by Joe Hill
Paper cups had been set along the fencepost. They contained what looked like orange Gatorade.
Nick picked it up, sniffed at it, glanced at Harper for permission. She nodded that it was all right to drink.
“What if it’s poison?” Allie asked.
“There’s easier ways to kill us,” Harper said. “They could just shoot us. Who wants to bet that man watching from the second floor has a gun?”
Allie darted a surprised look back at the farmhouse. A lantern-jawed man with raven-black hair—graying at the temples, swept back from his high brow—regarded them from a window above and to the right of the front door. His gaze was dispassionate and unblinking. Sniper eyes.
The woman watched them drink but didn’t speak. Harper thought the orange stuff might be Tang. Whatever it was, it was sweet and clean and made her feel almost human.
“Thank you,” Harper said.
The woman nodded.
Harper was about to go on, then paused and leaned over the fence. “Our friend is sick. Very sick. He needs antibiotics. Do you have antibiotics?”
The woman’s forehead wrinkled in thought. She looked at the Fireman, strapped to the travois, and back at Harper. She took a step toward the fence and opened her mouth to speak and the window on the second floor banged open.
“Keep walkin’,” the man called, and Harper was right. He had a rifle, although he didn’t point it at them, just cradled it to his chest. “You take one step our side of the fence, you won’t take another. There’s a place for people like you up north.”
“One of them is sick,” the woman called up.
Her husband laughed. “All of them is sick.”
26
All through the following morning, Harper was conscious of being observed, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes openly. An old man in a wifebeater glared at them from behind the screen door of his cottage. Three small and nearly identical boys with running noses studied them from the window of their ranch house. Nick waved. They didn’t wave back.
Another time, a black car followed them, hanging about a quarter mile back, gravel grinding under its tires. It stopped when they stopped, and when they proceeded it rolled on in their wake. Four men in it, two in front, two in back, men in flannel hunting coats and porkpie hats.
“I think they have guns,” Renée said. “Do you think we’re safe? No, don’t answer that. They say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but I believe that qualifies. We haven’t been safe in months.”
The black car kept pace with them for over an hour before suddenly accelerating, then lurching off the highway onto a narrow side road, tires throwing stones. One of the passengers hurled an empty beer can out the window, but Harper wasn’t sure he was throwing it at them. She didn’t see any weapons, but as they took the corner, a fat, ruddy-faced man in the backseat made a pistol with his hand, pointed his finger at Nick, and pulled an imaginary trigger. Pow.
Very late in the day they reached the Bucksport Trading Post, which had the look of a former stable, with a hitching post out front and window frames of wormy, untreated pine. Antlers rose above the front door. A nonfunctional Coke machine from the forties collected dust on the board porch. The dirt lot was empty, a chain hung across the entrance. A white sheet had been draped over the chain, words slapped on in black paint:
ALL HEALTHY HERE SICK GO ON
But a folding table had been set up on their side of the rusty, swinging chain. On it were paper bowls of chicken noodle soup. Paper cups of water had been arranged in a row.
The smell of the soup was enough to get Harper’s saliva glands working and her stomach tightening with hunger, but that wasn’t what really excited her. Over on one corner of the table was a bottle of some kind of pink syrup and a little plastic syringe. It was the sort of syringe you might use to orally administer medicine to a dog or a small child. The label on the bottle said ERYTHROMYCIN and gave a dosage for someone named Lucky. It had expired over a year ago and was only half full, the outside of the bottle tacky with dried syrup. Pinned beneath the bottle was a ruled sheet of notebook paper:
heard you are with invalid will this help?
Harper took the bottle in one hand and peered up at the Bucksport Trading Post. A black man in a flannel shirt, with gold spectacles resting on the end of his nose, peered back from behind a window crowded with knickknacks: a carved wooden moose, a lamp with a driftwood base. Harper lifted a hand in a gesture of thanks. He nodded, his glasses flashing, and retreated into dimness.
