The Fireman: A Novel Part 35

When Bethann took off, she did not try to grab for Ben's gun and she did not try to draw her own. Instead she pushed herself off the sidewalk and gave Ben a kind of comical shove, one hand in his face, the other on his breastbone. He reeled. She turned, took one step, then a second. Ben's right foot plunged over the curb. He pitched backward toward the street. His pistol cracked. Bethann buckled, pushing her chest out, arching her back. Then she straightened and ran another half dozen steps, her hand falling to the b.u.t.t of her Glock, before she suddenly fell face-first onto the icy, unshoveled sidewalk.

The tires of the ambulance smoked and spun. Jamie got her hands back on the Bushmaster and lifted it to her shoulder, hollering something Harper couldn't hear. There was a wrenching clang of tortured steel. The rear fender of Peter and Bethann's cruiser fell in the road. The ambulance, free, shot backward, straight into a telephone pole, banged to a stop once more.

The tires screamed and it jolted forward, veering straight toward Jamie. The Bushmaster went off in a series of pops. The shotgun sounded with a clap. Ben stepped into the road, leveled his pistol, and fired one shot after another.

The windshield of the ambulance exploded. The siren choked, made a dismal, dying wail, and went silent. A headlight exploded with a bright snap.

Jamie backpedaled, moving aside, then stood there, watching dumbly as the ambulance glided sedately past, no longer gaining speed, but moving at a surreal creep like a zombie in a horror movie. They watched as it rolled over Peter the cop's body. Peter's spine snapped like a tree branch. The ambulance trundled on another five yards before thumping to a stop against the curb, the fuming, bullet-riddled grille less than twenty feet away from the front of Ben's Challenger.

3.

Ben Patchett stood at the ready, like a shooter taking target practice at the gun range. He had swiveled around to follow the pa.s.sage of the ambulance as it rolled by him, firing the whole time. At last, he lowered the gun and looked around at the broken gla.s.s and the blood in the street with a sort of stunned amazement.

They were all shining-all of them. Even Harper was lit up, could feel the tingling thrill of the Dragonscale racing over her skin. Nothing created a sense of harmony, it seemed, like a communal act of homicide.

"Whoa!" Nelson cried, a kind of ragged excitement-maybe even euphoria-in his voice. "Anyone hurt?"

"Is anyone hurt?" Ben shouted, almost screamed. "Is anyone HURT, you jacka.s.s?" Harper had never heard him say anything so profane. "What's it look like? We got four corpses here. Why in G.o.d's name did you start shooting?"

"I shot the back tire out," Nelson said. "So they couldn't get away. The guys in the ambulance. They were backing up. Didn't you see?"

"They didn't start backing up until you started shooting!" A vein stood up in the center of Ben's forehead, an ugly red twig pulsing across his brow.

"No. No! I swear, they were making a run for it. Seriously! Jamie, you were standing right there. Weren't they making a run for it?"

Jamie stood over Peter the cop, pointing her Bushmaster at the corpse, as if he might get up and start running again. Peter, however, was bent over backward and grotesquely squashed, a red tread mark printed across his flattened chest. Some of his guts had been forced up and out his mouth in a bluish-red ma.s.s of slick tissue.

"What?" Jamie lifted her head, and looked from Norman to Ben, her face bewildered. She put a finger behind her right ear. "What'd you say? I can't hear anything."

"Look. Maybe if we had instant replay, we could go back and see what really happened. I don't know. I thought they were trying to drive away. Someone had to do something, so I shot out a tire." Nelson shrugged. "Maybe I made a rookie mistake. If you want to lay all the blame on someone, go ahead! Pile it on! I don't mind being the scapegoat here."

Ben looked as if he had been knifed, mouth open, eyes wide and unblinking. He went to put his pistol back in his holster, and missed on the first two attempts.

Jamie came around to Harper's side of the car and let her out of the backseat.

"Come on," Jamie said. "Let's go." Moving around to open the trunk and collect the duffel bags.

Harper felt short of breath, as if she had stepped into shockingly cold water. Her legs wobbled. A high-pitched drone rang in her ears.

She walked to the ambulance, gla.s.s crunching underfoot, and looked in. The driver was a young black woman who had dyed her close-cropped hair a ripe banana yellow. Her mouth was open as if to call out. Her eyes were wide and startled. Her lap was filled with blue safety gla.s.s.

Harper couldn't see a bullet hole and didn't know what had killed her. She had no doubt the driver was dead-she could see it in her face-but she pulled open the door and put two fingers on her neck to feel for a pulse. When she did, the driver's head slid over to rest on her right shoulder, leaving a smear on the vinyl headrest. A single bullet had entered her open mouth and exited through the base of her skull.

