The Fireman: A Novel Part 30

Like what?

Like there's still something rong inside Father Storey. Now his gaze was solemn and unblinking. He smells sick. He smells . . . too sweet. Like flowers when they rot.

Harper didn't like that. She had known a doctor in nursing school who claimed he could smell death, that the ruination of the body had a particular fragrance. He insisted you could smell it in someone's blood: a whiff of things spoiling.

The moss-colored sheet between the ward and the waiting room twitched, and Renee Gilmonton ducked through, holding a bowl covered in tinfoil.

"Norma sent me over with a glop of oatmeal for the sick ol' kid," Renee said, crossing to Nick's bed and sinking down on the mattress, directly across from Harper. Renee mined one pocket of her parka and came up with something else wrapped in tinfoil. "I figured he wasn't the only little guy who might be in the mood for a snack." Nodding at Harper's distended belly.

Harper half expected to peel back the foil and find a rock inside. Eat that, b.i.t.c.h, Renee would tell her, and then get on your knees and repent for Mother Carol. But of course it wasn't a rock, she could tell even before she unwrapped it, just from the weight. Renee had brought her a biscuit with an improbable smear of honey in the middle.

"Allie ought to be ashamed," Renee went on. "Giving you a rock instead of breakfast. You're well into your second trimester. You can't be skipping meals. I don't care what she thinks you did."

"I let her down. She trusted me not to do something stupid and I screwed her."

"You were trying to get medical supplies to care for your patients. You were trying to collect them from your home. No one can forbid you to go home. No one can take your rights away from you."

"I don't know about that. The camp voted to put Ben and Carol in charge of things. That's democracy, not tyranny."

"My. Black. a.s.s. That wasn't any real election. They took a vote after an hour of singing and everyone was s.p.a.ced out in the Bright. Most of the camp were so blitzed they would've voted for a top hat and believed they were electing Abraham Lincoln."

"The rules-"

Renee shook her head. "This isn't about rules. Don't you know that? This is about control. You went home to get medical supplies-to help people. To help Carol's own father! Your real crime wasn't breaking a rule about leaving camp. Your real crime was deciding for yourself what would be best for the people in your care. Only Carol and Ben get to decide what's best for the people in Camp Wyndham now. Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn't say is that voice belongs to her. There's only one song to sing these days-Carol's song-and if you aren't in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the h.e.l.l up."

Harper looked sidelong at Nick, who was bent to his bowl of oatmeal, paying them no mind, and for the moment showing no sign at all of the tummyache that had brought him to the infirmary.

"That would sound better if a Cremation Crew didn't turn up while I was home," Harper said. "If they had found me, they would've made me talk before they killed me. My husband was with them. My ex. He would've made me talk. I can see it in my head. I can picture him asking me questions in a very calm, reasonable voice, while he uses a pair of garden shears to take off my fingers."

"Yeah. Well. That part is-I don't know what to make of that part. I mean, what are the odds they'd show up at your house when you were there? That's like being struck by lightning."

Harper considered telling Renee about the Marlboro Man and his secret broadcast-the radio station he claimed to hear in his thoughts, his psychic transmission from the future-then decided she didn't want to think about it. She ate her biscuit instead. In the honey, she tasted jasmine, mola.s.ses, and summer. Her stomach rumbled, a sound as loud as someone sliding furniture across the floor, and the two women traded looks of comic surprise.

"I wish I could do something to tell Allie I'm sorry," Harper said.

"Did you try telling her you're sorry?"

"Yes."

"Then that's over and done. That should be enough. She's-she's not herself, Harp. Allie and I never got along all that well, but now she's like someone I don't even know."

Harper would've replied but for the moment was swiftly tucking away the last of the biscuit. It had looked big in her palm but had vanished with disappointing haste.

