The Fireman (63 page)

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HarperCollins
Publishers

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

20

John’s eyes were scared, his face pebbled with sweat and soot. His pants were off. The right thigh was black and bloated, twice as thick as his left. Renée’s chubby palms rested below the break, while Harper’s gripped the leg just above it.

“Are you ready?” Harper asked.

John gave her a tight, frightened nod. “Let’s get this Dark Ages medical procedure over with.”

Allie was standing thirty feet away, but when the Fireman began to scream, she turned her back on them and clapped her hands over her ears. The bone made a grinding sound as the two broken parts settled back together, a noise that made Harper think of someone dragging a rock across a chalkboard.

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HarperCollins
Publishers

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

21

Allie was the one who figured out how to make a travois by folding blankets across a segment of fire ladder. They lashed him down to it, running bungee lines across his shins and hipbones. A final cord went around his forehead. Those were the only places they could put the cables without crossing a broken bone.

He was, by then, unconscious but restless, blowing air from his lips and trying to shake his head. He looked very old, Harper thought, his cheeks and temples sunken, his brow creased. He also had a flustered, dim-witted expression that made her heartsick.

Renée disappeared for a while, but when she returned she had a road map of New England, which she had discovered in the glove compartment of Jakob’s Freightliner. Harper sat with it across her knees for a while, then told them it was two hundred miles to Machias.

“If we set a pace of twenty miles a day,” Harper said, “we can be there in a little over a week.”

Harper waited for someone to ask if she was kidding.

Instead, Allie crouched, took the ends of the homemade travois, and stood. John’s head rose into the air until it was about level with the small of her back. Allie’s face was a grim, stoic mask.

“Better get going, then,” Allie said. “If we start right now we can make ten miles before we lose the light. I don’t see any good reason to waste the day. Do you?”

She glared around at them, as if she expected a challenge. She didn’t get one.

“Ten days on your feet,” Renée mused. She looked at Harper’s distended belly. “When’s the due date?”

Harper showed her a tight smile. “Plenty of time.”

She had lost track, but was pretty sure it was down to less than two weeks.

Renée salvaged a bag of groceries from the wreck and Harper picked the Portable Mother out of the road. They had struggled their way back up the slope to I-95 before Harper noticed Nick was carrying a fire axe. He was a practical child.

Where it wasn’t shattered, the road was blanketed with ash. There was nothing to see, all the way to the horizon, except cinder-colored hills and the charred spears of the pines.

A few hours before dusk they reached a place where the interstate caved away into what had once been a creek. The water was choked with ash, had become a magnesium-colored sludge. A ’79 Mercury floated down it, up to its headlights, looking like a giant robot crocodile patrolling a toxic canal.

Allie set the travois down by the side of the road. “I’ll go upstream, see if there’s another way across.”

“I don’t like the idea of you taking off alone,” Harper said. “We don’t know who might be out there. I can’t lose one more person I love, Allie.”

It blindsided Allie, hearing Harper tell her she loved her. She looked around at Harper with an expression of shock and pleasure and embarrassment that made her seem much younger than she was: twelve, not seventeen.

“I’m coming back,” Allie said. “Promise. Besides.” She tugged the fire ax out of Nick’s hands. “My mom isn’t the only one who knows how to sling one of these around.”

She went down the steep slope at the side of the road, whickering the blade back and forth to clear her way through the shoulder-high grass.

She was back just as it turned twilight, the sky curdling a sickly shade of yellow. When Harper asked if she had found anything, she only wearily wagged her head and didn’t speak.

They camped on the banks of the river, under the overhang of the collapsed bridge. In the night, the Fireman began to rave.

“Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim che-ride, find me some water, ’fore I burn up inside! Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cha-red! If I was on fire, would you piss on my head?”

“Shh,”
Harper told him, one hand across his waist, clasping herself to him to keep him warm. The day had been sullen and hot, a stew of heavy damp air, but after dark the air was so cold and sharp, they might’ve been on an exposed mountain ridge. His face was drenched with an icy, sick sweat, yet he kept grabbing the collar of his shirt and pulling at it, as if he were roasting. “
Shh
. Try and sleep.”

