Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  “We have to climb it, I think,” Luke said. “The wires ought to be over there, in the ground a few inches on the other side. Which means that we can’t dig under it without disturbing them. And if we had wire cutters — which we don’t — we’d set them off when we went through. But if we climb up to the top, and jump down, the jump can carry us clear.”

  Luke waited for him to answer, but Ron didn’t say a word.

  “So? What do you think?”

  Ron cursed. “I think you’re out of your mind. What do you expect me to think?” Looked away; looked up and across at the fence. “What about the razor wire up there?”

  Luke shrugged. “Just be careful of it. Push it aside. Isn’t sharp in every direction.”

  Right.

  There had to be a better way to get inside. An old gate, maybe — chained shut and unwatched. A neglected spot where the fence had fallen of its own accord. Something — anything. Before he could say anything Luke was already halfway up, moving fast and determined toward the crown of razor wire, and when Ron told him to wait up and give the whole business a little more thought, Luke just ignored him.

  “Come on, Luke. This is crazy. Wait up.”

  He was up toward the top of the fence now, carefully widening a gap in the wire.

  “You’re going to break your neck, jumping down from there.”

  “So? Are you coming or not?”

  Not, Ron thought. But he braced himself and started up the fence anyway. It wasn’t a time for taking a stand over no issue at all. Besides, he wasn’t really afraid of getting hurt trying to climb over a fence. Worse things had happened to him over the last week. His real objection, as much as he had one, was to getting himself hurt for no good reason.

  He was half-way up when Luke Munsen lifted himself up over the razor wire and jumped; Ron saw the cuff of his slacks catch in the nest of sharpened wire, and for a moment Luke was falling askew toward the ground, heading toward a hard fall on one leg, and something was going to break, and —

  No, Luke landed rolling, hard and grunting but not disastrously. He grabbed his knee and rocked back and forth, hugging it for the longest while. It wasn’t disjointed and there wasn’t any blood, and in a moment, Ron knew, he’d be well enough to walk. Had to be.

  Ron wasn’t that lucky.

  Oh, he got to the top well enough. But that wire — it frightened him. Intimidated him. So where he should have kept calm and made himself the master of it, he shied from it, tried to press it away from him with the tips of his fingers.

  It was a serious mistake.

  Ron pulled the gap wide with his left hand, heaved himself up and onto the rail at the top of the fence —

  And the wire slipped.

  Slipped just a bit. That bit was enough; one of the thin-sharp razors molded into the wire slid into the soft flesh of his thumb and split it wide, wet-bloody and burning painful as it dug a gouge out of his thumbnail from the underside.

  And Ron swore. And pulled his hand away, instinctively, to lift it to his mouth to suck the blood from the wound — except it never got that far. Because as soon as he let go of the wire it sprang back, returning to its original position — and where it wanted to be was where Ron’s shoulder was now. Razors dug through his shirt and into the meat of his upper arm, shredding flesh and skin, and the wire was cutting and wrapping and digging all around him, folding him into a bird’s nest of knife-sharp metal.

  And Ron didn’t think; he jumped.

  That was his second mistake.

  What he should have done was calm down in spite of that pain and the fact that his own blood was leaking out all around him. Calm down, and carefully but firmly take hold of the razor wire and press it away from him. And, once it was under control, hold it down with the sole of one shoe while he jumped.

  He didn’t think. He panicked, jumped straight into the thick of the razor-wire snare that surrounded him.

  Later, he decided that he’d been lucky. It could easily have been a lot worse than it was.

  The wire didn’t tear the skin off his face and chest, even though there was every reason that it should have. And it didn’t manage to cut his throat and tear his neck open, even though it ought by rights to have done that, too. It did leave him a cut-bloody mess from head to toe, and one long loop of wire wrapped around his left leg as he jumped and turned his outward leap to an arc that slammed him bloody-face-first into the fence. As he hit the fence the wire loosened, sprang free, and released him — leaving him free to fall head-first to the ground eight or nine feet below his skull.

  He was lucky there, too, when it got right down to it. The fall only knocked him senseless — it didn’t split open his brain-case, crush his neck, or any of the other more interesting things that it could have done. And when he’d finished falling and his body lay still and face-down on the grassy Kansas soil, Luke Munsen came and helped him back to his feet.

  “Can you move?” Luke asked. “Can you run? You’ve hit the trip-wire. If they’ve got people watching their security equipment, they’ll be here any moment.”

  “Uh.” Luke was holding out his hand. Ron reached up, took it, tried to sit up, but the throb and the swirl inside his head were too much. His stomach clenched, dry-heaved; his body went slack and sank back toward the ground.

  Then Luke was pulling him up, lifting him to his feet anyway, and Ron’s knees managed to lock instead of buckling, so suddenly he was standing in spite of himself.

  Luke levered himself under Ron’s arm, set his own arm across Ron’s back. “We’ve got to try to get away from here,” he said. “Come on. You can try to walk, can’t you?”

