Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  “The basement,” Stein said. “There’s a passage downstairs that leads to the airfield, and as far as I know we haven’t been using it. There’s a lot of this base we haven’t been using — not enough men.”

  That sounded pretty strange to Luke, especially when he thought of the crowds he’d seen storming the ABC building in New York.

  “Really? I had the impression you had a large organization.”

  Stein shrugged. “Very large. But our paramilitaries are all out guarding the media network. Were guarding it. We couldn’t afford to keep all of them here.”

  Stein was on the stairs again already, heading down; Luke followed him.

  “Late yesterday,” Stein said, “watching through the window up there, I saw a convoy of them coming in through the gate. And the convoy just kept coming, hour after hour. Through the gate, across the base, going to the empty barracks at the west end. It didn’t take me long to realize Herman had lost the network and called everyone here.”

  “Here? Why here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Herman is expecting the Army to move in on us, after what he did to St. Louis.”

  “How many people do you think he has here?”

  “Thousands.” Stein stopped suddenly, went rigid. “Be quiet down here, and careful. I don’t know my way around the basement, and God only knows what Herman’s got them using it for.”

  Stepped down onto the basement landing. Opened the fire door like the ones on the floors above. Stepped out into a badly-lit corridor.

  “We’re going to have to explore a little,” Stein said. “I’m not remembering my way around here very well at all. Only went down here a couple of times, and some things — some things are still a little fuzzy.” Coughed. “You know what I mean? Herman . . . did things to me. After he killed me.”

  Luke didn’t want to know. One of his own memories had come back to him as he listened to Stein — the memory of Herman and what he’d done to his creature, back at the institute. Of the day he’d walked in on Herman accidentally, and Herman had been stooped over his lab table, scalpel in hand, performing surgery. Could you call it surgery? No. Surgery was a sterile, careful, healing thing. Herman’s lab was full of the air of the torture chamber. The creature was screaming when Luke opened the door, and all the while he stood in the doorway too shocked to move, it’d screamed and screamed, struggling against its straps to break free from Herman’s knife.

  A sign, taped to a door, misspelled and badly lettered in black marker:

  reastricted area — do not enter without authorization

  And Stein walked right past it. Which seemed stupid to Luke; it had to be exactly the sort of place they ought to be looking. So he said “Shouldn’t we look here?” and without waiting for an answer he turned opened the door, began to step inside —

  And Stein said, “No — ! You don’t want to see what’s in there —”

  By then Luke was already inside, and he had seen.

  And George Stein was right: he wished that he hadn’t.

  Seen a man he’d only known as the President of the United States.

  Lying naked and strapped to a bed. Staring at the ceiling like a congenital idiot, wide-eyed, not blinking. Drooling.

  “God.”

  George Stein nodded.

  “What’s happened to him?”

  Stein shook his head. “Wrong question.” He looked away; the expression on his face looked like he felt ill. “You ought to ask: ‘What is he?’ or maybe ‘What is it?’ — what you’re looking at isn’t Paul Green. Never was Paul Green.”

  He was quiet for a good long while. The subject seemed to pain him.

  “If that isn’t President Green, who is he? Or what?”

  George Stein shook his head.

  “Paul had his appendix out — what, five years ago? A good while back, anyway. After the operation he had the doctors . . . save it for him. And put it in a jar full of alcohol (or maybe it was formaldehyde? don’t ask me. I never wanted to know; too grisly for my taste by half) and kept it on his desk back home in Topeka. Used it for a paperweight.” He stopped. Sighed. “When Paul died in that fire, Herman got it in his head that we could use the resurrection bacteria to bring him back. Somehow arranged for Paul’s remains to be sent here. Might have worked, if the fire hadn’t been so intense that it left no remains to find — just ash that no one could possibly sort from the ashes of the plane.

  “Then Herman remembered the appendix. I thought it was — well, I thought it was too unnatural. Thought that from the start, in fact — from the time Herman first tried to get Paul’s ashes sent to us. I didn’t feel it strongly enough to start screaming at the top of my lungs. When Herman sent someone out to Topeka to get the jar off Paul’s desk, I didn’t try to stop him.

  “An hour after Herman took the lid off that jar, something was growing inside the glass. If I’d known it was going to grow into this —” he nodded toward the bed, where the thing that looked like Paul Green was breathing slowly, but otherwise not moving at all “— if I’d known, maybe I would have raised hell and put a stop to it. Looking back, I can’t really say that for sure. None of us was quite sure what was wrong with it. Maybe it didn’t have any of Paul’s memories? I don’t know. The way I’d figure, if that was the case it’d act like a baby, maybe — screaming, crying. Carrying on. It’s not like that at all. Won’t eat — won’t even swallow when you shove food down its mouth. I kind of tend to believe that there was something wrong with it in the first place — DNA stuff, you know? Like the part of it that tells how to grow the brain? You know what I mean?”

  Luke had a vague memory of the idea behind DNA. A very vague idea. He remembered enough to know that he’d spent most of his adult life working with it, and that was about all. So he grunted, and nodded, and let George Stein go on, because he didn’t want to think about the parts of himself that he didn’t have any more.

