The smoke in the steeple was fragrant, smelled of baking pinecones.
“John,” she said, seized by a sudden idea. “What if we turned back? What if we tried to go through the flames. The Dragonscale would protect us, wouldn’t it?”
“Not from gunfire, I’m afraid. Besides, Allie wouldn’t come out at all. She doesn’t know how to control the ’scale like I do—or like you. And Nick is unconscious, so I don’t know—but look, if you want to try it, then let me get upstairs first. We’ll see if we can’t make you some cover. You might—with all the confusion—” His eyes brightened as he came alive to the idea.
“No,” Harper said. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking about Allie or Nick. I’m not going anywhere without them.”
They were on the uppermost landing now. A door stood half open, looking onto dark, smoke-filled night. He gripped her shoulders and squeezed. “You have a child to think about.”
“More than one, Mr. Rookwood,” she said.
He stared at her fondly and kissed her and she kissed him back.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose we better make a fight of it. Spit spot, out we go.”
“Out we go, Nurse Willowes,” he said.
The bell tower was an open well, with a catwalk of pine planks going around all four sides of the square hole. The copper bell, stained a dignified green with age, hung over the drop. It bonged whenever it was struck by a bullet from below. White stone balusters supported a waist-high marble rail. Lead cracked off rock, making small clouds of white powder.
Harper did not expect to step over a corpse, but there was a dead boy flung across the last couple of stairs. He was facedown, with a red hole in the back of his chambray shirt. The Lookout who had been on watch in the steeple that night, Harper supposed. He had missed the signal from the bus, down at the end of the road, had been too preoccupied with the stoning in progress below, but he had more than paid for his lack of attention. Harper bent to feel for a pulse. His neck was already cold. She left him, helped John past him, and rose into the night.
Allie sat on the floor, below the railing, with her brother in her arms. Both of them looked as if they had crawled arm over arm through a particularly filthy abattoir.
Jamie was on her knees, the dead sentry’s rifle resting on the stone railing. The gun went off with a flat, snapping sound. She cursed, slid back the bolt, grabbed for a bullet in a battered cardboard box at her knee.
Harper had crouched instinctively as she came into the open air. Now she lifted her head to take in a panorama of ruin. From here she could see it all, had a God’s-eye view of the camp in its entirety.
The Memorial Park stood just beyond the chapel’s front steps. From here, that circle of barbaric standing rocks looked even more like Stonehenge. A half dozen men had fanned out among the boulders and plinths for cover. One of them, a scrawny guy in thick, black-framed Buddy Holly glasses, was crouched behind the blackened altar with what appeared to be an Uzi. He grinned, his face—under a bushy white-boy Afro—filthy with soot.
Some perverse trick of the air currents carried his voice to Harper. She knew his cat screech right away, remembered it well from the afternoon the Marlboro Man had almost found her hiding in her house.
“This is the real shit!” Marty screamed. The gun stammered in his hands. “This is the real commando shit right here!”
To the north was the bare, muddy expanse of the soccer field and the overturned Hummer. A pair of black pickups had parked themselves out there, to cover the double doors that led out of the basement. Through the haze it was hard to tell how many men were in the flatbeds, but Harper saw a steady pop and blink of gunfire, going off like camera flashes. The Freightliner lumbered down the hill, moving to join the others on the north side of the chapel. Maybe Jakob hoped the basement bulkhead would fly open and some folks would make a desperate run for it and he’d have something to do with his plow.
It was harder to see to the south. There was a stretch of grass as wide and even as a two-lane avenue, in the space between the church and the forest. Harper knew the Marlboro Man was down there, in his big silver Intimidator, but she could only barely glimpse the top of the cab by craning her head. It was parked too close to the building to see it well.
A black and filthy smog poured from below, seeping out from under the eaves and boiling through the open hole in the bell tower just exactly the way it would’ve come streaming out of a chimney. A sickly firelight throbbed within the churning smoke. Harper suspected the tower was only dimly visible from below, maybe the only thing they had going for them.
All that smoke mounted into a soaring cloud bank that spread to the east, back down the hill toward the water. Harper couldn’t see most of the sky, the cloud smothering the stars and the moon.
The roof was fifteen feet below the railing of the tower and it was a steeply banked surface of black slate. Harper saw herself leaping, falling, hitting feet-first, her ankles rupturing, crashing to her hip with a glassy crack, sliding straight down the side of the roof, and a tearing inside as her uterus came apart and—
“Fuck that,” she said to herself.
She crawled over to be next to Allie.
“How’s my mouf?” Allie asked.
“Not too bad,” Harper said.
“Fuck you it isn’t. I love it. I’m punk rock now. I always wanted to be punk rock.” Allie feathered a hand back through Nick’s hair. “I tried to do the right thing at the end, Ms. Willowes. Maybe I flunked the exam, but at least I did pretty good with the extra credit.”
“Exam in what?”
“Basic humanity,” Allie said, blinking at tears. “Will you hold my hand? I’m scared.”
Harper took her hand and squeezed.
The Fireman worked his way around the catwalk to the south-facing side of the turret, to be next to Jamie.
“Fuckers in the Silverado,” Jamie said. “They’re too close to the side of the building. I can’t get a bead on them. If we could drive them off, we could hang a rope—”
“What rope?” the Fireman asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe we make a rope out of our clothes. We get into the trees. Run for the road. Steal a car.” Her voice was hurried and distracted, leaping from one improbability to another. “I know people in Rochester. They’ll hide us. But first we need to drive off that truck.”
The Fireman nodded, wearily. “I might be able to do something about them.”
But when he tried to stand, he swayed, dangerously. Harper saw his eyelids flutter, as if he were an ingénue in a 1940s musical comedy trying to look kissable. For a moment it was all too easy to imagine him dipping backward and falling over the waist-high iron railing around the hole in the center of the tower, dropping away into the smoky dark.
Jamie caught his elbow before he could topple. Harper cried out, let go of Allie’s hand, and scrambled around the catwalk toward him. By the time she reached him, he had sunk back to one knee.
She touched his cheek, felt clammy sweat.
“Is the bell droning?” he muttered thickly.
“No,” she said. “Not at the moment.”
“Christ. That sound must be in my head, then.” He pressed the balls of his palms to his temples. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Don’t try to get up.”
“We need to drive them back if we’re going to have any chance of getting down from here.”
“Stay down. Get your wind. You’re no good to anyone if you pass out.”
She let go of his hands and stood, pouring all her heart into a wordless song. Her right hand was a scimitar of flame. Get a spoonful of this, motherfuckers.