The Fireman: A Novel Part 21

The second Gasmask Man extended the dropped halligan.

"Take it. There's a lot of f.u.c.king guys running around. I don't want someone falling down and taking a f.u.c.king hatchet to the knee."

"Right. Thanks," she said, then added, "f.u.c.k," for good measure.

The metal was still warm-her palm tingled painfully as she took hold of it-but the cold water on the ground had lowered its temperature enough so she could hold it without wrapping her hands first. She took hold of it and tugged, but for an instant the second Gasmask Man didn't let go of his end. Through the lenses of his mask, she saw his brow knot up. He was looking at the both of them, really looking at them, maybe for the first time. Just possibly he was thinking that firewomen were few and far between, so few that he knew all of them by name and had suddenly recognized she didn't belong. In a moment he would jerk the halligan back out of her hand and come at them with it.

The damp white smoke eddied around them, sketching ghosts.

The second Gasmask Man let go of the halligan and turned away, shaking his head. He sank to one knee next to the man on the ground.

"Nurse Willowes," John murmured, and she realized it was safe to go.

She walked him through the smoke. Men ran past them, going the other way, calling to each other.

"He said 'this guy again,'" she said, leaning in to speak quietly into the cup of his ear. "Do you spend a lot of nights keeping the fire department in hysterics with creative acts of arson?"

"Everyone needs a hobby," he said.

Then they were through the smoke and into the parking lot, the Portsmouth Police Department not a hundred steps away on their left. The smoke was a towering wall of white cloud that masked the causeway and all of South Mill Pond behind them.

They had come out close to one of the two bonfires. It seethed, a sound it was impossible not to a.s.sociate with rage, and she wondered, for the first time, if flame could hate . . . an absurd, childish notion that she could not quite set aside.

Lawmen milled about just beyond the double gla.s.s doors leading into the police department. Harper and John had emerged from the smoke right next to a cop with a round, freckled, innocent face, dressed in a black poncho and black rubber gloves. He didn't look at them, only goggled at the smoke. Harper thought she saw his lips moving in a soundless prayer. Was it any surprise, really? The whole world was burning and tonight they had seen the devil, come to claim his kingdom of fire at last.

Harper looked over at the first bonfire and saw they were not burning piles of clothes after all. Or, rather, they were burning piles of clothes-it was just that people were still wearing them. The bonfire to the left was a heap of desiccated bodies, blackened and shriveled corpses. In the flames, they snapped and whistled and crackled noisily, just like any kindling.

She glimpsed a dead woman, holding a dead child of about eight, the boy's face buried in her breast. She did not flinch from the sight. She had seen enough of the dead in Portsmouth Hospital. If she felt anything, it was simply that she was glad the two of them-mother and child-had died together, holding each other. To be held by your mother, or to be able to hold your child at the end, struck her as a kind of blessing.

"Keep your head down," John murmured. "He might see."

"Who?"

"The ex."

She looked past the first bonfire to the great orange town truck on the far side. The tailgate was down, the rear end raised, as if to dump a heap of sand. Four or five bodies remained in the back end, had for some reason not slid out. Maybe they were frozen to the metal.

Jakob sat in the open pa.s.senger-side door, elbows on his knees, smoking a Gauloise. He was flushed, oiled with sweat from the heat of the bonfire, and hadn't shaved in a while. He had lost weight, and it showed in his face, in his sunken cheeks and the deep hollows around his eyes.

As if he felt her gaze-like a light touch on his scarred cheek-Jakob turned his head and stared back at her. His wounds had healed badly, s.h.i.+ny white slashes carved across the side of his face. Worse still was the black mark on his neck, a hideous burn in the shape of a man's hand.

She looked down, walked on. She counted to ten and risked another glance back. He had returned his stare to the causeway, peering dully into the smoke. He hadn't known her. That was maybe not such a surprise. Although she had recognized him right off, in some obscure way she felt she didn't know him, either.

