The Fireman: A Novel Part 33

Carol fussed with the black curl of hair that fell across her forehead. "John John John John John John John John. If John is in no hurry to help my father, I'd feel awful about rushing him."

"He isn't delaying for no reason. His ribs are knocked in, Carol."

Carol nodded sympathetically. "Yes. Yes, of course, John must be allowed to rest. I don't want him disturbed. We don't need him. Nurse Willowes, Ben will require a list detailing everything you need to give my father the very best care."

"That won't work. I have to go with them."

"Oh, no. No, you couldn't. You are so brave and kind to want to go, but I need you at my father's side. We can't risk you."

"You're going to have to. Ben is only going to have a few minutes in the ambulance. Do you really want him picking through two hundred bottles, trying to make sense of pharmacological abbreviations? Personally, I wouldn't take a chance on it, if it were my father." Turning it around to see how Carol liked it.

Carol gave her a baleful look.

"My father needs more than good medicine. He needs a good nurse," Carol said. "One is no good without the other. Be sure you come back."

Harper didn't know what to say to that. The whole conversation had been confounding, full of hints she didn't understand and implications she didn't like.

Carol said, "Ben, I want to talk over the plan with you. I want to know everything. Who you're taking with you. What Verdun Avenue is like. Everything. Nurse-" She flicked her glance at Harper. "You can find your own way back to the infirmary, I hope."

It surprised Harper that they would just let her walk out unsupervised. To a degree, she thought herself as much a prisoner as Gilbert Cline, only with a nicer cell. They had brought her to the House of the Black Star under guard, and she had expected to leave the same way.

A part of her wanted to walk out the door right away, before Carol changed her mind and decided to send her back with Bowie or one of the Lookouts hanging around outside. She already had in mind a modest detour on her way back to the infirmary. But she forced herself to wait, fingering the black b.u.t.tons on her overcoat. There was, after all, still one other matter to address.

"Carol . . . I was hoping we could talk about Allie. She's been walking around with a rock in her mouth for days, because she believes she has something to atone for. I think she's doing it, partly, because she looks up to you. She wants to impress you. She wants everyone to know how devoted she is to camp. Can't you make her stop?"

"I can't," Carol said. "But you can."

"Of course you can make her stop. Tell her she's punished herself enough. You're her aunt and she loves you. She'll listen. You're almost all she has. You're responsible for her. You need to step in before she has a collapse."

"But we're all responsible to each other," Carol said, her face a.s.suming a maddening serenity. "We're a house of cards. If even a single card stops supporting its share of the weight, the whole camp will collapse. That is what Allie is trying to tell you. She carries your stone in her mouth. Only you can pluck it out."

"She's a child and she's acting like one. It's your job to be the adult."

"It's my job to look after more than a hundred and fifty desperate people. To keep them safe. To keep them from burning alive. In a way, I am a nurse, too. I have to protect this camp from the infection of despair and selfishness. I have to protect us from secrets, which can be like cancer. From disloyalty and disaffection, which run like fevers." As she spoke, she straightened in her chair, and her wet eyes glittered with a sick heat. "Since my father fell, I have tried to be what all these people need. What they deserve. My father wanted Camp Wyndham to be a nice place for people who had no other place to go. And that's all I want. I just want it to be a nice place . . . and I think it's nicest when we all look out for each other. My dad thought so, too." She clenched her hands together and then squeezed them between her knees. "We're stronger together, Harper. And if you're not with us, you're all alone. These days, alone is no way to be." Her look, Harper thought, was almost pitying. "Don't you see that?"

11.

Harper followed a barely discernible path beneath an obscure sky.

Whichever way she turned her face, snow blew into it. The wind gusted. A tree cracked. Boards wobbled and flexed underfoot, requiring her to proceed slowly to keep her balance.

When the House of the Black Star was out of sight behind her, she held up in the frozen, pine-scented dark. In another two hundred steps, she would cross the trail that wound down through the trees to the shingle and the dock. She could be across the water in ten minutes, tell John they were going after the ambulance tomorrow, tell him- A child ran through the pines to her right, a flickering shadow shape, and she turned her head to look and saw that it wasn't a child at all, only a skein of snow, fleeing through the trees.

Whack!

A s...o...b..ll hit her in the side of her head, but she didn't know it until she had gone another two steps. It took that long to register. She was not aware of reeling to one side or her right knee giving out under her until she found herself kneeling in the snow.

Harper saw a blur of motion from the corner of her eye and raised an elbow in time to block the next s...o...b..ll. The impact deadened her arm. A ringing shock jolted from elbow to hand. The s...o...b..ll shattered the moment it struck her. The speckled white stone that had been packed in its center rolled out onto the snow in front of her.

Girl shapes jumped from behind trees on either side of her, breathless with laughter. Harper thought she saw a s...o...b..ll sailing at her stomach and dropped her arms to cover it, and it hit the side of her neck instead, a sharp sting, followed by numbness.

