by Joe Hill
There was a rending crack, a sliding, reverberating crash that shook the forest floor and caused Harper’s pulse to leap. She stared back through the woods in the direction they had come from. She couldn’t imagine what could possibly have made such an enormous, shattering noise.
The Fireman cast a brief, considering glance over his shoulder, then took her arm and began to move her along again, a little more briskly now. He continued as if there had been no interruption at all.
“You have to understand that most of the camp is between your age and Allie’s. There are a few oldsters, but a lot more who ought to still be in school. Most of them have lost family, seen the people they love burn to death in front of them. They were in shock when they found their way to camp, refugees, deranged by grief, and just waiting around to burst into flame themselves. Then Father Storey and his daughter Carol—Allie’s aunt—taught them they don’t have to die. They’ve offered them hope when they had none and a very concrete form of salvation.”
Harper slowed, in part to rest her sore ankle, in part to absorb what he was saying.
“What do you mean, they’re teaching people they don’t have to die? No one can teach someone with Dragonscale not to die. That’s impossible. If there was a treatment, some pill—”
“You aren’t required to swallow anything,” the Fireman said. “Not even their faith. Remember that, Nurse Grayson.”
“If there was anything that could prevent the Dragonscale from killing people, the government would know by now. If there was something that worked, really worked, something that could extend the lives of millions of sick people—”
“—people with a lethal and contagious spore on their skin? Nurse Grayson, no one wants us extending our lives. Nothing could be less desirable. Shortening them—that’s what would best serve the public good. At least in the minds of the healthy population. One thing we know about people with Dragonscale: they don’t burst into flame if you shoot them in the head. You don’t have to worry about a corpse infecting you or your children . . . or starting a conflagration that might take out a city block.” She opened her mouth to protest and he squeezed her shoulder. “There’ll be time to argue this point later. Although I warn you, it’s been argued before, most notably by poor Harold Cross. I feel his case largely settles the matter.”
“Harold Cross?”
He shook his head. “Leave it for now. I only want you to understand that Tom and Carol have given these people more than food or shelter or even a way to suppress their illness. They’ve given them belief . . . in each other, in the future, and in the power they share as a flock. A flock isn’t such a bad thing if you belong, but a few hundred starlings will tear an unlucky martin to feathers if it crosses their path. I think Camp Wyndham could be a very unfriendly place for an apostate. Tom, he’s tolerant enough. He’s your inclusive, modern, thoughtful religious type, an ethics professor by trade. But his daughter, Allie’s aunt: she’s barely more than a kid herself, and most of the other kids have made a kind of cult around her. She sings the songs, after all. You want to stay on her good side. She’s kind enough, Carol is. Means well. But if she doesn’t love you, then she’s afraid of you, and she’s dangerous when she’s afraid. I am uneasy in my mind about what might happen if Carol ever felt seriously threatened.”
“I’m not going to threaten anyone,” Harper said.
He smiled. “No. You don’t strike me as the type to make trouble, but to make peace. I still haven’t forgotten the first time you crossed my path, Nurse Grayson. You saved his life, you know. Nick. And you saved my skull, while you were at it. I seem to remember it was just about to be kicked in when you intervened. I owe you.”
“Not anymore,” Harper said.
Ahead of them, in the dark, branches rustled and were pushed aside. A modest assembly emerged, Allie leading the way. The girl was breathing hard and had a pretty flush of color on her delicate features.
“What happened, John?” asked a man standing directly behind her. His voice was low and melodious and even before she saw Tom Storey’s face, Harper liked him. At first, she could make out little more than his gold-rimmed spectacles flashing in the darkness. “Who do we have here?”
“Someone useful,” the Fireman said, only now she knew his name: John. “A nurse, a Miss Grayson. Can you take her the rest of the way? I’m no doctor, but I think she fractured her ankle. If you’ll help her along to the infirmary, I’d like to go back and collect her things while there’s still time. My guess is there’ll soon be police and a Quarantine Patrol swarming her place.”
“Gee, can I help?” said one of the other members of the greeting party. He stepped forward, slipping easily between the Fireman and Harper, and put his arm around her waist. Harper slung hers over his shoulders. He was a big man, maybe quarter of a century older than Harper, with sloping shoulders and pale silver hair beginning to thin up top. Harper thought of an aged and well-loved Paddington Bear. “Ben Patchett,” he said. “Glad to meet you, ma’am.”
There was a woman with them, too, short, squashy, her silver hair braided into cornrows. She smiled tentatively, perhaps unsure Harper would remember her. Of course there was no chance at all Harper could’ve forgotten the woman who fled Portsmouth Hospital, shimmering as brightly as a flare and just as sure to explode.
“Renée Gilmonton,” Harper said. “I thought you ran away to die somewhere.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Father Storey had other ideas.” Renée put an arm under Harper’s armpits, helping to support her from the other side. “You took such good care of me for so long, Nurse Grayson. What a pleasure to have a chance to tend to you for a bit.”
