کتاب 09-33

33

John touched his navel. His hand was still aglow and it seemed he was bleeding light, that his palm was a saucer filling with gold. He was full of gold and now it was coming out of him. A wave struck the side of the boat—it felt like they had slammed into a rock, it jolted them so hard—and John dropped ungracefully to the deck.

Allie was trying to scream. Harper could see her at the edge of her vision, Allie’s mouth open, the tendons standing in her neck, so it looked like she was choking. If she was actually making a sound, Harper didn’t know, couldn’t tell. She couldn’t hear anything except the deep, hard wallop of her own pulse in her ears.

Harper sank to one knee, gripping John’s shoulder, turning him a little. The dirty water slopping around the deck was already turning red while his blood pumped into it. His face was white with anguish and shock. She felt for the wound, thinking Pressure, stop the bleeding first, then try and assess the damage.

“Oh,” he said, his voice a faint gasp. “Oh! I’ve been shot right through.”

“Goddamn it,” Jim said. “Now there’s blood all over the deck.”

“John,” she said. “Oh, John. John, my love. Please stay here. Stay with me. Please don’t go.”

“Get away from him. Stand up and take your vest off or I’ll shoot you, too. I’d rather not. Please. It’s better in the water. Easier,” Jim said, but she wasn’t listening.

The blood dripped into John’s palm, sizzled, and smoked, smelled like a burning frying pan. Harper wasn’t crying, but he was.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was so self-important. So full of myself. So fucking smug. I’m seeing it all and I was so—so desperate for attention—so desperate to impress you. Oh, Harper. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better man. I wish I was better.”

“You are perfect. You are the most perfect thing. You make me happy. You make me laugh. I never laughed in all my life like I laughed with you. You don’t have to apologize for anything.”

A weak smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Maybe one thing. I apologize I didn’t cook that half-wit with the gun before he shot me. But better late than never.” Gold rings flashed in his irises, his eyes brightening like steel coils with an electric current passing through them.

The hand, hidden under his body, began to leap with red flame.

“Do me one favor,” he said. “Please. Promise me one thing.”

“Yes, my love. Anything. Anything for you, John.”

“Live,” he said.

Harper shoved herself away from him. He lifted his chin and opened his mouth and Jim screamed “What the fuck!” and a jet of yellow flame poured in a great hot blast from the Fireman’s open mouth. Jim raised one arm. Flame spattered over the yellow rubber of his suit, blistering the material. He reached to steady himself against the doorframe. The boat lunged over another swell and Jim staggered and waved his gun wildly, pointing it into the cabin. It went off with a harsh blam. The skipper ducked. A window shattered.

The armed sentry shouldered past Jim, lifting his assault rifle. Harper was already rising from her knee. The boat took another lurch and flung her into the soft, warm mass of Renée Gilmonton.

The Fireman ignited, all at once, with a soft, deep whump, as if someone had thrown a match on a pile of leaves soaked in lighter fluid. He was a roaring bed of flame, a nest, and a bird began to rise from it. A great red prehistoric thing with vast and spreading wings. The assault rifle thundered, splintering the deck.

The boat slewed across a high wave. Allie grabbed Nick by the vest and stepped onto the cushioned seat and leapt. Harper had her arms around Renée and carried her over the side and as she lifted she had a sense of something tearing in her groin, in her abdomen. A man was screaming behind her. A yellow light was rising.

She hit black water, so cold it burned, it was like dying, it was like spontaneous combustion. A hundred thousand silver bubbles spun around her in a frantic whirl. She came up gasping, caught a mouthful of salt water and began to choke.

A blazing bird of fire, with eyes of blowtorch blue and the wingspan of a single-engine airplane, opened its terrible beak and seemed to scream. A man who wore a shroud of flame twisted madly before it. The pilot’s cabin was full of fire. Gray smoke boiled from the destruction. The boat was still moving, leaving them behind, already almost a hundred feet away.

Another wave slapped Harper in the face, blinding her, deafening her. Her vest carried her up and down in the tormented water. She rubbed her hands in her eyes and cleared her vision just in time to see The Maggie Atwood shatter, as the flames reached what must’ve been a propane tank. There was a flash of white light and a blast of concussive sound that struck Harper like a blow, knocking her head back. She would discover her nose bleeding a few moments later.

A blinding tower of fire rose into the sky from the immolated wreck of the boat, and a bird was hatched from that column of fire, a bird as big as God. It spread its wings and lifted into a sky of roiling black cloud, drew a great red circle of light in the sky, spinning above them. To Harper, it seemed magnificent and dreadful, a thing barbaric and triumphant.

It circled once, and again, and although it was high above them, Harper could feel its heat on her upturned face. Then it banked—banked and began to sail away, giving its wings one slow, dreadful flap, leaving them and the sinking, burning, hissing wreck.

Harper was watching it go when she noticed her thighs weren’t as cold as they should’ve been. There was a sticky, unnatural warmth around them.

Her water had broken.