They left the lake behind and soon crossed back into another burn zone. Low clouds of smoke smothered the sky, and they were hot and sticky in their slickers. A wind came in spasms, blowing grit. Harper had ash in her mouth, ash in her eyes. Allie collected ash in her long eyelashes and eyebrows and short, bristly hair. With her pink, dust-irritated eyes, she very much looked like an albino. When they stopped to rest, Harper took John’s pulse. It was shallow and erratic. She crushed four more aspirin and force-fed them to him.
Late in the afternoon they came over a hill and looked down into more green, and this time it was on both sides of the road. On the right were swaying evergreens. On the left was a meadow of russet straw, bordered by blueberry bushes that were months from bearing fruit. A mile away they saw a white farmhouse, a barn, a gleaming steel silo.
As they neared the farmhouse, Harper saw a woman standing in the dooryard, shading her eyes with one hand and peering back at them. A screen door slapped shut. A dog barked.
They arrived at a fence of stripped, shining logs, with the farm buildings on the other side. A black retriever ran back and forth on a chain, flinging himself in their general direction and barking without cessation. His eyes shone with a jolly lunacy.
A white bedsheet hung over the fence, one corner flapping in the breeze. Words had been written on it in Sharpie.
WE ARE HEALTHY. PLEASE GO ON. MACHIAS, 126 MI.
GOD LOVE AND KEEP YOU. HELP AHEAD.
“These fucking people,” Allie whispered.
“These fucking people might have children,” Harper said. “And maybe they don’t want them to burn to death.”
“Burn to death!” John Rookwood shouted, cawing like a crow. He began to hack, a dry, wrenching cough, twisting violently on his stretcher.
The woman continued to watch them from her front step. She looked like she had walked out of another century, in her ankle-length dress and blue denim blouse, a kerchief holding back her graying brown hair.
Paper cups had been set along the fencepost. They contained what looked like orange Gatorade.
Nick picked it up, sniffed at it, glanced at Harper for permission. She nodded that it was all right to drink.
“What if it’s poison?” Allie asked.
“There’s easier ways to kill us,” Harper said. “They could just shoot us. Who wants to bet that man watching from the second floor has a gun?”
Allie darted a surprised look back at the farmhouse. A lantern-jawed man with raven-black hair—graying at the temples, swept back from his high brow—regarded them from a window above and to the right of the front door. His gaze was dispassionate and unblinking. Sniper eyes.
The woman watched them drink but didn’t speak. Harper thought the orange stuff might be Tang. Whatever it was, it was sweet and clean and made her feel almost human.
“Thank you,” Harper said.
The woman nodded.
Harper was about to go on, then paused and leaned over the fence. “Our friend is sick. Very sick. He needs antibiotics. Do you have antibiotics?”
The woman’s forehead wrinkled in thought. She looked at the Fireman, strapped to the travois, and back at Harper. She took a step toward the fence and opened her mouth to speak and the window on the second floor banged open.
“Keep walkin’,” the man called, and Harper was right. He had a rifle, although he didn’t point it at them, just cradled it to his chest. “You take one step our side of the fence, you won’t take another. There’s a place for people like you up north.”
“One of them is sick,” the woman called up.
Her husband laughed. “All of them is sick.”
26
All through the following morning, Harper was conscious of being observed, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes openly. An old man in a wifebeater glared at them from behind the screen door of his cottage. Three small and nearly identical boys with running noses studied them from the window of their ranch house. Nick waved. They didn’t wave back.
Another time, a black car followed them, hanging about a quarter mile back, gravel grinding under its tires. It stopped when they stopped, and when they proceeded it rolled on in their wake. Four men in it, two in front, two in back, men in flannel hunting coats and porkpie hats.
“I think they have guns,” Renée said. “Do you think we’re safe? No, don’t answer that. They say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but I believe that qualifies. We haven’t been safe in months.”
The black car kept pace with them for over an hour before suddenly accelerating, then lurching off the highway onto a narrow side road, tires throwing stones. One of the passengers hurled an empty beer can out the window, but Harper wasn’t sure he was throwing it at them. She didn’t see any weapons, but as they took the corner, a fat, ruddy-faced man in the backseat made a pistol with his hand, pointed his finger at Nick, and pulled an imaginary trigger. Pow.
Very late in the day they reached the Bucksport Trading Post, which had the look of a former stable, with a hitching post out front and window frames of wormy, untreated pine. Antlers rose above the front door. A nonfunctional Coke machine from the forties collected dust on the board porch. The dirt lot was empty, a chain hung across the entrance. A white sheet had been draped over the chain, words slapped on in black paint:
ALL HEALTHY HERE SICK GO ON
But a folding table had been set up on their side of the rusty, swinging chain. On it were paper bowls of chicken noodle soup. Paper cups of water had been arranged in a row.
The smell of the soup was enough to get Harper’s saliva glands working and her stomach tightening with hunger, but that wasn’t what really excited her. Over on one corner of the table was a bottle of some kind of pink syrup and a little plastic syringe. It was the sort of syringe you might use to orally administer medicine to a dog or a small child. The label on the bottle said ERYTHROMYCIN and gave a dosage for someone named Lucky. It had expired over a year ago and was only half full, the outside of the bottle tacky with dried syrup. Pinned beneath the bottle was a ruled sheet of notebook paper:
heard you are with invalid will this help?
Harper took the bottle in one hand and peered up at the Bucksport Trading Post. A black man in a flannel shirt, with gold spectacles resting on the end of his nose, peered back from behind a window crowded with knickknacks: a carved wooden moose, a lamp with a driftwood base. Harper lifted a hand in a gesture of thanks. He nodded, his glasses flashing, and retreated into dimness.
She gave John his first dose, squirting it into the back of his mouth, and followed with aspirin, while the others sat on the side of the road, tipping their paper bowls to their mouths to drink lukewarm soup.
An orange DETOUR FOR SICK sign pointed them west, along a winding country road, away from the town of Bucksport itself. But they paused at a wooden sawhorse (SICK DO NOT CROSS) to peer along a lane that led into town and down toward the sea. The street was shaded with big leafy oaks and lined with two-and three-story Colonials. It was late in the day and Harper could see lights on in the houses—electric lights—and a streetlamp casting a steely blue glow.
“My God,” Renée said. “We’re back in a part of the world that has power.”
“No we aren’t,” Allie told her. “That part of the world is on the other side of this sawhorse. What do you think would happen if we tried to cross?”
“I don’t know, and we’re not going to find out. We’re going to follow the signs and do what we’re told,” Harper said.
“Walk right this way,” Allie said. “Up the ramp and into the slaughterhouse. Single file, please. No shoving.”
“If they wanted to kill us, they’ve had plenty of opportunities,” Renée noted.
“Never mind me,” Allie said. “I’m just your typical jaded teenage leper.”
27