The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  “Oh, Allie,” Harper said. “You apologized once. I don’t expect you to do it over and over.”

  “It’s not an apology. It’s a vote,” Allie said, meeting Harper’s gaze almost with defiance.

  “Yes, it is,” Renée said. “And my vote is for Harper, too. It is awfully good of some people to have asked me to take the job, but I’d rather read about a grand escape than plan one. Besides, I’m terrible at keeping secrets and I hate to scheme against people. It seems rude. I don’t deal with guilt well and I’m worried we might hurt some feelings in the process of defending ourselves. Also, I’m juggling a couple of books. Being a full-time conspirator would take away from my reading time. So it’ll have to be Harper.”

  “Hey!” Harper said. “I’ve got books to read, too, lady!”

  “It also crossed my mind that you are very pregnant, and I think that makes it much, much less likely they’ll hang you if we’re caught,” Renée said. “And Harp, I hate to break it to you, but I think this puts you in charge. By my count you just won the vote, five to seven.”

  “Make it six to seven,” Harper said. “Because I voted for John.”

  “What a coincidence.” The Fireman opened his mouth in a toothy grin that made him look just mildly deranged. “So did I.” Opening his vote and turning it to show what he had written there, a single word: myself.

  9

  Ten minutes later the others were gone. Only Harper and the Fireman remained behind.

  “Tell Michael I’ll be along in a few hours and not to worry,” Harper told Don Lewiston.

  Renée leaned in from outside, through the half-open door, her hand on the latch.

  “Don’t forget to come back, Harper,” Renée said, her eyes glittering from the cold or from delight, it was hard to say.

  “Go on, you,” Harper said. “Hurry. Don’t you know the first rule of running a conspiracy? Don’t get caught.”

  The door closed. Harper and the Fireman heard whispers, choked laughter, Allie singing a line of “Love Shack,” and then the crunch of boots moving away. Finally it was just the two of them again, in a taut but agreeable silence, the kind of silence that precedes a first kiss.

  They didn’t kiss, though. Harper was aware of the open furnace at her back, the heat cast by the shifting flames, and wondered who was watching. He had gotten up twice to feed driftwood to the fire, and each time she thought, If we abandon Camp Wyndham, he won’t be with us. He has to stay here and tend his private flames.

  “It was a setup,” she said. “You guys counted the votes ahead of time.”

  “Well. I wouldn’t go that far. Let’s just say the outcome was not entirely unforeseen. Why do you think Michael made a special point to let you know there was no rush to return tonight?”

  There had been time, when they were all together, to sketch two different plans in broad outline. One imagined what they would do if they had to leave in a hurry. The other plotted a method to (gently) wrest control of camp away from Carol. It had been left to John and Harper to work out the details for both eventualities.

  “I’m ready to hatch schemes if you are,” he said.

  “I need sugar for my best scheming,” she said, found her canvas tote, and tugged out a Mary Poppins lunch box. “Nothing gets me in a conspiratorial mood like an illicit candy bar, even if they are a year old.”

  His brow knotted. “I warn you. Claiming to have candy bars when you don’t would be a gross violation of your Hippocratic oath never to inflict needless suffering.”

  “I have news for you, Rookwood. I’m a nurse. We don’t take the Hippocratic oath. That’s just doctors. Nurses only swear to one thing—the patient will take his medicine.”

  “Sometimes you say something just a bit menacing and it gives me a happy little shiver,” he said. And then, without any change of tone or hesitation, he added, “I’d burn Camp Wyndham to the ground before I’d let Carol and her sycophants take your baby from you. There’d be nothing left of this place but charred sticks. I hope you know that.”

  “Wouldn’t be very fair to the rest of them, would it?” Harper asked. “They’re not bad people, most of them. All they want is to be safe.”

  “Isn’t that always a permission slip for ugliness and cruelty? All they want is to be safe, and they don’t care who they have to destroy to stay that way. And the people who want to kill us, the Cremation Crews, all they want is safety, too! And the man I killed with the Phoenix the other night—the man behind the .50 caliber. I felt I had to do it. I had to cook him down to the bones. It was the only way I could know for sure you’d get back to me.”

  He looked at her with a curious mix of bemusement and grief. She wanted to take his hand. Instead she gave him a miniature Snickers and took a tiny Mounds bar for herself.

  “Are we going to have to kill people to be safe?” Her voice was very quiet. “Do you think it will come to that? With Ben? With Carol? Because if you do, I think maybe I should row back to shore now. I don’t want to make a plan to murder anyone.”

  “If you row back to shore now,” he said, “it might murder me. So I guess you’ll have to stay.”

  “I guess so,” she said, and poured them each a little more rum.

  10

  He said the candy bar was awful and he needed another one to get the taste out of his mouth. She gave him a cigarette instead and another splash of rum. He lit up with his thumb.

  Harper wasn’t so sure about the escape plan. It had too many moving parts. She had a list going, beginning with the letter A (Father Storey is responsive), continuing on through E (create a distraction by dropping the bell in the steeple), and finishing with Q (Don leads the other boats north). That was way too much of the alphabet.

