Firechild (13 page)

Strange fire, because it ceased to smoke. No smoke was left to dim the late moon’s yellow curve when it rose beyond the town, yet still the fire burned on. Like a white sea rising, it reached and drowned those closer shapes. Slowly crawling, it seemed to burn everything. Trees and houses, fields of corn and grass. The highway cut a black slash across the glowing white. Before dawn, it had crept almost to the bridge where that wrecked car had burned.

He saw motion. Animals running. The cattle he had seen, grazing so peacefully then. Bellowing, at first far away, they came racing out of that slow bright tide, down toward the stream he had crossed. At first they were black silhouettes against the brightness, but in a moment it had washed them. The bellowing died away. One by one, they staggered and went down into the grass. Shining, their bodies flattened and dissolved. New fire spread from where they had fallen.

Shivering, even in the warm and windless dawn, he knew he had to run, even if he didn’t care. But not quite yet. The strangeness of it held him. The eastern dawn had already grown brighter than the fire, but still he saw no smoke. He felt no heat. No common fire had ever burned so strangely.

Even if it had come to burn the whole world for too many centuries of sin, he wanted to avoid it as long as he could. Stiff from lying too still too long on the splintery boards, he stood up to go. Looking again, however, while he flexed his achy joints, he thought its deadly march had stopped. Had sunlight somehow quenched it?

He lay back on the platform to keep on watching.

It had come almost to the stream. Its edge was a sharp-drawn line. Closer to him, grass and weeds still grew green. A red pony grazed, unalarmed. Beyond the line, gray ashes spread as far as he could see. Only a few scattered objects had somehow escaped, a row of steel towers that carried power wires, the grain elevator, the downtown buildings where that man on TV had taken refuge.

He lay a long time there. Unharmed flies came to buzz around him. The ashes shimmered under the driving sun, smokeless and dead. No wind stirred them. He watched the red pony. Grazing to their edge, it trotted on into a wide gray tongue of ashes, lay down to roll in them, stood and shook off its own small gray cloud and ambled on down to the creek. Waiting for it to shine and die, he saw no sign of harm. The pony drank and grazed back along that line of death.

His feeling of danger fading, he fell half asleep. A drumming engine roused him. Another military chopper, cruising low, men with binoculars scanning the ashes. A hazard he could understand. Motionless till it had passed, he wanted a place to hide.

The old wooden water tank standing by the tower— it was big enough to hold him, high enough on its own platform to let him watch in all directions. He peered inside, where broken staves had opened a window, and decided it would do.

Back in the abandoned house, he found blankets in a closet, gathered up the rest of the bread and ham and beer. Searching the empty garage, he found a flashlight and a camper’s ax. He erased the marks of his presence as best he could, washing and replacing the few dishes he had used. He locked the door again, climbed to the tank with his loot, and used the ax to break out a larger door.

The old tank was a wooden oven, even hotter than the jail cell he had escaped. Yet he stayed there, climbing now and then on a stack of broken staves to look out through the manhole, sleeping when he couldn’t stay awake. The whole sky soon throbbed with choppers, flying low outside the dust, a little higher where it lay. Twice one of them came to hover near the house, the crewmen shouting through a bullhorn. They didn’t touch the perilous land.

Darkness fell. Waiting till no engines were near, he went back to the house. The power was off, the refrigerator stopped, the TV dead. Wondering how Marty Marks had fared, he ate and drank by flashlight, washed dishes till the water quit running, and returned to the tank.

That night he watched and napped and watched again. The black sky roared with engines. The land lay black below them, no fire burning anywhere. Now and then he slept, dreaming that he was coming home to San Rosario, where he thought there would be no electric chair and his mother would call him
un hombre
and this strange fire could never burn. He woke to weary bitterness. His mother was dead, and he would never be seven again.

The next day was even hotter. Sweating in the tank, he was afraid to leave it. Choppers filled the blazing sky, flying slower and lower than ever. He saw the glint of searching lenses. Late in the airless afternoon, he watched a military jeep that came cautiously toward the town. It stopped on the hill while men climbed out to set up a tripod, perhaps to take photos. They stopped again before they reached the ashes, went fast when they left.

