The Fireman: A Novel Part 9

"I read your book," she said.

And there, she saw a flicker of something human, something besides his patient, beatific, dangerous calm. Behaviorists talked about micro-expressions, emotions that jumped to the surface, revealing all, in a flicker almost too fast to catch. For the briefest instant he regarded her with uncertainty and a blanch of discomfort. It was a wonder, how much information could pa.s.s between two people in a single glance, without a word being said. He had, after all, really cheated on her with any number of their friends. That momentary look of shame was as good as a confession.

"Pretty dirty, dude," she said. "I was getting hot flashes that don't have anything to do with Dragonscale."

"I asked you not to read it," he said.

"So shoot me."

He made a harsh barking sound. It took her a moment to identify this noise as laughter.

She exhaled again and threw her hands down and shook them, as if they were wet and she were air-drying them. "Whoo. All right. The world is going to have to burn out without us. I want something good before I go."

He gave her a dull, hopeless look.

"Please. I'll try," she said. "I'll try to make it nice."

"I don't know if it'll do any good. I'm not in the mood anymore. I think maybe I just want to get it over with."

"But I'm not ready. And you want it to feel right for me, don't you? Besides. I'm not going without getting laid once more." And she laughed and tried to smile. "You've got no one to blame but yourself, Jakob Grayson. Leaving a bored and lonely woman all alone with that pile of shameless filth." Gesturing with her head at the ma.n.u.script on the desk.

He smiled himself, although it looked forced. "s.e.x means more to you than it does to me. I know that turns the stereotype on its head. You really live in your body more than I do. It's one of the things I always found exciting about you. But now-at the moment, I suppose I regard the s.e.xual act with a certain amount of disgust."

She turned and crossed to the h.e.l.lo Kitty boom box on the shelf. She had brought it in here the other day after discovering fresh batteries in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"What are you doing?" Jakob asked.

"Music."

"I don't need music. I'd rather just talk."

"I need music. And a drink. You need a drink, too."

Finally, something got through to him. He said, "I'd kill for a drink." He made the harsh barking sound again, the one that seemed to stand for laughter.

He could've shot her already, if her death was all he wanted, but it wasn't. Part of him wanted more: a last kiss, a last f.u.c.k, a last drink, or maybe something deeper, forgiveness, absolution. Harper wasn't inclined to let him have any of it, but was happy to let him hope. It was keeping her alive. She turned on the FM. The cla.s.sic-rock station was playing an oldie but a goodie. A lovestruck Romeo was getting ready to start the serenade, you and me, babe, how 'bout it, and for no reason at all, Harper thought of Hillary Clinton.

She stood in front of the sound box, moving her hips from side to side. She didn't doubt that Jakob currently regarded s.e.x with disgust, but he wasn't the only one who had taken some psychology courses in college. She hadn't forgotten what lay just across the border from disgust.

She kept her back to him for maybe ten seconds, pretending to be lost in the music, then cast a slow look over her shoulder. His gaze was fixed raptly upon her.

"You hurt me," she said. "You threw me down."

"I'm sorry. That was across the line."

"Except in the bedroom," she said.

He narrowed his eyes, and she knew she had pushed it too far, had strained his credulity-she never talked that way about s.e.x-but before he could speak, she said, "Our bottle!" As if she were just remembering. "I want to have that bottle of wine we brought back from France. Remember? You said it was the best you ever had and we should save it for something important." She gave him what she hoped was a wry look and said, "Is this important enough?"

The wines were all there in the study with them, the whites in the cooler that wasn't keeping them cool anymore, the reds in the cupboard. Whenever they went somewhere, they bought a bottle of wine, the way other people bought fridge magnets. They hadn't gone so many places, though, in the last few years. She grabbed for the honeymoon French Bordeaux, and her palm was so damp with sweat it almost slipped out of her grasp and flew across the room at him. She imagined him jumping in surprise and shooting her in the stomach, just out of reflex. Killing her and the baby in one shot, which, when she thought about it, would be perfectly in keeping with Jakob's character. He was parsimonious by nature, hated waste; he had often scolded her for using too much milk in her cereal.

She pinned the bottle between her body and her right arm, and took two wine goblets from where they hung under one of the bookshelves. The deep crystal gla.s.ses clinked musically together, while her hands trembled. She got the corkscrew.

