The Fireman: A Novel Part 57

The farther north they went, the less it seemed they were driving on the Earth. Dunes of gray ash had drifted across the road, sometimes so high and so wide-islands of pale fluffy grime-it seemed wisest to slow down and steer around them. The landscape was the color of concrete. Carbonized trees stood on either side of the road, s.h.i.+ning with a mineral gleam under a sky that was steadily turning pale and pink. Nothing grew. Harper had heard that weeds and gra.s.s recovered swiftly after a wildfire, but the soil was buried under the caked ash, a whitish clay that permitted no trace of green upon it.

The breeze gusted, grit fluttered across the winds.h.i.+eld, and the Fireman turned on the wipers, which smeared long streaks of gray across the gla.s.s.

They had been on the road for perhaps twenty minutes when Harper saw houses, a line of mobile homes, on a ridge to the east of the car. There was nothing left of them. They were black sh.e.l.ls, windows smashed out, roofs collapsed in. They flickered past, a line of warped aluminum shoe boxes, open to the sky.

By then they were only doing twenty miles an hour, the Fireman weaving in and around mounds of ash and the occasional tree across the road. They pa.s.sed above a stream. The water was a trough of gray sludge. Debris was tugged reluctantly along in the filthy drink: Harper saw a tire, a twisted bicycle, and what looked like a bloated pig in denim overalls, its ripe, spoiled flesh swarming with flies. Then Harper saw it wasn't a pig and reached over to cover Nick's eyes.

They went down into Biddeford. It looked as if it had been sh.e.l.led. Black chimneys stood amid collapsed brick walls. A line of baked telephone poles stood in a long file, looking for all the world like crosses awaiting sacrifice. Southern Maine Medical rose above it all, a stack of blocks the color of obsidian, smoke still fuming from the interior. Biddeford was an empire of ruin.

In sign, Nick asked, "Do you think most of the people who lived here got away?"

"Yes," Harper told him. "Most of them got away." It was easier to tell a lie with your hands than when you had to actually say a thing.

They left Biddeford behind.

"I thought we'd see refugees," Harper said. "Or patrols."

"As we head north, I suspect the smoke will intensify, and other toxins in the air. Not to mention all the ash. The air could turn poisonous very quickly. Not for us, mind you. I think the Dragonscale in our lungs will look after us. But for normals." He smiled faintly. "Humankind may be on the way out, but we have the good fortune to be part of whatever is next."

"Yay," Harper said, looking at the acres of waste. "Look at our good fortune. The meek shall inherit the Earth. Not that anyone would want what's left of it."

The Fireman popped on the FM band and twiddled through a haze of static, past muted, distant voices, a boys choir reaching for a high note in an echoing cathedral, and then-through the haze-the sound of a leaping, almost goofy ba.s.s line, and a man bemoaning that his lover was determined to run away, run away. The signal was faint and came through a maddening crackle and pop, but the Fireman leaned forward, listening with wide eyes, then looking at Harper.

Harper stared back, then nodded.

"Do I hear what I think I hear?" the Fireman asked.

"Sure sounds like the English Beat to me," Harper replied. "Keep driving, Mr. Rookwood. Our future awaits us. We'll get there sooner or later."

"Who knew the future was going to sound so much like the past?" he said.

14.

A couple of miles north of Biddeford, the Fireman took his foot off the gas, and the truck began to slow.

"To be fair," he said, "we had almost forty miles of smooth sailing, which was more than I ever expected to get."

An eighteen-wheeler was parked across the northbound lanes. Like everything they had seen for the last hour, it looked as if a bomb had gone off near it. The cab was a baked sh.e.l.l, burnt down to the frame. The container on back was blacked with soot, but through the filth, Harper could dimly see the word WALMART.

Above the corporate logo, someone had wiped away the grit and spray-painted a message in dull red letters: PORTLAND GONE.

ROAD WIPED OUT NO THRUWAY.

