Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  “That’s right.”

  Bill shuddered. “Okay, then. Might as well get to it.” He crossed the last few steps to the man’s bedside, pulled away the sheets, took the man’s upper arm. Tried to pull him upward, or maybe get him to sit himself up. It wasn’t much use; the body was enough like putty that when he lifted the arm that arm itself was the only thing that moved.

  “We’ve got to lift him out of bed ourselves,” Joe said. “Once he’s on his feet you can get him to walk. He won’t get there on his own.”

  “Oh,” Bill said. This job was going to get unpleasant. There was an odor in the air, here, close to the man who wasn’t entirely alive. A smell like — like filth, and worse than that. The smell that skin gets when it chafes against itself too much for too long. Sick, sweet, sour. Decay.

  Joe crossed the room, went to the far side on the man’s bed. Bent and took his arm. “We both need to lift at the same time. Now,” he said, and they heaved that man, all jellylike mass of him, to a sitting position. Where Bill held his back steady while Joe pulled his legs around so that they hung over his edge of the bed. “Come around, and help me get him to his feet.” Bill did, and a moment later they were leading the dead man from the room — Bill holding his left arm, Joe holding his right. It was a little tricky getting out the door, what with three abreast like that, but they managed.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  WASHINGTON

  All Graham could think as he crawled down the embankment was God loves me, God loves me and He forgives me. In spite of all I’ve done. Already the constriction in his throat was beginning to ease; he could feel blood pulsing up through the fat veins of his neck. Even his larynx — which just a few moments before had felt as though it’d been crushed permanently and hopelessly out of shape — even his larynx seemed to be reforming itself.

  There was gunfire all around him, and blood. Old blood, scabrous and brown, and fresh stuff, too, that made his trembling hands and knees feel as though they’d slide out from under him. People screaming in pain as they died violent deaths.

  I’m still in Hell, he thought. God has freed me, but I’m still in Hell. I’ve got to crawl up, out of here. Crawl my way free of here and find God. God wants me and needs me — why else would he set me free? God’s waiting for me, somewhere not far away at all.

  The only path that led away from the place, of course, wasn’t a path up out of Hell at all.

  Just the opposite. It led down, down the embankment and through the gaping ruin of a chain link fence.

  That fact should have told Graham Perkins something. He should have known what he was doing, even as addled as he was. Should have known that he wasn’t escaping from Hell, but crawling down into another, deeper and more subtle ring of the inferno.

  Whether he ought to have known or not, he didn’t. When he was free of the broken fence he edged along the sidewalk, certain that sooner or later he’d find heaven, or purgatory, at least. He kept crawling for a whole block and a half, wearing his hands and knees raw and red with his own blood.

  And then the limousine spotted him.

  The driver braked suddenly as soon as he began to pass Graham — suddenly enough to add the sound of screaming rubber to the chaos on the Beltway. A moment later the back door eased open, and a man stepped out.

  A smiling man — and after Graham had taken a moment to absorb the smile, he realized that he recognized him.

  From the White House. It was one of the men from Paul Green’s “kitchen cabinet” — though no one ever actually used that term. There weren’t many who knew about the dozen or so people who had special access to the Oval Office; certainly Green himself had taken pains to keep their comings and goings unnoticed. It was one of the few things Green actually had been discrete about. Likely that was because all of his cronies were deeply involved in the fundamentalist sect that the President had been a part of.

  Graham even knew this one by name — they’d been introduced at a cocktail party a few weeks after Green’s inauguration.

  Herman Bonner.

  What was Herman Bonner doing here, in Hell? Herman was a Christian, just as Paul Green had been. It didn’t make any sense. Unless —

  Unless maybe . . . unless maybe he was here to save Graham.

  I’m redeemed, Graham thought as he took Herman Bonner’s hand.

  And that was the moment that Graham Perkins lost his soul.

  ³ ³ ³

  SOUTH KOREA

  Someone brought a tray of dead things around eight. At nine they brought a corpse.

