The Fireman (35 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

8

Ben led the way. They walked on a bridge of pine planks set end to end across the snow. There seemed to be no light in all the world except for the white disc of Ben’s flashlight. Jamie Close followed behind. She had her rifle over her left shoulder and a broom handle in her right hand, cut short, one end wrapped in tape. She whistled while she swung it back and forth.

They came out from beneath the firs and proceeded to the House of the Black Star, the cottage where Carol had wintered with her father. It was a tidy one-floor place—gingerbread shingles and black shutters—named for the enormous iron barn star that hung on its north-facing side between a pair of windows. Harper thought it was a fine bit of decoration, ideal for any inquisitor’s dungeon or torturer’s crypt. Two Lookouts sat on the single stone step, though they jumped to their feet when Ben came out of the trees. Ben didn’t acknowledge them, but only stepped past them and rapped on the door. Carol called them in.

Carol sat in an aged mission chair covered in cracked, glossy leather. The chair had surely belonged to her father: it was a place to read Milton, smoke a pipe, and think wise, kindly, Dumbledorish thoughts. There was a matching love seat with creamy pale leather cushions, but no one was seated there. Carol had a pair of Lookouts with her, but they sat on the floor, at her feet. One of them was Mindy Skilling, damp-eyed and adoring before Mother Carol. The other was a girlish male, with close-cropped pale hair, feminine lips, and a big knife on his skinny belt. Almost everyone in camp called him Bowie, but Harper wasn’t sure if that was because of the knife or because of his resemblance to Ziggy Stardust. He watched them enter from beneath pink, drooping lids.

Harper didn’t expect to see Gilbert Cline there, too, but he was seated on the low stone ledge in front of the fire. Red worms twisted in the heaped coals, and the warmth didn’t reach far. Frost had turned the panes of glass to brilliant squares of diamond and made Harper feel as if she had entered a cave behind a frozen waterfall.

Jamie Close banged the door shut and leaned against it. Ben heaved himself down on the love seat with a great sigh, as if he had just come in from hauling armfuls of wood. He patted the space beside him, but Harper pretended not to see. She didn’t want to sit with him, and she didn’t care to appear as a supplicant at Carol’s feet. She remained close to the wall, her back to a window, winter breathing on the nape of her neck.

Carol’s gaze drifted to Harper. Her eyes were glassy and feverish and bloodshot. With her shaved head and starved, wasted face, she had the look of an aged cancer patient, responding poorly to chemotherapy.

“It’s good to see you, Nurse Willowes. I’m grateful you could come by. I know you’ve been busy. We were just hearing from Mr. Cline about how he came to be hiding by South Mill Pond, not a hundred yards from the police department. Some tea? Some breakfast?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Mindy Skilling rose without being spoken to and padded away into the darkened kitchenette.

“It seems Mr. Cline couldn’t plausibly have had anything to do with what happened to my father,” Carol went on. “And I’ve been interested to know something about who my dad risked his life for. Maybe
gave
his life for. You don’t mind do you, Nurse Willowes? He was just starting to tell us the story of his escape.”

“No. I don’t mind,” Harper said. Mindy was already back, handing her a little china cup of hot tea and a plate with a thin slice of fragrant, nutty coffee cake on it. Harper’s stomach rumbled noisily. Coffee cake? It seemed only slightly less luxurious than a foaming hot tub.

“Go on. Please continue, Mr. Cline. You were saying where you and Mr. Mazzucchelli met?”

“This was in Brentwood, at the county lockup.” Cline gave Harper a lingering, curious look—
what are you here for?
—before turning to face Carol. “They’ve got a facility there to hold maybe forty prisoners. And they had a hundred of us there.

“There were ten cells, each about ten feet long, with ten men packed in each. They put a TV in a hall and played
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
and
Pete’s Dragon
so we’d have something to watch. All they had was kid videos they keep around for family visits. There was one guy who lost his mind down the hall. Sometimes he’d start screaming
‘I’ll be your candle on the water!’
until guys started hitting him to shut him up. After a while I started to think they were running those two videos to torture us.”

It jarred her, to hear about someone trapped and going mad with panic while singing that particular song. Gilbert Cline was, in some ways, describing Harper herself, when she got stuck in the storm drain.

“None of us were supposed to be down there longer than a few days. There’s only a couple reasons you wind up in Brentwood. Most of the men there were awaiting trial. In my case, I was down from the prison in Concord to provide testimony in an ongoing case, not my own. The Mazz had been brought in from the state prison in Berlin to appeal his conviction.”

“What was he in jail for?” Carol asked.

“He looks like a rough customer,” Gil said, “but they locked him up for perjury. I can’t tell you whether he hurt your father or not, ma’am. But the Mazz isn’t the sort of guy who buys himself trouble with his hands. His mouth has always been his problem. Can’t help himself. He doesn’t know how to tell a story without smearing a thick layer of bullshit on top.”

