“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
