The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  In Carol’s voice, Harper heard the innocent and utter belief of the fanatic, and was dismayed by it. She had learned from Jakob to think of people who spoke of blessings and faith as simple and a little infirm. People who thought things happened for a reason were to be pitied. Such folk had given up their curiosity about the universe for a comforting children’s story. Harper could understand the impulse. She was a fan of children’s stories herself. But it was one thing to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon reading Mary Poppins and quite another to think she might actually turn up at your house to apply for the babysitting job.

  She did her best to appear blandly interested, but her distress must’ve shown. Carol rocked back in her chair and laughed. “Was that a little too much, a little too fast? You’re new here. I’ll try and go easy on you. I warn you, though, in this joint, the lunatics really are running the asylum. What does the cat say to Alice in Wonderland?”

  “‘We’re all mad here,’” Harper said, and smiled in spite of herself.

  Carol nodded. “My father wanted me to take you around and show you the camp. Everyone wants to meet you. We’re late for lunch, but Norma Heald, who runs the cafeteria, promised to keep the kitchen open until we ate.”

  Harper lifted her head and squinted out the windows into a darkness so complete she might’ve been underground. The infirmary’s single wardroom had three cots, with curtains hung between them to create some privacy; she occupied the central bed. It had been dark when she dozed off and was dark now, and she had not the slightest notion what time it might be.

  As if Harper had asked, Carol said, “About two A.M. You slept through the whole day . . . which is just as well. We all live like vampires here: up at sundown, back to the crypt at dawn. No one is drinking blood yet, but if we run out of canned goods, it’s hard to say what will happen.”

  Harper sat up, wincing—just the fabric of her hoodie brushing against her sore, swollen breasts was enough to make them hurt—and discovered two things.

  The first was that one of the curtains was pushed back and a boy sat on the next camp bed over, a boy she recognized . . . a boy with dark, curly hair and delicate, elfin features. The last she had seen him, he was suffering from acute appendicitis, his face greasy with sweat. No—that wasn’t quite right. She supposed she had seen him more recently than that. It had surely been him at her door in the Tiger mask with Allie. Now he sat cross-legged, watching her with the intentness of a child in front of a favorite television show.

  The second was that a radio was on, tuned to static. It sat on the counter, next to a plaster model of a human head, the skull removed to reveal the brain.

  Harper remembered the boy was deaf and moved her hand in a slow wave. In response, he reached behind his back, found a sheet of paper, and handed it to her. On it was a drawing—a little boy’s drawing, although it showed skill—of a large striped cat walking across green grass, tail in the air.

  TEMPORARY CAT read the words beneath the stalking feline.

  Harper gave him a quizzical look and a smile, but he was already sliding off the cot and trotting out.

  “That’s Nick, yes?” Harper asked.

  “My nephew. Yes. Odd duck. It runs in the family.”

  “And John is his stepfather?”

  “What?” Carol said, and it was impossible to miss the sudden edge in her voice. “No. Not at all. My sister and John Rookwood dated for a few months, in a very different world. Nick’s actual father is dead, and John—well, he barely registers in the boy’s life anymore.”

  It seemed to Harper this was a little unkind—not to mention unfair—considering the Fireman had carried Nick to the hospital in his arms and had been ready to fight security and everyone in line to get him treatment. Harper also knew when a topic was an unwelcome one. She left the subject of John Rookwood for another time and said, “Nick gave me a temporary cat. Why did he give me a temporary cat?”

  “It’s a thank-you note. You were the nurse at the hospital who saved his life. That was an awful week. That was the most awful week of my life. I lost my sister. I thought I was going to lose my nephew. I knew we were going to be best friends and I was going to be crazy for you, even before I met you, Harper. Because of what you did for Nick. I want us to have matching pajamas. That’s how crazy I am for you. I wish I had a temporary cat to give you.”

  “If it’s temporary, do I have to give it back?”

