Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  When he was near the top he stole another glance toward Luke and his companion. What were they doing? Purposely getting the attention of the irregulars, and now that they had it — running. Not running sensibly in among the planes or out toward the woods. They were running off across the open landing field, toward the next runway over.

  Where they’d make even better targets.

  They were going to get themselves killed.

  Very soon.

  Ron pulled the cables out of the warhead. Let himself drop back to the runway.

  Spotted Luke and the man with him, whoever he was. Damn it — here Ron was, trying to save the world, and they had to go and try to get themselves killed. There wasn’t time for this kind of nonsense.

  No time at all. The hell with them, he thought. If they wanted to get themselves killed, that was their business. Wasn’t like there was a whole lot Ron could do about it, was there? . . . Well, maybe there was. It didn’t matter. Saving the world had to come ahead of fishing a friend out of some boneheaded trouble he’d made for himself, didn’t it?

  Didn’t it?

  He thought about that for about ten seconds, cursing under his breath all the while. And realized that it didn’t matter what ought to come first. Realized that it didn’t matter what was at stake; he couldn’t stand back and watch and do nothing as a friend was hunted down and shot.

  Saving the world would just have to wait.

  Ron took off after Luke and whoever that was and the irregulars running with everything he had. There weren’t many times in his existence when Ron had run like he did then, and most of those times had been in the last few days.

  Running for the love of life, in fact, was getting to be almost an ordinary occurrence. He’d certainly had enough practice to begin to get good at it. And he had an advantage over the irregulars, too: each of them was weighted down by a heavy machine gun, and by enough ammunition to blow up a bridge. A couple of them had other weapons, too — knives. Pistols. One of them looked as though he had a bayonet fixed to the muzzle of his gun, though it was hard to be sure of that in the moonlight.

  Ron wasn’t carrying anything heavier than the shirt on his back. Which was why he managed to catch up with the bastards, in spite of the fact that they had a couple hundred yards’ lead on him when he started running.

  They didn’t even hear him coming. Partly that was because he was a quiet runner and they weren’t expecting him. Probably just as much because they weren’t all that bright. They had to be pretty stupid: this was the same crew that had been fueling the jets and shooting at him in the dark — what kind of an idiot, Luke asked himself, goes around fueling a plane with a loaded weapon in his hands? And then is stupid enough to start firing the thing indiscriminately?

  The one Ron caught up with first never really knew what hit him. He had his hands wrapped around his gun, and he was firing it every now and then while he ran, and Ron grabbed the gun’s shoulder-strap right out of the crook of the man’s neck, grabbed the gun right out of his hands. Which just happened to pull the fool right out from on top of his own feet, so that he went slamming back-of-the-skull-first right into the dirt. Ron didn’t really mean for his foot to come down square in the center of the man’s face — but when it happened it wasn’t something he regretted especially, not when he thought about the way that atomic warhead’s casing burst wide open only a couple of feet away from his head. Oh, maybe he did feel a little guilt — but not until he felt the man’s nose, and then his whole face, give in and press up toward his brain. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could feel good about.

  It was about then that the man’s three friends noticed what was going on. By the time they did, of course, Ron had his finger on the machine gun’s trigger —

  And the gun was out of ammunition.

  Oh, there were plenty of rounds on the first man’s corpse, of course. What good were they going to do Ron over there? What good could they do him at all, for that matter? — it wasn’t like he knew how to load a machine gun.

  The three irregulars who were still alive were turning toward Ron, now. Their guns were drawn, and Ron could see one of them beginning to pull his trigger.

  And what was there for Ron to do? He hit the bastard with the butt of his rifle. Hit him good, too — right below the ear and a little forward, breaking the man’s jaw right at the hinge as soon as he hit, and by the time Ron finished following through there were lots of teeth flying out of his mouth.

  Not a pretty sight.

