The Fireman (19 page)

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HarperCollins
Publishers

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

12

On the night of the first lottery to see who would eat and who wouldn’t, Harper pulled kitchen duty. Norma planted Harper just beyond the serving window, behind a folding table set with thermoses and mugs and a big rectangular tin of sugar.

“You can sweeten the coffee for the losers. One spoonful each, no more. And let ’em see that belly of yours, remind ’em what they’re skippin’ lunch for: your precious little miracle,” Norma said.

This did not make Harper feel better. It made Harper feel fat, entitled, and lonesome. Of course she wasn’t fat, not really. Yes, all right, she could no longer button the top of her jeans, a fact she hid by wearing loose hoodies. But it wasn’t like the furniture shook when she crossed the room.

Lunch was watery porridge with a side of peaches, dished out from yet another can. It fell to Nelson Heinrich to dispense the lottery tickets, and he turned up to do the job wearing one of his Christmas sweaters: dark green with gingerbread men dancing across it. He wore a Santa cap, too, an obscene touch in Harper’s opinion; as if he were handing out candy canes and not taking away meals.

The tickets were piled in a woman’s brown leather purse. The losing tickets had black
X
’s marked on them. Harper thought that purse was some kind of karmic opposite to the Sorting Hat. Instead of being sent to Slytherin or Gryffindor, you were sent off to go hungry with a cup of sweet coffee. You wouldn’t even be allowed to stay in the cafeteria with the others.

I don’t think that would be a good idea,
Ben Patchett had explained.
If we let the losers stay, folks will take pity and start sharing. Normally I’m all for share and share alike, but in this case, it would defeat the whole purpose of the lottery. There’s so little to split, if people begin dividing their portions, it’ll be like no one’s getting fed at all.

Then he said there would only be twenty-nine losing tickets in the purse. He had decided to take the thirtieth, to show he wasn’t asking anyone to do anything he wasn’t ready to do himself.

At 2:00
a.m
.—their normal lunchtime—Norma slid back the bolt on the cafeteria doors and stood aside as people began to push in, snow dusting their caps and shoulders. It was coming down again, in a fast, light, powdery flurry.

Don Lewiston was at the head of the line and he made his way up to Nelson Heinrich. Nelson blinked at him in surprise. “Don, you’re sixty-three! You don’t need to draw a ticket! I didn’t and I’m only sixty! Go on and get your peaches. I already had mine. Gosh, they were yummy!”

“I’ll draw a ticket, same as any t’others here, thank you, Nelson. I’ve never been a big eater anyway and would almost rather a cup of coffee with some sugar.”

Before Don could stick his hand in the purse, Allie slipped up alongside him and grabbed his wrist.

“Mr. Lewiston, I’m sorry, if you could just wait a minute. We’ve got a mess of Lookouts who have been out in the cold all night, sweeping off the boards between houses. Father Storey said it would be all right if they drew first,” Allie said.

She looked away from Don, down along the line, and gestured with her head. Teenagers began to shuffle toward the front.

Someone shouted: “Hey, what’s with the cutting in line? Everyone here is hoping to get some lunch.”

Allie ignored him. So did Michael, and the kids coming along behind him. Michael eased around Don Lewiston with a nod, reached into the purse—and came up with a white stone, the size of a robin’s egg.

“Huh,” he said. “Look at that. I think I drew a loser!”

He popped the stone in his mouth and walked past the line of serving windows, on to the coffee bar. There he silently poured a cup of coffee for himself and held out his ceramic mug so Harper could dump in his sugar.

Nelson Heinrich stared after him, mouth lolling open in a rather witless way. He looked down into the purse, trying to figure out where the stone had come from.

Allie began to whistle a jaunty little tune.

Gillian Neighbors drew next. Another stone.

“Just my luck!” she said happily and plopped the stone in her mouth. She walked on to Harper, poured a coffee, and waited for her sugar.

Behind her, her sister, Gail, was reaching into the purse, and this time Harper could see she already had the stone in her palm, even before she began to dig around among the tickets.

Harper wanted to laugh. She wanted to clap. She felt like a girl filled with helium, so light she might’ve come free from the floor and bumped up against the ceiling like a balloon. She ached with happiness—a fierce, bright happiness of a sort she had not felt in all the time she had been sick with Dragonscale.

She wanted to start grabbing the kids, the Lookouts, Allie’s friends, and squeezing them. And not only because of what they were doing: forgoing the lottery and simply volunteering to do without, taking it upon themselves to skip lunch so others could eat. It was just as much what Allie was
whistling,
a song Harper recognized from the first three bars: a melody so sweet she felt it might break her in two, just as a glass can be shattered by certain musical tones.

