The Fireman (54 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

9

Carol spun on her heel. The high vault of the nave echoed with cries for help, for Jesus, for mercy, for forgiveness. Carol stared into the long and crowded room, her gaze stricken and confused.

Some sprawled on the floor. Some huddled in the pews, holding one another. Many sat at the foot of the altar. Norma sat on the steps leading up to the stage, rocking back and forth, shaking her head.

“What are you
crying
for?” she cried out. “Why you crying? You think we can’t get out of here? You think we’re
trapped
? The Bright is
a-waitin’
for us and ain’t no one can stop us from flying into it to be free! It ain’t time to cry! It’s time to
sing
!”

The stained-glass windows that lined the long hall were covered up with plywood sheets, nailed up on the outside of the building. One of these plywood sheets was in flames, and the rippling fire cast garish, candy-store colors across the pews.

“Time to sing!”
Norma screamed again. “Come on! Come on now!” Her wild gaze found Carol across the full length of the room, through the tumult of the crowd. “Mother Carol! You know what we need to do! You know!”

Carol looked back at her for a long moment, something like incomprehension on her face. But then she drew breath and lifted her voice and began to sing.

“O come all ye faithful—”
Carol sang. It was hard to hear her, at first, over the moans and shouts.

Bullets drummed against the exterior of the chapel, falling like a hard rain.

“Joyful and triumphant,”
Carol went on, her voice tragic, and terrified, and sweet. She walked into the nave, stepping around Michael and holding her hands out to either side of her. Blood dripped from her fingertips.

Gail stood nearby. She seemed to have given up looking for her sister, was just swaying there. Carol took her by the hand. Gail looked down at it in surprise, jumping a little, as if Carol had pinched her.

Carol squeezed her fingers and went on:
“O come ye . . . o come y e . . . to Bethlehem.”

“Yes!” Norma roared. “Yes! To Bethlehem! To the Bright!”

A second voice joined Carol’s, someone singing with her in a frightened, off-key lilt.

Someone else was crying out, over and over, “We’re going to die! We’re going to die in here! Oh God, we’re going to die!”

Gail looked at Carol’s hand holding hers and began to weep. She wept so hard her shoulders shook. But then she began to sing as well.

Half a dozen of them now, their voices rising together, into the rafters:
“Come and behold him! Born the king of angels!”

And a silvery rose-hued light raced along the ridges and whorls of Carol’s Dragonscale. Harper could see her lighting up through the thin silk of her pajamas.

In a bellowing, grief-choked voice, Norma shouted:
“O come let us adore him! O come let us adore him! O come let us adore him!”
It was more than an exhortation. It sounded almost like a threat.

Another Molotov cocktail crashed against the south side of the church. Flame leapt up a section of wall. Two men ran at it and began to beat at it with coats.

“It’s over,” Harper said to the Fireman. “It’s all over.”

Carol walked slowly toward the altar and as she waded into the crowd they rose to their feet and reached for her. Pews shrieked as people pushed them aside. They clambered over and past one another to get closer to Carol.

The worshippers reached for her and sang with her and many gazed upon Carol with adoration. One little boy hurried along in her wake, hopping and clapping his hands in an inexplicable fit of excitement, as if he were being led to the gates of an amusement park he had long dreamed of visiting. Carol squeezed hands as she made her way forward, not unlike a politician making her way through a crowd, sometimes leaning over to brush someone’s knuckles with her lips, but going on with her song all the while. She loved them, of course. It was a sick, spoiled sort of love—it was, Harper thought, not so different from the way Jakob had loved her—but it was real and it was all she had left to give them.

Bullets drummed into the wooden doors behind them, snapped Harper out of her trance. She turned the Fireman and half pulled, half carried him into the safety of the stone archway that opened into the stairwell. Bullets zipped and whined, chipping the flagstones on the floor behind them. Allie squeezed in beside them, holding her brother in her arms.

