The Fireman (2 page)

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Book One
Carrying

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APRIL • 1

She did not leave the school until an hour after the last child had gone home, but for all that she was departing early. Most school days she was required to stay until five, for the fifty or so children who hung around for extended hours while their parents worked. Today, everyone was gone by three.

After she shut off the lights in the nurse’s office, she stood at the window and looked out into the playground. There was a black spot by the jungle gym where the fire department had hosed away the charred bits that couldn’t be scraped up. She had a premonition she would never return to her office and look out this window again, and she was right. School was suspended statewide that evening, with assurances they would reopen when the crisis passed. As it happened, it never passed.

Harper imagined she would have the house to herself, but when she got home, Jakob was already there. He had the TV on, turned low, and was on the phone with someone. From his tone—calm, steady, almost lazy—a person would never guess Jakob was in a state of excitement. You had to see him pacing to know he was keyed up.

“No, I didn’t see it myself. Johnny Deepenau was down there in one of the town trucks, pushing the debris out of the road, and he sent us pictures from his cell phone. It looked like a bomb went off inside. It looked like terrorism, like . . . hang on. Harp just walked in.” Her husband lowered the phone, pressed it to his chest, and said, “You came home the back way, didn’t you? I know you didn’t come through downtown. They’ve got the roads all sewed up from North Church to the library. The whole town is crawling with cops and National Guard. A bus exploded into flames and crashed into a telephone pole. It was full of Chinese people infected with that shit, the Dragonscale shit.” He let out a long, unsteady breath and shook his head—as if it shocked him, the nerve of some people, igniting in the middle of Portsmouth on such a nice day—and turned from her, put the phone back to his ear. “She’s fine. Didn’t know a thing about it. She’s home and we’re going to have a good old shouting match if she thinks I’m letting her go back to work anytime soon.”

Harper sat on the edge of the couch and looked at the TV. It was tuned to the local news. They were showing footage from last night’s Celtic game, just like nothing was happening. Isaiah Thomas rose up on his toes, fell backward, and let go of the basketball, hit a shot from nearly half court. They didn’t know it then, but by the end of the following week, the basketball season would be over. Come summer, most of the Celtics would be dead, by incineration or suicide.

Jakob paced in his rope sandals.

“What? No. No one got off,” he said into the phone. “And it may sound harsh, but there’s a part of me that’s glad. No one to pass it on.” He listened for a bit and then, unexpectedly, laughed and said, “Who ordered the flaming pupu platter, right?”

His pacing had taken him all the way across the room to the bookshelf, where there was nothing to do but circle around and come back. As he turned, his gaze drifted to Harper again and this time he saw something that stiffened his back.

“Hey, babygirl, are you all right?” he asked her.

She stared at him. She couldn’t think how to reply. It was a curiously difficult question, one that required a certain amount of introspection.

“Hey, Danny? I have to go. I want to sit with Harper for a minute. You did the right thing, going to pick up your kids.” He paused, then added, “Yes, all right. I’ll send you and Claudia the pictures, but you didn’t get them from me. Love to you both.”

He ended the call, lowered the phone, and looked at her. “What’s wrong? Why are you home?”

“There was a man behind the school,” Harper said, and then a wedge of something—an emotion like a physical mass—stuck in her throat.

He sat down with her and put a hand on her back.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

The pressure on her windpipe relaxed and she found her voice, was able to start again. “He was in the playground, staggering around like a drunk. Then he fell down and caught fire. He burned up like he was made of straw. Half the kids in school saw it. You can see into the playground from almost every classroom. I’ve been treating kids in shock all afternoon.”

“You should’ve told me. You should’ve made me get off the phone.”

She turned to him and rested her head on his chest while he held her, his ropy arms on her shoulders.

“At one point I had forty kids in the gym, and a few teachers, and the principal, and some were crying, and some were shivering, and some were throwing up, and I felt like doing all three at the same time.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I passed out juice boxes. Cutting-edge medical treatment, right there.”

