The Fireman (27 page)

“Don’t worry,” said Renée Gilmonton. “We won’t let you go hungry, Mr. Cline. No felonies required.”

Harper wheeled and saw Renée standing in the open locker door. Renée went on, “I don’t know how you can maintain an appetite in here, though.
Whoo,
it smells bad. Is this the best we can do for them?”

“Jesus,” Ben muttered. “First her, now you. I’m sorry the frickin’ Hilton didn’t have any rooms available for an attempted murderer and his accomplice. What the heck are you doing here? You ought to be asleep. No one should be out during the daytime. We have rules for a reason.”

“The girls wanted an update on Father Storey and when I checked the infirmary, Harper wasn’t there. I figured the cafeteria was the next best bet. Anything I can do to help?”

“No,” Ben said.

“Yes,” Harper told her. “This man needs a cold compress for his face, a cup of hot tea, and a visit to the bathroom, although probably not in that order. Both of them ought to have breakfast. And you’re right, this is a filthy place for them. There’s two unused beds in the infirmary. We ought to—”

“Out of the question,” Ben said. “They stay here.”

“Both of them? Right. I was meaning to get that. You said Mr. Mazzucchelli assaulted Father Storey. I’m not clear why Mr. Cline is also locked up.”

“Because they’re in it together, these two. They already partnered up to break out of one place.”

“But I take it Mr. Cline was nowhere near the scene of the attack on Father Storey?”

Ben’s eyes were dull, expressionless. “No. He was in the boat with me. Father Storey and Mazzucchelli arrived back at camp first. Then Allie and Mike. Cline and me got lost paddling around in the mist and for a while I couldn’t find the bay. Finally I spotted a flashing light and we rowed toward it. It was Allie, signaling us from the beach. She stayed on the beach to be sure we found our way back, while Michael went on ahead. We had barely pulled the canoe onto shore when we heard Mike screaming for help. We proceeded to the scene”—Harper noted the way Ben had unconsciously begun to tell the story as if he were giving a deposition to a hostile lawyer—“and found Mike sitting in the snow with Father Storey and blood everywhere. Mike said someone had killed him. But when Allie checked his pulse, we determined he was still with us. Michael carried Father Storey into camp, which was where we found a few men holding Mr. Mazzucchelli. Allie observed that Mazzucchelli was wearing Father Storey’s boots and coat. After that the situation turned hostile. Both these men are lucky they weren’t killed.”

“That still doesn’t explain why Mr. Cline is being treated as a threat,” Renée said.

Gilbert said, “When things turned ugly, my partner shouted for help. I gave it.”

“He broke three fingers in Frank Pendergrast’s right hand,” Ben said. “And punched Jamie Close in the throat so hard I thought he crushed her windpipe. Jamie is nineteen, by the way, barely more than a kid.”

“A kid who was holding a broken bottle,” Gilbert said, almost apologetically.

“I’ll need to see them both,” Harper said. “I should’ve seen Mr. Pendergrast before now.”

“He didn’t want to distract you from Father Storey,” Ben said. “Don bandaged him up pretty good with some rags we had laying around.”

“Goddamnit,” she said.

The injuries she couldn’t adequately treat because she didn’t have the supplies kept piling up: subdural hematoma, facial contusion, advanced exposure, John’s sprains and smashed ribs and dislocations, now a badly shattered hand. She had iodine, Band-Aids, and Alka-Seltzer. She had sealed the hole in Father Storey’s skull with cork and candle wax, like a doctor from the seventeenth century. It was the seventeenth century out here in the woods.

Ben went on, “Whatever Cline did and why ever he did it, let’s be clear. We all knew who bashed in Father Storey’s head, Cline as well as us. He chose his side.”

“He chose not to watch his friend be killed by a lynch mob,” Renée said. “That’s understandable.”

Ben looked at Gilbert Cline and said, “What I understand is he ought to pick better friends. His buddy nearly killed a man. Cline knew it. He could’ve stayed out of it. He chose to commit some life-endangering assaults of his own. You want to dispute any part of this story, Cline, you go on and speak right up.”

“No, sir,” Gilbert Cline said, but he was looking at Renée. “That’s how it happened. The Mazz is the only reason I didn’t die in the lockup. And I never would’ve made it through the smoke and down to the canoes if not for him. I could barely move my legs. He just about carried me. I felt obliged not to stand back and watch him get killed.”

