The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  Where it wasn’t shattered, the road was blanketed with ash. There was nothing to see, all the way to the horizon, except cinder-colored hills and the charred spears of the pines.

  A few hours before dusk they reached a place where the interstate caved away into what had once been a creek. The water was choked with ash, had become a magnesium-colored sludge. A ’79 Mercury floated down it, up to its headlights, looking like a giant robot crocodile patrolling a toxic canal.

  Allie set the travois down by the side of the road. “I’ll go upstream, see if there’s another way across.”

  “I don’t like the idea of you taking off alone,” Harper said. “We don’t know who might be out there. I can’t lose one more person I love, Allie.”

  It blindsided Allie, hearing Harper tell her she loved her. She looked around at Harper with an expression of shock and pleasure and embarrassment that made her seem much younger than she was: twelve, not seventeen.

  “I’m coming back,” Allie said. “Promise. Besides.” She tugged the fire ax out of Nick’s hands. “My mom isn’t the only one who knows how to sling one of these around.”

  She went down the steep slope at the side of the road, sweeping the blade back and forth to clear her way through the shoulder-high grass.

  She was back just as it turned twilight, the sky curdling a sickly shade of yellow. When Harper asked if she had found anything, she only wearily wagged her head and didn’t speak.

  They camped on the banks of the river, under the overhang of the collapsed bridge. In the night, the Fireman began to rave.

  “Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim che-ride, find me some water, ’fore I burn up inside! Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cha-red! If I was on fire, would you piss on my head?”

  “Shh,” Harper told him, one hand across his waist, clasping herself to him to keep him warm. The day had been sullen and hot, but after dark the air was so cold and sharp they might’ve been on an exposed mountain ridge. His face was drenched with an icy, sick sweat, yet he kept grabbing the collar of his shirt and pulling at it, as if he were roasting. “Shh. Try and sleep.”

  His eyelids fluttered and he gave her a wild, distracted look. “Is Jakob still after us?”

  “No. He’s all gone.”

  “I thought I heard his truck. I thought I heard him coming.”

  “No, my love.”

  He patted her hand and nodded, relieved, and slept again for a while.

  22

  They spent most of the next morning doubling back, retracing their steps to an off-ramp, which led them down past the napalmed ruin of a Pizza Hut. The Fireman slept most of the way. When he did wake, his eyes were stunned and uncomprehending.

  He didn’t have much to say—at first—and sometimes it was necessary to ask him a question a few times before he’d hear it. His replies, however, were coherent and sensible. Yes, he would like some water. Yes, his leg hurt, but it was all right, he was managing. His chest didn’t hurt so much, but it felt heavy, it felt tight. He asked Allie several times to loosen the strap across his chest. At first she told him there wasn’t a strap across his chest, but the third time he asked, she said sure, no problem, and he thanked her and dropped the subject.

  Only once did the Fireman do anything particularly troubling. He moved his hands, speaking to Nick. Nick’s reply was easy to understand: he shook his head no. Then he hurried to catch up to Harper and walked along beside her, where he could avoid eye contact with the Fireman.

  “What did he say?” Harper asked.

  “He said he was pretty sure the truck was still behind us. The big plow. I told him it wasn’t, but he said he could hear it. He said it was still coming and if it got any closer we’d have to leave him.”

  “He’s sick. Don’t worry. He’s mixed up.”

  “I know,” Nick said. “Your sign language is getting pretty good.”

  Harper was going to say, “Maybe I’ll teach my son,” and then she remembered if everything went according to plan, she would never know her own son. She would be giving him up to someone healthy. She put her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and left them there, all done talking for a while.

  They stopped for lunch in an improbable stand of birch trees, located in a center island between two lanes of a country highway. The hills to either side of the road were crowded with blackened trees, but in the small teardrop-shaped island, there was a place that had been untouched by fire, a zone of green, ferny cool.

  They drank bottled water and ate pretzels. At some point a soft, dry hail began to spatter down around them, striking their shoulders and the trees, the leaves and the ferns. Harper found a ladybug crawling on the back of her hand and another on her wrist. She brushed a hand through her hair and swept half a dozen ladybugs into the grass.

