The Last Town on Earth (39 page)

“Who are they arresting?” Philip asked, folding his arms against the cold.

“
Everyone.
Everyone who didn’t enlist.”

Philip imagined them dragging Graham and throwing him in a dank prison, something far darker and fouler than the last place Frank had laid eyes on. He saw them hanging Graham after a quick trial, saw Graham’s body being thrown into an empty and nameless ditch, saw Amelia in black. Philip tried to remember the conversation he’d had with Graham about the war those many months ago, but it felt like that part of his brain had been scrubbed away by something so abrasive that even trying to think about it hurt.

So he focused on the present: Graham was being arrested. Philip concentrated so hard he had to close his eyes, concentrated on making his mind work the way he knew it could. The Timlins lived in one of the houses closest to the town entrance. But Graham and Amelia lived far to the other side of the Worthy house, closer to the mill. If the men hadn’t knocked on the Worthys’ door yet, then perhaps they hadn’t yet knocked on Graham’s.

Philip slowly made his way through the parlor. He gazed out the window, this one adorned not with Elsie’s thoughts but with snowy patches in the bottom corners, the whiteness clinging there. He looked out and saw, far to his right, a group of men knocking on a neighbor’s front door: Jay Wachowski, the man who’d broken both his hands in a mill accident a few weeks ago. Philip didn’t know if Wachowski had enlisted, didn’t know if Doc Banes had cut open the man’s casts yet. Would he be carted off to prison with his hands still bound in plaster?

Philip tapped at the cold glass, remembering the time his hands had been covered in bandages to save them from frostbite. He remembered being unable to touch his own brow, being unable to feed himself, unable to so much as count on his fingers because they were all balled together in the same hideous mash of white. The snow was falling more heavily, growing thick on the roads, which would soon be dangerous, impassable.

But his thoughts returned to Graham. Graham had been the one who pulled the trigger while Philip had just stood there. He had been granted the luxury of seeing what happened to Graham as a result, and that was why he hadn’t been able to repeat Graham’s act when Frank came walking up that hill. When Philip thought of all that Graham had done, he could not escape the fact that he too might have been forced down the same path if he’d been the one who pulled the trigger. He hated and feared what Graham had turned into, but Graham’s actions had saved him from a similar fate.

Rebecca had gone back upstairs, so Philip walked to the closet by the front door. He grabbed his boots and his coat, his hat and gloves. Then he grabbed the rifle.

This was already too rough for J.B. Though Miller had said there was a chance things would get out of hand, he had also said these were weakling slackers and the vast majority would go willingly. He had said that twenty men, a show of such force, would cow the slackers into surrendering, would send them single-file, heads hung, into the backs of those trucks. Men like J.B. were doing what they could for their country, Miller had said:
We may be too old to be out on the front lines, but we’re doing our part to keep the home front protected.

But seeing that first man get slugged by Hightower, with the man’s wife and children crying in the background, had turned J.B.’s stomach. The sight of the suffering family reminded him even more of his own wife and his lost children. He did not want to be here. He had made a mistake. He should be back home, knocking on his wife’s door, again and again, beseeching her to let him in so they could wrap their arms around each other and try to keep the world at bay.

Many of the APL men with him were young enough to serve in the army but had been deferred for various reasons. Some were essential war workers, some were policemen whose absence their towns could not afford. The rest of the men, like Hightower, were older but still strong enough to defeat any young man who should foolishly challenge them. J.B., though, knew he was just a pencil pusher, a man more like Miller, who had given himself the lightweight role of truck guard. As part of Bartrum’s six-man brigade, J.B. stayed in the shadows while the others used their broad shoulders to intimidate and used their thick boots to pound down anyone who tried to resist.

“Kick the sonuvabitch,” Hightower told J.B. after the rest of them had subdued a man who had tried to escape, who had spat in Bartrum’s face and grazed Hightower with an inept punch. Every other man in the crew had kicked him at least once except J.B., whose lack of gusto had finally, as he’d feared, become suspect.

J.B. didn’t look at Hightower, looked instead at the man on the ground, covered in snow. An older child, really, a kid who probably had turned eighteen only a few months ago.

“Kick him for our sons,” Hightower said. J.B. felt that everyone was looking at him, waiting, assessing. What was he doing here? His son, James, wouldn’t want him to kick this weakling. James wasn’t like Hightower or his roughneck sons. James would want to help this boy up. But James was gone, his shattered body a million miles away and his soul across the impassable void. War changes a man, and J.B. shuddered to think what James may have become by the day he died. Maybe James would have stomped on this young man’s face, would have leaped upon him with terrifying enthusiasm.

