The Fireman (33 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

4

Late at night—or early in the morning, depending on how you cared to look at it—Nick gave lessons in how to speak without words, and Harper was his attentive pupil, in the lonely classroom of the infirmary.

If anyone had asked why Nick was staying in the infirmary, instead of with his sister in the girls’ dorm, or with the men in the boys’ dorm, Harper would’ve said she wanted to keep him under observation. She would’ve claimed she was worried about a late-developing inguinal hernia as a result of his appendectomy in the summer. The word
inguinal
would be frightening enough to shut down any further questions. But there were no questions, and Harper suspected that few people gave any thought at all to where Nick slept. When you had no voice, you had no identity. Most people took no more notice of the profoundly deaf than they did of their own shadows.

They sat across from each other on Nick’s cot, in their pajamas. Harper kept three buttons undone below her breasts to show the ripe pink globe of her belly, and when they were finished practicing sign for the night, Nick popped the cap off a Sharpie and drew a smiley face on it.

What are you going to name her?
Nick asked. He tried to ask in sign language, but she lost the thread and he had to write it down.

“A boy,” she said with her hands.

He pressed both palms on the bulging gourd of her stomach, closed his eyes, and inhaled gently. Then he signed, “Smells like a girl.”

“How girls smell?” she asked, her hands finding the words automatically—a fact that produced a small flush of pride.

He gave her a confounded look and wrote:
like sugar & spice & everything nice,
duh
.

You can’t really smell if it’s a girl,
she wrote back.

People who have lost 1 sense,
he scrawled,
become stronger in the others. Don’t you know that? I smell
LOTS
of things other peeple don’t.

Like what?

Like there’s still something rong inside Father Storey.
Now his gaze was solemn and unblinking.
He smells sick. He smells . . .
too sweet
. Like flowers when they rot.

Harper didn’t like that. She had known a doctor in nursing school who claimed he could smell death, that the ruination of the body had a particular fragrance. He insisted you could smell it in someone’s blood: a whiff of things spoiling.

The moss-colored sheet between the ward and the waiting room twitched, and Renée Gilmonton ducked through, holding a bowl covered in tinfoil.

“Norma sent me over with a glop of oatmeal for the sick ol’ kid,” Renée said, crossing to Nick’s bed and sinking down on the mattress, directly across from Harper. Renée mined one pocket of her parka and came up with something else wrapped in tinfoil. “I figured he wasn’t the only little guy who might be in the mood for a snack.” Nodding at Harper’s distended belly.

Harper half expected to peel back the foil and find a rock inside.
Eat that, bitch,
Renée would tell her,
and then get on your knees and repent for Mother Carol
. But of course it wasn’t a rock, she could tell even before she unwrapped it, just from the weight. Renée had brought her a biscuit with an improbable smear of honey in the middle.

“Allie ought to be ashamed,” Renée went on. “Giving you a rock instead of breakfast. You’re well into your second trimester. You can’t be skipping meals. I don’t care what she thinks you did.”

“I let her down. She trusted me not to do something stupid and I screwed her.”

“You were trying to get medical supplies to care for your patients. You were trying to collect them from
your home
. No one can forbid you to go home. No one can take your rights away from you.”

“I don’t know about that. The camp voted to put Ben and Carol in charge of things. That’s democracy, not tyranny.”

“My. Black. Ass. That wasn’t any real election. They took a vote after an hour of singing and everyone was spaced out in the Bright. Most of the camp were so blitzed, they would’ve voted for a top hat and believed they were electing Abraham Lincoln.”

“The rules—”

Renée shook her head. “This isn’t about rules. Don’t you know that? This is about control. You went home to get medical supplies—to
help
people. To help Carol’s own father! Your real crime wasn’t breaking a rule about leaving camp. Your
real
crime was deciding for yourself what would be best for the people in your care. Only Carol and Ben get to decide what’s best for the people in Camp Wyndham now. Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn’t say is that voice belongs to
her
. There’s only one song to sing these days—Carol’s song—and if you aren’t in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the hell up.”