  Especially not for the man standing next to him, who got two of those broken teeth right in the face. One of them actually stuck in the man’s eye, and while he was howling mostly with disgust and a little from pain Ron jumped on the third man, grabbing his gun —

  And a moment later Ron had shot both of those last two. One of them while he was all but unarmed, and Ron thought that maybe that was cold-blooded murder and he tried not to think about it.

  Which wasn’t all that hard, since there were a thousand headlights coming at them from every direction.

  Ten thousand, maybe.

  Luke and his friend were heading back toward Ron. Which was the last thing they ought to be doing right now. The fence was only a couple hundred yards away; if they could get over that the jeeps and trucks would have a hell of a time getting at them.

  “No, damn it. Run. Go for the fence!”

  Ron saw Luke look confused for a long moment before he turned back around and headed off. By the time he’d started Ron was running himself.

  Not that it did any good.

  ³ ³ ³

  Shooting. Off and on for most of an hour Graham Perkins had heard the sound of gunfire — and there it was again scratching through the softness of the summer night like the talons of a bird of prey.

  Something was wrong.

  No one had come to see him since late afternoon. Which meant that it had been hours since anyone had given him the medicine they used to ease his heart. For the first time since Herman Bonner had found him, Graham was feeling the worry and the tension that had followed him all through his life, and trailed beyond it.

  It wasn’t good. Graham was President now. He couldn’t let himself sit back and do nothing but worry over things; it was a President’s job — his duty! — to act on the things that worried him. And Graham knew that his heart wasn’t ready for anything as precipitous as that.

  Still. Still. A duty was a duty.

  Herman was so good at taking care of these things. Herman ought to be here, Graham thought. If Herman were here, he’d know what to do about the sound of gunfire right outside his wall.

  Herman wasn’t here. He was . . . where? His office, maybe? Likely that was so. Herman spent most of his time in the suite of rooms he used as both office and living quarters.

  Well then, the answer was obvious. What Graham had to do was go up to Herman’s office and tell him about the gunfire. Once Graham had done that, he was sure, Herman would get those guns taken care of.

  It was so obvious, in fact, that Graham wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

  Graham began to wonder if it was such a wonderful idea when he saw how deserted the corridors were outside his room. It wasn’t just as though there was no one in them — which there wasn’t — but rather there was a cold emptiness in the halls, as though there wasn’t another soul in the entire building.

  By the time he got to Herman Bonner’s office Graham Perkins was convinced that he was completely and utterly alone. And when he saw the broken door to Herman’s office, and the blood all over everything in the adjoining room, Graham became certain that the worst had happened. He wasn’t exactly certain what the worst might be — not even when he took a moment to reflect on the idea — but Graham Perkins was convinced of it all the same.

  And if the worst had come to pass, then it was Graham’s duty, as Commander-in-C
hief, to take the situation into his own hands.

  Graham’s gut lurched when that realization came to him. The drugs might be fading, but they were still with him; he didn’t have enough of his wits about him to be a Commander-in-Chief. Graham knew that. And he knew that even if his head had been clearer, he wouldn’t have been ready for the Presidency: he still hadn’t sorted himself out of the events and images of the week past.

  The truth was that he didn’t know if he’d ever get himself that sorted out. He didn’t know if he’d be able to do that sorting. And he wasn’t even sure that he wanted to do the sorting. In fact, when he thought of what he wanted to do what he thought of was a small cabin in the deep Vermont woods, not far from a stream. He owned that cabin — he’d owned it for most of ten years, since his grandfather had passed on and willed it to him.

  The cabin held a lot of appeal.

  But Graham had a duty, and there was no denying it. He was President. He’d taken responsibility for that job when he’d signed on to run for the Vice Presidency, and it wasn’t the sort of responsibility you could deny once you’d taken it on yourself.

  Out there — Graham saw tiny flashes of light through Herman’s window. And again the sound of gunfire. Out on the landing field.

  If that was where the trouble was, then Graham had to go to it. It wasn’t a thing he wanted to do, but he had to go there even so.

