The Fireman: A Novel Part 28

"But, you know . . . by dinnertime, I had mostly quit thinking about it. It didn't take long to feel like just one more of this century's possible but unlikely apocalypses, like an epidemic of bird flu wiping out billions or an asteroid cracking the planet in half. You can't do anything about it, and it's happening to poor people on the other side of the world, and the kids need help with homework, so you just stop thinking about it.

"As much as I could stop. It was in the subject header of every e-mail and the top thirty threads on every message board in the mycology community. There were webinars and conferences and a presidential committee. There was a report to the Senate. For a while I followed along out of academic interest. Also, you know me, Nurse Willowes, how I do like to show off. What I learned about the spore gave me great cachet at backyard barbecues. I don't think it hit me, on a human level, that this thing was ever going to reach our backyard until Manitoba started burning and no one could put it out. That was about a month before the first Boston cases.

"But what good was it knowing? If it was a plague like other plagues, you'd hide. Head for the woods. Take the people you love, hole up somewhere, bolt the door, and wait for the infection to burn itself out. This, though. One person carrying the spore could start a fire that would wipe out half a state. Hiding in the woods would be like hiding in a match factory. At least cities have fire departments.

"I can tell you exactly when and how I caught it. I can tell you where we all were when we caught it, because of course we were together. We had a little party for Carol's thirtieth birthday at the very beginning of May. Sarah and I had just moved in together. We had a little pool, though it was so cold no one wanted to go in except Sarah. It wasn't much of a party, just Tom and the kids and Sarah and Carol and myself and a gluten-free cake for the birthday girl.

"Sarah and I often had late-night debates as to whether or not Carol had ever been laid. She had been engaged, as a younger woman, for five years, to a very devout young man who everyone knew was a h.o.m.os.e.xual except, apparently, Carol. He was, I think, one of these decent, haunted young queers who are drawn to religion because they're hoping to pray the gay away. Sarah told me she didn't believe they had ever slept together, although they exchanged some very pa.s.sionate e-mails. Carol dropped in on her fiance by surprise, while the boy was doing a residency at a theological inst.i.tute in New York, and discovered him in bed with a nineteen-year-old Cuban dance student.

"I asked Sarah once if she thought Carol herself might be gay, and she frowned about it for a long time and finally said she thought Carol mostly just hated the idea of s.e.x itself. She hated the idea of mess. Carol wanted love to be like a bar of soap: a purifying, hygienic scrub. She also said that Carol had full possession of their father and that was the only man who had ever really mattered to her.

"Carol and Sarah could be quite wary of each other. When Sarah was teenage and pregnant, Carol sent her a scolding letter about breaking their father's heart and promised never to speak to her again. And she did, in fact, stop talking to her until Nick was born. Sarah made a place for her little sister back in her life, but things were always uneasy between them. Carol could compete for attention in a way that was so childish it was sort of funny. If Sarah was winning at Scrabble, Carol would put on a coughing fit, say she had come in contact with an allergen, and make her father drive her to the hospital. If Sarah and Tom started talking about Victor Hugo, Carol would insist Sarah couldn't really appreciate his novels because she hadn't read them in the original French. Sarah just laughed that sort of thing off. I think she felt too sorry for Carol to compete with her and went out of her way to do nice things for her. Like the birthday party.

"I was just building up the energy to go inside and get another beer when there was a big thud-like something heavy falling off a truck a long way off, something so heavy it made the water shudder in the pool. Everyone glanced around-even Nick, who felt the vibration through his feet.

"Sarah stood in the shallow end, looking goose-b.u.mpy and blue in the lips and very pretty, listening to hear if there was going to be something more. Nick saw it first-a black, oily tower of smoke, coming from the end of the block. There was another thud and another and then several close together, loud enough to shake the windows and make the silverware jump.

"Sirens wailed. Sarah said she thought it was the CVS drugstore on the corner and asked if I would look down the street and see.

"A lot of the neighbors had come out onto the sidewalks and were standing under the trees. The breeze turned and blew the smoke down the street. Oh, it stank. Like roasting tires and foul eggs.

"I made my way down the block until I could see the CVS. One side was a roiling wall of red flame. A woman wept on the curb, using her T-s.h.i.+rt to mop up her tears. I had a hanky, so I handed it to her and asked if she was all right. She said she had never seen anyone die before. She told me a guy on a motorcycle had slid into the wire cabinet outside the drugstore, the one full of propane cans. They went off like a string of the world's largest firecrackers. Someone said it was a h.e.l.l of an accident, and she said it wasn't just an accident. She said the guy was on fire even before he hit the propane tanks. She said it was like Ghost Rider. She said his helmet visor was up and there was a burning skull in there-flame and grinning teeth.

