The fireman stopped and stared at him. “What?”
“Janey says you need to listen to me. To help. Or else it will have all been for nothing, all of it. Will you help me, then?”
The fireman’s mouth dropped open. He gaped for a moment, then said, “How in the hell do you know?”
“Will you help me?” said Hayes again.
The fireman’s face grew pale. Shaken, he nodded, and followed Hayes into the building.
Hayes led the fireman down into the basement, standing aside sometimes to let the man hack away at the doors that barred their progress. When they reached the bathroom in the basement they had to turn aside and cover their faces, as the ceilings were filled with thick rolls of black smoke, yet they saw a mother and her little girl lying on the sooty floor like dolls thrown aside. The fireman stuck his head in and looked at them for as long as he could, then looked at Hayes and said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned.” Then he went to the front door and called for help.
Four more firemen trooped in. Hayes withdrew to the street and watched. He could feel it when the firemen grasped their limp arms and dragged them out, the little girl pale as the moon, the mother drooling and unconscious. Hayes watched as the firemen laid them out on the cement and began to tend to them.
Then the fireman he had spoken to approached him slowly. “How did you do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Hayes said honestly.
“How did you know they were in there?”
“I don’t know. I just did.”
“Can… can you find any more?”
Hayes turned and looked at the buildings up and down the street. “I think so. If I get close.”
“Well. We’ll follow you if we can.”
Hayes took a thick leather coat from them and began the haphazard process of sprinting up and down any alleys he could, frantically trying to listen for anyone trapped inside. He would know when they were close, as they lit up in his mind as they always had, but so much faster and brighter than he had ever felt it before. For a while there was nothing as he dodged and ducked among the flaming pathways, but then he skidded to a halt before a small ramshackle tenement, looking up at it. Then he ran back to the firemen, calling, “In here, in here! There’s one in here!”
They came and broke the side door down. Inside was a man trapped in his stairwell, his leg broken in two places and his ankle crushed below a mound of fallen wood. When they found him he looked up, gaping like a fish and scrabbling at his leg. He was curiously bald, his hair having slowly withered in the heat, and his face glistened with the promise of blisters. The crew chief levered the boards up and they pulled his foot out, twisted and wet and red. Then they hauled him away, and he howled whenever his foot touched cement, tears running down his red face.
The firemen stared at Hayes. “Jesus,” one said softly. “What the hell are you?”
“Enough of that,” said the crew chief. “He can find more. Can’t he?”
Still breathing hard, Hayes nodded.
“Then go to it, I guess,” said the chief.
Hayes sprinted through the network of streets, the fire crew shining in his mind and distant screams ringing in his ears. He led the crew through a maze of ruined streets and tumbling rookeries to three vagrants trapped in a cellar, having crept in in the middle of the night to find a warm place to sleep. The fire crew hooked the truck’s hoses up to the hydrants, and the hose chuckled and whistled as the water barreled through it until finally it shot a towering spray onto the alley. It blew the boards back and the fire died instantly, and Hayes and the crew pulled the drunken vagrants out and led them staggering out to safety.
Hayes wiped sweat from his face before running back into the streets. There were more, many more. He felt them, when he looked. Felt their terror beating wild, hovering in the fire when they were near like will-o’-the-wisps in boggy mists. Minute after minute he returned to the gathering fire crews, telling them where he had found another and how they were trapped. Then he realized more people were following him. Not fire crews, but normal people. Normal people listening to his voice and following his commands.
He was surveying the fire from a corner when he felt it start to leave him. His veil of awareness slowly began to recede, and the souls that had burned so brightly in the night now dimmed to become murky haze. Soon he knew he would be blind and broken and fumbling again, shortsighted and lost, and he cried out, “No! No, not now! Please, don’t!” But it did not stop. It was leaving him.
He climbed back up to the top of the fire truck and began desperately shouting orders. He pointed up one street and told them where survivors were hidden, and pointed down another and told them where the fires were spreading fast. He told them who was hurt and where and how long they had. And each time the crews emerged from the rubble with a black-streaked refugee he waited for them to be laid upon the sidewalk before turning around and sprinting back into the fire.
And the crowd watched him. They watched this strange, sooty little man bellowing hoarse commands and ordering them this way and that. They watched him climb up onto a car roof and summon some strange authority around himself like a cloak and then shout directions to teams far down the street. And for some reason they began to believe that he wielded some power over the fire, as if he could control the fire itself. Like he could merely point at a burning home and the flames would wither and die and not return. And how could they believe otherwise? Battle-scarred and tattered and grim as the fiercest warrior, how could this little man be anything less than the commander of all things within his sight?
Hayes knew this. He heard what they thought of him. And he knew then that this moment would echo through time for him. This one would be different. In some way he knew that even though he had been whole and painless and powerful for only a short time, he had been what he was always supposed to be, and would be for the rest of his days.
He was watching the firemen tend to the wounded when it left him entirely. The world fell silent around him, dead of all the thoughts and hopes he’d heard so clearly. Now he heard only the indistinct mutters he’d heard all his life. It was like being struck blind.
Hayes sat down on the hood of the fire truck. He huddled in his coat and wiped tears from his eyes and fought to hold on to that feeling, that feeling of being whole, of being unbroken and able.
“Are you all right?” asked one fireman.
“Yes,” said Hayes hoarsely. He stood up. “What else is there to do?”
CHAPTER FORTY
It took a long while for Samantha to get to Garvey’s apartment. In the past few hours the city had come under siege, practically. As Samantha hurried through the gloomy streets she held the pistol Hayes had given her at her side, glad it was there but hoping she would not have to use it. You could hear the din of the crowds and fires far away to the southeast, as if through a radio, and all the sky was smoke. The few cabs that were still out would not stop for anyone and trolleys sat abandoned in their tunnels and stations. Some of the eastern portions of the city had lost power, and there the windows and stoops were lit up with candlelight, little flickering stars spackling the building fronts. It seemed medieval.
When she finally came to Garvey’s apartment she found it deserted. At first she was frightened for him, but then she saw it had not been ransacked. Everything was clean and ordered, as usual. Even the bed had been made. Then she opened the drawer to his desk and found his gun was missing.
“Oh, Donald,” she said sadly.
She thought for a moment, then went east to where the Wering Canal began. She followed the paths down into the canal to where they ran just above the water. As she moved she could hear people running around among the bridges and sidewalks above her, sometimes cackling or shouting threats. She was glad of the solitary darkness down here, underneath the bridges and forgotten piping.
Soon the paths rose up and she was met with a string of small apartments, the first one being Hayes’s safe house. She went to the door and found it unlocked, then thought hard and pushed it open to reveal darkness. She kept the gun pointed down as it swung. There was a sharp click, the sound of a pistol cocking from somewhere