Hightower and the others were still waiting. J.B. kicked the boy in the back. Not too hard but enough. He exhaled. He would kick the next one harder.

Graham stood up when he heard the shots. He had been sitting beside Amelia, staring at the snow, when they heard the first pop followed by three more volleys. It was a hundred times louder than any sound the town had mustered in days.

Amelia stayed in her chair, looking up at him questioningly. From their vantage point, they could see nothing but a neighborhood being buried by winter’s first act, but Graham recognized gunshots. He went to the front door and stood behind it for a moment, afraid to open it, afraid of what he might let in.

He opened the door and stepped onto the porch, shivering in the biting wind. About two blocks to his left, he saw a pile of men, a scrum, at the bottom of which was some whitened rodent flailing about. But it wasn’t a rodent, it was a man lying there in the snow, a man being kicked and hit by the surrounding men, at least one of whom held a gun pointed to the heavens.

Then a truck started driving toward them. It pulled up beside them, and a well-dressed man in a derby emerged. He opened the large back door, then the scrum of men picked up the snow-covered body they had been trouncing and carried it into the back of the truck. Graham saw the redheaded mane of one of the Timber Falls men who had tried to enter Commonwealth, the man who had called them slackers and had ranted about his dead sons in France. The sight of the man gradually meshed with that past experience, became bound in a tight net Graham felt closing around him.

The men dusted the snow from their coats and walked up to the house of one of Graham’s neighbors, where the crape in the windows should have told them they were entering a death house. They knocked on the door nonetheless, perhaps too enthralled by their bloodlust to notice the telltale signs surrounding them.

Hightower was doing this for his sons. He was doing it because he and his wife had raised their boys right, had produced two strong and right-thinking young men who went to church and had adoring Christian sweethearts. He was doing it because they had proceeded to the enlistment board on the allotted date, had entered their names and accepted their numbers with dignity. He did not know what had transpired in their rooms behind those shut doors on the last night before they reported at Fort Jenkins, did not know what they had asked of God in their prayers on their last night at home, did not know if fear had yielded to tears or if they had been calm before sleep took them. He knew what they had said to him, though, and what they had written in their letters, knew the looks in their eyes the last time he had seen them, decked out in military fatigues and looking so much older than he had ever realized they could be.

Maybe if every other young man in the country had responded as his sons had, there would have been more doughboys at the front. Maybe the Expeditionary Force would have been twice as strong, would have mowed through France in days, would have beaten the Hun clear through Belgium and back into the primeval German forests where it belonged. Maybe if every boy had been as valiant as the Hightowers, they would be home again, announcing their wedding engagements. Maybe if this damn state hadn’t been overrun by slackers and reds, by people who would rather hide from a threat than face it, Hightower’s sons would be alive.

His sons were so unlike this weak young man, who’d climbed out of his side window and leaped down into the snow, trying to sprint away through the thickening drifts. Bartrum had fired some warning shots, which slowed the kid a bit, left him debating whether this tactic was the right one. Before he could resume his flight, Hightower had tackled him from behind. The kid had tried to wrestle free and had landed a boot square across Hightower’s jaw, but by then the others were upon him. He wasn’t even moaning anymore by the time they loaded him into the truck, the last one they hadn’t yet filled.

“We’re running out of space,” Miller said.

“There’s still plenty slackers left,” Bartrum answered. His nose was broken, and though the blood no longer flowed, it was the color of cooked beets, so much darker than the white snow surrounding his head. The skin around his eyes was also darkening—that slacker from a couple houses ago had clocked him good. “We haven’t even been to half the town yet.”

“We’ll need to come back,” Hightower said.

“Not today,” Miller replied. “Way this snow’s falling, this is the last chance we’ll get for a few days. I say we stuff as many into these trucks as we can before heading out.”

Hightower nodded. “No argument here.” He gazed down the block at the next residence on their agenda. But what captured his attention was a few houses beyond, a man standing on a porch, watching them. “Sonuvabitch,” he said. “There he is.”

“Who?” Bartrum asked.

Ever since the first day they’d come to Commonwealth, Hightower had been haunted by those eyes. Even though the man had pulled a mask over half his face when Worthy had shown up, Hightower would never forget those insolent eyes. He didn’t know the man’s name, but he’d been hoping he’d be the one who got to knock on his door.

“Let’s skip the next few houses,” Hightower said. “I want to make sure we take that bastard in today.”

