Stranger

Eight

THIS IS A ***WARNING***

Following a meeting May 15, the

Caucus has implemented the following emergency ruling with immediate effect:

STRANGERS

No more strangers are to be admitted into Sullivan.

Report any outsiders you see approaching the island by road or by boat.

If you see anyone on the island you suspect might be a stranger

REPORT IT!

Be aware that anyone giving food or shelter to a stranger will be punished.

Any such punishment will be severe.

Be warned.

OFF ISLAND TRAVEL

All travel off island is strictly forbidden.

TAKE THESE MEASURES SERIOUSLY THEY HAVE BEEN MADE TO KEEP OUR COMMUNITY SAFE.

Caucus Order 174, May 15

We read the notice stapled to the post by the jetty. I saw more of those yellow sheets of paper fixed to trees on the road that lead up to the town.

“The Caucus is getting jittery,” I told Ben.

“They’re not the only ones.” He still looked pale after seeing the severed head caught up in the branch he’d pulled from the water. “The whole world’s in meltdown.”

I’d only seen the head for a moment before it slithered from the fork in the branch and sank out of sight. Hell, it looked weird. Sickeningly weird. I was happy to see it vanish again, believe me, but Ben had shouted to me to pull it out with the hook (but on no account to touch it with my bare hands; something I wouldn’t have done for all the tea in China anyway). Showing as a gray ball through the clear water, the head came to a rest on pebbles on the lake bed. I must have disturbed it as I splashed into the shallows because in a moment it rolled away. Soon I couldn’t even see it, never mind hooking the thing out. Ben had called me back, telling me that the lake bed plunged down a good fifty feet there into an underwater ravine. The head was gone. Sweet Jesus, I was pleased to no end it had gone, too.

Even so, I still had a sharp mental image of it as it lay there wedged into the fork of the branch. A man’s head, it had only just started to decompose; that meant it had to have come from someone who’d been alive and well until a few days ago.

I use the word well loosely… very, very loosely. Because there was something about the head that just wasn’t right. The hair had been long, the face heavily bearded. A bread bandit, I figured. The eyes were closed. You could have fooled yourself that the guy was only sleeping (if it hadn’t been for the strings of raw meat hanging down where the neck should be). But what took your breath away, and what horrified Ben so much that he cried out, was that a sickening bulge of brown flesh came out of the side of the face where the cheek should be. Set in that were two wide blue eyes. And those eyes seemed somehow alive. They stared right into mine. Then a second later the head slipped from the branch and back into the water, where it now lay fifty feet beneath the surface. Thank God.

Usually Ben would be full of ideas about anything new or unusual. This time he kept silent. As we walked back all he did was swallow in a queasy way.

This piece of yellow paper at least took his mind off what he’d just seen.

“It’s because of the stranger…” I thought for a moment he was going to say that stranger you killed. Instead he said, “It’s because of the stranger who arrived recently.” He wiped his mouth, as if the taste of his own vomit was still on his tongue. “The Caucus decided that because he wasn’t a bread bandit and he was from this part of the country, the disease must have infected North Americans.”

“They believe he really was infected?”

“ You know,” he said firmly. “You saw it in him. God knows how you do it, but you knew he’d got it in him.”

I sensed a creeping cold in my blood. “I might have been wrong.”

“You’ve not been wrong yet.”

“Yet.”

“The town’s put their faith in you. You’ve got some instinct that tells you when a person’s infected.”

“And so they turn a blind eye when I hack some poor bastard to pieces. I don’t want to kill, Ben. I just find myself doing it, but it’s like I’m watching it all happen from across the street. Why don’t they just put anyone arriving in town in quarantine until they’re sure? They don’t have to wait until I’ve passed fucking judgment on some poor fucking stranger.” I began to feel angry again. That anger always lurked below the surface… as soon as I started to think or talk about what I’d done it came shooting out of me in flames of bloody red.

Ben was quick to try and calm me. “Greg. We’re lucky to have you. You’ve saved our necks.”

“Lucky?” I gave a sour-sounding laugh.

“Sure. Before you turned up we’d let anyone in who came to town, bread bandits as well as our own countrymen. But we didn’t know what was in the blood of the bread bandits or what was in their brains. We’d give those people food and lodging. They’d be completely normal, completely sane. But then…” He clicked his fingers. “One day, they’d snap. One Chilean guy said he was a doctor. He was polite, charming even. But one night he went downstairs, grabbed a carving knife and cut the throats of the family he was lodging with. Now you’re here, Greg. You’ve got a nose for who’s infected. Somehow you can see it in them, but we can’t. You’re our best early warning system.”

“Yeah, right… but now I’ve killed a guy who’s an American. Who might have been born just down the road.”

“And that means the disease has spread. We know it can infect our people.” Ben nodded back at the yellow notice. “That means the town has got to be more security conscious. From now on nobody comes onto the island. No one leaves.”

“And that means suddenly our world has gotten a whole lot smaller.” I looked ’round. “We’ve turned the place into a prison.”

He shook his head. “Not a prison. A fortress.”

“Either way, nobody’s going anywhere, are they?”

We headed off to Ben’s apartment, where he’d left some beers in the icebox of the refrigerator. Even though the electricity had been cut at midnight they were still cold enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. He also maintained a store of rechargeable batteries. So we sat there listening to Hendrix hurl those amazing guitar sounds out into the cosmic hereafter while we poured the beautifully cold beer down our hot and thirsty throats.

For a long time we didn’t say much. Suddenly a whole army of question marks had come marching over our mental horizons. They were dark, menacing. And I found myself thinking: Why had the disease suddenly spread to our own countrymen? Had it infected us here in Sullivan? If it had, when would we see the first symptoms? Or would it be only me who recognized the disease in people? If that was the case, how long would it be before I used the ax on a neighbor? Or even Ben, sitting there on the sofa, listening to Hendrix’s guitar calling out to eternity?

I swallowed the beer in big, hard gulps.

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.