The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  She pulled again. The pipe held her fast.

  She blinked, eyes tearing from the smoke. It wasn’t the fire that killed you, she understood then. It was terror, or maybe surrender. It was the moment when, with horror and shame, you realized you had got yourself stuck someplace and you were too weak to pull yourself free. The Dragonscale was the bullet, but fear was the finger that pulled the trigger.

  Her breath screamed in her throat. She poked the porcupine with the stick before he could get any ideas, and stabbed a choked little squeal out of the thing. He began to hustle away, moving along even faster than before.

  She couldn’t see the other end of the pipe anymore through the smoke rising from her. She didn’t know why she wasn’t choking on it. She inhaled deeply, preparing to cough, and thought, Sing. Sing it away.

  “Dum dilly dilly, um dilly die,” she whispered, in a cracked, hoarsened voice, and immediately stopped.

  It was bad enough to be stuck in a pipe with a porcupine, worse to be in there with a lunatic, even if the lunatic happened to be herself. The desperation she heard in her own voice unnerved her.

  A fresh wave of chemical heat prickled over her body. Worms of heat crawled on her scalp. She could smell her hair frizzing and cooking and she thought if she got out of the pipe she would let Allie shave her head, but she wasn’t going to get out of the pipe, because it was all a lie, the idea that singing could save you. British children sang to each other during the Blitz and the roof still caved in on them. Her own voice had never mattered. Tom Storey’s faith was a prayer to an empty cupboard.

  Smoke burned in her throat. White clouds spurted from her nostrils. She hated every moment of hope she had ever allowed herself to feel. Hated herself for singing along, singing with the others, singing to the others, singing—

  Singing to the others, she thought. Singing in harmony. Father Storey said it was not the song but harmony itself that mattered. And you couldn’t create harmony alone.

  She blinked at the smoke, eyes watering, tears sticky on her face, and in a soft, uneven voice, sang again, her mind turned inward, to the life knotted like a fist in her womb.

  “I’ll be your candle on the water,” she sang. Not Julie Andrews this time, but Helen Reddy. It was the first song that came to mind, and at the sound of it, echoing faintly in the pipe, she felt the sudden, half-hysterical urge to laugh. “My love for you will always burn.”

  She was badly off-key, her voice warbling with emotion, but at almost the first word, her Dragonscale pulsed and shone with a soft golden light, and that sensation of her skin crawling with chemical heat began to abate. At the same time the baby seemed to subtly shift inside her, rotating like a screw, and she thought, He’s showing you what to do. He is in harmony. A ludicrous idea, except then she swiveled her hips, following the twisting corrugations of the pipe, and eased forward. She came loose so suddenly she banged her head with a hollow gong.

  Harper crawled into a funnel of smoke. Her lungs strained to find oxygen that wasn’t there, yet her head did not swim and she did not feel faint. Indeed, she had enough air to continue singing to the baby in an exhausted, whispered chant.

  She lowered her head, blinking tears out of her eyes, and when she blearily looked back up, the porcupine was right in front of her, so close she almost put a hand down on him. His cloak of needles bristled.

  She banged the stick against the side of the pipe, drew it back, and lanced it at the porcupine.

  “I’ll be a candle right up your ass, you don’t keep waddling, fat boy,” she half sang, half choked.

  He began to trundle away from her again, but Harper had had enough of the porcupine and enough of the drainage pipe. She scooped the stick right under his rear end and shoved him along ahead of her. She felt this had the makings of a new Olympic sport: porcupine curling.

  The rodent broke into what passed for a run with his species. He did not hesitate when he reached the end of the pipe, but dropped down and out through the opening. In the flickering orange firelight that illuminated the evening, Harper could see the porcupine was not so large after all. Jammed into the pipe, he had looked to be the size of a puppy. Out in the throbbing glow of the bonfires, he was no more than a hamster with quills. He glared back at her with a single, reproachful eye before continuing on. For a moment Harper felt almost guilty about the way she had treated him. She had also been driven from her home and felt she could relate.

