The Fireman: A Novel Part 60

They splashed through a soupy, Dijon-colored fog, beneath trees festooned with streamers of dirty mist. They walked north into it, and by midmorning the sun was no more than a faint brown disk burning a rusty hole through the pall. It was impossible to see more than a few yards into the miasma. Harper spotted what she thought was a hulking motorcycle leaning against the ruin of a barbed-wire fence. It turned out to be a dead cow, its blackened skin fissured to show the ripe, spoiled flesh beneath, its empty eye sockets buzzing with flies. Renee staggered past it, coughing, holding her throat, trying not to gag.

It was the first and last time Harper heard anyone cough all day. Even the Fireman's breathing was long and slow and regular. Although her eyes and nostrils burned, she might've been breathing fresh alpine air for all that the roiling smoke bothered her.

The idea occurred to her that they were breathing poison, had crossed into an environment roughly as hospitable to human life as Venus. But it didn't drop them, and Harper turned that thought over in her mind. It was the Dragonscale, of course, doing its thing. She had known for a while that it converted the toxins in smoke to oxygen. This, though, led to another notion, and she called for Allie to stop.

Allie held up, flushed and filthy. Harper knelt beside the drag sled, unb.u.t.toned John's s.h.i.+rt, and put her ear to his chest.

She still heard a dry and gritty rasp she didn't like, but if it was no better, it was also no worse. He was smiling and, in sleep, almost looked his old, calm, wry self. The smoke around them was as good as an oxygen tent. It wouldn't make his pneumonia go away-the best chance for him now was a course of antibiotics-but it might buy him time.

In the early afternoon, though, they dragged him clear of the haze and went on beneath a clear, cloudless, hateful blue sky, the sun throwing blinding flashes off every piece of metal and every sooty fragment of gla.s.s. By the time they finally got off the road, John was worse than Harper had ever seen him. His fever returned, a sweat springing up on his cheeks and in his gray, depressed temples. His tongue kept flicking out of his mouth, looking swollen and colorless. His teeth chattered. He spoke to people who weren't there.

"The Incas were right to wors.h.i.+p the sun, Father," the Fireman said to Father Storey. "G.o.d is fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They've all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their pa.s.sing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, or the Const.i.tution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold."

They settled in an airplane hangar beside a small private landing strip. The hangar, a blue metal building with a curved roof, didn't have any planes in it, but there was a black leather couch in one office. Harper decided they ought to bungee him down to it, so he didn't fall off in the night.

As she was binding him down, his rolling, baffled eyes locked in on her face. "The truck. I saw the truck this afternoon. You ought to leave me. I'm slowing you down and the plow is coming."

"There's no way," Harper said, and brushed his sweaty hair back from his brow. "I'm not going anywhere without you. It's you and me, babe."

"You and me, babe," he repeated, and flashed a heartbreaking smile. "How 'bout it?"

After he drifted off into fitful slumber, they collected together by the open hangar doors. Allie broke up a bookshelf with a hammer and Nick made a campfire from the shelves and piles of flight manuals. He ignited the whole mess with one pa.s.s of his burning right hand. Renee turned up some Dasanis and dried pasta in a cupboard. Harper held a pot over the flames, waiting for the water to boil. Harper's hand extended straight into their cook fire, the blaze licking around her knuckles. Once you had mastered Dragonscale, you could skip the oven mitts.

"If he dies," Allie said, "I quit. I don't care about Martha Quinn's island. I don't even like eighties music."

The fire snapped and popped.

"Here's the part where you promise me he won't die," Allie said.

Harper didn't say a word for ten minutes, and then all she told them was, "Pasta's done."

24.

Late the next morning the small party of pilgrims came around a bend and drifted to a shuffling, weary halt.

What stopped them initially was a shock of color. On the left side of the road was the sort of scenery they were used to: blasted trees and a long slope of burnt sticks and ruin. But on the right was a gray-green forest of pine. The branches of the firs were caked in ash, but the trees beneath were healthy, undamaged, and the gra.s.s growing below them was rich and lush. Through the evergreens they saw a gleam of black water.

A billboard stood on the green side of the road. Originally it had featured an ad for GEICO insurance. A dainty little gecko suggested that fifteen minutes or less could save a buck or two. Spray-painted directly under this helpful suggestion was a message in black: NEW MAINE FREE ZONE.

INFECTED TAKE GLOVES + COAT.

STAY ON ROAD CONTINUE NORTH.

TO MACHIAS FOR MARTHA QUINN ISLE.

INFECTED WEAR ORANGE SAFETY.

GARMENTS AT ALL TIMES!.

An elderly pickup was parked alongside the billboard. The flatbed contained milk cartons crammed with bright orange work gloves. A pile of orange rain slickers had been heaped beside them. Nick climbed up to root around, lifted one of the slickers, and turned it so they could see.

A biohazard symbol had been stenciled on the back in black.

"What now?" Renee asked.

"Looks like we get dressed," Harper said. "Will you be a hon and find me a coat? I don't want to try and climb up there."