“You did what you could,” he said. “You got who knows how many kids through the most awful thing they’ll ever see in their lives. You know that, don’t you? They’re going to remember the way you looked after them the rest of their lives. And you did it and now it’s behind you and you’re here with me.”

For a while she was quiet and motionless inside the circle of his arms, inhaling his particular odor of sandalwood cologne and coffee.

“When did it happen?” He let go of her, regarded her steadily with his almond-colored eyes.

“First period.”

“It’s going on three. Did you eat lunch?”

“Uhn-uh.”

“Light-headed?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Let’s get some food into you. I don’t know what’s in the fridge. I can order us something, maybe.”

Who ordered the flaming pupu platter,
Harper thought, and the room tilted like the deck of a ship. She steadied herself on the back of the couch.

“Maybe just some water,” she said.

“How about wine?”

“Even better.”

He got up and crossed to the little six-bottle wine cooler on the shelf. As he looked at one bottle, then another—what kind of wine did you pair with a fatal contagion?—he said, “I thought this stuff was only in countries where the pollution is so thick you can’t breathe the air and the rivers are open sewers. China. Russia. The Former Communist Republic of Turdistan.”

“Rachel Maddow said there’s almost a hundred cases in Detroit. She was talking about it last night.”

“That’s what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit.” A cork popped. “I don’t understand why someone carrying it would get on a bus. Or a plane.”

“Maybe they were afraid of being quarantined. The idea of being kept from your loved ones is scarier than the sickness for a lot of people. No one wants to die alone.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Why die alone when you can have company? Nothing says ‘I love you’ like passing along a horrible fucking fatal infection to your nearest and dearest.” He brought her a glass of golden wine, like a cup of distilled sunshine. “If I had it I’d rather die than give it to you. Than put you at risk. I think it would actually be easier to end my own life, knowing I was doing it to keep other people safe. I can’t imagine anything more irresponsible than going around with something like that.” He gave her the glass, stroking one of her fingers as he passed it to her. He had a kind touch, a
knowing
touch; it was the best thing about him, his intuitive feel for just when to push a strand of her hair behind her ear, or smooth the fine down on the nape of her neck. “How easy is it to catch this stuff? It’s transmitted like athlete’s foot, isn’t it? As long as you wash your hands and don’t walk around the gym in bare feet, you’re fine? Hey.
Hey
. You didn’t go close to the dead guy, did you?”

“No.” Harper did not bother to stick her nose in the glass and inhale the French bouquet as Jakob had taught her, when she was twenty-three and freshly laid and more drunk on him than she would ever be on wine. She polished off her sauvignon blanc in two swallows.

He sank down next to her with a sigh and shut his eyes. “Good. That’s good. You have a horrible need to look after people, Harper, which is fine in ordinary circumstances, but in some situations a girl has to look after—”

But she wasn’t listening. She had frozen, leaning forward to set her wineglass on the coffee table. On the TV, the program had cut away from hockey highlights to an old man in a gray suit, a newscaster with shy blue eyes behind his bifocals. The banner across the bottom of the screen said
breaking news space needle on fire
.

“—going to Seattle,” the anchor said. “Be warned, the footage is very graphic and upsetting. If there are children in the room they should not look.”

Before he was done talking NECN cut to helicopter footage of the Needle, reaching up to jab at a bright, cold, blue sky. Black smoke filled the interior and boiled from the windows, so much that it obscured many of the other helicopters circling the scene.

“Oh my God,” Jakob said.

A man in a white shirt and black pants leapt from one of the open windows. His hair was on fire. His arms pinwheeled as he dropped out of frame. He was followed seconds later by a woman in a dark skirt. When she jumped, she clasped her hands to her thighs, as if to keep her skirt from flapping up and showing her underwear.

Jakob took Harper’s hand. She threaded her fingers through his and squeezed.

“What the fuck is happening, Harper?” he asked. “What the fuck
is
this?”

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MAY–JUNE • 2

FOX said the Dragon had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated the ’scale might’ve been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides.

All throughout May and June, there were roundtable discussions on every channel, in between live reports from places that were in flames.

