The Last Town on Earth (30 page)

The C.O. kept stabbing. The bayonet slid out easily, no twisting required. There were no broomsticks and no drill sergeants and no life before me, none. I was surrounded by death and I could barely move, could barely think, could barely cry: “Stop!”

I said it again, and the C.O. finally obeyed—after a final deep lunge with the bayonet that went so far in and stuck to something so solid that when he let go, it stayed there, hovering over Sepenski’s chest like some horrific and final extension of himself.

The C.O. fell back onto his hands, then pushed himself against the opposite wall, staring at the body of his tormentor. His face was rigid but oddly shivering, as if at any moment he might scream or howl or bawl uncontrollably. With an unsteady hand he wiped away the spit that had dripped down his chin, but his eyes stayed on Sepenski.

I looked back at Chicago and saw that he was as dead as his buddies. There was no blood, but his neck was bent at an impossible angle. It was as revolting a sight as that of his eviscerated companions. He was staring off above me, as if looking for the protector who should have stopped me from killing him.

“Oh my God,” I said, or whispered, or thought, or moaned. The wop’s blood was still flowing, its pool almost reaching me. I realized how much my right hand hurt, I felt the cuts and bruises on my neck, I bit back the pain I felt when swallowing. I could barely swallow, barely breathe.

I stood up, stepped forward, and vomited, resting my hands against the wall as I spat everything up. I closed my eyes and tried to will away the savage butchery that surrounded me. Coughing and choking on whatever was left inside me, I tried to steady myself, tried to think.

Beyond the C.O.’s shivers was silence. No sound of anyone running toward us, no one about to kick open the door. The whole ordeal had somehow been quiet enough to escape detection. Soon it would be lights-out; the quartermaster and maybe the sergeants would be patrolling the halls upstairs, would possibly even poke through the storeroom.

The shock was so overwhelming that not until later did I think maybe I could have concocted some story. Perhaps I could have cast myself as merely the luckiest victim of the C.O.’s deadly rampage. But right then all I was thinking was that I had killed someone, a soldier, and that the other two dead soldiers beside him may as well have been struck down by my hands. I had to get out of there.

I stood up and looked around. There was a door at the end of the hallway that was always locked from the inside. The C.O. had staggered to his knees, breaking free of his maddened state. He saw me looking at the door, then moving toward it.

“Where…where are you going?” he stammered.

I shook my head. Our barracks was located at the northeastern corner of the camp. Not too far away, trucks full of food and supplies were unloaded; surely those trucks had to go out, too. I didn’t know the schedule or how I could get into a truck, but that seemed my best shot to get away from the cantonment.

I must have explained this to the C.O., or maybe he just understood it, because he threw on his shirt and tunic and followed me out. He followed as I walked through the dark camp, hiding in the shadows beside the buildings. I watched every window we passed, hoping no face would appear and spot us, hoping the silence would not be torn by an alarm, hoping I was the only one who could hear my thundering heartbeat, hoping the tracks we were leaving in the mud would not become an easily followed trail to our capture, hoping the bodies would not be discovered until we had escaped, hoping I would wake up in my uncomfortable army cot and shake my head at this horrible, tortured dream.

I remember him lying beside me in the back of a truck. I remember us overhearing the inane banter of the men driving it. I remember our bodies being jostled against each other as the truck made its way through the dark and uneven world beyond our base, a land defined for us only by the bumps in the road and the silence outside. I had no idea what towns the camp was nearest to, didn’t know the roads or whether there were any railway lines nearby. I remember the C.O. wincing when bumps in the road jostled him, I remember smelling something that might have been his blood. I remember being cold back there, I remember hearing the C.O. put on a jacket that he found in the back, and I remember quietly removing a pistol from a crate and the C.O. finding a rifle for himself. He was a pacifist no more. He no longer had the luxury.

Sheer terror kept us from sleeping those long hours. I didn’t know which direction we were headed, only that I was being taken farther from home. My neck ached and I touched my fingers to my throat, half expecting to feel Chicago’s dead arm wrapped around me, but all I could feel was my pulse.

XIII

L
ong after listening to Frank’s story, Philip still pondered it. A few blocks from the Worthy home, he sat on an old swing that he and Graham had hung from a fir tree a couple of years ago. It was cold out, and the swing wasn’t the most comfortable of seats, but he needed a private place to think.

