“Go with Jesus and the holy host?” she said. “I thought that’s what we were trying to avoid.”
“The fire crew,” he said, his eyes large in his bony face. “We’ll drive right across the bridge and into Maine with them. They’ll wave us right through with the others.” He turned his head and met her gaze. “They’re leaving in two days. We can be on Martha Quinn’s island by this time next week.”
10
When it was time, John woke her with a touch, his knuckles lightly brushing her cheek.
She rubbed her face, sat up on her elbows. “I don’t—what? Isn’t it too early? I thought they weren’t moving out until noon on Friday.”
Allie sat up on the floor. Nick was asleep on his side next to her. She yawned hugely into the back of her hand. “Is it noon?”
“Is it Friday?” Harper asked.
“Yes to Friday, no to noon. Only about eight. But if you come outside, you can hear them. I told you we’d have plenty of advance warning when they were ready to go. Why do you think so many little boys want to be firemen when they grow up? So they can blast the siren. A dozen trucks were bound to make enough noise to wake the whole city.”
He wasn’t kidding. Harper heard them even before she stepped out into the smoky, slightly chill morning air: the whoop and shriek of competing sirens, going off less than half a mile away. One would blurp and cry out for a few moments, then go silent, and another would take its place. John had predicted they would mass up at the central fire station, just beyond the town offices, and only a short jog down the road from the cemetery.
“How much of a rush are we in?” she asked the Fireman.
“We don’t want to cross the bridge ahead of them, obviously,” he said. “But we wouldn’t want to be too far behind them, either. Come along. Let’s get the kids in the truck.” As if they were old hands at parenting and were referring to their own children and a planned drive of some distance to see disagree able relatives. Harper supposed Allie and Nick were their children now.
Renée was already at the back of the truck, opening the wooden cabinets located above the rear fender. The engine had rolled out of a Studebaker factory in 1935, forty-eight feet long, as red as an apple, and as sleek as a rocket in a Buck Rogers strip. It would always look splendidly like the past’s idea of the future, and the future’s idea of the past. The cabinets were full of filthy fire hose, rows of steel fire extinguishers, heaps of coats, and ranks of boots, extending away into a cavernous darkness. It seemed perfectly possible that Narnia might be found somewhere at the back of one of those compartments. Renée lifted Nick up and he scrambled in.
“Get under the hose,” Renée told him, and then tsk-ed herself for trying to talk to him. “Harper, will you tell him to bury himself under the hoses?”
Harper didn’t need to. He was already at it. Allie leapt up on the chrome bumper, scrambled in beside him, and began to help, artfully arranging coils of hose on top of him.
“This is almost exactly how Gil got out of jail,” Renée said.
“Where do you think John got the idea?” Harper asked. “Gil’s still helping us, you know.”
“Yes,” Renée said and squeezed Harper’s hand. “I’ll get my things, such as they are. And the radio. Don’t leave without me.”
Harper loaded the Portable Mother in the right rear compartment, setting it behind three rows of chrome fire extinguishers, next to a bag of groceries. There was space back there for Renée and Harper to cuddle together out of sight, beneath a mover’s blanket.
And the Fireman—the Fireman would drive.
“I hate that part of the plan,” she said to him.
The Fireman was on the running board, next to the passenger side of the cab. He had a bucket of coals in his hands. He set it next to the exhaust pipe, which protruded into the air from a ledge behind the cab. John leaned in and she saw the tip of his pointer finger light up, turning red and transparent—Harper thought inevitably of E.T.—brightening until it hurt to look at. Sparks spat as he welded the pail to the outside of the exhaust pipe with his finger.
“What part of it?” he asked, absently.
“The part where you try to drive this thing across the bridge. They’re hunting you. There are people who have seen you, who know what you look like.”
It had even crossed Harper’s mind that the whole thing was only a ploy to draw them out, this well-advertised caravan of fire trucks heading to Maine to fight the fires there. The more she considered it, the more she thought it was quite possible they were driving into a trap and would all be dead by teatime.
In the end, what made up her mind to risk it was a series of contractions that lasted half an hour and made her womb feel like a mass of swiftly hardening concrete. At one point, the pain was so sharp and so rhythmic, and her breath was so fast and short, she was sure the baby was coming. In that precise moment of near-total certainty, the contractions began to abate, and soon they had passed entirely, leaving her in a nasty sweat, with trembling hands. Two weeks—only two weeks till her due date, give or take a few days.
What they were doing now was a desperate lunge, like soldiers in the First World War heaving themselves out of a trench and sprinting into no-man’s-land, never mind that the last four waves of soldiers to go over the top had been cut to pieces. But they could not stay, because you could not raise a baby in a trench.
It wasn’t just a matter of safely delivering. It was about what happened in the minutes, hours, and days afterward. Especially if the boy didn’t have the ’scale. It had been months since she had last seen any data, but back in the days when she still had Internet, there were some numbers to suggest as many as 80 percent of the children of the infected were born healthy. The little guy was going to be pink and clean, and the only way to make sure he remained that way was to find someone healthy who could take him away . . . a thought she refused to give close consideration. First she had to find a place she could bring the baby into the world. Then she would work out the next part, locating a home for her uninfected child. Presumably the doctors on Martha Quinn’s island were not carrying ’scale. Perhaps one of them would take the infant. Perhaps her baby could even remain on the island with her!
No. That was probably too much to hope for. She was determined to accept whatever would be best for the child, even though she thought that meant it was likely the day of his birth would be the last time she ever saw him. She had already decided that when the moment came, she would handle it like Mary Poppins. She told herself the child was only hers until the west wind blew . . . and when the gale came, she would calmly open her umbrella and float away, leaving him in the care of someone loving and trustworthy and wise, if such a thing could be managed. She could not have him, but he could have her, in a sense. The Portable Mother would go with him.
“I don’t think Nick knows how to handle a vehicle with a standard transmission. Renée has never driven anything this big. Allie is too young. You are too pregnant. Besides—the fuckah they’re lookin for talks like Prince fackin’ Charles, not like Don fackin’ Lewiston,” the Fireman told her, his vowels going long, his R’s disappearing, so that all at once he sounded as if he were from Manchester in Maine, not Manchester in the United Kingdom. “I can sound like I’m from around here for a few minutes, long enough to get us through the checkpoint.”
“What about your wrist?” Harper asked, touching his right arm. The wrist was still bound in filthy tape.
“Oh, it’s well enough to use a gearstick. Don’t worry yourself, Willowes. I’ll get us through the checkpoint. You forget how much I enjoy performing.”