The woman in the pa.s.senger seat-a tiny, small-boned woman zipped into a blue EMT jumpsuit-groaned. She had dropped onto her side, facedown across the front seat.

Harper left the driver, made her way around to the pa.s.senger side. She opened the door and climbed onto the step.

There was blood on the pa.s.senger seat and blood soaking the pa.s.senger's right shoulder. Harper suspected a bullet had pulverized her scapula on the way through . . . painful, but hardly fatal. Someone she could help. She felt a relief so intense it left her weak.

"Can you hear me?" Harper asked. "You have a wound in your shoulder. Do you think you can move?"

But even as Harper spoke to her, she had the growing sense there was more wrong than a smashed shoulder. It was the way the small woman was breathing. Her inhalations required a sobbing effort; her exhalations were worse, made a strenuous gurgling sound.

Harper put one knee up in the footwell, leaning into the ambulance and taking the woman by the hip, lifting and rolling her slightly. The EMT had another bullet wound, dead in the center of her chest. Blood drenched the front of her jumpsuit. Bubbles frothed in the wound when she exhaled.

The woman's eyes strained from her head in pain. She stared up at Harper and Harper stared back and then recoiled in surprise, b.u.mping her head on the dash. Harper knew her. She had crossed paths with her a few times in the summer, when they were both working at Portsmouth Hospital. The EMT was pretty, in a freckled, boyish way: upturned nose, pixie cut.

"Charity," Harper said, remembering her name and saying it aloud in the same moment. "We worked at the hospital together. I don't know if you remember me. I'm going to take care of you. You have a collapsed lung. I'm going to step away and get the gurney and put you on it. You need a chest compress and oxygen. You're going to be all right. Do you understand me? I'll be right back and we'll make you more comfortable."

Charity gripped Harper's hand and squeezed. Her fingers were warm and sticky with her own blood.

"I remember you," Charity said. "You're little Mary Poppins. You're the one who was always humming that song 'Spoonful of Sugar.'"

Harper smiled in spite of the blood and the stink of gunsmoke. "That's me."

"Want to know something, little Mary Poppins?" Charity asked. Harper nodded. "You and your friends just murdered two EMTs. I'm going to die and you aren't going to save me. Eat a spoonful of sugar with that, b.i.t.c.h." She shut her eyes and turned her face away.

Harper flinched, b.u.mped her head again, as she retreated. "You aren't going to die tonight. Hang on, Charity. I'll be right back." Harper was aware her own voice was an octave too high, uneven and unconvincing.

Harper hopped down from the c.o.c.kpit. She was halfway around to the rear of the ambulance when Ben gently took hold of her upper arm.

He said, "You can't do anything for her, you know. I wish to G.o.d you could, but you can't."

"Get your hand off me." Harper twisted her biceps free from his grip.

Mindy walked past her, an empty duffel bag in each hand, deliberately not looking at the squashed police officer in the road. Red and blue lights chopped the night into a series of frozen moments, little slices of time captured in stained gla.s.s.

"We have to get what we came for and go," Ben said. "There'll be more police soon. We can't be here when they arrive, Harper."

"You should've thought of that before you shot up the street, you a.s.sholes. You stupid a.s.sholes."

"If they get even one of us, they get us all. If you love Nick and Renee and Father Storey and the Fireman, you'll get what we came for and roll."

I'm going to die and you aren't going to save me. Eat a spoonful of sugar with that, b.i.t.c.h. Harper heard it again in her head and felt a frustration-a rage-so intense it was like nausea. She wanted to hit Ben, to scream at him. She wanted to hit him over and over while she wept.

Instead, she spoke in a soft voice that wavered with emotion and which she hardly recognized. She was unused to hearing herself plead.

"Please, Ben. Please. Just a chest compress. She doesn't have to die. I can save her. I can make sure she'll still be alive when the next police car gets here."

"Pack what we need for camp and we'll see if there's time," he said, and she understood she would not be allowed even to apply the chest compress.

She lowered her head and went to the rear of the ambulance.

Mindy was already standing in the brightly lit interior with its stainless steel surfaces, its rolling gurney, its drawers and cabinets. Already Harper's sense of sickened frustration was congealing into a rancid form of grief. They had done the killing; now it was time for the looting. On some level she felt the plan had always been to murder and steal, and she had not only gone along with it, she had all but engineered it.

