The Last Town on Earth (35 page)

When Amelia heard Graham’s plea she stopped, her hand pressed against the door.

The other person screaming was Charles, coming down the road after his son. “Philip!”

At his father’s voice, Philip gave in to his body’s agonized pleas and slumped down onto the porch, huddling there and catching his breath and coughing yet again. He closed his eyes and for a moment things were quiet, then humming at a low and steady pitch. He wondered where he was.

Charles was crouched above him and Philip felt a hand behind his back. Charles was wearing his gauze mask. “Are you all right?”

Philip nodded, and his father helped him to his feet. Philip leaned against the post again while Charles asked Graham what was going on.

Graham found that he couldn’t bring himself to look Charles in the eye. He breathed in and out, and his mouth was tight as if trying desperately to prevent some toxin from slipping in. “He needs to be in bed,” Graham finally said.

Charles didn’t understand, but he could demand explanations later. He put an arm around Philip and guided him home, walking slowly and stopping every time Philip coughed. It took them quite a while.

Graham stayed on the porch, willing away his tears and breathing loudly, as if he had just emerged from under water. As the adrenaline slowly faded, though his arms and knees were still shaking, he felt the harsh cold on his arms, the hair prickling up against his shirt. And still he felt Philip’s breath on his face.

He looked up and there was Amelia on the other side of the window. She had one hand at her breast and the other on the glass, not two feet from Graham. He wanted only to close his eyes and hold her. But he stood there, motionless, terrified, and unwilling to walk through the door.

III

P
hilip knew it was morning only because Rebecca told him it was. To him it was just the latest stop on this hellish train ride he had been sent on, an overcrowded train car so hot from the press of bodies that he felt the sweat pool on his clavicle and in his armpits and groin, felt the sweat roll from his forehead. The train was unsteady and it swayed back and forth, and the clattering of the rusty metal cars was a booming cacophony in his ears. The motions of the train had turned his stomach, contributing to the weakness that sapped every ounce of vitality from his body. He was standing in the car between two large men who hadn’t left him enough room, but when he opened his eyes he saw that he was actually lying down in his bed. He closed his eyes again and things made more sense: his legs ached and his foot throbbed because he was in this dark train car, his toes occasionally stepped upon by others and his leg muscles weary from too many hours of standing, trapped. Where was the train going? Every once in a while it stopped briefly, but only to board more passengers. No one ever seemed to get off the train. It was becoming more crowded, hotter still. His clothes were sticking to his flesh, the sweat was everywhere, and despite this, he shivered. He tried to look out the windows but there were too many bodies in the way. Where was he?

“Mom,” he tried to say, but instead coughed. There was something inside his chest, something large and waxy and heavy, something that had attached itself to his rib cage and woven its fibers into his muscles and ligaments. He coughed all over the man in front of him, whose chest was facing him even though his face was not, as if the man’s head were turned 180 degrees. But the man didn’t seem to mind Philip’s coughs, didn’t try to move away or demand that Philip apologize. That was when Philip realized everyone was coughing. It was the coughs that were making the train shake back and forth, the force of so many heaves and spasms. Was the train even moving forward, or were they just sitting in the middle of some wasteland?

Rebecca was telling him it was morning and he opened his eyes. The train dissipated briefly and there she was, holding a mug of something steaming and placing it on the table beside his bed. She was wearing a gauze mask. He coughed again and wasn’t able to cover his mouth because his hands, balled into sweaty fists, were buried beneath the covers. Rebecca put her hand on his forehead and frowned. Philip closed his eyes and the train kept rocking. He thought he heard someone singing a familiar song. Then he was hit by such an awesome chill that his eyes bulged open and there was Rebecca again, her hands extended above him as she placed a cold towel on his forehead. Every nerve in his body stood up and genuflected with gracious thanks for that beautiful towel, even though Philip knew that in twenty minutes, maybe less, he’d again be wilting from the heat of the train car.

I can talk, Philip reminded himself. So he pulled one of his arms out from under the covers and put his hand before his face as he coughed. He was able to say, “Thank you.” Rebecca nodded. There was a grim look in her eyes, and the rest of her face was covered by her gauze mask. She sat down in a small chair she must have dragged in from the dining room, stayed watching him, but eventually, her soft, lined visage was replaced by the faceless heads on the train car, by the shaking and rocking and swaying and all those other coughs, the stale and reeking breath.

