The Fireman (23 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

11

The light dimmed. It was as if a great black curtain had been dropped between the water and the bonfires up in the parking lot.

The prisoner’s eyes widened by degrees.

“What?” she asked.

He didn’t reply, only gave his head a short, distracted shake. He put a hand on his knee and pushed, rising to his full height with some effort. She could see his legs were hurting. He stepped to her left, out of sight. She heard him whispering to someone, a low groan of pain, and the scuffle of shoes on rock. Then nothing.

No: not nothing. From a distance, she heard yells, startled cries.

It was as if all light were being swallowed, were being drowned. She could not for the life of her imagine what could smother the night that way.

She darted her head out of the pipe for a look, meaning to scuttle straight back if she saw the man in orange. But there was no one waiting for her. To her left was another sloped, six-foot-high wall of irregular granite blocks. A wide, concrete-lined culvert was set into it, sunk beneath the parking lot above. There was room for perhaps two men to crouch out of sight, under the concrete soffit, but rusted bars blocked the way into the darkened passage beyond. That was where they had hidden . . . jammed into that cramped space, huddled together for warmth against the wrought-iron bars.

Harper craned her neck to see up onto the causeway, but she was still most of the way in the pipe and from that angle couldn’t make out much. What she
could
see was smoke: a bubbling black cloud, pouring into the sky, spreading across the road and the parking lot.

She slid forward on her knees, freed herself from the pipe, stood up, and gazed dumbly at the top of the embankment.

The devil stood in that immense cloud: a devil that towered two stories high, a broad-shouldered demon with a vast rack of horns. He was a flickering apparition of flame, buried deep in that boiling thunderhead of smoke. In one hand he held a hammer and he raised an arm as thick as a telephone pole and brought it down on a burning red anvil. Steel clanged—she heard it quite distinctly. Sparks flew from somewhere in the black cloud. The devil’s tail—a slender, twelve-foot whip braided from fire—lashed behind him.

The black cloud was so immense, Harper could no longer see the police station or the parking lot or the bonfires. The smoke spread over the causeway, an impenetrable bank of toxic fog.

Men screamed, hollered, ran about on the other side of the smoke.

The devil brought the hammer down again and again, each time with another ringing
clang!
He tossed his burning head back, his eyes two red, delighted coals. In profile, it was impossible not to recognize him as the Fireman.

The devil finished his work, set aside his hammer, and lifted his new-forged instrument: a lance of fire, a pitchfork fashioned from pure flame, as long as his own body.

Someone on the other side of the smoke wailed. Harper had never heard a voice raised in such despair. It was the cry of a man afraid for his own soul.

Several ideas occurred to her in rapid succession, a string of firecrackers rattling off.

First: It was a shadow show. She didn’t know how he was doing it, but she was sure that what she was seeing was no different than a little boy shining a flashlight at his hand and conjuring the shadow of an elephant on his bedroom wall.

Second: If she was going to go, she had to go
now
. This couldn’t possibly last.

Third: John needed to go himself. To end his performance and slip away. He had made more than enough smoke and chaos to allow the prisoners to limp across the causeway unseen.

Fourth and last: Maybe he didn’t care if he got away or not. Maybe he had never cared. Maybe the possibility of his own capture and death was not a concern but an enticement.

Harper climbed the slope on all fours, digging her fingers into the mossy gaps between stone blocks.

She struggled to her feet and stood up in that dense black cloud of smoke. She knew not to inhale, but her throat and nostrils began to burn anyway. It was a little better if she sank low, but only a little.

Harper advanced into the cloud. She could see the asphalt directly beneath her feet, but no more. The smoke was too dense to see any farther than that.

From the far side of the smoke bank, she heard a new noise—a chorus of organized, authoritative shouts—the sound of several men calling to one another as they worked in unison.

The blast of water hit the smokebank, aimed at the devil’s burning chest. Satan flickered, lifted his arms to protect his face, and for a moment the pitchfork quivered and took on the shape of an enormous halligan bar.

The Fireman shouted somewhere in the smoke, a surprised yell. Steel banged and clattered.

Satan staggered, wheeled about, and dropped his flickering pitchfork. He closed his wings around his body, hiding within, shrank into himself, and vanished.

The men holding the fire hose continued blasting water into the cloud. Spray rained past Harper. It hissed in the hot smoke, and the cloud changed in color and texture, going from polluted and black to humid and pale, not so much smoke as steam.

