The Fireman: A Novel Part 39

Music played, tinny and flat through the little iPhone speakers, barely audible over the rain, but no less lovely for all of that. It was a song Harper used to perform herself when she was eight years old, using a wooden spoon as the microphone, sliding across the kitchen linoleum in her Miss Piggy slippers. Ric Ocasek sang that this one girl was just what he needed, over a melody that sproing-sproinged along like a Slinky walking down a staircase.

Photos loaded, but slowly.

The first showed a vast gradual slope of waist-high gra.s.s, yellowing in the autumn. The ocean was a sheet of battered steel in the background. Martha Quinn stood in the center of a long line of children, five on either side of her, her arms around the waists of the two closest. She was as bony as ever and even at nearly sixty, her face was impish and kind, her eyes narrowed in a way that suggested she had a good joke she wanted to tell. The wind blew her platinum hair back from her high brow. Her sleeves were rolled up to show the Dragonscale on her forearms, a black-and-gold scrollwork that brought to mind ancient writings in Kanji.

As the song faded, a second photograph loaded. A doctor in a white lab coat, a pretty Asian woman with a clipboard in one hand, crouched to be at eye level with a scrumptious nine-year-old girl. The little girl clutched a stuffed racc.o.o.n doll to her chest and her nose was wrinkled in a shriek of laughter. Her bare, chubby arms were lightly scribbled over with 'scale. They were in the white, clean, sterile hall of a hospital unit somewhere. There was a sign on the wall in the background, blurred, almost out of focus. It wasn't an important part of the image and so Harper saw it without really noticing it . . . then narrowed her eyes and looked again. When she registered what it said, the intensity of her emotions drove all the air out of her. Just two words: * Pediatrics * Maternity The third photo began to load as the song faded out. A voice began to speak-a voice Harper knew only from 1980s retrospectives on VH1 and MTV. The volume was already so low, Harper could barely hear Martha Quinn over the furious tinny drumming of rain on the ceiling, but out of caution she turned it down still more and bent close to listen.

"Whoo, h.e.l.lo, was that just what you needed? It was just what I needed. Well, it was one of the things I needed. It's a pretty long list. I NEED to know that Michael Fa.s.sbender is still alive, because, h.e.l.lO! That man was right in so many ways. He was setting ladies on fire way before the spore got loose, you know what I mean? I NEED new episodes of Doctor Who, but I'm not holding my breath, because I bet everyone who made that show is dead or hiding. Is there still an England out there? I hope you didn't burn up, British Isles! Where would the world be without your epic contributions to culture: Duran Duran, Idris Elba, and Love Actually? Drop me an e-mail, England, let me know you're still hanging in there!"

The next image showed a large tent with some folding tables set up in it. A processing center. The tables were manned by the sort of broad-shouldered, blue-haired old ladies that worked high school cafeterias . . . although they wore the bright yellow s.p.a.cesuits that were standard for anyone who might come in contact with Ebola, anthrax, or Dragonscale. One of the stout old ladies was offering a stack of blankets, pajamas, and forms to a kind of family: an old man with bushy gray eyebrows, a fatigued-looking woman of maybe thirty, and two little boys with bright coppery hair.

"I need peach pie. BAD. I am sorry to say there is no peach pie here on Free Wolf Island, but we do have our own apple orchard, and boy, I can't wait until it's apple-picking season and I can go out and get myself a basket of Granny Smiths, Cortlands, Honeycrisps, Honey Boo Boos, Honey Grahams, Graham Nortons, Ed Nortons . . . all that good stuff. No bad apples here! I wish there was a fruit named after me. I wonder what a Quinn would taste like. Probably it would taste like 1987. The best thing about radio is you can imagine me just like I looked in 1987, every man's fantasy. And by 'every man,' I mean shy thirteen-year-olds who liked to read comics and listen to the Cure. ANYHOO! I need more solar panels. I only have four lousy solar panels! It's okay, that's better than none. But as you know, I can only broadcast for three hours a day and then our transponder transpires to expire. A heads-up: you are probably not hearing me live, but on a recorded loop. We upload a new loop every day, around eleven A.M., give or take twenty-four hours."

Nick couldn't hear Martha Quinn, but he could see the images loading on the screen, and he bent forward, eyes as wide as one who has been mesmerized.

