The Fireman (11 page)

“Yeah,” she said. “So they could get laid. Are we going to drink this wine or what?”

He made the barking sound again. “You’re not even going to deny it?”

“Which part? The part about how women are stupid, or the part about how I don’t really want to kill myself with you?”

“The part where you think you can shake your ass and make me forget what I came here to do. Because it’s getting done. If nothing else, I have a moral obligation to stop you from going out in the world and infecting someone else like you infected me.”

“Thought you said the world was going to end, so what would it matter? What would it—” But she couldn’t talk anymore. Something awful was happening.

The cork wouldn’t come out of the bottle.

It was a fat cork, sealed with dribbles of wax, and she had the bottle under her arm and was pulling at the corkscrew with the other hand, but the cork wouldn’t give in the slightest, felt fixed in place.

He reached across the table with his left hand and caught the neck of the bottle and tugged it out from under her arm. His right hand continued to grip the gun.

“I told you these needed to be kept someplace dry,” he said. “The cork swells. I told you it was a mistake to just stick the reds in the cabinet.”

I told you
had to be some kind of karmic opposite to the words
I love you
. He had always found it much easier to say “I told you.” It would’ve been something to resent, if she didn’t feel all the breath go out of her. Because now Jakob had the corkscrew. She had let him take it without a struggle, without an objection, the only weapon she had.

He squeezed the bottle between his thighs, hunched and pulled. His neck reddened and cords stood out in it. Those fat blobs of wax split and the cork began to move. She looked at the gun. He still held it with his free hand—but it shifted a titch, to point more toward the bookshelf behind her.

“Get your glass,” he said. “It’s coming.”

She picked up her goblet and scootched forward, so her knees bumped his. Time began to move in small, careful increments. The cork moved another centimeter. And another. And came out with a perfect little pop. He exhaled and set the corkscrew down by his knee, where she couldn’t reach it.

“Have a taste,” he said, and spilled a trickle into her outstretched glass.

Jakob had taught her how to drink wine when they were in France, had instructed her in the subject with great enthusiasm. She stuck her nose into the cavern of the glass and inhaled, filled her nostrils with peppery fumes so strong, it was possible to imagine getting drunk off them alone. It smelled good, but instead she flinched and frowned.

“Oh, damn it, does
everything
have to be wrong?” She lifted her gaze. “It went over. It’s complete vinegar. Do we get another one? We’ve got that one from Napa. The one you said all the collectors want.”

“What? It’s not even ten years old. That doesn’t seem right. Let me see.” He bent toward her, coming halfway out of the Egg.

His eyes widened the instant before she moved. He was quick, almost quick enough to duck out of the way, but that little lean forward was all she needed.

She smashed the glass into his face. The goblet shattered with a pretty, tuneful sound, and glass fangs tore open the skin in bright red lines, carving across his cheekbone, the bridge of his nose, and his eyebrow. It looked like a tiger cub had swiped at his face.

He screamed and lifted the gun and it went off. The sound of it was a shattering slam, right next to her head.

A shelf of books behind her exploded and the air filled with a snowstorm of flying pages. Harper came to her feet, pitching herself to her left, toward the door to the bedroom. She smashed a knee against the edge of the coffee table, coming around it, registered the impact but felt no pain.

An awesome silence gathered around her, the only noise in it a high-pitched whining, the sound of a struck tuning fork. A torn sheet of paper, part of some book, floated down and caught against her chest, stuck there.

The recoil flipped the Great Egg straight back, with Jakob still in it. The bottle flew as he fell backwards, sailed across the room, and clubbed her in the shoulder. She kept going, crossed the den in three steps, and reached the door to the bedroom. The doorframe exploded to the left of her ear, throwing white chunks of wood into her hair, into her face. The sound of the gun going off was so muffled, it was like hearing a car door slam in the street. Then she was through, into the bedroom.

She snatched thoughtlessly at the sheet of paper stuck to her chest, pulled it back, stared down at it, saw a handful of words:

his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

She flung it aside, behind her, back into the den, and slammed the door after it.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

15

There was a lock on the door that she didn’t bother with. No point. It was a button lock and he’d kick right through it. She wasn’t even sure the door would stay shut, half the doorframe missing where a bullet had smashed into it.