She knew what had happened. They got him, that was what. The battering ram of water had knocked the Fireman right off his feet.

Without thinking, Harper ran deeper into the smoke, plunging toward where she thought she had heard his voice.

More yells, closer now. Some of them were moving into the cloud, coming toward her. No—coming toward the Fireman.

Her foot caught on something, a metal bar that clanged across the blacktop, and she stumbled, steadied herself. The halligan. Something moved nearby in the mist. Someone retched.

The Fireman rose unsteadily up onto all fours. His helmet had been blown off and his hair was drenched. His shoulders hitched. He gagged and vomited water.

“John?” she asked.

He lifted his head. His eyes were bewildered, unhappy.

“The fuck are you doing here?” he asked.

He rose to his knees, swaying, and opened his mouth to say something more. Before he could, a shape reared up in the clouds to his left, drawing his attention.

A thing—a bug-faced monstrosity—lurched out of the smoke. Its slick, glistening eyes were bright in the drifting mist, and it had a bulbous, grotesque mouth. Otherwise it resembled a man dressed in a fireman’s turnout jacket and knee-high boots. It put one of those black boots between the Fireman’s shoulder blades and shoved, and John was slammed down onto his face.

“You fuck,” said the monstrosity—a fireman, a
real
fireman, in a gas mask. The Gasask Man said, “You goddamn fuck, I got you now.”

John started to rise onto all fours. The Gasmask Man cocked back one boot and drove it into his ribs, knocked his hands and knees out from under him.

“Fuck you, you little fuck,” the Gasmask Man said. “You fucking fuck . . . guys!
Guys,
I got him! I
got
the fucking fuck!”

He booted the Fireman again, in the side this time, half turning him over.

Harper saw quite clearly that in moments John would be overrun, kicked to death by the Gasmask Man and his pals.

She bent and grabbed the halligan—

—and screamed in surprise and pain and dropped it. She looked at her hand in shock. Blisters were already forming on her reddened palm. The halligan was
hot,
nearly as hot as the business end of a branding iron.

Her cry caught the Gasmask Man’s attention. He fixed her with his blind, terrible stare and pointed one gloved hand.

“You! Get the fuck on the fucking ground! Tits down, hands behind your fucking head!
Do
it, do it right the fuck—”

John rose with an angry shout, got his arms around the Gasmask Man’s waist, and tried to throw him down. All he was able to do was back the guy up a few steps before the Gasmask Man—six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than John Rookwood—started shoving him the other way.

They grappled, turning in circles. The Gasmask Man closed his hands on John’s right arm and twisted. A joint made a sickening, oddly wet pop. John went down on one knee and the Gasmask Man brought his knee up under his chin, snapped his head back. John toppled onto his back. The Gasmask Man stepped forward and put his boot on the Englishman’s chest and stomped. Bones cracked.

Harper slipped off her nylon fall coat, wrapped it around her burnt right hand, and scooped up the halligan bar again. Even through a fistful of fabric she could feel its heat, could smell it liquefying the nylon.

Harper lifted the halligan. The Gasmask Man turned, took his foot off John’s chest, and came at her, arms spread. She slashed the halligan and the bar caught him across the helmet with a steely
thwang
! He took one more step and folded, diving face-first into the ground. His helmet sailed off, slicing Frisbee-like through the mist. It clattered to the blacktop, a grotesque dent creasing one side.

The sight of that dent sickened her. She felt bile rising in her chest, tasted it in the back of her throat. The sight of that dent was somehow worse than seeing a smashed-in head.

She didn’t know what had made her do it. She had wanted to scare him away with the halligan, not crush his head in. She dropped the halligan in revulsion. It fell into the great dirty puddle spreading across the blacktop and hissed.

More yells. She saw another fireman sprint through the drifting white cloud of smoke and vapor off to her left. He raced past without seeing them.

The Fireman—her Fireman—had her by the elbow. His other arm, the right, hung at a strange angle at his side and he was half bent over, grimacing, a runner trying to catch his breath.

“You all right?” he asked.

She stared at him as if he were speaking in a foreign language. “John! I—I hit him with your halligan.”

“Ooh, you did, too! Sounded like someone playing a steel drum.” He grinned with admiration.

Someone yelled from what seemed only a few feet away. He glanced back over his shoulder, and when he looked at her again, the smile was almost gone. He gripped her shoulder.

