Fire (4 page)

Ron had played this game with the stray before; the dog had some pretty strange ideas about playing fetch. Once Tom had the stick in his teeth he’d chew at it for a while, and eventually he’d carry it back to Ron. But he wouldn’t give it to him. Instead, he’d taunt Ron with it, offer it to him and back away. Either that or show Ron he had it and carry it off in the opposite direction. Or lie on the ground and chew it like a bone, which was what he did this time.

That was fine by Ron.

Tom was still splayed out on the grass gnawing at the stick when Ben Hooper from Security came out of the north building. At first Ron was relieved to see him; if Hooper was coming out of the building, then most likely it meant that Security was finally through with the search, and that meant that they could finally get back to work. Not that Ron was all that eager to finish collecting the trash and start mopping the fifth floor, but it was a damn sight more interesting than sitting in the parking lot contemplating the lawn.

Then Hooper got a little closer, close enough to see his face clearly, and in the time it took to blink relief was gone and dread was in its place.

Hooper was scared. Pasty-faced, and sweating, and scared.

Oh shit.

“What’s the good news, Ben?” Ralph Hernandez called out from his place on the fender of an old white Ford. Ralph was nearsighted — even with his contacts there was no way he could see Ben Hooper’s face clearly from that distance. “We finally going to be able to get back to work?”

Hooper shook his head. “No good news at all. In fact, I’m going to have to ask you all to move your cars back to the far end of the parking lot. We got a live one in there right now. Lucky it didn’t go off already — would have, too. Looks like there’s something wrong with the clock they got wired to the damn thing. Got to call in the bomb squad from the county sheriff’s department. Even clearing the Security people out of there.”

Ralph’s dark face went slack and pale. “Goddamn.” He rubbed his eyes and looked around kind of queasy-like. “Christ all mighty.” He coughed and swallowed. “You heard him, everybody. Better get a move on. . . . No. The hell with that. Enough of this shit. All of you might as well get the hell out of here. There’s no way they’re going to get this taken care of before the shift’s through. And it isn’t safe, anyway. Go on home. You left any loose ends, you try and be up early enough in the morning to give the morning shift a call and let them know what’s what.”

Thank God, Ron thought. Or thank Ralph anyway.

“I think that’s just as well,” Hooper said. “I don’t know that anywhere on the grounds here is going to be safe if this damn thing goes off.”

Ralph Hernandez nodded. He was already in his Buick; the engine was already running. Before Ron thought to say good night to him he was half-way across the parking lot, heading toward the gate at a speed that wasn’t especially safe.

Ron waved to Hooper and started his own engine. For a moment he thought about the stray dog, Tom, who was still there on the institute lawn, wearing away at the stick like there wasn’t anything special going on. Maybe, Ron thought, he should get the dog in the car and drive him off the institute grounds, or at least shoo him out the gate. But the stray was a stray, damn it. The dog was its own master. And besides, Security was always trying to shoo that dog off the grounds, and the damn thing never went in the direction they meant it to. Ron could end up spending an hour getting Tom the dog out the gate, and even then he wouldn’t know for sure if the damn thing hadn’t decided to hide in the bushes right beside the building where the bomb was, and he wouldn’t know that it wouldn’t just wander back in through under the barrier as soon as he was gone.

So Ron put the car into gear, and started toward the gate. He was the last one to get clear of it.

And went home, and slept — earlier than he usually got to bed. Sleeping wasn’t any use; all night he dreamed of terrorists and bombs and nuclear explosions that woke him, and wore him, and sent him sliding back down toward miserable sleep.

THURSDAY

July Fourteenth

(Radio Moscow shortwave broadcast

9.720 mHz.

01:00 UTC, Thursday, July 14.)

. . . .our Views tonight on News & Views come from Pravda correspondent Gregor Samsa, who is concerned and upset over recent events in the United States. Gregor?

Thanks, Anna. You are right: I am upset about the events in Washington these last few weeks. And frightened as well. And I know that I speak for the entire Russian people when I say that I begin to grow angry and impatient with the constant bullying and humiliation we receive from the American President.

