by Chloe Garner
“Few black eyes in the lot?” Sarah asked. Thomas nodded.
“The low guys. The skinny ones and the ones…”
He paused, looking in his mind for what they’d all had in common.
“The ones what don’t belong here?” Sarah asked.
Thomas sighed.
“That isn’t it. I mean, I do wonder how men like that ended up here, but it isn’t that they don’t belong. They’re smart, some of them, and… I guess they’re the ones like me. The rest of them are like the rest of the Lawsons, but the ones who are like me…”
“All right,” Sarah said, and he nodded.
“Anyway, the weaker guys who couldn’t stand up for themselves, and the ones who didn’t have a name over them, they kept showing up to take the meals, and I was fine with it… I mean, I wasn’t fine with it, it wasn’t fair, but we had soap and they all washed after they’d been in the sick rooms, and it wasn’t like anyone was bleeding to death. They were just getting weaker and weaker. They ate less… there at the end…” He shook his head. “But even if they caught it, Doc would fix them, after the water went back down. No one was going to die. So if it kept the peace…”
“You let it happen,” Sarah said. He nodded.
“I don’t know if I was right or not, but I can’t say I would have done anything else, even looking back.”
Sarah nodded.
“Anyway, Rich found out, and he blew a gasket. Said that anyone who had a job that a Lawson told them to do, they had better well do it, or else there’d be consequences.”
Sarah could just picture Rich makin’ a speech, ‘long those lines, though he’d ‘a gone on a bit longer, and been a bit more specific.
“That was when it got bad, I think,” Thomas said. “I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?” Sarah asked. “What don’t you know?”
“I was still working with the sick crew,” Thomas said. “More men were getting sick, and we were getting busier, and I kind of lost track of what was going on with Rich and Wade in the common room, but the sick crew… the guys who were trying to make sure everyone got fed and that the rooms were…”
Sarah pressed her mouth, identifyin’ the sick rooms in her mind easy enough.
“Well, we weren’t very good at it, but we tried,” Thomas said. “The sick crew kept… I don’t know. It was like, the angrier everyone got, the more beat up my guys were getting, and I didn’t see it until late, that they weren’t just getting picked on because everyone was bored.”
“What was going on?” Sarah asked.
“Men were locking themselves in their rooms and demanding that someone bring their meals,” Thomas said. “They didn’t want to get sick. And Rich and Wade said that anyone who wanted food had to come get it from the common room, and they put down hours for meals, and if you weren’t there on time… You didn’t eat. I kept my guys fed, even when we worked through meals, and Rich was… Anyway, that doesn’t matter.”
“They were gettin’ pounded on ‘cause you were takin’ special care of ‘em,” Sarah said. Thomas paused.
“I… didn’t see that.”
Sarah shook her head.
“You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t ever think to be angry someone else was eatin’ regular.”
“Maybe I would, if I hadn’t had Jimmy looking out for me, all this time.”
Sarah shook her head.
“Don’t sell yourself short, like that.”
He shrugged.
“I’m not sure I am, after this. Anyway. Guys started taking double portions of toiletries and stuff, when we had them out, and rooms were stockpiling them, trying to figure out how to lock down and keep the sickness out. Thing is, it didn’t hit rooms, you know? You’d think four guys living together like that, they’d get sick at once, but that’s not how it went… I don’t know. I was trying to figure it out, but it just kept happening, and it was so much work… Rich and Wade started auditing rooms to make sure that no one had more than they needed, and then there was the curfew…”
Sarah shook her head.
“Not enough of you for that much control,” she said. “Mistake. Even with guns.”
He nodded.
“I wish I could tell you how it started. I was asleep, and I heard guns. In the supply room next door. When I got there… Rich was already gone and Wade was yelling about everyone going back to bed or they’d just shoot them all. There had been a big fight in the supply room. Wade didn’t tell me who was there or what it was over, just that it had started as a fistfight and that he and Rich had ended it. I still don’t know… I don’t know, Sarah. I don’t know what happened.”
“That’s just two,” Sarah said. He nodded.
“That’s the hard part. They said there were ringleaders, ones who were planning to take them down, and that the penalty for organizing against a Lawson is death. For two days, no one was allowed in the hallways but us and my guys. They delivered food and supplies to everyone, working three shifts, all day long. Two meals for everyone, because we couldn’t get to everyone fast enough for three. Rich said they were going to figure out who had planned everything, I don’t even know what that means, and they were going to make an example of them, and… I didn’t stop them. That was the next four. My guys buried them, one after the next, out where I showed you. Rich would break down a door and he or Wade would go in…”
Sarah nodded.
“Execution, then.”
Thomas nodded at the floor again.
“They weren’t armed. There wasn’t anything but a pair of chairs in there to use as a weapon, and they… you couldn’t break them apart or anything to use them. I don’t even know how they figured out who was doing it. Or… if they were right. I don’t know. I don’t know, Sarah. They just… decided, and they went in and they killed people, and then just… walked away. I was supposed to go get the other three and put them in a new room, split them up, and then… I just kept working. Trying to keep food in all of the rooms, trying to make sure that the men who were sick…”
“There were only bloody footprints at a couple of the sites,” Sarah said. He nodded.
