The Last Town on Earth (40 page)

“Get out of our town!” Graham screamed, his eyes no longer tearing up but still shining, still wild. Miller froze. He had no weapon, nor did the man beside him.

Behind Graham and Philip, four other Commonwealth men—as if they had been waiting all day for the opportunity—emerged from their homes, rifles in hand.

Miller had already sent two trucks and most of the men back to Timber Falls. He was outnumbered and outgunned, but he tried to remain calm. He saw the body on the porch, saw Hightower’s beaten face and the look in J.B.’s eyes. J.B. stepped up to him and spoke low in his ear: “They killed Bartrum.”

Miller swallowed. “We’ll be back, gentlemen,” he said to Graham, trying to bite back his fear. “I promise you that.”

“You were right about the spy,” Graham told Miller, his voice thick with emotion. His head ached from Hightower’s blows, his ribs pinched his insides with every breath, and his trampled abdomen screamed at him to bend over rather than standing so tall. “He did come here after you left, and I killed him. And I’ll kill you next if you ever come back.”

Miller kept his eyes on the gunmen as he walked toward one of the trucks, filled with captured men. He jumped when he heard the pop, and one of the tires before him exploded.

Graham shot another wheel, then two on the other truck. “The trucks stay,” he commanded. “The men stay.” He was less than ten feet from Miller now.

Philip kept his rifle aimed at Miller’s chest, but Graham held his pistol pointed at the ground a few feet in front of him. He couldn’t aim at another man.

“You’ve made a terrible mistake, son.”

Graham gritted his teeth. The pistol was heavy in his hand. “Get out while we’re still letting you.”

Miller stood there another moment, his face white. Then he nodded, turned around and started walking toward the Ford. His compatriots followed.

Graham, Philip, and the men who had left their homes came closer as Miller started the engine, then slowly turned it around. Several blocks ahead and out of view, the remaining group of APL men had climbed into their vehicle, having been told by Miller only a moment ago that they’d done all they could for the day. They didn’t know Bartrum had been slain and they would not know it until after the long ride home.

Miller’s Ford made its way slowly along the snow-covered road. It passed all those houses with crape hanging in the windows, passed the women and children of the men who had already been trucked out of town, Rankle and Deacon and all the others, some of them still sick with flu and some barely recovered and some worsening, some of them beaten and some of them without a mark. Miller gripped the wheel tightly, his jaw clenched at the townspeople watching him go. He saw Charles Worthy standing at the edge of the crowd and fought off an urge to drive into him, to cut him down in front of all these fools who had followed him here to the ends of the earth. Then the town was gone and they were rolling down the hill, nothing before them but the thick woods that would be all but impenetrable after another hour of snowfall.

Philip bent over and laid his rifle on the soft snow near the abandoned trucks, the men still inside. One of the first faces he’d seen through the windows he had recognized: Alfred Metzger, who, at forty-two, was still three years younger than the cutoff for the most recent, expanded draft. Philip pulled at the handle of the back door until it swung clear.

The men burst out, desperate to be free, but once they were safely on the outside, their movements varied. They dropped to the ground and cried with relief, or clapped each other on the shoulders, or ran to their wives, or swore vengeance upon those Timber Falls bastards. But Alfred Metzger spent only the slightest moment standing among them, looking down at the snow-covered ground, and then he walked away briskly. Philip saw the look in the man’s eyes and realized that imprisonment would have been a more pleasant fate than the horrors that awaited him at home.

I
t did not seem at all odd that Philip now stood in a train station. It was like an inexorable fate, something that had been perpetually on his horizon, something he could not run from. He thought about that, how running away was something he couldn’t run away from.

He still wasn’t right in the head. He had told his father this in the middle of the street, both of them covered in snow, the rifle by Philip’s feet smelling strongly of gunpowder, of metal and blood. Charles had not asked Philip what he had done, though surely he was piecing it together from the expressions on the faces of the men around them.
I don’t feel right in the head,
Philip had said, and Charles had nodded and walked him home.

It snowed for an entire day. The storm did more to insulate Commonwealth, to block it off from the rest of the world, than the quarantine had done. The heavy snowfall would keep the invaders from returning, but for how long?

Philip rested in bed for the next two days, sleeping for such long stretches that his parents worried he was slipping back into the flu’s icy embrace. But his symptoms continued to fade. He still complained that his head, though no longer aching, felt fuzzy; he said he heard ringing in his ears, found it difficult to concentrate. But Doc Banes assured them this would pass, that perhaps this wicked flu would be particularly difficult to shake, but shake it Philip would in time. Philip spoke little; Charles hadn’t heard his son laugh in days, perhaps weeks.

Elsie died late the night of the raid. She never knew that her father had been arrested, nor did she know Philip had set him free. She had been lying in a delirium for the final two days, attended by her father, whose pleas that the Lord take him instead of Elsie were left unanswered. Alfred Metzger never suffered the slightest fever or cough despite standing by his wife’s and daughter’s bedsides.

