“Mother Carol,” Michael said, from over by the door into the ward. For the first time, Harper heard it: the soft tone of reverence in his voice that suggested not just affection but obsession. “What do you want to do with the Fireman? I can’t keep him drugged forever. We’re already out of the Versed. I used the last of it.”
Carol lowered her head. The flame light of the oil lamp turned the sharp angles of her bare skull to bronze. “It can’t be up to me. I can’t think. My father always said when you can’t think you have to be quiet and still and listen for God’s small voice, but the only voice I hear is the one saying, Make this not true over and over. Make this not true. Make my daddy alive. My father wanted me to love and look after people, and I don’t know how to do that now. Whatever we do with the Fireman, it can’t be up to me.”
“Then it should be up to the camp,” Ben said. “You have to say something to them, Carol. They’re all out there and half of them are witless with fear. People are crying. People are saying this is it, this is the end of us. You need to talk to them. Tell them what you know. Put the story in front of them. If you can’t hear God’s small voice, you can at least hear theirs. All those voices got us through the last nine months and they can get us through tonight.”
Carol swayed, staring at the floor. Michael put his hand on her bare arm—she wore a silky pink pajama top with short sleeves, too thin for the cold night—and for a moment his thumb slid gently up her shoulder, a lover’s caress that no one seemed to observe but Harper herself.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll bring them before the camp.”
“In church?” Ben asked.
“No!” Carol cried, as if this were a somehow obscene suggestion. “I don’t want either of them ever going in there again. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
“What about Memorial Park?” Michael asked, his thumb moving gently up and down along the back of her arm again.
“Yes,” Carol said, her eyes wide and unblinking and unfocused, as if she had had a little hit of Versed herself. “That’s where we’ll gather. That’s where we’ll decide.”
3
In all the time they were talking, Harper felt awfully like she was climbing an endless flight of steps—climbing the steps up into the bell tower above the church, perhaps—rising steadily toward light and fresh air. Only those thousands of steps were in her head, and she was climbing back toward awareness and certainty. It was weary work and it gave her a headache. Her temples were full of splinters and needles. Her mouth was full of rock.
What came to her now was the necessity of holding on to her calm and saving whoever could be saved. Nick and Allie came first; then she would try to protect the rest of them, Renée and everyone else who had put their trust and hopes in the Fireman and Nurse Willowes. She would tell whatever lies made the most sense to limit their suffering. If she was allowed to speak at all, that is.
It was worse, in some ways, knowing that she was going to have to watch John die and she would not be allowed to die with him. They would keep her alive long enough to cut open her stomach and pull her baby slithering and red from her uterus. She would die then. They would let her bleed to death while her baby squalled.
The two Lookouts holding Harper’s arm turned her around to face the screen door.
People stood together along the muddy track that led past the cafeteria to the chapel and Memorial Park. Some of them held torches. Harper saw suddenly that the walk across the camp was going to be very bad. She had never been a praying woman—Jakob had ruined God for her—but she said some thing like a prayer to herself now. She wasn’t sure who it was directed to: Father Storey, perhaps. When she closed her eyes for a moment she saw his frowning, creased, loving face. She prayed for the strength to hold on to the best parts of herself, here at the end.
“Get a move on, bitch,” Jamie Close said, grabbing the nape of Harper’s neck and forcing her forward.
Harper’s legs were still loose and wobbling under her, and the Lookouts who clutched her arms half marched, half dragged her out into the crispness of the night. Gail and Gillian Neighbors, Harper saw. They looked as frightened as she felt. Harper wanted to tell them not to be afraid, they were doing fine, but of course she had the stone in her mouth and duct tape wrapped around her head.
The crowd shrank from her, as if she carried some contamination worse than Dragonscale. Children with dirty faces watched with a kind of wondering horror. A silver-haired woman in modish cat’s-eye glasses was weeping and shaking her head.
Norma Heald was the first to lunge forward, out of the mass of onlookers, and spit on her.
“Killer’s whore!” she screamed in a raggedy voice.
Harper flinched, staggered, and Gail squeezed her arm hard, steadying her. Harper shook her head, reflexively—no, not me, I didn’t—then made herself stop. For the next half hour she had to be a killer’s whore. She didn’t know what would happen to Nick after she was dead, but while she was alive, she had to do what she could.
“How could you do it!” screamed a beautiful young woman with a blotchy face. Ruth something? She wore a nightgown with little blue flowers on it, under a puffy orange parka. “How could you! He loved you! He would’ve died for you!”
Another thick, curded wad of spit landed in Harper’s short hair.
Ahead, Harper saw the massive, rude stones and that rough granite bench that she had thought looked like a place of sacrifice—a place where a white queen would slaughter a holy lion. The rest of the camp waited there.
As they came into the outer ring of the circle, Harper’s right leg gave completely and she went down on her knees. Gillian leaned over her, as if to whisper some encouragement.
“I don’t care if you are pregnant,” she said. “I hope you die here.” She squeezed Harper’s nose, shutting her nostrils. “Far as I’m concerned, you and the baby can both die.”
For one terrible moment Harper had no air. Her head was as empty as her lungs. Gillian could kill her as easily as she could flip a light switch. Then Jamie had Harper by the back of the neck again, hoisted her to her feet and shoved her on, smacked her across the ass to get her moving, and Harper could breathe again.
“Giddy-up!” Jamie shouted, and some men cheered.
Harper looked back and saw Michael walking between Ben and Carol. Michael had the Fireman over his shoulder, carrying him the way he might’ve carried a sack of oats. The Fireman had always seemed an adult and Michael had always seemed a child, but now Harper could see the redheaded boy was bigger than John, broader through the shoulders. It looked like there was something—burlap sacking, perhaps—pulled over the Fireman’s head.
Harper was marched to one of those tall, crooked stone plinths. A boy—the kid Harper thought of as Bowie—came forward carrying a yellow mop handle, and Harper wondered if she was about to take a clubbing. No. The Neighbors sisters yanked Harper’s arms straight back. The mop handle went across the far side of the stone column, and the girls used more of the duct tape to bind her wrists to it. When they were done, she was trapped, with her back to the jagged stone and her arms wrenched behind her.
Chuck Cargill and some other boys stood the Fireman up against one of the standing stones ten feet away. They pulled his arms back and used the tape to bind his wrists to a shovel braced against the far side of the rock. As soon as they let go, his legs gave out—he wasn’t conscious—and he sat down, his feet splayed apart and his chin resting against his chest.