کتاب 09-23

23

They splashed through a soupy, Dijon-colored fog, beneath trees festooned with streamers of dirty mist. They walked north into it, and by midmorning the sun was no more than a faint brown disk burning a rusty hole through the pall. It was impossible to see more than a few yards into the miasma. Harper spotted what she thought was a hulking motorcycle leaning against the ruin of a barbed-wire fence. It turned out to be a dead cow, its blackened skin fissured to show the ripe, spoiled flesh beneath, its empty eye sockets buzzing with flies. Renée staggered past it, coughing, holding her throat, trying not to gag.

It was the first and last time Harper heard anyone cough all day. Even the Fireman’s breathing was long and slow and regular. Although her eyes and nostrils burned, she might’ve been breathing fresh alpine air for all that the roiling smoke bothered her.

The idea occurred to her that they were breathing poison, had crossed into an environment roughly as hospitable to human life as Venus. But it didn’t drop them, and Harper turned that thought over in her mind. It was the Dragonscale, of course, doing its thing. She had known for a while that it converted the toxins in smoke to oxygen. This, though, led to another notion, and she called for Allie to stop.

Allie held up, flushed and filthy. Harper knelt beside the drag sled, unbuttoned John’s shirt, and put her ear to his chest.

She still heard a dry and gritty rasp she didn’t like, but if it was no better, it was also no worse. He was smiling and, in sleep, almost looked his old, calm, wry self. The smoke around them was as good as an oxygen tent. It wouldn’t make his pneumonia go away—the best chance for him now was a course of antibiotics—but it might buy him time.

In the early afternoon, though, they dragged him clear of the haze and went on beneath a clear, cloudless, hateful blue sky, the sun throwing blinding flashes off every piece of metal and every sooty fragment of glass. By the time they finally got off the road, John was worse than Harper had ever seen him. His fever returned, a sweat springing up on his cheeks and in his gray, depressed temples. His tongue kept flicking out of his mouth, looking swollen and colorless. His teeth chattered. He spoke to people who weren’t there.

“The Incas were right to worship the sun, Father,” the Fireman said to Father Storey. “God is fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They’ve all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their passing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, or the Constitution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold.”

They settled in an airplane hangar beside a small private landing strip. The hangar, a blue metal building with a curved roof, didn’t have any planes in it, but there was a black leather couch in one office. Harper decided they ought to bungee him down to it, so he didn’t fall off in the night.

As she was binding him down, his rolling, baffled eyes locked in on her face. “The truck. I saw the truck this afternoon. You ought to leave me. I’m slowing you down and the plow is coming.”

“There’s no way,” Harper said, and brushed his sweaty hair back from his brow. “I’m not going anywhere without you. It’s you and me, babe.”

“You and me, babe,” he repeated, and flashed a heartbreaking smile. “How ’bout it?”

After he drifted off into fitful slumber, they collected together by the open hangar doors. Allie broke up a bookshelf with a hammer and Nick made a campfire from the shelves and piles of flight manuals. He ignited the whole mess with one pass of his burning right hand. Renée turned up some Dasanis and dried pasta in a cupboard. Harper held a pot over the flames, waiting for the water to boil. Harper’s hand extended straight into their cook fire, the blaze licking around her knuckles. Once you had mastered Dragonscale, you could skip the oven mitts.

“If he dies,” Allie said, “I quit. I don’t care about Martha Quinn’s island. I don’t even like eighties music.”

The fire snapped and popped.

“Here’s the part where you promise me he won’t die,” Allie said.

Harper didn’t say a word for ten minutes, and then all she told them was, “Pasta’s done.”