The Fireman: A Novel Part 31

"No," Harper said. "I'm not going to put a stone in my mouth in some moronic self-abasing act of contrition when I don't have anything to feel contrite about. And I'm also not going to let you lie to people and tell them I went along with this hysterical bulls.h.i.+t, either."

"Will you stop swearing at me?" he asked.

"Why, is swearing against the rules, too? Will it get me another hour with a stone in my mouth? Ben: no. I say no. Absolutely no. I am a f.u.c.king nurse, and it is my job to say when something is sick, and this is sick."

"I'm trying to make things easier here, for cripes' sake."

"Easier for who? Me? Or you? Or maybe Carol? Is she worried it might undermine her authority if I don't bow and sc.r.a.pe with the rest of you? If I don't play along, maybe other people will make trouble, is that it?"

"Ben," Renee said, "isn't keeping secrets also against one of the rules? You aren't going to get in trouble for plotting to get Harper out of a punishment, are you? I'd hate to see our head of security walking around with a rock in his mouth. That might cost him something in terms of respect."

"Jeeeshus," he said. "Jeeesum Crow. Listen to you two. Harper-they're gonna make you-you can't just-I can't protect you if you won't let me."

"Your impulse to protect me conflicts with my need to protect my self-respect. Sorry. Besides. I have this vaguely uneasy feeling you're offering to protect me from you. That's not doing me a kindness-that's coercion."

He sat there for a time. At last, in a wooden, stilted tone, he said, "Carol still needs to see you tomorrow."

"Good, because I need to see her. Going to my house to get a first aid kit was a decent start to restocking the infirmary, but it isn't nearly enough, and next time I go hunting for supplies, I will need help. Yours, and maybe a few other men. I'm sure Carol will want to weigh in. I appreciate you making the arrangements for my audience with her eminence."

Ben stood, twisting his wool cap in his hands. Muscles bunched and unbunched in his jaw.

"I tried," he said.

He almost tore the curtain down on his way out.

6.

From the diary of Harold Cross: JULY 13th: THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT OF SARAH STOREY BUT A BAKED SKULL AND THE THIGH BONES. THE DEAFMUTE WAS IN THE COTTAGE WITH HER WHEN THE PLACE WENT UP BUT HE WASN'T EVEN SINGED. HE MIGHT'VE BEEN UNHURT IF THE ROOF HADN'T CAVED IN FROM THE HEAT. I'M MONITORING HIM FOR SIGNS OF INTERNAL INJURIES BUT THERE'S NOT MUCH I CAN DO FOR HIM IF HE'S GOT A RUPTURED INTESTINE. HE'D HAVE TO GO TO PORTSMOUTH HOSPITAL AND THAT'D BE THE END FOR HIM. ONCE YOU GO INTO PORTSMOUTH HOSPITAL, YOU NEVER COME OUT.

NO ONE WILL SAY SO IN FATHER STOREY'S HEARING, BUT I KNOW A LOT OF PEOPLE THINK SARAH WOULDN'T HAVE DIED IF SHE SPENT MORE TIME IN CAMP, SINGING IN CHAPEL WITH THE REST OF US. I'M LESS CONVINCED. I WISH I KNEW MORE ABOUT WHAT SHE WAS DOING OVER THERE WITH THE FIREMAN AND HER LITTLE BOY. I'M ALSO, FRANKLY, STUNNED: SHE CONTRACTED DRAGONSCALE LESS THAN TWO WEEKS AGO. FOR THE LONGEST TIME SHE WAS THE ONLY "HEALTHY" IN CAMP. I'VE NEVER HEARD OF ANYONE BURNING SO QUICKLY AFTER INFECTION. WILL HAVE TO SNEAK BACK TO THE CABIN SOON AND GET ONLINE, SO I CAN Pa.s.s THE DETAILS OF HER CASE ON TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE.

THE FIREMAN HASN'T LEFT THE ISLAND, NOT SINCE THE ACCIDENT. THE DEAF BOY IS HERE IN THE INFIRMARY WITH ME, SO I CAN MONITOR HIS CONDITION. AND ALLIE IS STAYING WITH HER AUNT AND GRANDFATHER. SHE DRIFTS AROUND LOOKING LIKE SHE'S DOSED UP ON A HEAVY NARCOTIC. SHE'S THE ZOMBIE VERSION OF HERSELF, PASTY AND DEAD-EYED.

IS IT WRONG TO BE THINKING ABOUT HOW GRIEF IS A FAMOUS APHRODISIAC? IF SHE'S LOOKING FOR COMFORT, MR. HAROLD CROSS'S SHOULDER IS A FINE PLACE FOR HER TO SHED HER TEARS.