Ten minutes later they walked on, all of them in the orange slickers and orange gloves that marked them as sick. They hadn't tried to pull a coat on the Fireman, had only tossed one over his chest.

The pond they had glimpsed through the trees turned out to be a nasty body of water indeed. Ma.s.ses of dead fish rotted on the stones at the edge of the water, and the shallows were hidden beneath a floating blanket of ash, although the center of the little pool was clear and black. There were a few undamaged and empty cottages built alongside the water, from the days before there were setback rules on construction. Notices had been nailed to the front doors, above more black biohazard symbols.

"Hang on," Harper said and left them in the road.

She climbed the steps of the first cottage and read the notice.

THIS HOUSE HAS BEEN DESIGNATED A TEMPORARY OVERNIGHT SHELTER FOR THOSE INFECTED WITH DRACO INCENDIA TRYCHOPHYTON A/K/A DRAGONSCALE. IF YOU ARE HEALTHY DO NOT ENTER.

DO NOT DRINK THE WATER OR USE THE TOILETS. THERE IS BOTTLED WATER IN THE FRIDGE AND CANNED GOODS. DO NOT TAKE MORE THAN YOU NEED. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO SQUATTING. VISITORS MUST DEPART WITHIN 12 HOURS. THIS RESIDENCE IS MONITORED BY LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT.

WEAR YOUR ORANGE SAFETY GARMENTS AT ALL TIMES. INFECTED FOUND NOT WEARING CLOTHING THAT MARKS THEM AS SICK WILL BE CONSIDERED HOSTILE AND MAY BE SHOT.

YOU ARE 131 MILES FROM MACHIAS, WHERE YOU MAY BE PROVIDED WITH TRANSPORT TO THE FREE WOLF ISLAND D.I.T. CARE UNIT. OUR PRAYERS ARE WITH YOU.

"What's it say?" Allie shouted.

"It says we can stay here overnight if we need to," Harper said, but she already knew they weren't going to. It was too early in the day to stop.

She let herself in, pus.h.i.+ng back the door and stepping into the front hall. The cottage had a pipe-smoke and dusty-book smell that Harper a.s.sociated with the aged. The phone on the wall had a rotary dial.

Harper found her way to a kitchen with a view of the pond. A 1950s-era Coldspot refrigerator the color of a banana milk shake stood against one wall. A picture of Smokey Bear in a rustic wooden frame hung next to the back screen door. ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES.

The light switches didn't work. She peeked into the fridge and found pallets of room-temperature bottled water. The bathroom was as dark as a closet, and Harper had to fumble around for a while before she found the catch on the medicine cabinet.

When she came out of the lake house five minutes later, Harper had a case of water under her left arm and a bottle of Bayer aspirin in her right hand. She squatted on the flagstone path and used a rock to crush four aspirin tablets into a fine powder. She spoonfed the smashed pills to John, mixed in with little sips of water.

"Will that make him better?" Allie asked.

"It'll bring down his fever," Harper said. For a while, she thought. If they didn't get antibiotics into him soon, all the aspirin in the world wouldn't keep his infected respiratory system going. He'd suffocate on his own fluids.

"Chim chim cher-ee," John muttered. "Chim chim cher-uck. Here comes Jakob in his truck. Chim chim cher-ee, chim chim cher-all. Desolation's plow sweeps away all."

Harper kissed his sweaty, damp cheek, stood, and nodded to Allie. Allie bent and took the handles of the ladder.

"Let's go," Harper said.

25.

They left the lake behind and soon crossed back into another burn zone. Low clouds of smoke smothered the sky, and they were hot and sticky in their slickers. A wind came in spasms, blowing grit. Harper had ash in her mouth, ash in her eyes. Allie collected ash in her long eyelashes and eyebrows and short, bristly hair. With her pink, dust-irritated eyes, she very much looked like an albino. When they stopped to rest, Harper took John's pulse. It was shallow and erratic. She crushed four more aspirin and force-fed them to him.

Late in the afternoon they came over a hill and looked down into more green, and this time it was on both sides of the road. On the right were swaying evergreens. On the left was a meadow of russet straw, bordered by blueberry bushes that were months from bearing fruit. A mile away they saw a white farmhouse, a barn, a gleaming steel silo.

As they neared the farmhouse, Harper saw a woman standing in the dooryard, shading her eyes with one hand and peering back at them. A screen door slapped shut. A dog barked.

They arrived at a fence of stripped, s.h.i.+ning logs, with the farm buildings on the other side. A black retriever ran back and forth on a chain, flinging himself in their general direction and barking without cessation. His eyes shone with a jolly lunacy.

A white bedsheet hung over the fence, one corner flapping in the breeze. Words had been written on it in Sharpie.

WE ARE HEALTHY. PLEASE GO ON. MACHIAS, 126 MI.

G.o.d LOVE AND KEEP YOU. HELP AHEAD.

"These f.u.c.king people," Allie whispered.

"These f.u.c.king people might have children," Harper said. "And maybe they don't want them to burn to death."

