The Fireman (39 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

4

The Browning went off in a series of deep concussions that could not be thought of merely as sound. Harper felt those stammering blasts through her entire body, in her teeth, in her eyeballs.

The ambulance shuddered. Pulverized tar leapt up from the street as the Browning strafed from left to right. Bullets passed through Nelson Heinrich’s legs, tearing them apart and throwing red smoke: blood turned to a cloud of vapor. His right leg folded backward at the knee, like the leg of a praying mantis. The portable defibrillator dropped a shower of white sparks. Nelson jittered like a man at a tent revival show getting a dose of the Holy Spirit.

Harper went down on her hands and knees, dropping behind the rear of Ben’s Challenger. From around the tire she saw Ben in Peter and Bethann’s cruiser. He knelt in the driver’s seat, leaning out with his automatic pistol. She saw the gun muzzle flash, but couldn’t hear the report over the merciless thudding of the .50 caliber.

Then Ben jerked his head back into the car and shrank down. In the next instant Peter and Bethann’s police cruiser was rocking from side to side, as if in a gale. Windows erupted. Bullets whanged into steel, blew out tires, sheared off the open driver’s-side door—it fell with a bang into the street—sprang open the trunk, smashed taillights.

Jamie had retreated behind the front of the ambulance, sunk into a crouch, Bushmaster between her legs. The Dodge Challenger was only a dozen steps from where she was taking shelter, but it might as well have been in a different county. Trying to cross that distance made about as much sense as diving headfirst into a wood chipper.

Then the shooting was over. Distantly, Harper heard the jingle-jangle of empty cartridges falling into the road. The air throbbed with reverberations.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” shouted the Marlboro Man. “I saw AC/DC with Bon Scott in ’79 and they sounded like pussies compared to our noise. You all lay still unless you want to hear our encore. Let me tell you what’s going to happen now. You’re all going to—”

A gun popped from the rear of the ambulance. After the racket of the Browning, Mindy Skilling’s little silver pistol sounded like a party cracker.

“Run for it, Mr. Patchett!” Mindy shrieked. “I’ll cover you! Run, run, everyone run! My life for Mother Carol! My life for the Bright!” The gun popped again and again. Mindy was no longer in the ambulance, but crouched on the sidewalk, behind the ambulance’s rear end.

“Mindy,” Ben shouted. “Mindy,
don’t
—”

The Freightliner ground into first gear and lurched forward with a raggedy diesel roar. It crashed over a curb, wrenching a holly bush out of the ground and flinging it aside in a shower of dirt. The truck found second gear with a steely crunch and third a moment later. Filthy smoke gushed from the exhaust pipe behind the cab. Mindy’s little gun popped and popped, bullets spanging musically off the plow. At the last moment Jamie Close dropped her Bushmaster and scrambled away from the ambulance, clambering on all fours across the sidewalk, to take shelter behind a telephone pole.

The Freightliner hit the ambulance, picked it up off the asphalt, and tossed it across the yard of 10 Verdun Ave. Mindy Skilling was still behind it and she went along for the ride, was under it when it rolled on top of her and slid across the lawn. The ruin of the ambulance wrenched up grass and earth, left a wide, smoking skid mark behind it. One of Mindy Skilling’s boots was squashed deep into the dirt, but the rest of her was beneath the deformed wreck. She had said it was hard to die in front of an audience, but in the end she had made it look easy.

“Who else wants to be a hero?” the Marlboro Man’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers. “We got all night, plenty of ammo, and the next best thing to a tank. You can come on out with your hands up and play let’s make a deal, or you can try and fight it out. But let me tell you, if you decide to make a scrap of it, not one of you will live to see the light of day. Does everyone understand me?”

No one spoke. Harper couldn’t find her own voice. She had thought nothing could be louder than the sound of the .50 caliber, lighting up the street, but the Freightliner crashing into the ambulance had been like a seventy-five-gun broadside from a ship of the line. She felt incapable of even beginning a thought, let alone completing one. One moment ticked by, and then another, and finally it was the Marlboro Man who spoke up yet again—only this time there was a distracted uncertainty in his voice.

“The fuck is that?” he said, his voice muted. Harper wasn’t sure he meant to broadcast that one.

The street brightened as if the sun had, impossibly, jumped into the sky. A rushing gold light flared and lit the road with a perfect noontime clarity. Or almost perfect. That unseen sun was
moving,
swooping straight up the lane. A hot summer gale rocked the cars, blasting them with the smell of the Fourth of July: a perfume of cherry bombs, campfires, hot tarmac. Then it was gone and the darkness dropped back over Verdun Avenue.

The Marlboro Man chuckled nervously. “You wanna tell me the fuck that was? Someone shoot a flare gun at us?”