"He isn't sick," Harper said.

"Not with Dragonscale."

Harper and John made their slow way across the parking lot, leaving the police station behind. The crowd thinned as they moved away from the lights. Although the other end of the parking lot was not entirely in darkness. The second bonfire cast a pulsing red glow into the gloom. The smell revolted her, a stink like they were burning wet carpet. She didn't want to look and couldn't help herself.

Dogs. They were burning dogs. Black ash drifted down out of the night.

"Look at all that ash," the Fireman said, blowing a flake away from his nose. "Idiots. Some of these men will be on our side of this battle in a few weeks. You may not have infected your husband, Nurse Willowes, but he may get lucky yet."

She gave him a questioning look, but he didn't seem inclined to explain himself.

"Why are they burning dogs?" she asked. "Dogs don't carry the 'scale, do they?"

"There are two infections running rampant. One is the Dragonscale, and the other is panic."

"It always surprises me when you do that."

"Do what?"

"Say something smart."

His laughter turned to a thin, anguished wheeze and they had to pause while he tottered in place, clutching his sides.

"My chest is full of broken gla.s.s," he said.

"We need to get you off your feet. How much farther?"

"There," he said, nodding into the darkness.

There were some other cars and pickups parked at the far end of the lot, and sitting among them was an antique fire truck-it had to be almost eighty years old-with a pair of headlamps set close together over a tall grille.

When John tried to lift himself up behind the wheel, he almost lost his footing and fell off the running board. She put her hands on his hips, caught and steadied him. He hung off the side of the truck, gasping. His eyes strained from his head, as if the simple act of breathing was work that required will and concentration.

When he had recovered himself, he tried again, hitching himself up into the old black leather seat. A copper bell hung from a metal brace, attached to the side of the windscreen. An actual bell, with a heavy iron clapper inside.

She went around to the other side of the truck and pulled herself in beside him. A pair of rusting steel brackets had been mounted behind the seats; the halligan fit neatly into them.

The engine, when it started, produced a pleasant series of throat-clearing sounds that made Harper think not of a truck, but of clothes tumbling in a dryer.

"Nurse Willowes, would you be a dear and wiggle the stick forward and to the right?"

He had his right arm crooked in his lap, left hand on the wheel. She didn't like the way his right wrist was turned.

"You better let me look at that arm," she said.

"Perhaps when we are at leisure," he said. "The stick."

She s.h.i.+fted it into reverse while he worked the clutch.

John eased the truck out from under the shadow of a great oak and onto the road, then asked her to put it into first for him. As they drove past the police department and out of the lot, he reached through the window and rang the bell, ding-ding. She thought of old film clips of San Francisco trolleys.

Perhaps as many as fifty people watched them go, and not a single one of them appeared to give them a second thought. One police officer even lifted his cap to them. Harper looked again for Jakob, but he wasn't sitting in the Freightliner anymore, and she couldn't spot him in the milling crowd.

"You have your own fire truck," she said.

"In a world with a fire burning on every corner, it's a surprisingly inconspicuous ride. Also you can't imagine how often a sixty-foot ladder comes in handy."

"I can imagine. You never know when you'll need to help a child escape from the third floor of a hospital."

He nodded. "Or change a reeee-alllly high lightbulb. Pull the gearstick back again? Into second-ah, lovely."

They left the bonfires, the smoke, the smell of burning man and dog, in a sudden rush of speed.

It had been a crisp wintry night down on the water. In the fire truck, moving at thirty miles an hour, it was arctic.

He ran the wipers and smeared gray ribbons of ash across the windscreen.

"Ach," he said. "Look at all of that. We could infect most of Rhode Island with what we've got on the winds.h.i.+eld."

They fled through the night.

"The ash," she said. "It's in the ash. That's why I didn't get Jakob sick. It doesn't transfer through any kind of touch. You have to come in contact with the ash."

