The woman’s eyes strained from her head in pain. She stared up at Harper and Harper stared back and then recoiled in surprise, bumping her head on the dash. Harper knew her. She had crossed paths with her a few times in the summer, when they were both working at Portsmouth Hospital. The EMT was pretty, in a freckled, boyish way: upturned nose, pixie cut.
“Charity,” Harper said, remembering her name and saying it aloud in the same moment. “We worked at the hospital together. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m going to take care of you. You have a collapsed lung. I’m going to step away and get the gurney and put you on it. You need a chest compress and oxygen. You’re going to be all right. Do you understand me? I’ll be right back and we’ll make you more comfortable.”
Charity gripped Harper’s hand and squeezed. Her fingers were warm and sticky with her own blood.
“I remember you,” Charity said. “You’re little Mary Poppins. You’re the one who was always humming that song ‘Spoonful of Sugar.’”
Harper smiled in spite of the blood and the stink of gunsmoke. “That’s me.”
“Want to know something, little Mary Poppins?” Charity asked. Harper nodded. “You and your friends just murdered two EMTs. I’m going to die and you aren’t going to save me. Eat a spoonful of sugar with that, bitch.” She shut her eyes and turned her face away.
Harper flinched, bumped her head again, as she retreated. “You aren’t going to die tonight. Hang on, Charity. I’ll be right back.” Harper was aware her own voice was an octave too high, uneven and unconvincing.
Harper hopped down from the cockpit. She was halfway around to the rear of the ambulance when Ben gently took hold of her upper arm.
He said, “You can’t do anything for her, you know. I wish to God you could, but you can’t.”
“Get your hand off me.” Harper twisted her biceps free from his grip.
Mindy walked past her, an empty duffel bag in each hand, deliberately not looking at the squashed police officer in the road. Red and blue lights chopped the night into a series of frozen moments, little slices of time captured in stained glass.
“We have to get what we came for and go,” Ben said. “There’ll be more police soon. We can’t be here when they arrive, Harper.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you shot up the street, you assholes. You stupid assholes.”
“If they get even one of us, they get us all. If you love Nick and Renée and Father Storey and the Fireman, you’ll get what we came for and roll.”
I’m going to die and you aren’t going to save me. Eat a spoonful of sugar with that, bitch. Harper heard it again in her head and felt a frustration—a rage—so intense it was like nausea. She wanted to hit Ben, to scream at him. She wanted to hit him over and over while she wept.
Instead, she spoke in a soft voice that wavered with emotion and which she hardly recognized. She was unused to hearing herself plead.
“Please, Ben. Please. Just a chest compress. She doesn’t have to die. I can save her. I can make sure she’ll still be alive when the next police car gets here.”
“Pack what we need for camp and we’ll see if there’s time,” he said, and she understood she would not be allowed even to apply the chest compress.
She lowered her head and went to the rear of the ambulance.
Mindy was already standing in the brightly lit interior with its stainless steel surfaces, its rolling gurney, its drawers and cabinets. Already Harper’s sense of sickened frustration was congealing into a rancid form of grief. They had done the killing; now it was time for the looting. On some level she felt the plan had always been to murder and steal, and she had not only gone along with it, she had all but engineered it.
She packed without thought. She filled the cooler with plasma and fluids and sent Mindy away with it. She packed the first duffel, then the second, collecting the items every respectable health clinic would stock and that her own infirmary lacked: reels of gauze, bottles of painkillers, ampoules of antibiotics, sterile thread and sterile tools, a bundle of second-skin burn gel pads. By the time Mindy got back, Harper was on her knees, packing adult diapers into the second bag—she was using them to insulate and cushion little glass bottles of epinephrine and atropine—and wondering if she could squeeze in an oxygen tank.
Jamie banged her fist on the steel door.
“Time. We got to move.”
“No! Two more minutes. Mindy, I want that cervical collar and I want—”
“It’s time,” Jamie said and she reached in for the duffel that was already full and slid it out on the ground.
“Go on,” Mindy said. “I’ll get the cervical collar, Ms. Willowes.”
Harper cast an unhappy, half-desperate look around at open cupboards and drawers hanging open. Her gaze found the heart-start paddles, the kit no bigger than the briefcase for a laptop.
“Nelson!” Harper cried.
He appeared at the rear of the ambulance, eyes goggling in that strangely smooth, unlined, pink face that always made her think of a fat baby.
“The heart-start paddles,” Harper said. “I want them.”
She jumped out of the back, duffel in one hand and a compression bandage in the other. She brushed past Nelson and walked quickly to the front of the ambulance.
“I came as soon as I—”
Charity was no longer breathing in that strenuous way—or in any other way. Harper rolled her onto her back and wrenched down the zipper at the front of the jumpsuit. When it stuck, she tore the jumpsuit open. The bullet hole was just below her right breast. Harper touched Charity’s wrist to take her pulse. Nothing. She felt sure there had been nothing for a long time now.
“Nursey,” Jamie said. “You can’t help her, but there’s people back at camp you can. Come on. Let’s go home.” Her voice was not unkind.
Harper let Jamie draw her by the elbow out of the ambulance. She got turned around, back toward Ben’s Challenger. Harper reached out blindly and found the straps of her duffel.
“I’ll gather up the others. See you at the car,” Jamie said.
Harper walked around to the open trunk of Ben’s car, moving in a daze. She heaved the duffel into the back, next to the cooler, and then looked up the street.
At the end of Verdun Avenue there was that blackened, burned-out concrete shell that had once been a CVS drugstore. Out past the CVS, right at the intersection of Verdun and Sagamore, a white windowless van idled. Call letters were painted on the side, words dragging cartoonish streamers of flame: WKLL ? HOME OF THE MARLBORO MAN. At a distance, Harper could hear another vehicle coming down Sagamore, something heavy and slow: her ear caught the soft blasting hiss of air brakes and the diesel whine of a heavy engine. It sounded like a school bus.
The passenger-side window of the WKLL van was down. A man leaned out of it with a spotlight and flipped the switch. A blinding beam of light, as dazzling as a fresh-cut diamond, struck Nelson Heinrich, nailing him to the spot in the middle of the road. Nelson had just climbed out of the ambulance with the heart-start paddle kit in both hands. He squinted into the brightness.
A low squall of feedback whined from a brace of speakers on the roof of the van.
Harper felt blood beginning to rush inside of her, her internal chemical carousel getting up to speed.
The voice that followed boomed like the voice of God. It was the hoarse, roughened voice of a man who has screamed his way through an entire Metallica concert. Harper had heard the voice live only a few days before, in her own house. Before that, she had listened to him often enough on the radio, narrating the apocalypse and providing the end of the world with a sound track that was heavy on seventies cock rock.
“What are we doing tonight, folks? Lootin’ an ambulance? There weren’t some nuns needed raping or an orphanage to burn down? Well, tell you what. I got good news, and I got better news. I’m the Marlboro Man, here tonight with the Seacoast Incinerators, and if you’re looking for medicine, boy, have you come to the right place. We got just the thing for treating you infected bags of meat. The even better news is there’s an ambulance right here, so after we’re done with you thieving and killing fucks, we won’t have to go very far to find the body bags.”