Fire (6 page)

It was crazy. It was trouble. God knew what kind of a mob scene would be waiting outside the institute by the time Ron got to work. Maybe even bad enough that he wouldn’t be able to get his car in the gate.

After he’d stood for a while there on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, Ron was so angry that he couldn’t see paying for that paper, even if at this point it’d be a good thing for him to read it. So he walked out to the old car, and he got into it, and drove to the grocery. There wasn’t any good reason to be buying groceries just then, Ron knew, because what good were groceries when you probably wouldn’t be alive next week to eat them? He stopped the car at the traffic light, waited for it to turn green so he could turn left into the Winn Dixie parking lot. Closed his eyes for a moment as he waited, pressing the world away from him. The world was falling to pieces all around him, and Ron’s gut knew, even if he couldn’t have put it into words, that the only way to keep a grip on his life was to live like it was any other day, to anchor his sanity to the rhythm of ordinary life. Even if that rhythm was almost too quiet to hear in all the racket.

Ron spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon shopping, cleaning out the refrigerator, and getting the groceries put away. Around three o’clock he looked up and saw that it was long since time to go, and started getting ready for work.

In all that time he never turned on the radio or the television, and he never looked at anything like a newspaper. He didn’t hear about the President making harsher and harsher threats, and didn’t hear when the Russians began making threats of their own. He never heard about all the reporters and foaming-at-the-teeth fundamentalists camped out outside the gates of the institute, not until he actually got there and had to spend twenty minutes honking the horn to get through the gate.

He was most of an hour late by then.

Inside Ralph was waiting for him, but not with a lecture or even a harsh glance. The man’s expression, in fact, was relief. Some anxiety, maybe, but not anxiety directed at Ron. Before Ralph actually got around to saying anything, Ron caught a glimpse of the schedule on the wall behind the supervisor, and he saw what Ralph’s mood was all about.

Ron was the only one besides Ralph who’d even bothered to show up. Of the seven people who ought to be here tonight, four of them were red-lined on the chart, which meant that they’d called in. The other three were yellow-lined, which meant that they hadn’t called and weren’t in yet, either, even though it was getting on toward a quarter till five. Maybe they’d had as much trouble getting through the crowd as Ron had, but it didn’t seem likely. Even with all those people making all that noise, Ron would have heard if there’d been another car behind him.

“Looks like you’re it tonight, champ.” Ralph almost smiled when he said it.

“Christ, Ralph, you expect me to handle the whole place by myself? Come on.”

“No — I don’t expect that. Just do what you can, all right? The trash. Police the floors. Anything that looks like a disaster. Don’t kill yourself.” Ralph sighed, but when the sigh came out it sounded more like a groan. “Do your best, okay?”

³ ³ ³

Out beyond the clogged feeder road that led into the institute, near the two-lane rural highway that ran beside the grounds, Tom the dog was having fun.

Tom wasn’t a stray, exactly, even though Ron thought he was. But the farmer’s boy who owned the dog had got old enough to be more interested in girls than dogs, and these last few years he left Tom mostly to his own devices.

Generally that wasn’t a thing that Tom the dog appreciated. Dogs like company, and they like attention, and in that respect Tom wasn’t at all exceptional. He spent a lot of time wandering the grounds of the institute, because there were people there, friendly people, and the guard at the booth wasn’t usually paying enough attention to notice when a dog walked past him.

But today, today being out on his own was heaven for a dog. There were strange, sweaty, wild-eyed people all over the place. So many of them that there was no way to get through to the gate, much less get past it.

And three of those strange people had brought their cats with them.

That was the fun part.

Tom the dog didn’t know from cats. They didn’t have cats in these parts (folks in this particular neck of the woods having more taste than to own the things), and Tom had never seen one before. Still, cats are in a dog’s blood. Cats are something to chase, and you didn’t have to say that twice to Tom. Tom was discovering one of his basic, fundamental, biological drives, a drive that he’d never known existed. And exploring that drive was pure and clear holy joy itself for Tom.

