She shifted it into reverse while he worked the clutch.
John eased the truck out from under the shadow of a great oak and onto the road, then asked her to put it into first for him. As they drove past the police department and out of the lot, he reached through the window and rang the bell, ding-ding. She thought of old film clips of San Francisco trolleys.
Perhaps as many as fifty people watched them go, and not a single one of them appeared to give them a second thought. One police officer even lifted his cap to them. Harper looked again for Jakob, but he wasn’t sitting in the Freightliner anymore, and she couldn’t spot him in the milling crowd.
“You have your own fire truck,” she said.
“In a world with a fire burning on every corner, it’s a surprisingly inconspicuous ride. Also you can’t imagine how often a sixty-foot ladder comes in handy.”
“I can imagine. You never know when you’ll need to help a child escape from the third floor of a hospital.”
He nodded. “Or change a reeee-alllly high lightbulb. Pull the gearstick back again? Into second—ah, lovely.”
They left the bonfires, the smoke, the smell of burning man and dog, in a sudden rush of speed.
It had been a crisp wintry night down on the water. In the fire truck, moving at thirty miles an hour, it was arctic.
He ran the wipers and smeared gray ribbons of ash across the windscreen.
“Ach,” he said. “Look at all of that. We could infect most of Rhode Island with what we’ve got on the windshield.”
They fled through the night.
“The ash,” she said. “It’s in the ash. That’s why I didn’t get Jakob sick. It doesn’t transfer through any kind of touch. You have to come in contact with the ash.”
“It’s a surprisingly common way for fungus to propagate. Third gear, please. Thank you. Farmers in South America will burn an infected crop and the airstream will carry fungal spores in the ash halfway around the world to New Zealand. Draco incendia trychophyton isn’t any different. You inhale it along with the ash that protects it and prepares it for reproduction and soon it’s colonizing real estate in your lungs. Could you shift us into fourth—yes, perfect.” He smiled wanly and added, “I was there when you were infected, you know. The day the hospital burned. I saw you all breathing it in, but I was too late to warn anyone.”
They banged a pothole—the truck didn’t seem to have anything in the way of shocks, and they felt every rut, crack, divot, and seam—and he groaned.
“You’re not too late to warn the rest of the world.”
“What? You think I’m the first person to realize it spreads through the ash? I’m a lowly mycologist at a state college. Or was. I’m sure the process is well understood in the places where study of the Dragonscale is an active concern. Wherever that may be.”
“No. If they understood transmission, they’d be warning people.”
“Maybe they are . . . in the parts of the country that haven’t fallen into chaos and been given up for dead. But you see, we’re downwind. Of everyone. The North American jetstream sweeps everything our way. Those who don’t have it today will have it tomorrow, or next year. I believe it can wait in the ash for a host for a very long time. Thousands of years. Possibly millions.”
The fire truck drifted off to the left-hand margin of the road. The edge of the hood clipped a mailbox, sent it flying. Harper grabbed the wheel and helped John bring the truck back into the humped middle of the lane.
John shivered weakly, touched his dry lips with his tongue. He didn’t seem to be steering the truck so much as it was steering him, and he was hanging onto the wheel for dear life.
“It’s really an ingenious cycle when you consider it. The ash infects a host who eventually burns alive, creating more ash to infect new hosts. Right now there’s the sick and the well. But in a few years it’ll just be the sick and the dead. There will only be those who learned to live with Dragonscale and those who were burned up . . . by their own terror and ignorance.”
He reached out into the darkness and began to strike the bell, ringing it so loudly that it hurt Harper’s ears, made her teeth ache. They were coming up on the turnoff. She wanted him to slow down, was trying to say it—slow down, John, please—when he grimaced and wrenched at the wheel, veering off Little Harbor Road.
The fire truck slung itself onto the snowbound lane that led to camp and sailed between the towering stones that flanked the entrance. Harper glimpsed a lean girl of perhaps twenty, standing to one side of the dirt track, the kid who had been assigned watch duty in the bus. She had heard John ringing his bell and known to drop the chain and let them through.
“Take us back down to third gear, Nurse Willowes—brilliant.”
John swayed from side to side as the fire truck ran up the hill, slowing as it went. Harper began to go over in her mind what had to be done when she got him into the infirmary. She would need medical tape, gauze, Advil, scissors, a sling for his arm, compression bandages, a plastic splint. Beyond the Advil and the tape, she wasn’t sure how much of that they had. They crested the hill—
—and continued on down the lane. The chapel flashed by on the left. The tires churned up a glittering spray of icy snow.
“You missed the turn to the infirmary,” she said.
“We’re not going to the infirmary. I can’t be away from home all night. My fire will go out.”
“So what? Mr. Rookwood, you’re not making any sense. You have smashed ribs and a dislocated or broken wrist—with pos sibly a fracture to the forearm or the elbow as well—and you need to turn this thing around.”
“I am long past the point where I could turn anything around, ’m’afraid, Nurse Willowes.”
The truck continued to slow, thudding and rocking from side to side, as it passed through a gap in a thick band of fir trees and came out by the boathouse. He effortfully pulled at the wheel, braking as they rolled inside, past shelves of kayaks and canoes, and parked the truck in the center of the bare concrete apron.
He turned the key and they sat in cold, silent darkness. John sank forward until his forehead rested on the steering wheel.
“I have to get across the water, Nurse Willowes,” he said, without looking at her. “I have to. Please. You said you want to help me. If you meant it, you’ll get me back onto my island where I belong.”
She climbed out and went around the truck to help him down.
He got his good arm over her shoulders and she lowered him, laboriously, first to the running board, then to the ground. His face was so pale it shone in the dark. His eyes widened with sudden wonder. Harper had seen that often enough in her days as a nurse. When the hurt came in full, it often left the injured as amazed as if they had seen a magician levitate.
They hobbled together over the glassy white surface of the snow, clinging to each other and creeping along in the mincing steps of the elderly.
A rowboat sat on the bank, oars stood up inside it. No canoes and no sign of Father Storey and the others. But then they wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. It had been about that long getting to South Mill Pond in the boats, and they hadn’t had to contend with fog.
A mist had come up and was piled atop the water, blanketing the horizon. John’s little island was no more than three hundred feet offshore (at low tide it was almost possible to walk to it) but now Harper could see no sign of it.
“I hope they can find their way home in this,” Harper said. “And that they’ll figure out I went with you.”
“Father Storey knows the way,” John said. “He’s been taking kids paddling along this shore since you were a kid yourself. Probably longer. And he knows I wouldn’t have left you behind, either.” Ignoring, Harper thought, that if it weren’t for her, he would’ve been left behind.