  Long about midnight the dead-eyed man started to drool.

  That was plain and simple too much for Bill Wallace, and he said so out loud as he got up and walked away from the corner of the room where he and the boy had been told to sit and watch the dead man.

  The major cocked an eyebrow when she saw him there staring over her shoulder, but then she got a glance at the way that thing was drooling like that, and she said, “All right, then Corporal. I take it you want to help us here?”

  Which was a sincere relief. “Yes, ma’am. Anything I can do to be of service.”

  She frowned. Took a good long look around the lab. “Do you see the table over there? The glass dishes set out on it? Yes, you do. Get yourself a pad and pen out of the cabinet” she pointed “near the door. Second drawer. Make yourself a list of the contents of each dish. It won’t be hard; they’re all labeled. I want you to check the contents of each dish every half hour, and note any changes that you see. If there are no changes, I want you to make a note of that, too.”

  Bill took a long, hard look at the table. It wasn’t your regular sort of Air Force work she was asking for, but it didn’t sound too complicated.

  “Got that?”

  The dishes on the table were where Joey and the Major had put those giblets that the quarantine-suit people had wheeled in half an hour back. Well, that was a relief; for just a moment Bill had been afraid he’d have to go into the adjoining lab and keep an eye on that corpse they’d brought in on the stretcher. Bill’d noticed how Joey had to go in and check on it every little bit or so.

  “Yes ma’am. No trouble ‘tall.”

  Two minutes later Bill was standing beside the lab table, making his list. The work wasn’t that tough, Bill decided. And this was all there was to being a scientist? Bill pictured himself as some kind of a Dr. Frankenstein, decked out in a white lab coat and Coke-bottle glasses and one of them pointy little mustaches. Grinned. Maybe there was something to this business of getting yourself enough college to do desk work. A damn sight easier than runway sweeping.

  The dishes were all labeled, just as the Major had said they’d be. Labeled twice, in fact: once with a common animal name that Bill didn’t have any trouble understanding, once in Latin that Bill couldn’t make sense of and could only barely recognize for what it was. The heck with that, he thought, scribbling on his pad; as long as he took down something understandable, there wasn’t any need to copy down those jumbled-up foreign letters.

  The first dish was marked chicken, and there wasn’t much mistaking it. Looked like a drumstick sitting in that glass dish. Fresh out of your grocer’s freezer. Well, not exactly like that. But pretty darned close. There was dark, fresh blood seeping out around the open knuckle. And the skin on the drumstick there looked fuller, like Bill imagined the skin of a live chicken would look underneath the feathers. Not that he’d ever seen a live chicken, let alone a live chicken without its feathers. Mountainville, where Bill grew up, might’ve been a small place in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t any farm-town, and Bill wasn’t any farm boy.

  The contents of the next dish were pretty familiar-looking — two cubes of the stew beef from dinner. Still covered with gooey-looking gravy, still leaking blood. It didn’t look as though it’d changed at all since dinner time. Which surprised Bill pre
tty thoroughly; it’d only taken twenty minutes for that stuff to uncook itself. Surely it would have changed more than that in the hours since then.

  Well, it hadn’t, and he wasn’t going to be able to figure out why himself. He scribbled on his pad: cow — looks the same as it did at dinner. Which didn’t sound any too scientific, but the Major would just have to understand about that, since Bill wasn’t any scientist.

  The next dish was pig, and it was a different matter altogether. chicken and cow had both looked . . . well, butchered. Looking at them you could still see nice clean edges where somebody had took a knife to the meat. The pig stuff was different — it didn’t look at all like something you’d see at the butcher’s counter. Not at all. More like some kind of a bleeding, stringy-red slime-mold you’d expect to see growing at the bottom of a vat. Very disgusting. How did you go about describing a thing like that on one line of paper? Bill wasn’t sure. So he put down large mess on the line beside pig. And hoped he’d be able to explain to the Major later on, when she asked about it.

