The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  “Only Sarah did not shine, because only Sarah did not have the Dragonscale. But she knew as well as the rest of us that we had solved something. That we had found a working cure. We didn’t need a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. The sugar was the medicine. Sarah sang with us, and watched us turn on, and kept her own counsel. I had been with her long enough by then that I should’ve seen what was coming. What she would do.

  “But I didn’t see what was coming because I was drunk most of the time. Not drunk on booze, you understand. Drunk on that rush of light and pleasure that came over me when we all sang together. Allie began to go out at night in her Captain America mask, to spy on friends, kids she knew from school. If she saw they were sick with the ’scale, she’d recruit them and their families. Tell them there was a way to stay alive. That the infection didn’t have to be a death sentence. We had a dozen new people coming in every week.

  “Sarah sent me along with Allie to make sure she got back to camp in one piece. I took to dressing as a fireman, because I discovered that in a world full of things burning up, no one looks at a fireman twice. I couldn’t even remember my own name for most of June, I was so drunk on the Bright. I was just . . . just the Fireman.” He coughed, weakly. A fragrant puff of smoke blew from his mouth, turned into the ghost of a toy-sized fire truck, and dissolved.

  “Show-off,” Harper said. “What happened next?”

  “Sarah died,” he said, and bent forward and surprised Harper by kissing her nose. “The end.”

  BOOK SEVEN

  NO STRAIGHT ARROW

  MARCH

  1

  From the diary of Harold Cross:

  AUGUST 28th:

  MARTHA QUINN IS REAL.

  HAS A WEBSITE, MARTHAQUINNINMAINE. THEY PROCESS YOU IN MACHIAS, CLEAN YOU UP, GIVE YOU FRESH CLOTHES AND A SQUARE MEAL, AND TAKE YOU OVER ON A LOBSTER BOAT. THEY’VE GOT WHAT’S LEFT OF THE CDC THERE WORKING ON A CURE.

  I’M GOING. TOMORROW OR THE DAY AFTER. IF I STAY HERE, SOONER OR LATER, I’LL BURN TO DEATH. THE OTHERS ARE GETTING THE BENEFIT OF SOCIAL CONNECTION, BUT I’M NOT, AND WITHOUT REGULAR DOSES OF OXYTOCIN, MY BIOCHEMICAL FUSE IS STILL HISSING.

  I WON’T BE ASKING ANYONE’S PERMISSION. I KNOW I WON’T GET IT. CAROL HAS ME UNDER PRETTY TIGHT WATCH. THE ONLY THING I’VE GOT GOING FOR ME IS JR. HE’S ARRANGED TO SLIP ME OUT OF HERE SO I CAN GET TO THE CABIN TONIGHT AND SEND MY LAST E-MAILS.

  NOT SURE HOW I’LL MAKE IT SO FAR NORTH WHAT WITH ALL OF SOUTHERN MAINE ON FIRE BUT JR SAYS MAYBE A BOAT. I CAN’T WAIT TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO THIS SHITHOLE FOREVER.

  2

  Her first thought was: It can’t be that easy.

  She turned the page, hoping for more, but that was it. After that, the notebook was blank.

  Rain fell. It hammered on the tin roof in a continuous rattle and crash. The rain had been falling ten hours straight. Sometimes trees fell, too. Harper had woken to the sound of one going over somewhere close by, with a great creak and a floor-shaking smash. The wind struck the infirmary again and again, one battering rush after another. It was like the end of the world out there. But then every day was like the end of the world now, come rain or shine.

  Harper had not imagined there was anything left in the diary to learn, let alone shock her. Martha Quinn was real. The island was a real place.

  Nick was watching her carefully: no surprise there. Harper had long since quit trying to keep the notebook secret from him. It was, in the narrow confines of the ward, impossible anyway. She met his intense, unwavering, curious gaze. He did not ask if she had read something important. He knew.

  It was a Lookout named Chuck Cargill in the waiting room that night. He had walked in on Harper two hours ago, when she had her sweater off and was rubbing lotion on the pink curve of her stupendous belly. She had a bra on, but Cargill was nevertheless so alarmed to find her in a state of undress he had dropped the breakfast tray he was carrying on the counter with a clatter, as if it had suddenly become too hot to handle. He reeled backward, stammering some sort of incoherent apology, and ducked back out through the curtain. Ever since, he had been careful to clear his throat, knock on the doorframe, and ask for permission to come in. Harper thought he might never be able to make eye contact with her again.