Allie was whistling “A Spoonful of Sugar,” the very best song from the very best movie ever.

Gail Neighbors drew the white stone, made a clucking sound, and walked on to get her coffee. All of the kids were doing it: Allie’s kids. All the teenage girls who had shaved their heads to look like her and all the teenage boys who had signed up for Lookout duty just to be around her.

Don Lewiston pushed back his Greek fisherman’s cap and scratched his forehead with his thumb and began to whistle himself. He nodded as each Lookout walked past to collect a stone and skip their lunch.

Father Storey was whistling, too. Harper had not seen him enter, but there he was, standing to one side of the door, smiling enormously, but blinking at tears. Aunt Carol stood beside him, her head resting on his shoulder, whistling with the rest of them, and her eyes were gold coins. Almost a dozen people were whistling the song now, the melody as lovely as the first warm perfumed breath of spring, and their eyes shone like lamps. Burning gently on the inside. Burning with song, with the Bright.

Gail Neighbors held out her mug for sugar. As Harper dumped it in, she began to sing.

“Just a spoonful of sugar,”
Harper sang, her voice thick with emotion,
“makes the medicine go down, makes the medicine go dow-own . . .”

She sang and for a moment forgot all about being pregnant, being fat, being lonely, being covered in some kind of flammable spore that was ready to ignite. She sang and forgot Jakob’s awful book and Jakob’s awful gun. She forgot the world was on fire.

A spoke of heat flashed up from the base of her spine and spread over the ribbons of Dragonscale on her skin, in a sweet, shiver-inducing rush. She swayed on her heels without being aware of it. The world possessed a new, liquid quality. She was conscious of a tidal rocking in her blood, as if she were afloat in a pool of warmth and light, as if she were an embryo herself, not the carrier of one.

The next time she poured sugar, the glittering grains seemed to fall in slow motion: a cascade of riches. Brightness cascaded along the Dragonscale around her wrists and throat, a silvery-white trill. She was a kite, filled and rising with song instead of wind. She was as warm as a kite in the sun, too, her skin blazing—not painfully, but with a flush of pleasure. Her hand wore a glove of light.

The Lookouts came and nodded to her and took their coffee or tea and went on and they all shone; they were all lit up like ghosts. She was glad for each of them, in love with each of them, although she could not remember who any of them were. She could not remember anything that had come before the song. She could not think of anything that mattered more than the melody. She did not believe that any spoonful of sugar, no matter how sweet, could be as fine as the melting sweetness running through her then.

Father Storey was the last to come up for coffee. He had drawn a stone himself, of course. He hadn’t put it in his mouth yet, was just holding it.

“There is Miss Willowes!” he cried. “Happy at last. Happy and looking well!”

“Miss . . . Willowes?” she asked, her voice as slow and dreamy as sugar spilling from a spoon. “Who’s Miss Willowes?”

“It’ll come back to you,” he promised.

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HarperCollins
Publishers

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

13

It did, too. Her name returned to her just before dawn, came back to her almost as soon as she stopped trying to remember it. Her subconscious coughed it up without any warning, in much the way it would sometimes supply her with the answer to a question in a crossword that had been stumping her.

She did not wake coughing smoke again. There were no more hot flashes burning up her T-shirts in the night. At the next chapel, Carol sat at the pipe organ to play “Spirit in the Sky,” and the congregation rose to sing. They roared and stamped like drunk sailors in a Melville story, full of grog and scaring the seagulls with their sea chanteys, and Harper bellowed with them, bellowed till her throat ached.

And they shone, all of them together, Harper, too. Her eyes blazed like lamps, her skin hummed with warmth and pleasure, her thoughts soared away from her like a kestrel rising on a hot summer updraft, and for a few weeks everything was almost all right.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

Book Three
Speak of the Devil

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

JANUARY • 1

She woke on the second day of January, not from a nightmare, but to a sensation of something shifting inside her, pushing out against the muscles of her abdomen.

Harper lay awake in the darkness, eyes open wide, her hands spread across the taut gourd of her stomach.

A bony protrusion, about the size of a thumb knuckle, pressed up from within, rising against her right palm.

“Hey, you,” she whispered.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

2

The night the locket went missing, Renée and Harper were listening to the Marlboro Man on a battery-powered radio.

“I don’t understand how you can stand that man.” Norma Heald was passing by their cots and had paused to hear what they had on. “Every word is a drop of poison in your ears.”

Renée said, “He’s the closest thing to local news left.”