  George Stein shrugged. “There isn’t much to be done with — with him. Herman tried to kill him, but it didn’t work; an hour after he died there he was again, staring at the ceiling. Drooling. Breathing slow, dead-steady. I had him put in this room — because this isn’t a place where anyone ought to be in the first place.”

  Luke raised an eyebrow at that. A place where no one should go? Which led directly to: Why not?

  And that was when he noticed the door at the back of the room.

  A solid-looking, unpainted, unburnished, grey-steel door. Sealed with rubber around its edges. The sort of door he’d have expected . . . oh, in a military airplane. Guarding the passage of air into a room where someone worked with biological contaminants.

  It wasn’t a door to either of those things, of course. Luke remembered enough of his work to recognize a laboratory, and this place was nothing like a laboratory.

  What it had, in fact, was the feel of a warehouse.

  The door was the entrance to an institutional freezer.

  Dear God.

  Luke swallowed back bile; he was feeling sick with himself.

  What has he got in deep freeze that no one should see?

  And the answer to that was obvious, too.

  Not what. Who.

  The soldiers who are supposed to be at this base.

  “We’re going to open that freezer up, George.” Luke was disgusted, and furious. This man was a part of the murder . . . of how many men? He thought of the number of buildings he’d seen as he’d walked toward the place. Thought of their size. Thousands. Maybe he didn’t kill them himself, and maybe he wasn’t happy about it when it happened. He let it happen all the same. “We’re going to open up the freezer, and we’re going to turn it off. And we’re going to fix it so that it can’t ever be turned on again.”

  George Stein was silent. His mouth hung agape. He looked terrified — and rattled and more than anything else his face was guilty.


  “You understand me, don’t you, George? Where are the controls to this thing? Nod if you know. Point to them.”

  He shook his head. So Luke stepped across the room.

  And pulled the freezer door open.

  It was an enormous freezer.

  The kind of freezer you needed for a kitchen that had to feed several thousand men: a freezer the size of a banquet hall.

  Bigger than that, maybe.

  And big as it was, the freezer was crowded.

  The corpses of soldiers were piled in rows like firewood, and stacked three and four deep. There was hardly room to pass through between the heaps of them.

  None of the corpses looked as though it had come to death by violence. Well, maybe that one over there, the one covered with crystallized blood — there was a deep pit where the right side of its chest ought to have been. That one was an exception.

  The rest of them, though — they looked as though they’d died in their sleep.

  Which was ludicrous, of course: it just wasn’t possible for several thousand young men to die peaceably and of natural causes all at once.

  They were dressed as though they’d died in their sleep, too.

  As though someone poisoned them, all at once. Poison in their food, maybe? It was possible, Luke thought. One big, industrial kitchen. Everyone eating more or less at once. A slow poison that would kill them all before they woke in the morning. He couldn’t see that killing all of them, or even killing all of them but one. A few of them would have to have missed dinner, it seemed to Luke. And that would have made for an ugly scene.

  No. It had to be poison, all right, but not something they’d eaten. Likely someone had gassed their barracks while they’d slept.

  And Herman Bonner had piled their corpses here, in the freezer, where they’d be certain to stay dead.

  There.

  The box of circuit breakers was on the wall outside the freezer, right beside the door. Right where he’d have expected it if he’d thought to look. Luke pulled back the metal cover to the circuit box, pushed down each of the dozen switches inside it. By the time he was done it was black inside the freezer — God knew which one of the switches had been for the overhead lights inside it.

  It wasn’t enough, of course. Five minutes from now someone could come through here and switch them all back on. And as soon as he stepped away the steel door would swing closed, and the freezer was cold enough and insulated enough that shut off it could stay frozen for days — maybe even weeks.

  So Luke looked around the room and spotted the heavy wooden chair. Picked it up and used it to smash the circuit box, smash it again till the thing was beyond any hope of repair. When he was done he took what was left of the chair and jammed it into the hinge of the freezer door. It wouldn’t be too hard for someone to yank it out and close the door, but it was the best Luke could manage — there was nothing in that room that could have been any use at all for destroying heavy-gauge steel doors.

  “We should go,” George Stein said. “Someone may have heard. And even if they haven’t, it isn’t that deserted down here. If we’re here long enough, sooner or later someone will think to look for us down here.”

  Luke grunted. He was looking into the freezer — dark, now, except for what little light spilled into it from the open door. It would be a long time before anything in that room was thawed enough for the infection to take hold and bring them back to life. God knew what could happen between now and then. He wanted to do something . . . something more certain for the murdered soldiers. Hard as he tried to think of anything — anything at all — that would help to bring them back to life more quickly, everything he could think of he’d already done or sounded as though it could cause more harm than good.

  So he turned back to face George Stein, and he said, “Yeah — you’re right. We need to get out of here.” And started out through the door. Into the corridor. There at the end of the hall was a glowing-red EXIT sign — Luke hadn’t seen it when they’d been in the hall before, but he certainly should have. That sign was pointing toward the passage George Stein had told them about — the one that led to the airfield. He took off running toward it; he could hear Stein following a few feet behind him.