It never occurred to Charles or Rebecca that the news of Elsie’s death may have contributed to Philip’s silence, because his outward reactions paled beside those of Laura, who cried herself to sleep the next two nights. Philip had stared out the window at the blindingly white snow, sharing his thoughts with no one.

Once the roads were passable, a small contingent of men who had enlisted and secured deferments months ago ventured south, seeking news from the outside world. They went to Pauling, a hamlet ten miles east of Timber Falls, avoiding the larger town. The men returned with as much food as they could buy, as well as newspapers whose emphatic headlines displayed, finally, something welcome: an armistice had been signed, and the guns of Europe were silent. The armistice had been declared the same day Miller and his crew had reached Commonwealth. All those men had been arrested for failing to enlist in a war that had mercifully drawn to an exhausted close.

Charles was confident the armistice would mean the nineteen imprisoned men would be released. Rebecca had decided she would journey to the Timber Falls jail the next day, would visit the post office and find a phone and reconnect with her political contacts, spread the word that the peace-minded men of her town had been rounded up like common criminals. She would visit Jarred Rankle and the others, demand that the jailers treat them fairly—a woman’s presence could go a long way toward getting the men humane treatment, she had learned from her experience in the Everett strike. But she did not share her husband’s faith that the men would be released, at least not until the war was more of a memory, replaced by whatever new necessities arose from the vacuum of these violent and fear-addled years.

After the raid, Charles and Rebecca had knocked on every door in town—they no longer cared if it put them at risk—and found out who had been taken by the APL, who was sick, who was starving, who was dead. The looks on people’s faces and the stories that Charles and Rebecca heard had kept them up the last few nights, lying beside each other. The Worthys had little food left, but they had shared with those too ill to cook for themselves.

Charles and Rebecca had seen the depths to which some had fallen, and the depths that lurked farther below. But as badly as his faith was shaken, Charles had lived through too many tragedies and busts to concede that the mill would fail. Somehow the town would survive, he believed. Somehow.

Doc Banes’s badly kept records showed that 250 people in Commonwealth—over half the town’s population—had contracted the flu. Of these, fifty-six men, women, and children had died. Most of the dead were adults younger than thirty, those who should have been hardy enough to survive the infection. Banes didn’t know why the children had been spared in favor of those in the prime of life, but it made the aftereffects all the worse, as there were now so many widowed parents, so many orphans.

Mo was dead, as was Lightning. The river chief O’Hare, who had kept his distance from Philip, somehow became infected despite his vigilance; he had died a week ago, as had three of the drivers who worked alongside him. Laura had recovered but had lost her best friend and two other classmates.

Doc Banes never took ill, despite his long hours beside the sick and dying. Like Deacon, he began to feel specially chosen, as if God had conscripted him as a watchman for the dead, a scrivener to mark the passage of their lives. But those memories were abominable, and Banes wanted only to be rid of them. Each night his bottles of alcohol beckoned, and he found no reason to resist their call.

The Stone family had been spared by the flu—Amelia and the baby were healthy, as was Graham. He didn’t know how it was that Philip could cough in his face without passing on the infection, but there was much he did not understand. He had barely been able to sleep the last two nights and had twice hid in another room so Amelia wouldn’t see it when he broke down.

The shock of the raid and the waning of the flu brought people out of their homes, and friends could tell their stories again. Word of how Leonard and others had been sneaking out of Commonwealth for booze and women spread through the awakening town. Those who heard the news, especially those who had lost loved ones, were consumed by vengeful desires. A party of angry men had gone knocking on the sneaks’ doors only to find the perpetrators dead of the flu. The vigilantes were all the more enraged when they realized there was no possibility for retribution; the flu was an evil with no body to beat, no face to spit upon, no neck to string up.

But people had heard what Graham said to Miller about killing the spy, and though some thought Graham had said it only to scare the APL away, others saw a glint of truth. It fit all too neatly with the other stories circulating through Commonwealth, stories of another soldier who had tried to enter town weeks ago and who had been shot by Graham and buried by the town entrance. When the Stones walked through town the day after the raid, Graham had received several fearful looks that Amelia assumed were just reactions to his ugly bruises.

The following day, Amelia had refused to believe it when a friend mentioned the stories about Graham and the spy, and that night she questioned him. So he told her what he had done, but he didn’t explain why. He once had hoped that his pure motives would excuse whatever hell and muck he’d had to wade through, but his reasons no longer seemed relevant or justified, even to himself. All that mattered was that he had killed someone, so that was all he said to his wife.

And if she had recoiled from him at first and then proffered her own desperate explanations that he would neither agree with nor deny, and if she had broken down crying and then apologized and walked out of the house, returning only hours later, and if she had acted wary of her own husband, not even asking him to hold the baby when her arms were tired, and if everyone in town was looking at him as though he were some part of themselves they wished would simply disappear, then this, too, was something Graham would have to accept.

The third day after the raid found Philip at a train station in Pauling. After saying goodbye to Rebecca and Laura, he had come here with Charles in the family’s Ford. In the backseat was Graham, who had asked to join them.