When Charles saw them carrying an unconscious man toward one of the trucks, he lunged forward. He was horrified by all that blood, by the fact that a man had been beaten so badly he could not walk. As they brought the man closer, Rankle’s head rolled to the side and Charles recognized his friend.

But as Charles ran, two other men stepped up and blocked his path. They told him he’d come far enough, and as he tried to press past them, they pushed him back until he fell into the snow.

Rankle was tossed into the back of the truck alongside Deacon. Deacon had been leaving a sick house with the doctor when the APL had confronted him and carted him away. He didn’t understand why the Lord would speak to him and then cast him off like this, but he had felt no fear as he allowed himself to be carried by God’s will. His faith was shaken, however, by the wounds he saw on Rankle’s face. He squeezed past the other captured men and took off his jacket, folding it into a makeshift pillow and stuffing it under Rankle’s head. He brushed some of the hair from Rankle’s forehead and sopped up his blood with a sleeve.

“All right, there, Jarred,” Deacon rasped. “You’ll be fine. We’ll get you to a doctor soon. We’ll be okay.”

Doc Banes helped Charles to his feet. All around them, teams of APL men were knocking on more doors, emerging with more workers. Many of the workers were sick, but the men from Timber Falls didn’t seem to care.

Banes was too tired to rail against them, as Charles had. He knew that these men had lived through the flu in Timber Falls, so perhaps they would survive anything the sick people of Commonwealth could breathe upon them. These were the lucky ones, the ones chosen by God or biology to be immune, or perhaps they had already suffered and survived.

“What can I do?” Charles said emptily, looking at the trucks. One by one, men who had ignored Charles’s advice about enlisting were being led away. By the time the APL was finished, the town would be emptied of most men.

The few who tried to fight were easily subdued, not only outnumbered but also weak from disease or hunger. Even Charles had lost weight. People had stretched their meager provisions as far as they could, and many had been too sick to venture out to other towns for food when the quarantine had been lifted. Everyone looked half starved, unable to defend themselves.

VII

T
he three knocks were so strong that Graham’s door shook on its hinges.

When he’d seen the men coming, Graham had sent Amelia upstairs with the baby. He had pondered his options and found them few and unappealing. The knocks, when they came, were more of an assault, the door nearly giving way to the weight of the men behind it.

There were three men on the porch, all of whom Graham recognized from the earlier confrontation. The redheaded one was eying him especially closely.

“Let’s see your enlistment papers,” the sheriff said.

“You’ve got no right to be doing this,” Graham told the sheriff, whose eyes seemed to be disappearing beneath the puffy blackness billowing from the bridge of his nose. “You boys have already caused enough trouble—go back to Timber Falls before this gets any more out of hand.”

Graham’s right hand was pressed up against the doorjamb. He had opened the door only halfway, and in his three-fingered left hand, behind the door and out of the men’s view, he was holding his rifle.

“We are deputized by the federal government,” the sheriff replied, “so we have every right.”

“Federal government’s got nothing to do with us. We built this town, no help from any of you.” The very doorjamb Graham’s hand was resting against, he had placed there himself; there was no way he would let some two-bit thugs drag him from it.

The redhead stepped forward to push the door open farther, but Graham’s hold was firm, the edge of the door digging into his forearm. He had elected not to brandish his weapon when he opened the door, thinking he could talk them into leaving. Now he was regretting the decision.

When Hightower had pointed Graham out to Bartrum, the sheriff hadn’t wanted to skip the other houses, so he sent three of the men from his group to knock on the neighbors’ doors. He kept Hightower and J.B. with him. Meanwhile, Miller had walked back to tell Winslow and another man to drive two of the trucks, filled beyond any point where more men could be shoved inside, back to Timber Falls. In only a few minutes, they’d fill the last two trucks and head back.

Bartrum knew how much Hightower had been yearning to bring this man in. The slacker had disparaged Hightower’s dead sons, and in so doing had disparaged J.B.’s dead son, disparaged Bartrum’s own son, still off fighting somewhere in France. Bartrum did not have the weight of a child’s death on his soul, but he saw how such weight pulled down even stronger men than he. He wasn’t going to let some yellow son of a bitch keep them from exercising their patriotic duties.

Bartrum reached for his pistol, removed it from the holster at his side. He held it there, pointed at the ground, and made sure Graham saw it. “Son, we bring you in alive or we bring you in dead. It doesn’t matter to us.”