She grabbed the wooden chair to the left of the door and flung it down, something to put in the way. Her carpetbag was at the foot of the bed, clothes stacked inside under
The Portable Mother
. She caught it by the leather handles and kept going, on to the window that looked over the backyard. She flicked the lock and shoved it up. Behind her, the chair shattered with a muffled crunch.

The hill behind the house dropped steeply, a long grade that led down to the trees. The bedroom appeared to be on the first floor, if you were looking at the house from the front. But when you came around back, it was possible to see the bedroom was really on the
second
floor: a finished, walk-in basement was beneath it. From the bedroom window, it was a fifteen-foot drop into darkness.

As she threw her legs over the sill, she looked down and saw she was pouring blood, the whole front of her white halter soaked with it. She couldn’t feel where she had been hit. She couldn’t take time to think about it. She jumped, dragging her bag. The window exploded outward behind her as Jakob put a bullet in it.

She fell and expected to hit the ground and didn’t and fell some more. Her stomach flipped inside her. Then she hit, her right foot folding under her with a breathtaking flash of pain. She thought of pianos falling in silent movies, shattering on impact, ivory keys spilling over the sidewalk like so many scattered teeth.

Harper lunged off-balance, fell forward, hit the dirt, rolled, and rolled, and rolled. She lost her grip on the carpetbag. It tumbled along with her, flinging its contents into the darkness. Her right ankle felt as if it had been shattered, but it couldn’t be shattered, because if it was, Jakob would catch her and he would kill her.

She flopped to a halt two-thirds of the way down the steep slope, the smoke-filled night sky whirling overhead. At one edge of her vision, she could see her tall, narrow house looming over her. At the other, she could see the edge of the woods, the trees half-shed of their leaves, skeletons in rags. All she wanted to do was lie there and wait for the world to stop moving.

But there wasn’t time for that. It would take him all of twenty seconds to get down the stairs into the basement and out the back door.

She pushed herself up. The ground tilted precariously beneath her, felt as unsteady as a dock floating on a turbulent lake. She wondered if some of the dizziness was blood loss, looked at her soaked blouse, at the deep red stain down the front of it, and smelled wine. He had not put a bullet in her after all. It was the honeymoon Bordeaux; she was wearing it. All of France’s wine country was nothing but ash now, which meant the stain on her blouse was probably worth a few thousand dollars on the black market. She had never worn anything so expensive.

Harper put her left hand on the ground to steady herself and planted it on some shirts and something wrapped in crinkly plastic. The slide whistle. God knew why she had packed it.

She shoved herself up and off the ground. Harper left her carpetbag and her scattered clothes and
The Portable Mother,
but she held on to the slide whistle. She took her first step toward the woods, and her right leg nearly folded underneath her. Something
grated,
and there was a flash of pain so intense, her knees buckled. She might not be shot, but she had fractured something in her ankle, there was no doubt about it.

“Harper!” Jakob screamed from up the hill behind her. “Stop running, Harper,
you bitch
!”

The fractured bone in her ankle grated again, and a flash of pain, brilliant and white, went off behind her eyes. For a moment she was running blind and close to crumpling, passing out. In action movies, people dropped out of windows all the time and it was no big deal.

As she ran, she found herself pulling at the cellophane wrap on the slide whistle. It was thoughtless, automatic action, her hands operating of their own accord.

On her next step, she put too much weight on the right foot, and the ankle folded, and she screamed weakly, couldn’t help it. A spoke of withering pain lanced straight from her ankle into her pelvis. She went down on one knee, behind some scrubby hemlocks.

She lifted the whistle and blew, pulling out the slide, so it made a shrill, out-of-place
carnival
sound in the forest. It was
loud
. That first gunshot had done something to her ears, bruised her eardrums and muffled her hearing, but the slide whistle cut right through it, loud as a bottle rocket whining away into the night.

“Harper, you bitch! My
face
! Look what you did to my face!” Jakob roared. He was closer now, almost to the woods.

