Fire (2 page)

Ron waited three minutes after he knocked — which was more than was sensible, but not as long as he’d have liked to wait — but no one answered. So, finally, he took the big ring of keys off his belt and opened the door.

The creature was waiting for him inside, quiet and pensive as though it knew Ron was coming. Maybe it did; Ron almost always cleared out Bonner’s trash this time of night.

The creature was a physical abomination, pure and simple. Three heads, and seven other knotlike protrusions coming up out of its shoulders — those looked like they were trying to be heads, too, but couldn’t quite make the grade. Those heads were vaguely reptilian, and for all that there were so many of them only the one in the center looked to be alive. The heads had mouths like lion maws, and most of them had horns. Sometimes one, sometimes two; ten horns in all. More than anything else, the creature was like a massive, grey-pelted leopard. Not that much like one, maybe. Those lower legs, those feet, they were the clawed and padded feet of a bear. And it had hands, too — but more like the hands of a monkey than they were like a man’s.

One of the slack-dead heads had a wide, grisly scar on its neck, just below its jaw. A scar from a wound that ought to have killed any creature, let alone one so horribly misformed.

Ron tried not to look the thing in the eye, but he couldn’t stop himself. What are you? The question rose to the top of his mind all by itself.

The creature didn’t answer, but its real head, the only one with eyes that ever opened, shifted, almost as though it had heard Ron ask.

It stared at Ron.

He shuddered, and he wondered — just as he did every night when he went to Bonner’s laboratory — why he didn’t find himself another job. Something simple and straightforward, something that didn’t try to take away a piece of his heart. Something that would let him finish up those last few college classes, so he could have a real future.

Ron frowned. He was kidding himself, and he knew it. Almost every job wanted to carve out a piece of you, even cleaning jobs. Either it took that piece from you directly, by working you too hard or through conditions that went against your nature — or it took from you by circumstance, because of the people you had to work with.

The business with Bonner and the creature was some of both. Ron liked to tell himself that it was the only part of the job that caused him any grief, and all things considered it wasn’t much. When he wasn’t in Bonner’s office, he almost believed it.

The worst part of Bonner’s trash was all tied up and waiting for him, four neatly packaged red plastic bags. Red because the trash was contaminated waste, dangerous and infected with God knew what. The contaminated stuff Ron had to treat specially; it didn’t go in the dumpster with everything else. It went out to a small, sturdy concrete shack, where you stacked the bags neatly and in the morning Adam Leitsky burned them in the incinerator. Bonner had a couple of wastepaper baskets, too, one under his desk and another a couple of feet from the creature’s cage, but the four red bags were the part that Ron dreaded every night.

Sometimes Ron wondered what Bonner did that could make four bags of contaminated waste every day. Wondered what was inside those bags. Not that he was dumb enough to try to find out. He hadn’t been stupid enough to open up a red bag when he worked at the hospital, where, by comparison, things were safe. He sure wasn’t going to develop unhealthy curiosities here, where there were people chopping up genes and turning them into microscopic horrors. Ron might be thirty years old and still in school, but he sure wasn’t stupid.

The creature began to make whining sounds as Ron carried out the bags. He tried hard as he could to ignore the thing.

He tried so hard not to see or hear the creature that his eyes caught on Bonner’s desk, and he saw that Bonner’s briefcase was still on it, half open. That meant that the man was still in the building somewhere; he never left without that briefcase. Ron didn’t want to see Bonner — tonight he was even less up to coping with him than he usually was. He grabbed the last two red-plastic bags, heaved them up, and hauled them out to the cart in the hall. That left only the two small wastepaper baskets. He grabbed new plastic liners for the cans and started to empty them.

He was in such a hurry that he somehow managed to forget about the creature completely. He got the trash from under Bonner’s desk, stepped across the room, bent over . . .

. . . and felt a hand touch his shoulder. He jumped six inches off the floor and only barely managed to force back a scream.

The hand stayed with him as he jumped, following the arc of his motion lightly, carefully. Like it was a butterfly resting on the cloth of his shirt.