  When she lifted her head she could see hundreds of them, crawling on the trunks of the trees, or opening their shells to glide on the breeze. No: thousands. Ladybugs soared on the updrafts, hundreds of feet above, a slow floating storm of them. Renée stood up wearing hundreds of ladybugs on her arms, like elbow-length gloves. She dusted them off and they fell pitter-patter into the ferns. John wore them like a blanket until Allie gently dusted him with a fern.

  They camped that night in the ruin of a cottage by the side of the road. The west-facing wall of the house had been swept by fire and collapsed, burying the living room and kitchen in charred sticks and burnt shingle. But the east-facing wing was mysteriously untouched: white siding, black shutters, blinds drawn behind the windows. They settled in what had once been a guest bedroom, where they found a queen bed, neatly made. A dried, withered bundle of white viburnum rested on the pillow. A former guest had written a message on the wall: THE CROWTHER FAMILY STAYED HERE ON OUR WAY TO SEE MARTHA QUINN, followed by a date from the previous fall.

  By the time they lost the daylight, John was shivering uncontrollably, and his body only relaxed when Harper curled against him under the quilt. He glowed with heat, and it wasn’t Dragonscale, either. It scared her, the dry, steady blaze of his fever. She carefully put her ear to his chest, listening to his lungs, and heard a sound like someone pulling a boot out of mud. Pneumonia, then. Pneumonia all over again, and worse than before.

  Nick stretched out on John’s other side. He had discovered a copy of the Peterson Field Guide to Birds on an end table and was leafing through the pages, studying the pictures by the light of one burning finger.

  “What are you thinking?” Harper asked him.

  “I’m wondering how many of these have gone extinct,” Nick told her.

  The next day the Fireman was gummy with sweat.

  “He’s burning up,” Renée said, putting her knuckles to his cheek.

  “Be funny if I cooked to death,” he muttered, and everyone jumped. He didn’t speak again all day.

  23

  They splashed through a soupy, Dijon-colored fog, beneath trees festooned with streamers of dirty mist. They walked north into it, and by midmorning the sun was no more than a faint brown disk burning a rusty hole through the pall. It was impossible to see more than a few yards into the miasma. Harper spotted what she thought was a hulking motorcycle leaning against the ruin of a barbed-wire fence. It turned out to be a dead cow, its blackened skin fissured to show the ripe, spoiled flesh beneath, its empty eye sockets buzzing with flies. Renée staggered past it, coughing, holding her throat, trying not to gag.

  It was the first and last time Harper heard anyone cough all day. Even the Fireman’s breathing was long and slow and regular. Although her eyes and nostrils burned, she might’ve been breathing fresh alpine air for all that the roiling smoke bothered her.

  The idea occurred to her that they were breathing poison, had crossed into an environment roughly as hospitable to human life as Venus. But it didn’t drop them, and Harper turned that thought over in her mind. It was the Dragonscale, of course, doing its thing. She had known for a while that it converted the toxins in smoke to oxygen. This, though, l
ed to another notion, and she called for Allie to stop.

  Allie held up, flushed and filthy. Harper knelt beside the drag sled, unbuttoned John’s shirt, and put her ear to his chest.

  She still heard a dry and gritty rasp she didn’t like, but if it was no better, it was also no worse. He was smiling and, in sleep, almost looked his old, calm, wry self. The smoke around them was as good as an oxygen tent. It wouldn’t make his pneumonia go away—the best chance for him now was a course of antibiotics—but it might buy him time.

  In the early afternoon, though, they dragged him clear of the haze and went on beneath a clear, cloudless, hateful blue sky, the sun throwing blinding flashes off every piece of metal and every sooty fragment of glass. By the time they finally got off the road, John was worse than Harper had ever seen him. His fever returned, a sweat springing up on his cheeks and in his gray, depressed temples. His tongue kept flicking out of his mouth, looking swollen and colorless. His teeth chattered. He spoke to people who weren’t there.

  “The Incas were right to worship the sun, Father,” the Fireman said to Father Storey. “God is fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They’ve all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their passing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, or the Constitution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold.”