“And did you think he bashed in Father Storey’s head?” Ben asked.

Cline looked at Mazzucchelli and back to Ben. His face was a calm, composed blank. “It didn’t cross my mind it mattered one way or another. I owed him.”

Harper had, until now, been concerned with injury and exposure. She had not paused to think about what it meant if Mark Mazzucchelli had really done it . . . really taken a rock to the back of Father Storey’s head, all for a pair of boots.

The rock.

“Was the weapon on Mr. Mazzucchelli when you discovered him trying to get away?” Harper asked.

“No,” the Mazz said. “ ’Cause it’s all bullshit. I never had no weapon.”

“We haven’t found what he used to crush Father Storey’s head in,” Ben said, his voice stiff. “Not so far. We may turn it up yet.”

“So what you have is an assault with no witnesses, no weapon, and a man who professes his innocence even after you hung him up in a stress position and struck him with your gun.”

“It wasn’t even a little like—”

Harper held up a hand. “You’re not in court and I’m not a judge. I don’t have any authority to go casting judgments.
And neither do you.
As far as I’m concerned you don’t have proof of
anything,
and until you do, these men ought to be treated as well as anyone in camp.”

Renée continued, “And without any evidence of wrongdoing, I’m curious how long you plan to keep them locked up and on what basis. There needs to be some kind of fair process. They have a right to a defense. They have a right to
rights
.”

“I’d love to take that dump now,” said the Mazz, but no one listened to him.

“I don’t know if you heard, Renée,” Ben said, “but the Constitution went up in flames, along with the rest of Washington D.C. The people in this camp would like very much not to wind up as cinders as well, Ms. ACLU.”

“I used to donate to them every year, in fact,” Renée said. “Never mind that, though. I’m trying to make a point. We don’t just need to decide whether or not this man tried to kill Tom Storey. We need to decide
how
we decide, and
who
does the deciding. And if Mr. Mazzucchelli here
is
found guilty, we have to make a choice, as a community, about what to do with him . . . about what we can live with. That’s the hard part.”

“I don’t think it’s that hard. I think this community has already made a choice. You would know that if you’d been there when they started throwing rocks. I don’t know what you were doing all night, but you missed all kinds of fun.”

“Maybe I spent my night hiding in the woods,” Renée said, “waiting for a chance to kill Father Storey.”

Ben stared, his mouth open and his brow furrowed, as if she had just posed a particularly irritating riddle. He shook his head.

“You shouldn’t make cracks. You don’t have any idea what Carol and Allie and that crowd would do to you if they thought . . .” His voice trailed off, and then he started again, with a hard smile on his face. “Thing about you, Renée, you’re a good-intentions person. With your tea and your books and your story sessions for the kids, you’re just as harmless as they come. And like most really harmless people, you don’t have the faintest idea what other people are capable of doing.”

“But don’t you see, Ben? That’s precisely my point. We
don’t
know what other people are capable of doing. None of us does. Who could say for certain Father Storey wasn’t surprised by someone in this camp who wants to do him harm? For all you know,
I
might have a reason to want him dead, and it
might’ve
been me waiting in the trees with a rock. It could’ve been
anyone,
and without certainty we can’t publicly execute a man. We ought not to even lock him up indefinitely.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Renée. That’s where you talk yourself into a corner. See, Mark Mazzucchelli here, he had a motive
and
he had an opportunity. Which is bad. But what’s worse, I can’t think of one other person in this whole camp would wish harm on the sweet old man who took us all in, who gave us shelter, and who taught us how to protect ourselves from the Dragonscale. It’s that simple. I can’t think of one reason why anyone else would want Father Storey dead.”

Which was when Harper remembered what Tom Storey had told her in the canoe.

I’m going to have to send someone away,
he had said.
Someone who has done . . . unforgivable things.

“Oh,” Harper said, “I can think of a reason.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

3

From the diary of Harold Cross:

June 19
th

THE SHITTERS. THE LOATHSOME IGNORANT SHITTERS.

June 19
th
, Later:

OFFICER CATSHITT TOOK MY PHONE. AND BEFORE HE SWITCHED IT OFF HE
WIPED
IT, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY EYES. EVERY TEXT, EVERY MAIL, EVERY NOTE.

THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND
ANYTHING
. THEY DIDN’T EVEN
TRY
TO UNDERSTAND. AS SOON AS I TOLD THEM I HAD BEEN COMMUNICATING WITH PEOPLE ON THE OUTSIDE THEY WENT INTO HYSTERICS. IF THEY HAD THE JIM JONES KOOL-AID ON HAND THEY ALL WOULD’VE BEEN LINED UP FOR A CUP. NOW THAT I’VE CALMED DOWN, I WONDER IF I SHOULD HAVE ANTICIPATED THIS.

THE MOST UNIQUE CHARACTERISTIC OF THE FUNGUS IS THE WAY IT BONDS WITH THE MIND. DOCTOR SOLZHENITSYN IN NOVOSIBIRSK HAS SHOWN THE SPORE IS DENDRITIC IN NATURE AND COMPATIBLE WITH THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE BRAIN. OXYTOCIN TELLS DRACO INCENDIA TRYCHOPHYTON IT HAS FOUND A SAFE ENVIRONMENT. THE FUNGUS, IN TURN, STIMULATES FLOCK BEHAVIOR TO PRESERVE ITS OWN WELL-BEING, THE SAME GROUP-THINK THAT MAKES A CROWD OF SPARROWS TURN ON A DIME. THE ’SCALE IS SO OVERPOWERING, IT CAN TEMPORARILY ERASE EVEN FUNDAMENTAL NOTIONS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY. OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS SEEM LIKE YOUR OWN, OTHER’S PEOPLE’S NEEDS SEEM MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOURS, ETC. WE REALLY ARE LIVING IN THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, IT’S JUST THE ZOMBIES ARE
US
.

ALL THIS MAKES SENSE, GIVEN THE NATURE OF OYXTOCIN, WHICH BRINGS COMFORT TO THOSE WHO PARTICIPATE IN TRIBAL BEHAVIOR. I’M NOT PART OF THIS STUPID CHRISTING TRIBE WHICH IS WHY I’M SMOKING ALL THE TIME AND GETTING NO CHEMICAL BENEFIT FROM THEIR IDIOTIC DAILY SINGALONGS. IT ALSO EXPLAINS WHY EVERYONE WAS SO EAGER TO TURN IN THEIR CELL PHONES (YES, FUCKFACE TOOK
ALL
OF THEM, NOT JUST MINE). THE ’SCALE HAS THEM ALL ADDICTED TO SOCIAL APPROVAL.

I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW WHY THE FIREMAN CAN STEER THE ’SCALE INSTEAD OF BEING STEERED BY IT. NO ONE IS MORE ALOOF THAN HIM. I WOULD
KILL
TO KNOW HOW HE CAN SET FIRE TO PARTS OF HIMSELF AND NOT BE HURT.

I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO WANTS TO KNOW WHAT HE KNOWS, EITHER. I WAS DOWN ON THE BEACH THREE DAYS AGO AND HEARD THEM OVER ON THEIR ISLAND, YELLING AT EACH OTHER. WHATEVER HE KNOWS, HE WON’T TELL SARAH STOREY, AND BOY OH BOY IS SHE PISSED.

IF SHE TEARS HIM A NEW ASSHOLE, IT’S TOUGH SHIT FOR MR. ROOKWOOD. THIS INFIRMARY IS ALL OUT OF ASSHOLE PATCHES. AND EVERYTHING ELSE.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

4

She swatted her thigh with the notebook and looked out the window. Goosedown flakes of snow floated about, couldn’t decide if they wanted to fall or rise. Camp was a snow globe and some God-child had given it a shake.

Harper had been awake for fifteen minutes and still wasn’t sure if it was morning or afternoon. The light was diffuse and gray, as if the whole world were hidden under a bedsheet. She sat on the edge of Father Storey’s cot. Every once in a while he would draw a sudden, startled-sounding breath, as if he had just read something terrible in the newspaper. The obituary of a friend, maybe. His own obituary.

One thing that had been true in the summer of Harold Cross was even more true now. The infirmary was out of asshole patches and everything else. She had disinfected Father Storey’s trepanation with a splash of port and had treated John Rookwood’s mauled arm with a weak dose of good intentions. She wasn’t sure good intentions always paved the road to hell, but they for sure weren’t the highest standard of medical care.

