The Fireman (62 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

17

Harper ran to the edge of the missing overpass and stared down past twisted rebar and crumbled concrete. The fire engine had dropped straight back and turned onto its passenger side. She had the wrong angle, couldn’t see into the cab, couldn’t see John. The Freightliner was upside down. Something was burning down there; Harper could smell the stink of scorched rubber.

It was only shock that held her where she was, a great tingling throb of emotion that she could feel in her nerve endings, in her fingertips.
All dead,
she thought.
All dead, all dead, John and Nick and Allie and Renée and John and Nick and Allie and Renée and John and Nick and Allie and Renée
.

Her throat hurt and she realized she was screaming, had been screaming for almost a full minute, and she made herself be quiet. The thing to do was to get down there. Get down there and see what she could do.

She turned—and almost ran right into Allie. Her face was aglow with sweat and she was gasping from her run.

“Where did you come from?” Harper asked. “How did you get out?”

Harper gazed blankly past her. Half a mile away she saw Nick trotting along the margin of the road, leading Renée by the hand.

“Never got in,” Allie said. “Never had a chance. Renée shoved us into a ditch as soon as I reached the back end of the truck with Nick. The next thing I knew you and John were driving off without us. Where’s John? Where—”

As Allie spoke, she was creeping past Harper to look over the drop. Harper grabbed her arm and drew her away before she could reach the edge.

“Don’t look. I don’t want Nick to see and I don’t want you to see, either. You stay here and don’t come unless I call for you.”

Harper wanted to run, but her days of running had ended several weeks before. She did a funny sort of pregnant lady trot, holding her stomach. She climbed over a guardrail, and slid down the bank on her big pregnant rump, grabbing fistfuls of brush to slow her descent.

The road below was a divided highway, running east and west. The fire truck lay across the eastbound lanes. A lake of fire sputtered and gushed across the blacktop and Harper thought, wildly,
Gasoline, it’s spilling burning gasoline, it’s going to explode.
She skipped over the flames and reached the front of the engine.

She could see in through the windshield. It was smashed and sagging inward from the frame. John hung sideways, still buckled in his seat, his head on his right shoulder, and blood dripping from under his hairline and nose. But: not dead. Harper could see the rise and fall of his chest.

What she couldn’t see was how to get him out. She was too pregnant to climb up to the driver’s-side door, which currently faced the sky. She couldn’t smash in what was left of the windshield without a tool, and was afraid to spray him with broken glass.

A ladder,
Harper thought. Not the big ladder mounted to the roof, but one of the smaller ones packed into the rear cabinets.

She hopped back over that long ribbon of fire (what exactly was burning? It didn’t smell like gasoline) and made her way to the rear of the truck. Compartments all along the fire engine had been torn open and she stepped carefully through a Lincoln Log tangle of ax handles and crowbars. She was in a hurry and almost stepped on the cat, recoiled when it yowled at her in alarm.

Harper caught herself, took a step back. Mr. Truffles gazed up at her, his jade-colored eyes glazed with shock, his fur ruffled up. Renée had got all of them away from the truck except for him, it seemed.

“Oh, you,” Harper said, crouching down and reaching toward him. “My God, how did
you
survive? I wonder how many of your nine lives you just used up.”

“All of ’em,” Jakob said and a shovel swiped down through the smoke and struck the cat like a croquet mallet impacting the ball.

Mr. Truffaut flew, broken-necked and dead, through the air and into the brush. Harper screamed and went straight back, falling on her rump. Jakob lifted the shovel over his head in both hands. She pushed herself back with her heels and the blade of the shovel came down in the soft blacktop between her feet.

She dragged herself away from him, pulling herself along on her bottom, through broken glass and loose rock. He had to wiggle the handle of the shovel back and forth to loosen the blade before he could step forward and she had time to get a good look at him. His right hand was blackened and burned to the texture of fried chicken skin. The flesh had fissured to show ripe, pink meat beneath, glistening with pus. The right side of his face was charred too, and the hair on that side of his head was still smoking. An old black burn in the shape of a man’s hand mottled the loose flesh of his throat.

He came forward, flat-footed and slow, with nothing of his former dancing grace. When he spoke, his voice was thick and slurred. His lips had fused together at the right corner of his mouth.

“I was right when I said you made me sick, babygirl,” he said. “It’s true you didn’t contaminate me with Dragonscale, but you made me sick in a different way. A worse way. Being around you was like having a low-grade fever. A woman like you is a kind of infection. You were living off me like a bacteria. You don’t know how badly I want to be well. To be cured of you.”

He took another swipe, but she pushed back on her heels. The shovel blade sliced through the haze, dragging silky shreds of smoke behind it.