  They settled in an airplane hangar beside a small private landing strip. The hangar, a blue metal building with a curved roof, didn’t have any planes in it, but there was a black leather couch in one office. Harper decided they ought to bungee him down to it, so he didn’t fall off in the night.

  As she was binding him down, his rolling, baffled eyes locked in on her face. “The truck. I saw the truck this afternoon. You ought to leave me. I’m slowing you down and the plow is coming.”

  “There’s no way,” Harper said, and brushed his sweaty hair back from his brow. “I’m not going anywhere without you. It’s you and me, babe.”

  “You and me, babe,” he repeated, and flashed a heartbreaking smile. “How ’bout it?”

  After he drifted off into fitful slumber, they collected together by the open hangar doors. Allie broke up a bookshelf with a hammer and Nick made a campfire from the shelves and piles of flight manuals. He ignited the whole mess with one pass of his burning right hand. Renée turned up some Dasanis and dried pasta in a cupboard. Harper held a pot over the flames, waiting for the water to boil. Harper’s hand extended straight into their cook fire, the blaze licking around her knuckles. Once you had mastered Dragonscale, you could skip the oven mitts.

  “If he dies,” Allie said, “I quit. I don’t care about Martha Quinn’s island. I don’t even like eighties music.”

  The fire snapped and popped.

  “Here’s the part where you promise me he won’t die,” Allie said.

  Harper didn’t say a word for ten minutes, and then all she told them was, “Pasta’s done.”

  24

  Late the next morning the small party of pilgrims came around a bend and drifted to a shuffling, weary halt.

  What stopped them initially was a shock of color. On the left side of the road was the sort of scenery they were used to: blasted trees and a long slope of burnt sticks and ruin. But on the right was a gray-green forest of pine. The branches of the firs were caked in ash, but the trees beneath were healthy, undamaged, and the grass growing below them was rich and lush. Through the evergreens they saw a gleam of black water.

  A billboard stood on the green side of the road. Originally it had featured an ad for GEICO insurance. A dainty little gecko suggested that fifteen minutes or less could save a buck or two. Spray-painted directly under this helpful suggestion was a message in black:

  NEW MAINE FREE ZONE

  INFECTED TAKE GLOVES + COAT

  STAY ON ROAD CONTINUE NORTH

  TO MACHIAS FOR MARTHA QUINN ISLE

  INFECTED WEAR ORANGE SAFETY

  GARMENTS AT ALL TIMES!

  An elderly pickup was parked alongside the billboard. The flatbed contained milk cartons crammed with bright orange work gloves. A pile of orange rain slickers had been heaped beside them. Nick climbed up to root around, lifted one of the slickers, and turned it so they could see.

  A biohazard symbol had been stenciled on the back in black.

  “What now?” Renée asked.

  “Looks like we get dressed,” Harper said. “Will you be a hon and find me a coat? I don’t want to try and climb up there.”

  Ten minutes later they walked on, all of them in the orange slickers and orange gloves that marked them as sick. They hadn’t tried to pull a coat on the Fireman, had only tossed one over his chest.

  The pond they had glimpsed through the trees turned out to be a nasty body of water indeed. Masses of dead fish rotted on the stones at the edge of the water, and the shallows were hidden beneath a floating blanket of ash, although the center of the little pool was clear and black. There were a few undamaged and empty cottages built alongside the water, from the days before there were setback rules on construction. Notices had been nailed to the front doors, above more black biohazard symbols.

  “Hang on,” Harper said and left them in the road.

  She climbed the steps of the first cottage and read the notice.

  THIS HOUSE HAS BEEN DESIGNATED A TEMPORARY OVERNIGHT SHELTER FOR THOSE INFECTED WITH DRACO INCENDIA TRYCHOPHYTON A/K/A DRAGONSCALE. IF YOU ARE HEALTHY DO NOT ENTER.

  DO NOT DRINK THE WATER OR USE THE TOILETS. THERE IS BOTTLED WATER IN THE FRIDGE AND CANNED GOODS. DO NOT TAKE MORE THAN YOU NEED. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO SQUATTING. VISITORS MUST DEPART WITHIN 12 HOURS. THIS RESIDENCE IS MONITORED BY LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT.

