Fire by Alan Rodgers Read Free Book Online Page B

to scrounge together. But there wasn’t. Wasn’t anything he had the stomach for, anyway. The cream for his coffee. A stick of margarine. A paper sack full of leftovers, but it’d been there for weeks, or longer — long enough that Ron couldn’t quite remember what was inside it. A covered cast-aluminum pot, whose contents were as much a mystery as the bag’s. A couple of oranges with mold spots on their sides.
    It was time to go to the grocery. Time to clean out the refrigerator, too, but that was the sort of job Ron preferred not to cope with. He’d go to the store, and then, when he got back, maybe take care of the high spots in the refrigerator before he put the groceries away. Doing all of that would take at least a couple of hours, and Ron was hungry now. So he got himself dressed, got in the car, and drove to Denny’s, which was what he’d meant to do the night before.
    ³³³
    If Ron had called in to work before he’d left the apartment, he would have saved himself a nasty surprise. As it was, he didn’t even know about the newspapers until he was half-way through breakfast.
    Ron was sitting there in Denny’s — dipping his toast into the yolk of his second egg and sipping at his coffee — when he looked up and saw that the woman in front of him was reading the Herald. He didn’t like to make a habit of reading over other people’s shoulders, which was rude, but before he even realized what he was doing he was reading the headlines and seeing the photo underneath them. The Herald’s always tended to do that to Ron — they were always so lurid and so overstated that it was hard not to read them. But even though he read them compulsively, at first they didn’t even register. That was probably because he’d expected something about the President, or the Russians, or about the nuclear bombs — the same as the headlines had been yesterday.
    The Beast from Revelation
    Alive in Labs of Mountain Institute!
    Underneath the headlines was a photo of the creature that Dr. Bonner had grown in his laboratory. The photo was blurry, and so big that it took up two thirds of the width of the page. Down below the picture was a smaller headline that told about the Russians’ response to President Green. Off at the bottom corner of the page was the news about impeachment and President Green trying to get the Marines to arrest the Speaker of the House.
    My God, Ron thought, how the hell did they find out about the creature? The institute was very careful about publicity, and careful about hiring people who were likely to get in touch with the newspapers. Genetic research was important stuff, but it was also something that got a lot of people awful upset. The wrong sort of press at the wrong time could cause the institute all kinds of trouble.
    Trouble like that headline.
    He tried to stop himself from reading any farther, because it was rude and he didn’t like to do things he had to be ashamed of. And the type was so small that the story was hard to read anyway. But his heart was pounding and his ears were ringing, and he had to know, had to know right then and there. He strained his eyes until he could focus well enough to read, and read:
    MOUNTAINVILLE — A failed bombing last night at the Mountain Institute Genetic Research Facility has led this paper to a fateful and unsettling discovery — a discovery of facts which may have even more scope, consequence, and bearing than those events currently underway in Washington and Moscow.
    The discovery that the Beast of Revelation is alive and breathing inside the institute’s laboratories — not five miles from this office. Details as to exactly how the Beast came into being and exactly how it came into the institute’s hands are not yet clear. The Beast was discovered quite accidentally by a police officer during the course of an investigation into an attempted bombing at the institute. That policeman, who has asked to remain unnamed, spotted the Beast during a