The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  She paused again, collecting herself. Her voice was low when she spoke once more, and many in the crowd leaned forward to hear her. “My dad. My dad was so strong. He fought his way back again and again. He began to wake. I think he willed himself to wake, against all odds. He knew the danger he was in. He found pen and paper and wrote a message.” She flapped one hand up in the air, holding a folded sheet of white paper. Her shoulders shuddered. “It’s his handwriting. I’ve known it since I was old enough to read my letters. It’s shaky, but it’s his. It says—” She looked upon it, blinking at tears. “It says, ‘Dear Carol, I will be dead soon. I hope you find this and not the nurse. Protect yourself. Protect the children. Protect the camp. Protect them all from the Fireman. Remember that Jesus came not to bring peace but the sword. I love you.’”

  She lowered the note, shut her eyes, swayed. When she opened them and looked up, Michael was waiting. She handed him the sheet of paper and once more he carried the evidence to the crowd, so they could pass it around, see for themselves.

  “None of this proves anything,” Renée shouted from where she sprawled in the mud. “There is no court anywhere in America that would accept any of this as evidence. Not your father’s note, which could’ve been written under duress, not that halligan bar, which could’ve been tampered with.” She turned her head, staring around at the crowd gathered at the edge of the stone ring. “There was no one planning to kill anyone. We talked about leaving! Not about murder. All Harper and John wanted to do was get a small group of us out of here and off to Martha Quinn’s island . . . which is a real place. With a charged cell phone we could prove it to you. Their signal broadcasts on the Internet. No one here—not Carol, not anyone—can offer any firsthand evidence of any criminal intention that would stand up in a true court of law.”

  “I beg to differ,” said the Mazz, from the edge of the circle.

  When Renée spoke of Martha Quinn’s island, there had been an almost immediate murmur of nervous surprise, a low thrum like an amplifier buzzing with feedback. But at this the many went silent again.

  “Just a couple nights ago, we all met in a secret conference on the Fireman’s island: myself, Gil here, Renée, Don Lewiston, Allie there, the Fireman, and the nurse,” the Mazz called out. “Renée asked me if I’d be head of security around camp after the Fireman got rid of Ben Patchett and Carol. And the nurse, she promised me I could have my pick of the girls, anyone over the age of fourteen. All I had to do was keep people in line. What they didn’t know was I had already tipped off Mr. Patchett something was up, and promised to work for the camp as a double agent, like. Renée and Allie thought they were so smart, sneaking us out of the meat locker for the meeting. They didn’t know Mr. Patchett let them break us out. Ben Patchett, Chuck Cargill, and Michael Lindqvist set the whole thing up so I could collect intel.”

  “And Cline will confirm all that,” Ben Patchett said, and thumped Cline in the back. “Won’t you, Cline?”

  Gilbert Cline turned his gray, calm eyes on Renée. Renée looked as if she had just caught a rifle butt to the stomach. She looked like she wanted to be sick.

  “I can confirm one thing,” Gil said. “I can confirm the Mazz is a lying sack of shit who will tell Patchett anything to get out of that meat locker. The rest of it is a crap sandwich and I can’t believe any of you are going to eat it.”

  Ben struck Gil in the back with the butt of his pistol. It made a low knocking sound, like knuckles on wood. Gil dropped to one knee.

  “No!” Renée said. “No, don’t you hurt him!” Harper doubted if many heard her over the sound of the crowd, which was now making a muted roar of surprise and rage.

  Ben stood behind Gil Cline, shaking his head and staring at Carol with a look of outrage.

  “He was telling a different story in the basement,” Ben said. “He was! He told me he’d back the Mazz up to the hilt, as long as we’d give him the same deal we gave Mazzucchelli. He said—”

  “I told you to leave him out of it,” the Mazz said. “Why do you think I didn’t bring him in from the start? I told you he wouldn’t—”

  “Enough!” Carol cried, and most of the chatter fell away. Most. Not all. The people of the congregation were restless now, shifting from foot to foot, whispering. “Anyone can see Cline is in love with Gilmonton and will tell any lie to protect her.”

