The Fireman (36 page)

“Anyway. There isn’t much more to tell. We hid under bodies while the other prisoners kept throwing more in. No one seemed to notice we were missing. Then, just as they were finishing, I heard someone jump into the truck and start wandering around. Bootheels clanging on metal. The bodies didn’t fully cover us and I could see between them and suddenly I was looking up at Devon and his clipboard, and damn if he wasn’t looking right back at me. We stared at each other for the longest second in the history of recorded time. Then he nodded, just a little. He got down out of the truck and banged the tailgate shut and it started up. One guard shouted to Devon and asked if everyone was accounted for and Devon said yes they were. He lied for us. He knew we were in the truck and he lied so we could slip away. Someday this is all going to be over and I’m going to find that guy and buy him a beer. No one ever deserved one more.”

He was silent then. The fire whistled and seethed.

“Then?” Carol asked.

“The driver threw it into first gear and hauled out of there. Half an hour later we pulled into the big lot in Portsmouth where they were burning the dead. The Mazz and I got out of the truck without being seen, but we only made it as far as a culvert on the edge of that pond there. And then we were stuck. We couldn’t get across the pond and we couldn’t get across the lot. I’m not sure what would’ve happened if the Fireman didn’t show up. I guess we either would’ve frozen to death or given ourselves up and been shot. I hope I get a chance to thank him. It must feel pretty good to have him on your side. You almost feel sorry for anyone who goes up against him.”

A prolonged, awkward silence followed.

“Thank you, Mr. Cline,” Carol said. “Thank you for sharing your story. You must be tired after all that talk. Jamie, will you take him back to the lockup?”

“The handcuffs, Jamie,” Ben said.

Jamie stepped forward and Bowie rose to his feet and they moved in on Gil, one on each side of him. Gil looked from Carol to Ben, his gray eyes weary and hooded. He stood and put his hands behind him. The handcuffs made a ratcheting sound as Jamie snapped them onto his wrists.

“I was going to ask if there’s a chance I might be transferred out of the meat locker and in with the other men,” Gil said. “But I guess not.”

Carol said, “I’m very grateful to you for how forthright you’ve been. Grateful—and happy. Happy you are with us. Happy you don’t have to fear being hauled out into a parking lot and gunned down. But Mr. Cline, after what Mr. Mazzucchelli did for you, I am not sure it’s in the interest of this community to let you out. He helped you escape and you seem like a loyal soul. How could you not want to help do the same for him? No. Back to the lockup, Jamie. It may seem like horrible treatment, but you understand why it’s necessary, Mr. Cline. As you said yourself, the people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. I think I know pretty well what you were implying when you said it. I think we all knew you were taking a dig at
me
.”

The corners of Gil’s mouth went up in a little smile.

“Ma’am,” Cline said, “I hid under dead bodies less cold than you.” He glanced at Harper and gave her a short nod. “Thanks for the water, Nurse. See you around.”

Jamie thumped him in the small of the back with her broom handle. “Come on, sexy. Let’s get you back to the honeymoon suite.”

When she opened the door, the wind blew snow in halfway across the room. Bowie and Jamie escorted Gilbert out, the door thudding shut behind them. The house creaked in the gale.

“Your turn, Harper,” Carol said.

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10

“Tell me about my father,” Carol said. “Is he dying?”

“His condition is stable right now.”

“But he won’t wake up.”

“I’m hopeful.”

“Ben says he should’ve woken up by now.”

“Yes. If it was a subdural hematoma with no complications.”

“So why hasn’t he?”

“There must’ve been complications.”

“Like what? What kind of thing is a ‘complication’?”

“I couldn’t say with any certainty. I’m a nurse, not a neurologist. A piece of bone in his brain? Or just a deep bruise on the brain. Or maybe he had a stroke while we were operating. I don’t have any of the diagnostic equipment I’d need to figure it out.”

“If he wakes up”—Carol began, and her breath seemed to hitch before she could go on, although her face remained slack, expressionless—“how retarded will he be?”

