by Jason Mott
If the news reports were to be believed, the death toll for the riot outside Rio numbered in the hundreds. Most of them died as the great, teeming stampede of bodies ran from the gunfire of the policemen. The others were simply killed by the policemen’s bullets.
And after everything was settled, after Jean Rideau and his wife were taken from Rio—with the French government screaming for their return—nothing was fixed for them on account of how, at some point in all the madness, Jean’s wife had taken a blow to the head and now lay in a coma, with the world still screaming for her and her husband to do some unknown thing, to fill some undisclosed role, to say something secret about life after death via his art.
But all Jean wanted to do was be with the woman he loved.
* * *
The pastor and his diminutive wife sat on the couch watching the television with space enough for another adult body between them. He sipped his coffee and stirred it now and again just to hear the sound of the spoon clink against the ceramic.
His wife sat with her small feet tucked beneath her and her hands in her lap and her back erect. She looked very proper and catlike. Now and again she reached up and stroked her hair without really knowing why.
On the television a very famous talk-show host was asking questions to both a minister and a scientist. The scientist’s specific discipline was never made quite clear, but he was very famous for a book he had written about the Returned in the early days of their appearance.
“When will this end?” the talk-show host asked, though it was unclear exactly to whom her question was aimed. Perhaps out of modesty, or perhaps because he simply was willing to concede he did not know the answer—at least, this is what the pastor thought—the minister kept quiet.
“Soon,” the scientist replied—his name appeared on the bottom of the screen, but Pastor Peters didn’t bother remembering it. Then the man said nothing, as if one word would suffice.
“And what do you say to people who claim they need a more specific answer than that?” the talk-show host asked. She looked out at the studio audience and then toward the cameras to convey that she was the everyman.
“This state cannot go on forever,” the scientist said. “Simply put, there’s a limit to how many people can return.”
“What a silly thing for a person to say,” the pastor’s wife said, pointing to the television. “How can he know how many people can come back?” she said. Then her hands moved nervously in her lap. “How can he pretend to know anything about any of this? This is God’s work. And God doesn’t need to tell us why He does anything!”
The pastor only sat and watched the television. His wife looked over at him, but he offered nothing. “It’s just ridiculous,” she finally said.
On the television, the minister finally entered the conversation, but he did so warily. “I believe it would be best if all of us remained patient at this time. None of us should pretend anything. There is a great danger in that.”
“Amen,” the pastor’s wife said.
“What the reverend means to say,” the scientist began, adjusting his tie as he spoke, “is that these events are beyond the realm of religion. Perhaps once, when we still dreamed of ghosts and phantasms, this would have been a matter for the church to have dominion over. But that is not the case now. That is not the case with the Returned. These are people. Real and true. They are physical beings. Not ghosts. We can reach out to them. We can speak to them. And they, in turn, can reach back to us, can speak back to us.” He shook his head and sat back confidently in his chair, as if all of this were a part of some great design. “This is a scientific matter now.”
The pastor’s wife sat up straighter on her end of the couch.
“He’s just trying to get folks stirred up,” her husband said.
“Well, he’s doing just that,” she replied. “I don’t understand why they let people like him on television.”
“And what do you have to say to that, Reverend?” the talk-show host asked. She was out in the audience now, with a microphone in one hand and a small stack of powder-blue index cards in the other. She stood next to a tall, burly man dressed as if he’d just come from a very long journey through very cold and hard country.
“To that,” the reverend said calmly, “I would argue that, ultimately, everything of the physical world is rooted in the spiritual. God and the supernatural are the roots from which the physical world grows. In spite of all of science’s advances, in spite of its many disciplines and theories, the flashing lights and buzzers of its modern phalanx of technology, the biggest questions—how the universe began, what is the ultimate fate and goal of humanity—remain as unanswered now by science as they always have been.”
“Well, what’s God got to say about all of this?” the burly man shouted, before any applause for the reverend’s words could begin within the crowd. He wrapped a large, meaty hand around both the talk-show host’s hand and the microphone and barked his question. “If you say the damned scientists don’t know anything, then what do you know, Reverend?”
Pastor Peters sighed. He raised a hand to this temple and began rubbing his head. “He’s hung himself out to dry now,” he said. “They both have.”
“What do you mean?” his wife asked.
She did not have to wait long for her answer.
On the television, things were suddenly very loud and very dynamic. The burly man had pried the microphone away from the talk-show host and was yelling about how both the reverend and the famous scientist weren’t worth a damn because all they ever did was promise answers while delivering nothing. “When it really comes down to it,” the man growled, “both of you are useless.”
The audience went into an uproar of applauding and cheering, to which the burly man responded by lunging into a tirade about how no one—not the scientific minds, not the churches, not the government—had an answer for the sea of Returned in which all of the True Living would soon drown. “They’re all perfectly content to sit around and keep telling us to wait patiently like children while the undead drag us off to the grave one by one!”
