Читать книгу The Last Town on Earth - Thomas Mullen - Страница 8

The road to Commonwealth was long and forbidding, stretching for miles beyond Timber Falls and leading deep into the evergreen woods, where the trees grew taller still as if trying to reach the sun that teased them with the paucity of its rays. Douglas fir loomed over the rock-strewn road like two warring armies perched on opposing cliffs. Even those travelers who all their lives had been reminded of their insignificance felt particularly humbled by that stretch of road and the preternatural darkness that shadowed it.

Some number of miles into the woods, the road curved to the right and the trees backed off a bit, the brown dirt and occasional stumps evidence that the woods had been cleared out only recently, and only with extreme tenacity. The clearing rose along a gradual incline; at the base of the hill, a tree that had recently been chopped down blocked the road. Into its thick bark a sign was nailed: a warning to travelers who didn’t exist, a silent cry into deaf woods.

A crisp wind picked up atop the bare hill, carrying the combined exhalations of millions of fir and pine. Philip sucked in his breath.

“Cold?” Graham asked.

“I’m fine.”

Graham motioned back to the town. “You need to get yourself a warmer jacket, go ahead.”

“I’ll stay.”

“Suit yourself.” Philip did look cold in his thin jacket and khaki pants—pencil-pusher attire—whereas Graham was clad in his usual blue overalls and a thick wool coat.

“Look like it’s gonna snow to you?” Philip Worthy was sixteen, tall despite the limp that made people think he was shorter, but not as brawny as most of the men in that town of loggers and millworkers.

“It’s not going to snow.”

Graham, twenty-five, was what in many ways Philip aspired to be: strong, quietly wise, the man of his house. While Philip felt he needed to be polite and conversational to ingratiate himself with people, Graham seemed to say the minimum necessary and always won respect. Philip had known him for two years, and he still wanted to figure out how a fellow did that.

“Colder’n I thought it’d be,” Philip said. “Sometimes that means snow.”

Graham understood his companion’s dread of snow. He shook his head. “It’s cold, but it ain’t going to snow. It’s October.”

Philip nodded, shoulders hunched against the cold.

Graham laid his rifle on the ground, then took off his coat. “Here, put it on.”

“No, really, I’ll be all right. I don’t want you to get—”

“Put the damn coat on.” Graham smiled. “I’ve got more meat on my bones anyway.”

“Thanks.” Philip placed his rifle beside Graham’s. The jacket was big on him, the sleeves extending beyond his hands. He knew he looked foolish, but it was as good as wearing gloves. He wouldn’t be able to hold the rifle, but that seemed fine, since he didn’t expect he’d need to.

“Who do you think that was in the Model? on Sunday?” Philip asked.

“Don’t know.” Neither of them had been at the post on Sunday, when two other guards had seen a shiny new Ford drive as far as the fallen tree would allow. The guard post was too far away to get a good look at the driver, who never emerged from his automobile. The fedora told them it was a man, but that was all. The man had apparently read the sign, stopped to think for no longer than a moment, then turned around and driven away. It was the only sighting of an outsider since the town had closed itself off.

Commonwealth sat about fifty miles northeast of Seattle, or maybe a hundred—no one seemed to know except the town’s founder, Charles Worthy, and those who transported the town’s lumber. To the east were the jagged peaks of the Cascades, close enough to be seen on a clear day but far enough to disappear when the clouds were low and thick. On those days, the town seemed to be cut off from the rest of the earth. Miles to the west was the open sea, the confluence of Puget Sound to the south, the Strait of Georgia to the north, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the west, the point where all three combined and wrapped their cold embrace around the San Juan Islands. But the sea was just far enough away, blocked by the thick forest, that it might as well not have been there at all.

Commonwealth was no ordinary town, and that helped explain why it appeared on no maps, as if the rest of the civilized world preferred to ignore its existence. It had no mayor, no postmaster, no sheriff. It had no prison, no taxman, no train station, no rail lines. No church, no telephones, no hospital. No saloon, no nickelodeon. Commonwealth had pretty much nothing but a lumber mill, homes for the workers, plenty of land from which to tear down more trees, and the few trappings necessary to support the mill, such as a general store and a doctor’s office. To shop for items the store didn’t sell, to visit the moving pictures, or to attend traditional church services, people went to Timber Falls, fifteen miles to the southwest. But no one from town was allowed to leave anymore, and no one was allowed to come in.

“Think the driver will come back?” Philip asked. The wind blew his thin brown hair across his forehead.

Graham thought for a moment, his face appearing immovable as his blue-green eyes focused on the base of the hill. “No, not after he saw the sign. If it was someone who really wanted to come in, he would’ve tried. Probably just somebody on mill business who didn’t know about the quarantine.”

