They went down into Biddeford. It looked as if it had been shelled. Black chimneys stood amid collapsed brick walls. A line of baked telephone poles stood in a long file, looking for all the world like crosses awaiting sacrifice. Southern Maine Medical rose above it all, a stack of blocks the color of obsidian, smoke still fuming from the interior. Biddeford was an empire of ruin.
In sign, Nick asked, “Do you think most of the people who lived here got away?”
“Yes,” Harper told him. “Most of them got away.” It was easier to tell a lie with your hands than when you had to actually say a thing.
They left Biddeford behind.
“I thought we’d see refugees,” Harper said. “Or patrols.”
“As we head north, I suspect the smoke will intensify, and other toxins in the air. Not to mention all the ash. The air could turn poisonous very quickly. Not for us, mind you. I think the Dragonscale in our lungs will look after us. But for normals.” He smiled faintly. “Humankind may be on the way out, but we have the good fortune to be part of whatever is next.”
“Yay,” Harper said, looking at the acres of waste. “Look at our good fortune. The meek shall inherit the Earth. Not that anyone would want what’s left of it.”
The Fireman popped on the FM band and twiddled through a haze of static, past muted, distant voices, a boys choir reaching for a high note in an echoing cathedral, and then—through the haze—the sound of a leaping, almost goofy bass line, and a man bemoaning that his lover was determined to run away, run away. The signal was faint and came through a maddening crackle and pop, but the Fireman leaned forward, listening with wide eyes, then looking at Harper.
Harper stared back, then nodded.
“Do I hear what I think I hear?” the Fireman asked.
“Sure sounds like the English Beat to me,” Harper replied. “Keep driving, Mr. Rookwood. Our future awaits us. We’ll get there sooner or later.”
“Who knew the future was going to sound so much like the past?” he said.
14
A couple of miles north of Biddeford, the Fireman took his foot off the gas, and the truck began to slow.
“To be fair,” he said, “we had almost forty miles of smooth sailing, which was more than I ever expected to get.”
An eighteen-wheeler was parked across the northbound lanes. Like everything they had seen for the last hour, it looked as if a bomb had gone off near it. The cab was a baked shell, burnt down to the frame. The container on back was blacked with soot, but through the filth, Harper could dimly see the word WALMART.
Above the corporate logo, someone had wiped away the grit and spray-painted a message in dull red letters:
PORTLAND GONE
ROAD WIPED OUT NO THRUWAY
HEALTHY? REPORT TO DEKE HAWKINS IN PROUTS NECK
INFECTED WILL BE SHOT ON SITE
GOD FORGIVE US, GOD SAVE YOU
The Fireman opened the door and stepped onto the running board. “I have a tow chain. I may be able to tug that lorry aside. Doesn’t look like we’d need much room to get around it. Maybe we should feed the pail, while we’re stopped.”
Nick followed Harper around to the rear of the fire truck, to check on Allie and Renée. Allie was in the road, reaching up to help Renée down over the bumper. Renée looked almost as gray as the landscape. She clutched her cat to her breast with one arm.
“How are you holding up, old woman?” Harper asked.
“You won’t hear me complain,” she said.
“No shit,” Allie said. “Who could hear anything over that cat yowling?”
“Our little hitchhiker has decided he doesn’t like riding in coach,” Renée said.
“He can sit up front, then,” Harper said. “And you can sit with him.”
Renée looked battered and fatigued, but she smiled at this. “Not on your life.”
“You aren’t riding in back, Ms. Willowes,” Allie said. “We hit one of those deep potholes, your baby will probably come flying out. Projectile delivery.”
Renée blanched. “That’s delicious imagery.”
“Isn’t it? Who wants to eat?” Allie said, reaching into one of the back compartments for the bag of groceries.
Harper carried a can of peaches and a plastic spoon around to the front of the truck, thinking John would want to share with her. She found him standing on the hood of the big eighteen-wheeler, shading his eyes with one hand and gazing up the highway.
“How does it look up ahead?” she asked.
He sat and slid off the hood. “Not good. Big chunks of the road are missing and I see an absolutely massive tree across it half a mile away. Also, things are still smoking.”
“That’s crazy. This fire is—what? Eight months old? Nine?”
“It won’t die out as long as there’s anything still to burn. All that ash is a protective blanket for the coals beneath.” He had slipped out of his turnout jacket and stood in a stained undershirt. It was midday and heat wobbled off the blacktop. “We’ll drive until we can’t drive anymore. Then we leave the truck and go on foot.” He looked at her belly for a moment. “I won’t pretty it up for you. It’s going to be hot, and we could be limping along for days.”
She had tried not to allow herself fantasies of reaching Martha Quinn’s island that night—had tried not to imagine a bed made up with fresh sheets or a hot shower or the smell of soap—but hadn’t entirely been able to help herself. It dispirited her, to hear it was going to be longer and harder to get there than she had hoped, than they had all hoped. But no sooner had she registered her own disappointment than she decided to set it aside. They were on their way and they were out of New Hampshire. That was good enough for today.
“What?” she said. “You think I’m the first pregnant lady who had to do some walking? Here. Eat a peach. It’ll give you something to do with that mouth of yours besides make dour speeches and grim predictions. Do you know you are drop-dead sexy until the minute you start to talk? Then you turn into a colossal ass.”
He opened his mouth for a plastic spoonful of peach. She followed it with a long kiss that tasted of golden syrup. When she broke away from him he was smiling.
Nick, Renée, and Allie began to clap, standing in a line behind them. Harper showed them her middle finger and kissed him again.
15
John and Allie strapped a tow chain to the hitch at the front of the fire engine and led the other end to the eighteen-wheeler. While they were hooking the line to the rear of the semi, Harper had a look inside the long Walmart container. The interior smelled of burnt metal and burnt hair, but there was a stack of wooden pallets against the back wall. Harper dragged one out, to see if she could break it up and feed pieces to the bucket of coals.
Renée brought her a crowbar and an ax. Harper leaned the pallet against the fire-blanched guardrail and began to whack at it. Chunks of pine splintered and flew.
Renée squinted into the bright afternoon at the bucket welded behind the cab.
“I’ve been meaning to ask—” she said.
“Probably just as well not to.”
“Okay.”
Harper carried an armful of shattered wood to the truck, climbed on the running board, and looked inside the pail. Coals pulsed. Harper fed pieces of wood, one by one. Each stick ignited in a fluttering hiss of white fire as it went in. Harper had jammed in four or five sticks, then paused, holding another stick over the pail, trying to figure out where to put it.
A deformed red banner of flame, shaped like a child’s hand, reached up and snatched at it. Harper let go with a soft cry and jumped off the running board. Her legs felt watery and loose beneath her. Renée put a hand on her elbow to steady her.
“I’ve heard of tongues of flame,” Renée said mildly. “But not arms.”
Harper shook her head, couldn’t find her voice.