“Don’t go,” he choked, rearranging his body on the damp pillows.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “I have to take care of your sister, too.”
His sister. “Laura…”
“Laura’s sick, too.” Then Rebecca was gone and the train car was swaying more violently than before, Philip’s chin whacking against so many shoulders and heads and elbows that he felt he was falling, felt the train car dissolving beneath his feet and the bodies of everyone around him sliding on top of his, piling up, and everything was dark and hot, so very hot.
He opened his eyes later and was back in his bed. How long had he been on that train? Days. He bent one leg and pulled the knee up halfway toward his chest, just to stretch the muscles, just to feel human, and within those muscles he felt some hazy memory, covered in wax paper and dust, of slowly stumbling through the house to the bathroom. Maybe twice a day. How many days? He had completely lost track, since days had no meaning here, no meaning in this bed. Time was a chimera dancing before him to distract him from the only thing that mattered: getting healthy. He realized he hadn’t even thought of this, of being healthy, in the longest time. His body dared not consider health—it took all its strength to fight on and stay alive while in this siege. Just as the town had been under siege from all sides. Now the same scenario was playing itself out, but this time the flu-infected world was his body and the safe haven of Commonwealth was his mind. He needed to protect his mind from his body. If his mind could stay healthy, if he could properly quarantine it, then maybe his body would give up this gruesome battle. He thought about that, then realized it made no sense. He was already losing his mind—his brain had already fallen victim to his body. The flu had broken the quarantine.
The door opened and in walked Graham, wearing a gauze mask. Philip was too weak to be confused by this. All the muscles in Graham’s forehead and temples were tensed around his eyes, wary of the inevitability of attack and constantly on guard. He was carrying his rifle. In that tiny room, it looked as big as a cannon.
“Hi,” Philip said, and amazingly, his voice sounded clear of infection.
Graham nodded.
“What are you doing here?” Even to himself, Philip still sounded weak, and the words were slow. He wanted to ask why Graham had the gun in here, but that would have been too many words.
“Keeping watch.” To underscore that point, Graham’s eyes darted from one side of the room to the next. Suddenly, the room felt large to Philip, the walls hundreds of yards away from one another, and between those walls were trees and boulders, Douglas fir and fallen branches, uncountable nooks where nameless animals had been born and had returned to the earth, thousands of places where enemies might hide. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.”
“From what?”
Graham said, “Sshhh.” Then he looked into Philip’s eyes gravely. “You know.”
Philip started to cry. He hated Graham so much yet felt so grateful that his friend was standing here beside him when no one else would, staring down whatever it was that wished to feast upon him. The something in Philip’s chest suddenly had company as a thick warmth welled up inside him, and the tears continued to roll down his cheeks until he fell asleep once more.
Philip opened his eyes. The room was dark. How long could you be sick with the flu? Philip wondered.
There was a tap at the window. Was that what had woken him up? Again a tap. With great effort, Philip lifted himself into a sitting position, letting the sheets fall down across his lap, exposing half his body to the room’s chill. His fingertips felt almost numb, and although he was used to this feeling since the auto accident, he knew it was a strange symptom to have when sick. Did this mean his infection was moving on to an even more sinister stage? He reached forward, taking the window curtains in his hand. He could feel them, barely. He pulled them apart and looked outside.
Little light trickled in; the outside world was nearly as dark as his room. But he could see, standing only a foot away from the window, Elsie. She held a stick that she’d been using to tap on the window, as if afraid to touch it with her bare hands. Not bare: she was wearing gloves, he saw, and it was cold enough outside for him to see her breath, that thin and quickly dissipating smoke hovering before her. Her scarf was wrapped thickly around her neck, tightly bundled beneath her chin, and some of her curls blew in front of her face, twisting in the November wind. Just above the scarf he could see her mouth, her thin lips pale in the cold. With his parents wearing masks, Elsie’s was the first full face he’d seen in days.
She waved. Her face had looked serious and drawn, but she now allowed herself a slightly hopeful look, her eyebrows curving in lieu of a smile, which would have seemed misplaced right then. He waved back. How late was it? It might have been seven in the evening or three in the morning.
He leaned forward, grasping the bottom sill, and was about to pull it open when he saw her shaking her head. She had stepped back as well, apparently ready to flee in case he opened it. She was afraid of him, afraid of his flu, despite having lived in the same house as her sick mother. He pulled his hands away from the window, showing her his empty palms as if he had just dropped a gun. He said, “Sorry,” but wasn’t sure if she could read his lips. She nodded, though, and stepped forward again.
She breathed on the glass and it fogged between them, tangible evidence of the barrier separating them. Then she reached forward and, with one gloved finger, wrote on the glass. She wrote slowly, as she had to write backward in order for Philip to understand it.
YOU OK?
