The Fireman

by Hill,Joe

  Harper climbed with the Fireman holding on to her for support, stopping now and then when he got dizzy or when she needed to catch her breath. They climbed like the elderly, going one step, pausing, going another. He was too weak to hurry and she was having contractions. Her womb felt like a stone, a hard block at the center of her.

  Jamie Close was already in the tower. She had run past them a minute before. Already, Harper could hear the occasional crack of a rifle from above.

  Allie was a little ahead of them, carrying Nick in her arms. Nick’s chin rested on her shoulder, and Harper could see his face quite clearly. He wore a red mask of blood, his scalp torn open where he had been kissed by the Humvee, but his expression was peaceful, drowsing. Once he opened his left eye to peer at her, but then he closed it again.

  “Almost there,” the Fireman said. “Almost there.”

  And what would they do when they got there? Wait for the fire to reach them, Harper assumed. Or be shot from below. But she didn’t share this thought with him. She was grateful for his closeness, for his arm at her waist and his head on her shoulder.

  “I’m glad I fell in love with you, John Rookwood!” she said to him, and kissed his neck.

  “Oh, I am, too,” he said.

  Behind them, the singing went on, although now screams threatened to drown it out. The screams, and the laughter. Someone was laughing very loudly.

  The smoke in the steeple was fragrant, smelled of baking pinecones.

  “John,” she said, seized by a sudden idea. “What if we turned back? What if we tried to go through the flames. The Dragonscale would protect us, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not from gunfire, I’m afraid. Besides, Allie wouldn’t come out at all. She doesn’t know how to control the ’scale like I do—or like you. And Nick is unconscious, so I don’t know—but look, if you want to try it, then let me get upstairs first. We’ll see if we can’t make you some cover. You might—with all the confusion—” His eyes brightened as he came alive to the idea.

  “No,” Harper said. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking about Allie or Nick. I’m not going anywhere without them.”

  They were on the uppermost landing now. A door stood half open, looking onto dark, smoke-filled night. He gripped her shoulders and squeezed. “You have a child to think about.”

  “More than one, Mr. Rookwood,” she said.

  He stared at her fondly and kissed her and she kissed him back.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose we better make a fight of it. Spit spot, out we go.”

  “Out we go, Nurse Willowes,” he said.

  The bell tower was an open well, with a catwalk of pine planks going around all four sides of the square hole. The copper bell, stained a dignified green with age, hung over the drop. It bonged whenever it was struck by a bullet from below. White stone balusters supported a waist-high marble rail. Lead cracked off rock, making small clouds of white powder.

  Harper did not expect to step over a corpse, but there was a dead boy flung across the last couple of steps. He was facedown, with a red hole in the back of his chambray shirt. The Lookout who had been on watch in the steeple that night, Harper supposed. He had missed the signal from the bus, down at the end of the road, had been too preoccupied with the stoning in progress below, but he had more than paid for his lack of attention. Harper bent to feel for a pulse. His neck was already cold. She left him, helped John past him, and rose into the night.

  Allie sat on the floor, below the railing, with her brother in her arms. Both of them looked as if they had crawled arm over arm through a particularly filthy abattoir.

  Jamie was on her knees, the dead sentry’s rifle resting on the stone railing. The gun went off with a flat snapping sound. She cursed, slid back the bolt, grabbed for a bullet in a battered cardboard box at her knee.

  Harper had crouched instinctively as she came into the open air. Now she lifted her head to take in a panorama of ruin. From here she could see it all, had a God’s-eye view of the camp in its entirety.

  The Memorial Park stood just beyond the chapel’s front steps. From here, that circle of barbaric standing rocks looked even more like Stonehenge. A half-dozen men had fanned out among the boulders and plinths for cover. One of them, a scrawny guy in thick, black-framed Buddy Holly glasses, was crouched behind the blackened altar with what appeared to be an Uzi. He grinned, his face—under a bushy white-boy afro—filthy with soot.

  Some perverse trick of the air currents carried his voice to Harper. She knew his cat screech right away, remembered it well from the afternoon the Marlboro Man had almost found her hiding in her house.

  “This is the real shit!” Marty screamed. The gun stammered in his hands. “This is the real commando shit right here!”

  To the north was the bare, muddy expanse of the soccer field and the overturned Hummer. A pair of black pickups had parked themselves out there, to cover the double doors that led out of the basement. Through the haze it was hard to tell how many men were in the flatbeds, but Harper saw a steady pop and blink of gunfire, going off like camera flashes. The Freightliner lumbered down the hill, moving to join the others on the north side of the chapel. Maybe Jakob hoped the basement bulkhead would fly open and some folks would make a desperate run for it and he’d have something to do with his plow.

  It was harder to see to the south. There was a stretch of grass as wide and even as a two-lane avenue, in the space between the church and the forest. Harper knew the Marlboro Man was down there, in his big silver Intimidator, but she could only barely glimpse the top of the cab by craning her head. It was parked too close to the building to see it well.

  A black and filthy smog poured from below, seeping out from under the eaves and boiling through the open hole in the bell tower just exactly in the way it would’ve come streaming out of a chimney. A sickly firelight throbbed within the churning smoke. Harper suspected the tower was only dimly visible from below, maybe the only thing they had going for them.

