“All the fires have smoked the mice out into the streets. I’m sure Truffaut is living high on the furry fat of the land. Do you think they’ll survive after we’re gone? The cats? Or will we take them with us?”
“The cats are going to make it and so are we,” Harper said, in her best chin-up voice. “We’re smart. We’re going to figure this thing out.”
Renée smiled wistfully. Her eyes were amused and a little pitying. She had gold flecks in her coffee-bean-colored irises. That might’ve been Dragonscale or it might’ve just been her eyes.
“Who says we’re smart?” she asked, in a tone of playful contempt. “We never even mastered fire. We thought we did, but you see now, it has mastered us.”
As if to punctuate this point, across the room, a teenage girl began to shriek. Harper turned her head and saw orderlies running to throw fireproof blankets on a girl struggling up out of her cot. She was shoved down and smothered. Flames belched from beneath the blankets.
Renée gazed sadly across the room at her and said, “And she just started Clan of the Cave Bear.”
Harper began to look for Renée whenever her duties brought her to the cafeteria. She sought her out to talk about books. It felt good to have that: some normal, pointless conversation in the morning, some talk that had nothing to do with the world catching fire. Harper made Renée a part of her day, knowing all the time it was a mistake, that when the older woman died, it would spoil something inside of her. After she recovered from the initial loss, Harper would be a harder person. And she didn’t want to become a harder person. She wanted to stay the same Harper Grayson who could get wet-eyed at the sight of old people holding hands.
She knew Renée would be gone one day, and one day she was. Harper wheeled a trolley full of fresh sheets into the cafeteria and saw in a glance that Renée’s mattress had been stripped bare and her personal items taken away. The sight of that empty bed was a wallop to the stomach, and Harper let go of the trolley and turned around, banging through the double doors, past the guards, and down the hall. She couldn’t make it to the ladies’ room in the basement for a cry, it was too far. She turned to face the wall, put a hand against it, and let go inside. Her shoulders shook and she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
One of the guards—Albert Holmes, as it happened—touched her shoulder.
“Ma’am?” he asked. “Oh my goodness. Ma’am? What’s wrong?”
At first, Harper couldn’t get a single word out. She was struggling for air, her whole body convulsively hitching. She fought it down. She was scaring him. He was a broad-shouldered and freckly kid who had been playing high school football not two years before, and the sight of a woman in tears was almost too much for him.
“Gilmonton,” she said at last, half coughing it out.
“You didn’t know?” Albert asked, his voice wondering and faint.
Harper shook her head.
“She left,” Al said. “Walked right out past the morning boys.”
Harper panted, her lungs aching, her throat full of tears. She thought maybe she was strong enough to get away now, get down to the bathroom, where she could find a stall and really let herself—
“What?” Harper said. “What did you say?”
“She took off!” Al told her. “Slipped right out of the hospital! With her little plant under one arm.”
“Renée Gilmonton walked out?” Harper asked. “With her mint? And someone let her?”
Al stared at her with those wide, wondering eyes. “You should see the security footage. She was glowing! Like a lighthouse! You look at the tape. It’s awesome. I mean ‘awesome’ the way they use that word in the Bible. The guys on duty ran for it. They thought she was going to explode. Like a human nuke. She was scared she was going to explode, too, which is why she ran outside. She ran outside and never came back. They don’t know what happened to her. She wasn’t even wearing shoes!”
Harper wanted to reach under her mask and wipe the tears off her face, but she couldn’t. Wiping anything off her face was a nearly half-hour process. She couldn’t remove her Tyvek until she had stood in a shower of bleach for five minutes. She blinked rapidly to clear her vision.
“That doesn’t make sense. People with Dragonscale don’t glow.”
“She did,” Al said. “She was reading to some little kids, right before breakfast, and the girl sitting in her lap jumped up because Mrs. Gilmonton was getting warm. Then people started to scream and scatter. She was lit up like a fuckin’ Christmas tree. ’Scuse my French, ma’am. On the video her eyes look like death rays! She ran past two sets of guards, right out of the quarantine. The way she looked—hell, anyone would’ve ducked for cover.”
Five minutes later, Harper watched the video herself, with four other nurses, at the reception desk down the hall. Everyone in the hospital was watching it. Harper saw it at least ten times before the day was done.
A fixed camera showed the wide corridor outside the entrance to the cafeteria, an expanse of antiseptic white tile. The door was flanked by security in their own combination of Tyvek suits and riot helmets. One of them leaned against the wall, leafing slowly through the pages of a clipboard. The other sat in a molded plastic chair, tossing his baton in the air and catching it.
The doors banged open and the hall flooded with brilliance, as if someone were pointing a spotlight into it. In the first moment, the glow was so intense it blew out the black-and-white image, filling the screen with a bluish glare. Then the light sensors in the security camera adjusted—a little. Renée remained a bright ghost, a wavering brilliance in the hourglass shape of a woman. The lit scrollwork of her Dragonscale obscured her features. Her eyes were blue-white rays of light and did, indeed, look a bit like death rays from a mid-fifties science-fiction film. She clutched her potted mint under her left arm.
The guard who had been tossing his baton twitched away from her. His nightstick dropped and clouted him on the shoulder and he fell out of his chair. The other guard tossed his clipboard in the air as if it had turned into a cobra. His heels shot out from under him and he sat down hard on the floor.
Renée looked from one to the other, seemed to lift a placating hand, and then hurried away.
Albert Holmes told Harper: “She said, ‘Don’t mind me, boys, I’m just going to go explode outside where no one will get hurt.’”
Dr. Ryall, the resident pathologist, was unimpressed. He had read about outlier cases, where the Dragonscale reached critical mass and then, for whatever reason, stalled without immediately causing a person to ignite. He assured anyone who would listen that Renée Gilmonton’s remains would be found within a hundred paces of the hospital. But some orderlies swept the high grass in the field beyond the parking lot, looking for cooked bones, and didn’t find any. Nor could they find any trace of which way she had gone: no singed brush or weeds. She seemed not to have exploded but evaporated, taking her potted mint with her.
The CDC had a team scheduled to visit Portsmouth Hospital in August, to review their quarantine procedures, and Dr. Ryall said he’d be sure to show them the video of the Gilmonton incident. He was confident they’d share his interpretation.
But the CDC team never got to look at it, because by the time August rolled around, Portsmouth Hospital was a hollowed-out chimney, gutted by fire, and Dr. Ryall was dead, along with Albert Holmes, Nurse Lean, and over five hundred patients.
5