The Fireman (16 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

NOVEMBER • 7

Harper woke the night of Thanksgiving from a dream about Jakob and
Desolation’s Plough
. She smelled smoke and couldn’t figure out what was burning and then she realized it was her.

Harper wasn’t in flames, but the stripe across her throat had charred the collar of her Coldplay T-shirt, causing it to blacken and smoke. Beneath the shirt, she felt a sensation like bug spray on a scrape, only all over.

She threw aside her sheets with a cry and yanked off her shirt. The stripe marked her skin in inky lines flecked with grains of poisonous red light. The jellyfish sting intensified, made thought impossible.

The sound that went up all around her, from the other women stirring in their beds, made her think uncharitably of pigeons startled into flight: a nervous cooing. Then Allie was with her. Allie put her legs around Harper’s waist and clasped her from behind. She sang, in a soft, barely audible whisper, lips close to Harper’s ear. In the next moment Renée was beside her, holding her hand in the dark, lacing her fingers through Harper’s.

Renée said, “You’re not going to burn. No one burns here, that’s one of the rules. You want to break the rules and get us all in trouble with Carol Storey? Deep breaths, Nurse Willowes. Big deep breaths. With me, now:
Innn
. Out.
Innnn
.”

And Allie sang that old Oasis song. She sang that Harper was her Wonderwall, in a sweet, unafraid voice. She even did it in her Fireman voice, in a darling faux-snotty English accent of the sort best known as Mockney.

Harper didn’t start to cry until the Dragonscale dimmed and went out and the pain began to pass. It left behind an achy, sunburnt feeling, all through the spore.

Allie stopped singing, but went on holding her. Her bony chin rested comfortably on Harper’s shoulder. Renée rubbed her thumb over Harper’s knuckles in a loving, motherly way.

Nick Storey stood in the dark, four paces from Harper’s cot, watching her uneasily. Nick was the only boy who slept in the girls’ dorm, splitting a cot with his big sister. He clutched a slide whistle to his chest with one hand. He couldn’t hear it, but he knew he could blow through it and call the Fireman. And what good would that do? Maybe the Fireman would’ve brought a hose to douse her ashes.

“Attagirl,” Renée said. “You’re okay. All over. Could’ve been worse.”

“Could’ve been better, too,” Allie said. “You just missed a perfectly good opportunity to toast an awful Coldplay T-shirt. If I ever spontaneously combust, I hope I’m holding a whole stack of their CDs.”

Harper made sounds that might’ve been laughter or might’ve been sobs; even she wasn’t sure. Maybe a bit of both.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

8

Harper filed into the night in her singed Coldplay shirt, moving along toward the cafeteria and breakfast with all the rest of them. She walked without seeing where she was going, letting the human tide carry her along.

A dream. A dream had almost killed her. She had never imagined that going to sleep might be as dangerous as a glass of wine with Jakob over a loaded gun.

In the dream, she was enormously pregnant, so huge it was both horrible and comic. She was trying to run, but the best she could manage was a tragic, hilarious waddle. She was clutching
Desolation’s Plough
to her sore and swollen breasts and the pages were sticky with blood. There were bloody handprints all over it. She had the confused idea that she had beaten Jakob to death with it and now she had to hide the evidence.

She was running across the road to bury it, as if it were a corpse. An icy wind sheared up the highway, caught the manuscript, and dashed it to the blacktop.

Harper got down on the frozen asphalt, grabbing pages and trying to collect the manuscript there in the dark and the cold. In the logic of the dream it was necessary not to lose a single page. She had gathered up about a third when a pair of headlights snapped on, three hundred feet down the road. A two-ton Freightliner with a plow the size of an airplane wing was parked along the curb.

“Oh, you bitch,” Jakob called from behind the wheel. “Do you know how hard I worked on that? Where is your respect for literature?”

The gears ground. The Freightliner began to roll. Jakob flicked the beams to high, pinning her to the road with a blinding blue light. He accelerated, crunched up into second gear, the noise of the engine rising to a diesel scream, and the headlights were piercing her right through, the headlights were hot on her skin, the headlights were
cooking
her—

Just remembering it made her Dragonscale prickle with an unwholesome heat.

She walked with her head down, so lost in her hopeless, dismal thoughts that she was startled when someone planted a cold gentle kiss on her cheek. She looked up in time to be kissed again, on her right eyelid.

It was snowing. Great fat white flakes as big as feathers floated aimlessly down from the darkness, so soft and light, they barely seemed to be descending at all. She closed her eyes. Opened her mouth. Tasted a snowdrop.

The cafeteria was steamy and smelled of seared Spam and white gravy. Harper shuffled through a din of shouts, laughter, and clattering utensils.

The children had made paper placemats shaped like turkeys and colored them in. All the kids were working as waiters that evening, and wore Pilgrim hats made out of construction paper.

Renée steered Harper to one of the long tables and they sat down together. Ben Patchett glided in from the other side, bumping Harper’s hip with his own as he settled on the bench.

“Did you want to sit with us, Ben?” Renée asked, although he had already plopped himself down.

