Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  He turned, looked the boy in the eye. “What am I going to do with you?”

  Andy rolled his eyes again. “Whatever you want to do, I guess.”

  Luke frowned, shook his head just slightly without really meaning to. “No, I’m serious. This is too dangerous. It’s not right for you to be with us. And there isn’t time to take you all the way back home. Do you have any relatives in this part of the country? Anyone we can leave you with? And if you don’t, what in the heck are we supposed to do with you — drop you off at an airport and let you wait until the planes start running again?”

  Andy sighed. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m supposed to be here.”

  “Oh, come on. Supposed to what? That’s nonsense.” Luke lifted his right hand to his face, tried to rub some of the tension out of the small muscles just above his eyes. “Be real, Andy —”

  Christine coughed. “He is, Luke.”

  It wasn’t the first thing she’d said since they’d left New York. Not quite. It was the first time that she’d actually said anything substantial.

  “He is supposed to be here. Wasn’t he in your dream?”

  Luke felt uneasy, unsettled, as though the world were pressing in on him. He could see the waitress coming from across the room with his coffee, and he knew that as soon as she got there the question would fall into the space between moments and he wouldn’t have to answer it. And that sounded like a good thing — a very good thing. But it wasn’t right.

  “No. He wasn’t.”

  “He was in mine. There’s something important that he has to do.”

  And then the waitress set his coffee on the table, and asked them if there was anything else she could get them, and by the time they’d all said that there wasn’t, the unease had faded away.

  “Yeah,” Andy said, “you see? Even she says so. I’m supposed to be here. You think my Momma would have let me come along if I wasn’t?”

  Luke sighed. “I don’t know.” He poured cream into his coffee, watched it swirl up in cloudlike billows. There was almost a pattern to them, he thought — almost . . . a vision? No, a vision would be clearer, more knowable. This was the back of his mind trying to talk to him, to prod him with a memory or an insight. And failing. “I don’t know.”

  “Well. If you don’t know, then how come you’re still talking about leaving me stranded at some airport? How about that, huh?”

  Christine laughed.

  “Let me think, will you? I can’t think with you leaning on me like this. Maybe you do have a point. Maybe. I still don’t want you getting yourself killed when I’m responsible for you.”

  “Already happened once. Didn’t do me any harm.”

  “It’s not like that, Andy. You ought to know that if you know so much else. Whatever we’re heading toward, it isn’t like getting hit by a couple of bullets from the gun of a high-strung policeman. It’s dead like there isn’t a trace of you left.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Andy said those words. The look on his face said that the idea had never occurred to him.

  “Nobody has to die,” Christine said. “It isn’t hopeless.”

  “No. Not hopeless.”

  “That’s good.” The boy sounded genuinely relieved. “What do you think is taking her so long with that banana split?”

  Luke blinked, tried to follow the connection, decided that there wasn’t one. Andy had a real gift for non sequitur. “All that extra chocolate sauce you asked for, I bet. Wouldn’t be surprised if they had to send out for more. Or maybe your banana came to life and tried to crawl out of the kitchen.”

  Andy harrumphed.

  Movement outside the window caught Luke’s eye; he turned to focus on it and saw a squirrel running across the restaurant’s lawn. Not just running, the way a squirrel darts from one place to another — not just running but fleeing, hard and fast and terrified, as though there was something behind the poor creature that wanted to steal its life away.

  There was nothing behind it.

  Luke turned away, unsettled and confused for no reason he could name. Looked back at Andy across the table from him. “All right. If you want to come with us, I won’t stop you. If you run off and try to get yourself killed like you did at the museum, you’re on your own. Understand?”

  It was a bluff, and Luke knew it; to judge from the look on the boy’s face, he did too.

  “Sure,” he said. “I understand. Hey — here she comes. There’s the ice cream. ‘Bout time, too, huh?”

