کتاب 08-10

10

Harper had wondered what it must’ve been like to be in one of the stairwells at the Twin Towers on the day the planes struck, what people felt as they made their way blindly down the steps through the smoke. She had wondered about it all over again the day men and women began to leap from the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, in the first weeks of widespread infection. In those days of conflagration, it happened again and again—the high building in flames, people inside hurrying to escape the fire at their backs, trying to find a way out, knowing all the while that the only exit might be a last jump and the giddy silent rush of falling: a final chance to snatch at a moment of peace.

Most of all, she feared panic. She feared losing possession of herself. But as they made their way up, Harper felt almost businesslike, focused on the next step, then the step after. That, at least, was a reason for gladness. She was less terrified of dying than she was of being stripped of her personality, of turning into an animal in the slaughterhouse, unable to hear her own thoughts over the clanging alarm of desperation.

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 stairs. 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 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 soaring cloud bank 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 swayed, 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. 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, 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.

Harper realized that Nick was standing next to her, staring below with a sleepy, dazed expression. She reached for his shoulder and turned him so his face was pressed to her breast, much as she had done almost a year ago to a boy named Raymond Bly, who wanted to look out a window and see what was happening in the school playground. She didn’t want Nick to see what happened next—although she herself could not look away.

Renée held herself flat and very still on the roof of the fire truck. Her right arm was the only thing moving—she was feeling around with one hand. Her fingers found the edge of the compartment she had opened up when she was looking for a way to raise the ladder. She reached inside and grasped the handle of a fire ax.

The Marlboro Man came up like Jack out of his box, his mouth stretched wide in a humorless animal grin, pointing the gun over the roof. Renée brought the ax down on his wrist and he fell back screaming. He left his hand behind on the roof, still squeezed tightly around his pistol. Renée batted it with the blade of the ax, knocking it away from her. The Marlboro Man’s right hand skidded over the edge of the roof and out of sight.

The Marlboro Man howled, his voice a low, deep cry of fury and hurt that seemed to echo up from the bottom of a well.

Renée sat on her knees, on the edge of the roof. She turned her head and looked toward the cab. Renée shouted something, but Harper was too far away to hear exactly what she said. Once she thought she heard Renée calling for Gil. Renée sat there for what seemed a long time, although in fact it was only a matter of seconds. Then she turned herself about and began to work the crank once more. Turning it with a kind of dull exhaustion now.

The Marlboro Man screamed and screamed again.

The Freightliner produced a grinding cough and began to back up. Another shudder ran through the entire church as the plow pulled loose from the hole it had made, and debris came spilling out into the soccer field.

The big truck backed fifty yards from the chapel, then slammed to a stop. Jamie had put a spiderweb fracture in the windshield on the driver’s side, and Harper had a sudden thought: Jamie had managed to hurt Jakob, had taken something out of him. Had maybe even come close to killing him.

Allie dropped the rifle and sank to a crouch.

“I’m out!” she yelled. “No more bullets.”

The handles of the fire ladder bumped into sight as it made its slow, hitching way up to the railing. The Fireman stood—rocking a little on his heels—reached over the side, and steadied it.

“Go. Down. Now. You first,” the Fireman said, nodding at Harper.

“Nick—” she said.

“Allie will have to take him on her back.”

“I’ve got him,” Allie said, crawling around the catwalk to Nick.

On the other side of the church, the Freightliner began to move, rumbling toward the base of the bell tower.

Harper didn’t like heights, and the thought of putting her leg over the side made her feel dizzy. But she was already straddling the railing, reaching with one bare foot for the first rung.

She glanced over her shoulder, searching for the ladder, and saw the fire engine forty feet below, looking small enough to pick up with one hand, and for a moment it seemed to her the entire bell tower was nodding like a flower, about to dump her. She clenched her hands on the stone railing and shut her eyes.

“You can do this, Harper,” the Fireman said, and kissed her cheek.

She nodded. She wanted to say something cute and daring, but she couldn’t swallow, let alone speak.

Harper swung her other leg over the side.

She moved her right foot down to the second rung, let go of the stone railing, grabbed wildly, got her hands on the ladder. The whole thing wobbled unsteadily beneath her.

On the far side of the building, she heard the distinct sound of the Freightliner chunking into a new gear as it sped up.

