Fire (72 page)

Then he stood up again and started throwing everybody into the burning lake. And Bill got to go first.

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Christine was the last to go. Partly because she lay on the shore, a dozen yards from the spot where the bluff had collapsed onto the Lake of Fire. Partly because the plane, which had fallen with the bluff, shielded them from the Beast’s line of sight.

Most of all, though, Christine was last because when the Beast finally did turn his attention in her direction, Luke had shielded her. All while the others had fought the Beast, Luke had knelt beside her, holding her hand. And when it had come for them, Luke had attacked the Beast to protect her.

It was futile, of course. The Beast threw Luke into the inferno before he could even as much as land a blow.

And then it came for Christine. And threw her into the same spot where it had thrown everyone else. Where in an instant her flesh began to burn and fuse into the mass of the dying and near-dead.

That was when she remembered the pendant, and remembered what it was for. And she sat up as best she could, and took the pendant from her neck, and with what was left of her hand she held it out toward the Beast.

And something began to happen.

A light came from the stone that hung in the pendant. A light like the light that had come from the creature when it first reached the edge of the lake. And not like that light at all. Brighter, and more intense; and it drank in the glow of the glow that came from the burning lake, made it dim all around her.

When the Beast saw the pendant it screamed. Screamed unhumanly in rage and fear and in frustration. Christine half expected it to wade into the Lake of Fire and seize it from her.

It even started to come for her — it took three steps into the Lake — and stopped when it reached the edge of the bright shadow that the pendant cast. Cringed, as though it could not bear the touch of that dark light. And screamed again.

Something strange was happening; Christine could feel the burning soothe down in her legs.

“No!” it shouted. “Not now! Not here!”

And it reached back with its great arms, and seized the missile strapped to the top of the fallen plane. Tore it away. And, wielding it like some gargantuan club, the Beast swung it at Christine.

Reflexively, she raised the hand that held the pendant, trying to shield herself from the warhead’s sharp tip.

Christine never really understood what happened next. Oh, she knew well enough that the warhead made contact with that strange pendant. And that making contact, the pendant ignited some potential at the missile’s heart.

But the idea of an atomic implosion was alien to her; she didn’t really understand how the force of the nuclear blast drank in through the strange gemstone. And through it, into Christine and the others whose flesh mingled and fused with hers in the molten rock.

And the force transformed them all.

Transformed them into something.

Into a single something that was all of them and none of them.

And more than the sum of them.

And not the sum of them at all.

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Bill’s mind rose up out of the cloud of the agony of the incineration of his body as the change began.

First came the fusion of his heart and his mind with the hearts of the others. The woman he loved who he didn’t understand — the secret history she kept locked in her heart, amazed and astounded him. A man named Luke Munsen who Bill might have been if he’d lived a different life. Ron Hawkins — till now Bill hadn’t even recognized him! — whose life more nearly was Bill’s, and would have been if the world had been more harsh. A woman named Leigh Doyle, who burned with the need to be heard and be loved, and knew in her heart that the world would give her neither. Knew in Bill’s heart, now, as all of them melded. A man named Graham Perkins, whom fate had made a leader of men in spite of the fact that it had taken from him the will to lead. Andy Harrison, Jerry Williams; both of them young and mostly innocent — though the first was impish where the second tended shy. A dog named Tom, whose heart was made of broad, simple strokes of the brush . . . but even so it was a noble heart, full of love and determination and loyalty. A woman named Christine, who’d spent most of a century mouldering in a crypt. A man named Tim, full of fear. George Stein, full of guilt. A strange creature born in a laboratory, a creature whose sense of the world and the hearts of others went deep. . . .

And when their hearts had fused and together they were all of them and none, their bodies too transformed — into a single being. In the shape and proportion of a man, but far taller than a man, and stronger. When he — who was they — opened his eyes he saw that he was cloaked in the armor that Bill’s lover had worn in his dream; impossibly sleek black steel that wore light as silk. Silver trim that shone like fire in the strange light. A helmet shaped like no helmet any of him had ever seen.

Most of all was the fiery sword, the sword made of the stone that the bag lady had given him as a pendant. And larger than that stone could ever have become. As the gem had drunk in the light and heat of the Lake of Fire, so did the sword. More: it drank so much, so hard, as to cool and congeal the magma that surrounded him. When he stepped toward the Beast, soft rock crumpled away from his feet.

The Beast’s eyes were wild, fearful — but not cowed. There was still that hunger in them — the blood-hunger that excitement always brought to Herman Bonner’s eyes. Looking at the Beast, he knew that that hunger ran so deep that the only satiation it could ever find was the destruction of every man, woman, and child on the earth. More than that, perhaps; perhaps the end of all life.

“Surrender, Herman,” he said. “Surrender now. Your time will come. In its course. It isn’t now.”

“No,” the Beast said. “This is my day. I won’t allow you to steal it from me.”

And the Beast lunged at him. Threw him off balance, and the Beast’s weight took him down, onto the lake that now was stone.

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.

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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.

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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.