She gave John his first dose, squirting it into the back of his mouth, and followed with aspirin, while the others sat on the side of the road, tipping their paper bowls to their mouths to drink lukewarm soup.
An orange DETOUR FOR SICK sign pointed them west, along a winding country road, away from the town of Bucksport itself. But they paused at a wooden sawhorse (SICK DO NOT CROSS) to peer along a lane that led into town and down toward the sea. The street was shaded with big leafy oaks and lined with two- and three-story Colonials. It was late in the day and Harper could see lights on in the houses—electric lights—and a streetlamp casting a steely blue glow.
“My God,” Renée said. “We’re back in a part of the world that has power.”
“No we aren’t,” Allie told her. “That part of the world is on the other side of this sawhorse. What do you think would happen if we tried to cross?”
“I don’t know, and we’re not going to find out. We’re going to follow the signs and do what we’re told,” Harper said.
“Walk right this way,” Allie said. “Up the ramp and into the slaughterhouse. Single file, please. No shoving.”
“If they wanted to kill us, they’ve had plenty of opportunities,” Renée noted.
“Never mind me,” Allie said. “I’m just your typical jaded teenage leper.”
27
They spent the night in a public campground that had been marked specifically for the use of the infected. The dirt road in was flanked by a pair of enormous wooden heads, carved to look like noble Indian chieftains, complete with sad, wise eyes and feathered headdresses. Hung above the entrance was a banner that proclaimed SICK STAY HERE WATER FOOD TOILETS.
They slept under picnic tables, rain plopping on the wooden planks and dripping down on top of them. But there were port-a-potties, an inconceivable luxury after over a week of using rags to wipe, and John surprised Harper by sleeping through the night, his chest rising and falling deeply and his lean, lined face set in an expression of dreaming calm. He woke just once, when she put the syringe in his mouth to give him another squirt of the antibiotic, and even then he only made a small sound, an amused sort of snort, and slipped away again.
They stayed in the campground most of the morning, waiting for the rain to pass. It quit around lunch and the afternoon was fine for walking. A cool breeze shushed in the big-leafed oaks. The daylight glittered on every wet surface, made spiderwebs into nets studded with diamonds.
They followed THIS WAY SICK signs north and east—mostly north—past forest and lake. Once they passed a folding table by the side of the road where someone had set out a bowl filled with individually wrapped Oreo cookies, a steel jug with blessedly cold milk in it, and Dixie cups. There were no houses in sight. The table stood alone at the end of a dirt lane that led back into trees.
“This is fresh,” Harper said. She shut her eyes to savor an icy swallow. “It can’t have been sitting outside for long.”
“No. ’Course not. They know we’re coming,” the Fireman croaked from his stretcher.
Harper almost coughed milk up her nose.
In the next moment they were all on their knees around the travois. John looked at them from half-shut eyes, his chin bristly and his cheeks caved in from all the weight he had lost. His color was ghastly. His smile was fond but weak.
“I wouldn’t say no to some of that milk myself, Nurse Willowes,” he said. “If it won’t interfere with my recovery.”
“Not at all
. But I want you to take some aspirin with it.”
She put a hand behind his head, propping it up, and gave him slow sips from her own cup. She didn’t say a thing. For the next ten minutes, Allie and Renée were talking over each other while Nick gestured furiously with his hands, all of them trying to tell the story of the last week and a half at the same time. The Fireman looked this way and that and nodded sometimes, making a drowsy effort to attend to each of them. Harper wasn’t sure how much he was getting, although his brow furrowed when Allie told him they had left Bucksport behind that morning.
“The four of you carried me all the way to Bucksport?”
“No,” Harper said. “Just Allie.”
“Lucky your bony English ass is light,” Allie said.
“Lucky you don’t know how to quit,” John said to her. “Lucky for me. Thank you, Allie. I love you, girl.”
Allie wasn’t good at the emotional stuff. She looked away into the trees, clenching her jaw and clamping down on some intense upswell of feeling.
