Grants Pass (18 page)

Final Edition

Jeff Parish

Dusk settled on Paris, Texas. The
sun, hidden all day behind dark clouds, took advantage of its last few moments
to create a nearly perfect sunset, painting the cloudbank in glowing blues, reds,
oranges and yellows.

It was, as Matt Godwin’s father
liked to say, enough to knock your eyeballs out. It was also a wasted effort,
as Matt’s own eyeballs remained firmly fixed on the ground spinning slowly
beneath him. The sun slipped below the horizon, stealing its momentary beauty
along the way. Sullen, leaden clouds hastened night’s approach.

Matt stopped turning the
merry-go-round. He lay there for a moment. His chin hung over the edge, his
hand tracing random glyphs in the pine bark mulch some city official or other
thought would make the playground safer for children. Scooting back, he rolled
over and rested his head on the metal surface. His five-foot-six frame barely
dangled off the other end. His girth just fit between hoops meant to hold children
despite his weight loss in the last few months.

He lifted his left hand and turned
his wrist this way and that in an effort to determine the time. The hour and
minute hands showed 4:27, and the minute hand hung motionless. Matt cursed the
watch for a few moments, but stopped with a wry chuckle. What was the point?
Time meant little anymore. It was morning, noon, dusk or night; what else did
you need to know these days? He unfastened the band and slipped the watch off
his wrist. He hefted it for a moment, and then tossed the offending timepiece
into the night.

“
Hey,
squirrels! Do you know what time it is?” he called, laughing once more.

As usual, no one answered except a
passing breeze laden with the scent of more rain. The wind ruffled his
close-cropped black hair as it played across seesaws stuck somewhere between
teeter and totter and pushed swings that might never again hear kids demanding
to go higher, Daddy, higher.

A soft crunching noise cut his
laughter short. He raised his head, casting about for the source. Surely Bill
wouldn’t have followed him here…

The noise came again. Head swiveling
like a radar array, Matt’s attention centered on a corner of the fence
surrounding the playground. He sighed with relief, and his entire body sagged
with departing tension as a bois d’arc dropped a third green, wrinkly apple on
the ground.

Thunder boomed across the yard,
warning anyone outside to get indoors.

Matt stood, wincing as tight muscles
protested a new position. Had he been on that merry-go-round all day? His
stomach rumbled, a small echo of the thunder overhead. He supposed he had been.
Matt stumbled around the carousel, disoriented after hours of slow turning.

“
Where did I
leave my backpack?” he muttered.

His feet found it first, stumbling
over the black fabric. Hoisting the bag onto one shoulder, Matt headed out the
gate. He needed to catch a City Council meeting.

****

Mayor Gary Hamilton pounded his
gavel on the table.

“
That is
enough out of you, councilman! I will not tolerate such rudeness at my meetings!
Do you understand me?” He glared at an alderman, who sat stiffly in his seat,
hands poised a few inches off the tabletop.

The mayor swept his glower around
the horseshoe, pointing at each seated figure with the gavel. Flickering light
from several oil lamps gave him the look of a stern medieval judge. Satisfied
an outburst was not forthcoming, he turned to the audience.

“
I’m sorry
you had to witness that, ladies and gentlemen. Sometimes the democratic process
gets a little heated.” Gary ventured a small laugh. “I hope this won’t make top
of the fold in tomorrow’s edition, Mr. Godwin.”

Matt smiled, shook his head and kept
writing in his reporter’s notebook. The last edition of
The Paris News
lay weeks in the past. But so long as anything happened here, it was his duty
to record it. He was the city reporter, after all. Of all the changes seen here
since the Crash — as people around here called it — three months ago, Gary
offered one of the strangest.

Voters elected this slender, balding
black man to represent one of the city’s two minority districts last May. Timid
and soft-spoken, he always made Matt think of a mouse. That changed once the
councilman realized he was the only surviving member of Paris city government.
As Gary saw it, that made him mayor — and that put him in charge. Power
transformed this small, mousy man into a thunderous orator who held the reins
of power tight. That the reins controlled nothing meant little to Gary. He just
forged ahead, calling nightly City Council sessions to deal with what he saw as
pressing problems.

“
Now on to
our last order of business,” he said, reading from an agenda he painstakingly
copied by hand each morning for the council and the dozens who attended the
sessions. “Ducks in Lake Crook were staring at me again yesterday. This sort of
impertinence simply cannot be allowed. I propose we form a subcommittee to
enter into discussions with them. Perhaps we can find a mutually agreeable
solution. If not, I’m afraid the police will simply have to arrest all of
them.”

The mayor adjourned the meeting with
a quick rap of his gavel. He stood and walked over to the council member who
had so recently been the target of his wrath.

“
No hard
feelings, I hope, Frank. You raise some good points; I just wish you would
learn to curb your enthusiasm a little. It’s unbecoming in a man of your
position.” He leaned over to shake Frank’s hand, which came off in his grip.

“
Well now,
that’s embarrassing,” Gary said with a chuckle as he pushed the mannequin’s
hand back into place.

Matt stood and walked out of the
council chambers, leaving the only empty seat in the house. He still couldn’t
believe Gary found enough mannequins in Paris to fill six City Council seats
and dozens of chairs in the audience. He must have raided every department store
in the city. It would explain why they all wore different clothes every time he
came here.

He turned back for a moment. Gary
wandered among the rows of chairs, grinning and patting shoulders as he
schmoozed with his ‘constituents’. Matt shuddered and walked down the stairs
and out into the night, eager to be gone despite the rain. The sight of all
those dummies no longer disturbed him as much as it once had, but it still
creeped him out. And he could only take so much of the unhinged, small-town
politician. At least Gary’s obsession gave him the illusion of productivity,
even if it did centre on ducks and dress-store dummies.

