by Jason Mott
“God’s work,” Lucille repeated. “Not the Old Testament God that parted the sea for Moses and crushed the pharaoh’s armies. No, not that God anymore. Maybe we drove that God off.”
Junior took another step back.
“Stay where you are, soldier!” Colonel Willis yelled.
“Harold, get Jacob somewhere safe,” Lucille said. Then, to Colonel Willis, “Things have got to stop. We’ve got to stop waiting for someone else, even God, to help us out of the things that we should be helping ourselves out of.”
“Don’t you move a step, Private!” Colonel Willis barked. “You will relieve Mrs. Hargrave of that weapon so that we can all go about our night peacefully.”
Junior was shaking. He stared into Lucille’s eyes, asking what to do.
“Run away, child,” she repeated in a voice she normally reserved for Jacob.
“Private!”
He reached for the gun.
Then Lucille shot him.
* * *
Lucille’s not-so-small army of Returned wasn’t as frightened by the shooting as the soldiers expected. Maybe it was because the vast majority of them had already died once in life and proven that, ultimately, death couldn’t contain them forever.
That was one possibility. But not a likely one.
They were still people, after all.
When Junior crumpled to the pavement, clutching his leg and wailing in pain, Lucille didn’t pause to tend to him as she once would have. Instead, she stepped over him and began walking directly toward Colonel Willis. Willis shouted for the soldiers at their posts to open fire. He placed his hand on the pistol on his hip but, much like Junior, was reluctant to draw on the old woman. She wasn’t like the Returned. She was alive.
So the gunshots rang out from the soldiers. Some of them found homes in the bodies of people, but most of them only in the empty air and the summer-warmed earth. Lucille marched toward Colonel Willis, gun leveled.
* * *
Before Junior was shot, Harold had scooped Jacob up into his arms and was dashing off away from the gunfire. Bellamy wasn’t far behind. He caught up to Harold and the boy shortly and, without asking, reached out and took Jacob from Harold’s arms.
“Let’s get to your mama,” Harold said.
“Yes, sir,” Jacob said.
“I wasn’t talking to you, son.”
“Yes, sir,” Bellamy said.
And the three of them raced off into the enclosed city.
* * *
What the Returned lacked in artillery, they made up for in sheer number. Even without the ones that had come to Lucille’s aid, there were still the thousands on the other side of the southern fence, still held within Arcadia. There were too many of them there watching things play out to be counted.
The soldiers seemed so few.
The Returned charged—silently, as if the whole event was not their ultimate purpose, only a scene to be performed—and the soldiers knew that ultimately their guns amounted to little more than posturing against such a crowd. As a result, the gunfire did not last very long. The Returned swelled around the knot of soldiers, consuming them like a tide.
* * *
Lucille’s army billowed ahead, quickly opening the distance between where she stood with her gun aimed at the colonel. There was the sound of yelling, the sound of people fighting and wrestling one another. It was an orchestra of chaos—passion for life on both sides of the divide.
Windows of buildings were broken. Fights raged on front lawns and in doorways as soldiers retreated in small groups. Sometimes they might gain some small advantage on account of the fact that the Returned were not soldiers, only people, and so they were afraid as people often are when faced with men with guns.
But life motivated them. They surged forward.
“You could have killed that boy,” Colonel Willis said, looking past Lucille to Junior. He had stopped yelling—resigned to the fact that he had been shot but was still alive and, for the most part, well. He only moaned and clutched his leg.
“He’ll be fine,” Lucille said. “My daddy taught me how to shoot almost before he taught me how to walk. I know how to hit what I’m aiming at.”
“This won’t work.”
“I figure it’s already worked.”
“They’ll send more soldiers.”
“That won’t undo the fact that the right thing was done today.” Lucille lowered her gun, finally. “They’ll come for you,” she said. “They’re people. And they know what you’ve done. They’ll come for you.”
Colonel Willis wiped his hands clean. Then he turned on his heel and walked away, saying nothing, headed toward town where the soldiers were scattered and, here and there, still shooting, still trying to claw back control, even as they failed at it. The Returned would not be held much longer.
Colonel Willis said nothing.
It was not long before the Wilsons arrived. They came the way a family should: Jim and Connie standing like bookends, with their beautiful children between them, protected from the world. Jim nodded at her. “I hope this wasn’t all on our account,” he said.
Then Lucille hugged him tightly. He smelled musty, as if he needed a shower, and Lucille thought that smell appropriate. It validated her. Indeed, he and his family had been mistreated. “This was the right thing,” she said to herself.
Jim Wilson was about to ask her what she meant. And she would have only waved him away and joked about the dishes he needed to do when they returned to the house. Perhaps she would have lectured him on child-rearing—playfully, of course, meaning no harm, only as the beginning of a running joke.
But a gunshot rang out in the distance and Jim Wilson trembled suddenly.
Then he fell, dead.