“More importantly,” Harper told her, “we’re awful women and his awfulness excites us. The more awful, the better.”

“Yes,” Renée said. “That, too.”

Harper was planting kisses on squares of parchment paper, trying out various shades of lipstick. After a kiss, she would wipe her mouth clean and try another. Renée had collected different lipsticks from everyone in the basement.

When Harper made a pleasant lipstick print, she would hand it off to Renée, who would roll it around a cinnamon stick, or a fragrant piece of shriveled lemon peel, and tuck it into a little glass bottle and cork it up. These were emergency kisses. Harper was stocking the Portable Mother with them so that when her son needed a kiss, he would have plenty to choose from. The Portable Mother was no longer a book, but a package, a whole collection of potentially useful items, which had swelled to occupy Harper’s entire carpetbag.

Nick was underfoot, playing Yahtzee against himself. Dice rattled and crashed inside the plastic cup. The basement was crowded, loud with conversation, argument, laughter, creaking bedsprings, everyone trapped in close quarters while it snowed heavily outside.

On the radio, the Marlboro Man said, “You think a girl with Dragonscale can blow smoke rings with her vajayjay? Friend, I always wondered about that myself. Well, this weekend the Marlboro Man was on the loose in Portsmouth with the Seacoast Incinerators and had a chance to find out. I’ll tell you all about it in a minute, but first, here’s a story from Concord. Governor Ian Judd-Skiller said members of the National Guard were only defending themselves when they shot and killed eleven burners yesterday on the Canadian border. The mob charged the barricade with sticks—not white flags, as has been reported elsewhere—and the besieged soldiers opened fire to disperse . . .”

“He’s a murderer,” Norma said and sniffed. “That DJ you’re listening to. He’s killed people like us. And he
boasts
about it. Hemlock in your ears—that’s what he is.”

“Yes,” Renée said. “He’s very stupid, you know. That’s another reason to listen. The more we know about
him,
the less likely he’ll ever know anything about
us
. People call in with tips and this bozo airs them live. If anyone ever mentions Camp Wyndham or points him in our direction, we’ll have a head start. And even if they don’t call in, I’ve learned all kinds of things about the Cremation Crew he runs with, just by paying attention to his program. I’ve learned it’s made up of eight men and women, and that two are former military and were able to supply some heavy ordnance. A fifty-caliber something? I gather that’s a pretty big gun. I know they travel in two vehicles, a van and a big orange truck. I know they have a police scanner, and most of the time, local law enforcement is happy to—”

“Orange truck?” Harper asked. “You mean like a town truck?”

Across the room, Allie screamed, “
No, NO
,” and flipped her cot with an echoing bang.

Every head turned—except for Nick’s, of course, since he had heard nothing.

Allie kicked over a battered suitcase, dumping filthy laundry on the floor.

“Fuck!” she screamed. “Fuck! Fuck
fuck
fuck
fuck
FUCK!”

Conversations petered out. Emily Waterman, barely eleven, a girl who had outlived her entire family and who had pretty feathers of Dragonscale on the backs of her freckled arms, climbed under her cot and covered her ears.

Renée was the first to move, her round, pleasant face remaining entirely calm. Harper was two steps behind her.

Renée slowed as she approached Allie, moving toward her in much the same way she might’ve attempted to get near a feral cat. Harper sank to her knees to look under Emily Waterman’s bed.

“Emily? Everything is okay,” Harper said, reaching out for her. In a whisper, she added, “Allie is being a fusspot.”

But Emily shook her head and shrank from Harper’s hand. Harper wished she had her
Mary Poppins
lunch box, with its individually wrapped candies and emergency radish.

“Allie,” Renée said. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s gone, it’s
fucking
gone—”

“What’s gone? What did you lose?”

“I didn’t
lose
anything. My locket was under my pillow and now it isn’t because one of you
bitches
took it.” She glared around the basement.

Emily made a thin squeal of terror and turned her face from Harper’s outstretched hand. Harper considered trying to pull her out for a hug, decided that might be too alarming, and settled for reaching under to stroke her back.

Renée said, “Allie, I know you’re upset, but you need to lower your voice—”

“I don’t need to do shit.”

“—because you’re frightening the little ones. Why don’t you ask Nick—”

“I asked him, don’t you think I
asked
him when I started
looking
for it, fifteen minutes ago?”

A tendril of pale smoke trickled from under one pant leg of Emily Waterman’s baggy overalls.

“Allie!” Harper said. “Stop it. You’re giving Emily the smokes!”

