The Narrows(94)

Or maybe it’s just the reverse, he thought, watching the street ahead of him fill up with water. Maybe the plague seeks out a town that is already on the verge of collapse—that is already very much near death—and it grabs hold and takes root and plants its virulent claws into the soil. Maybe when a town dies, it becomes this rotting, festering corpse that attracts the sorts of things that feed off corpses.

He thought of his father at that moment—and not just the man, but the things that had made him the man he was. The farm out on Sideling Road where his father had sweated and bled and ached and worked hard, and where both his parents had created a home for their only child, their only son. Ben had stayed and watched his mother die and then he had remained and watched the farm die all around him. His father’s death now seemed like more of a resignation than anything else, a futile surrender as the rest of the world was similarly reduced to dust. I was a fool to have stayed.

But he had, and he carried a burdensome responsibility. The Crawly boy was dead. Something horrific had gotten to him, just as it had gotten to the unidentified boy a few weeks earlier. Quite possibly the same thing had happened to Bob Leary’s son, too. And then there was Maggie Quedentock…and whatever had happened to her husband and Tom Schuler…and Ben couldn’t wrap his mind around how all these random things could possibly be connected. Could they be? Could they?

He punched the car back into Drive and continued along the road until he came to the turnoff for Route 40. The rain still pounded and the driving was treacherous. Across the gulley, he could make out the ominous bulk of the old plastics factory with its twin parapets rising like lighthouses against the stormy sky. He felt like someone’s father, patrolling the house at night as his children slept soundly, checking the locks on the windows and the bolts on the doors. When he turned a bend, he jumped on the brakes, sending the car fishtailing back and forth across the asphalt. A moment later, the car came to a shuddering stop across both lanes.

A mudslide had avalanched down from the hill, tossing mounds of black sludge and twisted, skeletal trees across the highway. To his left, the water of the Narrows had already risen above its concrete basin and was slowly climbing the embankment toward the road. Wills Creek was flooded, which meant the water was shuttling quickly toward downtown.

Ben took out his cell phone, scrolled through the phonebook, and hit the number to the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Department in Cumberland. The phone never rang. When he looked at the screen, there was no signal. The storm must have knocked out some towers.

He shifted into Reverse but the tires spun without traction. The engine roared but the car did not move.

“Of course. Fantastic.”

Switching between Drive and Reverse, he jockeyed the car back and forth until the tires gripped solid roadway and he was able to execute a functional if not very pretty three-point turn that faced him back toward town. But he only had to drive another few yards to realize one of his tires was flat.

“Goddamn it!”

He slammed both palms against the steering wheel. Lightning filled the sky, a dazzling artery of electrical fire. He got out of the car and, sure enough, the passenger tire sagged dramatically off the rim. Cursing, he leaned back into the car and keyed the CB radio but got nothing but static.

“Shirley? Hon, you there?”

Static…and then a dull silence.

Ben switched frequencies and tried it again. “Shirley? It’s Ben. Come in, Shirley. Come in, HQ.”

The only response was the electronic crinkle of static.

At that moment, he was overcome by the sensation that he was being purposely segregated from the rest of the community by some unseen and preternatural force. The shepherd has lost his flock. It was such a potent feeling that it nearly caused his legs to weaken and surrender beneath his weight.

Keep it together, keep it together…

He dropped the CB and went around the car to readdress the ruined tire. He had a spare and a jack in the trunk. Question was, would he be able to change it out here on the sloping tarmac of Route 40 in the middle of a torrential downpour?

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said, already shivering as he popped open the trunk and dragged the full spare out. The water in the road was already rising over his shoes. He didn’t have much time, if he had any time left at all…

When he looked back up and back out toward town, the storm and the protruding mountainside blocked the lights of Stillwater completely from view. He could see nothing. Only darkness.

Why do I have the unsettling feeling that I’m suddenly the only human being left alive in Stillwater?

And just like that, Ben Journell was standing on the moon.



2



“Oh Lord,” Shirley said, standing from behind her desk. She brought her hands to her mouth and watched as Joseph Platt and Melvin Haggis carried between them some small figure wrapped in blue tarpaulin and a heavy gray blanket. She had been working dispatch for over a decade and this was by far the most horrific sight she had ever seen. She knew the Crawly family in passing and could summon an image of the young boy from memory—blond, bowl-cut hair, frail, with a light smattering of reddish-brown freckles across his nose—but she found it impossible to equate that lively and lovely child with something packaged in blankets and plastic and carried by two grim-looking police officers.

Shirley squeezed out from behind her desk and followed them down the hall. The officers did an awkward two-step, as if deciding what room they were taking the body to and who should go in first. Haggis suggested the lockup and Platt nodded his assent.