She stood on the chair and reached up to put Harold’s notebook behind the ceiling panel. Some little movement or gesture at the edge of her vision caught her attention. She looked around and discovered she and Father Storey had company that morning.

Nick was in the cot closest to the door, sheets pulled to his chest. His hair was a pretty black tousle. He gazed at her as if he had forgotten how to blink. He must’ve crept in while she was asleep and quietly settled into the first empty bed.

She pushed the notebook up out of sight, deciding to act as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do. When the ceiling tile was back in place she climbed down off the chair and stood at the foot of Nick’s cot. Harper moved her hands carefully, using what he had taught her so far to ask why he was here.

He reached for the notepad and pen he carried with him everywhere he went, and wrote:
My stomach hurts. Allie walked me over. She had to come to the infirmery anyway because she’s stashioned here today.
Harper sat beside him on the cot, took his notepad, and wrote:
Have you been vomiting? Diarrhea?

He shook his head. She suspected anxiety for Father Storey, not food poisoning.

What do you mean, Allie is stationed here?
Harper wrote and passed him his pad and pen.

She’s in the other room,
Nick scrawled.

Harper raised her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, hands out, palms turned up:
Why?

Allie’s here for protecshun. Aunt Carol wants to make shure granddad is safe. What did you just stick in the ceiling?
Before she could formulate a reply, he added,
I
promise
if you tell me I won’t SAY A WORD.
She had to smile at that. Of course he wouldn’t.

Just some notes I’m keeping,
she said, which was true, even if it was leaving out a detail or two.

Notes on what?

If you don’t ask about that,
she wrote,
I won’t ask if you
really
have a stomachache.

He smacked the heel of his hand into his forehead, a gesture he must’ve picked up from television. She didn’t judge. Harper sometimes felt she spent half her life playing Julie Andrews in the movie version of her life. The problem with role models is they teach you roles.

Harper used her finger-spelling to say
S-L-E-E-P
.

He nodded and said, “You too, right?” Speaking in silence, hands moving precisely through the air, as if he were adjusting the gears of an invisible machine.

“I go,” she said with her own, less fluent hands. “Be soon back.”

“Be careful,” said Nick’s hands.

Allie was in the waiting room, curled on the couch. Not asleep, not reading—just lying there with the knuckles of one hand pressed to her lips. She blinked and glanced up. For a moment her eyes were unfocused and she seemed to look upon Harper without recognition.

“Nick says you’ve been stationed here.”

“Looks like. You’ve got Ben and Aunt Carol thinking someone in camp might be out to kill Granddad. I think that’s nuts—everyone knows it was that guy the Mazz—but I don’t call the shots.”

“And Ben does?”

“No. He’s just doing what Aunt Carol wants. And she wants Granddad safe. You can’t blame her. Someone
did
try to kill him. Aunt Carol wants you to stay here from now on, too. So there’s always medical staff on hand, in case he has a seizure or whatever.”

“Am I going to start eating here, too?”

Harper was joking, but Allie said, “Yeah. She was really upset when she heard you wandered off yesterday to get something to snack on and left him all alone. His heart could’ve stopped. Or someone could’ve walked in and put a pillow over his face.”

“I can’t stay here. Not full-time. As a matter of fact, I have to step out right now. John’s pretty banged up. I want to head over to his island and get a compression bandage and a brace on him.”

Harper was not carrying either item but was counting on Allie not to notice, and she didn’t.

“Can’t,” Allie said. “Even if you were allowed to leave the infirmary, it’s the middle of the day. No one goes out during the day.”

“What do you mean, ‘even if I was allowed’? Is that from Carol? Who put her in charge?”

“We did.”

“Who?”

