The Fireman: A Novel Part 11

"Fire is the devil's only friend," Ben Patchett said, and laughed. "Isn't that right, Father?"

"I don't know if he's a devil," said Father Storey. "But if he is, he's our devil. Still . . . I wish Allie wouldn't go with him. Does she want to get herself killed like her mother? Sometimes it almost seems she's daring the world to try."

"Oh, Father," said Renee. "You raised two teenage girls. If anyone understood Allie, I'd think it would be you." She looked off into the woods, in the direction Allie had disappeared in. "Of course she's daring the world to try."

2.

It was barely a mile to Camp Wyndham, but it seemed to Harper they were tromping after Father Storey, through the weary, stifling darkness, for hours. They wallowed in drifts of leaves, wove in and around pine trees, clambered over a pile of rocks, always moving toward the briny scent of the Atlantic. Her ankle thrummed.

Harper did not ask where they were and Father Storey did not say. Not long after they started moving, he popped something into his mouth-it was the size of a blue jay's egg-and after that made no sound.

They emerged alongside Little Harbor Road, looking across the blacktop at the turnoff into Camp Wyndham: a lane of hard-packed white sh.e.l.l and sandy earth. The entrance was barred by a chain hung between a pair of tall standing boulders that would not have looked out of place at Stonehenge. Beyond, the land mounded up in green hills. Even at night, Harper could see the white steeple of a church, sticking up over the ridge a half mile away.

The burned-out and blackened hull of a bus was parked off the road, just past those totemic blocks of granite. It was up to its iron rims in weeds and had been baked down almost to the frame.

Before they crossed the road, Father Storey clapped twice. The four of them hobbled up out of the brush and crossed the blacktop to the sandy lane. A boy descended the steps of the bus to stand in the open doorway and watch them approach.

Father Storey removed the white egg from his mouth and glanced back at Harper and her human crutches.

"The bus may look like a wreck, but it isn't quite. The headlights work. If someone unknown were to come up our road, a boy in the bus would wait for our visitors to move out of sight, then flash a signal. Another boy, in the steeple of the church, keeps a lookout for it. The eye in the steeple sees all the people." He smiled at this, then added, "If necessary we can get into hiding in two minutes. We drill every day. Credit to Ben Patchett-this inspiration is his. My own ideas involved a fantastical system of bird whistles and the possible use of kites."

The boy in the bus had a beard that made Harper think of Vikings: a stiff coil of braided orange wires. But the face behind the beard was young and soft. Harper doubted he was any older than Allie. He lazily twirled a nightstick in one hand.

"I guess I misunderstood the plan, Father," the boy said. "I thought you were off to bring us a nurse, not someone who needs a nurse." His gaze s.h.i.+fted from one face to another and he smiled in a worried sort of way. "I don't see Allie."

"We heard a thunderous crash, a stupendous roar of mindless violence and senseless destruction," Father Storey told him. "Naturally, Allie ran straight toward it. Try not to worry, Michael. She has the Fireman with her."

Michael nodded, then dipped his head toward Harper in a way that was almost courtly. His eyes shone with the fevered innocence of someone who has been Saved. "h.e.l.lo to you. We're all friends here, Nurse. This is where your life begins again."

She smiled back at him but couldn't think how to reply, and in another moment it was too late, Ben and Renee shuttling her along. When Harper looked back, the boy had vanished into the bus.

Father Storey was about to put the gumball back in his mouth, then saw Harper looking at it. "Ah. Bit of a compulsion of mine. Something I picked up reading Samuel Beckett. I stick a pebble in my mouth to remind myself to be quiet and listen now and then. I taught in a private school for decades, and with all these young people wandering about, the urge to deliver impromptu lectures is very strong."

They followed the winding lane through leafy darkness, past a dry swimming pool and a riflery range where bra.s.s cartridges glittered dully amid dead leaves. All seemed long abandoned-an appearance maintained at some effort, Harper learned later.

At last they reached the top of the hill. A soccer pitch lay on the other side of the slope in a shallow, gra.s.sy cup below them. Children yelled and chased a ball that glowed a pale, eerie green, the color of a ghost. Beyond that, through the trees, loomed a long boathouse and the heaving blackness of the sea.

The chapel was on the right, set back from the road. It was placed on the far side of a sculpture garden of mossy dolmens and tall monoliths. The Monument Park was an odd, primitive sort of thing to find guarding the way to a perfectly modern-looking church with a tall steeple and bright red doors. The church might be a place of wors.h.i.+p, but the sculpture garden looked more a place of sacrifice.