"I went back home, meaning to tell them all to go inside. Not for any clear reason. Just some . . . vague apprehension. They were right where I left them, staring up at the smoke. They were standing there together in the snow. It had begun to snow, you see. Big goosefeather flakes of ash. Falling in everyone's hair. Falling in the birthday cake.

"A couple weeks later, Nick woke Sarah and me up to show us the stripe across his wrist. He didn't even ask what it was. He already knew. I found my first mark later that afternoon. Within four days we were all scrawled with Dragonscale . . . all of us except Sarah."

8.

"All except Sarah?" Harper asked.

"Story for another night, I think."

"You must miss her very much."

His voice had tailed off and he stared across the room, into the open furnace, with blank, tranced eyes. He roused himself slowly, looked around, and smiled. "She's still with me."

Harper's pulse whumped in her throat. "What?"

"I talk to her almost every day." He narrowed his eyes to slits, peering intently into the flickering gloom, as if picturing her somewhere over there on the other side of the shed. "I can always imagine just what she'd say to take the p.i.s.s out of me. When I ask myself a question, it's her voice that answers. We are taught to think of personality as a singular, private possession. All the ideas and beliefs and att.i.tudes that make you you-we are raised to believe them a set of files stored in the lockbox of the brain. Most people have no idea how much of themselves they store off-site. Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you-finish you-as much as you create you. When you're gone, the ones you've left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had."

She pursed her lips, exhaled a whistling breath. He was talking about memories, not ghosts.

His gaze drifted back to the open hatch in the side of the furnace, and she thought, Ask him about what you saw-ask him about the face. Some instinct for caution prevented her. She thought if she pressed him now, he would play dumb, pretend he didn't know what she was talking about. And there were, after all, other, more important matters to press him on.

"You hardly touched your coffee," she said. "It's gone cold."

"That is easily remedied," he said, and lifted his tin mug in his left hand.

The gold hieroglyphics marking his Dragonscale brightened and flashed. His hand became a chalice of flame. He rotated the mug slowly in his fingers and the brew within began to steam.

"I wish there was a way to treat you for being such a shameless attention hog," she said.

"What, you think I'm showing off? This is nothing. Yesterday, stuck in my bed, dying as much from boredom as from my staved-in chest, I taught myself to fart smoke rings in three different colors. Now that was impressive."

"I'm glad someone is having fun with the end of the world."

"What makes you think the world is ending?" He sounded genuinely surprised.

"Sure looks like the end of the world to me. Fifteen million people are infected. Maine is like Mordor now-a belt of ash and poison a hundred miles wide. Southern California is even worse. Last I heard, SoCal was on fire from Escondido to Santa Maria."

"s.h.i.+t. I knew I shouldn't have put off going to Universal Studios."

"What part of the end of the world is funny to you?"

"All of it. Especially the arrogant notion that the world will end just because humans might not make it through this century. We were never properly grateful for making it through the last century, as far as I'm concerned. Humanity is worse than flies. If even one dried nugget of offal survives the flames, we'll be swarming all over it. Fighting about who owns it and selling the most fragrant chunks to the wealthy and the gullible. You're afraid it's the End Times because we're surrounded by death and ruin. Nurse Willowes, don't you know? Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem. Did you ever read about the bacterium that thrives in volcanoes, right on the edge of boiling rock? That's us. Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe."

"Who do you make these speeches to when I'm not around?"

He barked with laughter, then hunched over and grimaced. "The idea of dying while laughing is more romantic in concept than reality."

She turned to face him, and crossed her legs like one preparing to meditate. "Teach me to do what you can do."

"What? No. I can't. It's no good asking me how I do it. I don't understand it myself. I can't teach you because there's nothing to teach."

"G.o.d, you're a terrible liar."

He put his bowl of oatmeal on the floor. "That was dreadful. Like eating paste. I would've been better sc.r.a.ping bugs off the bottom of rocks. What do you have in that bag of yours for painkillers? I need something powerful to knock me out. I haven't slept longer than ten minutes at a time in the last three days."

She rose and dug through the cloth shopping bag on the floor. She returned with two slippery plastic pouches of Advil. "All I can spare for you. Wait at least six hours before you take the second-"

"What in the name of the holy p.u.s.s.ydrill is this?" he cried. "Advil? Just Advil? You're not a nurse. You're a third-world torturer."