  She also thought if she wanted to get the phone down out of the ceiling, he probably wouldn’t walk in on her while she was using it. No one else would, either. Even Ben Patchett wasn’t going to do spot inspections on a night like tonight.

  Harper turned the straight-backed chair around and climbed unsteadily onto it. She reached into the ceiling, found the cell phone, and climbed back down. Nick stared at her—at it—with wide, fascinated, wondering eyes. She gestured with her head: Come over here.

  They walked to the far end of the ward, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the curtain into the waiting area. Harper and Nick sat down side by side on the edge of Father Storey’s cot, with their backs to the doorway into the next room. If Cargill did suddenly walk in, the phone would be concealed by their bodies and she might have time to shut it down and stick it under the mattress.

  She squeezed the power button. The screen flashed gray, then a deep obsidian black. The battery life was a whopping 9 percent.

  Harper pulled up the browser and loaded marthaquinninmaine.

  3

  Music played, tinny and flat through the little iPhone speakers, barely audible over the rain, but no less lovely for all of that. It was a song Harper used to perform herself when she was eight years old, using a wooden spoon as the microphone, sliding across the kitchen linoleum in her Miss Piggy slippers. Ric Ocasek sang that this one girl was just what he needed, over a melody that sproing-sproinged along like a Slinky walking down a staircase.

  Photos loaded, but slowly.

  The first showed a vast gradual slope of waist-high grass, yellowing in the autumn. The ocean was a sheet of battered steel in the background. Martha Quinn stood in the center of a long line of children, five on either side of her, her arms around the waists of the two closest. She was as bony as ever and even at nearly sixty, her face was impish and kind, her eyes narrowed in a way that suggested she had a good joke she wanted to tell. The wind blew her platinum hair back from her high brow. Her sleeves were rolled up to show the Dragonscale on her forearms, a black-and-gold scrollwork that brought to mind ancient writings in Kanji.

  As the song faded, a second photograph loaded. A doctor in a white lab coat, a pretty Asian woman with a clipboard in one hand, crouched to be at eye level with a scrumptious nine-year-old girl. The little girl clutched a stuffed raccoon doll to her chest and her nose was wrinkled in a shriek of laughter. Her bare, chubby arms were lightly scribbled over with ’scale. They were in the white, clean, sterile hall of a hospital unit somewhere. There was a sign on the wall in the background, blurred, almost out of focus. It wasn’t an important part of the image and so Harper saw it without really noticing it . . . then narrowed her eyes and looked again. When she registered what it said, the intensity of her emotions drove all the air out of her. Just two words:

  • Pediatrics

  • Maternity

  The third photo began to load as the song faded out. A voice began to speak—a voice Harper knew only from 1980s retrospectives on VH1 and MTV. The volume was already so low, Harper could barely hear Martha Quinn over the furious tinny drumming of rain on the ceiling, but out of caution she turned it down still more and bent close to listen.

  “Whoo, hello, was that just what you needed? It was just what I needed. Well, it was one of the things I needed. It’s a pretty long list. I NEED to know that Michael Fassbender is still alive, because, HELLO! That man was right in so many ways. He was setting ladies on fire way before the spore got loose, you know what I mean? I NEED new episodes of Doctor Who, but I’m not holding my breath, because I bet everyone who made that show is dead or hiding. Is there still an England out there? I hope you didn’t burn up, British Isles! Where would the world be
without your epic contributions to culture: Duran Duran, Idris Elba, and Love Actually? Drop me an e-mail, England, let me know you’re still hanging in there!”

  The next image showed a large tent with some folding tables set up in it. A processing center. The tables were manned by the sort of broad-shouldered, blue-haired old ladies that worked high school cafeterias . . . although they wore the bright yellow spacesuits that were standard for anyone who might come in contact with Ebola, anthrax, or Dragonscale. One of the stout old ladies was offering a stack of blankets, pajamas, and forms to a kind of family: an old man with bushy gray eyebrows, a fatigued-looking woman of maybe thirty, and two little boys with bright coppery hair.