The touch itself, the gentle pressure of fingerlike claws on the flesh of his back, they were only part of what scared Ron half out of his mind. There was something else there, too, something electric that ran through him from one end to the other and funneled itself toward his heart. A sensation so strange and soft that even as Ron felt it he wasn’t sure it was real.

“No!”

Ron heard himself shout before he even knew what he was saying. Reflexively, he caught his balance and jerked himself away from the creature’s cage. When he turned to look back he saw the creature’s hand groping toward him slowly, easily, almost the way a lover’s hand reaches out at night.

“No,” he said. “Stop.”

And the creature did stop, and that unnerved Ron most of all, because it meant that the thing understood him. Which meant that the caged thing was human, or that it had a mind like a human’s anyway.

The creature drew its hand back into its cage, and it stared at him, not angry or even sullen, but not pleasant, either. The thing was too grotesquely ugly ever to look pleasant.

(But couldn’t a dog understand that much English, too? And dogs weren’t human and they weren’t especially intelligent.

(No. Dogs learned like that when you taught them hard for years, or months, at least, and six weeks ago the thing had been a cub no bigger than an infant child, and now it was bigger than Ron, so big that it had to crouch inside its cage. No dog could learn that fast, not while it was growing.)

“What do you want from me?” Ron asked. The creature didn’t answer. “Do you want me to let you out of there, so you can be free? Hell, I know how you feel. I wouldn’t want to be locked inside Bonner’s office, either. But I can’t let you out of there. They’d just find you again in the time it took to scream bloody murder, and once they found you they’d fire me. And what good would that do either one of us?” The creature didn’t move a muscle, not a hair. “What are you, anyway? What are you?”

The creature still didn’t answer, but its hand started toward him again, reaching through the bars of its cage, fingers probing the air between it and Ron —

“No. Don’t do that. It’s . . . weird. I don’t like it.”

A cough — no, a throat, clearing — from behind Ron. From the doorway.

Bonner. Oh God, it’s Bonner.

“And what, pray tell, is that, Mr. Hawkins? What’s ‘. . . weird’?”

Ron didn’t know what to say; he wanted to curl up and hide someplace, anyplace. He tried to answer Bonner, but he didn’t have an answer, and all that came out of his throat was a choking sound.

“The Beast isn’t a pet, Mr. Hawkins. Not your pet. Not my pet. Not anyone’s pet, not even the institute’s. He isn’t something to play with. I trust you’ll remember that in the future?”

Ron nodded, because that was the only thing he could do. But Bonner didn’t look like he was done with him, not by half. Hell. Now I bet I’m going to lose my job without letting the poor thing out of its cage.

“Do you have any idea, Mr. Hawkins, what kind of danger you’re placing yourself in? What kind of danger your irresponsibility creates for everyone here in the institute? Let me tell you —”

Then, mercifully, the paging system crackled and hissed, and the voice of Ralph Hernandez, the night supervisor, came through the overhead speaker.

“Attention, everybody. We got a bomb threat situation going on.” Ralph wasn’t real professional where it came to using the PA system. Not that it did him any harm. It wasn’t something he did often, and none of the dozen people who’d be in the institute at this hour were likely to care much about his manner. “This probably ain’t going to amount to anything, but all the same I’ve got to ask you all to evacuate the buildings. If you can all meet me in the front parking lot so that we can get a head count against the sign-in log, it’ll be much appreciated.”

Bonner scowled and hissed. “I’ll have you on your way now, Mr. Ron Hawkins. I’ve business to attend to before I leave the building, and no time in which to attend to it. I’m sure the same is true of yourself. I’ll rely on your good sense to ensure that in the future you tend to your mops and brooms, and leave important business in more capable hands.”

Bonner nodded sharply and turned away, like to say Ron ought to know he was dismissed. Ron couldn’t decide whether he ought to feel insulted or relieved — but he turned and walked from the room anyway. By the time he was out the door it dawned on him that he was feeling both those things at the same time. Which was pretty damned strange.