Philip smiled weakly and nodded, lying to the vision of Elsie before him. She looked so beautiful but forlorn, all bundled against the cold as if waiting for a train she had missed. Her eyes were sad, but beneath this sadness was a tenderness that warmed him and made him wish more than ever that he could shatter the glass and hold her again. He opened his mouth but didn’t know what he could say that would be easily readable on his lips. There was no paper nearby for him to write her a note, and the thought of breathing on the glass the way she had, of expelling his germs toward her, even with the barrier, seemed unwise. So he sat there looking at her, hoping that his eyes were conveying all that he felt.
Elsie wiped at the glass, removing her message. She leaned forward and breathed on the glass again, just off to the side of the previous spot, and the fog magically grew before their eyes once more. This time she looked at him for another moment before writing, looked at him closely.
Then she reached out with her finger and wrote on the glass, LOVE YOU.
Her face was so serious, as if love and the mere thought of love required her most adult expression. But the sight of those words and the meaning behind them were so amazing to Philip that he couldn’t stop from smiling. When she saw this she smiled too, looking down briefly, perhaps embarrassed by what she’d written. Then she looked back at him, and he mouthed a silent “Me, too” and hoped she understood it.
Beneath the LOVE YOU, the fog provided more space for her scrawled thoughts, so she wrote, in smaller letters, GET WELL, though the second E she got backward. He would do anything for her, he knew right then, and it made getting well seem like such an easy task. He breathed deeply.
For those few minutes he had felt strangely freed of the flu’s grip, but now everything was coming back. He felt the itching at the back of his sinuses, the throb in his leg muscles, the strangely loud and hurried heartbeat, the something that still lived in his chest and made him cough once again. How long has it been? he wondered. That night at the general store, sitting beside her, kissing her. How long had he been trapped in this room, been in and out of the train car?
Elsie reached out and pressed her palm flat against the window. He wanted to put his hand on the other side of the glass but hesitated. He felt the men on the train stiffen, felt the shoulders and the elbows jostle him, and he felt dizzy, all those faceless heads confusing him about which direction to turn to find Elsie. Where had she gone? His
body slumped back; he was startled by how quickly the train was moving. It was rocketing through the empty landscape, the world beyond the windows that he couldn’t see. And although he had no idea where it was going, he knew it was hurtling away from Elsie, taking him farther away with every second, every breath.
Philip had never been this sick. The worst he’d felt was after the accident, lying in that foreign hospital bed surrounded by people he didn’t know, people who wouldn’t tell him where his mother was. Even that had felt different, not a sickness but a recovery, albeit a long and brutal one. Almost like a rebirth, a painful passage from one phase of his life to the next.
He’d been bedridden one other time. He had been eight or so, and he and his mother had been living in some Oregon town when he’d caught a bad case of pneumonia. His mother had nursed him, had been at his side every time he woke up, whether early in the morning or in the middle of the night. She had been working as a secretary for a lawyer who had always made eyes at her, Philip had noticed, but she had stayed home from her job all week. And even though he felt miserable and had honestly wondered if he might die—one boy from his school had already succumbed to the same illness—his memories of that week were somehow happy ones. He had never felt more loved by Fiona. All of the tortured ambivalence was replaced by a calm maternal consistency, and he felt so protected and happy with her bringing him soup or reading him magazines or newspapers. He’d stayed in bed at least one day longer than he’d really needed to, just to prolong it.
The night before he was to return to school, he had woken up when he heard a noise coming from his mother’s room. He rose from his bed, the wood floor cold on his feet, and he pushed open the door as quietly as he could. Her bedside lamp was lit and she was sitting at the small writing table, her back to him, her shoulders hunched. The clock above her told him it was past three in the morning. She was crying. Was she as sad as he was that their idyllic time together was coming to an end? Was she as crushed as he was with the disappointment that he must return to school and she to that lawyer? Or was there something else? For one solid week—and for the first time he could remember—he had completely overlooked her emotions, her opinions, her thoughts. He had felt that her whole being revolved around him.
Maybe there was something else making her cry, some other aspect of her confusing adult world. Maybe there had been other reasons why she had chosen to stay home and avoid that lawyer. Philip walked toward her, and she showed no signs of hearing him until he put his hand on her shoulder. She was shaking slightly from the tears, but she put one of her hands on his, squeezing it. They stayed that way for a while, his feet freezing beneath him and the unimpressed clock ticking away the minutes. Eventually her tears slowed and she gave his hand a final squeeze. She told him to go back to bed and he obeyed, never having seen her face.
When Philip next opened his eyes, Charles was sitting in the chair before him, holding his hand. Philip wasn’t sure how long Charles had been there but felt from the sweatiness in his father’s palm that their hands had been clasped for some time. Charles, seeing Philip’s eyes open, began to speak.
“I know you feel at fault for this,” Charles said, his voice the slightest bit muffled by the gauze mask. “That’s why I wanted to tell you what Dr. Banes told me a few days ago.”
Philip gritted his teeth against the ache in his head and the light filtering through the curtains.
“I’ve tried to tell you that you aren’t to blame, but I know you didn’t believe me. You’ve always been willing to own up to the consequences of what you do, and I admire that.” Charles smiled slightly, and the look in his eyes was that of a man remembering what he loved about a dearly departed family member. Philip’s eyes had been closing periodically—he’d been slipping back onto the train—but now that he knew what was happening, the power of this realization and a deep, innate fear beyond any he’d felt before kept his eyes open.