Bill was a different matter
altogether.

Matt supposed he should have seen it
coming. “Big Bill” Vance of Clarksville was the most persistent letter writer
The
Paris News
had seen in years. Even with the newspaper’s policy that nobody
had a letter printed more than once a month, Bill’s name showed up more than
any other on the opinion page. The policy didn’t stop him from sending his missives
every week, either. The subject changed from rant to rant, but each contained
the same two themes: The government did it, and the media couldn’t be trusted.
Had the various local, state and federal agencies paid Matt all the money Bill
claimed, he could have retired two years ago, before he even reached thirty.

It probably shouldn’t have come as
any surprise that Bill would focus all that mistrust on Matt. After all, he was
likely the last member of the media left in Northeast Texas. But who would have
thought he would turn violent?

Looking back now, Matt could see the
first warning signs. He could even pinpoint the time — 5:30 p.m. on June 24 —
since he set the meeting. That was the benefit of hindsight. At the time,
everyone worried too much about survival to think of anything else. Sure Big
Bill had been edgy, but so was everyone gathered there. And why wouldn’t they
be?

Even now, three months later, Matt
saw the small crowd with crystal clarity. It was a pitiful group of
shell-shocked survivors from three counties. These three dozen or so men, women
and children were all who responded to Matt’s message in the last edition of
the paper. It was a single sheet, front and back, detailing what he knew about
the happenings of the last few weeks. He closed with a request: Everyone still
up and about should meet at newspaper office on Loop 286 to discuss what they
should do.

The meeting started with a rehash of
what people knew, which wasn’t much.

America was more or less gone, both
in government and people. The dreaded Big One had finally hit California,
followed by smaller ones that shook the entire West Coast. Hundreds of millions
were dead or dying of some particularly nasty germs.

Elsewhere, the world fared much the
same. No matter where you looked, everything trembled on the point of
unraveling. The same diseases had run rampant in every nation, decimating
populations before medics had time to blink.

That led to personal stories.
Everyone knew several people — mostly loved ones — who were dead. Matt listened
with as much patience as he could muster, but it was hard. They weren’t here to
tell war stories. But he knew if he interrupted too soon, they would turn on
him. As if he hadn’t suffered! A souped-up version of the Black Death that
appeared to have originated in Austin took his fiancée. Matt had held her hand
as she wheezed and rattled her last few breaths. His sister had died of the
Super Flu, for crying out loud! A cousin succumbed to some bizarre strain of
Ebola or something like it. And what about his parents? Dead in one of a pair
of twisters that hit Paris in the last month — the first the town had seen in
two decades. Did Matt whine about it? Of course not; he went to work so this
bunch of babies would know what was going on.

Eventually, his patience came to an
end.

“
All right,
people. That’s enough,” Matt said, standing on a desk. His voice rose over the
inevitable protest. “Enough! We can talk about this later, but right now, we’ve
got more important stuff to think about, like what do we do now? Where do we
go?”

The small crowd erupted. Where could
they go? Why would they go anywhere? The cities were desolate wastelands, home
to only the rotting dead. At least they knew the land here. So what if a couple
of tornadoes had taken out a few buildings? Most of them still stood; even if
the Love Civic Centre and Paris’ landmark Eiffel Tower had been obliterated, at
least its giant red cowboy hat had survived to adorn a Cadillac in the parking
lot. Others pointed out that this town was just as empty as any of the bigger
metro areas. Were forty people going to keep a town alive that once had about
twenty-six thousand? Besides, most of those here lived outside Paris. Did they
plan to leave their homes and move here?

Where — that was the question
everyone shouted eventually. Matt wanted that question; he needed it to make
this meeting work. He had an answer. He raised his hands and yelled, “Hey!”
until the clamor quieted.

“
Actually, I
have a suggestion,” he said. “I agree we can’t stay here. There just aren’t
enough of us. I also understand your reluctance to leave this area. I share it.
This has been my family’s home for generations. But if we are to survive, we’re
going to have to find other people. I think I know where some are headed.”

“
And how
would you know that?” Heads turned to identify the speaker. Matt could have
told them who it was. He heard that voice at least once a week over the phone.
Bill stood near the back, leaning against a door with arms folded across his
barrel chest. He was an imposing figure, a foot taller than Matt and big enough
to fill the doorway. Gray hair and beard did nothing to soften his look. “Big
Bill” was tough, and he knew it.

“
It’s my job
to know,” Matt shot back. He instantly regretted the quip. This had to be
handled delicately, but the man grated on him. He forced himself to soften his
tone. “Look, I shouldn’t have said it like that, but you know it’s true. I was
researching an article about how people felt about the end of the world — it
seemed to be coming up on us real quick — after I saw a preacher on TV talking
about a blog post from a girl named Kayley. He spent a lot of time talking
about it; it even made some of the national news casts.”

“
What’d they
say?” a woman asked from the back.

Matt paused. He hadn’t counted on
questions. He was surprised they didn’t know already, even if most of them had
been too wrapped up in their own affairs to pay much attention to the world
outside Lamar County. He figured they’d have heard the televangelist, at any
rate. But if they didn’t know, he wasn’t about to tell them that he’d seen the
preacher holding up a crumpled sheet of paper and quivering with such righteous
indignation that even his immaculately styled grey hair trembled in rage while
he denounced those “attempting to flee God’s righteous judgment”.
What was
that passage he quoted? “Then they will say to the mountains, ‘Cover us!’ and
to the hills, ‘Fall on us!’”
Matt had laughed and started searching
immediately for the posting. He printed out his own copy to reference, which
proved fortuitous. Traffic to the blog grew so heavy in the following days he’d
found it nearly impossible to access it.