The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  He sighed, winced, pressed his good hand to his bad side. “You hid behind Ben’s police cruiser when the shooting started. Nelson was the first one to die—he was torn apart in the street. Then the town truck hit the ambulance and Mindy Skilling was mashed beneath it. After, you tore out of there like one of your American NASCAR blokes. I recall everything right up to the moment your ex smashed the van and nearly crushed me flat. Nearly crushed the Phoenix flat, I mean.”

  Harper couldn’t wrap her head around it. Up until now she had assumed the Phoenix was a glorious pyrotechnic display that could somehow be operated from a distance, rather like a remote-control airplane. A puppet of flame, with John Rookwood tugging the strings from here on his island.

  Yet he could recount the confrontation with Jakob and the Marlboro Man as if he had fought it out with them in person, a concept Harper found perplexing and also irritating, because John so clearly loved being impressive and mysterious.

  “That’s impossible. You can’t have seen all that.”

  “Oh, let’s not get carried away. It’s only improbable. And besides. I didn’t say I saw it. I didn’t see it. But I remember it.” He saw her getting ready to interrupt and held a hand up, palm out, to forestall questions. “You know that the Dragonscale, over time, saturates the human brain. It listens in to your thoughts and feelings and reacts to them. It’s dendritic in nature and it bonds with the mind.”

  “Yes. That’s why people catch fire when they’re afraid or under stress. Panic releases cortisol. The Dragonscale reacts to cortisol by assuming the host is no longer safe. It erupts into flame, producing lots of ash, enabling it to depart for better real estate.”

  He looked at her with admiration. “Yes. That’s the mechanism exactly. Who have you been talking to?”

  “Harold Cross,” Harper said, pleased to surprise him for once.

  The Fireman took this in, then lifted one corner of his mouth in a smile. “You found his notebook. I’d love to see it sometime.”

  “Maybe after I’m done with it,” she said. “Cortisol kicks off spontaneous combustion. But oxytocin—the social-networking hormone—puts the Dragonscale at ease. Anytime you feel the pleasure of group approval, you increase the Dragonscale’s sense of security and make it less likely to burn you to death later. That I understand. I can’t understand how you could be here in your cabin, while also seeing things that were happening two miles away.”

  “But I told you, I didn’t see them. I remember them, and that’s the difference. The Phoenix has a cloud of Dragonscale burning at its core. That Dragonscale contains a crude copy of my thoughts, my feelings, my responses. It’s an outboard brain. Eventually it returned to me, came back to the nest, where it died out, having done its job. The ash fell on me like snow while I was unconscious on the beach, and in the hours that followed, I dreamt everything the bird did and saw. It all came back to me, fragmentary at first, but eventually the entire awful scene.”

  Harper weighed this notion in her mind. Ash that could think and flame that lived and a spore that could swap impulses and memories with the human mind. It was, she thought, just exactly the sort of fantastical nonsense that evolution was always going in for. Nature was a grand one for sleight of hand and magic tricks.

  When she spoke again, it concerned the Dragonscale not at all. “You need a course of antibiotics. As it happens, I have some. I’ll send Michael over with a bottle of azithromycin. He should be able to slip over during the changing of the watch at dawn. Come on, Mr. Rookwood, let’s have a look at your arm.”

  “I take it you won’t be available to bring my medicine yourself?”

  She declined to meet his gaze. Instead she gently loosened the sling and unbent his elbow. He grimaced, but she thought it was more from the anticipation of pain than any actual suffering.

  “Things are going sour here, John. I’m confined to the infirmary, on house arrest and forbidden to leave Father Storey’s side. I’m only here tonight because Michael drew watch, and Mike isn’t playing by Carol’s rules anymore. Neither is Allie, who is on permanent house arrest in the girls’ dorm. Michael was afraid if he let me go see you, I might not come back. He doesn’t want me driving off without him.” She considered for a moment. “It’s only a matter of time before a couple dozen defectors try to make a run for it. Fill some cars with supplies and light out. Renée has already talked about leaving with Don and the prisoners and a few others.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Oh, I don’t know that I’d head out with them, whatever Michael thinks. While there’s still a chance for Father Storey, it wouldn’t be right to abandon him.”