“Any ideas?” she asked, without a trace of panic.

“There might be a way out across the roof,” the Fireman said.

Harper knew that once they climbed into the bell tower, there would be no coming back down—not for her, anyway. She would not be escaping across the top of the chapel. It was too high. If she dropped off the steep pitch of the roof she would pulverize her legs and bring on a miscarriage.

But she didn’t say this to either of them. The thought was in her mind that Allie, at least—nimble, athletic Allie—might be able to get across the roof and down to a gutter, hang herself off the side and drop. There would be lots of smoke and noise, maybe enough to give her a chance to reach the woods and cover.

“Yes,” Harper said, but still she hesitated, stayed where she was, craning her neck to see into the nave.

The voices of all who remained rose in sweet, agonized song. They sang and they shone. Their eyes glowed as blue as blowtorches. A little girl with a shaved head stood on a pew, singing at the top of her lungs. The Dragonscale on her bare arms was glowing so bright, it rendered the arms themselves almost translucent, so Harper could see the shadows of bones through her skin.

Norma was the first to ignite. She stood behind the altar, swaying in front of the cross, booming out the words of the song. Her big, homely face was pink and shiny with sweat and she opened her mouth and cried out:
“Sing in exultation!”
The inside of her throat was full of light.

Norma drew a deep breath for the next line. A yellow blast of flame gushed from her mouth. Her head snapped back. Her throat was red and straining as if with some terrible effort. Then her neck began to blacken, while dark smoke boiled from her nostrils. The Dragonscale on the wobbling meat of her bare arms was a livid poisonous shade of deepest red. She wore a black flower-print dress roughly the size of a pup tent. Blue flames raced up the back of it.

Gail choked, stumbled, knocked into the little boy who had been skipping up and down. She waved one hand, back and forth, through the air, as if to clear gnats away from her face. The third time she did it, Harper saw her arm was on fire.

“What’s happening to them?” cried Jamie, who had joined them in the wide stone archway.

“It’s a chain reaction,” the Fireman said. “They’re all going down together.”

“Glory in the highest!”
they sang. Some of them, anyway. Others had begun to scream. The ones who weren’t burning.

When Carol went up in flames, she was at the center of the throng, dozens of worshippers reaching in to touch her. And all at once she was a white rippling pillar of fire, her head thrown back and her arms spread out as if to embrace an invisible lover. She went up as if she had been doused in kerosene. She did not cry out—it was too fast.

Bullets zinged and whickered through the nave, cutting down people at random on the outer edge of the crowd. Harper saw a teenager, a slender black kid, slap a hand to his brow, as if he had just realized he had forgotten to bring his textbook to class. When he dropped the hand, she saw a hole through the center of his forehead.

A teenage girl doubled over, grabbing herself, her whole back on fire. The lanky kid who looked like David Bowie had sunk to his knees at the back of the crowd, his head bowed as if in prayer, his hands pressed together. His head was on fire, a black match at the center of a bright yellow flame. A little girl ran up and down the aisle, flapping both of her burning hands in the air and shrieking for her mother. Her ponytail was a blue scarf of flame.

“Oh, John,” she said and turned her face away. “Oh, John.”

He had her by the arm, and he drew her on into the smoky gloom of the stairwell, and they began to climb together, away from shouts, and laughter, and song, but most of all, away from the screams, which rose together in a final wrenching chorus, a last act of harmony.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

10

Harper had wondered what it must’ve been like to be in one of the stairwells at the Twin Towers on the day the planes struck, what people felt as they made their way blindly down the steps through the smoke. She had wondered about it all over again the day men and women began to leap from the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, in the first weeks of widespread infection. In those days of conflagration, it happened again and again—the high building in flames, people inside hurrying to escape the fire at their backs, trying to find a way out, knowing all the while that the only exit might be a last jump and the giddy silent rush of falling: a final chance to snatch at a moment of peace.

