کتاب 09-16

16

The Fireman steered the truck around the great crumbled pits in the road, rolled along to the fallen larch, and stopped again. Harper and the others didn’t even bother riding with him in the truck but followed along on foot. The sky hazed over as if it were going to rain, only it wasn’t going to rain, and the color of the clouds was wrong. Those clouds were salmon-colored, as if lit by sunset, and never mind it was midday. The air had the staticky feel that sometimes warned of thunderheads. The pressure tickled Harper’s eardrums unpleasantly.

The Fireman strapped the tow to the downed tree and ran the truck back. There was a loud crack. He cursed artistically.

“Did you hear what he said? No woman could really do that,” Renée said. “It’s anatomically impossible.”

He jumped down from behind the wheel. The towline had yanked a ten-foot branch right off the tree.

“You have to get the chain around the trunk,” Allie said. “Or it’ll break into pieces.”

Nick sat on the rear bumper of the fire truck with Renée and Harper, while Allie and the Fireman ran the tow around the center mass of the tree.

“Let’s play a game,” Renée said. “Twenty Questions. Who wants to go first?”

Harper translated. Nick replied in sign.

“He wants to know if it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral.”

“Mineral. Sort of. Oh boy. We’re off to a bad start.”

They went back and forth, Harper serving as their conversational go-between.

“Is it yellow?” Harper asked for him.

“Yes, but also sort of orange.”

“Now he wants to know if it’s bigger than a car.”

“Yes. Much bigger.”

Nick spoke rapidly with his hands.

“He says ‘It’s a truck,’” Harper said.

“No!” Renée said cheerfully.

Nick hopped off the rear bumper, his hands flying, arms waving.

“He says ‘It’s a big orange truck,’” Harper said.

“No!” Renée told her again, frowning. “Tell him no. He’s wasting his questions.”

But by then Harper was off the fender herself, staring back down the interstate.

“We have to go,” she said.

Nick was already running toward the front of the truck. Harper jogged after him, shouting the whole way, her voice rising from a yell to something that wavered at the ragged edge of a scream.

“John! We have to go! We have to go. Right! NOW!”

John was half in the cab, one hand on the steering wheel and one foot on the running board. He leaned out of the fire engine to shout instructions to Allie, who straddled the larch, adjusting the towline around the trunk. When he heard Harper hollering, he glanced around, then narrowed his eyes and squinted past her.

On the far rise, a mile away, an orange truck winked in the sun. Harper could distantly hear the building roar of its engine as the Freightliner barreled toward them.

“Allie, get off the tree!” John shouted.

Allie cupped a hand to her ear and shook her head. Can’t hear you. Harper could barely hear John herself over the fire truck’s idling engine.

Harper jumped up on the running board beside the Fireman and rang the brass bell, hard and loud as she could. Allie read Harper’s face, leapt off the tree, and came running.

“In the truck, in the truck!” John shouted. “Quick, now, I need to back up.”

Allie snatched Nick off the ground, arms around his thighs, lifted him off the road, and hustled for the rear of the fire truck.

John gave them perhaps ten seconds to climb in and then he threw the fire truck into reverse, gunned the engine. The tree caught the truck and anchored it in place. The tires spun. Harper stood on the running board, clutching the open door with one hand and John’s arm with the other.

Jakob’s Freightliner was less than a mile away, sun glaring bleakly off the splintered windshield. Harper could hear the thin whine as it accelerated.

John applied more pressure and the tree rocked, turned over, and began to slide through the ash. Branches snapped and broke, littering the road.

A half mile away, Jakob’s snow-wing plow clipped the back end of the Walmart truck and tore the trailer to shreds, launched it up and out of his way with a metallic crash.

The tree caught on a fissure in the road, wouldn’t budge. John cursed. He put the truck in drive, rolled forward ten feet, and slammed it into reverse again. He ran straight back, tires shrieking. Harper held on, clenching her teeth, her pulse sick and fast, bracing herself for the jolt. The larch tree jounced up in the air and crashed back down, boughs shattering and flying, rolling far enough to one side to clear a lane.

“I’ll unhook us,” Harper said. She jumped down and ran around to the front of the truck.

“Hurry, Willowes,” the Fireman called to her. The sound of the Freightliner rose to a bellowing roar. “Get in, get in.”

Harper slipped the towline free from the front hitch and ran for the passenger side.

“Go!” she yelled, grabbing the passenger-side door and stepping onto the running board.

The fire truck lumbered forward. Thick branches cracked and shattered under the tires. By the time Harper pulled herself part of the way up into the passenger seat, he was doing nearly twenty miles per hour. He swung around the larch, building speed slowly but surely on a straight stretch of road that climbed to the top of a little rise.

The snow-wing plow struck the tree. The larch wasn’t swatted clear so much as pulverized, branches shattering in a cloud of gray powder and black fragments. The Freightliner screamed. Harper felt she was hearing Jakob’s true voice for the first time.

She had one knee up on the passenger seat when the Freightliner slammed into the rear of the truck. The impact dropped her. Her legs fell back out the open door, hung over the road. She got one arm through the open passenger-side window, hanging on to the door. Her other hand grabbed the seat.

“Harp!” the Fireman yelled. “Oh God, Harp, get in, get in!”

“Faster,” she told him. “Don’t you dare slow down, Rookwood.”