Philip still did not fully comprehend the need for this journey, but Charles had insisted, explaining that it was the safest thing to do in light of what had happened the day of the snowstorm. Charles didn’t know whether those men would return, but if they did, they would be looking for Philip. Regardless of the circumstances, Philip had shot a policeman. Regardless of how sick or confused Philip had been, regardless of what might have happened to Graham if Philip hadn’t intervened, Charles knew how Philip’s act must have looked to Miller. Whether the European armistice would lead to an armistice here in the Washington forest remained to be seen.

The previous day, Charles had made a quick call to a cousin in Portland from a phone in Pauling. The cousin’s family had already suffered through the flu, the children sick in bed for days, but all was now well. Charles had explained to his cousin only that he feared for Philip’s safety due to an escalated rivalry with another mill, and he gave Philip a series of half-lies he could feed his new caretakers upon arrival.

It won’t be long,
Charles promised his son.
Probably only a fortnight.
Just enough time for Charles to communicate with the local powers in Timber Falls, for Rebecca to rally her comrades, for people across the state to fully appreciate the fact that the Great War was finally over, that they were free to reimagine the lives they had pursued before it began. Charles was confident there would be a way to justify Philip’s actions.

Charles always used such detached language when discussing the situation, Philip noticed. He never said that Philip had shot someone, killed someone. And strangely, as much as Philip had been haunted by the first soldier, he was not similarly tortured by his memories of the sheriff. To Philip, the man with the broken nose and the black eyes had played the role of villain in a way the first soldier had not. The sheriff had invaded Graham’s home, had beaten other men, and because of this, Philip had felt a certainty to his own actions. Though his mind had been muddled that afternoon, he hadn’t thought of it as taking a life, but as saving lives.

Still, he wondered if the image of himself shooting the lawman would make some nefarious return, would gradually or suddenly insinuate itself into his every thought. Perhaps once his mind was free of the flu’s grasp, he would be forced to wear the same yoke Graham was suffering under.

The ride was mostly silent, and it felt interminably long. The quiet was broken only by Charles’s interjections that all would be fine. Philip found even those brief comments grating, saw from his sheltered vantage point the awkward way Charles was struggling against the irrefutable winds of all the evidence surrounding them. Philip was certain Graham saw it as well, and every time his father waxed optimistic, he cringed.

At last they reached the train station, no more than an outdoor platform beside a small kiosk where the heavily bundled attendant breathed on his hands. Charles bought the ticket while Philip and Graham waited by the tracks.

“Thank you for coming for me,” Graham said. It was the first thing he’d said to Philip that day, his first acknowledgment of what Philip had done. His face was a darkened blue in the spots where he’d been struck by the APL men, and he took careful, shallow breaths due to the stabbing pain of his broken ribs. “Thank you for helping me.”

Philip nodded. “What are you going to do now?” If he was in such danger that he needed to be sent away, then the same probably applied to Graham. Yet Philip couldn’t imagine Graham running from anything.

“I don’t know.” Graham looked down the long train tracks that cut into the thick forest, the product of so many hours of hard labor that their creation seemed incomprehensible. Everything here was the result of sacrifice and pain. He looked back at Philip and his face seemed constricted, the muscles along his forehead and temples taut.

“I’ll be back soon, my father says,” Philip said.

“I hope the town’s still standing.” Their eyes met, and they held the gaze, then Philip nodded.

Graham knew from his days of riding the rails how quickly a place like Commonwealth could disappear. Many times he had journeyed past abandoned streets that had been thriving storyvilles, and he had seen that villages where he’d once laid his head were no longer marked on any maps. He knew how violence could not only tear a town in two but tear it so many times that there was nothing left to build upon, nothing left to hold, nothing left even to remember as you grabbed your scant belongings and headed someplace new.

Charles was walking toward them, ticket in hand, but not yet in earshot.

Philip looked down at the ground. “I know you want me to apologize for letting Frank into town. But I can’t.” He didn’t know if Graham had been told about the men who were sneaking out of Commonwealth for liquor or to visit their sweethearts. Nor did he know whether those facts mattered at all, or if they were just so many more flakes of snow tossed in among the blizzard of coincidences and occurrences and accidents over the last month, something so discrete and tiny that you couldn’t focus on them no matter how hard you tried. Following them with your eyes was impossible amid the swirl. “I’m not sorry I did it.”

Philip could tell Graham was concentrating carefully on what he was about to say. “I know you want me to apologize,” Graham said, borrowing Philip’s line. He paused, his eyes suddenly red and glassy. He wasn’t even looking Philip in the eye. What he managed to say, between labored and painful breaths, was “And I know that I should.”

But then Charles was back, handing Philip a ticket and some money, not seeing the look in Graham’s eyes. Charles repeated the instructions he’d already given, and Philip nodded, looking at Graham more than at his father. Then Philip asked that they not wait for the train with him.

“It’ll feel more like a goodbye if you stay.” He stuffed the ticket in his pocket. He wasn’t quite recovered, but he was well enough to stand there, boots on the tightly packed snow.