The Fireman: A Novel Part 59

"You don't blame a match for starting a fire," the Sarah flame said. "You blame the person who strikes it. You were just a match."

"You'd still be with us if I hadn't tried to teach you how to cast fire."

With her hands, she said, "I am still with you." With gestures, she said, "I am always with you. Love never burns away. It just keeps on and on."

They were crying again. Perhaps she wept as well. Flame dripped from her face and spattered in the road.

The children spoke to her with their hands and she nodded and replied in kind, but Harper turned away from them and did not see the end of their conversation. What they said to each other was for them alone.

Harper came unsteadily to her feet and looked around. Jakob's charred and withered corpse poured filthy black smoke. Harper walked to the rear of the wreck and dug through dirty coils of hose. She excavated a fire blanket and flapped it over Jakob's head and shoulder, then backed away, waving the smoke from her face. It smelled like a trash fire.

She b.u.mped into someone standing behind her. Renee put a steadying hand on her shoulder. Renee had made her way down the embankment to join them at last.

"Have you seen the cat?" Renee asked, her voice strained and stunned.

"He-he didn't make it, Renee," Harper said. "He was-thrown clear in the accident. I'm sorry."

"Oh," Renee said and blinked. "What about-"

"John. Is alive. But hurt. I need help to get him out of the truck."

"Yes. Of course." Renee looked back at Allie and Nick and the burning woman. "That-what is that?"

"She came with John," Harper explained.

"She's-" Renee began, then swallowed, licked her lips, tried again. "She's-" Her voice caught in her throat again.

"An old flame," Harper said.

19.

Renee wedged a crowbar under one corner of the winds.h.i.+eld and pried it free. It flopped into the road all in one piece, a jingling blanket of blue safety gla.s.s with a thousand fissures in it, impossibly holding together. Harper and Renee squeezed into the cab together and stood below John, who hung suspended above them, strapped in by his seat belt. A drop of blood fell into Harper's right eye, and for a moment she was seeing the world through red-stained gla.s.s.

The two of them did their best to get him down to the ground without jostling him, but when his right foot struck the blacktop, his eyes flew open and he cried out in a thin voice. They dragged him from the wreck of the truck. Renee went to get something to put under his head and came back with the Portable Mother, which served well enough as a pillow.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, my leg. It's bad, isn't it? I can't look."

Harper moved her hands over his thigh, feeling the break in his femur through the thick rubber of his fireman pants. She didn't think it had punched through the skin and was certain it hadn't nicked a major artery. If it had, he wouldn't be asking her about his leg. He'd be unconscious from blood loss, or dead.

"I can deal with it. I'll have to set it and splint it, and without painkillers, that's going to hurt." She probed his chest. Once he gasped and shut his eyes and pressed his head hard back into the carpetbag beneath it. "I'm more worried about the ribs. They're broken again. I'll have to scratch around, see what I have to set your leg." She felt a heat at her back and knew who was standing behind her. "There's someone here to keep you company while I'm rummaging around."

She kissed him on the cheek, rose, and stepped aside.

Sarah stood blazing over him. She lowered herself to one knee and looked into his face, and Harper thought she was smiling. It was hard to tell. Her face was little more than rags of flame. When Sarah had first appeared she had been a shroud of white fire with a core of almost blinding heat at her very center. Now, though, her dominant hue was a dull, deep red, and she had diminished to childlike proportions, was about the size of Nick.

"Oh. Sarah. Oh, look at you," John said. "Just hold on. We'll collect up some wood. We'll keep you going." He lifted his hands, trying to say it in gestures.

She shook her head. Harper was sure now she was smiling. The lady of fire lifted her chin, the breeze gently blowing the last tatters of her hair, and she seemed to stare right into Harper-to stare at her in the dreamy way Harper herself had often stared into moving flames. At the last, Harper thought Sarah winked at her.

When she went out, it happened all at once. The girl of flame collapsed into herself in a rattling drizzle of cinders. A thousand green sparks whirled up into the afternoon. Harper raised one hand to protect her eyes and was stung all over-gently stung-as they rained into her, touching her bare arms and brow and neck and cheeks. She flinched, but the light p.r.i.c.kling was gone in a moment. She wiped at her cheeks and came away with a palm of smeared ash.