  Beside pig was cat, and it was even more disgusting than pig was. It wasn’t just dead — it was dead dead. And whole, too, where all the other dishes had just been hunks of meat. cat looked like he’d spent a good six years soaking in formaldehyde — and it was formaldehyde; Bill knew the smell of it well enough to recognize it anywhere — it looked like it’d spent a good six years pickled in that stuff. There was a long slit down the center of the thing’s belly, like someone way back when had cut it open to take a look inside. cat, Bill wrote, very dead.

  Disgusting as cat was, monkey did worse things to Bill’s stomach. Not that he looked worse — nothing could have looked much worse than cat did — but he looked just about as bad, and the fact that he looked like a tiny caricature of a human being made it pretty hard to take. With the skin of his chest slitted open and hanging loose that way, he almost did look like a man, a tiny little bare-chested fellow with his suit jacket hanging open. How long have you been sitting in that vat of formaldehyde, huh, little guy? For half a moment, looking into its cute little wide dead eyes, Bill was half afraid that it was going to answer. It didn’t answer, though — it just kept staring dead-eyed at Bill, like it was the world’s best poker player.

  Monkey: as dead as cat. Maybe deader.

  Then here was the dish marked dog, only Bill didn’t see any dog in it all. Just this oversize drumstick, which Bill (who wasn’t any butcher, truth to tell) would have took for a turkey leg if it weren’t for the label. cat and monkey were clearly laboratory animals, dissection stuff like the frog they made Bill chop to bits back and junior high. But dog, here — dog looked a lot like chicken did. Which is to say that dog haunch looked like it’d come out of somebody’s refrigerator, same as the drumstick did. These Oriental types here in Korea, they were dog eaters, weren’t they? Bill thought he remembered hearing a couple of airmen come back from here, telling horror stories about it. Ugh. He wasn’t too sure how much more of this he could take. Not that it mattered whether he could take it or not; he was an airman and the Major had told him this was what he had to do and he had to do it. No two ways about it. So he looked real close at that haunch of dog, and he saw how the open bloody wound end was just like the pig, lots of little fibrous tentacles growing up out of the meat. And he wrote that down.

  It got a little easier after dog, which was a good thing. A plate with a dried up dead roach on it, and even if it was a little gross Bill’d sure seen worse. carp wasn’t anything but a fish fillet. Two plates full of shriveled up stuff marked brine shrimp and planarian worm. A frog and a lizard, both of which looked like things that had got themselves mooshed out on the road. A busted-open clam, which Bill looked at and tried to figure out what he was supposed to be able to say from looking at it. Two hunks of meat, marked horse and sheep, that looked like they were fresh in the butcher’s case. A dead spider. mouse and rat, both of them clean and lily white like lab animals. Little blots of blood on their backs where someone had taken the trouble to sever their spines. And a headless rabbit that was probably from a lab, too.

  When he’d made his notes on the last of them, Bill turned away from the lab table and let out a long breath. The big round-face clock there on the wall by the door said that it was twenty after twelve, which meant that he had a good twenty minutes before he had to make another round and start over with chicken. Twenty minutes. Time enough to have a cigarette. If he had any, which he didn’t, since he hadn’t had a chance to get by a commissary in a lifetime or so.

  “Joey,” he said, about a second and a half before he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to call him that any more, “you got a couple smokes I can bum?”

  Joe was sitting in front of a computer terminal just then, pounding away on its keys. “Quit three years ago,” he said. Without bothering to look away from the computer screen. “Sorry.”

  Damn.

  “You’re welcome to one of mine, Corporal Roe. There in my purse, on the chair. Help yourself.”

  Which brought the Major up a couple more points in Bill’s book. It wasn’t often when he’d been offered a cigarette by an officer.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Much appreciated.”

  There they were, just like she’d said: a gold-and-red pack of Winston 100s sticking out of that little side pocket on her hand bag. Beside the cigarettes were three packs of matches; Bill took a cigarette and one of the matchbooks, started to light up —

  “You’d best step outside to smoke it; God knows what the combination of smoke and formaldehyde would do to your lungs.” There wasn’t even a hint of reproof in her voice — just a little concern.

