Toby could only try and speak,
‘People want this, Eddy. They’ve wanted it for years.’
‘Really? Do they?’ Eddy looked quickly, left and right, then spoke loudly, addressing the crowd,
‘You want people thinking you’re from Loonyville, USA? You want your kids pointed at, stuck in special homes, experimented on? Scorned on every talk-show, and laughed at on every comedy? Do you think one of you here will be able to keep hold of your children when the authorities learn about how we do things up here?’
‘That’s better than them being dead, Deputy,’ said someone in the crowd.
Eddy’s head and neck jerked, looking around for the speaker. His right arm seemed to flinch, and then Toby saw the pistol in his hand. It was currently half-hidden under the cuff of his black sleeve.
‘Well, it’s not happening!’ the armed man called out. ‘Everybody back home.’ And then his gun-arm flew out straight, twisting in stuttering motion across the field of potential victims.
All breath left Toby’s body.
‘Lord, don’t leave me now,’ he muttered to himself, incoherent, half-prayer, half-curse. Toby intoned the words mechanically, the new inhuman, emptied-out Toby. These were moments that felt like minutes, but were split-seconds in total. Under his breath he repeated,
‘Lord, don’t leave me now. Lord, don’t leave me now. God damn you, God. God damn you, God. You bring me to the most important moment in my life, and you give the other guy a gun? You leave my enemy four-handed, likely four-barrelled; and me with a broken-down doctor, a weeping teacher and a hack with city hands? God damn you, God. God damn you, God. Don’t leave me now? Don’t leave me now? You left me on the day I was born here...
‘They aren’t going back home, Eddy.’
The Sheriff stepped forward a pace.
Chapter 78 – Epilogue: In the Footsteps of Benjamin Drew
Opinions differ over the order of the shots. Janey remembers the puff of blood coming from Toby’s hand first, and he even looking down at it the moment before the second hit his chest. Others recall him slumping forward when the first shot was heard, and that the second was a panicked misaim from a flipping-out Eddy. Yet it makes little difference – two shots were fired, one was fatal. The rest is details.
As for the moments after, what can anyone now recall? There was Janey jumping down from the truck and running to her hero’s body, oblivious to gunfire. Her shriek this writer is clear on – I’ll not forget that so long as I live. Nor moments later, when the crowd, who had been taken so far to the brink that they weren’t going back, jumped on Eddy, and in a moment ended him also. They left him just another body of a townsperson of Stove. But the last one, we all hoped.
‘When it starts, it starts quickly,’ had observed Toby’s landlady when the first snow fell. Indeed, and once a thing has started we don’t get to choose our ending.
The convoy Toby had arranged still went its famous route. The truck with its snowplough and its flatbed full of patients easily cut its way through the late-winter snow. Fitch drove, with tears in his eyes. Job was on the back with Janey, pulled away from Toby’s body.
Other vehicles followed like carnival floats. Down came the girls from the school, stood in the back of the swaying milk truck in their nightclothes. Individual families came next in whatever vehicles could be got going in time, all wanting to get their sons out as quickly as possible... though none quite wanting to get to Gaidon first. The old town bus that Toby and Vernon Monroe had arrived on had been forgotten about at first, though this was soon brought out of its mothballs. Loaded to the hilt, it brought another forty down.
Behind the vehicles went the rest of the town on foot, every man, woman and child of them – they weren’t going to be left behind while their friends and neighbours were getting to leave. Once reaching Gaidon, then their police had a chance to assist. In their Jeep Cherokees, they fought their way uphill against the tide to help the stragglers and those stranded on the road.
Most of this I heard from those who were there. I had to stay behind, of course – I had a bedroom full of papers and surveillance footage that I wasn’t going to let fall into the wrong hands.
Of course, you know it’s me writing this, don’t you? Who else could it be?
Making sure there were no lingering Deputies around, I dashed back to the Emsworth house. With Sarah’s help I got the essentials into a box each for us to carry. You see I’d lied to Toby: there were no copies of documents stashed in the woods, no partners out of town. What we had in that top bedroom was all we had, there was no back-up plan.
Leaving all else behind – in Sarah’s case, her entire life – we caught the stragglers on the journey down the mountain. By then the road was well trod, cleared but slushy, and I confess I went over at one point. Thank God my box didn’t break, and so spill papers and cassettes and photographs across the ground. Have you ever worked in an office, and been the one to bring the letter-headed paper from the storeroom for the copiers? Then you might know how heavy those boxes can be to carry even for a minute. We had ours for almost an hour.
But still, it was so short a walk. Ten minutes on the bus. No wonder Benjamin Drew could manage it those six years before. Yet I take nothing away from his achievement, accomplished while half-dressed and spiking with the sickness. And most importantly, being the first on record to even try – his achievement therefore is as much one of imagination as athleticism.
Pausing sometimes to rest at the side of the road, Sarah and I found others doing the same. With them would be jewellery boxes, deeds, framed pictures, photo albums – were people leaving for a day or forever? No one knew.
Some rested their arms from carrying small children, who’d not a clue of what was going on, of course. The youngest were sometimes crying, hurriedly dressed and hungry. They would have been smiling if they’d known what their parents were saving them from.