He believed Frank’s story about the C.O. Frank had recounted his experience stone-faced at first, his voice calm in the manner of someone who had relived something a thousand times. The empty room perfectly complemented the hollow tone in his voice. He had killed a man and done it in a way that had amounted to killing himself, his tone seemed to be saying. Only now did Philip wonder how much of the despair came from the ramifications of his act—not being able to return home to his family, to Michelle—and how much was a reaction to the act itself, of feeling the dead body roll off his shoulders, of seeing the stillness in the other men’s eyes.

As he spoke, Frank’s cheeks were streaked with tears, though his face remained grave. Not until the end of his story did his voice thicken and his eyes turn red and his shoulders start to shake. Soon he couldn’t talk, and the two of them just sat in silence, momentarily held captive by the weight of his memories.

I’m just like you,
Frank had prefaced the tale, and that thought chilled Philip more than the wind that cut through his coat. It was getting late, and Philip was probably the only person in town who wasn’t inside, except perhaps Doc Banes. Philip had felt a loneliness—a complete desolation—for days, ever since the encounter with the first soldier. Ever since seeing him fall to the ground as a result of what he and Graham had done. What Graham had done. What he and Graham had done. Which? Or both?

The loneliness had intensified each time he’d seen Graham walk past or stand there as if he did not recognize Philip as a friend, did not acknowledge him as a man who had been through the same terrors, did not want to accept the fact that they were somehow joined in this, awash in the same confusing swirl of emotions. Or maybe they weren’t—maybe Graham’s heart and mind were forever unknowable to Philip; perhaps the quarantine had forever separated them, driving them each down different paths that would never again intersect.

Yet Philip recognized what he had seen in Frank’s eyes, and he felt a strange kinship. Perhaps it had been there all along, and that was why they had befriended each other. Each was trying to hide from something he’d done, some body they’d left behind, unsure of their reasons, doubtful of the purity of their motives. Philip hadn’t seen that in Graham’s eyes, but it was in Frank’s.

Charles had said Graham was worried for his young family, that he had so much to lose.
But don’t I have so much to lose as well?
Philip had wanted to shout. All his life, he had been dragged across the country in search of what he finally had: a family, a home. Now he had neighbors who knew him, a job where he could make something of himself, maybe even a future with a girl he was falling for. The thought of being responsible for the illness or death of Laura or Charles or Rebecca horrified him, had woken him up in the middle of every night over the past week. And now Elsie’s mother was sick, the Metzgers shut inside their diseased home! He thought of kissing Elsie, and the rush of infatuation was rivaled only by the terror that it might be the last time he saw her healthy. Yes, he too had much to lose.

He had nothing to gain from trying to help Frank. If he somehow succeeded in letting the man loose, he risked the ire and possibly the punishment of everyone in town. He also risked Frank’s capture on the way to Canada—a long and perilous journey, to be sure—and the captors learning that he’d been in Commonwealth. Surely they would pay the town a visit, asking questions. To aid him would be to risk everything Charles had created, everything the people in that town had sacrificed for. All to spare one man a trip to the gallows.

Philip thought of Elsie in her gauze mask, the way it cast her whole face in shadow. The last time he’d been faced with a decision to spare Frank, the result had somehow loosed the flu in Commonwealth. He wasn’t sure how that was possible—Frank still denied ever being sick—but he couldn’t deny the truth. Now he was thinking of helping Frank again, and wondering how this act might backfire as well.

The first soldier had been no spy but a conscientious objector. Not unlike Graham, who simply had not enlisted. The soldier had been just another victim of this rotten war, Rebecca would say. Philip kicked at a stone and then began to swing a bit, forward and back, the world before him arcing and bending like something elastic, something that could be distorted and reshaped to one’s will.

It had occurred to Philip that every decision made by the town since the quarantine began had been somewhat selfish. They’d placed themselves on a pedestal above all outsiders, holding their value to be superior on pain of death. It seemed wrong, even when placed against the vision of Philip’s own family falling ill. He didn’t know how worthy a man he was or might become, what kind of skewed moral compass he had inherited from his mother, but he wanted to believe he was capable of selflessness. He needed to believe this.

He had looked to Graham for answers and found only silence. He had gone to Charles for explanations and found them too tortured, their logic too skewed by rationalizations. He’d find no guidance here, Philip had learned—the quarantine designed to block out the flu had only succeeded in cutting off the town from its previous ideals of right and wrong. It was a town in full eclipse, and Philip would have to navigate through the dark by himself.

“Okay,” Philip had told Frank. “I’ll get you out of here. But I need to figure out how.”