Harper looked sidelong at Nick, who was bent to his bowl of oatmeal, paying them no mind, and for the moment showing no sign at all of the tummyache that had brought him to the infirmary.

“That would sound better if a Cremation Crew didn’t turn up while I was home,” Harper said. “If they had found me, they would’ve made me talk before they killed me. My husband was with them. My ex.
He
would’ve made me talk. I can see it in my head. I can picture him asking me questions in a very calm, reasonable voice, while he uses a pair of garden shears to take off my fingers.”

“Yeah. Well. That part is—I don’t know what to make of that part. I mean, what are the odds they’d show up at your house when you were there? That’s like being struck by lightning.”

Harper considered telling Renée about the Marlboro Man and his secret broadcast—the radio station he claimed to hear in his thoughts, his psychic transmission from the future—then decided she didn’t want to think about it. She ate her biscuit instead. In the honey, she tasted jasmine, molasses, and summer. Her stomach rumbled, a sound as loud as someone sliding furniture across the floor, and the two women traded looks of comic surprise.

“I wish I could do something to tell Allie I’m sorry,” Harper said.

“Did you try
telling
her you’re sorry?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s over and done. That should be enough. She’s—she’s not herself, Harp. Allie and I never got along all that well, but now she’s like someone I don’t even know.”

Harper would’ve replied but for the moment was swiftly tucking away the last of the biscuit. It had looked big in her palm but had vanished with disappointing haste.

“Things are going bad here,” Renée said. Harper half thought she was kidding and was caught off guard by the unease she saw in the other woman’s eyes. Renée offered her a tired, crooked smile and went on: “You missed a good scene in the school this morning. I give the kids a twenty-minute recess after our little history class. They can’t go outside, but we block off half the chapel with pews to give them some space to run wild. I noticed Emily Waterman and Janet Cursory whispering together in one corner. Once or twice Ogden Leavitt wandered toward them and the two girls shooed him away. Well, I brought everyone together after recess for storytime, but I could tell Ogden was feeling blue, trying not to cry. He’s only seven and he saw his parents die—killed trying to run from a Quarantine Patrol. He only recently started talking again. I had him in my lap and I asked him what was wrong, and he said Emily and Janet were superheroes and he wanted to be a superhero, too, but they wouldn’t tell him the magic rhyme and he thought secrets were against the rules. Janet was angry and called him a tattletale—she’s only nine—but Emily went white. I told Ogden I knew a rhyme for superpowers:
be-bop-a-loo-loo, you have superpowers, too!
He cheered right up and said now he could fly and I thought,
Good job, Renée Gilmonton, you’ve saved the day again!
I tried to steer things back to storytime, but then Emily stood up and asked if she could carry a stone in her mouth to make up for keeping secrets. I said that rule was only for
serious
secrets,
grown-up
secrets, but Emily looked ill and said if she didn’t atone, she wouldn’t be able to sing along in chapel, and if you didn’t sing and join the Bright you could catch fire. That scared Janet, who started begging for a stone, too.

“I tried to reassure them. I told them they hadn’t done anything they needed to atone for. Harper—they were just being
kids
. But then Chuck Cargill heard the commotion and wandered over. He’s one of Allie’s friends, about Allie’s age. In the Lookouts, of course. And he said it was really cool they wanted to do penance like big kids and if they each had a stone in their mouths for ten minutes, it would clean the slate. He got them both stones and they sucked on them all through storytime, looking like Cargill gave each of them a lollipop.

“You want to know the worst part, Harp? As soon as storytime was over, Ogden ran over to Chuck Cargill and announced he had been hiding comic books under his bed and asked if he could do penance, too. By the end of school half the kids had stones in their mouths . . . and Harp. They were
shining
. Their eyes were shining. Just like they were all singing together.”

“Oxytocin,” Harper muttered.

“Oxy
contin
? Isn’t that a pain medicine?”

“What? No. Nothing. Forget it.”

“You missed morning chapel today,” Renée said.

“I was rigging up a feeding line for Father Storey.” She nodded back at the old man. A plastic pouch of apple juice hung from the armature of a floor lamp next to the cot. The tubing did two loop-de-loops before disappearing up his nostril.