  “No. It’s only to tide you over until he can get you a real cat. He’s hunting one. He’s made some snares and complicated traps. He goes around with a net on a stick, like catching cats is the same as catching butterflies. He keeps bugging people to find him catnip. I’m not sure the one he’s hunting is real. No one else has seen it. I’m starting to think it’s like Snuffleupagus, Big Bird’s friend? Just in his head.”

  Harper said, “But Snuffleupagus was real.”

  “That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that.”

  Harper couldn’t put her weight on her right foot, but Carol got an arm around her and helped her stand. As they hobbled past the radio on the counter, Carol reached out—hesitated a moment—and moved the dial slowly through bands of static. That anatomical model of a human head gaped at them in amazement. It was a grotesque thing, skin peeled away from one half of the face to show the sinew and nerves beneath, one eyeball suspended in a fibrous red nest of exposed muscle.

  “What?” Harper asked. “Are you listening for something in particular?”

  “Snuffleupagus,” Carol said, and laughed, and switched the radio off.

  Harper waited for her to explain. She didn’t.

  4

  The cafeteria was perched on top of the hill, overlooking the soccer pitch and the pebbly beach below. Moss and strands of yellowing dead grass grew on the shingled roof and the windows were boarded up, giving it a look of long disuse.

  The impression of abandonment was dispelled the moment Carol pushed open the door and led them into the seating area, a dim, cavernous space with exposed beams of red pine. Plates clattered in the kitchen and the air was fragrant with the odor of marinara sauce and stewed pork.

  Lunch appeared to be over and done, but they didn’t have the place entirely to themselves. Renée Gilmonton sat at a table for two, across from an old fella in a Greek fisherman’s cap, both of them hunched above steaming coffees. A boy sat alone at the next table over, the kid who looked like a Viking. Michael, Harper remembered. He was forking up noodles in red sauce and turning the pages of an ancient Ranger Rick, reading by the light of a candle in a jelly jar. The evening before, Michael had come across as maybe seventeen. Now, bent over an article on “Miami’s Marvelous Manatees,” his eyes wide with fascination, he looked like a ten-year-old in a fake beard.

  Renée lifted her chin and caught Harper’s eye. It was a pleasure and a relief to have a friend here, to not be completely alone among strangers. Harper flashed back to other lunches in other cafeterias, and the anxiety that came with not seeing a familiar face and not knowing where to sit. She suspected Renée had waited around in hopes of meeting up with Harper and helping her to settle in . . . a small act of consideration for which Harper was indecently grateful.

  The serving counter was manned by Norma Heald, a mountainous pile of flesh with the broad, sloping shoulders of a silverback gorilla. The postmeal cleanup was under way—Harper saw a couple of teenage boys in the kitchen, plunging dishes into soapy water by the light of an oil lamp—but Norma had reserved some pasta in a steel warming pan and a couple of ladles of sauce. There was coffee and a can of condensed milk for cream.

  “We had sugar for a while and it was full of ants. Ants in the coffee, ants in the muffins, ants in the peach cobbler,” Carol said. “For a few weeks, ants were my primary source of protein. No sugar now, though! Just syrup. Sorry! Welcome to the Last Days!”

  “The sugar is gone and the milk will follow,” Norma said. “I put out two
cans of milk for the coffee, but there’s only one left.”

  “The other got used up?” Carol asked. “So quickly?”

  “Nope. Stole.”

  “I’m sure no one stole a can of milk.”

  “Stole,” Norma repeated, her tone of voice closer to satisfaction than outrage. She sat behind the counter, occupied with a pair of silver knitting needles that raced back and forth, clicking and clacking, all the time she spoke. She was working on a giant shapeless tube of black yarn that might’ve been a prophylactic for King Kong.

  Harper and Carol made their way to Michael’s table, Carol making a come-on-over gesture to Renée and the old fella. “Sit with us, you two. We can all share Harper! There’s enough to go around.”

  They arranged themselves around the table, bumping knees. Harper lifted her hand for her fork, but Carol grasped her fingers before she could reach it.