She kicked her feet but couldn’t seem to pull herself up into the seat. Too much of her was hanging out the passenger-side door and her center of gravity was too low, all her mass and weight dangling over the road.

Harper turned her head to see where the Freightliner was and in the same moment Jakob hit them again. Harper saw him then, behind the wheel: Jakob’s starved, bristly, scarred face. He did not smile or look angry. His head rolled on his neck as if he were dosed up with some heavy anesthetic.

“Will you for God’s sake get in the truck,” the Fireman said. He had one hand on the wheel but wasn’t looking out the windshield anymore. He had stretched all the way across the passenger seat to grab for her, extending his right hand with its taped wrist.

She swatted wildly for his arm, caught his fingers. He hauled at her, straining against the slipstream that wanted to vacuum her right out of the front seat. Her feet kicked in the air and then her knee found the footwell and she was in the cab.

The fire truck had been drifting while he dragged her up. They clipped a baked Honda Civic parked on the left-hand margin of the interstate. The Honda’s back end flipped into the air as if a mine had exploded under the rear tires. They sped past it, left it behind.

The Honda came down across the turnpike behind them with a rattling thud. The snowplow hit it an instant later and knocked it aside with a shriek, a sound of almost human fury, mingled with the crunch of imploding glass.

She scrambled into her seat, the passenger door still open and waving back and forth. Harper grabbed the black leather strap hanging above the door and stuck her head out, looking back.

“The fuck are you—” the Fireman asked.

She was full of song, a song of outrage and grief that had no words and no melody, and her hand ignited like a rag soaked in gasoline when touched with a match. Blue flame roared from it and she threw it, threw a softball of fire. It struck the windshield of the Freightliner, sprayed across the glass in a liquid fan of flame—and went out.

Harper threw fire again and again. A blast of blue flame snapped off the passenger-side mirror on the plow. A bolt struck the plow itself, briefly turning the snow-wing into a shallow trough filled with crackling white flame. The fourth time she cast flame, it hooked, like a curveball or a knuckler, and struck the front passenger-side tire. The wheel became a blazing hoop.

“Can you blind him?” the Fireman asked.

“What?” Harper asked.

“Blind him. Just blind him for ten seconds. Now, if you please. And for God’s sake put your seat belt on.”

The tendons stood out in John’s neck. His lips were drawn back in an appalled grimace. They were rushing up a hill toward some kind of overpass. The front of the fire truck thwacked aside a diamond-shaped orange sign, a warning. Harper didn’t have time to see what it said before the Fireman sent it spinning.

Harper didn’t bother with the belt. She couldn’t buckle in and still lean far enough out the door to throw flame directly at Jakob behind the steering wheel. She stuck her head into the boiling afternoon air and looked at the Freightliner. Jakob stared back through his cobwebbed windshield, the cracks running from a single bullet hole, just to the right of where he sat. Harper thought Jamie Close had come very close to shooting him through a lung that night in the church tower.

She took a deep breath and threw a fistful of fire. It hit the windshield at the bullet hole. Flame squirted outward, following the cracks, making a web of flame. A little fire spattered through the hole and Jakob flinched, turned his head away. Harper thought, for a moment, he shut his eyes.

Harper turned to see what lay ahead and saw the overpass was gone. BRIDGE OUT—that was what the orange safety sign had said. The overpass had collapsed in the center, leaving a chasm thirty feet across, rebar sticking out of shattered concrete. At the last instant it came to her that she still didn’t have her seat belt on.

John hammered his foot onto the brake and wrenched the wheel to the side, veering suddenly and sharply away from the drop.

It was almost too much, too hard. The fire truck slewed sideways, tires whining, a high ragged whine of blistering rubber. Blue smoke poured from the undercarriage. Harper could feel how the truck wanted to topple over. John had his whole body across the steering wheel, pulling against it. The truck slid sideways, shuddering with the force of a jackhammer. I am going to lose this baby, Harper thought.

The Freightliner clipped the rear end in passing The fire engine spun like a revolving door. For an instant they were staring back the way they had come and still sliding backward. Centrifugal force slung Harper against her door. If she had not closed it the moment before, she would’ve been hurled out. The steering wheel whirled so quickly in the Fireman’s hands that he let go of it with a cry of pain.

They were looking back in the direction of New Hampshire, still skating over the blacktop, so Harper didn’t see when the Freightliner blew past them and over the drop, fell thirty feet and hit the road below with a concussive crash that seemed to shake the world. It felt as if a bomb had gone off beneath them.

She still felt a little as if they were spinning, even after the fire truck stopped moving. She looked at John. He stared back at her with wide, bewildered eyes. He moved his lips. She believed he was saying her name, but wasn’t sure, couldn’t hear over the drone in her ears. Nick was right. Reading lips was hard.

He gestured with his hands, a little shooing motion. Get out. He was fighting with his seat belt.

She nodded, stepped down through the open door on trembling legs, climbed onto the running board, then lowered herself to the road. She let go of the door and looked toward the gap in the overpass and felt all the wind go out of her.

The back half of the fire engine hung over the edge of the chasm. It was tipping. As Harper watched, it seesawed back, the front tires rising into the air.

Harper just had time to catch her breath. She was getting ready to scream John’s name when the fire truck tilted over the side, into the gap, and took the Fireman with it.