"I'm desperate is what I am, Mr. Rookwood. See that little grocery bag? There's a first aid kit in there. It contains over half of all the medical supplies I have to look after a hundred and fifty people, including an elderly coma patient with a quarter-inch hole in his skull."

He gave her a haggard, exhausted look. "You need provisions."

"You have no idea. Plaster. Morphine. Antibiotics. A s.h.i.+tload of second-skin burn pads. Antihistamines. Heart-start paddles. Norma Heald has rheumatoid arthritis and on a cold morning can hardly open her hands. She needs Plaquenil. Michael is diabetic and ten days from running out of insulin. Nelson Heinrich has high blood pressure and-"

"Yes, yes, all right. I get the idea. Someone needs to rob a drugstore."

"Someone needs to rob an ambulance."

"Yes, I suppose that would do, wouldn't it?" He gingerly touched his side. "I'll need four or five days before I'm ready. No, better make it a week. I'm too sore and tired to do what needs doing right now."

"You won't be ready to go anywhere for two to four weeks. I doubt you could walk as far as the chapel, in your current state."

"Oh, I'm not going. I'll send my Phoenix. Now listen. There's a house-"

"What does that mean, send a phoenix?" As she spoke, Harper remembered the Marlboro Man's pal Marty, half babbling: This giant f.u.c.kin' bird of flame, thirty feet from wing tip to wing tip, dive-bombed 'em. It dived so close the sandbags caught fire!

"Oh, another of my little goofs. A bit of fireworks to impress the natives and fortunately something I can manage from long range. You and a few reliable hands will want to find a side street well away from camp. Verdun Avenue would be fine, that's across from the graveyard, and I happen to know number ten is empty. Park in the driveway there and-"

"How do you know number ten is empty?"

"Sarah and I used to live there. One week from tonight, I want you to call 911. Use a cell phone, I think Ben held on to a collection of them. Tell emergency services your dear old dad is having a heart attack. When they ask, promise them you don't have Dragonscale. Tell them you need an ambulance and wait."

"They won't send an ambulance without a police escort."

"Yes, but don't worry about that. That's what the Phoenix is for-my little light show. When they pull up out front, I'll see that everyone is chased away and you can scarper with all the supplies you need. I wish you could simply drive off with the ambulance, but-"

"It'll have LoJack. Or some other way to trace it."

"That's right."

"I don't want anyone hurt. The people in the ambulance are risking their lives to take care of others."

"No one will be hurt. I'll scare the pants off them, but that's all."

"I hate asking you for help. You always do this. You make things mysterious that don't have to be mysterious, because you like to keep everyone wondering about you. It's a cheap high."

"Don't deny me my little pleasures. You're going to get everything you want. There's no reason I can't have a little of what I want, too."

"I'm not getting everything. If I could do what you can do, I wouldn't need to beg for your help. Please-John. Can't you at least try to teach me?"

His gaze s.h.i.+fted past her to the furnace and back. "Might as well ask a fish to teach you how to breathe underwater. Now go away. My sides hurt and I need to get some sleep. Don't come back without cigarettes."

"Did you try and teach her? Sarah?"

He seemed to shrink from her. For an instant, there was so much shock and hurt in his eyes it was as if she had slugged him in the ribs. "No. Not me." Which was, she thought later, an odd sort of denial. He stretched out, turning onto his good side, so she was looking at the bony curve of his back. "Don't you have other people to look after? Give someone else the soothing balm of your bedside manner, Nurse Willowes. I've had all I can take."

She rose and put her shoes on. Zipped herself into her parka. Collected her bag. She stopped with her hand on the latch.

"I spent three hours hiding in a cupboard today, with my ex not a dozen feet from me. I had three hours to listen to him talk about the things he's done to the sick. Him and his new friends. Three hours to listen to him talk about things he'd do to me if he had half a chance. From their point of view, we're the bad guys in this story. If he sees me again he'll kill me. If he had the opportunity, he'd kill everyone in camp. And after he did it, he'd feel he had done a good day's work. In his mind he's that guy in the cowboy hat from The Walking Dead, wiping out the zombies."

To this, the Fireman said nothing.

She continued, "You saved me once. I will owe you for that the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. But if I die in the next couple of months, and you could've taught me how to be like you-how to protect myself? It'll be just the same as if you hid in the woods that night and let Jakob kill me."

Bedsprings creaked uneasily.

