The Radio Tower
PART 1 -
My memory is a sieve. I am not the first physician to notice this, though in my case the diagnosis is not a punchline or a coping mechanism but a pathologically true fact. For most of my adult life I have trusted in my recall the way a man trusts his skeleton: implicitly, to the point of forgetting it exists. Now I keep discovering new structural failures, hairline cracks, long stretches of bone gone to sand. I write these sentences at a desk which I must, every evening, reacquaint myself with; I am forced to relearn the patterns in the wood grain, the exact drag of the left drawer, the taste of my own coffee, which has always been bitter. I am trying to be honest. In medical school they teach you that writing is not for remembering but for defending against forgetting, if you want to preserve the truth you must carve it in the hardest substance at hand, the way a trauma surgeon learns to stitch through cartilage, not just flesh. The following is my best attempt at such a record.
It will read, I suspect, as both confession and eulogy. If I have structured it well, it will serve as a sufficient account for those who survive me, even if I am not here to answer questions.
The year was 1983. The place was Stanic Island, off the Maine coast, population 812, not counting the dead. I was fifteen, a scholarship child, spending my third summer as a ward of the local program designed to keep us bright, unathletic children from drowning in the gene pool. The isolation suited me. My only complaints were the ones any person would have had: the insect load, the air so wet you could taste every decomposing leaf in it, and the persistent, metronomic blinking of the radio tower, visible from almost every square foot of the southern peninsula. I have to remind myself, as I write this, how normal it all seemed at the time.
The recollection proper begins here.
The five of us walked in loose, uneven formation along the gravel service path. Behind us, the settlement: nineteen double-wides, a general store, two churches so nearly identical that the locals told them apart by the species of dog tied outside, and a derelict community hall whose roof was kept from collapse only by the collective will of the people who insisted on holding events inside it. Ahead of us, the spruce line cut off direct view of the radio tower, but its shadow crawled over us whenever the breeze was strong enough to part the trees. The path was slick with rain from the night before, each step dislodging cold spray from the ferns and knee-high grass that bracketed the tire ruts.
Geoff, who claimed not to be cold, had the bluest lips of the bunch. He spat into the ditch every six or seven paces, watching the trajectory as if expecting it to arc differently each time. Tony and Tommy flanked him, engaged in a running debate over which girl from the program would have the best chance of smuggling contraband onto the ferry at week’s end. They were not careful about the volume of their discussion. Tony’s voice was lower, but what it lacked in decibels it made up for in percussive emphasis; every syllable landed like a shovel in packed dirt. Tommy was all bounce and echo, repeating phrases and laughing before anyone else did, as if racing to the punchline. Mara and I walked in the lead, not so much together as simply ahead of the noise.
She made no pretense of matching my stride, but somehow I never found myself more than a meter ahead of her. The rest of them would lose ground, fall behind, catch up, pass us, and then slow again, obeying an erratic logic that I could never map. I liked Mara’s gait: economical, precise, unshowy. She walked the way she did everything else, as if each movement was a bet she had already calculated and was sure to win. She said little unless directly asked, which made the rest of us either nervous or desperate to fill the silence.
The forest on either side was wet with an overripe, almost solvent odor of decomposing needles and resin, an undercurrent of salt. There was a small swamp to the left, its mirror-surface broken by the castoff heads of cattails and the occasional drift of scum-green duckweed. Gnat clouds bloomed and receded, replaced every few meters by a differently unpleasant insect presence. Every time I brushed a branch or reed I half-expected to come away marked, stung, or god knows what. My father would have described it as “unspoiled,” a term I had always found suspect, as though beauty was measured only by how untouched it could remain by human hands.
The radio tower itself had no opinions. Its uppermost light blinked with the steady, indifferent pace of a heart on an EKG, one second on, one second off, a rhythm that became audible in your skull the longer you stared at it. The generator at its base was a more direct phenomenon: even from a hundred meters out you could feel its bass throb through the ground, a low, unbroken sound like the ocean held just outside your field of vision. When we rounded the final bend and the clearing opened up, the air seemed to thin, the ambient temperature dropping a full degree as we stepped onto the soaked, trampled grass at the base of the tower.
“God, look at that,” said Geoff. “It’s like a fucking spaceship landed here.”