Graham wasn’t left-handed. He would need to back up, let the door swing open, and switch the rifle into his right hand. Shoot the man with the gun first, then the redhead. The four-eyed guy in the business suit would probably run away. Graham looked at all three of them, gauged how quickly they would act.

But Hightower surprised Graham by stepping in front of Bartrum and driving his shoulder into the door, forcing it open. It smacked against Graham’s left wrist so hard he nearly dropped the rifle, now plainly visible. Graham switched it to his right hand, but Hightower was so close Graham couldn’t even point the gun at him. Hightower pushed the rifle aside, then punched Graham in the side of the face.

Graham stumbled back, the rifle hitting the ground, and wasn’t able to steady himself before Hightower charged into him again. Graham was younger and stronger, but he was back on his heels and off balance. He used his raised arms to deflect some of Hightower’s blows; the ones that struck him left him dizzy. Hightower was leaning him back against the couch, and Graham was about to fall when he landed a punch just to the right of the man’s chin, feeling the crunch of breaking bone. But Graham fell backward after landing that blow, and Hightower, gripping his aching jaw, stepped forward and kicked him the second he hit the floor.

“Jesus, J.B.” Hightower winced through his broken jaw. Finally, J.B. joined in kicking Graham’s ribs and abdomen.

Bartrum had leveled his gun at Graham, ready to shoot if the slacker tried to attack again. But that clearly was not going to happen.

Hightower held back once he knew the fight was won. As much as he hated this man, he was already losing his taste for fighting. He reached down and picked Graham up, holding him around the neck from behind.

“Graham!” Amelia screamed. Graham’s nose was bleeding, his left eyebrow was badly cut, and his face was becoming redder and redder from the thick arm around his neck. When Amelia reached the bottom crooked stair, she stopped, her face contorted by fear and fury. “Stop it, please!”

“We are stopping.” Bartrum silently cursed the fact that every one of these millworkers seemed to have wives.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, her eyes filling with tears as she slumped at the foot of the stairs. She looked straight into her husband’s eyes, and the sight of her caused Graham to struggle again, his fingers digging into Hightower’s arms. Hightower tightened his grip.

“Your husband is a yellow-bellied coward, young madam,” Bartrum informed her, “and he’s going to rot in jail till long after our boys have won this war.” The sheriff nodded to J.B. and Hightower. “Let’s go.”

But as he turned toward the door again something new caught his eye. Emerging from the kitchen was another figure. And he was holding a rifle pointed at Bartrum’s heart.

“Let him go,” Philip said, walking slowly but steadily through the kitchen and into the dining room. The rifle felt so heavy to his atrophied muscles and hollow-seeming bones, but he would not lower it.

Philip had reached Graham’s house too late, had seen the men standing on the porch when he turned the corner. He had stood there a moment, unsure what to do, the thoughts echoing in his cavernous head. The men would take Graham away, would stuff him into one of those trucks. Philip had carried the rifle with him as if heading back to guard duty at the town entrance, as if the flu had not come to Commonwealth. But it had come, of course, and he still felt it inside him. His head was wrong, his thoughts were wrong and his feelings were wrong. He found it hard to concentrate, hard to deliberate. It was so much easier just to act, and so he had walked through the snow to the Stones’ back door. Despite his weakness, his body seemed lighter, as if it were being propelled by the wind, by someone’s breath, by thought alone.

He had opened the back door silently. He had heard the sounds of fighting but had concentrated on stealth, on gliding through the house and aiming the rifle perfectly. His breaths were quick and he fought the urge to cough. He glanced at Graham just long enough to see his face contorted from the grip of the man holding him, then Philip trained his eyes on the midsection of the man with the pistol. The pistol was pointed at the floor, still aimed at where Graham had lain.

“Son, you’d best put that rifle—”

“Let him go,” Philip cut Bartrum off, repeating his command with added force. “
You
put down your gun, and then get out of this house.”

Hightower and Graham were still. Hightower had loosened his grip, apparently afraid that further struggle would cause Philip to fire their way. The man’s arm was still around Graham’s neck but now it was almost an embrace.

Philip coughed despite his attempts to choke it back. The rifle wavered but then returned to its target: the chest of the man before him, the man with the beaten face, with crusted blood and pus pooled beneath his trampled snout.

“Son, you’re pointing a weapon at an officer of the law,” Bartrum said, his voice calm but serious. “I’m sure you’re a sick boy and you aren’t acting yourself, but you need to put that down right now.” He began to raise his own pistol.

“If you even twitch your arm again—” Philip warned, and Bartrum stopped.