HEALTHY? REPORT TO DEKE HAWKINS IN PROUTS NECK.

INFECTED WILL BE SHOT ON SITE.

G.o.d FORGIVE US, G.o.d SAVE YOU.

The Fireman opened the door and stepped onto the running board. "I have a tow chain. I may be able to tug that lorry aside. Doesn't look like we'd need much room to get around it. Maybe we should feed the pail, while we're stopped."

Nick followed Harper around to the rear of the fire truck, to check on Allie and Renee. Allie was in the road, reaching up to help Renee down over the b.u.mper. Renee looked almost as gray as the landscape. She clutched her cat to her breast with one arm.

"How are you holding up, old woman?" Harper asked.

"You won't hear me complain," she said.

"No s.h.i.+t," Allie said. "Who could hear anything over that cat yowling?"

"Our little hitchhiker has decided he doesn't like riding in coach," Renee said.

"He can sit up front, then," Harper said. "And you can sit with him."

Renee looked battered and fatigued, but she smiled at this. "Not on your life."

"You aren't riding in back, Ms. Willowes," Allie said. "We hit one of those deep potholes, your baby will probably come flying out. Projectile delivery."

Renee blanched. "That's delicious imagery."

"Isn't it? Who wants to eat?" Allie said, reaching into one of the back compartments for the bag of groceries.

Harper carried a can of peaches and a plastic spoon around to the front of the truck, thinking John would want to share with her. She found him standing on the hood of the big eighteen-wheeler, shading his eyes with one hand and gazing up the highway.

"How does it look up ahead?" she asked.

He sat and slid off the hood. "Not good. Big chunks of the road are missing and I see an absolutely ma.s.sive tree across it half a mile away. Also, things are still smoking."

"That's crazy. This fire is-what? Eight months old? Nine?"

"It won't die out as long as there's anything still to burn. All that ash is a protective blanket for the coals beneath." He had slipped out of his turnout jacket and stood in a stained unders.h.i.+rt. It was midday and heat wobbled off the blacktop. "We'll drive until we can't drive anymore. Then we leave the truck and go on foot." He looked at her belly for a moment. "I won't pretty it up for you. It's going to be hot, and we could be limping along for days."

She had tried not to allow herself fantasies of reaching Martha Quinn's island that night-had tried not to imagine a bed made up with fresh sheets or a hot shower or the smell of soap-but hadn't entirely been able to help herself. It dispirited her, to hear it was going to be longer and harder to get there than she had hoped, than they had all hoped. But no sooner had she registered her own disappointment than she decided to set it aside. They were on their way and they were out of New Hamps.h.i.+re. That was good enough for today.

"What?" she said. "You think I'm the first pregnant lady who had to do some walking? Here. Eat a peach. It'll give you something to do with that mouth of yours besides make dour speeches and grim predictions. Do you know you are drop-dead s.e.xy until the minute you start to talk? Then you turn into a colossal a.s.s."

He opened his mouth for a plastic spoonful of peach. She followed it with a long kiss that tasted of golden syrup. When she broke away from him he was smiling.

Nick, Renee, and Allie began to clap, standing in a line behind them. Harper showed them her middle finger and kissed him again.

15.

John and Allie strapped a tow chain to the hitch at the front of the fire engine and led the other end to the eighteen-wheeler. While they were hooking the line to the rear of the semi, Harper had a look inside the long Walmart container. The interior smelled of burnt metal and burnt hair, but there was a stack of wooden pallets against the back wall. Harper dragged one out, to see if she could break it up and feed pieces to the bucket of coals.

Renee brought her a crowbar and an ax. Harper leaned the pallet against the fire-blanched guardrail and began to whack at it. Chunks of pine splintered and flew.

Renee squinted into the bright afternoon at the bucket welded behind the cab.

"I've been meaning to ask-" she said.

"Probably just as well not to."

"Okay."