Harper pushed herself up again. She staggered deeper in among the trees, holding a hand up in front of her to protect her face from branches. Every time she put weight on her right foot, it was like her ankle breaking all over again. Sweet crisp leaves crunched beneath her heels.

She was scared now, as scared as she could ever remember being in her life, and the sound of her fear was the
wheeeeeee-ooooop
of a pennywhistle, slicing through the night. She didn’t know why she was blowing it again. It would lead Jakob right to her.

She loped jaggedly off course. No, that wasn’t right; for her to wander off course, she needed to
have
a course, and she had no idea where she was going. The pennywhistle fell from her hand and she went on without looking back. She put her right foot in a soft depression, and wrenched her ankle again, and cried out softly, and fell to one knee.

“I’m coming, Harper!” Jakob yelled, and he made the barking sound of laughter. “Wait till you see what I’m going to do to
your
face!”

Harper reached out, blindly, to the right, for a tree trunk that remained stubbornly out of reach. She was in danger of falling onto her side. If that happened, she wouldn’t be able to get up. She would be lying there, curled in the fetal position, gasping for breath, when Jakob found her and began pumping bullets into her.

Leaves crackled and someone took her hand. She opened her mouth to cry out and the sound caught in her throat. She stared up into Captain America’s stoic, blank face.

“Come on,” said Cap in a girl’s voice, and she hauled Harper to her feet.

They hurried along the edge of the forest, holding hands, the bald girl showing Harper the way. Her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground, and Harper felt again what she had felt when they first met, that this wasn’t happening, this was being dreamt.

The girl led Harper to an oak that had probably been old when Kennedy was shot. There were boards nailed into the trunk, leading up into the branches, remnant of some long-forgotten tree house. Harper thought of the Lost Boys, thought of Peter Pan.

“Up,” the girl whispered. “Quick.”

“Quick-
ly,
” said the Fireman, as he came out of the bushes from Harper’s right. His face was so filthy it was nearly black, and he was wearing his big fireman’s helmet and sooty yellow coat, and the halligan swung from one hand. “Proper usage, Allie. Try not to distort my language with your horrible Americanisms.” And he grinned.

“He’s coming,” Allie said.

“I’ll send him on his way,” said the Fireman.

Jakob cursed, from somewhere close by. Harper could hear him crashing through the brush.

She climbed into the tree, using her right knee instead of her foot. It wasn’t easy, and the girl was right behind her, shoving at her ass with both hands.

“Will you
hurry up,
” Allie hissed.

“I busted my ankle,” Harper said, reaching for a wide branch above her and pulling herself onto it.

She hitched her rear to one side, sliding out across the branch to make room for the girl. They were about twelve feet off the ground and Harper could see through the leaves of the oak to the small open area below. The Fireman did not go far—just a few steps in the direction of Jakob’s crashing noises. Then he positioned himself behind a sumac and waited.

A breeze, smelling faintly of bonfires, lifted and tossed Harper’s hair. She turned her face into it—and realized she could see her house through the trees. By daylight, she would have a good view of her own back deck and the windows into the kitchen from here.

Jakob spilled from the bushes, going past the Fireman without seeing him. Jakob’s face was bleeding; the laceration below his left eye was particularly bad, a flap of skin wobbling and hanging down over his cheekbone. He had leaves in his hair and a fresh scrape on his chin. He carried the gun low, at his side, barrel pointed toward the forest floor.

“Oi!” said the Fireman. “Why are you running about with a gun? Someone could get hurt. I hope you have the safety on.”

Jakob made a sound, a little cry of surprise that was also like a sharp, indrawn breath, and turned, lifting the revolver. The Fireman brought the halligan down, that long rusty bar, with tools bristling from either end. It whistled in the air and struck the barrel of the gun with a clang. The pistol dropped and thudded to the ground and went off and the flash lit the forest.

“No, I guess not,” said the Fireman.

“Who the fuck are you?” Jakob asked. “You with Harper?”