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  LAKE-OF-FIRE, KANSAS

  Graham Perkins felt happy and comfortable. Better than he had in years, in fact, and that was no small thing — there’d been some of the best moments of his life in those years.

  It was cheating, of course, to feel so good. They’d given him drugs to help him feel better. Less hysterical. Sedatives? Mood elevators? Both, Graham thought. Maybe other things, too. It was a Good Thing, even if he did have to get it from a syringe. The world needed him. Herman had told him so, and Graham believed it. Other people told him, too. Christian Counselors? That was what Graham thought they called themselves. And there was more than that. Graham knew that he was needed. Knew it just as he knew that there was God’s work to be done, because God had seen fit to free him from hell.

  And make him President, too. Not two hours ago Herman had led him in the oath of office while the cameras watched and sent his image all over the country. All over the world, via satellite. The Voice of Armageddon Network had affiliates all around the globe, just like ABC used to.

  There was God’s work sitting right here in front of him, on this table. A long speech that he was supposed to give in a few minutes, on television. Well, not that long. It’d run about five minutes, he thought, to judge from the length of it. Not that long at all, except that it felt long because he was having trouble concentrating. He forced himself to focus on the words, to read them when his eyes didn’t want to read.

  My friends, it started, my fellow Christians across this country and around this planet, the time has come for grim decisions.

  There was something in those words that almost made Graham uneasy. When he started to think about why they might do that, the drugs washed over him like a tide, and then he was having trouble concentrating again, but the world sure was a wonderful place.

  Grim decisions indeed. We find ourselves besieged by the armies of evil — of Gog and Magog; of Sodom and Gomorrah. And the time has come when we must strike out against them with the fire of righteousness. And that is a grave decision indeed.

  The words weren’t making a whole lot of sense. Not mostly. But senseless or not they were scaring him silly. How could he be scared of something he didn’t even understand? It was just plain stupid. He took another tablet from the bottle that his favorite Christian Counselor had given him, and started to feel better almost immediately.

  There was a solution, now that he thought about it. And the more it floated around in his head, the happier the idea made him feel. The idea went like this: if the words were that scary, there wasn’t any reason he had to pay attention to them. He could just read them to the camera, without paying any attention to them. Like back in grade school with the pledge of allegiance — nobody ever thought about that when they said it.

  He practiced that for a while, there in the white room with the table. By the time they came to take him to the studio, he had it down real good.

  ³ ³ ³

  INSIDE THE KOREAN DEMILITARIZED ZONE

  They didn’t talk very much. Bill figured that that was because none of them had anything to say — or maybe if any of them did he didn’t have the presence of mind to say it. After twenty minutes Bill fell asleep there in the small meadow washed in sun, and as he slept the sound of shelling in the near distance was music, almost. Like a lullaby whose meter and melody were
as uncertain as their lives.

  For all that his dreams were sweet and easy — romantic dreams but not erotic. About a letter he was writing to the woman he loved, only the letter had no words and when he tried to picture his love’s face, to remember her name, he could find neither. Then, when he’d dreamed for half an hour, the shelling stopped. And what should have turned his easy, pretty dreams to something even more pleasant did just the opposite: and his dream turned to a nightmare, where something powerful and endless chased Bill as he searched desperately for some grail that he could not name.

  And woke to the sound of a small, frightened voice whispering in his ear.

  “. . . .in the woods, Corporal Bill. There’s people in the woods, and they got guns. And they’re walking real quiet, like they was hunters.”

  It was Jerry’s voice. He had his hand on Bill’s shoulder, and he was shaking him ever so gently. Waking him up.

  “Who? What?” He whispered, quiet as the boy. Which — groggy as Bill was — he might not have thought to do if the sensation of being hunted hadn’t followed him up from sleep.

  “Soldiers.”

  Bill forced his eyes to focus. Slow and silent craned his neck to look out toward the source of the sound of footsteps. And saw them.