  “I need peach pie. BAD. I am sorry to say there is no peach pie here on Free Wolf Island, but we do have our own apple orchard, and boy, I can’t wait until it’s apple-picking season and I can go out and get myself a basket of Granny Smiths, Cortlands, Honeycrisps, Honey Boo Boos, Honey Grahams, Graham Nortons, Ed Nortons . . . all that good stuff. No bad apples here! I wish there was a fruit named after me. I wonder what a Quinn would taste like. Probably it would taste like 1987. The best thing about radio is you can imagine me just like I looked in 1987, every man’s fantasy. And by ‘every man,’ I mean shy thirteen-year-olds who liked to read comics and listen to the Cure. ANYHOO! I need more solar panels. I only have four lousy solar panels! It’s okay, that’s better than none. But as you know, I can only broadcast for three hours a day and then our transponder transpires to expire. A heads-up: you are probably not hearing me live, but on a recorded loop. We upload a new loop every day, around eleven A.M., give or take twenty-four hours.”

  Nick couldn’t hear Martha Quinn, but he could see the images loading on the screen, and he bent forward, eyes as wide as one who has been mesmerized.

  “What else do I need? I need you to get your butt up to Machias and come on over, because we got cocoa! And barrels of walnuts! And a former TV weather anchor who makes amazing fresh bread in a wood-fired stove! Do you know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about Free Wolf Island, located seventeen miles off the coast of Maine, a place where you can safely settle if you—yes, you!—happen to be the lucky winner of a case of Dragonscale. We’ve got a bed for you. And that’s not all! We’ve got a federally operated medical facility, where you can receive cutting-edge experimental treatments for your condition. As I speak to you, I myself, Martha Quinn, am lubed up in a cutting-edge experimental salve that smells and looks exactly like sheep shit, and guess what! I have not burned alive all day! I haven’t even had a hot flash! My last hot flash was in 2009, and that was before the infection even got started.”

  Now a photo of an island seen from off the coast: a ridge of green, a beach of blue stone, a scattering of New England–style cottages along a single dirt road. The sun was just coming up or just setting and it cast a gold flare upon the dark water.

  “No one is saying the word cure. Do not even whisper the word cure. There are six hundred sick people on this island, and what they are mostly sick of—besides the Draco tryptowhatever—is getting their hopes up over the latest treatment. But I will say that our last death by fire was almost twelve weeks ago. That’s right: six hundred infected and just one dead in the last three months.”

  A final image showed a smiling elderly pair with a child. The man was gangly, weathered, with high, almost patrician cheekbones and a weary relief in his eyes. His wife was small, round, the corners of her eyes deeply grooved with laugh lines. The man had a five-year-old boy up on one shoulder. They wore fall clothes: flannel shirts, jeans, knit hats. The woman had Dragonscale scrawled all over the backs of her hands. The caption read: Sally, Neal, and George Wannamaker arrive at the Machias Processing Center and prepare to depart for Free Wolf Island. Do YOU have friends and family on the island? Click for a photo gallery of the—and here a counter showed the number 602—people to receive shelter and comfort in the Free Wolf Island Quarantine and Research Zone.

  “When you get to Machias—and you will get here, you have to believe that; I got here and so will you—you will be directed to a processing tent. They’ll take care of you. They’ll give you a pillow, a blanket, a pair of cute paper slippers, and a hot meal. They’ll put you on a boat and send you right over to us, where you will be fed, clothed, and housed. All that, plus the opportunity to rub elbows with incredible celebrities like myself! And a guy who did the weather for a channel in Augusta, Maine! What are you waiting for? Pack your stuff and get your little butt here. Your bed is made. Time to sleep in it.

  “I’m going to spin another song, and then I’ll be back with a list of the latest safe routes from Canada . . .”

  Nick pointed to the picture of the island, and then asked Harper, in sign, “Is this a real place?”

  “You bet,” she said in gestures. “A good place for sick people.”

  “When do we go?” Nick’s hands asked.

  “Soon,” Harper said, unconsciously speaking aloud while saying it with a gesture at the same time.

  In the bed behind her, Father Storey sighed heavily and in a voice of quiet, gentle encouragement, said, “Soon.”

