The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  She turned a frustrated look upon Allie.

  “What? What? You got something to say, Nurse Nobody?” Allie asked her.

  “Yes,” Harper said, summoning up all the Julie Andrews she had in her heart. “A bad show, Allie. A very bad show. He also lost his mother, you know, and you are all he has left. For shame. After he threw two Yahtzees!”

  Allie’s response to this shocked Harper more than anything else. Her face crumpled and she began to sob. She sat down hard, with her back against the springs of her overturned bed.

  At this sudden display of defeat, the Neighbors twins, Jamie Close, and all the other members of Allie’s unofficial, unnamed sorority—that society of orphan girls with shaved heads—flocked to her side. Even Emily Waterman scuttled out from under her cot and ran over to throw her arms around Allie’s neck. Girls took her hands and sat beside her, whispering soothingly and fussing over her. Gail Neighbors began to quietly pick up her things. One entering the room would’ve imagined Allie was the person who had just been bullied and humiliated, not Renée or Nick.

  Harper returned to her cot, which was at a right angle to Renée’s. Renée was already sitting on the edge of her mattress by then, looking as worn and disheartened as Harper felt.

  “Should one of us go after Nick?” Renée asked.

  “I don’t think so. He won’t go far in this snow. The Lookouts will yell if he so much as steps off the planks. One of them will bring him back eventually.”

  The Marlboro Man was still chattering, saying something about a woman who had smelled like a wet cat when she burned. He seemed offended that she had the bad grace to stink when she died. Talk radio was enough to make Harper think the end of the world wasn’t so bad after all.

  “I can’t take anymore,” Renée said, and Harper thought she was speaking of life in the camp, but she only meant the DJ. Renée reached out and, with an irritated flick, switched the radio to AM and began to skip through bands of static.

  Harper said, “What are you doing? Why are people in this camp always listening to static? What are all of you listening for?”

  “Martha Quinn,” Renée said.

  “Martha Quinn? Martha Quinn, who used to be on MTV a thousand years ago?”

  “She’s out there . . . somewhere.”

  “Lies,” Norma Heald murmured. “All lies. That’s a pipe dream.”

  Renée ignored her. “You know what the kids say.”

  “I have no idea what the kids say. What do they say?”

  “She came back from the eighties to save mankind. Martha Quinn is our only hope.”

  3

  “I’ve never heard the broadcast myself, but supposedly she’s transmitting from off the coast of Maine.” Renée struggled into a bulky orange parka.

  It was later. Women milled around the bottom of the basement steps, picking coats and hats out of cardboard boxes, readying themselves for the three-hundred-foot march through the snow to the cafeteria and supper. Outside, the wind screamed.

  “From a boat?”

  “From an island. They’ve got a little town and their own research lab, backed by the federal government. What’s left of the federal government, anyway. They’re testing experimental treatments.”

  Jamie Close grinned, showing snaggled teeth, two incisors missing from the lower part of her mouth. “They’ve got a serum they give to you in eighteen shots. Like for rabies. It suppresses the Dragonscale, but they need to give it to you every day. Bend over, drop your pants, and bite on this stick, because you’re getting it right in the ass. I say no thank you to that. If I wanted someone poking painful things in my ass every day, I’ve got an uncle I could look up.”

  Harper had a scarf over her mouth, wound around and around the lower part of her face, and she felt this gave her permission not to reply. She squeezed into the crowd of women making their way up the steps, out into the darkness and the shrieking gale.

  “It’s not as bad as that,” murmured Gail Neighbors. At least Harper thought it was Gail Neighbors. It would’ve been difficult to tell the twins apart under any circumstances, but with a hat pulled to the girl’s eyebrows and the puffy collar of her parka up around her ears, Harper could hardly see any of her face. “Apparently they’re doing great things with medical marijuana. Everyone gets an allowance, seven joints a week. Government-bred weed, so it’s really clean, really mellow.”

  “Also, the legal drinking age there is sixteen,” said the one Harper thought was Gillian. They had both turned sixteen, Harper recalled, just after Thanksgiving.