Philip imagined himself firing at the man. Shooting the C.O. had been wrong, and shooting Frank would have been wrong. Graham, too, had done something so wrong Philip still could barely understand it—would probably never understand it. But this, this was not wrong. These men should not be here. Philip would finally be able to do something unimpeachable. He would pull the trigger if he had to.

Amelia was still at the foot of the stairs, paralyzed and mute. Graham was staring at her as if he desperately wanted to cover her body with his, but she was so far away.

The windows and the open doorway behind the men were an explosion of white, the snow falling even thicker than before.

“Philip,” Graham managed to squeeze out of his dry throat, but that was all.

Nothing felt real to Philip—the scene was even more dreamlike than his conversation with Fiona on the train. He felt surrounded by death, felt that Fiona and Frank and the C.O. were nearby, felt the heavy spirits of all the people in Commonwealth who had been taken by the flu. The men standing in front of him were probably dead, too. All Philip had to do was knock them down.

“Son”—every time Bartrum spoke, his words came even slower—“I’m sure you think you’re doing the right thing. But these men have done wrong, and it’s our job to set things right. Now we’re going to walk out this door with this man, and then—”

Philip shook his head, and the end of the rifle bounced. “No. You’re leaving alone.”

The pistol in Bartrum’s hand moved again. Whether he was aiming it or moving it away, Philip wasn’t sure, but he squeezed the rifle’s trigger.

Bartrum disappeared. The shot threw him so far through the open doorway and into the descending layers of snow that he seemed erased into whiteness. Graham drove both of his elbows into Hightower’s stomach, less stunned by the gunshot than his adversary had been, and the arm fell from around his neck. Graham turned around and slugged him twice in the face, the second blow barely glancing off Hightower’s ear because he was falling so fast.

Philip hastily reloaded his rifle, then turned it toward Graham and Hightower, but Hightower was already on the ground, motionless. Philip looked at Graham, at his bloody face and the sweat that covered his forehead, dripping from his brow.

Bartrum’s pistol had landed on the floor between J.B. and Graham. J.B. had just seen one of his companions shot dead and the other knocked out, and he was now outnumbered, and there was the pistol right in front of him. It was out of neither cold calculation nor bold decisiveness but sheer self-preservation that he leaped onto the hard floor, lunging for the pistol.

Graham, too, saw the gun, and he lunged forward. He was faster and less frightened than J.B., and just as the banker’s fingers touched the handle of the gun, Graham’s larger hand took it from him. They were both on their knees as Graham grasped the revolver, aiming at J.B.’s forehead. Graham’s nerves were all firing, sparks running up his limbs and his finger tensed on the trigger, ready to pull, ready to pull. He needed to put this intruder down.

J.B. was so close that Graham could see clearly the look of terror and survival in the man’s eyes, eyes that perfectly mirrored Graham’s. Despite the adrenaline and the fear, Graham heard Philip’s accusation echoing in his mind once more. That and the look in J.B.’s eyes made Graham hesitate.

“Graham, don’t!” Amelia shouted.

Graham staggered to his feet, lowering the pistol while keeping his eyes on J.B.

Philip walked forward, the rifle pointed ahead until he saw Hightower lying behind the sofa, conscious but disoriented, blinking again and again. Philip told him to get up.

Graham pointed the pistol at the open doorway. Hightower and J.B. rose, staring at the two men and then at the feet of the sheriff, barely visible at the edge of the porch. Hightower’s eyes were already swelling and he was silent. He and J.B. walked through the doorway toward their vehicles, their footfalls unsteady as their legs shivered with adrenaline.

Philip followed them a few steps and looked down at the fallen sheriff, the man’s eyes wide open, his eyebrows still arched with surprise. The blood was beginning to seep even through his thick coat. Things felt fluid, one action leading to the next with unusual speed, and Philip felt he could no longer pause between events to try and understand them.

Amelia and Graham were holding each other, the sheriff’s pistol sitting on the table. They were crying, and Graham’s arms seemed to be shaking.

“Graham,” Philip interrupted them, his voice trancelike. “There are men outside.”

Graham steadied himself, then stepped away from his wife. “Don’t go,” Amelia said, making it more of a command than a plea, but he shook his head, wiping at his tears.

He grabbed the pistol. “Please,” he told her.

Philip and Graham went onto the porch and saw Miller and two other men standing outside two trucks and a Ford half a block away. Graham led the way and Philip followed. Before the APL men had time to react to the sight, Graham fired a shot into the white sky that was disintegrating all around them.