Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  And the great bright sword fell from his grip and went clattering away from him.

  “I’ll kill you,” the Beast said. “Kill you, and destroy every trace that you ever existed.” Hard, rough-strong hands around his throat, crushing his neck through the armor. “You don’t frighten me.”

  For that long moment he thought that the Beast was right, thought that it would kill him. Destroy him beyond remaking.

  That death didn’t frighten him. Not for his own part.

  But his own part was his least concern — he didn’t exist to live, as most creatures do.

  He existed for his world.

  And the hands around his throat, crushing away his life, mattered only because of the Apocalypse they meant to create.

  “No, Herman.” Because he had so little breath the words were barely a whisper. “I can’t allow that.” And he set his hands on the Beast’s forearms, and with all the strength he had he pressed them out and away.

  And kept pushing, until he stood holding the Beast in the air over his head. It kicked at him; struggled to free itself. Which was pointless; the Beast’s animal feet had little effect on the armor that covered him.

  “You have to kill it now.”

  The voice came from behind him — from the direction of the broken bluff. The bag lady’s voice? Yes, it was. He recognized it. Remembered it six times over.

  “There isn’t any other way. You cannot leave it alive.”

  Kill. . . ?

  No. He did not want to kill. He didn’t want that on his heart.

  His hearts.

  The Beast was struggling even more fiercely now. Screaming. Without thinking, he threw it away from him, turned to answer the woman.

  Which was stupid; in a moment the Beast had leapt on him again, peeled back the visor of his helmet. Tried to claw out his eyes.

  “Damn you,” he said. And he leaned forward, grabbed the great clawlike hands by their wrists, pulled the Beast over his head, and slammed it into the ground in front of him.

  Then for a long while the Beast lay still, and there was nothing he could do but stare down at it in horror.

  By the time the old woman came to him, the Beast had begun to stir again.

  She had the fiery sword in her hands, and she held it out to him.

  “Through the heart,” she said, “and into the ground beneath him.”

  He who was all of them who’d traveled to this place still hesitated.

  “Look around you,” the old woman said. “Look at the destruction. This is what he will make your world.”

  And he saw.

  And he took the sword.

  And just as the Beast from Revelation opened its eyes, he killed it.

  It was a horrible, cold-blooded killing. A killing that shamed all of him for all of his days. As the Beast’s blood welled up from the wound all black in the dim light, and the fiery blade bit into the once-molten ground, the glow that had filled the lake disappeared everywhere all at once, and the sword turned to light and dust in a great exploding instant.

  And all that was left of the Beast was Herman Bonner, pale and dead in the moonlight.

  Off in the distance, in the place that had been the center of the Lake of Fire, was a dim light even fainter from so far away.

  “Yes,” the old woman said. “You see it, don’t you? You have to take him there. And then it’s done.”

  He carried the corpse like a sick child in his arms across those miles. Until he found a circular hole in the air, exactly like the one he’d seen in his dream.

  Inside that hole was the dead President who’d called him.

  “Yes,” the President said. He took the corpse from their arms, held it tenderly. “You’ve done well. This world is Herman’s place, now. Not that one. His time will come — but not because he wants it to.”

  The old woman walked up from behind him, stepped through the portal, into that strange place. He had not even realized that she’d followed him.

  And the hole in the air closed sudden as though it had never been, without even a good-bye.

  He turned, walked back toward the edge of the hard Lake. As he went, he felt his strength waning; a few steps after he’d reached the shore it left him completely. And he blacked out, collapsing into the dry grass.

  When he woke late in the afternoon of the next day, he was many again and not one.

  ³ ³ ³ ³

  EPILOGUE

  A Year Later Late in the Spring

  SATURDAY

  May Fifteenth

  A year.

  It has been nearly a year, now, since the explosion in the laboratory that changed the nature of human life everywhere on the planet. Most of the dead who ever lived now have risen from their graves — but not all of them. There are places in the world where bacteria do not easily permeate the soil. Even now, men and women return to life every day. It is likely that they will continue rising for a thousand years.

  There was an awful scare late last August (as the world was calming, learning to cope with the newness of its circumstances) when someone realized that every man, woman, and child who’d ever lived would soon return to crowd the world. That man asked questions: How will we feed them? Where will they live? Who will find them work?

  A week of awful panic followed. Riots. Burnings. Fear. People died, but they did not die for long.

