The Last Town on Earth (32 page)

Graham, standing over the dead man wrapped in the meager blanket, hated what he had done and hated that he’d had to do it, but that was the way it was and there was no point questioning it. Killing the soldier was what the town needed. He didn’t understand why no one else could see this, or, if they indeed saw it, why everyone else had refused to act on it. This man had brought something upon the town, had fouled the air or carried a curse. He was slowly killing them off, one by one. Whether a spy or simply a soldier, he was indeed a murderer. Graham had done the right thing when the first soldier had approached, had saved the town, and by removing this soldier, he had done right again. This deed, though painful, would maintain the purity of his earlier act.

The dying would stop now, Graham knew. Maybe not right away, maybe not until a storm had washed the town clean or a good wind had blown away the rank air, but it would end soon. They would still uphold the quarantine, could still avoid the fate of Timber Falls and those other towns. They could leave those ridiculous gauze masks in a cabinet somewhere, a memento of a time they would try to forget.

Graham decided to leave the knife in the body rather than retrieving it and cleaning it. No more blood. He reached down and lifted the body, which was heavy but nothing he couldn’t manage, and let it fold over his left shoulder. He grabbed his lantern and slowly made his way up the steps. Leaving the building and closing the door behind him, he carefully laid the body over Icarus. Graham climbed up behind the body and guided Icarus past the building and into the woods, along one of the old trails leading farther up the hill.

It had already been cold out, but now it felt like the temperature had dropped another ten degrees. Graham’s fingers gradually lost all their heat through the insufficient gloves, and the haze of warm breath escaping through his gauze mask hung before his eyes. Icarus moved slowly and carefully, possibly spooked by the way the tree trunks looked in the lantern light, their bottom twenty feet illuminated but the rest fading into nothingness, nothing but the spirits of the forest hanging above them. Or perhaps the horse was spooked because he sensed he was carrying dead freight, that the faint wetness he felt along some of his vertebrae was the blood of a man who had been alive only moments ago. The earth crunched beneath Icarus’s hooves, and Graham swayed as they proceeded along the uneven ground.

Graham rode until he reached the clearing he had been seeking. He dismounted and tied Icarus at its edge, then grabbed the soldier’s body by the feet and tugged. The body slipped off the horse and landed roughly on the ground. Graham bent down and lifted the body on his shoulder again, walking to the outer circumference of the lantern’s light.

The light barely traced the edges of the grave Graham had dug earlier. His shoulders and arms were still tired from the digging; each shovelful had been a painful extraction, as the earth had been wet from the recent rains and cold from the long nights. He dropped the body into the grave and looked at it down there, the way the blanket had rolled up, exposing the soldier’s feet and hair. The sight of the partially covered body lying there in a filthy blanket in the dark and wet grave struck Graham in a way that even the act of killing had not. He wanted to apologize to the soldier, but he reached for the shovel and began to fill the grave.

Mo had agreed to lend Graham his horse with the understanding that Graham would use Icarus to ride the living soldier out of town, giving him a head start to someplace else. Graham had said he would ride over the back trails a few miles, far enough to get the soldier away from Commonwealth but not so far that Graham would risk bumping into anyone from the outside. The next morning Rankle and another man—who were not in on the plan; Graham knew that Rankle would not approve—would take over guard duty, and when it was time to bring the prisoner some food, they would discover him gone. They would also discover a hole in the back of the building, which Mo had secretly made that morning. No one would ever figure out how the soldier had let himself out of those chains, but it wouldn’t matter—he was gone, he was part of the past.

Mo assented to the plan because he, too, was beginning to think the soldier was the problem. In truth, Mo hadn’t quite understood the reasons for keeping him captive these last few days, the reasons Charles and Doc Banes had presented and Rankle had echoed. So when Graham had told him the plan, Mo had agreed, clearly pleased that all he had to do was make a hole in a wall and lend Graham his horse, then play dumb the next morning.

By the time the grave was filled, Graham’s arms were so heavy he wouldn’t have been able to lift them above his head if he had tried, wouldn’t have been able to reach up to the heavens even if he hadn’t been scared to do so. He patted down the freshly turned earth, hoping that no one would cross this way for some time, at least not until after several good rains had flattened the dirt. This was a seldom used trail, leading only deeper into the forbidding woods and hilly terrain, away from the river and the lumber camps.

Graham dropped the shovel and took off the gauze mask, which had made his work all the more tiring, as if it were smothering him, his mouth and nose trapped by the wet second skin. He untied Icarus, picked up the lantern, and took a final look at the fresh grave. Then he rode back to town, past the storage buildings and beyond, back to Mo’s house, where he returned the horse to the stable. The town was dark and peaceful, not even Doc Banes anywhere to be seen.

Graham’s steps were slow as he made his way back to the storage buildings, where he would stand for the rest of the night, guarding a building with no one inside it, waiting for the foulness to pass.

XVII

C
harles walked to work early the next morning; his sleep had been brought to a premature conclusion by nightmares about the mill failing, the town in ruins. But the waking world proved no more peaceful.

