Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  And stood.

  “C’mon,” he said to the boy. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  And headed north along the side of the mountain. Toward the DMZ.

  The zombies didn’t have to be told which way to go; they followed on their own.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Thirty-One

  GALLATIN COUNTY, ILLINOIS

  It took Ron better than a quarter of an hour to run the three miles to the far edge of the field. By the time he got there he was exhausted, and he was beginning to come back to himself, too. And almost wishing that he could crawl back into a small dead shell.

  The creature was dead.

  Permanently dead. If those people had their hands on his corpse, then there wasn’t any hope for him. The Beast had told Ron that.

  It was hopeless.

  For four days since he’d first come back to life, everything about Ron had orbited around the creature. Without him. . . ? Ron didn’t know. He could go back to Tennessee and try to rebuild the life he’d had before. He could. Not that it’d be easy. The institute was gone, which meant that he didn’t have a job. He could find another job like that one in the space of a week, of course. . . . No. That possibility was nothing but empty. And besides, the creature had had about him a consuming sense of mission, and Ron had felt a powerful commitment to that mission, even if he hadn’t understood what it was.

  What he ought to do, he decided, was try to fulfill that mission. He owed it to the creature’s memory. But how to fulfill? They’d been traveling west, and a little to the north. And whatever they were headed toward had to do with the people who used the cross and the circle and the dove as their emblem.

  He needed to think about it.

  Ron was still thirty feet from the edge where the field gave way again to forest when the dog came running across the field toward him.

  He was panting, and he looked about as happy as any dog ever did. Ron stooped to pet the dog when he was beside him.

  “Heya, boy. Where’ve you been, huh? And how’d you get over on this side of the river with that bridge blown out behind us? Did you cross over here before we did?”

  The dog didn’t give any answer, though for some reason Ron had half expected him to. It was that way a lot with dogs, he decided; you end up talking to them so much that you expect them to be able to hold up their end of a conversation.

  “He’s dead, boy. Bad news, huh? I saw them kill him. Pretty horrible stuff.”

  The dog stood there, still panting, basking in attention.

  “So what are we supposed to do now? You got any ideas?”

  No response.

  “Sometimes, dog. Sometimes you’re no help at all.”

  Ron heard the sound of helicopter engines again in the distance. God knew what they were up to, but whatever it was it meant that it was time to get out of plain sight.

  “Come on, boy. Let’s get into that woods. Probably no harm in relaxing a little once we’re there.”

  The forest here was thicker, deeper-feeling than the woods between the bridge and the cornfield. Ron found a big, broad rock in a place where the sun streamed down among the trees, and he sat down to think. When he was comfortable the dog decided it was a good idea too, and he curled up beside Ron, closed his eyes and drifted off toward sleep.

  What he had to do, he decided, was find those cross-and-circle people. Find where they lived. Where was he going to find them? And what was he going to do once he found them? Ron shook his head. Sighed.

  The helicopters were getting close again. Hadn’t they done enough already? God. They were going to come looking for him, now, too. Murderers. They were murderers, and they meant to kill him.

  If he just sat here, taking in the sun, it wouldn’t take them more than half an hour to find him. An hour at the outside.

  And so what if they did? He was feeling fatalistic, Ron realized. A big part of him didn’t care enough about being alive to struggle for his life. Let them take him, and do whatever they wanted to him.

  Why not?

  The depression got even worse when he realized that he didn’t have an answer for the question.

  A helicopter was passing directly overhead; Ron looked up in time to catch a glimpse of it through the opening in the trees.

  Beside him, Tom the dog woke up enough to whine fearfully. And then suddenly he stood and looked around, his ears and rump trembling with tension. And he bolted out into the forest.

  He didn’t look as though he were running away from anything so much as he seemed to be running toward something. Ron forgot about his funk long enough to go chasing after the dog.

  It wasn’t easy; a dog is a lot more suited to running over uneven terrain than a man is. It wasn’t that hard, either. Even though the dog was moving harder and faster than Ron was, Ron managed a good pace himself — the injuries he’d taken at the bridge were all but gone.

  Strange. Strange and unsettling. Ron should have known to expect it, of course. Just not so quickly. . . !

  The dog reached the top of a low hill and turned back to look at Ron expectantly. Barked, twice — Ron wished there was a way to silence him; if he didn’t stop, Ron was sure, he’d draw the soldiers to them. Tom waited until Ron was nearly at the summit of the hill before he started running again, not straight downhill but hard to the left and down. That’s crazy, Ron thought. Dogs don’t wait around to make sure you don’t lose track of them. They come and go as they please, and to hell with whether or not anybody else can follow.

  It was exactly what the dog had done. And it was a good thing, too; the route he took was complex enough that there was no way Ron would have been able to follow it by guess.

  He chased after that damned dog for the better part of another half a mile before they came out into the tiny, thick-dark hollow with the stream.

  The creature was there.

  He was there, and he was alive and unscratched as he’d been when they’d started across the bridge from Kentucky. And he was waiting for them.

