The Fireman Read Online Free Page B

then,” Nurse Lean said.
    “No.”
    “That means I won’t be able to let you go with him while he’s examined. I’m—I’m very sorry,” Nurse Lean said, sounding, for the first time all day, not just uncertain but also exhausted. “Family only.”
    “He’ll be afraid. He can’t understand you. He understands me . He can talk to me .”
    “ We’ll find someone who can communicate with him,” Nurse Lean said. “Besides. Once he goes through these doors he’s in quarantine. The only people who go in there have Dragonscale or work for me. I can’t make any exceptions on that, sir. You told us about the mother. Does he have any other family?”
    “He has—” the Fireman began, paused, frowned, and shook his head. “No. There isn’t anyone left. No one who could come and be with him.”
    “All right. Thanks—thank you for bringing him to our attention. We’ll take care of him from here. We’ll get him all sorted out.”
    “Give me a moment?” he asked her, and looked back at Nick, who was blinking at fresh tears. The Fireman seemed to salute him, then to milk an imaginary cow, and finished by pointing at the boy’s chest. Nick’s response required no translation. He leaned into the Fireman and let himself be hugged: gently, gently.
    “I wish you wouldn’t do that, sir,” Nurse Lean said. “You don’t want to get what he has.”
    The Fireman didn’t reply—and he didn’t let go until the double doors batted open and a nurse pushed a gurney into the hall.
    “I’ll be back to check on him.” The Fireman lifted the boy in both arms and gently set him on the rolling cot.
    Nurse Lean said, “You won’t be able to see him anymore. Not once he’s in quarantine.”
    “Just to inquire about his welfare at the front desk,” the Fireman said. He offered Albert and Nurse Lean a sardonic but not ill-humored nod of appreciation and turned back to Harper. “I am in your debt. I take that very seriously. The next time you need someone to put out a fire, I hope I’m lucky enough to get the call.”
    Forty minutes later, the kid was under the gas, and Dr. Knab, the pediatric surgeon, was cutting him open to remove an inflamed appendix the size of an apricot. The boy was in recovery for three days. On the fourth day he was gone.
    The nurses in recovery were sure he had not walked out of his room. The window was wide open and a theory made the rounds that he had jumped. But that was crazy—the recovery room was on the third floor. He would’ve shattered both legs in the fall.
    “Maybe someone brought a ladder,” Albert Holmes said, when the subject was being batted around over bowls of American chop suey in the staff room.
    “There’s no ladder that can reach to the third floor,” Nurse Lean said in a huffy, aggrieved voice.
    “There is on a fire truck,” Al said around a mouthful of French roll.

 
    UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ....................................
    4
    In those stifling, overheated days of high summer, when a manageable crisis was teetering on the edge of an unmanageable disaster, the deaf child was not the only patient to vanish from Portsmouth Hospital. There was one other among the contaminated who escaped with her life, in the last days before everything went—not metaphorically, but literally—up in smoke.
    All that month the wind blew from the north and a dismal brown fog settled over the coast of New Hampshire, swept down from the fires in Maine. Maine was burning from the Canadian border to Skowhegan, a hundred miles of blue spruce and fragrant pine. There was nowhere to go to escape the stink of it, a sweet-harsh odor of burnt evergreens.
    The smell followed Harper into sleep, where every night she dreamt of campfires on the beach, roasting hot dogs with her brother Connor. Sometimes it would turn out there were heads charring on the ends of their sticks instead of wieners. Occasionally, Harper woke shouting. Other times she woke to