The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  “They went looking for counselors who knew how to sign, and I fit the bill. I learned sign language as a lad from my deaf Irish mother . . . which, I add, charmed quite a few of the kids, who liked to say my hands had an Irish accent. I was in the States to collect a master’s degree and was glad to get a decent-paying summer job. A man just can’t earn a living wage selling Smurfpecker in this blighted nation. I have to tell you, heroin dealers and meth slingers have made your country a wretched place to be a simple, honest drug dealer who wants to give his customers a lovingly curated experience.

  “Tom hired me to teach outdoorsy stuff—what berries you could eat, what leaves not to wipe with, how to make fire without matches. I was always especially good at that last trick. On arrival we were each assigned a cute name. I was dubbed Woody John. Sarah got to be Ranger Sarah.

  “We had a few days of orientation and training before the kids arrived, and I wasn’t there long before I could see being named Woody was going to be a problem. On the very first day, Sarah greeted me by saying, ‘Morning, Wood,’ with a darling look of sweet innocence on her face. The other counselors heard her and fell all over the place laughing. Pretty soon everyone was saying it. ‘Who’s got Wood?’ ‘Hey, guys, don’t be so hard on Wood.’ ‘I’ve been walking around all morning with Wood.’ You get the idea.

  “Well, the night before the kids were due to show up, we were all having some beers together, and I told her maybe one day if she was lucky and played her cards right, she might wake up with Wood. That got some laughs. She said it would be more like waking up with a splinter in an awkward place, and that got more.

  “I asked her how come she got to be Ranger Sarah, and she said since she was program director she was allowed to pick her own name. So I announced by ancient English law I had the right to challenge her authority with trial by combat. I told her we’d settle it on the dartboard. We’d each get one throw. If I hit closer to the center, I could rename both her and myself. And I warned her ahead of time that I would be choosing Bushmaster for me and the Camp Beaver for her. She said I was going to lose, and she’d let me know my new name after the game, and that soon enough I’d be longing for the days when I was plain old Woody.

  “By now everyone was deadly serious. And by ‘deadly serious’ I mean ‘crying on the ground.’ Of course I liked my odds. When I was an undergrad I spent more time in pubs throwing darts than I did in classrooms taking notes. I stood well back and nearly hit bull’s-eye without so much as a warm-up. Suddenly everyone went completely silent. Awestruck by my powers.

  “Sarah didn’t so much as blink. She pulled this little hatchet out of her belt, walked to the line, and chucked it. She didn’t just hit bull’s-eye, she split the board in half. She told me, ‘You never said I had to throw a dart.’ Well, that was how I became Tosser John. On account of how well I could toss a dart.

  “And I suppose that’s where it started—the feeling like we belonged together.

  “At the time camp officially got going, Allie and her mother were hardly speaking. Allie, who was all of fourteen, had been dropped by her third therapist after throwing a paperweight at his balls. She had wrecked her mother’s car after taking some boys for a spin in it. Older boys. I couldn’t tell you how much of her behavior was a result of being kidnapped by a parent when she was in third grade, but certainly her anger went well beyond the ordinary teenage stuff. She hated her mother for exerting any control over her at all, and was furious she had been forced to work as a counselor-in-training. Those first few days were ugly. Allie would wander away from the kids to do things with her cell phone. If she didn’t like what they were serving in the cafeteria, she’d walk out of camp and hitch a ride into town to meet up with friends. And so on.

  “Sarah decided Allie was going to join her on an overnight backpacking trip to the Jade Well—a pool of icy water beneath an eighteen-foot cliff. Perhaps she had decided to strangle her and figured it would be easiest to hide the body out in the deep dark woods. They needed a third grown-up and drafted me. Off we went with twelve little kids on a ten-mile hike, walking in a cloud of mosquitoes. All I can say is thank God the children were deaf. Allie and Sarah cursed each other the whole way. When Allie glanced at her phone once, Sarah confiscated it. Allie would let branches snap back into her mother’s face. The kids knew something was wrong and were getting more and more rattled.