“We got to burials when we could, which wasn’t very often. We were all just working so hard to keep everyone alive…”
“We’ve still got the last three,” Sarah said, knowin’ there were too much time left for the rest of the story to turn well. He nodded.
Looked at his hands.
“I don’t like to think about it. In it, in the moment, we were just working, just trying to get through it, but looking back at it… I should have said something. Should have done something. I don’t even know what. Not even now.”
“Just keep goin’,” Sarah said. He sighed.
“So, they thought they had the ringleaders dead. That’s what they called them. Like there was some vast conspiracy, and not just men afraid that they were going to get sick or starve. I mean, yeah, there’s political dynamics, and there are leaders, but there aren’t ringleaders if there isn’t anything nefarious going on, right?”
He coughed, and Sarah frowned, hearin’ the resonance of congestion in his lungs.
“How long you had the cough?” she asked. He nodded, lookin’ out at the horizon with dull eyes.
“Yesterday,” he said. “I caught it, whatever it was… Didn’t tell Rich or Wade because I was afraid of what would happen to everyone if I wasn’t there…”
It was too early to make judgments, to reassure bystanders that they weren’t a part of her concerns, too early to tell him he done what he could, but it didn’t stop her from wantin’ to.
“You keep stallin’,” she said. “Tellin’ me why ‘stead of what.”
“Yeah. They thought they had the ringleaders, and everyone was angry and scared. They’d barricade the doors and make us give them food over a wall of mattresses. Some of them wouldn’t even open the doors anymore. We’d leave the food and most of the time we’d come back to empty dishes, but I think… I think some of the r
ooms just decided it was better to starve than deal with Rich and Wade. They pointed guns at anyone out in the halls that they didn’t know was supposed to be there, my guys included, and my guys kept quitting, because everyone knew it was only a matter of time before one of them blew a gasket and killed someone by accident or without any real reason.”
“You think they would?” Sarah asked. He frowned, deep.
“I don’t want to answer that.”
“You think they would,” she said, watchin’ the pull-horse’s ears.
“They didn’t,” Thomas said. “Everyone they killed…” He stopped short. She let her eyes drift over to him without turnin’ her head, and he coughed again.
He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t say that everyone they’d killed had deserved it.
He didn’t know.
Or worse, he knew.
She waited.
“The seventh man was one of mine,” Thomas finally said. “Rich said he was taking messages from room to room, because he always went to the same rooms, and they were ones where men who had been staying with men they’d already killed were. By the time I knew that they thought he was involved in… whatever… Wade had already gone… He was dead before I even knew what was happening. He was a good man. Friendly. Willing to work. Laughed… By the end, everyone had stopped laughing. But he did. He told jokes and he laughed, and I liked him.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. He nodded.
“It was another week like that, everyone stuck in their rooms almost the whole time…” Sarah finally put the connection to the smell of the place. “And then they just… They wouldn’t do it anymore. I don’t know how they all decided at once. Maybe Reggie was spreading communication. Maybe all of my guys were. I mean, I didn’t tell them not to. They could stand and talk if they wanted to, so long as everyone got their meals. But it all happened at once. They just all came out at once, and the sick men wouldn’t stay in their rooms anymore, except the ones who couldn’t even walk anymore, and Rich and Wade went… They went nuts, Sarah. The yelling, the threatening, beating men at random to try to prove they were still in charge. I don’t know what happened, but they all just decided at once that they weren’t going to put up with it anymore, being killed in their rooms. I think a lot of them thought that it was at random. That Rich and Wade were just breaking in and killing people to show off that they were in power. I don’t think it was, but…”
“That’s the story they’d tell, either way,” Sarah said.
“Yeah,” Thomas said, coughing again. She looked over and he shrugged weakly at her.
“This is how it goes,” he said. “Good thing Doc is going to tell us what it is.”
She frowned.
“You’ve still got two to go,” she said. He rolled his shoulders forward and leaned back against the seat back, twisting his mouth to the side.
“Mack,” he said. “Mack was the eighth. He was one of the big men. I thought Jimmy would have wanted to meet him, for all of the influence he had with the rest of the men. He had the biggest number of men that he protected, and he was one of the oldest. Maybe our age, I don’t know. Just… a grownup, compared to a lot of them, you know? He said that Rich and Wade didn’t get to tell us what to do just because they were Lawsons and just because they had the key to the food. That that wasn’t how things should have worked. He was trying to organize a vote.” Sarah caught Thomas identifying with the men over the Lawsons, and let it pass.
“What were they voting about?”
“Leaders,” Thomas said. “The men I talked to said that the leaders would have just been the ones to talk to Rich and Wade and figure out what the rules needed to be, but Rich said that they were going to kill the three of us and take over, if we didn’t do something about it.”
“Wade agreed,” Sarah said, not really a question.