She had descended not more than five rungs when the Fireman helped Allie over the side, Nick clinging to her back. Allie scrambled after Harper, wearing Nick as lightly as she might’ve worn a backpack for school.

The Fireman put a leg over the railing, planted one boot on the top rung. His other foot found the second rung. He reached down and put one hand on the ladder itself, stood there clinging to the very, very top of it.

The Freightliner hit the north side of the chapel doing nearly fifty miles an hour. It turned at the last instant, swiping away the entire front corner of the church, throwing enough wood and stone and glass to fill a dump truck.

The steeple lurched, steadied for a moment—and caved in. One moment it was there. The next it wasn’t. It dropped in on itself, the stone railing, the balusters, the bell tower roof, the beams, the wooden catwalk. It collapsed with a wrenching boom that Harper felt in her chest, like a throb in the blood. All at once the top of the fire ladder swung in empty air. John Rookwood hung suspended at the pinnacle. A black gush of smoke spun up from the ruin, obscuring him in a whirl of spark-filled darkness.

A blast of cold wind that smelled of the sea carried some of that smoke away a moment later, and the Fireman was gone.

Harper opened her mouth to scream, but then her gaze found him, already ten rungs down from the top and making his way hand over hand toward the earth below. The ladder shook and bounced in the open air. Allie was moving so quickly she was almost stepping on Harper’s hands.

Harper made her effortful way toward the engine below. Lower down, the ladder still had some roof to lean against. The southern half of the church remained intact. Harper didn’t know she had reached the roof of the truck until she felt metal under her bare feet. She stepped off the ladder on shaking legs and looked around for Renée. She wasn’t on top of the engine anymore, had climbed down at some point.

Now Harper felt shivery and weak, cold even in her bones. The shuddering was moving from her legs to the rest of her body. Her first thought was that she was going into shock. Then it occurred to her it might be something else entirely. John had said casting flame used up calories and oxygen and afterward you were dazed and ill and could easily get into trouble if you didn’t find a place to rest.

She went unsteadily to the rear of the truck, where there was an old short ladder of rusted iron. She climbed down it to the bumper and stepped off, and her legs collapsed on her without warning. She sat ungracefully in the wet grass. Sparks and smoke whirled slowly above her, like a carousel coming to a halt.

She forced the feeling of weakness back and used the bumper to stand.

“Oh, you cunt! My hand! My HAND!”

Harper came around the side of the fire engine, moving toward the screaming. The Marlboro Man was on his back in the grass, arching his spine and digging his heels into the mud. He looked like he was trying to push his way across the dirt on his back. He held his right wrist with his left hand. There was no right hand. There was only a broken bit of pink bone sticking out, where the hand belonged.

Harper stepped over him to get to Renée, who was leaning in the open driver’s-side door. When Harper got there, Renée was cradling Gilbert Cline in her arms. Blood still leaked from the bullet wound in his neck, but without much enthusiasm. There was blood all over the front seat.

Harper noticed—almost absently—a severed hand, still clutching a gun, set carefully in on the dash. Renée had thoughtfully picked it up and put it where the Marlboro Man couldn’t go after it in an attempt to get his Glock back.

“We were almost to the end of Watership Down,” Renée said. “Gil said he never thought he could like a story about talking animals so much. I said life was strange, I never expected to fall in love with a man who stole cars.” She was not weeping and spoke with great clarity. “He hot-wired the truck. We couldn’t find the keys. While he was doing it, he told me he was just more proof that most criminals went right back to what they knew best as soon as they got out. He said he was sorry to be adding to the recidivism rate. It took me a moment to realize he was joking. He was very dry. He didn’t even smile at his own jokes, let alone laugh at them. Didn’t give you any clues he was being funny. Oh, Harper, I don’t want to try and live without him. I feel like I spent my whole life unable to taste food. Then Gil came to camp and suddenly everything had flavor. Everything was delicious. And then that awful man shot him and Gil is dead and I’ll have to go back to not being able to taste things again. I don’t know if I can do that.”

Harper wished there were something to say. Maybe there was, and she was just too wobbly and light-headed to think what. Instead she put her arm around Renée and clumsily kissed her ear. Renée closed her eyes and lowered her head and wept in a very quiet, private way.

The Marlboro Man shrieked.

Harper turned and saw Allie standing over him. Allie had her brother in her arms again. She had paused, Harper thought, to kick the Marlboro Man in the ribs.