His eyelids fluttered and he gave her a wild, distracted look. “Is Jakob still after us?”

“No. He’s all gone.”

“I thought I heard his truck. I thought I heard him coming.”

“No, my love.”

He patted her hand and nodded, relieved, and slept again for a while.

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HarperCollins
Publishers

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

22

They spent most of the next morning doubling back, retracing their steps to an off-ramp, which led them down past the napalmed ruin of a Pizza Hut. The Fireman slept most of the way. When he did wake, his eyes were stunned and uncomprehending.

He didn’t have much to say—at first—and sometimes it was necessary to ask him a question a few times before he’d hear it. His replies, however, were coherent and sensible. Yes, he
would
like some water. Yes, his leg hurt, but it was all right, he was managing. His chest didn’t hurt so much, but it felt
heavy,
it felt
tight
. He asked Allie several times to loosen the strap across his chest. At first she told him there
wasn’t
a strap across his chest, but the third time he asked, she said sure, no problem, and he thanked her and dropped the subject.

Only once did the Fireman do anything particularly troubling. He moved his hands, speaking to Nick. Nick’s reply was easy to understand: he shook his head
no
. Then he hurried along to catch up to Harper and walked along beside her, where he could avoid eye contact with the Fireman.

“What did he say?” Harper asked.

“He said he was pretty sure the truck was still behind us. The big plow. I told him it wasn’t, but he said he could
hear
it. He said it was still coming and if it got any closer we’d have to leave him.”

“He’s sick. Don’t worry. He’s mixed up.”

“I know,” Nick said. “Your sign language is getting pretty good.”

Harper was going to say, “Maybe I’ll teach my son,” and then she remembered if everything went according to plan, she would never know her own son. She would be giving him up to someone healthy. She put her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and left them there, all done talking for a while.

They stopped for lunch in an improbable stand of birch trees, located in a center island between two lanes of a country highway. The hills to either side of the road were crowded with blackened trees, but in the small teardrop-shaped island, there was a place that had been untouched by fire, a zone of green ferny cool.

They drank bottled water and ate pretzels. At some point a soft, dry hail began to spatter down around them, striking their shoulders and the trees, the leaves and the ferns. Harper found a ladybug crawling on the back of her hand and another on her wrist. She brushed a hand through her hair and swept half a dozen ladybugs into the grass.

When she lifted her head she could see hundreds of them, crawling on the trunks of the trees, or opening their shells to glide on the breeze. No:
thousands
. Ladybugs soared on the updrafts, hundreds of feet above, a slow floating storm of them. Renée stood up wearing hundreds of ladybugs on her arms, like elbow-length gloves. She dusted them off and they fell pitter-patter into the ferns. John wore them like a blanket until Allie gently dusted him with a fern.

They camped that night in the ruin of a cottage by the side of the road. The west-facing side of the house had been swept by fire and collapsed, burying the living room and kitchen in charred sticks and burnt shingle. But the east-facing wing was mysteriously untouched: white siding, black shutters, blinds drawn behind the windows. They settled in what had once been a guest bedroom, where they found a queen bed, neatly made. A dried, withered bundle of white viburnum rested on the pillow. A former guest had written a message on the wall:
the crowther family stayed here on our way to see martha quinn
, followed by a date from the previous fall.

By the time they lost the daylight, John was shivering uncontrollably, and his body only relaxed when Harper curled against him under the quilt. He glowed with heat, and it wasn’t Dragonscale, either. It scared her, the dry steady blaze of his fever. She carefully put her ear to his chest, listening to his lungs, and heard a sound like someone pulling a boot out of mud. Pneumonia, then. Pneumonia all over again, and worse than before.

Nick stretched out on John’s other side. He had discovered a copy of the
Peterson Field Guide to Birds
on an end table and was leafing through the pages, studying the pictures by the light of one burning finger.