The light began to build again: a bronze burning glow that made the spotlight shining from the van as unnecessary as a penlight at high noon in July. Harper rose to one knee and twisted her head to see over the roof of the Challenger . . . just in time to see a teardrop of flame, the size of a private jet, plunging out of the night above.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

5

In the first instant of seeing it, the light was so intense, Harper was half blinded and could not make out any features of what was falling upon them. It was simply a blaze of red glare, plunging toward the stretch of road between the WKLL van and the Dodge Challenger.

It was thirty feet above the road and still dropping when the bolt of flame opened wings to reveal the blazing, monstrous bird within. The heat deformed the air around it—Harper saw it through a blur of tears. At the sight, she was struck through with wonder, with terror. The people who had witnessed the mushroom cloud rising from Hiroshima could’ve felt no less. It was twenty-four feet across from burning wingtip to burning wingtip. Its open beak was large enough to swallow a child. Feathers of blue and green flame, yards long, rippled from its tail. It made no sound at all, aside from a rushing roar that reminded Harper of a train passing through a subway tunnel.

Time snagged in place. The bird hovered less than a dozen feet above the road. The blacktop beneath it began to smoke and stink. Every window on the street reflected the bonfire light of the Phoenix.

Then it was moving—and so was Harper.

Its wings lashed at the air, and it was like someone had thrown open the hatch to a great furnace. A withering billow of chemical heat rolled down the road, and the Dodge Challenger shook in the gale. Harper was crawling around to the driver’s-side door.

The Phoenix launched itself at the white van. One wing stroked a hedge and the brush ignited, became a wall of flame. The Phoenix flew into the open side door of the van. Harper had a glimpse of the gunman behind the Browning shrieking and raising his arms in front of his face. The front doors were flung open. The driver and the passenger toppled into the street.

The massive bird of flame hit the van so hard it went up on two tires, tilting toward the driver’s side, threatening to overturn, before crashing back onto all four wheels. The interior boiled with fire, with threshing wings of flame. A bullet went off with a metallic
spow!
Then another. Then .50-caliber ammunition was exploding like kernels of popcorn, blam-blam-blamming inside the white van, flashing as the shells went off, bullets bonging off the roof, the walls, deforming the vehicle from the inside.

Harper hoisted herself behind the wheel of Ben’s Challenger, sat on broken glass. The keys were in the ignition. She stayed low, just peeking over the dash, while she started the car.

Up the road, the Freightliner turned in a slow circle, tires chewing up the snow and dirt in front of 10 Verdun.

Harper threw the cruiser into drive and stamped on the gas. She only went a short distance, though—less than five yards—before slamming one foot on the brake. The Challenger shrieked to a stop, close to where Jamie was crouched behind a telephone pole. Jamie broke and ran, crossed the open blacktop, and dived into the passenger seat. She was saying something, shouting something, but Harper didn’t hear and didn’t care.

Up the road, the Phoenix emerged from the side door of the van, stretching its head out on a comically long neck as if to scream triumphantly into the night. The van continued to shake and jump on its springs while the ammo popcorned inside the wreck. The windshield exploded. Someone was screaming.

Harper launched the Challenger up the street, swerving across half-melted rubble to pull alongside the shot-up police cruiser. Ben flung himself out, hobbled across the space between the two cars, and tumbled into the backseat facedown, his legs hanging out the door. The air reeked of burning tires.

The Freightliner roared and leapt up the street at the van and the Phoenix. The plow struck the side of the Econoline with a shattering clang and tossed it aside as if it were an empty shoebox. The van rolled, spraying blue sparks, the roof collapsing. The Freightliner charged after it, hitting it again, flipping it to the far side of the cross street, Sagamore Road. The Phoenix exploded from the gaping windshield and streaked into the sky—much diminished, Harper saw. Minutes earlier, it had been the size of a Learjet. Now it was smaller than a hang glider.

Her foot found the gas pedal. The Challenger jumped forward hard enough to shove her all the way back into her seat. Ben’s legs were still hanging out the rear door. He had wrapped seat belts around his hands to keep from being tossed out, was kicking his feet to try and pull himself farther into the car.

She looked out as they launched themselves past Nelson Heinrich on his back in the street, legs splintered and smashed, folded at improbable angles. The defibrillator sat on the dead man’s chest, the plastic black with scorch marks, a bullet hole the size of a fist in the center of it. At least she thought he was dead. It was only after they were well past him that Harper wondered if Nelson had turned his head to watch them go.

The Freightliner filled the road before them. Harper swerved toward the parking lot in front of the burned-out CVS. The Challenger jumped the curb. Harper felt herself lift weightlessly off the seat. The car hit the lot with a spray of sparks and Ben howled, still hanging on.

