Firechild (9 page)

Hardly aware of the passing time, he found himself stiff from standing, sat back in the car till his legs cramped, climbed out to walk around it, stood again, staring at that slow tide of brightness. He saw the half moon rising. He was dimly astonished to discover it again, suddenly midway to the zenith.

Now and then one of the choppers came near, flying low along the edge of the brightness, seeming to ignore him. He wondered if the crews knew any more than he did about what they were observing.

The white glow crept toward him. Never fast enough for him to see the motion, it was always closer, crawling over grass and weeds and brush, somehow crumbling them into luminous dust. Touching trees, it turned them silver, cloaked them in fleeting glory, dissolved them at last into showers of pale sparks. There was no sound he could hear, no heat he could feel, no smoke he saw rising, no odor—

Alarmed at the notion of odor, he got back into the car and rolled the windows up, but still he sat there, groping back through all he had ever learned about bioluminescence, recalling nothing that made any sense. No familiar biological process could do this. No familiar virus or bacterium, however magically mutated. Nor anything else that he could imagine.

The killer had to be something—something midway between life and fire. Slower than fire, faster than life, it seemed to consume everything organic. Perhaps only its makers had ever known what it was. They were probably dead. He doubted that anybody else would ever know. Yet, trapped by its lethal mystery, awed by a sense of implacable power in its devastating march, he kept on watching and half forgot to fear it.

It spread by contact, he decided. Metal was apparently left untouched. The spidery steel of a farm windmill stood alone where a home and a barn had shone and crumbled. Fence wire hung from thin steel posts. An old hay rake lay like a black steel skeleton against the shine of what had been a meadow.

What it consumed was organic: life or matter that had been alive. Was it something—something not quite alive yet parallel to life, using the tissues of life as fertile soil where its germs or seed or spores could root them-self and multiply into more of those luminescent germs or seed or spores? Could it—

What if the wind came up?

He reached to start the car but checked himself to roll the window down and put his hand out to test the air again. It had grown cooler. When he wet his finger, he felt a very slight movement, still from the west. Reassured at least for the moment, he closed the window and sat back to watch that creeping glow at least a little longer.

EnGene?

The need to know stronger than his alarm, he returned to that cruel riddle. Had EnGene labs really been a weapons shop? Vic a worker at its fearful forge? He shook his head, thinking of Canis. The spotted mongrel Vic had found hurt on the street and lugged home in his arms—that was back in Ohio while their father was still a country doctor; it must have been the summer Vic was seven.

He had refused to let their mother have the injured dog put to sleep. Tearfully defiant, he had built a shed for it in the backyard, nursed it to recovery, loved it while it lived, cried half the night when it was run down again. Vic couldn’t have made the killer dust. Not knowingly. Not willingly.

Would anybody? It was hard to believe that any sane scientist would allow any risk of causing such disaster. Yet—thinking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the stockpiled nukes that sane patriots had built, he had to battle a sudden flood of dread.

If the dust overtook him—

In a sudden waking nightmare, he fled from it. Those shining sparks pursued him. He ran faster, gasping, desperate. Spinning in a fire-bright tornado, the dust overtook him. He was trapped and suffocating. He was instantly blind, sobbing for breath that wouldn’t come. Overwhelmed with agony, he felt the burning film searing all his body, imagined hands and feet and all his skin crumbling into a glittering cloud that swirled away from his glowing bones.

Was this the end of all mankind?

The chill of terror clung and probed and paralyzed him, overwhelming reason. Nuclear genocide had never seemed really likely. Even if civilization fell, the human species had always seemed tough enough to somehow survive absolute extinction from the worst the nukes could do. This silent dust seemed deadlier. Already, it must have killed all who knew its secrets. It looked unstoppable.

Shaking, he bent to start the car. A glimpse of motion checked him. Something beyond that little bridge, coming down the road just ahead of that shining tide. A boy on a bicycle, pedaling desperately.

Carrying the killer?

He started the engine and waited again, delayed by a sudden hunger for human company. If the boy had taken flight in time, escaping infection, it would be a coward’s trick to leave him here alone.

