The Fireman slammed the driver’s-side door and put the fire engine into reverse. The towline was yanked taut with a snap. The fire truck’s tires spun, smoked, found purchase, and dragged the rear of the eighteen-wheeler aside with a shriek of metal.
When the big rig was out of the way, Harper could see up the road for the first time. Less than twenty feet beyond the semi, a crater the size of a compact car had swallowed one lane. Not far after that was another crater, but in the passing lane. Half a mile down the highway, Harper saw an enormous tree across the interstate, a vast larch that had somehow been crystallized by fire. It looked as if it were made of burnt sugar. The road was long and straight, and heat distortion climbed off the softened, buckled ruin of the blacktop.
“We’ll have to take it slow from here on out,” the Fireman said.
He had that one wrong.
16
The Fireman steered the truck around the great crumbled pits in the road, rolled along to the fallen larch, and stopped again. Harper and the others didn’t even bother riding with him in the truck but followed along on foot. The sky hazed over as if it were going to rain, only it wasn’t going to rain, and the color of the clouds was wrong. Those clouds were salmon-colored, as if lit by sunset, and never mind it was midday. The air had the staticky feel that sometimes warned of thunderheads. The pressure tickled Harper’s eardrums unpleasantly.
The Fireman strapped the tow to the downed tree and ran the truck back. There was a loud crack. He cursed artistically.
“Did you hear what he said? No woman could really do that,” Renée said. “It’s anatomically impossible.”
He jumped down from behind the wheel. The towline had yanked a ten-foot branch right off the tree.
“You have to get the chain around the trunk,” Allie said. “Or it’ll break into pieces.”
Nick sat on the rear bumper of the fire truck with Renée and Harper, while Allie and the Fireman ran the tow around the center mass of the tree.
“Let’s play a game,” Renée said. “Twenty Questions. Who wants to go first?”
Harper translated. Nick replied in sign.
“He wants to know if it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral.”
“Mineral. Sort of. Oh boy. We’re off to a bad start.”
They went back and forth, Harper serving as their conversational go-between.
“Is it yellow?” Harper asked for him.
“Yes, but also sort of orange.”
“Now he wants to know if it’s bigger than a car.”
“Yes. Much bigger.”
Nick spoke rapidly with his hands.
“He says ‘It’s a truck,’” Harper said.
“No!” Renée said cheerfully.
Nick hopped off the rear bumper, his hands flying, arms waving.
“He says ‘It’s a big orange truck,’” Harper said.
“No!” Renée told her again, frowning. “Tell him no. He’s wasting his questions.”
But by then Harper was off the fender herself, staring back down the interstate.
“We have to go,” she said.
Nick was already running toward the front of the truck. Harper jogged after him, shouting the whole way, her voice rising from a yell to something that wavered at the ragged edge of a scream.
“John! We have to go! We have to go. Right! NOW!”
John was half in the cab, one hand on the steering wheel and one foot on the running board. He leaned out of the fire engine to shout instructions to Allie, who straddled the larch, adjusting the towline around the trunk. When he heard Harper hollering, he glanced around, then narrowed his eyes and squinted past her.
On the far rise, a mile away, an orange truck winked in the sun. Harper could distantly hear the building roar of its engine as the Freightliner barreled toward them.
“Allie, get off the tree!” John shouted.
Allie cupped a hand to her ear and shook her head. Can’t hear you. Harper could barely hear John herself over the fire truck’s idling engine.
Harper jumped up on the running board beside the Fireman and rang the brass bell, hard and loud as she could. Allie read Harper’s face, leapt off the tree, and came running.
“In the truck, in the truck!” John shouted. “Quick, now, I need to back up.”
Allie snatched Nick off the ground, arms around his thighs, lifted him off the road, and hustled for the rear of the fire truck.
John gave them perhaps ten seconds to climb in and then he threw the fire truck into reverse, gunned the engine. The tree caught the truck and anchored it in place. The tires spun. Harper stood on the running board, clutching the open door with one hand and John’s arm with the other.
Jakob’s Freightliner was less than a mile away, sun glaring bleakly off the splintered windshield. Harper could hear the thin whine as it accelerated.
John applied more pressure and the tree rocked, turned over, and began to slide through the ash. Branches snapped and broke, littering the road.
A half mile away, Jakob’s snow-wing plow clipped the back end of the Walmart truck and tore the trailer to shreds, launched it up and out of his way with a metallic crash.
The tree caught on a fissure in the road, wouldn’t budge. John cursed. He put the truck in drive, rolled forward ten feet, and slammed it into reverse again. He ran straight back, tires shrieking. Harper held on, clenching her teeth, her pulse sick and fast, bracing herself for the jolt. The larch tree jounced up in the air and crashed back down, boughs shattering and flying, rolling far enough to one side to clear a lane.
“I’ll unhook us,” Harper said. She jumped down and ran around to the front of the truck.
“Hurry, Willowes,” the Fireman called to her. The sound of the Freightliner rose to a bellowing roar. “Get in, get in.”
Harper slipped the towline free from the front hitch and ran for the passenger side.
“Go!” she yelled, grabbing the passenger-side door and stepping onto the running board.
The fire truck lumbered forward. Thick branches cracked and shattered under the tires. By the time Harper pulled her self part of the way up into the passenger seat, he was doing nearly twenty miles per hour. He swung around the larch, building speed slowly but surely on a straight stretch of road that climbed to the top of a little rise.
The snow-wing plow struck the tree. The larch wasn’t swatted clear so much as pulverized, branches shattering in a cloud of gray powder and black fragments. The Freightliner screamed. Harper felt she was hearing Jakob’s true voice for the first time.
She had one knee up on the passenger seat when the Freightliner slammed into the rear of the truck. The impact dropped her. Her legs fell back out the open door, hung over the road. She got one arm through the open passenger-side window, hanging on to the door. Her other hand grabbed the seat.
“Harp!” the Fireman yelled. “Oh God, Harp, get in, get in!”
“Faster,” she told him. “Don’t you dare slow down, Rookwood.”
She kicked her feet but couldn’t seem to pull herself up into the seat. Too much of her was hanging out the passenger-side door and her center of gravity was too low, all her mass and weight dangling over the road.
Harper turned her head to see where the Freightliner was and in the same moment Jakob hit them again. Harper saw him then, behind the wheel: Jakob’s starved, bristly, scarred face. He did not smile or look angry. His head rolled on his neck as if he were dosed up with some heavy anesthetic.
“Will you for God’s sake get in the truck,” the Fireman said. He had one hand on the wheel but wasn’t looking out the windshield anymore. He had stretched all the way across the passenger seat to grab for her, extending his right hand with its taped wrist.
She swatted wildly for his arm, caught his fingers. He hauled at her, straining against the slipstream that wanted to vacuum her right out of the front seat. Her feet kicked in the air and then her knee found the footwell and she was in the cab.