Satan staggered, wheeled about, and dropped his flickering pitchfork. He closed his wings around his body, hiding within, shrank into himself, and vanished.
The men holding the fire hose continued blasting water into the cloud. Spray rained past Harper. It hissed in the hot smoke, and the cloud changed in color and texture, going from polluted and black to humid and pale, not so much smoke as steam.
She knew what had happened. They got him, that was what. The battering ram of water had knocked the Fireman right off his feet.
Without thinking, Harper ran deeper into the smoke, plunging toward where she thought she had heard his voice.
More yells, closer now. Some of them were moving into the cloud, coming toward her. No—coming toward the Fireman.
Her foot caught on something, a metal bar that clanged across the blacktop, and she stumbled, steadied herself. The halligan. Something moved nearby in the mist. Someone retched.
The Fireman rose unsteadily up onto all fours. His helmet had been blown off and his hair was drenched. His shoulders hitched. He gagged and vomited water.
“John?” she asked.
He lifted his head. His eyes were bewildered, unhappy.
“The fuck are you doing here?” he asked.
He rose to his knees, swaying, and opened his mouth to say something more. Before he could, a shape reared up in the clouds to his left, drawing his attention.
A thing—a bug-faced monstrosity—lurched out of the smoke. Its slick, glistening eyes were bright in the drifting mist, and it had a bulbous, grotesque mouth. Otherwise it resembled a man dressed in a fireman’s turnout jacket and knee-high boots. It put one of those black boots between the Fireman’s shoulder blades and shoved, and John was slammed down onto his face.
“You fuck,” said the monstrosity—a fireman, a real fireman, in a gas mask. The Gasmask Man said, “You goddamn fuck, I got you now.”
John started to rise onto all fours. The Gasmask Man cocked back one boot and drove it into his ribs, knocked his hands and knees out from under him.
“Fuck you, you little fuck,” the Gasmask Man said. “You fucking fuck . . . guys! Guys, I got him! I got the fucking fuck!”
He booted the Fireman again, in the side this time, half turning him over.
Harper saw quite clearly that in moments John would be overrun, kicked to death by the Gasmask Man and his pals.
She bent and grabbed the halligan—
—and screamed in surprise and pain and dropped it. She looked at her hand in shock. Blisters were already forming on her reddened palm. The halligan was hot, nearly as hot as the business end of a branding iron.
Her cry caught the Gasmask Man’s attention. He fixed her with his blind, terrible stare and pointed one gloved hand.
“You! Get the fuck on the fucking ground! Tits down, hands behind your fucking head! Do it, do it right the fuck—”
John rose with an angry shout, got his arms around the Gasmask Man’s waist, and tried to throw him down. All he was able to do was back the guy up a few steps before the Gasmask Man—six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than John Rookwood—started shoving him the other way.
They grappled, turning in circles. The Gasmask Man closed his hands on John’s right arm and twisted. A joint made a sickening, oddly wet pop. John went down on one knee and the Gasmask Man brought his knee up under his chin, snapped his head back. John toppled onto his back. The Gasmask Man stepped forward and put his boot on the Englishman’s chest and stomped. Bones cracked.
Harper slipped off her coat, wrapped it around her burnt right hand, and scooped up the halligan bar again. Even through a fistful of fabric she could feel its heat, could smell it liquefying the nylon.
Harper lifted the halligan. The Gasmask Man turned, took his foot off John’s chest, and came at her, arms spread. She slashed the halligan and the bar caught him across the helmet with a steely thwang! He took one more step and folded, diving face-first into the ground. His helmet sailed off, slicing Frisbee-like through the mist. It clattered to the blacktop, a grotesque dent creasing one side.
The sight of that dent sickened her. She felt bile rising in her chest, tasted it in the back of her throat. The sight of that dent was somehow worse than seeing a smashed-in head.
She didn’t know what had made her do it. She had wanted to scare him away with the halligan, not crush his head in. She dropped the halligan in revulsion. It fell into the great dirty puddle spreading across the blacktop and hissed.
More yells. She saw another fireman sprint through the drifting white cloud of smoke and vapor off to her left. He raced past without seeing them.
The Fireman—her Fireman—had her by the elbow. His other arm, the right, hung at a strange angle at his side and he was half bent over, grimacing, a runner trying to catch his breath.
“You all right?” he asked.
She stared at him as if he were speaking in a foreign language. “John! I—I hit him with your halligan.”
“Ooh, you did, too! Sounded like someone playing a steel drum.” He grinned with admiration.
Someone yelled from what seemed only a few feet away. He glanced back over his shoulder, and when he looked at her again, the smile was almost gone. He gripped her shoulder.
“Come along,” he said. “We have to go. Help me get his coat.”
When she wouldn’t go any closer to the dead body he let go of her and waded into the smoke. He bent with some effort—through her shock, she registered his face tightening with pain—and picked up the dented helmet. When he looked back at her, she still hadn’t moved.
“His coat, Willowes!” he called to her. “Quickly now.”
She shook her head. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even look at him. She had killed a man, smashed his brains in, and it was all she could do not to cry, not to fall on her knees.
“Never mind,” he said, and for the first time he seemed impatient with her, even angry. He removed his own coat—it took a great deal of care for him to slip it gently off his dangling right arm—and when he got to her, he hung it over her shoul ders. Beneath he wore a black shirt made of some kind of elastic material and bright yellow suspenders.
He went to put the dented helmet on her own head and she flinched, backed away. He followed her gaze to the body slumped on the ground and finally seemed to understand.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he said. “You didn’t kill him. Look—”
He stuck his boot behind the Gasmask Man’s ear and gave a gentle nudge. The Gasmask Man made a small, unhappy shriek.
“There’s no blood on it and no brains either, so put it on and help me,” he said, and this time she allowed him to set the helmet on her head. He stepped back and looked at her and grinned again. “Well! Aren’t you the perfect little firewoman!”
And then his legs gave out.
12
She caught him before he could fall to his knees and got her hands around his waist. He sagged against her. He hummed a disconcertingly sunny tune, as they went around in a drunken circle.
“What is that?”
“The Hooters! And we danced!” He almost sang. “A lost treasure from a better time, the days of acid-washed jeans and fun hair. Do you like eighties music, Nurse Willowes?”
“Can we discuss the oldies another time?”
“What? What? The oldies? I’ve already had a man kicking in my ribs, and now you pull out my heart.”
“Hey!” someone yelled at them, coming through the smoke. Harper looked past John and saw another Gasmask Man heading toward them, even bigger than the last. “You okay?”
Harper realized that in the shifting clouds, he believed they were firemen, too.
“He got away! The guy! The fucking fuck who made the smoke!” John shouted, and his voice carried no trace of an accent at all. “He clobbered us and went that way!” John pointed past her, through the streaming vapor.
“This fucking guy . . . this fucking guy again,” said the second Gasmask Man.