The Fireman

by Hill,Joe

  “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 came 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?

  “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 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.”

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  Book Seven No Straight Arrow

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  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 GOODBYE TO THIS SHITHOLE FOREVER.

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  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 between themselves and the curtain into the waiting area as they could. 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.

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  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-o
ld 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.”

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