  The pressure of the crowd behind Harper ejected her out of the stairwell and into the night. A pair of planks ran alongside each other, across the snow, dwindling off into the darkness. The salty gale battered at Harper, caused her to stagger. She wasn’t as steady on her pins as she had been a couple months ago. Her center of gravity was shifting. She steadied herself against a boulder wearing a white cap of snow.

  The Neighbors girls passed her, went on ahead. Emily Waterman skipped along behind them, and Harper heard her saying, “They have ice cream on Fridays! Homemade ice cream! Three flavors, strawberry, vanilla, and I think coffee. Coffee is my favorite.”

  “Ice cream every day!” promised one of the Neighbors girls.

  “Ice cream for breakfast!” said the other, and then they were gone into the night.

  Allie took Harper’s elbow, helped her to stand straight.

  “Think Nick went to the cafeteria?” Allie asked in a low, dispirited voice. He hadn’t returned to the dorm, hadn’t been seen since running out.

  “I don’t know,” Harper said. “Probably.”

  “Think Renée will ever talk to me again?”

  “I think you’ll feel better as soon as you apologize.”

  “Don Lewiston knows where it is.”

  “Where what is?”

  “The island. Martha Quinn’s island. At least he thinks he knows. He showed me on a map once. He says based on all the information, it’s probably Free Wolf Island, off Machias.”

  “So he’s heard the broadcast?”

  “No.”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Has anyone heard Martha Quinn?”

  “No,” said Carol Storey, before Allie could reply.

  They had reached an intersection, beyond Monument Park, where the path from the chapel met a series of planks extending from the woods. Carol emerged from the snow, which was whipping almost sideways, her father behind her. She led him as if he were a child, holding his mittened hand.

  “You ask everyone in camp,” Carol Storey said. “It’s always someone else who has heard it. And if it makes them feel better to have a perfect safe haven to daydream about, what’s wrong with that? I’ve caught myself going through the AM band sometimes, too. But I’ll tell you what. Even if she’s out there, Martha Quinn doesn’t have anything we need. We’ve already got everything we need right here.”

  Harper stamped into the cafeteria, snow falling off her boots in wet white clumps. Father Storey flapped his coat and a small blizzard fell around his legs. She cast her gaze around for Nick and didn’t see him.

  They collected trays and moved along the line to be served.

  Father Storey said, “I always had a bit of a crush on Martha Quinn, in her bright vests and skinny ties. There’s something about a woman in a tie. You just want to grab it and pull her over for a squeeze.” He winked. Norma Heald dished him a scoop of ravioli. The sauce had the consistency of mud. “Norma, this looks delightful. Is it your own recipe?”

  “It’s Chef Boyardee,” Norma said.

  “Wonderful!” he cried, and shuffled along to get himself some Ritz crackers.

  Norma rolled her eyes to watch him go, then looked back to Harper. She collected another scoop of ravioli, but instead of dumping it into Harper’s bowl, she waved the big serving spoon at her. “I remember when she was on TV. Martha Quinn. Teaching little girls to dress like tiny whores. Her and Madonna and the o
ne with the hair like cotton candy, Cyndi Lauper. People like Martha Quinn are the reason this world is being scourged by fire. You ask yourself if God would let such a woman live, and make her His voice, calling His people to safety? Look in your heart. You know He wouldn’t. She is gone and Madonna is gone and every moneylender in Jew York City who got rich turning little girls into prostitutes is gone. You know it and I know it.” The ravioli fell from the spoon into Harper’s bowl with a thick wet schlopp.

  “I doubt very much that God harbors anti-Semitic views toward New York City or anywhere else, Norma,” Harper told her. “Seeing as he called the Jews his own chosen people, that seems highly unlikely. Have you seen Nick? Did he come in for dinner?”

  Norma Heald gave her a glazed, dull, unfriendly look. “Haven’t seen him. Why don’t you go outside and yell for him?”

  “He’s deaf,” Harper said.