What caught Harper's attention in particular was a knot of six teenagers, sitting on logs, at one corner of a vast barn of a building that turned out to be the cafeteria. They were gathered around a campfire that burned a peculiar shade of ruby-gold, as if the flames were s.h.i.+ning through red crystal.

A slim-shouldered beauty swayed in the undulating crimson light, strumming a ukulele. At first glance, she might've been Allie's twin. But no, she was older, mid-twenties maybe. Her head was shaved, too, although she had preserved a single black lock of hair, like a comma, on her brow. The aunt, Harper guessed.

She led the others on a sing-along, their voices lacing together like lovers' fingers. They sang an old U2 number, sang about how they were one but not the same, and how they would carry each other. As Harper went by, the woman with the uke lifted her gaze and smiled and her eyes were bright as gold coins, and that was when Harper saw there was no campfire at all. It was them making the light. They were all of them tattooed with loops and whorls of Dragonscale, which glowed like fluorescent paint under a black light, hallucinatory hues of cherry wine and blowtorch blue. When they opened their mouths to sing, Harper glimpsed light painting the insides of their throats, as if each of them were a kettle filled with embers.

Harper felt she had never seen anything so frightening or beautiful. She s.h.i.+vered and for a moment was conscious of her body beneath her clothes and a feeling like fingers gently tracing the lines of Dragonscale on her skin. She swayed with a sudden giddy light-headedness.

"They're s.h.i.+ning," Harper muttered, a little thickly. Her head was filled with their song and it was hard to push a thought through it.

"You will, too," Ben Patchett promised her. "In time."

"Is it dangerous?" Harper breathed. "Can they catch fire doing that?"

Father Storey popped the stone out of his mouth and said, "The Dragonscale is like anything that makes fire, Nurse Grayson. You can use it to burn a place down . . . or light your way to something better. No one dies of spontaneous combustion in Camp Wyndham."

"You've beaten it?" Harper asked.

"Better," Father Storey said. "We've made friends with it."

3.

Harper sprang shuddering to consciousness from an ugly dream, twisting in her bedsheets.

Carol Storey leaned over her, a hand on her wrist.

"You're all right. Breathe."

Harper nodded. She was woozy, her pulse rapping so hard it made her vision flash.

She wondered how long she had slept. She remembered being half carried up the steps into an infirmary, recalled Ben Patchett and Renee Gilmonton following her careful instructions as they set her ankle and bound it in rolls of gauze. She dimly remembered Renee bringing her lukewarm water and some gel tabs of acetaminophen, remembered the older woman's dry, cool hand on her forehead and worried, watching gaze.

"What were you dreaming?" Carol asked. "Do you remember?"

Carol Storey had enormous, wondering eyes with irises of chocolate, flecked with gold speckles of Dragonscale. Hoops of gold and ebony circled her wrists, and she wore a short T-s.h.i.+rt that rode up to show crossed belts of the 'scale above her hips. It gave her the look of a goth gunslinger. Where her skin was unmarked, it was pale almost to the point of translucency. She was so delicate it looked as though, if she stumbled and fell, she might shatter, like a ceramic vase.

Harper's b.r.e.a.s.t.s were sore, there was a dry spoke of heat in her fractured ankle, and her thoughts were muddled and slow with the dregs of a deep sleep. "My husband wrote a book. I dropped it. The pages went everywhere. And . . . I think I was trying to put it all back in order before he got home. I didn't want him to know I'd been reading it." There had been more-more and worse-but it was already slipping away, dropping out of sight, like a stone kicked into deep water.

"I thought I'd better wake you," Carol said. "You were s.h.i.+vering and making these awful noises and-well-smoking a little."

"I was?" Harper asked. She realized she could smell a faint odor of char, as if someone had burned a few pine needles.

"Only a little." Carol gazed at her with a look of pained apology. "When you sighed, there'd be a blue puff. It's stress that does it. After you've learned to join the Bright, that won't happen anymore. Once you're really one of us-part of the group-the Dragonscale won't ever hurt you. It's hard to believe, but one day, you may even look at the 'scale as a blessing."

