The Fireman

by Hill,Joe

  “Come on,” the Fireman said. “The church.”

  His legs buckled and Harper lugged him back up.

  “No,” Harper said. “That’s a trap—”

  “It’s shelter, now go.”

  Her insides tightened, as if being squeezed by a steel brace. Her abdomen hurt so badly it took her breath away and she wondered, wildly, if this was it, if the stress had induced labor a month early.

  Then she pushed the thought down and began to make her stumbling way toward the chapel. The Fireman pedaled his feet, mimicking the act of walking, but for all that she was carrying him. Allie fell in next to them with Nick in her arms. Blood ran from the tip of her chin, but her lips were open in a kind of savage grin.

  They thudded up the steps together: Allie carrying Nick, Harper carrying the Fireman, and Michael hauling Carol. No sooner had they reached the top of the steps than the stairs exploded, bullets chewing them up and filling the night with the sweet odor of fresh-sawn wood.

  That Chevy Intimidator—a flaming WKLL decal on the passenger-side door—went off-road, booming down the hill, swinging around the outer edge of the ring of stones. It pulled in on the southern side of the chapel, in the narrow strip of open ground between the church and the woods. A fully automatic gun of some sort rattled from the flatbed. Harper didn’t know what it was, but it had a flat, plasticky sound that was different from the Bushmaster.

  Two other pickups slammed over the open ground to the north, roaring into place to cover the north side of the building. The Freightliner remained at the top of the hill, idling in place, as if Jakob were waiting and watching to see where he might be of the most use.

  Gail Neighbors stood just inside the entrance at one of the great red doors. The wispy elfin boy who looked like young David Bowie was at the other. They were already swinging the doors closed as Harper and the Fireman lurched inside, into dimness, sobbing, shouts, and terror. The doors banged shut behind them—and never opened again.

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  HarperCollinsPublishers

  ....................................

  8

  Michael bent forward and gently—reverently—set Carol back on her feet in the shadows of the foyer.

  “Are you hurt?” he cried, his voice cracking. “Oh, God, please—please—don’t be shot. I don’t know what I’d do.”

  Her eyes rolled in the way of a panicked horse. She hardly seemed to know him. “Yes. Unhurt. The Bright. I think it was the Bright! It turned their bullets aside. It was like a force field made of love. I think it protected you, too!”

  Harper cleared her throat and nudged Carol gently aside with one elbow. In her left fist was a rock bigger than a golf ball, the rock Jamie Close had shoved in her mouth fifteen impossible minutes before. It was smoking by now, had been heating steadily in her Dragonscale scrawled hand. She swept it down across Michael Lindqvist Jr.’s jaw, knocking in two of his teeth.

  “Nope,” Harper said. “No force field on him.” As he doubled over and sank down, she brought her knee up into his broken face. At the same time she clubbed him in the shoulder with the molten rock. Sparks flew. The shoulder popped out of its socket with a sound like someone pulling a cork.

  She could’ve kept hitting him. She didn’t know herself anymore. Her arm was operating on its own and her arm wanted to kill him. But it would’ve meant getting down on her knees, and she was having little contractions and that seemed like a lot of effort. Besides, the Fireman had an arm around her, and while he was too weak to pull her back, he was at least trying.

  “Wait,” she said. “I’m okay. I’m all done.”

  She thought she was, too, but then he let go of her and she booted Michael in the neck.

  “He was a sweet old man,” Harper said, as the Fireman tugged her out of kicking range. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

  Carol gave them a bewildered, wondering look. One side of her face was pink and swollen, the skin peeling off her ear. The falling hand of God had given her an instant sunburn on one cheek.

  “And you!” Harper said to her. “I guess your force field was never switched on when Mikey was in the mood to finger your pussy.”

  Carol flinched as if Harper had slapped her. Her left cheek began to turn the same shade as the side of her face that had been burned.

