The Fireman (50 page)

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22

He was aghast at the idea that she would row them into shore alone.

“I’ll sit on the left,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt to use my left arm. You sit on the right. We’ll row together.”

“It’ll never work. The two of us will never be in sync. We’ll just go around and around in circles together.”

“Oh, it won’t be so bad. We’ve been doing that for months.”

She glared at him, thought he was having a laugh at her but then he was bending to the bow of the boat, shoving it into the water, and she had to get beside him to help. A woman eight months pregnant and a man with recovering from a chest full of busted ribs. To think Carol was afraid of either of them.

When they were out in the shallows she fell in over the side and then reached over the gunwale to take his hands and pull him in after her. His fireman boots squealed on the hull, grabbing for traction, and he thumped his lousy wrist, and his face went white. He squirmed onto the thwart beside her and she pretended she didn’t see him thumbing tears out of his eyes. She reached over and gently straightened his helmet.

They rowed, leaning forward and back, slowly and carefully, shoulders touching. The boat creaked and slid through the water in the night.

“Tell me about Harold Cross,” the Fireman said.

He listened with head inclined while she went through it again. When she was done, he said, “Harold didn’t have many friends in this camp, but I agree—when word gets out about what Carol did, calling the Cremation Crew on him and all,
well
. That’ll be the end for her. Sending her away with you is a great act of mercy, really. It’s easy to imagine it could be much worse.”

“She’ll come with me,” Harper said. “And you’ll stay here.”

“Yes. I’ll have to. Father Storey will be too weak to look after camp alone. I expect that’s why I’m being summoned to his bedside. I’m being enlisted.” His mouth twisted in a sour frown.

“You wouldn’t leave anyway. You have to tend your private fire.”

“No one else would understand.”

“You should let her go out, and come away with me.” Harper found she could not look at him when she said this. She had to turn her face toward the ocean. The wind was spooning the foam off the tops of the waves and she could pretend the water on her face was spray. “It isn’t safe here. It hasn’t been safe for a long time. You can’t hide a hundred and fifty people indefinitely. They’re going to find Camp Wyndham. The Marlboro Man and my husband, or men like them. Sooner or later.” She thought of the dreams, of Nelson Heinrich in a blood stained candy-cane print sweater, grinning out of a skinless face, and shuddered.

She didn’t believe in a fixed future, didn’t believe in precognition. Didn’t even believe in the Marlboro Man’s psychic radio station, although it seemed like awfully good luck, him turning up on the exact day she returned home. But she believed in the subconscious and she believed in paying attention when it started waving red flags. She had left Nelson alive—she was almost sure of it now—and that was bad news for all of them. And even if Nelson never recovered to lead the Seacoast Incinerators to camp, then it would be something else. You could only hide a small village for so long.

They drifted, had stopped rowing. After a moment, at some silent, unspoken signal between them, they took up the oars and began to move again.

“I’ll be taking Nick and Allie with me,” she told him. “No matter how things shake out with Carol. I love that little boy. I’m going to take him someplace safe—safer than here.”

“Good.”

“Sarah would want you to come with them, you know. She’d want you to look after them.”

“You know I can’t. The old man is going to need my help around here.”

“Then come as soon as he’s better. Bring him. Bring as many as you can.”

“We’ll see,” he said, in a way that meant
no
.

“John. Her life is over. Yours is not.”

“Her life isn’t—”

“It is. She told you so herself. You’ve been keeping her a prisoner. Trapped in a rusted can. You aren’t any different than Carol, keeping me locked up in the infirmary all winter.”

He turned on her suddenly, his face rippling with pain. “What pestilent, flyblown
bullshit
. I am
nothing
like—and how could Sarah tell me anything? She’s a creature of flame. She can’t tell me what she wants or feels. She lost her power of speech when she lost her body.”

“No, she didn’t. I don’t know what’s worse, you lying to me, or you lying to yourself. I
heard
you screaming at her. All the way back in the fall. She’s already
asked
you to let her go out.”

“And how—”

“Sign language. She’s at least as fluent as you.”

They had both stopped rowing, although the dock was in sight.

John Rookwood was trembling. “You little spy. Listening in on my—”

“Spare me your paranoid insinuations. You were drunk at the time. I could hear it in your voice. Anyone could’ve heard it in your voice, from half a mile off, the way you were shouting.”

Some terrible struggle was taking place in the muscles beneath his face. He kept tightening and untightening his jaw, and breathing strangely.

“It’s time to let that fire go out, John. Time to leave your island behind. Allie and Nick are still in this world and they need you. I do, too. I can never be her—I can never be what she meant to you—but I can still try to be worth your time.”