  Then someone realized that no one had been truly hungry in months. That for all that a meal was and is a great and wonderful thing, a body could no longer starve without one. Eventually, the panic ebbed; there was no need for it. People in the cities made room for one another. People in the fields are glad of the company.

  Other changes have been more terrible. And sad. There is something in the nature of the bacteria that maintains the world that will not abide a child in its mother’s womb — no more than it will abide a cancer. In all the world these last six months, only four dozen children have been born. Of those, only a pair this month. The day is in sight when there will be no children playing, laughing in the streets, and that is a grim thing indeed.

  Still other changes are frightening: the swine are everywhere, hungry, devouring. All but unkillable. Armies fight them daily, incinerate them with flame throwers — if the pigs burn hard and hot and long enough, they do not return. It is slow, uncertain work; bloody and dangerous. More than one platoon of soldiers has become a meal for swine.

  Not to say there is no hope. The pigs reproduce themselves no more than do the men and women — the time will come when they are no more a threat. Or are much less of one, at least.

  ³ ³ ³

  NORTHWEST GEORGIA

  When Luke finally finished getting Andy Harrison back to his mother, he and Christine left New York behind. Left it on foot, in spite of the fact that they’d come to the city by bus, and Luke had money enough to get them anywhere they needed to be. There was something right about walking, something that Luke couldn’t have explained for the life of him. The two of them followed that rightness as far as it took them.

  They wandered aimlessly, mostly south but west, too, for most of the year, until one morning Luke woke in an abandoned summer cabin and knew that he’d found a perfect place — cool enough, and warm enough, and always mild as an island in a warm-current sea. It was in a hollow, near a roaring stream somewhere in north Georgia not all that far from the home he’d left in Tennessee before the world changed and died and was reborn.

  When they’d been there — Luke and Christine — for a time that became vague as the soft edges of the seasons, Ron Hawkins found them. Showed up in the cabin’s driveway very early one morning, driving a station wagon crammed with everything he’d ever owned. Or so it looked to Luke, at least. Luke was never too sure how Ron had done it — could they have left a trail, perhaps? Or did Ron have some sort of a homing instinct? Luke didn’t
think so. However Ron had found them, there was a rightness about it; it didn’t surprise Luke at all that he had.

  They invited Ron in, of course. How could they not invite him in? Ron was a friend, and he deserved their hospitality. Not that there was much in the way of hospitality to offer him. Neither of them felt much of a need to eat any more, and there was nothing to offer Ron. Luke always felt that there ought to be something to offer a guest; he felt like a poor host with an empty larder.

  The three of them sat down at the kitchen table, in spite of the fact that it was empty, because it was a good place to talk.

  “I wanted to stop by and see you,” Ron said, “before I went north. Starting graduate school next month, up near Boston. Don’t know when I’ll get a chance to get down in the direction again.”

  Luke nodded, and smiled. Ron Hawkins in grad school. That was something, wasn’t it?

  “How did you find us?” Christine asked him. “You’re welcome, of course. But I hadn’t realized we’d left a trail. And we haven’t seen anyone in the months we’ve been here.”

  Ron shook his head. “No — you didn’t.” Shrugged. “Damned if I know. It’s spring and I’m here. I think the others will show up, too. Soon, now. Real soon.”

  Luke found himself looking absently out the window, wondering if the creature was somewhere out there in the woods, watching them. It was a strange idea, a little unsettling and a little comforting both at once.

  He thought of the days just after the scene at the edge of the Lake of Fire. How they’d all waited there, the Vice President and George Stein and Ron and Andy and himself and all the others, waited for Christine and the creature to be well enough to leave. It hadn’t taken that long — most of a day, maybe. And then they’d all traveled together for a while, but before they’d reached the first town George Stein had slipped away, and a while after that the creature and the dog had headed off in another direction while no one was looking. Bill and the dark-eyed woman did the same, as did the technician, Tim. By that time Tim had already taken the dead policeman under his wing. Looking in his eyes, just before they’d wandered off, Luke thought that he was helping the dead policeman to make some amends for the city of St. Louis, whose destruction Tim had largely caused.

  In the town those of them still left had bought bus tickets to three different places. The Vice President, to Washington. Ron and Jerry Williams, back to Tennessee. And Luke and Christine and Andy had bought tickets to New York. Until Ron showed up, it’d been the last he’d seen of any of them.

