by Jason Mott
He entered the house and walked slowly to his bedroom. His wife lay sleeping in a small ball in the center of the bed.
This will hurt her terribly, he thought.
She would be awake soon. She always awoke early. He placed a small note on the bedside stand and thought briefly of kissing her.
He decided against it and left.
* * *
She awoke to an empty house. Out in the hallway the grandfather clock was keeping time. The sun pushed in through the blinds. It was already a warm morning. It would be a hot day, she thought.
She called out to her husband and he did not answer her back.
He must have fallen asleep in the study again, she thought. He was falling asleep in his study a lot lately and that worried her. She was about to call out to him again when she saw the note on the bedside stand. Very simply written in his rough handwriting was her name.
He wasn’t the type to leave notes.
She did not cry when she read it. She only cleared her throat, as if she could say something back to the words. Then she sat there listening only to the sound of her own breathing and the mechanical heartbeat of the grandfather clock in the hallway. She thought of her father. Her eyes were wrapped with tears, but still she would not cry.
The words looked blurry and far away, seeming to rise up through a heavy mist. But still, she read them again:
“I love you,” the letter said. And then, below that, he had written, “But I have to know.”
Jim Wilson
Jim didn’t understand any of it. Not the soldiers, not the role Fred Green had played in everything. In Jim’s memory, Fred Green had always been likable enough. The two of them hadn’t been friends per se, but only because they’d never worked together and they spent their time in different circles. They’d just never had time to become friends, Jim thought. But how could that cause this current state of things? Jim wondered.
He was a prisoner now. Soldiers had come for him and taken him and his family away at gunpoint and, somehow, Fred Green had been there, watching. He pulled up behind the soldiers in his old pickup truck and just sat there in the cab while Jim and Connie and the kids were led from the house in handcuffs.
What had changed in Fred? The question kept Jim up at night. If he’d thought far enough ahead to answer that question sooner, maybe they wouldn’t all be imprisoned now.
Jim stood in the crowded school with his family huddled around him, all of them waiting in line for the lunch that would fail to satiate, as it always did. “What happened to him?” Jim asked his wife. It was something he’d asked her before, but all the answers she had given him thus far hadn’t done much to solve the riddle. And Jim had come to find that a riddle—even a dark one like Fred Green—was a good way to take his mind off what was happening to his family. “He wasn’t always this way.”
“Who?” Connie replied. She wiped Hannah’s mouth, which was perpetually chewing on things since they’d been arrested…detained…whatever the word for it was. Fear manifested itself in strange ways, she knew. “You’re too old to be acting like a toddler,” she scolded.
Tommy wasn’t as much trouble, fortunately. He was still frightened over how they were taken from the Hargraves’s house. He didn’t have the energy to misbehave. Mostly he just sat quietly, not speaking much and seeming very far away.
“I don’t think he used to be this way,” Jim said. “What changed? Did he change? Did we? He seems dangerous.”
“Who are you talking about?” Connie asked, frustrated.
“Fred. Fred Green.”
“I heard his wife died,” Connie said flatly. “I hear he wasn’t the same after that.”
Jim paused. When he thought hard enough, he was able to find a handful of memories of Fred’s wife. She was a singer, and a damned good one. He remembered her as tall and slender, like some grand and beautiful bird.
Jim took stock of his family. He looked them over, suddenly aware of all they were, suddenly aware of all they meant, all that anyone could mean to someone else. “I suppose that can happen,” he said. Then he leaned over and kissed his wife, holding his breath as if it could hold the moment, as well, as if this single kiss could keep his wife and family and everything he loved from ever coming to harm, from ever leaving him alone.
“What was that for?” Connie asked when their lips finally separated. She was flush and felt a little dazed, the way she had felt when they were younger and kissing each other was still new to them.
“For everything I don’t know how to say with words.”
Fifteen
HAROLD WAS NOT so bold to say that he had taken a liking to the young soldier, but he was willing to go so far as to say that he saw something of merit in the boy. Or, if not merit, something familiar. And in a world in which the dead did not stay dead, familiarity in any form was a blessing.
It was the same young man he had met on the morning of the riot—just over a week ago now—and that had bonded them. When the dust settled that day, somehow, no one had been seriously injured. Just a fair amount of scrapes and bruises from where the soldiers went in and wrestled people to the ground. One person, Harold had heard, needed to be taken to the hospital due to an allergic reaction to the tear gas. But even they had been okay.
It all seemed distant now, as if it had happened years ago. But just like many things that happened in the South, Harold knew that the wounds hadn’t really healed. They had only been covered up by the heat and perpetual “Sirs” and “Ma’ams” of the locals.
People were still wound too tightly.
* * *
Harold sat on a wooden stool beside the barbed-wire-adorned fencing called “the Barricade.”