Then Glenn Beck burned to death on his Internet program, right in front of his chalkboard, burned so hot his glasses fused to his face, and after that most of the news was less about who did it and more about how not to catch it.

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JULY • 3

There was a fireman causing trouble.

“Sir,” said Nurse Lean. “Sir, you can’t cut the line. You’ll have your free examination when it’s your turn.”

The Fireman glanced over his shoulder at the line that stretched down the hall and around the corner. Then he looked back. His face was filthy and he wore the same yellow rubber jacket all the firemen wore and he had a child in his arms, a boy, hugging him around the neck.

“I’m not checking in. I’m dropping off,” he said, and his accent made people look. You didn’t expect a New Hampshire fireman to sound like he was from London. “And it’s not about what they’re here for. This isn’t about the mold. My boy needs to see a doctor. He needs him
now,
not in two hours. This is an
emergency
. I don’t see why I can’t make anyone here in this so-called emergency room understand that.”

Harper was passing along the line, handing out lollipops and paper cups of apple juice to the little kids. She also had a radish in one pocket and a potato in the other, for the most seriously unhappy children.

The sound of an English accent distracted her and lifted her spirits. She associated English accents with singing teapots, schools for witchcraft, and the science of deduction. This wasn’t, she knew, terribly sophisticated of her, but she had no real guilt about it. She felt the English were themselves to blame for her feelings. They had spent a century relentlessly marketing their detectives and wizards and nannies, and they had to live with the results.

Her spirits needed lifting. She had spent the morning stowing charred corpses in body bags, their blackened, shriveled tissues still warm to the touch, still fuming. Because the hospital was running out of bags, she had to pack a pair of dead children into a sack together, which wasn’t so hard. They had burned to death with their arms around one another, had fused into a single creature, a tangled cat’s cradle of charred bones. It looked like death metal sculpture.

She hadn’t been home since the last week in June and spent eighteen hours out of twenty-four in a full-body rubber suit that had been designed to repel Ebola. The gloves were so tight she had to lube her hands up with petroleum jelly to get them on. She stank like a prophylactic. Every time she inhaled her own fragrance of rubber and K-Y she thought of awkward college encounters in the dorms.

Harper made her way toward the head of the line, approaching the Fireman from behind. It was her job to keep the people who were waiting content, not Nurse Lean’s, and Harper didn’t want to wind up on Nurse Lean’s bad side. Harper had only been working under her, at Portsmouth Hospital, for three weeks, and was a little afraid of her. All the volunteer nurses were.

“Sir,” Nurse Lean said now, in a voice thin with impatience. “Everyone in this line is having an emergency. It’s emergencies all the way back to the lobby. We take ’em in the order they come here.”

The Fireman peered over his shoulder at the line. A hundred and thirty-one of them (Harper had counted), weary and stained with Dragonscale and staring back at him with hollow-eyed resentment.

“Their emergencies can wait. This boy’s cannot.” He snapped back around to face Nurse Lean. “Let me try this another way.”

His right arm hung at his side. He held a tool close against it, between his arm and body, a rusty iron bar, with hooks and prongs and hatchet blades bristling from either end. He opened his hand and let the bar slide down into full view, so that one end was almost touching the dirty linoleum. He waggled it but did not raise it.

“Either you let me through that door or I take this halligan and begin smashing things. I will start with a window and work my way up to a computer. Get a doctor, or let me by, but do not imagine I am going to wait in line while this nine-year-old boy dies in my arms.”

Albert Holmes made his lazy way down the hall, coming from the double doors that led into the pre-quarantine exam rooms. He wore an Ebola suit, too. The only thing that marked Al out as different from the medical staff was that instead of a rubber hood, he had on a black riot helmet, the glass faceplate pulled down. He also wore his belt on the outside of his suit, his security badge and his walkie-talkie on one hip, his Teflon nightstick on the other.

Harper and Al closed in at the same time, from opposite directions.

“Let’s settle down here,” Al said. “Listen, bud, we can’t have you in here with that—what’d you call it? The hooligan thing. Fire personnel have to leave their equipment outside.”