He was not wrong. The clearing was a deliberate space in the forest, an almost perfect oval scraped down to mineral dirt. The tower itself was newer than anything else on the island, a steel latticework, painted hazard-red, its topmost section clearly taller than the tree line by a factor of two or three. I had been out here twice before and found it equally impressive both times. The generator shed, a low concrete box with a slanted tin roof, was sunk several feet into the ground at the western edge of the clearing. From this angle, you could see both the guy wires that anchored the tower and the chain-link fence that circumscribed the base, topped with a single line of slack barbed wire.
The thing that caught the eye, though, was the splash of color at the foot of the tower’s eastern leg. The human figure was not immediately apparent, at first I thought someone had dumped a tarp or heavy coat, the color so wrong for the landscape that my brain failed to process it as a person. It was Tony who stopped first.
“Wait,” he said. “Is that-?”
We all halted. The rest of the group closed the gap between themselves and Mara and me, the energy of the walk dissipating in an awkward, silent shuffle.
“Henrik,” said Mara. Not a question.
He was face-down in the moss and spruce needles, one boot half-on, the heel of the other foot canted skyward in a way that seemed both unnatural and inevitable. His tool belt was twisted up under his torso, one leather pouch ruptured and spilling a handful of hex keys and washers into the dirt. The left arm was extended, palm up, and a coil of heavy radio cable was looped three times around the wrist and forearm, terminating in a ragged, frayed end two feet from the body. His right hand was curled in a loose fist next to his head, which rested in a shallow depression worn into the moss. There was a thin, dark wash of blood at the temple, not the arterial spurt I would later read about but a slow, soaking leak, the kind that suggested a loss of consciousness rather than instant death.
For a long moment, nobody said anything.
I crouched next to the body, balancing on my toes to avoid soaking my shoes. The first thing I did was check the neck for pulse. This was not medical training (my father had forbidden me to touch his patients) but I had watched him enough times to know where the carotid ran, how to press just hard enough to flatten the vessel without crushing it. There was nothing. I looked at the color of the skin, the slackness of the jaw. I had never seen a dead person, but I had seen photos. This was not like the photos. This was smaller, somehow.
“Is he-” Tommy began.
I straightened, wiping my hands on my jeans before I realized how pointless that was. The blood had already dried on my fingers.
“He’s dead,” I said.
Geoff tried to make a joke, a reflex born of discomfort, but the words failed him. Instead he let out a single, high-pitched laugh and then clapped a hand over his mouth. Tony took a slow step backward. Mara knelt beside me and examined the cable, tracing its length from the forearm to the ragged end, then back to the base of the tower. Her face was careful, a precision instrument set to record without judgment. I admired her for that.
“Was it an accident?” Tommy asked, as if the logic of it might redeem the scene. “Did he fall?”
I looked up at the tower, at the regular intervals of the crossbars, the clean lines of the guy wires. The base of the tower was dry, the only disturbance in the clearing, the patch where Henrik lay.
“Maybe,” I pondered. “But I don’t think so.”
The generator continued, indifferent to the drama at its threshold.
We stood there, five teenagers and a dead man, surrounded by the unbroken forest, the generator’s low throb and the tower’s blinking red, the only witnesses.
“I think we should go back,” Mara said. Her voice was even, but she kept her hand close to her face as she stood.
Nobody disagreed. We left Henrik as we had found him, the tableau arranged for whatever adult would next wander through. I did not look back until we had entered the tree line, and even then I was not certain what I was hoping to see.
I remember this with such clarity it sometimes feels like an implanted memory, a film I have watched too many times and now confuse with my own history. But I was there, and so were the others, and what happened next is simply the remainder of the story but would irrevocably change all of our lives.
The walk back through the forest is not a walk. We move in a kind of single-file disorder, speed fluctuating between a forced march and something not quite a jog. Nobody wants to be the first to call it running, and nobody lags so far behind that the group splits, but there is a current underfoot and we are all carried by it. I lead, not because I am particularly brave or even especially sure of where I am going, but because I have the highest forward velocity and the others are content to draft behind it.
Mara is two steps behind, her breathing measured and regular. She has not once looked over her shoulder since we left the clearing. I keep glancing sideways, expecting to see her eyes scanning between the trees, but she is fixed entirely on the route ahead. If she is afraid, she is storing it for later.
The forest is denser now. Every sound is crisp to the point of violence: the collapse of a dead branch underfoot, the wet slide of boot on stone, the rasp of Tommy’s jacket as he tries to keep up while avoiding the brambles. Behind us, the tower’s red pulse is still visible at intervals, a metronome counting down to nothing in particular.