The Fireman cocked his head to one side and seemed to consider this for a moment, his eyes puzzled. Then his face brightened, and he opened his mouth in a generous, toothy grin.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” he said and rocked back on his heels, as if this were something he had only just realized and found delightful. It came to Harper, then, that he was crazy—as crazy as Jakob. “Harper. Like Harper Lee, I imagine. I only knew her as Nurse Grayson. Harper. Wonderful name.” He cleared his throat and added, “I suppose I’m also the man telling you to sod off. These woods don’t belong to you.”

“Who the fuck do you think they belong to?” Jakob asked.

“Me,” said the Fireman. “I fucking think they fucking belong the fuck to me. I can swear too, mate. I’m English. We swear without fear. The c-word? We say that too: cunt cunt cunty cunt cuntcunt.” Without dropping the grin he said, “Go on, now. Get lost, you loudmouthed cunt.”

Jakob stared at the Fireman warily, seemed genuinely not to know what to say or what to do. Then he turned and bent over, reaching for his gun.

The Fireman lashed out with the halligan, using it like a polo stick, striking the pistol and knocking it away into the ferns. Jakob did not hesitate, but pivoted and threw himself at the thin, wiry Englishman. The Fireman lifted the halligan, bringing it up between them, but then Jakob had his hands on it, and they were wrestling over it, and Jakob was the stronger man.

Stronger, and he had better balance . . . that sense of balance that carried him across tightropes and allowed him to perch comfortably on a unicycle. He set his feet and twisted at the waist, lifting the Fireman right off the ground, swinging him half a foot through the air and slamming him into the trunk of the very oak Harper sat in.

Harper felt the force of the impact shake the tree branch beneath her, felt the whole tree shudder.

Jakob pulled the bar back a few inches and slammed the Fireman into the tree again. The Fireman grunted, and all the air shot out of him, a whistling exhalation through his nostrils.

“You motherfucker,” Jakob was saying, almost chanting. “I’ll kill you, motherfucker, I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill her, and I’ll—” His voice trailed off; he had run out of people to kill.

He slammed the Fireman into the tree again, and the Fireman’s helmet cracked loudly against the trunk. Harper flinched and caught a shout in her throat. Allie, though, had her hand on her knee, and she squeezed it.

“Watch,” she whispered. She had pulled the mask down around her neck, and Harper saw a beauty: chocolate eyes that glittered with hilarity, tomboy freckles, and delicate features that seemed even sharper and clearer because her head was shaved smooth, to better show the hollows of her temples and her fine bones. “Look at his
hand
.”

And Harper saw that the Fireman’s bare left hand was boiling with gray smoke. The left hand had let go of the halligan bar and dropped to the Fireman’s side. Harper flashed to a memory—the Fireman wrestling with Albert in the hallway off the emergency room, and trying to yank his glove off with his teeth.

Jakob pulled back on the halligan bar, meaning to drive the Fireman into the tree trunk again. But at that moment the Fireman reached over the bar and put his hand on Jakob’s throat, and fire belched from his palm.

That flame was as blue as a blowtorch. The Fireman’s hand wore a glove of radiant fire. The blaze roared like a rising wind and Jakob screamed and let go of the halligan and fell away. He screamed again, grabbing at his blackened throat. His feet got tangled and he went straight down on his ass and then he sprang up once more and ran, heaving himself blindly through the branches and brush.

The Fireman watched him go, his left hand a torch. Then he opened his filthy yellow turnout jacket, put his burning hand under it, and clapped the jacket shut, trapping his hand between the coat and his shirt.

He opened the jacket and shut it and opened it again, beating at his hand calmly—he looked rather like a child trying to use his armpit to make farts—and the third time he opened the jacket, the flame had gone out and the hand was spewing filthy black smoke. He waved the hand in the air, letting the smoke boil off it. In the distance, Harper could hear branches snapping and brush crackling, the sound of Jakob running away. In another moment the woods were quiet except for the alien chirp of night insects.

The Fireman held up his left hand, drew a deep breath, and blew away the last of the smoke. His palm was sketched with Dragonscale. Those fine, delicate black lines were ashed over now, the surface snow white, with a few sparks nested here and there, glowing faintly. The rest of the skin covering his hand was—fine. Clean and healthy and pink and impossibly unburnt.