Harper carried an armful of shattered wood to the truck, climbed on the running board, and looked inside the pail. Coals pulsed. Harper fed pieces of wood, one by one. Each stick ignited in a fluttering hiss of white fire as it went in. Harper had jammed in four or five sticks, then paused, holding another stick over the pail, trying to figure out where to put it.

A deformed red banner of flame, shaped like a child's hand, reached up and s.n.a.t.c.hed at it. Harper let go with a soft cry and jumped off the running board. Her legs felt watery and loose beneath her. Renee put a hand on her elbow to steady her.

"I've heard of tongues of flame," Renee said mildly. "But not arms."

Harper shook her head, couldn't find her voice.

The Fireman slammed the driver's-side door and put the fire engine into reverse. The towline was yanked taut with a snap. The fire truck's tires spun, smoked, found purchase, and dragged the rear of the eighteen-wheeler aside with a shriek of metal.

When the big rig was out of the way, Harper could see up the road for the first time. Less than twenty feet beyond the semi, a crater the size of a compact car had swallowed one lane. Not far after that was another crater, but in the pa.s.sing lane. Half a mile down the highway, Harper saw an enormous tree across the interstate, a vast larch that had somehow been crystallized by fire. It looked as if it were made of burnt sugar. The road was long and straight, and heat distortion climbed off the softened, buckled ruin of the blacktop.

"We'll have to take it slow from here on out," the Fireman said.

He had that one wrong.

16.

The Fireman steered the truck around the great crumbled pits in the road, rolled along to the fallen larch, and stopped again. Harper and the others didn't even bother riding with him in the truck but followed along on foot. The sky hazed over as if it were going to rain, only it wasn't going to rain, and the color of the clouds was wrong. Those clouds were salmon-colored, as if lit by sunset, and never mind it was midday. The air had the staticky feel that sometimes warned of thunderheads. The pressure tickled Harper's eardrums unpleasantly.

The Fireman strapped the tow to the downed tree and ran the truck back. There was a loud crack. He cursed artistically.

"Did you hear what he said? No woman could really do that," Renee said. "It's anatomically impossible."

He jumped down from behind the wheel. The towline had yanked a ten-foot branch right off the tree.

"You have to get the chain around the trunk," Allie said. "Or it'll break into pieces."

Nick sat on the rear b.u.mper of the fire truck with Renee and Harper, while Allie and the Fireman ran the tow around the center ma.s.s of the tree.

"Let's play a game," Renee said. "Twenty Questions. Who wants to go first?"

Harper translated. Nick replied in sign.

"He wants to know if it's animal, vegetable, or mineral."

"Mineral. Sort of. Oh boy. We're off to a bad start."

They went back and forth, Harper serving as their conversational go-between.

"Is it yellow?" Harper asked for him.

"Yes, but also sort of orange."

"Now he wants to know if it's bigger than a car."

"Yes. Much bigger."

Nick spoke rapidly with his hands.

"He says 'It's a truck,'" Harper said.

"No!" Renee said cheerfully.

Nick hopped off the rear b.u.mper, his hands flying, arms waving.

"He says 'It's a big orange truck,'" Harper said.

"No!" Renee told her again, frowning. "Tell him no. He's wasting his questions."

But by then Harper was off the fender herself, staring back down the interstate.

"We have to go," she said.

Nick was already running toward the front of the truck. Harper jogged after him, shouting the whole way, her voice rising from a yell to something that wavered at the ragged edge of a scream.

"John! We have to go! We have to go. Right! NOW!"

John was half in the cab, one hand on the steering wheel and one foot on the running board. He leaned out of the fire engine to shout instructions to Allie, who straddled the larch, adjusting the towline around the trunk. When he heard Harper hollering, he glanced around, then narrowed his eyes and squinted past her.

On the far rise, a mile away, an orange truck winked in the sun. Harper could distantly hear the building roar of its engine as the Freightliner barreled toward them.