The Barricade had grown at a hideous and terrifying rate. It snaked out from the south end of town where Long’s Gas, Guns and Gear sat, old and decrepit, and it kept going, cutting through yards, butting up against houses now and again that were no longer houses, but outposts for soldiers. It wrapped around the entire town—encompassing the stinking, ruined school, encircling a great many houses and stores, encapsulating the fire department building and the sheriff’s office, which were one and the same. The Barricade, propped up by the soldiers and their guns, took in everything.
Only those houses beyond the town proper—those people who were farmers or simply leery of living in cities like Harold and Lucille, the preacher and a few others—lay beyond the reach of the fences. Inside the town, people were living in the houses like dormitories. The school had just been pressed too hard, so the townspeople were moved out of their homes and set up in hotels over in Whiteville. Then the soldiers went into their homes and set up cots and made it generally livable for the Returned that would be sleeping there. There was all manner of uproar put on by the townspeople forced to move, but Arcadia wasn’t the only town this was happening in and America wasn’t the only country.
There were just too many people in the world all of a sudden. Concessions for life had to be made.
So now the town and houses of Arcadia were completely consumed by the event, by the fencing and the soldiers and the Returned and all the complexity and promise of tension that came with it.
But the town of Arcadia was never meant to hold many. Whatever small relief that came with expanding outward from the school dissipated as quickly as it materialized. Even with the whole town being consumed, there was no peace.
For his part, Harold was just happy he and Lucille had made the decision so long ago to live outside of town. He couldn’t imagine having his house taken over and dished out to strangers, even if it was the right thing to do.
Beyond the Barricade surrounding Arcadia proper lay a twenty-foot swath of open space that ended at the exterior fencing. Soldiers were placed at hundred-yard intervals. Sometimes they actually went about the business of patrolling both the Barricade and Arcadia. When they did walk through the town, they clustered together into groups, carrying their guns along the same streets where children once played. They
were stopped by people and asked about the general state of things—not only in Arcadia, but in the world—and when they might change.
They did not often answer these questions.
But mostly the soldiers only stood—or sometimes even sat—at the Barricade, looking either very detached or very bored, depending on the lighting at that particular moment.
The young soldier that had caught Harold’s interest was called “Junior.” The name, expectedly, was a bit of a mystery because the boy, from what he told Harold, had never known his father and they didn’t share a name. His real name was Quinton, the boy said, but as far back as he could remember, he had been called “Junior” and that seemed to him just as fair a name as any other.
Junior was clean-cut and eager to please, all that the military could want from a recruit. He had made it to the end of his teenage years and into a soldier’s uniform without ever having pierced his ear or gotten a tattoo or done anything else particularly rebellious with his life. His joining the military was done at the behest of his mother. She had told him that the military was the place that all true men eventually went. So when he was seventeen and a half and had skated through high school, his mother drove Junior down to the recruiter’s office and signed him up.
His test scores hadn’t impressed anyone. But he could stand and he could hold a gun and he could do as he was told, which is what he did most of the day now as he stood guard in a town swollen with Returned. And now, of late, he’d found himself more and more in the company of a bitter old Southerner and his previously deceased son. The Southerner Junior could tolerate; it was the boy, always at his father’s heels, that Junior didn’t care for.
“How much longer they going to keep you here?” Harold asked from his wooden stool behind the Barricade. He spoke to Junior’s back, which was how most of their conversations were conducted. In the distance behind Harold, just beyond earshot, Jacob sat and watched his father speak to the soldier.
“Not sure,” Junior said. “I suppose as long as they keep you here.”
“Well,” Harold said in a tired drawl, “I reckon it won’t be as long as it has been. There’s only so long these types of conditions can persist. Somebody’ll figure out a plan, if only for the grace of the roosters.”
Harold had been making up expressions for Junior’s sake for days now, the more bizarre the better. It was surprisingly easy, just a matter of tossing some reference to farm animals, weather or landscape into an enigmatic arrangement. And if Junior ever asked what the strange expression meant, Harold would make up the meaning right there on the spot. The game, for Harold, was remembering which expressions he had already made up and what they meant, and then trying not to duplicate them.
“What the hell does that mean, sir?”
“Well, good Lord! Ain’t you never heard ‘grace of the roosters’ before?”
Junior turned to face him. “No, sir, I haven’t.”
“Well, I can’t hardly believe that! If I live to grow potato roots from m’ feet I won’t hardly ever believe that, son!”
“Yes, sir,” Junior said.
Harold killed his cigarette on the heel of his shoe and slapped the half-empty pack for another. Junior watched him. “You smoke, son?”
“Not on duty, sir.”
“I’ll save one for ya,” Harold said in a whisper. He lit his cigarette with flair and pulled in long and slow. In spite of the pain, he made it look easy.
Junior looked up at the sun. It was hotter here than he had expected when his orders came in. He’d heard all the stories about the South and, for certain, it got hot enough in Topeka. But here, in this town, in this place, the heat seemed well-settled. It was hot every day.
“Can I ask you something?” Harold asked.
He hated it here. That much Junior was sure of. But at least the old man was fun.
“Ask away,” Junior said.
“What’s it like out there?”
“It’s hot. Same as it is in there.”