“I thought you would be my muse, once,” he said, and laughed, a strange, discordant sound. “I thought you’d inspire me! Well. In the end, you sure did. In the end, you led me to my real calling: putting out fires. I’m such a good little fireman, I put them out before they even start. You see? In a way, you
were
my muse!”

She was no more a muse than he had ever been a writer, Harper thought, and she wasn’t sorry, not for that. Jakob could only see her in terms of blame or inspiration, but either way it reduced her to a kind of fuel. Either way, she had always just been something for him to burn up.

“Is your boyfriend still alive?” Jakob asked, nodding back toward the truck. “I want him to be alive. I want to slice off your head and put it in his lap before I kill him. I want him to look into your face one last time and say your name. I want him to know that he couldn’t keep what he took away from me.”

In her mind, Harper began to sing without words. Her left hand sputtered, smoked, glowed, and began to flicker with firelight. She lifted it and Jakob smashed it with the shovel and the flame went out. Harper shouted at the pain of it.

“Did he teach you a little trick?” Jakob asked. “Besides how to suck his cock? Too bad he didn’t teach you not to play with fire. A woman your age ought to know how that ends, babygirl. Little girls who play with fire get burnt in the end. They get burnt all up gone.”

But Harper wasn’t listening. Harper was looking past him. She felt a sick rush of blood to her heart and was having trouble finding her breath.

“Pay attention to me,”
Jakob said. He put the point of the shovel under her chin and used it to lift her head, forcing her to look up into his eyes. “I’m
talking
to you, babygirl. Did you even hear what I just said? Did you listen to me at all? Little girls shouldn’t play with fire. That’s how people get hurt.”

“Yes,” Harper whispered. “You’re right. I’m so sorry, Jakob.”

He narrowed his eyes in a question, then started to turn his head.

By then, the woman of flame had crossed half the distance between him and the truck. She was Jakob’s very height, and her hair flowed for yards behind her, yellow and red. She was nude, in a sense, although her shifting, wavering shape seemed more like a form made out of crimson silks. Her eyes alone burned hot blue, like the flame of a blowtorch. She left footprints behind her—footprints of red flame.

“Mom?” Allie said, from thirty feet away. She had made her way down the incline after all, and stood there holding Nick’s hand. Her voice was small and bewildered.

The woman of fire threw a hatchet of flame. It wasn’t there until the instant she drew back her hand. It struck Jakob in the face and he screamed, flame splattering across his features, up into his hair. She cocked back her hand and a new hatchet of fire appeared in it, leaping into her fist out of nowhere. She threw again, coming toward him. The second hatchet struck him in the chest and the filthy, oil-stained ruin of his white T-shirt ignited. He took a staggering step toward her, but he couldn’t see through the black smoke engulfing his head. She stepped aside like a bullfighter. He stumbled and fell to one knee.

She sank down beside him and took him gently into her blazing arms.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

18

Allie crouched at the bottom of the embankment with Nick in her arms. She clutched her brother’s face to her chest and buried her own head in his shoulder, the pair of them squeezed together like the two halves of a walnut.

The flame that had once been a woman rose from the black and smoking corpse of Jakob Grayson. She left her kill and walked toward the children. Her heels left bubbling footprints. liquefying the asphalt beneath them.

When she was ten feet from Nick and Allie, she lowered herself with an exquisite grace, crossing her ankles and sinking down to sit cross-legged. Allie lifted her head and peered at her, then squeezed Nick’s shoulder to let him know it was okay to look.

Her golden hair flowed and crackled. The road beneath her was melting, turning to a puddle of tar.

Nick spoke with his hands. He said, “Mom?”

She nodded and said, “I was once,” moving her hands in swirls of fire. “Most of who I was has burned away.”

“I’ve missed you,” he said, and Allie finger-spelled, “Me, too. So much.”

Sarah nodded again. The top of her head was an open chalice of flame. Whatever she was burning to stay with them—the air and a million whirling grains of spore—she was using it up fast now, cooling out, cooling off. When the breeze gusted, she rippled like a reflection in unsettled waters.

“It was all my fault,” Nick told her with his hands.

“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 away from her face. It smelled like a trash fire.

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

“Have you seen the cat?” Renée asked, her voice strained and stunned.

“He—he didn’t make it, Renée,” Harper said. “He was—thrown clear in the accident. I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” Renée said and blinked. “What about—”

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

“Yes. Of course.” Renée looked back at Allie and Nick and the burning woman. “That—what is that?”

“She came with John,” Harper explained.

“She’s—” Renée began, then swallowed, licked her lips, tried again. “She’s—” Her voice caught in her throat again.

“An old flame,” Harper said.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

19

Renée wedged a crowbar under one corner of the windshield and pried it free. It flopped into the road all in one piece, a jingling blanket of blue safety glass with a thousand fissures in it, impossibly holding together. Harper and Renée 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 glass.

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. Renée 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 prickling 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 away 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.