The tears of grief that had materialized at the end of Frank’s story were transformed to gratitude.
There’s a set of keys somewhere,
Frank had said,
and they’ll unlock these chains.
Philip told him he needed to think it through, devise a strategy. Frank had nodded, trying to understand, trying to restrain himself when for a brief moment he had thought he was only minutes away from freedom.
I’ll come back,
Philip said.
Give me a day, maybe two. I need to think.

He almost regretted having visited Frank, wished he had simply allowed the rush of kissing Elsie to carry him home. He could have fallen asleep content. Now he wanted to tell Elsie Frank’s story, but he wasn’t sure how she’d react, didn’t know if she would understand why it was worth risking anything for this stranger. And he knew she had enough to worry about already.

Suddenly, as Philip sat on the swing, he was stirred from his thoughts by the sounds of coughing, loud and close by. He’d been sitting there for a while—he wasn’t sure how long—and there had been no sound. And just like that, someone in the house was racked with coughs whose guttural bass notes throbbed against the walls, echoing in the world beyond. It can happen just like that, Philip realized. He knew who lived there: a millworker named Zeke who was only three years Philip’s elder, and Zeke’s new wife, whom he had courted in Timber Falls a few months ago. What was her name? Philip tried to remember. Red hair, pale skin, freckles all across her cheeks, a toothy smile. She was coughing badly. Then the window was illuminated, either she or her worried husband turning on the light. Fetching some water, or an extra blanket, or the Bible. The coughing became even steadier, the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun. The same sound and scene was most likely being enacted in the Metzgers’ house, Flora coughing and Alfred holding a cool cloth to her forehead and Elsie praying. Philip tried to push those visions from his mind as he stood up and walked home, the coughs chasing him as far as the sound allowed them to travel, and then nothing, silence.

XIV

T
he next day passed in a blur for Philip, punctuated by the random sentences he scribbled to Elsie in whatever free moments he could find as he tried without success to focus on his work. He told her he was thinking of her, that the whole Worthy family, indeed the whole town, was praying that Flora would make a swift recovery. He told her how glad he was that they’d bumped into each other the night before, that he hadn’t slept well because he couldn’t stop thinking of her and what her family was going through. He told her he wished he could be in the house with her to help care for Flora, even though he secretly wondered whether he was a vector of illness, if his presence would finish Flora off. He told Elsie he was barely getting any work done, as if the length of the letter didn’t make that obvious.

When Philip read the letter he saw that it was disappointingly disjointed, the product of the scattershot way it had been written. Whole sentences were repeated, and Philip’s stomach went sour as he saw how little he seemed to be saying, how woefully inept his prose was at conveying his thoughts. But he remembered how much Elsie’s letter had meant to him, so rather than tearing it up and starting again, he signed it, hoping his could have one half the effect as Elsie’s had on him.

He slipped the letter under the Metzgers’ door that afternoon, walking through streets so empty even the dogs had vanished. He had wanted to knock, to go inside, but knew he would be admonished for it, by Charles and by the doctor and perhaps even by Mr. Metzger. So he walked away, peering into a few windows on the first floor as he passed. The scant sunlight reflected off the glass and he couldn’t see inside, didn’t know if Elsie was there watching him or if she was in another room, tending to her mother. He heard no sounds from the house and wondered if that meant anything.

In the rare moments when he hadn’t been thinking of Elsie, he was thinking of his promise to set Frank free. He mulled over every Houdini story he’d ever heard in search of inspiration—surely, if the Great One could escape from the jail that held President Garfield’s assassin, then Philip could help Frank bust out of the storage building. Philip first needed to find out who had the keys to Frank’s chains, or he would need to go into the prison armed with something that could break them. Regardless, he decided not to act that night, figuring his chances would be better the following evening when Lightning was scheduled to be on duty. He would tell Lightning he needed to talk to Frank again, then he would unlock or break the chains. Philip knew that some of the building’s back walls were rotten—he and Frank should be able to find a weak spot in the back wall and create a hole big enough for a man to sneak through. Once Frank was out of the building, he would be on his own. Philip felt bad about waiting the extra day, but it seemed like the best decision.

Night seemed to fall more quickly than usual over Commonwealth. Philip’s family went to bed early, everyone cautiously conserving strength. Philip sat in bed for a long while, staring out the dark window and wondering if the first snow would soon be upon them. He found himself thinking of his night in the ravine again, of Charles rushing down from the road to save him from freezing to death. Charles had trudged down the hill despite not knowing who was in the wrecked auto; he had somehow carried an unconscious Philip up the steep hill through a foot of snow. The thought of snow always left Philip quiet and anxious, but lately the memory seemed so much colder than usual.