The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  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 basement 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. God 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 bitch!”

  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, passing 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 muffled her hearing, but the slide whistle cut right through it, loud as a bottle rocket whining away into the night.

  “Harper, you bitch! 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 ass 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 scrape on his chin. He carried the gun low, at his side, barrel pointed toward the forest floor.

  “Oi!” said the Fireman. “Why are you running about with a gun? Someone could get hurt. I hope you have the safety on.”

  Jakob made a sound, a little cry of surprise that was also like a sharp, indrawn breath, and turned, lifting the revolver. The Fireman brought the halligan down, that long rusty bar, with tools bristling from either end. It whistled in the air and struck the barrel of the gun with a clang. The pistol dropped and thudded to the ground and went off and the flash lit the forest.

  “No, I guess not,” said the Fireman.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Jakob asked. “You with Harper?”

  The Fireman cocked his head to one side and seemed to consider this for a moment, his eyes puzzled. Then his face brightened, and he opened his mouth in a generous, toothy grin.

  “Yes, I suppose I am,” he said, and rocked back on his heels, as if this were something he had only just realized and found delightful. It came to Harper, then, that he was crazy—as crazy as Jakob. “Harper. Like Harper Lee, I imagine. I only knew her as Nurse Grayson. Harper.
Wonderful name.” He cleared his throat and added, “I suppose I’m also the man telling you to sod off. These woods don’t belong to you.”

  “Who the fuck do you think they belong to?” Jakob asked.

  “Me,” said the Fireman. “I fucking think they fucking belong the fuck to me. I can swear, too, mate. I’m English. We swear without fear. The C-word? We say that too: cunt cunt cunty cunt cuntcunt.” Without dropping the grin he said, “Go on, now. Get lost, you loudmouthed cunt.”

  Jakob stared at the Fireman warily, seemed genuinely not to know what to say or what to do. Then he turned and bent over, reaching for his gun.

  The Fireman lashed out with the halligan, using it like a polo stick, striking the pistol and knocking it away into the ferns. Jakob did not hesitate, but pivoted and threw himself at the thin, wiry Englishman. The Fireman lifted the halligan, bringing it up between them, but then Jakob had his hands on it, and they were wrestling over it, and Jakob was the stronger man.

  Stronger, and he had better balance . . . that sense of balance that carried him across tightropes and allowed him to perch comfortably on a unicycle. He set his feet and twisted at the waist, lifting the Fireman right off the ground, swinging him half a foot through the air and slamming him into the trunk of the very oak Harper sat in.

  Harper felt the force of the impact shake the tree branch beneath her, felt the whole tree shudder.

  Jakob pulled the bar back a few inches and slammed the Fireman into the tree again. The Fireman grunted, and all the air shot out of him, a whistling exhalation through his nostrils.

  “You motherfucker,” Jakob was saying, almost chanting. “I’ll kill you, motherfucker, I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill her, and I’ll—” His voice trailed off; he had run out of people to kill.

  He slammed the Fireman into the tree again, and the Fireman’s helmet cracked loudly against the trunk. Harper flinched and caught a shout in her throat. Allie, though, had her hand on her knee, and she squeezed it.

  “Watch,” she whispered. She had pulled the mask down around her neck, and Harper saw a beauty: chocolate eyes that glittered with hilarity, tomboy freckles, and delicate features that seemed even sharper and clearer because her head was shaved smooth, to better show the hollows of her temples and her fine bones. “Look at his hand.”

  And Harper saw that the Fireman’s bare left hand was boiling with gray smoke. The left hand had let go of the halligan bar and dropped to the Fireman’s side. Harper flashed to a memory—the Fireman wrestling with Albert in the hallway off the emergency room, and trying to yank his glove off with his teeth.

  Jakob pulled back on the halligan bar, meaning to drive the Fireman into the tree trunk again. But at that moment the Fireman reached over the bar and put his hand on Jakob’s throat, and fire belched from his palm.

  That flame was as blue as a blowtorch. The Fireman’s hand wore a glove of radiant fire. The blaze roared like a rising wind and Jakob screamed and let go of the halligan and fell away. He screamed again, grabbing at his blackened throat. His feet got tangled and he went straight down on his ass and then he sprang up once more and ran, heaving himself blindly through the branches and brush.

  The Fireman watched him go, his left hand a torch. Then he opened his filthy yellow turnout jacket, put his burning hand under it, and clapped the jacket shut, trapping his hand between the coat and his shirt.

  He opened the jacket and shut it and opened it again, beating at his hand calmly—he looked rather like a child trying to use his armpit to make farts—and the third time he opened the jacket, the flame had gone out and the hand was spewing filthy black smoke. He waved the hand in the air, letting the smoke boil off it. In the distance, Harper could hear branches snapping and brush crackling, the sound of Jakob running away. In another moment the woods were quiet except for the alien chirp of night insects.

  The Fireman held up his left hand, drew a deep breath, and blew away the last of the smoke. His palm was sketched with Dragonscale. Those fine, delicate black lines were ashed over now, the surface snow white, with a few sparks nested here and there, glowing faintly. The rest of the skin covering his hand was—fine. Clean and healthy and pink and impossibly unburnt.

  Allie said, “I love it when he does that, but his best trick is when he makes a phoenix. It’s better than fireworks.”

  “True enough!” said the Fireman, turning his head and grinning cheekily up at them. “I put the Fifth of November and the Fourth of July to shame. Who needs Roman candles when you’ve got me?”

