The Fireman (61 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

13

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, shining with a mineral gleam under a sky that was steadily turning pale and pink. Nothing grew. Harper had heard that weeds and grass 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 windshield, and the Fireman turned on the wipers, which smeared long streaks of gray across the glass.

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 shells, windows smashed out, roofs collapsed in. They flickered past, a line of warped aluminum shoeboxes, 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 passed 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 shelled. 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 bass 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.

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HarperCollins
Publishers

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

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 shell, 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

GOD FORGIVE US, GOD 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 Renée. Allie was in the road, reaching up to help Renée down over the bumper. Renée 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 shit,” Allie said. “Who could hear anything over that cat yowling?”

“Our little hitchhiker has decided he doesn’t like riding in coach,” Renée said.

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

Renée 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.”

Renée 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 massive 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 undershirt. 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 Hampshire. 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 give dour speeches and make grim predictions. Do you know you are drop-dead sexy until the minute you start to talk? Then you turn into a colossal ass.”

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

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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.

Renée 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.

Renée 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 snatched at it. Harper let go with a soft cry and jumped off the running board. Her legs felt watery and loose beneath her. Renée put a hand on her elbow to steady her.

“I’ve heard of tongues of flame,” Renée 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 passing 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.

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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 was 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,” Renée 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 bumper of the fire truck with Renée and Harper, while Allie and the Fireman ran the tow around the center mass of the tree.

“Let’s play a game,” Renée 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!” Renée said cheerfully.

Nick hopped off the rear bumper, his hands flying, arms waving.

“He says ‘It’s a big orange truck,’ ” Harper said.

“No!”
Renée 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 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.

“Allie, get off the tree!” John shouted.

Allie cupped a hand to her ear and shook her head
. Can’t hear you
. Harper could barely hear John herself over the fire truck’s idling engine.

Harper jumped up on the running board beside the Fireman and rang the brass bell, hard and loud as she could. Allie read Harper’s face, leapt off the tree, and came running.

“In the truck, in the truck!” John shouted. “Quick now, I need to back up.”

Allie snatched Nick off the ground, arms around his thighs, lifted him off the road, and hustled for the rear of the fire truck.

He gave them perhaps ten seconds to climb in and then he threw the fire truck into reverse, gunned the engine. The tree caught the truck and anchored it in place. The tires spun. Harper stood on the running board, clutching the open door with one hand and John’s arm with the other.

Jakob’s Freightliner was less than a mile away, sun glaring bleakly off the splintered windshield. Harper could hear the thin whine as it accelerated.

John applied more pressure and the tree rocked, turned over, and began to slide through the ash. Branches snapped and broke, littering the road.

A half mile away, Jakob’s snow-wing plow clipped the back end of the Walmart truck and tore the trailer to shreds, launched it up and out of his way with a metallic crash.

The tree caught on a fissure in the road, wouldn’t budge. John cursed. He put the truck in drive, rolled forward ten feet, and slammed it into reverse again. He ran straight back, tires shrieking. Harper held on, clenching her teeth, her pulse sick and fast, bracing herself for the jolt. The larch tree jounced up in the air and crashed back down, boughs shattering and flying, rolling far enough to one side to clear a lane.

“I’ll unhook us,” Harper said. She jumped down and ran around to the front of the truck.

“Hurry, Willowes,” the Fireman called to her. The sound of the Freightliner rose to a bellowing roar. “Get in,
get in
.”

Harper slipped the towline free from the front hitch and ran for the passenger side.

“Go!” she yelled, grabbing the passenger-side door and stepping onto the running board.

The fire truck lumbered forward. Thick branches cracked and shattered under the tires. By the time Harper pulled herself part of the way up into the passenger seat, he was doing nearly twenty miles per hour. He swung around the larch, building speed slowly but surely on a straight stretch of road that climbed to the top of a little rise.

The snow-wing plow struck the tree. The larch wasn’t swatted clear so much as pulverized, branches shattering in a cloud of gray powder and black fragments. The Freightliner screamed. Harper felt she was hearing Jakob’s true voice for the first time.

She had one knee up on the passenger seat when the Freightliner slammed into the rear of the truck. The impact dropped her. Her legs fell back out the open door, hung over the road. She got one arm through the open passenger-side window, hanging on to the door. Her other hand grabbed the seat.

“Harp!” the Fireman yelled. “Oh God, Harp, get in, get in!”

“Faster,” she told him. “Don’t you dare slow down, Rookwood.”

She kicked her feet but couldn’t seem to pull herself up into the seat. Too much of her was hanging out the passenger side door and her center of gravity was too low, all her mass and weight dangling over the road.

Harper turned her head to see where the Freightliner was and in the same moment Jakob hit them again. Harper
saw
him then, behind the wheel: Jakob’s starved, bristly, scarred face. He did not smile or look angry. His head rolled on his neck as if he were dosed up with some heavy anesthetic.

