کتاب 07-05

5

Harper needed to clear her head, needed to do some quality thinking, so she walked out of the infirmary into the bitter chill. No one stopped her. They were all in the chapel together. Harper could hear them singing, could see their mystery lights flickering around the edges of the closed red doors.

The funny thing was that they were all singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” which didn’t seem like the kind of rag they’d go for in chapel. Almost everyone in the congregation had seen someone they loved devoured by fire, lived in fear of burning themselves. But now their voices rose together in hopeful praise of ashes and soot, voices that quivered with a kind of hysterical delight. She left them behind.

The air was clean and sharp and the walking was easy. Harper had left her big belly, and the baby inside of it, back at the infirmary, needed a break from being pregnant. It felt good to be thin again. She let her thoughts wander and in no time at all found she had reached the place where the dirt track from camp joined Little Harbor Road. That was farther than she had meant to go, farther than was necessarily safe. She glanced at the rusting, battered blue school bus, expecting to be yelled at by whoever was on watch. A gaunt, dark figure slumped behind the steering wheel. She guessed whoever it was had to be dozing.

She was going to turn around and walk back when she saw the man in the road.

There was a guy right in the middle of Little Harbor Road, not a hundred feet away, pulling himself arm over arm, like a soldier wriggling under barbed wire on a battlefield. Or, no: really, he was pulling himself along like someone whose legs didn’t work. If anyone came along in a hurry, he was going to get run over. Aside from that, it was awful, watching him struggle along across the icy tarmac.

“Hey!” Harper called. “Hey, you!”

She lifted the chain draped across the entrance to Camp Wyndham and started briskly toward him. It was important to get this done—deal with the man in the road—and get back out of sight before a car turned up. She shouted at him once more. He lifted his head, but the only streetlight was behind him, so his face remained in shadow: a round, fleshy, fat face, hair thinning on top. Harper hurried the last few steps to him and knelt down.

“Do you need medical attention?” she asked. “Can you stand up? I’m a nurse. If you think you can stand up, give me your hand, and I’ll walk you to my infirmary.”

Nelson Heinrich lifted his head and gave her a sunny smile. His teeth were red with blood and someone had removed his nose, leaving a pair of red slots in the ragged flesh. “Oh, that’s all right, Harper. I’ve made it this far. I can lead them the rest of the way without your help.”

Harper recoiled, fell back into the road, sitting down hard. “Nelson. Oh, God, Nelson, what happened to you?”

“What do you think?” Nelson said. “Your husband happened to me. And now he’s going to happen to you.”

The headlights came on down the street, flashing over both of them. The Freightliner awoke with a boom of combustion and a grinding of gears.

Nelson said, “Go on, Harper. Go back.” He winked. “I’ll see you soon.”

She held her hands up over her face to shield her eyes from the light and when she lowered them she was awake, sitting up on her elbows in bed in the infirmary and having another contraction.

“These are dreams about the baby coming,” Harper said to herself, in a low voice. “Not about Nelson Heinrich leading a Cremation Crew to camp. Nelson Heinrich is dead. He was torn apart by machine-gun fire. You saw him dead in the road. You saw him.”

It was funny how the more she said it to herself, the less she believed it.