The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  “Willowes! I’ve never been so glad to see another human face! It feels like a car is parked on my chest. I haven’t been in so much pain since Guns N’ Roses broke up.”

  “Sorry,” she said. She dropped the cloth shopping bag she had brought with her. “Busy day.”

  She opened her mouth to tell him about Jakob and the Marlboro Man and almost being discovered, then caught herself.

  He was sitting on his cot, and he still wasn’t wearing a stitch, except for the sling she had made out of a canvas quiver. His only gesture to modesty was the bedsheet bunched up in his lap and pooled around his hips. His skin was scrawled all over with the devil’s handwriting in black and gold. The bruises beneath the ’scale had darkened to shades of blackberry and pomegranate. It hurt her in her own chest just to look at them.

  “You still aren’t dressed,” she said.

  “Well,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I should bother. Aren’t you going to examine me? Seemed a lot of effort to go to, just to take it all off again. And where have you been? I’ve been stranded on this muddy blob of sand for days, with no one to talk to but myself.”

  “At least you were having conversations with someone who thinks you’re clever.”

  He fixed the cloth shopping bag with a rapacious glare. “There better be morphine in there. And cigarettes. And fresh-ground coffee.”

  “I wish I had morphine. In fact, we’ll have to talk about that.”

  “Cigarettes?”

  “I don’t have any cigarettes for you right this instant, Mr. Rookwood,” she said, choosing her words with care. This was not a lie—but it was also not strictly honest. Harper was becoming practiced at such evasions. “Look at it as an opportunity to quit before the smokes kill you.”

  “You think smoking is going to kill me? When I smoke, Nurse Willowes, it’s other people who need to worry about their health. There better be fresh coffee, then.”

  “I brought you some wonderful loose teas—”

  “Tea! You think I want tea?”

  “Why not? You’re English.”

  “And so you think I drink tea? What, do you imagine I used to wander around in the London fog in a deerstalker cap, talking to my mates in iambic pentameter? We have Starbucks, woman.”

  “Oh, good. Because I also have a few packets of Starbucks instant.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Because you’re such an amusing man to disappoint. How about I put on the kettle and you at least put on some pants? I don’t recall any below-the-waist injuries that require a medical opinion.”

  He swept a foggy gaze around the floor, reached with one bony foot for his fireman pants.

  She took a deep breath to tell him about going home—and then sidetracked herself again, saying, “Did you always want to be a fireman? How long have you been dressing like one? Since childhood?” That was the adrenaline talking. She wondered if this was how people felt after skydiving. Her hands had a tremor.

  “Not at all. I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to wear leather pants and spend weekends in bed with stoned fashion models and write songs full of pretentious riddles.”

  “I didn’t know you were musical. What instrument did you play?”

  “Oh, I never got around to learning an instrument. Seemed like too much work. Also, as my mother was deaf and my father a bully, musical education wasn’t a priority in my family. The closest I ever got to the rock-star life was selling drugs.”

  “You were a drug dealer? I don’t think I like that. What drugs?”

  “Hallucinogenic mushrooms. Seemed a sensible way to turn a profit on my degree in botany. Mycology had always been my field of study. I sold a form of psilocybin called Smurfpecker that was quite blue, quite popular, and quite delicious with eggs. Do you want to split a Smurfpecker omelet with me sometime, Nurse Willowes?”

  She turned her back on him, to give him privacy so he could pull on his pants. “The Dragonscale—that’s a kind of spore. A fungus. You must know a lot about it.”

  He didn’t reply. She glanced back and his face was composed into a look of benign innocence. He wasn’t even trying to pick up his pants. They were still snarled around his feet. It irritated her that he wouldn’t get dressed. It made him more of a creep than she had hoped he would be. She looked away once more.

  “Is that why you can control it? Use it? Keep from burning alive like you’re coated in asbestos? Is it because you understand something about it other people don’t understand?”

