The Fireman: A Novel Part 58

"Allie, get off the tree!" John shouted.

Allie cupped a hand to her ear and shook her head. Can't hear you. Harper could barely hear John herself over the fire truck's idling engine.

Harper jumped up on the running board beside the Fireman and rang the bra.s.s bell, hard and loud as she could. Allie read Harper's face, leapt off the tree, and came running.

"In the truck, in the truck!" John shouted. "Quick, now, I need to back up."

Allie s.n.a.t.c.hed Nick off the ground, arms around his thighs, lifted him off the road, and hustled for the rear of the fire truck.

John gave them perhaps ten seconds to climb in and then he threw the fire truck into reverse, gunned the engine. The tree caught the truck and anch.o.r.ed it in place. The tires spun. Harper stood on the running board, clutching the open door with one hand and John's arm with the other.

Jakob's Freightliner was less than a mile away, sun glaring bleakly off the splintered windshield. Harper could hear the thin whine as it accelerated.

John applied more pressure and the tree rocked, turned over, and began to slide through the ash. Branches snapped and broke, littering the road.

A half mile away, Jakob's snow-wing plow clipped the back end of the Walmart truck and tore the trailer to shreds, launched it up and out of his way with a metallic crash.

The tree caught on a fissure in the road, wouldn't budge. John cursed. He put the truck in drive, rolled forward ten feet, and slammed it into reverse again. He ran straight back, tires shrieking. Harper held on, clenching her teeth, her pulse sick and fast, bracing herself for the jolt. The larch tree jounced up in the air and crashed back down, boughs shattering and flying, rolling far enough to one side to clear a lane.

"I'll unhook us," Harper said. She jumped down and ran around to the front of the truck.

"Hurry, Willowes," the Fireman called to her. The sound of the Freightliner rose to a bellowing roar. "Get in, get in."

Harper slipped the towline free from the front hitch and ran for the pa.s.senger side.

"Go!" she yelled, grabbing the pa.s.senger-side door and stepping onto the running board.

The fire truck lumbered forward. Thick branches cracked and shattered under the tires. By the time Harper pulled herself part of the way up into the pa.s.senger seat, he was doing nearly twenty miles per hour. He swung around the larch, building speed slowly but surely on a straight stretch of road that climbed to the top of a little rise.

The snow-wing plow struck the tree. The larch wasn't swatted clear so much as pulverized, branches shattering in a cloud of gray powder and black fragments. The Freightliner screamed. Harper felt she was hearing Jakob's true voice for the first time.

She had one knee up on the pa.s.senger seat when the Freightliner slammed into the rear of the truck. The impact dropped her. Her legs fell back out the open door, hung over the road. She got one arm through the open pa.s.senger-side window, hanging on to the door. Her other hand grabbed the seat.

"Harp!" the Fireman yelled. "Oh G.o.d, Harp, get in, get in!"

"Faster," she told him. "Don't you dare slow down, Rookwood."

She kicked her feet but couldn't seem to pull herself up into the seat. Too much of her was hanging out the pa.s.senger-side door and her center of gravity was too low, all her ma.s.s and weight dangling over the road.

Harper turned her head to see where the Freightliner was and in the same moment Jakob hit them again. Harper saw him then, behind the wheel: Jakob's starved, bristly, scarred face. He did not smile or look angry. His head rolled on his neck as if he were dosed up with some heavy anesthetic.

"Will you for G.o.d's sake get in the truck," the Fireman said. He had one hand on the wheel but wasn't looking out the windshield anymore. He had stretched all the way across the pa.s.senger seat to grab for her, extending his right hand with its taped wrist.

She swatted wildly for his arm, caught his fingers. He hauled at her, straining against the slipstream that wanted to vacuum her right out of the front seat. Her feet kicked in the air and then her knee found the footwell and she was in the cab.

The fire truck had been drifting while he dragged her up. They clipped a baked Honda Civic parked on the left-hand margin of the interstate. The Honda's back end flipped into the air as if a mine had exploded under the rear tires. They sped past it, left it behind.

The Honda came down across the turnpike behind them with a rattling thud. The snowplow hit it an instant later and knocked it aside with a shriek, a sound of almost human fury, mingled with the crunch of imploding gla.s.s.

