Fire (3 page)

Don’t they know? Aren’t they listening to the news as they read it? They had to be. It was just too important not to listen to. Unless maybe they’re as scared as I am, so scared that they’re putting off dealing with it as long as they can. There was something to that idea, Ron thought; it struck a chord. But it didn’t feel right, either. He shook his head, and sighed, and waited, still driving toward town.

The man on the radio was just beginning to tell about the Russians when Ron got to town, which was annoying. Ron had half been planning to go into Denny’s and get himself a decent meal, maybe a chili burger or something, but if he did that it’d mean not hearing what was going on, and Ron was feeling more and more compelled to find out what was happening right then, before the nuclear bombs could sneak up on him and surprise him. So he turned into the Burger King, and went through the drive-through.

Something by the restaurant caused an awful lot of static on the radio, especially right near the lit-up plastic menu with the speaker and microphone. Even when he turned up the volume it was hard to hear. He ended up concentrating so hard to hear that the girl inside the Burger King had to ask him three times what he would like to order tonight, because he was listening to how the Russians were saying they weren’t going to take any more humiliation from the President ever again. He told her he wanted a Whopper and a Coke, and when she told him that they only had Pepsi he told her to just give him a soda. Actually he also used a couple of other words and his tone was more than a little surly, and when Ron heard himself he felt bad about it. Not that bad, though. He was too wrapped up in the news to feel much guilt.

Because he was listening to the beginning of the end of the world.

The worst of it was that the Russians were right. The President was pushing them around. Pushing them around about bullshit.

They’d caught an American trying to smuggle a hand-held nuclear bomb into the country, and they’d arrested him. They were going to put him on trial soon, the news said. At first they’d made wild claims about the man being an agent of the CIA or the NSC, but after a day or so they’d realized that that just wasn’t so. The man was a crazy, a class-one lunatic who’d tried to enter the country on a tourist visa. Back home in Kansas, the man had been a member of one of those weird Protestant sects that made the John Birchers look like a left-wing reform movement.

The cross-dove-and-circle people, the same ones who were causing all the ruckus outside the UN.

The problem was that President Green was a member of that self-same crack-brain church. And the man the Russians caught had known the President for years, by all reports. He’d been an important part of the election campaign that’d got Green into office.

There was a lot of uneasy speculation about just exactly where and how the man had got his hands on a nuclear bomb. The security agencies were all denying that they knew anything about it. Ron expected they’d deny that sort of thing whether it was true or not, but even so he was inclined to believe them. They had better ways of getting things into Russia than tourist visas.

President Green wasn’t denying a thing. Whenever anyone asked him whether he knew anything about the bomb, he ignored the question. But he was real firm on the demand that the Russians had to let the man go — let him go now, or else.

Congress wasn’t real sympathetic. To say the least. Even the President’s own Cabinet had come out against him — and an hour later the President had dismissed the lot of them. There wasn’t much that anyone could do to stop any of it. The people in Congress were making a lot of noise, but what could they do about it? They could impeach the man, but that would take weeks, at least, maybe even months. It sure wasn’t going to happen overnight.

It looked like it’d all be over before anyone could do anything to put a stop to him; President Green was threatening to blow the world to kingdom come, and the Official Russian Spokesman was saying that the man with the bomb wasn’t going anywhere but to trial, and from there to the gallows.

Ron took his dinner from the girl in the Burger King, parked the car in a spot a few feet away, and killed the engine. He turned off the headlights and turned the key back past the lock position so he could listen to the radio as he ate.

When the announcer finished reading the report, there was a tape of another man, giving a analysis of the situation. After him there was another, and another. Nothing that any of the analysts said was new. The things they had to say were interesting, and for a while Ron listened carefully — until they began to sound like parrots, repeating the same terrifying things over and over and over. . . . Before the last of them was done Ron turned off the radio, set his Whopper on the seat beside him, and sat there with his head against the steering wheel fretting quietly.

He was still sitting like that when the old woman tapped on his window. He didn’t feel like talking to her — he wouldn’t have wanted to talk to anyone just then — but he rolled the window down anyway, because it wasn’t polite to ignore somebody when they were that close by.