  He made a soft humming sound and said, “I’m not sure I understand the ’scale so much as I’ve helped it to understand me. The pans are in the box under the furnace.”

  “Why do I need a pan?”

  “Aren’t you going to make us eggs?”

  “You have eggs?”

  “No. Don’t you? In that grocery bag of yours? For God’s sake, Nurse Willowes, you must’ve brought me some goodies!”

  “I am sorry to say I did not bring you eggs or French roast or morphine. Instead I hiked three miles and nearly walked right into a Cremation Crew to get a brace for your elbow and tape for your wrist. My ex-husband among them.” She felt an unexpected prickle in the back of her eyes that she refused to let become anything more. “I also brought you some great loose tea because I’m nice and I thought it would cheer you up and I haven’t even asked for thanks. All I’ve asked is for you to put on your pants, but you won’t even do that, because I assume you get off on being naked and seeing if it rattles me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what? Can’t say thanks? Can’t apologize? Can’t show basic human courtesy?”

  “I can’t put on my pants. I can’t bend over and pick them up. It hurts too much. And you’ve been very kind and of course I should’ve said thanks. I’m saying it now. Thank you, Nurse Willowes.”

  The contrition in his voice deflated her in some way. She was coming down off her adrenaline buzz now, a tide receding to reveal the fatigue beneath.

  “I’m sorry. It has been a long couple of days. And I just got through the worst part of it. I went back home to salvage some supplies and Jakob turned up, with a crowd of new friends. One of them was that bully on the radio, the Marlboro Man, the one who’s always bragging about all the burners he’s executed. I had to hide. For a long time.”

  “You went home? Alone? Why didn’t you send someone?”

  “Who? The Lookouts are all kids. Starved, overtired kids. I didn’t feel like putting one of them at risk. I couldn’t send you, not with your ribs like they are. Besides, I knew where to look for the things I wanted. It just seemed to make more sense to go myself. You didn’t tell me what happened to my house.”

  “That your ex decided to remodel with a two-ton snowplow? I felt like you had lost enough for one week. Why pile on? Are you all right?”

  “I was . . . scared. I heard them talking about me. They talked about you, too.”

  “You don’t say!” he said. He sounded pleased.

  “Yes. They talked about a man with weaponized Dragonscale, someone who can throw flame, and who goes around dressed as a fireman. They couldn’t decide if you were real or an urban legend.”

  “Ah! Halfway to being a rock star at last!”

  “Mostly they talked about things they’ve done to people who are sick. The Marlboro Man keeps track of the numbers for the whole Cremation Crew, was talking about who’s killed the most overall, who’s murdered the most in one day, who killed the ugliest girl, who killed the hottest girl. It was like he was talking about the stats for his fantasy baseball team.”

  The Marlboro Man had praised Jakob for “busting his nut” on New Year’s Day. It was several minutes before Harper realized the Marlboro Man was not talking about sex, but murder. Jakob had used his Freightliner to T-bone a Nissan with a sick family in it, a man, a woman, and their two children. The car had been pancaked. The bodies came squeezing out of the wreckage like toothpaste, or so the Marlboro Man said. Jakob had accepted the Mar
lboro Man’s praise without comment, expressing neither pride nor horror.

  What a curious thing: to think the man she had married, a man she had loved and been devoted to, had gone on to commit murders. Had killed and meant to kill again. Eighteen months ago, they had spent their nights cuddled on the couch, watching Master of None.

  “I was scared I’d start shaking and they’d hear me. They’d hear my teeth chattering. Then they left, and when I knew I was okay—that I was going to leave the house alive—I—I felt—like someone threw a grenade at me and then for some reason it didn’t explode. I walked out of there with my head full of cotton fluff and my legs all rubber. Aren’t you going to give me a talking-to?”

  “For being an idiot and blithely walking right into trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  “Naw. I can’t think of two qualities I admire more in a person. Glad you came back, though. I haven’t had coffee in days.”

