The Last Town on Earth Read online

  “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.

  II

  The residents of Commonwealth had blocked the road and posted the sign one week earlier, the morning after a town meeting at which Philip Worthy was the youngest attendee.

  He had sat there beside his parents in the front row of the fir-scented town hall, a building that had served many roles in the two years since its construction: a church on Sunday afternoons; a dance hall on the first Friday night of each month; a bazaar where the town ladies sold or traded quilts, blankets, and other crafts a few times a year; and a makeshift school until the growing number of children in Commonwealth had necessitated the construction of a schoolhouse next door. Philip’s right knee bounced nervously as more men and women filed into the building. It had been cold when they had arrived in the early-evening darkness, but already it had grown warm in the room as people traded rumors and worries, the shuffle of feet and the twitches of fear.

  Philip felt awkward at this meeting of adults, as if his presence would be questioned. But Charles had insisted, saying that as “a man of the mill,” Philip had an obligation to let his voice be heard on so vital a matter. Philip turned his head to look for Graham in the packed hall, but he couldn’t see his friend in the thick forest of faces.

  Although Philip felt honored to be working in the mill office with Charles, he suspected the jacks and millworkers resented his easy ascension and looked down on him for his limp, for the wooden block in his left boot. He assumed they thought he wasn’t cut out for the arduous labor that kept the town running, that fed everyone and kept them alive out here in the wilderness.

  His adopted mother, Rebecca, looked at him and smiled shortly, and he realized he must have been showing his nerves. He sat a bit taller in his chair and stopped bouncing his knee. She reached out and squeezed his hand, then let it go. Her smile seemed forced. The look in her light blue eyes was watchful, as ever.

  “How do you think people are going to react?” Philip asked her quietly.

  She shook her head, some gray tendrils falling from her hastily arranged bun. Rebecca had been to countless suffrage and political meetings, not only in Commonwealth but also in Timber Falls, in Seattle, and in dozens of towns and cities along the coast. She practically had been raised on such gatherings, accompanying her father, Jay Woodson, a fecund intellectual who had written tomes little read by any but the far-left intelligentsia, provocative disquisitions on the country’s coming economic collapse. Rebecca’s father had passed away before she married Charles, but she had done her part to build upon her father’s legacy, spearheading suffrage groups, antiwar organizations, and now this: the town of Commonwealth, a new hybrid of socialist haven and capitalist enterprise. And yet tonight’s meeting was less about politics than survival.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted to Philip. “We’ll see.”

  Graham sat several rows behind the Worthys, having arrived only a few minutes before the meeting was to start. Amelia had stayed at home with the baby—she was more tired than usual on account of her being two months pregnant, a fact the couple hadn’t yet revealed to their friends. He rubbed at his neck, the air too hot now that the room was filled to bursting, the movable wooden pews lined with men and women, the walls covered with people leaning, shifting their weight from foot to foot.

  Finally, Rebecca whispered to her husband that he should get things started. Sometimes Charles still seemed uncomfortable in his role as head of the mill and de facto leader of the town, she noticed. All those years as the silent bookkeeper in his family mill, years of being overshadowed by his fast-talking older brothers and the domineering patriarch, had been difficult for him to overcome. He had learned how to emerge from the low expectations of others, had become an eloquent spokesman, rallying the faith of a town, but sometimes he needed his wife to remind him of this. Charles no
dded without looking at her and stood up.

  Charles’s hair and beard had gone completely white over the last few years. He was tall and had the broad shoulders of a lumberjack despite the fact that he had spent all his days inside an office. Anyone could have looked at his fingers and seen that they were too free of blemishes for him to be a jack, his palms too soft. At fifty-two, he was one of the oldest residents in this town of workingmen, and his eyes were calm and benevolent. His white collared shirt and gray flannel pants were slightly worn in places that he had either failed to notice or chosen not to concern himself with.

  He was followed to the podium by Dr. Martin Banes, the town’s sole medical authority, and as the two men looked out at the packed hall, voices quieted without a single raised hand or throat clearing. It occurred to Charles as he opened his mouth to speak that he had never heard so many adults so quiet. He stayed silent for an extra or second or two, the first invisible syllable hiding somewhere beneath his tongue.

  Charles was not the town mayor or its pastor, as Commonwealth lacked either civic or religious leaders. But the town was in many ways his creation, the realization of a dream he and Rebecca had shared years ago while suffering through the Everett general strike, its violence and madness.

  Charles had been eighteen when his father, lured to the great Northwest by stories of endless forests of Douglas fir, had uprooted his family from their home in Maine in 1890. Charles’s mother and his younger brother had been buried less than a year earlier, taken by that winter’s brutal pneumonia, and Reginald Worthy insisted that this new endeavor was exactly what he and his remaining sons needed. Their destination was the new town of Everett, established just north of Seattle with a well-situated port that, people said, would soon become the Manhattan of the Pacific.

  The first years had been torture. Charles would remember with a pained wistfulness the busy streets of Portland—to say nothing of the crowded shops and festive parks of Boston—as he walked past newly constructed houses that looked like a strong gale might knock them down, the taverns whose floors were still covered with inches of sawdust, the streets thick with mud. And the stench of the place—the cows that townspeople kept in their yards as insurance against hard times, the sweat of the millworkers and lumberjacks and carpenters, the poor experiments with plumbing. That far-western outpost of America was decades behind the New England that Charles sorely missed; it felt less like they had crossed the country and more like they had crossed back in time, slogging away in the preternatural darkness of a city without streetlights.