The children spoke to her with their hands and she nodded and replied in kind, but Harper turned away from them and did not see the end of their conversation. What they said to each other was for them alone.
Harper came unsteadily to her feet and looked around. Jakob’s charred and withered corpse poured filthy black smoke. Harper walked to the rear of the wreck and dug through dirty coils of hose. She excavated a fire blanket and flapped it over Jakob’s head and shoulder, then backed away, waving the smoke from her face. It smelled like a trash fire.
She bumped into someone standing behind her. Renée put a steadying hand on her shoulder. Renée had made her way down the embankment to join them at last.
“Have you seen the cat?” Renée asked, her voice strained and stunned.
“He—he didn’t make it, Renée,” Harper said. “He was—thrown clear in the accident. I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” Renée said and blinked. “What about—”
“John. Is alive. But hurt. I need help to get him out of the truck.”
“Yes. Of course.” Renée looked back at Allie and Nick and the burning woman. “That—what is that?”
“She came with John,” Harper explained.
“She’s—” Renée began, then swallowed, licked her lips, tried again. “She’s—” Her voice caught in her throat again.
“An old flame,” Harper said.
19
Renée wedged a crowbar under one corner of the windshield and pried it free. It flopped into the road all in one piece, a jingling blanket of blue safety glass with a thousand fissures in it, impossibly holding together. Harper and Renée squeezed into the cab together and stood below John, who hung suspended above them, strapped in by his seat belt. A drop of blood fell into Harper’s right eye, and for a moment she was seeing the world through red-stained glass.
The two of them did their best to get him down to the ground without jostling him, but when his right foot struck the blacktop, his eyes flew open and he cried out in a thin voice. They dragged him from the wreck of the truck. Renée went to get something to put under his head and came back with the Portable Mother, which served well enough as a pillow.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, my leg. It’s bad, isn’t it? I can’t look.”
Harper moved her hands over his thigh, feeling the break in his femur through the thick rubber of his fireman pants. She didn’t think it had punched through the skin and was certain it hadn’t nicked a major artery. If it had, he wouldn’t be asking her about his leg. He’d be unconscious from blood loss, or dead.
“I can deal with it. I’ll have to set it and splint it, and without painkillers, that’s going to hurt.” She probed his chest. Once he gasped and shut his eyes and pressed his head hard back into the carpetbag beneath it. “I’m more worried about the ribs. They’re broken again. I’ll have to scratch around, see what I have to set your leg.” She felt a heat at her back and knew who was standing behind her. “There’s someone here to keep you company while I’m rummaging around.”
She kissed him on the cheek, rose, and stepped aside.
Sarah stood blazing over him. She lowered herself to one knee and looked into his face, and Harper thought she was smiling. It was hard to tell. Her face was little more than rags of flame. When Sarah had first appeared she had been a shroud of white fire with a core of almost blinding heat at her very center. Now, though, her dominant hue was a dull, deep red, and she had diminished to childlike proportions, was about the size of Nick.
“Oh. Sarah. Oh, look at you,” John said. “Just hold on. We’ll collect up some wood. We’ll keep you going.” He lifted his hands, trying to say it in gestures.
She shook her head. Harper was sure now she was smiling. The lady of fire lifted her chin, the breeze gently blowing the last tatters of her hair, and she seemed to stare right into Harper—to stare at her in the dreamy way Harper herself had often stared into moving flames. At the last, Harper thought Sarah winked at her.
When she went out, it happened all at once. The girl of flame collapsed into herself in a rattling drizzle of cinders. A thousand green sparks whirled up into the afternoon. Harper raised one hand to protect her eyes and was stung all over—gently stung—as they rained into her, touching her bare arms and brow and neck and cheeks. She flinched, but the light prickling was gone in a moment. She wiped at her cheeks and came away with a palm of smeared ash.
Harper rubbed it between thumb and finger, watching the pale grime drift off on the light breeze, thinking of what they said at funerals, the bit about ashes to ashes, which went along with something about the certainty of resurrection.
20
John’s eyes were scared, his face pebbled with sweat and soot. His pants were off. The right thigh was black and bloated, twice as thick as his left. Renée’s chubby palms rested below the break, while Harper’s gripped the leg just above it.
“Are you ready?” Harper asked.
John gave her a tight, frightened nod. “Let’s get this Dark Ages medical procedure over with.”
Allie was standing thirty feet away, but when the Fireman began to scream, she turned her back on them and clapped her hands over her ears. The bone made a grinding sound as the two broken parts settled back together, a noise that reminded Harper of someone dragging a rock across a chalkboard.
21
Allie was the one who figured out how to make a travois by folding blankets across a segment of fire ladder. They lashed him down to it, running bungee lines across his shins and hip bones. A final cord went around his forehead. Those were the only places they could put the cables without crossing a broken bone.
He was, by then, unconscious but restless, blowing air from his lips and trying to shake his head. He looked very old, Harper thought, his cheeks and temples sunken, his brow creased. He also had a flustered, dim-witted expression that made her heartsick.
Renée disappeared for a while, but when she returned she had a road map of New England, which she had discovered in the glove compartment of Jakob’s Freightliner. Harper sat with it across her knees for a while, then told them it was two hundred miles to Machias.
“If we set a pace of twenty miles a day,” Harper said, “we can be there in a little over a week.”
Harper waited for someone to ask if she was kidding.
Instead, Allie crouched, took the ends of the homemade travois, and stood. John’s head rose into the air until it was about level with the small of her back. Allie’s face was a grim, stoic mask.
“Better get going, then,” Allie said. “If we start right now we can make ten miles before we lose the light. I don’t see any good reason to waste the day. Do you?”
She glared around at them, as if she expected a challenge. She didn’t get one.
“Ten days on your feet,” Renée mused. She looked at Harper’s distended belly. “When’s the due date?”
Harper showed her a tight smile. “Plenty of time.”
She had lost track, but was pretty sure it was down to less than two weeks.
Renée salvaged a bag of groceries from the wreck and Harper picked the Portable Mother out of the road. They had struggled their way back up the slope to I-95 before Harper noticed Nick was carrying a fire ax. He was a practical child.
Where it wasn’t shattered, the road was blanketed with ash. There was nothing to see, all the way to the horizon, except cinder-colored hills and the charred spears of the pines.
A few hours before dusk they reached a place where the interstate caved away into what had once been a creek. The water was choked with ash, had become a magnesium-colored sludge. A ’79 Mercury floated down it, up to its headlights, looking like a giant robot crocodile patrolling a toxic canal.
Allie set the travois down by the side of the road. “I’ll go upstream, see if there’s another way across.”