  “Has it changed much out there?” Luke asked. “Has the world changed?”

  “Oof,” Ron said — as though the question were bigger than he knew how to lift. “Yeah. It’s changed a lot. An awful lot.” He frowned, thinking. “People aren’t dying any more. And they aren’t starving when they don’t eat. And when they’re broke, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. Hard to get anyone to do a job he doesn’t want to do.”

  And they talked a long time after that, but nothing Ron said haunted Luke the way that idea did. Imagine that: a whole world where no one did anything against his will, or because he had to.

  Would it even work? Ron wasn’t all that clear on whether it was working or not. It was a thing Luke had to see, he decided. Real soon.

  Later in the day the others arrived. Bill Wallace and his strange, dark-eyed wife; the creature and the dog who followed him everywhere. The preacher, George Stein. Graham Perkins, the man who’d been President (in the eyes of the law, at least) for the four weeks it took him to get to Washington and sign resignation papers. Andy Harrison and young Jerry Williams, each escorted by their parents. Last to arrive was Tim, the technician who’d worked for Herman Bonner. The vacant-eyed policeman, Jorge Rodriguez, came with him. Neither of the two had much to say, though Rodriguez looked as though something had begun to regrow inside him.

  All of them sat in the hearth room of the cabin, and they broke the bread that the Harrisons had brought. Later they went out into the woods and walked for a long while. None of them said much of anything.

  That night they made room for bedrolls near the fireplace, and those who felt a need for sleep rested.

  Late that night, Luke sat awake at the kitchen table, counting how little he’d accomplished in the last year and thinking about whether people ought to do things or not. Or whether they should just be. After a long time he decided that there wasn’t much point to life unless you did something with it.

  Soon, he thought. Soon. Soon it’d be time to set himself back into the world and find things to accomplish — and accomplish them. And swore to himself that he’d set himself to the task in a day or three. Or a week. Or a month. Time wasn’t a thing that could press on him now; soon was soon enough.

  I will, he thought.

  It was a promise, in a way. A promise to himself. And though there wasn’t much urgency in it, it wasn’t an empty pledge.

  About the Author

  Bram Stoker Award-winning author and editor Alan Rodgers (1959-2014) was a horror writer, he loved sci-fi, and was an extraordinarily gifted editor and poet.

  Alan is remembered by many for his work in the early eighties as Associate Editor for Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine(1984-1987). Soon after he initiated another project as the Editor of the spin-off horror digest Night Cry(1985-1987). His stories have been published in a number of venues including Weird Tales, Twilight Zone and a number of anthologies such as Darker Masques, Prom Night and Vengeance Fantastic.

  He began publishing fantasy with Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Form Fiction winner and World Fantasy Award nominee the novelette “The Boy Who Came Back From the Dead”(1987). His debut horror novel “Blood of the Children”(1989) was a Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best First Horror Novel. Other novels to follow were “Fire”(1990), “Night”(1991), “Pandora”(1995), Stoker Award nominee “Bone Music”(1995), “The Bear Who Found Christmas”(2000) and “Her Misbegotten Son”(2000).

  Alan spent the last ten years of his life working 12-14 hours a day, every day, bringing classic works of literature back to life as the publisher of Alan Rodgers Books. Today, there are over 4,000 titles in the Ingram Catalog which have been edited, typeset, and put out in lovingly-prepared legacy editions as trade paperbacks, jacketed hardcovers, and library hardcovers.

  Alan’s family continues this tradition as part of Chameleon Publishing. Laurie DeGange, Alan’s sister, is Chameleon Vice President, and his brother Scott Rodgers is an editor and book designer with Chameleon. More Alan Rodgers Books, including new editions of his bestselling horror novels of the 90s, an expanded edition of “The Boy Who Came Back From the Dead,” children’s novels written before his death, and never-before published adult horror novels, including Smoke, are forthcoming.

  ³ ³ ³

  About the Publisher

  Chameleon is a premier next-generation, 21st century publishing company, operating on a new, sustainable and stable model for developing and selling books to readers. We value readers, writers, and want to deliver the highest quality books for the best price. Visit us at Chameleon Publishers for information about upcoming titles, authors and more. Sign up for our newsletter to receive information and opportunities for free books.