After five minutes the terrain flattens and the path widens. The houses of the settlement appear suddenly, as if extruded from the earth while we were gone. I can see the dock, the strip of gravel that passes for Main Street, and the general store’s makeshift banner advertising some brand of potato chips I have never seen outside New England. The ferry is at anchor, a pale hulk looming at the far end of the cove, and the smell of diesel competes with the usual brine.
The adults are arranged in their standard morning configurations: four men at the far dock, each with a crab trap in a different state of disrepair; Mrs. Tierney and her assistant at the store’s outdoor freezer, restocking bags of ice; a cluster of seniors on the sunward side of the community hall porch, playing some variant of cards that seems more about argument than points.
We cross the open ground, ignoring the usual markers, no detours to the convenience store for gum or to the picnic benches for a drink of water. The others let me keep the lead as we approach the first adult.
Roy Collins is the one I choose to speak to. I have always liked him, which is rare for me; he has the hands of a man who could break you in two but the voice of a patient, slightly amused uncle. He sees us coming and raises an eyebrow, but does not set down the crab trap he is re-lining.
“Something up?” he asks. There is a strong undertow of expectation in the question, as if he has already predicted a handful of possible answers and is preloading his responses.
“There’s a body at the base of the radio tower,” I say, “and it’s Henrik.”
I deliver this in the same tone my father used when listing patient symptoms over the phone, careful not to dramatize, letting the words do the work.
Collins blinks once, slowly. For a split second he is a blank page, the words arranging themselves in a sequence I can almost see behind his eyes. Then he nods, twice, a slow deliberate motion that does not travel above his shoulders.
“Henrik, huh. Where exactly?”
“At the base,” I repeat, “near the east support. He’s face down. There’s blood at his temple.”
Collins processes this with a small pursing of the lips. He does not look at the other men, who are now openly watching us.
“Well,” he smacks his lips together, “we’ll have a look, then.”
He turns back to the crab trap, his hands resuming their task as if I had told him nothing more consequential than discovering a pothole. I stand there, waiting for the acknowledgment to deepen or evolve, but he offers only a vague nod in the direction of the forest.
Mara tugs gently at my sleeve. It is the first time she has initiated contact all morning.
“Let’s try the store,” she says, barely above a whisper.
I nod and we walk away. Behind us, the only sign of change in Collins’s behavior is that he takes a second, longer pause before threading the next section of rope through the trap. I look back at him once and see him staring at the water, mouth slightly open.
At the store, Mrs. Tierney is supervising her assistant, a teenage girl I do not know by name, as they restock a wire rack with SunChips and soda. She is old enough that her hair no longer looks “gray” but has begun to approximate the color of the steel door behind her. I admire her ability to monitor multiple things at once; her eyes flick from the truck to the assistant’s hands to us to the register and back again in an endless, efficient cycle.
“We found Henrik at the radio tower,” I say, again opting for directness over pleasantry. “He’s dead. I think someone might have hurt him.”
Mrs. Tierney’s gaze stops cycling for the duration of one breath, then resumes at its usual clip. “These things have a way of working themselves out,” she slurs, and I note the phrase because it is not one I have ever heard from her before. She always favored specifics: ‘Let me call Donny, he’ll know what to do,’ or ‘We should get some ice on that, dear.’ I wait for her to break character, but she simply nods, accepts a stack of flattened chip bags from her assistant, and moves on to the next chore.
Tony is scowling now, his arms folded across his chest, the posture of someone who has spent a childhood being underestimated and resents every minute of it. He opens his mouth to say something to Mrs. Tierney, then thinks better of it and mutters under his breath, “Nobody gives a shit.”
“We can try the ferry,” Mara offers, as if she is mapping out a diagnostic algorithm and we are only at step two.
On the way down to the dock, Geoff stops me with a light tap on the shoulder.
“This is weird, right?” he asks, and for once his tone is completely stripped of irony. “Like, this isn’t just me?”
“It’s not just you,” I reply.
He nods, relieved. Tommy is walking ten feet ahead, his head on a swivel, as though expecting someone to leap out from behind a barrel and offer a plausible explanation for everything. I am struck by how young he looks in this light, the normal bravado of his posture erased by the gravity of what we have seen.
Aldous Peck is the ferry operator, and in my life to that point I have never seen him do anything that is not directly related to the ferry. He is always in motion: loading, unloading, checking manifests, refueling, making complicated notes on a clipboard. Today he is standing by the edge of the water, staring at a yellow float that bobs twenty yards out. His uniform is a green t-shirt with the name of the ferry stenciled across the chest, the letters faded almost to invisibility.