They slewed onto Sagamore Road and Harper gave it all the gas it would take. A bronze light lit their way from above. The Phoenix escorted them for a quarter of a mile, a brassy blaze that made headlights all but unnecessary—and then it soared out and ahead of them. For a few moments it was gliding this way and that in front of the car, a vast kite of bright fire. At last, with a final dip of its wings, it left them, rose in a sputtering rush into the night, and was gone, disappearing over trees to the east.

An especially hard piece of glass or steel was jabbing Harper in the butt, and she reached under her to get rid of it. It turned out to be the cell phone Mindy Skilling had used to call 911. Without really considering it, she pushed it into the pocket of her snow jacket.

No one saw.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

6

Harper was unprepared to get back and find the infirmary full of people, lamps burning in every corner, and the air humid from the close press of bodies. She knew before anyone spoke to her, just from the way they looked at her, that they were in a panic, and she wondered how they already knew about the massacre on Verdun Avenue.

The waiting room was crammed with Lookouts: Michael Lindqvist, the Neighbors twins, Chuck Cargill, Bowie, a few others Harper didn’t know by name. Allie was there, too, and looked so afraid, so pale and distraught and starved, Harper couldn’t feel any anger toward her. Norma Heald sat in the corner, a quaking mound of white flesh in a flower-print dress.

What surprised Harper most was to find Carol there, bundled into a threadbare pink and yellow robe that was so old, the colors had taken on an exhausted
thin
hue. Those words—exhausted, thin—applied as much to Carol herself. Her skin was stretched tight over the skull beneath, her eyes burning dangerously hot in their sockets.

Harper had an arm around Ben’s waist, helping him stumble-skip along. His left cheek, his left forearm, his left hand, and his left buttock were cactused with glass needles. Jamie was right behind them, lugging the Styrofoam cooler full of plasma. They had spilled far more blood then they had brought home.

“What?” Harper asked. “Why are you all—”

“Seizure,” Carol said. “My father had a seizure. While you were out there and he was here alone. His heart stopped. He died.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

7

Later, Nick told Harper everything, using a combination of sign language and notes. He was there for the whole thing. He was holding Father Storey’s hand when the old man stopped breathing.

Nick had been in a nervous state when Harper left with Ben to hit the ambulance. Somehow he had worked out what was up and was sure someone was going to die. Michael Lindqvist had tried to settle him down. They had beans and tea and played Battleship. The second time Nick yawned, Michael said it was time for a nap, and even though Nick said he wasn’t tired, he was asleep in the cot next to his grandfather inside of five minutes.

He had a dream of light falling in the darkness, a torch dropping from a sky of midnight blue. The torch plummeted behind some hills and there was a red flash and the world began to shiver and rattle, as if some hidden scaffolding beneath the green grass was coming apart. Nick jumped awake, but the clattering sound continued.

Which was when he saw it: Father Storey’s head snapping from side to side and foam running from the corners of his mouth. Father Storey’s whole bed jittered and shook. Nick ran into the waiting room, where Michael was on watch, flipping through a
Ranger Rick
that was older than Nick himself. He dragged Michael off the couch and propelled him into the ward, hauled him along to Father Storey’s bedside. Michael froze at the foot of the cot, rigid with shock.

Nick ran around his cot to his little satchel of clothes and books and dug out the most valuable item in all the world that night: his slide whistle. He shoved up a window and began to blow.

It was not the Fireman who answered the call, but Allie, and half a dozen Lookouts. By the time they got there, Father Storey had gone still. His chest had ceased its labored rise and fall. His eyelids had a gray, sickly pallor. Nick held his cold, gaunt hand, the skin loose on the bones, while Michael wept with the savagery of a small, bereft child.

Allie brushed past them both. She used a finger to scoop the foam and vomit out of Father Storey’s mouth, put her lips over his, and exhaled into his lungs. She braided her fingers together and began to thrust against the center of his chest. She had learned CPR two summers before, when she was a counselor-in-training at Camp Wyndham, had received her instruction and certification from John Rookwood. So: in some ways the Fireman had answered the whistle after all.

She was at it for close to five minutes, a long, desperate, silent, timeless time, driving her hands down onto his chest and breathing into his mouth in front of a steadily growing audience. But it wasn’t until Carol arrived—until she shoved through the curtain and screamed, “Dad!”—that Father Storey coughed, gagged, and with a weary sigh, began to breathe on his own again.

Aunt Carol called him back from the dead,
Nick wrote Harper.

Your
sister
called him back,
Harper scribbled in reply, but she had the unpleasant notion that most people would think the same as Nick and would credit Carol with a kind of miracle. After all, she already drove back death by leading them in song every day. Was this really so different? Once again she had confronted death, armed only with her voice, and once again the doomed had been saved.

