Fire by Alan Rodgers Read Free Book Online Page A

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