  “Don’t let that stop you,” Norma said.

  4

  Michael brought Nick back a few minutes before dawn. Nick was soaked through and shivering from his night out, his dark hair matted into tangles, his eyes sunk in deep hollows. Harper thought he looked feral, as if he had been raised by wolves.

  The boy walked swiftly past Allie’s bed, without so much as a glance at his sleeping sister, and went straight to Harper’s cot. He wrote on a sticky pad: I don’t want to sleep with her anymore. can I sleep here?

  Harper took his pad and wrote: teach me how to say “time for bed” in sign language and it’s a deal.

  That was how Nick Storey came to sleep with Harper instead of Allie, and how Harper renewed her education in American Sign Language; they settled on one new word or phrase a night as the price of admission to her bed. She was a good student, she liked practicing with him, and she was glad to have the distraction.

  Although maybe she was too distracted: when the thief got around to stealing the Portable Mother, Harper didn’t even know it was gone until Renée Gilmonton asked what had happened to it.

  5

  Harper had never seen the Fireman in chapel before—no one had—and she was as surprised as the rest of them when he turned up the night after the Portable Mother was stolen. He did not come all the way into the building, but remained in the narthex, just beyond the inner set of doors. His presence contributed to a low but steady sense of anticipation that had been building all night. Word had passed that Father Storey was going to make an announcement about the thefts in the girls’ dorm. He was going to do something.

  “I think we should send the bitch away,” Allie said over breakfast. “Find out who she is and pack her shit. No excuses, no apologies.”

  Harper said, “What if the thief gets picked up by a Cremation Crew? Not only would they kill her, they’d force her to tell them about camp.”

  “She isn’t going to tell them anything. Not if we yank her fucking tongue out before she goes. And break her fingers so she can’t write.”

  “Oh, Allie. I don’t think you mean that.”

  Allie only stared back with an expression of glassy, indifferent serenity. Like all the Lookouts, she had been skipping lunches for over a month now. Her cheekbones protruded in a way that made a person quite aware of the skull under her skin.

  For herself, Harper didn’t want Father Storey, or anyone else, to worry about what she had lost. Everyone had lost something: homes, families, hope. Put alongside these things, the Portable Mother seemed no very great loss.

  Which was not to say it meant nothing. She had found no end of things to squeeze into the carpetbag for the baby. There was a wooden sword with a rope handle for when he needed to practice his sword fighting. There was a mini audio player on which Harper had recorded lullabies, bedtime stories, and a few poems. There was an umbrella for rainy days, slippers for lazy ones. Most of all, there was the notebook that had started it all and which she had filled up with facts (your grandfather—my father—worked at NASA for thirty years . . . he made honest-to-God spaceships!!), advice (you can put anything in a salad—slices of apple, hot peppers, nuts, raisins, chicken, anything—and it will all taste good together), affection (I haven’t said I love you anywhere on this page, so here’s a reminder: I love you) and lots of capital letters and exclamation points (I LOVE YOU!!!).

  Others had made contributions as well. Allie Storey put in a plastic Iron Man mask for when he was on secret missions and needed a disguise. Renée Gilmonton had appropriated eighteen short books from the camp library, one that would be right for each year of her son’s life, starting with Wheels on the Bus and ending with Of Mice and Men. Don Lewiston had made a present of a ship in a bottle. Carol Storey offered Harper a View-Master full of pictures of historic places that were all gone now. These days, the Eiffel Tower was a blackened spear puncturing a sky of smoke. The Strip in downtown Las Vegas was a charred wasteland. But in the View-Master, the neon lights and spouting fountains would be bright forever.

