The Fireman (67 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

Delivery

The water seemed less choppy once she was in it. Her vest lifted her gently to the top of each wave and dropped her back down over the side. The motion was almost soothing, didn’t make her feel seasick at all. Or maybe she was too numb, too frozen through, to care. She already couldn’t feel her hands, her feet. Her teeth were chattering.

Renée blinked and sputtered, shaking her head. She peered around in a frightened, shortsighted sort of way. She had lost her glasses. “What? Did we capsize? Did we—” A wave caught her in the side of the face and she swallowed some, coughed and choked.

Harper struggled toward her and took her hand. “Allie!” she screamed. “Allie, where are you?”

“Over here!” Allie cried, from somewhere behind Harper.

Harper kicked and waved her arms feebly and got turned around. Allie was making her clumsy way to her, towing her brother by the back of his vest. He was still asleep, his plump, smooth face turned to the sky.

“
G-G-G-God
,” Renée said when she could speak again. “
S-s-so
c-c-c-cold
. What—what?”

“You were d-d-drugged. The stew. They were going to kill us. John. John.” Harper had to stop and catch her breath.

Instead of trying to explain, she pointed at the wreck. The prow of the boat had already dived into the water, the stern lifting into the air. The big rusted blades of the motor, snaggled with seaweed and algae, revolved slowly in the night. The flames sputtered and seethed as
The Maggie Atwood
slid into the water. A great black oily bank of smoke mounted into the night. Harper moved her finger from the blazing ruin to the Phoenix, which was now no more than a distant bright glare of yellow in the night sky, like a remote passenger jet.

Renée looked at her without any understanding at all. She was still half-doped, Harper thought, incapable of following any complicated chain of cause and effect.

Allie caught up to them and took Harper’s other hand. They were strung out in a line now, the four of them, kicking feebly in the black and icy water. Harper could see her breath. Or maybe that was smoke.

“We’ll die,” Allie panted. “We’re g-g-going to freeze to death.”

“S-sing,” Harper said.

Allie looked at her incredulously.

Harper lifted her voice and called out, ““
In every j-job that must be done, there is an element of fun! Find the f-f-fun and,
snap
! The job is a game!
”

“Why?” Allie said. “Why? This is s-s-
stupid
! It’s over. Does it matter if we die in t-t-ten minutes or in t-t-ten
hours
? We’re going to drown out here.”

Harper kept singing. “
And every task you undertake, becomes a piece of cake, so sing! I’m not going to fucking argue with you!
” She sang this last part right in key.

Renée, blinking and rubbing at her face with her pudgy hands, joined her voice to Harper’s.

They kicked together in the water, their wavering voices rising and falling as their bodies rose and fell in the waves.

Allie’s hands, scrawled with Dragonscale, began to shine, a yellow light spreading up her wrists and under her soaked shirt. A warm brilliance shone from within the hood of her orange rain slicker. Her eyes brimmed with gold.

The light seemed to race across her thin white fingers and up Harper’s hand. Harper felt warmth, a deep, cozy warmth, rushing up her arm and across her torso, as if she were easing sideways into a hot shower.

Their bodies smoked in the freezing water. When Harper looked at Renée, the older woman’s eyes were alight. Her blouse was torn at the collar and her throat wore a pretty choker of glowing gold wires.

“What about Nick?” Allie shouted when they had sung through the whole of “A Spoonful of Sugar.”

“Keep singing,” Harper said. “He doesn’t have to be awake. He won’t hear us anyway. We’re singing for the Dragonscale, not for him. Sing, goddamn it.”

“This is pointless!”

“Are you alive?”

“Yes!”

“Then there’s a point,” Harper told her and then couldn’t say anymore. She was having contractions, hard ones. Her insides seized up, relaxed, and then seized up again. She had always wanted a water delivery. That had been all the rage not so long ago.

They were singing “A Spoonful of Sugar” a second time when
The
Maggie Atwood
was sucked underwater with a last loud hiss, a blast of gray smoke, and a noisy roil of bubbles.

They sang “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” When they forgot the words, they made them up.