“Try not to get nearly killed again,” she said, when she was able to speak.
They all seemed to run out of things to say at the same time, and then there was a pleasant silence, no sound except for the swish of the cool wind in the trees and the twittering of the birds. Harper found herself holding John’s hand.
“Perhaps we can procure me a crutch,” he said. “Or fashion one. I wouldn’t like to burden you all any longer.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Harper said. “Yesterday this time, I wasn’t sure you’d live to see another morning.”
“That bad?”
“Buddy,” Harper said, “I thought you were smoked.”
“Ha ha,” he said. “Good one, Willowes.”
28
He slept through most of the next twenty-four hours, waking only to eat meals. Dinner was cold beef stew, left out on the side of the road in a deep steel pot. There were no bowls, so they took turns drinking right from the ladle.
It was rich—so rich it made Harper a little light-headed—and salty and gluey in consistency. Big carrots and buttery pieces of beef and a smoky undertaste of bourbon. Harper didn’t care that it was cold. She could not remember a better meal in all her life. John couldn’t manage the big pieces, but he was able to get down some peas and a few of the smaller bits of beef, and when he dozed off again, Harper thought his color was better.
Early on the afternoon of the following day, they found themselves at the bottom of a long rise, the sides of the road crowded with leafy oaks, so that the two-lane blacktop passed beneath a canopy of pale green. Sunlight flashed and winked through the waving branches and a dappled brightness danced across the road. It was a long, sweaty trudge to the top of the hill, but the climb was worth it. At the top, the trees parted to the right, to reveal a view that went for miles, across meadows and dense bands of forest. Harper saw grazing cows and the roofs of a few farmhouses. And beyond it all was a dark blue reach of ocean. When Harper breathed deeply, she thought she could almost smell it.
John had missed their glimpse of the sea when they crossed through Bucksport and asked Allie to turn him so he could admire the scenery. She held him tilted almost upright in the drag sled while he stared out across the fields, drenched in golden midafternoon light, and on to the deep blue water. The wind whisked his hair back from his smooth brow. Every time Harper looked at his forehead she wanted to kiss it.
“Is that a sailboat?” John said, narrowing his eyes. “Does anyone else see a sail?”
All of them stood there squinting.
“I don’t see anything,” Renée said.
“Me neither,” Harper said.
Allie pointed. “Yeah. There.”
John said, “Do you see something on the sail? A little splash of red?”
Allie peered into the distance. “Nnnoooo. Why?”
But John had turned his head and asked Nick with a few gestures what he saw. Nick nodded and replied. Harper didn’t catch it.
“What’d he say?”
“Nick’s eyes are best,” John replied, in a slightly irritating tone of satisfaction. “He sees the little splash of red too.”
“So what?” Harper asked.
“You never saw the Bobbie Shaw out on the water,” he told her. “The boat. But I did. I was out in it a time or two, the year I was a counselor at Camp Wyndham. There’s a picture of a large red crab on the sail.”
“No,” Renée said. “I know what you’re saying, John, but it can’t be Don Lewiston. It can’t. It’s been four weeks. I don’t know how long it would take to get from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Machias by sail, but not almost a month.”
“We ran into a few setbacks along the way,” he said mildly. “Maybe Don did, too.”
They stood there a while longer and then without a word Allie turned the travois and began to tramp on. One by one the others fell in behind her, until only Harper remained. Squinting hard into the distance.
There. On the very line of the horizon. A tiny white splinter against all that blue.
With a little red fleck upon it.
29
They were perhaps fifty miles from Machias the morning they found the crutch.
It was, by then, two days since John had woken and asked for a glass of milk. Allie had gone on hauling the drag sled—there was no other reasonable option—and John had rediscovered his voice, which he used to complain about being shaken and bumped. He kvetched about itches he couldn’t reach, a sore back, and the sun in his eyes.
“I liked it better when you were dying,” Allie said. “You didn’t bitch so much.”
