The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  “Healthy American boobies, that’s what we’re fighting for,” he said. “That needs to be in the Constitution. Every man has a right to life, liberty, and germ-free titties. Learn the drill, girls. If we show up at your front door, be ready to do your patriotic duty and show us your freedom-loving, virus-free knockers.”

  The knocker crashed at the front door, and Harper jumped as if a Cremation Crew were kicking it in. The sound was, in a way, more startling than someone screaming in the street, or a fire siren. She heard people screaming every day and sirens every hour. She could not remember the last time someone had knocked on the door.

  She padded down the hall and looked through the peephole. Tony the Tiger and Captain America stood together on the front step, holding wrinkled plastic bags. Beyond them, down at the end of the drive, a man sat with his back to the house, smoking a cigarette, a tendril of smoke rising from his head.

  “Trick and treat,” came a muffled voice. A girl’s voice.

  “Trick or . . .” Harper started, then stopped. “It’s not Halloween.”

  “We’re getting an early start!”

  It offended her, some idiot sending his kids house to house in the middle of a plague. She had stern ideas about parenting, and such behavior fell well short of her standards. It riled up her inner English nanny and made her want to stab the offending grown-up in the eye with an umbrella.

  Harper picked her Windbreaker off the hook and slipped it on to cover the pretty scrollwork of Dragonscale scrawled on her arms. She opened the door, but left it on the chain, and peered out through the six-inch gap.

  The girl might’ve been as old as eighteen or as young as thirteen. With her face hidden behind her Captain America mask, it was impossible to tell. Her head was shaved and if Harper hadn’t heard her voice, she would’ve taken her for a boy.

  Her brother was possibly just half her age. The eyes that peered out through the holes in his Tony the Tiger mask were very pale—the light green of an empty Coke bottle.

  “Trick and treat,” Captain America said again. A gold locket, shaped like a hardcover book, hung outside her moth-eaten turtleneck.

  “You shouldn’t be knocking on doors for candy.” She looked past them to the man smoking a cigarette on the curb with his back to the house. “Is that your father?”

  “We aren’t here to get a treat,” Captain America told her. “We’re here to give you one. And we’ve got tricks, too. You can have one of each. That’s why it’s trick and treat. We thought it would cheer people up.”

  “You still shouldn’t be out. People are sick. If someone sick touches someone who isn’t, they can give you the bad thing they’ve got.” She raised her voice and yelled past them. “Hey, buddy! These kids shouldn’t be out! There’s a contagion on!”

  “We’re wearing gloves,” Captain America told her. “And we won’t touch you. No one is going to catch anything from anyone. I promise. Sanitation is our number-one priority! Don’t you want to see your treat?” She jabbed the boy with her elbow.

  The Tiger held open his bag. There was a bottle of sugared gummy vitamins in there—prenatal vitamins, she saw. Harper snapped her head up, eyeing one child and then the other.

  “What is this?”

  “They’re like Sour Patch Kids,” said Captain America. “But you can only take two a day. Are you all right?”

  “What do you mean am I all right? Hang on a minute. Who are you? I think I want to talk to your father.” She lifted herself on tiptoes and hollered over their heads. “I want to talk to you!”

  The man sitting on the curb didn’t look at her, just waved one hand in a sleepy, dismissive gesture. Or maybe he was fanning the smoke away from his face. He blew a trickle of smoke rings into the afternoon.

  Captain America cast a casual glance over her shoulder at the man on the curb. “That’s not our father. Our father isn’t with us.”

  Harper dropped her gaze. The boy was still holding the bag open for her to inspect his offering. “These are prenatal vitamins. How do you know I’m pregnant? I don’t look pregnant. Wait. Do I?”

  Captain America said, “Not yet.”

  “Who sent you here? Who told you to give this to me?”

  “Don’t you want them? If you don’t want them, you don’t have to take them.”

  “It’s not about whether I want them. You’re very kind, and I would, but—”

  “Take them, then.”

  The boy hung the bag on the doorknob and stepped back. After a moment, Harper reached through the gap and slipped the bag into the house.

