Fire Read Free

the pathetic thing to stand up in. Just like it was nothing but some poor, dumb beast.
    Which, maybe, was all that the thing was. Ron didn’t have any proof that it was intelligent, just a deep twinge in his gut. But his heart didn’t look at the thing like it was an animal, not for an instant. He’d never been able to go into Bonner’s lab without feeling frightened and sick with himself from the guilt of not setting the creature loose.
    He found the trash cart in its corner downstairs in the basement, and rolled it back to the elevator. When he got to Bonner’s laboratory he parked it against the wall a few feet from the door.
    He knocked on the door before he went inside. Bonner wasn’t the sort of person you wanted to walk in on and surprise. He wasn’t the sort of person you wanted to see at all, for that matter. Ron wasn’t sure whether he was less eager to be in that room with the . . . thing while Bonner was there or while he wasn’t. The creature was unsettling and physically repugnant, but there was something malignant about Bonner.
    Ron waited three minutes after he knocked — which was more than was sensible, but not as long as he’d have liked to wait — but no one answered. So, finally, he took the big ring of keys off his belt and opened the door.
    The creature was waiting for him inside, quiet and pensive as though it knew Ron was coming. Maybe it did; Ron almost always cleared out Bonner’s trash this time of night.
    The creature was a physical abomination, pure and simple. Three heads, and seven other knotlike protrusions coming up out of its shoulders — those looked like they were trying to be heads, too, but couldn’t quite make the grade. Those heads were vaguely reptilian, and for all that there were so many of them only the one in the center looked to be alive. The heads had mouths like lion maws, and most of them had horns. Sometimes one, sometimes two; ten horns in all. More than anything else, the creature was like a massive, grey-pelted leopard. Not that much like one, maybe. Those lower legs, those feet, they were the clawed and padded feet of a bear. And it had hands, too — but more like the hands of a monkey than they were like a man’s.
    One of the slack-dead heads had a wide, grisly scar on its neck, just below its jaw. A scar from a wound that ought to have killed any creature, let alone one so horribly misformed.
    Ron tried not to look the thing in the eye, but he couldn’t stop himself. What are you? The question rose to the top of his mind all by itself.
    The creature didn’t answer, but its real head, the only one with eyes that ever opened, shifted, almost as though it had heard Ron ask.
    It stared at Ron.
    He shuddered, and he wondered — just as he did every night when he went to Bonner’s laboratory — why he didn’t find himself another job. Something simple and straightforward, something that didn’t try to take away a piece of his heart. Something that would let him finish up those last few college classes, so he could have a real future.
    Ron frowned. He was kidding himself, and he knew it. Almost every job wanted to carve out a piece of you, even cleaning jobs. Either it took that piece from you directly, by working you too hard or through conditions that went against your nature — or it took from you by circumstance, because of the people you had to work with.
    The business with Bonner and the creature was some of both. Ron liked to tell himself that it was the only part of the job that caused him any grief, and all things considered it wasn’t much. When he wasn’t in Bonner’s office, he almost believed it.
    The worst part of Bonner’s trash was all tied up and waiting for him, four neatly packaged red plastic bags. Red because the trash was contaminated waste, dangerous and infected with God knew what. The contaminated stuff Ron had to treat specially; it didn’t go in the dumpster with everything else. It went out to a small, sturdy concrete