by Hill,Joe
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.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
....................................
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 leaped 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 hands, bound in hairy twine, were trapped behind her back. Harper touched them with one hand, 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 lace, 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.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
....................................
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 reindeers leaping across green background. This man had a noose around his neck, the hairy rope leading back to the grill 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!”
An amplified voice—there were speakers mounted on top of the Intimidator, along with floodlights—boomed into the night. Harper knew it. They all knew it. The Marlboro Man was famous up and down the seacoast.
“A promise is a promise,” the Marlboro Man said. “And ain’t no one can say the Marlboro Man don’t keep his word. Someone cut Mr. Heinrich loose.”
A man in fatigues stood up from the passenger seat of the Humvee. He had a Bushmaster and he steadied the barrel on the top edge of the windshield before he began to fire.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
....................................
7
Nelson Heinrich arched his spine, as if he had been struck across the small of the back with a steel rod. Red smoke burst from his chest in puffs, made a crimson mist in the air around him. He tried to run, got two steps, and then the rope around his neck jerked him off his feet and he hit the dirt.
The Mazz turned and ran, too. He took one step, and a second, and then bullets shredded his legs. Other bullets hit his back with a sound like rain falling on a drum. The last slug caught a shoulder as he fell and spun him around as he dropped into the road, so he landed faceup to the smoky night sky.
The Humvee took off, banging over the rutted road, raising a cloud of white chalk. It accelerated into the darkness between the church and the cafeteria, cutting off the path of escape in that direction. The headlights lurched across the muddy ground and fell upon Nick. The Hummer did not slow, but accelerated, rushing toward him. Harper screamed his name. He didn’t hear, of course.
The Humvee went over the Mazz with a crunch and a pop and jolted as if it had slammed into a deep pothole. Nick turned, almost casually, as in a dream. He raised his right hand. Sparks whirled up off it, rising in a funnel into the night, into the stars, a thousand hot stars flying up off his hand. Only instead of winking out as they climbed, in the usual manner of sparks, they brightened and swelled. They rose into a flock of burning sparrows, not one of them any bigger than a golf ball, a hundred darting birds of flame, and then they dived.
They hit the Humvee in a spattering rain of red light when it was still fifty feet away. The burning darts struck in a flurry of wet-sounding smacks and cracked the windshield; hit the men in the front seat and turned them into screaming effigies; lashed the tires and made spinning wheels of fire; pelted a box of ammunition and set it off with a rattling thud and a burst of strobing white lights.
The Humvee swerved to the left. The right edge of the fender clipped Nick on the way by and threw him aside. The Humvee kept going, skewing left. The passenger-side tires struck a half-buried white rock. The Hummer rose up on two wheels, then turned over with a shattering crash. A burning corpse—the driver—vaulted through the night.
Allie screamed Nick’s name again and again. She couldn’t move. She was stuck in place. She tried to go to him, but the Fireman tightened the arm over her shoulders.
“Ben will get him, Ben—” the Fireman said, holding Allie against him for half a moment before she twisted free and began to sprint for her brother.
Ben Patchett was well ahead of her, though. He ran in a shambling waddle, but for all that he was already two-thirds of the way to the boy on the ground. In one hand he held his pistol and he shot blindly at the Freightliner. A bullet hit the plow and threw blue sparks. Ben dropped to one knee, gathered the smoking boy up in his arms, and slung him over his shoulder. He fired again, just once, then began to run back, not so fast this time.
There were men standing behind the snow-wing plow, using it for cover. Muzzles flashed. Guns thudded. Ben stumbled, reeled off course, kept going. Harper couldn’t see where the first bullet hit him. The second struck him in the right shoulder and half turned him around. It seemed sure he would go down, or drop Nick. He did neither. He steadied himself and came on, in a sort of exhausted jog, a man at the end of a long run on a hot day. The third bullet to hit him blew off the top of his head. Harper could only think of a wave dashing itself to foam against a rock. His skull came off in a blast of red foam, hair and bone and brain scattering into the darkness.
And still he jogged on, another step, and a second, and by the time he fell to his knees, Allie was right there, her arms outstretched. Ben passed Nick to her almost gently, settling him into her arms with an unhurried care, as if losing the top half of his skull was a matter of no consequence. Before Ben dropped onto his face, Harper had a last look at his expression. It seemed to her he was smiling.
“Run!” Carol screamed. “Run for the church! Everyone run!” She was standing on the stone bench again, her arms raised out to either side, lit from behind by headlights. Bullets rattled and thwacked on the towering stones all around her and once Harper thought she saw the hem of Carol’s robe jerk, as if something had snapped at it. Not a sin
gle bullet struck her. Smoke rose from the blackened rock beneath her feet. She looked like an illustration from the Old Testament, a mad prophet in a scene of midnight desolation, calling for God to deliver a stroke of redemptive violence.
The people of Camp Wyndham were already on their way, the whole mass of them. They stampeded for the stairs, 170 of them, shoving and shrieking. Emily Waterman, who was still on the ground, was stepped on by half a dozen people. The last to trample over her, a woman named Sheila Duckworth, a former dentist’s assistant, put her foot on the back of Emily’s head, driving her face down into the mud, which was where the eleven-year-old suffocated. Her neck was broken by then, and she couldn’t lift her face to breathe.
Harper looked around for Renée and saw her at the far corner of the church. Gilbert stood with her, pulling Renée along by one arm. They weren’t going in the chapel, but around the side and behind. Renée’s eyes were damp and frightened and pleading and it looked like she wanted to stay, but Gil hauled her on, and Harper thought, Go, just go. It felt like a deep breath of clean, fresh air to see Renée slip away and out of sight. It was too far to go with John—John could barely stand—but Renée and Gil had already made it, could escape down the hill and into the trees. Maybe they would find their way to a kayak, paddle out to Don Lewiston, if he was out there somewhere, watching from offshore. She hoped they did. She hoped they didn’t look back.
Michael was out from under the altar, reaching up to take Carol’s hands. She paid him no mind. She stood there screaming for her congregation to run, and when he caught at her wrists, she pulled them free. Michael grabbed her about the waist and lifted her bodily off the stone. He turned and ran with her, much as Ben had run with Nick only a moment before. He ran for the chapel. Most of the rest of camp had already shoved their way in through the red doors.