Yet—

Shivering from a sudden sweat, he watched the bike go off the road. It spun into the ditch, went down into a mass of weeds that hid it. Watching, breathing harder, he couldn’t help a sense of sick relief. Now he wouldn’t have to risk a rescue.

He watched the weeds. For a time, he saw no change. He was almost convinced that the boy had brought no infection, but then the weeds again began to shine and shatter. They crumbled away, finally revealing the unharmed bike and at least the small bright skeleton flaking slowly into dust.

A chopper startled him, passing low overhead. He found the moon, suddenly almost at the zenith. An actual dawn shone pink in the east, the uneaten steel of that windmill tower stark against it. The chopper slowed above him and then drummed on, so low it raised a pale gray plume.

A plume of deadliness. Dull against the dawn, it hardly seemed to move, but he thought day might bring rising winds. It was time to go. He drove back up the road toward the motel and slowed on the curve to look across the creek. The shine of the dust had faded beneath the brighter light of day, and he was struck with a sudden hope that somehow it had been slowed or even halted.

He turned to frown at the little patch of bare gray ash around the bicycle. It was still an isolated island. It had grown no larger. He sat there, watching a line of tall sunflowers along a fence row, watching the clump of trees around a more distant farmhouse—the boy’s home, perhaps. The rising sun was suddenly higher, hot in his face—

And nothing more had been touched!

Nerved with hope, he waited. Waited through a dragging eternity, not an hour by the clock on the dash. The sunflowers tipped a little, following the sun. The trees stood unharmed, dark against an ash-white desert. He counted five of the choppers still patrolling, most of them miles away.

Reporting—what? That Task Force Watchdog had stopped the killer? That the quarantine could soon be lifted? Not very likely. Whatever they reported, the quarantine would surely be kept in force until more was known about the nature and the origin of that mysterious lethal vector.

In truth, would anything more ever be known?

Nearly too groggy to care, he drove back to the motel and parked at the door of number nine. Stiff and achy from sitting too long, he walked around to the office. The bell jingled when he went inside, but nobody came.

He turned to the vending machines. With the power off all night, the drinks would be warm. Not that he cared for Coke anyhow, unless with rum and a twist of lemon. His stomach churned when he thought of Snickers for breakfast, but he found cheese wafers and salted peanuts.

Back in number nine, he pulled off his shoes and scrubbed his hands as if for surgery before he touched his face. Sitting on the creaky bed, he washed the wafers down with tepid water out of the lavatory tap. The little bag of peanuts half open, he let it slide out of his fingers—

His own scream woke him.

He had been dreaming about that boy on the bicycle, racing the dust, swerving into the ditch. In the nightmare, however, the victim had risen out of the weeds, run desperately on toward him across the little bridge.

It had been Vic!

Vic, the age he was in the photo their mother took back on that Ohio farm, the Christmas he got his first bicycle. The picture showed him standing beside it, grinning proudly through his freckles, a front tooth missing, straw-colored hair uncombed. She’d had it enlarged, kept it hanging in her room the rest of her life. Her baby boy.

The grin had become a grimace of terror in the nightmare, and the dust was alive again, flowing fast after him, a glittering sea that overtook him, washed him with liquid fire, dissolved his clothing and his flesh into dancing sparks. He became a skeleton, still running up the road from the bridge, that gap-toothed grin grown hideous. If he came too near—

Belcraft’s own scream ended the dream.

In the first dazed moment of waking, he thought he was back in his familiar bedroom in Fort Madison. He sat up, calling Midge’s name because he needed her arms around him to drag him back to sanity. In another moment, the roar of a low chopper recalled Vic’s phone call, plunged him back into the Enbard Mo el and real-life madness.

The room had become an airless oven. Yellow sunlight blazed through the faded curtain on a west window. Hot sweat drenched him. Blinking sticky eyes, he stumbled toward the bathroom and stopped to listen at the chopper, suddenly deafening. It was over the parking lot when he looked out, so near he could read
US ARMY
lettered on its dark-mottled camouflage.

A rescue mission?

Thinking that, he ran for it. It had almost touched the baking asphalt fifty yards ahead, but it hadn’t come to rescue anybody. It didn’t land. A man in uniform leaned out, waving a gun to warn him back. A cardboard carton tumbled to the pavement. The chopper rose quickly, hammering him with searing air.