“But you need to know that this is not your fault. I won’t have you think that.” Charles’s eyes welled up, and he exhaled a few times. “Dr. Banes told me that he was in someone’s house—whose house it was, that isn’t important. Someone very sick. He noticed a newspaper in the corner of the room, the Timber Falls Daily. It was dated a week ago, Philip. Well after we started the quarantine.”
Charles paused briefly, then said, “Do you see? Dr. Banes questioned the man’s wife, and she tried to deny it at first. But she finally admitted that her husband and some friends of his had sneaked off a few times over the past two weeks, to Timber Falls. To buy alcohol.” Charles shook his head. “We were guarding the road, but they took one of the Indian trails. Since then other men have confessed to Dr. Banes, confessed on their sickbeds, confessed that they’d stolen off to Timber Falls for other reasons. To visit girlfriends, to visit…prostitutes.” Charles stumbled over that word, embarrassed to say it in front of his son. “Not many men but enough. One would have been enough, really.” Charles’s right hand still clasped his son’s. “We don’t know how the town fell sick, Philip, and we never will know. There are too many possibilities. I so regret keeping you in that building for those two days.”
Charles paused. “I worry now that nothing I’ve done here has made any difference, nothing at all. But I’ve tried, and you’ve tried. You tried so admirably.” He squeezed Philip’s hand. “So I don’t want you blaming yourself, or feeling that you’ve done anyone in, because you haven’t.” His voice was now as firm as his grip. “I believe now that what’s happened here was simply meant to be, that this is something larger than all of us—larger than each of us individually and larger than all of us collectively. I don’t know why God would see fit to do this, and I don’t know what lessons we’ll draw when it’s passed. We can only press on as best as we can, and I intend to do that.” He swallowed painfully. “And I want you to be there with me.”
Philip had never seen Charles cry and never wanted to again. “Is Laura okay?” he managed to ask.
“She’s in bed still,” Charles said. “But she’ll be better.” From Charles’s tone, Philip couldn’t tell if he had some concrete reason to believe this.
Philip knew that all of this was important—Laura still being sick, some men escaping town to run wild in the disease-ridden streets of Timber Falls—but it seemed to glance off him. Soon Charles was gone, and Philip was back on the train.
The men were still packed so tightly that Philip could barely breathe. He had hoped it was from the emotion in his chest at seeing his father cry, but that had long passed, and still his breaths required great effort. Was it worth this pain? If it would always hurt this way, Philip wasn’t strong enough to continue. The flu had him now, its talons so deep in his lungs and heart that it would soon overtake him completely.
“You look bad, kid,” Frank said. He was smiling, the smile that had made Philip hate him so much at first—because how could he smile with a gun pointed at him, and how could he smile when he was trapped in a stinking prison? But that smile had disarmed Philip over time; eventually, it had made Philip like him, too quickly and too intensely considering how briefly they had known each other. Perhaps it was the pressure of the situation that had played with his emotions, but the fact remained that when Philip had realized what Graham had done, it was as if Philip’s own brother had been murdered.
“I feel bad,” Philip replied. “I feel horrible.”
“This train stinks. You notice that?”
“I can’t smell a thing. I can barely breathe.”
Frank was riddled with bullet holes, his army shirt in tatters, but thankfully, there was no blood. Philip didn’t know how Graham had killed Frank, but the bullet holes seemed as likely a method as any.
“You don’t think I was lying to you about the C.O., do you?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t really know what to think, you know? All I know is I liked you.” Philip thought of something. “Do you know where this train is going?”
“’Course. You don’t?”<
br />
“I guess I hoped I was wrong. What happened to all those other guys?”
“The hell with those other guys. The hell with everyone, is what I say. It’s just about you, you know? You can’t worry about other folks—you just gotta watch your own back. The hell with everyone else.”
“Then why’d you help the C.O.?”
“Look where it got me, kid.”
“Doesn’t mean it was wrong.”
“Didn’t say it was wrong. All I said is that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t.”
Philip nodded.
“What?” Frank challenged, noticing the look in Philip’s eyes.
“Nothing, I just…That’s sad, I guess.”
“This whole mess is pretty goddamned sad, don’t you think? The hell with sad. And the hell with everyone. The hell with you, too.”
“Why?”
“I wish I’d gotten to France. I would’ve been a hell of a soldier. I would’ve rounded up hundreds of Heinies, captured ’em with my bare hands. I would’ve been a madman out there.”
“What kind of soldier do you think I would have been?”
Frank eyed him carefully. “You would’ve saved somebody’s life or died trying.”
It felt like the greatest compliment Philip had ever received.
“I gotta go now, kid.”
Frank was gone. Philip was alone on the train.
Later, he heard singing, the same song he had heard before, a song his mother used to sing to him, a lullaby. He stood there on the train listening intently, swooning at every word, until he thought to turn around, and there she was.
The Last Town on Earth Page 36