“We found a body up at the tower,” I repeat, again, as soon as we are within earshot. “Henrik’s dead.”
Peck nods, but does not turn away from the float.
“I’ve only got two round-trip slots open this week,” he states, as if the dead man’s presence might constitute a reservation. “Can you wait till Thursday?”
I am so startled by the non sequitur that I say nothing for a full five seconds. Mara recovers first.
“We just thought you’d want to know?” she says accusingly.
Peck shrugs. “Probably the generator again. Just kept going out, no warning.”
There is a brief silence, the kind that only happens when a conversation is already over but the participants have not yet agreed to walk away.
“Thanks,” Mara doesn’t quite know how to end the conversation, and we walk back up the dock.
On the way, we pass Collins again. He is alone now, the other men gone, and he is threading rope through his hands with the same absent motion as before. If not for the slight change in lighting, I would swear he had not moved.
The five of us gather near the dock entrance, not sure what to do next. Tony is vibrating with anger, fists clenched at his sides.
“We should drag someone up there,” he mutters. “Make them look at it.”
“Nobody’s going to do anything,” barks Geoff. He has sat down on the lip of the seawall, staring at the horizon with the blankness of a person on day three of a fever. “They already know. They just don’t care.”
Tommy is still watching the community hall, as if expecting an adult to emerge and set things right. His face is blank but his hands are shaking slightly.
Mara looks at me. She does not ask a question, but I feel compelled to answer anyway.
“I think something’s wrong with them,” I say. “Not just… I mean, not just today. It’s like they’re…” I search for the word, but all the ones I can find are medical, and none fit.
“Broken,” says Mara.
I nod. “Yeah. Broken.”
I take out my notebook. My father always carried a field notes log in his pocket, and it had always seemed a dignified habit, so I adopted it, even though I rarely had occasion to record anything outside of school assignments or interesting animal sightings. I turn to a clean page and, with a borrowed pencil stub, write: “Something on this island is wrong.”
There is a long, shared silence. The others stand in a rough circle, not looking at each other, not looking at me. Above us, the radio tower’s warning light is visible through the gap in the trees, still blinking at its perfect, inhuman interval.
The community hall seems less a building than an assertion of collective memory. It exists at the edge of the settlement, shingled with a local tradition that says if you hold enough birthday parties and bake sales under a given roof, the structure will be immune to both time and weather. This is not true, but the lie is serviceable. The place smells of a history that has soaked into its fibers. The double doors stutter on their hinges as we file in.
There are three phones in the hall, which is exactly two more than any other building on the island. One is an ancient black wall mount, the kind with a cord so coiled it looks like a fossilized intestine. The second is a squat, gray tabletop model with a rotary dial scarred by the fingernails of every person who ever tried to call in a weather warning before the storm cut power. The third is new, a pushbutton unit with plastic so white it repels fingerprints.
Mara goes first, as always. She crosses the wood planks in a line so straight I can feel the effort in each step. She lifts the wall phone and presses the receiver to her ear, then holds it there, unmoving, her jaw set in a line so controlled I want to reach over and prod her just to see if she would react.
“Well?” says Geoff, after a time.
Mara keeps the receiver to her ear but turns to look at him, the angle of her head asking if he expects anything different than the obvious.
“Static,” she states. “Nothing else.”
She does not hang up. She covers the mouthpiece with one hand and closes her eyes, as if some hidden frequency will emerge if she simply outlasts the silence. After ten full seconds, she puts the receiver back, the cradle accepting it with a soft click.
I prefer verification. I move to the gray tabletop phone, spin the rotary through a test number, and count the audible gaps as the dial resets. The plastic is cold and slightly greasy against my skin. I do not expect a dial tone, but I check for one anyway, because the gesture is ritual. When the absence repeats, I place the receiver on the table and mentally catalog the likely failure points: circuit box, trunk line, tower base, operator’s switchboard.
Tommy kneels beside me. He is careful to avoid making eye contact, instead focusing on the phone as if by proximity he can force the machinery to life.
“Maybe the lines are just overloaded,” he suggests. “That happens. Storms do it all the time.”
“There wasn’t a storm last night,” I remind him, but gently.
“Then somebody cut them,” says Tony. His voice is flat, factual, the way a person might point out a missing limb. He offers the statement, leaving it to float in the astringent air.
