Fire by Alan Rodgers Read Free Book Online

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