The Fireman: A Novel Part 32

"Jesus," Ben whispered.

"He didn't die easy, either. They were banging his head off the walls and the floor and the side of the toilet for twenty minutes, all while this one lunatic in another cell sang 'Candle on the Water' and laughed about it. Eventually the infected prisoner began to smolder and char. He never completely caught fire, but he made plenty of smoke before he died. It was like being in an Indian sweat lodge. Men were crying from all the smoke and coughing on the ash.

"Well, after they beat this poor kid to death, the staties dragged the corpse out of the cell with rubber gloves and disposed of him. But we all knew it was going to spread. The whole place was a concrete petri dish. Pretty soon it was on a couple guys in a completely different cell. Then it was on three boys in another unit. I have no idea how or why it could hop around like that."

Harper could've told him, but it was no matter now. The Fireman had said the world was divided into the healthy and the sick, but soon it would be down to the sick and the dead. For everyone in the room, the subject of how Dragonscale spread was now of academic interest only.

"The state cops didn't know what to do. There wasn't a facility for dealing with felons coated with Dragonscale, and they didn't want to release any of the prisoners into the civilian population. The cops got dressed in riot gear and rubber gloves and herded all the men who had Dragonscale into one cell, all together, while they tried to figure out what to do.

"Then, one morning, this guy starts screaming, 'I'm hot! I think I'm dying! I got fire ants crawling all over me!' Then he was screaming smoke. It was coming out of his throat before the rest of him started to burn. That's going full dragon, I've heard, when you breathe fire before you die. You do it because the tissues in your lungs have ignited, so you're burning from the inside out. He was running around screaming and smoke pouring out of his mouth like someone in an old cartoon who accidentally drank hot sauce. All the men in the cell with him were pressed flat against the cinder blocks to keep from catching fire themselves.

"Well, the cops came running, led by the head bull, a fella named Miller. The bunch of them stared into this cell at the burning man for a few seconds and then they started shooting." He waited to see if Ben would object. Ben sat very still, his arms draped over his knees, staring at Gilbert steadily in the wavering red light of the fire. "They pumped, I don't know, three hundred rounds in there? They killed everyone. They killed the guy who was burning and they killed all the men around him.

"After the shooting stopped, this head bull, Miller, he hitches up his belt like he just finished a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon and tells us he saved our lives. Stopped a chain reaction before it could get started. If they didn't shoot the whole bunch, the jail block would've turned into an inferno. The other cops stood around looking shocked, staring at the guns in their hands, like they couldn't fathom how they had all gone off.

"They had a few of us put on rubber cleaning gloves and carry the bodies out. I volunteered myself to get some fresh air. I was in Brentwood for three, four months and they never got the smell of burned hair and gunsmoke out of the jail block. Oh, and that empty cell? That filled back up, too. There weren't any trials happening. No one was getting processed. But cops were still arresting folks for looting and such and they had to put them somewhere.

"They fed us on corned beef and lime Jell-O for the first couple months. Then the food situation got a little dicey. One day we had canned peaches for lunch. Another day, three cops busted open a concession machine and pa.s.sed out candy bars. We had rice eight meals straight. One day they announced they were going to discontinue breakfast. That was when I started to believe I was going to die in Brentwood. Sooner or later they'd discontinue lunch. Then one day the cops wouldn't come down to the cellblock at all."

His voice was a rasp that made Harper think of someone running a knife across a leather strop. She stepped into the kitchenette without asking for permission, found a cup, and poured him some tap water. She brought it back and offered it to him and he took it with a look of surprise and grat.i.tude. He drank it off in three swallows.

When it was gone, he licked his lips and said, "Like I say. Some of the cops were all right. There was a guy named Devon. A dainty little fellow. Most of the guys called him a h.o.m.o behind his back, which maybe he was, but I'll tell you what. He never shot anyone and one day he brought two shopping bags full of beer down for us. He said it was his birthday and he wanted to celebrate. So he poured us plastic cups of warm beer and handed out cupcakes and we all sang 'Happy Birthday' to him. And that was the best birthday I've ever been to. Stale supermarket cupcakes and room-temperature Bud to wash it down." He glanced at Ben and said, "See, there are some good cops in this story."

Ben grunted.

Carol said, "There's always a little decency in the worst places . . . and always a little secret selfishness in the best."

Harper wondered if Carol was taking a veiled swipe at her. If so, it was a clumsy, ineffectual sort of swipe-after all, Harper wasn't the one with coffee cake in the cupboard while the rest of the camp made do with canned beets. She supposed a small quant.i.ty of supplies were still trickling into camp now and then, one way or another, carried in by the occasional new arrival. And she imagined the best pickings wound up here, courtesy of Ben and the Lookouts: treats to help Mother Carol keep up her strength in her time of trial.