Geoff grunts and moves to the third phone. He stabs at the keypad, his thumb heavy on the plastic, dialing nothing at all.
“What’s the plan now?” he asks. “I mean, if we can’t call out. Are there walkies? Does anybody have CB?”
Mara shrugs. “Henrik was the only one who ran the board. If he’s gone…”
“He is gone,” I say, unable to stop myself.
“-then the relay’s down for good.”
Tony kicks at the floor, his boot scraping a bright new scar into the wood. “We could try the VHF direct,” he says, not to anyone in particular.
Tommy laughs, but the sound is damp and wavering. “What are you going to do, Tony? Build a radio from junk in the kitchen?”
“If you have a line-of-sight and enough wattage-” Tony begins, but Mara cuts him off.
“You heard what the ferry guy said. Nobody’s coming until Thursday, at best.”
“That’s five days,” says Geoff. He sits on the edge of a folding table, the metal groaning under his weight. “You know what can happen in five days?”
“Everything,” I say, and the word tastes sour.
A draft moves through the hall. It snakes in via the cracks around the windowpanes, winding its way around our ankles. The windows here are so thin they magnify the blinking red of the radio tower outside, each pulse staining the floor with a faint, blood-colored afterimage. If you stare at it long enough, the rhythm sets your heart rate.
I open the circuit box near the storage closet, check the fuses, flip the main. Nothing changes.
Mara paces the room in a deliberate square, each lap methodical, as though she is counting perimeter for an eventual escape. Geoff watches her, his eyes following the route, but his mind is already elsewhere.
“We could try the Jensen house,” says Tommy, “they have a Ham radio setup. The old guy, Mr. Jensen, he used to patch through to the mainland during lobster season.”
“They’re probably home,” hopes Tony, but it doesn’t sound like hope.
Mara stops pacing. “Let’s just say it out loud,” she says. “We’re cut off. We’re stuck here until the next scheduled boat or until somebody fixes the relay at the tower.”
“Or until somebody else dies,” says Geoff, and his voice comes out thin, like he is already practicing the retelling.
Tommy slides down to the floor, his back against the wall, and stares up at the ceiling. “You think they’ll send somebody, when they notice?”
“If the lines are dead, how would they notice?” shouts Mara. “Henrik handled the logs, the only way anyone would even know is if there’s no check-in. And even then, you think anybody on the mainland is waiting to hear from us?”
Tony shrugs again, this time more ambiguous.
The room feels smaller now. The humidity of breath and adolescent sweat, the sense of being watched by the inventory of unclaimed trophies and warped portrait photos that line the walls.
I drift to the window and peer out. There is no visible movement of anyone. The village looks suddenly uninhabited, a model or a diorama abandoned by the child who built it.
“Okay,” I say, “Let’s review what we know.”
Four faces turn to me, waiting.
“One, Henrik is dead, possibly murdered, though nobody is calling it that. Two, the adults are-” I struggle for the word, then settle for “nonresponsive.” “Three, the phones are out, and the tower is functioning maybe but unmanned. Four, we have no way to get ourselves off the island to the mainland for help.”
Mara holds up a hand, ticking off points as if checking them for fault.
“We’re missing something,” says Geoff, “some piece. Because this doesn’t make sense, not in any real-world way.”
“Sometimes things don’t make sense,” says Tommy.
I look at each of them in turn.
“We need a plan,” I say, and this time it is not a suggestion.
Mara nods, the motion small but decisive.
I have always hated my father’s living room. The entire design is an argument against comfort: no throws or pillows, all the furniture arranged to maximize airflow rather than human use, and a persistent odor of ozone from the ancient humidifier he insisted on running year-round. My father was a man who believed in the prophylactic effect of minor suffering. He applied this philosophy to medicine, child-rearing, and the choice of his sofa. The couch cushions are undisturbed, untouched by any human since the last time he rose from them. I have to remind myself that he is not about to walk in from the kitchen, mug of black coffee in one hand and a question about my performance in school poised on his tongue.
The group clusters at the threshold, uncertain if they are allowed to cross the boundary into my domestic history. I wave them in. Mara is first, as usual, scanning the room with a kind of predatory caution. Tommy and Tony follow in a pair, their steps landing out of sync, then converging as they stake out separate corners. Geoff lingers at the threshold until I gesture again, then closes the door behind him with an audible click.
