Stranger

by Simon Clark

  So there I sat as dusk fell. I wrote down everything I knew on this block of paper. I pushed myself so hard to explain what happened I stopped feeling the pain in my face. The water was still now after the breeze of the day. Bats dipped to take insects from just above the lake. Uphill, electricity still fed the town. People burned more lights than were necessary. But then, nighttime had taken on a more sinister edge of late.

  It wasn’t quite dark when I saw the procession of people heading toward my cabin. There must have been twenty of them. I didn’t like what I saw. Because the first person I recognized was the guy who tried to break that log over my head earlier in the day. Crowther’s face wore a grim expression. Anger burned in his eyes.

  There was nowhere to run. So I put down my paper and my pencil and went outside to see what they wanted from me.

  Six

  If looks could kill . . . That’s a phrase you’ll know well enough. When someone who hates you can’t physically touch you but the look in his eye screams, I’m going to rip your fucking head off!

  Crowther’s hate-shot eyes burned right into mine. The crowd that walked with him were mainly middle-aged or older. This was no lynch mob. They were the ruling committee of Sullivan, who were known as the Caucus. The youngest there was Lynne’s husband. He was thirty-one. I recognized Crowther’s father, looking the picture of misery.

  I came down the steps from the cabin’s veranda and waited for them to speak. They’d walked purposefully enough. Now, however, they slowed to a kind of shuffling approach, as if suddenly they no longer wanted to be here. Rose Bertholly had been a corporate lawyer before the fall. She glanced back at the others, took a breath that seemed to say, Ok, I guess it’s up to me, then: “Greg. How are you?”

  Stupid question. I’d been slammed by a hunk of maple wood.

  “How’s your face?” she asked when I didn’t answer.

  “OK. Considering.” I looked at Crowther junior. Meanwhile, Crowther senior shuffled his feet in the dirt like he wanted those feet to carry him away.

  “I won’t beat about the bush, Greg.”

  Nice choice of words, lady lawyer.

  “The Caucus met tonight. We discussed Mr. Crowther’s assault on you. We consider it unwarranted. . . .”

  That mean he didn’t have a good enough excuse to crack my skull bone?

  “It was cowardly, and we deem it a serious infringement of the rule of law in this time of national emergency.”

  Well, said, Miss Bertholly. You must have been sharp as a blade in court.

  “Greg.” She gave me a look that was seriously lawyer like. “The Caucus has agreed unanimously that Mr. Crowther is guilty of the crime of actual bodily harm against you. We feel very strongly, also, that he shouldn’t go unpunished.” She paused. “How do you respond to that, Greg?”

  “My response would be, why do you call me Greg and the guy who tried killing me, Mr. Crowther?” I looked from Crowther junior to Crowther senior. “It seems strange to me. Or is it because I crawled in here on my hands and knees just a few months ago? While the two Mr. Crowthers here are old Sullivan blood and the local neighborhood millionaires?” I jerked my head in the direction of the burnt piece of crap that Lewis had become. “See how much you can buy for a dollar across there.”

  “Greg . . . Mr. Valdiva. I apologize.” Her voice was polite, but the words came out with a glint of ice on them now. “This isn’t a court of law.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I was merely trying to be informal.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t blame you for being angry.”

  “Me? Angry?”

  “You suffered a physical assault today. It was unprovoked.”

  “Assault? If you took the hard end of the wood like I did you’d call it attempted murder.”

  “Mr. Valdiva. Mr. Crowther had maybe a few more drinks than he ought. He didn’t mean to—”

  I couldn’t stop the snort of pure disbelief shooting out of my nostrils. “Oh, I see. You’re closing ranks. It was just a bit of fun that got out of hand. See?” I tilted my head to the light shining from the cabin so she could see the crazy paving of grazes and bruising. “That’s Crowther’s little bit of fun.”