  “Now have a trick,” the girl said and held her own bag open, so Harper could see what was inside.

  Tony the Tiger didn’t seem to have anything to say. He never made a sound.

  Harper looked into the bag. There was a slide whistle in it, in plastic wrap.

  “They’re really loud,” said Captain America. “You can hear it all the way from here to Wentworth by the Sea. A deaf person could hear it. Take it.”

  “There’s nothing else in the bag,” Harper said. “You don’t have any other tricks to hand out.”

  “You’re our last stop.”

  Harper wondered, for the first time, if she might be dreaming. It felt like the kind of conversation that occurred in a dream. The children in their masks seemed like more than children. They seemed like symbols. When the girl spoke, it felt like she was talking in a secret dream-code; a psychologist could spend hours trying to puzzle it out. And the boy. The boy just stood there staring at her. He never blinked. When Harper spoke, he stared at her lips like he wanted to kiss her.

  She felt a brief but almost painful stab of hope. Maybe all of it was a dream. Maybe she had a bad case of flu, or something worse than flu, and everything that had happened in the last three months was a vision inspired by sickness. Wasn’t this exactly the kind of thing a person would dream if she were on fire with a fever? Perhaps she was only dreaming Jakob had left her and that she was alone in an infected world, a world that was burning, and her only visitors in weeks were a pair of masked children who spoke in fortune-cookie messages.

  I will take the whistle, Harper thought, and if I blow it, if I blow hard, my fever will break, and I will wake up in bed, covered in sweat, with Jakob pressing a cool washcloth to my forehead.

  The girl hung her bag from the doorknob and stepped away. Harper took it, clutched the crinkling plastic to her chest.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” the girl asked. “Do you need anything? I mean, besides your trick and your treat? You don’t come outside anymore.”

  “How do you know I don’t come outside anymore? How long have you been watching me? I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t like games. Not unless I know who I’m playing with.” She looked past them, elevated herself onto her tiptoes once more, and shouted at the man sitting on the curb with his back to her. “I don’t like games, buddy boy!”

  “You’re all right,” Captain America said, in a confident, assertive tone. “If you need anything, just call.”

  “Call?” Harper asked. “How am I supposed to call? I don’t even know who you are.”

  “That’s all right. We know who you are,” Captain America said, and gripped the little boy by the shoulder, and turned him away.

  They walked swiftly down the path toward the street. As they reached the curb, the man sitting there pushed himself to his feet, and for the first time Harper saw he wasn’t smoking a cigarette, he was just smoking. He blew a last mouthful of cloud, which disintegrated into a hundred small butterflies of smoke. They scattered, flapping frantically away into the smoggy morning.

  Harper slammed the door, yanked the chain off, threw the door open wide, took three reeling steps into the yard.

  “Hey!” she shouted, her heart clouting against the inside of her chest, as if she had just run a few laps around the house.

  The guy looked back over his shoulder at her and she saw he was wearing a Hillary Clinton mask. For the
first time she noticed he was wearing slightly reflective yellow pants, like the sort firemen wore.

  “Hey, come back here!” she yelled.

  The man walked the children swiftly away down the sidewalk, disappearing behind a hedge. The boy was practically skipping.

  Harper crossed the yellowing grass, still clutching the bag with the slide whistle in it. She reached the sidewalk and looked around for them, blinking in the haze that drifted perpetually along the street. It was thicker than usual today, a pale mass that gradually erased the road, so that she couldn’t see to the end of the block. The smoke swallowed houses, lawns, telephone poles, and the sky itself. It had swallowed the man and his children, too. Harper stared after them, eyes watering.

  When Harper was back in her house, she put the chain on the door again. If a Quarantine Patrol showed up, that chain might buy her enough time to get down into the basement, out the back door, and into the woods. With her carpetbag. And her slide whistle.

  She was turning the whistle over in her hands, wondering how loud it was, when she realized the house had gone perfectly still. No music and no Marlboro Man. Somewhere in the last few minutes, the batteries had died in her Hello Kitty radio. The twenty-first century—like her masked visitors—had briskly and unapologetically slipped away from her, leaving her all on her own again.