They circled.

The water in her eyes wanted to turn to ice, freeze there. The faces surrounding her were stiff and white and inexpressive, as if she were being attacked by department-store mannequins.

One of them charged at her back and shoved her. She toppled onto her side.

"Please be careful, girls," she said. "I'm pregnant. I'm not fighting you."

"Whitewash, whitewash!" sang someone who sounded horribly like Emily Waterman.

Someone grabbed her hair in one gloved hand, picked up a fistful of snow in the other, and scrubbed her face with it. A girl shrieked with laughter.

When Harper blinked away the snow, Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones was crouched before her. He looked at her with a blank-eyed incredulity: a cheap plastic mask. He-no, she, it was a girl behind that mask-held out a hand, palm up. A flat white stone rested in it.

"Eat it," came the voice from behind the mask. "Eat it, b.i.t.c.h."

"Make her eat it," another girl said.

"Eat it, eat it, eat it," girls chanted.

Harper was on her side in the snow, one arm covering the ripe swell of her belly, the other arm trapped under her body. The girl holding her hair yanked. Then she yanked harder.

Harper opened her mouth and held it open like a child letting a doctor look at her tonsils. Tyrion Lannister forced in the stone: a cool, flat weight.

Captain America watched from between two pines, five paces away. Harper stared at Allie until her eyes blurred with tears and her vision doubled, trebled.

There was a sound like someone ripping a bedsheet in half. The hand clutching her hair yanked, pulling Harper's chin up, forcing her head back. Another hand slapped her in the mouth, hard. A thumb moved back and forth, pressing a strip of duct tape flat across her lips.

"Half an hour," said the girl who had her by the hair. "It stays in for half an hour. Now get up. Get on your knees."

Harper was lifted onto her knees. The girls pulled her arms behind her and there was another ripping sound, while one of them tore off a fresh length of duct tape and bound her wrists together.

"Mbeby," Harper said, meaning be careful of the baby. She had no idea if anyone understood her.

Two girls danced together, holding hands, twisting and spinning each other: one wore an Obama mask, the other a Donald Trump face. In all this time, Captain America didn't move, but remained between two firs, as motionless and unblinking as an owl.

Flashlights played across the pines, a swarm of bright gold lights. Harper had to look again before she realized none of the girls were holding flashlights. It was the girls themselves, leaping about, laughing, kicking snow at her. They were lit up, like in church when they sang together. They shone for each other, the 'scale throbbing, intense enough to cast a brightness from under their jackets, up around their open collars.

So there were other ways to enter the exalted state of the Bright, then. A chorus or a firing squad: either would serve to satisfy the 'scale. A gang rape was as good as a gospel.

Harper heard the snicker-snack of scissors. Her gold hair began to fall in the snow.

"Ha ha! Ha ha!" said the smallest of her attackers, the girl she was sure was Emily Waterman. "Cut it off cut it off cudidauff!" Her voice was a drunk bray.

The wind sighed, reluctantly, like a lover who realizes it's time to go. Her hair fell around her while the scissors went snickety-snack.

"How's that rock taste?" one of the girls asked. "I bet not as good as the Fireman's p.r.i.c.k."

The girl who had been clipping her hair said, "Isn't it s.e.xy? The way the scissors sound?" She opened and closed them next to Harper's ear. "Gives me shivers. I like cutting your hair so much I'm sorry there's not more of it. I'm sorry I have to stop. Maybe next time I'll cut something else. You need to decide if you're with us or against us. If you're going to shine with us or not shine at all. You want my medical advice? I prescribe a change in your b.i.t.c.hy att.i.tude."

Yes, they were all shining . . . all except for Allie. Allie took a step toward her and made a small choked sound of grief, but when Harper turned her gaze upon her, she faltered and froze in place. She even lifted one hand, palm outward, as if somehow Harper could leap up, free her hands, and strike her.

Harper thought there was a chance that soon one of them would haul back and kick her belly like a football, just for the fun of it. They didn't know what they were doing anymore. Maybe they had already gone much further than they had intended. Maybe they had just meant to pelt her with s...o...b..a.l.l.s and run. They had forgotten who they were. They had forgotten their own names, the voices of their mothers, the faces of their fathers. She thought it was very possible they would kill her here in the snow without meaning to. Use that pair of scissors to open her throat. When you were in the Bright, everything felt good, everything felt right. You didn't walk. You danced. The world pulsed with secret song and you were the star of your own Technicolor musical. The blood leaping from her carotid artery would be as beautiful to them as a sparkler throwing a burning red shower of phosphorus.

The girl who had been standing behind her all this time pushed her onto her side in the snow. A bubble of some powerful, dangerous emotion quivered inside her and Harper remained very still so it would not burst. She did not want to find out what it was . . . whether it was grief, terror, or, worst of all, surrender.