In the last three weeks, Ben had developed a habit of hovering. When Harper walked toward a door, it seemed like he was always there to hold it open for her. If she was limping, he slipped up against her, unasked, to put an arm around her waist and serve as her crutch. His fat, warm hands reminded her of yeasty, uncooked dough. He was harmless and he was trying to be useful and she wanted to be grateful, but instead she often found herself wearied by the sight of him.

“You okay, Harper?” Ben narrowed his eyes at her. “You look flushed. Drink something.”

“I’m fine. I already had some water and you wouldn’t believe how much I’m peeing these days.”

“I said
drink
.” He pushed a paper cup of cranberry juice at her. “Dr. Ben’s orders.”

She took the cup and drank, mostly to shut him up. She knew he was kidding, trying to have fun with her in his clumsy way, but she found herself even more irritable with him than usual. It was no problem for
him
to join the Bright. Ben Patchett always lit right up in chapel, from the first chords Carol played on the pipe organ. He was never going to wake up burning. He didn’t have to be afraid of going to sleep.

Harper’s bad dreams of being run down in the road didn’t surprise her in the least. She felt trapped in the path of oncoming headlights at least once a day, when all the rest of them sang. More and more, she dreaded entering the chapel for services. She had been in camp all month and had not been able to join the Bright, not a single time. In chapel, she was the one dead bulb on the Christmas tree. She clenched her fists in her lap throughout each day’s ceremony, a white-knuckled flier gritting her teeth through a battering stretch of turbulence.

Recently, even Ben had stopped reassuring her it was just a matter of time before she
connected,
before she
plugged in, joined up . . .
all those phrases that made it sound like a matter of getting online with some modem of the soul. When services were over, and they all filed out, Harper saw people avoiding eye contact with her. Those who did meet her gaze, did so with small, cramped, pitying smiles.

There was a stir of commotion halfway across the room as Carol helped Father Storey up onto a chair. He raised both hands for quiet, smiling down at the almost full room and blinking through his gold-rimmed bifocals.

“I—” he began, in a mumbly, muffled sort of way, and then he reached into his mouth and plucked out a white stone. His audience responded with a rumble of adoring laughter.

Someone—it sounded like Don Lewiston—shouted, “Hey, Fadder, is that what’s for dinner?
Christ,
the food in this joint is bad.”

Norma Heald glowered in the direction of whoever had been yelling, then called out, “No snacking before meals, Father.”

Father Storey smiled and said, “I thought this being the day of Thanksgiving, I should say something before we dig in. You can put your hands together if you want, or hold hands with whoever is next to you, or tune me out and listen to the wind, as it suits you.”

Throats cleared and chair legs thumped. Ben Patchett took Harper’s hand in his, his palm moist and doughy. Renée gave Harper a sidelong glance that was full of sardonic sympathy—
Look who has a boyfriend! Lucky you!
—and took the other hand.

“All of us together are a chorus of praise, saved by song and light,” Father Storey began. “We are grateful to have this chance to come together in harmony, saved by our love for each other. We have so much to be thankful for. I know I am thankful for biscuits and white gravy. It smells great. We all sing our thanks for Norma Heald, who busted her butt making this amazing Thanksgiving dinner with very limited supplies. We sing our thanks for the girls who sweated puddles assisting her in the kitchen. We sing for Renée Gilmonton, who helped the kids with their Pilgrim hats and taught them how to be an ace wait staff. We sing for John Rookwood, who isn’t here tonight, but who miraculously provided us with the cocoa and marshmallows I’m not supposed to mention, because we don’t want the kids to get excited.”

A shriek of happiness went up around the room, followed by an indulgent murmur of adult laughter. Father Storey smiled, then shut his eyes. His brow furrowed in thought.

“When we sing together, we sing for all the people who loved us but who aren’t here tonight. We sing in memory of every minute we got to have with them. I had a daughter—a beautiful, smart, funny, combative, difficult, inspiring daughter—and I couldn’t miss her any more than I do. I know other people here feel just the same about the ones they lost. I sing for what I had with my Sarah. And when we raise our voices in harmony, I feel her still. I find her spirit in the Bright. I hear
her
singing for
me,
as I sing for her.”

The wind shrilled beneath the eaves. Someone took a choked breath. Harper could feel the silence in her nerve endings, a sweet, painful throb.

Father Storey opened his wet eyes and swept a grateful, affectionate look across the room. “The rest of us, we’re still here, and it feels pretty good. One more night on Earth, with a little music and some fresh biscuits and some good conversation. That’s about all I ever wanted. I don’t know about anyone else. And now I think everyone would just about sing with joy if I’d shut up so we can get to eating.”

A cheer went up, a loud yell of pleasure, followed by applause. Don Lewiston stood. Then others were standing with him, pushing back their benches and chairs, so they could clap for the old man, who told them it was all right to still sometimes be happy, even now. As Father Storey came down out of his chair, they rose from theirs, whistling and clapping, and Harper whistled and clapped with them, glad for him. For one moment, anyway, she was not sick at heart about waking up to the smell of smoke.