  4

  When Harper’s pulse had settled down, she checked Father Storey’s—holding his thin wrist in her fingers and monitoring the thump of the blood in his arteries. His heartbeat was slight and not altogether steady, but she thought it had a little more zip than the day before. When she stroked a fingernail up his bare foot he curled his toes and made a soft snort of amusement. When she had tested him that way last week, she might as well have been tickling a loaf of bread.

  She couldn’t ask Nick if he had heard Father Storey speak, of course—the only time his deafness had ever frustrated her. She wanted desperately for someone, anyone, to have heard him. She considered sending for Carol. Perhaps Tom would respond to his daughter’s voice. By some accounts, he had before. Even if he didn’t stir again, Carol had a right to know her father had spoken today.

  But after turning the thought over, she rejected it. Carol would rejoice to hear her father was recovering—but the rejoicing could wait. Harper wanted to talk to him before anyone else did. She wanted to see what he remembered, if anything, about the night he had been clubbed in the head. And she wanted to warn him about what the strain of the last months had done to Carol, how the winter had left her ravaged and feverish and mistrustful. He needed to know about the slaughter on Verdun Avenue, and children marching around camp with rifles, and people forced to carry stones in their mouths to shut them up.

  No: in truth, Tom didn’t need to know those things. Harper needed him to know those things. She wanted the old man back to make things right again. How she had missed him.

  She sat with him the rest of the night, his hand in hers, stroking his knuckles. She spoke to him sometimes. “You hibernated through the whole winter, just like a bear, Tom Storey. The icicles are dripping. The snow is almost all gone. Time to wake up and crawl out of your cave. Nick and Allie and Carol and John are waiting for you. I’m waiting, too.”

  But he did not speak again, and at some point close to dawn, she dozed off with his hand in her lap.

  Nick woke her an hour later. The rising sun shot through the mist outside, turned it shades of lemon and meringue, sweet as pie.

  “He looked at me,” Nick told her with his hands. “He looked at me and smiled. He even winked before he went to sleep again. He’s coming back.”

  Yes, Harper thought. Like Aslan, he was coming back and he was bringing the spring with him.

  Just in time, she thought. He’s coming back just in time and everything is going to be okay.

  Later, she would remember thinking that and laugh. It was either that or cry.

  5

  Harper needed to clear her head, needed to do some quality thinking, so she walked out of the infirmary into the bitter chill. No one stopped her. They were all in the chapel together. Harper could hear them singing, could see their mystery lights flickering around t
he edges of the closed red doors.

  The funny thing was that they were all singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” which didn’t seem like the kind of rag they’d go for in chapel. Almost everyone in the congregation had seen someone they loved devoured by fire, lived in fear of burning themselves. But now their voices rose together in hopeful praise of ashes and soot, voices that quivered with a kind of hysterical delight. She left them behind.

  The air was clean and sharp and the walking was easy. Harper had left her big belly, and the baby inside of it, back at the infirmary, needed a break from being pregnant. It felt good to be thin again. She let her thoughts wander and in no time at all found she had reached the place where the dirt track from camp joined Little Harbor Road. That was farther than she had meant to go, farther than was necessarily safe. She glanced at the rusting, battered blue school bus, expecting to be yelled at by whoever was on watch. A gaunt, dark figure slumped behind the steering wheel. She guessed whoever it was had to be dozing.

  She was going to turn around and walk back when she saw the man in the road.

  There was a guy right in the middle of Little Harbor Road, not a hundred feet away, pulling himself arm over arm, like a soldier wriggling under barbed wire on a battlefield. Or, no: really, he was pulling himself along like someone whose legs didn’t work. If anyone came along in a hurry, he was going to get run over. Aside from that, it was awful, watching him struggle along across the icy tarmac.

  “Hey!” Harper called. “Hey, you!”

  She lifted the chain draped across the entrance to Camp Wyndham and started briskly toward him. It was important to get this done—deal with the man in the road—and get back out of sight before a car turned up. She shouted at him once more. He lifted his head, but the only streetlight was behind him, so his face remained in shadow: a round, fleshy, fat face, hair thinning on top. Harper hurried the last few steps to him and knelt down.