There were three men on the porch, all of whom Graham recognized from the earlier confrontation. The redheaded one was eying him especially closely.
“Let’s see your enlistment papers,” the sheriff said.
“You’ve got no right to be doing this,” Graham told the sheriff, whose eyes seemed to be disappearing beneath the puffy blackness billowing from the bridge of his nose. “You boys have already caused enough trouble—go back to Timber Falls before this gets any more out of hand.”
Graham’s right hand was pressed up against the doorjamb. He had opened the door only halfway, and in his three-fingered left hand, behind the door and out of the men’s view, he was holding his rifle.
“We are deputized by the federal government,” the sheriff replied, “so we have every right.”
“Federal government’s got nothing to do with us. We built this town, no help from any of you.” The very doorjamb Graham’s hand was resting against, he had placed there himself; there was no way he would let some two-bit thugs drag him from it.
The redhead stepped forward to push the door open farther, but Graham’s hold was firm, the edge of the door digging into his forearm. He had elected not to brandish his weapon when he opened the door, thinking he could talk them into leaving. Now he was regretting the decision.
When Hightower had pointed Graham out to Bartrum, the sheriff hadn’t wanted to skip the other houses, so he sent three of the men from his group to knock on the neighbors’ doors. He kept Hightower and J.B. with him. Meanwhile, Miller had walked back to tell Winslow and another man to drive two of the trucks, filled beyond any point where more men could be shoved inside, back to Timber Falls. In only a few minutes, they’d fill the last two trucks and head back.
Bartrum knew how much Hightower had been yearning to bring this man in. The slacker had disparaged Hightower’s dead sons, and in so doing had disparaged J.B.’s dead son, disparaged Bartrum’s own son, still off fighting somewhere in France. Bartrum did not have the weight of a child’s death on his soul, but he saw how such weight pulled down even stronger men than he. He wasn’t going to let some yellow son of a bitch keep them from exercising their patriotic duties.
Bartrum reached for his pistol, removed it from the holster at his side. He held it there, pointed at the ground, and made sure Graham saw it. “Son, we bring you in alive or we bring you in dead. It doesn’t matter to us.”
Graham wasn’t left-handed. He would need to back up, let the door swing open, and switch the rifle into his right hand. Shoot the man with the gun first, then the redhead. The four-eyed guy in the business suit would probably run away. Graham looked at all three of them, gauged how quickly they would act.
But Hightower surprised Graham by stepping in front of Bartrum and driving his shoulder into the door, forcing it open. It smacked against Graham’s left wrist so hard he nearly dropped the rifle, now plainly visible. Graham switched it to his right hand, but Hightower was so close Graham couldn’t even point the gun at him. Hightower pushed the rifle aside, then punched Graham in the side of the face.
Graham stumbled back, the rifle hitting the ground, and wasn’t able to steady himself before Hightower charged into him again. Graham was younger and stronger, but he was back on his heels and off balance. He used his raised arms to deflect some of Hightower’s blows; the ones that struck him left him dizzy. Hightower was leaning him back against the couch, and Graham was about to fall when he landed a punch just to the right of the man’s chin, feeling the crunch of breaking bone. But Graham fell backward after landing that blow, and Hightower, gripping his aching jaw, stepped forward and kicked him the second he hit the floor.
“Jesus, J.B.” Hightower winced through his broken jaw. Finally, J.B. joined in kicking Graham’s ribs and abdomen.
Bartrum had leveled his gun at Graham, ready to shoot if the slacker tried to attack again. But that clearly was not going to happen.
Hightower held back once he knew the fight was won. As much as he hated this man, he was already losing his taste for fighting. He reached down and picked Graham up, holding him around the neck from behind.
“Graham!” Amelia screamed. Graham’s nose was bleeding, his left eyebrow was badly cut, and his face was becoming redder and redder from the thick arm around his neck. When Amelia reached the bottom crooked stair, she stopped, her face contorted by fear and fury. “Stop it, please!”