  “Oh, no doubt!” shouted the Mazz. “They’ve been screwing for weeks! Her phony little book club was always just a cover story. Reading Watership Down, my ass. That was their code word for what they were really up to, which was fuckin’ like rabbits, every chance they—”

  “Once a perjurer, always a perjurer,” Gil said.

  “Mr. Mazzucchelli is not our only witness!” Carol cried. “There is another! Ask the nurse herself! Ask her! Is it not true? Did she not watch as the Fireman injected my father with an air bubble and ended his life? Did she herself not drug my nephew, Nick, so they could commit their homicide in peace? Ask her! Is it true, Nurse Willowes? Yes or no?”

  Harper lifted her head and looked around. A hundred and seventy faces watched, lit an infernal shade of orange by the torches. They watched in fear and rage. Emily Waterman looked stricken. Tears had cut through the lines of dirt on her cheeks. Jamie, on the other hand, seemed almost to quiver with purpose, still gripping Allie by the jaw. At last Harper found Michael, who stood behind the two convicts, just to the right of Ben Patchett. He had recovered his rifle and he held it at waist level, the barrel pointing in the general direction of Allie. He nodded, imperceptibly: Do it.

  Harper moved her chin up and down. Yes. It was true.

  A scream—a bellow of anguished rage—rose all around her, and the darkness itself seemed to quake. Harper had never heard such a sustained howl of noise. It was a chorus of a different sort, and for the first time, Harper saw some of them beginning to shine. Jamie’s eyes shone like gold dollars flashing in the direct light of the noonday sun. Norma Heald’s exposed arms crawled with Dragonscale, and the Dragonscale crawled with a livid red brightness.

  “Unh,” the Fireman said through the burlap sack. “What is that? What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

  His heel sliding over the ground, trying to find purchase.

  “He’s waking up!” Emily Waterman shrieked, in a high, shrill voice. “He’ll kill us! He’ll burn us all!”

  Once again, Norma Heald was the first to break from the crowd. She reared back and threw a rock, a small white pebble not much bigger than a golf ball. There was a sudden instant of silence, as if everyone drew a breath in the same moment. The rock hit the Fireman on the shoulder with a bony thwock!

  A great and savage roar of satisfaction rose from the crowd.

  Not one of them saw the door to the infirmary, three hundred feet away, open and slap shut, as Nick came staggering through it, half awake and half drugged.

  Neither did the Lookout in the steeple spy the headlights of the bus, less than a mile away, flashing a frantic warning at the gates of Camp Wyndham. He was looking directly below, watching the action. Watching as the stones began to fly.

  4

  A rock banged off the granite above the Fireman’s head. He flinched from the sound. A rock struck his knee with a bony pop.

  His left hand erupted into blue flame, melting duct tape, snapping the shovel handle.

  A white stone the size of a paperweight struck the burlap bag over his head and his left hand abruptly went out in a poisonous cloud of black smoke. The Fireman’s chin dropped against his chest. Rocks thudded off his shoulder, his stomach, the meat of one thigh, banged off the sheer face of the stone behind him.

  No, Harper thought, no no no . . .

  She shut her eyes and turned her mind inward and began to chant without words, sing without melody.

  5

  The Zapruder film, the silent color reel that captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, lasts less than twenty-seven seconds, and yet entire books have been written in an attempt
to adequately explore everything that can be seen happening in the frame. Time must be slowed to a crawl to make sense of any scene of true chaos—to show the flurry of human action and reaction going off like multiple strings of firecrackers, all at once. Every rewatching of the film reveals a new layer of nuance, a fresh set of impressions. Every review of the evidence uncovers a new set of overlapping narratives, suggesting not a single story—the shooting of a great man—but dozens of stories, all caught in frantic medias res.

  Harper Willowes didn’t have the convenience—not to mention the distance, or safety—of seeing what happened over the next eleven minutes on film. Nor could she rewatch that scene of slaughter later, to see what she might’ve missed. If such a thing had even been possible, she would’ve refused, couldn’t have stood facing it again, facing all that was lost.

