کتاب 03-06

6

When Father Storey asked the Fireman who he’d need, Harper didn’t expect to be on his list, but she was the only person he mentioned by name.

“Two or three men and Nurse Willowes, if you please, Father. I don’t know what kind of state they’ll be in. At the very least they’ve spent twenty-four hours in a cramped hiding place, in temperatures barely above freezing, so they’ll be suffering from exposure. It might make sense to have medical assistance on hand. What say we group up in Monument Park in twenty minutes? I’d like to get under way.”

The service was over. Everyone crowded into the aisles, all of them yammering at once. Harper pushed her way through the close press of bodies and the noise. Ben Patchett was saying something—Harper, you’re pregnant, he’s out of his mind if—but she pretended not to hear. In another moment she was through the enormous red doors and out into a cold so dry and sharp it stung the eyes.

Alone in the infirmary, she flung open cabinets, collecting anything that might be useful and dumping it in a small nylon knapsack. In her haste, her elbow struck the big anatomical model of a human head. It tipped off the counter and smashed on the floor.

She cursed, turned to kick the shards out of sight—was in too much of a hurry to sweep—then hesitated.

The head had busted into several large pieces. One half of the face gaped up at her with an idiotic astonishment. A stenographer’s notebook, rolled into a tube and bound up with thick rubber bands, lay among the shards.

Harper picked it out of the shattered pieces, undid the rubber bands, and looked at the cover.

PRIVATE NOTEBOOK OF HAROLD CROSS

MEDICAL OBSERVATIONS AND PERSONAL INSIGHTS

WITH SOME OCCASIONAL POETRY

She considered what to do with it, thought there might be quite a few people in camp who would want to know what Harold had written about in the weeks before his death. Finally she decided not to decide. There wasn’t time. She tossed it in a drawer and got out of there.

Captain America was waiting on the steps of the infirmary.

“I’ve got some other masks if you want one,” Allie said, leading the way along the wobbling planks set out between buildings. “I’ve got Hulk, Optimus Prime, and Sarah Palin.”

“Is it important to disguise our identity?”

“I don’t think so. But it does make you feel more badass. Like when guys rob a bank and they’re all wearing scary clown masks? I have a huge girl boner for scary clown masks.”

“Unless you have Mary Poppins, I think I’ll go as I am. But thank you for asking.”

Allie led her through the looming pagan rocks of Monument Park, to a stone altar that would’ve been the perfect place to sacrifice Aslan. Father Storey stood behind it, with the Fireman on his right, and Michael and Ben on his left—an image that Harper thought oddly recalled The Last Supper. Michael even had Judas’s stringy red beard, if none of his malice or fear.

“Allie?” Father Storey raised one hand, palm out, as if in benediction. “I promised your aunt you’d have no part in this. Head down to the bus—you’re watching the gate tonight.”

“I swapped with Mindy Skilling,” Allie said. “Mindy didn’t mind.”

“And I’m sure she won’t mind if you swap back.”

Allie shot a questioning, hostile look at the Fireman. “I always go. Since when do I not get to go? Mike is going. He’s only a year older than me. I started the Lookouts, not him. I was the first.”

“The last time you went running around with John, your aunt Carol sat staring out the window, clutching one of your sweaters and praying,” said Father Storey. “She wasn’t praying to God, Allie. She was praying to your mother to keep you safe. Don’t put her through another night like that. Have mercy on her. And have mercy on me.”

Allie went on staring at the Fireman. “You going along with this bullshit?”

“You heard him,” the Fireman said. “Run along, Allie, and don’t give me one of your sixteen-year-old death stares. If you want to have a row with me, it’ll have to be later.”

She glared at him for a moment longer—eyeing him as if trying to decide how best to get even. Then she looked at Michael, opened her mouth as if to plead with him. Mike half turned away, though, scratching his back with his rosewood nightstick, and pretended not to see her staring.

“Fuck you,” Allie said, her voice shaking with anger. “Fuck all of you.”

In the next instant she bolted into the trees. Harper had been able to move like that once; she remembered being sixteen quite vividly.

Father Storey smiled in a way that looked awfully like a wince. “In her own soft-spoken, gentle fashion, she does manage to get her point across, doesn’t she? I would add that compared to her mother, Allie Storey is the very model of restraint.”

“Shoot,” Ben Patchett said. “I forgot to grab a flashlight.”

“No worries, Ben,” the Fireman said, stripping off his left glove. “I brought a light.”

His hand ignited in a gout of blue flame, with a soft whoosh, illuminating a circle ten feet in diameter. The boulders threw monstrous shadows halfway down the hill.

Ben Patchett swallowed heavily as Harper fell in beside him.

“I’ll never get used to that,” he said.