“Come along,” he said. “We have to go. Help me get his coat.”

When she wouldn’t go any closer to the dead body he let go of her and waded into the smoke. He bent with some effort—through her shock, she registered his face tightening with pain—and picked up the dented helmet. When he looked back at her, she still hadn’t moved.

“His coat, Willowes!” he called to her. “Quickly now.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even look at him. She had killed a man, smashed his brains in, and it was all she could do not to cry, not to fall on her knees.

“Never mind,” he said and for the first time he seemed impatient with her, even angry. He took off his own coat—it took a great deal of care for him to slip it gently off his dangling right arm—and when he got to her, he hung it over her shoulders. Beneath he wore a black shirt made of some kind of elastic material and bright yellow suspenders.

He went to put the dented helmet on her own head and she flinched, backed away. He followed her gaze to the body slumped on the ground and finally seemed to understand.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he said. “You didn’t kill him. Look—”

He stuck his boot behind the Gasmask Man’s ear and gave a gentle nudge. The Gasmask Man made a small, unhappy shriek.

“There’s no blood on it and no brains either, so put it on and
help me,
” he said, and this time she allowed him to set the helmet on her head. He stepped back and looked at her and grinned again. “Well! Aren’t you the perfect little firewoman!”

And then his legs gave out.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

12

She caught him before he could fall to his knees and got her hands around his waist. He sagged against her. He hummed a disconcertingly sunny tune, as they went around in a drunken circle.

“What is that?”

“
The Hooters!
And we danced!”
He almost sang. “A lost treasure from a better time, the days of acid washed jeans and fun hair. Do you like eighties music, Nurse Willowes?”

“Can we discuss the oldies another time?”

“What?
What?
The oldies? I’ve already had a man kicking in my ribs, and now you pull out my heart.”

“Hey!” someone yelled at them, coming through the smoke. Harper looked past John and saw another Gasmask Man coming toward them, even bigger than the last. “You okay?”

Harper realized that in the shifting clouds, he believed they were firemen too.

“He got away! The guy! The fucking fuck who made the smoke!” John shouted and his voice carried no trace of an accent at all. “He clobbered us and went that way!” John pointed past her, through the streaming vapor.

“This fucking guy . . . this fucking guy
again,
” said the second Gasmask Man.

“We’ve got a fucking man down!” John cried, pointing back at the first Gasmask Man, sprawled on the ground. “Fucking fuck fuck!” Harper wanted to elbow him in the side, but his ribs couldn’t take it.

“Go on, get the fuck out of here,” said the second Gasmask Man. “Both of you. Get clear of the fucking smoke. I got him.”

She had to help John walk, her arm around his waist, his over her shoulders. They limped a few steps away and then the second Gasmask Man yelled at their backs.

“Hey! Wait!”

She forced herself to glance back, eyes lowered.

The second Gasmask Man extended the dropped halligan.

“Take it. There’s a lot of fucking guys running around. I don’t want someone falling down and taking a fucking hatchet to the knee.”

“Right. Thanks,” she said, then added,
“Fuck,”
for good measure.

The metal was still warm—her palm tingled painfully as she took hold of it—but the cold water on the ground had lowered its temperature enough so it could be held without wrapping her hands first. She took hold of it and tugged, but for an instant the second Gasmask Man didn’t let go of his end. Through the lenses of his mask, she saw his brow knot up. He was looking at the both of them, really
looking
at them, maybe for the first time. Just possibly he was thinking that fire
women
were few and far between, so few that he knew all of them by name and had suddenly recognized she didn’t belong. In a moment he would jerk the halligan back out of her hand and come at them with it.

The damp white smoke eddied around them, sketching ghosts.

The second Gas Mask Man let go of the halligan and turned away, shaking his head. He sank to one knee next to the man on the ground.

“Nurse Willowes,” John murmured, and she realized it was safe to go.

She walked him through the smoke. Men ran past them, going the other way, calling to each other.

“He said ‘this guy
again,
’ ” she said, leaning in to speak quietly into the cup of his ear. “Do you spend a lot of nights keeping the fire department in hysterics with creative acts of arson?”

“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said.

Then they were through the smoke and into the parking lot, the Portsmouth Police Department not a hundred steps away on their left. The smoke was a towering wall of white cloud that masked the causeway and all of South Mill Pond behind them.

