The Fireman: A Novel Part 19

"I couldn't agree more," Father Storey said, and again there was that caustic, nasty tone of bitterness that was so unlike him.

Harper could feel the ocean under the boat, the dreamy pull of it. If they stopped paddling, the current would catch the canoe and draw it to the east. In half an hour they would be far enough out to see all the lights of Portsmouth; in an hour, far enough perhaps to see all the lights on the New Hamps.h.i.+re coast. An hour after that they would be too far out to see any lights at all.

"We're going to have to send someone away, I'm afraid. Force a woman from camp," Father Storey said. "When that happens . . . well, I wouldn't send someone, no matter how deluded, into exile, all alone. Sooner or later a Cremation Crew would catch her. No. I think I will go with her. Perhaps in the big sailboat out on John's island. Myself and Don Lewiston. I'd like to go looking for Martha Quinn."

"Who'll take care of camp?"

"It would have to be John. He's the only one I'm certain is up to the job."

They swung around the headland to a narrow inlet, not more than eighty feet across, with houses on either side and decks built right over the water. Directly ahead was a short bridge, spanning the entrance to the small bay beyond.

She didn't recognize where they were until they were gliding under the bridge itself, where their breath produced metallic echoes, ringing off the rusting iron gridwork above them. South Mill Pond opened up before her, a gourd-shaped body of water between a park . . . and the Portsmouth Police Department.

Most of the buildings around the pond were dark, but the police department and the parking lot alongside it were lit up like a football stadium on game night. From where she sat, Harper could see two big hills of waste burning in the lot. Each pile was almost twenty feet high. Harper wondered what they were destroying-contaminated clothing? A few fire trucks were parked nearby, the fire department managing the blaze. Harper spied men in helmets and fire jackets moving here and there about the bonfires. The burning mounds produced an evil-looking smoke that climbed into the night, blanking out the stars.

The Fireman began to paddle toward the police station.

"Oh, John," Father Storey sighed. "I hope you know what you're doing."

The pond was no bigger than a soccer pitch and bisected by a causeway, which lay directly ahead of them. There was no crossing the causeway to the water on the other side without portaging the canoes. Harper wasn't sure where the Fireman intended to beach them, but one way or another, they'd be on sh.o.r.e soon.

Harper leaned forward and hissed, "We'll talk more when we get back to camp. Of course, though, I'll do what I can to help you. If I had the proper drugs, I'd be willing to sedate the thief, after you confront her . . . but only as a last resort. I can't believe it would come to that. If you and Carol approach this person together, privately, and show her the kind of empathy and understanding you were talking about in chapel-well, I can't imagine anyone in camp who wouldn't respond to that."

Tom Storey turned his head to look back at her, his brow furrowed in puzzlement, a question in his eyes, forming on his lips . . . as if she had posed a very baffling riddle. Harper wondered at it. She felt she could not have been more direct or clear. She wanted to ask him what he didn't understand, but there was no time. The Fireman was bringing them into sh.o.r.e, close to the causeway. Harper pointed with her paddle, and Father Storey nodded and turned away. Later, she thought, not imagining that there wouldn't be a later.

Not for Father Storey.

9.

The embankment was made of rough-hewn granite blocks, rising from a ribbon of sand. The canoe made an agonizingly loud crunch as it came into the shallows. Ben was already waiting to pull their boat up alongside the other two.

The Fireman squeezed Allie's shoulder and pointed toward the causeway. He murmured something into her ear and Allie nodded and began picking her way along the little ledge of sand, staying low.

"Where's she going, John?" Harper asked in a whisper.

"The men we came here to rescue are on the other side of the causeway, and the only way to get to them without being seen is through that."

He pointed again and this time Harper saw one end of a drainage pipe beneath the causeway. At high tide the opening would be underwater, but right now it was nearly dry. Allie crouched and began clearing away the dead branches and rusted beer cans that choked the entrance.

"You're sending a sixteen-year-old girl to talk to a pair of felons?" Ben asked. "What happens when one of them grabs her by the hair and pulls her out of the pipe?"

