Dan Simmons: Hard Freeze

The hood was gone; the engine compartment was a well of flames.

Hansen did not stop. Reaching up and over with hands of molten flesh, he grabbed the optional roof rack of the Cadillac and pulled his charred and burning legs out of the wreck, twisting free of the interior, dropping himself away from the flaming mass of metal.

His hair was on fire. His face was on fire. Hansen rolled in the deep snow, smothering the flames, screaming in agony.

He crawled on his smoking elbows farther from the wreck, rolling on his back, trying to breathe through the pain in his lungs. He could see everything clearly, not knowing that his eyelids had fused with his brow and could not be closed. Hansen held his hands in front of his face. They hurt. He saw in a surge of disbelief bordering on a weird joy that his fingers had bloated like hot dogs left too long on the charcoal grill and then burst and melted. He saw white bone against the black sky. The flames illuminated everything in a sixty-yard radius.

Hansen tried to scream for help but his lungs were two sacks of carbon.

A silhouette walked between him and the burning vehicle. A man. The dark shape knelt, leaned closer, showed a face to the flames.

"Hansen," said John Wellington Frears. "Do you hear me? Do you know who I am?"

I am not James B. Hansen , Hansen thought and tried to say, but neither his jaws nor tongue would work.

Frears looked down at the burned man. Hansen's clothes had peeled off and his skin hung in greasy folds, smoking like charred rags. The man's face showed exposed and burned muscles like cords of slick red-and-yellow rope. Hansen's scorched lips had peeled back from his teeth, so he seemed to be caught in the middle of a wild grin. The staring gray eyes could not blink. Only the thin column of Hansen's breath rising into the frigid air from the open mouth showed that he still lived.

"Can you hear me, Hansen?" said Frears. "Can you see who I am? I did this. You killed my daughter, Hansen. And I did this. Stay alive and suffer, you son of a bitch."

Frears knelt next to the charred man for several minutes. Long enough to see the pupils in the monster's eyes widen in recognition and then become fixed and dilated. Long enough to see that the only vapor rising into the cold air from Hansen now was no longer breath, but steam and smoke from the cooked flesh.

Distant sirens rose from the direction of the lighted city—the habitat, John Wellington Frears thought, of the other men, the civilized men. He rose and was ready to walk back to the Lincoln parked a block away when he saw something that looked like an animal crawling toward him through the snow of the parking lot.

Mickey Kee stood at the open window for a minute, staring down at Kurtz's body through the hole in the metal canopy and then glancing up at the vehicle burning in the distance. He was curious about the explosion, but he hadn't let it deter him from his work.

His charge from Mr. Gonzaga had been—kill Kurtz, then kill Millworth. In Mr. Gonzaga's words, "Any fucking cop crazy enough to hire me to kill somebody is too fucking crazy to be left alive." Mickey Kee had not disagreed. Mr. Gonzaga had added that he wanted Kurtz's head—literally—and Kee had brought a gunny sack on his belt to transport the trophy. Mr. G planned to give Ms. Angelina Farino a surprise present.

Kee had been mildly disappointed twenty minutes earlier when Millworth and his two sidekicks had come into the station like the Keystone Kops shuffling along in body armor. He'd followed them to Kurtz, knowing that the time was not right to take care of Millworth, that it was too risky with all of that firepower in the hands of clowns. Now this explosion. With any luck, Millworth was no longer a factor. If it hadn't been the homicide detective's pyre, then Mickey Kee would drive to Millworth's house and take care of things there. The evening was young.

Moving silently even over broken glass, Kee circled the mezzanine and went down the stairs, across the rotunda, and out the front door. Kurtz's body had not moved.

Kee slipped his Beretta out of its holster and approached carefully. Kurtz had made a mess coming through the overhang. Rebar hung down like spaghetti. Plaster and rotted wood were scattered around the body. Kurtz's right arm was visibly broken, the bone visible, and his left leg looked all twisted out of position. His left arm was pinned under his body just as he had fallen on it. There was blood soaking the snow around Kurtz's head and his eyes were wide and staring fixedly at the sky through the hole he'd made in the overhang. Snow-flakes settled on the open eyes.

Mickey Kee straddled the body and counted to twenty. No breath rising in the cold air. Kee spat down onto Kurtz's open mouth. No movement. The eyes stared past Kee into intergalactic space.

Kee grunted, slipped away the Beretta, pulled the gunny sack from his belt, and clicked open the eight-inch blade on his combat knife.

Kurtz blinked and brought his left hand up and around, squeezing the trigger of the Compact Witness.45 he'd pulled out during his fall. The bullet hit Mickey Kee under the chin, passed through his soft palate and brain, and blew the top of his skull off.

The.45 suddenly grew too heavy to hold so Kurtz dropped it. He would have liked to have closed his eyes to go away from the pain, but Kee's body was too heavy on his damaged chest to let him breathe, so he pulled the body off him with his left hand, rolled over painfully, and began crawling on his belly toward the distant flames.

John Wellington Frears drove Kurtz to the Erie County Medical Center that night. It wasn't the hospital closest to the train station, but it was the only one he knew about since he'd driven past it several times on the way to and from the Airport Sheraton. Despite the storm, or perhaps because of it, the emergency room was almost empty, so Kurtz had no fewer than eight people working on him when he was brought in. The two real doctors in the group didn't understand the injuries—severe cuts, lacerations, concussion, broken ribs, broken wrist, damage to both legs—but the well-dressed African-American gentleman who'd brought the patient in said that it had been an accident at a construction site, that his friend had fallen three stories through a skylight, and the shards of glass in Kurtz seemed to bear that story out.

Frears waited around long enough to hear that Kurtz would live, and then he and the black Lincoln disappeared back into the storm.

Arlene made it through the weather to the hospital that night, stayed until the next afternoon, and came back every day. When Kurtz regained consciousness late the next morning, she was reading the Buffalo News , and she insisted on reading parts of it aloud to him every day after that.

On that first day after the murders, Thursday, the carnage at the train station almost crowded out the news about the blizzard. "The Train Station Massacre," the papers and TV news immediately christened it. Three homicide detectives were dead, a civilian named Donald Rafferty, a petty criminal from Newark named Marco Dirazzio, and an Asian-American not yet identified. It was obvious to the press that some sort of straight-from-the-movies shoot-out between the crooks and the cops had taken place that night, probably while Captain Robert Gaines Millworth and his men were working undercover.

By that afternoon, the chief of police and the mayor of Buffalo had both vowed that this cold-blooded murder of Buffalo's finest would not go unavenged—that every resource, including the FBI, would be used to track down the killers and bring them to justice. It would, they said, be the largest manhunt in the history of Western New York. The vows were made in time to be picked up by the prime-time local and network news. Tom Brokaw said during the lead-in to the report, "A real—and deadly—game of cops-and-robbers took place in Buffalo, New York, last night, and the body count may not be finished yet." That odd prediction came true when the authorities announced late Thursday that the dead bodies of Captain Millworth's wife and son, as well as another unidentified body, had been discovered that morning at the captain's home in Tonawanda. One city alderman was quoted during the late news saying that it was inappropriate for a captain of Homicide on the Buffalo Police Department to live in Tonawanda, that city law and department policy required residence within the city limits of Buffalo for all city employees. The alderman was largely ignored.