They didn’t use the word
retarded
to discuss brain damage, but Harper didn’t think it was the time or place to correct her. “He may suffer no impairment at all or he may be severely damaged. At this point I’d just be guessing.”

“Would you agree, though,” Carol said, “that he should’ve recovered by now? This is an unexpected outcome, isn’t it?”

“I was hoping for better.”

Carol nodded, slowly, almost dreamily. “Is there anything you can do for him?”

“With what I have on hand? Not much. I rigged up a way to pass him fluids—watered-down apple juice—but that will only sustain him for so long. If the infirmary was better stocked, though, it would open up a range of options to improve his care. It would give me more flexibility with other patients, too. That’s what I was hoping to talk to you about. I spoke with John—”

“Yes,” Carol said. “So I heard.”

Harper continued as if there had been no interruption. “—and he has a plan to get us the supplies—”

This time Ben broke in.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Ben asked Carol. “Didn’t I say we could trust the Fireman to have a plan for us?” He spoke in a flat, almost bored tone, but beneath that there was an edge in his voice.

Harper tried again. “John thinks he can help us get what I’d need to look after your father and see to his long-term care, if he remains incapacitated. I think it ought to be considered.”

“Tell me,” Carol said.

Harper laid out the Fireman’s plan: how he wanted them to take Ben’s police cruiser to Verdun Avenue, use one of the camp cell phones to call an ambulance, wait for them to show up, and then—

“—then John says he’ll send a phoenix to chase away the EMTs and any police who come along with them,” Harper finished. She felt this was a rather lame way to wrap up and was, briefly, nettled with John and John’s perverse theatrical impulses. “I’m not sure what he means by that, but he hasn’t let us down in the past.”

“It’ll be another of his stunts,” Carol said. “One of his distractions. He does like his distractions.”

Ben said, “I don’t see why we need his help. We can take down an ambulance without him. We have enough guns.”

“To get how many people killed?” Harper asked.

“Oh, it won’t come to that. We’ll put it to them like this: either you give us what’s in the ambulance or you wind up riding in one. Most people are pretty cooperative when they’ve got a rifle poking them in the eye.”

“They’ll have guns, too. They’ll have a police escort.”

“Sure. But when we meet them, I’ll be in my uniform and driving my police cruiser. They won’t be on guard. We’ll have the drop on them before they know what’s up,” Ben told her.

“Why go it alone?” Harper asked. “Why not do it John’s way?”

“The last time we did things John’s way, someone nearly murdered my father,” Carol said.

“What happened to your father happened
here,
back on our ground. John’s plan
worked
.”

“Yes. It worked out all right for
him
.”

“Now what does that mean?”

Instead of answering, Carol said, “When was John planning to give us the benefit of his help?”

“Three nights from now.”

“We can’t wait that long. It’ll have to be tomorrow. Ben, I’m trusting you to do this without any violence unless you absolutely have no other way.”

Ben said, “Right. Well. There’ll be four of them—two responders in the ambulance, two in the police cruiser—so there better be five of us. Jamie is the best shot in camp after me. Nelson Heinrich used to have his own NRA Facebook page and is apparently good with a rifle. That girl Mindy Skilling could place the 911 call for us. She’s old enough, so I wouldn’t feel irresponsible about taking her along, and she’s dramatic. Went to Emerson, I think? I figure—”

“Wait.
Wait,
” Harper interrupted. “Carol, there’s no reason we can’t hold off for three nights. Your father—”

“—is nearly seventy years old. Would you wait three nights if it was your father? If you could do something now?”

It was in Harper to say
my father wouldn’t want people getting shot for him,
but she couldn’t get the words out of her mouth. In truth, she thought Carol was right. If it were her father, she would’ve begged the Fireman to do whatever he could, as soon as possible. Begging wasn’t the sort of thing Julie Andrews did, but Harper wasn’t above it.

“All right. I’ll talk to John. See if he can move things up to tomorrow night.”

Carol fussed with the black curl of hair that fell across her forehead. “John John John John John John John John. If John is in no hurry to help my father, I’d feel awful about rushing him.”

“He isn’t delaying for no reason. His ribs are knocked in, Carol.”

