The Last Town on Earth (17 page)

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lsie couldn’t believe the news. “He’s locked up in a storage building?”

Laura nodded, her brow knit with concern. They were standing outside the school, the first two students to arrive, as usual. Mrs. Worthy was already inside, having said hello to Elsie and hurried along.

Elsie pestered her friend with questions, only a few of which Laura could answer. Charles had told Laura that Philip had let the man into town because he was starving, that he had refused to just stand there and let the man die. Charles had said he was proud of Philip, that he had surely done the right and Christian thing but that, due to the flu, he and the stranger would need to be quarantined for two days.

“So he might be sick?” Elsie asked.

“I don’t know. My father said I was asking too many questions.”

Elsie shook her head, still taking in the news. “He must have let him in because of what happened to the other soldier.”

Laura gave her a peculiar look. “What do you mean? I figured this was the same soldier as last time.”

Elsie remembered Philip’s warning that the first soldier’s death be kept secret. “No, you’re right. I’m just…confused by everything.”

“My mother told me I should try not to think about it and pretend it’s a normal day. She said Philip will be home for dinner tomorrow night and everything will be fine.”

“This just feels so…” Elsie couldn’t find the right word.

“I know.”

“Are you all right?”

“I don’t think anyone in my house slept very much. I could hear my parents talking all night.”

“Maybe we could go visit him?”

“We’re not allowed,” Laura said, and finally motioned to the school.

They walked inside holding hands.

Once they were in school, Elsie had no choice but to stew in silence. Mrs. Worthy had already scrawled an assignment on the chalkboard and was sitting at her desk, sifting through papers. Elsie, in her role of elder student and apprentice teacher, asked how she could be of help, and Mrs. Worthy described the day’s lessons. At no point did she say anything about Philip.

“How does that sound?” Mrs. Worthy asked when she finished her instructions.

“Fine, ma’am,” Elsie replied. She realized she hadn’t listened to a thing her teacher had said about the lessons. She stood there an extra moment, confused to be in such an unfamiliar position.

“Everything is going to be fine, Elsie,” Mrs. Worthy said in her typical calmly authoritarian tone. “But there’s much to get accomplished today.”

Mrs. Worthy was the embodiment of her own advice, proceeding as if it were a normal day. Once the students had filled the building, attendance was called, the lesson was read, assignments were distributed, unruly children were disciplined, and order was kept as it always was. The only difference, Elsie noticed, was her: her inability to concentrate, her uncharacteristic daydreaming, the snippets of a letter to Philip she jotted in her notebook while pretending to record Mrs. Worthy’s lesson. When Mrs. Worthy called on her during the lesson on the drafting of the Constitution, Elsie stammered until her instructor seemed to have pity and called on someone else.

During recess, news of Philip and the soldier spread, and by the end of the day, everyone seemed to know the story, despite the fact that Mrs. Worthy never broached the subject. When she released the students for the day, they walked away in a mass, trading stories about what their fathers and mothers had told them, speculating about the soldier and whether either of the prisoners would become ill. Elsie snapped at a few of them, then walked back inside to help Mrs. Worthy clean up. The teacher was standing at her desk, placing some papers in her satchel.

“I’m going to leave early today, girls,” she said to Elsie and Laura, who was busily erasing the board. “I’ll leave you to finish cleaning.”

Elsie said, “Mrs. Worthy, I was wondering…”

Her teacher looked at her patiently. She already seemed to know what Elsie was struggling to say.

Elsie continued, “Does Philip really need to be locked in that building all day? If the man he let in doesn’t seem sick, maybe they could come out this evening instead of tomorrow?”

Mrs. Worthy sat down beside Elsie in one of the pupils’ chairs, finally acknowledging that this was not a normal day after all.

She explained the doctor’s instructions and reminded Elsie of that day’s history lesson. “We all are a part of something larger than ourselves,” Mrs. Worthy said. “Being in a democracy sometimes means we are outvoted. When that happens, we need to press on and trust that the decision the majority made was right. I know it’s hard, but it’s something each of us has to do.”