“What are you thinking?” Harper asked him.

“I’m wondering how many of these have gone extinct,” Nick told her.

The next day the Fireman was gummy with sweat.

“He’s burning up,” Renée said, putting her knuckles to his cheek.

“Be funny if I cooked to death,” he muttered, and they all jumped a little. He didn’t speak again all day.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

23

They splashed through a soupy, Dijon-colored fog, beneath trees festooned with streamers of dirty mist. They walked north into it, and by midmorning the sun was no more than a faint brown disc burning a rusty hole through the pall. It was impossible to see more than a few yards into the miasma. Harper spotted what she thought was a hulking motorcycle leaning against the ruin of a barbed-wire fence. It turned out to be a dead cow, its blackened skin fissured to show the ripe, spoiled flesh beneath, its empty eye sockets buzzing with flies. Renée staggered past it, coughing, holding her throat, trying not to gag.

It was the first and last time Harper heard anyone cough all day. Even the Fireman’s breathing was long and slow and regular. Although her eyes and nostrils burned, she might’ve been breathing fresh alpine air for all the roiling smoke bothered her.

The idea occurred to her that they were breathing poison, had crossed into an environment roughly as hospitable to human life as Venus. But it didn’t drop them, and Harper turned that thought over in her mind. It was the Dragonscale, of course, doing its thing. She had known for a while that it converted the toxins in smoke to oxygen. This, though, led to another notion, and she called for Allie to stop.

Allie held up, flushed and filthy. Harper knelt beside the drag sled, unbuttoned John’s shirt, and put her ear to his chest.

She still heard a dry and gritty rasp she didn’t like, but if it was no better, it was also no worse. He was smiling and, in sleep, almost looked his old, calm, wry self. The smoke around them was as good as an oxygen tent. It wouldn’t make his pneumonia go away—the best chance for him now was a course of antibiotics—but it might buy him time.

In the early afternoon, though, they dragged him clear of the haze and went on beneath a clear, cloudless, hateful blue sky, the sun throwing blinding flashes off every piece of metal and every sooty fragment of glass. By the time they finally got off the road, John was worse than Harper had ever seen him. His fever returned, a sweat springing up on his cheeks and in his gray, depressed temples. His tongue kept flicking out of his mouth, looking swollen and colorless. His teeth chattered. He spoke to people who weren’t there.

“The Incas were right to worship the sun, Father,” the Fireman said to Father Storey. “God
is
fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They’ve all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their passing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, or the Constitution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold.”

They settled in an airplane hangar beside a small private landing strip. The hangar, a blue metal building with a curved roof, didn’t have any planes in it, but there was a black leather couch in one office. Harper decided they ought to bungee him down to it, so he didn’t roll off in the night.

As she was binding him down, his rolling, baffled eyes locked in on her face. “The truck. I saw the truck this afternoon. You ought to leave me. I’m slowing you down and the plow is coming.”

“There’s no way,” Harper said, and brushed his sweaty hair back from his brow. “I’m not going anywhere without you. It’s you and me, babe.”

“You and me, babe,” he repeated, and flashed a heartbreaking smile. “How ’bout it?”

After he drifted off into fitful slumber, they collected together out by the open hangar doors. Allie broke up a bookshelf with a hammer and Nick made a campfire from the shelves and piles of flight manuals. He ignited the whole mess with one pass of his burning right hand. Renée turned up Dasanis and dried pasta in a cupboard. Harper held a pot over the flames, waiting for the water to boil. Harper’s hand extended straight into their cook fire, the blaze licking around her knuckles. Once you had mastered Dragonscale, you could skip the oven mitts.

“If he dies,” Allie said, “I quit. I don’t care about Martha Quinn’s island. I don’t even like eighties music.”

The fire snapped and popped.

“Here’s the part where you promise me he won’t die,” Allie said.

Harper didn’t say a word for ten minutes, and then all she told them was “Pasta’s done.”