Carol nodded sympathetically. “Yes. Yes, of course, John
must
be allowed to rest. I don’t want him disturbed. We don’t need him. Nurse Willowes, Ben will require a list detailing everything you need to give my father the very
best
care.”

“That won’t work. I have to go with them.”

“Oh no. No, you couldn’t. You are so brave and kind to want to go, but I need you at my father’s side. We can’t risk you.”

“You’re going to have to. Ben is only going to have a few minutes in the ambulance. Do you really want him picking through two hundred bottles, trying to make sense of pharmacological abbreviations? Personally, I wouldn’t take a chance on it, if it was my father.” Turning it around to see how Carol liked it.

Carol gave her a baleful look.

“My father needs more than good medicine. He needs a good nurse,” Carol said. “One is no good without the other. Be sure you come back.”

Harper didn’t know what to say to that. The whole conversation had been confounding, full of hints she didn’t understand and implications she didn’t like.

Carol said, “Ben, I want to talk over the plan with you. I want to know everything. Who you’re taking with you. What Verdun Avenue is like. Everything. Nurse—” She flicked her glance at Harper. “You can find your own way back to the infirmary, I hope.”

It surprised Harper that they would just let her walk out unsupervised. In some ways, she thought herself as much a prisoner as Gilbert Cline, only with a nicer cell. They had brought her to the House of the Black Star under guard, and she had expected to leave the same way.

A part of her wanted to walk out the door right away, before Carol changed her mind and decided to send her back with Mindy or one of the Lookouts hanging around outside. She already had in mind a modest detour on her way back to the infirmary. But she forced herself to wait, fingering the black buttons on her overcoat. There was, after all, still one other matter to address.

“Carol . . . I was hoping we could talk about Allie. She’s been walking around with a rock in her mouth for days, because she believes she has something to atone for. I think she’s doing it, partly, because she looks up to you. She wants to impress you. She wants everyone to know how devoted she is to camp. Can’t you make her stop?”

“I can’t,” Carol said. “But you can.”

“Of
course
you can make her stop. Tell her she’s punished herself enough. You’re her aunt and she loves you. She’ll listen. You’re almost all she has. You’re
responsible
for her. You need to step in before she has a collapse.”

“But we’re
all
responsible to
each other,
” Carol said, her face assuming a maddening serenity. “We’re a house of cards. If even a single card stops supporting its share of the weight, the whole camp will collapse. That is what Allie is trying to tell
you
. She carries
your
stone in her mouth. Only you can pluck it out.”

“She’s a child and she’s acting like one. It’s your job to be the adult.”

“It’s my job to look after more than a hundred and fifty desperate people. To keep them safe. To keep them from burning alive. In a way, I am a nurse, too. I have to protect this camp from the infection of despair and selfishness. I have to protect us from secrets, which can be like cancer. From disloyalty and disaffection, which run like fevers.” As she spoke, she straightened in her chair, and her wet eyes glittered with a sick heat. “Since my father fell, I have tried to be what all these people need. What they deserve. My father wanted Camp Wyndham to be a
nice
place for people who had no other place to go. And that’s all I want. I just want it to be a
nice
place . . . and I think it’s nicest when we all look out for each other. My dad thought so, too.” She clenched her hands together and then squeezed them between her knees. “We’re stronger together, Harper. And if you’re not with us, you’re all alone. These days, alone is no way to be.” Her look, Harper thought, was almost pitying. “Don’t you see that?”

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11

Harper followed a barely discernible path beneath an obscure sky.

Whichever way she turned her face, snow blew into it. The wind gusted. A tree cracked. Boards wobbled and flexed underfoot, requiring her to proceed slowly to keep her balance.

When the House of the Black Star was out of sight behind her, she held up in the frozen, pine-scented dark. In another two hundred steps, she would cross the trail that wound down through the trees to the shingle and the dock. She could be across the water in ten minutes, tell John they were going after the ambulance tomorrow, tell him—

A child ran through the pines to her right, a flickering shadow shape, and she turned her head to look and saw that it wasn’t a child at all, only a skein of snow, fleeing through the trees.

