Fire Will Fall

  Dr. Godfrey let the clipboard sit on the bed while he studied Scott with his hands on his hips. Tyler was taking his time replying, so the room was deadly silent. He finally swept the clipboard up and moved toward the door. But he turned around and came back with a sigh when Scott groaned again.

  He said, "Okay, I guess I'm a softy. Roll over."

  So, Scott had manipulated a morphine shot out of him, but he could have gotten that without signing that dreadful form. So I was clueless as to all the fuss.

  This time, a lengthier e-mail came. It had that more dignified, less comical tone to it, and I noticed it was signed by the Kid and not Tyler.

  Miss Cora, I do not have much time to talk as I am detained by pressing issues at my terminal. Unfortunately, you cannot see us nor meet us nor know where we are. But you can e-mail the photos as soon as you get your scanner. We thank you for your help. As for telling the Jersey or New York squads what you have found before showing us, I must be honest in saying that USIC has left us in an unsafe and compromised situation, and our trust in them is severely breached. We would not be the best advisors on whom you should trust. Best of luck with your overhearing. And welcome to the Show. We think of you every hour and hope someday for the privilege of looking upon you in person and hearing your beautiful voices. Be strong. Our friendship is with you always. K.

  After that, I did not dare answer, but I felt torn between embracing the laptop to get a second blast of their courage or leaving it on the bed for Scott to read and fleeing the room. "Welcome to the Show." I felt Aleese laugh all over the place.

  Scott moaned, but it sounded like a moan of relief, like maybe the morphine was working. I walked to his side, clutching the laptop. Between his blinks, I could see the whites of his eyes.

  "How are you now?" I whispered.

  "Cut the pain in half." He sat up slowly, and I sat beside him on the bed. "Half is not great. Half is ... better. I wanted to be alert and sane enough to e-mail them."

  "Unfortunately, they're gone for now. Party's over. But you can read it all. It's a bit disturbing."

  He muttered a few more bad words and said, "It's payback time from God ... for going to too many parties in high school." He read through all the exchanges twice, saying nothing until the second time through. Then he let out a groan that sounded like he'd been saving it up.

  "USIC betrayed their trust..." he mumbled. "Betcha it's got to do with their ages. Some red-tape clusterfuck over not being allowed to take intelligence from minors... 'And therefore we have no budget to assist minors...'"

  He lay back slowly, obviously in pain in spite of the morphine. I could sense the situation upsetting him and tried to draw him away from it.

  "Why all the fuss with the DNR form?" I hissed. "You didn't have to sign it to get the drug."

  He pushed against his eyes with his fingertips and said, "The DNR form was how I got him to loosen up about the morphine."

  I understood.

  "As for actually signing it? I agree with him ... You guys aren't old enough. But I am. There's only one thought that's kept me putting one foot in front of the other. That's wanting to catch the guys who killed our moms and did this to us. If I can't do that here? I'll wait for them in hell."

  "How can you be so crude?" I whispered, angry at what could almost be taken as suicidal thoughts, and for his seeming ignorance of the bigger issue. Aleese poured through me, laughing as usual, muttering that it was about time I got angry. "Say it!" she screamed.

  "What about—" I couldn't.

  "What about Owen?" he asked.

  I nodded, feeling my eyes well up, supposing Owen was important also.

  "Truth? I'm starting to think Owen won't make it through this. He's deteriorating too quickly. Takes him an entire minute to walk down a flight of stairs. I haven't watched him go up yet. I'm too scared."

  I stayed silent, thankful for the blackness, thankful for this gift I had of being able to cry without spazzing and making noises. But he reached up, found my face, and brushed a tear away. I heard him suck it off his thumb.

  "There. You can tell Miss Haley we swapped body fluids," he said.

  "Not funny." I waited an eternity for him to wipe more away or rub my hair or ... anything. But he only tugged a strand affectionately, which made me sniff loudly.

  "You'd be fine without me, Cora Holman. You'll be amazed at how fine you'll be."

  There was something about the tenses he mixed that made it sound half prophetic. Aleese badgered me, "Go, girlie. Frost him. Don't look back." Or maybe it was something inside me that suddenly realized how exhausted I was making myself by chronically thinking that I was so weak, so needy, so stuck on seeing Scott Eberman as a legend. I didn't know why a selfish thought should hit me at a time like this. Maybe it was a defense mechanism.

