Fire Read Free Page A

shack, where you stacked the bags neatly and in the morning Adam Leitsky burned them in the incinerator. Bonner had a couple of wastepaper baskets, too, one under his desk and another a couple of feet from the creature’s cage, but the four red bags were the part that Ron dreaded every night.
    Sometimes Ron wondered what Bonner did that could make four bags of contaminated waste every day. Wondered what was inside those bags. Not that he was dumb enough to try to find out. He hadn’t been stupid enough to open up a red bag when he worked at the hospital, where, by comparison, things were safe. He sure wasn’t going to develop unhealthy curiosities here, where there were people chopping up genes and turning them into microscopic horrors. Ron might be thirty years old and still in school, but he sure wasn’t stupid.
    The creature began to make whining sounds as Ron carried out the bags. He tried hard as he could to ignore the thing.
    He tried so hard not to see or hear the creature that his eyes caught on Bonner’s desk, and he saw that Bonner’s briefcase was still on it, half open. That meant that the man was still in the building somewhere; he never left without that briefcase. Ron didn’t want to see Bonner — tonight he was even less up to coping with him than he usually was. He grabbed the last two red-plastic bags, heaved them up, and hauled them out to the cart in the hall. That left only the two small wastepaper baskets. He grabbed new plastic liners for the cans and started to empty them.
    He was in such a hurry that he somehow managed to forget about the creature completely. He got the trash from under Bonner’s desk, stepped across the room, bent over . . .
    . . . and felt a hand touch his shoulder. He jumped six inches off the floor and only barely managed to force back a scream.
    The hand stayed with him as he jumped, following the arc of his motion lightly, carefully. Like it was a butterfly resting on the cloth of his shirt.
    The touch itself, the gentle pressure of fingerlike claws on the flesh of his back, they were only part of what scared Ron half out of his mind. There was something else there, too, something electric that ran through him from one end to the other and funneled itself toward his heart. A sensation so strange and soft that even as Ron felt it he wasn’t sure it was real.
    “No!”
    Ron heard himself shout before he even knew what he was saying. Reflexively, he caught his balance and jerked himself away from the creature’s cage. When he turned to look back he saw the creature’s hand groping toward him slowly, easily, almost the way a lover’s hand reaches out at night.
    “No,” he said. “Stop.”
    And the creature did stop, and that unnerved Ron most of all, because it meant that the thing understood him. Which meant that the caged thing was human, or that it had a mind like a human’s anyway.
    The creature drew its hand back into its cage, and it stared at him, not angry or even sullen, but not pleasant, either. The thing was too grotesquely ugly ever to look pleasant.
    (But couldn’t a dog understand that much English, too? And dogs weren’t human and they weren’t especially intelligent.
    (No. Dogs learned like that when you taught them hard for years, or months, at least, and six weeks ago the thing had been a cub no bigger than an infant child, and now it was bigger than Ron, so big that it had to crouch inside its cage. No dog could learn that fast, not while it was growing.)
    “What do you want from me?” Ron asked. The creature didn’t answer. “Do you want me to let you out of there, so you can be free? Hell, I know how you feel. I wouldn’t want to be locked inside Bonner’s office, either. But I can’t let you out of there. They’d just find you again in the time it took to scream bloody murder, and once they found you they’d fire me. And what good would that do either one of us?” The creature didn’t move a muscle, not a hair. “What are you,