  Yet she saw much, much more than anyone else, perhaps, because she didn’t panic. It was a curious quirk of Harper’s nature that she grew calmer in the moments when others were most inclined to sink into hysterics; that she was habitually at her most observant and clear-eyed in the very times when others could not bear to see what was happening at all. She would’ve made a fine battlefield nurse.

  She opened her eyes as flame leapt from her hands and the duct tape about her wrists shriveled and melted with a filthy stink. Then her arms were free . . . free and crawling with yellow fire almost to her shoulders. There was no pain. Her arms felt blessedly cool, as if she had dipped them in the sea.

  There was no need for torches anymore. The camp was all lit up. Harper faced a surging crowd of men and women with eyes that were bright and blind and shining. All of them were scrawled with glowing lines of Dragonscale, the spore casting a crimson light that shone right through sweaters and dresses. Some were outside barefoot and they walked in slippers of bronze.

  Norma Heald, her eyes glowing like drops of cherry-colored neon, bent to grab another rock off the ground. Harper lunged and threw her right hand and a crescent of flame the size of a boomerang leapt through the darkness and struck the back of Norma’s arm in a liquid spatter of fire. Norma shrieked, stumbled backward, and fell, taking down at least two people who stood behind her.

  Harper heard screaming. She was conscious of motion at the edges of her vision, people running, shoving each other down. A rock whickered past her left ear and clattered off the standing stone to which she had been tied.

  She turned toward the Fireman and found Gillian Neighbors standing in her way. Harper lifted her left hand and opened her palm, as if to give a high five. Instead she threw a plate of fire, like a pie in the face. Gillian screamed and grabbed at her eyes and fell back and was gone.

  A rock struck the small of Harper’s back, a sharp momentary pain that quickly faded.

  Harper reached up with one hand, found the duct tape around her head, and yanked. It did not tear free so much as slide away in a melted slurry. She opened her mouth and the rock in it fell into her left palm. She squeezed it in her fist and it began to heat, the surface cracking and fissuring and turning white.

  Remember the stone in her fist.

  Michael reached up to grasp Carol’s wrist like Romeo reaching over the side of the balcony to take Juliet’s hand, you and me, babe, how ’bout it?

  Gilbert Cline was off the ground, turning and sinking his fist into Ben Patchett’s stomach. Ben doubled over and seemed to shrink, and Harper thought of a baker pounding risen dough to make it collapse.

  Another rock struck Harper in the hip and she staggered. Allie fell in beside her, restoring Harper’s balance with a touch of her shoulder. Allie wore a muzzle of blood. She grinned through her split lips. Her wrists, bound in hairy twine, were trapped behind her back. Harper touched them with a hand sheathed in a white glove of fire. The twine fell away in twisting orange worms.

  Harper and Allie were at the Fireman’s side in three more steps. Harper grabbed him beneath the armpits, buried her hands into the flame-retardant material of his coat. Her gloves of flame went out with a gush of black smoke, to reveal the lace of Dragonscale wound around her forearms. The spore was still lit a feverish reddish-gold. No sooner had the flames gone out than her whole body went thick and strange with gooseflesh and she felt so light-headed she almost toppled over, and Allie had to steady her with a hand on her shoulder.

  Blood soaked through the burlap sack over John’s head, staining it in two places, one at his mouth, the other on the left side of his head. Allie yanked it off to reveal the face beneath. His cheekbone was split open, and his upper lip was swollen, drawn up in a bloody sneer, but Harper had been braced for worse. His eyes rolled this way and that—and then his gaze found her. Her and Allie.

  “Can you get up?” Harper asked. “We’re in trouble.”

  “What elf is new?” he said, blood spitting from his mouth. He glanced from woman to woman with a kind of blurred dismay. “Don’t boffer with me. Go.”

  “Oh, will you shut up,” Harper said, yanking him to his feet.

  But he wasn’t listening anymore. The Fireman squeezed Harper’s shoulder and pointed, his mouth opening wide into a blood-rimmed ring and his eyes straining in his sockets. He pointed into the sky.

  “The hand of God!” someone was screaming. “It’s the hand of God!”