  But I snapped my laptop completely shut, straightened my posture, and stood up. I said, "While you're busy dying, I'll be out here writing my blog for the Americans who love us. Call me if you need anything."

  He said nothing. I left.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  OWEN EBERMAN

  SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002

  7:05 P.M.

  RAIN'S BEDROOM

  WE ACTUALLY ATE THE FOOD Marg served us for dinner, having been convinced by Mr. Tiger that the mistake was theirs and not hers. But we ate in Rain's bedroom. Rain wasn't supposed to get up, and after the running and the trips up the stairs after her injury, my hips were done for the day.

  Cora ate with us. She picked at her food and looked so distracted and tense that I wanted to go check on my brother. Before I could get up the energy to hobble down there, a voice called, "Anybody home?"

  "Dempsey!" Rain's fork dropped and bounced eagerly on the bed.

  John Dempsey, one of our best buddies, came through the door. Rain crawled to the edge of the bed, got up on her knees, and gave him a huge hug.

  "I hear you got bit by a water moccasin," Dempsey said, rocking her sideways. "Touché. That means you can join in with all us guys who love freshwater fishing. I've been bit twice."

  He kept patting her back, waiting for her to let go, but she didn't.

  "Rain," he finally said. "It's only been two days."

  He and maybe six other friends from school had been at St. Ann's to see us the night before we were released. I'd been laid up and missed it.

  "Yeah, but I was afraid it might be longer."

  "We told you we wouldn't do that to you. Dobbins, Tannis, and Jeanine are downstairs getting a house tour from your nurse." He checked out Rain's butterfly and laid a kiss on it. "The antivenin isn't too bad. Starts making you seasick about four hours after you take it."

  "I feel great. I'm not sure I needed it," she said, turning her pinkie this way and that. "You should have seen Scott. He's gonna be a surgeon somehow, someday, I'm telling you. He opened up the wound and used a venom extractor to suck everything out. I thought it was going to suck my finger off. It still burns, but he must have gotten it all or I'd be dead. Right?"

  "You'd be really sick," Dempsey said. "Godfrey says you're cool?"

  "He's taking my blood back to St. Ann's to see if he can decide if it was a snake or a bee or something else. He says in the meantime, I have to stay lying down. I'm on observation for liver damage, but ... forget about that. No bummers. I'm so happy to see you guys."

  Dempsey went around to the far side of the bed and got a hug from Cora. Bob Dobbins, Tannis Halib, and Jeanine Fitzpatrick came in next. Bob and Tannis played football with me. Jeanine had been Rain's co-captain on field hockey. Dobbins was carrying a grocery bag.

  "S'up?" I said, knocking knuckles with him. "What's in the bag?"

  "Party goods. We were going to see if you guys were copasetic to party in the woods. But we'll be okay in here."

  Our friends were good sports. Dobbins tossed a bag of Fritos, which were Rain's favorite, into the middle of the bed, then pretzels, which were my favorite, and stuck a Mountain Dew in her hand and a Dr Pepper in mine.
They were our favorite sodas. We weren't supposed to be having any of this stuff, but you gotta live a little. Thank god we had big beds. Cora moved over to Rain's chair, having decided to open her laptop, and the six of us piled on.

  "Where's Scott?" Dempsey asked.

  "He's down," I said. "Down" meant anything that prevented one of us from getting out of bed. We didn't discuss symptoms too much with our friends and tried to keep things upbeat when they were around. Dempsey just accepted it. He got up and leaned down beside Cora, put his chin on her shoulder, and said, "What are you doing? Studying for a test?"

  We still had some homework to do so we could graduate, but it was a breeze, and we had most of three months' work done by the end of March.

  "I started a blog, and people keep signing the guest book. It's pretty amazing." She turned the screen and showed them the messages left by people from all over, her pretty smile making Dempsey stare into the side of her head.

  He'd had a crush on almost every girl in school over the years, but he kept returning to Cora. None of us had ever really noticed Cora, and to that he always responded that he liked "going it alone sometimes."