“One more reason to hear about your escape from Brentwood from you instead of him,” Carol said.

“And you can spare us the potty mouth while you’re at it, mister,” Ben said. “There’s ladies present.”

Harper almost choked on her last mouthful of coffee cake. She could not have explained to anyone quite why the phrase
potty mouth
bothered her more than the word
bullshit
.

She cleared her throat and morosely considered her empty saucer. She had meant to eat her slice of cake slowly, but there was only a little bit of it, and after the first soft dissolving mouthful of sugar and nutmeg she hadn’t been able to help herself. Now it was horribly, tragically, impossibly all gone. She put the saucer on an end table so she wouldn’t be tempted to lick it.

Gil continued: “I was only supposed to be in Brentwood until I testified. But they shut the court down. I waited for them to pack us up and send us back, but they never did. They just kept shoveling in more prisoners. A young man in my cell once approached the bars to say he wanted to lodge a complaint and meet with his lawyer. A state trooper walked over and popped him right in the mouth with his nightstick. Knocked in three teeth with one slug. ‘Your complaint has been noted. Speak right up if there’s anything else bothering you,’ this cop said, and then gave us all a look to see if anyone else was dissatisfied with their treatment.”

“That didn’t happen,” Ben said. “In my twenty years of police work, I’ve heard a thousand reports of police brutality, and only about three I thought held water. The rest was just sorry drug addicts, drunks, and thieves, looking to get even with the person who locked them up.”

“It happened, all right,” Gilbert said, in a calm, untroubled tone. “Things are different now. Law ain’t law anymore. Without someone higher to answer to, the law is just whoever’s holding the nightstick. A nightstick—or a dish towel full of rocks.”

Ben bristled. His chest swelled, threatening to pop a button. Carol held up one hand, palm outward, and Ben closed his mouth without speaking.

“Let him continue. I want to hear this. I want to know who we brought to our camp. What they’ve seen, what they’ve done, and what they’ve been through. Go on, Mr. Cline.”

Gil lowered his gaze, like a man trying to remember some lines of verse from a poem he had memorized years before, for a long-ago English class, perhaps. At last, he looked back up, meeting Carol’s stare without fear, and he told them how it had been.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

9

“They weren’t all bad cops in Brentwood. I don’t want to give that idea. There was one man who made sure we had food and drink and toilet paper and other necessities. But the longer we were in there, the harder it was to find a friendly face. There were a lot of angry cops who didn’t want to be looking after us. And when people started to get the ’scale, they weren’t just angry. They were scared, too.

“Anyone could see what was going to happen, the way we were all crowded in together. One morning, a guy came down with Dragonscale, in a cell at the end of the block. The other prisoners panicked. I understand why they did what they did. I like to think I wouldn’t have gone along with them, but it is hard to say. His cellmates forced the infected boy into a corner, not touching him, just driving him back with pillows and such. Then they clubbed him to death.”

“Jesus,” Ben whispered.

“He didn’t die easy, either. They were banging his head off the walls and the floor and the side of the toilet for twenty minutes, all while this one lunatic in another cell sang ‘Candle on the Water’ and laughed about it. Eventually the infected prisoner began to smolder and char. He never completely caught fire, but he made plenty of smoke before he died. It was like being in an Indian sweat lodge. Men were crying from all the smoke and coughing on the ash.

“Well, after they beat this poor kid to death, the staties dragged the corpse out of the cell with rubber gloves and disposed of him. But we all knew it was going to spread. The whole place was a concrete petri dish. Pretty soon it was on a couple guys in a completely different cell. Then it was on three boys in another unit. I have no idea how or why it could hop around like that.”

Harper could’ve told him, but it was no matter now. The Fireman had said the world was divided into the healthy and the sick, but soon it would be down to the sick and the dead. For everyone in the room, the subject of how Dragonscale spread was now of academic interest only.

“The state cops didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t a facility for dealing with felons coated with Dragonscale, and they didn’t want to release any of the prisoners into the civilian population. The cops got dressed in riot gear and rubber gloves and herded all the men who had Dragonscale into one cell, all together, while they tried to figure out what to do.

“Then, one morning, this guy starts screaming, ‘I’m hot! I think I’m dying! I got fire ants crawling all over me!’ Then he was screaming smoke. It was coming out of his throat before the rest of him started to burn. That’s going full dragon, I’ve heard, when you breathe fire before you die. You do it because the tissues in your lungs have ignited, so you’re burning from the inside out. He was running around screaming and smoke pouring out of his mouth like someone in an old cartoon who accidentally drank hot sauce. All the men in the cell with him were pressed flat against the cinder blocks to keep from catching fire themselves.