"I'm going to live to have this baby. If G.o.d can help me make it through the next three months, I'll pray. If Carol Storey can keep me alive, I'll sing 'k.u.mbaya' with her till my throat is hoa.r.s.e. And if you can teach me something useful, Mr. Rookwood, I will even put up with your superior att.i.tude and lack of manners and half-baked philosophy lectures. But don't imagine for a minute I'm going to drop it. You've got some keep-alive medicine. I want it." She opened the door. The wind wailed in a tone that was at once both terrifying and melodic. "One other thing. I didn't say I don't have any cigarettes. I said I don't have any cigarettes for you. And I won't . . . until you put your teacher hat on and give me my first cla.s.s in surviving spontaneous combustion. Until that day, my Gauloises will stay in my shopping bag."

As she shut the door, he began to yell. Harper learned a few new obscenities on her way back to the boat. c.u.n.t-swill was a good one. She would have to save that one for a special occasion.

9.

Harper didn't know anyone was waiting for her on the dock until the boat b.u.mped up against it and someone reached down to take the bow.

"Help you out there, Nurse?" Jamie Close offered a hand.

It was as if the darkness itself were speaking. Harper could hardly make out Jamie's squat, chunky figure against the black swaying pines and the black turmoil of black clouds in a black sky. Someone else was with her, cleating the front of the boat. Allie. Harper knew her by her lithe, boyish frame and quick grace.

Harper took Jamie's hand, then hesitated. The cloth sack of supplies was pushed in under the bench on which she sat, a canvas shopping tote containing the rum, cigarettes, instant coffee, and tea, among other things. What was hers belonged to all, according to the old rules of camp-but she was writing her own rules now. If liquor and smokes could buy the Fireman's secrets, then camp would have to do without.

Harper reached under the seat and plucked the first aid kit from the top of the sack. She rose, leaving the rest behind.

She looked past Jamie, trying to catch Allie's eye, but the girl had already stood up from the cleat and turned her back. She was trembling-from rage, Harper thought, not the cold. She had her rifle over her shoulder. So did Jamie.

"I'm sorry I didn't get back sooner, Allie. I understand if you're mad at me. If you're in any kind of trouble at all, I'll talk to Ben or Carol or whoever, and make them understand you bear no responsibility. But I don't see why you should be in trouble. I said I was going to check on the Fireman and come back and that's what I did. More or less."

"You left out the part about goin' home first, though, din'cha, Nurse?" Jamie said.

So they knew she had taken a detour on her way to the Fireman's island. She had kept to the trees as she headed out of camp, but had looked back once and wondered if Michael, up in the church tower, was peering down at her. The eye in the steeple sees all the people.

"The infirmary was short on some critical supplies. Fortunately I knew I could get what I needed from my own bas.e.m.e.nt."

The two fell in on either side of her. Harper was reminded of a police escort walking a prisoner into court.

Jamie said, "That was all kinds of fortunate. You know what else was fortunate? You weren't clubbed to death with pool sticks. We was fortunate, too. We was fortunate they didn't follow your tracks, into the woods and all the way back to camp. Oh, yeah. We seen 'em. The Cremation Crew that turned up right after you went in. We both had our rifles but Allie told me I'd have to be the one to shoot you. She couldn't bear the thought of doing it herself. We hid in the woods watchin' till we lost the daylight. Then there wasn't no point."

Harper and her escorts came out of the firs and up alongside the soccer pitch, a snowy basket filled with moonglow. Harper couldn't tell if the thudding pain in her abdomen was a cramp of tension or the baby driving a heel into her.

"Allie," Harper said, "I'm sorry I scared you. I shouldn't have put you through any of that. But you have to understand, I can't bear the thought of sending a kid into danger when it's something I can do myself. And you're a kid. All of you Lookouts are kids."

"See, but you did put us in danger. You put the whole camp in danger," Jamie told her.

"I was careful. They wouldn't have found my tracks."

"They didn't need to find any tracks. They only needed to find you. Maybe you think you wouldn'ta said nothing, but it's funny how a pool cue up the s.n.a.t.c.h will loosen someone's lips. You shouldn'ta gone. You knew you shouldn'ta gone. And what tore Allie up the worst was knowing she shouldn'ta let you. We made promises to keep people safe. To keep well-meaning dips.h.i.+ts like yourself in camp, under watch. All the Lookouts promised Mother Carol-"

"Mother WHO? She's no one's mother, Jamie." Harper thought Mother Carol and the Lookouts sounded like a band that might've been playing Lilith Fair in 1996.