"Things are going bad here," Renee said. Harper half thought she was kidding and was caught off guard by the unease she saw in the other woman's eyes. Renee offered her a tired, crooked smile and went on: "You missed a good scene in the school this morning. I give the kids a twenty-minute recess after our little history cla.s.s. They can't go outside, but we block off half the chapel with pews to give them some s.p.a.ce to run wild. I noticed Emily Waterman and Janet Cursory whispering together in one corner. Once or twice Ogden Leavitt wandered toward them and the two girls shooed him away. Well, I brought everyone together after recess for storytime, but I could tell Ogden was feeling blue, trying not to cry. He's only seven and he saw his parents die-killed trying to run from a Quarantine Patrol. He only recently started talking again. I had him in my lap and I asked him what was wrong, and he said Emily and Janet were superheroes and he wanted to be a superhero, too, but they wouldn't tell him the magic rhyme and he thought secrets were against the rules. Janet was angry and called him a tattletale, but Emily went pale. I told Ogden I knew a rhyme for superpowers: Be-bop-a-loo-loo, You have superpowers, too! He cheered right up and said now he could fly and I thought, Good job, Renee Gilmonton, you've saved the day again! I tried to steer things back to story time, but then Emily stood up and asked if she could carry a stone in her mouth to make up for keeping secrets. I said that rule was only for serious secrets, grown-up secrets, but Emily looked ill and said if she didn't atone, she wouldn't be able to sing along in chapel, and if you didn't sing and join the Bright you could catch fire. That scared Janet, who started begging for a stone, too.

"I tried to rea.s.sure them. I told them they hadn't done anything they needed to atone for. Harper-they were just being kids. But then Chuck Cargill heard the commotion and wandered over. He's one of Allie's friends, about Allie's age. In the Lookouts, of course. And he said it was really cool they wanted to do penance like big kids and if they each had a stone in their mouths for ten minutes, it would clean the slate. He got them both stones and they sucked on them all through storytime, looking like Cargill gave each of them a lollipop.

"You want to know the worst part, Harp? As soon as story time was over, Ogden ran over to Chuck Cargill and announced he had been hiding comic books under his bed and asked if he could do penance, too. By the end of school half the kids had stones in their mouths . . . and Harp. They were shining. Their eyes were shining. Just like they were all singing together."

"Oxytocin," Harper muttered.

"OxyContin? Isn't that a pain medicine?"

"What? No. Nothing. Forget it."

"You missed morning chapel today," Renee said.

"I was rigging up a feeding line for Father Storey." She nodded back at the old man. A plastic pouch of apple juice hung from the armature of a floor lamp next to the cot. The tubing did two loop-de-loops before disappearing up his nostril.

Renee said, "It's different now, without Father Storey."

"Different how?"

"Before, when everyone joined the Bright, it was like-well, everyone compares it to being a little drunk, right? Like having a few swallows of a really good red wine. Now it's like the congregation is throwing down jars of cheap, filthy moonshine. They sing themselves hoa.r.s.e and then after they just . . . hum for a while. Stand there swaying and humming, with their eyes burning."

"Humming?" Harper asked.

"Like bees in a hive. Or-or like flies around roadkill." Renee shuddered.

"This happens to you, too?"

"No," Renee said. "I've had trouble joining in. Don Lewiston, too. And a few others. I don't know why."

But Harper thought she did. When she had first read Harold Cross's notes about oxytocin she had thought, randomly, of soldiers in the desert and burning crosses in the night. She hadn't seen the connection then, but she did now. Oxytocin was the drug the body used to reward people for winning the approval of their tribe . . . even if their tribe was the KKK, or a squad of marines humiliating prisoners in Abu Ghraib. If you weren't part of the tribe, you didn't get the payoff. Camp was dividing itself, organically, naturally, into those who were in-and those who were threats.

Renee gazed disconsolately across the room, and in a drifting, absentminded voice, said, "Sometimes I think it would be better if one of these days we just . . ."

Her voice trailed off.

"We just-what?" Harper asked.

"Just helped ourselves to one of the cars and some supplies and took off. Gather up the last few sensible people in camp and run. Ben Patchett has all the car keys hidden somewhere, but we wouldn't have to worry about that. We'd have Gil, and he can-" She caught herself, went silent.

"Gil?"

"Gilbert. Mr. Cline."

Her face was a studied, falsely innocent blank. Harper wasn't fooled for a moment. Something teased her memory, a terrible tickling in the mind, and then it came back to her. In the summer, when Renee Gilmonton was a patient at Portsmouth Hospital, she had told Harper about volunteering at the state prison, where she had organized and led a reading group.

"Do you two know each other?" Harper asked, but the answer was in Renee's bright, startled eyes.

Renee glanced at Nick, who sat now with the empty bowl in his lap, watching them both attentively.

"He doesn't read lips," Harper said. "Not really."