“Well, the cops came running, led by the head bull, a fella named Miller. The bunch of them stared into this cell at the burning man for a few seconds and then they started shooting.” He waited to see if Ben would object. Ben sat very still, his arms draped over his knees, staring at Gilbert steadily in the wavering red light of the fire. “They pumped, I don’t know, three hundred rounds in there? They killed everyone. They killed the guy who was burning and they killed all the men around him.

“After the shooting stopped, this head bull, Miller, he hitches up his belt like he just finished a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon and tells us he just saved our lives. Stopped a chain reaction before it could get started. If they didn’t shoot the whole bunch, the jail block would’ve turned into an inferno. The other cops stood around looking shocked, staring at the guns in their hands, like they couldn’t fathom how they had all gone off.

“They had a few of us put on rubber cleaning gloves and carry the bodies out. I volunteered myself to get some fresh air. I was in Brentwood for three, four months and they never got the smell of burned hair and gunsmoke out of the jail block. Oh, and that empty cell? That filled back up, too. There weren’t any trials happening. No one was getting processed. But cops were still arresting folks for looting and such and they had to put them somewhere.

“They fed us on corned beef and lime Jell-O for the first couple months. Then the food situation got a little dicey. One day we had canned peaches for lunch. Another day, three cops busted open a concession machine and passed out candy bars. We had rice eight meals straight. One day they announced they were going to discontinue breakfast. That was when I started to believe I was going to die in Brentwood. Sooner or later they’d discontinue lunch. Then one day the cops wouldn’t come down to the cellblock at all.”

His voice was a rasp that made Harper think of someone running a knife across a leather strop. She stepped into the kitchenette without asking for permission, found a cup, and poured him some tap water. She brought it back and offered it to him and he took it with a look of surprise and gratitude. He drank it off in three swallows.

When it was gone, he licked his lips and said, “Like I say. Some of the cops were all right. There was a guy named Devon. A dainty little fellow. Most of the guys called him a homo behind his back, which maybe he was, but I’ll tell you what. He never shot anyone and one day he brought two shopping bags full of beer down for us. He said it was his birthday and he wanted to celebrate. So he poured us plastic cups of warm beer and handed out cupcakes and we all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to him. And that was the best birthday I’ve ever been to. Stale supermarket cupcakes and room-temperature Bud to wash it down.” He glanced at Ben and said, “See, there are some good cops in this story.”

Ben grunted.

Carol said, “There’s always a little decency in the worst places . . . and always a little secret selfishness in the best.”

Harper wondered if Carol was taking a veiled swipe at her. If so, it was a clumsy, ineffectual sort of swipe—after all, Harper wasn’t the one with coffee cake in the cupboard while the rest of the camp made do with canned beets. She supposed a small quantity of supplies were still trickling into camp now and then, one way or another, carried in by the occasional new arrival. And she imagined the best pickings wound up here, courtesy of Ben and the Lookouts: treats to help Mother Carol keep up her strength in her time of trial.

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t the only decent thing Devon did for us. In the end, he did a little more for us than hand out plastic cups of suds. We’ll get back to him in a minute.

“The mortar between the cement blocks in the walls was crumbly. Not so crumbly you could chip it away and escape—never in ten thousand years—but you could get a kind of chalk residue on your fingers if you rubbed at it. The Mazz figured out if you mixed it with spit, you could make a white paste. That’s what he used to cover the Dragonscale when he came down with it, and that’s what I used, too. A couple black guys in our cell got the ’scale, but they scraped themselves up, then claimed they had a fight. A cop threw in a roll of bandages for them, and they used that to cover the marks. By the end of the week, everyone in our cell was carrying Dragonscale and covering it up one way or another. See, all of us were afraid of Miller and the others coming down and shooting up another cell.

“It was in other cells, too. I don’t know if every man in the block had it by January, but I think by New Year’s Day, more had it than didn’t. Some were good at hiding it. Some weren’t. The cops knew after a while. You could tell because they began delivering food wearing elbow-length gloves and riot helmets, in case anyone tried to spit on them. You could tell because they looked so goddamn scared behind the plastic faceplates.

“Well, one morning Miller came downstairs with twelve other cops, all of them in their riot gear and carrying shields. Miller announced he had some good news. He told us there was a transport waiting outside. Anyone who was sick with Dragonscale was eligible for transfer to a camp in Concord, where they’d get the best medical treatment available and three squares a day. Miller read from a sheet of paper that they were having ham and pineapple that evening. Rice pilaf and steamed carrots. No beer, but cold whole milk. The cells opened up and Miller told everyone with Dragonscale to come out. A short black guy with a frill of Dragonscale running right up onto his left cheek stepped out first. It looked like a tattoo of a fern. Most people don’t get it on their faces, but he did, and I guess he saw no reason to pretend he wasn’t carrying it. Another guy came out after him, and then a few more, and then some guys I didn’t even know had it. Pretty soon about half of the block had emptied into the corridor that ran between cells. I was going to go myself. It was the thing about cold milk that got me. You know how good a cup of cold whole milk is, when you haven’t had one in a long time? My throat hurt thinking about it. I even took a step forward, but the Mazz caught my arm and just gave his head a little shake. So I stayed.