Chris Davis
They found him in his office, staring at a wall of monitors. He did not speak. He did not run, as Chris thought he would. He only straightened his back when they entered the room and stared them all down and said, “I did my part, nothing more.” Chris could not tell if he was asking them for forgiveness, or making some manner of excuse. The colonel didn’t seem like the type of man to make excuses.
“I don’t know what you are any more than you do,” the colonel said. “Maybe you’re like the ones in Rochester, ready to fight until you die a second time. But I don’t believe that.” He shook his head. “You’re something else. This can’t last. None of it can.” Then: “I did my part. Nothing more.”
For a moment Chris expected Colonel Willis to kill himself. It seemed dramatic enough for the moment. But when they took him, they found his gun empty and placed harmlessly atop his desk. On the monitors on the wall—where he had, for so many weeks, watched the lives and, sometimes, deaths of the Returned—there was only the image of an old black woman sitting alone on her cot.
The colonel inhaled sharply when they lifted him and began carrying him through the halls of the school. Chris wondered what the man’s imagination was doing to him.
When the door to the room opened, the boy inside—in dirty, soiled clothes—covered his eyes from the light with a trembling hand. “I’m hungry,” he said weakly.
Two of them entered the room and helped the boy out. They lifted him in their arms and carried him away from his prison. Then they placed Colonel Willis inside the room where the boy had been held for days. Before they closed the door and locked it, Chris could see the colonel looking out at the mass of Returned. The colonel’s eyes were large and filled with wonder, as if the Returned before him were spreading out to cover the entire world, filling its empty places, forever rooted in this world, this life, even after their deaths.
“Okay, then,” Chris heard the colonel say, though it was not clear to whom he was speaking.
Then they shut the door and locked it.
Eighteen
“WE’VE GOT TO stop,” Harold huffed, his lungs burning.
Even though every instinct in him told Bellamy that they should keep going—his mother was out there somewhe
re, in all this madness—he gave no protest. He needed only look at Harold’s state to know that there was no choice. He placed Jacob on the ground. The boy went to his father. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Between coughs, Harold gasped for air.
“Sit down,” Bellamy said, putting his arm around the old man. They were near a small house on Third Street. It was far enough away from the gate to keep them out of trouble. This particular part of town was quiet, as so many other people were back at the gate where everything was happening. Likely as not by now, Bellamy figured, everyone that could escape Arcadia was doing just that. Eventually this might all be empty, he thought.
The house belonged to the Daniels family, if Bellamy’s memory served him correctly. He’d made it a point of remembering as much about the town as possible, not because he ever expected any of this to happen, but only because his mother had always taught him to be a man of details.
In the direction of the gate, a single gunshot cracked.
“Thank you for helping me get him out of there,” Harold said. He looked down at his hands. “I wasn’t fast enough.”
“We shouldn’t have left Lucille,” Bellamy replied.
“What was the alternative? Stay and get Jacob shot?” He groaned and cleared his throat.
Bellamy nodded. “Good logic, I guess. It’ll be over soon, though.” He placed his hand on Harold’s shoulder.
“He’ll be okay?” Jacob asked, wiping his father’s brow as Harold went on coughing and gasping.
“Don’t worry about him,” Bellamy said. “He’s one of the meanest men I’ve ever met in my life. Don’t you know the mean ones live forever?”
Bellamy and Jacob led Harold up to the porch steps of the Daniels’s house. The house was lonely looking, squatting beneath a broken streetlight next to an abandoned lot.
Harold coughed until his hands knotted into fists.
Jacob rubbed his back.
Bellamy was standing with his eyes aimed toward the heart of town, toward the school.
“You should go tend to her,” Harold said. “Nobody’s going to bother us. The only people that had guns were the soldiers and, well, they’re a mite outnumbered.” He punctuated the promise by clearing his throat.
Bellamy continued staring in the direction of the school.
“Nobody’s concerned with an old man and a young boy right now. We don’t need you standing over us.” He reached over and put his arm around Jacob. “Ain’t that right, son? You’ll keep me safe, won’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Jacob said sternly.
“You know where we live,” Harold said. “I reckon we’ll head back to find Lucille. Things sound quiet up that way now. It’s all moved past the gate but Lucille will stay there, I imagine. She’ll wait for us.”
Bellamy turned his head sharply. He squinted in the direction of the southern gate.
“Don’t you worry about Lucille. Nothing’ll happen to that woman.” Harold laughed, but it came out heavy and filled with tension.
“We just left her,” Bellamy said.
“We didn’t leave her. We got Jacob to safety. And if we hadn’t done that, she would have shot us herself. I can guarantee that.” He pulled Jacob closer.
Off in the distance there was the sound of shouting, then silence.
Bellamy rubbed his brow. Harold noticed then that, for the first time since he’d met the man, Bellamy was sweating. “She’ll be fine,” Harold said.
“I know,” he replied.
“She’s alive,” Harold said.
Bellamy chuckled. “That’s still the question, isn’t it?”
Harold reached out and shook Agent Bellamy’s hand. “Thank you,” he said, coughing a little.