"She doesn't have any hair to grab, Ben, and she knows her business. This isn't the first time she's helped someone out of a tight spot," the Fireman said.

He reached back into his canoe. Steel chimed. He rose with his halligan.

"I trust you, John," said Father Storey. "As long as you can promise me Allie will be safe."

"I couldn't promise that even if she stayed behind to knit with Norma Heald, Tom. But I'm not afraid of the two men hiding on the other side of the causeway. They want to get away, not get caught."

Michael said, "That pipe looks pretty small. You sure they'll be able to follow her back through?"

Allie was wrestling with a rusted shopping cart that partially blocked the entrance.

"I'm sure they won't," the Fireman said. "One is as tall as Boris Karloff and the other is roughly the size of a water buffalo. If they tried to follow her through, they'd be even more stuck than they are now. No, they'll have to go over the causeway, as soon as it's safe to cross without being seen. Ben, Michael, Father: you just be ready to help them. I don't know how well they'll be able to walk."

"What do you mean, they'll have to go over the causeway?" Ben asked. "When will it be safe for them to go?"

The Fireman clambered up the steep pitch of the embankment, using the halligan's pick end to hoist himself along. He glanced back and whispered, "When the screaming starts."

He reached the top of the wall, stood for a moment at the edge of the parking lot with the bronze glow of the firelight s.h.i.+fting over his features, then leaned his halligan against one shoulder and walked away whistling.

"Does he make you feel dumb?" Ben asked no one in particular. "He always makes me feel dumb."

"What now?" Harper asked.

"I guess we hunker down," Ben said. "And wait to see if anything goes wrong."

The Fireman had been gone not a moment-the strong, carrying sound of his whistle had only just faded away-when Allie reared back from the drainage pipe with a mewling cry of horror, stumbled, and sat down in the water.

"That was fast," Michael said.

10.

Harper was the first to get to Allie, helping her to stand.

"What?" Harper whispered. "What is it?"

Allie shook her head, her eyes bright spots in the holes of her Captain America mask.

Harper went around her and crouched at the entrance to the drainage pipe. A mound of mud and sticks and leaves was wedged in there, a brushy, th.o.r.n.y ma.s.s, just beyond arm's reach.

The ma.s.s of leaves rose, s.h.i.+fted, and turned sideways.

It was an animal. There was a f.u.c.king animal in the pipe, a porcupine the size of a Welsh corgi.

Harper spied a stick, two feet long and forked at one end. She had an idea she could reach the stick past the porcupine and pull him toward her, drag him out into the open. Instead, the forked end of the stick jabbed the porcupine in the side. Quills bristled. The porcupine grunted and crept farther into the pipe.

She looked back for Allie. Michael had scrambled over to her and put his jacket around her. Her jeans were soaked from her spill into the water and she was s.h.i.+vering steadily. s.h.i.+vering . . . and regarding the drainage pipe with a bleak look of alarm. Harper had never before seen the slightest trace of fear in Allie Storey, and in a way it was a kind of relief to know something could get to her.

Harper didn't blame her. The idea of squeezing into a three-foot-wide pipe with a fat, p.i.s.sed-off porcupine was appalling, nearly unthinkable.

So she didn't think. Harper got down on all fours and put her face into the pipe. She smelled rotting garbage and a warm mammalian reek.

"The h.e.l.l you thinking?" Ben asked. "Aw, Harper. Aw, don't do that. Don't go in there. Let me-"

But when he reached for her, she twitched her arm away and pushed her shoulders into the pipe. Ben was six feet tall and over two hundred pounds and had as much chance of getting through the drainage pipe as the rusted shopping cart Allie had tossed into the shallows.

Harper, though, was only a little taller than Allie, maybe fifteen pounds heavier, and she knew if any of them were able to squirm through the pipe, it was her. It was going to be tight, though. She could feel that already, the walls forcing her shoulders in close to her body.

She remembered then that she was in her second trimester and probably thirty pounds heavier than Allie. She wondered if she had fattened up enough to get jammed in here. She considered going back, then squirmed forward another foot.

