The Fireman: A Novel Part 2

The Fireman was staring at her. Al was staring, too, gaping at her over the Fireman's shoulder. By then Al had relaxed his arm, letting the other man breathe. The Fireman rubbed his throat with his left hand-he had quit trying to pull his glove off-and beamed at her with a mix of appreciation and relief.

Nurse Lean's face had darkened again, but she seemed fl.u.s.tered. "You can't make that diagnosis without a CAT scan."

"I can't make that diagnosis at all," Harper said. "But I'm just-I'm sure. I used to be a school nurse and I had a boy with this last year. Look, do you see the way he's covering up?" She glanced at the Fireman, frowned, locked into something else he had been trying to tell them. "Building collapse-you said he was 'right there.' Did you mean he was in the building, with his mother, when it fell?"

"Yes. That is exactly what I was trying to explain. She was killed. He was struck by some debris. We pulled him out and at the time he seemed physically, well, a little battered, but nothing serious. And when he stopped eating and responding to people, we put that down to the shock. Then, this morning, he came up with sweats and couldn't sit up without pain."

"If he took a blow to the abdomen it could've damaged his appendix. When was his last bowel movement?"

"I can't say I keep track of when the kids go poo. I reckon I can ask, though, if this gentleman wanted to let me go."

Harper shifted her gaze to Albert, who stood there baffled, mouth hanging slightly open.

"Well," she said, and for the first time her voice was cross. "Let him go. Spit spot." Spit spot was a favorite of Mary Poppins, and Harper had, since childhood, liked to subst.i.tute Julie Andrewsisms for profanity whenever possible. It gave her a steely feeling of control and reminded her of her best self at the same time.

"Sorry, ma'am," Al mumbled, and not only removed his arm from the area of the Fireman's throat but carefully helped to steady him before stepping back.

"Lucky for me you let go when you did," the Fireman said to him, no anger or dislike in his voice at all. "Another minute and instead of dropping off a patient, I would've been one myself." The Fireman crouched down next to the boy, but paused to offer Harper another smile. "You're good. I like you. Spit spot!" He said it as if the words really meant well done!

He turned to face Nick, who was brushing tears away with his thumb. The Fireman moved his hands in a series of brisk gestures: closed fists, a pointed finger, a hand squeezed shut and another hand flying open from it. Harper thought of a man playing with a b.u.t.terfly knife, or running through scales on some fantastic but invisible musical instrument.

Nick held out three fingers and pinched them together, as if he were grabbing for a fly in the air. Harper knew that one. Most people knew it. No. There was a little more after that she couldn't catch, his hands, arms, and face all in motion.

"He says he can't go to the bathroom. That he tried and it hurts. He hasn't gone to the bathroom since the accident."

Nurse Lean blew a hard puff of air, as if to remind everyone who was in charge. "Right. We'll have your son looked at . . . spit spot. Albert, will you radio for a gurney?"

"I told you already-he's not my son," the Fireman said. "I auditioned for the part, but the play was canceled."

"You aren't family, then," Nurse Lean said.

"No."

"That means I won't be able to let you go with him while he's examined. I'm-I'm very sorry," Nurse Lean said, sounding, for the first time all day, not just uncertain but also exhausted. "Family only."

"He'll be afraid. He can't understand you. He understands me. He can talk to me."

"We'll find someone who can communicate with him," Nurse Lean said. "Besides. Once he goes through these doors he's in quarantine. The only people who go in there have Dragonscale or work for me. I can't make any exceptions on that, sir. You told us about the mother. Does he have any other family?"

"He has-" the Fireman began, paused, frowned, and shook his head. "No. There isn't anyone left. No one who could come and be with him."

"All right. Thanks-thank you for bringing him to our attention. We'll take care of him from here. We'll get him all sorted out."

"Give me a moment?" he asked her, and looked back at Nick, who was blinking at fresh tears. The Fireman seemed to salute him, then to milk an imaginary cow, and finished by pointing at the boy's chest. Nick's response required no translation. He leaned into the Fireman and let himself be hugged: gently, gently.

