* * * *
The pounding on the door comes just before noon. Samantha’s getting a little color back in her lips, but she still seems to have a fever or something. She’s feeling good enough to compete in a game of Candy Land, but I want to get her out of here. She insists she’s fine and doesn’t want me going out, but I can’t hold off much longer. I was just about to disobey her orders and make a run for some meds when the banging started.
I open the door and come face to face with a handful of officers. If it weren’t for the news acclimating me to the militarized outfits, I might have assumed we were being paid a visit from some elite commando team. I don’t know why the cops have to dress like Judge Dredd. Whatever happened to the blues? Now they look like they’re ready to shoot anyone who can’t produce their documents fast enough. Whatever. They’re here now, and they look like they’re capable of storming the house and getting whatever they want with or without my constitutional consent, so I just say, “Hi.”
Their automatic weapons aren’t aimed directly at me, but they aren’t hanging idle either. I look up and down the street and see other officers in black-armored uniforms knocking on doors. So far it doesn’t appear that, though they may look like it, these cops are part of an execution team.
“We’re going door to door and letting everyone know that they are free to leave the county once they’ve received a vaccine,” the one cop with a mustache tells me.
“A vaccine?”
“Just a precaution. In case the seagulls were carrying something.”
A precaution… And the CDC just happens to have a vaccine for whatever the birds might be carrying already in place here, huh? Of course, I don’t say anything like this, because I don’t want my head shot off. Police can be touchy and sometimes respond a little heavy-handed to…well, anything they don’t want to hear.
“Where?” I ask.
“The courthouse.”
“And then we can leave?”
He nods.
Despite the outfit, the guy actually seems human. Like he understands and wants to help, not just scare the crap out of us. Doug steps out of the house and hides behind me, peering up at the cops with untrusting eyes. He can’t seem to take his eyes off all the guns. Whether they fascinate him or scare the hell out of him, I can’t tell. But him being this close to so many of them, all in the hands of those with the authority to shoot us down for just about anything they can think of, makes me uneasy. I want them gone.
“Thank you.”
“No one crosses the bridge without them,” he states coldly.
“What about the birds? They still out there?”
“A few. We got most of them.”
“What are they?” But I don’t mention the things driving my suspicion, like the tags they wear or their metallic innards. If this is some sort of top-secret experiment, I’m just dandy not knowing anything about it. No liabilities here.
“Couldn’t say,” he responds. They turn and leave, walking over to the next house.
I ruffle Doug’s hair. “Okay, let’s go pack up.”
“We goin’ home?”
“Soon.”
He leaves my side with neither a complaint nor a shout of joy. I think this whole vacation has him quite confused.
Randall is waiting for me when I step back inside.
“Vaccines?” he asks.
“That’s what they say.”
He sighs. “Guess we don’t have much of a choice.”
For someone who doesn’t even trust the flu shot, having someone stick a needle in my arm without telling me what the hell it is or what it’s supposed to fight, it’s going to take a lot to convince me that it’s necessary.
“They say anything about the birds?” he asks me.
“Said there’s a few left.”
“Strange how they seemed to be on top of this right from the start, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Makes me suspicious.”
“Absolutely.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Me neither.”
“Ignorance is bliss.”
“Or deadly.”
He frowns. “Let’s go with bliss on this one.”
12
Randall waves goodbye as he climbs into his car, and I feel a twinge of sadness knowing I’ll never see him again. The big Italian actually grew on me. And he might have saved my wife’s life.
We pull up to the checkpoint, about fifth in a long line of cars heading away from Cape May. The soldiers, or cops, or whatever they are—who can even tell anymore?—are searching each car thoroughly, as if someone reported seeing a seagull being smuggled into a suitcase. Once they’re satisfied that no rabid gull is hogtied in the trunk, they then remove the wristbands that we were given as receipt of inoculation. Again, no one is told what it is we have been inoculated against. Whatever it is, or might be, it can’t be all that big of a concern if they’re letting us leave like this. Unless… Randall had made a comment as they were jabbing him that this could be their way of spreading a disease, making it look like it was the birds that were responsible when in reality it might be some concoction designed by one of our Nazis meant to be released into the general population. For what reason? Politics and power. Is there ever really any other motive? The thought is absurd, yet I’ve read stories of it having happened before. But I don’t want to think about it. It’s in me now, anyway. Whatever it is.