  The Fireman, on the other hand, loved the plan. Of course he did. He had the starring role. Harper kept trying to subtract letters, and he kept trying to add them.

  “I wish we had time to dig a tunnel,” the Fireman said.

  “To where?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You can’t have a decent prison break without a tunnel. The aspiring novelist in me wants a secret tunnel hidden behind a false wall, or a poster of a famous movie star, or possibly in the back of a wardrobe. We could call it Operation Narnia! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like that.”

  “I wouldn’t like if you turned into a novelist. I might have to tear off half your face. That’s what I did with the last wannabe writer to cross my path.”

  He swished the dregs of his banana liquor around his paper cup and then tossed the last of it back. “I forgot your husband was an aspiring novelist.”

  “Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggression with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight—or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won’t follow an outline.” A glumness settled upon her. It crossed her mind that she had never been Jakob’s friend or wife or lover, but only his subject, only material. Writers were as parasitic, she supposed, as the spore itself.

  “I am in one hundred percent agreement on the subject of outlines. Any writer who works by outline should be burned at the stake. Possibly with their own outline and notecards used as kindling. That’s what I dislike most about our plan. It’s an outline. Life doesn’t work by outline. If I were writing this scene, I wouldn’t even bother describing our plan, not in any detail. I already know it won’t work out the way we’re hoping. It would just be wasting the reader’s time.” He saw the look on her face and kicked her foot. “Oh, come on. We have candy bars and smokes and booze and evil plans. Don’t get morose on me. What else is in that lunch box of yours?”

  She took out a deformed, tumorous potato and set it on the bed.

  The Fireman recoiled. “Aa! What the awful, beard
ed Christ is that?”

  “That? That’s Yukon Gold, Chumley,” she said.

  “Ah, well,” he said. “I suppose we’ve had enough chocolate. How about a baked potato?”

  He picked it up and clasped it between his hands. Smoke began to rise from between his fingers and with it, the smell of roasting spuds. The smell cheered Harper up. She couldn’t help it.

  “I love a man who knows how to cook,” Harper said.

  11

  He had salt and a little tumbler of olive oil and they split the potato. The fragrant mineral smell of it filled the shed. It was so good, it made Harper feel a bit teary, and when it was gone she licked oil and salt off her hands.

  “You know what I miss?” she said.

  “If you say Facebook, you’ll ruin a perfectly lovely evening.”

  “I miss Coca-Cola. That would’ve been so good with a Coke. You know, we might’ve fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren’t all bad.”

  “As a species, we might not live to regret melting the ice caps. That’s where it comes from, you know: the spore. I’m eighty percent sure. That’s why all the earliest cases were along the Arctic Circle. It was under the glaciers. I think it’s happened before, too. Everyone believed the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor strike, but I figure it was the spore. It hides under the ice until the world warms up enough to let it back into the air. Then it burns everything until the world is so blanketed in smoke the planet freezes over again. The mold dies out, except for a little bit that is preserved once more under the ice. There have been six extinction events in the life of this planet. I bet every one of them was the spore.”

  “You’re saying it’s a planetary T cell. It attacks any infection that throws the environment out of whack. Like us.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s the third-best theory I’ve ever heard. I like the idea that the Russians bred a superfungus back in the seventies, out on this island for testing biological weapons. Rebirth Island, I think it was called. They had to abandon the site in 2000 after the spore got loose. But the island was in a lake that dried up and animals crossed back and forth, carrying the ash in their fur. All the early cases were in Russia.”

  “You said third-best theory. Is there something better than Arctic melt or a Russian island of pure evil?”

  “I also like the idea that God is punishing us with killer athlete’s foot for wearing Crocs.” She gave herself another tipple of banana liquor. In her medical opinion, another sip wouldn’t give the baby a deformed brain. “Now that the world is over, what do you most regret not getting to do?”

  “Julianne Moore,” he said. “And Gillian Anderson. At the same time or separately, it really would’ve made no difference.”

  “I mean what did you want to do that actually might’ve happened.”

  “I wish I had discovered a new kind of mold I could’ve named after Sarah.”

  “Wow. You romantic son of a bitch.”

  “What about Harper Willowes? What did you always want to do?”

  “Me? Julianne Moore, same as you. That hot little bitch had one fine ass.”

  The Fireman went and got a dish towel and apologized over and over for spitting his banana rum on her, while he patted her shirt dry.

  12

  He got up to stir the fire and came back holding the longbow that had sat in the corner all winter long. He stretched out on his cot, holding the bow as if it were a guitar and thwanging its one atonal string.

  “Do you think Keith Richards is still alive?” he asked.

  “Sure. Nothing can kill him. He’ll outlast us all.”

  “Beatles or Stones?” he asked.

  She sang the opening lines of “Love Me Do.”

  “Is that a vote for the Beatles?”

  “Of course I pick the Beatles. It’s a stupid question. It’s like asking what you like better: silk or pubic hair?”

  “Ah, that’s disappointing.”