  Cora was almost as aloof to Jon now as she had been for years, though she was always polite. She pretended he wasn't there. I decided to help her out a little before she had to put a stop to it herself. "Did you hear about the speech Nurse Haley gave us the night before we left?"

  "My mom told me, yeah," Jon said quizzically, returning to the bed. "Sounds complicated. Let's see. We can touch you, but we can't stick our fingers in your mouths when we got cuts on our hands. You can catch it by swapping spit—they think, but they're not sure."

  Nobody laughed, waiting tensely for Rain's take on this. Whatever Rain joked about, everyone would joke about. But she was rammy and probably still frustrated about what never came down between her and me at the pond, and her finger burned. She would not tell about the pond to this crew—yet. They'd take a while to believe it.

  "Nurses are so outspoken. They'll talk about anything. She says we're in the Gonorrhea Guild. It'll work like an STD, honest to god."

  Dobbins shook his head. "That is so not right. There's no justice in the universe. How do the president of the 'No' Girls and the only guy who never misses a Young Life meeting get in a mess like this?"

  "What's the 'No' Girls?" Rain's head went up.

  I'd never told her this one. It's strictly locker-room speak. Dobbins grinned helplessly as Tannis and Jon and I laughed into our laps.

  "Rain, it means that when it came time to decide who we were all taking to the junior prom, we had to pull straws to see who was going to get stuck with you," Dobbins said.

  Rain and I could have been voted Least Likely to Catch an STD in school.

  "Now I have to sit around here and wish I had been you." She nudged Jeanine.

  I shushed everyone after laughs exploded. There are no secrets in this group. Jeanine drinks and has random sex, but she's remorseful on Monday and apologizes and explains herself and asks for forgiveness, which sounds like heaping more dumb behavior onto dumb behavior, but she gets away with it somehow. It's hard to cut up about somebody who's vulnerable and crying in your face. Twice she had "gone on a ride" with a few guys in the music crowd (we call them Head Bangers in our school) who kind of hate us, and she'd have us threatening to kick their butts by the end of school on Monday.

  Jeanine is adorable, and in a very pseudo-sexy way. She's a tall, lean athlete, all strappy muscle and bone, always with the same unkempt ponytail, no makeup, and you never see her without her varsity jacket. Zero cleavage. You just can't imagine her doing this stuff.

  "Oh, no. You don't wish you were me." She giggled, gripping her long ponytail nervously. "Something terrible happened a few weeks back. Are you ready for information overload?"

  We said no, but that didn't stop her.

  "I was shopping for my prom dress with my mom. And this other lady came in with her daughter. No names, okay? And my mom got in these silent giggle fits, and she exploded once we got back out in the mall. She said, 'Did you see that woman in there? When we were your age, she used to pull trains.'"

  "Whoa..." I tried to quiet Dempsey and Tannis as their sides split.

  Cora's bare feet were crossed on the bed, driving Dempsey mad. "Cora. You know what a pulled train is? It's when there's plural guys and a singular girl—"

  "Don't taint her." Dobbins tossed a Dorito at his head. "Will you not be satisfied until her mind is just as scummed over as yours? Continue, Jeanine. Don't listen, Cora."

  Cora's smiling face turned bright red, and I often thought the comments about her naiveté bothered her more than the unedited remarks that flew between us all.

  Jeanine's voice got lower, and heads went in. "I was all 'Mom! How could you tell me a thing like that, and how can you even remember it?' She said, 'Certain things people never forget. So take it under advisement if you're ever thinking of creating a sex scandal.' Well, she didn't know I'd already taken a few stupid pills. So as I see it, I have to go live somewhere else as an adult. I have to marry someone from out of town."

  "Maybe you'll have sons," Dempsey said. "That'd make for fewer trips to the mall. At any rate, I'll marry you, Jeanine!"

  "You would marry anybody," she noted, and turned to the rest of us. "So, you see, Rain? Don't ever wish you were me, unless you want to be in the mall with your kids someday with moms suddenly crawling out of the woodwork, guffawing into their handbags. Would you want your daughter standing there, all 'Mom. Why's everyone staring at you?'"

  Rain pinched her lips to keep a grin from forming, but I was glad to see it coming out her eyes.