  And he did it, too. Graham was proud of that fact. Most of his life he’d shied away from the things he didn’t have the heart to face. But a President was more than just a man, he was more than just a politician: a President had no right to be a coward, and even if he was afraid Graham Perkins didn’t let that fear rule him.

  It was a big step. A big enough step to change him, all by itself. It cleared his head, just to begin with, but it did more than that, too. By the time Graham Perkins got out to the runway and found it empty his heart was a stronger thing than it had ever been in all the years he’d been alive. And because it was strong, when he found the runway empty and void of whatever trouble he’d set out to pursue, he didn’t skulk back to his room and hole up, the way he might have an hour or two before.

  Instead he looked around until he found where the trouble had gone — to a field maybe a quarter of a mile away.

  And he followed it.

  ³ ³ ³

  Ron Hawkins wasn’t the least bit inclined to give up a fight. Especially not a fight like this one — where not just his own future hung on the scale, or even the future of Luke Munsen and his friend, but — when you got right down to it — the future of the whole damned world.

  He also knew that there are situations where a man has to surrender and bide his time. Not give up, exactly. Give in, and wait for an opportunity to present itself.

  If this wasn’t one of those, then nothing was.

  They were surrounded, just the three of them. And not just surrounded by a dozen men, or even a couple dozen. Surrounded by hundreds of men — thousands. With odds like that, and only Ron among the three of them armed with a single gun, it wasn’t even possible to go down fighting. (Oh, sure, he could take a few of them down. Maybe as many as a dozen — it was a machine gun, after all. But with that many men, sooner or later they could just walk over him, and Ron didn’t have any trouble figuring that out.)

  So when the trucks and the jeeps finally managed to surround them — when they were still at least thirty yards from the fence — Ron threw down the gun and put his hands in the air, because if he could keep himself alive maybe he could figure a way out of this. Luke and his friend did pretty much the same thing. Maybe their reasoning was similar, and maybe it wasn’t.

  That was when Herman Bonner stepped out from between two jeeps, leering at them.

  What in the hell was Herman Bonner doing here? Last Ron had seen of him he was in Luke Munsen’s lab, planting a package that turned out to be a bomb.

  That was what he was doing here — that package was where all of this had started. And somehow Herman Bonner was the source of all the events that’d happened since. He’d started this long nightmare back then, and now here he was at the core of things, putting an end to them.

  Or an end to Ron, at least. And Luke. And Luke’s friend, whoever he was.

  “Herman, let’s put an end to this,” Luke’s friend was saying, all but echoing the words inside Ron’s head. “What do you want from us? Why not let us be?”

  And Herman Bonner’s eyes got all righteous and bulging. “Demon! Demons! You steal the form of my dearest friend — our murdered shepherd — and now you ape his voice as well! You will learn, now, demon. You will learn that a creature up out of hell can die an excruciating, horrible, and eternal death!”

  And Bonner turned toward the man at his right, and for just half a moment Ron saw surprise on his face, as though the man were closer than he expected anyone to be, and perhaps as though he wasn’t the man Bonner had expected. Bonner hid the surprise quickly, but once he recognized the man beside him there was concern in his eyes that he didn’t make any real effort to mask.

  When the man spoke to Bonner he spoke in a soft voice — but not a voice too quiet for Ron to hear.

  “They’ve disabled half the missiles, Dr. Bonner,” the man said. “Maybe more. I’ve only had a moment to look at them, but from what I can see it’ll take me days to get them wired back together again. A couple look like they might not take too much effort. Some of them — I don’t know that they can be fixed. The electronics are awfully delicate. There isn’t much I can do for a broken circuit board. Not with the equipment I’ve got here.”

  And Herman Bonner screamed with frustration.

  “We need them all,” he said. “All of them! Do you hear me?”