Whack!

A snowball hit her in the side of her head, but she didn’t know it until she had gone another two steps. It took that long to register. She was not aware of reeling to one side or her right knee giving out under her until she found herself kneeling in the snow.

Harper saw a blur of motion from the corner of her eye and raised an elbow in time to block the next snowball. The impact deadened her arm. A ringing shock jolted from elbow to hand. The snowball shattered the moment it struck her. The speckled white stone that had been packed in its center rolled out onto the snow in front of her.

Girl shapes jumped from behind trees on either side of her, breathless with laughter. Harper thought she saw a snowball sailing at her stomach and dropped her arms to cover it, and it hit the side of her neck instead, a sharp sting, followed by numbness.

They circled.

The water in her eyes wanted to turn to ice, freeze there. The faces surrounding her were stiff and white and inexpressive, as if she were being attacked by department store mannequins.

One of them charged at her back and shoved her. She toppled onto her side.

“Please be careful, girls,” she said. “I’m pregnant. I’m not fighting you.”

“Whitewash, whitewash!” sang someone who sounded horribly like Emily Waterman.

Someone grabbed her hair in one gloved hand, picked up a fistful of snow in the other, and scrubbed her face with it. A girl shrieked with laughter.

When Harper blinked away the snow, Tyrion Lannister from
Game of Thrones
was crouched before her. He looked at her with a blank-eyed incredulity: a cheap plastic mask. He—no,
she,
it was a girl behind that mask—held out a hand, palm up. A flat white stone rested in it.

“Eat it,” came the voice from behind the mask. “Eat it, bitch.”

“Make her eat it,” another girl said.

“Eat it, eat it, eat it,” girls chanted.

Harper was on her side in the snow, one arm covering the ripe swell of her belly, the other arm trapped under her body. The girl holding her hair yanked. Then she yanked harder.

Harper opened her mouth and held it open like a child letting a doctor look at her tonsils. Tyrion Lannister forced in the stone: a cool, flat weight.

Captain America watched from between two pines, five paces away. Harper stared at Allie until her eyes blurred with tears and her vision doubled, trebled.

There was a sound like someone ripping a bedsheet in half. The hand clutching her hair yanked, pulling Harper’s chin up, forcing her head back. Another hand slapped her in the mouth, hard. A thumb moved back and forth, pressing the strip of duct tape flat across her lips.

“Half an hour,” said the girl who had her by the hair. “It stays in for half an hour. Now get up. Get on your knees.”

Harper was lifted onto her knees. The girls pulled her arms behind her and there was another ripping sound, while one of them tore off a fresh length of duct tape and bound her wrists together.

“Mbeby,”
Harper said, meaning be careful of the
baby
. She had no idea if anyone understood her.

Two girls danced together, holding hands, twisting and spinning each other: one wore an Obama mask, the other a Donald Trump face. In all this time, Captain America didn’t move, but remained between two firs, as motionless and unblinking as an owl.

Flashlights played across the pines, a swarm of bright gold lights. Harper had to look again before she realized none of the girls were holding flashlights. It was the girls themselves, leaping about, laughing, kicking snow at her. They were lit up, like in church when they sang together. They shone for each other, the ’scale throbbing, intense enough to cast a brightness from under their jackets, up around their open collars.

So there were other ways to enter the exalted state of the Bright, then. A chorus or a firing squad: either would serve to satisfy the ’scale. A gang rape was as good as a gospel.

Harper heard the snicker-snack of scissors. Her gold hair began to fall in the snow.

“Ha ha! Ha ha!” said the smallest of her attackers, the girl she was sure was Emily Waterman. “Cut it off cut it off
cudidauff!
” Her voice was a drunk bray.

The wind sighed, reluctantly, like a lover who realizes it’s time to go. Her hair fell around her while the scissors went
snickety-snack
.

“How’s that rock taste?” one of the girls asked. “I bet not as good as the Fireman’s prick.”