In Carol's voice, Harper heard the innocent and utter belief of the fanatic, and was dismayed by it. She had learned from Jakob to think of people who spoke of blessings and faith as simple and a little infirm. People who thought things happened for a reason were to be pitied. Such folk had given up their curiosity about the universe for a comforting children's story. Harper could understand the impulse. She was a fan of children's stories herself. But it was one thing to spend a rainy Sat.u.r.day afternoon reading Mary Poppins and quite another to think she might actually turn up at your house to apply for the babysitting job.

She did her best to appear blandly interested, but her distress must've shown. Carol rocked back in her chair and laughed. "Was that a little too much, a little too fast? You're new here. I'll try and go easy on you. I warn you, though, in this joint, the lunatics really are running the asylum. What does the cat say to Alice in Wonderland?"

"'We're all mad here,'" Harper said, and smiled in spite of herself.

Carol nodded. "My father wanted me to take you around and show you the camp. Everyone wants to meet you. We're late for lunch, but Norma Heald, who runs the cafeteria, promised to keep the kitchen open until we ate."

Harper lifted her head and squinted out the windows into a darkness so complete she might've been underground. The infirmary's single wardroom had three cots, with curtains hung between them to create some privacy; she occupied the central bed. It had been dark when she dozed off and was dark now, and she had not the slightest notion what time it might be.

As if Harper had asked, Carol said, "About two A.M. You slept through the whole day . . . which is just as well. We all live like vampires here: up at sundown, back to the crypt at dawn. No one is drinking blood yet, but if we run out of canned goods, it's hard to say what will happen."

Harper sat up, wincing-just the fabric of her hoodie brus.h.i.+ng against her sore, swollen b.r.e.a.s.t.s was enough to make them hurt-and discovered two things.

The first was that one of the curtains was pushed back and a boy sat on the next camp bed over, a boy she recognized . . . a boy with dark, curly hair and delicate, elfin features. The last she had seen him, he was suffering from acute appendicitis, his face greasy with sweat. No-that wasn't quite right. She supposed she had seen him more recently than that. It had surely been him at her door in the Tiger mask with Allie. Now he sat cross-legged, watching her with the intentness of a child in front of a favorite television show.

The second was that a radio was on, tuned to static. It sat on the counter, next to a plaster model of a human head, the skull removed to reveal the brain.

Harper remembered the boy was deaf and moved her hand in a slow wave. In response, he reached behind his back, found a sheet of paper, and handed it to her. On it was a drawing-a little boy's drawing, although it showed skill-of a large striped cat walking across green gra.s.s, tail in the air.

TEMPORARY CAT read the words beneath the stalking feline.

Harper gave him a quizzical look and a smile, but he was already sliding off the cot and trotting out.

"That's Nick, yes?" Harper asked.

"My nephew. Yes. Odd duck. It runs in the family."

"And John is his stepfather?"

"What?" Carol said, and it was impossible to miss the sudden edge in her voice. "No. Not at all. My sister and John Rookwood dated for a few months, in a very different world. Nick's actual father is dead, and John-well, he barely registers in the boy's life anymore."

It seemed to Harper this was a little unkind-not to mention unfair-considering the Fireman had carried Nick to the hospital in his arms and had been ready to fight security and everyone in line to get him treatment. Harper also knew when a topic was an unwelcome one. She left the subject of John Rookwood for another time and said, "Nick gave me a temporary cat. Why did he give me a temporary cat?"

"It's a thank-you note. You were the nurse at the hospital who saved his life. That was an awful week. That was the most awful week of my life. I lost my sister. I thought I was going to lose my nephew. I knew we were going to be best friends and I was going to be crazy for you, even before I met you, Harper. Because of what you did for Nick. I want us to have matching pajamas. That's how crazy I am for you. I wish I had a temporary cat to give you."

"If it's temporary, do I have to give it back?"

"No. It's only to tide you over until he can get you a real cat. He's hunting one. He's made some snares and complicated traps. He goes around with a net on a stick, like catching cats is the same as catching b.u.t.terflies. He keeps bugging people to find him catnip. I'm not sure the one he's hunting is real. No one else has seen it. I'm starting to think it's like Snuffleupagus, Big Bird's friend? Just in his head."

Harper said, "But Snuffleupagus was real."

"That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that."

Harper couldn't put her weight on her right foot, but Carol got an arm around her and helped her stand. As they hobbled past the radio on the counter, Carol reached out-hesitated a moment-and moved the dial slowly through bands of static. That anatomical model of a human head gaped at them in amazement. It was a grotesque thing, skin peeled away from one half of the face to show the sinew and nerves beneath, one eyeball suspended in a fibrous red nest of exposed muscle.