  The Fireman did a strange thing then. He glanced past her at the furnace—then leaned in and spoke in a soft voice, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. “I admire a good bit of foolishness more than anyone, Harper, but in this case it won’t do. Your first obligation is to yourself and that baby, not to Tom Storey. He had the biggest heart of any man I ever knew and I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to stay for him. He’s been under for—how long? Six weeks? Seven? After a crushing blow to the head? At the age of seventy? He’s gone. He’s not coming back.”

  “Men have recovered from worse,” she said, although as she spoke, Harper found herself wondering if she even still knew the difference between a diagnosis and a denial. “Besides. John. I’m close. Nine weeks? Eight? I need somewhere to have this baby. The infirmary is a good place. I don’t know if I can find better. Don could deliver the child. He’s reeled in plenty of fish—I’m sure he can manage one more. Right now, so close to my due date, I wouldn’t leave camp unless there was no other choice.” She did not mention that if Father Storey died, she really would have no other choice. She would run with the baby or be sent into exile without it. But she did not want to distress John by telling him about Carol’s threats, not now. John was sick; he was beat up and feverish and his lungs were full of filthy damp. Her job was to give sympathy and care, not elicit it.

  She got up, went through some drawers beneath what had once been a worktable, and came back with some scissors. Harper snipped the filthy tape away from his wrist. It was still swollen and grotesquely discolored but it was only a little stiff when she asked him to rotate it, and she decided it didn’t need to be re-bound.

  “I think we can be done with the sling as well. But keep the brace on your elbow until you can bend the arm without sharp pain. And try to rest it. Until you’ve had a little more time to heal, you better limit yourself to intellectual masturbation only. We don’t want to put any undue strain on this wrist.”

  For once he had nothing to say.

  She sat back and said, “You know, Michael won’t leave camp without Allie. And I’m sure Allie won’t run without Nick. It scares the shit out of me to imagine them ditching camp and taking their chances out in the wild. What about you? They’d be safe if they went with you. You could look after them: Allie and Nick.”

  His gaze shifted briefly to the furnace behind her, then dropped. “And do you really think I’m in any condition to go anywhere?”

  “Maybe not now. But we’ll make you better. I’ll make you better.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There isn’t even a plan yet. Just a lot of loose talk.”

  Harper cast a slow and uneasy glance at the open furnace herself. She saw no one looking back at her from the flames: not a mystery woman and not Sirius Black. She thought of how John had glanced at the fire before leaning close to speak in a soft voice, as if he did not want to be overheard. Something else occurred to her, almost randomly, something he had said about the Phoenix: It’s an outboard brain. The thought raised a chill on the nape of her neck.

  “No,” she said. “But we better get working on one. I think we should try to meet here. All of us. Even the prisoners, if it can be managed. We don’t need to work out just how we’re going to leave, but also where we’re going to go and how we intend to survive.” She steeled herself and added, gently, “Yo
u say Father Storey wouldn’t want me to risk my life or the baby’s life by staying. I say Sarah wouldn’t want you to risk your life by staying.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It wouldn’t be so bad: to be buried here. Why not? In some ways I feel like this is where my real life started. Here in Camp Wyndham, where I met Sarah, and where we all returned after we came down with Dragonscale. There would be a certain narrative elegance in my life ending here as well.”

  “Fuck narrative elegance. How did you all wind up deciding to hide out here?”

  “Nowhere else to go. That simple, really.”

  “You can do better than that,” Harper said.

  “If you insist,” he told her.

  13

  “We were all marked. The first lines appeared on Nick’s arm and back. Three days later we looked like we had all gone to the same tattoo parlor in hell. Except for Sarah. In the space of seventy-two hours, Sarah had to face the idea of losing her son, her daughter, her sister, her father, and her boyfriend. You’d expect a person to quit functioning.