She packed without thought. She filled the cooler with plasma and fluids and sent Mindy away with it. She packed the first duffel, then the second, collecting the items every respectable health clinic would stock and that her own infirmary lacked: reels of gauze, bottles of painkillers, ampoules of antibiotics, sterile thread and sterile tools, a bundle of second-skin burn gel pads. By the time Mindy got back, Harper was on her knees, packing adult diapers into the second bag-she was using them to insulate and cushion little gla.s.s bottles of epinephrine and atropine-and wondering if she could squeeze in an oxygen tank.

Jamie banged her fist on the steel door.

"Time. We got to move."

"No! Two more minutes. Mindy, I want that cervical collar and I want-"

"It's time," Jamie said and she reached in for the duffel that was already full and slid it out on the ground.

"Go on," Mindy said. "I'll get the cervical collar, Ms. Willowes."

Harper cast an unhappy, half-desperate look around at open cupboards and drawers hanging open. Her gaze found the heart-start paddles, the kit no bigger than the briefcase for a laptop.

"Nelson!" Harper cried.

He appeared at the rear of the ambulance, eyes goggling in that strangely smooth, unlined, pink face that always made her think of a fat baby.

"The heart-start paddles," Harper said. "I want them."

She jumped out of the back, duffel in one hand and a compression bandage in the other. She brushed past Nelson and walked quickly to the front of the ambulance.

"I came as soon as I-"

Charity was no longer breathing in that strenuous way-or in any other way. Harper rolled her onto her back and wrenched down the zipper at the front of the jumpsuit. When it stuck, she tore the jumpsuit open. The bullet hole was just below her right breast. Harper touched Charity's wrist to take her pulse. Nothing. She felt sure there had been nothing for a long time now.

"Nursey," Jamie said. "You can't help her, but there's people back at camp you can. Come on. Let's go home." Her voice was not unkind.

Harper let Jamie draw her by the elbow out of the ambulance. She got turned around, back toward Ben's Challenger. Harper reached out blindly and found the straps of her duffel.

"I'll gather up the others. See you at the car," Jamie said.

Harper walked around to the open trunk of Ben's car, moving in a daze. She heaved the duffel into the back, next to the cooler, and then looked up the street.

At the end of Verdun Avenue there was that blackened, burned-out concrete sh.e.l.l that had once been a CVS drugstore. Out past the CVS, right at the intersection of Verdun and Sagamore, a white windowless van idled. Call letters were painted on the side, words dragging cartoonish streamers of flame: WKLL * HOME OF THE MARLBORO MAN. At a distance, Harper could hear another vehicle coming down Sagamore, something heavy and slow: her ear caught the soft blasting hiss of air brakes and the diesel whine of a heavy engine. It sounded like a school bus.

The pa.s.senger-side window of the WKLL van was down. A man leaned out of it with a spotlight and flipped the switch. A blinding beam of light, as dazzling as a fresh-cut diamond, struck Nelson Heinrich, nailing him to the spot in the middle of the road. Nelson had just climbed out of the ambulance with the heart-start paddle kit in both hands. He squinted into the brightness.

A low squall of feedback whined from a brace of speakers on the roof of the van.

Harper felt blood beginning to rush inside of her, her internal chemical carousel getting up to speed.

The voice that followed boomed like the voice of G.o.d. It was the hoa.r.s.e, roughened voice of a man who has screamed his way through an entire Metallica concert. Harper had heard the voice live only a few days before, in her own house. Before that, she had listened to him often enough on the radio, narrating the apocalypse and providing the end of the world with a sound track that was heavy on seventies c.o.c.k rock.

"What are we doing tonight, folks? Lootin' an ambulance? There weren't some nuns needed raping or an orphanage to burn down? Well, tell you what. I got good news, and I got better news. I'm the Marlboro Man, here tonight with the Seacoast Incinerators, and if you're looking for medicine, boy, have you come to the right place. We got just the thing for treating you infected bags of meat. The even better news is there's an ambulance right here, so after we're done with you thieving and killing f.u.c.ks, we won't have to go very far to find the body bags."

"Get under cover!" Ben screamed.

The side door of the WKLL van slid open. Harper had never seen anything like the gun mounted there outside of a movie. She did not know the make or caliber-did not know she was looking at an M2 Browning .50 caliber-only that it was the type of gun you usually saw bolted on top of tanks or inside combat helicopters. She could see it was belt-fed. A chain of bullets hung down into an open metal case.

A man sat on a low stool behind it, wearing a pair of bright yellow ear defenders. She had two thoughts before the night was crushed into fragments of sound and white flame.