“Shh,”
he said, looking away and blinking at his tears. “That’s an awful thing to say. Don’t you dare put yourself down. You think I don’t love you to pieces, Nurse Willowes? You and your ridiculous, pregnant belly and weird yen for Julie Andrews? I just hate—
hate
—the disloyalty of it. The sickening disloyalty of—of—”

“Being alive when she isn’t,” Harper said. “Of going on.”

“Yes. Exactly,” he said and lowered his chin to his chest. Tears dripped off the end of his nose. “Falling in love: what a horrible thing. For what it’s worth, I tried to have as little to do with you as possible. To see you as little as possible. Not just because I didn’t want to fall in love. I didn’t want
you
to fall in love, either. I was aware just how difficult it might be for you to resist my abundant charms.”

“You do grow on a girl,” Harper said. “Kind of like the spore.”

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Book Eight
All Fall Down

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HarperCollins
Publishers

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1

When the rowboat clouted against the side of the dock, Harper scanned the shore, but Cargill was gone. He had left his rod on the rocks. He had taken his rifle.

Probably he had gone to tell Carol something was afoot. That was fine. She was going to know in a few minutes anyway.

It was hard work for a seriously pregnant woman to climb that steep hill, and she was breathing hard by the time they reached the infirmary. She had a nasty sweat on her face and just as they reached the steps to the front door she was struck with a leg-buckling contraction. She bent, gripping her lower abdomen in one hand, and exhaled a harsh breath through clenched teeth.

“Are you all right?” John asked her.

She nodded and waved him on. She didn’t have the air to speak, although already the contraction was subsiding, leaving behind a dull ache and a feeling like she had swallowed a rock.

Harper followed him into the waiting room, which was empty, Michael presumably in the next room. The Fireman held open the moss-colored curtain and ducked into the ward, Harper right behind him.

“Father—” the Fireman said, and a rifle butt shot into the side of his neck with a dull, stomach-turning thud. He went down as if he had been cut in half.

Harper opened her mouth to scream, but Michael had already turned the gun around to point the barrel at Nick. The boy was asleep on his bed, his hands folded neatly across his stomach, his chin almost touching his chest. He frowned, thoughtfully, as if trying to remember something he felt he should know.

“Please, don’t. I wouldn’t like to have to shoot a kid,” Michael said.

Father Storey’s head was turned so he seemed to be staring at her, but whatever he was seeing now, it wasn’t in the room with them. His face had darkened to a hue that brought to mind summer storm clouds. The IV had toppled over. The needle had come out of his arm. Bright red spots showed on the white sheets.

Michael went on, in an almost apologetic tone, “Here in the next few hours it’s gonna come out you murdered Father Storey to keep him quiet. That you were gonna kill Carol and Ben to take over the camp. I got everything I need to make people believe it, but it would
help
if you’d say it’s true, ma’am. I know you don’t have any reason to trust me right now. But I swear, if you’ll do that for me—if you’ll admit you and Rookwood were out to finish Carol off—I
swear
I’ll keep Allie and Nick from dying with you. I’ll look after them.”

Harper bent down next to John, who had collapsed on his side. She took his pulse, found it steady and slow. She was trembling. At first she thought it was with grief, but when she spoke, she discovered it was rage.

“You and Carol had Harold Cross murdered.”

“I didn’t shoot him. Ben Patchett did,” Michael said. “I
was
gonna shoot him, then figured it might look better if Ben took the shot. So I handed him the rifle. Besides. The last couple months he was here, I kinda got to liking Harold a little. He was teaching me how to play chess. I got sentimental feelings like anyone else. I didn’t really want to be the one who gunned him down.”

“You were the one who slipped him out of the infirmary,” Harper said. “But in his notebook he called you—”
JR,
she remembered. Harold wrote everything in capitals, like a shout, and so she had naturally assumed those letters stood for John Rookwood. And then she knew why Michael reminded her of her nephew. It had been her subconscious, waving another flag, trying to alert her to the one thing Michael had in common with sweet, innocent-eyed Connor Willowes—“Junior.”

“Yep. That was what Harold called me most times: Michael Lindqvist Junior. My daddy never gave me nothing except his name, you want to know the truth. His name and occasionally the back of his hand.”

“No one is going to believe I kept Father Storey alive for three months just to kill him now,” she said.

“Yes, they will. You’ve tried to kill him on the sly a few times already, sticking him with insulin to bring on seizures. Right between his toes. But then you couldn’t do it anymore, ’cause Nick was here, and he had an eye on you all the time. And you were scared, you lost your nerve.” He was holding the rifle one-handed, the barrel pointed across the room at Nick. He reached out with his free hand, grabbed her short blond hair, and gave her head a hard snap. “That’s important. That part of it.
Don’t forget
. You stuck him with insulin. You were hoping he’d die in a way that would look natural. You screwed up the brain surgery, too, stuck the drill in his brain. You did everything you could to finish him off, but he was protected from you.”

“Protected how?” Harper asked.