  “Of course you’d pick the Stones. Anyone who’d walk around pretending he’s a fireman when he isn’t—”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Men who love the Stones are fixated on cock. I’m sorry, but that’s the only word. And a firehose is a symbolic fantasy cock. It’s pathetic. Male Stones fans are frozen at eighteen months old, just discovering the thrill of yanking on the rubber band of their own phallus. Female Stones fans are even worse. Mick Jagger has a weird gross mouth that makes him look like a cod, and this turns them on. They’re sexually aroused by fish-men. They’re deviants.”

  “So what are Beatles fans fixated on? The glory of pussy?”

  “Exactly. Strawberry Fields is not just a place in Liverpool, Mr. Rookwood.” She held out her hand. “Give me that. Every time you twang the cable you’re putting unnecessary torque on the cams.”

  “You talk like an auto mechanic when you’re drunk. Did you know that?”

  “I’m not drunk. You’re drunk. I’m a former archery instructor. Now give it.”

  He gave her the bow. She stood it upright, ran her fingers down the slick of the cable.

  “An archery instructor?”

  “When I was in high school. For the town rec department.”

  “What inspired you? Jennifer Lawrence? Did you have Catsass Everdame fantasies? Jennifer Lawrence was a corker. I hope she didn’t burn to death.”

  “No, this was pre–Hunger Games. I went on this whole Robin Hood jag when I was nine years old. I started saying thy and thou and when my parents asked me to do a chore I’d drop to one knee and bow. At the peak of my obsession I wore a Robin Hood costume to school.”

  “For Halloween?”

  “No. Just because I liked the way it made me feel.”

  “Oh God. And your parents let you? I didn’t know you were neglected as a child. That gives me a sad feeling in my”—he paused, to try and figure out where his sad feelings were located—“emotions.”

  “My parents are sturdy, practical people who own several ratlike dogs. They were very good to me and I miss them very much.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “I don’t think they’re dead. But they are in Florida.”

  “The first stage of decline.” He nodded sadly. “I suppose they dress their dogs in sweaters.”

  “Sometimes, if it’s cold. But how did you know?”

  “They let you cavort about in public wearing a Robin Hood outfit, to what I can only assume was a deluge of cruel taunts from your peers. It’s easy enough to guess how they’ll treat their pets.”

  “Oh, no. They didn’t know about my Robin Hood outfit. I had it in my backpack and changed into it in the bathroom at school. But you’re right about the taunts. That was a dark day for Harper Frances Willowes.”

  “Frances! Lovely. May I call you Frannie?”

  “No. You may call me Harper.” She rested her chin on the top of the bow. “My dad got me my first bow for Christmas, when I was ten. But he took it away before New Year’s.”

  “Did you shoot someone?”

  “He caught me soaking arrows in lighter fluid. I just really, really wanted to shoot a flaming arrow at something. It didn’t matter what. Still do. I feel like that would complete me: to see a burning arrow go thwock into something and set it afire. I suppose it’s how men feel when they imagine sinking balls-deep into the perfect piece of ass. I just want one sexy little thwock.”

  John choked on another mouthful of banana rum. She had to pound him between the shoulders to get him breathing again.

  “I am certain you are drunk,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve limited myself to a very responsible two cups of banana-flavored dog vomit. I’m pregnant.”

  He gasped, began to cough once more.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go shoot flaming arrows. Want to? The fresh air will do you good. You need to get out of this hole m
ore often.”

  He gave her a look through watering eyes. “What are we going to shoot?”

  “The moon.”

  “Ah,” he said. “A nice fat target. Do I get to shoot, too?”

  “Sure,” she said, and pushed back her chair. “I’ll get the arrows. All you have to do is bring the fire.”

  13

  The cold was so sharp after the banana-scented heat of the Fireman’s shed, it drove the breath out of her and stung her cheeks like a slap.

  She led him around the shed, up through the high sea grass, and down the dune to the ocean-facing side of the island, out of sight from shore. When he struggled in the sand, she reached back and took his hand to help him along.

  They stopped at one corner of the big cruising sloop, sitting in its steel carriage. From here, Harper could see the name written across the stern in sparkling gold cursive: THE BOBBI SHAW. The Bobbi Shaw featured prominently in their plans, appearing in steps F, H, and M–Q.

  The Fireman looked around, wearing his rubber fireman’s jacket like a cape and clutching himself inside of it. Finally he found what he was hunting for—the moon, an ice-colored button pinned to the black cape of the sky.

  “There it is. Kill it so we can go back inside where it’s warm.”

  She had the bow in one hand, a clutch of arrows in the other. She dropped all but one of the arrows onto the blue shale, held the last out to him, point first.

  “Got a light?”

  He closed his fist around the black carbon of the arrow and slid his hand along it. Blue fire followed, as if the arrow were soaked in gasoline and he had touched a match to it.

  She nocked the arrow and sighted along the burning shaft. Fire lashed off it in a red banner. She aimed for the moon and let go.

  A blazing red comet sliced through the darkness. The arrow climbed two hundred feet, hooked hard to the right, and dropped in a shower of embers.

  She held the bow over her head, feeling joyously savage.

  “Isn’t that beautiful!” he said.