She scrambled into her seat, the pa.s.senger door still open and waving back and forth. Harper grabbed the black leather strap hanging above the door and stuck her head out, looking back.

"The f.u.c.k are you-" the Fireman asked.

She was full of song, a song of outrage and grief that had no words and no melody, and her hand ignited like a rag soaked in gasoline when touched with a match. Blue flame roared from it and she threw it, threw a softball of fire. It struck the windshield of the Freightliner, sprayed across the gla.s.s in a liquid fan of flame-and went out.

Harper threw fire again and again. A blast of blue flame snapped off the pa.s.senger-side mirror on the plow. A bolt struck the plow itself, briefly turning the snow-wing into a shallow trough filled with crackling white flame. The fourth time she cast flame, it hooked, like a curveball or a knuckler, and struck the front pa.s.senger-side tire. The wheel became a blazing hoop.

"Can you blind him?" the Fireman asked.

"What?" Harper asked.

"Blind him. Just blind him for ten seconds. Now, if you please. And for G.o.d's sake put your seat belt on."

The tendons stood out in John's neck. His lips were drawn back in an appalled grimace. They were rushing up a hill toward some kind of overpa.s.s. The front of the fire truck thwacked aside a diamond-shaped orange sign, a warning. Harper didn't have time to see what it said before the Fireman sent it spinning.

Harper didn't bother with the belt. She couldn't buckle in and still lean far enough out the door to throw flame directly at Jakob behind the steering wheel. She stuck her head into the boiling afternoon air and looked at the Freightliner. Jakob stared back through his cobwebbed windshield, the cracks running from a single bullet hole, just to the right of where he sat. Harper thought Jamie Close had come very close to shooting him through a lung that night in the church tower.

She took a deep breath and threw a fistful of fire. It hit the windshield at the bullet hole. Flame squirted outward, following the cracks, making a web of flame. A little fire spattered through the hole and Jakob flinched, turned his head away. Harper thought, for a moment, he shut his eyes.

Harper turned to see what lay ahead and saw the overpa.s.s was gone. BRIDGE OUT-that was what the orange safety sign had said. The overpa.s.s had collapsed in the center, leaving a chasm thirty feet across, rebar sticking out of shattered concrete. At the last instant it came to her that she still didn't have her seat belt on.

John hammered his foot onto the brake and wrenched the wheel to the side, veering suddenly and sharply away from the drop.

It was almost too much, too hard. The fire truck slewed sideways, tires whining, a high ragged whine of blistering rubber. Blue smoke poured from the undercarriage. Harper could feel how the truck wanted to topple over. John had his whole body across the steering wheel, pulling against it. The truck slid sideways, shuddering with the force of a jackhammer. I am going to lose this baby, Harper thought.

The Freightliner clipped the rear end in pa.s.sing The fire engine spun like a revolving door. For an instant they were staring back the way they had come and still sliding backward. Centrifugal force slung Harper against her door. If she had not closed it the moment before, she would've been hurled out. The steering wheel whirled so quickly in the Fireman's hands that he let go of it with a cry of pain.

They were looking back in the direction of New Hampshire, still skating over the blacktop, so Harper didn't see when the Freightliner blew past them and over the drop, fell thirty feet and hit the road below with a concussive crash that seemed to shake the world. It felt as if a bomb had gone off beneath them.

She still felt a little as if they were spinning, even after the fire truck stopped moving. She looked at John. He stared back at her with wide, bewildered eyes. He moved his lips. She believed he was saying her name, but wasn't sure, couldn't hear over the drone in her ears. Nick was right. Reading lips was hard.

He gestured with his hands, a little shooing motion. Get out. He was fighting with his seat belt.

She nodded, stepped down through the open door on trembling legs, climbed onto the running board, then lowered herself to the road. She let go of the door and looked toward the gap in the overpa.s.s and felt all the wind go out of her.

The back half of the fire engine hung over the edge of the chasm. It was tipping. As Harper watched, it seesawed back, the front tires rising into the air.

Harper just had time to catch her breath. She was getting ready to scream John's name when the fire truck tilted over the side, into the gap, and took the Fireman with it.

17.

