Burn by Bill Ransom Page B

ceiba tree. His head buzzed, and people gathered around him, one face swimming into the other. Though they handled him, Manuelito felt nothing. But he saw, very clearly, a quetzal high in the tree. It cocked its head to see him better, ruffled its iridescent wings, and swung its long tail free of the branches. It preened a moment, then cocked its head at him again.
    Manuelito heard snatches of his mother’s voice crying: Corre, Luis . . . una enfermera . . . la farmacía and, finally, la bruja.
    I must be sick, indeed, he thought. Mama never calls for the witch woman,
    Then he felt like he was floating, upward, towards the quetzal, and all around him he was lit by a blue glow, the same rich blue that spilled from the silver bottles. And then he was not.

Chapter 11
    No man can escape his destiny; and he should next
inquire how best he may live the time he has.
    —Plato

    Vice-President Carl J. Carlson smelled Death as soon as he boarded Eagle Two, and when he triggered his safety harness he felt his leather recliner become a coffin. The Vice-President smelled Death every time he flew, which, even this early in the campaign, was almost every day. Today it smelled sour, that moldy washrag sour of his childhood. His nose had its fill of Death just an hour ago, on the smoke-laden air that stuck to the remains of a Children of Eden compound in Tennessee. Death’s thick perfume clung to fire trucks, the blackened clothing of rescuers, to the breath of a glad-handing mayor.
    He might be a politician, but he was no fool.
    The fire couldn’t have been an accident, he thought. These bodies . . . somebody set them on fire and let them run.
    FBI investigators thought so, too, but the local medical examiner claimed they had not had time enough to know what they were looking at. The examiner was a big shot in the Children of Eden, and it looked like all of the dead were Gardeners, mostly Innocents.
    One hundred and twenty retarded kids, another eighty adults. Maybe twenty-five staff.
    He shook his head to try to shake the memory of the pitiful remains of those children.
    They called their compound “Revelation Ranch,” and someone had engineered a flash fire to burn them out.
    The question was, did that someone kill them all first, with something chemical or biological, and then torch them as a cover? And what’s the immediate health threat to the neighborhood?
    “Clever bit of engineering, eh?” asked Perkins, the obnoxious Toronto reporter. “Torching people without really doing too much damage to the structures?”
    “Perkins,” Carl Carlson said, “maybe up in Toronto you’re accustomed to this sort of thing. Down here when somebody kills two hundred-plus people to make a point we take it seriously. They are not ‘clever engineers,’ they’re bastards , pure and simple.”
    Perkins held up his Sidekick, its “send” light blinking.
    “You’re on record, Mr. Vice-President.”
    “Then strike ‘bastards.’ Make it ‘dickheads.’”
    The Vice-President had flown halfway across the continent twice in one morning, and now he was off again without even the chance to kiss his wife.
    “Don’t look so glum, Carl,” Mark O’Connor said. “The best is yet to come.”
    Mark O’Connor was husband to President Claudia Kay O’Connor, and “The Best Is Yet To Come!” was the Knuckleheads tune that they sang for Carl that hot night at the convention when his name went up in lights. His name shimmered across the ceiling of the convention center, under the name “Claudia Kay O’Connor.” The party had duped him into thinking he’d be their Number-One Guy, then trapped him into playing life insurance for the first woman President of the United States.
    “It was an obscene song,” he said. “We’ve been living it down ever since.”
    “That was three years ago,” Mark said. “You’ve got those going-into-the-last-round campaign jitters, that’s all.”
    He pulled an EdenSprings water from the refrigerator and