In recent weeks he has threatened us, belittled us, and insulted our nation beyond all reason. And for most of that time we have abided his abuse, for our collective heart was still heavy for the death of his wife in our land.

Now a madman has attempted to smuggle a nuclear device into our borders. By all appearances the criminal is the personal emissary of President Paul Green; certainly it is beyond doubt that they are close friends of long standing — and it is equally apparent that no one else in the United States government was remotely involved in this attempted crime against all humanity.

Our grief over the death of Ada Green is still boundless, but we cannot allow ourselves to be cowed. The demands that Paul Green has made upon us are preposterous. We will not free the man who would have murdered so many millions of people. The nuclear criminal will be prosecuted. And in due course — after a fair, open, and public trial — he will be executed.

³ ³ ³

Chapter Two

MOUNTAINVILLE, TENNESSEE

Ron prided himself on the fact that he was still in school.

He hadn’t come from the sort of family where anyone expected to graduate from high school, let alone college; he’d dropped out a month and a half after he turned sixteen. Then he’d got himself into trouble a few times, but the law didn’t get very serious with you when you weren’t yet eighteen, and he’d only got himself into more trouble.

Then, the year he’d turned nineteen, Ron and two friends had got drunk out of their minds and gone shoplifting for beer in a convenience store at three a.m., and they’d been so drunk and so blatant that the clerk had seen them at it. And if that’d been all that had happened — if the clerk had been sensible and just shaken his head and called the law as soon as Ron and his friends were done — if that were all that had come of it he would have come out of it okay. Even if the cops had somehow traced them down and arrested them. Shoplifting could get you put in jail, but not in prison.

It didn’t happen that way at all.

The clerk got tough with them, tough like he’d been ripped off a thousand times and finally had his chance to do something about it. He got a baseball bat out from somewhere, and stood in front of the door and locked it.

“You boys ain’t going anyplace,” the clerk said.

And Billy Wallace was too drunk to see exactly how mad the clerk was, and he’d gone at the clerk ready to grab the bat and good-naturedly whop him upside the head. But the clerk wasn’t drunk, and he was serious, and he’d bashed Billy so hard and so fast that before Ron and Joey Harris even knew what they were doing they were jumping on the guy to keep him from pounding Billy into a bright-red pulp.

The clerk, of course, hadn’t been any match for two guys, not even with him having a baseball bat. Especially since he was all caught up in pounding and pounding on Billy. But he hadn’t given up without a fight, either, and before Ron and Joey got themselves and Billy out of that place the clerk was almost as bad a mess as Billy was.

Still, they did manage to get Billy out of there. They had to break down the door, and Ron didn’t like to think about what they had to do to the clerk before he finally stopped coming at them. Breaking down the door set off half a million alarms, ones you could hear and ones that you couldn’t, and they only got a mile in the pickup before every cop in that part of the city tried to pull them over at the same time.

Ron wasn’t a minor any more, and the mess they’d made of the clerk had turned a little drunk-stupid shoplifting into a major felony. Ron had gone to jail, hard and fast and for a long time. Not just to jail, but to the state penitentiary.

Even that Ron could have learned to live with. Five years would have marked him, but it wouldn’t have broken him.

What broke him was the six-foot-six-inch bodybuilder who spotted Ron on his third day in the prison. The man told him that he wanted Ron, wanted to know him the way the Bible uses the word. Ron hadn’t wanted any part of that, and he’d said so. He hadn’t taken any pains to be polite about the way he said it.

That night the body builder somehow got himself into Ron’s cell. And the man beat him. And beat him. And when he was done he raped Ron, but by then Ron wasn’t awake to know about it any more.

He woke up in the prison hospital, with both his body and his spirit broken.

The prison chaplain, a Catholic priest, visited Ron in the hospital, and for some reason he decided to make a special case of him — to put a special effort into trying to talk a little sense into him. And because Ron was beaten and broken, for the first time since he’d been a small boy he actually paid attention to the good advice he was getting.