  In a moment they’d be out of this place. They could give Ron Hawkins a hand, and then they could find a place to hide and figure out what it was they were supposed to be doing. They’d think of something. It’d all work out.

  Luke told himself that, but he didn’t have a whole lot of faith in it.

  And when he turned the bend in the hall that the sign pointed toward, he saw Herman Bonner waiting for them, grinning. His arms crossed. Blocking their way.

  He was alone.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” Bonner said. And he started toward Luke, bloodlust shining in his eye —

  Luke was still running. Right toward the man. And he didn’t slow and he didn’t stop — he threw up his arms like a football lineman. Slammed into Bonner, knocking him over.

  And just kept going.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  CHEYENNE COUNTY

  They were walking, now, along a bluff above the shore of hell.

  That was what it seemed to Christine, at least. Out beyond the bluff was a pit of shattered glass and white-molten rock that seemed to stretch out to forever. Which was an exaggeration, maybe — maybe it was only the size and shape of a lake.

  A lake of fire.

  “Tell me now,” Christine said. “There isn’t much time. I can feel it. What do you expect of me?”

  The old woman smiled. “I only want you to be yourself.” It was a strange smile, unsettling. It made Christine feel as naked as she’d been the first time she’d met the woman. “Remember the pendant that I gave you. You still have it, don’t you?”

  Automatically, Christine’s hand went to her breast. She drew the stone up out of her blouse, to look at it, to see it —

  And when she looked up again, the old woman had disappeared.

  Just as she had the first time Christine had met her.

  Disappeared utterly, totally, and without leaving behind a trace of her passing.

  And she’d left Christine alone at the gate of hell.

  ³ ³ ³

  LAKE-OF-FIRE

  A dozen planes.

  There were at least a dozen more planes to disable before Ron could get himself the hell away from here. Get the hell away from those half-dozen assholes with their machine guns who weren’t positive he was on the airfield, weren’t sure where he might be, but kept firing at shadows. Twice they’d come close to hitting him, but mostly they kept pounding holes in the planes.

  And in the missiles.

  That was the part that scared Ron. Scared him seriously. One of the bullets had hit squarely on the warhead of a missile while Ron was only a few feet away from it, and the shell of the thing had shattered in a thousand directions, and something cracked inside the mechanism and for a moment Ron had seen himself devoured by a shell of fire hot and infinite as the sun —

  Then the cracking sound was gone, and the bomb hadn’t gone off, and after a moment Ron realized that he was still alive, and that he just might continue to be alive. It was enough of a relief that he almost lost his grip on the plane’s fuselage. Breath leaked out of him in something that wasn’t quite a sigh.

  He managed to keep his grip. Barely. When he looked back up at the warhead he saw the bullet had torn lose the jury-rigged wiring for him.

  Which left eleven planes. Or was it ten? He kept losing track of the count.

  He eased himself down the cable that he’d used to climb up onto the plane. Let himself drop onto the runway. Stood still for a long moment, taking a good look around, spotting the fools with the machine guns so that he could avoid them.

  Noticed that he wasn’t heari
ng gunfire off in the woods any more. Which meant that the irregulars out there had either finally killed each other off, or figured out that Luke and Ron weren’t out there any more. Or maybe it just meant that they’d run out of ammunition. It wasn’t likely good news: as long as they kept themselves busy out there, there was no way for them to join up with the idiots here on the airfield. If enough of them showed up here, they just might be able to find him — even in the dark, with so many planes to hide among.

  Shouting. At the far end of the runway. Up there by the first plane he’d disabled. Whatever that meant, it wasn’t good. The last thing Ron needed was more trouble. Or was it bad? Whatever it was, it’d got the attention of the irregulars. That wasn’t a thing Ron was going to complain about — it left him free to run directly toward the next jet, instead of skulking around carefully the way he’d had to since they’d first spotted him.

  Up. Hand over hand along the cable that ran toward the next warhead. Both hands gripped around the wires where they went into the missile. Pull and yank them back, toward him. Out of the rocket’s shell. Down again.

  Ten left. (Nine? Eleven? Those planes, over there, and to hell with how many of them there were.)

  They were shouting at the other end of the runway. Didn’t he recognize one of those voices? Yes — he did. Of course he did. That was Luke Munsen’s voice. What in the name of God was Luke doing here? Why was he making a spectacle of himself? Even if they had lousy night vision, these irregulars weren’t the sort of people whose attention a sane man would want to attract.

  Christ. There wasn’t time to worry about this now. Not when he was so close to done. What was Luke doing? Ron stole a glance down the runway. Saw the silhouettes of two men down there by the first of the planes. Who was that with Luke?

  No time. It didn’t matter who it was — there wasn’t time to let it matter.

  Back on the tarmac. Running toward the last of the transport planes. Jumping up toward the cable, getting ahold of it, climbing . . .