OH I AM A BAD BAD BAD MAN.

A THOUGHT, INSPIRED BY FILET AU STOREY: SARAH STOREY HAS TURNED TO ASH, AND HER ASH CONTAINS THE ACTIVE SPORE, WAITING FOR A NEW HOST. WHICH MEANS THE SPORE IS PREPARED FOR REPRODUCTION BY HEAT, BUT NOT DESTROYED BY IT. AN ENZYME MUST PROTECT IT FROM DAMAGE. ENOUGH OF THAT ENZYME COULD-THEORETICALLY-ALSO COAT THE SKIN AND ACT AS A FIRE r.e.t.a.r.dANT. SO, MY THEORY: THE FIREMAN CAN TRICK THE ENZYME INTO PROTECTING THE HOST. SARAH STOREY COULDN'T AND IS NOW FLAMBe. BUT WHAT IS THE ENZYME TRIGGER? SOMETHING ELSE TO DISCUSS WITH THE GUYS ONLINE.

NICK STOREY ISN'T A COMPLETE MUTE. RIGHT NOW HE'S GROANING LIKE HE CAN'T TAKE A t.u.r.d. FML. I'M NEVER GOING TO GET TO SLEEP.

7.

Harper woke with a jolt, as if her bed were a boat that had struck a rock, the hull grinding off stone. She blinked into the darkness, not sure if a minute had pa.s.sed or a day. The boat s.h.i.+vered off the rocks again. Ben stood at the foot of it, nudging the bed frame with his knee.

She had slept from dawn to dusk and another evening had come.

"Nurse," Ben said. Only it was not the same Ben who had pleaded with her the night before. This was Officer Patchett, his soft, pleasant, round face gone blank and formal. He was even in his police uniform: dark blue trousers, pressed blue s.h.i.+rt, dark blue coat with a white fleece lining and the words PORTSMOUTH PD printed on the back in bold yellow letters.

"Yes?"

"Mother Carol is hoping for an update on Father Storey," Ben told her. "As soon as you're ready, Jamie and I will walk over with you."

Jamie Close stood in the doorway to the waiting room, pa.s.sing a white rock from hand to hand.

"Before I update her on the patient's progress, I'd like to update myself. And take a minute to get ready. If you'll wait in the other room?"

Ben nodded and cast a casual look toward Nick, who was sitting up in bed, watching with wide, fascinated eyes. Ben threw him a wink, but Nick did not smile.

The police officer ducked through the curtain, but Jamie Close lingered.

"You like dis.h.i.+n' out the medicine," Jamie said. "We'll see how you like takin' it."

Harper was trying to think of a brave, clever reply when Jamie followed her superior back into the waiting room.

Nick signed, "Don't go."

"Have to," she said with her hands.

"Don't," Nick told her silently. "They're going to do something bad."

She grabbed the pad of paper and wrote, Don't get yourself worked up. You might give yourself a stomachache.

Harper was combing out her hair in the bathroom when there was a little knock.

"Yes? Come in."

Michael nudged the door inward three inches. His freckled, boyish face was very pale behind his coppery twist of a beard. "Insulin shot?"

"Go ahead. I'm dressed."

He removed the lid on the back of the toilet and fished out a plastic bag with a few disposable sticks of insulin left in it. It wasn't the most hygienic place to store medical supplies, but it kept them cold. He lifted his s.h.i.+rt to reveal a bony edge of fishbelly white hipbone, and dabbed at it with an antiseptic wipe.

"Ma'am," he said, not looking at her. "You need to be careful tonight. People ain't right. They aren't thinking right. Allie isn't thinking right."

"Will you be here keeping an eye on the infirmary while I'm visiting with Carol?" Harper asked.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good. Nick will be glad to have a pal around."

"Ma'am? Do you hear what I'm saying? About people not thinking right? I tried to talk to Allie at breakfast. I don't know what's come over her. She hasn't eaten in days and she wasn't in any shape to be missing meals to begin with. Someone's got to do something. I'm scared-"

"Michael Lindqvist! She can take that stone out of her mouth and have breakfast anytime she likes. I'm sorry if you want me to give her an easy out, but I am not going to encourage more of this barbaric nonsense by going along with it. If you came in here to see if you could bully me or guilt me-"

"No, ma'am, no!" he cried with real anguish. "That's not what I'm trying to do at all! You're not doing anything wrong. That's not what's worrying me. What's worrying me is the way Carol and Ben and all Allie's friends are cheering her on while she starves herself. You're in the infirmary all day and all night, so you don't see that part. You don't see the Neighbors sisters whispering to her that she can't give in, that the whole camp believes in her. Or the way all her friends sit with after she's missed another meal and chant her name until her eyes start glowing and she's in the Bright. It's almost like she needs them to be proud of her more than she needs to eat. And none of 'em care how thin she is or how fragile she's getting. I'm scared she's going to go hypoglycemic and crash. Pa.s.s out and maybe swallow that stone! Christ, it's enough-it's enough to make a person think about just grabbing her and-you know-throwing some stuff in a suitcase."

