The Fireman (8 page)

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Harper said. “I told you that already. I’ve got this baby in me. I mean to see it born. I can deliver by C-section next March.”

“March? It’s
September
. You’ll be
cinders
by March. Or target practice for a cremation squad. You want to die like those people in the field?”

“No,” Harper said quietly.

“I know what you did to me,” he said. He drew a shuddering, effortful breath. “I
know
. I keep getting hot patches on my arms and legs. I loved that you made your work so socially conscious, that you were so connected to community, even if it was, always, just this thing you did to satisfy your own narcissism. You needed to surround yourself with crying kids, because of the good feeling it gives you about yourself when you wipe away their tears. There are no unselfish acts. When people do something for someone else, it’s always for their own personal psychological reasons. But I’m still a little sick to see how fixated you are on your own needs. You don’t even care how many people you spread it to. As long as nothing uproots you from your delusion of saving one more child.”

He was trying to get a fight out of her, wanted to push her into saying things she didn’t want to say. She tacked in another direction. “These hot patches. I haven’t heard of that. That’s not a symptom of—”

“That’s not
your
symptom. It’s mine. Don’t pretend you’re a fucking doctor. A fucking master’s in nursing and three years of working at an elementary school doesn’t make you Doctor motherfucking House. You wipe a real doctor’s sweat off his upper lip when he’s performing surgery and shake his prick when he’s done taking a leak.”

“Maybe you should come home. I can examine you without touching you. Maybe I can reassure you.”

“I am going to wait,” he said. “Until I am sure. And
then
I am coming home. And you need to be there. Because you promised.”

“Jakob,” she said again, but he was gone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

OCTOBER • 11

The power went out again one hot, smoky morning, a few days after her last call from Jakob, and this time it didn’t come back.

By then, Harper was down to the last cans from the back of the cupboard, the ones with dust on them that she couldn’t remember buying. She hadn’t been out of the house since the day before she found the first stripe on her leg. She didn’t dare. Maybe she could cover up—she didn’t have the ’scale on her face or hands—but her heart quailed at the thought of bumping into someone in the corner store and accidentally sentencing them to death.

One part of her wondered if she could eat Crisco. Another part of her knew she could and soon would. She had saved a little cocoa powder, hoping she could make it taste like chocolate pudding.

There was no single moment when she thought to herself:
I am going
. There was no hour of steely-eyed decision, when she realized soon she would be out of food and have to start taking chances.

One day, though, she unstrung clothes from the line across the back deck and began to make a pile on the bed, next to
The Portable Mother
. At first it was just a collection of things she meant to put away: some T-shirts, a pair of jeans, her sweats. But it also looked like a stack of things she might take with her if she were packing the car to go elsewhere. When she opened the dresser, she found herself picking things out instead of putting them away.

There was no destination, no plan, almost no thought at all. She operated on no more than the half-formed notion that it might be smart to have some things in her old carpetbag, in case she had to leave the house in a hurry. Mostly she was zoned out, gliding along with no more intention or purpose than a leaf blown about by a restless fall breeze. She had the radio on, a violently pink Hello Kitty boom box that ran on D-cells, and she folded clothes to the classic rock radio station, Tom Petty and Bob Seger supplying the sonic equivalent of wallpaper.

At some point, though, her consciousness settled back into the moment, and she realized the music had stopped. The DJ was belting out a monologue and had been at it for a while. She recognized his voice, a hoarsened, raspy bass that belonged to a former morning-show joker. Or had he been a right-wing radio host? She couldn’t recall and she couldn’t quite remember his real name, either. When he referred to himself—which he did frequently—it was as the Marlboro Man, on account of all the burners he had smoked. That was what he called people sick with Dragonscale: burners.

He boomed, with a certain crass authority, that the former president was blacker than he used to be, since he had cooked to death from Dragonscale. He said when he went off the air he would be out with a Cremation Crew, chasing burners out of their hidey-holes and lighting them up. Harper sat on the bed and listened with a repulsed fascination while he told a story about forcing three girls to take their shirts off, to prove they didn’t have Dragonscale on their boobies.