Philip nodded, appreciating Graham’s certainty.

Philip had grown up with neither father nor siblings, dragged throughout the West by an itinerant mother until the accident that left him in the Worthys’ care. And when his new family had moved to Commonwealth two years ago to start this bold experiment, he had quickly befriended Graham, who hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his own younger brothers until he met Philip.

Graham, like many millworkers, had run away from his home too young, chased off by a drunk father with whom he had violently clashed one time too many. He had been about Philip’s age when he’d left his home in Kansas, and sometimes when he looked at Philip, he was amazed that he himself had been so headstrong, so foolish, to venture out into the world at such an overwhelmed age. Somehow he had survived, survived bloody strikes and stints in jail and fights with cops, and here he was, a foreman at a respectable mill. Though he had his own family to care for now, he liked teaching Philip the things he’d learned from his older brother, to hunt his first deer, catch his first fish, navigate the trails that cut through the endless forest.

In truth, Graham didn’t feel so certain that the man in the automobile wouldn’t return, but the mere sound of his own calm voice was reassuring. This was why Graham had missed having younger brothers, he realized—they made you feel almost as strong as the image they looked up to.

Philip and Graham’s first stint as guards, four days earlier, had been uneventful. They had stood there for the ten long hours, silent for stretches and chatting when the boredom became too great. Wondering aloud how long the flu would last, swapping stories of past illnesses and ailments. Philip had even proposed a small wager as to how long the quarantine would last, but Graham had lightly chastised him for being indelicate. Philip regretted the comment, felt young and stupid. But other than that the time had passed slowly, the sky gradually darkening, the mists descending from the formless clouds above, leaving the two watchmen damp and tired and longing for their warm homes, where they would have nothing interesting to share with their families over the supper table.

“So how’s ‘class’ coming?” Graham asked, minutes or hours later.

“Class is fine. Ask me anything you’d like to know about interest payments.”

“I would like to know nothing at all, thank you very much.”

Philip was Charles Worthy’s apprentice, being trained in the business side of the mill, bred for the same job that Charles himself had held in his father’s mill, the one he had disgustedly turned his back on only two years ago.

“You honestly like sittin’ in a chair all day?” Graham asked.

“Wouldn’t know what else to compare it to.”

Philip wondered if Graham looked down on his desk work, but with his damaged body, Philip was a bad candidate for labor of a more physical nature. He gave a surreptitious glance at Graham’s missing finger, the one he’d lost in a mill accident some years ago, and figured his wasn’t such a bad lot to draw.

Just the other day, Philip had helped calculate what the mill would save if it switched over from gang saws to band saws, whose thinner blades would mean losing less of the lumber to sawdust. It had been challenging work, but when he was finished, he felt he’d contributed something of value to the mill, and his father’s soft-spoken compliment was still ringing in his ears.

“How’s your little girl doing?” Philip asked.

“She’s great,” Graham said with a slight smile. “Been crawlin’ all over the house lately. Amelia’s gotta keep her eyes on her all the time now.”

“How long till she talks?”

“A few months yet, at least.”

“How long till she chops down trees like her old man?”

“Till hell freezes over.”

“I don’t know,” Philip said, “she does look like a logger.”

“How’s that?”

Philip shrugged. “She drools a lot. Burps. Kinda smells sometimes.”

Graham nodded, smirking.

“So you get any sleep, or is she still up all night?”

“I sleep when I can.”

“Like when you’re out here standing guard.”

“I was not asleep last time. I was resting my eyes and ignoring you. It’s an important skill a man develops after he has a wife and kid. Trust me on this.

“Speaking of which,” Graham continued after a brief pause, looking at Philip from the corner of his eye, “I keep seeing you talking with that Metzger girl.”

Philip shrugged unconvincingly. “She’s my sister’s friend.”

“So how come I keep seeing you and her and no sister?”

It took an extra second for Philip to come up with a retort. “What, a guy can’t talk to a girl?”

Graham smiled. “Boy, I hope you’re less obvious with her than you are with me.”

Minutes of silence had passed before they saw someone at the base of the hill.

They saw him through the tree trunks first, hints of light brown and tan flashing every other second through that tangle of bark. Each of them stiffened, breath held, as they waited to see if a figure would emerge or if they had imagined it, if it was some trick of light.

The figure turned the corner and looked up the hill, saw the town in the distance. Between him and the town stood Philip and Graham, though he seemed not to notice them.

“You see that, too, right?” Philip asked.

“I see it.”

The figure started walking toward them.

“Read the sign,” Graham quietly commanded the stranger. “Read the sign.”

