The fire truck had been drifting while he dragged her up. They clipped a baked Honda Civic parked on the left-hand margin of the interstate. The Honda’s back end flipped into the air as if a mine had exploded under the rear tires. They sped past it, left it behind.
The Honda came down across the turnpike behind them with a rattling thud. The snowplow hit it an instant later and knocked it aside with a shriek, a sound of almost human fury, mingled with the crunch of imploding glass.
She scrambled into her seat, the passenger door still open and waving back and forth. Harper grabbed the black leather strap hanging above the door and stuck her head out, looking back.
“The fuck are you—” the Fireman asked.
She was full of song, a song of outrage and grief that had no words and no melody, and her hand ignited like a rag soaked in gasoline when touched with a match. Blue flame roared from it and she threw it, threw a softball of fire. It struck the windshield of the Freightliner, sprayed across the glass in a liquid fan of flame—and went out.
Harper threw fire again and again. A blast of blue flame snapped off the passenger-side mirror on the plow. A bolt struck the plow itself, briefly turning the snow-wing into a shallow trough filled with crackling white flame. The fourth time she cast flame, it hooked, like a curveball or a knuckler, and struck the front passenger-side tire. The wheel became a blazing hoop.
“Can you blind him?” the Fireman asked.
“What?” Harper asked.
“Blind him. Just blind him for ten seconds. Now, if you please. And for God’s sake put your seat belt on.”
The tendons stood out in John’s neck. His lips were drawn back in an appalled grimace. They were rushing up a hill toward some kind of overpass. The front of the fire truck thwacked aside a diamond-shaped orange sign, a warning. Harper didn’t have time to see what it said before the Fireman sent it spinning.
Harper didn’t bother with the belt. She couldn’t buckle in and still lean far enough out the door to throw flame directly at Jakob behind the steering wheel. She stuck her head into the boiling afternoon air and looked at the Freightliner. Jakob stared back through his cobwebbed windshield, the cracks running from a single bullet hole, just to the right of where he sat. Harper thought Jamie Close had come very close to shooting him through a lung that night in the church tower.
She took a deep breath and threw a fistful of fire. It hit the windshield at the bullet hole. Flame squirted outward, following the cracks, making a web of flame. A little fire spattered through the hole and Jakob flinched, turned his head away. Harper thought, for a moment, he shut his eyes.
Harper turned to see what lay ahead and saw the overpass was gone. BRIDGE OUT—that was what the orange safety sign had said. The overpass had collapsed in the center, leaving a chasm thirty feet across, rebar sticking out of shattered concrete. At the last instant it came to her that she still didn’t have her seat belt on.
John hammered his foot onto the brake and wrenched the wheel to the side, veering suddenly and sharply away from the drop.
It was almost too much, too hard. The fire truck slewed sideways, tires whining, a high ragged whine of blistering rubber. Blue smoke poured from the undercarriage. Harper could feel how the truck wanted to topple over. John had his whole body across the steering wheel, pulling against it. The truck slid sideways, shuddering with the force of a jackhammer. I am going to lose this baby, Harper thought.
The Freightliner clipped the rear end in passing The fire engine spun like a revolving door. For an instant they were staring back the way they had come and still sliding backward. Centrifugal force slung Harper against her door. If she had not closed it the moment before, she would’ve been hurled out. The steering wheel whirled so quickly in the Fireman’s hands that he let go of it with a cry of pain.
They were looking back in the direction of New Hampshire, still skating over the blacktop, so Harper didn’t see when the Freightliner blew past them and over the drop, fell thirty feet and hit the road below with a concussive crash that seemed to shake the world. It felt as if a bomb had gone off beneath them.
She still felt a little as if they were spinning, even after the fire truck stopped moving. She looked at John. He stared back at her with wide, bewildered eyes. He moved his lips. She believed he was saying her name, but wasn’t sure, couldn’t hear over the drone in her ears. Nick was right. Reading lips was hard.
He gestured with his hands, a little shooing motion. Get out. He was fighting with his seat belt.
She nodded, stepped down through the open door on trembling legs, climbed onto the running board, then lowered herself to the road. She let go of the door and looked toward the gap in the overpass and felt all the wind go out of her.
The back half of the fire engine hung over the edge of the chasm. It was tipping. As Harper watched, it seesawed back, the front tires rising into the air.
Harper just had time to catch her breath. She was getting ready to scream John’s name when the fire truck tilted over the side, into the gap, and took the Fireman with it.
17
Harper ran to the edge of the missing overpass and stared down past twisted rebar and crumbled concrete. The fire engine had dropped straight back and turned onto its passenger side. She had the wrong angle, couldn’t see into the cab, couldn’t see John. The Freightliner was upside down. Something was burning down there; Harper could smell the stink of scorched rubber.
It was only shock that held her where she was, a great tingling throb of emotion that she could feel in her nerve endings, in her fingertips. All dead, she thought. All dead, all dead, John and Nick and Allie and Renée and John and Nick and Allie and Renée and John and Nick and Allie and Renée.
Her throat hurt and she realized she was screaming, had been screaming for almost a full minute, and she made herself be quiet. The thing to do was to get down there. Get down there and see what she could do.
She turned—and almost ran right into Allie. Her face was aglow with sweat and she was gasping from her run.
“Where did you come from?” Harper asked. “How did you get out?”
Harper gazed blankly past her. Half a mile away she saw Nick trotting along the margin of the road, leading Renée by the hand.
“Never got in,” Allie said. “Never had a chance. Renée shoved us into a ditch as soon as I reached the back end of the truck with Nick. The next thing I knew, you and John were driving off without us. Where’s John? Where—”
As Allie spoke, she was creeping past Harper to look over the drop. Harper grabbed her arm and drew her away before she could reach the edge.
“Don’t look. I don’t want Nick to see and I don’t want you to see, either. You stay here and don’t come unless I call for you.”
Harper wanted to run, but her days of running had ended several weeks before. She did a funny sort of pregnant-lady trot, holding her stomach. She climbed over a guardrail, and slid down the bank on her big pregnant rump, grabbing fistfuls of brush to slow her descent.
The road below was a divided highway, running east and west. The fire truck lay across the eastbound lanes. A lake of fire sputtered and gushed across the blacktop and Harper thought, wildly, Gasoline, it’s spilling burning gasoline, it’s going to explode. She skipped over the flames and reached the front of the engine.
She could see in through the windshield. It was smashed and sagging inward from the frame. John hung sideways, still buckled in his seat, his head on his right shoulder, and blood dripping from under his hairline and nose. But: not dead. Harper could see the rise and fall of his chest.
What she couldn’t see was how to get him out. She was too pregnant to climb up to the driver’s-side door, which currently faced the sky. She couldn’t smash in what was left of the windshield without a tool, and was afraid to spray him with broken glass.