“How’d you bust your ankle?” Father Storey asked, lifting his chin so the dim light flashed on the lenses of his spectacles, and for the first time Harper could see his features, his long, skinny, deeply lined face and silver beard, and she thought: Dumbledore. The beard was actually less Dumbledore, more Hemingway, but the eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were a brilliant shade of blue that naturally suggested a man who could cast runes and speak to trees.
Harper found it hard to reply, didn’t know yet how to speak of Jakob and what he had tried to do to her.
The Fireman seemed to see in a glance how the question defeated her, and answered himself. “Her husband came for her with a gun. I chased him off. That’s all. Time is short, Tom.”
“Isn’t it always?” Father Storey replied.
The Fireman started to turn away—then pivoted back and pressed something into Harper’s hand. “Oh, you dropped this, Nurse. Do keep it on you. If you ever need me again, just blow.” It was her pennywhistle. She had dropped it running from Jakob and forgotten all about it, and was absurdly grateful to have it returned.
“He doesn’t slip everyone his slide whistle of love,” Allie said. “You’re in.”
“Mind out of the gutter, Allie,” the Fireman said. “What would your mother have said?”
“Something dirtier,” Allie said. “Come on, let’s go get the nurse’s gear.”
Allie dropped the Captain America mask back over her face and bounded into the trees. The Fireman cursed under his breath and began to hurry after her, using that great iron pole of his to swat aside the underbrush.
“Allie!” Father Storey cried. “Allie, please! Come back!”
But she was already gone.
“That girl has no business mixing herself up in John’s work,” said Ben Patchett.
“Try and stop her,” Renée said.
“The Fireman—John—he lit himself on fire,” Harper said. “His whole hand burst into flame. How’d he do that?”
“Fire is the devil’s only friend,” Ben Patchett said, and laughed. “Isn’t that right, Father?”
“I don’t know if he’s a devil,” said Father Storey. “But if he is, he’s our devil. Still . . . I wish Allie wouldn’t go with him. Does she want to get herself killed like her mother? Sometimes it almost seems she’s daring the
world to try.”
“Oh, Father,” said Renée. “You raised two teenage girls. If anyone understood Allie, I’d think it would be you.” She looked off into the woods, in the direction Allie had disappeared in. “Of course she’s daring the world to try.”
2
It was barely a mile to Camp Wyndham, but it seemed to Harper they were tromping after Father Storey, through the weary, stifling darkness, for hours. They wallowed in drifts of leaves, wove in and around pine trees, clambered over a pile of rocks, always moving toward the briny scent of the Atlantic. Her ankle thrummed.
Harper did not ask where they were and Father Storey did not say. Not long after they started moving, he popped something into his mouth—it was the size of a blue jay’s egg—and after that made no sound.
They emerged alongside Little Harbor Road, looking across the blacktop at the turnoff into Camp Wyndham: a lane of hard-packed white shell and sandy earth. The entrance was barred by a chain hung between a pair of tall standing boulders that would not have looked out of place at Stonehenge. Beyond, the land mounded up in green hills. Even at night, Harper could see the white steeple of a church, sticking up over the ridge a half mile away.
The burned-out and blackened hull of a bus was parked off the road, just past those totemic blocks of granite. It was up to its iron rims in weeds and had been baked down almost to the frame.
Before they crossed the road, Father Storey clapped twice. The four of them hobbled up out of the brush and crossed the blacktop to the sandy lane. A boy descended the steps of the bus to stand in the open doorway and watch them approach.
Father Storey removed the white egg from his mouth and glanced back at Harper and her human crutches.
“The bus may look like a wreck, but it isn’t quite. The headlights work. If someone unknown were to come up our road, a boy in the bus would wait for our visitors to move out of sight, then flash a signal. Another boy, in the steeple of the church, keeps a lookout for it. The eye in the steeple sees all the people.” He smiled at this, then added, “If necessary we can get into hiding in two minutes. We drill every day. Credit to Ben Patchett—this inspiration is his. My own ideas involved a fantastical system of bird whistles and the possible use of kites.”
The boy in the bus had a beard that made Harper think of Vikings: a stiff coil of braided orange wires. But the face behind the beard was young and soft. Harper doubted he was any older than Allie. He lazily twirled a nightstick in one hand.
“I guess I misunderstood the plan, Father,” the boy said. “I thought you were off to bring us a nurse, not someone who needs a nurse.” His gaze shifted from one face to another and he smiled in a worried sort of way. “I don’t see Allie.”
“We heard a thunderous crash, a stupendous roar of mindless violence and senseless destruction,” Father Storey told him. “Naturally, Allie ran straight toward it. Try not to worry, Michael. She has the Fireman with her.”
Michael nodded, then dipped his head toward Harper in a way that was almost courtly. His eyes shone with the fevered innocence of someone who has been Saved. “Hello to you. We’re all friends here, Nurse. This is where your life begins again.”
She smiled back at him but couldn’t think how to reply, and in another moment it was too late, Ben and Renée shuttling her along. When Harper looked back, the boy had vanished into the bus.
