The Last Town on Earth (31 page)

XV

T
he sound that woke Elsie was one she should have been used to but wasn’t: her mother’s coughing. This time it sounded more like choking. Then she heard her father cry her mother’s name.

Elsie ran into their bedroom. It was the middle of the night and the floor was cold on her feet. As she walked into the dimly lit room she saw the concern on her father’s face, the pain in her mother’s eyes.

Flora lay on her back, her head and shoulders slightly propped up on some pillows, but she was sagging from the weight of her coughs. Her hair was a disheveled mass of curls and her arms lay motionless at her sides.

When Elsie saw the gauze mask on her father’s face she realized she’d forgotten her own, so she ran back to her room to fetch it. When she returned her mother was coughing again, and the sound was more horrifying up close. It wasn’t a cough at all but more of a strangled wheeze, as if her throat and lungs had collapsed and she was struggling for air.

Elsie’s father stood with a glass of water in his hand. “She can’t swallow,” he said, his voice pulled tight with worry, ready to break.

Flora hadn’t spoken in over a day, had been unable to muster a single word as she lay there in the grip of her illness. Doc Banes had tried to control her coughing with codeine, to no avail. They had tried to believe that she hadn’t grown worse each day, but this new change could not be ignored.

She started wheezing again, several staccato bursts followed by a mighty cough, as if she was trying to dislodge something. Elsie saw red spray in the air, saw blood on her father’s mask and face.

Elsie stepped back. “Mama,” she said weakly, wishing her voice could free her unresponsive mother from this spell.

She had heard that tuberculosis victims coughed blood, but flu? The doctor hadn’t said anything about this—she had seen blood on his clothes a few times but had chosen to believe it was unrelated.

“She’s having trouble breathing,” Elsie said to her father.

“I know!” he snapped.

Now there was no occasional calm between breaths: either Flora gasped painfully or she coughed blood. Elsie put her hands over her ears to block the sound. She couldn’t watch anymore, couldn’t listen, but there was nowhere else to go. This was all she had seen for three days, each worse than the one before, and the nights were always the worst.

Alfred dabbed at his wife’s lips, wiping away some blood with a handkerchief. The wheezing became higher-pitched.

Elsie swallowed. “I should get Doc Banes.” She looked at her mother’s face and wondered if it was turning dark or if that was just the lamp dimming.

Her hands were still so tight over her ears that she barely heard her father say, “Yes, hurry!”

XVI

I
t was dark when Graham rode on Mo’s horse along the lonely road leading to the old storage buildings. Half a mile away Graham could hear the river faintly, the water running along the rocks by the riverbed. He felt as though the world around him had been nearly purged of sound but that he, an instrument of God or at least of his own decisive actions, was deafeningly loud, that the slow clops of his horse were shaking the earth and making the trees sway, that the deep rhythm of his heartbeat was chasing the nocturnal animals deeper into the woods. This was not nervousness, he felt—this was conviction.

Deacon was the lone guard at that hour, and he turned and nodded when he saw Graham approach.

Graham dismounted and tied the horse—which Mo had named Icarus because he’d thought that was what you called a horse with wings—to a post.

“Didn’t think you’d be coming till later,” Deacon said.

Graham replied that he’d had nothing better to do. “Why don’t you head home,” he suggested after a few minutes. “You’ve already been out here a while. I can stare at a building just fine myself.”

“You sure?” Deacon did not sound surprised at the offer; he knew that other men didn’t like being alone with him. All those years of silence, of not hearing God call out to him, had made him different. In a group he could be ignored or insulted, but when there was only one other guy with him, that guy would start to feel funny being around a taciturn ex-priest, especially an ex-not-quite-priest who invented his own cuss words and frequented prostitutes.

Graham insisted, reminding Deacon that he had already been out for a few hours, and Deacon complied. He said good night and started walking home, the silence following him.

Graham stood there alone. The wind picked up a bit, just loud enough to blanket the sound of the river.

The day before, Graham had guarded the house of a sick man for six hours. But today Doc Banes had told him that the guarding of sick houses was no longer necessary, that the sickness had spread so quickly across town that Graham’s sentry duty the day before had been useless. Graham did not like thinking of himself as useless.

Doc Banes had given up—Graham could see it in the old man’s eyes. Banes was not long for this world, and he probably wouldn’t mind if all of the human race was wiped out in the next few months: all the more souls to escort him on his journey to the afterlife. Graham wasn’t so sure he believed in an afterlife, but whether or not there was anything beyond, he was still determined to make this world as hospitable and safe as possible while he remained.

