Fire (5 page)

Coffee.

He’d feel alive again soon, he knew. No matter how bad this cup was. He’d been drinking so much coffee for so long that it’d become a negative option: he didn’t feel awake at all until he’d had a cup or two, and when he didn’t make himself coffee on Saturday morning he usually spent most of the day studying and dozing off.

He ought to call in.

Marge King was the morning supervisor. She was a severe woman, and Ron didn’t like to have any more contact with her than he could avoid. That was at least a part of the reason he was putting off this call; Ron dreaded the idea of talking to Marge. Especially when the first thing she’d ask him would be why he hadn’t called earlier. And then she’d berate him for leaving the cleaning cart in the bathroom in the first place — he should have parked it in the closet before he went to get the trash. If he didn’t call, if he just let it go, maybe the morning guy would figure out what was going on, and maybe he’d find the carts when he needed them, and maybe there wouldn’t be any trouble at all.

Ron sat down and stared into his coffee. Put in a couple of sugar cubes, stirred it.

Stared at the telephone, looked away.

Looked anyplace else at all; the walls, the kitchen window.

And that was when his eye caught on the little comic book the old woman had given him last night. He picked it up and opened it without even thinking how it was probably the last thing in the world he wanted to be reading. Before the fact settled through to him it was already too late — the leaflet was strange and seductive and frightening just the way a horror movie is. He couldn’t have put it down any more than he could have walked out of Dracula before he had a chance to see the end.

The comic book told about the Apocalypse, which came at the end of the world, and the Rapture, which was something that came afterward. Ron had heard about the Apocalypse more times than he wanted to think about, and the Rapture sounded familiar, too, but he wasn’t sure where he knew about it from.

The pamphlet didn’t help too much as far as making things clearer went. It talked a lot about this Rapture a lot, but it didn’t go as far as saying exactly what it was — though it did seem like maybe Rapture was something that involved people, living and dead, going on up to heaven after the world had got blown to pieces by nuclear bombs.

There was this dragon who was supposed to come down out of the sky, and he was supposed to try to kill a baby that was somehow like the Christ child, and trying to kill the baby’s mom, too. The booklet wasn’t actually going as far as to call him Christ — which seemed important somehow, but Ron was damned if he could figure out why.

The dragon didn’t quite manage to pull off killing the baby or the mom, so instead it made the stars come down from the sky, and that was the nuclear war that was the end of the world — except it wasn’t the end of the world.

So after the dragon blew up the world with bombs or stars or whatever they were, it made this nasty, many-headed Beast, just for spite or something like that.

The creature — the Beast. . . ? The picture in the comic book looked unsettlingly like the thing in Bonner’s office. Ron had heard Bonner call the creature he’d made Beast more than once. He couldn’t, in fact, remember ever having heard the man call his creature anything else.

The Beast was horrible and grotesque, and it had seven heads, and part of it was like a leopard, and part of it was like a lion, and its feet were like a bear’s. And if you hurt it, no matter how bad, no matter even if you burned off one of its heads, it’d just grow back.

Ron thought of the wicked scar on the creature’s third neck, and he felt a deep, queasy-making chill run down the back of his neck toward his gut. Was Bonner trying to make a creature that would make people think it was the end of the world? Why he should bother, Ron couldn’t figure, since the President was doing a pretty good job of making the end of the world for real, and it was hard to imagine that anybody needed convincing. Maybe the way that creature looked was just a coincidence, but Ron couldn’t see that. Bonner was too careful, too punctilious, to do something like that by accident. Even if the man had come out and said it right to his face, Ron wouldn’t have believed it. Not for a minute.

According to the comic book, that first Beast would create a second Beast which would look a lot more like an ordinary man, except that it would have horns coming out of its head. Covered with hair, too — and the thing in the picture in the comic book had a head like a ram’s. Then this second Beast, the one with the horns, was going to make everyone wear a number on his forehead. Ron didn’t like the sound of that at all — he thought about seeing Billy Wallace get a tattoo needled into his arm, back when they were both seventeen, and thought about how even though Billy was drunk, the needling had hurt him so bad he’d bit a hole clear though his lower lip.