“Protected by the Bright,” Michael said, a calm simplicity in his voice. “His mind and soul aren’t just in his body anymore. They’re in the Dragonscale on his skin. They’re stored in the Bright forever and ever, just like files backed up to an external hard drive. He wrote a note, talking about how the Bright kept him safe all these months. I made him write it before I kilt him. I could’ve written it myself, but I thought it would look better in his handwriting. It’s under his pillow. I’ll let Carol find it.” He reached to the side counter, found a syringe, and held it out to her. “Stick yourself now. Not in your wrist or your neck. Right in your big round ass. I want them to see I snuck up on you.”

“I won’t.”

“Then I guess you fought me for the gun and Nick got shot in the struggle,” Mike told her. “You could’ve saved me a lot of trouble, you know, if you just got killed a few months back, like you were supposed to. I called the Seacoast Incinerators on you that time you went home looking for medical supplies. I don’t know why they didn’t find you. I called ’em again the night you went to raid the ambulance. Beats me how you got away from ’em both times.”

“How did you call them? I thought Ben took all the phones.”

“Who do you think he sent around to collect ’em up? I kept a couple back for myself.”

It amazed and appalled her that she had ever for a moment imagined the Marlboro Man really did, perhaps, have some gift for prophecy, some unnatural access to secret knowledge. She felt even the children she had treated as an elementary school nurse would not have been pulled in by such an absurd notion.

“Enough fucking around,” Michael said. “Stick yourself already.”

She took the syringe and looked at the clear fluid inside. “What is this?”

“Versed? Is that a good one? You had it in with the other heavy-duty drugs. I don’t know much about sedatives. I tranqed Allie once . . . the day we got rid of Harold. I needed to give fatboy a chance to slip out of camp and she was on watch. But back then I had some Lunesta my own Mama used to keep in the medicine cabinet, and I knew what I was doing when I slipped some into her decaf.”

“Michael, please. I’m eight months pregnant. I don’t know what Versed would do to the baby. I don’t have any idea.”

“It doesn’t matter what it will do to the baby. We’ll love him even if he’s a retard or a cripple. Carol will look after him, make sure he’s brought up right. The whole camp will. And don’t you worry. I know my beloved. Carol will have the baby cut out of you before we execute you. She’ll have the baby yanked out and love it just like it was her own. I found a medical book in the camp library that sort of tells you how to do a C-section. It doesn’t seem that hard. I bet me and Don Lewiston can manage it. Don will be lookin’ for some way to keep from being slaughtered along with you and the Fireman. Come on now. Stick that needle in. I’m not in the talking business. I’m in the doing business.”

“If you try a C-section without any medical training, you will murder me and you will murder my baby.”

“Nah. Besides. We’n keep you awake. You can talk us through the procedure. Can’t you?”

“Jesus,” Harper said, the first tear falling hot down her cheek. “How can you do this to Allie? Kill her grandfather. Threaten her brother. She loves you. I thought you loved her.”

“I guess I do, sort of. She ain’t no Carol, though. Carol is still a virgin. Thirty years old and she still hasn’t bled. She wants
me
to be the one. She says she’s been waiting for me her whole life.”

He looked like one inspired, his eyes shining strangely. Harper remembered Ben saying he had seen Michael and Allie making out frantically behind the chapel, the same night Father Storey got his head caved in. But of course in the dark it was easy to mistake the niece for the aunt. They almost could’ve been played by the same actress in the movie version.

“Tom told me his daughter would never hurt him. I can’t believe he was so wrong about that,” Harper said.

Harper was surprised to see blotches of color break out on Michael’s cheeks. He touched a finger to his lips, almost as if he was shushing her. “Oh, I kinda done that on my own. Carol told me Father Storey knew about how we took care of Harold, but she thought when he had time to think about it, he’d accept it had to be done. Only then I met up with all of you to go rescue the convicts. And on the walk to the water, Father Storey pulled me aside and warned me we were going to have to lock Mama Carol up when we got back. Lock her up and send her into exile. He was pretty upset. I figured maybe it would just be easiest if he died for the camp. Tell you what. That son of a gun had a hell of a hard head, though. I hit him with my nightstick hard enough to smash a watermelon into slush and he didn’t even go down for almost ten seconds. Just stood there swaying, lookin at me with a puzzled kinda smile on his face.”

“When Carol finds out what you did to her father, she’ll have you killed. She’ll kill you herself.”

“She won’t find out.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“It’ll be a lie. Everything you say will be a lie. And I’ll make sure Nick and Allie die with you. Or die later. Whatever. Your only chance to protect those kids is to throw yourself on your sword.”

“You can’t—”

“Done talkin’,” Michael said, and looked at Nick. “One more word out of you,
one more,
and I swear to God, I will spray the little deaf boy’s empty head all over his fuckin’ pillow. Stick yourself. Do it.”

Harper stuck herself.