Each of the girls took turns dancing up to her and kicking snow in her face, and Harper closed her eyes.

The girls stood over her, whispering. Harper couldn't bear to look at them, to see that circle of masked faces gathered around her. They talked on and on, in soft, hissing, unintelligible voices. Harper shivered violently. Her jeans were soaked and her wrists hurt and her face was raw and burnt from all the snow that had been thrown in it.

At last she opened her eyes at a squint. The whispering continued, but the girls were gone. The only thing talking was the wind, shushing the pines.

She wriggled and twisted her wrists. The tape was on her gloves, not her skin, and in a while she was able to squirm one hand free. Harper pulled off the other glove and tossed them both aside, still stuck together with duct tape. She did not hesitate, did not give herself time to think, but found the edge of the duct tape over her mouth and ripped it off. She tore away some of her upper lip with it.

Harper spat the stone into the snow. It was pink with blood.

She got so light-headed when she stood up, she had to put a hand against a pine to steady herself. She made her way from trunk to trunk, like a wobbly toddler taking her first steps and using the furniture to steady herself. She found the turning to the waterfront and started down the hill. She got perhaps twelve steps when someone called out to her.

"Nurse Willowes?" Nelson Heinrich shouted. "Where are you going? The path to the infirmary is up here."

He stood on the boards with Jamie Close. Jamie was dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing the last time Harper saw her, the blaze orange snow pants and the puffy slate-colored parka. The only thing different was that she had taken off her Tyrion Lannister mask.

"That snow is up to your neck. Why don't you come back here before you're buried alive?" Nelson's face was scrubbed red from the cold and he grinned to show his two front teeth.

Harper's breath steamed. When she licked her upper lip she tasted blood.

It took her almost five minutes to trudge the twenty steps back to the boards, wading waist-deep in the snow, powder getting inside her boots.

"Jamie and I were just off to relieve the Lookouts at Mother Carol's! Good thing we showed up when we did. You were all turned around." He reached out with both hands to help her up onto the planks. He frowned, but his eyes were gay with amus.e.m.e.nt. "But look at all these tracks! We have rules, you know! No wandering off the paths! We can move the boards, but we can't make tracks disappear. What if a hunter wanders by? By G.o.d, if we were discovered, they'd ship us all off to Concord! If they didn't just shoot us here! Wandering puts the whole camp in peril! Mr. Patchett and Mother Carol have been very clear about that. One hour with a stone should remind you of your responsibilities."

Jamie Close stepped around him, holding out a white stone in her palm. She grinned to show a chipped tooth.

Harper took the rock and obediently put it in her mouth.

12.

She was walked, like a prisoner, through the trees, Nelson leading her back to camp, Jamie behind her with her rifle and her sawed-off broomstick. Harper was surprised to find she didn't mind the stone as much as she thought she would. She believed with time she might even start to find it a comfort. The stone invited calm, meditation. It insisted on silence-inner silence as well as actual silence.

It demanded her entire attention, which was a relief because so much of what she normally thought about twisted her up inside: if she could keep Father Storey alive, if she could keep herself alive, what she would do if the baby had Dragonscale like her, what would happen if stress brought on premature labor.

The stone forced it all away and at first she thought if she had known how easy it was to live with a rock in her mouth, she wouldn't have resisted so furiously. Then she thought she had always known, deep down. She had always understood that obedience would be a great comfort to her, and that was in fact exactly why she resisted. She had sensed if she gave in once, just once, the next time would be easy.

They emerged from the woods close to the chapel. The double doors to church were open and people were looking out at her. She felt sure most of them knew what she was walking away from.

Harper turned her stare on them, cold, remote, unashamed, and was pleased to see some of them shrink back into the shadows. Most of the kids, however, held their ground. The punishment of others was a matter of great interest to children, a source of tremendous gratification.

Allie paced at the bottom of the chapel steps, but when she saw Harper she went still.

"Keep that a.s.s of yours moving, Nurse," Jamie said.

Allie waited until Harper had gone past, then couldn't keep herself in check. She broke and sprinted across the snow to intercept them.

"Allie," Nelson Heinrich said, "you're supposed to be Lookout in the steeple tonight. Go back to your post."

Allie ignored him. "Harper. I want you to know, I never meant for-"

But Harper had quietly dropped the stone from her mouth into her hand. She hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it on Allie's cheek. Allie flinched as if slapped.

Jamie thumped her in the back of the head, with a fist or the stick, Harper wasn't sure.

"That stone belongs in your mouth!" Nelson squawked. "And you can keep it in there until sunup now!"

Harper never broke eye contact with Allie, whose face was wrinkling with shock and misery, her startled eyes beginning to spill over. Harper watched until Allie's first sob. Then she put the rock back into her mouth and continued on into the infirmary.

BOOK SIX.

PHOENIX.

FEBRUARY.