Father Storey was about to put the gumball back in his mouth, then saw Harper looking at it. “Ah. Bit of a compulsion of mine. Something I picked up reading Samuel Beckett. I stick a pebble in my mouth to remind myself to be quiet and listen now and then. I taught in a private school for decades, and with all these young people wandering about, the urge to deliver impromptu lectures is very strong.”
They followed the winding lane through leafy darkness, past a dry swimming pool and a riflery range where brass cartridges glittered dully amid dead leaves. All seemed long abandoned—an appearance maintained at some effort, Harper learned later.
At last they reached the top of the hill. A soccer pitch lay on the other side of the slope in a shallow, grassy cup below them. Children yelled and chased a ball that glowed a pale, eerie green, the color of a ghost. Beyond that, through the trees, loomed a long boathouse and the heaving blackness of the sea.
The chapel was on the right, set back from the road. It was placed on the far side of a sculpture garden of mossy dolmens and tall monoliths. The Monument Park was an odd, primitive sort of thing to find guarding the way to a perfectly modern-looking church with a tall steeple and bright red doors. The church might be a place of worship, but the sculpture garden looked more a place of sacrifice.
What caught Harper’s attention in particular was a knot of six teenagers, sitting on logs, at one corner of a vast barn of a building that turned out to be the cafeteria. They were gathered around a campfire that burned a peculiar shade of ruby-gold, as if the flames were shining through red crystal.
A slim-shouldered beauty swayed in the undulating crimson light, strumming a ukulele. At first glance, she might’ve been Allie’s twin. But no, she was older, mid-twenties maybe. Her head was shaved, too, although she had preserved a single black lock of hair, like a comma, on her brow. The aunt, Harper guessed.
She led the others on a sing-along, their voices lacing together like lovers’ fingers. They sang an old U2 number, sang about how they were one but not the same, and how they would carry each other. As Harper went by, the woman with the uke lifted her gaze and smiled and her eyes were bright as gold coins, and that was when Harper saw there was no campfire at all. It was them making the light. They were all of them tattooed with loops and whorls of Dragonscale, which glowed like fluorescent paint under a black light, hallucinatory hues of cherry wine and blowtorch blue. When they opened their mouths to sing, Harper glimpsed light painting the insides of their throats, as if each of them were a kettle filled with embers.
Harper felt she had never seen anything so frightening or beautiful. She shivered and for a moment was conscious of her body beneath her clothes and a feeling like fingers gently tracing the lines of Dragonscale on her skin. She swayed with a sudden giddy light-headedness.
“They’re shining,” Harper muttered, a little thickly. Her head was filled with their song and it was hard to push a thought through it.
“You will, too,” Ben Patchett promised her. “In time.”
“Is it dangerous?” Harper breathed. “Can they catch fire doing that?”
Father Storey popped the stone out of his mouth and said, “The Dragonscale is like anything that makes fire, Nurse Grayson. You can use it to burn a place down . . . or light your way to something better. No one dies of spontaneous combustion in Camp Wyndham.”
“You’ve beaten it?” Harper asked.
“Better,” Father Storey said. “We’ve made friends with it.”
3
Harper sprang shuddering to consciousness from an ugly dream, twisting in her bedsheets.
Carol Storey leaned over her, a hand on her wrist.
“You’re all right. Breathe.”
Harper nodded. She was woozy, her pulse rapping so hard it made her vision flash.
She wondered how long she had slept. She remembered being half carried up the steps into an infirmary, recalled Ben Patchett and Renée Gilmonton following her careful instructions as they set her ankle and bound it in rolls of gauze. She dimly remembered Renée bringing her lukewarm water and some gel tabs of acetaminophen, remembered the older woman’s dry, cool hand on her forehead and worried, watching gaze.
“What were you dreaming?” Carol asked. “Do you remember?”
Carol Storey had enormous, wondering eyes with irises of chocolate, flecked with gold speckles of Dragonscale. Hoops of gold and ebony circled her wrists, and she wore a short T-shirt that rode up to show crossed belts of the ’scale above her hips. It gave her the look of a goth gunslinger. Where her skin was unmarked, it was pale almost to the point of translucency. She was so delicate it looked as thou
gh, if she stumbled and fell, she might shatter, like a ceramic vase.
Harper’s breasts were sore, there was a dry spoke of heat in her fractured ankle, and her thoughts were muddled and slow with the dregs of a deep sleep. “My husband wrote a book. I dropped it. The pages went everywhere. And . . . I think I was trying to put it all back in order before he got home. I didn’t want him to know I’d been reading it.” There had been more—more and worse—but it was already slipping away, dropping out of sight, like a stone kicked into deep water.
“I thought I’d better wake you,” Carol said. “You were shivering and making these awful noises and—well—smoking a little.”
“I was?” Harper asked. She realized she could smell a faint odor of char, as if someone had burned a few pine needles.
“Only a little.” Carol gazed at her with a look of pained apology. “When you sighed, there’d be a blue puff. It’s stress that does it. After you’ve learned to join the Bright, that won’t happen anymore. Once you’re really one of us—part of the group—the Dragonscale won’t ever hurt you. It’s hard to believe, but one day, you may even look at the ’scale as a blessing.”