"What else do I need? I need you to get your b.u.t.t up to Machias and come on over, because we got cocoa! And barrels of walnuts! And a former TV weather anchor who makes amazing fresh bread in a wood-fired stove! Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about Free Wolf Island, located seventeen miles off the coast of Maine, a place where you can safely settle if you-yes, you!-happen to be the lucky winner of a case of Dragonscale. We've got a bed for you. And that's not all! We've got a federally operated medical facility, where you can receive cutting-edge experimental treatments for your condition. As I speak to you, I myself, Martha Quinn, am lubed up in a cutting-edge experimental salve that smells and looks exactly like sheep s.h.i.t, and guess what! I have not burned alive all day! I haven't even had a hot flash! My last hot flash was in 2009, and that was before the infection even got started."

Now a photo of an island seen from off the coast: a ridge of green, a beach of blue stone, a scattering of New Englandstyle cottages along a single dirt road. The sun was just coming up or just setting and it cast a gold flare upon the dark water.

"No one is saying the word cure. Do not even whisper the word cure. There are six hundred sick people on this island, and what they are mostly sick of-besides the Draco tryptowhatever-is getting their hopes up over the latest treatment. But I will say that our last death by fire was almost twelve weeks ago. That's right: six hundred infected and just one dead in the last three months."

A final image showed a smiling elderly pair with a child. The man was gangly, weathered, with high, almost patrician cheekbones and a weary relief in his eyes. His wife was small, round, the corners of her eyes deeply grooved with laugh lines. The man had a five-year-old boy up on one shoulder. They wore fall clothes: flannel shirts, jeans, knit hats. The woman had Dragonscale scrawled all over the backs of her hands. The caption read: Sally, Neal, and George Wannamaker arrive at the Machias Processing Center and prepare to depart for Free Wolf Island. Do YOU have friends and family on the island? Click for a photo gallery of the-and here a counter showed the number 602-people to receive shelter and comfort in the Free Wolf Island Quarantine and Research Zone.

"When you get to Machias-and you will get here, you have to believe that; I got here and so will you-you will be directed to a processing tent. They'll take care of you. They'll give you a pillow, a blanket, a pair of cute paper slippers, and a hot meal. They'll put you on a boat and send you right over to us, where you will be fed, clothed, and housed. All that, plus the opportunity to rub elbows with incredible celebrities like myself! And a guy who did the weather for a channel in Augusta, Maine! What are you waiting for? Pack your stuff and get your little b.u.t.t here. Your bed is made. Time to sleep in it.

"I'm going to spin another song, and then I'll be back with a list of the latest safe routes from Canada . . ."

Nick pointed to the picture of the island, and then asked Harper, in sign, "Is this a real place?"

"You bet," she said in gestures. "A good place for sick people."

"When do we go?" Nick's hands asked.

"Soon," Harper said, unconsciously speaking aloud while saying it with a gesture at the same time.

In the bed behind her, Father Storey sighed heavily and in a voice of quiet, gentle encouragement, said, "Soon."

4.

When Harper's pulse had settled down, she checked Father Storey's-holding his thin wrist in her fingers and monitoring the thump of the blood in his arteries. His heartbeat was slight and not altogether steady, but she thought it had a little more zip than the day before. When she stroked a fingernail up his bare foot he curled his toes and made a soft snort of amus.e.m.e.nt. When she had tested him that way last week, she might as well have been tickling a loaf of bread.

She couldn't ask Nick if he had heard Father Storey speak, of course-the only time his deafness had ever frustrated her. She wanted desperately for someone, anyone, to have heard him. She considered sending for Carol. Perhaps Tom would respond to his daughter's voice. By some accounts, he had before. Even if he didn't stir again, Carol had a right to know her father had spoken today.

But after turning the thought over, she rejected it. Carol would rejoice to hear her father was recovering-but the rejoicing could wait. Harper wanted to talk to him before anyone else did. She wanted to see what he remembered, if anything, about the night he had been clubbed in the head. And she wanted to warn him about what the strain of the last months had done to Carol, how the winter had left her ravaged and feverish and mistrustful. He needed to know about the slaughter on Verdun Avenue, and children marching around camp with rifles, and people forced to carry stones in their mouths to shut them up.

No: in truth, Tom didn't need to know those things. Harper needed him to know those things. She wanted the old man back to make things right again. How she had missed him.

She sat with him the rest of the night, his hand in hers, stroking his knuckles. She spoke to him sometimes. "You hibernated through the whole winter, just like a bear, Tom Storey. The icicles are dripping. The snow is almost all gone. Time to wake up and crawl out of your cave. Nick and Allie and Carol and John are waiting for you. I'm waiting, too."

But he did not speak again, and at some point close to dawn, she dozed off with his hand in her lap.

Nick woke her an hour later. The rising sun shot through the mist outside, turned it shades of lemon and meringue, sweet as pie.