"I wish you wouldn't do that, sir," Nurse Lean said. "You don't want to get what he has."

The Fireman didn't reply-and he didn't let go until the double doors batted open and a nurse pushed a gurney into the hall.

"I'll be back to check on him." The Fireman lifted the boy in both arms and set him on the rolling cot.

Nurse Lean said, "You won't be able to see him anymore. Not once he's in quarantine."

"Just to inquire about his welfare at the front desk," the Fireman said. He offered Albert and Nurse Lean a sardonic but not ill-humored nod of appreciation and turned back to Harper. "I am in your debt. I take that very seriously. The next time you need someone to put out a fire, I hope I'm lucky enough to get the call."

Forty minutes later, the kid was under the gas, and Dr. Knab, the pediatric surgeon, was cutting him open to remove an inflamed appendix the size of an apricot. The boy was in recovery for three days. On the fourth day he was gone.

The nurses in recovery were sure he had not walked out of his room. The window was wide open and a theory made the rounds that he had jumped. But that was crazy-the recovery room was on the third floor. He would've shattered both legs in the fall.

"Maybe someone brought a ladder," Albert Holmes said, when the subject was being batted around over bowls of American chop suey in the staff room.

"There's no ladder that can reach to the third floor," Nurse Lean said in a huffy, aggrieved voice.

"There is on a fire truck," Al said around a mouthful of French roll.

4.

In those stifling, overheated days of high summer, when a manageable crisis was teetering on the edge of an unmanageable disaster, the deaf child was not the only patient to vanish from Portsmouth Hospital. There was one other among the contaminated who escaped with her life, in the last days before everything went-not metaphorically, but literally-up in smoke.

All that month the wind blew from the north and a dismal brown fog settled over the coast of New Hampshire, swept down from the fires in Maine. Maine was burning from the Canadian border to Skowhegan, a hundred miles of blue spruce and fragrant pine. There was nowhere to go to escape the stink of it, a sweet-harsh odor of burnt evergreens.

The smell followed Harper into sleep, where every night she dreamt of campfires on the beach, roasting hot dogs with her brother, Connor. Sometimes it would turn out there were heads charring on the ends of their sticks instead of wieners. Occasionally, Harper woke shouting. Other times she woke to the sound of someone else crying out. The nurses slept in shifts, sharing a crash room in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and they were all having bad dreams.

In the hospital, the infected were divided into two groups: "symptomatic normals" and "smolderers." Smolderers smoked on and off, always ready to ignite. Smoke curled from their hair, from their nostrils, and their eyes streamed with water. The stripes on their bodies got so hot they could melt latex gloves. They left char marks on their hospital johnnies, on their beds. They were dangerous, too. Understandably, perhaps, the smolderers were always wavering on the edge of hysteria. Although there was a chicken-and-egg aspect to it: Did they panic because their bodies were constantly smoking, or did they smoke because their minds were constantly in a state of panic? Harper wasn't sure. She only knew you had to be careful around them. They bit and they screamed. They made ingenious plans to grab the sun out of the sky. They decided they were actual dragons and tried to jump out the windows to fly. They came to believe their doctors were holding back limited quant.i.ties of a cure, and attempted to take them hostage. They formed armies, congresses, religions; plotted rebellions, fomented treasons, practiced heresies.

The rest of the patients were marked with 'scale, but were otherwise physically and emotionally normal, right until the moment they incinerated themselves. They were frightened and had no place to go and wanted to believe someone might develop a cure before their time ran out. A lot of them came to Portsmouth because even then there were rumors that the other local hospitals were simply trucking cases to the camp in Concord, a place that had turned back a Red Cross inspection team a few weeks before, and that had a tank parked by the gate.

The hospital filled every ward and the infected kept coming. The first-floor cafeteria was converted to an immense dormitory for the healthiest of the sick. That was where Harper met Renee Gilmonton, who stood out among all the others by virtue of being the only black person in a room of two hundred other patients. Renee said it was easier to spot a moose in New Hampshire than a black person. She said she was used to being stared at as if her head were on fire, people had been staring that way for years.