“We are stopping.” Bartrum silently cursed the fact that every one of these millworkers seemed to have wives.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, her eyes filling with tears as she slumped at the foot of the stairs. She looked straight into her husband’s eyes, and the sight of her caused Graham to struggle again, his fingers digging into Hightower’s arms. Hightower tightened his grip.
“Your husband is a yellow-bellied coward, young madam,” Bartrum informed her, “and he’s going to rot in jail till long after our boys have won this war.” The sheriff nodded to J.B. and Hightower. “Let’s go.”
But as he turned toward the door again something new caught his eye. Emerging from the kitchen was another figure. And he was holding a rifle pointed at Bartrum’s heart.
“Let him go,” Philip said, walking slowly but steadily through the kitchen and into the dining room. The rifle felt so heavy to his atrophied muscles and hollow-seeming bones, but he would not lower it.
Philip had reached Graham’s house too late, had seen the men standing on the porch when he turned the corner. He had stood there a moment, unsure what to do, the thoughts echoing in his cavernous head. The men would take Graham away, would stuff him into one of those trucks. Philip had carried the rifle with him as if heading back to guard duty at the town entrance, as if the flu had not come to Commonwealth. But it had come, of course, and he still felt it inside him. His head was wrong, his thoughts were wrong and his feelings were wrong. He found it hard to concentrate, hard to deliberate. It was so much easier just to act, and so he had walked through the snow to the Stones’ back door. Despite his weakness, his body seemed lighter, as if it were being propelled by the wind, by someone’s breath, by thought alone.
He had opened the back door silently. He had heard the sounds of fighting but had concentrated on stealth, on gliding through the house and aiming the rifle perfectly. His breaths were quick and he fought the urge to cough. He glanced at Graham just long enough to see his face contorted from the grip of the man holding him, then Philip trained his eyes on the midsection of the man with the pistol. The pistol was pointed at the floor, still aimed at where Graham had lain.
“Son, you’d best put that rifle—”
“Let him go,” Philip cut Bartrum off, repeating his command with added force. “You put down your gun, and then get out of this house.”
Hightower and Graham were still. Hightower had loosened his grip, apparently afraid that further struggle would cause Philip to fire their way. The man’s arm was still around Graham’s neck but now it was almost an embrace.
Philip coughed despite his attempts to choke it back. The rifle wavered but then returned to its target: the chest of the man before him, the man with the beaten face, with crusted blood and pus pooled beneath his trampled snout.
“Son, you’re pointing a weapon at an officer of the law,” Bartrum said, his voice calm but serious. “I’m sure you’re a sick boy and you aren’t acting yourself, but you need to put that down right now.” He began to raise his own pistol.
“If you even twitch your arm again—” Philip warned, and Bartrum stopped.
Philip imagined himself firing at the man. Shooting the C.O. had been wrong, and shooting Frank would have been wrong. Graham, too, had done something so wrong Philip still could barely understand it—would probably never understand it. But this, this was not wrong. These men should not be here. Philip would finally be able to do something unimpeachable. He would pull the trigger if he had to.
Amelia was still at the foot of the stairs, paralyzed and mute. Graham was star
ing at her as if he desperately wanted to cover her body with his, but she was so far away.
The windows and the open doorway behind the men were an explosion of white, the snow falling even thicker than before.
“Philip,” Graham managed to squeeze out of his dry throat, but that was all.
Nothing felt real to Philip—the scene was even more dreamlike than his conversation with Fiona on the train. He felt surrounded by death, felt that Fiona and Frank and the C.O. were nearby, felt the heavy spirits of all the people in Commonwealth who had been taken by the flu. The men standing in front of him were probably dead, too. All Philip had to do was knock them down.
“Son”—every time Bartrum spoke, his words came even slower—“I’m sure you think you’re doing the right thing. But these men have done wrong, and it’s our job to set things right. Now we’re going to walk out this door with this man, and then—”
Philip shook his head, and the end of the rifle bounced. “No. You’re leaving alone.”