"He looked at me," Nick told her with his hands. "He looked at me and smiled. He even winked before he went to sleep again. He's coming back."

Yes, Harper thought. Like Aslan, he was coming back and he was bringing the spring with him.

Just in time, she thought. He's coming back just in time and everything is going to be okay.

Later, she would remember thinking that and laugh. It was either that or cry.

5.

Harper needed to clear her head, needed to do some quality thinking, so she walked out of the infirmary into the bitter chill. No one stopped her. They were all in the chapel together. Harper could hear them singing, could see their mystery lights flickering around the edges of the closed red doors.

The funny thing was that they were all singing "Chim Chim Cher-ee," which didn't seem like the kind of rag they'd go for in chapel. Almost everyone in the congregation had seen someone they loved devoured by fire, lived in fear of burning themselves. But now their voices rose together in hopeful praise of ashes and soot, voices that quivered with a kind of hysterical delight. She left them behind.

The air was clean and sharp and the walking was easy. Harper had left her big belly, and the baby inside of it, back at the infirmary, needed a break from being pregnant. It felt good to be thin again. She let her thoughts wander and in no time at all found she had reached the place where the dirt track from camp joined Little Harbor Road. That was farther than she had meant to go, farther than was necessarily safe. She glanced at the rusting, battered blue school bus, expecting to be yelled at by whoever was on watch. A gaunt, dark figure slumped behind the steering wheel. She guessed whoever it was had to be dozing.

She was going to turn around and walk back when she saw the man in the road.

There was a guy right in the middle of Little Harbor Road, not a hundred feet away, pulling himself arm over arm, like a soldier wriggling under barbed wire on a battlefield. Or, no: really, he was pulling himself along like someone whose legs didn't work. If anyone came along in a hurry, he was going to get run over. Aside from that, it was awful, watching him struggle along across the icy tarmac.

"Hey!" Harper called. "Hey, you!"

She lifted the chain draped across the entrance to Camp Wyndham and started briskly toward him. It was important to get this done-deal with the man in the road-and get back out of sight before a car turned up. She shouted at him once more. He lifted his head, but the only streetlight was behind him, so his face remained in shadow: a round, fleshy, fat face, hair thinning on top. Harper hurried the last few steps to him and knelt down.

"Do you need medical attention?" she asked. "Can you stand up? I'm a nurse. If you think you can stand up, give me your hand, and I'll walk you to my infirmary."

Nelson Heinrich lifted his head and gave her a sunny smile. His teeth were red with blood and someone had removed his nose, leaving a pair of red slots in the ragged flesh. "Oh, that's all right, Harper. I've made it this far. I can lead them the rest of the way without your help."

Harper recoiled, fell back into the road, sitting down hard. "Nelson. Oh, G.o.d, Nelson, what happened to you?"

"What do you think?" Nelson said. "Your husband happened to me. And now he's going to happen to you."

The headlights came on down the street, flashing over both of them. The Freightliner awoke with a boom of combustion and a grinding of gears.

Nelson said, "Go on, Harper. Go back." He winked. "I'll see you soon."

She held her hands up over her face to shield her eyes from the light and when she lowered them she was awake, sitting up on her elbows in bed in the infirmary and having another contraction.

"These are dreams about the baby coming," Harper said to herself, in a low voice. "Not about Nelson Heinrich leading a Cremation Crew to camp. Nelson Heinrich is dead. He was torn apart by machine-gun fire. You saw him dead in the road. You saw him."

It was funny how the more she said it to herself, the less she believed it.

6.

It was five days before Father Storey spoke again.

"Michael?" the old man muttered, in a muzzy tone of bemus.e.m.e.nt and curiosity, and a moment later Mike Lindqvist pushed the curtain back and ducked into the ward.

"Did you call for me, ma'am?" he asked Harper.

The sound of Father Storey's voice jackknifed Harper's pulse, made her blood strum with surprise. She opened her mouth to tell Michael that it had been the old man, then thought better of it. Michael would carry the news to Allie and who knew where that would lead.

"I did," Harper said. "I need your help. I need you to carry a note to Allie."

"That's no trouble," he said.

"I'm afraid I require a bit more than that. I want to get together with the Fireman again. And I want Allie to go with me. Allie and Renee and Don Lewiston. You should be there, too, if it can be managed. And-if at all possible-Gil Cline and the Mazz. Is there a way . . . any way . . . such a thing could be done?"

Michael paled. He rested one cheek of his a.s.s against the edge of the counter and lowered his head and plucked at the copper wires of his little goatee. Finally he looked up.

"What's this meeting about?"