  “Before we eat, we go around the circle and say one thing we’re glad for,” Carol said, leaning into Harper and speaking in a confidential tone of voice. “Sometimes it’s the best part of the meal. Which will make more sense after you’ve tried the food.”

  “We snacked already, but I don’t mind bowing the head with you,” said the old man, who hadn’t yet been introduced.

  Renée squeezed Harper’s other hand and then they were all sitting in a ring, leaning in toward the light of the single candle, like a group assembled for a séance.

  “I’ll start us off,” Carol said. “I’m glad for the woman sitting next to me, who saved my nephew when he had appendicitis. I’m glad she’s here and I have a chance to show her how grateful I am. I’m glad for her baby, because babies are exciting! Like fat little sausages with faces!”

  The old fella spoke with lowered head and half-shut eyes. “I’m glad for the nurse myself, because a hundred and twenty-four people need a lot of lookin’ after, and I’ve been over my head for months. I’m all this camp’s had for medical care since the end of August, and all I know is what I larnt in the navy. I don’t want to say how long it’s been since I studied as a hospital corpsman, but at the time they had only just phased out the use of leeches.”

  “Me, I guess I’m mostly just glad to be in a place where people love me,” Michael told them. “People like Aunt Carol and Father Storey. I’d do anything for them, to keep this place safe. I lost one family. I’d rather die myself than lose another.”

  “I’m glad to have had a hot lunch,” Renée said, “even if it was fried Spam in Ragú. I’m also glad this camp has an ace fisherman in Don Lewiston, and I’ll be gladder still the next time it’s my turn for fish.” Nodding at the old fella. Then she looked sidelong at Harper and said, “And I’m so glad to see my friend from Portsmouth Hospital, who marched around eighteen hours a day, whistling Disney tunes and trying to keep up the spirits of a thousand sick and terrified patients. Every time she came in the room, it felt like a break in a month of clouds. She made me want to keep going when there wasn’t any other reason.”

  Harper wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her own voice, was ambushed by unexpected emotion. In her days at Portsmouth Hospital, she had felt about as useful as Renée’s potted mint, and it caught her unprepared to hear someone tell her different. Finally, she managed, “I’m just glad not to be alone anymore.”

  Carol squeezed her fingers. “I am so glad to be part of this circle. We are all voices in the same chorus and we sing our thanks.”

  And for a moment it was there again: Carol’s eyes pulsed with brightness, her irises becoming rings of fey green light. Michael’s eyes flashed as well, and Harper saw a prickle of red and gold flicker across the whorls of Dragonscale on his bare arms.

  Harper let go of Carol’s hand as if at a physical shock. But then the weird sheen was gone and Carol was eyeing her mischievously.

  “Freaked you out, didn’t I? Sorry. You’ll get used to it, though. Eventually it’ll happen to you, too.”

  “It’s a little frightening,” Harper said. “But also . . . well, like magic.”

  “It’s not magic. It’s a miracle,” Carol said, like someone identifying the make of her new car: It’s a Miata.

  “What’s happening when you shine like that?” Harper asked. Something came back to her then and she looked, almost accusingly, at Renée. “It’s the same thing that happened to you in the hospital. You ran out covered in light. Everyone thought you were going to explode.”

  “So did I,” Renée said. “I stumbled onto it by accident. They call it joining the Bright.”

  Michael said, “Or the Network. But I guess that’s only people my age. A lot of my friends joke that it’s just another social network. Only they’re kind of not joking.”

  “You probably understand that the Dragonscale responds badly to stress,” Carol said.

  The old fella, Don Lewiston, laughed. “That’s one way a puttin’ it.”

  “That’s because it feels what you feel,” Carol continued. “That’s such a powerful concept. I’m surprised more people haven’t followed the thread of that idea to see where it goes. If you can create a feeling of security and well-being and acceptance, the Dragonscale will react in a very different way: by making you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt before. It will make colors deeper and tastes richer and emotions stronger. It’s like being set on fire with happiness. And you don’t just feel your happiness. You feel everyone else’s, too. Everyone around you. Like we’re all notes being played together in a single perfect chord.”