  All that smoke mounted into a towering cloudbank that spread to the east, back down the hill toward the water. Harper couldn’t see most of the sky, the cloud smothering the stars and the moon.

  The roof was fifteen feet below the railing of the tower and it was a steeply banked surface of black slate. Harper saw herself leaping, falling, hitting feet-first, her ankles rupturing, crashing to her hip with a glassy crack, sliding straight down the side of the roof, and a tearing inside as her uterus came apart and—

  “Fuck that,” she said to herself.

  She crawled over to be next to Allie.

  “How’s my mouf?” Allie asked.

  “Not too bad,” Harper said.

  “Fuck you it isn’t. I love it. I’m punk rock now. I always wanted to be punk rock.” Allie feathered a hand back through Nick’s hair. “I tried to do the right thing at the end, Ms. Willowes. Maybe I flunked the exam, but at least I did pretty good with the extra credit.”

  “Exam in what?”

  “Basic humanity,” Allie said, blinking at tears. “Will you hold my hand? I’m scared.”

  Harper took her hand and squeezed.

  The Fireman worked his way around the catwalk to the south-facing side of the turret, to be next to Jamie.

  “Fuckers in the Silverado,” Jamie said. “They’re too close to the side of the building. I can’t get a bead on them. If we could drive them off, we could hang a rope—”

  “What rope?” the Fireman asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we make a rope out of our clothes. We get into the trees. Run for the road. Steal a car.” Her voice was hurried and distracted, leaping from one improbability to another. “I know people in Rochester. They’ll hide us. But first we need to drive off that truck.”

  The Fireman nodded, wearily. “I might be able to do something about them.”

  But when he tried to stand, he sway
ed, dangerously. Harper saw his eyelids flutter, as if he were an ingénue in a 1940s musical comedy trying to look kissable. For a moment it was all too easy to imagine him dipping backward and falling over the waist-high iron railing around the hole in the center of the tower, dropping away into the smoky dark.

  Jamie caught his elbow before he could topple. Harper cried out, let go of Allie’s hand, and scrambled around the catwalk toward him. By the time she reached him, he had sunk back to one knee.

  She touched his cheek, felt clammy sweat.

  “Is the bell droning?” he muttered thickly.

  “No,” she said. “Not at the moment.”

  “Christ. That sound must be in my head, then.” He pressed the balls of his palms to his temples. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Don’t try to get up.”

  “We need to drive them back if we’re going to have any chance of getting down from here.”

  “Stay down. Get your wind back. You’re no good to anyone if you pass out.”

  She let go of his hands and stood, pouring all her heart into a wordless song. Her right hand was a scimitar of flame. Get a spoonful of this, motherfuckers.

  Harper launched a curved blade of blue fire into the darkness. It whizzed, dropping gobbets of blazing light as it flew, and hooked unnaturally just beyond the roof of the chapel, dropped out of sight onto the Silverado Intimidator below. Men shouted as the hood of the truck was blown off in a spout of light.

  Bullets spanged and pinged into the bell, hit the railing, flew through the air with an angry whine like lead wasps, and Harper dropped again, her flaming hand fluffing out in a billow of smoke

  One of those bullets struck the rope that held the bell in position, cutting through all but a few strands. The giant bell spun, making a low humming sound. The last few braids of line holding it up popped and broke musically, like guitar strings. The bell fell through the open hole. A moment later it hit the floor of the church below with a resounding BONG that shuddered upon the air, visibly shook the smoke around them, and made Harper’s eardrums throb.

  Nick lifted his head and looked around with muddled eyes. The bell was so loud, Harper thought, it had woken the deaf.

  “Oh Christ, what the fuck now—” Jamie shouted, looking north and then scuttling past the Fireman and around to that side of the tower.

  Jakob.

  The Freightliner had turned to face the broad north side of the church. With a grinding roar it came thundering forward, plow lowered, toward the side of the chapel.

  Jamie stood with the rifle socked into her shoulder. She fired. A white spark dinged off one corner of the cab of the truck. She levered back the bolt and the empty cartridge jumped into the air, a bright glitter of brass. She slammed in a fresh bullet and fired again. A blue crack leapt through the windshield. The truck jigged a little to the left, and Harper thought, Got him, but then the Freightliner shifted into a higher gear and lunged the last fifty feet and the snow-wing plow buried itself into the side of the chapel.

  Harper was thrown into the stone baluster. It felt as if some vast invisible hand had reached down and adjusted the entire building, prying it free from its foundation to shift it a few feet back to the south. The rear north corner of the chapel collapsed with a groan and crash of falling slate and smashed wood. A great burning heap of it dropped on the front of the Freightliner, the plow disappearing into curdled smoke and pulverized debris. The jolt rocked the tower. Jamie had been stepping back to open the bolt of her .22 and was thrown onto her heels. Her ass hit the low metal railing over the open hole. She dropped the rifle and grabbed—at air.

  “Jamie!” Allie screamed—screaming for the girl who had slashed open her face—but she was beneath Nick and couldn’t even stand up, and anyway there was no time.