“Most of the guys in our cell went, though. One guy who was in with us, Junot Gomez, he shot me a confused look and muttered, ‘I’ll think of you when I’m eatin’ breakfast tomorrow.’ ” Gilbert lifted his glass to his lips before he remembered it was empty. Harper offered to get him more water, but he shook his head.

“What happened?” Carol asked.

“Is it really that obvious they didn’t ever get their ham and rice pilaf? I guess so, huh? They led ’em upstairs and outside and they shot them all. The guns went off loud enough to shake the walls, and they thundered away for almost half a minute. Not pistols. We were hearing fully automatic bursts of fire. I thought it was never going to stop. You couldn’t hear anything else, not shouts, not screams . . . just guns going, like someone feeding logs into a wood chipper.

“After the shooting stopped, everyone was real quiet. The cellblock hadn’t ever been so quiet, not even in the middle of the night, when people were supposed to be sleeping.

“A while later Miller and the others came down. You could smell homicide on them. Gunsmoke and blood. They brought their M16s and Miller stuck the barrel through the bars at us and I thought,
Well, now it’s our turn.
Damned if we went and damned if we stayed. I felt sick about it, but I didn’t fall on my knees and start to beg.”

“Good,” Harper said. “Good for you.”

“He says, ‘I want ten men for a cleanup crew. You do good, you can have a soda after.’

“And the Mazz says, ‘What about a glass of cold milk?’ Needling him, you know. Only Miller didn’t get the joke. He just said, ‘Sure, if we have any.”

“The Mazz asks, ‘What happened out there?’ Like we didn’t know already.

“Miller says, ‘They tried to escape. Tried to seize the truck.’

“And the Mazz, he just laughs.

“Miller blinks at him and says, ‘They were all dead anyway. It’s better this way. We did ’em a favor. We made it quick. Better than burning alive.’

“The Mazz says, ‘That’s you, Miller. Always thinking about how to help your fellow man. You’re the picture of empathy.’ I told you—the Mazz just has an instinct for running his mouth when anyone else would know to shut up. I thought for sure he’d get shot, but you know what? I think Miller was in shock, too. Maybe his ears were still ringing and he couldn’t hear the Mazz too good. All I know is he just nodded, like he was agreeing with him.

“He opened the cell and the Mazz and I came out. Some other men drifted from the other cells. Guards had us sit down and take off our shoes and leave them behind, so we wouldn’t try and run. When there were ten of us, we went upstairs, flanked by men in body armor. They walked us down a long concrete corridor and out through a pair of double fire doors into the parking lot.

“It was a cold bright morning, so bright I couldn’t see at first. The whole world was just a white blur for at least a minute. I’ve thought about that a lot in the time since. The men they gunned down—they must’ve been staggering around blind while they got shot.

“When my vision cleared I could see the brick wall was shot to shit. Most of the bodies were up against it, but a few had tried to run. At least one guy made it twenty feet across the lot before his head got blown off.

“They had a town truck backed up to the rear of the building. They handed us yellow rubber gloves and told us to get working. They wanted to get the bodies off to Portsmouth for ‘disposal.’ The guy I told you about, Devon, the birthday boy who brought us beers that time? He was out there, too, with a clipboard. He checked us off as we collected our gloves and would have to check us off again when we went back to our cells. He looked like a different man. He looked like he had had ten birthdays in the last month, not one.

“At first it was easy throwing the bodies into the back of the truck, but after a bit, the Mazz and I had to climb up to arrange them and make room for more. Cold as it was, they were already going stiff. It was more like moving deadfall than you might think. I turned over Junot Gomez, who died with his mouth open, like he was going to ask someone a question. Maybe he was going to ask them what they were serving in Concord for breakfast.” Gilbert Cline laughed at that, a single, harsh sound that was more jarring than a sob would’ve been. “We had about forty of the corpses piled in the truck when the Mazz grabbed my elbow and pulled me down with him. He drug Junot’s body over the both of us. Just like that. No discussion. Like we planned it. It never even occurred to me to have second thoughts.

“Well. I don’t know that there was anything to think about. The guards thought we were healthy for the moment, and they wouldn’t figure on two healthy men squirming in with a pile of infected corpses. And it wasn’t like it was safer to stay. Sooner or later they’d shoot the rest of us, for one reason or another. They’d shoot us and tell themselves it was the right thing to do, that they saved us from starvation, or burning alive, or whatever. The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.