  “You can kill me now if you want,” Carol said. “You will only be sending me back into the arms of my father. He waits for me in the Bright. Everyone we’ve lost waits in the Bright. That’s our only escape now anyway.”

  Harper said, “I’m not going to kill you, and I never was. I don’t need to kill you anyway. The people outside are going to take care of that for me. This place is a box and they’ve got all the guns. But we might have another five or ten minutes. While it lasts, you think about this. Michael killed your father . . . for you. To save you. And himself. Your father was going to send you away for what you did to Harold Cross. Mikey bashed his head in to keep him from telling the camp about the way you set Harold up and had him shot. When you sent Harold to his grave? You sent your father into the dirt with him. One led naturally to the other. You take that into the Bright with you.”

  Harper’s voice dropped steadily as she spoke, and by the time she had said the last of it, she was trembling, her voice little more than a husky whisper. She was not, after all, really good at being cruel to people, even people who had it coming. Carol’s frightened, pale, confused face sickened her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her face had a gray cast beneath the pink of her burns. Harper thought she finally looked like a grown-up: a washed-out, weary, and not terribly attractive woman who had done some hard living.

  Carol turned her baffled gaze toward Allie, who stood there holding Nick in both arms. When she saw her niece, her face shriveled, and she began to weep.

  “Allie,” she said, and held out her arms. “Let me hold Nick. Let me see him. Please.”

  Allie spat in Carol’s face. Carol blinked, her cheeks and brow dappled in red drops. She held up her hands defensively and Allie spat on them, too, a shower of mucus and stringy blood.

  “Fuck I will,” Allie said through her slashed mouth. “I don’t want you touching him. You got something worse than Dragonscale and I don’t want him anywhere near it, in case it’s contagious.” Blood flew on every other syllable. The gash across her lips was a bad one. Harper thought it would need stitches and was likely to scar badly.

  “We don’t have time for this,” the Fireman said. “We need to get up in the bell tower. We can make a fight of it from up there.”

  Harper thought this was the most hopeless thing she had ever heard, and opened her mouth to say so, but Jamie spoke first.

  “There’s at least one rifle up there,” she said. Her face was filthy and she was shuddering furiously, although whether from shock or terror, Harper couldn’t have said. “And a box of shells. There’s always at least one gun there for whoever’s on watch up in the steeple.”

  Jamie Close was a harsh little savage, but she was nobody’s fool. She could grasp the situation as well as them and had shifted her loyalties to the most likely survivors with the businesslike efficiency of a bank teller making change.

  The Fireman nodded. “Good. That’s good, Jamie. Get up there. We’ll follow. We can direct our fire down from the steeple to open up a path, from the basement doors across to—” He paused, eyes straining in his head. He had lost his glasses somewhere. Harper knew he was visualizing the camp, and seeing how the double doors down into the basement opened onto the north field: a vast stretch of bare ground with no cover. There were two trucks over there full of men and guns. Harper had already thought it through and didn’t see a way out.

  “Where’s Gillian!” Gail was shrieking. “Did anyone see my sister? Did anyone see if my sister made it inside?” She turned away from the double doors and staggered in
to the nave, where most of the congregation had gathered.

  Harper squeezed John’s shoulder. “Do you think you can make it up those stairs?”

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll follow.”

  “I’m not leaving you behind. There’s no way. We’ll take the steps together.”

  He nodded, swiped blood away from his cheek. “Come on, then. We’ll have a good position on them from up there. I don’t care how many of them there are. That’s a sniper’s nest. We might still be able to shoot and burn our way out. Somehow. It’s not too late, Willowes.”

  It was though. The first of the Molotov cocktails hit the south side of the church a moment later, in a crash and rush of blue flame.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  ....................................

  9

  Carol spun on her heel. The high vault of the nave echoed with cries for help, for Jesus, for mercy, for forgiveness. Carol stared into the long and crowded room, her gaze stricken and confused.

  Some sprawled on the floor. Some huddled in the pews, holding one another. Many sat at the foot of the altar. Norma sat on the steps leading up to the stage, rocking back and forth, shaking her head.