Harper ran to the edge of the missing overpa.s.s and stared down past twisted rebar and crumbled concrete. The fire engine had dropped straight back and turned onto its pa.s.senger side. She had the wrong angle, couldn't see into the cab, couldn't see John. The Freightliner was upside down. Something was burning down there; Harper could smell the stink of scorched rubber.

It was only shock that held her where she was, a great tingling throb of emotion that she could feel in her nerve endings, in her fingertips. All dead, she thought. All dead, all dead, John and Nick and Allie and Renee and John and Nick and Allie and Renee and John and Nick and Allie and Renee.

Her throat hurt and she realized she was screaming, had been screaming for almost a full minute, and she made herself be quiet. The thing to do was to get down there. Get down there and see what she could do.

She turned-and almost ran right into Allie. Her face was aglow with sweat and she was gasping from her run.

"Where did you come from?" Harper asked. "How did you get out?"

Harper gazed blankly past her. Half a mile away she saw Nick trotting along the margin of the road, leading Renee by the hand.

"Never got in," Allie said. "Never had a chance. Renee shoved us into a ditch as soon as I reached the back end of the truck with Nick. The next thing I knew, you and John were driving off without us. Where's John? Where-"

As Allie spoke, she was creeping past Harper to look over the drop. Harper grabbed her arm and drew her away before she could reach the edge.

"Don't look. I don't want Nick to see and I don't want you to see, either. You stay here and don't come unless I call for you."

Harper wanted to run, but her days of running had ended several weeks before. She did a funny sort of pregnant-lady trot, holding her stomach. She climbed over a guardrail, and slid down the bank on her big pregnant rump, grabbing fistfuls of brush to slow her descent.

The road below was a divided highway, running east and west. The fire truck lay across the eastbound lanes. A lake of fire sputtered and gushed across the blacktop and Harper thought, wildly, Gasoline, it's spilling burning gasoline, it's going to explode. She skipped over the flames and reached the front of the engine.

She could see in through the windshield. It was smashed and sagging inward from the frame. John hung sideways, still buckled in his seat, his head on his right shoulder, and blood dripping from under his hairline and nose. But: not dead. Harper could see the rise and fall of his chest.

What she couldn't see was how to get him out. She was too pregnant to climb up to the driver's-side door, which currently faced the sky. She couldn't smash in what was left of the windshield without a tool, and was afraid to spray him with broken gla.s.s.

A ladder, Harper thought. Not the big ladder mounted to the roof, but one of the smaller ones packed into the rear cabinets.

She hopped back over that long ribbon of fire (what exactly was burning? it didn't smell like gasoline) and made her way to the rear of the truck. Compartments all along the fire engine had been torn open and she stepped carefully through a Lincoln Log tangle of ax handles and crowbars. She was in a hurry and almost stepped on the cat, recoiled when it yowled at her in alarm.

Harper caught herself, took a step back. Mr. Truffles gazed up at her, his jade-colored eyes glazed with shock, his fur ruffled up. Renee had got all of them away from the truck except for him, it seemed.

"Oh, you," Harper said, crouching down and reaching toward him. "My G.o.d, how did you survive? I wonder how many of your nine lives you just used up."

"All of 'em," Jakob said and a shovel swiped down through the smoke and struck the cat like a croquet mallet impacting the ball.

Mr. Truffles flew, broken-necked and dead, through the air and into the brush. Harper screamed and went straight back, falling on her b.u.t.t. Jakob lifted the shovel over his head in both hands. She pushed herself back with her heels and the blade of the shovel came down in the soft blacktop between her feet.

She dragged herself away from him, pulling herself along on her bottom, through broken gla.s.s and loose rock. He had to wiggle the handle of the shovel back and forth to loosen the blade before he could step forward and she had time to get a good look at him. His right hand was blackened and burned to the texture of fried chicken skin. The flesh had fissured to show ripe, pink meat beneath, glistening with pus. The right side of his face was charred too, and the hair on that side of his head was still smoking. An old black burn in the shape of a man's hand mottled the loose flesh of his throat.

He came forward, flat-footed and slow, with nothing of his former dancing grace. When he spoke, his voice was thick and slurred. His lips had fused together at one corner of his mouth.

"I was right when I said you made me sick, babygirl," he said. "It's true you didn't contaminate me with Dragonscale, but you made me sick in a different way. A worse way. Being around you was like having a low-grade fever. A woman like you is a kind of infection. You were living off me like a bacteria. You don't know how badly I want to be well. To be cured of you."

