Thomas Mullen - The Last Town on Earth

The air over the Sound was cold, but there were so many people on board that few could feel it. The boat slowed as Everett came into view, all the mills silent, the sky above their smokestacks pure with inactivity.

But silent the dock wasn’t. As the Verona pulled nearer to Port Gardner Bay, Graham was one of the first to see the crowd. Even more people lined the streets and the hill just beyond, looking down at the dock and the approaching boat like spectators at a boxing match. These throngs were not singing, and Graham noticed that quite a few of them were wearing handkerchiefs on their forearms.

The passengers grew quiet, perhaps remembering broken noses and cut eyebrows suffered at the hands of McRae’s men, or similar assailants in some other town, different faces but always the same fists. The passengers who had knives in their pockets let their hands slip down and finger the steel as they watched the scene unfold before them. Waiting.

The songs started up again, this time even louder than before. “We meet today in freedom’s cause and raise our voices high! We’ll join our hands in union strong to battle or to die!” Hearts beat faster as the singers looked one another in the eye, trying to keep themselves from being intimidated by some two-bit thugs with a bottle of whiskey in one pocket and a .38 in the other.

Graham put an arm around Tamara and held her hip with his good hand. They were toward the bow, on the port side—the side that was lining up against that dock swarming with men. Graham couldn’t see any knives or clubs or shovels or guns on the dock, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

The boat pulled alongside the dock and one of the Wobblies reached across to tie it down, but an angry-looking man with dizzy eyes stepped out from the crowd. It was Sheriff McRae, Graham recognized, and the stories about him seemed to be true, as he walked with the slightly staggered shuffle of the raging and belligerent drunk.

“Who’s your leader?” McRae demanded.

“We’re all leaders!” a handful shouted back, voicing one of the IWW slogans.

Graham leaned down toward Tamaras ear to tell her they should take a few steps back, but before he could speak, McRae raised his voice.

“I’m sheriff of this town, and I’m enforcin’ our laws. You can’t dock here, so head on back to—”

“The hell we can’t!” someone shouted back.

Then a gunshot. It tore through the air and bounced off the still water, echoing throughout the harbor, off distant islands and near inlets. Everyone on the boat tried to move, but there was nowhere to go. People screamed and ducked for cover, tried to turn around, to escape. The shot echoed endlessly. But it wasn’t an echo—it was more shots, some coming from the dock and some coming from the boat. Who had fired first was as impossible to determine as it was irrelevant. Between the popping sounds of shots and ricochets were the hard slaps of limp bodies hitting the water, men disappearing into the depths below.

Graham slipped, whacking his knee on the deck and sliding forward, since no one was between him and the rail anymore. Everyone was running to the opposite side of the boat. Men on the dock were pointing and shouting and screaming and some of them were brandishing guns and firing still.

He realized he wasn’t holding Tamara—he must have lost his grip on her in the initial turmoil. He looked behind him at the Wobblies running to the starboard side, looked for long hair, for those black coils, for anything remotely female.

The boat started tipping. All the weight had shifted to starboard, and now the port side, where Graham stood, was lifting into the air. Two vigilantes who’d had clear shots at him missed when the deck beneath him rose, but Graham lost his footing again and stumbled back, sliding on the wet deck and tumbling back toward the cowering bodies on the far side.

The boat’s captain, who didn’t give much of a damn for either unions or mill owners, started hollering at them to disperse around the boat or it’d go under. He turned the wheel and hit the engines with a force he’d never before dared, and the Verona lurched away from the dock, a lopsided and badly wounded animal retreating from predators. The only people who obeyed the captain’s orders despite the bullets were Graham and a small handful of others hoping to get a closer look at the water.

The guns were still firing but were more distant now, less threatening. Graham leaned over the railing and screamed for Tamara. Was she in the water? Was she back on the other side of the boat?

Bodies floated beneath the dock, but none looked female. The water was so dark that the blood was completely absorbed into its deep indigo.

There. Over there, by the dock’s farthest pylon. Long dark hair, soot-black. Hair Graham had twisted his fingers in the night before. But no, it could be a woman who’d been on the dock, could be anyone.

Then a wave from the wake of the Verona’s quick retreat hit the body, roughly lifting it and turning its head. Graham screamed when he saw her face.

He pulled at the rail so tightly he nearly tore it from the ship’s deck. His scream echoed over the bay, over the Sound, over every island and with more force than the earlier anthems. Folks from Everett who were blocks away from the water heard that scream, marveled about it for days. He screamed so loudly the dead surely heard him, Tamara surely heard him, screamed so loudly he wouldn’t have been able to hear her answer even if she’d had one.

Then her face exploded. Two goons atop the dock were laughing themselves hysterical, hooting and hollering and stomping with glee as they fired round after round at the bodies floating in the water. They shot indiscriminately at every floating thing in human form, shooting the bodies of Wobblies but also shooting the occasional body of an Everett cop or vigilante, a body who only moments ago had been a man filled with pride for his town and hatred for these foulmouthed agitators and their foreign ideas about how the world should be run. One or two of those bodies had actually still been alive, but most had already been dead, and still the men fired as if they could somehow make them more dead.

Graham’s scream was cut off by this sight. His breath too fled—he stood there gripping the rail, watching in mute shock and rage.

The Verona pulled away with merciful speed and the scene dissolved into washes of gray and blue with streaks of red, blurring with the distance and with Graham’s tears. The sound of the engine soon overpowered that of the gunshots, of the bullets slamming into flesh and water. Graham crumpled to the deck.

Their safety ensured by distance, the passengers on the Verona began to fan out again as the boat headed back toward Seattle. Wounded men were tended, though the death toll would increase by the time they made landfall. There were men with broken bones, men who’d slipped or been crushed as they’d fled the path of the bullets. And there were men, their eyes still wide, who had seen their comrades fall.

Yet they all seemed to know that no one had lost as much as the man who lay in a heap by the front of the boat. His arms were wrapped around himself, his nine fingers digging into the thick muscles of his shoulders. The rest of the men kept a respectful distance, a wide circle of emptiness surrounding him.

I will never again permit myself to be in so powerless a position, Graham had long vowed.

Ain’t nothing a man has can’t be taken away.

He knew that then, knew how easy it would be for home and family and love to vanish forever. He thought of the dead soldier and he pitied him, pitied the randomness of fate that had placed him on that path in front of Graham, pitied him the way he had once pitied himself. But Graham had done what was necessary to protect Amelia and Millie. He lifted his head from his hands and wiped the tears from his eyes. No one and nothing would come into this town, into his home, to do harm to his family. And even if the devil himself should ride into town on a flaming beast breathing pestilence and death, then Graham would stand at that post, look him in the eye, and shoot him down.