Her plan was to use it to pull the cork, then ask him to pour the wine. And while he was pouring it, she would wiggle the cork off the screw and stab him in the face. Or, if she didn't have the stomach for that, she would at least try to impale him in the back of the hand that held the gun.

She sat down on the edge of the coffee table, facing him and the Great Egg. The gun rested on his knee, the barrel pointing at her, but without any particular intention. She had the corkscrew in her right hand, the twisted point sticking between her middle and ring fingers. He was a long way off-she would have to throw herself at him to get the corkscrew into his face. But maybe he would be closer when he poured the wine. Maybe.

Then she shifted her gaze to his eyes and saw him staring at her with icy speculation. His face was pale and still and nearly expressionless.

"Do you think if you get me drunk and f.u.c.k me, it'll change my mind about what has to happen?" he asked her.

She said, "I thought getting drunk and making love and having a good time was the whole idea. Doing it on our terms. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"It is. But I'm still not clear that's what you want. I don't know if that's what you ever wanted. Maybe in some vapid, Lifetime movie sense, you liked the idea of pulling a Romeo and Juliet, and dying side by side, but you were never really committed. You never thought it would happen. Now it's time, and you'll do anything to get out of it. Including wh.o.r.e yourself." He rocked back and forth and then said, "I know it's politically incorrect to say, but what the h.e.l.l, we're both about to die: I've never thought much of the intelligence of women. I've never once met a woman who had any true intellectual rigor. There's a reason things like Facebook and airplanes and all the other great inventions of our time were made by men."

"Yeah," she said. "So they could get laid. Are we going to drink this wine or what?"

He made the barking sound again. "You're not even going to deny it?"

"Which part? The part about how women are stupid, or the part about how I don't really want to kill myself with you?"

"The part where you think you can shake your a.s.s and make me forget what I came here to do. Because it's getting done. If nothing else, I have a moral obligation to stop you from going out in the world and infecting someone else like you infected me."

"Thought you said the world was going to end, so what would it matter? What would it-" But she couldn't talk anymore. Something awful was happening.

The cork wouldn't come out of the bottle.

It was a fat cork, sealed with dribbles of wax, and she had the bottle under her arm and was pulling at the corkscrew with the other hand, but the cork wouldn't give in the slightest, felt fixed in place.

He reached across the table with his left hand and caught the neck of the bottle and tugged it out from under her arm. His right hand continued to grip the gun.

"I told you these needed to be kept someplace dry," he said. "The cork swells. I told you it was a mistake to just stick the reds in the cabinet."

I told you had to be some kind of karmic opposite to the words I love you. He had always found it much easier to say "I told you." It would've been something to resent, if she didn't feel all the breath go out of her. Because now Jakob had the corkscrew. She had let him take it without a struggle, without an objection, the only weapon she had.

He squeezed the bottle between his thighs, hunched and pulled. His neck reddened and cords stood out in it. Those fat blobs of wax split and the cork began to move. She looked at the gun. He still held it with his free hand-but it shifted a t.i.tch, to point more toward the bookshelf behind her.

"Get your gla.s.s," he said. "It's coming."

She picked up her goblet and scootched forward, so her knees b.u.mped his. Time began to move in small, careful increments. The cork moved another centimeter. And another. And came out with a perfect little pop. He exhaled and set the corkscrew down by his knee, where she couldn't reach it.

"Have a taste," he said, and spilled a trickle into her outstretched gla.s.s.

Jakob had taught her how to drink wine when they were in France, had instructed her in the subject with great enthusiasm. She stuck her nose into the cavern of the gla.s.s and inhaled, filled her nostrils with peppery fumes so strong it was possible to imagine getting drunk off them alone. It smelled good, but instead she flinched and frowned.

"Oh, d.a.m.n it, does everything have to be wrong?" She lifted her gaze. "It went over. It's complete vinegar. Do we get another one? We've got that one from Napa. The one you said all the collectors want."

"What? It's not even ten years old. That doesn't seem right. Let me see." He bent toward her, coming halfway out of the Egg.

His eyes widened the instant before she moved. He was quick, almost quick enough to duck out of the way, but that little lean was all she needed.

She smashed the gla.s.s into his face. The goblet shattered with a pretty, tuneful sound, and gla.s.s fangs tore open the skin in bright red lines, carving across his cheekbone, the bridge of his nose, and his eyebrow. It looked like a tiger cub had swiped at his face.

