Read Fire for Free Online Page B

had already been at work for most of an hour. It was time he finally broke down and called the morning supervisor, to let her know about the cleaning cart in the men’s room and the trash dolly in the hall outside Bonner’s office. He’d meant to be up early enough to have called them already, even though that meant being awake four hours before he usually got out of bed. But last night, when he’d reset the alarm, he’d seen 6:15 a.m. there on the glowing dial, and the thought of it had made him feel ill. He’d said the hell with it, and pressed the hour button one more time, and fallen back against his pillow.
    Now it was late enough that the morning shift had probably already found the two carts, and seen everything from last night that hadn’t gotten done. It wouldn’t do a damn bit of good for him to call, but if he didn’t do it the morning supervisor would bitch to Ralph Hernandez, and he’d have a lecture waiting for him when he got in at four o’clock. Or maybe he wouldn’t; what with the bomb scare last night, there were certainly extenuating circumstances.
    Still, I ought to call. The morning guy may not get into the bathroom until after lunch. Somebody could trip on that cart and break his neck.
    He would call, Ron decided. Soon. After his coffee, probably.
    The glass thimble on top of the percolator began to flicker brown, which meant that the coffee was ready — probably. Ron’d been using the same damned aluminum percolator for a year and a half now, and he still couldn’t get it to make the same cup of coffee twice. He got out of the chair and poured himself a cup, opened the refrigerator, got out the cream, and lightened the coffee.
    Coffee.
    He’d feel alive again soon, he knew. No matter how bad this cup was. He’d been drinking so much coffee for so long that it’d become a negative option: he didn’t feel awake at all until he’d had a cup or two, and when he didn’t make himself coffee on Saturday morning he usually spent most of the day studying and dozing off.
    He ought to call in.
    Marge King was the morning supervisor. She was a severe woman, and Ron didn’t like to have any more contact with her than he could avoid. That was at least a part of the reason he was putting off this call; Ron dreaded the idea of talking to Marge. Especially when the first thing she’d ask him would be why he hadn’t called earlier. And then she’d berate him for leaving the cleaning cart in the bathroom in the first place — he should have parked it in the closet before he went to get the trash. If he didn’t call, if he just let it go, maybe the morning guy would figure out what was going on, and maybe he’d find the carts when he needed them, and maybe there wouldn’t be any trouble at all.
    Ron sat down and stared into his coffee. Put in a couple of sugar cubes, stirred it.
    Stared at the telephone, looked away.
    Looked anyplace else at all; the walls, the kitchen window.
    And that was when his eye caught on the little comic book the old woman had given him last night. He picked it up and opened it without even thinking how it was probably the last thing in the world he wanted to be reading. Before the fact settled through to him it was already too late — the leaflet was strange and seductive and frightening just the way a horror movie is. He couldn’t have put it down any more than he could have walked out of Dracula before he had a chance to see the end.
    The comic book told about the Apocalypse, which came at the end of the world, and the Rapture, which was something that came afterward. Ron had heard about the Apocalypse more times than he wanted to think about, and the Rapture sounded familiar, too, but he wasn’t sure where he knew about it from.
    The pamphlet didn’t help too much as far as making things clearer went. It talked a lot about this Rapture a lot, but it didn’t go as far as saying exactly what it was — though it did seem like maybe Rapture was something that