“Wade was the one who killed him,” Thomas told her. “I don’t think it would have been that bad, if Mack had gotten the election to happen. It would have made them feel like they had some power, and it would have given us someone specific to talk to about how to handle everything. But Antony… No, I know Antony would have killed us. He kind of scared me, when he was around. Just… the feel of him, you know?, like he would slit my throat on the way past and not even wash his hands before he ate lunch. After Wade killed Mack, Antony was the next big voice, and the men who were afraid of voting, when Mack was talking, they kind of got behind Antony. They thought that anything they did, they were going to have to do it fast and violently, so that Rich and Wade didn’t have a chance to react to it.”
“How do you know that?” Sarah asked. Thomas twisted his mouth to the side.
“One of my guys told me,” he said. “I hope he makes it. I don’t know if they know he told me, but… If they find out, they’ll probably kill him.”
Sarah nodded.
“So they killed him. Antony.”
“Hunted him for a full week,” Thomas said. “We were just about stuck in our room that whole time. Rich and Wade only left together, and I… didn’t. My guys came and got me and we got food for meals and supplies for everyone, then they took me back to the room and made sure the door locked behind me. I let them. I let them take the risk like that, because they were all sure someone was going to kill me when I wasn’t looking, if they didn’t have my back like that.”
“Good men,” Sarah said.
“Every one of them,” Thomas said. No group of men were all good, but Sarah let it go.
“So they found Antony.”
“Two days ago,” Thomas said. “After that, the wind kind of went out of everything, because the water was dropping and because Rich and Wade were making… serious threats. People believed them, that they’d just line up men and shoot them, without caring which side of the divide they were on. Rich said a bunch of times that the Lawsons didn’t need any of them to survive, because the next train would just bring more.”
“Jimmy’s gonna love the sound of that,” Sarah said.
“You’re the one who really looks out for them,” Thomas said. “They all know that.”
She shrugged.
“So Antony was the last.”
“Antony was the last,” Thomas said.
She nodded slowly as town came into view ahead of them.
“Nobody died of this illness?” she asked.
Thomas shook his head.
“I mean, I don’t think so. We didn’t… I don’t know how much anybody was checking in the last couple of days.”
“All right, then,” she said, pullin’ the buckboard up to the boardwalk and steppin’ over onto it. Thomas followed her, and they went into Doc’s shop, findin’ him and Sid puttin’ things right.
“How’d everybody hold up, where you were?” Sarah asked, lookin’ ‘round.
“Kirk boy’ll make a fine recovery,” Doc said. “Heard he’s supposed to be headin’ up into the hills, soon enough.”
Sarah nodded.
“Like to see him on his feet in time for that,” she said, and Doc gave her a good nod.
“Ought. Nothin’ like a flood to make a man take his time at rest.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Sid said. “You just live with that, year after year?”
“Might get two, three this year,” Sarah said.
“You think?” Doc asked. Sarah nodded.
“Joiners are talkin’ like they might not put gremlin in the ground at all ‘till season’s past.”
He gave her a little mouth shrug and went back to his sweepin’.
“Need y’all packed up and out in the buckboard right quick,” Sarah said. “Once you got a good look at Thomas and figured out what’s goin’ on with him and the rest of the boys.”
“What’s that?” Doc asked, straightenin’ and comin’ at Thomas with a shrewd eye.
“Are you sick, Thomas?” Sid asked, gettin’ a kit off a wall and puttin’ it down next to one of the exam tables. Thomas coughed and shrugged.
&
nbsp; “It’s how the rest of them all started,” he said, and Doc took him over to the table, gettin’ a stethoscope to listen to his chest while Sid took out a box and put it against Thomas’ ribs, lookin’ over at a screen and seein’ somethin’ what made no sense to Sarah, even with her experience as a patcher.
“How long have you felt like this?” Doc asked, movin’ the ‘scope.
“Yesterday morning,” Thomas said.
Sid put Thomas’ finger into a box.
“Small pinch,” the younger doctor said, and Thomas jerked.
“Ow,” he complained. “That wasn’t a small pinch.”
“It has to take enough blood to do a full panel on it,” Doc said, movin’ the ‘scope again. “But it isn’t going to find this. What were you boys doin’ for water, while you were there?”
“Well water,” Thomas said. “Pumped so that we had running water in the rooms.”
Doc nodded.
“It’s been contaminated.”
“With what?” Sid asked.
“There’s a sand worm that tends to only live in a very narrow range of sand, here, but durin’ the floods, it gets out, spreads about a bunch, and gets into the well water, if you ain’t careful how you drill it. You drink it, then cough it up and it goes in your lungs, sounds just like… that,” he said, noddin’ to his ‘scope. He took off the buds and offered ‘em to Sid, who put ‘em on only reluctantly.
“What is that?” Sid asked.
“They got hard bits on their heads what bump against each other when they’s in number,” Doc said. Sid brought his imagin’ box around to look where he’d been listenin’, and Sarah could see it, there on the screen, the mass ‘a worms rollin’ round in Thomas’ lungs.
“How did we not all get sick?” Thomas asked.
“Best I can tell, it’s part blood type, part natural pH, part bad luck,” Doc said. “Lucky for you, I got a pill’ll knock ‘em all out in under a day. Unlucky for you, you’re gonna be coughin’ ‘em up for weeks.”