  “Hey, Valdiva.” Now it was old man Crowther’s turn. Disgust came oozing through his voice as he spoke. “Valdiva. My boy would not harm anyone without just cause. He must have been—”

  “Jim.” An old man beside Crowther senior held up a hand. “Jim, the Caucus has made its decision. Your son is guilty of assault. There’s no debate about that.”

  “The question is,” Miss Bertholly said crisply, “what will the punishment be?”

  I shrugged. “OK. So why have you come down here to discuss that?”

  There was a pause long enough to hear the cry of night birds shimmering across the water. Those men and women shifted uneasily, as if they heard the sound of ghost children calling to them from the ruins of Lewis.

  “Why have the Caucus meet here outside my house? You’ll have made up your damned minds about Crowther anyway. You going to stop ten dollars from his allowance, Mr. Crowther? Are you going to ground him for a week?” This slice of crappola had become a joke. I turned to go inside.

  “Mr. Valdiva,” Miss Bertholly said. “We—the Caucus, that is—have also decided that as you are the victim you must decide the punishment.”

  “Get away . . .” I shook my head. “You want me to fix a punishment for Crowther? Why?”

  “Because if we chose a punishment you’d only say . . .” She took a breath and selected more diplomatic words, “If you chose the punishment you would know that an adequate redress had been made.”

  “OK.” I nodded. “OK. That sounds fair enough.” I reached back to the veranda rail to grab a coil of rope that hung from a nail there. Underarm, I tossed it at old man Crowther. He caught it as it slapped into his chest.

  “I’ve decided the punishment,” I told them. “Hang him.”

  There was a silence you could have carved with a blade. Even the call of the night birds died. All I could hear was the lap of water out there in the darkness.

  “There’s a lighting rig down at the jetty. It’s a good ten feet tall. You can string him up from that.”

  Jesus, their faces. They looked as if I’d thrown a hand grenade at them. Crowther junior had arrived with a look of defiance pasted across his face. Now his eyes seemed to race from one person to another, finishing with a pleading look at his father. I looked into the eyes of the others there, especially into the eyes of Miss Bertholly the lawyer.

  “What did he say? Dad, what did Valdiva say?” Crowther’s voice came stammering out of his mouth. “Dad?” His eyes had morphed into big rolling white balls that locked tight onto the rope in his father’s hands. “Dad? D-der-does he want to hang me?”

  Gritting my teeth, I lunged forward to snatch the rope from the old man’s hands. “Go home,” I told them, angry. “Go home; it’s late.”

  With the rope in my hand I went back to the cabin, punched open the door, then crashed it shut behind me.

  I stood there with the door pressed shut by my back. Jesus . . . my hands were trembling. Sweat poured down my face, its salt getting onto my tongue. I balled my hand and rubbed it across my mouth with the back of my fist.

  “Christ. Idiots . . . You crazy idiots . . .” I looked at the rope as if it had burst into a mass of bloody tumors, then threw it from me. Because I’d read that look in their eyes. They’d have gone along with what I’d asked for. They were going to hang Crowther junior, the poor bastard.

  Sweet Jesus Christ.

  What was happening with these people?

  Seven

  “You’re kidding me, Valdiva.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Straight up?”

  “Straight up.”

  “You told them to hang the Crowther kid and they were actually going to do it?”

  I nodded as I hooked the log before pulling it out of
the lake onto the beach.

  “But you say his own father was there?” Ben’s eyes were huge. He couldn’t get his head ’round this slice of news. “He was just going to stand by and watch his own son be killed?”

  “He’d have put the noose ’round his own son’s neck if I’d demanded it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I tell you, they looked weird. If you ask me the . . . what do you call it? Trauma . . . the trauma of what’s happened to these people over the last few months has gotten to them. They’re getting desperate.”

  “Why? We’re safe enough here.”

  “For the time being.”

  “We’re damn lucky, Greg, The Caucus is publishing a report next week. They say we’ve got enough gasoline in those big storage tanks in the interchange to last ten years.”

  “Yeah, I know, and enough juice for the power plant for twenty years if they ration the electricity supply to six hours a day.”