Renee smiled at Nick and mussed his hair and said, "Glad to see he's recovering from that stomachache." She lifted her chin, met Harper's stare, and said, "Yes, I knew him straightaway, the moment I saw him. Well, New Hampshire is a small state. It would be a shock if some of us didn't know each other from our former lives. He was part of the book club I led, up in Concord. I'm sure most of the men there joined the reading group just for a chance to talk to a woman. Standards drop after you've been locked up awhile, and even someone almost fifty and built like Mr. Potato Head starts to look good."

"Oh, Renee!"

Renee laughed and added, "But Gil cared about the stories. I know he did. He made me nervous at first, because he kept a notebook and wrote down everything I said. But eventually we got comfortable with each other."

"What do you mean comfortable? Did you have him sitting in your lap for story time?"

"Don't be awful!" Renee cried, with a look on her face that suggested such awfulness was, in fact, delightful. "It was literary talk, not pillow talk. He was hard to draw out-shy, you know-but I thought he had fine insights and told him so. I had encouraged him to seek a degree in English from UNH. I believe he had just enrolled in an online course when the first cases of Dragonscale began to appear in New England." Renee looked down at her boots and said, in an offhand tone: "We appear to be reconvening the book club, as a matter of fact. I have Ben's permission to visit the prisoners. He even let me set up a corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt with some ratty chairs and a sc.r.a.p of carpet. Once a night, the prisoners are allowed out of that awful meat locker, to have a cup of tea and sit down with me. Under guard, of course, although whoever is watching us usually sits on the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs to give us some privacy. We're reading Watership Down together. Initially Mr. Mazzucch.e.l.li was opposed to reading a story about rabbits, but I think I've brought him around. And Gil-Mr. Cline-well, I think he's just glad to have someone to talk to." Renee hesitated, then added, "I'm glad to have someone to talk to, too."

"Good," Harper said.

"I understand Gil has a quote by Graham Greene on his chest," Renee said. She was studying a bit of wet snow as it slid off the tip of one boot. Her voice was calculatedly indifferent. "Something about the nature of imprisonment. But of course I've never seen it."

"Ah!" Harper said. "Nice. If Ben comes in on the two of you and you've got Gil half out of his clothes, tell him it's a matter of urgent literary research, and ask him to come back later . . . after you're done consulting Gil's Longfellow."

Renee quaked with barely contained mirth. Harper half expected smoke to begin coming out of her ears, and in those days of burning and plague, this was not an entirely unrealistic possibility. It felt good to see Renee laughing over a little innocent filth. It felt like normal life again.

"Uh-oh. The hens are clucking over something." Ben Patchett brushed through the curtain into the ward and offered them an uncertain smile. "Should I be worried?"

5.

"Speak of the devil," Renee said, wiping at her eyes with one thumb.

The hens are clucking. Harper thought it would be a toss-up, which term for women she hated more: b.i.t.c.h or hen. A hen was something you kept in a cage, and her sole worth was in her eggs. A b.i.t.c.h, at least, had teeth.

If there was irritation on her face, Ben didn't see it or didn't want to. He paced halfway to Father Storey's cot, considering the tube filled with amber-colored juice, the mostly empty plastic bag hanging from the lamp by the bed.

"Is that ideal?" Ben asked.

"Feeding him out of a Ziploc bag? Or the hole in his skull that I sealed with a cork and candle wax? Totally ideal. Just like they'd do it at the Mayo Clinic."

"Okay, okay. You don't need to snip at me. I'm not snipping at you. I'm a fan, Harper! You've done amazing things here." He sat on the edge of Father Storey's bed, across from her. Springs creaked. He looked at the old man's grave, resting face. "I wish he had told you more about this woman he planned to send into exile. He didn't say anything except he thought he was going to have to send her away and maybe he'd go with her?"

"No. He did say one other thing."

"What?"

"He said if he left he wanted John to be in charge of the camp."

"John. The Fireman." His voice flat.

"Yes."

"That's a fascinating piece of information to be hearing at this late date. Why would-the Fireman's not even part of the camp. That's ridiculous. Why not Carol? Why wouldn't he want his own daughter for the job?"

"Maybe because he knew she was the type of nervous paranoid who would think it's a good idea to hand out rifles to children," Harper said.

Ben glanced quickly at the curtain into the waiting room, as if worried someone might be standing just on the other side, eavesdropping on them.

