کتاب 09-25

25

They left the lake behind and soon crossed back into another burn zone. Low clouds of smoke smothered the sky, and they were hot and sticky in their slickers. A wind came in spasms, blowing grit. Harper had ash in her mouth, ash in her eyes. Allie collected ash in her long eyelashes and eyebrows and short, bristly hair. With her pink, dust-irritated eyes, she very much looked like an albino. When they stopped to rest, Harper took John’s pulse. It was shallow and erratic. She crushed four more aspirin and force-fed them to him.

Late in the afternoon they came over a hill and looked down into more green, and this time it was on both sides of the road. On the right were swaying evergreens. On the left was a meadow of russet straw, bordered by blueberry bushes that were months from bearing fruit. A mile away they saw a white farmhouse, a barn, a gleaming steel silo.

As they neared the farmhouse, Harper saw a woman standing in the dooryard, shading her eyes with one hand and peering back at them. A screen door slapped shut. A dog barked.

They arrived at a fence of stripped, shining logs, with the farm buildings on the other side. A black retriever ran back and forth on a chain, flinging himself in their general direction and barking without cessation. His eyes shone with a jolly lunacy.

A white bedsheet hung over the fence, one corner flapping in the breeze. Words had been written on it in Sharpie.

WE ARE HEALTHY. PLEASE GO ON. MACHIAS, 126 MI.

GOD LOVE AND KEEP YOU. HELP AHEAD.

“These fucking people,” Allie whispered.

“These fucking people might have children,” Harper said. “And maybe they don’t want them to burn to death.”

“Burn to death!” John Rookwood shouted, cawing like a crow. He began to hack, a dry, wrenching cough, twisting violently on his stretcher.

The woman continued to watch them from her front step. She looked like she had walked out of another century, in her ankle-length dress and blue denim blouse, a kerchief holding back her graying brown hair.

Paper cups had been set along the fencepost. They contained what looked like orange Gatorade.

Nick picked it up, sniffed at it, glanced at Harper for permission. She nodded that it was all right to drink.

“What if it’s poison?” Allie asked.

“There’s easier ways to kill us,” Harper said. “They could just shoot us. Who wants to bet that man watching from the second floor has a gun?”

Allie darted a surprised look back at the farmhouse. A lantern-jawed man with raven-black hair—graying at the temples, swept back from his high brow—regarded them from a window above and to the right of the front door. His gaze was dispassionate and unblinking. Sniper eyes.

The woman watched them drink but didn’t speak. Harper thought the orange stuff might be Tang. Whatever it was, it was sweet and clean and made her feel almost human.

“Thank you,” Harper said.

The woman nodded.

Harper was about to go on, then paused and leaned over the fence. “Our friend is sick. Very sick. He needs antibiotics. Do you have antibiotics?”

The woman’s forehead wrinkled in thought. She looked at the Fireman, strapped to the travois, and back at Harper. She took a step toward the fence and opened her mouth to speak and the window on the second floor banged open.

“Keep walkin’,” the man called, and Harper was right. He had a rifle, although he didn’t point it at them, just cradled it to his chest. “You take one step our side of the fence, you won’t take another. There’s a place for people like you up north.”

“One of them is sick,” the woman called up.

Her husband laughed. “All of them is sick.”