“Oh, you fuckin’ bitch, you’re gonna burn, and I’m gonna jack off on your charred fuckin’ tits,” the Marlboro Man said.

“You want to jack off,” Allie said, “you’re going to have to learn how to do it with your left hand, stumpy.”

“I don’t think he should live,” Renée said, wiping her face. “Not when so many other people are dead. It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Do you want me to kill him?” the Fireman said. Harper hadn’t realized he was on the ground, standing behind her. He was swaying himself, and looked as bad—maybe worse—than she felt. Sweat crawled on his wasted, white face. His eyes, though, were as dark as crow feathers, and perfectly serene.

He put a hand on the fire ax that leaned against the side of the truck.

Renée thought it over, then shook her head. “No. I guess not. I suppose I’m very weak and foolish, not to get even while I can.”

“It makes you the furthest thing from weak I can imagine,” the Fireman said. He looked back at Allie, who had joined them. “You’ll have to drive the fire truck, Allie. And you’ll have to find somewhere you can hide all of you, somewhere nearby. I’ll meet up with you later.”

“What are you talking about?” Harper asked him. “You’re coming with us.”

“Not now. Soon.”

“That’s crazy. John. You can’t be on your own. You can hardly stand.”

He waved this notion away, shook his head. “I’m not seeing double anymore. That has to be a sign of progress.” And when he saw her expression, he insisted, “I’m not abandoning you. Any of you. I swear I’ll be with you in no more than a day. Two at most.”

“How will you find us?” Harper asked.

“Nick will send for me,” the Fireman said, looking over Allie’s shoulder into Nick’s swollen, filthy, dazed face.

The Fireman did something with his hands, moving them here and there. Nick blinked slowly and seemed to nod. Harper thought the Fireman had said something about birds.

Renée said, “We’ll have to squeeze in with Gil. I hope that’s all right. I won’t leave him here.”

“No,” Harper said. “Of course you won’t.”

Renée nodded, then climbed up on the running board and gently eased Gilbert aside, making room behind the steering wheel.

The Fireman turned and strode across the matted grass. He crouched over the Marlboro Man.

“You,” the Marlboro Man said. “I know who you are. You’re going to die. My man Jakob is going to spread your faggot British ass all over the road. He’s going to paint the highway with you. Jakob loves killing the burners—he says it’s the first thing in his life he’s ever done really well. But he’s looking forward to doin’ you most of all. He wants to do it while she watches.”

“Jakob likes finishing off burners, does he?” the Fireman asked. He lifted his left hand and a trickle of green flame fluttered like a silk ribbon from the tip of his index finger. The Fireman gazed into it in a sleepy, speculative way, then blew it out, leaving the tip of his finger gray with ash. The Fireman lowered his hand and spread the ash across the Marlboro Man’s forehead, drawing a cross. The Marlboro Man flinched. “Well. You better get up and get moving then, soon as you can. Because you’re one of us now, friend. That ash is full of my poison. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a few other people who are infected who will shelter you and look after you, as the folk in this camp once did for us. Maybe—but I doubt it. I think most people will close their doors in your face the moment you open your big mouth to ask for their help. You have a quite recognizable voice.”

The Marlboro Man kicked his feet against the ground and slid six inches across the dirt, shaking his head frantically, and began to shriek. “No! No no no, you can’t! You can’t! Listen to me! Listen!”

“Actually,” the Fireman said, “I think I’ve heard more than enough. The only thing worse than listening to men like you on the radio is meeting you in real life. Because out here in the world there’s just no simple way to change the station.” And he kicked him—lightly, almost humorously—under the jaw. The Marlboro Man’s head snapped back and his teeth clapped shut on the tip of his tongue, and his scream became a high, hideous, inchoate keening.

The Fireman started away, staggering a little, his coat flapping about him.

“If I don’t see you by tomorrow night,” Harper shouted at him, “I’ll come looking for you.”

He glanced back over his shoulder and gave her a crooked smile. “Just when I thought I was out of the frying pan. Try not to worry. I’ll be with you again soon enough.”

“Come on, Ms. Willowes,” Allie said. Allie was in the truck now, behind the steering wheel, hand on the door and leaning out to look down at her. “We have to go. There’s still men with guns out there. There’s still that plow.”

Harper jerked her head in a nod, then cast her gaze around for a last look at John. But he wasn’t there. The smoke had claimed him.