He climbed out of his stifling prison to watch them out of sight. Tired of hiding, he was halfway sorry that he hadn’t been discovered. Fear of the law and the chair, fear of that strange fire, fear of all he didn’t understand—he had feared too much, endured too long. In the end, unless that cold and deadly fire overtook him first, they surely would find him.

When they did, he would tell the best tale he could invent. If jailors enough were dead, and legal records burned, perhaps they would believe him. Perhaps—but he couldn’t really care. His luck was lost. Live gringos were no better than their poison ashes, and nothing would ever matter again.

No le hace nada.

He clambered back down the ladder. In spite of all the gringo choppers, he had to stretch his legs. He started walking down toward the stream. His cramped muscles rejoiced to action, and something changed his bitter mood. Whatever evil things were coming, the air had grown a little cooler. Low in the darkening west, a delicate feather of cloud turned to glowing gold. He caught the sweetness of a honeysuckle climbing the white picket fence.

He came down to the stream and stopped on a grassy bank. The water ran clear, pebbles shining through it. He scrambled down the bank, stooped to wash his grimy hands. It felt cool and good. He dropped on his belly to wash the sticky sweat off his face. Something pink and quick flashed toward him through the ripples. It jumped out to kiss his chin.

Una
culebra!

A water snake, striking at his face. His mother had taught him to dread
las culebras de cascabel,
the rattlesnakes that made their winter dens in the rocky slopes above San Rosario. He sprang back from the water and stood trembling with that old fear until he heard a thin little cry from the edge of the water. An odd, anxious sound, almost like the peep of a hungry baby chick.

Snakes didn’t speak. He bent to look and saw the pink thing coming out of the water. No snake and no
pollita,
it crawled on four tiny limbs, like
una salamandra.
It stopped at his feet, looking up at him with bright black eyes.

He had whistled in astonishment. Now he saw its minute mouth pucker daintily. Its tiny whistle echoed his own. No longer afraid, he suddenly wanted to help it. He put his hand down to the sand beside it. With a grateful little whine, it squirmed into his palm.

“Qué es?”

It lifted a pink doll-face and squeaked eagerly again, as if trying to tell him what it was. Certainly no
salamandra.
Its skin was too rosy, the tiny features so much like a human baby’s that he flinched from a fleeting recollection of the gringo women he had known, those carefully elegant
putas
who took his money and scolded him for mussing their hair and laughed if he ever spoke of his old dreams of marriage and
ninos.

“Quién sabe?”
he murmured to it.
“La pobre pendeja!
Poor little pink thing! Who knows what you are?
Tiene
hambre?”
The gentle Spanish seemed to fit it better than the rough gringo words. “If you’re hungry, let’s look for supper.”

17

“Nothing on

Earth”

B
elcraft stood that morning at the door of number nine, watching the pink thing drop off the steps and creep along the side of the building. It paused at the corner. The featureless head rose and twisted as if to look back at the roaring chopper and then at him. In another moment it was gone, toward the rank jungle of weeds and underbrush between the motel and the creek.

He stepped outside and waved to the crew, hoping to hold their eyes until the little fugitive was safely out of sight. Nobody answered his gesture, but the machine slid lower and he saw a man in dull-spotted camouflage aiming a big camera at him, perhaps to take back proof that he still survived his excursion into the dust.

He waited in the hot engine reek until the chopper lifted. Back in the room, he stripped off the clothing he had worn all night, showered in tepid water, dressed again. Eating an orange out of that gift carton, he tried the TV.

Channel Five was still dead. A worried anchorman on another network was rehashing stale reports of the Enfield incident. Official Washington, he told his viewers, was repeating assurances that all evident hazards to the public health had been safely contained. The network news staff would be standing by to cover anything—

A rap on the door. He opened it to find Lieutenant Dusek backing uneasily away. The muddy National Guard jeep was parked on the lot behind him.

“Dr. Belcraft?” Dusek’s haggard eyes swept him. “You still okay?”

“So far as I can tell.”

“Dr. Kalenka.” He nodded at another man waiting in the jeep. “A civilian scientist with the task force. He wants the creature you brought out of the ruins.”

“He’ll have to find it.”

“What?” An angry yelp. “What happened to it?”