The first was, absurdly, that such a gun could not possibly be legal.

The second was that the other vehicle, the one rolling into sight just past the ruin of the CVS, was not a school bus, of course, but an orange Freightliner with a plow the size of an airplane wing across the front, and Jakob behind the wheel.

4.

The Browning went off in a series of deep concussions that could not be thought of merely as sound. Harper felt those stammering blasts through her entire body, in her teeth, in her eyeb.a.l.l.s.

The ambulance shuddered. Pulverized tar leapt up from the street as the Browning strafed from left to right. Bullets pa.s.sed through Nelson Heinrich's legs, tearing them apart and throwing red smoke: blood turned to a cloud of vapor. His right leg folded backward at the knee, like the leg of a praying mantis. The portable defibrillator dropped a shower of white sparks. Nelson jittered like a man at a tent revival show getting a dose of the Holy Spirit.

Harper went down on her hands and knees, dropping behind the rear of Ben's Challenger. From around the tire she saw Ben in Peter and Bethann's cruiser. He knelt in the driver's seat, leaning out with his automatic pistol. She saw the gun muzzle flash, but couldn't hear the report over the merciless thudding of the .50 caliber.

Then Ben jerked his head back into the car and shrank down. In the next instant Peter and Bethann's police cruiser was rocking from side to side, as if in a gale. Windows erupted. Bullets whanged into steel, blew out tires, sheared off the open driver's-side door-it fell with a bang into the street-sprang open the trunk, smashed taillights.

Jamie had retreated behind the front of the ambulance, sunk into a crouch, Bushmaster between her legs. The Dodge Challenger was only a dozen steps from where she was taking shelter, but it might as well have been in a different county. Trying to cross that distance made about as much sense as diving headfirst into a wood chipper.

Then the shooting was over. Distantly, Harper heard the jingle-jangle of empty cartridges falling into the road. The air throbbed with reverberations.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" shouted the Marlboro Man. "I saw AC/DC with Bon Scott in '79 and they sounded like p.u.s.s.ies compared to our noise. You all lay still unless you want to hear our encore. Let me tell you what's going to happen now. You're all going to-"

A gun popped from the rear of the ambulance. After the racket of the Browning, Mindy Skilling's little silver pistol sounded like a party cracker.

"Run for it, Mr. Patchett!" Mindy shrieked. "I'll cover you! Run, run, everyone run! My life for Mother Carol! My life for the Bright!" The gun popped again and again. Mindy was no longer in the ambulance, but crouched on the sidewalk, behind the ambulance's rear end.

"Mindy!" Ben shouted. "Mindy, don't-"

The Freightliner ground into first gear and lurched forward with a raggedy diesel roar. It crashed over a curb, wrenching a holly bush out of the ground and flinging it aside in a shower of dirt. The truck found second gear with a steely crunch and third a moment later. Filthy smoke gushed from the exhaust pipe behind the cab. Mindy's little gun popped and popped, bullets spanging musically off the plow. At the last moment Jamie Close dropped her Bushmaster and scrambled away from the ambulance, clambering on all fours across the sidewalk, to take shelter behind a telephone pole.

The Freightliner hit the ambulance, picked it up off the asphalt, and tossed it across the yard of 10 Verdun Avenue. Mindy Skilling was still behind it and she went along for the ride, was under it when it rolled on top of her and slid across the lawn. The ruin of the ambulance wrenched up gra.s.s and earth, left a wide, smoking skid mark behind it. One of Mindy Skilling's boots was squashed deep into the dirt, but the rest of her was beneath the deformed wreck. She had said it was hard to die in front of an audience, but in the end she had made it look easy.

"Who else wants to be a hero?" the Marlboro Man's voice boomed from the loudspeakers. "We got all night, plenty of ammo, and the next best thing to a tank. You can come on out with your hands up and play Let's Make a Deal, or you can try and fight it out. But let me tell you, if you decide to make a sc.r.a.p of it, not one of you will live to see the light of day. Does everyone understand me?"

No one spoke. Harper couldn't find her own voice. She had thought nothing could be louder than the sound of the .50 caliber, lighting up the street, but the Freightliner crashing into the ambulance had been like a seventy-five-gun broadside from a ship of the line. She felt incapable of even beginning a thought, let alone completing one. One moment ticked by, and then another, and finally it was the Marlboro Man who spoke up yet again-only this time there was a distracted uncertainty in his voice.

"The f.u.c.k is that?" he said, his voice muted. Harper wasn't sure he meant to broadcast that one.