In a bellowing, grief-choked voice, Norma shouted: “O come let us adore him! O come let us adore him! O come let us adore him!” It was more than an exhortation. It sounded almost like a threat.
Another Molotov cocktail crashed against the south side of the church. Flame leapt up a section of wall. Two men ran at it and began to beat at it with coats.
“It’s over,” Harper said to the Fireman. “It’s all over.”
Carol walked slowly toward the altar and as she waded into the crowd they rose to their feet and reached for her. Pews shrieked as people pushed them aside. They clambered over and past one another to get closer to Carol.
The worshippers reached for her and sang with her and many gazed upon Carol with adoration. One little boy hurried along in her wake, hopping and clapping his hands in an inexplicable fit of excitement, as if he were being led to the gates of an amusement park he had long dreamed of visiting. Carol squeezed hands as she made her way forward, not unlike a politician making her way through a crowd, sometimes leaning over to brush someone’s knuckles with her lips, but going on with her song all the while. She loved them, of course. It was a sick, spoiled sort of love—it was, Harper thought, not so different from the way Jakob had loved her—but it was real and it was all she had left to give them.
Bullets drummed into the wooden doors behind them, snapped Harper out of her trance. She turned the Fireman and half pulled, half carried him into the safety of the stone archway that opened into the stairwell. Bullets zipped and whined, chipping the flagstones on the floor behind them. Allie squeezed in beside them, holding her brother in her arms.
“Any ideas?” she asked, without a trace of panic.
“There might be a way out across the roof,” the Fireman said.
Harper knew that once they climbed into the bell tower, there would be no coming back down—not for her, anyway. She would not be escaping across the top of the chapel. It was too high. If she dropped off the steep pitch of the roof she would pulverize her legs and bring on a miscarriage.
But she didn’t say this to either of them. The thought was in her mind that Allie, at least—nimble, athletic Allie—might be able to get across the roof and down to a gutter, hang herself off the side and drop. There would be lots of smoke and noise, maybe enough to give her a chance to reach the woods and cover.
“Yes,” Harper said, but still she hesitated, stayed where she was, craning her neck to see into the nave.
The voices of all who remained rose in sweet, agonized song. They sang and they shone. Their eyes glowed as blue as blowtorches. A little girl with a shaved head stood on a pew, singing at the top of her lungs. The Dragonscale on her bare arms was glowing so bright it rendered the arms themselves almost translucent, so Harper could see the shadows of bones through her skin.
Norma was the first to ignite. She stood behind the altar, swaying in front of the cross, booming out the words of the song. Her big, homely face was pink and shiny with sweat and she opened her mouth and cried out: “Sing in exultation!” The inside of her throat was full of light.
Norma drew a deep breath for the next line. A yellow blast of flame gushed from her mouth. Her head snapped back. Her throat was red and straining as if with some terrible effort. Then her neck began to blacken, while dark smoke boiled from her nostrils. The Dragonscale on the wobbling meat of her bare arms was a livid poisonous shade of deepest red. She wore a black flower-print dress roughly the size of a pup tent. Blue flames raced up the back of it.
Gail choked, stumbled, knocked into the little boy who had been skipping up and down. She waved one hand, back and forth, through the air, as if to clear gnats away from her face. The third time she did it, Harper saw her arm was on fire.
“What’s happening to them?” cried Jamie, who had joined them in the wide stone archway.
“It’s a chain reaction,” the Fireman said. “They’re all going down together.”
“Glory in the highest!” they sang. Some of them, anyway. Others had begun to scream. The ones who weren’t burning.
When Carol went up in flames, she was at the center of the throng, dozens of worshippers reaching in to touch her. And all at once she was a white rippling pillar of fire, her head thrown back and her arms spread out as if to embrace an invisible lover. She went up as if she had been doused in kerosene. She did not cry out—it was too fast.
Bullets zinged and whistled through the nave, cutting down people at random on the outer edge of the crowd. Harper saw a teenager, a slender black kid, slap a hand to his brow, as if he had just realized he had forgotten to bring his textbook to class. When he dropped the hand, she saw a hole through the center of his forehead.
A teenage girl doubled over, grabbing herself, her whole back on fire. The lanky kid who looked like David Bowie had sunk to his knees at the back of the crowd, his head bowed as if in prayer, his hands pressed together. His head was on fire, a black match at the center of a bright yellow flame. A little girl ran up and down the aisle, flapping both of her burning hands in the air and shrieking for her mother. Her ponytail was a blue scarf of flame.
“Oh, John,” Harper said and turned her face away. “Oh, John.”
He had her by the arm, and he drew her on into the smoky gloom of the stairwell, and they began to climb together, away from shouts, and laughter, and song, but most of all, away from the screams, which rose together in a final wrenching chorus, a last act of harmony.
10
Harper had wondered what it must’ve been like to be in one of the stairwells at the Twin Towers on the day the planes struck, what people felt as they made their way blindly down the steps through the smoke. She had wondered about it all over again the day men and women began to leap from the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, in the first weeks of widespread infection. In those days of conflagration, it happened again and again—the high building in flames, people inside hurrying to escape the fire at their backs, trying to find a way out, knowing all the while that the only exit might be a last jump and the giddy silent rush of falling: a final chance to snatch at a moment of peace.
Most of all, she feared panic. She feared losing possession of herself. But as they made their way up, Harper felt almost businesslike, focused on the next step, then the step after. That, at least, was a reason for gladness. She was less terrified of dying than she was of being stripped of her personality, of turning into an animal in the slaughterhouse, unable to hear her own thoughts over the clanging alarm of desperation.
Harper climbed with the Fireman holding on to her for support, stopping now and then when he got dizzy or when she needed to catch her breath. They climbed like the elderly, going one step, pausing, going another. He was too weak to hurry and she was having contractions. Her womb felt like a stone, a hard block at the center of her.
Jamie Close was already in the tower. She had run past them a minute before. Already, Harper could hear the occasional crack of a rifle from above.
Allie was a little ahead of them, carrying Nick in her arms. Nick’s chin rested on her shoulder, and Harper could see his face quite clearly. He wore a red mask of blood, his scalp torn open where he had been kissed by the Humvee, but his expression was peaceful, drowsing. Once he opened his left eye to peer at her, but then he closed it again.
“Almost there,” the Fireman said. “Almost there.”
And what would they do when they got there? Wait for the fire to reach them, Harper assumed. Or be shot from below. But she didn’t share this thought with him. She was grateful for his closeness, for his arm at her waist and his head on her shoulder.
“I’m glad I fell in love with you, John Rookwood!” she said to him, and kissed his neck.
“Oh, I am, too,” he said.
Behind them, the singing went on, although now screams threatened to drown it out. The screams, and the laughter. Someone was laughing very loudly.