“Have you heard the word, brother?” she asked him once the window was all the way down. Her eyes were all lit up and crazy-looking, and there was a tiny drop of spittle oozing from the left corner of her mouth.

“Uh. . . ?” Ron blinked. “Which word? Or about what, I guess.”

She smiled at him, and Ron shuddered at the strangeness of that expression on a face so . . . worn. She was missing three teeth from the front of her mouth; two from the top and one from her lower jaw. And her blotchy, wrinkled skin was caked filthy with dirt.

“The word,” she said. “The word.” She reached down into one of the deep pockets of her overcoat and fished around until she found a tiny pamphlet, a little newsprint thing no bigger than Ron’s hand. “Take this. It’s important. You need it,” she said, and she thrust it at him. Reached right in through the open window and shoved it to within an inch and a half of Ron’s nose.

Her hand was so close to his nose that he could smell it, and he didn’t want to think about where it smelled like it had been.

“What — ?” Ron asked, but he knew what. Even though the pamphlet was too close to his eyes to focus on he recognized it; he’d found one just like it once, left on the seat of a bus. It was a comic book, sort of. Or maybe it was a religious diatribe in comic book form.

Two inches tall by four wide, printed on coarse white paper. And there in the upper left corner was that symbol: a cross with a circle that overlapped its top and right branches, and just above it, a tiny figure of a dove.

Those people again. Sometimes it seemed as though they were everywhere. Or as though their symbol was. Ron had even seen it on a few of those hardbound books in Herman Bonner’s office.

He took the leaflet from the woman, and opened it, at least partly to get the scent of her hand away from his nose.

“Read it,” she said. “You need to know.”

He leafed through the pages, and as he did he felt an awful chill: the comic book was exactly what he’d thought it was. Not the same one he’d seen before, but something an awful lot like it.

And worse, too. It was all about the Book of Revelation, and about the Apocalypse.

“Two dollars,” the woman said.

“What?” Ron shook his head — not to say no, but to clear it.

“Now you’ve got to give me two dollars. For the Word. To pay me, so that I can afford to spread it to others, too.”

Ron almost closed the booklet and handed it back to her. Bad enough that the woman was going around handing out tracts. Asking for money for them? It was too much.

Then it occurred to him that he actually wanted to read it. And what with the end of the world coming any moment now, what did money matter, anyway?

So he reached into his pocket, took out three one-dollar bills, and handed them to the woman. Before she could try to sell him anything else he rolled up his window, started the engine, and pulled out of the parking spot.

He thought about pulling over someplace, stopping to read the comic book, finish his burger. Glanced at his watch, read it by the light of a streetlight passing overhead. There wasn’t time; he’d been away from the institute for more than an hour already, and even if there was a bomb scare going on, it was time to get back. Besides, the smell of that woman had pretty much killed his appetite — what little of it the radio report hadn’t took care of.

He tossed the leaflet onto the dash, and forgot all about it.

When he got back to the institute the security guard was sitting in his booth looking bored. He had a television in there with him, and it was making a dumb racket. The man looked up from the screen, saw Ron, and pressed the switch that lifted the gate for him.

“Bomb scare over yet?” Ron asked. The guard frowned vacantly and shook his head. Ron was about to ask him what exactly was going on, but the guard was already watching the TV again, watching in such a video trance that Ron didn’t think the guy would hear the question if he asked it.

So he took his foot off the brake and drove on to the parking lot, where half a dozen people were sitting around on the hoods of cars looking tired and impatient under the street lights. The professional staff had all headed home a while back, from the look of things; the only ones there were the two guys from maintenance, Ralph Hernandez, and the three other night-shift janitors. The situation was written all over their faces — the bomb scare was a bust, as dead and stupid as Ralph had said it would be when he got on the intercom. The bomb scare was a bust, and security wasn’t taking any chances, security was going to search the whole institute, top to bottom, end to end, and Ron and Ralph and the rest of the night crew were going to have to spend the whole night sitting in the parking lot, staring at each other.