  When she turned around, the Fireman was yawning, a fist covering his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut, and the sheet had dropped to show the line of his hip. Harper was surprised by her own reaction to the sight of his scrawny, hairy self, the dense pelt of hair on his sunken and battered chest. She felt an immediate twitch of physical want, florid and absurd, where there had been none a minute before.

  She marched to the bed, feeling there was safety in briskness. “Raise your legs.”

  He lifted his feet. She tugged his fireman pants up to the knees, then sat down beside him and slipped an arm under his armpits.

  “On three, lift your skinny ass.” But she did most of the lifting and when she scooped him up, she heard it: the whistling inhalation, the shuddering start of a gasp, quickly bitten off. What little color was in his face drained away.

  “The worst bit isn’t the pain when I move. It’s the itch in my chest. After every breath. Can’t sleep the way it itches.”

  “Itch is good. We like itch, Mr. Rookwood. Bones itch when they’re knitting back together.”

  “I suppose it will feel better after you tape up my chest.”

  “Mm, no, I’m sorry, that isn’t done anymore. We don’t want to constrict lungs that need to breathe. But I would like to strap up that wrist of yours and slip this brace on your elbow.”

  She inched the elastic brace up his forearm, shifted it into place, then went to work on his swollen, hideously bruised wrist. Harper pressed cotton pads to either side of the wrist, then wound medical tape around and around, up the wrist and down it, creating an almost stiff but comfortable cast around the joint. After, she lifted the right arm for a look at his discolored side. Harper traced her fingers over his ribs, carefully seeking out each fracture. She tried not to take any pleasure at all in the knuckles of his spine or the scrollwork of Dragonscale on his skin. He looked like an illustrated man from a carnival. There was no guessing how many people the Dragonscale had killed, but for all that, she could not help thinking it was very beautiful. Of course she was desperately horny. That didn’t help.

  “You might be in for worse than a tongue-lashing from Ben Patchett,” the Fireman said. “And you might receive a very unhappy look and some great sad sighs from Tom Storey. Nothing makes a person feel more low and ashamed than disappointing the old man. It’s like telling a department-store Santa you know his beard is fake.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be in trouble with Father Storey.”

  He gave her a sharp, searching look and all the humor dropped from his expression. “Better let me have it, then.”

  She told him about trepanning Father Storey’s skull with a power drill and disinfecting it with port. She told him about Ben in the meat locker and the handcuffed prisoners and the dish towel full of rocks. Then she had to go back in time to tell him about her last talk with Father Storey, in the canoe.

  The Fireman did not ask many questions . . . not until she recounted her final conversation with the old man.

  “He was going to exile some poor girl for stealing a teacup and cans of Spam?”

  “And a locket. And the Portable Mother.”

  He shook his head. “Still. That doesn’t seem like Tom.”

  “He wasn’t going to exile her because she stole. He was going to exile her because she was dangerous.”

  “And he knew this because he had confronted her over her thefts and she—what? Threatened him?”

  “Something like that,” Harper said.

  But she frowned. It was hard to remember now precisely what Tom had said and how he had said it. It seemed like a conversation that had happened months, not days, ago. She found it maddeningly difficult to recall what he had told her about the thief; there were moments when it seemed to her he had never mentioned theft at all.

  “And for some reason he decided he needed to go into exile with this thief?”

  “To look after her. He was going to search for Martha Quinn’s island.”

  “Ah, Martha Quinn’s island. I like to imagine it’s crowded with refugees from the eighties, wandering about in spandex and leopard fur. I hope Tawny Kitaen is there. She was at the center of all my earliest sexual fantasies. Who was Tom going to leave in charge of camp?”

  “You.”

  “Me!” He laughed. “Are you sure he didn’t say all this after getting conked in the head? I can’t imagine anyone worse for the job.”

  “How about Carol?”

  He had been smiling, but at this his look became unhappy again. “I like Carol for high holy priest about as much as I’d like another kick in the ribs.”

  “You don’t think she means well?”