  She heard a startled whisper from outside the pipe and to the left. “The fuck is that?” Someone threw a rock at the porcupine and it scampered away into brush, the poor, persecuted thing.

  Harper pulled herself forward a few inches, almost to the lip of the pipe.

  “Hello out there,” she said in a low voice.

  The end of the pipe darkened and filled, the night sky eclipsed by the head and shoulders of a large man.

  Harper was no longer smoldering and no longer singing, and at some point in the last few moments, the gold flecks of Dragonscale had ceased to shine. Her arms and back, inked with the fine, delicate tracery of the spore, felt tender and sore, but not entirely unpleasant.

  “Who is that?” asked the big man peering into the pipe.

  Even scuffed, filthy, and ash-streaked, his carrot-colored jumpsuit was lurid in the shadows, as bright as neon. His build was bearish, his face blocky, acne-scarred . . . but his yellowish eyes struck Harper as almost professorial. Those eyes were, in fact, nearly the exact same color as the porcupine’s eyes.

  “I’m Harper Willowes. I’m a nurse. I’m here to help you get away. There are two of you, yes?”

  “Yeah, but—he already tried squeezing in the pipe and he couldn’t get in. And I’m even bigger’n he is.”

  “You aren’t going to come through the pipe. You’re going to walk straight across the causeway. There are friends waiting on the other side with boats. They’ll take you to safety.”

  “Lady, we been hidin’ in a culvert for twenty hours. Ain’t neither of us up to sprinting across that road. My pard here can barely stand. I thank you for thinking of us. I sincerely do. But it’s not happening. It doesn’t matter if your boats are only a hundred feet away. They might as well be on the moon. There’s fifty men up in that parking lot, most of ’em armed. If we break cover and make a dash for it—and a hobble would be more like it—they will shoot first and ask questions never.”

  “You aren’t going to run,” she said, remembering what the Fireman had said. “You’re going to walk. And you won’t be seen. There’ll be a distraction.”

  “What distraction?”

  “You’ll know it when you see it,” she said, because that sounded better than admitting she had no idea.

  He grinned to show a gold tooth in the back of his mouth. He was what her father would’ve called an ugly cuss. “Why don’t you come out here? Come on out and sit with us, darlin’.”

  “I have to get back. Just be ready,” she said.

  “You aren’t gonna back all the way down that pipe, are you? Wouldn’t it be better to crawl out and get yourself turned around?”

  She hadn’t thought about going back until now—ridiculous but true—and didn’t know how to reply. He was right, of course. She could no more get out of the pipe by crawling in reverse then she could by turning to smoke and vanishing; in fact, turning to smoke was a far more likely possibility.

  If she went forward, though, even a foot, she imagined the bearish man snatching a handful of her hair, his smile going away and his eyes going dead. He and his friend could do whatever they wanted to her; she wasn’t going to scream, bring down the law on them, give up the location of her friends. The Fireman had said they wanted to get away, not get caught, and that was true. But it was also true that they were convicts and she was a pregnant woman who couldn’t call for help. It was entirely possible, she saw now, for them to have their cake and rape and murder it, too.

  She was stuck again, maybe worse than she had been when she was halfway through the pipe
. She could not see a way back and she didn’t dare go forward. Why don’t you sing him something from one of your favorite musicals? she thought, and almost laughed.

  But as it happened there was nothing to figure out; it was a problem that never required solving. The big man was distracted by something up on the causeway. His eyes—reflecting the firelight—were bewildered and glassy with fright.

  “Haaaaa—” he sighed. “Holy . . . holy . . .”

  She assumed he was trying to say Holy shit, but he never got out anything more than that first word. And later it occurred to her that maybe he had said exactly what he meant: that what was happening up on the road was a kind of holy manifestation, as unlikely as a burning bush or a night sky full of angels, twinkling over Bethlehem.

  Although holy wasn’t the word that came to her mind when she saw what was happening up on the road.

  Infernal was more like it.

  11

  The light dimmed. It was as if a great black curtain had been dropped between the water and the bonfires up in the parking lot.