  Harper looked up and saw a great flaming hand, the size of a falling station wagon. It dropped into the center of the ring of stones and fell upon the granite bench where Carol had been standing only a moment before. Now Carol was underneath it and Michael was holding her in his arms.

  That enormous burning hand struck the ground hard enough to make the earth shudder. It exploded into vast wings of flame, which billowed up across the inner circle of standing stones and scorched the granite black. Grass sizzled, turned to orange threads, and burned away. A blast of hot air boomed out from the center of the circle, hard enough to knock Harper into John’s lap, hard enough to stagger the crowd, to send the front row of people reeling back into the line behind them.

  There were screams of anguish and cries of terror. Emily Waterman was knocked down by the scattering, stumbling adults around her, and a 212-pound former plumber named Josh Martingale stepped on her left wrist. Her arm broke with an audible crack.

  The burning hand from the sky went out almost the moment it slammed into the ground, leaving behind only burning grass and the smoking stone bench, Carol and Michael cowering beneath it in each other’s arms.

  “How?” Harper asked. “Who—”

  “Nick,” the Fireman said.

  For a few moments the congregation of Carol Storey had all been shining together, in a bright harmony of rage and triumph, but no one was lit up anymore, and they blundered into one another with all the grace of panicked steers. To the north, looking back toward the infirmary, a gap opened in the crowd. People glanced around, saw what was approaching, and fled. Bill Hetworth, a twenty-two-year-old former engineering student who had been in camp for four months, saw what was marching toward them and his bladder let go, darkening the front of his jeans. Carrie Smalls, a fourteen-year-old who had been in Camp Wyndham for just three weeks, fell to her knees and began babbling to “my Lord in heaving, owls be thy name.”

  Nick crossed the ground toward them, his head on fire, his eyes like coals, his hands claws of flame, trailing a long black gown of smoke.

  6

  They parted, a human sea before a Moses wrapped in a robe of flame. As he stalked toward them, he was already letting himself go out. The blue corona of fire that surrounded his head guttered, flickered through different hues—emerald, then palest yellow—before dying in a puff of white smoke. His eyes continued to burn, however, remained hot, blind embers.

  “Come on,” the Fireman said. “Thiff is our cue to go.” When he attempted a fricative, his busted lips blew a fine spray of blood.

  Harper and Allie pulled the Fireman to his feet, each of them taking one of his hands. He had no balance, no strength in his legs, and almost immediately started to plunge
forward. Harper and Allie steadied him and he put his arms over their shoulders.

  “Get us behind Nick,” the Fireman said. “They’re terrified of him. They’re at least as terrified of him as they’ff ever been of me.”

  They only got two steps, though, Harper and Allie helping the Fireman along, when they heard the blast of an air horn, a bellowing bronk-bronk that seemed to go right through Harper’s chest. She froze and glanced wildly around, staring up the road, toward the crest of the hill.

  A pair of headlights came on, bright blue xenon headlights casting an arctic glare above an enormous snow-wing plow.

  They shone upon a man, standing eight feet before the truck, a guy in a filthy sweater with reindeer leaping across a green background. This man had a noose around his neck, the hairy rope leading back to the grille beyond the snowplow. His hands were tied behind his back. The headlights turned his wispy white hair to filaments of steel.

  Those headlights also fell upon Mark Mazzuchelli. The Mazz was almost fifty yards away, moving up the middle of the dirt road, had apparently decided he had spent enough time luxuriating in the pleasures of Camp Wyndham and was on his way to greener pastures. But when the lights blinked on he took a last staggering step and then went still.

  “The fuck is this?” the Mazz said, his voice carrying in the sudden hush.

  Another pair of headlights blinked on, and then a third. One set belonged to an open-top Humvee. The other lights blazed from the front of a Chevy Silverado Intimidator, on six jacked-up tires. Blinding floodlights flashed on above the cab. There were at least two other pickup trucks down the road behind them.

  Nelson Heinrich, the limping man in the noose, looked over his shoulder into the lights.

  “See!” he screamed. “See, I told you! I told you they’d be here! All of ’em! Two hundred infected at least! I told you I could help you! Now you have to let me go! You promised! You promised you’d be done with me!”