Most of all, she feared panic. She feared losing possession of herself. But as they made their way up, Harper felt almost businesslike, focused on the next step, then the step after. That, at least, was a reason for gladness. She was less terrified of dying than she was of being stripped of her personality, of turning into an animal in the slaughterhouse, unable to hear her own thoughts over the clanging alarm of desperation.

Harper climbed with the Fireman holding on to her for support, stopping now and then when he got dizzy or when she needed to catch her breath. They climbed like the elderly, going one step, pausing, going another. He was too weak to hurry and she was having contractions. Her womb felt like a stone, a hard block at the center of her.

Jamie Close was already in the tower. She had run past them a minute before. Already, Harper could hear the occasional crack of a rifle from above.

Allie was a little ahead of them, carrying Nick in her arms. Nick’s chin rested on her shoulder, and Harper could see his face quite clearly. He wore a red mask of blood, his scalp torn open where he had been kissed by the Humvee, but his expression was peaceful, drowsing. Once he opened his left eye to peer at her, but then he closed it again.

“Almost there,” the Fireman said. “Almost there.”

And what would they do when they got there? Wait for the fire to reach them, Harper assumed. Or be shot from below. But she didn’t share this thought with him. She was grateful for his closeness, for his arm at her waist and his head on her shoulder.

“I’m glad I fell in love with you, John Rookwood!” she said to him, and kissed his neck.

“Oh, I am, too,” he said.

Behind them, the singing went on, although now screams threatened to drown it out. The screams, and the laughter. Someone was laughing very loudly.

The smoke in the steeple was fragrant, smelled of baking pinecones.

“John,” she said, seized by a sudden idea. “What if we turned back? What if we tried to go
through
the flames. The Dragonscale would protect us, wouldn’t it?”

“Not from gunfire, I’m afraid. Besides, Allie wouldn’t come out at all. She doesn’t know how to control the ’scale like I do—or like you. And Nick is unconscious, so I don’t know—but look, if you want to try it, then let me get upstairs first. We’ll see if we can’t make you some cover. You might—with all the confusion—” His eyes brightened as he came alive to the idea.

“No,” Harper said. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking about Allie or Nick. I’m not going anywhere without them.”

They were on the uppermost landing now. A door stood half open, looking onto dark, smoke-filled night. He gripped her shoulders and squeezed. “You have a child to think about.”

“More than one, Mr. Rookwood,” she said.

He stared at her fondly and kissed her and she kissed him back.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose we better make a fight of it. Spit spot, out we go.”

“Out we go, Nurse Willowes,” he said.

The bell tower was an open well, with a catwalk of pine planks going around all four sides of the square hole. The copper bell, stained a dignified green with age, hung over the drop. It bonged whenever it was struck by a bullet from below. White stone balusters supported a waist-high marble rail. Lead cracked off rock, making small clouds of white powder.

Harper did not expect to step over a corpse, but there was a dead boy flung across the last couple of steps. He was facedown, with a red hole in the back of his chambray shirt. The Lookout who had been on watch in the steeple that night, Harper supposed. He had missed the signal from the bus, down at the end of the road, had been too preoccupied with the stoning in progress below, but he had more than paid for his lack of attention. Harper bent to feel for a pulse. His neck was already cold. She left him, helped John past him, and rose into the night.

Allie sat on the floor, below the railing, with her brother in her arms. Both of them looked as if they had crawled arm over arm through a particularly filthy abattoir.

Jamie was on her knees, the dead sentry’s rifle resting on the stone railing. The gun went off with a flat snapping sound. She cursed, slid back the bolt, grabbed for a bullet in a battered cardboard box at her knee.

Harper had crouched instinctively as she came into the open air. Now she lifted her head to take in a panorama of ruin. From here she could see it all, had a God’s-eye view of the camp in its entirety.