  The prisoner’s eyes widened by degrees.

  “What?” she asked.

  He didn’t reply, only gave his head a short, distracted shake. He put a hand on his knee and pushed, rising to his full height with some effort. She could see his legs were hurting. He stepped to her left, out of sight. She heard him whispering to someone, a low groan of pain, and the scuffle of shoes on rock. Then nothing.

  No: not nothing. From a distance, she heard yells, startled cries.

  It was as if all light were being swallowed, were being drowned. She could not for the life of her imagine what could smother the night that way.

  She darted her head out of the pipe for a look, meaning to scuttle straight back if she saw the man in orange. But there was no one waiting for her. To her left was another sloped, six-foot-high wall of irregular granite blocks. A wide, concrete-lined culvert was set into it, sunk beneath the parking lot above. There was room for perhaps two men to crouch out of sight, under the concrete soffit, but rusted bars blocked the way into the darkened passage beyond. That was where they had hidden . . . jammed into that cramped space, huddled together for warmth against the wrought-iron bars.

  Harper craned her neck to see up onto the causeway, but she was still most of the way in the pipe and from that angle couldn’t make out much. What she could see was smoke: a bubbling black cloud, pouring into the sky, spreading across the road and the parking lot.

  She slid forward on her knees, freed herself from the pipe, stood up, and gazed dumbly at the top of the embankment.

  The devil stood in that immense cloud: a devil that towered two stories high, a broad-shouldered demon with a vast rack of horns. He was a flickering apparition of flame, buried deep in that boiling thunderhead of smoke. In one hand he held a hammer and he raised an arm as thick as a telephone pole and brought it down on a burning red anvil. Steel clanged—she heard it quite distinctly. Sparks flew from somewhere in the black cloud. The devil’s tail—a slender, twelve-foot whip braided from fire—lashed behind him.

  The black cloud was so immense, Harper could no longer see the police station or the parking lot or the bonfires. The smoke spread over the causeway, an impenetrable bank of toxic fog.

  Men screamed, hollered, ran about on the other side of the smoke.

  The devil brought the hammer down again and again, each time with another ringing clang! He tossed his burning head back, his eyes two red, delighted coals. In profile, it was impossible not to recognize him as the Fireman.

  The devil finished his work, set aside his hammer, and lifted his new-forged instrument: a lance of fire, a pitchfork fashioned from pure flame, as long as his own body.

  Someone on the other side of the smoke wailed. Harper had never heard a voice raised in such despair. It was the cry of a man afraid for his own soul.

  Several ideas occurred to her in rapid succession, a string of firecrackers rattling off.

  First: It was a shadow show. She didn’t know how he was doing it, but she was sure that what she was seeing was no different than a little boy shining a flashlight at his hand and conjuring the shadow of an elephant on his bedroom wall.

  Second: If she was going to go, she had to go now. This couldn’t possibly last.

  Third: John needed to go himself. To end his performance and slip away. He had made more than enough smoke and chaos to allow the prisoners to limp across the causeway unseen.

  Fourth and last: Maybe he didn’t care if he got away or not. Maybe he had never cared. Maybe the possibility of his own capture and death was not a concern but an enticement.

  Harper climbed the slope on all fours, digging her fingers into the mossy gaps between stone blocks.

  She struggled to her feet and stood up in that dense black cloud of smoke. She knew not to inhale, but her throat and nostrils began to burn anyway. It was a little better if she sank low, but only a little.

  Harper advanced into the cloud. She could see the asphalt directly beneath her feet, but no more. The smoke was too dense to see any farther than that.

  From the far side of the smoke bank, she heard a new noise—a chorus of organized, authoritative shouts—the sound of several men calling to one another as they worked in unison.

  The blast of water hit the smoke bank, aimed at the devil’s burning chest. Satan flickered, lifted his arms to protect his face, and for a moment the pitchfork quivered and took on the shape of an enormous halligan bar.

  The Fireman shouted somewhere in the smoke, a surprised yell. Steel banged and clattered.