The porcupine had stopped waddling and turned sideways to watch her approach. She jabbed him with the stick again and the eye that faced her seemed to flash with outrage. It was the color of blood frozen in a drop of amber. The porcupine hissed and shuffled onward.

She followed him, crawling on hands and knees across corkscrew corrugations. She had gone perhaps a third of the distance when her hips caught.

Harper heaved forward to free herself, but didn't go anywhere. Instead, she felt the walls clamp tighter around her. She tried to go back, and couldn't, and flashed to an image of a cork stuck in a wine bottle, that last night with Jakob.

The porcupine hesitated and seemed to give her a look of unfriendly speculation: What? Something wrong? A little stuck? Maybe you need a friendly poke from a stick to get you moving again?

The water trickling between her hands was icy and the stainless steel walls were rimed with frost, but suddenly Harper was hot. Heat p.r.i.c.kled up her sides and in the cup made by her collarbones. It was not the ordinary flush of warmth a person sometimes felt in a moment of anxiety. She knew this sensation well, a feeling like bug spray on abraded skin. She drew another sharp breath and smelled smoke, a sickly sweet stink, like maple-flavored bacon burning in the pan.

That's you, she thought, and when she looked down, she saw a pale fluff of smoke coming off the tracery of Dragonscale on the backs of her hands.

I told you, the porcupine whispered, in Jakob's voice. We should've died together, the way we planned. Wouldn't that have been better than burning to death like this, in a dark hole? You could've just gone to sleep in my arms, no fuss, no pain. Instead you're going to roast here and when you begin to shriek, it will draw the police, and they'll get Allie, and Father Storey, and Ben, and Michael, and make them kneel on the sand, and put bullets in their brains, and it will be your fault.

She pulled again. The pipe held her fast.

She blinked, eyes tearing from the smoke. It wasn't the fire that killed you, she understood then. It was terror, or maybe surrender. It was the moment when, with horror and shame, you realized you had got yourself stuck someplace and you were too weak to pull yourself free. The Dragonscale was the bullet, but fear was the finger that pulled the trigger.

Her breath screamed in her throat. She poked the porcupine with the stick before he could get any ideas, and stabbed a choked little squeal out of the thing. He began to hustle away, moving along even faster than before.

She couldn't see the other end of the pipe anymore through the smoke rising from her. She didn't know why she wasn't choking on it. She inhaled deeply, preparing to cough, and thought, Sing. Sing it away.

"Dum dilly dilly, um dilly die," she whispered, in a cracked, hoa.r.s.ened voice, and immediately stopped.

It was bad enough to be stuck in a pipe with a porcupine, worse to be in there with a lunatic, even if the lunatic happened to be herself. The desperation she heard in her own voice unnerved her.

A fresh wave of chemical heat p.r.i.c.kled over her body. Worms of heat crawled on her scalp. She could smell her hair frizzing and cooking and she thought if she got out of the pipe she would let Allie shave her head, but she wasn't going to get out of the pipe, because it was all a lie, the idea that singing could save you. British children sang to each other during the Blitz and the roof still caved in on them. Her own voice had never mattered. Tom Storey's faith was a prayer to an empty cupboard.

Smoke burned in her throat. White clouds spurted from her nostrils. She hated every moment of hope she had ever allowed herself to feel. Hated herself for singing along, singing with the others, singing to the others, singing- Singing to the others, she thought. Singing in harmony. Father Storey said it was not the song but harmony itself that mattered. And you couldn't create harmony alone.

She blinked at the smoke, eyes watering, tears sticky on her face, and in a soft, uneven voice, sang again, her mind turned inward, to the life knotted like a fist in her womb.

"I'll be your candle on the water," she sang. Not Julie Andrews this time, but Helen Reddy. It was the first song that came to mind, and at the sound of it, echoing faintly in the pipe, she felt the sudden, half-hysterical urge to laugh. "My love for you will always burn."