  “By the time we reached the Jade Well, the two of them were screaming at each other. Everyone was sunburnt and chewed to pieces. Sarah was furious at Allie for forgetting the bug spray back at the bus, and Allie was angry at Sarah for blaming the mistake on her, and I was ready to quit. They were standing near the edge of the cliff and I just couldn’t help myself. I took them both by the arm and dropped them over the side, right in their boots. And do you know what? They both came up laughing . . . laughing and spitting water at each other.

  “The two of them were after me the rest of the hike. When they served out hot dogs they passed me a nice fresh tampon in a roll. They opened the roof of my tent at two A.M. and doused me with cold water. They spritzed me with hair spray instead of suntan lotion. And you know what? It was good. The hike out was as happy as the hike in had been miserable. The kids took to protecting me from Ranger Sarah and Muskrat-in-Training Allie. Nick especially. I think Nick decided it was his special responsibility to protect me from the madwomen in his family. He was my bodyguard for the rest of the summer.

  “There was one more overnight hike on the last weekend of camp. That was the night Sarah unzipped my tent. She only said one thing. ‘Did I play my cards right?’

  “We had almost exactly a year together as a couple after that. She wanted to swim the Great Barrier Reef. I wish we had gone. I wish we had read books to each other. We had one weekend of sexy-times in New York City while her father looked after the kids. I wish we’d had more. I wish we’d walked more. I wish we hadn’t sat in front of the TV so much. It was nice, we cuddled, we laughed at Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, but it didn’t make much in the way of memories. We did such ordinary, banal things. Ordered pizza and played Trivial Pursuit with her sister and her dad. Helped the kids with homework. We did dishes together more than we ever made love. What kind of life is that?”

  “Real life,” Harper said.

  He had not looked at her once while he recounted the story of his courtship. Instead he stared at his own shadow, which rose and fell in an almost tidal motion as the firelight pulsed in the open furnace. “I spend more time thinking about the things I wish we had done than I do thinking about the things we did do. It was like we opened the perfect bottle of wine and each shared a sip . . . and then a clumsy waiter knocked the bottle to the floor before we got to have any more.

  “The first time I saw the spore was at a luncheon presentation at the Boston Mycology Society, three months before Seattle.” He didn’t need to explain what he meant by Seattle. She knew he was talking about the Space Needle. “A fellow named Hawkins who’d just returned from Russia gave a forty-minute PowerPoint on it. I don’t know what scared me more, the photos or Hawkins himself. His mouth kept drying out. He drank half a pitcher of water while he was standing behind the podium. And he spoke in such a low voice you had to strain to hear what he was saying. We were all just catching little bits: ‘disease vectors,’ ‘contagion points,’ ‘cellular combustion.’ Meanwhile he’s flashing these horror-movie pictures of charred corpses, all teeth and blackened meat. I can tell you, no one went back to the buffet for seconds, but the bar sure was busy. This guy, Hawkins, said in closing that while there were only seventy-six known deaths in Kamchatka as a direct result of the spore, this had resulted in wildfires that had ended the lives of 530 other people. There had been almost eighty million dollars of damage to urban areas and the Russians had lost forty-three hundred acres of the richest timberland in the world. Hawkins said that three recent cases in Alaska suggested the pathogen might have a mode of transmission different than traditional viruses and that
further study was urgently required. Based on his math, a quarter million sick in the United States would easily lead to the deaths of more than twenty million people and would turn over six million acres into an ashtray.”

  “How much is that?”

  “About the size of Massachusetts. I have to say, he scared the hell out of us at the time, but in retrospect, he was far too conservative. I suppose his calculations didn’t consider a social breakdown so severe there would be no one left to fight the fires.

  “But, you know . . . by dinnertime, I had mostly quit thinking about it. It didn’t take long to feel like just one more of this century’s possible but unlikely apocalypses, like an epidemic of bird flu wiping out billions or an asteroid cracking the planet in half. You can’t do anything about it, and it’s happening to poor people on the other side of the world, and the kids need help with homework, so you just stop thinking about it.