“Please, Allie,” Renée said, putting a hand on Allie’s shoulder. “We’ve all been under so much pressure, you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t sometimes want to scream. But if you’ll sit down with me—”

“Will you stop
touching
me?” Allie cried. She shrugged off Renée’s hand. “You don’t know anything about me. You aren’t my mother. My mother
burned
to death. You are
no
one to me. You are not my mother and you are not my friend. You’re a
pain
vulture who circles around and around, looking for someone to feed off. That’s why you spend all your free time reading to the kids. You love their wounded little hearts. You feed off their loneliness just like a vampire. You love kids with no parents, because they
need
someone. It’s easy to read them a story to make yourself feel special. But you aren’t special. Stop feeding off us all.”

A stunned silence fell upon the basement.

Harper wanted to say something but had lost the trick of speech. She was not sure if she had been silenced by her horror—she had never imagined Allie, who was so daring, so clever, so beautiful, and so funny, could be so cruel—or by a crippling wave of déjà vu
.
For when Allie insisted altruism was really selfishness, and kindness a form of manipulation, she sounded just like Jakob. She had all his savage powers of logic. It made a person feel naive and childish for imagining there could be any good in the world at all.

For herself, Renée had lifted an arm to protect her face, as if she expected to be struck. She studied Allie with a mute, wounded fascination.

The room was still waiting for her to reply—to defend herself—when Nick charged across the basement, inserting himself between Allie and Renée. He held up his Yahtzee scorecard, turned over to the back, where he had written:

two yahtzees in a row!!

Allie stared at this message with blank incomprehension. Then she took the sheet of paper from his hands, balled it up, and threw it in his face. It bounced off his forehead and onto the floor.

Nick staggered backward, as if he had been shoved. His shoulder thumped into Renée’s breast. Harper did not think she had ever seen so much naked hurt in a face before.

He ran. Before anyone could catch him, he flew to the stairs. He hesitated at the bottom of the steps for one last look at his older sister, and for a moment he fixed her with a glare of contempt as fierce as anything Allie herself could produce. Like their elfin good looks, a gift for hate was, perhaps, something that ran in the family.

Harper called his name, called for him to wait. But of course Nick didn’t—
couldn’t
—hear her. Harper rose to go after him, but he had already dashed up the stairs, banged through the door at the top, and launched himself into the falling snow.

She turned a frustrated look upon Allie.

“What?
What?
You got something to say, Nurse Nobody?” Allie asked her.

“Yes,” Harper said, summoning up all the Julie Andrews she had in her heart. “A
bad
show, Allie. A very bad show. He also lost his mother, you know, and you are
all
he has left. For shame. After he threw two Yahtzees!”

Allie’s response to this shocked Harper more than anything else. Her face crumpled and she began to sob. She sat down hard, with her back against the springs of her overturned bed.

At this sudden display of defeat, the Neighbors twins, Jamie Close, and all the other members of Allie’s unofficial, unnamed sorority—that society of orphan girls with shaved heads—flocked to her side. Even Emily Waterman scuttled out from under her cot and ran over to throw her arms around Allie’s neck. Girls took her hands and sat beside her, whispering soothingly and fussing over her. Gail Neighbors began to quietly pick up her things. One entering the room would’ve imagined Allie was the person who had just been bullied and humiliated, not Renée or Nick.

Harper returned to her cot, which was at a right angle to Renée’s. Renée was already sitting on the edge of her mattress by then, looking as worn and disheartened as Harper felt.

“Should one of us go after Nick?” Renée asked.

“I don’t think so. He won’t go far in this snow. The Lookouts will yell if he so much as steps off the planks. One of them will bring him back eventually.”

The Marlboro Man was still chattering, saying something about a woman who had smelled like a wet cat when she burned. He seemed offended that she had the bad grace to stink when she died. Talk radio was enough to make Harper think the end of the world wasn’t so bad after all.

“I can’t take anymore,” Renée said, and Harper thought she was speaking of life in the camp, but she only meant the DJ. Renée reached out and, with an irritated flick, switched the radio to AM and began to skip through bands of static.

Harper said, “What are you doing? Why are people in this camp always listening to static? What are all of you listening
for
?”

“Martha Quinn,” Renée said.

“Martha
Quinn
? Martha Quinn, who used to be on MTV a thousand years ago?”

“She’s out there . . . somewhere.”

“Lies,” Norma Heald murmured. “All lies. That’s a pipe dream.”

Renée ignored her. “You know what the kids say.”

“I have
no
idea what the kids say. What do they say?”

“She came back from the eighties to save mankind. Martha Quinn is our only hope.”