Although of course it was the older children who were the revelation. Taking up our loads, we tail-formers found the comet as we neared Gaidon town. And what we found there were scenes of weeping in the street. This was more often the parents than the teenagers themselves, who mostly wore a look of incomprehension. As if waking from an odd dream, recently-beaten youths were wondering why they were standing in the icy street in their pyjamas or without proper shoes. This was not as any had known it before, or how fresh sufferers had been told the sickness-season would end for them. They had been physically moved, were outside of their town, and were not coming around in their beds or in trashed, emptied living rooms.
The girls, having travelled in the lorry, were more collected. The boys meanwhile were dispersed among their families. And there were Gaidon policemen and women, in broad tan hats and bright blue shirts – not black, not hated black. Men and women who were trying to help.
‘How did it end for you, when you were a kid?’ I asked Sarah, seeing these scenes in the town square of Gaidon.
‘Slowly, and in waves. You would come around to your senses, then wake up again three days later.’
The recoveries we were seeing then though were instantaneous, and there were no relapses. Just as Benjamin Drew had told Toby it would be. Benjamin was there, smiling with his younger brother. The lad was hardly able to gather his wits, his eyes wide open. As were the eyes of almost everyone from Stove. Including an elderly man in a blue suit, who seemed sad but wore a beaming smile of approval.
Chapter 79 – Getting out of Life Alive
If only Toby could have seen it all. It was chaos, and anyone who wanted to flee was now at liberty to do so. And many did, with people jumping buses or buying lifts. Toby had told me specifically to get as far away as possible. Yet a sense of public service gripped me. Along with the medics pouring out of the town clinic, the Gaidon Sheriff’s Office were managing a wholly unexpected humanitarian situation. From nowhere had come several hundred confused people, on foot or in trucks and cars, cold and homeless and often injured, and with only bab
bled explanations of what had happened.
Someone had to tell the story, and that someone was me.
We hadn’t time to waste. In the melee, Sarah and I found a dried-out crawl space beneath the town’s railcar diner, and shoved the boxes there. Then I had to present myself to the authorities – taking whatever consequences might have come. This was in order to assist as best as I could in what was sure to be a convoluted investigation.
Yet it was as hard as hell to get the attention of a policeman in the town. I had only one option, and that was to follow the Jeeps that I’d already seen going back up the mountain. There, with fewer distractions but many more questions, they might be a little keener to hear my answers.
Unburdened by the boxes, I made it half-way back up the road before I felt the effort in my house-bound lungs. It had been hard to keep exercised that winter not going outside of the Emsworth House. I’d had dumbbells and an exercise regime, but it was blood-pumping exercise I’d missed and was exactly what I now needed.
‘Get off the road,’ a car shouted as it slithered up past me. ‘We don’t know what’s up there.’
‘Lor,’ I said, after they’d scooted past. ‘What do they think it is, the Black Death?’
Before I’d reached the top, black Cadillac Escalades had passed me, and I knew the Bureau were already on the case – within the hour! Incredible. Above the town, helicopters hovered – regional police, army, news crews – keen to keep a safe distance from the misty mountain peaks.
Stove, once I’d reached it, was the photonegative of Gaidon – chaotic in its emptiness, spooky for its lack of people. Almost any Stovian who’d chosen not to go down, or who had even slept right through it all, was now being rousted up and questioned. I even saw one opportunist thief being escorted away holding someone else’s television. In a fit of pique, the thief threw it down on the ground to smash the tube. There were shotgun blasts, and people holing themselves up in their homes. I’d later learn that some of these families still had sick children.
Thankfully the sieges didn’t last for long. These ‘localised incidents’ would be resolved by the FBI SWAT teams, soon seen heaping out of further helicopters like Marines on a search and destroy mission. They had secured the town’s sloping football field as an airstrip, and they alone were risking landing as the day turned dark and cold.
As I got there, barriers were already being put up. But I was one man moving quickly, and I got through all the way back to the town square. There I saw men and women in different uniforms standing over Toby’s body.
‘What in hell happened here?’ one was asking.
‘And what is he wearing?’
I approached them to answer,
‘Officers, that is the body of the finest man this town has ever known.’
‘Sir, I think you need to come with us.’
From that moment on I would be under some kind of official jurisdiction for the next three years. It ended only with the winding-up of the FBI investigation into the events of the town, and the wrapping-up without solid conclusion of the Senate Subcommittee Public Enquiry and Congressional House Committee Hearings into the same. In the eighteen months since then, I have been forever called upon to offer evidence here or expert testimony there, to be interviewed for this or that documentary, or to write a piece for whatever Sunday newspaper review thinks there’s still more to be said on the matter. I doubt I’ll be free of the sickness all my days. You might say then, that the investigation that began with those reports of old car wrecks was more successful than its investigator ever imagined.
But in another way, I really didn’t have to do very much. I am only glad to have been there when I was. For Stove’s way of life was due to end, it only needed someone to end it. That someone wasn’t me, it was an inestimably braver man that I. Though I like to comfort myself by thinking that I offered him some perspective, some grounding in town history, or maybe only a friendly ear. Maybe that was enough?
