The Fireman: A Novel Part 49

She turned toward the Fireman and found Gillian Neighbors standing in her way. Harper lifted her left hand and opened her palm, as if to give a high five. Instead she threw a plate of fire, like a pie in the face. Gillian screamed and grabbed at her eyes and fell back and was gone.

A rock struck the small of Harper's back, a sharp momentary pain that quickly faded.

Harper reached up with one hand, found the duct tape around her head, and yanked. It did not tear free so much as slide away in a melted slurry. She opened her mouth and the rock in it fell into her left palm. She squeezed it in her fist and it began to heat, the surface cracking and fissuring and turning white.

Remember the stone in her fist.

Michael reached up to grasp Carol's wrist like Romeo reaching over the side of the balcony to take Juliet's hand, you and me, babe, how 'bout it?

Gilbert Cline was off the ground, turning and sinking his fist into Ben Patchett's stomach. Ben doubled over and seemed to shrink, and Harper thought of a baker pounding risen dough to make it collapse.

Another rock struck Harper in the hip and she staggered. Allie fell in beside her, restoring Harper's balance with a touch of her shoulder. Allie wore a muzzle of blood. She grinned through her split lips. Her wrists, bound in hairy twine, were trapped behind her back. Harper touched them with a hand sheathed in a white glove of fire. The twine fell away in twisting orange worms.

Harper and Allie were at the Fireman's side in three more steps. Harper grabbed him beneath the armpits, buried her hands into the flame-r.e.t.a.r.dant material of his coat. Her gloves of flame went out with a gush of black smoke, to reveal the lace of Dragonscale wound around her forearms. The spore was still lit a feverish reddish-gold. No sooner had the flames gone out than her whole body went thick and strange with gooseflesh and she felt so light-headed she almost toppled over, and Allie had to steady her with a hand on her shoulder.

Blood soaked through the burlap sack over John's head, staining it in two places, one at his mouth, the other on the left side of his head. Allie yanked it off to reveal the face beneath. His cheekbone was split open, and his upper lip was swollen, drawn up in a b.l.o.o.d.y sneer, but Harper had been braced for worse. His eyes rolled this way and that-and then his gaze found her. Her and Allie.

"Can you get up?" Harper asked. "We're in trouble."

"What elf is new?" he said, blood spitting from his mouth. He glanced from woman to woman with a kind of blurred dismay. "Don't boffer with me. Go."

"Oh, will you shut up," Harper said, yanking him to his feet.

But he wasn't listening anymore. The Fireman squeezed Harper's shoulder and pointed, his mouth opening wide into a blood-rimmed ring and his eyes straining in his sockets. He pointed into the sky.

"The hand of G.o.d!" someone was screaming. "It's the hand of G.o.d!"

Harper looked up and saw a great flaming hand, the size of a falling station wagon. It dropped into the center of the ring of stones and fell upon the granite bench where Carol had been standing only a moment before. Now Carol was underneath it and Michael was holding her in his arms.

That enormous burning hand struck the ground hard enough to make the earth shudder. It exploded into vast wings of flame, which billowed up across the inner circle of standing stones and scorched the granite black. Gra.s.s sizzled, turned to orange threads, and burned away. A blast of hot air boomed out from the center of the circle, hard enough to knock Harper into John's lap, hard enough to stagger the crowd, to send the front row of people reeling back into the line behind them.

There were screams of anguish and cries of terror. Emily Waterman was knocked down by the scattering, stumbling adults around her, and a 212-pound former plumber named Josh Martingale stepped on her left wrist. Her arm broke with an audible crack.

The burning hand from the sky went out almost the moment it slammed into the ground, leaving behind only burning gra.s.s and the smoking stone bench, Carol and Michael cowering beneath it in each other's arms.

"How?" Harper asked. "Who-"

"Nick," the Fireman said.

For a few moments the congregation of Carol Storey had all been shining together, in a bright harmony of rage and triumph, but no one was lit up anymore, and they blundered into one another with all the grace of panicked steers. To the north, looking back toward the infirmary, a gap opened in the crowd. People glanced around, saw what was approaching, and fled. Bill Hetworth, a twenty-two-year-old former engineering student who had been in camp for four months, saw what was marching toward them and his bladder let go, darkening the front of his jeans. Carrie Smalls, a fourteen-year-old who had been in Camp Wyndham for just three weeks, fell to her knees and began babbling to "my Lord in heaving, owls be thy name."

Nick crossed the ground toward them, his head on fire, his eyes like coals, his hands claws of flame, trailing a long black gown of smoke.

6.

They parted, a human sea before a Moses wrapped in a robe of flame. As he stalked toward them, he was already letting himself go out. The blue corona of fire that surrounded his head guttered, flickered through different hues-emerald, then palest yellow-before dying in a puff of white smoke. His eyes continued to burn, however, remained hot, blind embers.