  A dozen of them. Soldiers in uniform, moving through the forest as quietly as they could. Which wasn’t all that quiet, what with that many of them all wearing heavy boots, walking through the pine straw and twigs and fallen leaves on the forest floor.

  They weren’t American. Bill could tell that from a glance. It took another long moment to be certain that they weren’t South Koreans; the only North Korean uniforms he’d seen before were the ones on those few enemy dead back by the barricade.

  “Damn,” he said. Said it very, very quiet. There wasn’t a thing they could do if they were spotted — not with twelve of them, all armed. And Bill and the boy and the two zombies all caught out in the open without as much as a pocket knife among them. He whispered in the boy’s ear: “Lie quiet. If we’re lucky maybe they’ll think we’re dead. Or maybe they won’t see us at all.”

  There was a chance it’d work. A good chance. Bill’s clothes and the boy’s both were marked with bullet holes and scabrous bloodstains.

  The boy nodded, and went still as stone. Before he closed his eyes Bill stole a sidelong glance at the woman and the dead policeman. She was asleep — looked that way, anyhow — and the policeman did a pretty good job of passing for a corpse, even if his eyes were open. Bill let his eyes fall shut —

  It didn’t work, of course. Half a minute — maybe not even that long — after he closed his eyes the soldiers were shouting in some language that Bill didn’t understand that had to be Korean. Directly after that Bill could hear the lot of them tromping heavy-footed into the clearing. Talking to each other with voices that seethed hostility. One of them — Bill thought, judging from the way he barked at the others, that it was the one in charge, but it was hard to be sure of that with his eyes closed and all — one of them walked right up to Bill. Hauled back his leg and kicked him hard in the gut, like he was testing to see if Bill was alive, trying to provoke a reflex reaction. Bill took the force of it limp and quiet, not even letting himself so much as grunt. Which made it hurt even more than it would have anyhow. Worse than getting shot to death, because at least when somebody shot you you got to die. And one of the nice things about being dead was that once you were there you didn’t have to feel a thing.

  The NKs were laughing.

  Had he reacted? Did they know he was alive? Oh God, Bill thought. Say it wasn’t so.

  The touch of a bayonet on his temple. Maybe he’d fooled them and maybe he hadn’t, but the NKs weren’t going to take any chances. They were going to blow his brains out, just to be certain —

  Bill braced himself. Thought about how death wasn’t really that unpleasant —

  Thought about the dead policeman zombie. How the man had got his brains blown out, just like this, and now he wasn’t nothing but a vegetable with legs —

  No.

  Bill reached up, quick as he could, moved the bayonet away from his head. . . .

  And the NKs laughed and laughed and laughed.

  “Get up,” said the man who once again had his rifle pointed at Bill’s head. Even from just those two words Bill could hear how thick the man’s accent was — so thick that Bill wondered if he actually understood the words he was saying.

  Well, whether the NK understood what he was saying or whether he was just aping a phrase he’d learned by rote, there wasn’t any question about what he wanted Bill to do. Bill looked at the barrel of his gun, which stared down at his nose from a distance that couldn’t have been more than a couple inches. There wasn’t much question what the man would do if Bill didn’t do what he wanted. Boom, and there Bill’d be, six hours, a day, two days from now. Opening his eyes to a world he didn’t recognize; mindless as the dead policeman.

  So carefully, slowly so as not to get the NK excited, Bill got to his feet. Put his hands in the air, because he’d never had to surrender before and that was what people always did in the movies when they had to give themselves up.

  Were those lieutenant’s bars on the uniform of the man who still had his gun pointed at Bill’s face? He thought they were. He wasn’t sure; the man’s uniform wasn’t much like the uniform of an American lieutenant.

  There were other soldiers hitting the boy, the woman, the cop with the butts of their rifles. Shouting orders a little less comprehensible than the one the NK lieutenant had shouted at Bill. The woman and the boy both got the message quickly enough, but the policeman didn’t respond at all until one of them grabbed hold of his collar and hauled him to his feet.