“Will you for God’s sake get in the truck,” the Fireman said. He had one hand on the wheel but wasn’t looking out the windshield anymore. He had stretched all the way across the passenger seat to grab for her, extending his right hand with its taped wrist.

She swatted wildly for his arm, caught his fingers. He hauled at her, straining against the slipstream that wanted to vacuum her right out of the front seat. Her feet kicked in the air and then her knee found the footwell and she was in the cab.

The fire truck had been drifting while he dragged her up. They clipped a baked Honda Civic parked on the left-hand margin of the interstate. The Honda’s back end flipped into the air as if a mine had exploded under the rear tires. They sped past it, left it behind.

The Honda came down across the turnpike behind them with a rattling thud. The snowplow hit it an instant later and knocked it aside with a shriek, a sound of almost human fury, mingled with the musical crash of imploding glass.

She scrambled into her seat, the passenger door still open and waving back and forth. Harper grabbed the black leather strap hanging above the door and stuck her head out, looking back.

“The fuck are you—” the Fireman asked.

She was full of song, a song of outrage and grief that had no words and no melody, and her hand ignited like a rag soaked in gasoline when touched with a match. Blue flame roared from it and she threw it, threw a softball of fire. It struck the windshield of the Freightliner, sprayed across the glass in a liquid fan of flame—and went out.

Harper threw fire again and again. A blast of blue flame snapped off the passenger-side mirror on the plow. A bolt struck the plow itself, briefly turning the snow-wing into a shallow trough filled with crackling white flame. The fourth time she cast flame, it hooked, like a curveball or a knuckler, and struck the front passenger-side tire. The wheel became a blazing hoop.

“Can you blind him?” the Fireman asked.

“What?” Harper asked.

“Blind him. Just blind him for ten seconds.
Now,
if you please. And for God’s sake put your seat belt on.”

The tendons stood out in John’s neck. His lips were drawn back in an appalled grimace. They were rushing up a hill toward some kind of overpass. The front of the fire truck thwacked aside a diamond-shaped orange sign, a warning. Harper didn’t have time to see what it said before the Fireman sent it spinning.

Harper didn’t bother with the belt. She couldn’t buckle in and still lean far enough out the door to throw flame directly at Jakob behind the steering wheel. She stuck her head back into the boiling afternoon air and looked at the Freightliner. Jakob stared back through his cobwebbed windshield, the cracks running from a single bullet hole, just to the right of where he sat. Harper thought Jamie Close had come very close to shooting him through a lung that night in the church tower.

She took a deep breath and threw a fistful of fire. It hit the windshield at the bullet hole. Flame squirted outward, following the cracks, making a web of flame. A little fire spattered through the hole and Jakob flinched, turned his head away. Harper thought, for a moment, he shut his eyes.

Harper turned to see what lay ahead and saw the overpass was gone.
bridge out
—that was what the orange safety sign had said. The overpass had collapsed in the center, leaving a chasm thirty feet across, rebar sticking out of shattered concrete. At the last instant it came to her that she still didn’t have her seat belt on.

John hammered his foot onto the brake and wrenched the wheel to the side, veering suddenly and sharply away from the drop.

It was almost too much, too hard. The fire truck slewed sideways, tires whining, a high ragged whine of blistering rubber. Blue smoke poured from the undercarriage. Harper could feel how the truck wanted to topple over. John had his whole body across the steering wheel, pulling against it. The truck slid sideways, shuddering with the force of a jackhammer.
I am going to miscarry,
Harper thought.

The Freightliner clipped the rear end in passing The fire engine spun like a revolving door. For an instant they were staring back the way they had come and still sliding backward. Centrifugal force slung Harper against her door. If she had not closed it the moment before, she would’ve been hurled out. The steering wheel whirled so quickly in the Fireman’s hands that he let go of it with a cry of pain.

They were looking back in the direction of New Hampshire, still skating over the blacktop, so Harper didn’t see when the Freightliner blew past them and over the drop, fell thirty feet and hit the road below with a concussive crash that seemed to shake the world. It felt as if a bomb had gone off beneath them.

She still felt a little as if they were spinning, even after the fire truck stopped moving. She looked at John. He stared back at her with wide, bewildered eyes. He moved his lips. She believed he was saying her name, but wasn’t sure, couldn’t hear over the drone in her ears. Nick was right. Reading lips was hard.

He gestured with his hands, a little shooing motion. Get out. He was fighting with his seat belt.

She nodded, stepped down through the open door on trembling legs, climbed onto the running board, then lowered herself to the road. She let go of the door and looked toward the gap in the overpass and felt all the wind go out of her.

The back half of the fire engine hung over the edge of the chasm. It was tipping. As Harper watched, it seesawed back, the front tires rising into the air.

Harper just had time to catch her breath. She was getting ready to scream John’s name when the fire truck tilted over the side, into the gap, and took the Fireman with it.