"Come on," the Fireman said. "Thiff is our cue to go." When he attempted a fricative, his busted lips blew a fine spray of blood.

Harper and Allie pulled the Fireman to his feet, each of them taking one of his hands. He had no balance, no strength in his legs, and almost immediately started to plunge forward. Harper and Allie steadied him and he put his arms over their shoulders.

"Get us behind Nick," the Fireman said. "They're terrified of him. They're at least as terrified of him as they'ff ever been of me."

They only got two steps, though, Harper and Allie helping the Fireman along, when they heard the blast of an air horn, a bellowing bronk-bronk that seemed to go right through Harper's chest. She froze and glanced wildly around, staring up the road, toward the crest of the hill.

A pair of headlights came on, bright blue xenon headlights casting an arctic glare above an enormous snow-wing plow.

They shone upon a man, standing eight feet before the truck, a guy in a filthy sweater with reindeer leaping across a green background. This man had a noose around his neck, the hairy rope leading back to the grille beyond the snowplow. His hands were tied behind his back. The headlights turned his wispy white hair to filaments of steel.

Those headlights also fell upon Mark Mazzuch.e.l.li. The Mazz was almost fifty yards away, moving up the middle of the dirt road, had apparently decided he had spent enough time luxuriating in the pleasures of Camp Wyndham and was on his way to greener pastures. But when the lights blinked on he took a last staggering step and then went still.

"The f.u.c.k is this?" the Mazz said, his voice carrying in the sudden hush.

Another pair of headlights blinked on, and then a third. One set belonged to an open-top Humvee. The other lights blazed from the front of a Chevy Silverado Intimidator, on six jacked-up tires. Blinding floodlights flashed on above the cab. There were at least two other pickup trucks down the road behind them.

Nelson Heinrich, the limping man in the noose, looked over his shoulder into the lights.

"See!" he screamed. "See, I told you! I told you they'd be here! All of 'em! Two hundred infected at least! I told you I could help you! Now you have to let me go! You promised! You promised you'd be done with me!"

An amplified voice-there were speakers mounted on top of the Intimidator, along with floodlights-boomed into the night. Harper knew it. They all knew it. The Marlboro Man was famous up and down the seacoast.

"A promise is a promise," the Marlboro Man said. "And ain't no one can say the Marlboro Man don't keep his word. Someone cut Mr. Heinrich loose."

A man in fatigues stood up from the pa.s.senger seat of the Humvee. He had a Bushmaster and he steadied the barrel on the top edge of the windshield before he began to fire.

7.

Nelson Heinrich arched his spine, as if he had been struck across the small of the back with a steel rod. Red smoke burst from his chest in puffs, made a crimson mist in the air around him. He tried to run, got two steps, and then the rope circling his neck jerked him off his feet and he hit the dirt.

The Mazz turned and ran, too. He took one step, and a second, and then bullets shredded his legs. Other bullets. .h.i.t his back with a sound like rain falling on a drum. The last slug caught a shoulder as he fell and spun him around as he dropped into the road, so he landed faceup to the smoky night sky.

The Humvee took off, banging over the rutted road, raising a cloud of white chalk. It accelerated into the darkness between the church and the cafeteria, cutting off the path of escape in that direction. The headlights lurched across the muddy ground and fell upon Nick. The Hummer did not slow, but accelerated, rushing toward him. Harper screamed his name. He didn't hear, of course.

The Humvee went over the Mazz with a crunch and a pop and jolted as if it had slammed into a deep pothole. Nick turned, almost casually, as in a dream. He raised his right hand. Sparks whirled up off it, rising in a funnel into the night, into the stars, a thousand hot stars flying up off his hand. Only instead of winking out as they climbed, in the usual manner of sparks, they brightened and swelled. They rose into a flock of burning sparrows, not one of them any bigger than a golf ball, a hundred darting birds of flame, and then they dived.

They hit the Humvee in a spattering rain of red light when it was still fifty feet away. The burning darts struck in a flurry of wet-sounding smacks and cracked the windshield; hit the men in the front seat and turned them into screaming effigies; lashed the tires and made spinning wheels of fire; pelted a box of ammunition and set it off with a rattling thud and a burst of strobing white lights.

The Humvee swerved to the left. The right edge of the fender clipped Nick on the way by and threw him aside. The Humvee kept going, skewing left. The pa.s.senger-side tires struck a half-buried white rock. The Hummer rose up on two wheels, then turned over with a shattering crash. A burning corpse-the driver-vaulted through the night.

Allie screamed Nick's name again and again. She couldn't move. She was stuck in place. She tried to go to him, but the Fireman tightened the arm over her shoulders.