  And Ron could, he could try at least, and they started off. All but stumbling, at first — Ron with his knees locked and tottering from one leg to the other and over again, almost as though he were walking on stilts. He kept going, and as he went his balance and his sense began to come back to him. By the time they’d covered thirty yards he was walking under his own steam, and Luke gradually eased away and let him support himself.

  “You set the pace,” Luke said. “We need to run, if you can. Move as quickly as your legs will let you.”

  “Yeah.” The dizziness was clearing the way a fog clears as the sun warms morning air — fading gradually, but even as slow as it was it was a faster recovery than he had any right to expect. Soon, Ron thought, he’d be able to run. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”

  And it was true: two minutes later they were moving at a quick trot, and the spot where they’d climbed the fence was out of sight in the woods, and somewhere back there and off to their left Ron could hear the sound of men moving through the woods, shouting.

  “Let’s hope that none of them is much of a tracker,” Luke said. Ron grunted to answer him. How far did they have to go? he wondered. Wondered where Luke was leading them — not for the first time. And wondered whether there’d be as much cover along the way as there was now — a woods in the middle of Kansas when they’d seen nothing but grain fields for hundreds of miles was a real blessing. How much of a blessing like that could they expect? And why was the base here wooded in the first place? That one, at least, had an answer he could guess. The trees were here to keep prying eyes from having a clear view of the base. They’d been planted — and watered, too, most likely — by the Air Force.

  They came to a trail that led through the woods, but Luke ignored it. Avoided it — actually turned them away, to the left, and led them into a thicker part of the woods at an off angle to the trail.

  Three hundred yards; four hundred. Ron could still feel a little of the daze from his fall. Only a little of it, and even that was fading quickly. “Where are we going? How much farther?”

  Luke ignored that question.

  To be fair, there was good reason for him to ignore it.

  Because that was the moment that the woods faded out around
them, and opened out into the concrete runway.

  A runway crowded with a score of airplanes.

  Big, substantial planes — military planes, to judge by their markings and by their drab green paint, but shaped more like airliners than like combat planes. Transports? Ron thought that was the word for them.

  The striking thing wasn’t whether or not they were transports, or their markings, or even the planes’ color.

  The striking thing was the fact that there was a missile strapped to the top of each of them. Great, long missiles — each very nearly the length of the plane that bore it. Too large, certainly, to fit inside the plane.

  No one had to tell Ron what those missiles were, or what they were for.

  Like . . . like pregnant birds, Ron thought, and almost laughed to himself at the idea, in spite of its absurdity. And wrongness, too — no pregnant bird could carry its womb above its spine. It would defy the architecture of vertebrate anatomy. He’d seen something like those planes before — photographs of the Space Shuttle in Newsweek, bolted on top of a 747 being flown cross-country. That much he understood; you strapped one vehicle on top of another when you couldn’t get the first to fly. When you wanted to put it someplace, but couldn’t get it to go there under its own steam.

  And they weren’t just relocating those missiles. They could do that with a truck — the things weren’t so wide like a Space Shuttle that you couldn’t get them onto a highway. It had to be that the missiles weren’t working for one reason or another, and someone wanted to use them anyway. Who? Someone never meant to have his hands on such engines of destruction — else they’d be used as they were designed to be. The people who were supposed to be entrusted with such things would know how to work them as they were supposed to work, and how to fix them when it became necessary.

  Thick black electric cables ran out from the forward doors of the jets, up into the missiles’ warheads. When Ron looked closely, he could see the bolts that would hold them fixed in place against the wind. Those were there to ignite the bombs, Ron thought. They had to be. These planes weren’t bombers — they were kamikaze planes. On a far more destructive scale than that of the original kamikazes.

  Atomic bombs. Someone wants to destroy the world.

  That was an exaggeration, certainly. Twenty atomic warheads couldn’t destroy the world by themselves.

  Could they?

  There wasn’t any way for Ron to answer that question. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, anyway.

  Without realizing what he was doing, Ron had wandered out onto the runway. He walked among the planes impossibly jury-rigged and sewn together.

  This is why we’re here, Ron thought. This is what drew Luke to this place. We’ve got to stop these things, before they can get off the ground.

  He turned to Luke, to tell him that he understood.

  The man was nowhere in sight.

  Off in the distance there was an endless-looking caravan of cars and pickup trucks and vans pouring in through one of the gates of the base. Ron thought he could see men in uniform in the backs of the pickups. At this distance it was hard to be certain exactly how they were dressed.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Forty-Five

  NEAR ST. FRANCIS, KANSAS

  It took Leigh Doyle hours to get to St. Francis from the overgrown field. Two hours? Three? After a while she lost track of time. One road became another and another, and there were no street signs. Maybe there had been once. If there had then someone had moved them. Maybe teenagers out on a drunken ride. Maybe a scrap-metal collector adding to his hoard.

  She found St. Francis, finally, by accident — when the rutted dirt road she drove on gave out behind a convenience store. Where she decided that it was time to give up her pride and get some directions. Pulled her rent-a-car around to the front of the store, to the parking lot — and saw through the dusk the glow of the Lake of Fire. The glow that consumed the entire eastern horizon. Leigh parked, got out of the car . . . and found herself transfixed by the aurora, unable to do anything but stand and stare.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Who? Oh. The clerk. Standing behind the counter, inside the store. Talking to her through the glass doors that hung open to admit the warm, dry summer air.

