instant the beggar-woman hesitated, too. And changed herself completely.

  “No,” the old woman said. “It isn’t the word you need to hear. There’s no need for you to hear the word — not this one nor any other. No reason. It’s something else you need.” And she held out her hand, and Christine took it without thinking. And the beggar lady led her away into the afternoon.

  They’d gone three blocks before Christine realized that she’d forgot about her nakedness. And for just an instant she felt the embarrassment coming over her again. Only for an instant: somehow the presence of the beggar woman who did not beg made it hard to care whether she was dressed or clothed.

  “Where are we going?” Christine asked. She felt no more concern for the answer to the question than she felt for the sensation of the sun on her bare thighs.