Harper spent an hour at Father Storey’s side, removing the feeding tube she had run down his nostril, getting him on a clean drip, changing his diaper and the pillowcase, which was stained with an acrid-smelling mix of vomit and blood. His pulse was strong but erratic, speeding along for a few beats, slowing, then staggering back into a hurry. His whiskery face was gray, almost colorless, and his eyelids were open on slits to show the whites of his eyes.

A stroke, she thought. He was stroking out, a little at a time. Whatever she had hoped or believed up until then, she thought now it was very unlikely the good old man would ever open his eyes or give her a smile again.

She found tweezers, sterile thread, a needle, bandages, and iodine, and went looking for Ben Patchett. By then it was early morning, the light watery and dismal, which perfectly mirrored how she felt.

She found Ben with Carol in the waiting room. He sat with one cheek of his ass on the edge of the coffee table, keeping his weight off the other cheek. He had been methodically picking the largest pieces of glass out of his face and arm and making a pile of them: a glistening heap of bright shards and shiny red needles.

Most of the rest had left, though Michael and Allie had remained. They sat on the couch, holding hands. Michael had stopped crying, but there were white lines etched on his cheeks, tracing the path of his tears. Jamie leaned against the door. The side of her face was swollen in a ripe red bruise.

Carol said, “He’s dying.”

“He’s stable. He’s getting fluids. I think he’s fine for now. You’re tired, Carol. You should go home. Try and rest. Your father needs you to be strong.”

“Yes. I will be. I intend exactly that. To be strong.” Carol fixed Harper with a fevered, unblinking stare. “Here is a thought for you. If my father
had
died, someone in this camp—maybe a
few
someones—would be glad. Whoever bashed in his head is
praying
for him to die. You want sickness? There are people in this place who wish my father dead with all their hearts. Who probably wish
me
dead. I don’t know why. I can’t make sense of it. I only want us all to be safe . . . safe and good to each other. But there are some who want my father gone, who want
me
gone, who want to tear us apart and turn us against each other.
That’s
sickness, Nurse Willowes, and nothing you brought back from the ambulance can cure it. It can’t be cured. It can only be cut out.”

Harper thought Carol sounded overtired and overwrought and didn’t think this was worth replying to. She shifted her gaze to Allie. Harper wanted to thank her for saving Father Storey’s life, but when she opened her mouth, she remembered how Allie had stood there and watched while the other girls kicked snow on her and cut off her hair. The words died before they made it to her lips.

Instead, she spoke to Ben. “Come into the ward and get those pants off. I want to clean your wounds.”

Before Ben could rise to his feet, Carol spoke again. “You walked away from my father once and you were almost captured. You walked away a second time and my father had a fit and almost died. He
did
die. And was called back. You aren’t walking away again. You will stay here in the infirmary until he recovers.”

“Carol,” Harper said, struggling with all her heart for tenderness, “I can’t promise you he
will
recover. I don’t want to deceive you about his chances.”

“I don’t want to deceive you about yours, either,” Carol said. “You may think letting him die will make room for you and the Fireman—”

“What?”
Harper asked.

“—but when my father’s time in this camp is over, so is yours, Ms. Willowes. If he dies, you’re
done
here. I want you to understand the stakes. You said yourself it is time for me to be strong. I agree. I need to be strong enough to hold people to account, and that is what I mean to do.”

The Dragonscale scrawled on Harper’s chest prickled painfully, heating up against her sweater.

“I will do everything I can,” Harper said, struggling to keep her voice even. “I love your father. So does John. He doesn’t have any interest in taking over or running the show. Neither do I! Carol, I just want a safe place to see this baby into the world. That’s it. I’m not looking to undermine anyone or anything. But you need to understand—if he does die—despite my best efforts—”

“If that happens it will be your last day in camp,” Carol said. There was, suddenly, a new calm in her voice. She was sitting straighter, her pose almost regal. “And so I trust you will not let it happen.”

Harper’s breath was fast and short. For the second time in one night, she felt like she was pinned down, trapped by lethal fire. “I
can’t
promise I can keep him alive, Carol. No one could promise that. He’s been grievously injured, and his age makes a full recovery . . . very unlikely.” She paused, then said, “You don’t mean what you’re saying. Sending me away would put the whole camp at risk. What if I was picked up by the sort of people who tried to kill us tonight? They’d force me to tell everything I know—that’s what Ben says.”

“Not if your baby was here with us,” Carol said. “You’d keep quiet then, no matter what they did to you. Of course I wouldn’t send you away until after you gave birth, no matter what happens to my father. And of course I wouldn’t punish the infant by sending him away with you. That’s no way to treat a child. No. If my father dies, you go, but the baby will stay here with us to ensure your silence. I’d look after him myself.”