“Sir? If you’ll come with me, I’d be
glad
to talk to you about your son’s complaint,” Harper said.

“He’s not my son,” said the Fireman, “and I’m not his hysterical father. What I am is a man with a dangerously ill child and a heavy iron bar. If someone doesn’t take the one, they’re going to get the other. You want to talk to me? Talk where? Through those doors where the doctors are, or at the end of the line?”

She held his gaze,
willing
him to be good, promising him with her eyes that she would be good to him in return, she would listen and deal with him and his boy with warmth, humor, and patience. Telling him that she was trying to protect him, because if he didn’t chill out he was going to wind up facedown on the floor with pepper spray in his eyes and a boot on his neck. Harper had been on staff for less than a month, but that was long enough to become accustomed to the sight of security drubbing unruly patients into better behavior.

“Come with me. I’ll get him a lemon ice and you can tell me about whatever’s wrong with him—”

“—at the end of the line. What I thought.” He turned away from her and took a step toward the double doors.

Nurse Lean was still in his way. If anything, she looked more imposing than Albert Holmes. She was bigger, an immensity of breasts and gut, as formidable as any defensive tackle.

“SIR,”
she said. “If you take one more step, we’ll be treating you this afternoon for a variety of bruises and contusions.” She swept her pale-eyed stare of death down the line. Her next statement was addressed to all of them. “
We will have order in this queue
. We will have it the easy way or we will have it the hard way, but
we will have it
. Does everyone understand me?”

There were low, embarrassed murmurs of assent up and down the line.

“I’m sorry.” Sweat crawled at the Fireman’s temples. “You don’t understand. This boy—”

“What’s wrong with him? Besides the same thing that is wrong with everyone else?” Nurse Lean said.

The boy was more or less the most beautiful child Harper had ever seen. His dark, curly hair was a delightful tangle above eyes the lucid pale green of an empty Coke bottle. He had on shorts and everyone could see the marks on the back of his calves: black, curving stripes, tattoolike, delicate and almost ornate.

Without any trace of concern in her voice, Nurse Lean added, “If you aren’t infected, you shouldn’t be holding him. Are you infected?”

“I’m not here about me,” said the Fireman. It only came to Harper much later that this was a neat way of not answering. “He’s not touching me.”

It was true. The boy in his arms had his head turned and his cheek plumped against the Fireman’s turnout jacket. Still: if the Fireman wasn’t sick, he was either idiotically fearless or just idiotic.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“His stomach,” the Fireman said. “There’s something wrong with his stomach. He can barely stand—”

“It’s very hot in here,” Nurse Lean said. “I’m sure he’s not the only child with a stomachache. Go to the end of the line and—“

“No.
No
.
Please
. This child has recently lost his mother. She was in a building collapse a few days ago.”

Nurse Lean’s shoulders slumped and for a moment a kind of glum sympathy was visible on her features. For the first and only time she seemed to look not at the Fireman but at the boy curled in his arms.

“Ah. That’s rotten. Listen, sweetheart, that’s just rotten.” If the boy was listening, though, he gave no sign. Nurse Lean lifted her gaze to the Fireman and was abruptly glaring again. “Something like that, who wouldn’t have a stomachache?”

“Hang on, now. Let me finish. A building fell and killed her and he was there, he was right
there
—”

“There are trained counselors who can talk to this boy about what happened to him and maybe even get him something fizzy and sweet for his dyspepsia.”

“Dyspepsia? Are you listening to me? He doesn’t need a Coke and a smile, he needs a
doctor
.”

“And he’ll get one, when it’s his turn.”

“I picked him up an hour ago and he
screamed.
Does that sound like dyspepsia to you, you incurious twat?”

“Hey,”
said Albert Holmes. “No one needs that mouth—”

Nurse Lean’s face darkened to a scalding shade of red. She spread her arms out to either side, like a small child playing airplane.

“YOU AND THAT BOY WILL GO TO THE BACK OF THE LINE, OR YOU WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM WITH THAT STEEL ROD OF YOURS JAMMED UP YOUR NARROW LIMEY ASS! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

If Nurse Lean had shouted this way at Harper, she would’ve burst into tears. It was staggering—like walking into a gale. Children in line covered their ears, hid their faces against their mother’s legs.