“Turn it off,” Pastor Peters said.
“Why?” his wife asked.
“Then leave it on.” He stood. “I’m going to my study. I’ve got a sermon to write.”
“I thought you were done with that.”
“There’s always another one to write.”
“Maybe I could help,” his wife said, turning off the television. “I don’t have to watch this. I’d rather help you.” The pastor gathered up his coffee and wiped the table where it had been sitting. He moved his large bulk slowly and with great precision, as he always did. His wife stood and downed the last of her own cup of coffee. “This show gave me an idea about a sermon you could give talking about how people shouldn’t be led astray by false prophets.”
The pastor grunted a noncommittal response.
“I think that everyone needs to understand that this isn’t something happening by accident. They need to know that this is all part of a plan. People need to feel that there’s a design on their lives.”
“And when they ask me what that design is?” the pastor responded without looking at his wife. He walked quietly into the kitchen. She trailed behind him.
“You tell them the truth—that you don’t know, but that you’re certain that a plan exists. That’s the important part. That’s what people need.”
“People are tired of waiting. That’s the problem every pastor, minister, preacher, shaman, voodoo man and whatever else you want to call them is having. People are tired of being told that there’s a plan, but nobody actually telling them what the plan is.” He turned and looked at her. She seemed smaller than usual all of a sudden, small and full of failings. She will always be a picture of failure, his mind said suddenly. The thought froze him, clipped his train of thought in two and left him standing in silence.
She stood just as silently. Since this all began, her husband had been changing. Something wa
s standing between them these days. Something that he would not tell her about. Something that he didn’t dare place into his sermons.
“I need to get started,” he said, and made a move to leave the kitchen. She stepped in front of him—a flower standing before a mountain. The mountain stopped at her feet, as it always had.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
He took her hand in his. Then he leaned down and kissed her gently. He held her face in his hands then and traced his thumb over her lips and kissed her again, long and deep.
“Of course I do,” he said softly. And it was the truth he spoke.
Then he lifted her with great gentleness and affection, and moved her aside.
* * *
Harold was particularly surly today. It was too hot to do anything but die, he thought, whatever a death was worth these days.
He sat on his cot with his feet drawn up to his body, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips and a perfectly even layer of sweat glistening on his brow. Out in the hallway the fans droned, moving only enough air through the building to rustle a stray sheet of paper now and again.
Jacob would be back from the bathroom soon and then Harold would be able to leave to go to the bathroom. It wasn’t safe to leave the cots unguarded anymore. There were simply too many people about with nowhere to sleep and when a body left a cot unwatched, even for a moment, they invariably returned to discover that, tonight, they would be sleeping on the hard pavement beneath the stars.
The only belongings a person had now were those they could hold on to. Harold had gotten lucky because he’d married a wife that came to visit him and who brought him a change of clothes when he needed it and who brought him food when he was hungry, but even that was beginning to wane. The military simply wasn’t allowing visitors the way they had been. “Too many people,” they claimed.
They couldn’t keep up with the numbers—Returned or True Living—and, more than that, they were afraid that the wrong kind of people might slip inside the school and start a riot—it had happened already out in Utah. Even now they were holed up out there in the desert, with their guns and their demands to be set free.
But the government was still not sure what they wanted to do with the people, so they held them there, surrounded by more soldiers than the small rebels could ever hope to overpower. The standoff was at a week now, and it was only the press coverage and the memories of the Rochester Incident that kept the soldiers at bay.
So the men with guns delivered food and the rebels—led exclusively by True Livings—were in a pattern of shouting demands for freedom and equal rights for the Returned as they came tentatively out from their compound and took the food the soldiers brought them. Then they went back behind their barricades and reentered the life that they and circumstance had manufactured.
But in spite of the fact that, compared to Rochester and the death of the German soldiers and that Jewish family, things were going smooth as butter, the Bureau wasn’t about to have things crumble. So, all over the place security levels went up and an iron hand came down and now Lucille could only come to visit her husband and son once a week. Now there were too many people crammed into a space that had never been designed to hold them and word around the camp was that plans were being put into place to give everyone more room, which meant that, somehow, lots of people would be going someplace—and Harold could not ignore how ominous that idea was.
* * *
The water was running out in Arcadia, though it hadn’t completely gone yet. Everything was on rations. And while having the food on rations was bad enough, having the water on rations seemed to be an unnecessarily draconian fate.
Though no one was dying of thirst, a person was lucky to be able to shower every three or four days. They learned to keep their clothes as clean as they could manage.