The cots made a kind of labyrinth, spread out across the entirety of the cafeteria, with Renee Gilmonton at the exact center. She was there before Harper came to work at the hospital at the end of June, had been there longer than anyone else walking around with the 'scale. She was fortyish, pleasantly rounded and bespectacled, gray showing in her neat cornrows, and she had not come alone: she had brought a potted mint with her, named Daniel, and a photo of her cat, Mr. Truffaut. When she had no one to talk to, she talked to them.

But Renee didn't often lack for human company. In a former life, she had been a professional do-gooder: organized a weekly pancake breakfast for a local orphanage, taught English to felons in the state prison, and managed an independent bookstore that lost money by the bucketload while hosting poetry slams. Old habits died hard. Not long after she came to the hospital, she organized two daily reading sessions for the littlest kids and a book group for the older patients. She had a dozen lightly toasted copies of The Bridge of San Luis Rey that had been widely pa.s.sed around.

"Why The Bridge of San Luis Rey?" Harper asked.

"Partly because it's about why inexplicable tragedies occur," Renee said. "But also it's short. I feel like most folks want a book they feel like they have time to finish. You don't want to start A Game of Thrones when you might catch fire all of a sudden. There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies."

Around the cafeteria, Renee was known as Mrs. Asbestos, because she didn't have fevers, didn't smoke, and when someone went up in flames, Renee ran toward them to try and put them out, when most people ran away. Running toward the flames was, in fact, against doctors' advice, and she was often scolded for it. There was ample evidence that the simple stress of seeing one person ignite was enough to set off others. Chain reactions were a daily occurrence in Portsmouth Hospital.

Harper tried her best not to get attached. It was the only way to face the job at all, to keep working day after day. If she let herself care too much for any of them it would shatter her inside, the daily harvest of the dead. It would smash all the best parts of herself, her silliness and her sense of play and her belief that the kindnesses you showed others added up to something.

The full-body Tyvek protection suit wasn't the only armor she put on to do her job. She also dressed herself in an air of gla.s.sy, professional calm. Sometimes she pretended she was in an immersive simulation, the faceplate of her mask a virtual reality screen. It also helped not to learn anyone's name and to rotate from ward to ward, so she was always seeing different faces.

And even so, at the end of her shift she needed a half hour alone, in a stall in the women's room, to sob herself sick. She never lacked company. A lot of nurses had a post-shift cry penciled into their daily routine. The bas.e.m.e.nt ladies' room, at 9 P.M., was a concrete box filled with grief, a vault that echoed with sniffles and shuddering breath.

But Harper fell for Renee. She couldn't help herself. Maybe because Renee gave herself permission to do all the things Harper couldn't. Renee learned everyone's name and spent all day getting attached. She let kids crawling with contamination and dribbling smoke sit in her lap while she read to them. And Renee worried over the nurses at least as much as any of the nurses worried about her.

"You won't do anyone any good if you drop dead of exhaustion," she said to Harper once.

I won't do anyone any good if I don't, Harper imagined saying back. I'm not doing anyone any good, one way or another. But she didn't say it. It would've been grief talking, and it was unfair to unload her sadness on someone who might not live to see another day.

Except Renee did live to see another day. And another. And another.

Also, she didn't try to hide her Dragonscale with gloves or scarves or long-sleeved shirts. She had a necklace of 'scale inked right onto her throat, pretty loops dusted with gold; bracelets of it up to the elbows. She did her nails in black with gold glitter to match.

"It could be so much worse," Renee said. "It could be a disease that involves pus or leaky privates. It could've been one of these things where your parts rot and fall off. There's nothing s.e.xy about swine flu. I bet this is the most s.e.xy pathogen ever. I think it makes me look like a tigress! A fat, frumpy tigress. Like if Catwoman got really out of shape."