Then Philip felt something, and he opened his eyes again to see Rebecca standing up. His left hand shot out from beneath the covers and he grasped her hand, unsure whether he was holding her roughly or barely touching her, so unfamiliar had he become with the way his own body worked.
Don’t go,
he said.
Don’t leave me. Everyone’s leaving me. My father left me before I could even remember and then my mother left me and Frank left me and Graham’s leaving me, too. Please don’t leave me.
He wasn’t sure how much of this he was able to say through the mucus and phlegm, but the look in Rebecca’s eyes showed that she understood enough of it.

She sat back down, holding his sweaty hand.

As much as Philip preferred the sight of his bedroom and Rebecca to the image of the men with no faces, he kept slipping back into that scene. The sweat had begun to pour down his forehead again when he felt his hand jostled by something that he couldn’t see, something that wasn’t in the train car. He opened his eyes and Rebecca was leaving again, this time having already reached the door.

“Don’t go,” he choked, rearranging his body on the damp pillows.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “I have to take care of your sister, too.”

His sister. “Laura…”

“Laura’s sick, too.” Then Rebecca was gone and the train car was swaying more violently than before, Philip’s chin whacking against so many shoulders and heads and elbows that he felt he was falling, felt the train car dissolving beneath his feet and the bodies of everyone around him sliding on top of his, piling up, and everything was dark and hot, so very hot.

He opened his eyes later and was back in his bed. How long had he been on that train? Days. He bent one leg and pulled the knee up halfway toward his chest, just to stretch the muscles, just to feel human, and within those muscles he felt some hazy memory, covered in wax paper and dust, of slowly stumbling through the house to the bathroom. Maybe twice a day. How many days? He had completely lost track, since days had no meaning here, no meaning in this bed. Time was a chimera dancing before him to distract him from the only thing that mattered: getting healthy. He realized he hadn’t even thought of this, of being healthy, in the longest time. His body dared not consider health—it took all its strength to fight on and stay alive while in this siege. Just as the town had been under siege from all sides. Now the same scenario was playing itself out, but this time the flu-infected world was his body and the safe haven of Commonwealth was his mind. He needed to protect his mind from his body. If his mind could stay healthy, if he could properly quarantine it, then maybe his body would give up this gruesome battle. He thought about that, then realized it made no sense. He was already losing his mind—his brain had already fallen victim to his body. The flu had broken the quarantine.

The door opened and in walked Graham, wearing a gauze mask. Philip was too weak to be confused by this. All the muscles in Graham’s forehead and temples were tensed around his eyes, wary of the inevitability of attack and constantly on guard. He was carrying his rifle. In that tiny room, it looked as big as a cannon.

“Hi,” Philip said, and amazingly, his voice sounded clear of infection.

Graham nodded.

“What are you doing here?” Even to himself, Philip still sounded weak, and the words were slow. He wanted to ask why Graham had the gun in here, but that would have been too many words.

“Keeping watch.” To underscore that point, Graham’s eyes darted from one side of the room to the next. Suddenly, the room felt large to Philip, the walls hundreds of yards away from one another, and between those walls were trees and boulders, Douglas fir and fallen branches, uncountable nooks where nameless animals had been born and had returned to the earth, thousands of places where enemies might hide. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.”

“From what?”

Graham said, “Sshhh.” Then he looked into Philip’s eyes gravely. “You know.”

Philip started to cry. He hated Graham so much yet felt so grateful that his friend was standing here beside him when no one else would, staring down whatever it was that wished to feast upon him. The something in Philip’s chest suddenly had company as a thick warmth welled up inside him, and the tears continued to roll down his cheeks until he fell asleep once more.

Philip opened his eyes. The room was dark. How long could you be sick with the flu? Philip wondered.

There was a tap at the window. Was that what had woken him up? Again a tap. With great effort, Philip lifted himself into a sitting position, letting the sheets fall down across his lap, exposing half his body to the room’s chill. His fingertips felt almost numb, and although he was used to this feeling since the auto accident, he knew it was a strange symptom to have when sick. Did this mean his infection was moving on to an even more sinister stage? He reached forward, taking the window curtains in his hand. He could feel them, barely. He pulled them apart and looked outside.

Little light trickled in; the outside world was nearly as dark as his room. But he could see, standing only a foot away from the window, Elsie. She held a stick that she’d been using to tap on the window, as if afraid to touch it with her bare hands. Not bare: she was wearing gloves, he saw, and it was cold enough outside for him to see her breath, that thin and quickly dissipating smoke hovering before her. Her scarf was wrapped thickly around her neck, tightly bundled beneath her chin, and some of her curls blew in front of her face, twisting in the November wind. Just above the scarf he could see her mouth, her thin lips pale in the cold. With his parents wearing masks, Elsie’s was the first full face he’d seen in days.