Chapter 80 – The Bureau
But back to that day... From the town square, I was taken to the battered old Sheriff’s Office, to face a man wearing a blue flack jacket over a work shirt and tie. I would later learn his name as Agent Carter. There I was asked the obvious questions. Then asked them again, and again, as if he hadn’t believed me the first however-many times. I don’t think he knew the answers he was hoping for.
We sat in Lloyd Thornton’s old chairs, at Lloyd Thornton’s old desk. I was interviewed by Agent Carter for an hour before they offered me a drink, and then for perhaps another two hours after that – soon I would begin to lose track of how long they had been talking to me for.
After dark, I was taken down the floodlit mountain in a Jeep, and interviewed some more by different people. Before being brought back up and being asked to give the investigators the guided tour. By then it was after midnight, and the town was under a second daylight of halogen lamps.
It seemed that every emergency protocol in the book had been activated. Any question of my not assisting was a moot point. And frankly, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. These men and women from several different agencies were concerned for public safety – they had a town who’d left in an exodus, they had hysterical and conflicting accounts of a mystery illness, alongside wails of denial that the illness had ever existed.
(I soon learnt the psychology of this denial: After arriving in Gaidon, and seeing that every child was instantly fine, a natural instinct in a lot of families had been to retreat into the old Stove secrecy. The crisis was over, so why drag up the past and have the town damned for its cruelty? Why not explain their presence in Gaidon – however implausibly – on a gas-leak, or them all losing their jobs? Before quietly catching the next Greyhound bus and getting the hell out of there.
But the families hadn’t had the time to get a story straight between them, and so they only confused and prolonged things. Those first officers on the scene might have imagined Jonestown, Waco, chemical attack, mass murder, or any point in-between. Anything I could do to clarify this for them would be a service.)
During my trips back up and down the mountain, I would see the uniforms of the Gaidon Sheriff’s Office amid the throng. And on one occasion I met again with their Sheriff Lacer. He remembered me, and looked at me gravely,
‘So this was what you were investigating?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Some kind of illness?’
I nodded.
‘And they were beating it out of the kids with clubs?’
The Bureau were leading the inquiries, and Carter was their man. He would tell me,
‘We have a dilemma when it comes to you.’
‘Me?’
‘You aren’t implicated criminally by any available testimony.’
‘Good!’
‘Except on local bylaws of withholding evidence and not reporting a crime.’
I went through it again, ‘But it was the police I was investigating – and it was almost impossible to leave the town to reach the Gaidon force.’
‘I know, I heard you the first time.’ (Though had he heard me the second, third and fourth?) ‘And we’re very grateful for all the evidence you’ve handed over.’ Agent Carter shuffled through his papers. I thought that might have been the end of it, but he offered no conclusion, only adding,
‘And there’s also this business of you going to a party under an assumed identity.’
I exhaled, ‘Again, Officer, I was working undercover. It was my first night in town, and they’d have thrown me in jail if they’d have known who I really was.’
‘Well, I have a roomful of guests who’ll swear you told them that you were a local man, and had returned that winter to join in with the efforts to contain these children.’
‘You have my passport, you know where I grew up. You know I had hardly set a foot in Stove before this winter.’
Again though, that seemed to be that. Agent Carter explained, ‘Yes, yes. I’m sure that in time all of thi
s will be sorted out. And frankly, we have too much else going on here to worry about it either way. The party-goers’ testimonies are on file, and I expect that’s where they’ll stay.’
He let the file close with a whumph, and for the first time I sensed that the interviews were over. This must have been after three or four airless days. Agent Carter looked at me calmly, his fingers interwoven, his elbows on the desk,
‘Jake – I can call you Jake, now we’ve gotten to know each other?’
I nodded – though of course he’d never told me his first name.
‘I’ve decided that I need to trust someone in this town, and that it might as well be you.’
He went on,
‘I have three-hundred-and-fifty-four witness statements on my desk. I don’t know if any two of them are telling me the same thing. None of you can tell me what crimes were committed because you seem blind as to what was a crime. Take this excerpt:
Interviewing Officer: Was an assault committed against your son?
Mrs Edna Wood: No, he just had the sickness.
Interviewing Officer: So what did the Deputy do?
Mrs Edna Wood: He held him down on the floor, then hit him if he got up.’
Agent Carter slapped the page down on the desk, and recoiled into Sheriff Thornton’s chair,
‘And that’s before we get onto the fathers and the grandfathers. What do we do with those? They were childhood victims of abuse, then perpetrators of that same abuse, then victims again by proxy when their children were abused.’
I explained, ‘A lot of sufferers jumped right into being Deputies. It was a town tradition.’
‘Well, that’s one town tradition that we can say quite conclusively has been brought to an end.’
Bought to an end by dint of there no longer being a town. The pipeline company claimed ignorance – which was correct. At last they understood why the permanent workers liked a year-round foreman from their own stock. They threw open their records to investigators, records which for the most part had been kept deliberately free of any mention of health issues by the staff and their families.