“Who?”
“All of us. We voted. You weren’t there. You were sleeping. We gathered in the church and we sang for Father Storey. We sang to everyone we’ve ever lost to show us what to do. I swear I could hear them singing with us. There were only a hundred and forty people in church, but it was like a thousand people singing all at once.” Allie’s bare arms pebbled with goose bumps at the memory of it. She hugged herself. “It felt like being rescued . . . from every bad feeling you ever had. I think it was just what we needed. Afterward, we settled down, and held hands, and talked. We talked about the things we were still glad for. We said thanks. Like you do before a meal. And we made plans. That was when we voted to give Ben final authority on all security matters. And we voted to make Aunt Carol head of the chapel services and daily planning, which is what Father Storey used to do. At first she didn’t want to. She said she couldn’t take on any more work. She said she needed to look after her dad. So we took another vote and everyone voted for Carol all over again. So then she said we were making a mistake. She said she wasn’t strong like her father. That he was better than her in every way. Kinder and more thoughtful and patient. But we took a third vote and she won that one, too, unanimously. It was funny. It was so funny. Even Carol laughed. She was kind of crying-laughing.”
Harper thought of something in Harold’s diary—THE FUNGUS STIMULATES FLOCK BEHAVIOR TO PRESERVE ITS OWN WELL-BEING, THE SAME GROUP-THINK THAT MAKES A CROWD OF SPARROWS TURN ON A DIME—but she didn’t like where that thought led her and pushed it aside.
Allie said, “I don’t think I ought to let you go. The last time I was on duty in the infirmary and didn’t do my job, a kid got killed.” She gave Harper a crooked smile that had no real happiness in it.
“What are you going to do to me if I walk out? You going to tackle a pregnant woman?”
“No,” Allie said. “I’d probably just shoot you in the leg or something.”
She was smirking when she said it and Harper almost laughed. Then she saw the Winchester leaning in one corner of the room.
“Why in God’s name do you have a gun?” she cried.
“Mr. Patchett decided the Lookouts on guard should have rifles,” Allie said. “He said we should’ve passed out the guns a long time ago. If a Cremation Crew turns up, a little bit of shooting would—”
“—would get a lot more people killed, is what it would do. None of you ought to be carrying rifles. Allie, some of the Lookouts are all of fourteen years old.” Harper did not mention that Allie herself was not yet seventeen. The idea of the kids stalking around in the snow with loaded guns agitated her, made her want to give Ben Patchett a hard poke in his soft gut.
“It’s only the older kids,” Allie said, but for the first time she sounded defensive.
“I’m going,” Harper said.
“No. Don’t. Please? Let’s wait until dark and we can talk to Carol. Going out in the daytime is pretty much the most important rule in camp. It’ll be dark soon.”
“In this snow it might as well be dark already.”
“We pulled the boards up. You’d leave tracks.”
“Not for long. It’s snowing now. My tracks will fill in. Allie. Would you let anyone tell you that you couldn’t go?”
She had her there.
Allie stared into a blue dimness silted with a billion diamond flecks of flying snow. The muscles at the corners of her jaw bunched up.
“Shit,” she said, at last. “This is so stupid. I shouldn’t.”
“Thank you,” Harper said.
“You need to be back in two hours or less. If you’re not back in two hours, I’m going to feed you to the wolves.”
“If I’m not back in two hours, you ought to get Don Lewiston anyway, just to check on Father Storey’s condition, see how he’s doing.”
Allie glared at Harper. “You have no idea how fucked this is. All us Lookouts met after chapel. Ben Patchett said too many people have been putting themselves ahead of the well-being of camp, doing what they like. He said we need to make some examples out of people who can’t follow our rules. We all voted. We agreed. We made a pact.”
“Mr. Patchett can worry about the well-being of the camp,” Harper said. “I need to worry about the well-being of my patients. If he finds out, you tell him you tried to make me stay and you couldn’t stop me. But he’s not going to find out, because I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Go if you’re going to go, then. Before I change my mind.”
Harper had her hand on the latch when Allie spoke again.
“I’m glad he likes you,” Allie said. “John is the loneliest person I know.”
She glanced back, but Allie wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was flopped on her side, curling up on the couch once more.
Harper thought the gentle blessings of children were often as unprovoked, unexpected, and uncalled for as their cruelties. Camp Wyndham that winter was neither Hogwarts nor the island in Lord of the Flies, after all, but a place of wandering, damaged orphans, kids who were willing to forgo eating lunch so there was enough food for others.
“I’ll be back soon,” Harper said, and when she said it, she believed it.
But she did not return until long, long after dark fell, and by then everything in camp had changed again.
5
The trees were ghosts of themselves in a smokeworld of low clouds and falling snow. The dying afternoon smelled like pinecones burned in an ashtray.
Harper meant every word of what she had promised Allie: that she was going to paddle over to the Fireman’s island, check his condition, and come back. She had left out the part about needing to go home first because the infirmary cupboard was all but bare and she was going to have to hunt through her personal supplies for the things John needed. If Allie knew about that, she might’ve knocked her down and sat on her chest to keep her from going.
She thought she might have a good poke around while she was home. See what else she could find that might be of use in Camp Wyndham. Shampoos and books and socks.
But when she got there she discovered there wasn’t as much to poke around in as she expected. She stopped at the edge of the woods, looking at what was left of her house with a feeling of shock so intense, it approached awe.
The side of the house facing the street had collapsed in on itself, the entire face swept away. Some great force had dragged the living room couch out into the yard and tossed it all the way to the edge of the driveway. Snow had mounded up on it, but Harper could still see the armrests. She guessed there was some more junk scattered across the lawn, but they were just lumps under the snow now. It looked like her house had been brushed by a tornado.
She caught her breath and thought back to the night she left. She remembered a rending crack, so loud it shook the ground. Jakob had climbed into his Freightliner and sideswiped the snowplow through the front of the house, dropped the roof in on what remained of their life together.
Papers hung impaled from bare tree branches, scattered all along the edge of the woods. Harper pulled one down: a page from Desolation’s Plough. She read the first words—despair is no more than a synonym for consciousness, and demolition much the same as art—and let the fretful breeze tug the sheet out of her hand. It flapped away in the wind.