  “But she didn’t quit. Her children still needed her, and as long as they could feel and think and be comforted, she was set on being whatever they wanted her to be. Besides, for a couple of weeks she assumed she had the infection, too, and just wasn’t symptomatic. I think when she finally realized she didn’t have it, she was more upset and shocked than she would’ve been if she did. How could every one of us have it except her? She got mad at me a couple times, as if it were my fault she wasn’t crawling with Dragonscale. Why all of you and not me? That’s what she kept asking.”

  “She was in the pool,” Harper murmured.

  “Figured it out, did you? Yes. The poisoned ash fell from the sky and we all got it on us, but Sarah had gone swimming. The chlorine killed the spore, or at least created a barrier against it. In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower or wisdom or pluck. It’s just a matter of where you’re standing. Two inches to the right and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don’t make it out in time.

  “Sarah put off grief. She put off a nervous collapse. I don’t know how she bore up, but she did. The only time I saw her nearly hysterical was when her father said we should all book ourselves into the federal quarantine in Concord. The thought of her children being taken from her was like being prodded with hot sticks. We had to back off. I think we were all afraid of what she might do to herself if we created a situation where Allie or Nick might be yanked from her life and never seen again.

  “For a few days Allie stayed curled up in a ball, just crying. Then one morning she came out of the bathroom with her head shaved and announced she was all done being sad. That night her mother and Allie did ’shrooms together. The next night, Sarah and Allie snuck out and stole a car. They were deranged but happy. They looted a costume store. Sarah came home as Hillary Clinton. Allie took a Captain America mask because she liked the big ‘A’ on it. They thoughtfully brought a Tony the Tiger mask for Nick. I said I always wanted to be a fireman and next time I hoped they’d think of me. Two nights later they stole an antique fire truck from the parking lot of a museum full of classic cars and all the fireman gear that was inside it. They had to park it in the boathouse at Camp Wyndham, just to have a place to stick it. Allie was determined to raise some hell before she died and Sarah felt it was important for a mother to support her daughter’s goals in life.

  “I didn’t think Carol would last long. I remember that. She dropped ten pounds she didn’t have to lose. She stopped sleeping. She’d watch TV, half naked, for twelve hours straight, as insensible as someone who has had a lobotomy. She smelled like a lit match and was always seeping smoke. The only thing that could bring her out of her miasma was her father, who made sure she ate and slept, and otherwise tended to her needs.

  “Then one morning I heard banging doors and screaming in the street. It was early and I was the only one up. I crept down the walk and looked out over the hedge. They had a lorry pulled up in front of a house down the street, a police van that had been pressed into service by Quarantine Patrol. Some SWAT types in gas masks were wrestling a woman into it. They had a doctor with them, in a mask and gloves, carrying a clipboard, and telling her this was for the protection of her own children. Telling her they would contact an appropriate relative to come and collect the kids. A boy of about four was sobbing his eyes out, trying to follow them. Another member of the Quarantine Patrol kept taking him by the shoulder and turning him around. Somewhere inside the house I could hear a baby shrieking. Just before they shoved the woman into the truck, she turned her head and I saw her face. It was the same lady who had been weeping on the curb the day the drugstore went up in flames.

  “That afternoon, we had a family conference around the dining room table and I filled them in on what I had seen. Allie said we needed a plan, in case they came back and knocked on our door. Tom said if such a thing happened, the best thing we could do was not be there to answer it. He said he had spent every summer for the last forty years at Camp Wyndham and saw no reason to change his plans now, and never mind summer camp had been canceled. He said he had been over to camp with Carol once already and there were enough dry goods on hand to feed an army for a decade. He was only off by nine years.

  “He settled into the house that had always been his, supposedly with Carol to look after him, although it was really the other way around. Sarah and I claimed a cabin close to the boathouse, because Nick liked to play fireman on our stolen fire truck. Would it sound strange to say those were lovely days? We had fresh eggs then, waffles, and coffee. We had swims at dawn and campfires at dusk. Sarah dusted off the organ in the church and played Billy Joel and Paul McCartney. She tried to get her sister to play with her, but Carol stayed in the House of the Black Star, her ’scale smoking and fuming. Waiting to die.