He screamed and lifted the gun and it went off. The sound of it was a shattering slam, right next to her head.

A shelf of books behind her exploded and the air filled with a snowstorm of flying pages. Harper came to her feet, pitching herself to her left, toward the door to the bedroom. She smashed a knee against the edge of the coffee table, coming around it, registered the impact but felt no pain.

An awesome silence gathered around her, the only noise in it a high-pitched whining, the sound of a struck tuning fork. A torn sheet of paper, part of some book, floated down and caught against her chest, stuck there.

The recoil flipped the Great Egg straight back, with Jakob still in it. The bottle flew as he fell backward, sailed across the room, and clubbed her in the shoulder. She kept going, crossed the den in three steps, and reached the door to the bedroom. The doorframe exploded to the left of her ear, throwing white chunks of wood into her hair, into her face. The sound of the gun going off was so m.u.f.fled, it was like hearing a car door slam in the street. Then she was through, into the bedroom.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed thoughtlessly at the sheet of paper stuck to her chest, pulled it back, stared down at it, saw a handful of words: his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

She flung it aside, behind her, back into the den, and slammed the door after it.

15.

There was a lock on the door that she didn't bother with. No point. It was a b.u.t.ton lock and he'd kick right through it. She wasn't even sure the door would stay shut, half the doorframe missing where a bullet had smashed into it.

She grabbed the wooden chair to the left of the door and flung it down, something to put in the way. Her carpetbag was at the foot of the bed, clothes stacked inside under The Portable Mother. She caught it by the leather handles and kept going, on to the window that looked over the backyard. She flicked the lock and shoved it up. Behind her, the chair shattered with a m.u.f.fled crunch.

The hill behind the house dropped steeply, a long grade that led down to the trees. The bedroom appeared to be on the first floor, if you were looking at the house from the front. But when you came around back, it was possible to see the bedroom was really on the second floor: a finished, walk-in bas.e.m.e.nt was beneath it. From the bedroom window, it was a fifteen-foot drop into darkness.

As she threw her legs over the sill, she looked down and saw she was pouring blood, the whole front of her white halter soaked with it. She couldn't feel where she had been hit. She couldn't take time to think about it. She jumped, dragging her bag. The window exploded outward behind her as Jakob put a bullet in it.

She fell and expected to hit the ground and didn't and fell some more. Her stomach flipped inside her. Then she hit, her right foot folding under her with a breathtaking flash of pain. She thought of pianos falling in silent movies, shattering on impact, ivory keys spilling over the sidewalk like so many scattered teeth.

Harper lunged off balance, fell forward, hit the dirt, rolled, and rolled, and rolled. She lost her grip on the carpetbag. It tumbled along with her, flinging its contents into the darkness. Her right ankle felt as if it had been shattered, but it couldn't be shattered, because if it were, Jakob would catch her and he would kill her.

She flopped to a halt two-thirds of the way down the steep slope, the smoke-filled night sky whirling overhead. At one edge of her vision, she could see her tall, narrow house looming over her. At the other, she could see the edge of the woods, the trees half shed of their leaves, skeletons in rags. All she wanted to do was lie there and wait for the world to stop moving.

But there wasn't time for that. It would take him all of twenty seconds to get down the stairs into the bas.e.m.e.nt and out the back door.

She pushed herself up. The ground tilted precariously beneath her, felt as unsteady as a dock floating on a turbulent lake. She wondered if some of the dizziness was blood loss, looked at her soaked blouse, at the deep red stain down the front of it, and smelled wine. He had not put a bullet in her after all. It was the honeymoon Bordeaux; she was wearing it. All of France's wine country was nothing but ash now, which meant the stain on her blouse was probably worth a few thousand dollars on the black market. She had never worn anything so expensive.

Harper put her left hand on the ground to steady herself and planted it on some shirts and something wrapped in crinkly plastic. The slide whistle. G.o.d knew why she had packed it.

She shoved herself up and off the ground. Harper left her carpetbag and her scattered clothes and The Portable Mother, but she held on to the slide whistle. She took her first step toward the woods, and her right leg nearly folded underneath her. Something grated, and there was a flash of pain so intense her knees buckled. She might not be shot, but she had fractured something in her ankle, there was no doubt about it.

"Harper!" Jakob screamed from up the hill behind her. "Stop running, Harper, you b.i.t.c.h!"

