The Last Town on Earth. Thomas Mullen

and near inlets. Everyone on the boat tried to move, but there was nowhere to go. People screamed and ducked for cover, tried to turn around, to escape. The shot echoed endlessly. But it wasn’t an echo—it was more shots, some coming from the dock and some coming from the boat. Who had fired first was as impossible to determine as it was irrelevant. Between the popping sounds of shots and ricochets were the hard slaps of limp bodies hitting the water, men disappearing into the depths below.

      Graham slipped, whacking his knee on the deck and sliding forward, since no one was between him and the rail anymore. Everyone was running to the opposite side of the boat. Men on the dock were pointing and shouting and screaming and some of them were brandishing guns and firing still.

      He realized he wasn’t holding Tamara—he must have lost his grip on her in the initial turmoil. He looked behind him at the Wobblies running to the starboard side, looked for long hair, for those black coils, for anything remotely female.

      The boat started tipping. All the weight had shifted to starboard, and now the port side, where Graham stood, was lifting into the air. Two vigilantes who’d had clear shots at him missed when the deck beneath him rose, but Graham lost his footing again and stumbled back, sliding on the wet deck and tumbling back toward the cowering bodies on the far side.

      The boat’s captain, who didn’t give much of a damn for either unions or mill owners, started hollering at them to disperse around the boat or it’d go under. He turned the wheel and hit the engines with a force he’d never before dared, and the Verona lurched away from the dock, a lopsided and badly wounded animal retreating from predators. The only people who obeyed the captain’s orders despite the bullets were Graham and a small handful of others hoping to get a closer look at the water.

      The guns were still firing but were more distant now, less threatening. Graham leaned over the railing and screamed for Tamara. Was she in the water? Was she back on the other side of the boat?

      Bodies floated beneath the dock, but none looked female. The water was so dark that the blood was completely absorbed into its deep indigo.

      There. Over there, by the dock’s farthest pylon. Long dark hair, soot-black. Hair Graham had twisted his fingers in the night before. But no, it could be a woman who’d been on the dock, could be anyone.

      Then a wave from the wake of the Verona’s quick retreat hit the body, roughly lifting it and turning its head. Graham screamed when he saw her face.

      He pulled at the rail so tightly he nearly tore it from the ship’s deck. His scream echoed over the bay, over the Sound, over every island and with more force than the earlier anthems. Folks from Everett who were blocks away from the water heard that scream, marveled about it for days. He screamed so loudly the dead surely heard him, Tamara surely heard him, screamed so loudly he wouldn’t have been able to hear her answer even if she’d had one.

      Then her face exploded. Two goons atop the dock were laughing themselves hysterical, hooting and hollering and stomping with glee as they fired round after round at the bodies floating in the water. They shot indiscriminately at every floating thing in human form, shooting the bodies of Wobblies but also shooting the occasional body of an Everett cop or vigilante, a body who only moments ago had been a man filled with pride for his town and hatred for these foulmouthed agitators and their foreign ideas about how the world should be run. One or two of those bodies had actually still been alive, but most had already been dead, and still the men fired as if they could somehow make them more dead.

      Graham’s scream was cut off by this sight. His breath too fled—he stood there gripping the rail, watching in mute shock and rage.

      The Verona pulled away with merciful speed and the scene dissolved into washes of gray and blue with streaks of red, blurring with the distance and with Graham’s tears. The sound of the engine soon overpowered that of the gunshots, of the bullets slamming into flesh and water. Graham crumpled to the deck.

      Their safety ensured by distance, the passengers on the Verona began to fan out again as the boat headed back toward Seattle. Wounded men were tended, though the death toll would increase by the time they made landfall. There were men with broken bones, men who’d slipped or been crushed as they’d fled the path of the bullets. And there were men, their eyes still wide, who had seen their comrades fall.

      Yet they all seemed to know that no one had lost as much as the man who lay in a heap by the front of the boat. His arms were wrapped around himself, his nine fingers digging into the thick muscles of his shoulders. The rest of the men kept a respectful distance, a wide circle of emptiness surrounding him.

      I will never again permit myself to be in so powerless a position, Graham had long vowed.

       Ain’t nothing a man has can’t be taken away.

      He knew that then, knew how easy it would be for home and family and love to vanish forever. He thought of the dead soldier and he pitied him, pitied the randomness of fate that had placed him on that path in front of Graham, pitied him the way he had once pitied himself. But Graham had done what was necessary to protect Amelia and Millie. He lifted his head from his hands and wiped the tears from his eyes. No one and nothing would come into this town, into his home, to do harm to his family. And even if the devil himself should ride into town on a flaming beast breathing pestilence and death, then Graham would stand at that post, look him in the eye, and shoot him down.

       VIII

      “You know what I heard?”

      What’s that?”

      “I heard that maybe the reason Mr. Worthy wanted us to close off the town is to stop workers from moving on to other jobs.”

      “What other jobs?”

      “I hear they got lotsa jobs on the coast, on account of the war. Hear they’ll pay fucking shipbuilders more than we’re making here.”

      “Nobody’s making more than we’re making here. They give you your own goddamn house at the shipyards?”

      “How do we know they don’t?”

      “I’m just saying I heard—”

      “And we heard you just fine. Hell, didn’t we all vote on this? I didn’t see you raising any ruckus that night.”

      “Just ‘cause I voted for something doesn’t mean I can’t change my mind. Ain’t a man free to do that?”

      “Ain’t much free right now.”

      “That’s my point. We ain’t free to move around and look for—”

      “Goddammit, enough. If that’s the way you’re thinking, then as soon as the fucking quarantine’s over, you can take your goddamn self out to those shipyards and see how much those military folk’ll pay you. I for one don’t buy any of that.”

      “I wasn’t saying I’m buying it. I just said I heard.”

      “Elton’s been coughin’ a lot lately.”

      “Elton’s always been coughin’.”

      “But how do we know it ain’t from the flu?”

      “Because he was coughing last year and there wasn’t any flu, and the year before that, and the year before that.”

      “But how come that—”

      “It ain’t the flu. He’s just a sick bastard.”

      “Hey, Yolen. You been by the gen’ral store this week?”

      “No. Jeanine’s fixing to go today, though.”

      “Well, get this—there ain’t no alcohol left.”

      “What?”