“Chim chim-a-nee, chim chim-a-nee, chim-chim-a-chick, paddling in the water sucks a big dick,”
Allie shouted.

“Blow me a kiss and you can blow it out your ass,”
Renée sang.

“Look,” Harper said.

Nick was glowing right through his sweater. Blue lights swarmed beneath his hoodie. The water steamed where it touched his pink, warm, sleeping face.

They started “A Spoonful of Sugar” again. Harper was in too much pain to join them, though. She clenched her teeth together and shut her eyes, weathering another series of contractions. When she opened her eyes, she saw the Portable Mother, her enormous black carpetbag, floating past them. The wide mouth of the bag was open and filling with water. As Harper watched, it revolved in a slow, dreamy circle and sank out of sight, carrying everything she had meant to give her child with it.

She wished the Phoenix had not soared away. For a long time she had been able to find it against the dark horizon, an intense, brassy gleam, but at some point—around the third run through “Candle on the Water”—she lost sight of it. Losing sight of it felt very much like losing hope. She could not imagine why it would go. Why John would leave them. That vast, monstrous bird—that was John, somehow. It was maybe more essentially John Rookwood even than the man who had gone down with the
Atwood
. It was the
true
John: immense, larger than life, a little silly, somehow invincible.

Harper could not tell Allie that she was going to continue singing for as long as she could because John had asked her to live. She wanted to try to do that much for him.

There had been lots of things she had wanted for both of them, simple domestic pleasures that she had started to imagine, in spite of herself. She had wanted a lazy Sunday morning in bed, with the sunlight falling in on them. She had wanted to put her hands on his bony hips and see what that felt like. She had wanted to watch some old sad movies with him. She had wanted to take some walks together in the fall and smell the autumn leaves crunching underfoot. She had wanted to see him hold the baby, and never mind that the more realistic part of her mind had always meant to give the child away. She had a theory John Rookwood would be fantastic with the baby. She had wanted him to have some fresh air and some happiness and to be free of his guilt and sorrow and loss. She had wanted a few thousand mornings of waking up next to him. They weren’t going to have any of it, but
he
had wanted her to live—he had loved them and wanted them
all
to live—and she thought he ought to get something for all his trouble.

They sang “Romeo and Juliet” and they sang “Over the Rainbow.” Allie sang the chorus of “Stayin’ Alive” while Renée rested her voice, and then Renée sang “Hey Jude” while Allie rested hers.

When Renée had finished, she shot a frightened look at Allie. “Why is Harper making that face?”

“I think she’s having the baby,” Allie said.

It had been a long time since Harper was able to sing. She jerked her head up and down in a wretched nod. She felt the baby—a dense, slippery, unbearably painful mass—shoving his way down through her. It felt like her guts were being pulled out, hand over hand.

“Oh, Christ, no,” Renée said, her voice a sickened hush.

Harper was in so much pain, she was seeing flashing lights. Black dots and silver flecks swarmed through her vision. She had an especially painful glare at the corner of her right eye, a persistent gold flickering. She shook her head to clear it, but it wouldn’t go away.

“Look,” Allie said, and grabbed Harper’s shoulder and squeezed. “Look!”

Harper turned her head to see what Allie was on about.

First she thought Allie was excited because Nick was awake. Nick waved his puffy hands this way and that, gazing blearily about, wiping at his streaming face. But Allie was pointing past him into the east.

Then Harper thought Allie was excited because it was dawn. A line of shimmering copper light lit the horizon. The sky in the east was crowded with fat masses of clouds, tinted in hues of cranberry and lemon.

Harper caught a splash of water in the face, blinked her burning eyes. For a moment she was seeing everything in double, and there were two bright, golden points of light in the distance. Then her vision collapsed back together into a single image and she could see a hot dazzling glow, high in the clouds, growing steadily. She couldn’t help it. At the sight of the Phoenix returning, her heart lifted, and she felt a warmth that had nothing to do with Dragonscale. For a moment even the sharp, steely cramps in her abdomen seemed to fade. She blinked at salt water that might have been ocean or might’ve been tears.

But Allie wasn’t pointing at the Phoenix, either.