Indeed, after a couple of seconds, the figure reached the sign and stopped. Stopped for an unusually long time, as if he could barely read and there were one too many big words written there. Then the man looked up at them. Graham made sure his rifle was visible, standing up beside him, his hand under the barrel so that it was pointing away from him.

Philip hadn’t looked at the sign in days yet he had memorized what it said.

QUARANTINE ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY ALLOWED! On Account of the Outbreak of INFLUENZA This Town Under Strict QUARANTINE. This Area Under Constant Watch of ARMED Guards. Neither STRANGER Nor FRIEND May Pass Beyond This Marker. May God Protect You.

After reading the sign the man had some sort of brief spasm, one of his hands reaching to his face. Then he stepped up to the fallen tree and started climbing over it. It was an impressive tree, and it took him a moment to ascend its thick trunk. Then he was past it and walking toward them again.

“He’s still coming,” Philip said helplessly, trying not to panic. He hurriedly rolled up the sleeves of Graham’s coat, wondering why he felt fidgety and nervous when Graham seemed to become even more still than usual.

The man walked with a slight limp, wincing when he moved his right leg. It made his progress slower but somehow more definite. His clothes suggested a uniform of some kind, with stripes on one sleeve. As the man approached, Philip and Graham saw the back end of a rifle poking up over his right shoulder.

He’s a soldier, Philip thought, confused.

He was nearly halfway to them. No more than eighty yards away.

“Stop right there!” Graham shouted. “This town is under quarantine! You can’t come any closer!”

The man did as he was told. He had dark and uncombed hair that appeared somewhat longer than a typical soldier’s. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and there was a piece of cloth tied around his right thigh, colored black from what might have been dried blood. His uniform was dirty all over the legs and was smeared with mud across parts of the chest.

Then the soldier sneezed.

“Please!” The man needed to raise his voice in order to be heard over the distance, but the effort of doing so seemed almost too much for him. “I’m starving. I just need a little something to eat…”

What’s a soldier doing out here, Philip wanted to ask, but he kept the thought to himself.

“You can’t come up here, buddy,” Graham replied. “The sign said, we’re under a quarantine. We can’t let anyone in.”

“I don’t care if I get sick.” The man shook his head at them. He was young, closer in age to Philip than to Graham. He had some sort of an accent, not foreign but from some other part of the country. New England, or maybe New York—Philip wasn’t sure. The man’s jaw was hard and his face bony and angular, the type of face Philip’s mother would have told him you couldn’t trust, though Philip never knew why.

“I’m starving—I need something to eat. I’ve been out in the woods two days now. There was an accident—”

“It’s not you getting sick we’re worried about.” Graham’s voice was still strong, almost bullying. “We’re the only town around here that isn’t sick yet, and we aim to keep it that way. Now head on back down that road.”

The soldier looked behind him halfheartedly, then back at Graham. “How far’s the next town?”

“‘Bout fifteen miles,” Graham replied. Commonwealth was not on the way to or from any other town—the road led to Commonwealth and ended there. So where had the soldier come from?

“Fifteen miles? I haven’t eaten in two days. It’ll be dark in a few hours.”

He coughed. Loudly, thickly. How far does breath travel? Philip wondered.

Then the soldier started limping toward them again.

Philip was rigid with a new mixture of fear, apprehension, and a sense of duty, the knowledge that he had a job to do. Although his job had seemed perfectly clear and understandable earlier in the day, he was realizing how completely unsure he was as to how it should be carried out.

Graham exhibited no such confusion: he picked up his rifle and held it ready.

Philip reluctantly did the same.

“Stop!” Graham commanded. “You’ve come close enough!”

It wouldn’t be until later that evening, when he was trying to fall asleep, that Philip would realize he could have volunteered to fetch some food from town and thrown it down the hill for the soldier. Surely there could have been some way to help the man without letting him come any closer.

The soldier stopped again. He was about forty yards away.

“I don’t have the flu,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m healthy, all right? I’m not going to get anybody sick. Please, just let me sleep in a barn or something.”

“For a healthy man, you sure are sneezing and coughing a lot,” Graham said.

The man took another step as he opened his mouth to respond, but Graham froze him in place by raising his gun slightly. “I said that’s close enough!”

The soldier looked at Philip imploringly. “I’m coughing and sneezing because my ship capsized and I’ve been in the forest for two days.” He sounded almost angry, but not quite—he seemed to know better than to raise his voice with two armed men. It was more exasperation, fatigue. “I’m telling you, I do not have any flu. I’m not going to get anyone sick.”

“You can’t control that. If you could, I’d trust you, but you can’t. So I don’t.”