  “What are you crying for?” she cried out. “Why you crying? You think we can’t get out of here? You think we’re trapped? The Bright is a-waitin’ for us and ain’t no one can stop us from flying into it to be free! It ain’t time to cry! It’s time to sing!”

  The stained-glass windows that lined the long hall were covered up with plywood sheets, nailed up on the outside of the building. One of these plywood sheets was in flames, and the rippling fire cast garish, candy-store colors across the pews.

  “Time to sing!” Norma screamed again. “Come on! Come on now!” Her wild gaze found Carol across the full length of the room, through the tumult of the crowd. “Mother Carol! You know what we need to do! You know!”

  Carol looked back at her for a long moment, something like incomprehension on her face. But then she drew breath and lifted her voice and began to sing.

  “O come all ye faithful—” Carol sang. It was hard to hear her, at first, over the moans and shouts.

  Bullets drummed against the exterior of the chapel, falling like a hard rain.

  “Joyful and triumphant,” Carol went on, her voice tragic, and terrified, and sweet. She walked into the nave, stepping around Michael and holding her hands out to either side of her. Blood dripped from her fingertips.

  Gail stood nearby. She seemed to have given up looking for her sister, was just swaying there. Carol took her by the hand. Gail looked down at it in surprise, jumping a little, as if Carol had pinched her.

  Carol squeezed her fingers and went on: “O come ye . . . o come y e . . . to Bethlehem.”

  “Yes!” Norma roared. “Yes! To Bethlehem! To the Bright!”

  A second voice joined Carol’s, someone singing with her in a frightened, off-key lilt.

  Someone else was crying out, over and over, “We’re going to die! We’re going to die in here! Oh God, we’re going to die!”

  Gail looked at Carol’s hand holding hers and began to weep. She wept so hard her shoulders shook. But then she began to sing as well.

  Half a dozen of them now, their voices rising together, into the rafters: “Come and behold him! Born the king of angels!”

  And a silvery rose-hued light raced along the ridges and whorls of Carol’s Dragonscale. Harper could see her lighting up through the thin silk of her pajamas.

  In a bellowing, grief-choked voice, Norma shouted: “O come let us adore him! O come let us adore him! O come let us adore him!” It was more than an exhortation. It sounded almost like a threat.

  Another Molotov cocktail crashed against the south side of the church. Flame leapt up a section of wall. Two men ran at it and began to beat at it with coats.

  “It’s over,” Harper said to the Fireman. “It’s all over.”

  Carol walked slowly toward the altar and as she waded into the crowd they rose to their feet and reached for her. Pews shrieked as people pushed them aside. They clambered over and past one another to get closer to Carol.

  The worshippers reached for her and sang with her and many gazed upon Carol with adoration. One little boy hurried along in her wake, hopping and clapping his hands in an inexplicable fit of excitement, as if he were being led to the gates of an amusement park he had long dreamed of visiting. Carol squeezed hands as she made her way forward, not unlike a politician making her way through a crowd, sometimes leaning over to brush someone’s knuckles with her lips, but going on with her song all the while. She loved them, of course. It was a sick, spoiled sort of love—it was, Harper thought, not so different from the way Jakob had loved her—but it was real and it was all she had left to give them.

  Bullets drummed into the wooden doors behind them, snapped Harper out of her trance. She turned the Fireman and half pulled, half carried him into the safety of the stone archway that opened into the stairwell. Bullets zipped and whined, chipping the flagstones on the floor behind them. Allie squeezed in beside them, holding her brother in her arms.

  “Any ideas?” she asked, without a trace of panic.

  “There might be a way out across the roof,” the Fireman said.

  Harper knew that once they climbed into the bell tower, there would be no coming back down—not for her, anyway. She would not be escaping across the top of the chapel. It was too high. If she dropped off the steep pitch of the roof she would pulverize her legs and bring on a miscarriage.

