“We’ve got a fucking man down!” John cried, pointing back at the first Gasmask Man, sprawled on the ground. “Fucking fuck fuck!” Harper wanted to elbow him in the side, but his ribs couldn’t take it.
“Go on, get the fuck out of here,” said the second Gasmask Man. “Both of you. Get clear of the fucking smoke. I got him.”
She had to help John walk, her arm around his waist, his over her shoulders. They limped a few steps away and then the second Gasmask Man yelled at their backs.
“Hey! Wait!”
She forced herself to glance back, eyes lowered.
The second Gasmask Man extended the dropped halligan.
“Take it. There’s a lot of fucking guys running around. I don’t want someone falling down and taking a fucking hatchet to the knee.”
“Right. Thanks,” she said, then added, “Fuck,” for good measure.
The metal was still warm—her palm tingled painfully as she took hold of it—but the cold water on the ground had lowered its temperature enough so she could hold it without wrapping her hands first. She took hold of it and tugged, but for an instant the second Gasmask Man didn’t let go of his end. Through the lenses of his mask, she saw his brow knot up. He was looking at the both of them, really looking at them, maybe for the first time. Just possibly he was thinking that firewomen were few and far between, so few that he knew all of them by name and had suddenly recognized she didn’t belong. In a moment he would jerk the halligan back out of her hand and come at them with it.
The damp white smoke eddied around them, sketching ghosts.
The second Gasmask Man let go of the halligan and turned away, shaking his head. He sank to one knee next to the man on the ground.
“Nurse Willowes,” John murmured, and she realized it was safe to go.
She walked him through the smoke. Men ran past them, going the other way, calling to each other.
“He said ‘this guy again,’” she said, leaning in to speak quietly into the cup of his ear. “Do you spend a lot of nights keeping the fire department in hysterics with creative acts of arson?”
“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said.
Then they were through the smoke and into the parking lot, the Portsmouth Police Department not a hundred steps away on their left. The smoke was a towering wall of white cloud that masked the causeway and all of South Mill Pond behind them.
They had come out close to one of the two bonfires. It seethed, a sound it was impossible not to associate with rage, and she wondered, for the first time, if flame could hate . . . an absurd, childish notion that she could not quite set aside.
Lawmen milled about just beyond the double glass doors leading into the police department. Harper and John had emerged from the smoke right next to a cop with a round, freckled, innocent face, dressed in a black poncho and black rubber gloves. He didn’t look at them, only goggled at the smoke. Harper thought she saw his lips moving in a soundless prayer. Was it any surprise, really? The whole world was burning and tonight they had seen the devil, come to claim his kingdom of fire at last.
Harper looked over at the first bonfire and saw they were not burning piles of clothes after all. Or, rather, they were burning piles of clothes—it was just that people were still wearing them. The bonfire to the left was a heap of desiccated bodies, blackened and shriveled corpses. In the flames, they snapped and whistled and crackled noisily, just like any kindling.
She glimpsed a dead woman, holding a dead child of about eight, the boy’s face buried in her breast. She did not flinch from the sight. She had seen enough of the dead in Portsmouth Hospital. If she felt anything, it was simply that she was glad the two of them—mother and child—had died together, holding each other. To be held by your mother, or to be able to hold your child at the end, struck her as a kind of blessing.
“Keep your head down,” John murmured. “He might see.”
“Who?”
“The ex.”
She looked past the first bonfire to the great orange town truck on the far side. The tailgate was down, the rear end raised, as if to dump a heap of sand. Four or five bodies remained in the back end, had for some reason not slid out. Maybe they were frozen to the metal.
Jakob sat in the open passenger-side door, elbows on his knees, smoking a Gauloise. He was flushed, oiled with sweat from the heat of the bonfire, and hadn’t shaved in a while. He had lost weight, and it showed in his face, in his sunken cheeks and the deep hollows around his eyes.
As if he felt her gaze—like a light touch on his scarred cheek—Jakob turned his head and stared back at her. His wounds had healed badly, shiny white slashes carved across the side of his face. Worse still was the black mark on his neck, a hideous burn in the shape of a man’s hand.
She looked down, walked on. She counted to ten and risked another glance back. He had returned his stare to the causeway, peering dully into the smoke. He hadn’t known her. That was maybe not such a surprise. Although she had recognized him right off, in some obscure way she felt she didn’t know him, either.
“He isn’t sick,” Harper said.
“Not with Dragonscale.”
Harper and John made their slow way across the parking lot, leaving the police station behind. The crowd thinned as they moved away from the lights. Although the other end of the parking lot was not entirely in darkness. The second bonfire cast a pulsing red glow into the gloom. The smell revolted her, a stink like they were burning wet carpet. She didn’t want to look and couldn’t help herself.
Dogs. They were burning dogs. Black ash drifted down out of the night.
“Look at all that ash,” the Fireman said, blowing a flake away from his nose. “Idiots. Some of these men will be on our side of this battle in a few weeks. You may not have infected your husband, Nurse Willowes, but he may get lucky yet.”
She gave him a questioning look, but he didn’t seem inclined to explain himself.
“Why are they burning dogs?” she asked. “Dogs don’t carry the ’scale, do they?”
“There are two infections running rampant. One is the Dragonscale, and the other is panic.”
“It always surprises me when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Say something smart.”
His laughter turned to a thin, anguished wheeze and they had to pause while he tottered in place, clutching his sides.
“My chest is full of broken glass,” he said.
“We need to get you off your feet. How much farther?”
“There,” he said, nodding into the darkness.
There were some other cars and pickups parked at the far end of the lot, and sitting among them was an antique fire truck—it had to be almost eighty years old—with a pair of headlamps set close together over a tall grille.
When John tried to lift himself up behind the wheel, he almost lost his footing and fell off the running board. She put her hands on his hips, caught and steadied him. He hung off the side of the truck, gasping. His eyes strained from his head, as if the simple act of breathing was work that required will and concentration.
When he had recovered himself, he tried again, hitching himself up into the old black leather seat. A copper bell hung from a metal brace, attached to the side of the windscreen. An actual bell, with a heavy iron clapper inside.
She went around to the other side of the truck and pulled herself in beside him. A pair of rusting steel brackets had been mounted behind the seats; the halligan fit neatly into them.
The engine, when it started, produced a pleasant series of throat-clearing sounds that made Harper think not of a truck, but of clothes tumbling in a dryer.
“Nurse Willowes, would you be a dear and wiggle the stick forward and to the right?”
He had his right arm crooked in his lap, left hand on the wheel. She didn’t like the way his right wrist was turned.
“You better let me look at that arm,” she said.
“Perhaps when we are at leisure,” he said. “The stick.”