"Burn to death!" John Rookwood shouted, cawing like a crow. He began to hack, a dry, wrenching cough, twisting violently on his stretcher.

The woman continued to watch them from her front step. She looked like she had walked out of another century, in her ankle-length dress and blue denim blouse, a kerchief holding back her graying brown hair.

Paper cups had been set along the fencepost. They contained what looked like orange Gatorade.

Nick picked it up, sniffed at it, glanced at Harper for permission. She nodded that it was all right to drink.

"What if it's poison?" Allie asked.

"There's easier ways to kill us," Harper said. "They could just shoot us. Who wants to bet that man watching from the second floor has a gun?"

Allie darted a surprised look back at the farmhouse. A lantern-jawed man with raven-black hair-graying at the temples, swept back from his high brow-regarded them from a window above and to the right of the front door. His gaze was dispa.s.sionate and unblinking. Sniper eyes.

The woman watched them drink but didn't speak. Harper thought the orange stuff might be Tang. Whatever it was, it was sweet and clean and made her feel almost human.

"Thank you," Harper said.

The woman nodded.

Harper was about to go on, then paused and leaned over the fence. "Our friend is sick. Very sick. He needs antibiotics. Do you have antibiotics?"

The woman's forehead wrinkled in thought. She looked at the Fireman, strapped to the travois, and back at Harper. She took a step toward the fence and opened her mouth to speak and the window on the second floor banged open.

"Keep walkin'," the man called, and Harper was right. He had a rifle, although he didn't point it at them, just cradled it to his chest. "You take one step our side of the fence, you won't take another. There's a place for people like you up north."

"One of them is sick," the woman called up.

Her husband laughed. "All of them is sick."

26.

All through the following morning, Harper was conscious of being observed, sometimes surrept.i.tiously, sometimes openly. An old man in a wifebeater glared at them from behind the screen door of his cottage. Three small and nearly identical boys with running noses studied them from the window of their ranch house. Nick waved. They didn't wave back.

Another time, a black car followed them, hanging about a quarter mile back, gravel grinding under its tires. It stopped when they stopped, and when they proceeded it rolled on in their wake. Four men in it, two in front, two in back, men in flannel hunting coats and porkpie hats.

"I think they have guns," Renee said. "Do you think we're safe? No, don't answer that. They say there's no such thing as a stupid question, but I believe that qualifies. We haven't been safe in months."

The black car kept pace with them for over an hour before suddenly accelerating, then lurching off the highway onto a narrow side road, tires throwing stones. One of the pa.s.sengers hurled an empty beer can out the window, but Harper wasn't sure he was throwing it at them. She didn't see any weapons, but as they took the corner, a fat, ruddy-faced man in the backseat made a pistol with his hand, pointed his finger at Nick, and pulled an imaginary trigger. Pow.

Very late in the day they reached the Bucksport Trading Post, which had the look of a former stable, with a hitching post out front and window frames of wormy, untreated pine. Antlers rose above the front door. A nonfunctional c.o.ke machine from the forties collected dust on the board porch. The dirt lot was empty, a chain hung across the entrance. A white sheet had been draped over the chain, words slapped on in black paint: ALL HEALTHY HERE SICK GO ON.

But a folding table had been set up on their side of the rusty, swinging chain. On it were paper bowls of chicken noodle soup. Paper cups of water had been arranged in a row.

The smell of the soup was enough to get Harper's saliva glands working and her stomach tightening with hunger, but that wasn't what really excited her. Over on one corner of the table was a bottle of some kind of pink syrup and a little plastic syringe. It was the sort of syringe you might use to orally administer medicine to a dog or a small child. The label on the bottle said ERYTHROMYCIN and gave a dosage for someone named Lucky. It had expired over a year ago and was only half full, the outside of the bottle tacky with dried syrup. Pinned beneath the bottle was a ruled sheet of notebook paper: heard you are with invalid will this help?

Harper took the bottle in one hand and peered up at the Bucksport Trading Post. A black man in a flannel s.h.i.+rt, with gold spectacles resting on the end of his nose, peered back from behind a window crowded with knickknacks: a carved wooden moose, a lamp with a driftwood base. Harper lifted a hand in a gesture of thanks. He nodded, his gla.s.ses flas.h.i.+ng, and retreated into dimness.

She gave John his first dose, squirting it into the back of his mouth, and followed with aspirin, while the others sat on the side of the road, tipping their paper bowls to their mouths to drink lukewarm soup.

An orange DETOUR FOR SICK sign pointed them west, along a winding country road, away from the town of Bucksport itself. But they paused at a wooden sawhorse (SICK DO NOT CROSS) to peer along a lane that led into town and down toward the sea. The street was shaded with big leafy oaks and lined with two- and three-story Colonials. It was late in the day and Harper could see lights on in the houses-electric lights-and a streetlamp casting a steely blue glow.

"My G.o.d," Renee said. "We're back in a part of the world that has power."

"No we aren't," Allie told her. "That part of the world is on the other side of this sawhorse. What do you think would happen if we tried to cross?"