Read Fire for Free Online Page A

it.
    That night the body builder somehow got himself into Ron’s cell. And the man beat him. And beat him. And when he was done he raped Ron, but by then Ron wasn’t awake to know about it any more.
    He woke up in the prison hospital, with both his body and his spirit broken.
    The prison chaplain, a Catholic priest, visited Ron in the hospital, and for some reason he decided to make a special case of him — to put a special effort into trying to talk a little sense into him. And because Ron was beaten and broken, for the first time since he’d been a small boy he actually paid attention to the good advice he was getting.
    The priest gave Ron direction that he was still living by. And when he saw Ron straightening out, he’d helped him get the sort of lawyer that could get you out of any kind of trouble, and three months after he’d gone into the penitentiary he was free again, doing scut-work to keep himself fed and going to high school at night.
    It’d been long and slow uphill since then. Slow but steady: in another year he’d graduate, and it’d all begin to come together.
    He thought about Bonner, and bombs at the institute, and the nuclear missile that he could almost feel hanging somewhere up there in the sky above him. The way things were going, maybe all these years of sailing into the wind, trying to make something of himself — maybe they were all for nothing.
    Ron was lying in bed already awake and thinking about wasted effort when the radio alarm kicked in and the morning news began to come through the speaker.
    The news was even worse than he’d imagined . . . so unsettling that it made his own problems seem not very important at all. The President — the same man who’d worn that angelic smile through eighteen months of campaigning — the President had declared martial law. The Army, Navy, and the Air Force were all on some incredible kind of alert. Everyone was scared; up in New Jersey, in Newark, people were rioting in the streets.
    The Speaker of the House had called Congress into session at midnight, and they’d finally got impeachment proceedings started. It was moving along, but there was no way it was going to happen quickly. Not quickly enough, anyway. And sometime during the night the President had ordered the Marines to arrest the Speaker and a dozen other senators and congressmen.
    The Marines had ignored him.
    That, Ron thought, might just be the worst thing of all. Crazy as the President obviously was, he was necessary. Or some President was necessary, anyway. Without him the country was paralyzed. Maybe the mail could still get delivered, but what would happen, Ron wondered, if the Russians decided to bomb us right now — would the people who had to fire the missiles listen to the President any more than the Marines had?
    Ron felt himself shiver, even though the room was sweaty-warm. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to live in a world where you had to think about things like that.
    Not that he had any choice. Except maybe the choice of killing himself before the bombs had a chance to kill him, and that wasn’t any choice at all.
    He shook his head and turned off the radio, before it could tell him anything else he wasn’t awake enough to hear. The thing to do — the only thing to do — was to live through the day like it was any other day, and pray to God that things didn’t get any worse than they already were.
    He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
    A shower. It’s time to take a shower. He always took a shower first thing in the morning; it was hard to wake up without one. A shower, and then a big cup of coffee, and then maybe something to eat. Or maybe not — sometimes Ron wasn’t hungry in the morning, and cooking was more effort than Ron liked to go to when he wasn’t hungry.
    Half an hour later he was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee to percolate. It was eight o’clock, which meant that the morning shift