The girl who had been clipping her hair said, “Isn’t it sexy? The way the scissors sound?” She opened and closed them next to Harper’s ear. “Gives me shivers. I like cutting your hair so much I’m sorry there’s not more of it. I’m sorry I have to stop. Maybe next time I’ll cut something else. You need to decide if you’re with us or against us. If you’re going to shine with us or not shine at all. You want
my
medical advice? I prescribe a change in your bitchy attitude.”

Yes, they were all shining . . . all except for Allie. Allie took a step toward her and made a small choked sound of grief, but when Harper turned her gaze upon her, she faltered and froze in place. She even lifted one hand, palm outward, as if somehow Harper could leap up, free her hands, and strike her.

Harper thought there was a chance that soon one of them would haul back and kick her belly like a football, just for the fun of it. They didn’t know what they were doing anymore. Maybe they had already gone much further than they had intended. Maybe they had just meant to pelt her with snowballs and run. They had forgotten who they were. They had forgotten their own names, the voices of their mothers, the faces of their fathers. She thought it was very possible they would kill her here in the snow without meaning to. Use that pair of scissors to open her throat. When you were in the Bright, everything felt good, everything felt
right
. You didn’t walk. You danced. The world pulsed with secret song and you were the star of your own Technicolor musical. The blood leaping from her carotid artery would be as beautiful to them as a sparkler throwing a burning red shower of phosphorus.

The girl who had been standing behind her all this time pushed her onto her side in the snow. A bubble of some powerful, dangerous emotion quivered inside her and Harper remained very still so it would not burst. She did not want to find out what it was . . . whether it was grief, terror, or, worst of all, surrender.

Each of the girls took turns dancing up to her and kicking snow in her face, and Harper closed her eyes.

The girls stood over her, whispering. Harper couldn’t bear to look at them, to see that circle of masked faces gathered around her. They talked on and on, in soft, hissing, unintelligible voices. Harper shivered violently. Her jeans were soaked and her wrists hurt and her face was raw and burnt from all the snow that had been thrown in it.

At last she opened her eyes at a squint. The whispering continued, but the girls were gone. The only thing talking was the wind, shushing the pines.

She wriggled and twisted her wrists. The tape was on her gloves, not her skin, and in a while she was able to squirm one hand free. Harper pulled off the other glove and tossed them both aside, still stuck together with duct tape. She did not hesitate, did not give herself time to think, but found the edge of the duct tape over her mouth and ripped it off. She tore away some of her upper lip with it.

Harper spat the stone into the snow. It was pink with blood.

She got so light-headed when she stood up, she had to put a hand against a pine to steady herself. She made her way from trunk to trunk, like a wobbly toddler taking her first steps and using the furniture to steady herself. She found the turning to the waterfront and started down the hill. She got perhaps twelve steps when someone called out to her.

“Nurse Willowes?” Nelson Heinrich shouted. “Where are you going? The path to the infirmary is up here.”

He stood on the boards with Jamie Close. Jamie was dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing the last time Harper saw her, the blaze orange snowpants and the puffy slate-colored parka. The only thing different was that she had taken off her Tyrion Lannister mask.

“That snow is up to your neck. Why don’t you come back here before you’re buried alive?” Nelson’s face was scrubbed red from the cold and he grinned to show his two front teeth.

Harper’s breath steamed. When she licked her upper lip she tasted blood.

It took her almost five minutes to trudge the twenty steps back to the boards, wading waist-deep in the snow, powder getting inside her boots.

“Jamie and I were just off to relieve the Lookouts at Mother Carol’s! Good thing we showed up when we did. You were all turned around.” He reached out with both hands to help her up onto the planks. He frowned, but his eyes were gay with amusement. “But look at all these tracks! We have rules, you know! No wandering off the paths! We can move the boards, but we can’t make tracks disappear. What if a hunter wanders by? By God, if we were discovered, they’d ship us all off to Concord! If they didn’t just shoot us here! Wandering puts the whole camp in peril! Mr. Patchett and Mother Carol have been very clear about that. One hour with a stone should remind you of your responsibilities.”

Jamie Close stepped around him, holding out a white stone in her palm. She grinned to show a chipped tooth.

Harper took the rock and obediently put it in her mouth.