  BOOK TWO

  LET YOUR DIM LIGHT SHINE

  1

  Allie was first out of the tree, grabbing the branch and swinging to the ground. Harper meant to go down by way of the rudimentary ladder nailed into the trunk, but as soon as she slid off the branch she had been sitting on, she dropped.

  The Fireman was there to break her fall. He didn’t exactly catch her. He just happened to be below her when she went down. She flattened him under her and they hit the dirt together. The back of her head smashed him in the nose. Her right heel bounced off the ground. The pain that shot through her ankle was exquisite.

  They groaned in each other’s arms, like lovers.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  “Is that the best you can do?” the Fireman asked. He was holding his nose and blinking back tears. “Just a lot of ‘fuck fuck fuck’ over and over again? Can’t you expand your range a little? Goddamn bloody arsefoam. Daddy drilling Mommy on the kitchen table. That sort of thing. Americans curse without any imagination at all.”

  Harper sat up, her shoulders hitching with her first sobs. Her legs were trembling and her ankle was broken and Jakob had nearly killed her, had wanted to kill her, and people were shooting guns and bursting into flame and she had fallen out of a tree, and the baby, the baby, and she couldn’t help herself. The Fireman sat up next to her and put an arm around her and she rested her head on the slippery shoulder of his jacket.

  “There, there,” he said.

  And he held her for a bit, while she had a good, unglamorous cry.

  When her sobs had subsided to hiccups he said, “Let’s get you up. We should be going. We don’t know what your deranged ex-husband might be up to. I wouldn’t put it past him to call a Quarantine Patrol.”

  “He’s not my ex. We’re not divorced.”

  “You are now. By the power vested in me.”

  “What power vested in you?”

  “You know how captains of ships can marry people? Little-known fact, firemen can divorce people as well. Come on, up with you.”

  The Fireman encircled her waist with his left arm and hoisted her to her feet. The hand on her hip was still warm, like fresh bread from the oven.

  “You set your hand on fire,” she said. “How did you do that?”

  On the face of it, she already knew the answer. He had Dragonscale, same as her. His hand was still uncovered and she could see a black-and-gold scrawl tracing the lines of his palm, running in a coil around and around his wrist. A fine gray smoke trickled from the thicker lines.

  She had seen at least a hundred people with Dragonscale ignite—ignite and begin to scream, blue fire racing over them, as if they were painted in kerosene, their hair erupting in a flash. It was not something anyone wanted or could do to themselves, and when it happened it was not controlled and it always ended in death.

  But the Fireman had consciously lit himself up. And only part of himself, just his hand. Then he had calmly put himself back out again. And somehow he had not been hurt.

  “I thought about offering a class once,” the Fireman said. “But I couldn’t figure out what I was teaching. Advanced Pyromancy? Spontaneous Combustion for Dummies? Arson 101? Besides, it’s hard to get people to sign up for a course when failing a test means burning alive.”

  “That’s a lie,” Allie said. “He won’t teach you. He won’t teach anyone. Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

  “No, not tonight, Allie. This is
my favorite pair of dungarees and I can’t afford to burn them up just because you want me to show off.”

  “You’ve been spying on me,” Harper said.

  The Fireman glanced up into the branches of the oak, where she had been perched only a moment before. “There’s an excellent view of your bedroom from up there. Isn’t it odd, how people with something to hide will pull the curtains at the front of the house, but never think to cover the windows out back.”

  “You spend a lot of time wandering around in your underwear, reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” Allie said. “Don’t worry. He never peeped through your windows at you while you were getting dressed. Maybe I did once or twice, but not him. ’E’s a proper English gen’lem’n is wot he is.” Allie’s faux English accent was at least as good as Dick Van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins. If Harper had been a sixteen-year-old boy, she would’ve been mad for her. You could just tell she was the best kind of trouble.

  “Why?” Harper asked the Fireman. “Why spy on me?”

  “Allie,” the Fireman said, as if he had not heard Harper’s question. “Run on ahead to camp. Bring your grandfather and Ben Patchett. Oh, and find Renée. Tell Renée we have acquired her favorite nurse. She’ll be so pleased.”

  Then Allie was gone, springing into leaves in a way that made Harper think of Peter Pan’s shadow zinging around Wendy’s bedroom. Harper had a head crammed full of children’s books and could be quite compulsive about assigning people storybook roles.

  When the girl was gone, the Fireman said, “Just as well to have you to myself for a moment, Nurse Grayson. I’d trust Allie Storey with my life, but there are some things I’d rather not say in front of her. Do you know the summer camp at the end of Little Harbor Road?”

  “Camp Wyndham,” Harper said. “Sure.”

  Dead leaves crunched underfoot and their smell sugared the air with autumn’s perfume.

  “That’s where we’re headed. There’s a fellow there, Tom Storey, Allie’s grandfather. They call him Father Storey. Once upon a time Tom was the program director at the camp. Now he has the place opened up as a shelter for folk with Dragonscale. He’s got more than a hundred people hiding there, and they’ve banged together a decent little society. There’s three meals a day—for now, anyway. I don’t know how much longer that will last. There’s no electric power, but they’ve got working showers if you can stand being pelted by ice water. They’ve got a school, and a kind of junior police force called the Lookouts, to keep watch for Quarantine Patrols and Cremation Crews. That’s mostly teenagers—the Lookouts. Allie and her friends. Gives them something to do. They have all the religion you could possibly want, too. In some ways it isn’t like any religion that’s ever come before and in other ways, well. Fundamentalists are much the same wherever you go. That’s one of the things I wanted to forewarn you about, while Allie ran on ahead. She’s even more devout than most, and that’s saying quite a lot.”