  “One morning Sarah went into Portsmouth to get news and groceries. She could shop for us, she wasn’t sick. She came back with the Neighbors girls. Two days later, Norma Heald showed up on her own. She had worked in the cafeteria in summers past and thought it would be safer to look for food here than in a supermarket. That was the beginning of Tom’s people.

  “A few days after Norma showed up in camp, Carol came flying out of the House of the Black Star, looking wild, almost incoherent with terror, found Sarah, and said it was happening. She said to come quick. She said Tom and Nick were lighting up—that both of them were about to burst into flame.

  “We ran so hard and fast we left Carol behind. We ran sick and scared. You can’t imagine what it’s like to run so hard toward something you don’t want to see. Like running toward your own firing squad. I was sure we’d find both of them withered and blackened, the house afire.

  “Sarah burst through the front door and then stopped so suddenly I ran into her and knocked her down. Allie was right behind me and tripped over the both of us. We were all tangled together on the floor when I saw them.

  “The dishwasher in that house has to be older than you, Harper. It had seen almost three decades of service, and thumped and shook when it was turned on. The beat, if you can imagine it, is very like that old song ‘Wooly Bully.’ You know that one? Tom sat with his back to the machine and Nick in his lap and that Wooly Bully thump going through the both of them. Tom had his fingers laced through Nick’s and he was singing and the both of them were shining. Tom had his sleeves rolled back to show the ’scale on his forearms, and it was as brilliant as swirls of glow-in-the-dark paint.

  “It didn’t bother him at all, watching us crash in through the doors like the Keystone Kops. He gave us a laughing sort of look and went right on singing. Sarah said, ‘Oh, Dad, oh, God, what’s happening to you?’

  “And he said, ‘I’m not sure, but I think the Dragonscale likes Sam the Sham. Come and sing with us and see if you don’t like the way it makes you feel.’

  “By the time Carol c
ame through the door we were all sitting together in a circle by the thumping dishwasher, singing garage rock and lit up like a carnival. As soon as the Dragonscale started to warm up and glow you knew you were all right. That you weren’t going to burn. Well, you know what it’s like in the Bright.

  “We sang until the dishwasher finished its cycle, and as soon as the machine quit thumping, our Dragonscale began to cool and go dim. We were all so high. I couldn’t remember which of Tom’s daughters I was dating, so I kissed both of them. Sarah had a laugh at that. Allie kept counting her toes, because she couldn’t remember how many she had. I guess you’d have to say we were good and baked. Baked! Ha! Isn’t that clever? Isn’t it—no? Ah. Well.

  “We gathered the others in the chapel that evening. Sarah sat at the organ and Carol tuned her ukulele and they played ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and ‘Let It Be’ and we lit up like sparks blowing from a bonfire. Their voices were so smoky and sweet. I have never been so drunk or so happy. I could feel myself letting go of my identity, the way you might put down a heavy suitcase you no longer need carry. It was, I imagine, how bees feel. Not like an individual at all, but like one humming note in a whole world of perfect, useful music.

  “After we were all sung out, Tom spoke to us. That seemed natural. He told us things we knew but needed to hear. He told us we were lucky for every minute we had together, and I knew it was true. He told us it was a blessing, to be able to feel each other’s love and happiness so intensely, right on our skin, and I said amen, and so did all the rest of us. He told us that in the darkest moments of history, kindness was the only light you had to find your way to safety, and I know I cried to hear him say it. I feel a little like crying now, just remembering it. It’s easy to dismiss religion as bloody, cruel, and tribal. I’ve done it myself. But it isn’t religion that’s wired that way—it’s man himself. At bottom every faith is a form of instruction in common decency. Different textbooks in the same class. Don’t they all teach that to do for others feels better than to do for yourself? That someone else’s happiness need not mean less happiness for you?