The fractured bone in her ankle grated again, and a flash of pain, brilliant and white, went off behind her eyes. For a moment she was running blind and close to crumpling, pa.s.sing out. In action movies, people dropped out of windows all the time and it was no big deal.

As she ran, she found herself pulling at the cellophane wrap on the slide whistle. It was thoughtless, automatic action, her hands operating of their own accord.

On her next step, she put too much weight on the right foot, and the ankle folded, and she screamed weakly, couldn't help it. A spoke of withering pain lanced straight from her ankle into her pelvis. She went down on one knee, behind some scrubby hemlocks.

She lifted the whistle and blew, pulling out the slide, so it made a shrill, out-of-place carnival sound in the forest. It was loud. That first gunshot had done something to her ears, bruised her eardrums and m.u.f.fled her hearing, but the slide whistle cut right through it, loud as a bottle rocket whining away into the night.

"Harper, you b.i.t.c.h! My face! Look what you did to my face!" Jakob roared. He was closer now, almost to the woods.

Harper pushed herself up again. She staggered deeper in among the trees, holding a hand up in front of her to protect her face from branches. Every time she put weight on her right foot, it was like her ankle breaking all over again. Sweet crisp leaves crunched beneath her heels.

She was scared now, as scared as she could ever remember being in her life, and the sound of her fear was the wheeeeeee-ooooop of a pennywhistle, slicing through the night. She didn't know why she was blowing it again. It would lead Jakob right to her.

She loped jaggedly off course. No, that wasn't right; for her to wander off course, she needed to have a course, and she had no idea where she was going. The pennywhistle fell from her hand and she went on without looking back. She put her right foot in a soft depression, and wrenched her ankle again, and cried out softly, and fell to one knee.

"I'm coming, Harper!" Jakob yelled, and he made the barking sound of laughter. "Wait till you see what I'm going to do to your face!"

Harper reached out, blindly, to the right, for a tree trunk that remained stubbornly out of reach. She was in danger of falling onto her side. If that happened, she wouldn't be able to get up. She would be lying there, curled in the fetal position, gasping for breath, when Jakob found her and began pumping bullets into her.

Leaves crackled and someone took her hand. She opened her mouth to cry out and the sound caught in her throat. She stared up into Captain America's stoic, blank face.

"Come on," said Cap in a girl's voice, and she hauled Harper to her feet.

They hurried along the edge of the forest, holding hands, the bald girl showing Harper the way. Her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground, and Harper felt again what she had felt when they first met, that this wasn't happening, this was being dreamt.

The girl led Harper to an oak that had probably been old when Kennedy was shot. There were boards nailed into the trunk, leading up into the branches, remnant of some long-forgotten tree house. Harper thought of the Lost Boys, thought of Peter Pan.

"Up," the girl whispered. "Quick."

"Quick-ly," said the Fireman, as he came out of the bushes from Harper's right. His face was so filthy it was nearly black, and he was wearing his big fireman's helmet and sooty yellow coat, and the halligan swung from one hand. "Proper usage, Allie. Try not to distort my language with your horrible Americanisms." And he grinned.

"He's coming," Allie said.

"I'll send him on his way," said the Fireman.

Jakob cursed, from somewhere close by. Harper could hear him crashing through the brush.

She climbed into the tree, using her right knee instead of her foot. It wasn't easy, and the girl was close behind her, shoving at her a.s.s with both hands.

"Will you hurry up," Allie hissed.

"I busted my ankle," Harper said, reaching for a wide branch above her and pulling herself onto it.

She hitched her rear to one side, sliding out across the branch to make room for the girl. They were about twelve feet off the ground and Harper could see through the leaves of the oak to the small open area below. The Fireman did not go far-just a few steps in the direction of Jakob's crashing noises. Then he positioned himself behind a sumac and waited.

A breeze, smelling faintly of bonfires, lifted and tossed Harper's hair. She turned her face into it-and realized she could see her house through the trees. By daylight, she would have a good view of her own back deck and the windows into the kitchen from here.

Jakob spilled from the bushes, going past the Fireman without seeing him. Jakob's face was bleeding; the laceration below his left eye was particularly bad, a flap of skin wobbling and hanging down over his cheekbone. He had leaves in his hair and a fresh sc.r.a.pe on his chin. He carried the gun low, at his side, barrel pointed toward the forest floor.