The roads were filling up as men walked to the mill, but conversations seemed especially muted. If people kept getting sick, it would be difficult for the mill to operate on its normal schedule. Charles was worried—the quarantine had already taken a financial toll on the mill, but if sickness limited production even after the quarantine ended, the mill would be in for hard times. He told himself not to worry. The mill had a massive amount of timber ready to ship, a backlog that had been steadily building. Even if they needed to slow down production for a week or two while the men fought illness, shipping out all that timber would pay immediate dividends. Because there was no bank in Commonwealth—something Charles hoped to remedy by persuading some Timber Falls bankers to open business in town—he had been unable to issue end-of-the-month checks to his workers. They had received IOUs that shamed Charles nearly as much as they irritated the men receiving them. Though everyone had known such IOUs were a possibility back when they had voted on the quarantine, the problem had seemed abstract at the time. With every passing day, however, it became more real.

Now that Commonwealth was infected, its residents were frightened and suspicious—people were no longer interested in communal sacrifice. Meals were becoming smaller and less frequent as everyone dug into the recesses of their pantries and cellars. Those men who owned cows or chickens as hedges against tough times were finding that the tough times had arrived, and each day someone heard the squeal of a neighbor slaying his animals.

Still, Charles refused to believe that the flu’s arrival meant the quarantine had been ineffective and should be ended. Commonwealth still wasn’t as ridden with the illness as Timber Falls and other towns seemed to be, so perhaps the sick people could still be isolated; perhaps the flu could be contained.

The entire town had worked too hard and had enjoyed too many successes to be defeated by something as meaningless as an illness. Charles had created a town that his children would be proud to inherit, a town where one day his grandchildren would grow up in peace and safety. He had not allowed his brothers to ruin it, he had not allowed competing interests in Timber Falls to undercut him, and he had not allowed the logistical challenges of starting a town in a distant land to disturb the tangibility of his dreams. The flu would not stop him.

But something did stop him on his morning walk to work: broken windows at Metzger’s General Store. Charles increased his pace until he reached the door, which was slightly ajar. Silence. He paused, wondering if an intruder was still inside. But then he heard a sound: a loud curse, in a voice he recognized but had never heard at such volume.

Charles stepped inside. Alfred Metzger stood in the middle aisle between bare shelves. Some flour and cornmeal had been spilled on the floor, amid empty boxes and torn sacks.

Metzger turned around when he heard Charles’s boot crunch on a shard of glass. Charles hadn’t seen him in days, not since Flora had taken sick and the doctor had recommended isolation. Metzger looked terrible: his hair was uncombed and his eyes were red, on the verge of tears. One of his boots was untied, laces trailing after him, and shirttails poked out from beneath his jacket.

“Look at this,” he said, his voice as empty as his ransacked store.

“This happened last night?”

Metzger shrugged. “I don’t know—I haven’t been here for two days. I didn’t have much left, but now I have nothing.”

First the community gardens and now this, Charles thought. Prior to the flu, there had been only two thefts in Commonwealth’s history, and both of the perpetrators had been expelled from the town. Now theft was becoming the norm, it seemed.

“Who would do this?” Metzger said almost to himself, his foot nudging aside an empty box.

Charles remembered that Metzger was potentially carrying the flu, and he felt an urge to remove the gauze mask from his pocket. But doing so would have felt like turning his back on Alfred. He let his hand fall to his pocket, but he couldn’t bring himself to move any further.

He saw the blood on Metzger’s shirt. “Are you hurt?” Charles asked.

Metzger gave him an utterly confused look.

Charles gestured to his shirt, and Metzger glanced down. When he looked up again, his face was unchanged, and Charles realized the look wasn’t confusion but shock. “Flora died last night. She couldn’t breathe.”

Charles felt a quiver in his gut. For the past few days he had known Flora’s life was in danger, but still he reeled from the news. “Alfred, I am so sorry.”

“And now this.” Metzger turned back to the empty shelves.

Charles wondered for no real reason if the two events had happened at the same time. Had Flora’s chair by the front desk been knocked over just as Doc Banes had tried sedating her? Had the store windows been shattered and the last of the food stolen just as the doctor, conceding defeat with his modern methods, had taken out his knives and tried to bleed the sickness out of her? Had the thieves concluded their work here, not even bothering to close the door, just as Flora issued her last breath?

“There’s nothing left,” Metzger said, sifting through the debris. “I barely have any food left in my own home.”

“If you want for anything, I’m sure your neighbors would help.”

Metzger shook his head. “Which neighbors would that be? The ones who stopped coming to visit when they heard Flora was sick? The ones who hold their breath when they walk past our home?”

Charles looked down.

“Open your eyes, Charles! My neighbors
did
this! No one is going to feed my daughter and me but
me
!”

“
I
will feed you. If there’s anything you lack, you know you can come to my home and we’ll share whatever we have. You know that.”

Metzger glared at him.

“I’m…I’m sorry I didn’t visit while Flora was ill, Alfred. I was only following the doctor’s instructions.” Charles realized how pathetic that sounded. “I’ll visit tonight, and anything that you need, I’ll pro—”

“I do not want your help,” Metzger spat. “You’ve done enough already. Calling a town meeting that panicked everyone. Locking down the town so people would have to rob me to feed their families. What’s the point in keeping the town closed if everyone’s sick anyway? This”—he gestured at the store—“would never have happened if people had been allowed to come and go as they pleased!”