In the beginning it had all seemed trivial, maybe even a little fun. Everyone smiled and ate with their pinkies in the air and paper napkins spread out across their laps and tucked into the collars of their shirts and, whenever something did spill, they all took to cleaning it with a flair of drama and importance. In the beginning, everyone was afraid of improperness, afraid of letting the situation make changes to who they were and how they came across.
In the beginning they had dignity. Like this would all end suddenly and they might go home at the end of the day and settle in on the couch and watch whatever reality television show they favored on that particular night.
But then the weeks rolled out into a full month—more than that now—and still no one was at home on the couch watching television. And when the first month passed and the oldest of the prisoners settled into the truth that they were not going home and that things were getting worse by the day, they all started caring less and less about their appearances and how other folks saw them.
The Bureau wasn’t any better at cleaning up after so many people than they were at supplying food and water for them. On the west wing of the school the toilets had broken from overuse and that hadn’t stopped people from needing to use the bathroom. Some people figured it was better to keep using the out of commission toilets for as long as they could stand them.
Other people just stopped caring. They would piss or shit wherever they could get a moment’s privacy. Some didn’t even need the privacy.
And somewhere in all this people were getting frustrated. The Returned, just like anyone else, didn’t care much for being held against their will. Their lives were spent in longing, wanting to return to those they had loved or, at the very least, wanting to return to the world of life. And while some of them had no idea exactly what they wanted or where they wanted to be, they knew that being held prisoner in Arcadia wasn’t it.
All over the camp the Returned were beginning to grumble. Beginning to lose patience.
If someone looked closely, they could foresee what would eventually happen.
* * *
A little after 5:00 a.m. every morning for the past few weeks, half a dozen or so men in the town of Arcadia received a phone call from Fred Green. There was no small talk, no introduction or apology for the early-morning wake up, just Fred’s gruff and abrasive voice shouting, “Be there in an hour! Bring enough food to get you through the day. Arcadia needs us!”
In the first days of their protesting, Fred and his team had kept their distance from the soldiers and the gate where the busloads of Returned were being brought in. Initially, they weren’t sure exactly who they were supposed to be mad at: the government or the Returned.
Yes, the Returned were horrible, unnatural things, but wasn’t the government, too? After all, it was the government that was taking over Arcadia. It was the government that brought the soldiers and the men in suits and the builders and everyone else.
Protesting was hard work. Harder than they had expected. They went through lulls of energy and their throats were almost constantly sore. But whenever a bus of Returned came chugging down the street, bound for the school, Fred and the others would find their waning spirits renewed. They raised their signs and turned up the volume on their tired voices and they shook their signs and made their hands into fists and waved them.
When the buses came, the slogans went out the window. It was every rebellious man for himself. “Go home!” they shouted. And “You’re not wanted here! Leave Arcadia!”
As the days passed, Fred and his crew grew tired of yelling from a distance. So they took to walking out into the path of the buses. They were careful, though. This was about expressing their right to free speech, about letting the world know that there were still decent, good people who wouldn’t sit idly by while everything went to pieces. It wasn’t about getting run over and becoming martyrs.
So they stayed in control of themselves right up until the moment when the buses stopped at the gate to get clearance before heading into the holding center. Then they speed walked across the street with their signs held up, each of them shouting angrily and waving their fists. Someone even went
so far as to grab a rock and throw it once—though, admittedly, they took care not to throw it where it might actually hurt anyone.
But with each day they grew a little bolder.
By the second week there were four soldiers instead of just one at the guard post near Fred and his followers. They stood with their arms behind their backs and their faces stern and expressionless, always watching the protestors but never doing anything to provoke them.
When the buses with the Returned came, the soldiers would walk out from the guardhouse and form a line in front of where the protestors were.
Fred Green and the rest were respectful of this show of authority. So they shouted their slogans and yelled their damnations from behind the soldiers and did not threaten the soldiers in any way. It was a well-behaved civil disobedience.
It was just after six—on the day that would prove to be remarkable—when Fred Green pulled into Marvin’s driveway; the sun had barely risen. “Another day at it,” John Watkins called. He was sitting in his truck with the door open and one leg dangling out of the cab. The radio was on, its music coming out garbled and tinny from busted speakers. Some song about a no good ex-wife.
“How many did I miss?” Fred asked, his tone hard and sharp. He got out of his truck, clutching his picket sign. He was starting the day in a bad mood. It had been another night of restlessness for him and, as is often the case with certain types of men, he’d decided that being angry in general was the best way to deal with whatever was going on in his heart that he didn’t understand.
“What’s the matter with you?” John asked. “You feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” Fred said. He tightened his face and wiped his brow—not sure exactly when he had begun sweating. “Many buses this morning?”
“None so far,” Marvin Parker said, walking up behind Fred. Fred turned quickly, his face flush. “Fred, you all right?” Marvin asked.
“I’m fine,” he spat.
“I asked him the same thing,” John said. “He looks off, don’t he?”