  Trick and treat, she thought.

  12

  When her cell phone was close to dead, she knew it was time to make the call she had been putting off—that if she waited one more day she might not be able to make the call at all. She had a glass of white wine to loosen herself up and she rang her brother. Her sister-in-law Lindy answered.

  In her early twenties, Lindy had parlayed her hobby of fucking the bassists in second-string rock bands into a job at a recording studio in Woodstock, which was what she was doing when she met Connor. He was playing bass for a prog-metal band called Unbreakable. They weren’t. Connor wound up with a bald spot the size of a tea saucer and a job installing hot tubs. Lindy became an instructor at an upscale gym, where she taught aerobic pole dancing to housewives, which she likened to being an animal trainer working with walruses: “You want to throw sardines at them just for turning in a complete circle without falling down.” Not long afterward, Harper let her own gym membership lapse. She couldn’t stop worrying about what the trainers said about her in private.

  “How are you, Lindy?” Harper asked.

  “I don’t know. I have a three-year-old. I’m too tired to think about how I’m doing. Ask me again in twenty years, if any of us are still around then. You must want Con.” She lowered the phone and screamed, “Con! The Sis!”

  Connor picked up. “Hey! It’s the Sis! What’s up?”

  “I’ve got big news,” she said.

  “Is it the monk? The monk in London?”

  “No. What monk?”

  “The one they shot trying to walk into the BBC. You don’t know about the monk? Him and three others. They were all sick. Long-term sick—this monk has been walking around with the junk since February. They think he might’ve infected literally thousands. They think he wanted to infect the newsroom staff to make a political point. Terrorism by way of disease. Crazy motherfucker. He was glowing like a lightbulb when they cut him down.”

  “It’s not a disease, you know. Not in the traditional sense. It’s not a germ. It’s a spore.”

  “Uh-huh. They talked to his followers when they rounded them up. He was telling them they could learn to control the infection and not to infect others. That they could go home, live among normal people. And if they did infect someone they loved, well, they could just teach them how not to be sick, too. He probably had a brain full of sickness. You had some patients like that in the hospital, didn’t you? Crazies with spore all over their brain?”

  “It gets all over the brain, but I don’t know if that’s why some people go crazy after they’re infected. Hearing you could explode into flames at any second will put a lot of mental strain on a person. Maybe the real surprise is that anyone stays sane.” She thought she would know pretty soon if the ’scale had any effect on a person’s mental state. It was probably beginning to coat her brain right now.

  “Is there something happening besides the terrorist monk?” Connor asked.

  She said, “I’m pregnant.”

  “You’re—” he said. “Ohmigod, Harpo! Oh my God! Lindy! Lindy! Harpo and Jake got pregnant!”

  In the background, Harper heard Lindy say, “She’s pregnant,” in a flat tone that carried no note of celebration. Then she said something else, in a lower tone; it sounded like a question.

  “Harpo!” Connor said. He was trying to sound joyous, but she heard the strain in his voice, and she knew Lindy was being unpleasant somehow. “I’m so, so happy for you. We didn’t even know you were trying. We thought—”

  In the background, but perfectly audible, Lindy said, “We thought you’d be crazy to get pregnant in the middle of a plague, after you spent months in constant contact with infectious people.”

  “Do Mom and Dad know?” Connor asked, his voice flustered. Then, before she could answer, he said, “Hang on.”

  She heard him press the phone to his chest to muffle it, something she had seen him do dozens of times. She waited for him to come back to her. Finally he did.

  “Hey,” he said, out of breath, as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. Maybe he had jogged upstairs to get away from Lindy. “Where were we? I’m so happy for you. Do you know the sex?”

  “It’s too early for that.” She took a deep breath and said, “What would you think if I came to visit for a while?”

  “I think I would try to talk you out of it. You don’t want to go on the road the way things are now. You can’t go thirty miles without hitting a roadblock, and that’s the least of what’s out there. If something happened to you, I’d never forgive myself.”