"Ben will get him, Ben-" the Fireman said, holding Allie against him for half a moment before she twisted free and began to sprint for her brother.

Ben Patchett was well ahead of her, though. He ran in a shambling waddle, but for all that he was already two-thirds of the way to the boy on the ground. In one hand he held his pistol and he shot blindly at the Freightliner. A bullet hit the plow and threw blue sparks. Ben dropped to one knee, gathered the smoking boy up in his arms, and slung him over his shoulder. He fired again, just once, then began to run back, not so fast this time.

There were men standing behind the snow-wing plow, using it for cover. Muzzles flashed. Guns thudded. Ben stumbled, reeled off course, kept going. Harper couldn't see where the first bullet hit him. The second struck him in the right shoulder and half turned him around. It seemed sure he would go down, or drop Nick. He did neither. He steadied himself and came on, in a sort of exhausted jog, a man at the end of a long run on a hot day. The third bullet to hit him blew off the top of his head. Harper could only think of a wave dashing itself to foam against a rock. His skull came off in a blast of red foam, hair and bone and brain scattering into the darkness.

And still he jogged on, another step, and a second, and by the time he fell to his knees, Allie was right there, her arms outstretched. Ben pa.s.sed Nick to her almost gently, settling him into her arms with an unhurried care, as if losing the top half of his skull were a matter of no consequence. Before Ben dropped onto his face, Harper had a last look at his expression. It seemed to her he was smiling.

"Run!" Carol screamed. "Run for the church! Everyone run!" She was standing on the stone bench again, her arms raised out to either side, lit from behind by headlights. Bullets rattled and thwacked on the towering stones all around her and once Harper thought she saw the hem of Carol's robe jerk, as if something had snapped at it. Not a single bullet struck her. Smoke rose from the blackened rock beneath her feet. She looked like an ill.u.s.tration from the Old Testament, a mad prophet in a scene of midnight desolation, calling for G.o.d to deliver a stroke of redemptive violence.

The people of Camp Wyndham were already on their way, the whole ma.s.s of them. They stampeded for the stairs, 170 of them, shoving and shrieking. Emily Waterman, who was still on the ground, was stepped on by half a dozen people. The last to trample over her, a woman named Sheila Duckworth, a former dentist's a.s.sistant, put her foot on the back of Emily's head, driving her face down into the mud, which was where the eleven-year-old suffocated. Her neck was broken by then, and she couldn't lift her face to breathe.

Harper looked around for Renee and saw her at the far corner of the church. Gilbert stood with her, pulling Renee along by one arm. They weren't going into the chapel, but around the side and behind. Renee's eyes were damp and frightened and pleading and it looked like she wanted to stay, but Gil hauled her on, and Harper thought, Go, just go. It felt like a deep breath of clean, fresh air to see Renee slip away and out of sight. It was too far to go with John-John could barely stand-but Renee and Gil had already made it, could escape down the hill and into the trees. Maybe they would find their way to a kayak, paddle out to Don Lewiston, if he was out there somewhere, watching from offsh.o.r.e. She hoped they did. She hoped they didn't look back.

Michael was out from under the altar, reaching up to take Carol's hands. She paid him no mind. She stood there screaming for her congregation to run, and when he caught at her wrists, she pulled them free. Michael grabbed her about the waist and lifted her bodily off the stone. He turned and ran with her, much as Ben had run with Nick only a moment before. He ran for the chapel. Most of the rest of camp had already shoved their way in through the red doors.

"Come on," the Fireman said. "The church."

His legs buckled and Harper lugged him back up.

"No," Harper said. "That's a trap-"

"It's shelter, now go."

Her insides tightened, as if being squeezed by a steel brace. Her abdomen hurt so badly it took her breath away and she wondered, wildly, if this was it, if the stress had induced labor a month early.

Then she pushed the thought down and began to make her stumbling way toward the chapel. The Fireman pedaled his feet, mimicking the act of walking, but for all that, she was carrying him. Allie fell in next to them with Nick in her arms. Blood ran from the tip of her chin, but her lips were open in a kind of savage grin.

They thudded up the steps together: Allie carrying Nick, Harper carrying the Fireman, and Michael hauling Carol. No sooner had they reached the top of the steps than the stairs exploded, bullets chewing them up and filling the night with the sweet odor of fresh-sawn wood.

That Chevy Intimidator-a flaming WKLL decal on the pa.s.senger-side door-went off-road, booming down the hill, swinging around the outer edge of the ring of stones. It pulled in on the southern side of the chapel, in the narrow strip of open ground between the church and the woods. A fully automatic gun of some sort rattled from the flatbed. Harper didn't know what it was, but it had a flat, plasticky sound that was different from the Bushmasters.

Two other pickups slammed over the open ground to the north, roaring into position to cover the other side of the building. The Freightliner remained at the top of the hill, idling in place, as if Jakob were waiting and watching to see where he might be of the most use.