Elsie thought for a moment, then nodded. There seemed to be two Mrs. Worthys—the friendlier one at Laura’s house and the sterner one in the school—and right now Elsie was looking at Laura’s mother, her eyes a bit larger than usual, a look of empathy on her face.

“But,” Elsie said, stammering again, “but he’s going to be okay, right?”

Mrs. Worthy smiled, but it was a strange half-smile, the outer edges cut off by tension. She reached out and grasped Elsie’s hands with a reassuring squeeze. “I’m sure everything will be fine.”

Mrs. Worthy explained that Elsie could always write Philip a letter and ask the guards to deliver it—she herself would write to him as soon as she returned home, she said. Then she released Elsie’s hands and stood up abruptly, walking toward the door as if she didn’t want anyone to see her face. She bade them goodbye and was gone.

Elsie and Laura tidied the building quickly, each in a rush to escape the chores. Normally, Elsie’s mother expected her at the store as soon as school was out, but since Elsie was not staying late to further discuss the next day’s lessons with Mrs. Worthy, as she normally would, she had time to return home and work on a letter to Philip. She read through what she had written during the day, displeased with how it sounded. She started over on a clean sheet of her favorite paper, a bright white with fraying corners.

Still, it felt wrong that she had to write him rather than visiting him. Despite Mrs. Worthy’s words, Elsie clung to the hope that when she reached the storage building, the guard would let her in, or perhaps there would be no guard, or perhaps Philip would already be freed from the building, the town elders having decided they were wrong to keep him there.

Her hopes were dashed as she approached the building, letter in hand, and saw a lone figure standing there. His back was to her, and he stood a good distance away from the building, as if wary of its inhabitants. He was holding a rifle.

She felt herself grow nervous as she walked toward the man, embarrassed to be delivering a letter to a boy and awkward to have to do so in someone else’s presence. She concocted a quick lie to explain herself, but her stomach clenched, and she saw the envelope quivering in her hand.

When she was a few feet from the guard, he turned around and nodded a silent greeting. It was Graham Stone. Elsie knew he was friends with Philip and Mr. Worthy, but she had rarely come into contact with him. She found herself intimidated by his wordless gaze, the solidity of his posture, and the rifle that lay across his arms neither casually nor rigidly.

“Um, the kids at school wrote this letter to Philip,” Elsie said without looking him in the eye. “Mrs. Worthy asked me to deliver it to him.”

“I’ll see he gets it,” he said, releasing the barrel of the rifle with his left hand, which Elsie saw had only three fingers, and taking the envelope.

He kept his eyes on her for another moment and, seeing that she had nothing else to say, turned back around. His shadow stretched across her feet and then it was like he was a statue. He seemed in no rush to deliver the letter, and she wondered how he would do it, whether there were proscribed times for deliveries or if he had lied to her. She blushed when she realized there was nothing she could do to stop him from opening it, and the thought broke her from her brief trance and chased her back down the empty path.

She had walked less than a minute when she stopped and caught her breath, then turned around. Graham was in the same spot. He didn’t seem to be reading the letter, and he obviously trusted that she was walking home.

Beside Elsie, a narrow trail split off and led into the woods. She slowly began to creep toward it. She had tramped over the trails all around Commonwealth, had explored them when her family first moved here, and had continued the habit despite her mother’s criticism that such wanderings were unladylike.

Elsie loved the woods. Her grandfathers had been river drivers and lumberjacks, so perhaps this was them surfacing in her, some hereditary predisposition that made her feel particularly at home when tramping beneath Douglas fir and climbing over fallen branches and pungent pine needles, collecting pieces of driftwood by the river. The trails were where Elsie escaped when she was tired from the drudgery of school and the store and housework, when she needed to disappear. Her mother had hoped she would outgrow such jaunts, but they had become more intriguing to her since her family had moved to Commonwealth, which was so newly carved into the woods that the trails cut behind most of the town’s homes. She could wander through the woods and wind up in someone’s backyard, or reach the edge of a street where some men or women might be talking, letting the afternoon slowly drift by. She’d hide beneath the low-hanging branches, careful to stay in the shadows, and listen. Even the most boring topics were interesting when you weren’t supposed to be hearing them. Often she didn’t know what people were talking about, didn’t even know who some of them were. But it was real life. She liked spying because she was such a good student, she told herself; she wanted to know everything that was happening.