“Healthy American boobies, that’s what we’re fighting for,” he said. “That needs to be in the Constitution. Every man has a right to life, liberty, and germ-free titties. Learn the drill, girls. If we show up at your front door, be ready to do your patriotic duty and show us your freedom-loving, virus-free knockers.”

The knocker crashed at the front door, and Harper jumped as if a Cremation Crew were kicking it in. The sound was, in a way, more startling than someone screaming in the street, or a fire siren. She heard people screaming every day and sirens every hour. She could not remember the last time someone had knocked on the door.

She padded down the hall and looked through the peephole. Tony the Tiger and Captain America stood together on the front step, holding wrinkled plastic bags. Beyond them, down at the end of the drive, a man sat with his back to the house, smoking a cigarette, a tendril of smoke rising from his head.

“Trick and treat,” came a muffled voice. A girl’s voice.

“Trick or . . .” Harper started, then stopped. “It’s not Halloween.”

“We’re getting an early start!”

It offended her, some idiot sending his kids house to house in the middle of a plague. She had stern ideas about parenting, and such behavior fell well short of her standards. It riled up her inner English nanny and made her want to stab the offending grown-up in the eye with an umbrella.

Harper picked her Windbreaker off the hook and slipped it on to cover the pretty scrollwork of Dragonscale scrawled on her arms. She opened the door, but left it on the chain, and peered out through the six-inch gap.

The girl might’ve been as old as eighteen or as young as thirteen. With her face hidden behind her Captain America mask, it was impossible to tell. Her head was shaved and if Harper hadn’t heard her voice, she would’ve taken her for a boy.

Her brother was possibly just half her age. The eyes that peered out through the holes in his Tony the Tiger mask were very pale—the light green of an empty Coke bottle.

“Trick and treat,” Captain America said again. A gold locket, shaped like a hardcover book, hung outside her moth-eaten turtleneck.

“You shouldn’t be knocking on doors for candy.” She looked past them to the man smoking a cigarette on the curb with his back to the house. “Is that your father?”

“We aren’t here to get a treat,” Captain America told her. “We’re here to give you one. And we’ve got tricks, too. You can have one of each. That’s why it’s trick
and
treat. We thought it would cheer people up.”

“You still shouldn’t be out. People are sick. If someone sick touches someone who isn’t, they can give you the bad thing they’ve got.” She raised her voice and yelled past them. “Hey, buddy! These kids shouldn’t be out! There’s a contagion on!”

“We’re wearing gloves,” Captain America told her. “And we won’t touch you. No one is going to catch anything from anyone. I
promise
. Sanitation is our number-one priority! Don’t you want to see your treat?” She jabbed the boy with her elbow.

The Tiger held open his bag. There was a bottle of sugared gummy vitamins in there—prenatal vitamins, she saw. Harper snapped her head up, eyeing one child and then the other.

“What
is
this?”

“They’re like Sour Patch Kids,” said Captain America. “But you can only take two a day. Are you all right?”

“What do you mean am I
all right
? Hang on a minute. Who
are
you? I think I want to talk to your father.” She lifted herself on tiptoes and hollered over their heads. “I want to talk to you!”

The man sitting on the curb didn’t look at her, just waved one hand in a sleepy, dismissive gesture. Or maybe he was fanning the smoke away from his face. He blew a trickle of smoke rings into the afternoon.

Captain America cast a casual glance over her shoulder at the man on the curb. “That’s not our father. Our father isn’t with us.”

Harper dropped her gaze. The boy was still holding the bag open for her to inspect his offering. “These are prenatal vitamins. How do you know I’m pregnant? I don’t look pregnant. Wait.
Do
I?”

Captain America said, “Not much.”

“Who sent you here? Who told you to give this to me?”

“Don’t you
want
them? If you don’t want them, you don’t have to take them.”

“It’s not about whether I
want
them. You’re very kind, and I
would,
but—”

“Take them, then.”

The boy hung the bag on the doorknob and stepped back. After a moment, Harper reached through the gap and slipped the bag into the house.

“Now have a trick,” the girl said and held her own bag open, so Harper could see what was inside.