“It came to me.” He shrugged. “It went away.”

“You let that monster go? Do you realize—” Dusek checked that heated question. He stood silent for a moment, looking sick, his stubbled face twitching. “Doctor, can’t you imagine how it felt to die in Enfield?”

“I’ve tried.”

“Then why in God’s name—” His voice quivered, and he stopped to control it. “Doctor, I grew up there. My father had split. Mom brought me up—teaching fifth grade and playing the organ for the Methodist Church. She was going to retire next year. Saving for a world cruise she never got to make.”

His lips quivered. “Doctor, that town was my life. I played Little League and rode a paper route and went to high school and dated a girl I was hoping to marry, if—if—” Fists suddenly clenched, he was sobbing. “Dead! They’re all dead. Carol and Mom and all the kids I grew up with.” His voice turned savage with accusation. “And you—you let that monster go!”

“My brother died in Enfield,” Belcraft said, his own voice uneven. “But please don’t blame that little creature. It wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

“You were told—” Dusek caught himself and stalked away to speak to the man in the jeep. “Come out here.”

He turned to beckon. “Dr. Kalenka wants to talk to you. Out here in the open.”

He went out to the jeep. Kalenka was a compact man in mud-spattered khaki. He wore a flat brown cap and a short black mustache. Anxious brown eyes scowled out of a firm brown face.

“Near enough!” He raised a nervous hand. “Your name’s Belcraft?”

He nodded.

“Related to Victor Belcraft?”

“My brother.”

“What do you know about his work at EnGene?”

“Nothing, really. We haven’t been together since medical school. We never really had a falling out. Just lost touch because we lived and worked so far apart. I think he was totally absorbed in his research. Which he never told me anything about.”

“Huh?” A skeptical grunt. “So what are you doing here?”

“The night before—before whatever happened—Vic called me back in Iowa.”

“So?” Kalenka looked at Dusek and squinted back at him. “What did he say?”

“Just enough to puzzle me. Nothing at all about his work. He spoke about our boyhood in Ohio. He seemed emotional, more I think than he had ever been. His tone left me troubled, though he seemed more elated than depressed. Next day I drove down here. Afraid of something wrong. I guess something was.”

“Plenty wrong.” A grim little nod. “You’ve been into the contamined area? In defiance of military orders?”

“I drove out into the ashes.”

“I understand you brought an animal back?”

“A little creature I found crawling from what’s left of the EnGene lab.”

“What have you done with it?”

“Nothing. It stayed with me last night. This morning it wanted to go. I opened the door and it crawled away.”

“Your blunder.” Kalenka nodded at Dusek, who moved alertly nearer. “Where did it go?”

He nodded at the weeds where it had vanished.

“We’ll run it down.”

“It’s afraid of you. It may be hard to find.”

“Huh?” Kalenka scowled. “What’s it like?”

“Worm-shaped. Pink. Looks a little like a raw hot dog. No limbs or visible external sense organs, though a mouth did open in its head. It seemed friendly. Intelligent.”

“Intelligent? Something perhaps totally new to science—and you simply let it go?” A scorching accusation. “Why?”

“I don’t—don’t know.” He shook his head, blinking at Kalenka. “My brother used to dream of testing the limits of life. He talked of engineering a new sort of life or para-life, different from and better than anything nature had ever evolved.”

“Better?” Kalenka snorted. “Good enough to kill a city? Maybe all mankind?”

“No!” Almost a shout. “You haven’t seen it. You haven’t felt—” He had to grope for words. “It’s somehow childlike. Trusting. It can’t have been the killer. I’ve been wondering if it actually is the new sort of life Vic hoped to engineer. It’s certainly different, certainly surprising. I don’t really understand it, or the way it affected me. I like it. I want to help it. I don’t expect you to understand, but I can’t feel sorry I let it go.”

A hostile glare. “It had you hypnotized?”

“No—” He caught himself uneasily. “Perhaps I was.” He frowned into the weeds. “I don’t know what to think. The little being seems really unique. Kin, so far as I can see, to nothing else on Earth. Perhaps nothing else that ever existed. I can’t imagine what it could grow to be, but I’d give nearly anything to know—and I hope it does survive!”