"I don't think Catwoman has stripes," Harper said. She was sitting with Renee at the time, on the edge of Renee's cot. She nodded at the photo of Renee's cat. "Who's looking after that handsome fella?"

"Street is," Renee said. "I let him scamper before I brought myself in."

"I'm sorry."

"All the fires have smoked the mice out into the streets. I'm sure Truffaut is living high on the furry fat of the land. Do you think they'll survive after we're gone? The cats? Or will we take them with us?"

"The cats are going to make it and so are we," Harper said, in her best chin-up voice. "We're smart. We're going to figure this thing out."

Renee smiled wistfully. Her eyes were amused and a little pitying. She had gold flecks in her coffee-bean-colored irises. That might've been Dragonscale or it might've just been her eyes.

"Who says we're smart?" she asked, in a tone of playful contempt. "We never even mastered fire. We thought we did, but you see now, it has mastered us."

As if to punctuate this point, across the room, a teenage girl began to shriek. Harper turned her head and saw orderlies running to throw fireproof blankets on a girl struggling up out of her cot. She was shoved down and smothered. Flames belched from beneath the blankets.

Renee gazed sadly across the room at her and said, "And she just started Clan of the Cave Bear."

Harper began to look for Renee whenever her duties brought her to the cafeteria. She sought her out to talk about books. It felt good to have that: some normal, pointless conversation in the morning, some talk that had nothing to do with the world catching fire. Harper made Renee a part of her day, knowing all the time it was a mistake, that when the older woman died, it would spoil something inside of her. After she recovered from the initial loss, Harper would be a harder person. And she didn't want to become a harder person. She wanted to stay the same Harper Grayson who could get wet-eyed at the sight of old people holding hands.

She knew Renee would be gone one day, and one day she was. Harper wheeled a trolley full of fresh sheets into the cafeteria and saw in a glance that Renee's mattress had been stripped bare and her personal items taken away. The sight of that empty bed was a wallop to the stomach, and Harper let go of the trolley and turned around, banging through the double doors, past the guards, and down the hall. She couldn't make it to the ladies' room in the bas.e.m.e.nt for a cry, it was too far. She turned to face the wall, put a hand against it, and let go inside. Her shoulders shook and she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

One of the guards-Albert Holmes, as it happened-touched her shoulder.

"Ma'am?" he asked. "Oh my goodness. Ma'am? What's wrong?"

At first, Harper couldn't get a single word out. She was struggling for air, her whole body convulsively hitching. She fought it down. She was scaring him. He was a broad-shouldered and freckly kid who had been playing high school football not two years before, and the sight of a woman in tears was almost too much for him.

"Gilmonton," she said at last, half coughing it out.

"You didn't know?" Albert asked, his voice wondering and faint.

Harper shook her head.

"She left," Al said. "Walked right out past the morning boys."

Harper panted, her lungs aching, her throat full of tears. She thought maybe she was strong enough to get away now, get down to the bathroom, where she could find a stall and really let herself- "What?" Harper said. "What did you say?"

"She took off!" Al told her. "Slipped right out of the hospital! With her little plant under one arm."

"Renee Gilmonton walked out?" Harper asked. "With her mint? And someone let her?"

Al stared at her with those wide, wondering eyes. "You should see the security footage. She was glowing! Like a lighthouse! You look at the tape. It's awesome. I mean 'awesome' the way they use that word in the Bible. The guys on duty ran for it. They thought she was going to explode. Like a human nuke. She was scared she was going to explode, too, which is why she ran outside. She ran outside and never came back. They don't know what happened to her. She wasn't even wearing shoes!"

Harper wanted to reach under her mask and wipe the tears off her face, but she couldn't. Wiping anything off her face was a nearly half-hour process. She couldn't remove her Tyvek until she had stood in a shower of bleach for five minutes. She blinked rapidly to clear her vision.

"That doesn't make sense. People with Dragonscale don't glow."