She was badly off-key, her voice warbling with emotion, but at almost the first word, her Dragonscale pulsed and shone with a soft golden light, and that sensation of her skin crawling with chemical heat began to abate. At the same time the baby seemed to subtly s.h.i.+ft inside her, rotating like a screw, and she thought, He's showing you what to do. He is in harmony. A ludicrous idea, except then she swiveled her hips, following the twisting corrugations of the pipe, and eased forward. She came loose so suddenly she banged her head with a hollow gong.

Harper crawled into a funnel of smoke. Her lungs strained to find oxygen that wasn't there, yet her head did not swim and she did not feel faint. Indeed, she had enough air to continue singing to the baby in an exhausted, whispered chant.

She lowered her head, blinking tears out of her eyes, and when she blearily looked back up, the porcupine was right in front of her, so close she almost put a hand down on him. His cloak of needles bristled.

She banged the stick against the side of the pipe, drew it back, and lanced it at the porcupine.

"I'll be a candle right up your a.s.s, you don't keep waddling, fat boy," she half sang, half choked.

He began to trundle away from her again, but Harper had had enough of the porcupine and enough of the drainage pipe. She scooped the stick right under his rear end and shoved him along ahead of her. She felt this had the makings of a new Olympic sport: porcupine curling.

The rodent broke into what pa.s.sed for a run with his species. He did not hesitate when he reached the end of the pipe, but dropped down and out through the opening. In the flickering orange firelight that illuminated the evening, Harper could see the porcupine was not so large after all. Jammed into the pipe, he had looked to be the size of a puppy. Out in the throbbing glow of the bonfires, he was no more than a hamster with quills. He glared back at her with a single, reproachful eye before continuing on. For a moment Harper felt almost guilty about the way she had treated him. She had also been driven from her home and felt she could relate.

She heard a startled whisper from outside the pipe and to the left. "The f.u.c.k is that?" Someone threw a rock at the porcupine and it scampered away into brush, the poor, persecuted thing.

Harper pulled herself forward a few inches, almost to the lip of the pipe.

"h.e.l.lo out there," she said in a low voice.

The end of the pipe darkened and filled, the night sky eclipsed by the head and shoulders of a large man.

Harper was no longer smoldering and no longer singing, and at some point in the last few moments, the gold flecks of Dragonscale had ceased to s.h.i.+ne. Her arms and back, inked with the fine, delicate tracery of the spore, felt tender and sore, but not entirely unpleasant.

"Who is that?" asked the big man peering into the pipe.

Even scuffed, filthy, and ash-streaked, his carrot-colored jumpsuit was lurid in the shadows, as bright as neon. His build was bearish, his face blocky, acne-scarred . . . but his yellowish eyes struck Harper as almost professorial. Those eyes were, in fact, nearly the exact same color as the porcupine's eyes.

"I'm Harper Willowes. I'm a nurse. I'm here to help you get away. There are two of you, yes?"

"Yeah, but-he already tried squeezing in the pipe and he couldn't get in. And I'm even bigger'n he is."

"You aren't going to come through the pipe. You're going to walk straight across the causeway. There are friends waiting on the other side with boats. They'll take you to safety."

"Lady, we been hidin' in a culvert for twenty hours. Ain't neither of us up to sprinting across that road. My pard here can barely stand. I thank you for thinking of us. I sincerely do. But it's not happening. It doesn't matter if your boats are only a hundred feet away. They might as well be on the moon. There's fifty men up in that parking lot, most of 'em armed. If we break cover and make a dash for it-and a hobble would be more like it-they will shoot first and ask questions never."

"You aren't going to run," she said, remembering what the Fireman had said. "You're going to walk. And you won't be seen. There'll be a distraction."

"What distraction?"

"You'll know it when you see it," she said, because that sounded better than admitting she had no idea.

He grinned to show a gold tooth in the back of his mouth. He was what her father would've called an ugly cuss. "Why don't you come out here? Come on out and sit with us, darlin'."

"I have to get back. Just be ready," she said.

"You aren't gonna back all the way down that pipe, are you? Wouldn't it be better to crawl out and get yourself turned around?"