Free Fire by Alan Rodgers Page B

Whatever Bonner had done, he hadn’t left behind a clue that Ron could detect.
    So Ron turned off the light, closed and locked the door behind him. Tomorrow was too soon. He’d have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday — whenever Luke got back from Washington — to talk to the people in administration; Luke deserved a chance to take a look around his office and see what harm had been done before the trouble started. Or maybe he won’t even want me to talk to them. That’d be a relief.
    The other peculiar thing that happened to Ron that Thursday night happened two hours later, when he was finally getting the last of the trash cleared away. It happened in Bonner’s lab — Ron saved Bonner’s office for last because he thought the man might still be lurking around someplace, and he wasn’t sure he could cope with him, not after seeing what he’d seen.
    Bonner’s laboratory had always made him uneasy, but this time as he unlocked its door the sensation was particularly intense. Maybe the chill on the back of his neck was there because of what he’d seen Bonner doing earlier that evening.
    Ron’s gut told him otherwise. There was something in the room . . . singing. No, not singing; there was no sound. No noise at all; his ears heard only the dead silence of the building’s empty hallways. It was an un-sound, and it wasn’t singing at all, because instead of melody and harmony it had other, stranger, qualities. Analogous but not similar at all.
    The beast, Ron thought. The Beast. It had to be Bonner’s creature that he was . . . hearing.
    Ron’s fingers lost their grip on the doorknob, and the door eased open on its own. For just an instant — just an instant as his fingers reached up to turn on the overhead lamp — Ron thought that he could see the creature in spite of the room’s darkness. Not that it glowed; the dark beyond the door was an ordinary, conventional absence of light. But for just that instant Ron thought he saw the creature plain and clear as day, watching him mournfully from across the room.
    Perhaps it was a trick of Ron’s mind. It must have been, in fact — there was no way Ron’s eyes could see anything in a room that dark, not when they were so accustomed to the bright fluorescent light in the corridors.
    But, of course, when his eyes finally finished blinking away the room’s sudden brightness, the creature was exactly as he’d seen it in the darkness. And now, inside the room, the sound that wasn’t sound or noise was clearer and more lyrical.
    It was wrong.
    Whatever was going on was wrong, and it was physically impossible, and Ron should have been scared. He should have been scared enough to turn around, bolt from that white-white room, slam the door behind him. Leave his cart behind him and run for his life.
    He would have survived that night if he had.
    He wasn’t scared. It did not, in fact, even occur to him to be afraid. What he felt was . . . almost something sexual. No, he realized, not sexual. Sexuality was more burning, more demanding an arousal. Sensual. Like a cool breeze drifting along the sweat-damp skin of his neck on a hot day. Different from that, too: intimate and intense as though there had never been such a breeze or such a day ever before in his life.
    Some small shade in his heart whispered that his life was almost over. He didn’t ignore it — he couldn’t have ignored a whisper that quietly intense — but he didn’t mind it, either. It just didn’t matter to him, in that one moment, whether or not he’d still be alive in half an hour. The moment was that powerful — that seductive and important. More important than his life.
    That was what his heart told him then, anyway. If it had still beat to speak to him three hours later, it might have told him otherwise.
    “What are you?” Ron heard himself ask, and he knew that he’d asked the question before, but he wasn’t sure if he’d asked it out loud or in a dream. The Beast looked at him, and