Ron hadn’t laid hands on another man in sixteen years, not since that night with Billy Wallace and Joey Harris at the all-night convenience store. After that night, and what followed after it, Ron had sworn off violence. There weren’t many times he’d regretted it, either; life doesn’t give a man that much call to go knocking other peoples’ heads together. Herman Bonner, on the other hand . . . he was a man who needed taking down a peg. Ron pictured himself hauling off and slugging the little weasel, and the thought warmed him.

And remembered that he was a grown man, pushing thirty past, and that resolution or not there was no excuse for a grown man to resort to that kind of behavior. And sighed, kind of sad-like.

In the hall he realized that while he’d got the trash from both of Bonner’s smaller baskets, he’d forgot to put a fresh liner in the second one. To hell with him. To hell with his goddamn trash. Of course, the lack of a liner wouldn’t stop Bonner from using the wastebasket, and that would mean that tomorrow night Ron might have a mess on his hands — no. The thought of a mess tomorrow night was a lot less to cope with right then than the idea of having to go back into Bonner’s office. Ron hung the plastic bag over the push-handle of the trash cart and headed toward the front parking lot.

Where Ralph Hernandez was waiting.

Ralph nodded when he saw Ron, and he checked his name off a list. And told him that he might as well take his dinner break now, since the building would be closed off for an hour at least.

That was a pain, since Ron generally brown-bagged his dinner, and the paper sack was in his locker in the lounge. Taking dinner now meant getting in his car and driving three or four miles before he found someplace to eat. Ralph was being cheap, making sure the lost time came out of Ron’s pocket instead of the institute’s, and for a moment the pettiness of it annoyed Ron. Where does Ralph get off, squeezing cheap over this kind of BS?

Ron was about to say as much when it occurred to him that right at that moment the institute was the last place in the world he wanted to be. The chance to get off the grounds was a blessing.

He nodded at the supervisor and headed on without saying a word.

Once he was clear of the security gate Ron fumbled around at the dash until he managed to turn on the radio and tune it to a news station.

It was time to make sure that the world wasn’t going to blow up before he had a chance to say good-bye to it.

He knew that if they were going to start shooting off nuclear missiles it wouldn’t make any difference whether he was listening to hear it or not. It wouldn’t, would it? He tried to sort out the fear and tension that the idea stirred in his low gut. An end like that might be a lot easier to take if he didn’t know it was coming — if he just ignored it death would be over and done with before he even had a chance to regret it —

No. He wanted to know. If he was going to die like that, turned to fire and dust in the time it took to blink, he wanted to know about it. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because he wanted to be able to make some kind of peace with the world, or repent his sins so he could go to heaven. He didn’t think so, though. He had his regrets, but he made a habit of doing what he could to make amends for them.

He wasn’t one for church-going. And he hadn’t had any real faith in God since back when he was five — when he’d heard two older kids talking about how there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and taken the revelation step-by-step through the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Batman, and God. Even though he didn’t have any real faith he tried to act Christian in the best sense of the word, because it seemed like too important a thing to take chances on.

No, he realized as the radio announcer read out baseball scores for what seemed like every city in the nation, it wasn’t anything that deep or real or important. He wanted to know about the end of the world for the same reason he always found himself trying to step on a brake pedal that wasn’t there when he was a passenger in a car with a crazy driver: because there was something in him that gave him a need to try, even when it couldn’t possibly make a damned bit of difference.

Ron was a mile away from the institute; the announcer finally finished the sports and began to read through the headlines.

Terrorists had bombed a bridge, not a hundred miles away from Mountainville. Ron remembered hearing three days ago that somebody had set off a bomb on a college campus that was even closer. Most likely it was the same people.

A TV evangelist was announcing that he was going to run for President, again.

Those crazy cross-and-dove people had put on another protest in front of the UN, up in New York City. And this one had turned into a riot, too.

And the Russians weren’t backing down, not an inch.

The announcer finished reading through the headlines and began to work his way through the details of the stories. Ron listened impatiently through the terrorists and the evangelist and the cross-and-dove people, wondering if he was going to be alive to wake up tomorrow. How could the radio let all those other stories come first when President Green was threatening to blow up the world?