The Memorial Park stood just beyond the chapel’s front steps. From here, that circle of barbaric standing rocks looked even more like Stonehenge. A half-dozen men had fanned out among the boulders and plinths for cover. One of them, a scrawny guy in thick, black-framed Buddy Holly glasses, was crouched behind the blackened altar with what appeared to be an Uzi. He grinned, his face—under a bushy white-boy afro—filthy with soot.

Some perverse trick of the air currents carried his voice to Harper. She knew his cat screech right away, remembered it well from the afternoon the Marlboro Man had almost found her hiding in her house.

“This is the real shit!” Marty screamed. The gun stammered in his hands. “This is the real commando shit right here!”

To the north was the bare, muddy expanse of the soccer field and the overturned Hummer. A pair of black pickups had parked themselves out there, to cover the double doors that led out of the basement. Through the haze it was hard to tell how many men were in the flatbeds, but Harper saw a steady pop and blink of gunfire, going off like camera flashes. The Freightliner lumbered down the hill, moving to join the others on the north side of the chapel. Maybe Jakob hoped the basement bulkhead would fly open and some folks would make a desperate run for it and he’d have something to do with his plow.

It was harder to see to the south. There was a stretch of grass as wide and even as a two-lane avenue, in the space between the church and the forest. Harper knew the Marlboro Man was down there, in his big silver Intimidator, but she could only barely glimpse the top of the cab by craning her head. It was parked too close to the building to see it well.

A black and filthy smog poured from below, seeping out from under the eaves and boiling through the open hole in the bell tower just exactly in the way it would’ve come streaming out of a chimney. A sickly firelight throbbed within the churning smoke. Harper suspected the tower was only dimly visible from below, maybe the only thing they had going for them.

All that smoke mounted into a towering cloudbank that spread to the east, back down the hill toward the water. Harper couldn’t see most of the sky, the cloud smothering the stars and the moon.

The roof was fifteen feet below the railing of the tower and it was a steeply banked surface of black slate. Harper saw herself leaping, falling, hitting feet-first, her ankles rupturing, crashing to her hip with a glassy crack, sliding straight down the side of the roof, and a tearing inside as her uterus came apart and—

“Fuck that,” she said to herself.

She crawled over to be next to Allie.

“How’s my mouf?” Allie asked.

“Not too bad,” Harper said.

“Fuck you it isn’t. I love it. I’m punk rock now. I always wanted to be punk rock.” Allie feathered a hand back through Nick’s hair. “I tried to do the right thing at the end, Ms. Willowes. Maybe I flunked the exam, but at least I did pretty good with the extra credit.”

“Exam in what?”

“Basic humanity,” Allie said, blinking at tears. “Will you hold my hand? I’m scared.”

Harper took her hand and squeezed.

The Fireman worked his way around the catwalk to the south-facing side of the turret, to be next to Jamie.

“Fuckers in the Silverado,” Jamie said. “They’re too close to the side of the building. I can’t get a bead on them. If we could drive them off, we could hang a rope—”

“What rope?” the Fireman asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe we make a rope out of our clothes. We get into the trees. Run for the road. Steal a car.” Her voice was hurried and distracted, leaping from one improbability to another. “I know people in Rochester. They’ll hide us. But first we need to drive off that truck.”

The Fireman nodded, wearily. “I might be able to do something about them.”

But when he tried to stand, he swayed, dangerously. Harper saw his eyelids flutter, as if he were an ingénue in a 1940s musical comedy trying to look kissable. For a moment it was all too easy to imagine him dipping backward and falling over the waist-high iron railing around the hole in the center of the tower, dropping away into the smoky dark.

Jamie caught his elbow before he could topple. Harper cried out, let go of Allie’s hand, and scrambled around the catwalk toward him. By the time she reached him, he had sunk back to one knee.

She touched his cheek, felt clammy sweat.

“Is the bell droning?” he muttered thickly.

“No,” she said. “Not at the moment.”

“Christ. That sound must be in my head, then.” He pressed the balls of his palms to his temples. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Don’t try to get up.”