“I’m an American soldier, for God’s sake.” He eyed Graham accusingly. “I’m asking you to help me.”

“And I’m telling you that I would if I could, but I can’t.”

The soldier hung his head. Then he coughed again. It was thick and phlegmy, as if he’d swallowed something in the Sound and was having trouble dislodging it.

“I don’t suppose there’s a sheriff in this town I could talk to?”

“Nope.”

“What town is this?”

“Quit stalling, buddy. Hit the road. I’m sorry—I am—but my best advice is to head down that road fifteen miles, and when you do get to the next town, be mighty careful. Everybody’s sick over there.”

The soldier coughed again, then turned around. Finally. Philip closed his eyes for a moment, thankful. Already he had started imagining how he would retell this story to his family and friends.

But the soldier turned back around and faced them once again. Philip’s stomach tensed at the look of focus in the soldier’s eye, a focus that meant something had been set in motion. Philip tightened his grip on the rifle.

“So I guess you didn’t get drafted,” the soldier said to Graham bitterly, his eyes narrow.

“Guess not,” Graham replied.

The soldier nodded. “Lucky break for you.”

“Guess so.”

The soldier started limping forward again.

Philip, wide-eyed, looked to Graham.

“I said you’ve come close enough!” Graham yelled, aiming the rifle dead at the soldier’s chest. “Stop, now!”

The soldier shook his head awkwardly. His neck seemed rigid. “I’m not gonna die in the woods.”

Philip aimed his rifle, too. He’d never aimed at a human being before, and it felt wholly unnatural, a forbidden pose. He hoped and hoped the soldier would turn around.

“I am not bluffing!” Graham screamed. His voice was different, more panicked.

The soldier was getting closer. Philip thought he could smell the man’s stench, water-soaked and putrid from sleeping on mossy logs, lying atop damp twigs and slugs.

The soldier shook his head again, his eyes wet and red. He inched closer and closer to the two guards, to food, to a warm place to rest his weary bones, to salvation.

“Don’t make me do this!” Graham cried.

More steps. The soldier opened his mouth and barely mustered a “please.”

Graham shot him. The sound and the force of the shot made Philip jump, almost made him pull his trigger in a redundant volley. He saw the soldier’s chest burst open, cloth and something the color of newly washed skin flying forward. The soldier staggered back a step and dropped to his left knee.

Then two things happened simultaneously. The place where the soldier’s chest had exploded—which for a moment had looked slightly blackened—filled in with a dark red. And his right arm reached up over his shoulder and grabbed for the rifle slung on his back. Philip would remember in his haunted dreams the strangely mechanical motion of the man’s arm, as if his soulless body were simply executing one last order.

Graham shot him again, and this time the soldier was blown onto his back. One knee crooked up a bit, but the rest of his body was flat on the ground, facing a sky so blank in its grayness that in that last moment of life he might have seen anything projected upon it: his god, his mother, a lost love, the eyes of the man who had killed him. The grayness was anything and nothing.

Philip wasn’t sure how long he stared at the man, how long he kept his gun trained on the air that the man had once occupied. Finally, after several seconds, he managed to move his head and looked to his left, at Graham. Graham’s eyes were wide, full of electricity and life.

They were both breathing loudly, Philip realized. But Graham especially: he was sucking in gulps of air, each one larger and louder than the last. Philip lowered his gun, wondering if he should touch his friend’s shoulder, do something.

“Oh God,” Graham moaned. “Oh God.”

Philip didn’t know if Graham had ever shot a man. He’d heard about what had happened to Graham in the Everett Massacre, but he wasn’t sure if Graham had been a victim only, or an aggressor, too.

“Oh God.”

Graham’s breathing kept getting louder, and right when Philip was going to ask if he was all right, Graham swallowed. Held his breath and then swallowed that last bit of air, as if completely digesting the scene before him, the act he had just committed. When he started breathing again, he sounded almost normal.

A few seconds passed.

“We’re gonna have to talk to Doc Banes,” Graham said. Suddenly his voice was steady and serious, unlike his earlier cries. He might as well have been speaking about the condition of some of the machinery in the mill.

“I … I think he’s dead.” Philip’s voice cracked.

“Of course he’s dead!” Graham snapped, turning to face Philip for the first time. His eyes were furious, and Philip backed off a step. Then Graham’s eyes returned to the body, and he paused for a moment.

“We should find out how long we need to stay away from the body before we can bury it,” he said. “I don’t know if dead bodies can still be contagious, and if so, for how long. We’ll have to ask Doc Banes.”

Philip nodded, slowly. Despite the wind, the rifle no longer felt cold in his damp hands.