She was pointing at the sail.

A great white triangular sail, with a stylized red crab printed on it. When the boat crossed in front of the rising sun, that sail became a shimmering veil of gold.

The boat had the wind coming hard off its starboard quarter and was canted over at a forty-five-degree angle, foam frothing over the bow. It came on toward them as if riding on a rail just out of sight under the waterline. Harper thought she had never seen anything glide along with such effortless grace.

The Phoenix dived low as it roared past them, less than eight feet over their heads. It had lost mass in the hours it was away, had shrunk to no more than the size of a condor, yet still it tore past with a blasting sound like a passing truck. A gush of chemical heat, smelling faintly like brimstone, washed over them. It was so close for a moment, Harper could’ve reached up and touched it. With its long hooked beak and flowing comb of red fire, it looked for all the world like a proud and ridiculous rooster, somehow given the power of flight.

Don Lewiston backed the sail and his long white craft slid the last hundred feet toward them on sheer momentum, the boom swinging loose and the canvas sagging and wrinkling. He threw a chain ladder over the stern, and when Nick began to climb, he reached a bony hand over to help him up. His blue eyes shone with something that was neither terror nor wonder, but both and more . . . an emotion Harper took for awe.

They fell in, sopping and shivering helplessly, one after another. None of them were shining anymore. They had each ceased to glow almost as soon as they caught sight of the sail, the Dragonscale giving out as if exhausted. The last ten minutes had been the hardest. The cold burned as if they were up to their necks in acid—and then it didn’t burn, and the numbness was even worse than the pain, killing the sensation in Harper’s feet and hands, creeping up her legs. By the time Don hauled her in—an unlikely catch indeed—she couldn’t even feel her own contractions.

Don left, came back with towels, with blankets, with baggy sweatshirts, with cups of coffee for Renée and Allie. He had lost weight, was gaunt and cold looking, the only color in his face the deep red of his nose.

Harper had water in her ears and was distracted by contractions, coming rapidly now, so she didn’t get much of what anyone was saying. Renée asked questions, and Don answered them in a low, shaken voice, but Harper only caught pieces. Renée asked him how he happened to be there, close enough to fish them out of the drink, and he said he had been off the coast waiting for days. He knew they were walking into Machias because he had heard all about it on the ham. Harper imagined Don Lewiston holding a ripe roast ham to his face, like a meat telephone, and came very close to laughing, bit down on a hysterical quaver of mirth. “The ham?” Renée asked. “Yes’m,” he said. He had a ham radio that got CB. He could pick up signals all along the coast, and he knew all about the woman who was enormously pregnant, walking north with a black woman, a teenager with a shaved head, a little boy, and a desperately ill man who raved in a British accent. The pack of them were making their slow way to Machias, where they would be processed and sent to Martha Quinn’s island.

Only Don had been out to Martha Quinn’s island, sailed around it and walked on it, and had seen nothing but blasted dirt and blackened skeletons. He had heard ol’ Martha on the radio—several times—talking about the pizza parlor and the one-room schoolhouse and the town library, but the place she was describing had not existed for months. Had been leveled.

If Martha Quinn’s Island wasn’t a refuge, then it was a trap, but Don couldn’t see how to keep them from walking into it. He had vague notions of hovering close to the bay, and maybe—
maybe
—sailing in under cover of dark when Harper and company were close to Machias, trying to intercept them, warn them. But then, in the last couple days, people had stopped broadcasting about them and he hadn’t known where they were or what was happening. He had been anchored near the ruin of Martha Quinn’s island when he saw the Phoenix sink from the clouds like fackin’ Lucifer falling from heaven. Don said he wasn’t sure if he had been led here, or chased here.

Harper only distantly heard this last part. She felt her insides were being turned inside out.

“What’s happening?” Don Lewiston asked. “The fack is happenin’? Oh shit. Oh shit, don’t tell me.”

“Breathe, Harper,” Renée cried. “In and out. Baby coming. All done in a minute.”

Allie was between her legs. Somehow Harper’s sweatpants had come off and from the waist down she was wet and naked to the day.