"It's a surprisingly common way for fungus to propagate. Third gear, please. Thank you. Farmers in South America will burn an infected crop and the airstream will carry fungal spores in the ash halfway around the world to New Zealand. Draco incendia trychophyton isn't any different. You inhale it along with the ash that protects it and prepares it for reproduction and soon it's colonizing real estate in your lungs. Could you s.h.i.+ft us into fourth-yes, perfect." He smiled wanly and added, "I was there when you were infected, you know. The day the hospital burned. I saw you all breathing it in, but I was too late to warn anyone."

They banged a pothole-the truck didn't seem to have anything in the way of shocks, and they felt every rut, crack, divot, and seam-and he groaned.

"You're not too late to warn the rest of the world."

"What? You think I'm the first person to realize it spreads through the ash? I'm a lowly mycologist at a state college. Or was. I'm sure the process is well understood in the places where study of the Dragonscale is an active concern. Wherever that may be."

"No. If they understood transmission, they'd be warning people."

"Maybe they are . . . in the parts of the country that haven't fallen into chaos and been given up for dead. But you see, we're downwind. Of everyone. The North American jetstream sweeps everything our way. Those who don't have it today will have it tomorrow, or next year. I believe it can wait in the ash for a host for a very long time. Thousands of years. Possibly millions."

The fire truck drifted off to the left-hand margin of the road. The edge of the hood clipped a mailbox, sent it flying. Harper grabbed the wheel and helped John bring the truck back into the humped middle of the lane.

John s.h.i.+vered weakly, touched his dry lips with his tongue. He didn't seem to be steering the truck so much as it was steering him, and he was hanging onto the wheel for dear life.

"It's really an ingenious cycle when you consider it. The ash infects a host who eventually burns alive, creating more ash to infect new hosts. Right now there's the sick and the well. But in a few years it'll just be the sick and the dead. There will only be those who learned to live with Dragonscale and those who were burned up . . . by their own terror and ignorance."

He reached out into the darkness and began to strike the bell, ringing it so loudly that it hurt Harper's ears, made her teeth ache. They were coming up on the turnoff. She wanted him to slow down, was trying to say it-slow down, John, please-when he grimaced and wrenched at the wheel, veering off Little Harbor Road.

The fire truck slung itself onto the s...o...b..und lane that led to camp and sailed between the towering stones that flanked the entrance. Harper glimpsed a lean girl of perhaps twenty, standing to one side of the dirt track, the kid who had been a.s.signed watch duty in the bus. She had heard John ringing his bell and known to drop the chain and let them through.

"Take us back down to third gear, Nurse Willowes-brilliant."

John swayed from side to side as the fire truck ran up the hill, slowing as it went. Harper began to go over in her mind what had to be done when she got him into the infirmary. She would need medical tape, gauze, Advil, scissors, a sling for his arm, compression bandages, a plastic splint. Beyond the Advil and the tape, she wasn't sure how much of that they had. They crested the hill- -and continued on down the lane. The chapel flashed by on the left. The tires churned up a glittering spray of icy snow.

"You missed the turn to the infirmary," she said.

"We're not going to the infirmary. I can't be away from home all night. My fire will go out."

"So what? Mr. Rookwood, you're not making any sense. You have smashed ribs and a dislocated or broken wrist-with possibly a fracture to the forearm or the elbow as well-and you need to turn this thing around."

"I am long past the point where I could turn anything around, 'm'afraid, Nurse Willowes."

The truck continued to slow, thudding and rocking from side to side, as it pa.s.sed through a gap in a thick band of fir trees and came out by the boathouse. He effortfully pulled at the wheel, braking as they rolled inside, past shelves of kayaks and canoes, and parked the truck in the center of the bare concrete ap.r.o.n.

He turned the key and they sat in cold, silent darkness. John sank forward until his forehead rested on the steering wheel.

"I have to get across the water, Nurse Willowes," he said, without looking at her. "I have to. Please. You said you want to help me. If you meant it, you'll get me back onto my island where I belong."

