The Last Town on Earth (22 page)

Charles took a breath and issued a slight nod. “Keep him in here,” he said to the guards. “We’ll get some chains.”

I

T
he flu had only worsened in Timber Falls.

Sipping Scotch, Joseph Miller sat in his den with Chief Bartrum. They had made their journey to Commonwealth based on a hunch that everything Charles Worthy had said and done seemed to confirm.

“What do you make of it?” Miller asked.

Bartrum shook his head. “It’s crooked. I don’t know if they do have anything to do with what happened at Fort Jenkins, but there’s something going on out there. All three of ’em looked guilty of something.”

“They were acting strangely,” Miller agreed. Bartrum had declined Miller’s offer of a Scotch, which confirmed the rumor that the police chief didn’t drink. But Miller noticed a peculiar look in the man’s eyes. Maybe he just preferred drinking alone.

“Obviously, I don’t like Worthy,” Miller said. “I don’t like his politics and I don’t like his town. But I would have been inclined to leave them alone, let them live whatever crazy way they choose to.” He sipped at the Scotch, felt the warmth in his throat. “If he’d invited us in and told us they had nothing to do with Fort Jenkins, then fine. But there’s something wrong about them closing themselves off. Crooked, like you say.”

“Want me to look into it some more?” Bartrum’s arms were folded across his broad chest. He looked out of place in such a refined room, surrounded by leather-bound books and fine paintings. His days had increasingly been spent assisting doctors, transporting and burying dead bodies, and dealing with the petty lawlessness that the state of emergency had engendered. Bartrum didn’t know what sights his son was being confronted with in the war, but he didn’t think they could be any worse than all that he had seen the last few weeks. Focusing on Commonwealth would be a welcome distraction from being a garbageman of souls, collecting the dead and making them disappear.

Miller nodded. “I’m curious about their enlistment records. Men in Commonwealth would have had to enlist in Timber Falls, correct? So let’s look up the records, see how many men from Commonwealth signed up for the draft.”

Bartrum stood to leave. “That should be easy—Merriwhether was on the enlistment board.”

Miller finished his Scotch. “Any news on his daughter?”

Bartrum paused. “She died this morning.”

After Bartrum left, Miller sat back in his chair, feeling fortunate that he and his wife had no children. Girls in Timber Falls were dying of flu, and boys from Timber Falls were dying in France. Just a few miles away, the people of Commonwealth were hiding from all this, doing God knew what behind their locked doors. Miller poured himself a second drink, wondering what he would say to J.B. when he saw him next.

II

T
he next day Doc Banes woke up more refreshed than he’d felt in days. Whether from relief at the healthy diagnoses for Philip and the soldier, or from the cumulative exhaustion of too many near-sleepless nights, he had finally slept soundly. When he rose, he stretched his back, which always troubled him in the colder months, and tried to remember his dreams, one of which had been about his wife. Already they were fleeting.

He had eaten a full breakfast and enjoyed a second cup of black coffee when there was a knock at his door. He opened it to find a young woman with dark circles under her eyes; she obviously had not slept as well as Banes.

“Doctor, my husband’s real sick.”

In less than ten minutes, they were in her house. The shades were all drawn, she explained, because her husband had complained of the brightness. But it was barely light out—it was early still, and thick clouds hung over the town.

She told Banes her husband had felt fine the previous day. No sniffling, no coughing. But in the middle of the night, he’d been racked by coughs that shook the bed. When the morning whistle had roused her, her husband had remained motionless on his back, as if he’d been dropped there from a great height. When he tried to speak, he coughed for a minute before he could form words. He managed to say that his whole body ached badly. He would not sit up to drink, he would not roll over to try and get more comfortable, he would not move at all.

It was a small house, nearly identical to the others on that block. The kitchen was not clean, and it smelled of whatever they had cooked last night, beans, perhaps, or stewed cabbage. A few empty bottles huddled in a group at the edge of a table. She led Banes into the bedroom, where the scent of alcohol was stronger.

“How much did he drink last night?” Banes asked hopefully.

She looked off to the side. Her name was Jeanine, and she was petite, barely ninety pounds, with unkempt, stringy dark hair. “No more than usual.”

Before entering the room, Banes put on a gauze mask. As soon as Jeanine saw him do so, she started fidgeting nervously.

“Morning, Yolen,” Banes said. Yolen was the opposite of his wife—his Goliath feet nearly hung off the bed, and his head looked too small for his body. He inhabited the bed so fully that Banes wondered how Jeanine shared it with him. His hair was the lightest blond, almost the mane of an albino. Doc wasn’t sure if his skin was always this white.

“Doctor,” the sick man greeted him with effort, his voice as tiny as his body was massive.

In a few minutes, Doc had the following facts: Yolen had worked a full shift at the mill the previous day, he’d felt perfectly fine all night, he’d eaten no meat for dinner, and he’d drunk perhaps more whiskey than was wise but not nearly enough to lay flat a man of his size. His lungs sounded dreadfully thick and his throat was inflamed. He was clearly fighting a tremendous infection that had sapped all of his strength; he had a fever of 104 degrees, and he was badly chilled.