Harold smiled. “No,” he said. “The TVs and computers are all gone in here. What’s it like out there?”
“That’s not our fault,” Junior said before he could even be accused. “It’s just orders,” he said.
There was a small patrol coming. Just a pair of soldiers from California who seemed to always wind up on duty at the same time. They came marching up the way they usually did and nodded and passed without taking much notice of Junior and the old man.
“It’s strange,” Junior said.
“What’s strange?”
“Stuff.”
Harold smiled. “We gotta work on your words, son.”
“It’s just…it’s just that everyone’s confused.”
Harold nodded.
“Confused and afraid.”
“Imagine how it is in here.”
“It’s different,” Junior said. “In there, things are more controlled. People are getting fed. You’ve got clean water.”
“Finally,” Harold said.
“Okay,” Junior said. “I’ll admit it took us a while, but we got the logistics worked out. But it’s still better in there than it is out here. After all, everyone that’s inside there chose to be in there.”
“I didn’t.”
“You chose to stay with it,” Junior said, nodding at Jacob—the boy was still sitting quietly just beyond earshot as Harold had told him to do. He wore a striped cotton shirt and jeans that Lucille had brought him weeks ago. He only watched his father, now and again stopping to look off at the shimmering steel of the Barricade. His eyes followed it, as if not able to fully understand how it came to be there around the town and exactly what it meant.
Junior looked over Jacob. “They offered to take it away from you,” he murmured, “but you chose to stay with it, just like all the rest of the True Living in there. It was a decision you all made, so you don’t have any reason to be scared or nervous or confused. You’ve all got it easy.”
“You must not have seen the toilets in here.”
“There’s a whole town in there.” He returned his attention to Harold. “Plenty of food, water—everything you people could need. There’s even a baseball field.”
“Baseball field’s full up with people. Camped out in tents. It’s a shantytown.”
“And then there’s the Renta-Johns.” He pointed back behind Harold into the direction of a string of blue-and-white standing rectangles.
Harold sighed.
“You think this is bad,” Junior said. “This is nothing compared to what’s happening in some other places. A buddy of mine is stationed in Korea. It’s the small countries that have it the worst. Big countries have places to put them. But Korea—Korea and Japan—they’re having it hard. There’s just not enough room to put everyone.
“There are these tankers,” Junior said in a low voice. He spread his arms wide, with his pale hands as bookends, indicating something of very great size. “They’re almost as big as oil tankers. They’re just full of them.” He looked away. “There’s just so many.”
Harold watched his cigarette burn away.
“There’s just too many of them and everybody’s catching hell for it,” Junior said. “Nobody can keep up. Nobody wants them back. A lot of the time nobody even calls to say they’ve found a new one. People just let them wander the streets.” Junior spoke through the fencing. Even with the seriousness of what he was saying, he seemed indifferent to it all. “We call them ‘dead barges.’ The newspeople call them something else. But they’re really just dead barges. Cargo holds full of the dead.”
Junior kept talking, but Harold was not listening. He saw in his mind a large, dark ship drifting unguided over a flat, unreflecting ocean. The hull grew up from the water, as much liquid as steel and rivets and welds. It was something out of a horror movie, this doomed ship traversing this doomed sea. Aboard the ship, stacked one atop the other, each one darker and heavier than the one below it, all of them pressing down upon one another like anvils
, were cargo containers. Each one cluttered with the Returned. Now and then the ship would move, tilted forward or backward by some unseen swelling of ocean. Still the Returned remained unmoved and unconcerned. Harold could see thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Crowded into these dark, hard shipping containers, being shoved over the earth.
In his mind Harold looked down upon them from a great distance, able to take in the sight of each and every one of them in a wholeness and completeness that only the world of dreams can afford. He saw everyone he had ever known somewhere in this Fleet of the Dead, including his son.
A chill struck him.
“You should see them,” Junior said.
Before Harold could reply the coughing began. He was not aware of much after that. He only knew that he was in a great deal of pain and, very suddenly—just like before—the sun was standing above his face and the earth had come and nuzzled up gently against his back.
* * *
Harold awoke with that same feeling of distance and unease he had the last time this happened. His chest hurt. There was something wet and heavy inside his lungs. He tried to inhale but his lungs would not work as they should. Jacob was there beside him. Junior, as well.
“Mr. Harold?” Junior said, kneeling.
“I’m fine,” Harold said. “I just need a minute, is all.” He wondered how long he’d been unconscious. Long enough for Junior to make it to one of the gates and get inside the fencing to try and help. His rifle was still slung over his shoulder.
“Dad?” Jacob asked, his face tight with unease.
“Yes?” Harold said in an exhausted croak.
“Don’t die, Dad,” Jacob said.
* * *
There were plenty of bad dreams to go around these days. Lucille had all but given up on sleeping. She had gotten so far removed from normal nights that she hardly missed them. She remembered sleep in a vague and distant way, the way one misses the sound of the car they rode in during their childhood—sometimes hearing its timbre in the murmur of distant highways.