She climbed out and went around the truck to help him down.

He got his good arm over her shoulders and she lowered him, laboriously, first to the running board, then to the ground. His face was so pale it shone in the dark. His eyes widened with sudden wonder. Harper had seen that often enough in her days as a nurse. When the hurt came in full, it often left the injured as amazed as if they had seen a magician levitate.

They hobbled together over the gla.s.sy white surface of the snow, clinging to each other and creeping along in the mincing steps of the elderly.

A rowboat sat on the bank, oars stood up inside it. No canoes and no sign of Father Storey and the others. But then they wouldn't be back for at least an hour. It had been about that long getting to South Mill Pond in the boats, and they hadn't had to contend with fog.

A mist had come up and was piled atop the water, blanketing the horizon. John's little island was no more than three hundred feet offsh.o.r.e (at low tide it was almost possible to walk to it) but now Harper could see no sign of it.

"I hope they can find their way home in this," Harper said. "And that they'll figure out I went with you."

"Father Storey knows the way," John said. "He's been taking kids paddling along this sh.o.r.e since you were a kid yourself. Probably longer. And he knows I wouldn't have left you behind, either." Ignoring, Harper thought, that if it weren't for her, he would've been left behind.

John lowered himself gingerly into the bow and Harper shoved the rowboat off the bank, then clambered into the stern. She settled on the thwart and took the oars.

"Row," he said. "Take us across the River Lethe, ferryman. Ferrygirl. Ferrybabe." He laughed. "Allons-y!"

He reached for an oil lamp, set on the floor between the seats, raised the gla.s.s chimney, and stroked the wick with his finger. It ignited: a hot lick of blue flame. He glanced at her to make sure she was watching. Even hurt as he was, he loved the attention.

The oars clanked in their locks. She had a sensation of gliding out, not across the sea, but into the sky, across an impossibly buoyant acre of cloud. The mist parted before them, curling from the bow in luminous feathers.

Harper was still peering into the pale, cool, billowing fog, looking for the island, when they struck ground, jarred to a hard stop.

"Going to be a bit sloppy when we step out, but I don't imagine either of us will drown in the mud," he said. "Follow me and step where I step."

He got one leg over the side of the boat before she could get to him, and then fell sideways. He was holding the lamp and it flew from his hand, shattered somewhere in the dark, and went out. He shouted in pain, then laughed-a bad, drunken cackle that both frightened and irritated her.

She sprang from the boat and sank past her ankles into the tidal mud. It was like stepping into icy, sticky pudding. Harper lost a boot, struggling through the rank muck to his side. She lost the other boot as she helped him to higher ground. It was sucked off her foot with a wet smack of suction and she tromped on without it.

They made their unsteady way up onto damp, firm sand, through the cool wet. Harper spied the shed, a dim green wall with a white door set in it, and steered them toward it.

"You'll have to come back and drag the boat up." John lifted the latch and put his shoulder to the door. "The tide will come in and it will drift off if you don't."

Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the gloom. She saw a cot; clothes hanging from a line; stacks of paperbacks that looked as if they had been soaked and dried many times, and were now swollen out of shape. A silvery fog-glow came through a pair of skylights, the only windows in the room.

In the back of the single-room workshop-that was the word that best described the place-was a big cast-iron barrel, turned on its side and raised off the floor on metal legs. Her father had a similar sort of thing in Florida, in his backyard; he used it to slow-roast BBQ pork shoulder. A chimney pipe was welded to one end, and bent away to disappear through the back wall.

The barrel had a sliding hatch in the side. Driftwood and heaps of sea gra.s.s were set in neat piles next to the homemade furnace. John let go of her and lurched unsteadily across the floor of narrow wooden planks, stopping before it. He peered in at a flame that burned in weird hues of green and blue.

"I'm here, darling," he said to the coals. "I'm home."