Anger flared in him, because he was no carrier—he was nearly sure of that. The dust had never touched him. He felt no hint of any invisible killer working in him. Nothing worse than an ache of hunger and the thirst bitter in his mouth. Yet, if the crewmen knew no more than he did about what the killer was, perhaps he shouldn’t blame them.

The hot tar was burning through his socks. He limped back to the room for his shoes and carried the carton into the motel office. Again, the bell brought no response. He walked around the counter to try the inside door. It was locked. He rapped and heard the quavery moaning of old Mrs. Bard:

“Jesus save us! Jesus save us! Jesus save—”

He opened the carton. A sheet of flimsy yellow paper lay at the top. Bold red letters headed a blurry block of duplicated typescript.

NOTICE!

TO PERSONS INSIDE QUARANTINE ZONE:

General Clegg is happy to announce that the emergency in Enfield appears to have been controlled. The spread of the not-yet-identified contagion is believed to have been arrested. Regrettably, however, continued uncertainties require all suspect areas to be kept under strict surveillance while investigations continue. Violators of quarantine orders are to be shot without further warning, but all possible aid will be rendered to those affected until the situation has been resolved.

(signed) Major Malcolm Forrest Acting Air Commander TASK FORCE WATCHDOG

He opened the carton. A brown bag of soggy hamburgers that set his mouth to watering. Loaves of bread. Cans of corned beef and tomato soup. Oreos and chocolate bars. A six-pack of cold Bud, which had smashed the bread when the package hit the pavement. Candles, matches, aspirin. A Kansas City newspaper with a head that caught his eye:

GENETIC CRISIS ENDING?

He skimmed the story. Washington sources were repeating earlier assurances that the reports of many thousands dead in “the Enfield incident” has been vastly exaggerated. General Adrian Clegg had deplored the incident, calling it “a moment of tragic public hysteria,” unjustified by any actual national hazard. Biological scientists were pressing urgent inquiries. Governor Bronson had deplored fresh outbreaks of irrational alarm. The quarantine would be lifted as soon as possible. The public, in the meantime, would be kept fully informed.

Grinning bleakly over the story, Belcraft divided the contents of the carton, stacking Mrs. Bard’s share on the counter. Sure she wouldn’t mind, he kept all the beer for himself. He carried his own lot back to number nine. Sitting on the doorstep, feasting on cold hamburgers and beer, he found spirit to savor the hot vitality all around him.

A musky breath of fecund growth rose out of the jungle of weeds and brush behind the motel. Cicadas were shrilling. A mockingbird in a lone cherry tree scolded an intruding jay. A bright-winged butterfly drifted past him. A dove cooed somewhere, its gentle voice almost lost in the sky-filling drum of the choppers.

Eight of them now. One in the northwest was probably dropping more food cartons. The rest cruised low over the dust where Enfield had stood. Black vultures, searching for carrion—

Not so. Not quite. He shook his head. The crewmen were brave men, no doubt, able scientists among them, risking everything to probe for that unidentified biological vector. Doomed to fail, because all who had ever known the answers had dissolved into that creeping dust.

Should he test it?

Its advance had stopped. Perhaps the danger had actually passed. He was here on the ground. He knew the basics of genetic science and epidemiology, maybe well enough. His two Peace Corps years had been spent in Zaire, working with Reinberg in tropical medicine.

Why not?

The men in the choppers had given no orders to keep him out of the dust. Energized with food and drink and at least a thin new hope, he got into the car and drove back toward the creek and the bridge and new gray desert where Enfield had been.

13

Three-Footed

Coyote

S
tanding in the shower of gravel as the deputies raced away, Pancho Torres frowned blankly after them and turned to look around him. He was alone. The empty road fell toward straggling trees and a thin shine of water at the bottom of a shallow valley. It rose again beyond, toward a lone grain elevator and the little clump of downtown towers, miles behind him now. Greasy smoke smudged the blue summer sky above them. An open field sloped up from the road toward a windmill and an isolated house. Whining away, the car went out of sight beyond it.