The pistol in Bartrum’s hand moved again. Whether he was aiming it or moving it away, Philip wasn’t sure, but he squeezed the rifle’s trigger.
Bartrum disappeared. The shot threw him so far through the open doorway and into the descending layers of snow that he seemed erased into whiteness. Graham drove both of his elbows into Hightower’s stomach, less stunned by the gunshot than his adversary had been, and the arm fell from around his neck. Graham turned around and slugged him twice in the face, the second blow barely glancing off Hightower’s ear because he was falling so fast.
Philip hastily reloaded his rifle, then turned it toward Graham and Hightower, but Hightower was already on the ground, motionless. Philip looked at Graham, at his bloody face and the sweat that covered his forehead, dripping from his brow.
Bartrum’s pistol had landed on the floor between J.B. and Graham. J.B. had just seen one of his companions shot dead and the other knocked out, and he was now outnumbered, and there was the pistol right in front of him. It was out of neither cold calculation nor bold decisiveness but sheer self-preservation that he leaped onto the hard floor, lunging for the pistol.
Graham, too, saw the gun, and he lunged forward. He was faster and less frightened than J.B., and just as the banker’s fingers touched the handle of the gun, Graham’s larger hand took it from him. They were both on their knees as Graham grasped the revolver, aiming at J.B.’s forehead. Graham’s nerves were all firing, sparks running up his limbs and his finger tensed on the trigger, ready to pull, ready to pull. He needed to put this intruder down.
J.B. was so close that Graham could see clearly the look of terror and survival in the man’s eyes, eyes that perfectly mirrored Graham’s. Despite the adrenaline and the fear, Graham heard Philip’s accusation echoing in his mind once more. That and the look in J.B.’s eyes made Graham hesitate.
“Graham, don’t!” Amelia shouted.
Graham staggered to his feet, lowering the pistol while keeping his eyes on J.B.
Philip walked forward, the rifle pointed ahead until he saw Hightower lying behind the sofa, conscious but disoriented, blinking again and again. Philip told him to get up.
Graham pointed the pistol at the open doorway. Hightower and J.B. rose, staring at the two men and then at the feet of the sheriff, barely visible at the edge of the porch. Hightower’s eyes were already swelling and he was silent. He and J.B. walked through the doorway toward their vehicles, their footfalls unsteady as their legs shivered with adrenaline.
Philip followed them a few steps and looked down at the fallen sheriff, the man’s eyes wide open, his eyebrows still arched with surprise. The blood was beginning to seep even through his thick coat. Things felt fluid, one action leading to the next with unusual speed, and Philip felt he could no longer pause between events to try and understand them.
Amelia and Graham were holding each other, the sheriff’s pistol sitting on the table. They were crying, and Graham’s arms seemed to be shaking.
“Graham,” Philip interrupted them, his voice trancelike. “There are men outside.”
Graham steadied himself, then stepped away from his wife. “Don’t go,” Amelia said, making it more of a command than a plea, but he shook his head, wiping at his tears.
He grabbed the pistol. “Please,” he told her.
Philip and Graham went onto the porch and saw Miller and two other men standing outside two trucks and a Ford half a block away. Graham led the way and Philip followed. Before the APL men had time to react to the sight, Graham fired a shot into the white sky that was disintegrating all around them.
“Get out of our town!” Graham screamed, his eyes no longer tearing up but still shining, still wild. Miller froze. He had no weapon, nor did the man beside him.
Behind Graham and Philip, four other Commonwealth men—as if they had been waiting all day for the opportunity—emerged from their homes, rifles in hand.
Miller had already sent two trucks and most of the men back to Timber Falls. He was outnumbered and outgunned, but he tried to remain calm. He saw the body on the porch, saw Hightower’s beaten face and the look in J.B.’s eyes. J.B. stepped up to him and spoke low in his ear: “They killed Bartrum.”
Miller swallowed. “We’ll be back, gentlemen,” he said to Graham, trying to bite back his fear. “I promise you that.”