Ron didn’t want anyone tattooing anything into his forehead, no sir. Not him.

The comic book said that in real life these Beasts and dragons would be things like the head of a church that the comic book didn’t like, or maybe they’d be the president of Russia or whatever he was called. (Ron was never too clear on that; the head guy in Moscow always seemed to have a different title, or a different set of titles, depending on who he was. Ron always kind of liked how Paul Harvey would call him the Head Red — but that wasn’t any real kind of title.) There weren’t people like that running any churches that Ron knew of, certainly not any of them that were big enough for you to think of them as being real. And Ron couldn’t picture the head of some church or even Russia having horns or being all that evil. Sure, sometimes bad people got into positions like that, but not generally that bad. Not in a big country where the government and the people knew how to cope with each other with any kind of decency. They said that Stalin was evil, and that Nixon was, but both of them were a long time back. The end of the world was going on right now, nobody had to tell Ron that. And the closest thing to evil that was part of running the world was President Green, and he wasn’t evil so much as he was bum-fuck crazy.

So where, Ron wondered, was this Beast that the comic book was talking about? He thought about that for a minute and decided that that Beast wasn’t anywhere at all. He wasn’t even the poor thing in Bonner’s laboratory — Ron had looked the creature in the eye, and he knew it wasn’t some kind of an antichrist. It wasn’t that bad — it wasn’t evil. Hell, it wasn’t even bad at all, if you were asking Ron about it. There was a goodness about the creature, almost a saintliness.

The comic book went on to tell about another war, after all the bombs had fallen the first time, where all the good guys fought against all the bad guys, in a big battle outside a village called Armageddon, which was really supposed to be Jerusalem, only maybe it wasn’t, because Armageddon was a real village in Israel, on the West Bank, and Ron had seen it on a map.

None of it rang true, and at the same time it did. The end of the world was the end of the world, and any way you wanted to tell it it was still the end. Maybe, Ron thought, you could kind of figure the way the world was now into the events that the comic book was telling about. Figure it like the way parents make up stories to convince a kid that a department-store Santa and another one outside asking for money don’t mean that Christmas is a big fib.

You could figure it that way if you wanted — but you couldn’t make it so.

The good guys, the comic book said, would win the battle outside Jerusalem — or Armageddon, or whatever it was — and when it was over all the bad guys would be thrown one at a time into a lake of fire. Then the good people would all go flying into the sky, flying to heaven like Superman, without any planes or helicopters or rockets or even wings. After that they could come back to earth any time they wanted, only the way the comic book made it sound you couldn’t imagine them wanting to, because heaven, after all, was heaven.

The last page of the comic book — the inside back cover — was a list of things about What You Should Do To Prepare For The Apocalypse. Mostly it was things like giving money to the evangelist of your choice, and praying a lot, and trying to convert your neighbors to the Truth, and doing what you could to make sure that the unbelievers Got Theirs. Ron thought it was all kind of petty and small-hearted, even mean, but that could be because he was identifying more with the unbelievers than with the True Christians. In his book people were people, and what they believed and what they thought was precious had more to do with where they were born than with whether they were decent or not. Decent people acted decent, and they acted that way because they had backbone, and that was all there was to it. If there was a God, and he loved people more for their creed than for their decency, then Ron didn’t think he wanted to go to heaven anyway.

Or, at least, that was the way he felt when he wasn’t thinking about dying himself, and having to face whatever was waiting for him.

Ron looked at his watch; it read 9:17 a.m. The coffee in his mug was mostly gone, and the little bit at the bottom of the cup was icy cold. It was time, long since, to call in and talk to Marge King.

The hell with it, he thought. I’m just not up to talking to her. Not now — maybe not ever. It meant he’d have to suffer through a lecture from Ralph when he got in at four, but right then he thought that a lecture from Ralph couldn’t possibly be worse than having to talk to Marge.