  ³ ³ ³

  “I saw you die,” Ron said. It was the only thing left in him. The grief was leaking out of his heart, and he had nothing to replace it with. Nothing but a hollow feeling.

  Tom the dog was prancing around the creature’s feet, wagging his tail furiously. The creature shook his head.

  No. You saw . . . a ghost? An illusion? No. You saw the desire in their hearts. The soldiers’ hearts. Made visible; I helped them see what they wanted to see. He sighed. They know their mistake now. They’re searching again.

  Ron couldn’t make much sense of that, but he got the idea behind it, anyway.

  “You could have told me.” He kicked at one of the smooth round stones embedded in the dark soil by his feet; it came loose and rolled down into the stream.

  The creature frowned, and shook his head ever so slightly. There was no time.

  Another of the helicopters went by overhead.

  We need to go.

  Ron felt his shoulders sag. He didn’t have the heart for running; he didn’t have it in him to do anything but sit down and be confused.

  That wasn’t an option, of course. There wasn’t time for confusion, unless he wanted to get all three of them killed. He looked around, kicked at another stone. It didn’t budge.

  “We can’t just keep running,” he said. “They can catch up with us faster than we can run. And there isn’t any way to hide, either, as long as they can track you.”

  The creature nodded. Still. We must run. And he turned away, and ran.

  The dog was only a couple steps behind him. Ron shook his head and took off after them.

  The three of them ran due west through that woods for the better part of an hour. Helicopters followed them all the while, more than a little uncertainly — probably, Ron thought, that was a function of using a radio
to track a moving target that couldn’t be seen. The helicopters always seemed to know more or less where they were, but never to know exactly; often they’d fire their guns or rockets, but they were always yards away from actually hitting the creature — and never even that close to hitting Ron or the dog.

  They’d been running for forty-five minutes when Ron stopped hearing the helicopters.

  That was trouble. It meant that they were actually thinking, setting some kind of a trap. Or that was what Ron guessed it meant.

  And he was right.

  Ambush stepped out at them from behind a mossy boulder ten minutes after Ron last heard a helicopter. Ambush was a man who wore denim overalls over a t-shirt stained by motor oil. A black armband bound his right bicep, and on the armband there was a patch embroidered with the symbol of the cross and the dove and the circle. He stepped out from behind the boulder when they were only three yards from him, and point-blank he started firing.

  He would have got them, too.

  He would have got them if Ron hadn’t been so edgy and nervous that as soon as he caught sight of the man stepping out from behind the rock he dived forward, into the creature’s back, dragging him to the ground.

  And the creature, falling, rifle exploding just above his head, had slammed into the man’s knee, and all three of them had gone down, and the man kept shooting but it didn’t make much difference since he was firing into the air.

  Their ambusher hadn’t lived long after that, because Tom the dog was all over him, and before Ron or the creature could do anything to stop him he’d ripped out the man’s throat.

  The sound of men in boots running toward them, from half a dozen different directions. Ron got to his feet, and saw that the creature was already standing, pulling the dog away from the man’s corpse. Run, he told him, as Ron stooped to take the man’s rifle. And then, No — leave it. It will only bring trouble. And Ron let it drop and ran even if he did think it was crazy to be unarmed when there were people shooting at him. There wasn’t time to argue the point.

  “Which way?” He could see more of the un-uniformed soldiers, now; the closest couldn’t be more than sixty yards away. That one started shooting at them, wildly, as though he were unable to aim properly while he ran. The creature finally managed to drag Tom away from the dead man, and he took off running, carrying the dog, in the same direction they’d been moving before the ambush.

  Ron followed him.

  Not far now. There’s something ahead . . . that can stop them.

  “Stop them? What can stop them? What are we heading into?”

  I don’t know that. I only know that it can happen.

  Twenty yards ahead — thirty? — Ron could see a thick wall of green where the forest came to an end; the weeds and bushes were too thick to tell from this distance what was on the other side of them.

  More shooting at their backs — at lot more. So much that it didn’t matter that none of the people behind them could run and aim at the same time. Leaves and dirt burst up from the ground near their feet as bullets hit the soil. . . .

  And then Ron and the creature were bursting through the wall of green at the forest’s edge, and they were safe, he knew, he knew —

  And then Ron saw where he was.

  The soldiers weren’t shooting, or even running. Not any more.

  There was a red-and-yellow banner strung high between two tall pines, not a dozen yards away.

  SOUTHERN ILLINOIS

  BAPTIST YOUTH CAMP

  And there were a thousand-thousand children picnicking in that broad, grassy clearing. None of them more than twelve years old. Twenty or thirty adults — camp counselors, Ron thought. Rough-wood cottages spread out around a pond off in the distance.

  “Oh my God,” Ron said. “Oh my dear God.”

  They’d led the gunmen into a crowd of children.

  “Creature,” Ron said, “creature, we have to turn back. Have to. We can’t let them follow us here. Those people are murderers; they won’t hesitate to start shooting here, even if it means killing children.”