“Look sharp, Allie. I think you missed a pothole back there. You don’t want to break up your streak of dragging me over every one.”
Allie slowed, straightened up, and stretched her back. “You want a break from me? Be careful what you wish for, smartass. You just might get one. Is that what I think it is?”
It leaned against the trunk of a great old oak, with a red bandanna tied around it so it would catch their eye: a stainless steel crutch with a yellow foam armpit pad. No note, no explanation. A white cottage stood behind a picket fence nearby, but the windows were dark. If they were being watched—Harper felt sure they were—she couldn’t tell from where.
Nick undid the bungee cords that held John to the travois and helped him up. Allie supported him while he fitted the crutch under one arm. He was testing it out, hobbling in little circles, when Harper noticed Renée blinking at tears.
“So much kindness,” Renée said. “So many people looking after us. They don’t know a thing about us except we’re in need. I read a Cormac McCarthy novel once, about the end of the world. People hunting dogs and each other and frying up babies, and it was awful. But we need kindness like we need to eat. It satisfies something in us we can’t do without.”
“Or maybe they just want us to hurry up,” Allie said. “The sooner we go on our way, the safer they are.”
“It’s hard to imagine a sinister agenda behind the food they’ve left out for us. The soup, the pitchers of milk. I just can’t imagine a secret wicked purpose behind supplying us with endless goodies.”
“Neither could Hansel and Gretel,” the Fireman said. “Shall we limp on? I think I’ll stretch my one good leg for a while.”
30
He lasted all of five minutes before he sat on the curb, white and sweaty and shaking, and agreed to climb on the stretcher again. All the talk seemed to go out of him and he bore every thump and bump with gritted teeth.
The next day, though, he crutched along with them for half an hour in the morning and another twenty minutes in the afternoon. He was better still the day after that and kept up with them for most of the A.M.
On the fourth day after they found the crutch, he hobbled along on his own power from breakfast until they broke for lunch, only resting when Harper insisted. Lunch was a selection of mushy brown cupcakes and some bologna sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. S
omeone had dropped them in a plastic shopping bag and left them dangling from a mailbox at the end of a gravel driveway. Harper unwrapped one of the sandwiches and took a whiff. It had a faintly corrupt odor, like the inside of a sneaker.
They stuck with the cupcakes—at first. But Harper carried the bag, and at some point, late in the day, found herself tucking into one of the sandwiches in spite of herself.
“I hope that doesn’t make you sick,” Renée said. “You are nine months pregnant.”
“Nine months and a week. And that’s why I’m eating it,” Harper said. “I can’t help myself.”
After the third bite, though, she was finally able to taste it, and knew it was spoiled. At first she had missed the slimy texture of the meat, and a faint but definite sour flavor that brought to mind sepsis. She spat it out and tossed what was left of the sandwich in the grass with a revulsion that approached moral horror.
She was guiltily licking bright yellow mustard off her fingertips when the Fireman said, “Hold up.”
Harper lifted her head to see what had caught his attention and saw a pair of jeeps, parked in such a way as to block both lanes of the highway, nose to nose. Two men stood in yellow rubber overalls and yellow masks with clear faceplates. Yellow booties and yellow gloves. Harper recognized it as the same outfit she had worn during her weeks as a nurse in Portsmouth Hospital. The sentinels carried assault rifles. One of them stepped forward, hand raised, palm outward. Harper wasn’t sure if this gesture meant for them to halt, or if he was simply waving hello.
Allie stopped walking, took Nick’s hand, and squeezed it to indicate he should stop as well. Renée walked past them without missing a step.
“You really think we ought to just hand ourselves over?” Allie asked.
Renée tossed a casual glance back. “Oh, Allie, we’ve been in their hands for days.”
A third man sat in one of the jeeps. He wore yellow, too, although he had his hood off, so Harper could see a full head of white hair and a big, craggy face. He had a knee on the steering wheel and a slender paperback open across his thigh. It looked like he was working a crossword.