  Even then all the cop did was stand in the position the NK lifted him to — kind of funny, Bill thought. Almost like he was made out of silly putty.

  The NK lieutenant barked another incomprehensible order, pointed at a tree on the near edge of the clearing, and the soldiers used their bayonets to herd the four of them into a line. Then he moved along that line, looking carefully into the eyes of each of them. When he got to the woman he leered, took her hand in his chin, and said something to her in a voice so full of brutal lust that Bill didn’t have to understand it to be offended. His free hand, now, so rough touching her breast —

  She spat in his face, cursed at him in Korean that was as fluent as her English; without even giving it a moment’s thought, Bill lurched toward the man, intent on ripping out the soft flesh of his vile throat with his bare hands —

  And suddenly there was a bayonet in his belly sliding through his skin into his gut, or maybe there were two or three of them, and Bill thought for sure that he was going to die again. No; none of the blades were following through. The wound was deep, but it wasn’t deep enough to kill. Which was a shame, because it hurt bad enough that Bill wanted to die. . . .

  When his knees started to sag out from under him, someone grabbed Bill’s collar, pulled him back up to his feet. Then for a long time the world was a black place that held nothing but Bill and his closed eyes and the bright pain down below his ribs. But the brightness faded after a while. Or grew dim. And Bill opened his eyes again and the four of them still stood at the edge of the clearing, but now there was only one NK standing there with his rifle trained on them. The rest were at the clearing’s far edge, talking quietly at each other in heated tones.

  The one who was guarding them wasn’t watching any too carefully; his attention seemed more focused on his friends than it was on his charges. Not that Bill was in any condition to take advantage of the fact.

  Still. He turned toward the woman. Her jump suit wasn’t torn, wasn’t any more disheveled than it had been when they’d been captured. “You’re . . . okay?”

  She nodded.

  “What did he say to you?”

  She frowned. Shook her
head. “You don’t want to know.”

  Bill thought about that. Realized that he probably didn’t.

  “And you?” she asked. “Can you walk?” She nodded toward the far side of the clearing. The hardness melted from her eyes as the subject changed, and what was there now was nothing but concern. Concern for Bill that made him feel shy and warm inside, and to hell with the pain in his gut. “They’re going to march us north. Can you walk? For miles?”

  Bill gritted his teeth. Carefully brought his fingers to his abdomen, probed at the edges of the wounds. And found to his surprise that they were far less tender than he’d expected — he was healing even more quickly than he had before. “It won’t be a problem,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

  That was when the NK lieutenant came back and started barking orders. Which weren’t any more comprehensible than anything he’d said before, but after a moment his grunts were prodding Bill and the other three with their bayonets, and there wasn’t much question about what they wanted. They were marching them out toward the dirt road. And once they got there, they’d head north, toward the NK lines.

  ³ ³ ³

  They hadn’t gone three miles when the NK lieutenant broke his leg.

  It was the stupidest thing, the way it happened. About twenty minutes after the shelling had started up again — nothing heading in their direction, but wherever it was going was close enough to make a godawful racket. They’d just gone round a big bend where the road swerved to avoid a mountain, when one of those shells hit ground a damn sight closer than any of the rest had. And the lieutenant, still walking, looks over his shoulder to get a fix on exactly where the hell it hit dirt. Doesn’t spot it right away, and keeps walking — and then whump, down he goes like a sack of potatoes. It was a real sight; Bill only barely managed to keep himself from laughing. The lieutenant barked again — real shrill this time, like he was in some genuine pain — and everyone stopped, and Bill got a good look at exactly what the hell had happened: the idiot had tripped over a long, thick root. A root that the bulldozer hadn’t torn loose, but just pressed flat — and not even all that flat. Damn thing stretched across the road like a trip wire thick around as a man’s wrist.