  WEAR YOUR ORANGE SAFETY GARMENTS AT ALL TIMES. INFECTED FOUND NOT WEARING CLOTHING THAT MARKS THEM AS SICK WILL BE CONSIDERED HOSTILE AND MAY BE SHOT.

  YOU ARE 131 MILES FROM MACHIAS, WHERE YOU MAY BE PROVIDED WITH TRANSPORT TO THE FREE WOLF ISLAND D.I.T. CARE UNIT. OUR PRAYERS ARE WITH YOU.

  “What’s it say?” Allie shouted.

  “It says we can stay here overnight if we need to,” Harper said, but she already knew they weren’t going to. It was too early in the day to stop.

  She let herself in, pushing back the door and stepping into the front hall. The cottage had a pipe-smoke and dusty-book smell that Harper associated with the aged. The phone on the wall had a rotary dial.

  Harper found her way to a kitchen with a view of the pond. A 1950s-era Coldspot refrigerator the color of a banana milk shake stood against one wall. A picture of Smokey Bear in a rustic wooden frame hung next to the back screen door. ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES.

  The light switches didn’t work. She peeked into the fridge and found pallets of room-temperature bottled water. The bathroom was as dark as a closet, and Harper had to fumble around for a while before she found the catch on the medicine cabinet.

  When she came out of the lake house five minutes later, Harper had a case of water under her left arm and a bottle of Bayer aspirin in her right hand. She squatted on the flagstone path and used a rock to crush four aspirin tablets into a fine powder. She spoonfed the smashed pills to John, mixed in with little sips of water.

  “Will that make him better?” Allie asked.

  “It’ll bring down his fever,” Harper said. For a while, she thought. If they didn’t get antibiotics into him soon, all the aspirin in the world wouldn’t keep his infected respiratory system going. He’d suffocate on his own fluids.

  “Chim chim cher-ee,” John muttered. “Chim chim cher-uck. Here comes Jakob in his truck. Chim chim cher-ee, chim chim cher-all. Desolation’s plow sweeps away all.”

  Harper kissed his sweaty, damp cheek, stood, and nodded to Allie. Allie bent and took the handles of the ladder.

  “Let’s go,” Harper said.

  25

  They left the lake behind and soon crossed back into another burn zone
. Low clouds of smoke smothered the sky, and they were hot and sticky in their slickers. A wind came in spasms, blowing grit. Harper had ash in her mouth, ash in her eyes. Allie collected ash in her long eyelashes and eyebrows and short, bristly hair. With her pink, dust-irritated eyes, she very much looked like an albino. When they stopped to rest, Harper took John’s pulse. It was shallow and erratic. She crushed four more aspirin and force-fed them to him.

  Late in the afternoon they came over a hill and looked down into more green, and this time it was on both sides of the road. On the right were swaying evergreens. On the left was a meadow of russet straw, bordered by blueberry bushes that were months from bearing fruit. A mile away they saw a white farmhouse, a barn, a gleaming steel silo.

  As they neared the farmhouse, Harper saw a woman standing in the dooryard, shading her eyes with one hand and peering back at them. A screen door slapped shut. A dog barked.

  They arrived at a fence of stripped, shining logs, with the farm buildings on the other side. A black retriever ran back and forth on a chain, flinging himself in their general direction and barking without cessation. His eyes shone with a jolly lunacy.

  A white bedsheet hung over the fence, one corner flapping in the breeze. Words had been written on it in Sharpie.

  WE ARE HEALTHY. PLEASE GO ON. MACHIAS, 126 MI.

  GOD LOVE AND KEEP YOU. HELP AHEAD.

  “These fucking people,” Allie whispered.

  “These fucking people might have children,” Harper said. “And maybe they don’t want them to burn to death.”

  “Burn to death!” John Rookwood shouted, cawing like a crow. He began to hack, a dry, wrenching cough, twisting violently on his stretcher.

  The woman continued to watch them from her front step. She looked like she had walked out of another century, in her ankle-length dress and blue denim blouse, a kerchief holding back her graying brown hair.