"Yeah, well, that wasn't the only decent thing Devon did for us. In the end, he did a little more for us than hand out plastic cups of suds. We'll get back to him in a minute.

"The mortar between the cement blocks in the walls was crumbly. Not so crumbly you could chip it away and escape-never in ten thousand years-but you could get a kind of chalk residue on your fingers if you rubbed at it. The Mazz figured out if you mixed it with spit, you could make a white paste. That's what he used to cover the Dragonscale when he came down with it, and that's what I used, too. A couple black guys in our cell got the 'scale, but they sc.r.a.ped themselves up, then claimed they had a fight. A cop threw in a roll of bandages for them, and they used that to cover the marks. By the end of the week, everyone in our cell was carrying Dragonscale and covering it up one way or another. See, all of us were afraid of Miller and the others coming down and shooting up another cell.

"It was in other cells, too. I don't know if every man in the block had it by January, but I think by New Year's Day, more had it than didn't. Some were good at hiding it. Some weren't. The cops knew after a while. You could tell because they began delivering food wearing elbow-length gloves and riot helmets, in case anyone tried to spit on them. You could tell because they looked so G.o.dd.a.m.n scared behind the plastic faceplates.

"Well, one morning Miller came downstairs with twelve other cops, all of them in their riot gear and carrying shields. Miller announced he had some good news. He told us there was a transport waiting outside. Anyone who was sick with Dragonscale was eligible for transfer to a camp in Concord, where they'd get the best medical treatment available and three squares a day. Miller read from a sheet of paper that they were having ham and pineapple that evening. Rice pilaf and steamed carrots. No beer, but cold whole milk. The cells opened up and Miller told everyone with Dragonscale to come out. A short black guy with a frill of Dragonscale running right up onto his left cheek stepped out first. It looked like a tattoo of a fern. Most people don't get it on their faces, but he did, and I guess he saw no reason to pretend he wasn't carrying it. Another guy came out after him, and then a few more, and then some guys I didn't even know had it. Pretty soon about half of the block had emptied into the corridor that ran between cells. I was going to go myself. It was the thing about cold milk that got me. You know how good a cup of cold whole milk is, when you haven't had one in a long time? My throat hurt thinking about it. I even took a step forward, but the Mazz caught my arm and just gave his head a little shake. So I stayed.

"Most of the guys in our cell went, though. One guy who was in with us, Junot Gomez, he shot me a confused look and muttered, 'I'll think of you when I'm eatin' breakfast tomorrow.'" Gilbert lifted his gla.s.s to his lips before he remembered it was empty. Harper offered to get him more water, but he shook his head.

"What happened?" Carol asked.

"Is it really that obvious they didn't ever get their ham and rice pilaf? I guess so, huh? They led 'em upstairs and outside and they shot them all. The guns went off loud enough to shake the walls, and they thundered away for almost half a minute. Not pistols. We were hearing fully automatic bursts of fire. I thought it was never going to stop. You couldn't hear anything else, not shouts, not screams . . . just guns going, like someone feeding logs into a wood chipper.

"After the shooting stopped, everyone was real quiet. The cellblock hadn't ever been so quiet, not even in the middle of the night, when people were supposed to be sleeping.

"A while later Miller and the others came down. You could smell homicide on them. Gunsmoke and blood. They brought their M16s and Miller stuck the barrel through the bars at us and I thought, Well, now it's our turn. d.a.m.ned if we went and d.a.m.ned if we stayed. I felt sick about it, but I didn't fall on my knees and start to beg."

"Good," Harper said. "Good for you."

"He says, 'I want ten men for a cleanup crew. You do good, you can have a soda after.'

"And the Mazz says, 'What about a gla.s.s of cold milk?' Needling him, you know. Only Miller didn't get the joke. He just said, 'Sure, if we have any.'"

"The Mazz asks, 'What happened out there?' Like we didn't know already.

"Miller says, 'They tried to escape. Tried to seize the truck.'

"And the Mazz, he just laughs.

"Miller blinks at him and says, 'They were all dead anyhow. It's better this way. We did 'em a favor. We made it quick. Better than burning alive.'

"The Mazz says, 'That's you, Miller. Always thinking about how to help your fellow man. You're the picture of empathy.' I told you-the Mazz just has an instinct for running his mouth when anyone else would know to shut up. I thought for sure he'd get shot, but you know what? I think Miller was in shock, too. Maybe his ears were still ringing and he couldn't hear the Mazz too good. All I know is he just nodded, like he was agreeing with him.

"He opened the cell and the Mazz and I came out. Some other men drifted from the other cells. Guards had us sit down and take off our shoes and leave them behind, so we wouldn't try and run. When there were ten of us, we went upstairs, flanked by men in body armor. They walked us down a long concrete corridor and out through a pair of double fire doors into the parking lot.