Banes asked whom they’d had contact with last evening, if anyone.

“Our friends Otto and Ray,” Jeanine said, and Doc wrote down their full names on his pad. Then he left the bedroom, and Jeanine followed, closing the door without a sound.

“Is he gonna be okay?”

Despite all his years of medical service, Banes still never knew who would react well to bad news and who would lash out, who would beg and who would deny the cold facts before them. The one thing he had learned was that people would startle and surprise you until your dying day.

So he ignored her question and instead gave instructions: plenty of rest, plenty of fluids. If noise bothers him, keep the house quiet. If light bothers him, cover the window. Give him aspirin for the pain, but no food, though he probably wouldn’t want any. Absolutely no liquor. Just keep him as comfortable as possible.

“Call me immediately if anything changes.”

“He told me his friend Leonard never made it to the mill yesterday.”

“Oh? Why not?”

Up until that point, Banes had still maintained hope that this was not the flu, despite the telltale signs.

She shrugged nervously. “He wasn’t sure. He meant to go by Leonard’s place last night to check on him, but he never got around to it.”

Banes had told the foremen at the mill to report any absences to him, but this news hadn’t reached him. Too many foremen had become guards, and too many instructions had been forgotten.

“Does Leonard live alone?”

Jeanine nodded.

Banes asked her for Leonard’s address, and as he prepared to leave, Jeanine asked with a quivering voice whether her husband had the flu.

“It could be,” Banes admitted reluctantly. “But maybe not. Just do what I told you to care for him, and he should pull through in a few days.” He took a step for the door, then thought of one last thing.

“In the meantime, don’t leave the house at all.”

Banes knocked on Leonard’s door, hard. He rapped again, three times, so forcefully it hurt his knuckles. There was no sound, just the noise of the mill in the distance. He tried to peer in the windows, but the curtains were drawn.

He had taken off his mask as he’d left the distraught Jeanine, but he put on a new one before opening the door to Leonard’s house. The door was unlocked, as was the norm in Commonwealth.

Inside, it was dark and the air was stale and cold, as if the house hadn’t been heated the previous day.

“Leonard?” No reply. “Leonard? This is Dr. Banes.”

The small parlor was unkempt, the home of a bachelor millworker. Banes’s footsteps on the wood floor were loud as he walked toward what he gathered was the bedroom. He noticed a sickening smell.

Banes had feared he was walking into a mausoleum the moment he had opened the front door, and his fears were confirmed when he reached the bedroom. Inside it, lying on the bed, was a still form, the blankets covering only the feet, as if Leonard had tried to kick them off in his final throes of agony. On the wall beside him was blood that had been coughed there or perhaps wiped by his fingers, which were also a dark red. There was blood on the pillow and blood on the sheets, and his entire jaw looked as if he had dipped it in reddish black ink. His eyes were white and opened wide, so wide Doc wondered if his eyelids had somehow been sucked into the space behind them. There was blood on the small table beside the bed, blood on the corner of a framed photograph that had fallen from its stand, an old portrait of a stern father and expressionless mother and three young sons in suit coats and shorts, blood on its lower left-hand corner and blood in the center, where he must have brushed against it one last time.

It had begun.

III

T
hat morning Philip heard the first whistle, but something kept him from rising. It certainly wasn’t the pleasantness of his dreams; indeed, he’d suffered nightmares in which he was chased by various pursuers—people from the town, his mother’s ex-boyfriends, ex-schoolmates living all across the West, people he’d never met. They came after him for different reasons: for shooting the first soldier, for not shooting Frank, for reading those silly fighter-pilot books, for failing to grasp all that Charles had taught him at the mill, for reasons he didn’t understand.

Despite being intermittently awakened by those unpleasant visions, Philip stayed in bed because the outside world seemed so much less welcoming than he’d expected. He had thought the previous evening would feel somehow triumphant as he was reunited with his family, a free man. Instead, it felt like he’d walked into some altered rendition of his life, painted by a malevolent artist intent on revising Philip’s most halcyon memories. As if not the flu but some other plague had descended upon the town while Philip was away, robbing everything of its warmth and casting a sinister hue on every familiar sight.

Rebecca had served supper even though Charles had not yet returned from the storage buildings; when Philip had asked why they weren’t waiting, she had replied in an odd tone that Charles would probably be late tonight. His words were still ringing in Philip’s head, the accusation that Frank could be a spy, something about three dead soldiers. Laura had asked a few innocent questions about how Philip had passed his time in there and what the soldier had been like, and Philip had felt Rebecca’s eyes on him as he answered. Charles still wasn’t home an hour after supper, but when Philip had asked Rebecca, she changed the subject, commenting on how tired he must be and saying perhaps he’d like to lie down early tonight. He felt strangely scared by her manner and by the look he’d seen in Charles’s eyes and in Graham’s. So he had obeyed Rebecca and retired to his room, closing the door and feeling even more alone than when he’d been locked up with a stranger.