Tony the Tiger didn’t seem to have anything to say. He never made a sound.

Harper looked into the bag. There was a slide whistle in it, in plastic wrap.

“They’re really loud,” said Captain America. “You can hear it all the way from here to Wentworth by the Sea. A deaf person could hear it. Take it.”

“There’s nothing else in the bag,” Harper said. “You don’t have any other tricks to hand out.”

“You’re our last stop.”

Harper wondered, for the first time, if she might be dreaming. It felt like the kind of conversation that occurred in a dream. The children in their masks seemed like
more
than children. They seemed like
symbols
. When the girl spoke, it felt like she was talking in a secret dream-code; a psychologist could spend hours trying to puzzle it out. And the boy. The boy just
stood
there staring at her. He never blinked. When Harper spoke, he stared at her lips like he wanted to kiss her.

She felt a brief but almost painful stab of hope. Maybe
all
of it was a dream. Maybe she had a bad case of flu, or something worse than flu, and everything that had happened in the last three months was a vision inspired by sickness. Wasn’t this
exactly
the kind of thing a person would dream if they were on fire with a fever? Perhaps she was only
dreaming
Jakob had left her and that she was alone in an infected world, a world that was burning, and her only visitors in weeks were a pair of masked children who spoke in fortune cookie messages.

I will take the whistle,
Harper thought,
and if I blow it, if I blow hard, my fever will break, and I will wake up in bed, covered in sweat, with Jakob pressing a cool washcloth to my forehead
.

The girl hung her bag from the doorknob and stepped away. Harper took it, clutched the crinkling plastic to her chest.

“Are you sure you’re
all right
?” the girl asked. “Do you
need
anything? I mean, besides your trick and your treat? You don’t come outside anymore.”

“How do you know I don’t come outside anymore? How long have you been watching me? I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t like games. Not unless I know who I’m playing with.” She looked past them, elevated herself onto her tiptoes once more, and shouted at the man sitting on the curb with his back to her. “I don’t like games, buddy boy!”

“You’re all right,” Captain America said, in a confident, assertive tone. “If you need anything, just call.”

“Call?” Harper asked. “How am I supposed to call? I don’t even know who you are.”

“That’s all right. We know who
you
are,” Captain America said, and gripped the little boy by the shoulder, and turned him away.

They walked swiftly down the path toward the street. As they reached the curb, the man sitting there pushed himself to his feet, and for the first time Harper saw he wasn’t smoking a cigarette, he was just smoking. He blew a last mouthful of cloud, which disintegrated into a hundred small butterflies of smoke. They scattered, flapping frantically away into the smoggy morning.

Harper slammed the door, yanked the chain off, threw the door open wide, took three reeling steps into the yard.

“Hey!” she shouted, her heart clouting against the inside of her chest, as if she had just run a few laps around the house.

The guy looked back over his shoulder at her and she saw he was wearing a Hillary Clinton mask. For the first time she noticed he was wearing slightly reflective yellow pants, like the sort firemen wore.

“Hey, come back here!” she yelled.

The man walked the children swiftly away down the sidewalk, disappearing behind a hedge. The boy was practically skipping.

Harper crossed the yellowing grass, still clutching the bag with the slide whistle in it. She reached the sidewalk and looked around for them, blinking in the haze that drifted perpetually along the street. It was thicker than usual today, a pale mass that gradually erased the road, so that she couldn’t see to the end of the block. The smoke swallowed houses, lawns, telephone poles, and the sky itself. It had swallowed the man and his children, too. Harper stared after them, eyes watering.

When Harper was back in her house, she put the chain on the door again. If a Quarantine Patrol showed up, that chain might buy her enough time to get down into the basement, out the back door, and into the woods. With her carpetbag. And her slide whistle.

She was turning the whistle over in her hands, wondering how loud it was, when she realized the house had gone perfectly still. No music and no Marlboro Man. Somewhere in the last few minutes, the batteries had died in her Hello Kitty radio. The twenty-first century—like her masked visitors—had briskly and unapologetically slipped away from her, leaving her all on her own again.

Trick and treat, she thought.