Usually Ben would be full of ideas about anything new or unusual. This time he kept silent. As we walked back all he did was swallow in a queasy way.
This piece of yellow paper at least took his mind off what he’d just seen.
“It’s because of the stranger…” I thought for a moment he was going to say that stranger you killed. Instead he said, “It’s because of the stranger who arrived recently.” He wiped his mouth, as if the taste of his own vomit was still on his tongue. “The Caucus decided that because he wasn’t a bread bandit and he was from this part of the country, the disease must have infected North Americans.”
“They believe he really was infected?”
“ You know,” he said firmly. “You saw it in him. God knows how you do it, but you knew he’d got it in him.”
I sensed a creeping cold in my blood. “I might have been wrong.”
“You’ve not been wrong yet.”
“Yet.”
“The town’s put their faith in you. You’ve got some instinct that tells you when a person’s infected.”
“And so they turn a blind eye when I hack some poor bastard to pieces. I don’t want to kill, Ben. I just find myself doing it, but it’s like I’m watching it all happen from across the street. Why don’t they just put anyone arriving in town in quarantine until they’re sure? They don’t have to wait until I’ve passed fucking judgment on some poor fucking stranger.” I began to feel angry again. That anger always lurked below the surface… as soon as I started to think or talk about what I’d done it came shooting out of me in flames of bloody red.
Ben was quick to try and calm me. “Greg. We’re lucky to have you. You’ve saved our necks.”
“Lucky?” I gave a sour-sounding laugh.
“Sure. Before you turned up we’d let anyone in who came to town, bread bandits as well as our own countrymen. But we didn’t know what was in the blood of the bread bandits or what was in their brains. We’d give those people food and lodging. They’d be completely normal, completely sane. But then…” He clicked his fingers. “One day, they’d snap. One Chilean guy said he was a doctor. He was polite, charming even. But one night he went downstairs, grabbed a carving knife and cut the throats of the family he was lodging with. Now you’re here, Greg. You’ve got a nose for who’s infected. Somehow you can see it in them, but we can’t. You’re our best early warning system.”
“Yeah, right… but now I’ve killed a guy who’s an American. Who might have been born just down the road.”
“And that means the disease has spread. We know it can infect our people.” Ben nodded back at the yellow notice. “That means the town has got to be more security conscious. From now on nobody comes onto the island. No one leaves.”
“And that means suddenly our world has gotten a whole lot smaller.” I looked ’round. “We’ve turned the place into a prison.”
He shook his head. “Not a prison. A fortress.”
“Either way, nobody’s going anywhere, are they?”
We headed off to Ben’s apartment, where he’d left some beers in the icebox of the refrigerator. Even though the electricity had been cut at midnight they were still cold enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. He also maintained a store of rechargeable batteries. So we sat there listening to Hendrix hurl those amazing guitar sounds out into the cosmic hereafter while we poured the beautifully cold beer down our hot and thirsty throats.
For a long time we didn’t say much. Suddenly a whole army of question marks had come marching over our mental horizons. They were dark, menacing. And I found myself thinking: Why had the disease suddenly spread to our own countrymen? Had it infected us here in Sullivan? If it had, when would we see the first symptoms? Or would it be only me who recognized the disease in people? If that was the case, how long would it be before I used the ax on a neighbor? Or even Ben, sitting there on the sofa, listening to Hendrix’s guitar calling out to eternity?
I swallowed the beer in big, hard gulps.
There was another question, too. A weird, twisty one. One that lurked in the background but seemed every bit as sinister as the rest. What had gone wrong with that human head we found tangled up in the branch? How could it bud an extra pair of eyes? Questions, Valdiva. Questions. Questions.
We’d been in Ben’s apartment barely an hour before the siren started. Its phantom wail cut into the room like the bad news it was.
When the siren called, able-bodied men and women were expected to collect weapons, to assemble at certain points in the town, to be ready for Trouble with a capital T. On account of his shaky hands, Ben wasn’t in the guard-the idea of him handling a rifle with those twitchy fingers put the fear of God into the guard sergeants. Even so, he came along. He often wrote articles for Sullivan’s (increasingly) slender newspaper; with a change of hats he moved from stock clerk to reporter. In ten minutes I was sitting in the back of the a pickup barreling with half a dozen others in the direction of the wall. Which was a “misnomer,” as Ben would have said, for a twenty-foot mass of steel fencing and barbed wire running the entire width of the isthmus and cutting the island off from the outside world.
A guy in an engineer’s hard hat shouted to the half dozen or so of us in the back of the pickup that outsiders were aiming to break in.
Hanging on to the sides, slipstream zithering his hair, Ben looked at me. “It looks as if we’ve got our first invasion,” he called.
Nine
Some invasion. The trucks skidded to a stop fifty yards from the gate in clouds of dust. We climbed out with the guard sergeants telling us to take it nice and easy; to stay back until the “threat had been quantified.” Jeez. Why don’t those guys speak so you can understand them?
There, under a cloudless blue sky, the wall ran from left to right, cutting across the highway and single rail-road track. Both ends of that mountain range of barbed wire ended in the water at either side of the land bridge. The guards’ officers-in real life a butcher, a cinema manager and a retired police chief- moved toward the gate. Someone handed me a shotgun and a handful of shells that I stuffed into my shirt pockets. I squinted against the glare of the sun. Through the monster of a steel gate I saw the invasion force.
Hell. Misnomers were thick as dog shit in a municipal park. Well, let me tell you, the invasion force consisted of a family in a sedan. The car was glossily clean.
It couldn’t have come far. Two of the car’s occupants climbed out, leaving a young woman in the passenger seat. She stared out at us, her eyes pumped full of anxiety.
The two who came forward to the gate were a man in his thirties and a boy of around eleven. Like the car they were clean; the man had shaved recently. Both were unarmed.
The stranger talked to the officers at the gate, though I noticed the three officers hung well back- you don’t know what filthy little microbes are peeling themselves from the strangers, do you, boys? I even saw one of them take a glance at the flag to see which way the breeze was blowing. The truth of the matter was, there was no breeze today. The lake was as flat as a mirror.
Curiosity got the better of us. We moved forward to hear the conversation.
“You’ve got to,” the stranger was saying… hell, not saying, pleading. He wanted something so bad it hurt.
“I’m sorry.” The cinema manager indicated a sign painted on a five-by-five board. “No one’s allowed in.”
“But my wife’s pregnant. She needs to be where she can get medical attention.”
“What’s wrong with the place you’ve just come from?”
“We’ve been living in a cabin up in the hills.”
“Go back there. You’ll be safe.”
The man shook his head. “There’s no one else there. She needs a doctor to look at her. Besides, we’re running short of food.”
“Got a rifle?”