  The soft-spoken man had stepped back at least half a dozen feet; he looked terrified. “Yes, Dr. Bonner. You know I do the best I can I —”

  Bonner turned toward the man on his other side — a grizzled, bloody-eyed man with lieutenants’ bars pinned to his Army-surplus camouflage coat. “There’s no time. It will have to do. It must.” Listening to the sound of the man’s voice, Ron was sure he was about to lash out, hit somebody. “Get the missiles that we still have into the air immediately, Lieutenant. Direct them toward our highest priority targets. Don’t waste a single moment.”

  Before the Lieutenant had taken three steps Ron heard another voice, somewhere out of sight but not far away at all.

  “Herman?”

  From out beyond the ring of jeeps and trucks.

  “That was you I heard screaming, wasn’t it, Herman? Hard to tell for sure, but it sounded like you. What’s going on? Is everything all right?”

  Ron recognized that voice. He’d heard it — on television? Yes. And on the radio, too. At election time.

  It was the Vice President’s voice.

  Herman Bonner sighed. “Yes, Mr. President. Everything is fine now. We were attacked — by demons. We have them now. We’ve captured them, and momentarily we will execute them.”

  The Vice President — or was he President now? Herman Bonner was calling him President, but Ron wasn’t the least bit sure that made it so — the Vice President stepped out through the circle of trucks, stood and looked Bonner in the eye.

  “Execute them, Herman? How exactly do you go about executing a demon? Especially now, with God raising up the dead so fast that no one stays gone long enough to hold a funeral?”

  Herman Bonner smiled.

  “By casting them into the Lake of Fire,” he said. “Come! As President, it is an execution you must witness!”

  Over on the runway the first of the planes was taking off.

  ³ ³ ³

  AT THE EDGE OF THE LAKE OF FIRE

  After she’d waited at the edge of the Lake of Fire for most of an hour, Leigh began to worry. Was it safe here? Wasn’t nuclear radiation dangerous? Certainly the glow that ca
me from the lake was radiation. And radiation was something that could kill you. Leigh knew that, even if she had been a lit major.

  Maybe she had dreamed that phone call. Maybe she was going out of her mind. There wasn’t anything here in the middle of radioactive nowhere that required her presence, was there? Seriously and genuinely required Leigh herself? There wasn’t anything at all here, except the sound of the wind on scorched grass. And the glow. And the car. And Leigh.

  She looked at the keys in the ignition. All she had to do was start the engine, pull away. . . . She could probably find a motel open down on I-70. Spend a quiet, easy night watching television.

  Yeah. Anything was better than roasting herself slowly beside an atomic fire. Even television was appealing in comparison.

  She looked at her watch. Thought about the phone call, the impossible phone call that had already sent her half-way around the world. How could she go that far, only to leave after an hour? Was the wait really that bad? No, not that bad. Tedious, maybe, but not terrible. She took a deep breath, looked at her own motives. Realized that the reason she wanted to go was because she was afraid. God knew what she was afraid of, but Leigh Doyle was afraid.

  She sighed.

  It wasn’t right to leave. Not yet.

  Another hour.

  At least.

  And maybe hours after that.

  ³ ³ ³

  LAKE-OF-FIRE, KANSAS

  The planes went up all at once, or nearly so. They took off one after the other on five separate runways, and inside of ten minutes there was only a single plane left of the airstrip. And that plane wasn’t flying anyplace; even from this distance Ron could see the flaps on its left wing hanging shredded and useless. Bullet holes all over that wing, and the fuselage behind it. One of those fools had done a good job on it while he’d been trying to kill Ron.

  The technician explained it to Bonner and the Vice President as Ron and Luke and George Stein stood waiting. It would take days to fix the plane, the tech said. He was sweating nervously. Fixing that kind of damage wasn’t any small job, and besides they didn’t have the parts. Or mechanics. Or tools. Well, maybe the right tools were somewhere on the base, but the tech hadn’t been able to find them. Yes, the engines were working, working just fine. All the time he spoke he kept glancing nervously up at the departing planes, as though he didn’t really want to help blow up the world — but couldn’t find a way to avoid it.