43

There was no time to lie there, he chided himself wryly, blinking up at the sky, thinking how hurt he was.

Bell dragged himself to his feet. He took one step, and then another. The ankle was not sprained, and his ribs were probably not broken, either. They only felt that way. But this was no time to stand, feeling his shirtfront like a smoker who has misplaced his lighter.

He limped to the center of the road. The surface of the two lane reflected the sun. The asphalt absorbed much of the light itself, but gave off so much heat that the double yellow line withered and floated in mirage only a few paces ahead of him.

A car had to roll along this road eventually. He began to run. The first few steps were awkward, but then he found his stride. A car would be here soon, he told himself. He could smell the smoke with every breath now. They would burn to death. The thought choked him. Surely any moment there would be a car, and he would flag it to a stop.

The mirage ahead of him did not look anything like water. It looked like gulls made of aluminum foil, flames made of shivering ice. With every step this silent ice escaped ahead of him. So much depended on a sole, running man, sprinting down the center of a highway, over rabbit skins with wire-thin bones, over ancient roadkill identifiable only by a stain on the road, a pinch of hair or a glittering scrap of reptile skin. He had, he gradually realized, no plan. He did not know where the nearest ranch might lie. He knew only that the road was empty. There was not a single car.

Another pancaked mummy passed beneath his feet. He had never realized what a desolate place a highway could be. He stopped, panting, sweating on the crown of the road, when his cramp bit him once again. He forced himself to run. There was no time to stand still.

Burn to death—the thought made the air whistle in his throat. Surely a car was coming. Any minute now. Someone had to use this road.

Bell shouldered through the heat as though it were a thickening gel. Each step was a loud thwack on the gray surface of the road.

His thoughts were fragments. Surely soon. A car. Any time.

The road was empty.

Speke shot down the sparks as soon as they danced on the roof. The hard stream of water blasted them away. It was all burning. The Outer Office was gone, with the two bodies. Sarah’s cottage was fuming, ropes of smoke writhing from the peak of its roof. Anguish made him tighten his grip on the hose, forcing the water into a hard, white rod that played and broke on the curls of smoke.

He looked back at Sarah watching it all, straddling the divide of the roof. She caught his eye.

Her glance said: Don’t worry. We’ll survive.

She watched with the kind of serenity she had before now only imagined. She descended the ladder briefly to pluck the shovel from the lawn, then carried the shovel up the ladder and used it to flick sputtering ashes when they fell out of Speke’s reach. She sent them spinning into the range of his water, or off the roof, then returned to her post at the peak.

As a girl she had been fascinated by the life of Joan of Arc. Perhaps the reason for this was quite simple. Joan was a young woman who fought like a warrior, with fighting men behind her. Her father, she must have imagined, would prize her all the more if he could see her leading men to battle. This fascination alone had brought her to consider, as a teenager, a Catholic conversion. Joan of Arc’s last word had to Sarah always been something of a mystery. Surrounded by the flames, lapped by the fire, clothes and flesh licked clean, her last word, as the flames possessed her, was the single name: Jesus. Sarah had always wondered how this last name sounded through the crackling prison. Like a shriek? Like a prayer, offered up in absolute faith? Like a call for someone, something, certainly her own champion, to come at last?

People who heard her last cry were shaken, changed for the rest of their lives. Just after her death the faggots were tumbled aside so the crowd could see the partially consumed corpse and see that their champion was dead. At this moment, Speke battling the rain of hot ash, Sarah hammering a red spark dead with the flat of the shovel, she was stung by yet another spinning ember that fell from the sky. Only one small burn, she told herself. Nothing more than that.

The spark left a black smudge on her arm, and it seemed to Sarah now that Joan’s cry was just another human cry out of agony to a sky which responds to nothing.

Speke turned. “There’s still time.”

She stood at the very ridge of the roof line, where it fell away to either side. She did not answer.

“For you to run,” Speke added. His tone said: I know you’ve made up your mind, but I have to say this anyway, for my own conscience.

She smiled. Sometimes, she saw, it doesn’t matter what you believe. It only matters that you act as though the faith were real. Heaven takes you in its loving arms, or it doesn’t.

She climbed downward toward another plume of smoke.

It was a pickup, and it was coming fast. Bell flung himself into its path. The driver did not see him waving his arms, dancing, crying out for the vehicle, for time itself, to stop. The truck came on, hard.

At the last moment the driver hit the brakes so hard that blue smoke billowed from the tires, and the truck swung from side to side.

Then it hit him.