  “I’m certain she means well. When your government was waterboarding poor sods to find bin Laden, they meant well. Carol’s father was a moderating influence on her, a calming force on a brittle personality. Without him, well. Carol has Quarantine Patrols, the police, and Cremation Crews threatening her from the outside. She has the thief and those two prisoners to create pressure from the inside. Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics. Especially not people like Carol.”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t even want the job. She turned it down three times before she accepted.”

  “So did Caesar. I only wish Sarah—” He broke off and cast a frustrated look toward the furnace. Then he dropped his gaze and tried again. “It’s not that Sarah would’ve kept Carol in check, or tried to wrest the camp from her, or any of that. But she would’ve tried to throw her little sister a line if she saw her drowning. That’s what I’m worried about, you know. Bad enough that Carol might drown in her own paranoia. But what’s worse is that drowning victims will pull others down with them, and right now she has her arms around the entire camp.”

  A knot snapped in the furnace with a dry, roasted crack.

  “What was Sarah like? Not like Carol, I guess. More like Tom?”

  “She had Tom’s sense of humor. She also had more steel than anyone I’ve ever met. She threw herself at things like a bowling ball. You see some of that in Allie, you know. Sarah always made me feel like one of the ten pins.” He cast a long, slow, considering look at the flames leaping in the furnace . . . then turned his head and gave Harper a sweet, almost boyish smile. “Which I guess is a fairly accurate description of a certain kind of love, innit?”

  7

  “What is there to say about Sarah before she met me? Pregnant at seventeen by her piano instructor, an angelically beautiful Lithuanian only a few years older than her. Cast out of the private academy where her father was a professor. Tom, her best friend in the entire world, and the most forgiving man she knows, says terrible things to her and sends her off to live with relatives. Finishes her senior year in disgrace at a public high school, baby bump under her sweaters. She gets married in a town office the day after she accepts her diploma. Her Lithuanian, humiliated and unable to get a job teaching, returns to private lessons, which is when Sarah discovers that screwing his students is one of his nervous tics. No matter—she stays married because if she left h
im she’d have to go home, and she’s promised herself she’ll never ask her father for another single thing in her life. Instead she decides the only way to save the relationship is to have another baby. Am I going too quickly? I promise we’ll get to the interesting part in a moment.”

  “Which part is that?” Harper asked.

  “The part where I come into the story. Nick is born. Nick is deaf. The father suggests putting him up for adoption, since he can never have a relationship with a defective brat who can’t appreciate his music. Sarah suggests her husband find a new place to live and throws him out. He kicks through the screen door at four A.M. one October night and threatens the whole family with a badminton racquet. Sarah has a restraining order leveled against him. He responds by showing up at Allie’s elementary school, supposedly to take his daughter to a dental appointment, and promptly disappears with the kid.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He was arrested four long days later, in a motel near the Canadian border, where he was trying to figure out how to reach Toronto without a passport for his daughter. I gather he had notions of getting to the Lithuanian embassy and trying to scuttle back to Europe with her. He was out on bail when he hung himself.”

  “Sounds like Sarah and me both picked our husbands in the same shop,” Harper said.

  “There was one good thing to come out of the piano tutor’s last waltz. In those terrible days when Sarah didn’t know where Allie was, her father showed up on her doorstep to do what he could for her. He made sure Sarah ate and slept, held her when she cried, saw to Nick’s needs. It was his chance, you see—to be the father she wanted, the father Sarah had believed he was before he so completely, colossally failed her. I know Tom, and I doubt he ever completely forgave himself for turning away from her when she was a frightened pregnant kid.

  “Tom stayed with her for months. Later Sarah moved closer to home, and he helped with the kids while she returned to school to study social work. Outreach to the disabled, that was her field.

  “Now, as it happens, Tom Storey had supervised worship at Camp Wyndham since the 1980s, and was made camp director a decade later. The spring that Nick turned seven, Sarah suggested the camp host a two-week program for the deaf, and Tom made it happen.