They ate: greasy cubes of Spam, half drowned in gravy, on top of floury, buttery biscuits. Harper didn’t have any appetite at all and ate mechanically, and she was surprised when it was all gone and she was scraping the plate for the last of the gravy.
She
might not be hungry, but the baby was always in the mood for a little something. She looked at the half biscuit on Renée’s plate a moment too long, and the older woman smiled and used a plastic fork to shove it on to Harper’s dish.

“No,” Harper said, “Don’t. I don’t want it.”

“That would be more convincing if I didn’t see you picking crumbs off the tablecloth and eating them.”

“Oh, God,” Harper said. “I’m such a pig. It must be like sitting next to a fucking swine at the trough.”

Ben twitched and looked away. Harper was not a big one for swearing, but around him she couldn’t help herself. Ben avoided profanity like a cat avoided getting wet, said
heck
for
hell,
crap
for
shit,
and
frick
for
fuck,
a habit Harper found unpleasantly prissy. When she herself swore, it never failed to make him flinch. Sometimes, Harper thought he was more of an old lady than Norma Heald.

She supposed she had been looking to pay him back ever since he decided to play Daddy and make her drink her cranberry juice. No sooner had she done it, though, than she felt guilty. It was a lousy thing to do, set out to offend a guy who had never been anything but decent to her.

He put his fork down and stood up. Harper felt a flash of horror, wondered if she had so offended him he was about to flee. But no; he was making his own announcement, climbing up onto the bench, putting two fingers in his mouth, and blowing an ear-splitting whistle.

“
I don’t have a rock in my mouth,” Ben said, “but by the time I’m done talking, some of you will probably wish I did.” He smiled at this, but no one was quite sure whether to laugh or not, and the room remained silent except for a low, uneasy rustle of back-chatter. “The snow may be pretty, but it’s going to make our lives a whole lot harder. Up until now we’ve had the freedom to go about camp as we like and the kids have had plenty of room to run and play. I am sorry, but now all that has to change. Tonight the Lookouts will be setting out planks to create walkways between buildings. When you’re passing between buildings, you
must
stay on the planks. If a Quarantine Patrol comes through here, and they find the snow all churned up with footprints, they are going to know people are hiding here. I want the Lookouts to meet me in Monument Park after tonight’s chapel. We need to practice getting the boards up and out of sight. I want to be able to make them disappear inside of two minutes. We can do this, but it isn’t going to come easy, so expect to be out there for a while, and dress accordingly.”

This was met by groans, but Harper thought they were less than entirely heartfelt. The teenagers who had signed up to be Lookouts loved hustling in the cold, pretending they were marines on a black op. Most of them had been preparing for postapocalyptic stealth missions since they were old enough to pick up an Xbox controller.

“Father Storey mentioned that Norma Heald just about killed herself pulling together today’s meal. It wasn’t easy, given what she has to work with. Which brings me to some unfortunate news. Norma and Carol and myself spent six hours in the kitchen yesterday, going over our supplies. I won’t kid you. We’re in a corner and we’ve had to make some tough decisions. So starting on Monday next week, everyone between the ages of thirteen and sixty, who isn’t infirm or pregnant”—Ben glanced down at Harper and winked—“will draw a ticket out of a hat, just before lunch. If your ticket has an X on it we’ll ask you to skip that meal. On an average night, probably thirty people will miss out on their lunch. If you happen to lose in the hunger games”—he paused, smiling, expecting laughter. When he didn’t get any, his face darkened, and he hurried on—“you can skip drawing a ticket at the next lunch. I’m sorry. It’s simple math. This camp was outfitted with enough dry and canned goods to keep a couple hundred kids fed for a few months. We’ve had over a hundred people here since July, and more turning up every week. The barrels are low and there isn’t going to be any more anytime soon.”

No one mock-groaned this time. Instead, Harper heard nervous whispers and saw people casting worried looks back and forth. Allie, who was two tables away, turned to Michael, sitting beside her, raised a hand, and began to hiss furiously into his ear.

“Anyone who draws a losing ticket will still be offered coffee or tea, and as a thank you . . . well, Norma has discovered some sugar. A large can of it. It doesn’t even have ants in it. So if you pull a bad ticket you can also have a teaspoon of sugar for whatever you’re drinking.
One
. Teaspoon. It’s not much, but it’s something. It’s the best we can do to show our gratitude.” Ben’s voice hardened, and he went on: “On the subject of low supplies and missing meals: someone is taking cans of condensed milk. Some of the Spam has gone missing, too, and we don’t have any to spare. That has to stop. It’s not a joke. You are literally stealing food out of the mouths of children. And if someone took Emily Waterman’s big teacup yesterday, I would be grateful if you would just put it back on her bed at some point. You don’t have to explain yourself. Just do it. It’s a very, very large teacup, about the size of a soup bowl, with stars printed in the bottom. It’s her lucky cup of stars and she’s had it since she was tiny and it means a lot to her. That’s all. Thank you.”