“I don’t like the idea of you taking off alone,” Harper said. “We don’t know who might be out there. I can’t lose one more person I love, Allie.”
It blindsided Allie, hearing Harper tell her she loved her. She looked around at Harper with an expression of shock and pleasure and embarrassment that made her seem much younger than she was: twelve, not seventeen.
“I’m coming back,” Allie said. “Promise. Besides.” She tugged the fire ax out of Nick’s hands. “My mom isn’t the only one who knows how to sling one of these around.”
She went down the steep slope at the side of the road, sweeping the blade back and forth to clear her way through the shoulder-high grass.
She was back just as it turned twilight, the sky curdling a sickly shade of yellow. When Harper asked if she had found anything, she only wearily wagged her head and didn’t speak.
They camped on the banks of the river, under the overhang of the collapsed bridge. In the night, the Fireman began to rave.
“Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim che-ride, find me some water, ’fore I burn up inside! Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cha-red! If I was on fire, would you piss on my head?”
“Shh,” Harper told him, one hand across his waist, clasping herself to him to keep him warm. The day had been sullen and hot, but after dark the air was so cold and sharp they might’ve been on an exposed mountain ridge. His face was drenched with an icy, sick sweat, yet he kept grabbing the collar of his shirt and pulling at it, as if he were roasting. “Shh. Try and sleep.”
His eyelids fluttered and he gave her a wild, distracted look. “Is Jakob still after us?”
“No. He’s all gone.”
“I thought I heard his truck. I thought I heard him coming.”
“No, my love.”
He patted her hand and nodded, relieved, and slept again for a while.
22
They spent most of the next morning doubling back, retracing their steps to an off-ramp, which led them down past the napalmed ruin of a Pizza Hut. The Fireman slept most of the way. When he did wake, his eyes were stunned and uncomprehending.
He didn’t have much to say—at first—and sometimes it was necessary to ask him a question a few times before he’d hear it. His replies, however, were coherent and sensible. Yes, he would like some water. Yes, his leg hurt, but it was all right, he was managing. His chest didn’t hurt so much, but it felt heavy, it felt tight. He asked Allie several times to loosen the strap across his chest. At first she told him there wasn’t a strap across his chest, but the third time he asked, she said sure, no problem, and he thanked her and dropped the subject.
Only once did the Fireman do anything particularly troubling. He moved his hands, speaking to Nick. Nick’s reply was easy to understand: he shook his head no. Then he hurried to catch up to Harper and walked along beside her, where he could avoid eye contact with the Fireman.
“What did he say?” Harper asked.
“He said he was pretty sure the truck was still behind us. The big plow. I told him it wasn’t, but he said he could hear it. He said it was still coming and if it got any closer we’d have to leave him.”
“He’s sick. Don’t worry. He’s mixed up.”
“I know,” Nick said. “Your sign language is getting pretty good.”
Harper was going to say, “Maybe I’ll teach my son,” and then she remembered if everything went according to plan, she would never know her own son. She would be giving him up to someone healthy. She put her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and left them there, all done talking for a while.
They stopped for lunch in an improbable stand of birch trees, located in a center island between two lanes of a country highway. The hills to either side of the road were crowded with blackened trees, but in the small teardrop-shaped island, there was a place that had been untouched by fire, a zone of green, ferny cool.
They drank bottled water and ate pretzels. At some point a soft, dry hail began to spatter down around them, striking their shoulders and the trees, the leaves and the ferns. Harper found a ladybug crawling on the back of her hand and another on her wrist. She brushed a hand through her hair and swept half a dozen ladybugs into the grass.
When she lifted her head she could see hundreds of them, crawling on the trunks of the trees, or opening their shells to glide on the breeze. No: thousands. Ladybugs soared on the updrafts, hundreds of feet above, a slow floating storm of them. Renée stood up wearing hundreds of ladybugs on her arms, like elbow-length gloves. She dusted them off and they fell pitter-patter into the ferns. John wore them like a blanket until Allie gently dusted him with a fern.
They camped that night in the ruin of a cottage by the side of the road. The west-facing wall of the house had been swept by fire and collapsed, burying the living room and kitchen in charred sticks and burnt shingle. But the east-facing wing was mysteriously untouched: white siding, black shutters, blinds drawn behind the windows. They settled in what had once been a guest bedroom, where they found a queen bed, neatly made. A dried, withered bundle of white viburnum rested on the pillow. A former guest had written a message on the wall: THE CROWTHER FAMILY STAYED HERE ON OUR WAY TO SEE MARTHA QUINN, followed by a date from the previous fall.
By the time they lost the daylight, John was shivering uncontrollably, and his body only relaxed when Harper curled against him under the quilt. He glowed with heat, and it wasn’t Dragonscale, either. It scared her, the dry, steady blaze of his fever. She carefully put her ear to his chest, listening to his lungs, and heard a sound like someone pulling a boot out of mud. Pneumonia, then. Pneumonia all over again, and worse than before.
Nick stretched out on John’s other side. He had discovered a copy of the Peterson Field Guide to Birds on an end table and was leafing through the pages, studying the pictures by the light of one burning finger.
“What are you thinking?” Harper asked him.
“I’m wondering how many of these have gone extinct,” Nick told her.
The next day the Fireman was gummy with sweat.
“He’s burning up,” Renée said, putting her knuckles to his cheek.
“Be funny if I cooked to death,” he muttered, and everyone jumped. He didn’t speak again all day.
23
They splashed through a soupy, Dijon-colored fog, beneath trees festooned with streamers of dirty mist. They walked north into it, and by midmorning the sun was no more than a faint brown disk burning a rusty hole through the pall. It was impossible to see more than a few yards into the miasma. Harper spotted what she thought was a hulking motorcycle leaning against the ruin of a barbed-wire fence. It turned out to be a dead cow, its blackened skin fissured to show the ripe, spoiled flesh beneath, its empty eye sockets buzzing with flies. Renée staggered past it, coughing, holding her throat, trying not to gag.
It was the first and last time Harper heard anyone cough all day. Even the Fireman’s breathing was long and slow and regular. Although her eyes and nostrils burned, she might’ve been breathing fresh alpine air for all that the roiling smoke bothered her.
The idea occurred to her that they were breathing poison, had crossed into an environment roughly as hospitable to human life as Venus. But it didn’t drop them, and Harper turned that thought over in her mind. It was the Dragonscale, of course, doing its thing. She had known for a while that it converted the toxins in smoke to oxygen. This, though, led to another notion, and she called for Allie to stop.
Allie held up, flushed and filthy. Harper knelt beside the drag sled, unbuttoned John’s shirt, and put her ear to his chest.