Bellamy grinned. “You’re going soft on me now?”
“Just say you’re welcome, Agent Man.”
“Oh, no,” Bellamy said. “I’m dragging this one out. If you’re going to get all soft and cuddly on me, I want to take a picture. Where’s my cell phone?”
“You’re an ass,” Harold replied, suppressing his laughter.
“You’re welcome,” he said brightly after a pause.
With that the two men parted ways.
* * *
Harold sat with his eyes closed, focusing on opening the distance between himself and that damned cough that didn’t seem to want to let go. He needed to figure out what to do next. He could feel that something else was left to take care of before it was all over, something horrible.
All his talk about knowing Lucille was okay was just that: talk. He wanted very much to see for himself that she was okay. He felt guiltier than Bellamy about leaving her there. He was her husband, after all. But he reminded himself that it was for Jacob’s safety. Lucille herself had told him to do it. It made sense. With all those guns and all those people and all that fear, there was no way to tell what might have happened. That was no place to stand holding your child.
If things had been reversed, if he’d been the one standing out there and it had been Lucille standing on the other side of those soldiers, he would have wanted her to grab the boy and take off running.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Jacob? What is it?” Harold still desperately wanted a cigarette, but his pockets were bare. He folded his hands between his knees and stared out at the city of Arcadia, which had grown deathly quiet.
“You love me, don’t you?”
Harold flinched. “What kind of fool question is that, son?”
Jacob pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs and said nothing.
* * *
They made their way through the town carefully, slowly heading back to the gate. They passed other Returned now and again. There were still so many people within the walls of the town, even though many had escaped into the countryside.
Harold tried to move surely, without sending his lungs into a panic. Now and then, Harold talked of whatever stray thing crossed his mind. Mostly he talked of Arcadia. Of how it was “back then”—when Jacob had been alive. It seemed very important to him just now to take notice of how much things had changed over the years.
The empty lot next to the Daniels’s place hadn’t always been empty. Back then, when Jacob was alive, it was where the old ice-cream shop stood, until sometime in the seventies, when it finally went under around the time of the oil crisis.
“Tell me a joke,” Harold said, squeezing Jacob’s hand.
“You’ve heard them all,” Jacob replied.
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re the one who told them to me.”
Harold’s shortness of breath was gone now and he was beginning to feel better. “But I’m sure you’ve got some new ones.”
Jacob shook his head.
“What about some you’ve seen on TV? Maybe some you heard somebody else tell?”
More head shaking.
“What about the kids back when we were staying in that art room with Mrs. Stone? Kids always have jokes to tell. They must have told you a few before things got all crowded over and whatnot—and before you had to beat them up.” He smirked.
“Nobody’s taught me any new jokes,” Jacob said flatly. “Not even you.”
He released Jacob’s hand and the two of them walked with their arms swinging. “Okay, then,” Harold said. “I suppose we need to try.”
Jacob smiled.
“So what should our joke be about?”
“Animals. I like jokes about animals.”
“Any particular animal in mind?”
Jacob thought for a moment. “A chicken.”
Harold nodded. “Good, good. Lots of rich territory with chicken jokes. Male chicken jokes in particular—but don’t let those get back to your mother.”
Jacob laughed.
“What did the mittens say to the hand?”
“What?”
“I’ll always glove you.”
* * *
By the time they neared Arcadia’s southern gate,
the father and his son had their joke—and a working philosophy of joke-telling—together.
“So what’s the secret to it?” Jacob asked.
“Delivery,” Harold answered.
“What about delivery?”
“Tell the joke like you know it.”
“Why?”
“Because if you sound like you’re making the joke up, then nobody wants to hear it. Because people always think a joke is funnier if they think it’s been told before. People want to be a part of something,” Harold finished. “When people hear a joke—and we’re talking about prepared jokes—they want to feel like they’re getting ushered into something bigger than they are. They want to be able to take it home with them and tell their friends about it and bring them into the joke, too. They want to make those around them a part of it.”
“Yes, sir,” Jacob said happily.
“And if it’s really good?”
“If it’s really good, it can keep going.”
“That’s right,” Harold said. “Good things never die.” Then, with a suddenness, without even time enough to tell their joke once more, they were at the southern gate, as if they had been wandering aimlessly—just a father and a son sharing time alone—and not headed back to where everything had happened, back to where Lucille was, and to where Jim Wilson lay.
* * *
Harold made his way through the scrum of Returned surrounding Jim Wilson with Jacob in tow.
Jim looked peaceful in death.
Lucille was kneeled beside him, weeping and weeping and weeping. Someone had stuffed a jacket or some such thing beneath his head and placed another over his chest. Lucille held one of his hands. His wife, Connie, held the other. Thankfully, someone had taken the children away.
Here and there, small pockets of soldiers sat together, unarmed and surrounded by Returned. Some had been tied with makeshift restraints. Others, knowing a lost cause when they saw one, sat without restraint and only watched in silence, offering no further resistance.