His stomach rumbled, partly from hungriness, partly from tension. He certainly ought to be hungry — he hadn’t eaten since Burger King last night, and the stray had ended up eating most of that. He got up from the kitchen table and crossed the room to the refrigerator. There had to be something to eat inside it, or at least something to scrounge together. But there wasn’t. Wasn’t anything he had the stomach for, anyway. The cream for his coffee. A stick of margarine. A paper sack full of leftovers, but it’d been there for weeks, or longer — long enough that Ron couldn’t quite remember what was inside it. A covered cast-aluminum pot, whose contents were as much a mystery as the bag’s. A couple of oranges with mold spots on their sides.

It was time to go to the grocery. Time to clean out the refrigerator, too, but that was the sort of job Ron preferred not to cope with. He’d go to the store, and then, when he got back, maybe take care of the high spots in the refrigerator before he put the groceries away. Doing all of that would take at least a couple of hours, and Ron was hungry now. So he got himself dressed, got in the car, and drove to Denny’s, which was what he’d meant to do the night before.

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If Ron had called in to work before he’d left the apartment, he would have saved himself a nasty surprise. As it was, he didn’t even know about the newspapers until he was half-way through breakfast.

Ron was sitting there in Denny’s — dipping his toast into the yolk of his second egg and sipping at his coffee — when he looked up and saw that the woman in front of him was reading the Herald. He didn’t like to make a habit of reading over other people’s shoulders, which was rude, but before he even realized what he was doing he was reading the headlines and seeing the photo underneath them. The Herald’s always tended to do that to Ron — they were always so lurid and so overstated that it was hard not to read them. But even though he read them compulsively, at first they didn’t even register. That was probably because he’d expected something about the President, or the Russians, or about the nuclear bombs — the same as the headlines had been yesterday.

The Beast from Revelation

Alive in Labs of Mountain Institute!

Underneath the headlines was a photo of the creature that Dr. Bonner had grown in his laboratory. The photo was blurry, and so big that it took up two thirds of the width of the page. Down below the picture was a smaller headline that told about the Russians’ response to President Green. Off at the bottom corner of the page was the news about impeachment and President Green trying to get the Marines to arrest the Speaker of the House.

My God, Ron thought, how the hell did they find out about the creature? The institute was very careful about publicity, and careful about hiring people who were likely to get in touch with the newspapers. Genetic research was important stuff, but it was also something that got a lot of people awful upset. The wrong sort of press at the wrong time could cause the institute all kinds of trouble.

Trouble like that headline.

He tried to stop himself from reading any farther, because it was rude and he didn’t like to do things he had to be ashamed of. And the type was so small that the story was hard to read anyway. But his heart was pounding and his ears were ringing, and he had to know, had to know right then and there. He strained his eyes until he could focus well enough to read, and read:

MOUNTAINVILLE — A failed bombing last night at the Mountain Institute Genetic Research Facility has led this paper to a fateful and unsettling discovery — a discovery of facts which may have even more scope, consequence, and bearing than those events currently underway in Washington and Moscow.

The discovery that the Beast of Revelation is alive and breathing inside the institute’s laboratories — not five miles from this office. Details as to exactly how the Beast came into being and exactly how it came into the institute’s hands are not yet clear. The Beast was discovered quite accidentally by a police officer during the course of an investigation into an attempted bombing at the institute. That policeman, who has asked to remain unnamed, spotted the Beast during a follow-up search, and immediately called reporters from this

Then the woman holding the newspaper turned the page, and there was no way for Ron to read any more without going out and buying a copy for himself. He left the rest of his breakfast on the table and went to pay the check.

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When Ron got outside to the newspaper vending machine he didn’t end up buying the paper. He stood there for a minute or two, staring at the paper through the machine’s clear-plastic window. Not reading it, just staring at the headline, staring at the grainy black-and-white photo of Bonner’s creature. And wondering: What in the hell is that newspaper trying to do, incite the whole world to riot? The Beast from Revelation was one of those things that everyone wanted to get all upset about. Decent people — basically decent people, anyway, people who honestly meant well — were going to start acting crazy about that headline. About that photo. The same way they started acting crazy when it came to subjects like abortion, because there was something religious about it. Bombing abortion clinics. And sometimes killing the people who worked in them, because they wanted to protect some kind of a right to life — only Ron always wanted to know about the right to life of the people they were killing.