Just now there was a cat lounging along the side of the highway, and Tom decided he was going to sneak up on it. Even though he’d been chasing this cat and the other two all afternoon, he hadn’t yet been able to catch up with any of them. Tom was lucky as far as that went, even though he wasn’t aware of and wouldn’t have appreciated his luckiness. His heart demanded that he catch up with one of those cats, and, well, do something with it. If he had gotten one of them cornered, though, the thing likely would have taken out one of the dog’s eyes with its claws. Or scratched his nose bloody, at least.

Tom didn’t know that, and even if he had known it from experience he wouldn’t have done a damn thing different, because chasing cats was in his blood, and he had to do it whether he wanted to or not. Ignorance, at least, let him find the joy of the chase. And that was a good thing. Or it was as far as Tom went, anyway.

Tom almost got the cat this time. The damned thing didn’t even catch scent of the dog until Tom was five yards away from him. When it smelled him, and it turned and laid eyes on him, and it let out a screech like something from a pit in hell.

And the cat, a grey-and-black tiger-stripe, ran.

The cat was faster than Tom, and while it wasn’t exactly smarter than he was, it was meaner and trickier by far. Five yards just now was the closest Tom had got to the cat all afternoon. That fact burned in Tom, and it hurt his canine pride — Tom was a dog who liked to accomplish what he set out to do, even when he wasn’t sure exactly what that was.

So, as they ran alongside the two-lane highway, and the cat got steadily farther and farther away from him, Tom poured every gram, every tiny speck of his heart and soul and attention into chasing that tiger-stripe cat. If the world had exploded all around him at that moment, Tom would never have noticed the fact.

The cat, on the other hand, had begun to get pretty damned sick of being hounded. And while its body was running for all the cat was worth, its mind was someplace else altogether.

Scheming.

Thinking.

This dog, the cat decided, had to die. Though the cat was a mean-hearted little beast, it wasn’t meanness alone that brought it to that conclusion — Tom had a good twenty pounds on the cat, and the cat knew it and was afraid for its life. Which isn’t to say that the cat felt the least bit of regret or sympathy as it veered across the highway, straight across the path of the semi truck.

Cutting it so close that the cat itself only missed being crushed by the truck’s right front tire by a matter of inches.

And Tom, just as the cat expected, didn’t see the semi until its tires were already right there in front of him, and by then there was no way to stop himself or even slow down. All Tom could do was keep going, under the truck, missing the truck’s left tires by the width of his tail.

Knocking his head on one of the axles, which was moving at seventy miles an hour, so fast that it burst the dog’s skull and jerked it aside so hard that four bones in his neck shattered instantaneously.

It didn’t end there, even though the dog was already dead. His carcass rolled over and over longwise under the truck, bouncing and banging and slamming against the pavement and the truck’s jagged metal underbelly. Before the body came out the other end the dog’s back bashed hard against the truck’s bumper, and at an off angle, so instead of just falling on the asphalt and resting there, where it would have been pulped and pulverized by the traffic, the battered meat and bone that had been Tom the dog went flying, up from the bumper of the truck and out onto the highway’s grassy shoulder.

Where, after an hour, the ants discovered and began to consume him. By dusk, when it grew cold enough that the ants lost their taste for dog meat, a pound and a half of his flesh was gone.

³ ³ ³

When Ron actually got out and into the main building and set to work, he found that the situation was even worse than he’d expected. The day crew had left things half finished all over the place, as though the whole lot of them had got up and walked out of the building at once. Worse than what they’d left were the things they hadn’t even started — the floors, the toilets, the trash, none of it had been taken care of. And the mess wasn’t the ordinary mess he would have expected after a day’s neglect. The floors were thick with dust and grit, like the floors of an elementary school. Which probably meant that there’d been crowds of people moving through the halls earlier in the day. Reporters, likely. And police. Maybe even a few congressmen — Congressmen just loved to hassle the institute, and the news today was just the sort of thing they relished.

Every floor needed dust mopping and wet mopping and then probably dust mopping all over again. There wasn’t time for that sort of work. If he’d been a dozen people there wouldn’t have been that much time. And he wasn’t twelve — only one.

So he started the work day where he’d left off the night before, with picking up the trash. The trash, especially the contaminated trash, was the one thing that had to be done, every day. The institute produced a lot of waste, and a lot of it was the sort of waste that could fester if you didn’t look after it properly.