They had come out close to one of the two bonfires. It seethed, a sound it was impossible not to associate with rage, and she wondered, for the first time, if flame could hate . . . an absurd, childish notion that she could not quite set aside.

Lawmen milled about just beyond the double glass doors leading into the police department. Harper and John had emerged from the smoke right next to a cop with a round, freckled, innocent face, dressed in a black poncho and black rubber gloves. He didn’t look at them, only goggled at the smoke. Harper thought she saw his lips moving in a soundless prayer. Was it any surprise, really? The whole world was burning and tonight they had seen the devil, come to claim his kingdom of fire at last.

Harper looked over at the first bonfire and saw they were not burning piles of clothes after all. Or, rather, they
were
burning piles of clothes—it was just that people were still wearing them. The bonfire to the left was a heap of desiccated bodies, blackened and shriveled corpses. In the flames, they snapped and whistled and crackled noisily, just like any kindling.

She glimpsed a dead woman, holding a dead child of about eight, the boy’s face buried in her breast. She did not flinch from the sight. She had seen enough of the dead in Portsmouth Hospital. If she felt anything, it was simply that she was glad the two of them—mother and child—had died together, holding each other. To be held by your mother, or to be able to hold your child at the end, struck her as a kind of blessing.

“Keep your head down,” John murmured. “He might see.”

“Who?”

“The ex.”

She looked past the first bonfire to the great orange town truck on the far side. The tailgate was down, the rear end raised, as if to dump a heap of sand. Four or five bodies remained in the back end, had for some reason not slid out. Maybe they were frozen to the metal.

Jakob sat in the open passenger-side door, elbows on his knees, smoking a Gauloise. He was flushed, oiled with sweat from the heat of the bonfire, and hadn’t shaved in a while. He had lost weight, and it showed in his face, in his sunken cheeks and the deep hollows around his eyes.

As if he felt her gaze—like a light touch on his scarred cheek—Jakob turned his head and stared back at her. His wounds had healed badly, shiny white slashes carved across the side of his face. Worse still was the black mark on his neck, a hideous burn in the shape of a man’s hand.

She looked down, walked on. She counted to ten and risked another look back. He had returned his stare to the causeway, peering dully into the smoke. He hadn’t known her. That was maybe not such a surprise. Although she had recognized him right off, in some obscure way she felt she didn’t know him, either.

“He isn’t sick,” Harper said.

“Not with Dragonscale.”

Harper and John made their slow way across the parking lot, leaving the police station behind. The crowd thinned as they moved away from the lights. Although the other end of the parking lot was not entirely in darkness. The second bonfire cast a pulsing red glow into the gloom. The smell revolted her, a stink like they were burning wet carpet. She didn’t want to look and couldn’t help herself.

Dogs. They were burning dogs. Black ash drifted down out of the night.

“Look at all that ash,” the Fireman said, blowing a flake away from his nose. “Idiots. Some of these men will be on our side of this battle in a few weeks.
You
may not have infected your husband, Nurse Willowes, but he may get lucky yet.”

She gave him a questioning look, but he didn’t seem inclined to explain himself.

“Why are they burning dogs?” she asked. “Dogs don’t carry the ’scale, do they?”

“There are two infections running rampant. One is the Dragonscale, and the other is panic.”

“It always surprises me when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Say something smart.”

His laughter turned to a thin, anguished wheeze and they had to pause while he tottered in place, clutching his sides.

“My chest is full of broken glass,” he said.

“We need to get you off your feet. How much farther?”

“There,” he said, nodding into the darkness.

There were some other cars and pickups parked at the far end of the lot, and sitting among them was an antique fire truck—it had to be almost eighty years old—with a pair of headlamps set close together over a tall grille.

When John tried to lift himself up behind the wheel, he almost lost his footing and fell off the running board. She put her hands on his hips, caught and steadied him. He hung off the side of the truck, gasping. His eyes strained from his head, as if the simple act of breathing was work that required will and concentration.

When he had recovered himself, he tried again, hitching himself up into the old black leather seat. A copper bell hung from a metal brace, attached to the side of the windscreen. An
actual
bell, with a heavy iron clapper inside.

She went around to the other side of the truck and pulled herself in beside him. A pair of rusting steel brackets had been mounted behind the seats; the halligan fit neatly into them.

The engine, when it started, produced a pleasant series of throat-clearing sounds that made Harper think not of a truck, but of clothes tumbling in a dryer.