  “And five warehouses crammed with canned foodstuff.”

  “And close on a hundred thousand gallons of beer, truckloads of whiskey and about ten million cigarettes.” I hooked another hunk of wood and started hauling in. “Yeah, everything’s peachy.”

  “Not peachy, Greg. But everything’s OK. What with the dairy herds and the poultry farms, fish from the lake and fruit from the orchards.” He sounded enthused now; words came tumbling out. “And the crops on the south end of the island, we’re self-sufficient. We can sit here for a decade and still not have to break sweat to feed ourselves. That’s going to be more than enough time for the country to get back to . . . oh, hell.”

  The “oh, hell” indicated that the piece of timber I’d been hauling wasn’t a piece of timber after all. Instead of a three-foot hunk of firewood I saw a fraying head linked to a torso. The face and eyes had gone. Whether it was a man or woman I couldn’t say. All I could say for sure was that fifty pounds of human flesh had seen better days. I pushed it back out into the lake with the pole. Gas from inside the body bubbled out, making it sink slowly out of sight.

  “Now you know why the fish get so fat these days,” I told Ben. “So you’re telling me the Caucus master plan is that we all sit tight here waiting for the government to announce that society is back to normal?”

  “There’s no point in doing anything rash.”

  I nodded across the lake at the distant hills. “You mean nothing rash like going out there and finding out for ourselves whether the country’s getting back on its feet again?”

  “You know it’s too dangerous to leave the island.”

  “You mean guys have left, but they never came back?”

  “Sure, so why risk it?”

  “Why risk it?” I hooked more wood—this time it was a window frame—and pulled it out of the water. “I figure we should satisfy ourselves that America, probably the whole world, has bellied up good and hard; then we can stop this pretense that one day the radio and TV stations will come back on air, and that the president’s going to announce everything’s hunky dory.”

  “You don’t think it’s going to happen, Greg?”

  “Do I hell. There is no president anymore. There is no government. They’re all dead.”

  So we carried on. Ben being bright-eyed and optimistic. Me? Well, I was cynical as hell. Our nation, and every other nation, without doubt, was well and truly busted. Only the men and women of Sullivan, population 4800, were still locked down with a tungstenhard case of denial. USA’s A-OK? No way, amigo. USA’s DOA.

  I liked Ben. He was one of the few guys in the town I could talk with. He was a year older than me at twenty. He liked the same music. He had the same sense of humor. When I first met him he seemed one of those super-intelligent people who towered over you and made you feel prickly, as if he were going to put you down the first time you opened your mouth and let slip you’re no Einstein. The first time we met was when the Caucus ordered him to show me ’round the island. I’d have been in Sullivan just a week at that point.

  “Of course ‘island’ is a misnomer,” he’d told me as he drove through town in a Ford.

  Misnomer? Christ, what kind of guy uses the word misnomer? I decided this bright-eyed student type with arms and a neck as thin as wires would only be my best buddy when hell developed icicles. And did you see that? I told myself as he fiddled with the car’s CD player. His hands shook like someone was running a couple of hundred volts through him. He could hardly push the buttons. His jerky fingers were all over the damn place. If he aimed to pick his nose he’d wind up with his finger in an eye. Probably not even his own.

  “Calling Sullivan an island is a misnomer,” he was saying while prodding the buttons. “You probably saw as you came in, it’s connected by a narrow strip of land to the mainland. The only road into Sullivan runs along that. If anything, Sullivan is shaped like a frying pan, with the handle forming the isthmus connecting us to the mainland. Across there is the Crowther distribution center. All those warehouses used to supply Lewis—that’s the big town, over the lake. You see, in years gone by it was easier to transport food, gasoline and general goods into Sullivan by railroad, than ship them across the lake. The terrain around here’s pretty bad for a decent road system . . . across there is the power plant. There, the building with the tall silver chimney. We’re so isolated we’ve got our own generators.”

  “They still work?”

  “Absolutely. Years ago they found pockets of orimulsion under the island.”