On his first run out to the concrete shack where he had to take the red-bag trash, he found Ralph Hernandez running the incinerator. The little shack was full and overflowing, and it was obviously necessary that someone take care of it, and soon, but it still surprised Ron to see Ralph there. It was the first time he’d seen the man doing honest work in all the time Ron had been with the institute.

Ralph didn’t look too happy about it, either. He nodded at Ron when he saw him, but he didn’t say a word, and the look on his face was so sour that Ron thought it best to just nod to the man and leave it at that. He headed back inside without either one of them saying a word.

Luke Munsen’s laboratory was next, and when Ron got there it almost looked as though Luke was waiting for him. Luke was sitting at his desk with his briefcase open, fussing over paperwork. There was a bulging suitcase beside his desk. When he heard Ron he got up and met him at the door.

“Ron — I was hoping I’d see you before I got out of here. I owe you an apology. For last night, that is.”

Ron blinked. So much had happened since he’d last seen Luke that for a moment he didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He remembered harshness, a little anger, but he couldn’t remember the conversation they’d had well enough to be sure who’d been angry at who, or what about.

“Sure, I guess. I mean, don’t worry — it’s all right.”

Luke shook his head. “No, it’s not all right. I had no business talking to you that way. You asked a legitimate and intelligent question. Not only that, but you were a lot more right to ask it than I could have imagined.”

Ron still wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about, but that last bit was too provocative for him not to follow up on. “How’s that?”

“The damned thing is alive.”

And suddenly the air around them was thick as steam.

“How’s that? What’s alive, Luke?” Ron could guess the answer.

“This damned strain I’ve got — I’d thought I had the whole problem licked. And, well, I guess I did, too. But this is too much. The damned thing is — well, damn it, the thing is alive. So goddamned alive that I can’t kill it.”

Ron nodded. “I thought you said that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Luke bit his lip. “I know I did.” He sighed. “Look,” Luke said, “here, look at this.” He reached across his desk and took a thumb-thick stoppered test tube off a shelf. Inside was a trilobite fossil, strange and grey and shiny. Ron had seen pictures of trilobites before; he knew what they looked like. That’s what Ron thought it was, anyway.

Until he saw the thing move.

“My God.” For a long moment — the time it took to gasp — he was transfixed by the miraculousness of it: a trilobite, an ancient goddamned fossil . . . and it was alive. Then in the time it took to reel in the breath he’d gasped out the consequence of the thing sunk through to him. It was dangerous, as dangerous as the dinosaurs he’d dragged out of his imagination the night before.

Especially if the germs that somehow made it alive were catching.

“Exactly,” Luke said. “We’re trying to build a strain that’ll give us good, inanimate models. Dead trilobites, not live ones. I’ve been trying to kill this damn thing all afternoon. Alcohol, formaldehyde, freezing it in liquid nitrogen. And it dies, too — for a good five minutes. That’s about how long it takes the damned bacteria to turn the poisons inert. And twenty minutes after I froze it the trilobite got up and tried to crawl off my work table.”

Ron could hear Luke running out of steam as he spoke. When he was done they just stood there for a moment, watching the trilobite try to crawl up out of the test tube. It never got very far; there was no way for its legs to find purchase on the smooth glass.

“It doesn’t work on everything,” Luke said. He reached across his desk again, took a cardboard box of fossils off the same box where he’d got the test tube. “Insects, plants, fish, no effect. You’ve seen what it does to the trilobite, but it doesn’t have much effect on other arthropods.” He shook the box. “No way of knowing yet what else it might work on, though. I sure didn’t design it for trilobites.”

Thick air — much thicker than steam, now. Thick like warm, sour coffee.

Luke nodded at the trilobite. “Burning should take care of it. If the temperatures are high enough, anyway. If it doesn’t, well — don’t think about that. Hey, what does it matter, anyway? Green’s going to blow up the world tomorrow. You heard he gave the Russians a deadline? Tomorrow, noon. Eastern Standard Time. What does it matter that the trilobites are going to conquer the world if none of us are alive to worry about it?”