“We need to drive them back if we’re going to have any chance of getting down from here.”

“Stay down. Get your wind back. You’re no good to anyone if you pass out.”

She let go of his hands and stood, pouring all her heart into a wordless song. Her right hand was a scimitar of flame. Get a spoonful of this, motherfuckers.

Harper launched a curved blade of blue fire into the darkness. It whizzed, dropping gobbets of blazing light as it flew, and hooked unnaturally just beyond the roof of the chapel, dropped out of sight onto the Silverado Intimidator below. Men shouted as the hood of the truck was blown off in a spout of light.

Bullets spanged and pinged into the bell, hit the railing, flew through the air with an angry whine like lead wasps, and Harper dropped again, her flaming hand fluffing out in a billow of smoke

One of those bullets struck the rope that held the bell in position, cutting through all but a few strands. The giant bell spun, making a low humming sound. The last few braids of line holding it up popped and broke musically, like guitar strings. The bell fell through the open hole. A moment later it hit the floor of the church below with a resounding
BONG
that shuddered upon the air, visibly shook the smoke around them, and made Harper’s eardrums throb.

Nick lifted his head and looked around with muddled eyes. The bell was so loud, Harper thought, it had woken the deaf.

“Oh Christ, what the fuck now—” Jamie shouted, looking north and then scuttling past the Fireman and around to that side of the tower.

Jakob.

The Freightliner had turned to face the broad north side of the church. With a grinding roar it came thundering forward, plow lowered, toward the side of the chapel.

Jamie stood with the rifle socked into her shoulder. She fired. A white spark dinged off one corner of the cab of the truck. She levered back the bolt and the empty cartridge jumped into the air, a bright glitter of brass. She slammed in a fresh bullet and fired again. A blue crack leapt through the windshield. The truck jigged a little to the left, and Harper thought,
Got him
, but then the Freightliner shifted into a higher gear and lunged the last fifty feet and the snow-wing plow buried itself into the side of the chapel.

Harper was thrown into the stone baluster. It felt as if some vast invisible hand had reached down and
adjusted
the entire building, prying it free from its foundation to shift it a few feet back to the south. The rear north corner of the chapel collapsed with a groan and crash of falling slate and smashed wood. A great burning heap of it dropped on the front of the Freightliner, the plow disappearing into curdled smoke and pulverized debris. The jolt rocked the tower. Jamie had been stepping back to open the bolt of her .22 and was thrown onto her heels. Her ass hit the low metal railing over the open hole. She dropped the rifle and grabbed—at air.

“Jamie!” Allie screamed—screaming for the girl who had slashed open her face—but she was beneath Nick and couldn’t even stand up, and anyway there was no time.

A moment later, the bell donged softly below when Jamie struck it.

The Fireman looked around in a daze, blood dripping from his face. Harper pushed his hair back from his eyes and then gently, carefully, put her arms around him. It was time to stop fighting, she felt. It was time to just hold each other, the four of them, their fucked-up little family. Five of them, counting the baby. They would cling together and there would be love and closeness at the end. They would have that at least until Jakob backed up and hit the chapel again, closer to the tower this time, and dropped them all into the flames.

The bell below was still echoing. It ding-ding-dinged with a small, piercing,
golden
sound, a noise like a much smaller bell. The Fireman lifted his head and peered out into the smoke, down along the south side of the chapel.

The fire truck—with Gilbert Cline behind the wheel, one hand out the window to ring the brass bell—launched itself through the boiling smoke to the south of the church and hit the Chevy Silverado head on. The old fire truck with the number 5 on the grille weighed almost three tons. It flattened the front end of the Intimidator like a bootheel coming down on a beer can. The Chevy’s engine block came right back through the dash and cut the driver in two. The pickup lifted off the ground, front wheels spinning in the air for a moment, before it turned over on the gunmen in the flatbed.