Secretly, she loved knowing there were things she had seen that others hadn’t. Like seeing the men bury the dead soldier. Not even Philip’s own sister knew about the dead soldier. Did Mrs. Worthy? Suddenly, there were big secrets in Commonwealth, and she didn’t know who held them, who was unaware of them, or how many secrets she had yet to discover.

So much had changed since the quarantine. People were terse on street corners, conversations by front doors were cut short, brief nods were replacing warm handshakes. No one was sick, but everyone was acting as if disease were stalking them and they needed to swiftly make their way to the safety of their homes. Kids weren’t allowed to play outside as often as before—mothers called them in, asked the friends to go back to their parents’ house. The quiet air of the men who guarded the town seemed to have infected everyone to some degree, and Elsie didn’t like it.

She’d even spied on some of Philip’s first shift of guard duty, when he’d stood out by the post with Graham for an uneventful afternoon. She had watched them, sitting beneath a fir tree and feeling the sun briefly poke out through a thin spot in the clouds as the two men shifted their weight from one foot to the other. How unlucky, then, that she had missed the most interesting events. She would have loved to see the confrontation with the first soldier, to hear what Graham and Philip had said to him, to see what an actual soldier looked like up close. Had they really fired a warning shot, as Philip had said, or had he embellished the story for her?

Elsie knew this trail wound to the other side of the storage building, where Graham wouldn’t be able to see her. She crept forward, careful not to step on any twigs and give herself away. The forest was thick here, the low branches all but blocking her from view, but she noticed when Graham moved. She stopped, peering out through a break in the trees, and watched him walk toward the storage building. She saw him slip the letter under the door, heard him knock on the door and go back to where he had stood. Then he was motionless again.

Elsie walked on, and the trail dipped down a slight hill until Graham and the building were out of view. But after a minute’s walk, the trail tracked up again. A couple hundred feet to her right was the back of the storage building. Graham wouldn’t be able to see her, as he was on the opposite side of the building, but she was careful not to make enough noise to attract attention. The ground was still damp from the rainfall early that morning, and she realized her shoes would be filthy, necessitating a trip home to clean them before showing up at the store. But it was worth it, for there was the back of the building, close enough to toss a pebble at.

She was at the edge of the woods now. She could see that the building was in disrepair, with a few holes at its base. They were too small for a man to fit through, but she could probably do it. Philip might even be able to, she thought. Maybe she could throw a pebble at the building, attract his attention, coax him out. She stood there in a crouch, her posture the picture of guilt. She knew she shouldn’t be doing this, but she hadn’t been able to resist.

She picked up a small stone. All she had to do was throw it. She listened. She could hear something, murmuring. She couldn’t pick out words or even voices, but it must be Philip and the soldier. What were they talking about? Was Philip all right? The stone started to feel slick in her palm.

Something snapped behind her and she turned around, panicked. She couldn’t see anything; it was only the sound of the forest. But she realized that just because Graham had stayed in one place for the past few minutes didn’t mean he wasn’t about to start pacing around the building. She could be discovered. And just what did she intend to say to Philip? She thought it wrong for him to be trapped in there, but she couldn’t take it upon herself to set him free. What would the town do if she were caught? And what if the soldier truly did have the flu?

More murmuring from inside the building. It sounded no different from voices she’d overheard in houses throughout town. She was no more than thirty feet from the building. So close to Philip. But only when she was close enough to hear his laugh—there it was, rising above the murmurs for a brief, glowing moment—did she realize how far they were from each other, how separate this new quarantine had rendered them. She traded the stone from one hand to the other and back again, over and over. Then she placed it on the ground, silently.