The priest gave Ron direction that he was still living by. And when he saw Ron straightening out, he’d helped him get the sort of lawyer that could get you out of any kind of trouble, and three months after he’d gone into the penitentiary he was free again, doing scut-work to keep himself fed and going to high school at night.

It’d been long and slow uphill since then. Slow but steady: in another year he’d graduate, and it’d all begin to come together.

He thought about Bonner, and bombs at the institute, and the nuclear missile that he could almost feel hanging somewhere up there in the sky above him. The way things were going, maybe all these years of sailing into the wind, trying to make something of himself — maybe they were all for nothing.

Ron was lying in bed already awake and thinking about wasted effort when the radio alarm kicked in and the morning news began to come through the speaker.

The news was even worse than he’d imagined . . . so unsettling that it made his own problems seem not very important at all. The President — the same man who’d worn that angelic smile through eighteen months of campaigning — the President had declared martial law. The Army, Navy, and the Air Force were all on some incredible kind of alert. Everyone was scared; up in New Jersey, in Newark, people were rioting in the streets.

The Speaker of the House had called Congress into session at midnight, and they’d finally got impeachment proceedings started. It was moving along, but there was no way it was going to happen quickly. Not quickly enough, anyway. And sometime during the night the President had ordered the Marines to arrest the Speaker and a dozen other senators and congressmen.

The Marines had ignored him.

That, Ron thought, might just be the worst thing of all. Crazy as the President obviously was, he was necessary. Or some President was necessary, anyway. Without him the country was paralyzed. Maybe the mail could still get delivered, but what would happen, Ron wondered, if the Russians decided to bomb us right now — would the people who had to fire the missiles listen to the President any more than the Marines had?

Ron felt himself shiver, even though the room was sweaty-warm. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to live in a world where you had to think about things like that.

Not that he had any choice. Except maybe the choice of killing himself before the bombs had a chance to kill him, and that wasn’t any choice at all.

He shook his head and turned off the radio, before it could tell him anything else he wasn’t awake enough to hear. The thing to do — the only thing to do — was to live through the day like it was any other day, and pray to God that things didn’t get any worse than they already were.

He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

A shower. It’s time to take a shower. He always took a shower first thing in the morning; it was hard to wake up without one. A shower, and then a big cup of coffee, and then maybe something to eat. Or maybe not — sometimes Ron wasn’t hungry in the morning, and cooking was more effort than Ron liked to go to when he wasn’t hungry.

Half an hour later he was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee to percolate. It was eight o’clock, which meant that the morning shift had already been at work for most of an hour. It was time he finally broke down and called the morning supervisor, to let her know about the cleaning cart in the men’s room and the trash dolly in the hall outside Bonner’s office. He’d meant to be up early enough to have called them already, even though that meant being awake four hours before he usually got out of bed. But last night, when he’d reset the alarm, he’d seen
6:15 a.m.
there on the glowing dial, and the thought of it had made him feel ill. He’d said the hell with it, and pressed the
hour
button one more time, and fallen back against his pillow.

Now it was late enough that the morning shift had probably already found the two carts, and seen everything from last night that hadn’t gotten done. It wouldn’t do a damn bit of good for him to call, but if he didn’t do it the morning supervisor would bitch to Ralph Hernandez, and he’d have a lecture waiting for him when he got in at four o’clock. Or maybe he wouldn’t; what with the bomb scare last night, there were certainly extenuating circumstances.

Still, I ought to call. The morning guy may not get into the bathroom until after lunch. Somebody could trip on that cart and break his neck.

He would call, Ron decided. Soon. After his coffee, probably.

The glass thimble on top of the percolator began to flicker brown, which meant that the coffee was ready — probably. Ron’d been using the same damned aluminum percolator for a year and a half now, and he still couldn’t get it to make the same cup of coffee twice. He got out of the chair and poured himself a cup, opened the refrigerator, got out the cream, and lightened the coffee.