  “If I could come, though—speaking hypothetically—what would happen if I turned up on your doorstep tomorrow?”

  “I would start with a hug and we’d go from there. Is Jakob on board with this plan? Does he know a guy with a private plane or something? Put him on, I want to say congratulations.”

  “I can’t put him on. Jakob and I aren’t living together anymore.”

  “What do you mean, you aren’t—what happened?” Connor asked. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Oh Jesus. He’s sick, isn’t he? That’s why you want to come. Jesus, I knew you were being weird, but I thought—well, you’re pregnant, you’re entitled.”

  “I don’t know if he’s sick,” she said softly. “But I am. That’s the bad news, Connor. I came down with it six weeks ago. If I turned up on your doorstep, the last thing you’d want to do is hug me.”

  “What do you mean?” His voice sounded small and frightened. “How?”

  “I don’t know. I was careful. It can’t have happened in the hospital. They had us in rubber head to foot.” She was again surprised at the calm she felt, staring the fact of her sickness in the face. “Connor. The womb isn’t a good host for the spore. There’s a strong chance the baby will be born healthy.”

  “Hang on. Hangonhangon. I mean. Oh God.” He sounded like he was trying not to cry. “You’re just a kid. Why’d you have to work in that hospital? Why’d you have to fucking go in there?”

  “They needed nurses. That’s what I am. Connor. I could live with this for months. Months. Long enough to have the baby by C-section. I want you and Lindy to have him after I’m gone.” The thought of Lindy being mother to her unborn child was a bad one, but she forced herself not to think about it. Connor, at least, would be a good dad: loving, and patient, and funny, and a bit square. And her child would have The Portable Mother for the tough times.

  “Harper. Harper. I’m sorry.” His voice was strained and close to a whisper. “It’s not fair. All you ever are is nice to people. It’s just not fair.”

  “Shh. Shh, Connor. This baby is going to need you. And I’
m going to need you.”

  “Yeah. No. I mean—wouldn’t it be better if you went to a hospital?”

  “I can’t. I don’t know what it’s like in New York, but here in New Hampshire they’re sending the sick to a quarantine camp in Concord. It’s not a good place. There’s no medical treatment there. Even if the baby lives, I don’t know what they’ll do with him. Where they’ll place him. I want the baby to be with you, Connor. You and Lindy.” Just saying Lindy’s name was hard. “Besides. People with the spore, when they congregate, they sometimes set each other off. We know that now. We saw it in the hospital. Going to a camp crowded with other people who have this thing is a death sentence. For me and probably the baby, too.”

  “So what about our baby, Harper?” said Lindy, her voice sharp and loud in Harper’s ear. She had picked up an extension. “I’m sorry. I am so fucking sorry I feel ill. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. But, Harper. We have a three-year-old. And you want us to hide you? You want us to take you in and risk you passing this infection to our child? To us?”

  “I could stay in your garage,” Harper whispered, but she doubted Lindy heard her.

  “Even if you don’t pass it to us, what happens if someone finds out? What happens to Connor? To me? They’re locking people up, Harper. We’re probably breaking six federal laws even talking about this,” Lindy said.

  Connor said, “Lindy, get off the phone. Let me talk to my sister.”

  “I am not getting off the phone. You are not making this decision without me. I am not going to let her talk you into risking all of our lives. You want to see our fucking little boy burn to death? No. No. NOT happening.”

  “Lindy. This is a private conversation,” Connor said—whined, really. “This business is between me and Harp.”

  “When it comes to decisions that could affect the safety of our child, it stops being private business and starts being Lindy business,” she said. “I would risk my life for either one of you, but I will not risk my son’s life, and it isn’t right to ask me to. Being a hero isn’t an option anymore when you have a little kid. I know it, and Harper, you know it, too. If you didn’t know it before you got pregnant, you know it now. You want your baby to be okay. I understand, because I feel the same way about mine. I am sorry, Harper. I am. But you made your choices. We have to make ours. They aren’t heroic choices, but they’ll keep our little boy alive until this is all over.”