  “Orimulsion?” That was a new one on me; sounded like something to do with house paint.

  “Orimulsion.” He tried flicking a bug away from his face. Those trembling fingers fluttered with the speed of batwings. “Orimulsion is a naturally occurring gas that’s highly inflammable. It’s no good for domestic use. Too corrosive. It’d rot your stove to crud inside twelve months. But it’s great for industrial use. What they did was bore down into the orimulsion pocket, then simply build the power plant over the top of it. That gas is good for twenty years yet.” The bug buzzed back and his damn fluttery fingers jerked up. He was steering with one hand now, and boy, those shakes. The car started flipping side-to-side on the street. A couple of kids on bicycles were pedaling the other way. “The Caucus . . . that’s the committee that governs Sullivan . . . they ruled that in order to eke out the orimulsion stock we shouldn’t squander electricity, so . . .” He tried flicking the insect from his face, only those trembling fingers were going all over the place. He even knocked the rearview mirror. And, Christ, those kids. They were going to be road meat in ten seconds flat. I flicked the bug against the windshield, where I crushed it under my knuckle.

  “Good shot,” he said, then carried on, happily talking about what a brilliant job his hometown was making of what must have been the biggest disaster this side of Noah’s flood. “So they decided to ration electricity to six hours a day, running from six in the evening until midnight. You see, dark evenings are bad for morale, so if we keep the power going for lighting and home entertainment people can watch movies on tape and disk and so on.”

  At last his trembling finger hit the play button. At that moment electric guitar sounds soared from the speakers. A driving bass pumped loud enough to shake the car.

  “Hendrix!” He nodded to the rhythm as he drove. “This is gold . . . pure gold.”

  We drove out of town and past fields where cows chewed their cud. He waved to a woman walking her dog. A rat-sized thing on the end of a leash that wore a tartan coat.

  “That’s Miss Bertholly. She’s a big cheese on the Caucus.” He looked at me. “She’s a real iceberg in pants; don’t let her order you ’round.”

  Then he flashed me a wide friendly grin. Something gave way inside me. I don’t know what. Because for the last few days I’d been wearing a face engraved out of granite, or as good as. I’d not cracked a single smile since I’d buried my sister and mom out on the bluff. Suddenly I felt this big object moving through me and didn’t know what the hell it was. Then it c
ame out, and I was making this weird braying sound.

  Jesus. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror that Ben’s jerky hand had knocked to face me. There I was with my black hair sticking up in wild spikes, my dark eyes glistening, and I realized I was laughing. It wasn’t as if Ben had said the wittiest line in the world. But it uncorked a hell of a lot of emotion pent up inside me. Now I was laughing so hard I thought my guts would rip out through my skin.

  Ben looked at me with a grin. Before you knew it, he was laughing, too.

  So roaring like a pair of madmen we cruised around the island that wasn’t really an island, while all the time Hendrix’s guitar blazed from the speakers like the cosmos itself had found its own voice and begun to sing.

  After that I’d go out for a beer or two with Ben, or we’d hang out with a few like-minded souls.

  Ben had one of these brains that people describe as lively and inquiring. He’d been hot as biology student. For months he speculated about the real cause of the “disease” that infected the bread bandits.

  Often he’d air his ideas as I made my daily round, using a hook on the end of a twenty-foot pole to haul driftwood from the lake. I’d leave it there on the shore in piles, then either me or old Mr. Locksley would roll up in the truck and haul it back to my cabin, where I’d cut it up for firewood.

  “Greg,” Ben once said to me, “you know that scientists never did find bacteria or a virus that could be attributed to the disease?”

  “What?” I said, half listening as I hauled branches out of the water. “You mean old Jumpy?”

  “Jumpy.” He grinned. “That’s it, give a terrible disease a comical name and it doesn’t seem half so bad, does it?”

  “Well, Jumpy seemed to sum it up well enough. Once those bread bandits had a full-blown case they nearly jumped out of their skin. They got so they were terrified of their own shadows.”