  When the last stragglers had filed into the chapel, Father Storey climbed the steps to the podium, took his thinking pebble out of his mouth, and said, “I thought I would reverse the usual order of things tonight and get my blab out of the way before we sing and join the Bright. I apologize in advance. Much as I do love to hear myself talk, I know the songs are my favorite part of the night. I imagine you feel the same way. Sometimes I think with half the world on fire—with so much dying and so much pain—it’s a special kind of sin to sing and feel good. But then I think, well, even before Dragonscale, most human lives were unfair, brutal, full of loss and grief and confusion. Most human lives were and are too short. Most people have lived out their days hungry and barefoot, on the run from this war and that famine, a plague here and a flood there. But people have to sing anyway. Even a baby that hasn’t been fed in days will stop crying and look around when they hear someone singing in joy. You sing and it’s like giving a thirsty person water. It’s a kindness. It makes you shine. The proof that you matter is in your song and in the way you light up for one another. Other folks may fall and burn—will fall and burn. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t seen it happen. But here no one burns. We shine. A frightened, faithless soul is perfect kindling—”

  “Amen,” someone murmured.

  “—and selfishness is as bad as kerosene. When someone is cold and you share your blanket, you’re both warmer than you would’ve been alone. You offer the sick your medicine and their happiness will be your medicine. Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you’re in hell when you don’t give to someone who needs, because you can’t bear to have less. What you are giving away then is your own soul. You have to care for each other or you walk on cinders, a matchstick ready to be struck. That’s what I believe, anyway. Do you believe it?”

  “I do,” Ben Patchett said from Harper’s right. Others said it with him. Harper herself.

  Sitting there in the pews, she felt as in love as she had ever been with Jakob in their happiest hours . . . or more so. Not with any one man or woman but with all of them, the whole church full of believers. All her fellow travelers in the Bright. There had been moments in the last few weeks when it seemed to her she was discovering what it was like to be in love for the very first time.

  Jakob had told her that all acts of altruism were secretly acts of selfishness, that you were really only doing for others to please yourself. And he was right, without ever really understanding what he was right about. He thought altruism was worthless if it brought you happiness—that it wasn’t really altruism at all—without seeing that it was all right to feel good about making other people feel good. When you gave your happiness away, it came back twofold. It kept coming and coming, like the loaves and fishes. Its impossible increase was, maybe, the one miracle that would never be disproved by science. It was the last wonder allowed to religion. To live for others was to live fully; to live only for yourself, a cold kind of death. The sugar was sweeter when you gave it to someone else to taste.

  She had not thought she was
a religious person, but in the church at Camp Wyndham, she had discovered everyone was religious. If you had it in you to sing, you had it in you to believe and be saved.

  With the possible exception of the Fireman, perhaps. The Fireman was watching Father Storey with an expression of calm detachment, and blowing smoke rings. He wasn’t smoking a cigarette. He was just making the rings from somewhere in his throat, fat cloudy circles that rose in rippling hoops. He caught Harper watching and grinned. Show-off.

  Father Storey slipped his glasses off, polished them on his sweater, and put them back on. “I guess someone doesn’t believe it, though. About two months ago someone started helping themselves to items from the kitchen. Nothing much—a little milk, some potted meat. Hardly worth mentioning. When you think about it, stealing a few cans of Spam might even be looked upon as doing us all a kindness. Then some other things went missing from the girls’ dorm. Emily Waterman had a teacup taken, her lucky cup of stars. A bottle of nail polish was swiped from the Neighbors girls. Five days ago, someone stole my granddaughter’s locket from under her pillow. I’m not sure it matters that it was gold, but it had a picture of her mother in it, all Allie had left of her, and it broke her heart to lose it. Then, yesterday, the thief helped herself to Nurse Willowes’s care package for her unborn child. I believe most of you know about her care package, what she’s been calling the Portable Mother.”

  Father Storey put his hands in his pockets and rocked from the hips and for a moment his glasses flashed, reflecting the candle on the podium, becoming circles of red flame.

  “I am sure whoever took the things from the girls’ dorm must feel very ashamed and frightened. There isn’t a person in this room who hasn’t suffered terribly since finding themselves marked with the ’scale, and under a strain like that, it can be easy to act impulsively, to take from someone else, without thinking how you would hurt them. I say to the person who took these things, and who sits among us now: you have nothing to fear by coming forward.”