The guys with the guns order us out of the car, and we obey. Civil disobedience could get you shot these days. We now live in a day when cops in riot gear can be commanded to keep veterans from visiting their own memorials. Anyway, I’m not looking to make a statement here. I just want to get my family out of here. I’ll leave that protest to someone with more pride than I have.
The drawbridge is up forty yards ahead, and unless someone wants to make a run for the controls, we have to play their game if we want to get home over this bridge. I don’t think we can swim it, birds or no birds.
I look around the sky and don’t see a bird of any sort anywhere. I suspect an avian genocide was ordered while we slept. There aren’t any boats out on the water either, no news helicopters circling.
We watch the men as they go through all of our belongings. When they’re done, one of the soldiers tells us to get back in our vehicle. He says “please,” and of course, this makes everything okay.
I fasten Doug back in his car seat, close the back doors, and slip into the front seat beside my bride. Then the soldier knocks on the window, signaling for me to roll them down. I comply. Where else am I going to go?
“Fasten your seatbelts, please.”
We do as he says, unsure if not wearing a seatbelt is an act of terrorism now or not. So many things change when the constitution is suspended, and I don’t recall ever seeing a blueprint for martial law in Cape May. Maybe it was in one of the brochures the renters always leave on the counter every year. I never look at them, so I wouldn’t know.
“Please place your hands on the wheel,” he tells me.
Another soldier is at the passenger window telling Samantha to place her hands on the dashboard. I wonder what they’ll have Doug do. They take the bands off our wrists, and a third soldier is doing the same with Doug. Doug has gotten over his fear, it seems, because he’s talking to the soldier about good guys and bad guys and birds and crap. The soldier is doing a wonderful job at completely ignoring him. Guess it’s all that training.
Once the evidence of our vaccines is removed, we’re free to leave, and half an hour later, the bridge lowers.
We inch along at first, and then we’re across and out of Cape May. I can’t help feeling like we’re fleeing prison and are about to get caught any second. I still can’t believe they’re just letting us go. Again, I hope it’s because whatever the birds might have been carrying isn’t so great a concern. I also hope that whatever they put in Doug’s young body doesn’t surprise us with any weird side effects. They gave him th
e same dose they gave us. I don’t know if I’d be able to forgive myself if something happened to him. I didn’t even put up a fight.
Samantha seems to be better, and by the time we’re back in Pennsylvania, she seems to have regained all her color.
I surf the radio stations as I drive, but there is absolutely nothing about what happened on the air. I’m not sure how they can completely keep this under wraps, but so far they have. I pull into our driveway, and it feels like a hundred years since we’ve been home.
* * * *
It’s Monday, and I still have two more days off from work. I have no idea what’s going on in Cape May now, but I have little desire to make good on the last few days we have left in the house. I’ve spent hours searching the internet for any mention of the seagull attack and ensuing martial law. I’ve spotted a few tweets, scattered Facebook posts, and some blog mentions, but by the next day, all such profiles have been erased. Until now, I had no idea how much control the forces-that-be have over the media. It’s frightening in a free country. I don’t even know how it’s possible. The news will spread from word of mouth, but if it ain’t on the radio and CNN don’t report it, it just didn’t happen. I look down at my laptop and do one more search. This time, I’m lucky. I spot hash-tag: SEAGULL SUMMER. I click on it and find hundreds of posts, all related to what just happened. I know they won’t last, so I copy them all and paste them into a Word doc. Some of them even have pictures.
Seagull Summer… Thirty years from now, if we haven’t all been wiped out by plague or nukes or zombies, we’ll be sitting on a porch in Cape May, holding grandkids and telling stories about Seagull Summer.
Douglas comes back into the living room, still in his pajamas. He’s fighting a cold or something, and he’s enjoying a lazy day of cartoons and chicken noodle soup. It’s raining outside, so we justify it that way. He climbs up beside me and rests his head against my shoulder and resumes watching whatever he has on TV. I’ve learned to tune it out by now.
Samantha walks in next and sits down on my other side. She’s hopeful that our shenanigans will result in a new addition to the household. I’m on the fence. I scratch at the rash that’s appeared on my chest, not thinking anything of it.
I’m just glad to be home with my family. I bring my e-reader to life, anxious to pick up where I left off in A Cape May Diamond.
Seagull Summer: A Novella Page 11