The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen Read Free Book Online

buildings bore the spotty marks of a hasty paint job, but there were no dilapidated storefronts or vacant lots, no broken windows or collapsed roofs. The town was so freshly ensconced in the woods that it smelled strongly of the forest, the Douglas fir and red cedar, the salal and toadstools dotting the nearby riverbed. Mixed with this was the smell of so many men sweating in a stuffy mill, emerging at the end of the day breaded with sawdust, the scent of torn bark and wet wool. Moments ago the cicada-like thrum of mill saws would have echoed through the colonnades of trees, but the closing whistle had already sounded, and Commonwealth was so quiet Philip could hear the river dancing over moss-covered rocks.
    And so quiet that Philip’s voice, when he entered Banes’s house and found the doctor alone, sounded deafening: “We shot a man trying to come to town. A soldier. He was sick. He’s dead.”
    That was how it came out, the words a jumble, all the facts except the main one—we killed someone—seeming so unimportant. He was a soldier. He was young. He sneezed and coughed a lot. He said please. He started to cry right before Graham pulled the trigger. He had a limp, like me.
    Banes followed Philip back to the guards’ post, a good distance beyond the front of the town, past a row of fir trees that all but concealed the buildings from view. The doctor nodded when he saw how far away the body lay. All of his experience told him to go forward, to kneel down beside the body, but he knew he couldn’t. He knew what the other people in his profession all across the country were going through right now, knew about the tired repetitions of futile acts, and he didn’t want this to happen to Commonwealth.
    “We’ll leave him there for twenty-four hours,” Banes decided. “Then we can bury him.”
    Philip was dreading the idea of burying the soldier, but at the same time, he wanted to be one of the ones to do it. He owed the soldier the respect of participating in a proper burial. Philip looked to his side, at the empty chair that the soldier could have been occupying, and he wondered what the man’s family would have said at his funeral.
             
    “I guess you were right,” Philip said as he stood to leave the dining room. “I guess it was a mistake to go out there.”
    “I never said that,” Rebecca answered after a pause.
    “I know. I could tell you thought it, though.”
    Rebecca dried her hands on her apron. “I never thought you made a mistake. I thought you had a very hard decision to make—we all do right now.”
    Philip nodded, then excused himself to the bathroom, leaving her alone in the cold kitchen. She sighed, realizing she hadn’t responded as well as she could have. But she was angry, and would it have been right to try and conceal her anger, to coat it with maternal sympathy and false warmth?
    She hadn’t believed what Charles had told her that afternoon about the soldier, had found it impossible to visualize Graham firing on another man—and with young Philip standing beside him! But then when she had seen the look in Philip’s eyes, she knew it was the truth.
    How could this happen? Years ago her two elder sisters had run off to join a commune, and Rebecca had hated them for running away, for cutting themselves off and never responding to her letters, even when she wrote to them of their father’s illness. Rebecca and her younger sister, Maureen, had cared for their father in his dying days. Maybe their little commune had been beyond the reach of any postmaster, but that possibility did nothing to salve the pain she had felt, the loneliness she had seen in her father’s eyes as he realized he would never see his girls again. Rebecca had hated them for their disinterest in the rest of the world, their silent shrugging at other people’s plight. And now her own community was doing the same thing.
    Rebecca wasn’t sure if she was letting her anger at the country—at Wilson, at