"She did," Al said. "She was reading to some little kids, right before breakfast, and the girl sitting in her lap jumped up because Mrs. Gilmonton was getting warm. Then people started to scream and scatter. She was lit up like a f.u.c.kin' Christmas tree. 'Scuse my French, ma'am. On the video her eyes look like death rays! She ran past two sets of guards, right out of the quarantine. The way she looked-h.e.l.l, anyone would've ducked for cover."

Five minutes later, Harper watched the video herself, with four other nurses, at the reception desk down the hall. Everyone in the hospital was watching it. Harper saw it at least ten times before the day was done.

A fixed camera showed the wide corridor outside the entrance to the cafeteria, an expanse of antiseptic white tile. The door was flanked by security in their own combination of Tyvek suits and riot helmets. One of them leaned against the wall, leafing slowly through the pages of a clipboard. The other sat in a molded plastic chair, tossing his baton in the air and catching it.

The doors banged open and the hall flooded with brilliance, as if someone were pointing a spotlight into it. In the first moment, the glow was so intense it blew out the black-and-white image, filling the screen with a bluish glare. Then the light sensors in the security camera adjusted-a little. Renee remained a bright ghost, a wavering brilliance in the hourgla.s.s shape of a woman. The lit scrollwork of her Dragonscale obscured her features. Her eyes were blue-white rays of light and did, indeed, look a bit like death rays from a mid-fifties science-fiction film. She clutched her potted mint under her left arm.

The guard who had been tossing his baton twitched away from her. His nightstick dropped and clouted him on the shoulder and he fell out of his chair. The other guard tossed his clipboard in the air as if it had turned into a cobra. His heels shot out from under him and he sat down hard on the floor.

Renee looked from one to the other, seemed to lift a placating hand, and then hurried away.

Albert Holmes told Harper: "She said, 'Don't mind me, boys, I'm just going to go explode outside where no one will get hurt.'"

Dr. Ryall, the resident pathologist, was unimpressed. He had read about outlier cases, where the Dragonscale reached critical ma.s.s and then, for whatever reason, stalled without immediately causing a person to ignite. He a.s.sured anyone who would listen that Renee Gilmonton's remains would be found within a hundred paces of the hospital. But some orderlies swept the high gra.s.s in the field beyond the parking lot, looking for cooked bones, and didn't find any. Nor could they find any trace of which way she had gone: no singed brush or weeds. She seemed not to have exploded but evaporated, taking her potted mint with her.

The CDC had a team scheduled to visit Portsmouth Hospital in August, to review their quarantine procedures, and Dr. Ryall said he'd be sure to show them the video of the Gilmonton incident. He was confident they'd share his interpretation.

But the CDC team never got to look at it, because by the time August rolled around, Portsmouth Hospital was a hollowed-out chimney, gutted by fire, and Dr. Ryall was dead, along with Albert Holmes, Nurse Lean, and over five hundred patients.

5.

She didn't know how long she stood there, watching Portsmouth Hospital burn. Thick black smoke, piled a thousand feet high, curdled above her, above all of them, a thunderhead that smothered the sky. The sun was a small red coin, glowing through that ma.s.s of smoke. One of the doctors said, "Anyone got marshmallows?" and laughed, but no one laughed with him.

They had lost the power, not five minutes after the fire alarm began its nerve-shredding whoop. Strobe lights throbbed in the darkness, smashing time into bright frozen slivers. Harper made her way out through those stammering shadows with her hands on the shoulders of the nurse in front of her, in a line of shuffling evacuees. The air on the first floor was smoky, grained with fine particulate matter, but the fire was somewhere above them. At first the shriek of the alarm was terrifying, but by the time Harper emerged into the day, she was almost bored, had been creeping along in the crowd for forty-five minutes. She didn't have any idea how bad it was until she cleared the building and could turn around.

Someone told her no one above the second floor had gotten out. Someone else said it started in the cafeteria; one person lit up, then another, then a third, like a string of firecrackers, and a guard panicked and bolted the door to keep anyone from getting out. Harper never found out if that was true.