The Englishman didn’t so much as buckle. He glared. Harper was only faintly conscious of the fact that the boy didn’t flinch either. In fact, he was staring at Harper, his eyes dreamy and damp, a little adrift. She assumed he was just faint from the heat, but it turned out there was more to it than that.

Harper tried again. “Sir? I’m
sure
I can help you. We can discuss the boy’s symptoms at the back of the line and if he needs immediate attention, I’ll bring a doctor right to him. If his stomach is bothering him, we don’t want to upset him with a lot of yelling. Let’s take this down the hall. Please. You and me . . . how ’bout it?”

All the anger went out of his face in an instant and he looked at her with the flicker of a weary smile. The boy might have lost his mother, but Harper saw then, for the first time, that the Fireman was in grief himself. She could see it in his eyes, a kind of exhausted glaze that she associated with loss.

“Do you fancy the Dire Straits too? A kid like you? You must’ve been chewing your blocks the last time they had a hit.”

“I don’t follow,” she said.

“You and me . . . how ’bout it? Dire Straits?” he said, cocking his head and giving her an inquisitive look.

She was at a loss, didn’t know what to say, wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He stared for a half instant longer, then gave up. The Fireman squeezed the boy gently, then set him on his feet with great care, as if he were handling a fragile vase filled to the brim with water. “His name is Nick. Do you want to walk Nick to the back of the line?” he asked Harper. “And then I can carry on my conversation with this lot?”

“I think you should
both
come with me,” she said to the Fireman, but she took the boy’s hand. Her rubber glove squeaked softly.

She could see the child wasn’t well. His face was waxy beneath his freckles and he swayed on his feet. Also she could feel a troubling heat in his soft, child-chubby fingers. But then a lot of people with the spore ran fevers, and the spore itself was often two to three degrees above body temperature. No sooner, though, had the Fireman set him down than the child bent at the waist with a pained grimace.

The Fireman crouched before the child and leaned his halligan against his shoulder. He did an odd thing then: he closed his hands into fists, showed them to the boy, then made an odd patting gesture, as if he were imitating a dog pawing at the air. The boy made the grimacing face and a funny teakettle sound, unlike anything Harper had ever heard from a child in distress; it sounded more like a squeak toy.

The Fireman craned his head to look back at Harper, but before he had a chance to speak, Albert Holmes moved, closed a hand around one end of the halligan.

“What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” the Fireman said.

“Sir? Let go of the weapon.”

The Fireman tugged on it. Al tugged back, harder, pulling him off balance, and then he had an arm around his throat. The Fireman’s bootheels squealed on the tiles as he kicked for purchase, tried to get his feet under him.

Harper observed their wrestling match the way she might’ve glimpsed the passing scenery on an accelerating carousel. She was playing back what she had just seen—not only the odd way the Fireman had swatted at the air, but the way it looked as if the boy were straining to lift a weight beyond the limits of his strength.

“You’re deaf,” she said to the child, but of course she was really only talking to herself. Because he was deaf.

She had, at some point in nursing school, had a single day of instruction in American Sign Language, of which she remembered nothing. Or at least, she didn’t
think
she remembered anything of what they had taught her. But then she found herself pointing her fingers at her ribs and twisting them, as if she were hand-screwing something into her own sides. She patted low on her abdomen.
Does it hurt here?

Nick nodded uncertainly. But when she reached to feel beneath the hands cupped over his abdomen, he stumbled back a step, shaking his head frantically.

“It’s all right,” she said, enunciating slowly and with great care, on the off chance he could read lips. She had picked up, somewhere—maybe in that one-day class on ALS—that the very best lip-readers could only understand about 70 percent of what they saw, and the majority of deaf fell far short of that. “I’ll be careful.”

She reached once more, to probe his midsection, and he covered up again, backing away, a fresh sweat glowing on his upper lip. He keened softly. And then she knew. Then she was sure.