  But she didn’t say this to either of them. The thought was in her mind that Allie, at least—nimble, athletic Allie—might be able to get across the roof and down to a gutter, hang herself off the side and drop. There would be lots of smoke and noise, maybe enough to give her a chance to reach the woods and cover.

  “Yes,” Harper said, but still she hesitated, stayed where she was, craning her neck to see into the nave.

  The voices of all who remained rose in sweet, agonized song. They sang and they shone. Their eyes glowed as blue as blowtorches. A little girl with a shaved head stood on a pew, singing at the top of her lungs. The Dragonscale on her bare arms was glowing so bright, it rendered the arms themselves almost translucent, so Harper could see the shadows of bones through her skin.

  Norma was the first to ignite. She stood behind the altar, swaying in front of the cross, booming out the words of the song. Her big, homely face was pink and shiny with sweat and she opened her mouth and cried out: “Sing in exultation!” The inside of her throat was full of light.

  Norma drew a deep breath for the next line. A yellow blast of flame gushed from her mouth. Her head snapped back. Her throat was red and straining as if with some terrible effort. Then her neck began to blacken, while dark smoke boiled from her nostrils. The Dragonscale on the wobbling meat of her bare arms was a livid poisonous shade of deepest red. She wore a black flower-print dress roughly the size of a pup tent. Blue flames raced up the back of it.

  Gail choked, stumbled, knocked into the little boy who had been skipping up and down. She waved one hand, back and forth, through the air, as if to clear gnats away from her face. The third time she did it, Harper saw her arm was on fire.

  “What’s happening to them?” cried Jamie, who had joined them in the wide stone archway.

  “It’s a chain reaction,” the Fireman said. “They’re all going down together.”

  “Glory in the highest!” they sang. Some of them, anyway. Others had begun to scream. The ones who weren’t burning.

  When Carol went up in flames, she was at the center of the throng, dozens of worshippers reaching in to touch her. And all at once she was a white rippling pillar of fire, her head thrown back and her arms spread out as if to embrace an invisible lover. She went up as if she had been doused in kerosene. She did n
ot cry out—it was too fast.

  Bullets zinged and whickered through the nave, cutting down people at random on the outer edge of the crowd. Harper saw a teenager, a slender black kid, slap a hand to his brow, as if he had just realized he had forgotten to bring his textbook to class. When he dropped the hand, she saw a hole through the center of his forehead.

  A teenage girl doubled over, grabbing herself, her whole back on fire. The lanky kid who looked like David Bowie had sunk to his knees at the back of the crowd, his head bowed as if in prayer, his hands pressed together. His head was on fire, a black match at the center of a bright yellow flame. A little girl ran up and down the aisle, flapping both of her burning hands in the air and shrieking for her mother. Her ponytail was a blue scarf of flame.

  “Oh, John,” she said and turned her face away. “Oh, John.”

  He had her by the arm, and he drew her on into the smoky gloom of the stairwell, and they began to climb together, away from shouts, and laughter, and song, but most of all, away from the screams, which rose together in a final wrenching chorus, a last act of harmony.

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  HarperCollinsPublishers

  ....................................

  10

  Harper had wondered what it must’ve been like to be in one of the stairwells at the Twin Towers on the day the planes struck, what people felt as they made their way blindly down the steps through the smoke. She had wondered about it all over again the day men and women began to leap from the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, in the first weeks of widespread infection. In those days of conflagration, it happened again and again—the high building in flames, people inside hurrying to escape the fire at their backs, trying to find a way out, knowing all the while that the only exit might be a last jump and the giddy silent rush of falling: a final chance to snatch at a moment of peace.

  Most of all, she feared panic. She feared losing possession of herself. But as they made their way up, Harper felt almost businesslike, focused on the next step, then the step after. That, at least, was a reason for gladness. She was less terrified of dying than she was of being stripped of her personality, of turning into an animal in the slaughterhouse, unable to hear her own thoughts over the clanging alarm of desperation.