  "Remember all the abstinence speeches Mr. Hypocrite used to give us?" she asked. She was talking about my brother, who gave her plenty of abstinence speeches last year—while he threatened to sic a hooker on me if I didn't decide to Do It before graduation. "Scott tried to explain to me before going to sleep last night that I have five boyfriends. Right here."

  She held up her fingers and wagged them. Jeanine tried to smack them down while her mouth made some horrified O shape that didn't last too long. She laughed spasmodically into her knee.

  "What are you staring at me for?" Dempsey demanded of Rain.

  "Because you get turned down so often. It must be, um, frustrating."

  "I know nothing about my five girlfriends. Even if I did, I don't own a manual to loan you. And boys and girls are very different. In case you never noticed."

  "This conversation grows gravely inappropriate," Dobbins said, studying the side of his soda can. For once, it wasn't me asking Rain to shut up.

  She ignored him, as I could have predicted, rambling on about Miss Haley's speech opening Pandora's box. "Adrianna LoPresti, our illustrious field hockey co-captain who would say anything ... she says if you're going to make a date with your five boyfriends, you need a 'trigger' and so to surf the Internet for dirty pictures. The problem? Dirty pictures do nothing for me except gross me out."

  "All right ... enough," Dobbins said over the cackles dripping from the ceiling. He wanted to be a teacher. I figured he would be a good one because of how he could take control of situations. He talked on in total seriousness until everyone was listening. "Rain, the nurse said you got hurt near what you thought was an animal carcass? Tell me about this, as I might have some interesting fodder that would shed some light."

  "It was an animal carcass," she insisted, swapping glances with me. "Or it was a pile of animal bones all caught in bramble. Very strange."

  "Because when we were driving up here, I couldn't figure out how to turn off Ronnie's police radio, so I was listening to it."

  Ronnie Dobbins was Scott's good friend, and he had just been accepted into the training program for state troopers in December. He had one of those endlessly babbling police CB radios in his bedroom, and I wasn't surprised he had one in his car, too. He'd obviously loaned his car to Bob tonight.

  "Did you know there were weird ani
mal remains found in Griffith's Landing this afternoon?"

  I sat up and listened, and everyone must have seen or sensed it, because the room got very silent.

  "Like ... goats?" Rain tore a marshmallow pack open and plopped one in her mouth. "It was definitely a goat. There's two other goats on this property, and they have bells on red ribbons around their necks. I started to feel the pain right after I lifted a red ribbon with a bell attached to it. It had been, like, imbedded in all this goo and bones in the bramble. I touched it with my pinkie."

  He pinched his lips, slowly shaking his head. "Your nurse didn't say what kind of animal you found. What they found in Griffith's Landing were dead monkeys."

  "Monkeys?" Rain looked totally lost. I figured it wasn't related, but the group's interest was piqued because you don't hear of monkeys in these parts unless they're in the Philadelphia zoo.

  "Yeah. Monkeys." He spun his index finger in the air. "These guys were blathering, so it wasn't all so easy to hear, but I know they found two dead monkeys and said some strange stuff about the corpses."

  Dobbins went on. "In a nutshell, the cops found these two piles of bones buried under the boardwalk in Griffith's Landing around three fifteen, having followed some stench that covered half the island. The CDC was at the scene. Your dad's name got mentioned, Rain. He was there."

  With that, Cora's head shot up, and she stared at Dobbins, too. Rain looked even more confused. "Daddy had run off for some emergency just before I got hurt. Mr. Tiger said tonight that with the emergency, they forgot to tell Marg and just took off. Monkeys? He's leaving us unattended due to dead monkeys? I mean, monkeys, dead or alive, are weird in these parts. But they've got nothing to do with his job. I don't get it. And come to think of it, he hasn't come back yet. When Scott blew a fuse at the nurse, Dad sent Mr. Tiger back here to soothe him down. I guess my dad and Scott had a fight. I'm, like, forced into this bed rest that I don't want or need, and Dad's over in Griffith's with animal bones?"

  I didn't get it either. Dobbins chewed a Dorito and swallowed, shrugging. "According to all this chatter, the CDC had to collect the remains in a steel drum, something about how the remains ate through three plastic garbage bags, and they were afraid of somebody getting burned."