Frank had barely slept the last few days. There was nothing to tire him, nothing to tax his body or spirit, and long after eating the meager suppers they’d given him, he would sit there thinking, his mind more places than he could control. He thought of Sepenski and the other dead soldiers, thought of their laughter and their taunts, thought of the C.O. and his weak attempt at push-ups and the water hose and the broomsticks that had turned into bayonets. If only they’d stayed broomsticks. He thought of Michelle and wondered where she was, what she thought of him. He thought about his family being told that he was a deserter, which would have been bad enough. But a spy? Surely they would know better, would refuse to look those army officers in the eye as they spouted their drivel. They would steadfastly hold on to their vision of Francis Joseph Summers as an upstanding and patriotic and God-fearing man. The only thing Frank wasn’t sure of was whether that vision was accurate any longer or if he had forever dispelled it with his actions.

His mind was doing things to him. He was certain one time that Michelle was there with him, that she was upstairs, that the people of this forsaken town had for some reason invited her in. Maybe they thought she could get him to confess to being a spy. She had stood at the top of the stairs and said she would come down only when he told the truth. He’d replied that he
had
told them the truth, but she chastised him for being dishonest with her. Finally he had screamed at her and she stopped talking, walked away. Another time he felt himself reenacting a conversation with his father, a long talk about duty and honor and all the reasons why enlisting was the right thing to do. It was a talk they’d had several months ago, and Frank had agreed with everything his father had said, only this time Frank found himself taking a contrary opinion. What the hell’s so honorable about it? Duty to whom? To myself, or to the guys who would be fighting without me, or to the people here at home afraid of the Hun? Or duty to President Wilson, or to Carnegie, or to God, or to all the fallen soldiers before me, to Great-granddad Emmett and his bleached bones down at Antietam? His father had shaken his head at him and walked away—not at all how the conversation had ended the first time, when Frank’s father had stepped forward and suddenly hugged his son, something he’d never done before.

But Philip’s visit—that had been real, right? Frank had thought otherwise at first, had figured it was the latest trick of his mind. But at some point he realized that this really was an actual person visiting him and talking to him—unlike the guards, who always brought the food and never said a word, their dry lips sealed behind gauze masks. Philip wore no mask and wanted to talk, wanted to hear Frank’s voice, to know him again. And the emotion that had been bottled up in Frank, then shaken and crammed into too small a space, had exploded, pouring out, and not until he had stopped shaking did he realize that it was the prison of his memories more than that of the chains that was so unbearable.

Philip’s visit—that had been yesterday, hadn’t it? Philip had said he would come back to free Frank. Had it been only a day? The absolute lack of sunlight in the prison was no longer bothersome to Frank; it had become expected. How long had it been since he was outside? Over a week, perhaps. He thought of the clouds and the sun melting the mountaintops in the distance beyond Missoula, of the vultures and buzzards that hung in the summer sky, of the kites he’d flown with his sister, who could not see them but loved the feel of the wind tugging at her hand as she grasped the roll of string, who thrilled at the knowledge that she was a part of something vast and overwhelming and beautiful, even if it was invisible.

Frank and the C.O. had escaped from the truck when it stopped at an outpost in a town they didn’t know, had marched through the surrounding forest all through the remainder of the night and continued to march the next day. They didn’t know where they were going, only that they would soon be pursued and therefore needed to create distance.

They found a place to sleep, a high spot that had stayed reasonably dry despite the rains. They had lain there beside each other, silent. At some point Frank had started crying and so had the C.O., and Frank saw the C.O. shaking his head over and over and saw him shivering and then Frank realized he was, too, and as they lay there in the cold they leaned in to each other and then clasped each other closer. Frank remembered the sound of the C.O.’s tears and the feel of the C.O.’s tensed fingers digging into his shoulders, remembered the feel of the C.O.’s tunic on his face as he buried his tears in it. They had lain there until they fell asleep, crying onto each other’s shoulders and holding each other tight for warmth and for reassurance that they weren’t completely alone in their fate.

They spoke little the next day. It didn’t occur to Frank until later that the C.O. had never thanked him for his aid that night in the storeroom. Perhaps the C.O. knew that if Frank hadn’t stepped in, his painful beatings may have continued but at least he wouldn’t have been condemned to death, as he was now. Frank would still be an honorable soldier, waiting for the flu to pass so he could be shipped off to France. The C.O. had never thanked him and Frank didn’t really feel like he deserved any thanks.

So maybe that was why Frank hated the C.O. so much. Maybe Frank blamed the whole situation on him. The morning after they had held each other, Frank had woken up and started walking. He pretended these were the woods outside Paris and that his pursuers were not the U.S. Army or police but the bloodthirsty, nun-raping Heinies, and he marched as fast as he could and never stopped, never looked back. He marched through the forest for hours, his feet sore and his stomach crying out for sustenance. He kept the road just barely in sight to his left, and when he finally took a break to relieve himself in the woods he saw that the C.O. was gone.

The sound of footsteps stirred Frank from his memories. The footsteps grew louder, tapping now down the stairs. They were heavy. Philip? The light from another lantern softly fell on the floor below, gracefully touching down without a sound except the footsteps, one and two more. And then a man standing before him, tall and strong, his face blank above the gauze mask but the skin around his eyes pulled tight in concentration. It was the man Frank had struggled against when he’d first seen the chains they meant to fix on his ankles, the man who had knocked him down with one blow—the man they called Graham.