She waved. Her face had looked serious and drawn, but she now allowed herself a slightly hopeful look, her eyebrows curving in lieu of a smile, which would have seemed misplaced right then. He waved back. How late was it? It might have been seven in the evening or three in the morning.

He leaned forward, grasping the bottom sill, and was about to pull it open when he saw her shaking her head. She had stepped back as well, apparently ready to flee in case he opened it. She was afraid of him, afraid of his flu, despite having lived in the same house as her sick mother. He pulled his hands away from the window, showing her his empty palms as if he had just dropped a gun. He said, “Sorry,” but wasn’t sure if she could read his lips. She nodded, though, and stepped forward again.

She breathed on the glass and it fogged between them, tangible evidence of the barrier separating them. Then she reached forward and, with one gloved finger, wrote on the glass. She wrote slowly, as she had to write backward in order for Philip to understand it.

YOU OK?

Philip smiled weakly and nodded, lying to the vision of Elsie before him. She looked so beautiful but forlorn, all bundled against the cold as if waiting for a train she had missed. Her eyes were sad, but beneath this sadness was a tenderness that warmed him and made him wish more than ever that he could shatter the glass and hold her again. He opened his mouth but didn’t know what he could say that would be easily readable on his lips. There was no paper nearby for him to write her a note, and the thought of breathing on the glass the way she had, of expelling his germs toward her, even with the barrier, seemed unwise. So he sat there looking at her, hoping that his eyes were conveying all that he felt.

Elsie wiped at the glass, removing her message. She leaned forward and breathed on the glass again, just off to the side of the previous spot, and the fog magically grew before their eyes once more. This time she looked at him for another moment before writing, looked at him closely.

Then she reached out with her finger and wrote on the glass,
LOVE YOU.

Her face was so serious, as if love and the mere thought of love required her most adult expression. But the sight of those words and the meaning behind them were so amazing to Philip that he couldn’t stop from smiling. When she saw this she smiled too, looking down briefly, perhaps embarrassed by what she’d written. Then she looked back at him, and he mouthed a silent “Me, too” and hoped she understood it.

Beneath the
LOVE YOU,
the fog provided more space for her scrawled thoughts, so she wrote, in smaller letters,
GET WELL,
though the second
E
she got backward. He would do anything for her, he knew right then, and it made getting well seem like such an easy task. He breathed deeply.

For those few minutes he had felt strangely freed of the flu’s grip, but now everything was coming back. He felt the itching at the back of his sinuses, the throb in his leg muscles, the strangely loud and hurried heartbeat, the something that still lived in his chest and made him cough once again. How long has it been? he wondered. That night at the general store, sitting beside her, kissing her. How long had he been trapped in this room, been in and out of the train car?

Elsie reached out and pressed her palm flat against the window. He wanted to put his hand on the other side of the glass but hesitated. He felt the men on the train stiffen, felt the shoulders and the elbows jostle him, and he felt dizzy, all those faceless heads confusing him about which direction to turn to find Elsie. Where had she gone? His body slumped back; he was startled by how quickly the train was moving. It was rocketing through the empty landscape, the world beyond the windows that he couldn’t see. And although he had no idea where it was going, he knew it was hurtling away from Elsie, taking him farther away with every second, every breath.

Philip had never been this sick. The worst he’d felt was after the accident, lying in that foreign hospital bed surrounded by people he didn’t know, people who wouldn’t tell him where his mother was. Even that had felt different, not a sickness but a recovery, albeit a long and brutal one. Almost like a rebirth, a painful passage from one phase of his life to the next.

He’d been bedridden one other time. He had been eight or so, and he and his mother had been living in some Oregon town when he’d caught a bad case of pneumonia. His mother had nursed him, had been at his side every time he woke up, whether early in the morning or in the middle of the night. She had been working as a secretary for a lawyer who had always made eyes at her, Philip had noticed, but she had stayed home from her job all week. And even though he felt miserable and had honestly wondered if he might die—one boy from his school had already succumbed to the same illness—his memories of that week were somehow happy ones. He had never felt more loved by Fiona. All of the tortured ambivalence was replaced by a calm maternal consistency, and he felt so protected and happy with her bringing him soup or reading him magazines or newspapers. He’d stayed in bed at least one day longer than he’d really needed to, just to prolong it.