“You were right about the spy,” Graham told Miller, his voice thick with emotion. His head ached from Hightower’s blows, his ribs pinched his insides with every breath, and his trampled abdomen screamed at him to bend over rather than standing so tall. “He did come here after you left, and I killed him. And I’ll kill you next if you ever come back.”
Miller kept his eyes on the gunmen as he walked toward one of the trucks, filled with captured men. He jumped when he heard the pop, and one of the tires before him exploded.
Graham shot another wheel, then two on the other truck. “The trucks stay,” he commanded. “The men stay.” He was less than ten feet from Miller now.
Philip kept his rifle aimed at Miller’s chest, but Graham held his pistol pointed at the ground a few feet in front of him. He couldn’t aim at another man.
“You’ve made a terrible mistake, son.”
Graham gritted his teeth. The pistol was heavy in his hand. “Get out while we’re still letting you.”
Miller stood there another moment, his face white. Then he nodded, turned around and started walking toward the Ford. His compatriots followed.
Graham, Philip, and the men who had left their homes came closer as Miller started the engine, then slowly turned it around. Several blocks ahead and out of view, the remaining group of APL men had climbed into their vehicle, having been told by Miller only a moment ago that they’d done all they could for the day. They didn’t know Bartrum had been slain and they would not know it until after the long ride home.
Miller’s Ford made its way slowly along the snow-covered road. It passed all those houses with crape hanging in the windows, passed the women and children of the men who had already been trucked out of town, Rankle and Deacon and all the others, some of them still sick with flu and some barely recovered and some worsening, some of them beaten and some of them without a mark. Miller gripped the wheel tightly, his jaw clenched at the townspeople watching him go. He saw Charles Worthy standing at the edge of the crowd and fought off an urge to drive into him, to cut him down in front of all these fools who had followed him here to the ends of the earth. Then the town was gone and they were rolling down the hill, nothing before them but the thick woods that would be all but impenetrable after another hour of snowfall.
Philip bent over and laid his rifle on the soft snow near the abandoned trucks, the men still inside. One of the first faces he’d seen through the windows he had recognized: Alfred Metzger, who, at forty-two, was still three years younger than the cutoff for the most recent, expanded draft. Philip pulled at the handle of the back door until it swung clear.
The men burst out, desperate to be
free, but once they were safely on the outside, their movements varied. They dropped to the ground and cried with relief, or clapped each other on the shoulders, or ran to their wives, or swore vengeance upon those Timber Falls bastards. But Alfred Metzger spent only the slightest moment standing among them, looking down at the snow-covered ground, and then he walked away briskly. Philip saw the look in the man’s eyes and realized that imprisonment would have been a more pleasant fate than the horrors that awaited him at home.
It did not seem at all odd that Philip now stood in a train station. It was like an inexorable fate, something that had been perpetually on his horizon, something he could not run from. He thought about that, how running away was something he couldn’t run away from.
He still wasn’t right in the head. He had told his father this in the middle of the street, both of them covered in snow, the rifle by Philip’s feet smelling strongly of gunpowder, of metal and blood. Charles had not asked Philip what he had done, though surely he was piecing it together from the expressions on the faces of the men around them. I don’t feel right in the head, Philip had said, and Charles had nodded and walked him home.
It snowed for an entire day. The storm did more to insulate Commonwealth, to block it off from the rest of the world, than the quarantine had done. The heavy snowfall would keep the invaders from returning, but for how long?
Philip rested in bed for the next two days, sleeping for such long stretches that his parents worried he was slipping back into the flu’s icy embrace. But his symptoms continued to fade. He still complained that his head, though no longer aching, felt fuzzy; he said he heard ringing in his ears, found it difficult to concentrate. But Doc Banes assured them this would pass, that perhaps this wicked flu would be particularly difficult to shake, but shake it Philip would in time. Philip spoke little; Charles hadn’t heard his son laugh in days, perhaps weeks.
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