  “As much as I could stop. It was in the subject header of every e-mail and the top thirty threads on every message board in the mycology community. There were webinars and conferences and a presidential committee. There was a report to the Senate. For a while I followed along out of academic interest. Also, you know me, Nurse Willowes, how I do like to show off. What I learned about the spore gave me great cachet at backyard barbecues. I don’t think it hit me, on a human level, that this thing was ever going to reach our backyard until Manitoba started burning and no one could put it out. That was about a month before the first Boston cases.

  “But what good was it knowing? If it was a plague like other plagues, you’d hide. Head for the woods. Take the people you love, hole up somewhere, bolt the door, and wait for the infection to burn itself out. This, though. One person carrying the spore could start a fire that would wipe out half a state. Hiding in the woods would be like hiding in a match factory. At least cities have fire departments.

  “I can tell you exactly when and how I caught it. I can tell you where we all were when we caught it, because of course we were together. We had a little party for Carol’s thirtieth birthday at the very beginning of May. Sarah and I had just moved in together. We had a little pool, though it was so cold no one wanted to go in except Sarah. It wasn’t much of a party, just Tom and the kids and Sarah and Carol and myself and a gluten-free cake for the birthday girl.

  “Sarah and I often had late-night debates as to whether or not Carol had ever been laid. She had been engaged, as a younger woman, for five years, to a very devout young man who everyone knew was a homosexual except, apparently, Carol. He was, I think, one of these decent, haunted young queers who are drawn to religion because they’re hoping to pray the gay away. Sarah told me she didn’t believe they had ever slept together, although they exchanged some very passionate e-mails. Carol dropped in on her fiancé by surprise, while the boy was doing a residency at a theological institute in New York, and discovered him in bed with a nineteen-year-old Cuban dance student.

  “I asked Sarah once if she thought Carol herself might be gay, and she frowned about it for a long time and finally said she thought Carol mostly just hated the idea of sex itself. She hated the idea of mess. Carol wanted love to be like a bar of soap: a purifying, hygienic scrub. She also said that Carol had full possession of their father and that was the only man who had ever really mattered to her.

  “Carol and Sarah could be quite wary of each other. When Sarah was teenage and pregnant, Carol sent her a scolding letter about breaking their father’s heart and promised never to speak to her again. And she did, in fact, stop talking to her until Nick was born. Sarah made a place for her little sister back in her life, but things were always uneasy between them. Carol could compete for attention in a way that was so childish it was sort of funny. If Sarah was winning at Scrabble, Carol would put on a coughing fit, say she had come in contact with an allergen, and make her father drive her to the hospital. If Sarah and Tom started talking about Victor Hugo, Carol would insist Sarah couldn’t really appreciate his novels because she hadn’t read them in the original French. Sarah just laughed that sort of thing off. I think she felt too sorry for Carol to compete with her and went out of her way to do nice things for her. Like the birthday party.

  “I was just building up the energy to go inside and get another beer when there was a big thud—like something heavy falling off a truck a long way off, something so heavy it made the water shudder in the pool. Everyone glanced around—even Nick, who felt the vibration through his feet.

  “Sarah stood in the shallow end, looking goose-bumpy and blue in the lips and very pretty, listening to hear if there was going to be something more. Nick saw it first—a black, oily tower of smoke, coming from the end of the block. There was another thud and another and then several close together, loud enough to shake the windows and make the silverware jump.

  “Sirens wailed. Sarah said she thought it was the CVS drugstore on the corner and asked if I would look down the street and see.

  “A lot of the neighbors had come out onto the sidewalks and were standing under the trees. The breeze turned and blew the smoke down the street. Oh, it stank. Like roasting tires and foul eggs.