He took another swipe, but she pushed back on her heels. The shovel blade sliced through the haze, dragging silky shreds of smoke behind it.

"I thought you would be my muse, once," he said, and laughed, a strange, discordant sound. "I thought you'd inspire me! Well. In the end, you sure did. In the end, you led me to my real calling: putting out fires. I'm such a good little fireman, I put them out before they even start. You see? In a way, you were my muse!"

She was no more a muse than he had ever been a writer, Harper thought, and she wasn't sorry, not for that. Jakob could only see her in terms of blame or inspiration, but either way it reduced her to a kind of fuel. Either way, she had always just been something for him to burn up.

"Is your boyfriend still alive?" Jakob asked, nodding back toward the truck. "I want him to be alive. I want to slice off your head and put it in his lap before I kill him. I want him to look into your face one last time and say your name. I want him to know that he couldn't keep what he took away from me."

In her mind, Harper began to sing without words. Her left hand sputtered, smoked, glowed, and began to flicker with firelight. She lifted it and Jakob smashed it with the shovel and the flame went out. Harper shouted at the pain of it.

"Did he teach you a little trick?" Jakob asked. "Besides how to suck his c.o.c.k? Too bad he didn't teach you not to play with fire. A woman your age ought to know how that ends, babygirl. Little girls who play with fire get burnt in the end. They get burnt all up gone."

But Harper wasn't listening. Harper was looking past him. She felt a sick rush of blood to her heart and was having trouble finding her breath.

"Pay attention to me," Jakob said. He put the point of the shovel under her chin and used it to lift her head, forcing her to look up into his eyes. "I'm talking to you, babygirl. Did you even hear what I just said? Did you listen to me at all? Little girls shouldn't play with fire. That's how people get hurt."

"Yes," Harper whispered. "You're right. I'm so sorry, Jakob."

He narrowed his eyes in a question, then started to turn his head.

By then, the woman of flame had crossed half the distance between him and the truck. She was Jakob's very height, and her hair flowed for yards behind her, yellow and red. She was nude, in a sense, although her shifting, wavering shape seemed more like a form made out of crimson silks. Her eyes alone burnt hot blue, like the flame of a blowtorch. She left footprints behind her-footprints of red flame.

"Mom?" Allie said, from thirty feet away. She had made her way down the incline after all, and stood there holding Nick's hand. Her voice was small and bewildered.

The woman of fire threw a hatchet of flame. It wasn't there until the instant she drew back her hand. It struck Jakob in the face and he screamed, flame splattering across his features, up into his hair. She c.o.c.ked back her hand and a new hatchet of fire appeared in it, leaping into her fist out of nowhere. She threw again, coming toward him. The second hatchet struck him in the chest and the filthy, oil-stained ruin of his white T-shirt ignited. He took a staggering step toward her, but he couldn't see through the black smoke engulfing his head. She stepped aside like a bullfighter. He stumbled and fell to one knee.

She sank down beside him and took him gently into her blazing arms.

18.

Allie crouched at the bottom of the embankment with Nick in her arms. She clutched her brother's face to her chest and buried her own head in his shoulder, the pair of them squeezed together like the two halves of a walnut.

The flame that had once been a woman rose from the black and smoking corpse of Jakob Grayson. She left her kill and walked toward the children. Her heels left bubbling footprints. liquefying the asphalt beneath them.

When she was ten feet from Nick and Allie, she lowered herself with an exquisite grace, hooking her ankles and sinking down to sit cross-legged. Allie lifted her head and peered at her, then squeezed Nick's shoulder to let him know it was okay to look.

Her golden hair flowed and crackled. The road beneath her was melting, turning to a puddle of tar.

Nick spoke with his hands. He said, "Mom?"

She nodded and said, "I was once," moving her hands in swirls of fire. "Most of who I was has burned away."

"I've missed you," he said, and Allie finger-spelled, "Me, too. So much."

Sarah nodded again. The top of her head was an open chalice of flame. Whatever she was burning to stay with them-the air and a million whirling grains of spore-she was using it up fast now, cooling out, cooling off. When the breeze gusted, she rippled like a reflection in unsettled waters.

"It was all my fault," Nick told her with his hands.