“Nurse Willowes, would you be a dear and wiggle the stick forward and to the right?”

He had his right arm crooked in his lap, left hand on the wheel. She didn’t like the way his right wrist was turned.

“You better let me look at that arm,” she said.

“Perhaps when we are at leisure,” he said. “The stick.”

She shifted it into reverse while he worked the clutch.

John eased the truck out from under the shadow of a great oak and onto the road, then asked her to put it into first for him. As they drove past the police department and out of the lot, he reached through the window and rang the bell,
ding-ding
. She thought of old film clips of San Francisco trolleys.

Perhaps as many as fifty people watched them go, and not a single one of them appeared to give them a second thought. One police officer even lifted his cap to them. Harper looked again for Jakob, but he wasn’t sitting in the Freightliner anymore, and she couldn’t spot him in the milling crowd.

“You have your own fire truck,” she said.

“In a world with a fire burning on every corner, it’s a surprisingly inconspicuous ride. Also you can’t imagine how often a sixty-foot ladder comes in handy.”

“I
can
imagine. You never know when you’ll need to help a child escape from the third floor of a hospital.”

He nodded. “Or change a reeee-alllly high lightbulb. Pull the gearstick back again? Into second—ah, lovely.”

They left the bonfires, the smoke, the smell of burning man and dog, in a sudden rush of speed.

It had been a crisp wintry night down on the water. In the fire truck, moving at forty miles an hour, it was arctic.

He ran the wipers and smeared gray ribbons of ash across the windscreen.

“Ach,”
he said. “Look at all of that. We could infect most of Rhode Island with what we’ve got on the windshield.”

They fled through the night.

“The ash,” she said. “It’s in the ash. That’s why I didn’t get Jakob sick. It doesn’t transfer through any kind of touch. You have to come in contact with the ash.”

“It’s a surprisingly common way for fungus to propagate. Third gear, please. Thank you. Farmers in South America will burn an infected crop and the airstream will carry fungal spores in the ash halfway around the world to New Zealand.
Draco incendia trychophyton
isn’t any different. You inhale it along with the ash that protects it and prepares it for reproduction and soon it’s colonizing real estate in your lungs. Could you shift us up into fourth—yes, perfect.” He smiled wanly and added, “I was there when you were infected, you know. The day the hospital burned. I saw you all breathing it in, but I was too late to warn anyone.”

They banged a pothole—the truck didn’t seem to have anything in the way of shocks, and they felt every rut, crack, divot, and seam—and he groaned.

“You’re not too late to warn the rest of the world.”

“What? You think I’m the first person to realize it spreads through the ash? I’m a lowly mycologist at a state college. Or was. I’m sure the process is well understood in the places where study of the Dragonscale is an active concern. Wherever that may be.”

“No. If they understood transmission, they’d be warning people.”

“Maybe they are . . . in the parts of the country that haven’t fallen into chaos and been given up for dead. But you see, we’re downwind. Of
every
one. The North American jetstream sweeps everything our way. Those who don’t have it today will have it tomorrow, or next year. I believe it can wait in the ash for a host for a very long time. Thousands of years. Possibly millions.”

The fire truck drifted off to the left-hand margin of the road. The edge of the hood clipped a mailbox, sent it flying. Harper grabbed the wheel and helped John bring the truck back into the humped middle of the lane.

John shivered weakly, touched his dry lips with his tongue. He didn’t seem to be steering the truck so much as it was steering him, and he was hanging onto the wheel for dear life.

“It’s really an ingenious cycle when you consider it. The ash infects a host who eventually burns alive, creating more ash to infect new hosts. Right now there’s the sick and the well. But in a few years it’ll just be the sick and the dead. There will only be those who learned to live with Dragonscale and those who were burned up . . . by their own terror and ignorance.”

He reached out into the darkness and began to strike the bell, ringing it so loudly that it hurt Harper’s ears, made her teeth ache. They were coming up on the turnoff. She wanted him to slow down, was trying to say it—
slow down, John, please
—when he grimaced and wrenched at the wheel, veering off Little Harbor Road.

The fire truck slung itself onto the snowbound lane that led to camp and sailed between the towering stones that flanked the entrance. Harper glimpsed a lean girl of perhaps fifteen, standing to one side of the dirt track, the kid who had been assigned watch duty in the bus. She had heard John ringing his bell and known to drop the chain and let them through.