  “And you don’t burn,” Michael said, twisting the orange coil of his beard.

  “And you don’t burn,” Carol repeated.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” Harper said. “How does it work?”

  “Harmony,” Carol said.

  “Harmony?”

  “Connection, anyway,” Renée said. “Strong social connection. John has some interesting theories about it, if you can draw him out. He told me once—”

  Carol’s face darkened. An artery, squiggling in her right temple, thickened. “John Rookwood isn’t here and he doesn’t want to be here. He prefers to keep his distance. It’s easier to maintain his own personal myth that way. I think he looks down on us, honestly.”

  “Do you really think that?” Renée asked. “I’ve never had that impression. I would’ve said he looks out for us. If he does have a condescending view of camp, he has a peculiar way of showing it. He’s the person who led most of us here in the first place.”

  There was an uneasy silence. Renée gazed at Carol with an innocent curiosity. For her part, Carol would not meet her stare. Instead she took a long swallow of coffee, a benign, easygoing gesture that Harper saw through. For an instant, there had been hate in her face. John had made it clear the night before, in the woods, that he was no fan of Carol Storey; the feeling, it seemed, was mutual.

  Michael was the first to speak and smooth over the awkward moment. “The easiest way to join the Bright is to sing. The whole mess of us, the entire camp, get together in church every day after breakfast and have a big sing and we always shine. You’ll shine, too. It might not happen right away, but stick with it. When it comes over you, it’s like someone plugged you in to a giant battery. It’s like all the lights are turning on in your soul for the first time in your life.” His eyes had a bright, hot look that made Harper want to check him for fever.

  “I had no idea what was happening to me, the first time I went into the Bright,” Renée said. “To say I was surprised doesn’t do it justice, Mrs. Grayson.”

  “You better start calling me Harper,” Harper said. She didn’t add that she thought she was all done being Mrs. Grayson. That name belonged to Jakob, and she felt she had left everything of Jakob’s behind in the woods. Her maiden name had been Willowes. She missed the way it rolled off her tongue, and the thought of having her old name returned to her felt like another escape—a far more satisfying and peaceful escape than her leap out the bedroom window.

  “Harper,” Renée said, tryin
g it out. She smiled. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get used to it, but I’ll try. Well, Harper. I was reading to the children. We were working our way through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I stopped to sing ‘The Candy Man’ song from the film. A few of them knew the words and sang along with me. It was such a nice, peaceful moment, I forgot we were all sick. I got that melty, tranced-out feeling that comes over you when you’re in front of a fire and you’ve had a couple drinks. And suddenly the kids began screaming. Time began to run thick and slow. I remember one of the children knocked my potted mint off my little end table and it seemed like I had half an hour to reach out and catch it. And when I did, I realized my whole arm was splattered with light. I thought it was so glorious looking, I couldn’t find it in me to be terrified. But then someone shrieked, Get away from her, she’s going to explode! And right away, I thought, I am! I’m going to go off like a grenade! Sometimes I think people are a bit more suggestible when they enter that state. The Bright. So I ran for my life, with my potted mint. Straight past two sets of guards and half a dozen doctors and nurses, across the parking lot and into the meadow south of the hospital. I thought I would set the grass on fire when I waded into it, but I didn’t. It took a while for the light to die out, and afterwards I was shivery and drunk.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Oh, yuh,” said Don Lewiston. “You wind up pretty pickled after you go into the Bright. Especially the first couple times. You forget your own name.”

  “You—what?”

  Carol said, “A lot of people forget their own name the first time. I think that’s the most beautiful part of it. All the stuff you think defines you—it peels off like Christmas wrapping. The Bright winnows you down to your truest, best self, the version of you that goes deeper than a name or what football team you root for. And you become aware of yourself as just one leaf on a tree, and everyone you know and love, they’re all the other leaves.”