"The possibility of leaving. The possibility of staying. It's past time for some of us to make plans about our future. Father Storey is stable for the moment. But if his condition changes suddenly, we'll want to be ready."

"For the worst?"

"For whatever."

Michael said, "If Carol finds you all out on the island together, making secret plans with the Fireman, she'll lock every one of you up. Or worse."

"We could face worse even if we do nothing."

Michael swiped one hand across his freckled forehead and bowed his head in thought again. At last he nodded, uneasily.

"I know how to do it. It isn't exactly like breaking them out of San Quentin. Renee visits the prisoners for lunch every day . . . that's when they meet for their little book club. That's the only time those boys ever come out of the meat locker. Renee tidied up a far corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt, put down carpet and some easy chairs, so they'd have a nice place to read and talk. While they're meeting, whoever is on guard steps into the meat locker to clean up. Empty the bucket they pee in during the day. Gather up the dirty clothes. That sort of thing. So maybe while he's in there, the Mazz comes back, says, 'Oops, I forgot my book.' And then on his way out closes the meat-locker door. The guard is stuck in there for the whole hour. He can kick and shout all he wants. That meat locker is pretty soundproof with the door clapped shut. They'll never hear him during a noisy lunch, not with the trapdoor closed.

"But Renee and the men would have to walk out past all the people in the cafeteria."

Michael shook his head. "There's another way out of the bas.e.m.e.nt. There's some steps that lead up to the parking lot out back. I guess that's where the trucks brought in supplies. Those doors are locked from the outside with two padlocks, but I could make sure they were unlocked. Renee and Gil and the Mazz would have to be back by one A.M., when their little book club wraps up for the day. Renee lets the guard out, says, 'Sorry! We didn't know you were stuck in here, couldn't hear you over all the noise from people above us.' Whoever pulls meat-locker duty will be some p.i.s.sed, but I bet they won't even tell Ben Patchett. Too embarra.s.sed. Also, who wants to wind up sucking a rock for two days, when no one got hurt and everything turned out fine?"

Nick sat watching them both, his knees drawn up under his chin. He couldn't know what they were talking about, didn't read lips, but his face was as ill as if he were watching the two of them handle sticks of TNT.

"Good, Michael. That's good," Harper said. "It's simple. With this kind of thing, the simpler the better, don't you think?"

He ran his thumb along the tight twists of his beard. "I think it's just great . . . as long as the prisoners don't decide to knock Renee down and run for it as soon as they're out of the bas.e.m.e.nt."

"They wouldn't need to knock her down," Harper said. "If they decided to run, Renee would run with them. But I think . . . I think she can convince them they have a better chance of long-term survival if they ally themselves with the Fireman. They don't just want to escape, they want to last." She had not forgotten about the way Gil spoke of the Fireman, with a mix of quiet admiration and something approaching reverence.

"Yeah, well. Maybe. But maybe when they get out of the bas.e.m.e.nt, it would be best if Allie was waiting for them out in the parking lot, with a rifle over her shoulder. She doesn't have to point it at them. It's enough just for her to have it on her. When Allie isn't confined to the girls' dorm, she's usually doing one punishment a.s.signment or another. I could arrange it so she has to scrub pans that night. Ben Patchett works out the daily punishment details, but he lets me hand them out. So Allie collects all the pans from the kitchen and goes outside and finds the gun I've left for her. She's waiting by the bas.e.m.e.nt doors when Renee comes out with the prisoners. She'd have to be back by one A.M., too."

Anxiety tickled Harper's stomach. It seemed like there was a lot that could go wrong.

"What about Don Lewiston?" Harper said.

"He's easy. He spends most of the night down along the water, tending to his fishing poles. No one minds him. He's not under observation. He can meet you at the dock, row you across."

"And you?" Harper asked. "Will you come, Michael? I'd like it if you were there. I think Allie would, too."

He showed her a small, apologetic smile and gave his head a curt shake. "Nope. Better not. I'll make sure I've been a.s.signed guard duty here in the infirmary, so I can slip you out and cover for you while you're gone. I don't need to be a part of your conference, anyway. Allie can fill me in later." He looked sidelong at Nick and said, "Take the kid, too. Bet he'd love to see his sister. And John."

Harper said, "I'm fighting the urge to hug you very, very hard, Michael Lindqvist."

"Why fight it?" he asked.

7.

But in the end Nick didn't want to go.

When the hour came, he was sitting in the worn-out chair beside Father Storey's cot, reading a comic book: a man made of flame did battle with an enormous yellow-and-orange robot that resembled a walking Freightliner, headlights for eyes and shovels for hands. He said he wanted to stay with Tom.