“You’re awake,” the man said, sounding somewhat disappointed.

“Couldn’t fall asleep with all the racket,” Frank replied, making a joke despite himself. Always jokes when there was no reason, always stupid comments when he was in a dire situation, like offering to do push-ups to prove to Philip that he wasn’t sick. There was a large man in the room and he had brought no food and there was no overt purpose for him being here.

“Well, it’s your lucky day,” the guard said. He reached into his pocket, and the hand emerged with something metal and shiny. “We’re letting you go.”

Graham was holding a key.

“Are you with Philip?” Frank asked.

Graham eyed him strangely. “Philip’s at home.” Then he stepped closer with the key. “Better back up a bit.”

Frank lifted himself up, his knees aching as the stiff muscles and ligaments were forced from their positions for the first time in hours. He felt the blood rush to his feet, reminding them they had a purpose.

“Thank you,” Frank said, backing away so Graham could bend down and reach the lock, and then Frank heard the click he had been dreaming about. He reached forward to untangle the chains, but Graham shook him off.

“I’ll do it,” Graham said. “Just hold back.”

Frank nodded; he couldn’t tell if this man still feared him, so he tried to act as harmless and compliant as possible.

After the chains were removed, Graham stood back up and took from his pocket a thick knife five inches long. “Better give me your hands,” he said.

Frank stepped forward, closer to Graham, and lifted his arms, presenting his bound wrists. The rope was thick and he hoped Graham would be able to cut the coils without digging into his wrists, especially since they had been bound palms-up, exposing his steel-blue veins. But after Graham put one hand on Frank’s wrists, the blade shifted in Graham’s clenched fist and his arm lunged forward. Frank felt first a long pinch, as if the skin of his chest were being grabbed by a clawed beast, and then a hot and violent pain deep in his chest, flooding his entire body and causing every muscle to spasm. He reached forward with his nearly useless hands and tried to grab Graham’s arm but the arm moved, pulling back and lunging a second time, driving the blade deeper. Frank finally grabbed hold of Graham’s fist, trying in vain to break his grip on the hilt of the knife, the only part of it that wasn’t jammed into Frank’s muscles and bones and heart. Graham’s other hand clamped down on one of Frank’s. Frank slipped and his back was pressed into the wall and the blade sank deeper still and all the air was forced from his lungs. His fingers and Graham’s interlocked like the opposing hands of a man praying. Frank’s eyes fixed on Graham’s, which were wide and determined as he forcefully exhaled and twisted the knife. Frank would never see Michelle again and never be allowed to argue his case before the military or at least his father, tell him that Dad you always said do right by God and do right by others and remember there’s no difference between the two, the action that pleases one pleases the other, and Dad I swear I tried to do both even when it seemed they weren’t the same, I swear I tried to do right and if I failed in that simple goal then I suppose the fault is mine, and mine alone.

Graham’s fingers were still interlocked with Frank’s. He finally let go and released the hilt, allowing the body to slide off the wall and onto the ground.

It had taken longer than he had thought it would; the soldier had suffered more than Graham had hoped. Graham would have liked to do it while the man slept but unfortunately that hadn’t been possible. He turned around and grabbed the blanket, wrapping it around the soldier’s body, covering him so most of the blood would be absorbed rather than staining the floor. There was already some blood spilled, but not much. Graham also had blood on his fingers, blood that had seeped onto them as he’d held the blade in place and let it do its work, so he reached down and grabbed the end of the blanket and wiped them clean. He retrieved his gloves from his pockets and put them on, something he realized he should have done before. His mind had been on other things.

When he was a kid his father had bought two enormous hogs from a visiting trader, two behemoths that looked healthy as could be. But within days, the other hogs all became sick, some of them dying. Graham’s father was not a rich man, and he couldn’t afford to have swine fever kill off what few hogs he had to his name; nor could he afford to get rid of the two hogs that seemed to have brought the strange plague with them. Yet Graham remembered helping his father go out back one morning and slaughter those two giant beasts, killing them and burying their bodies right by the edge of their property. It was a lot of money he was burying, money spent in hopes of a good investment but costing him far more than he could have imagined. Young Graham had asked his father why they couldn’t just release the two hogs—which had still seemed healthy the morning they were killed—or maybe put them in a separate pen where they wouldn’t have sickened the others, but his father said it had to be done this way. They had disturbed the air somehow, and the only way to purge that disturbance was with blood. If he had let those two hogs go, the air would have remained foul, would have stayed that way forever and doomed all their livestock and possibly even the Stone family as well. His father had not relished this chore, and it would put the family in somewhat hard times for another year, but he’d had no choice, he told Graham. After the two hogs were slaughtered the remainder became healthy again, practically overnight, vindicating his father’s decision.