“All of us. We voted. You weren’t there. You were sleeping. We gathered in the church and we sang for Father Storey. We sang to everyone we’ve ever lost to show us what to do. I swear I could hear them singing with us. There were only a hundred and forty people in church, but it was like a thousand people singing all at once.” Allie’s bare arms pebbled with goose bumps at the memory of it. She hugged herself. “It felt like being
rescued . . .
from every bad feeling you ever had. I think it was just what we needed. Afterward, we settled down, and held hands, and talked. We talked about the things we were still glad for. We said thanks. Like you do before a meal. And we made plans. That was when we voted to give Ben final authority on all security matters. And we voted to make Aunt Carol head of the chapel services and daily planning, which is what Father Storey used to do. At first she didn’t want to. She said she couldn’t take on any more work. She said she needed to look after her dad. So we took another vote and everyone voted for Carol all over again. So then she said we were making a mistake. She said she wasn’t strong like her father. That he was better than her in every way. Kinder and more thoughtful and patient. But we took a
third
vote and she won that one, too, unanimously. It was funny. It was so funny. Even Carol laughed. She was kind of crying-laughing.”

Harper thought of something in Harold’s diary—
THE FUNGUS STIMULATES FLOCK BEHAVIOR TO PRESERVE ITS OWN WELL-BEING, THE SAME GROUP-THINK THAT MAKES A CROWD OF SPARROWS TURN ON A DIME
—but she didn’t like where that thought led her and pushed it aside.

Allie said, “I don’t think I ought to let you go. The last time I was on duty in the infirmary and didn’t do my job, a kid got killed.” She gave Harper a crooked smile that had no real happiness in it.

“What are you going to do to me if I walk out? You going to tackle a pregnant woman?”

“No,” Allie said. “I’d probably just shoot you in the leg or something.”

She was smirking when she said it and Harper almost laughed. Then she saw the Winchester leaning in one corner of the room.

“Why in God’s name do you have a
gun
?” she cried.

“Mr. Patchett decided the Lookouts on guard should have rifles,” Allie said. “He said we should’ve passed out the guns a long time ago. If a Cremation Crew turns up, a little bit of shooting would—”

“—would get a lot more people killed, is what it would do. None of you ought to be carrying rifles. Allie, some of the Lookouts are all of fourteen years old.” Harper did not mention that Allie herself was not yet seventeen. The idea of the kids stalking around in the snow with loaded guns agitated her, made her want to give Ben Patchett a hard poke in his soft gut.

“It’s only the older kids,” Allie said, but for the first time she sounded defensive.

“I’m going,” Harper said.

“No.
Don’t
. Please? Let’s wait until dark and we can talk to Carol. Going out in the daytime is pretty much the most important rule in camp. It’ll be dark soon.”

“In this snow it might as well be dark already.”

“We pulled the boards up. You’d leave tracks.”

“Not for long. It’s snowing now. My tracks will fill in.
Allie
. Would you let anyone tell
you
that you couldn’t go?”

She had her there.

Allie stared into a blue dimness silted with a billion diamond flecks of flying snow. The muscles at the corners of her jaw bunched up.

“Shit,” she said, at last. “This is so stupid. I shouldn’t.”

“Thank you,” Harper said.

“You need to be back in two hours or less. If you’re not back in two hours, I’m going to feed you to the wolves.”

“If I’m not back in two hours, you ought to get Don Lewiston anyway, just to check on Father Storey’s condition, see how he’s doing.”

Allie glared at Harper. “You have no idea how fucked this is. All us Lookouts met after chapel. Ben Patchett said too many people have been putting themselves ahead of the well-being of camp, doing what they like. He said we need to make some
examples
out of people who can’t follow our rules. We all voted. We agreed. We made a
pact
.”

“Mr. Patchett can worry about the well-being of the camp,” Harper said. “I need to worry about the well-being of my patients. If he finds out, you tell him you tried to make me stay and you couldn’t stop me. But he’s not going to find out, because I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Go if you’re going to go, then. Before I change my mind.”

Harper had her hand on the latch when Allie spoke again.

“I’m glad he likes you,” Allie said. “John is the loneliest person I know.”

She glanced back, but Allie wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was flopped back on her side, curling up on the couch once more.

Harper thought the gentle blessings of children were often as unprovoked, unexpected, and uncalled for as their cruelties. Camp Wyndham that winter was neither Hogwarts nor the island in
Lord of the Flies,
after all, but a place of wandering, damaged orphans, kids who were willing to forgo eating lunch so there was enough food for others.

“I’ll be back soon,” Harper said, and when she said it, she believed it.

But she did not return until long, long after dark fell, and by then everything in camp had changed again.