He was the second person in twenty-four hours to admit he had given thought to scarpering off. Harper wondered how many others were about sung out and if Carol knew how dangerously slippery her grip on the camp really was. Maybe she did. Maybe that explained everything.

Michael swallowed heavily. In a steadier, lower voice, he finished: "You do what you think is right. Just don't get hurt, ma'am. Allie may hate your guts right now, but she'd hate herself more if you got hurt on her account." He took a shaky breath, and then added, "I love Carol as much as I ever loved my own mother, you know that? I do! I'd die for her in a heartbeat." His eyes were damp and pleading and an unspoken but hovered in the air between them.

There was more to say, but no time to say it. Ben and Jamie Close were waiting.

8.

Ben led the way. They walked on a bridge of pine planks set end to end across the snow. There seemed to be no light in all the world except for the white disk of Ben's flashlight. Jamie Close followed behind. She had her rifle over her left shoulder and a broom handle in her right hand, cut short, one end wrapped in tape. She whistled while she swung it back and forth.

They came out from beneath the firs and proceeded to the House of the Black Star, the cottage where Carol had wintered with her father. It was a tidy one-floor place-gingerbread s.h.i.+ngles and black shutters-named for the enormous iron barn star that hung on its north-facing side between a pair of windows. Harper thought it was a fine bit of decoration, ideal for any inquisitor's dungeon or torturer's crypt. Two Lookouts sat on the single stone step, though they jumped to their feet when Ben came out of the trees. Ben didn't acknowledge them, but only stepped past them and rapped on the door. Carol called them in.

Carol sat in an aged mission chair covered in cracked, glossy leather. The chair had surely belonged to her father: it was a place to read Milton, smoke a pipe, and think wise, kindly, Dumbledorish thoughts. There was a matching love seat with creamy pale leather cus.h.i.+ons, but no one was seated there. Carol had a pair of Lookouts with her, but they sat on the floor, at her feet. One of them was Mindy Skilling, damp-eyed and adoring before Mother Carol. The other was a girlish male, with close-cropped pale hair, feminine lips, and a big knife on his skinny belt. Almost everyone in camp called him Bowie, but Harper wasn't sure if that was because of the knife or because of his resemblance to Ziggy Stardust. He watched them enter from beneath pink, drooping lids.

Harper didn't expect to see Gilbert Cline there, too, but he was seated on the low stone ledge in front of the fire. Red worms twisted in the heaped coals, and the warmth didn't reach far. Frost had turned the panes of gla.s.s to brilliant squares of diamond and made Harper feel as if she had entered a cave behind a frozen waterfall.

Jamie Close banged the door shut and leaned against it. Ben heaved himself down on the love seat with a great sigh, as if he had just come in from hauling armfuls of wood. He patted the s.p.a.ce beside him, but Harper pretended not to see. She didn't want to sit with him, and she didn't care to appear as a supplicant at Carol's feet. She remained close to the wall, her back to a window, winter breathing on the nape of her neck.

Carol's gaze drifted to Harper, her eyes gla.s.sy and feverish and bloodshot. With her shaved head and starved, wasted face, she had the look of an aged cancer patient, responding poorly to chemotherapy.

"It's good to see you, Nurse Willowes. I'm grateful you could come by. I know you've been busy. We were just hearing from Mr. Cline about how he came to be hiding by South Mill Pond, not a hundred yards from the police department. Some tea? Some breakfast?"

"Yes. Thank you."

Mindy Skilling rose without being spoken to and padded away into the darkened kitchenette.

"It seems Mr. Cline couldn't plausibly have had anything to do with what happened to my father," Carol went on. "And I've been interested to know something about who my dad risked his life for. Maybe gave his life for. You don't mind, do you, Nurse Willowes? He was just starting to tell us the story of his escape."