"It was a cold, bright morning, so bright I couldn't see at first. The whole world was just a white blur for at least a minute. I've thought about that a lot in the time since. The men they gunned down-they must've been staggering around blind while they got shot.

"When my vision cleared I could see the brick wall was shot to s.h.i.t. Most of the bodies were up against it, but a few had tried to run. At least one guy made it twenty feet across the lot before his head got blown off.

"They had a town truck backed up to the rear of the building. They handed us rubber gloves and told us to get working. They wanted to get the bodies off to Portsmouth for 'disposal.' The guy I told you about, Devon, the birthday boy who brought us beers that time? He was out there, too, with a clipboard. He checked us off as we collected our gloves and would have to check us off again when we went back to our cells. He looked like a different man. He looked like he had had ten birthdays in the last month, not one.

"At first it was easy throwing the bodies into the back of the truck, but after a bit, the Mazz and I had to climb up to arrange them and make room for more. Cold as it was, they were already going stiff. It was more like moving deadfall than you might think. I turned over Junot Gomez, who died with his mouth open, like he was going to ask someone a question. Maybe he was going to ask them what they were serving in Concord for breakfast." Gilbert Cline laughed at that, a single, harsh sound that was more jarring than a sob would've been. "We had about forty of the corpses piled in the truck when the Mazz grabbed my elbow and pulled me down with him. He drug Junot's body over the both of us. Just like that. No discussion. Like we planned it. It never even occurred to me to have second thoughts.

"Well. I don't know that there was anything to think about. The guards thought we were healthy for the moment, and they wouldn't figure on two healthy men squirming in with a pile of infected corpses. And it wasn't like it was safer to stay. Sooner or later they'd shoot the rest of us, for one reason or another. They'd shoot us and tell themselves it was the right thing to do, that they saved us from starvation, or burning alive, or whatever. The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did 'em.

"Anyway. There isn't much more to tell. We hid under bodies while the other prisoners kept throwing more in. No one seemed to notice we were missing. Then, just as they were finishing, I heard someone jump into the truck and start wandering around. Bootheels clanging on metal. The bodies didn't fully cover us and I could see between them and suddenly I was looking up at Devon and his clipboard, and d.a.m.n if he wasn't looking right back at me. We stared at each other for the longest second in the history of recorded time. Then he nodded, just a little. He got down out of the truck and banged the tailgate shut and it started up. One guard shouted to Devon and asked if everyone was accounted for and Devon said yes they were. He lied for us. He knew we were in the truck and he lied so we could slip away. Someday this is all going to be over and I'm going to find that guy and buy him a beer. No one ever deserved one more."

The fire whistled and seethed.

"Then?" Carol asked.

"The driver threw it into first gear and hauled out of there. Half an hour later we pulled into the big lot in Portsmouth where they were burning the dead. The Mazz and I got out of the truck without being seen, but we only made it as far as a culvert on the edge of that pond there. And then we were stuck. We couldn't get across the pond and we couldn't get across the lot. I'm not sure what would've happened if the Fireman didn't show up. I guess we either would've frozen to death or given ourselves up and been shot. I hope I get a chance to thank him. It must feel pretty good to have him on your side. You almost feel sorry for anyone who goes up against him."

A prolonged, awkward silence followed.

"Thank you, Mr. Cline," Carol said. "Thank you for sharing your story. You must be tired after all that talk. Jamie, will you take him back to the lockup?"

"The handcuffs, Jamie," Ben said.

Jamie stepped forward and Mindy rose to her feet and they moved in on Gil, one on each side of him. Gil looked from Carol to Ben, his gray eyes weary and hooded. He stood and put his hands behind him. The handcuffs made a ratcheting sound as Jamie snapped them onto his wrists.

"I was going to ask if there's a chance I might be transferred out of the meat locker and in with the other men," Gil said. "But I guess not."

Carol said, "I'm very grateful to you for how forthright you've been. Grateful-and happy. Happy you are with us. Happy you don't have to fear being hauled out into a parking lot and gunned down. But Mr. Cline, after what Mr. Mazzucch.e.l.li did for you, I am not sure it's in the interest of this community to let you out. He helped you escape and you seem like a loyal soul. How could you not want to help do the same for him? No. Back to the lockup, Jamie. It may seem like horrible treatment, but you understand why it's necessary, Mr. Cline. As you said yourself, the people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. I think I know pretty well what you were implying when you said it. I think we all knew you were taking a dig at me."

The corners of Gil's mouth went up in a little smile.

"Ma'am," Cline said, "I hid under dead bodies less cold than you." He glanced at Harper and gave her a short nod. "Thanks for the water, Nurse. See you around."

Jamie thumped him in the small of the back with her broom handle. "Come on, s.e.xy. Let's get you back to the honeymoon suite."