Renée said, “It’s different now, without Father Storey.”

“Different how?”

“Before, when everyone joined the Bright, it was like—well, everyone compares it to being a little drunk, right? Like having a few swallows of a really good red wine. Now it’s like the congregation is throwing down jars of cheap, filthy moonshine. They sing themselves hoarse and then after they just . . .
hum
for a while. Stand there swaying and humming, with their eyes burning.”

“Humming?” Harper asked.

“Like bees in a hive. Or—or like flies around roadkill.” Renée shuddered.

“This happens to you, too?”

“No,” Renée said. “I’ve had trouble joining in. Don Lewiston, too. And a few others. I don’t know why.”

But Harper thought
she
did. When she had first read Harold Cross’s notes about oxytocin she had thought, randomly, of soldiers in the desert and burning crosses in the night. She hadn’t seen the connection then, but she did now. Oxytocin was the drug the body used to reward people for winning the approval of their tribe . . . even if their tribe was the KKK, or a squad of marines humiliating prisoners in Abu Ghraib. If you weren’t part of the tribe, you didn’t get the payoff. Camp was dividing itself, organically, naturally, into those who were
in
—and those who were threats.

Renée gazed disconsolately across the room, and in a drifting, absent-minded voice, said “Sometimes I think it would be better if one of these days we just . . .”

Her voice trailed off.

“We just—what?” Harper asked.

“Just helped ourselves to one of the cars and some supplies and took off. Gather up the last few sensible people in camp and run. Ben Patchett has all the car keys hidden somewhere, but we wouldn’t have to worry about that. We’d have Gil, and he can—” She caught herself, went silent.

“Gil?”

“Gilbert. Mr. Cline.”

Her face was a studied, falsely innocent blank. Harper wasn’t fooled for a moment. Something teased her memory, a terrible tickling in the mind, and then it came back to her. In the summer, when Renée Gilmonton was a patient at Portsmouth Hospital, she had told Harper about volunteering at the state prison, where she had organized and led a reading group.

“Do you two know each other?” Harper asked, but the answer was in Renée’s bright, startled eyes.

Renée glanced at Nick, who sat now with the empty bowl in his lap, watching them both attentively.

“He doesn’t read lips,” Harper said. “Not really.”

Renée smiled at Nick and mussed his hair and said, “Glad to see he’s recovering from that stomachache.” She lifted her chin, met Harper’s stare, and said, “Yes, I knew him straight away, the moment I saw him. Well, New Hampshire is a small state. It would be a shock if some of us didn’t know each other from our former lives. He was part of the book club I led, up in Concord. I’m sure most of the men there joined the reading group just for a chance to talk to a woman. Standards drop after you’ve been locked up awhile, and even someone almost fifty and built like Mr. Potato Head starts to look good.”

“Oh, Renée!”

Renée laughed and added, “But Gil cared about the stories. I know he did. He made me nervous at first, because he kept a notebook and wrote down everything I said. But eventually we got comfortable with each other.”

“What do you mean comfortable? Did you have
him
sitting in your lap for storytime?”

“Don’t be awful!” Renée cried, with a look on her face that suggested such awfulness was, in fact, delightful. “It was literary talk, not pillow talk. He was hard to draw out—shy, you know—but I thought he had fine insights and told him so. I had encouraged him to seek a degree in English from UNH. I believe he had just enrolled in an online course when the first cases of Dragonscale began to appear in New England.” Renée looked down at her boots and said, in an offhand tone: “We appear to be reconvening the book club, as a matter of fact. I have Ben’s permission to visit the prisoners. He even let me set up a corner of the basement with some ratty chairs and a scrap of carpet. Once a night, the prisoners are allowed out of that awful meat locker, to have a cup of tea and sit down with me. Under guard, of course, although whoever is watching us usually sits on the basement stairs to give us some privacy. We’re reading
Watership Down
together. Initially Mr. Mazzucchelli was opposed to reading a story about rabbits, but I think I’ve brought him around. And Gil—Mr. Cline—well, I think he’s just glad to have someone to talk to.” Renée hesitated, then added, “I’m glad to have someone to talk to, too.”