Metzger was right, Charles realized. And that only underscored a more horrible truth: that the town, having quarantined itself for over two weeks now, was particularly ill equipped to deal with the flu’s onslaught. If the town hadn’t been closed all month, at least people’s pantries would have been filled when the illness hit. Now they had little left to eat and were weakened by meager diets. Perhaps the flu had been inevitable, in which case closing the town was the biggest mistake Charles had ever made.

More crackling of boots on broken glass caused Charles to turn around. Two more millworkers had walked into the store, slowly taking in the scene. Their eyes seemed too weary for surprise; they were merely saddened by the inevitability.

“Have mercy,” one of them said.

“We’ll get this cleaned up,” Charles said to them, feeling the need to show that things were under control. “Don’t worry, I’m sure—”

“Is everything gone?” the other man asked, completely ignoring Charles. “Ain’t there a storage room or a cellar or something?”

“That’s empty, too,” Metzger said.

Three more men had poked their heads in.

“There ain’t nothin’ left?” One man’s eerie calmness disappeared. “How can there be nothing—”

Charles held up his hands, hoping to calm the man, as well as those behind him, who were cursing. “Please,” Charles said. “We’ll set things right.”

“Who the hell did this?” a man in back yelled. The gathering was attracting an even larger crowd as men passed the store on their way to the mill. There were half a dozen millworkers inside now, with still more crowding the doorway behind them.

“I’m gonna kill the bastards that did this!” someone vowed.

“Forget killing ’em,” another man said. “Let’s just steal the food back.”

Charles wondered if he should call a meeting of the magistrates, launch an investigation. Whoever had stolen from the store and the community gardens likely had volumes of food. But the thought of searching house to house did not sit well with him. That would lead to more confrontations and conflicts, would turn Commonwealth into precisely the kind of police state he had abandoned during the Everett strike. He wondered if that transformation had happened already.

“What the hell are you so angry about, Mike?” a man with a long scar down his left cheek said with a sneer. “You got enough food at your place to feed an army.”

Heads turned.

“The hell I do!” said an older man with a thick black beard flecked by white hairs. “I ain’t got no more’n you!”

Even though a cold wind was blowing in through the broken windows, Charles felt sweat roll down his back.

“You’re the one with the two cows in his backyard,” someone else said to the man with the scar.

“Do you see, Charles?” Metzger said softly into Charles’s ear as they watched the millworkers’ argument intensify.

Charles finally saw a friendly face, that of Jarred Rankle shouldering his way in through the crowded doorway. Rankle interposed himself between the scarred man and the bearded man, who seemed on the verge of blows. Charles could see Rankle reasoning with them, and he envied his friend’s lack of hesitation at striding right up to men poised at the lip of violence.

Another man stepped away from the mob to approach Charles. “How can the store be out of food, Mr. Worthy? I’ve about run out myself.” He was young, barely older than Philip, and one of the newer workers at the mill.

“I’ll visit your house later today,” Charles promised, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You can tell me what you need then.” He hoped that this was reassurance enough, even though he wasn’t sure what he would be able to offer the man.

The man looked less than hopeful as he turned to leave.

“Let’s everybody get to work!” Rankle called out after clapping a few men on the back. “We don’t have time to be feeling sorry for ourselves. Let’s keep this mill going.”

The men were still grumbling, but Rankle seemed to have called their bluff: no one wanted to fight, no one wanted to riot. They just wanted things to be back to normal, and for now, hearing one of the town’s respected foremen insisting that things would indeed work out seemed to be enough. But it was clear that the men’s tensions would not be eased for long.

The workers began filing out, and Rankle walked against the tide toward Charles.

“This isn’t good, Charles,” he said quietly.

Charles nodded. “I know. We just need to press on as best we can. This can’t last long.” He saw a lack of conviction in Rankle’s gray eyes.

“I need to get to the storage building. I’m supposed to relieve Deacon this morning. I’ll come by your office after my shift’s over.” Rankle left, and Charles and Metzger were again the only people in the building. Charles closed the door, hoping to prevent another scene.

Metzger was standing behind the desk where his wife had always sat. Even if the shelves had been filled, the room would have felt empty without her. He leaned forward, his palms on the desk, his head hanging down as if he might collapse.

“Alfred,” Charles started, “I can’t pretend to know how you feel right now. If anything that’s happened is the result of my choices, then I will carry that regret with me to my dying day.” He paused. “In the meantime, you’re right: the quarantine should be called off. If you need to go to Timber Falls for food, you of course have my blessing. I’ll tell the guards they are no longer needed. And I’ll go to the banks on Monday to get what money I can. I only hope the stores in Timber Falls have opened back up.”

Metzger kept his head down through Charles’s speech.

“Rebecca and I will come over tonight, and if there’s anything we can do—”

“There is nothing you can do.” Metzger still would not look at him. “You are not welcome in my home.”