Harper rubbed it between thumb and finger, watching the pale grime drift off on the light breeze, thinking of what they said at funerals, the bit about ashes to ashes, which went along with something about the certainty of resurrection.

20.

John's eyes were scared, his face pebbled with sweat and soot. His pants were off. The right thigh was black and bloated, twice as thick as his left. Renee's chubby palms rested below the break, while Harper's gripped the leg just above it.

"Are you ready?" Harper asked.

John gave her a tight, frightened nod. "Let's get this Dark Ages medical procedure over with."

Allie was standing thirty feet away, but when the Fireman began to scream, she turned her back on them and clapped her hands over her ears. The bone made a grinding sound as the two broken parts settled back together, a noise that reminded Harper of someone dragging a rock across a chalkboard.

21.

Allie was the one who figured out how to make a travois by folding blankets across a segment of fire ladder. They lashed him down to it, running bungee lines across his s.h.i.+ns and hip bones. A final cord went around his forehead. Those were the only places they could put the cables without crossing a broken bone.

He was, by then, unconscious but restless, blowing air from his lips and trying to shake his head. He looked very old, Harper thought, his cheeks and temples sunken, his brow creased. He also had a fl.u.s.tered, dim-witted expression that made her heartsick.

Renee disappeared for a while, but when she returned she had a road map of New England, which she had discovered in the glove compartment of Jakob's Freightliner. Harper sat with it across her knees for a while, then told them it was two hundred miles to Machias.

"If we set a pace of twenty miles a day," Harper said, "we can be there in a little over a week."

Harper waited for someone to ask if she was kidding.

Instead, Allie crouched, took the ends of the homemade travois, and stood. John's head rose into the air until it was about level with the small of her back. Allie's face was a grim, stoic mask.

"Better get going, then," Allie said. "If we start right now we can make ten miles before we lose the light. I don't see any good reason to waste the day. Do you?"

She glared around at them, as if she expected a challenge. She didn't get one.

"Ten days on your feet," Renee mused. She looked at Harper's distended belly. "When's the due date?"

Harper showed her a tight smile. "Plenty of time."

She had lost track, but was pretty sure it was down to less than two weeks.

Renee salvaged a bag of groceries from the wreck and Harper picked the Portable Mother out of the road. They had struggled their way back up the slope to I-95 before Harper noticed Nick was carrying a fire ax. He was a practical child.

Where it wasn't shattered, the road was blanketed with ash. There was nothing to see, all the way to the horizon, except cinder-colored hills and the charred spears of the pines.

A few hours before dusk they reached a place where the interstate caved away into what had once been a creek. The water was choked with ash, had become a magnesium-colored sludge. A '79 Mercury floated down it, up to its headlights, looking like a giant robot crocodile patrolling a toxic ca.n.a.l.

Allie set the travois down by the side of the road. "I'll go upstream, see if there's another way across."

"I don't like the idea of you taking off alone," Harper said. "We don't know who might be out there. I can't lose one more person I love, Allie."

It blindsided Allie, hearing Harper tell her she loved her. She looked around at Harper with an expression of shock and pleasure and embarra.s.sment that made her seem much younger than she was: twelve, not seventeen.

"I'm coming back," Allie said. "Promise. Besides." She tugged the fire ax out of Nick's hands. "My mom isn't the only one who knows how to sling one of these around."

She went down the steep slope at the side of the road, sweeping the blade back and forth to clear her way through the shoulder-high gra.s.s.

She was back just as it turned twilight, the sky curdling a sickly shade of yellow. When Harper asked if she had found anything, she only wearily wagged her head and didn't speak.

They camped on the banks of the river, under the overhang of the collapsed bridge. In the night, the Fireman began to rave.

"Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim che-ride, find me some water, 'fore I burn up inside! Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cha-red! If I was on fire, would you p.i.s.s on my head?"

"Shh," Harper told him, one hand across his waist, clasping herself to him to keep him warm. The day had been sullen and hot, but after dark the air was so cold and sharp they might've been on an exposed mountain ridge. His face was drenched with an icy, sick sweat, yet he kept grabbing the collar of his s.h.i.+rt and pulling at it, as if he were roasting. "Shh. Try and sleep."