  Satan staggered, wheeled about, and dropped his flickering pitchfork. He closed his wings around his body, hiding within, shrank into himself, and vanished.

  The men holding the fire hose continued blasting water into the cloud. Spray rained past Harper. It hissed in the hot smoke, and the cloud changed in color and texture, going from polluted and black to humid and pale, not so much smoke as steam.

  She knew what had happened. They got him, that was what. The battering ram of water had knocked the Fireman right off his feet.

  Without thinking, Harper ran deeper into the smoke, plunging toward where she thought she had heard his voice.

  More yells, closer now. Some of them were moving into the cloud, coming toward her. No—coming toward the Fireman.

  Her foot caught on something, a metal bar that clanged across the blacktop, and she stumbled, steadied herself. The halligan. Something moved nearby in the mist. Someone retched.

  The Fireman rose unsteadily up onto all fours. His helmet had been blown off and his hair was drenched. His shoulders hitched. He gagged and vomited water.

  “John?” she asked.

  He lifted his head. His eyes were bewildered, unhappy.

  “The fuck are you doing here?” he asked.

  He rose to his knees, swaying, and opened his mouth to say something more. Before he could, a shape reared up in the clouds to his left, drawing his attention.

  A thing—a bug-faced monstrosity—lurched out of the smoke. Its slick, glistening eyes were bright in the drifting mist, and it had a bulbous, grotesque mouth. Otherwise it resembled a man dressed in a fireman’s turnout jacket and knee-high boots. It put one of those black boots between the Fireman’s shoulder blades and shoved, and John was slammed down onto his face.

  “You fuck,” said the monstrosity—a fireman, a real fireman, in a gas mask. The Gasmask Man said, “You goddamn fuck, I got you now.”

  John started to rise onto all fours. The Gasmask Man cocked back one boot and drove it into his ribs, knocked his hands and knees out from under him.

  “Fuck you, you little fuck,” the Gasmask Man said. “You fucking fuck . . . guys! Guys, I got him! I got the fucking fuck!”

  He booted the Fireman again, in the side this time, half turning him over.

  Harper saw quite clearly that in moments John would be overrun, kicked to death by the Gasmask Man and his pals.

  She ben
t and grabbed the halligan—

  —and screamed in surprise and pain and dropped it. She looked at her hand in shock. Blisters were already forming on her reddened palm. The halligan was hot, nearly as hot as the business end of a branding iron.

  Her cry caught the Gasmask Man’s attention. He fixed her with his blind, terrible stare and pointed one gloved hand.

  “You! Get the fuck on the fucking ground! Tits down, hands behind your fucking head! Do it, do it right the fuck—”

  John rose with an angry shout, got his arms around the Gasmask Man’s waist, and tried to throw him down. All he was able to do was back the guy up a few steps before the Gasmask Man—six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than John Rookwood—started shoving him the other way.

  They grappled, turning in circles. The Gasmask Man closed his hands on John’s right arm and twisted. A joint made a sickening, oddly wet pop. John went down on one knee and the Gasmask Man brought his knee up under his chin, snapped his head back. John toppled onto his back. The Gasmask Man stepped forward and put his boot on the Englishman’s chest and stomped. Bones cracked.

  Harper slipped off her coat, wrapped it around her burnt right hand, and scooped up the halligan bar again. Even through a fistful of fabric she could feel its heat, could smell it liquefying the nylon.

  Harper lifted the halligan. The Gasmask Man turned, took his foot off John’s chest, and came at her, arms spread. She slashed the halligan and the bar caught him across the helmet with a steely thwang! He took one more step and folded, diving face-first into the ground. His helmet sailed off, slicing Frisbee-like through the mist. It clattered to the blacktop, a grotesque dent creasing one side.

  The sight of that dent sickened her. She felt bile rising in her chest, tasted it in the back of her throat. The sight of that dent was somehow worse than seeing a smashed-in head.

  She didn’t know what had made her do it. She had wanted to scare him away with the halligan, not crush his head in. She dropped the halligan in revulsion. It fell into the great dirty puddle spreading across the blacktop and hissed.