  “I made my way down the block until I could see the CVS. One side was a roiling wall of red flame. A woman wept on the curb, using her T-shirt to mop up her tears. I had a hanky, so I handed it to her and asked if she was all right. She said she had never seen anyone die before. She told me a guy on a motorcycle had slid into the wire cabinet outside the drugstore, the one full of propane cans. They went off like a string of the world’s largest firecrackers. Someone said it was a hell of an accident, and she said it wasn’t just an accident. She said the guy was on fire even before he hit the propane tanks. She said it was like Ghost Rider. She said his helmet visor was up and there was a burning skull in there—flame and grinning teeth.

  “I went back home, meaning to tell them all to go inside. Not for any clear reason. Just some . . . vague apprehension. They were right where I left them, staring up at the smoke. They were standing there together in the snow. It had begun to snow, you see. Big goosefeather flakes of ash. Falling in everyone’s hair. Falling in the birthday cake.

  “A couple weeks later, Nick woke Sarah and me up to show us the stripe across his wrist. He didn’t even ask what it was. He already knew. I found my first mark later that afternoon. Within four days we were all scrawled with Dragonscale . . . all of us except Sarah.”

  8

  “All except Sarah?” Harper asked.

  “Story for another night, I think.”

  “You must miss her very much.”

  His voice had tailed off and he stared across the room, into the open furnace, with blank, tranced eyes. He roused himself slowly, looked around, and smiled. “She’s still with me.”

  Harper’s pulse whumped in her throat. “What?”

  “I talk to her almost every day.” He narrowed his eyes to slits, peering intently into the flickering gloom, as if picturing her somewhere over there on the other side of the shed. “I can always imagine just what she’d say to take the piss out of me. When I ask myself a question, it’s her voice that answers. We are taught to think of personality as a singular, private possession. All the ideas and beliefs and attitudes that make you you—we are raised to believe them a set of files stored in the lockbox of the brain. Most people have no idea how much of themselves they store off-site. Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you—finish you—as much as you create you. When you’re gone, the ones you’ve left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.”

  She pursed her lips, exhaled a whistling breath. He was talking about memories, not ghosts.

  His gaze drifted back to the open hatch in the side of the furnace, and she thought, Ask him about what you saw—ask him about the face. Some instinct for caution prevented her. S
he thought if she pressed him now, he would play dumb, pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. And there were, after all, other, more important matters to press him on.

  “You hardly touched your coffee,” she said. “It’s gone cold.”

  “That is easily remedied,” he said, and lifted his tin mug in his left hand.

  The gold hieroglyphics marking his Dragonscale brightened and flashed. His hand became a chalice of flame. He rotated the mug slowly in his fingers and the brew within began to steam.

  “I wish there was a way to treat you for being such a shameless attention hog,” she said.

  “What, you think I’m showing off? This is nothing. Yesterday, stuck in my bed, dying as much from boredom as from my staved-in chest, I taught myself to fart smoke rings in three different colors. Now that was impressive.”

  “I’m glad someone is having fun with the end of the world.”

  “What makes you think the world is ending?” He sounded genuinely surprised.

  “Sure looks like the end of the world to me. Fifteen million people are infected. Maine is like Mordor now—a belt of ash and poison a hundred miles wide. Southern California is even worse. Last I heard, SoCal was on fire from Escondido to Santa Maria.”

  “Shit. I knew I shouldn’t have put off going to Universal Studios.”

  “What part of the end of the world is funny to you?”

  “All of it. Especially the arrogant notion that the world will end just because humans might not make it through this century. We were never properly grateful for making it through the last century, as far as I’m concerned. Humanity is worse than flies. If even one dried nugget of offal survives the flames, we’ll be swarming all over it. Fighting about who owns it and selling the most fragrant chunks to the wealthy and the gullible. You’re afraid it’s the End Times because we’re surrounded by death and ruin. Nurse Willowes, don’t you know? Death and ruin is man’s preferred ecosystem. Did you ever read about the bacterium that thrives in volcanoes, right on the edge of boiling rock? That’s us. Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.”