  The creature turned and looked at Ron, horrified, but it was already too late — the children were crowding around them, drawn to the Beast the same way the people in Tylerville had been. So many of them crowding so close that there was barely any way to move, let alone run back into the woods and get themselves killed. And kept crowding; by the time the two-dozen soldiers had made it out into the cleared field, every child and adult at the picnic was pressed into the crowd, trying to touch the creature.

  One soldier — he looked as though he might be their leader — cupped his hands and shouted. “All of you, move away from these two. We’re here to arrest them in the name of God and the United States of America.”

  The children ignored him. To be fair, it was only barely possible to hear what he’d said over the din of a million happy campers.

  “This is an order! Move away immediately, or face consequences! This pair is a dire threat to the security of the nation and the future of the world. Your lives are forfeit if you do not follow instructions!”

  Someone at the far edge of the crowd threw a gooey wad of chocolate picnic cake at the man; it struck him just above his left eye.

  And the man reeled, more out of surprise than because the cake did him any harm, and as he reeled his arm twitched, and two rounds from his machine gun burst out into the crowd.

  And the bloodbath started.

  Maybe — just maybe — the firing of those two rounds was an accident. All the same, as soon as he’d fired them and the first three children died, his men were firing too.

  The truth was, of course, that they had to fire. Where any ordinary crowd would have bolted and stampeded away at the sound of gunfire and the sight of bloody-gory death, the children surged forward, into the sights of the guns. Does the creature do that to them — do they love him enough to die for him after only seeing him for a few moments? Ron looked in his own heart, and realized that he’d have done the same thing. Hell, was doing the same thing; even now he was trying to get at the soldiers, to put himself in front of the guns. Partly he tried to do that out of concern for the children, of course. He didn’t want them dying to protect him.

  He looked over at the creature, three yards away in the crowd, and saw him wild-eyed and panicked, trying even harder than Ron tried to put himself in front of the guns. He wasn’t making any more progress than Ron was. The dog had fallen out of the creature’s arms, somehow; Ron hoped that it wasn’t getting trampled in the crush.

  If the soldiers hadn’t fired their guns and kept shooting, they’d have been overwhelmed in a moment. As it was they nearly were anyway; only the press of falling bodies kept the mob of children from surging forward and pulling the guns from their hands. The bodies of children piled at the soldiers’ feet and piled higher, until finally they began to form a barricade.

  It went on that way for a good three minutes before Ron saw the first of the dead children rise. The boy was at the very bottom of the heap, but at the edge of it, too, so he didn’t have to struggle too hard to unbury himself. The soldier in front of him — the one in charge, who had chocolate smeared all over his forehead and matted in his hair — watched dumbstruck as the child freed himself and rushed toward him. So dumbstruck that the boy had the gun out of his hands before the man got his senses back.

  Luke Munsen’s bacteria — the stuff that resurrected us. It’s here, already. Spreading faster than we’re walking cross-country.

  The soldiers didn’t cope too well after that. There were children — angry, violent children — all over them, ripping the guns out of their hands, dragging them down to the ground and keeping them there. Beating them, once they were pinned. Ron saw one boy jump feet-first onto the face of a soldier; the man’s nose broke, and instantly there was blood everywhere, and when the boy stepped away Ron saw the man’s left
eye hanging out of its socket and his jaw gaping wide and slack at an angle that meant the bone inside was completely shattered. He tried to scream, but with his jaw such a mess all the sound he could make was a nerve-wracking gurgle.

  “Throw them in the lake!” someone shouted. And Ron saw the man with his eye out of place hoisted up in the shoulders of a dozen children. He looked around and saw the others lifted, too, and the crowd started melting away toward the pond at the far end of the clearing. All of them — all of them that were alive enough to walk — were trying to help carry away the disarmed soldiers.

  When the last of them filtered away Ron and the creature were left standing alone in a bloody field scattered with the half-alive bodies of wounded children.

  None of them seemed especially interested in the creature any more.

  “I don’t understand,” Ron said. “How can they . . . just wander away from you like that? Five minutes ago it looked like they wanted to build a church around you. And now they’ve all wandered off, and there isn’t one of them looking back.”

  The creature didn’t answer that; he only shook his head and turned west. The expression on his face was grim and defeated and hopeless. Guilty.

  Nine hours, he told Ron. We have nine hours before more of them come to hunt us.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  LAKE-OF-FIRE, KANSAS

  George Stein woke from the dead in chains.

  He woke clutching his chest, trying to close over a wound to his heart that had killed him.

  And what his hand found when it reached into the wound was no wound at all; the skin over his sternum was as smooth and unbroken as it had been the day he was born, and the breastbone itself firm and strong and unhurt. For a moment, before he felt the chain bolted to his ankle, he almost thought he was waking from a bad dream.

  It wasn’t a dream, of course. None of it had been a dream. If he’d had any doubt after he realized that he was chained by the leg to an army cot, it evaporated when he saw where he was.