The Last Town on Earth. Thomas Mullen

kept getting louder, and right when Philip was going to ask if he was all right, Graham swallowed. Held his breath and then swallowed that last bit of air, as if completely digesting the scene before him, the act he had just committed. When he started breathing again, he sounded almost normal.

      A few seconds passed.

      “We’re gonna have to talk to Doc Banes,” Graham said. Suddenly his voice was steady and serious, unlike his earlier cries. He might as well have been speaking about the condition of some of the machinery in the mill.

      “I … I think he’s dead.” Philip’s voice cracked.

      “Of course he’s dead!” Graham snapped, turning to face Philip for the first time. His eyes were furious, and Philip backed off a step. Then Graham’s eyes returned to the body, and he paused for a moment.

      “We should find out how long we need to stay away from the body before we can bury it,” he said. “I don’t know if dead bodies can still be contagious, and if so, for how long. We’ll have to ask Doc Banes.”

      Philip nodded, slowly. Despite the wind, the rifle no longer felt cold in his damp hands.

       II

      The residents of Commonwealth had blocked the road and posted the sign one week earlier, the morning after a town meeting at which Philip Worthy was the youngest attendee.

      He had sat there beside his parents in the front row of the fir-scented town hall, a building that had served many roles in the two years since its construction: a church on Sunday afternoons; a dance hall on the first Friday night of each month; a bazaar where the town ladies sold or traded quilts, blankets, and other crafts a few times a year; and a makeshift school until the growing number of children in Commonwealth had necessitated the construction of a schoolhouse next door. Philips right knee bounced nervously as more men and women filed into the building. It had been cold when they had arrived in the early-evening darkness, but already it had grown warm in the room as people traded rumors and worries, the shuffle of feet and the twitches of fear.

      Philip felt awkward at this meeting of adults, as if his presence would be questioned. But Charles had insisted, saying that as “a man of the mill,” Philip had an obligation to let his voice be heard on so vital a matter. Philip turned his head to look for Graham in the packed hall, but he couldn’t see his friend in the thick forest of faces.

      Although Philip felt honored to be working in the mill office with Charles, he suspected the loggers and millworkers resented his easy ascension and looked down on him for his limp, for the wooden block in his left boot. He assumed they thought he wasn’t cut out for the arduous labor that kept the town running, that fed everyone and kept them alive out here in the wilderness.

      His adopted mother, Rebecca, looked at him and smiled shortly, and he realized he must have been showing his nerves. He sat a bit taller in his chair and stopped bouncing his knee. She reached out and squeezed his hand, then let it go. Her smile seemed forced. The look in her light blue eyes was watchful, as ever.

      “How do you think people are going to react?” Philip asked her quietly.

      She shook her head, some gray tendrils falling from her hastily arranged bun. Rebecca had been to countless suffrage and political meetings, not only in Commonwealth but also in Timber Falls, in Seattle, and in dozens of towns and cities along the coast. She practically had been raised on such gatherings, accompanying her father, Jay Woodson, a fecund intellectual who had written tomes little read by any but the far-left intelligentsia, provocative disquisitions on the country’s coming economic collapse. Rebecca’s father had passed away before she married Charles, but she had done her part to build upon her father’s legacy, spearheading suffrage groups, antiwar organizations, and now this: the town of Commonwealth, a new hybrid of socialist haven and capitalist enterprise. And yet tonight’s meeting was less about politics than survival.

      “I don’t know,” she admitted to Philip. “We’ll see.”

      Graham sat several rows behind the Worthys, having arrived only a few minutes before the meeting was to start. Amelia had stayed at home with the baby—she was more tired than usual on account of her being two months pregnant, a fact the couple hadn’t yet revealed to their friends. He rubbed at his neck, the air too hot now that the room was filled to bursting, the movable wooden pews lined with men and women, the walls covered with people leaning, shifting their weight from foot to foot.

      Finally, Rebecca whispered to her husband that he should get things started. Sometimes Charles still seemed uncomfortable in his role as head of the mill and de facto leader of the town, she noticed. All those years as the silent bookkeeper in his family mill, years of being overshadowed by his fast-talking older brothers and the domineering patriarch, had been difficult for him to overcome. He had learned how to emerge from the low expectations of others, had become an eloquent spokesman, rallying the faith of a town, but sometimes he needed his wife to remind him of this. Charles nodded without looking at her and stood up.

      Charles’s hair and beard had gone completely white over the last few years. He was tall and had the broad shoulders of a lumberjack despite the fact that he had spent all his days inside an office. Anyone could have looked at his fingers and seen that they were too free of blemishes, his palms too soft. At fifty-two, he was one of the oldest residents in this town of workingmen, and his eyes were calm and benevolent. His white collared shirt and gray flannel pants were slightly worn in places that he had either failed to notice or chosen not to concern himself with.

      He was followed to the podium by Dr. Martin Banes, the town’s sole medical authority, and as the two men looked out at the packed hall, voices quieted without a single raised hand or throat clearing. It occurred to Charles as he opened his mouth to speak that he had never heard so many adults so quiet. He stayed silent for an extra second or two, the first invisible syllable hiding somewhere beneath his tongue.

      Charles was not the town mayor or its pastor, as Commonwealth lacked either civic or religious leaders. But the town was in many ways his creation, the realization of a dream he and Rebecca had shared years ago while suffering through the Everett general strike, its violence and madness.

      Charles had been twenty-four when his father, lured to the great Northwest by stories of endless forests of Douglas fir, had uprooted his family from their home in Maine in 1890. Charles’s mother and his younger brother had been buried less than a year earlier, taken by that winter’s brutal pneumonia, and Reginald Worthy insisted that this new endeavor was exactly what he and his remaining sons needed. Their destination was the new town of Everett, established just north of Seattle with a well-situated port that, people said, would soon become the Manhattan of the Pacific.

      The first years had been torture. Charles would remember with a pained wistfulness the busy streets of Portland—to say nothing of the crowded shops and festive parks of Boston—as he walked past newly constructed houses that looked like a strong gale might knock them down, the taverns whose floors were still covered with inches of sawdust, the streets thick with mud. And the stench of the place—the cows that townspeople kept in their yards as insurance against hard times, the sweat of the millworkers and loggers and carpenters, the poor experiments with plumbing. That far-western outpost of America was decades behind the New England that Charles sorely missed; it felt less like they had crossed the country and more like they had crossed back in time, slogging away in the preternatural darkness of a city without streetlights.

      All the more reason to work ceaselessly, trying to forget the world around him by focusing only on what his father wanted him to master: the numbers, the cost of acreage, the price of lumber and the price of shingles, the pay of the millworkers. While his father and his elder brothers did the hobnobbing and the wooing, Charles remained at his desk in his small office, where the sounds of the mill would have made concentration difficult for a man less single-minded.

      Still, to Charles, the great family narrative of amassing staggering wealth was a tainted one. He had never been comfortable with the way his family and all their rivals inflated