And there was not a damned thing to do but sit back and try to enjoy it.

Ron parked the car and cut the engine. It hung on knocking for thirty seconds after he turned off the ignition, and he promised himself for at least the thousandth time that he was going to break down and spend the money he needed to spend on that valve job.

When it was finally quiet he opened the car door and looked at the supervisor. “So, Ralph,” he said, “why don’t you let us call it a night and head out of here? We aren’t going to be able to get anything else done tonight. You know that as well as I do.”

Ralph shook his head. “Forget it.”

Ron was going to ask him why — rib him, maybe, about being too cheap to let them go, even when there was nothing for anyone to do, but then Hernandez turned, and his face was shifted into the light, and Ron saw that the man’s expression was tense and sour. Something was eating him, enough to put him in the sort of mood that Ron didn’t want to have anything to do with. It was better, much better, to just let it go. Better to be bored than have the man take a leak on you.

The way the stray dog, the one Ron called Tom, was taking a leak against one of the shrubs near the corner of the institute’s north building.

He nodded at the supervisor, to let him know that the matter was dropped, and sighed. Everyone was quiet, too quiet, as though they’d all asked the same question before, and maybe hadn’t had the sense to let the matter go soon enough. Ron called the dog, more to break the tension than because he wanted to see the mangy thing.

“C’mere, Tom. Come on over here. That’s a boy.” For a stray, Tom was incredibly trusting. He didn’t have a collar, but his brown coat was generally pretty clean — clean enough that sometimes Ron wondered whether the dog was a stray at all.

It took the dog a couple of minutes to walk across the closely trimmed lawn; Tom wasn’t in any hurry. The dog only hurried when he caught sight of a rabbit or a squirrel, which wasn’t all that often since he was too nearsighted to see anything more than a couple dozen yards away. When Tom did see that squirrel, though, then he’d run — run like Ron didn’t know what. Fast. So fast that it was hard to believe it was the same dog.

Another thing that made it hard to believe that Tom was a stray was the fact that he never ate what he caught. The poor dog never even seemed to know what to do with a squirrel once he’d got ahold of it. Tom would just stand there, holding the thing down with one paw, and sooner or later the squirrel would realize it was still alive, and it’d take its nasty little claws or its tiny wicked-sharp teeth, and it’d start wreaking havoc with old Tom’s foreleg. And the dog would yelp — almost scream — with surprise and terror, and he’d take off running like he thought the sky was falling.

Ron had seen it happen exactly like that, at least half a dozen times.

He turned in the car seat so that his legs hung out the door and his feet rested on the blacktop, watched the dog pace the last few yards toward him. Tom’s tongue was hanging out, and he was panting, and he looked about as happy as a dog ever looks. He stopped a few inches from Ron’s feet and sat down, panting, watching Ron expectantly.

“Heya, old boy. What’s up with you, huh?” Ron stooped over and patted the dog on the head. “You hungry, boy?” Ron didn’t have to wait for an answer; Tom was always hungry enough to eat your leftovers. Ron fished around on the passenger seat behind him until he found what was left of the Whopper he’d bought for dinner.

He tore the sandwich into bites he didn’t think would choke the dog, and Tom took it from him eagerly. Eagerly, but not so eagerly that Ron was in any danger of losing a finger. When it was gone the dog sat up on his hindquarters and begged for more.

“Sorry, Tom. Ain’t nothing else to give you.” The dog didn’t take that for an answer; he sat there, patient as a statue, panting and staring at Ron like a hungry orphan. Ron patted the dog’s head and told him that he was a bum and a thief, but he couldn’t manage to make himself say it in a tone that would make the dog ease off. Then he noticed the weathered stick on the blacktop not far from his feet. Bent down, picked up the stick, teased Tom with it a little; once Ron was sure he had the dog’s attention he threw the stick hard as he could in the general direction of the north building. It flew out over the parking lot, and farther — it finally landed twenty yards into the lawn. Tom went chasing after it almost as hard as he chased after squirrels.