When she opened the door, the wind blew snow in halfway across the room. Mindy and Jamie escorted Gilbert out, the door thudding shut behind them. The house creaked in the gale.

"Your turn, Harper," Carol said.

10.

"Tell me about my father," Carol said. "Is he dying?"

"His condition is stable right now."

"But he won't wake up."

"I'm hopeful."

"Ben says he should've woken up by now."

"Yes. If it was a subdural hematoma with no complications."

"So why hasn't he?"

"There must've been complications."

"Like what? What kind of thing is a 'complication'?"

"I couldn't say with any certainty. I'm a nurse, not a neurologist. A piece of bone in his brain? Or just a deep bruise on the brain. Or maybe he had a stroke while we were operating. I don't have any of the diagnostic equipment I'd need to figure it out."

"If he wakes up"-Carol began, and her breath seemed to hitch before she could go on, although her face remained slack, expressionless-"how r.e.t.a.r.ded will he be?"

They didn't use the word r.e.t.a.r.ded to discuss brain damage, but Harper didn't think it was the time or place to correct her. "He may suffer no impairment at all or he may be severely damaged. At this point I'd just be guessing."

"Would you agree, though," Carol said, "that he should've recovered by now? This is an unexpected outcome, isn't it?"

"I was hoping for better."

Carol nodded, slowly, almost dreamily. "Is there anything you can do for him?"

"With what I have on hand? Not much. I rigged up a way to pa.s.s him fluids-watered-down apple juice-but that will only sustain him for so long. If the infirmary was better stocked, though, it would open up a range of options to improve his care. It would give me more flexibility with other patients, too. That's what I was hoping to talk to you about. I spoke with John-"

"Yes," Carol said. "So I heard."

Harper continued as if there had been no interruption. "-and he has a plan to get us the supplies-"

This time Ben broke in.

"Didn't I tell you?" Ben asked Carol. "Didn't I say we could trust the Fireman to have a plan for us?" He spoke in a flat, almost bored tone, but beneath that there was an edge in his voice.

Harper tried again. "John thinks he can help us get what I'd need to look after your father and see to his long-term care, if he remains incapacitated. I think it ought to be considered."

"Tell me," Carol said.

Harper laid out the Fireman's plan: how he wanted them to take Ben's police cruiser to Verdun Avenue, use one of the camp cell phones to call an ambulance, wait for them to show up, and then- "-then John says he'll send a phoenix to chase away the EMTs and any police who come along with them," Harper finished. She felt this was a rather lame way to wrap up and was, briefly, nettled with John and John's perverse theatrical impulses. "I'm not sure what he means by that, but he hasn't let us down in the past."

"It'll be another of his stunts," Carol said. "One of his distractions. He does like his distractions."

Ben said, "I don't see why we need his help. We can take down an ambulance without him. We have enough guns."

"To get how many people killed?" Harper asked.

"Oh, it won't come to that. We'll put it to them like this: either you give us what's in the ambulance or you wind up riding in one. Most people are pretty cooperative when they've got a rifle poking them in the eye."

"They'll have guns, too. They'll have a police escort."

"Sure. But when we meet them, I'll be in my uniform and driving my police cruiser. They won't be on guard. We'll have the drop on them before they know what's up," Ben told her.

"Why go it alone?" Harper asked. "Why not do it John's way?"

"The last time we did things John's way, someone nearly murdered my father," Carol said.

"What happened to your father happened here, back on our ground. John's plan worked."

"Yes. It worked out all right for him."

"Now what does that mean?"

Instead of answering, Carol said, "When was John planning to give us the benefit of his help?"

"Three nights from now."

"We can't wait that long. It'll have to be tomorrow. Ben, I'm trusting you to do this without any violence unless you absolutely have no other way."

Ben said, "Right. Well. There'll be four of them-two responders in the ambulance, two in the police cruiser-so there better be five of us. Jamie is the best shot in camp after me. Nelson Heinrich used to have his own NRA Facebook page and is apparently good with a rifle. That girl Mindy Skilling who just walked out of here could place the 911 call for us. She's old enough, so I wouldn't feel irresponsible about taking her along, and she's dramatic. Went to Emerson, I think? I figure-"

"Wait. Wait," Harper interrupted. "Carol, there's no reason we can't hold off for three nights. Your father-"

"-is nearly seventy years old. Would you wait three nights if it was your father? If you could do something now?"

It was in Harper to say, My father wouldn't want people getting shot for him, but she couldn't get the words out of her mouth. In truth, she thought Carol was right. If it were her father, she would've begged the Fireman to do whatever he could, as soon as possible. Begging wasn't the sort of thing Julie Andrews did, but Harper wasn't above it.

"All right. I'll talk to John. See if he can move things up to tomorrow night."