  A moment later, the bell donged softly below when Jamie struck it.

  The Fireman looked around in a daze, blood dripping from his face. Harper pushed his hair back from his eyes and then gently, carefully, put her arms around him. It was time to stop fighting, she felt. It was time to just hold each other, the four of them, their fucked-up little family. Five of them, counting the baby. They would cling together and there would be love and closeness at the end. They would have that at least until Jakob backed up and hit the chapel again, closer to the tower this time, and dropped them all into the flames.

  The bell below was still echoing. It ding-ding-dinged with a small, piercing, golden sound, a noise like a much smaller bell. The Fireman lifted his head and peered out into the smoke, down along the south side of the chapel.

  The fire truck—with Gilbert Cline behind the wheel, one hand out the window to ring the brass bell—launched itself through the boiling smoke to the south of the church and hit the Chevy Silverado head on. The old fire truck with the number 5 on the grille weighed almost three tons. It flattened the front end of the Intimidator like a bootheel coming down on a beer can. The Chevy’s engine block came right back through the dash and cut the driver in two. The pickup lifted off the ground, front wheels spinning in the air for a moment, before it turned over on the gunmen in the flatbed.

  And still the fire truck pushed the Chevy along, shoving it through the dirt to the very front of the church. The fire engine lurched to a stop with a gasp of its air brakes. A chubby little woman with gray in her cornrows dropped from the passenger seat and hustled around to the chrome step on the back bumper.

  Renée climbed to the top of the fire truck and lifted the wooden ladder, turned it on its swivel to face the side of the church. The ends of the ladder banged against the exterior wall. Then Renée stood there, looking to the left and right, as if she had dropped something, an earring perhaps, and was trying to spot it. She bent and opened a compartment on the roof of the truck, looked in at a collection of fire axes and steel poles. She shook her head in frustration.

  “It’s right at your feet!” the Fireman hollered at her. He seemed to know what she was looking for instinctively. He cupped one hand around his mouth and repeated: “AT YOUR FEET.”

  She squinted up at him, peering into the wafting smoke, and swiped sweat off her cheeks with the back of one arm. She looked down again, between her feet, then nodded and dropped to her knees. There was a rusty iron crank set in a circular depression in the roof. She began, effortfully, to turn it. The wooden ladder vibrated, trembled, and began to bump up the side of the church toward the tower.

  In the circle of standing stones, the guy Harper knew as Marty craned his neck to see what was going on past the overturned Chevy. A bullet spanged off the stone bench, right in front of his legs, and he screamed and reeled back and got his feet tangled and fell.

  “Damn it,” Allie said. She was standing all the way up, the butt of Jamie’s rifle resting against her shoulder. She worked the lever and an empty shell casing made a bright leap into the night.

  Harper was looking at Allie, not down at the fire truck and the overturned Chevy, so she didn’t see a bald man in a blue denim shirt drop out of the Silverado’s passenger seat. But she spotted him right away when she glanced back. There was an embroidered American flag on the back of the shirt, the brightest thing in the gloom. He was bleeding from the scalp and staggering a little. He was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, built like an aging running back who was keeping active in the gym to slow the slide into middle age. He had a gun, a black pistol.

  The fire ladder thudded, bumped, and got caught under the eaves, halfway up to them.

  The guy with the gun—Harper felt sure it was the Marlboro Man; with that American flag on the back of his shirt, he had to be—began to creep forward toward the driver’s side of the fire engine.

  “Renée!” Harper screamed. “Renée, watch out! He’s coming!” Stabbing a finger and pointing.

  Renée Gilmonton stood on the roof of the truck, holding the ladder in both hands, adjusting it somehow, trying to
shift it around so it could get up past the eaves. When she had it the way she wanted it, she stepped back and squinted toward the steeple.

  “Watch out! Gun!” Harper screamed.

  “Guy with a gun! Guy with a gun!” the Fireman yelled.

  Renée pointed to her ear and shook her head. She dropped to one knee and began to work the crank again. The ladder whacked against the edge of the roof, rising once more toward the steeple, climbing into the sky a few inches at a time.

  The Marlboro Man had crawled all the way around to the cab of the fire engine and crouched beneath the driver’s-side door.

  Harper rose, thinking, I will throw fire and strike him down and save my friends. She began to sing inside once more, singing without words. The Dragonscale scrawled on her palm brightened steadily like an electrical coil heating up. But her hand was thrumming and sore and wouldn’t light up, and while she was waiting for that first rush of flame, the Marlboro Man stood, planted his foot on the running board, stuck his gun through the window, and fired.

  Renée stiffened, lifted her head, looked toward the front of the truck, and then dropped flat on her stomach, spreading out across the roof of the fire engine.

  The ladder remained twelve feet out of reach.

  Allie’s rifle cracked. There were six men with guns in that circle of stones and she was keeping them there, hiding behind rocks. She cursed and loaded a fresh shell.

  The Marlboro Man flattened himself against the side of the fire truck and vanished from sight. Harper couldn’t see him from her angle. Neither could Renée. But he was down there—working his way along the side of the truck and into a position where he could rise up and shoot Renée Gilmonton.