The Last Town on Earth. Thomas Mullen

heard some men saying someone tried to get into town.”

      Philip nodded. “Someone did. He was sick, so we made him leave—fired a couple warning shots, and he got the message.”

      That was what they’d been told to say. Charles’s idea, and the doctor had agreed. No need to worry everyone, no need to complicate things. Only the guards needed to know. Charles had told Rebecca, so maybe it was assumed that the men would tell their wives and that their hushed and conspiratorial whispers would stay in the chamber of matrimonial secrets. But Philip sure wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. That he knew.

      “How close did he get?”

      “Not close enough to make us sick.” But Philip wasn’t sure—what if he was carrying around a tiny piece of the soldier right now, in his lungs, his blood, his heart?

      “What was he doing here? He didn’t say if he was going to come back with more soldiers, did he?”

      Philip and Graham had thought this question might arise, but Charles and Doc Banes had dismissed it. So Philip chose to belittle his own concern by smiling and lightly chiding Elsie. “I really don’t think any soldiers are trying to take over our town. He didn’t look like a Heinie.”

      She smiled, even though her grandparents had come over from Germany. Her parents had assured her that the incessant anti-German comments of the day didn’t apply to them. “So who fired the shots?”

      “We both did—Graham shot one, and I shot one.” He said that quickly, twitching his head before he said it.

      “I’ve just never shot at anyone, is all.” Like many girls in Commonwealth, Elsie had fired a gun a few times, but she seemed to find the idea of firing at another person strangely thrilling.

      Philip tried to clarify the lie. “We didn’t shoot at him. We shot into the air. Just as a warning.”

      “Did he have a gun, too? He was a soldier, right?”

      Damn, you have a lot of questions, he thought. “Mustn’t’ve had one with him, I guess.”

      Elsie nodded. She planned on becoming a teacher in two years, when she finished her own schooling, and Rebecca had encouraged her to be curious and inquisitive, especially when things didn’t make sense.

      They walked on in silence. Philip’s arms were aching, but he resisted the temptation to rearrange the bags and let Elsie see he was struggling.

      “I heard in Seattle they aren’t even letting people go outside without masks on,” Elsie said. “If you don’t have a mask, the trolley won’t pick you up. You can even get arrested for it.”

      “I heard that, too. Not about the arresting, but I guess that makes sense.”

      “They’ve canceled school in most towns, and closed any other places people get together.”

      Philip nodded. “I wonder what teachers are doing, then.”

      “Getting sick, most likely. Or tending sick husbands and children.”

      “I guess we’re lucky, huh?” But as his comment hung in the air, Philip thought how strange it sounded. He’d meant lucky that the flu hadn’t invaded their town yet, but the flu was still laying siege to it, so that didn’t seem so lucky. And what had happened today sure as hell wasn’t lucky.

      She seemed to know what he’d been thinking. “It’s pretty rotten, isn’t it? First war, and now everybody sick.”

      “They say we’re winning the war.” But by the time they could get another newspaper, Lord only knew what would be happening in Europe. Were the soldiers healthy? The one from that afternoon certainly was not. Philip had a sudden image of a gray battlefield bereft of explosions or gunfire but filled with the writhing bodies of the sick and dying.

      “I know we’ll win, but still,” Elsie said. “Two rotten things happening at once. Makes you wish you could run away someplace where none of this is happening.”

      “It’s happening pretty much everywhere, I think.”

      “I know. I just wish there was someplace to escape.”

      But as they walked in silence, they came to the same strange realization: the closed-off town of Commonwealth was precisely this place. There was no war, no pestilence. People around the globe were dying, dying from flu and pneumonia and aerial bombings and bayonets, but in Commonwealth, the last town on earth, people were safe. This was the place to run to, and they were already here. All they could do was wait.

      By the time they reached his house, Philip’s hands were almost completely numb. “Well, my lady, thank you for your kind assistance.”

      “You’re welcome.” He let her pile the cornmeal atop the stack he was barely holding on to. After a brief pause, he took a quick step toward the door right as she did the same. They smiled at each other awkwardly, and he stepped back to let her open the door for him.

      “Thanks,” he said.

      “Sure. Be careful out at guard post, okay?”

      “Okay.” Their eyes locked for what felt like an uncomfortable amount of time.

      “And if something interesting happens again, you’d better come tell me about it.” She smiled again. “I don’t want to have to carry cornmeal across town just to hear all the good stories.”

      She turned and hurried off.

      Philip kicked the door shut and ran to the dining room table, dropping the bags with a heavy crash. He sat down and shook his hands to get the blood flowing.

      It was quiet in the house. He sat there for a while, thinking about Elsie but also, inescapably, about what he and Graham had done. He looked at his hands and thought of Graham’s four-fingered hand, wondering if Graham ever stayed up at night worrying that he’d lose more fingers on the job. One lost finger you could deal with, you could accept. Carry things with the other hand, learn to give an extra 25 percent of strength and dexterity to the remaining four fingers. But losing a second or third would be tougher, surely. Philip had seen many such men in Everett and Commonwealth, had caught glimpses of their horrible claws in the rare moments when they let their hands out of their pockets and exposed them to the world and the amazed gazes of children. He wondered if there was some end point, some line in the dirt, some amount of pain and suffering beyond which one could never continue.

      Philip sat there and massaged his sore arms with his numb fingers, waiting for the feeling to return.

       V

      The body only felt light because six of them were lifting it. On the doctor’s orders, they’d waited exactly twenty-four hours, unsure whether Banes had cold hard science as his reason or if he was just superstitious. Maybe this was how you were supposed to bury vampires or the possessed to make sure they wouldn’t rise again.

      Philip had left the mill office to come down there, though Charles had told him he didn’t need to. He had dreamed of the soldier the night before and had been thinking of him all day, and he knew it would have been wrong to run from this last duty.

      The other gravediggers were men who, in addition to their jobs as loggers and millworkers, were serving the town as guards: Rankle, Mo, Deacon, and Graham.

      “Vultures didn’t get to it,” someone remarked.

      “Deacon wouldn’t let them,” Rankle said softly.

      Deacon just nodded.

      “You shoot at the vultures?” asked Mo.

      Deacon shook his head. “They stayed away,” he said in his raspy voice.

      Indeed, Deacon, with his gaunt cheeks and flimsy limbs and coal-black eyes, looked like a scarecrow brought to wicked life.