His eyelids fluttered and he gave her a wild, distracted look. "Is Jakob still after us?"

"No. He's all gone."

"I thought I heard his truck. I thought I heard him coming."

"No, my love."

He patted her hand and nodded, relieved, and slept again for a while.

22.

They spent most of the next morning doubling back, retracing their steps to an off-ramp, which led them down past the napalmed ruin of a Pizza Hut. The Fireman slept most of the way. When he did wake, his eyes were stunned and uncomprehending.

He didn't have much to say-at first-and sometimes it was necessary to ask him a question a few times before he'd hear it. His replies, however, were coherent and sensible. Yes, he would like some water. Yes, his leg hurt, but it was all right, he was managing. His chest didn't hurt so much, but it felt heavy, it felt tight. He asked Allie several times to loosen the strap across his chest. At first she told him there wasn't a strap across his chest, but the third time he asked, she said sure, no problem, and he thanked her and dropped the subject.

Only once did the Fireman do anything particularly troubling. He moved his hands, speaking to Nick. Nick's reply was easy to understand: he shook his head no. Then he hurried to catch up to Harper and walked along beside her, where he could avoid eye contact with the Fireman.

"What did he say?" Harper asked.

"He said he was pretty sure the truck was still behind us. The big plow. I told him it wasn't, but he said he could hear it. He said it was still coming and if it got any closer we'd have to leave him."

"He's sick. Don't worry. He's mixed up."

"I know," Nick said. "Your sign language is getting pretty good."

Harper was going to say, "Maybe I'll teach my son," and then she remembered if everything went according to plan, she would never know her own son. She would be giving him up to someone healthy. She put her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and left them there, all done talking for a while.

They stopped for lunch in an improbable stand of birch trees, located in a center island between two lanes of a country highway. The hills to either side of the road were crowded with blackened trees, but in the small teardrop-shaped island, there was a place that had been untouched by fire, a zone of green, ferny cool.

They drank bottled water and ate pretzels. At some point a soft, dry hail began to spatter down around them, striking their shoulders and the trees, the leaves and the ferns. Harper found a ladybug crawling on the back of her hand and another on her wrist. She brushed a hand through her hair and swept half a dozen ladybugs into the gra.s.s.

When she lifted her head she could see hundreds of them, crawling on the trunks of the trees, or opening their sh.e.l.ls to glide on the breeze. No: thousands. Ladybugs soared on the updrafts, hundreds of feet above, a slow floating storm of them. Renee stood up wearing hundreds of ladybugs on her arms, like elbow-length gloves. She dusted them off and they fell pitter-patter into the ferns. John wore them like a blanket until Allie gently dusted him with a fern.

They camped that night in the ruin of a cottage by the side of the road. The west-facing wall of the house had been swept by fire and collapsed, burying the living room and kitchen in charred sticks and burnt s.h.i.+ngle. But the east-facing wing was mysteriously untouched: white siding, black shutters, blinds drawn behind the windows. They settled in what had once been a guest bedroom, where they found a queen bed, neatly made. A dried, withered bundle of white viburnum rested on the pillow. A former guest had written a message on the wall: THE CROWTHER FAMILY STAYED HERE ON OUR WAY TO SEE MARTHA QUINN, followed by a date from the previous fall.

By the time they lost the daylight, John was s.h.i.+vering uncontrollably, and his body only relaxed when Harper curled against him under the quilt. He glowed with heat, and it wasn't Dragonscale, either. It scared her, the dry, steady blaze of his fever. She carefully put her ear to his chest, listening to his lungs, and heard a sound like someone pulling a boot out of mud. Pneumonia, then. Pneumonia all over again, and worse than before.

Nick stretched out on John's other side. He had discovered a copy of the Peterson Field Guide to Birds on an end table and was leafing through the pages, studying the pictures by the light of one burning finger.

"What are you thinking?" Harper asked him.

"I'm wondering how many of these have gone extinct," Nick told her.

The next day the Fireman was gummy with sweat.

"He's burning up," Renee said, putting her knuckles to his cheek.

"Be funny if I cooked to death," he muttered, and everyone jumped. He didn't speak again all day.

23.