"No. I don't mind," Harper said. Mindy was already back, handing her a little china cup of hot tea and a plate with a thin slice of fragrant, nutty coffee cake on it. Harper's stomach rumbled noisily. Coffee cake? It seemed only slightly less luxurious than a foaming hot tub.

"Go on. Please continue, Mr. Cline. You were saying where you and Mr. Mazzucch.e.l.li met?"

"This was in Brentwood, at the county lockup." Cline gave Harper a lingering, curious look-What are you here for?-before turning to face Carol. "They've got a facility there to hold maybe forty prisoners. And they had a hundred of us there.

"There were ten cells, each about ten feet long, with ten men packed in each. They put a TV in a hall and played Bedk.n.o.bs and Broomsticks and Pete's Dragon so we'd have something to watch. All they had was kid videos they keep around for family visits. There was one guy who lost his mind down the hall. Sometimes he'd start screaming 'I'll be your candle on the water!' until guys started hitting him to shut him up. After a while I started to think they were running those two videos to torture us."

It jarred her, to hear about someone trapped and going mad with panic while singing that particular song. Gilbert Cline was, in some ways, describing Harper herself, when she got stuck in the storm drain.

"None of us were supposed to be down there longer than a few days. There's only a couple reasons you wind up in Brentwood. Most of the men there were awaiting trial. In my case, I was down from the prison in Concord to provide testimony in an ongoing case, not my own. The Mazz had been brought in from the state prison in Berlin to appeal his conviction."

"What was he in jail for?" Carol asked.

"He looks like a rough customer," Gil said, "but they locked him up for perjury. I can't tell you whether he hurt your father or not, ma'am. But the Mazz isn't the sort of guy who buys himself trouble with his hands. His mouth has always been his problem. Can't help himself. He doesn't know how to tell a story without smearing a thick layer of bulls.h.i.+t on top."

"One more reason to hear about your escape from Brentwood from you instead of him," Carol said.

"And you can spare us the potty mouth while you're at it, mister," Ben said. "There's ladies present."

Harper almost choked on her last mouthful of coffee cake. She could not have explained to anyone quite why the phrase potty mouth bothered her more than the word bulls.h.i.+t.

She cleared her throat and morosely considered her empty saucer. She had meant to eat her slice of cake slowly, but there was only a little bit of it, and after the first soft dissolving mouthful of sugar and nutmeg she hadn't been able to help herself. Now it was horribly, tragically, impossibly all gone. She put the saucer on an end table so she wouldn't be tempted to lick it.

Gil continued: "I was only supposed to be in Brentwood until I testified. But they shut the court down. I waited for them to pack us up and send us back, but they never did. They just kept shoveling in more prisoners. A young man in my cell once approached the bars to say he wanted to lodge a complaint and meet with his lawyer. A state trooper walked over and popped him right in the mouth with his nightstick. Knocked in three teeth with one slug. 'Your complaint has been noted. Speak right up if there's anything else bothering you,' this cop said, and then gave us all a look to see if anyone else was dissatisfied with their treatment."

"That didn't happen," Ben said. "In my twenty years of police work, I've heard a thousand reports of police brutality, and only about three I thought held water. The rest was just sorry drug addicts, drunks, and thieves, looking to get even with the person who locked them up."

"It happened, all right," Gilbert said, in a calm, untroubled tone. "Things are different now. Law ain't law anymore. Without someone higher to answer to, the law is just whoever's holding the nightstick. A nightstick-or a dish towel full of rocks."

Ben bristled. His chest swelled, threatening to pop a b.u.t.ton. Carol held up one hand, palm outward, and Ben closed his mouth without speaking.

"Let him continue. I want to hear this. I want to know who we brought to our camp. What they've seen, what they've done, and what they've been through. Go on, Mr. Cline."

Gil lowered his gaze, like a man trying to remember some lines of verse from a poem he had memorized years before, for a long-ago English cla.s.s, perhaps. At last, he looked back up, meeting Carol's stare without fear, and he told them how it had been.

9.

"They weren't all bad cops in Brentwood. I don't want to give that idea. There were folks who made sure we had food and drink and toilet paper and other necessities. But the longer we were in there, the harder it was to find a friendly face. There were a lot of angry cops who didn't want to be looking after us. And when people started to get the 'scale, they weren't just angry. They were scared, too.

"Anyone could see what was going to happen, the way we were all crowded in together. One morning, a guy came down with Dragonscale, in a cell at the end of the block. The other prisoners panicked. I understand why they did what they did. I like to think I wouldn't have gone along with them, but it is hard to say. His cellmates forced the infected boy into a corner, not touching him, just driving him back with pillows and such. Then they clubbed him to death."