"What?" Harper asked. "Are you listening for something in particular?"

"Snuffleupagus," Carol said, and laughed, and switched the radio off.

Harper waited for her to explain. She didn't.

4.

The cafeteria was perched on top of the hill, overlooking the soccer pitch and the pebbly beach below. Moss and strands of yellowing dead gra.s.s grew on the s.h.i.+ngled roof and the windows were boarded up, giving it a look of long disuse.

The impression of abandonment was dispelled the moment Carol pushed open the door and led them into the seating area, a dim, cavernous s.p.a.ce with exposed beams of red pine. Plates clattered in the kitchen and the air was fragrant with the odor of marinara sauce and stewed pork.

Lunch appeared to be over and done, but they didn't have the place entirely to themselves. Renee Gilmonton sat at a table for two, across from an old fella in a Greek fisherman's cap, both of them hunched above steaming coffees. A boy sat alone at the next table over, the kid who looked like a Viking. Michael, Harper remembered. He was forking up noodles in red sauce and turning the pages of an ancient Ranger Rick, reading by the light of a candle in a jelly jar. The evening before, Michael had come across as maybe seventeen. Now, bent over an article on "Miami's Marvelous Manatees," his eyes wide with fascination, he looked like a ten-year-old in a fake beard.

Renee lifted her chin and caught Harper's eye. It was a pleasure and a relief to have a friend here, to not be completely alone among strangers. Harper flashed back to other lunches in other cafeterias, and the anxiety that came with not seeing a familiar face and not knowing where to sit. She suspected Renee had waited around in hopes of meeting up with Harper and helping her to settle in . . . a small act of consideration for which Harper was indecently grateful.

The serving counter was manned by Norma Heald, a mountainous pile of flesh with the broad, sloping shoulders of a silverback gorilla. The postmeal cleanup was under way-Harper saw a couple of teenage boys in the kitchen, plunging dishes into soapy water by the light of an oil lamp-but Norma had reserved some pasta in a steel warming pan and a couple of ladles of sauce. There was coffee and a can of condensed milk for cream.

"We had sugar for a while and it was full of ants. Ants in the coffee, ants in the m.u.f.fins, ants in the peach cobbler," Carol said. "For a few weeks, ants were my primary source of protein. No sugar now, though! Just syrup. Sorry! Welcome to the Last Days!"

"The sugar is gone and the milk will follow," Norma said. "I put out two cans of milk for the coffee, but there's only one left."

"The other got used up?" Carol asked. "So quickly?"

"Nope. Stole."

"I'm sure no one stole a can of milk."

"Stole," Norma repeated, her tone of voice closer to satisfaction than outrage. She sat behind the counter, occupied with a pair of silver knitting needles that raced back and forth, clicking and clacking, all the time she spoke. She was working on a giant shapeless tube of black yarn that might've been a prophylactic for King Kong.

Harper and Carol made their way to Michael's table, Carol making a come-on-over gesture to Renee and the old fella. "Sit with us, you two. We can all share Harper! There's enough to go around."

They arranged themselves around the table, b.u.mping knees. Harper lifted her hand for her fork, but Carol grasped her fingers before she could reach it.

"Before we eat, we go around the circle and say one thing we're glad for," Carol said, leaning into Harper and speaking in a confidential tone of voice. "Sometimes it's the best part of the meal. Which will make more sense after you've tried the food."

"We snacked already, but I don't mind bowing the head with you," said the old man, who hadn't yet been introduced.

Renee squeezed Harper's other hand and then they were all sitting in a ring, leaning in toward the light of the single candle, like a group a.s.sembled for a seance.

"I'll start us off," Carol said. "I'm glad for the woman sitting next to me, who saved my nephew when he had appendicitis. I'm glad she's here and I have a chance to show her how grateful I am. I'm glad for her baby, because babies are exciting! Like fat little sausages with faces!"

The old fella spoke with lowered head and half-shut eyes. "I'm glad for the nurse myself, because a hundred and twenty-four people need a lot of lookin' after, and I've been over my head for months. I'm all this camp's had for medical care since the end of August, and all I know is what I larnt in the navy. I don't want to say how long it's been since I studied as a hospital corpsman, but at the time they had only just phased out the use of leeches."

"Me, I guess I'm mostly just glad to be in a place where people love me," Michael told them. "People like Aunt Carol and Father Storey. I'd do anything for them, to keep this place safe. I lost one family. I'd rather die myself than lose another."