There was another question, too. A weird, twisty one. One that lurked in the background but seemed every bit as sinister as the rest. What had gone wrong with that human head we found tangled up in the branch? How could it bud an extra pair of eyes? Questions, Valdiva. Questions. Questions.
We’d been in Ben’s apartment barely an hour before the siren started. Its phantom wail cut into the room like the bad news it was.
When the siren called, able-bodied men and women were expected to collect weapons, to assemble at certain points in the town, to be ready for Trouble with a capital T. On account of his shaky hands, Ben wasn’t in the guard-the idea of him handling a rifle with those twitchy fingers put the fear of God into the guard sergeants. Even so, he came along. He often wrote articles for Sullivan’s (increasingly) slender newspaper; with a change of hats he moved from stock clerk to reporter. In ten minutes I was sitting in the back of the a pickup barreling with half a dozen others in the direction of the wall. Which was a “misnomer,” as Ben would have said, for a twenty-foot mass of steel fencing and barbed wire running the entire width of the isthmus and cutting the island off from the outside world.
A guy in an engineer’s hard hat shouted to the half dozen or so of us in the back of the pickup that outsiders were aiming to break in.
Hanging on to the sides, slipstream zithering his hair, Ben looked at me. “It looks as if we’ve got our first invasion,” he called.
Nine
Some invasion. The trucks skidded to a stop fifty yards from the gate in clouds of dust. We climbed out with the guard sergeants telling us to take it nice and easy; to stay back until the “threat had been quantified.” Jeez. Why don’t those guys speak so you can understand them?
There, under a cloudless blue sky, the wall ran from left to right, cutting across the highway and single rail- road track. Both ends of that mountain range of barbed wire ended in the water at either side of the land bridge. The guards’ officers-in real life a butcher, a cinema manager and a retired police chief- moved toward the gate. Someone handed me a shotgun and a handful of shells that I stuffed into my shirt pockets. I squinted against the glare of the sun. Through the monster of a steel gate I saw the invasion force.
Hell. Misnomers were thick as dog shit in a municipal park. Well, let me tell you, the invasion force consisted of a family in a sedan. The car was glossily clean.
It couldn’t have come far. Two of the car’s occupants climbed out, leaving a young woman in the passenger seat. She stared out at us, her eyes pumped full of anxiety.
The two who came forward to the gate were a man in his thirties and a boy of around eleven. Like the car they were clean; the man had shaved recently. Both were unarmed.
The stranger talked to the officers at the gate, though I noticed the three officers hung well back- you don’t know what filthy little microbes are peeling themselves from the strangers, do you, boys? I even saw one of them take a glance at the flag to see which way the breeze was blowing. The truth of the matter was, there was no breeze today. The lake was as flat as a mirror.
Curiosity got the better of us. We moved forward to hear the conversation.
“You’ve got to,” the stranger was saying… hell, not saying, pleading. He wanted something so bad it hurt.
“I’m sorry.” The cinema manager indicated a sign painted on a five-by-five board. “No one’s allowed in.”
“But my wife’s pregnant. She needs to be where she can get medical attention.”
“What’s wrong with the place you’ve just come from?”
“We’ve been living in a cabin up in the hills.”
“Go back there. You’ll be safe.”
The man shook his head. “There’s no one else there. She needs a doctor to look at her. Besides, we’re running short of food.”
“Got a rifle?”
“Yes, but-”
“Hunt, then. Catch food. The woods are full of wild game.”
“But don’t you understand?” The man sounded angry now. “My wife is seven months pregnant. She’s not been well lately. She needs a doctor.”
At that moment the woman pulled herself from the car, using the door to lever herself upright. “Jim, tell him about my brother.”
“OK, Tina, just you take it easy.” He looked at the boy. “Mark, go look after your Mom while I talk.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the retired police chief spoke now in that polite but firm voice he must have used a million times before in his career. “You’re going to have to turn your car around and leave the island.”
“What goddam fucking island?” The stranger’s patience had reached burn out. “It’s not an island. It’s a fucking town at the edge of a fucking lake…”
“Jim,” the woman pleaded, “Don’t get mad at them. They’re just being cautious.”
“Tina, OK. Sit back in the car.”
“They don’t know us, Jim. For all they know we might be-”
“Bread bandits? Hey, guys. Do we look like bread bandits?”
“No,” replied the old police chief, “but you can’t-”
“Then let us in. Please.”
“Sorry.”
“But you can see my wife isn’t well.”
“We’re taking no chances.”
“But do we look South American? We’re from a place that’s three hours’ north of here.”
“What place?” asked the ex-chief.
“Golant, just off Route 3. Look, I’ve got a driver’s license that-”
The ex-chief gave a regretful sigh. “Sorry. No can do.
We’ve reached a decision to seal this town off from the outside. We can’t risk contamination.”
“Contamination! Do you think my wife and my son and my unborn child can contaminate you?”
“Jim,” called the woman from the car. “Tell them about my brother.”
Jim turned back to us. “My wife’s brother owns a vacation home here.”
“He’s living here now?”
“No. He was in New York with his family when the crash came. We haven’t heard from him since.” His voice softened into those pleading tones again. “Don’t you see? We wouldn’t beg a place to stay, we could move into my brother-in-law’s cabin. I know how to weld… look!” Suddenly eager, he gripped the gate bars with his two hands and gave it a shake. “I could make this even stronger. I could make it so strong it would keep an army out. You need to weld reinforcing bars diagonally across the-”
“Sorry.” The ex-chief spoke gently. He sounded genuinely regretful. “I truly am sorry. I can’t permit you to enter the town. You look like good people, but we just don’t know if you’re carrying the disease.”
“So you’re going to turn us away, and leave us to starve?”
The officers looked at each other; then the ex-chief spoke again. “We can give you food and medicine if you know what your wife needs.”
“I don’t know what drugs she needs. I need a doctor to see her. Hey, listen… listen!”
But the three officers moved back to our group. I glanced at Ben. His expression revealed that the incident sickened him. He had a good heart. If you ask me, he’d have allowed the family in.
The stranger returned to the car, spoke in an agitated way to his wife, then came back to the gate to yell, “We’re not moving, do you hear? We’re going to sit outside these gates until we starve to death or you let us in. Did you hear me? Did you?”
The ex-chief spoke to a couple of guards. “Bring them some food, boys. Pack it in fish crates so we can shove it through the gap under the gate.”
Sergeants dismissed us from guard duty; the idea was we’d return to our own jobs, but most of us hung