Gail Neighbors stood just inside the entrance at one of the great red doors. The wispy, elfin boy who looked like young David Bowie was at the other. They were already swinging the doors closed as Harper and the Fireman lurched inside, into dimness, sobbing, shouts, and terror. The doors banged shut behind them-and never opened again.

8.

Michael bent forward and gently-reverently-set Carol back on her feet in the shadows of the foyer.

"Are you hurt?" he cried, his voice cracking. "Oh, G.o.d, please-please-don't be shot. I don't know what I'd do."

Her eyes rolled in the way of a panicked horse's. She hardly seemed to know him. "Yes. Unhurt. The Bright. I think it was the Bright! It turned their bullets aside. It was like a force field made of love. I think it protected you, too!"

Harper cleared her throat and nudged Carol gently aside with one elbow. In her left fist was a rock bigger than a golf ball, the rock Jamie Close had shoved in her mouth fifteen impossible minutes before. It was smoking by now, had been heating steadily in her Dragonscale-scrawled hand. She swept it down across Michael Lindqvist Jr.'s jaw, knocking in two of his teeth.

"Nope," Harper said. "No force field on him." As he doubled over and sank down, she brought her knee up into his broken face. At the same time she clubbed him in the shoulder with the molten rock. Sparks flew. The shoulder popped out of its socket with a sound like someone pulling a cork.

She could've kept hitting him. She didn't know herself anymore. Her arm was operating on its own and her arm wanted to kill him. But it would've meant getting down on her knees, and she was having little contractions and that seemed like a lot of effort. Besides, the Fireman had an arm around her, and while he was too weak to pull her back, he was at least trying.

"Wait," she said. "I'm okay. I'm all done."

She thought she was, too, but then he let go of her and she booted Michael in the neck.

"He was a sweet old man," Harper said, as the Fireman tugged her out of kicking range. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

Carol gave them a bewildered, wondering look. One side of her face was pink and swollen, the skin peeling off her ear. The falling hand of G.o.d had given her an instant sunburn on one cheek.

"And you!" Harper said to her. "I guess your force field was never switched on when Mikey was in the mood to finger your p.u.s.s.y."

Carol flinched as if Harper had slapped her. Her left cheek began to turn the same shade as the side of her face that had been burned.

"You can kill me now if you want," Carol said. "You will only be sending me back into the arms of my father. He waits for me in the Bright. Everyone we've lost waits in the Bright. That's our only escape now anyway."

Harper said, "I'm not going to kill you, and I never was. I don't need to kill you. The people outside are going to take care of that for me. This place is a box and they've got all the guns. But we might have another five or ten minutes. While it lasts, you think about this. Michael killed your father . . . for you. To save you. And himself. Your father was going to send you away for what you did to Harold Cross. Mikey bashed his head in to keep him from telling the camp about the way you set Harold up and had him shot. When you sent Harold to his grave? You sent your father into the dirt with him. One led naturally to the other. You take that into the Bright with you."

Harper's voice dropped steadily as she spoke, and by the time she had said the last of it, she was trembling, her voice little more than a husky whisper. She was not, after all, really good at being cruel to people, even people who had it coming. Carol's frightened, pale, confused face sickened her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her skin had a gray cast beneath the pink of her burns. Harper thought she finally looked like a grown-up: a washed-out, weary, and not terribly attractive woman who had done some hard living.

Carol turned her baffled gaze toward Allie, who stood there holding Nick in both arms. When she saw her niece, her face shriveled, and she began to weep.

"Allie," she said, and held out her arms. "Let me hold Nick. Let me see him. Please."

Allie spat in Carol's face. Carol blinked, her cheeks and brow dappled in red drops. She held up her hands defensively and Allie spat on them, too, a shower of mucus and stringy blood.

"f.u.c.k I will," Allie said through her slashed mouth. "I don't want you touching him. You got something worse than Dragonscale and I don't want him anywhere near it, in case it's contagious." Blood flew on every other syllable. The gash across her lips was a bad one. Harper thought it would need st.i.tches and was likely to scar badly.

"We don't have time for this," the Fireman said. "We need to get up in the bell tower. We can make a fight of it from up there."

Harper thought this was the most hopeless thing she had ever heard, and opened her mouth to say so, but Jamie spoke first.

"There's at least one rifle up there," she said. Her face was filthy and she was shuddering furiously, although whether from shock or terror, Harper couldn't have said. "And a box of sh.e.l.ls. There's always at least one gun there for whoever's on watch up in the steeple."

Jamie Close was a harsh little savage, but she was n.o.body's fool. She could grasp the situation as well as they could and had shifted her loyalties to the most likely survivors with the businesslike efficiency of a bank teller making change.