"I'm the one who decided to distribute the firearms, and no one under the age of sixteen got one. And I'll tell you something else. I require the Lookouts to walk around with the bolt open at all times, to prove their rifle is unloaded. I ever see the bolt closed on any of those guns, they'll be sucking on a rock until . . ." His voice trailed off and he left the sentence unfinished. A rose hue suffused his cheeks. "And you might not want to run around camp calling Carol 'paranoid.' You're in enough trouble as it is. In fact, that's why I'm here. You strayed from camp two days ago, went home, and nearly walked right into a Cremation Crew. Then, after slipping away-thank G.o.d-instead of returning to your post you went across to see the Fireman and stayed there most of the night."

"My post?"

"Mother Carol made it clear she expects you to remain by her father's side, night and day, until the crisis pa.s.ses. One way or another."

"The immediate crisis did pa.s.s, and I have other patients."

"Not as far as Mother Carol is concerned." Ben lowered his head, thought a moment, then looked up. "Is that when the Fireman plans to make his move? When his busted ribs are healed up?"

"Make what move? Move where?"

"Here. To take over."

"He doesn't want to take anything over." It crossed Harper's mind that she might've made a tactical mistake, telling Carol's first lieutenant that Father Storey had wanted someone else for Carol's job. Then she thought, f.u.c.k it. If the notion of a power struggle with the Fireman made Ben squirm, all to the good. Let him feel hara.s.sed and threatened for once. "But I suppose he'll do whatever is best for the camp in the end. John always has."

Renee coughed in a way that seemed to mean Shut up.

Ben took a moment to compose himself. He laced his fingers together in his lap and looked down into the bowl made of his palms. "Let's go back to when you wandered out of camp. I've been trying to figure out what to do about that. I think I know how to fix it."

"What do you mean-fix it? There's nothing to fix. I went, I came back, everything is fine, and it's over."

"It's not that simple, Harper. We're trying to protect a hundred and sixty-three people here. A hundred and sixty-four if we count that baby you've got on the way. We have to take steps to keep people safe. If people do things that aren't safe, well, there have to be consequences. If people steal. If they h.o.a.rd. If they go wandering and potentially get themselves captured by the people who want to kill us. Harp, I know why you went back. I know you had the best intentions. But every kid who ever went to Sunday school knows where good intentions get you. You weren't just risking your life and the life of that precious cargo you're carrying-"

Harper could not say why the phrase precious cargo made her feel ill. It wasn't the precious part, it was the cargo bit. Possibly it was also an aversion to cliche. When it came to speaking in cliches, Ben Patchett left no stone unturned.

"-but you were also risking Father Storey's life and the life of everyone in camp. It was dangerous and thoughtless and violated rules that exist for good reason and it can't go without consequences. Not even for you. And believe me: there do have to be consequences for unsafe behavior. There has to be a way to keep order. Everyone wants that. They won't stay without it. They want to know we're taking steps to keep this shelter safe. People need law. They need to know someone is looking out for them. They may even feel better if they know a few hard-a.s.ses are in charge. Strength breeds confidence. Father Storey, G.o.d bless him"-casting a halfhearted look over his shoulder at the sleepless sleeper behind him-"never seemed to understand that. His answer to everything was to hug it out. His reaction to someone stealing was to say possessions are overrated. Things were going to h.e.l.l even before we brought the convicts back to camp. So."

"So," Harper said.

He lifted his shoulders and then dropped them in a great sigh. "So we at least have to make a show of punishing you. And that's what we're going to do. Carol wants to see you tomorrow, to get an update on her father. I'll take you over and we'll stick around, have tea with her. When we come back, I'll pa.s.s the word you made amends at the House of the Black Star, that you spent most of the time there with a stone in your mouth. In a lot of ways, that's the fairest way to handle the situation. In my field, we say ignorance of the law is no excuse-"

"Ignorantia juris non excusat," Renee said. "But considering punishments in this camp are handed out on the spot, without an opportunity to appeal to an impartial judge or present a fair-"

"Renee," Ben said wearily. "Just because you've read a couple of John Grisham novels doesn't make you a Supreme Court justice. I'm giving Harper a way out, so will you lay off my a.s.s?"

"Ben, thank you," Harper said softly.

He was silent for a moment, then lifted his gaze and offered her a tentative, wan smile.

"Don't mention it. If anyone in this camp deserves a little slack-" he began.

"But there's no f.u.c.king way," Harper said.

He stared at her, his mouth partly open. It took him a while to come up with a response, and when he did, his voice was thin and hoa.r.s.e. "What?"