A knock on the door finally roused Philip from bed. “It’s getting late, Philip,” Charles’s voice importuned from the hallway.

As Charles walked away, Philip sat up. Waking up in his own room was reassuring, as was the ability to use an actual toilet, wash, and put on fresh clothes. When he walked into the kitchen, he saw that Rebecca and Laura had already left for school. Charles was sitting at the dining room table—normally, he would have left for the mill an hour earlier.

“I’m sorry I overslept,” Philip said.

“That’s all right. I’m sure you needed it.”

They spoke briefly about the mill, Charles catching Philip up on who had taken over which of his jobs during his absence and which tasks had gone incomplete. But they were talking around something.

“I’m sorry I let him into the town,” Philip blurted out. “I know I shouldn’t have.” He wasn’t at all sure he knew that, actually, but he knew it was the right thing to say.

“It’s all right,” Charles said. “You shouldn’t have been left alone at the post.”

Philip recapped the events of his last guard shift for Charles, omitting certain facts. He and Frank had shot at each other, Philip said, though he was vague on how the shooting had started. They had run through the woods trying to hide from each other, but Philip had managed to sneak up on the intruder and take his gun. He had realized then that he and the soldier had had such close contact that the quarantine was effectively broken, so he hadn’t known what else to do.

“I’m sorry,” Philip said again. “I know there are things I should have done differently, but right when it was happening…” He let his voice trail off. He still barely understood what had happened in the woods, whether Frank really had gone easy on him, as he’d claimed, or whether Frank would have killed him if not for stumbling and losing his gun.

“I blame myself,” Charles said. “We all assumed no one would try to come to Commonwealth, and that if anyone did, they would surely heed our warnings. I never imagined any confrontations like the two you’ve had.”

Philip thought. “Where is Frank, anyway?”

Charles shifted in his seat and put his palms on the table. “Philip, we can’t let that man go. We need to hold him here until we can allow someone from the army to take him back.”

“Why can’t we just let him leave? He’s afraid that if he doesn’t get back to his base soon, he’ll get in trouble.”

“Did he say that?”

Philip shrugged. “I guess he—”

“Did he seem anxious to get away?”

“Neither of us were very happy being stuck there, sir.” Philip went on, “Do you actually think he’s a spy? He seems like a good fellow. He’s just—”

“The army is looking for German spies who killed three soldiers. It happened just a few days before he showed up here. We asked him about it and…I don’t believe his answer.”

Philip sat there, taking the information in. “Why don’t you believe him?” he asked.

Charles explained that Frank came from the army cantonment but claimed to have been in a naval accident. Even if that was true, Frank would have to be a very poor soldier to trek from the Sound all the way here to Commonwealth, rather than in the direction of the cantonment. And surely he would have passed some other town; if he was so anxious to return to the base, why didn’t he stop in the first town he came to? Why had he stopped here, at a town far removed from all others? Charles was certain Frank was lying; the only question was whether he had come to Commonwealth solely to escape his pursuers or if there was a deeper plot at work.

“We offered to contact the base and straighten everything out, but he asked us not to. Why would an innocent man do that? He lied to you when he said he wanted to go back to the base. Now, we don’t know much about what happened there, but clearly he’s…done something.”

At those two hollow words, Philip folded his arms over his chest as if for protection. He looked away and spoke softly. “Graham and I…”

“You did the right thing then.”

Philip shook his head, gritted his teeth. “How could I have done the right thing both times?” His voice was shaking.

He had never challenged Charles before, and he feared that his father, though slow to anger, would chastise him. But he did not.

“Philip, if these men were both spies, then that means that what Graham did last week was shoot a German spy. That changes things, you see?”

It doesn’t feel any different, Philip thought. He looked up at Charles. “Maybe I should talk to him.”

“No.” Charles’s voice was forceful, and he said that with a brief shake of his head, as if punctuating it with the fall of a hammer. “I don’t think that would be wise.”

“Maybe I can straighten everything out if we just talk a little while. This is all wrong—it’s just a misunderstanding. No one’s been acting right since the quarantine started, and now—”

Charles opened his mouth as if to speak, and that was enough to stop Philip. Philip didn’t even know what he was saying, really. He was just flailing about, looking for something: explanations, justice, order. He wanted Charles to be able to deliver those, wanted it so much that he sat there mute, hoping that whatever Charles was about to say would make everything right. But Charles didn’t continue, and they sat there looking at each other for a moment.

Finally, Philip looked away. He felt a cruel headache fumbling with his forehead, trying to gain a firm hold of his temples. “Are people angry at me?”

“No. People understand.”

“Graham didn’t look too happy to see me.”

“Graham has been working very hard. He’s a bit worn down at the moment, but I’m sure he’ll come around. Don’t take it personally if he doesn’t want to see you yet—he’s worried about his family.”

Philip’s best friend wanted to avoid him, and the man he’d been playing cards with for two days was supposedly a spy. The man Graham had shot was also a spy, a murderer himself. None of this made any sense.

Charles was about to tell Philip to get dressed for work when a knock came at the door.

It was Doc Banes, and he’d been running.