  “Um.” She blinked, trying to clear her head. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “That’s where the bombs fell, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is. What a night! You should have been here. Or maybe you shouldn’t have.”

  She looked at the man — or was he a boy? He looked very young. Cocked an eyebrow at him. Found herself drawn to glance back at the bright horizon; resisted the pull. “Tell me,” she said. “I’ve been away . . . since it happened. Away from the country.”

  The boy (man? young man?) smiled. He had a handsome smile; easy, relaxed, hiding nothing. “What’s to tell? Boom! in the middle of the night, and light so big that everybody with his eyes open for thirty miles around goes blind, and the noise so loud that went on so long. And I get up out of bed expecting to see the Angel Gabriel here to tell us it’s the end of the world. After a while the light that’s bright as day fades down to dusk, and in the morning everything facing east is bleached like from a dozen summers. And there’s a gouge in the ground,” he nodded toward the Lake of Fire, “big as the Great Salt Lake. It isn’t full of water; it’s full of fire.”

  Leigh tried to imagine herself there at the edge of a nuclear holocaust, waiting for the second coming. And pressed that image away from her heart.

  “Lots of us around here were sick for a while, after the blast. Lately I’ve been getting better. And some of those who lost their sight can see again.”

  Leigh thought of the stories she’d read in the papers on the plane from Finland. Stories of resurrection and miraculous healing happening all over the world. Thought of the telephone call that had come from a man who’d left behind nothing on this earth to resurrect. Maybe, she thought, the Angel Gabriel was coming for them — coming to announce the end of the world. She bit her lip. It was a crazy idea. Leigh knew that the world was a more rational place than that, even if she did write for the National Interlocutor. And especially so; working with material that bordered on fantasy made Leigh uneasy about her grip on the world. Because of that uneasiness, she overcompensated, and cast a skeptical eye on things that give most people pause.

  She cleared her throat. “I need directions,” she said. “To St. Francis, Kansas. Can you point me there?”

  The young man smiled again. “I could, I guess. There isn’t really any need. ‘Cause you’re already here — this is St. Francis.”

  Leigh blushed. “Oh.”

  “Anybody in particular I can point you toward? You here to visit?”

  “Ah — no. Passing through. You could steer me toward the county road — the one that runs along the South Fork Republican River.”

  The young man pointed east. “Take 36 here a hundred yards. It’ll be your second left. You sure you know where you’re going? The county road is only barely passable; comes close enough to the Lake of Fire that you could toss a penny into it from your window. You’d have to toss it pretty hard, but you could do it.”

  “I know,” she said, “I know.” And then she was thanking the man; getting in her car. Waving good-bye, starting the engine, leaving. Ten minutes later she made that final right turn, onto OLD ROAD, a grassy, dirty thing that very nearly wasn’t a road at all. Half a mile more and there was no farther she could go, because the road fell away over a bluff that overlooked the Lake of Fire. And just as the President had asked her, Leigh Doyle shut off the engine of her car, rolled down the window, and waited for the obvious to come to her.

  ³ ³ ³

  CHEYENNE COUNTY

  That monster was one cool guy. Better than any old Frankenstein, or Dracula — even cooler than the living mummy they got to see in the museum back in New York.
/>   Or, at least, that’s what Andy Harrison thought. Look at him there, Andy thought: standing in the middle of a graveyard, whispering down into the ground. Oh, sure, he wasn’t making any sound. Whispering was the word for it all the same — it wasn’t like he spoke any words or anything, but you could hear his voice in your head if you listened real hard. Hear it even if he meant you not to. And Andy could hear it even now, when he was trying to talk to the people coming to life down inside the graves — when that old monster wasn’t trying to let himself be heard by anyone on this side of the dirt. It wasn’t easy, but Andy could hear it when he tried.

  Be calm, the creature said. He was staring hard down at that grave where they’d heard the little kid crying just a little while ago. Press yourself up through the soil. It isn’t hard.

  They listened to him, too. Already there were two dozen people who’d crawled up out of the graves because the monster had told them how. Mostly they were sitting on the ground or on their tombstones, staring off into space and looking dazed and confused. Andy wondered if there was anything the monster could do about that. It seemed an awful shame to him — people getting to be alive all over again, and even though they were alive they were dead to the world. Andy kind of suspected that there wasn’t anything the monster could do about it. The kind of confusion that was all over those faces wasn’t anything that was the matter with a person’s body — it came from shock, from adjusting to important things that had suddenly changed. Andy had seen it before; it was the kind of thing you saw a lot of out in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Especially on the faces of junkies and crack-heads. There wasn’t anything anybody could do about that kind of shock but get used to the world all over again.

  Except for the shock, though, most of them looked pretty normal. Or healthy, anyhow. It was hard to think about people as being normal when they were filthy with dirt from head to toe, and so pale and pink-skinned as though they’d never-ever been out in the sun. (Which, of course, they hadn’t — at least not since they’d got to be alive again.)