  “Yes ma’am. Thanks again.”

  It was a plain relief getting out of that room, with all its smell and presence of death. Already he was beginning to wonder if maybe there wasn’t some way to get out of having to look at all that dead . . . stuff. The thought of looking in on that disgusting mass of pig again did a lot to make sweeping runways look appealing. Maybe being a scientist wasn’t all that much fun after all. There was an idea: maybe he could volunteer to do something else, something a little more in the line of work airmen ordinarily did. Maybe he could volunteer to tidy up that runway he’d come into this base on, for instance.

  Ha — fat chance of that. The major wasn’t likely to appreciate the suggestion; the whole reason he was down here inside this mountain was because he was too classified an object to allow to be seen in the light of day.

  Someone was shouting, somewhere in some vague and distant tunnel; the sound of it was barely recognizable from where Bill stood. And was that noise the clatter of a machine gun going off? It was. Best to tell the Major about it. He looked around for an ashtray to put the cigarette into. Saw none and quashed the butt on the tile floor. Wincing as he did it — Bill had cleaned enough floors in his time in the Air Force to know how much trouble it was to get rid of a cigarette scar. Opened the door to the lab, went inside.

  “Major Carver, ma’am —”

  “Not now, William. This is a critical moment, and I’m very busy. I need you to check up on your dishes right away.”

  “But Major —”

  “The dishes, William. Now.”

  It was an order, plain and simple. Stated in a tone of voice that ought not to be ignored. So Bill said “Yes ma’am,” and he got his pad from where he’d left it by the Major’s purse. And he went back to the table to check on his charges.

  Which were even more disgusting now than they had been before.

  chicken hadn’t changed all that much; it was maybe a little more raw-looking around the edges. cow hadn’t changed at all. pig, on the other hand — pig was another story altogether. If Bill hadn’t’ve known it was a piece of meat, if he hadn’t seen it before when there was still the chance to recognize it, he’d never have figured out what it was. It looked like some kind of an amoeboid mass from a science fiction horror movie,
all crazy strands of bloody fibrous ook heading off in every direction. Pulsing. And growing almost visibly; not long ago it’d been a tiny hunk, no bigger than a half dollar, and now it took up a full fourth of the plate it sat on. I probably ought to tell the major about this, too. I bet she still isn’t in any mood to listen.

  Bill glanced across the room; the major was at that computer terminal now, typing away even more furiously than Joe had been a little bit before. Nope. There wasn’t any sense interrupting her. Not if Bill didn’t want to get his head took off. He shook his head, went back to work.

  Cat hadn’t changed a bit; he still looked like something that should have long since been put to rest. But monkey — monkey was a sight that gave Bill a wicked case of goose flesh. There was a thin slick of fresh blood of the open flesh of his chest, and the tiny little veins there were pulsing. The loose chest skin that’d looked so much like a dinner jacket just a little while back had begun to fuse itself back onto the rib cage. And the glassy eyes that had been so dead were darker — not yet alive but neither entirely dead.

  The haunch of dog was growing, too. There was a great, fibrous mass — like the mass of pig — growing out to meet its nonexistent hip. And it wasn’t just growing, it was alive — as Bill watched the leg twitched at the knee.

  He made his notes, moved on. roach, carp, planarian worms, brine shrimp, frog, clam, sheep, spider, mouse, rat, rabbit — none of them had changed in any way that Bill could see. horse was a little redder than it had been, but not that much redder; it hadn’t changed even as much as chicken.

  The strangest thing — the thing that sent Bill running over toward the Major and her computer terminal, and to hell with how she felt about being interrupted — the strangest thing was lizard.

  Which wasn’t in its plate any more.

  lizard had got up and walked away; it was half-way across the table, prowling furtively. Looking at roach with a light in its eye that struck Bill as being distinctly hungry.