The house is silent except for the periodic tick of the kitchen clock and the low, ultrasonic whine of the fridge cycling on and off. On the end table is a medical journal, open to an article on the epidemiology of emerging viral encephalopathies. I slide it to the center of the table with a practiced flick. The article is heavy on electron micrographs and short on answers, a perfect encapsulation of my father’s view of the world.
“Ssssoooooo,” drawls Geoff, “what’s the next move?”
“We compare notes,” I reply, “and we see what fits.”
Tony grunts, but otherwise says nothing.
I begin with Mrs. Harper, the morning of the day before. I recount her standing at the dock, muttering to herself. The locals avoided her with theatrical nonchalance, the way you might step around a fresh oil stain in the driveway, each detour a little wider than the last.
Mara nods along, unsmiling. She has already heard this, but she lets me re-tell it for the sake of the others.
Then Mr. Jensen: up at dawn, drilling a neat row of holes into the hull of his own lobster boat. When I asked why, he looked straight at me and said, “To let the air out.” Then he returned to work, as if my question had never been asked.
“Maybe he finally cracked,” laughs Tommy. “The guy’s been losing it for years.”
“Possibly,” I say. “But it doesn’t explain the rest.”
I pause, waiting to see if anyone else will contribute. Mara picks up the thread.
“Mrs. Tierney,” she adds. “I watched her take inventory at the store. She recited the numbers backwards, every item, then locked the freezer and put the keys in the slot for outgoing mail. When I asked if she was okay, she just said, ‘I’m keeping score.’”
Tony shrugs, his default gesture for all information.
Geoff offers a data point: “Collins at the dock. I saw him open the same crab trap, five times in a row, each time acting surprised by what was inside. I asked if he needed help and he told me to fuck off, which I guess is normal, but the rest isn’t.”
The evidence accrues, each anecdote more inexplicable than the last. None of the adults seem capable of acknowledging a deviation in anyone’s behavior, least of all their own.
I rise and move to the bookshelf. The spines are a uniform brown, the dust jacket color leeched out by sunlight over years. I pull down my father’s favorite text “Neurovirology, third edition” and open it to the flagged section on viral-induced cognitive dysfunction. Chapter Twelve: Encephalopathies, Progressive and Acute.
I set the book on my knees and trace the diagram with my index finger: virus enters host, crosses blood-brain barrier, interrupts normal neural transmission, leads to abnormal behaviors (and eventually) systemic collapse. The annotations in my father’s handwriting are precise and joyless.
Tommy leans over my shoulder. “You think it’s contagious?” His breath is loaded with the acetone tang of sweat and whatever snack food he has hoarded in his pockets.
“Everything is contagious,” I say, but only Mara hears it, and she looks at me like I have confirmed her worst suspicion.
The cold kettle on the stove is an artifact of the morning, a relic left untouched as the rest of the house drifted toward entropy. I want to boil water for everyone, as if tea could stave off the thing that is crawling through the community’s collective nervous system, but I don’t know if that would help or just further the illusion that normalcy is achievable.
“What about us?” asks Tommy, and this time his voice is almost childlike. “How do we know we’re not?”
He does not finish the sentence, and nobody tries to supply the words for him.
Tony is staring at the bookshelf. Geoff sits on the arm of the couch, fidgeting with the buttons on the remote, each click another layer of static added to the background.
Mara moves closer. She studies the diagram, then flips back several pages, scanning each one with a finger that moves at a pace both deliberate and slightly impatient.
“We need a hypothesis,” she says, “not just anecdotes.”
“I agree,” I say, and this time my voice is steadier.
I open my notebook, the one I had used at the dock, and draw a table with two columns: Affected and Unaffected. The first column fills quickly: Henrik (dead), Mrs. Harper, Mr. Jensen, Collins, Mrs. Tierney, all exhibiting aberrant behavior. In the Unaffected column, the only names are the five of us and, perhaps, the store clerk girl whose name I still do not know.
Tony finally speaks. “Maybe it’s the water.”
I consider this. The island’s water table is shallow, and after heavy rain the wells often overflow.
“Or the air,” says Geoff, “like spores or a mold.”
“Nobody’s coughing,” I point out, but he is not wrong to suggest inhalation as a vector.
“It started with the boats,” says Mara, not as a question.
“Or when it rained the other night,” says Tommy.
“Or it’s the soil,” I say, “and something just triggered the acute phase.”
We stare at each other for a full minute, the silence as dense as the humidity after a storm.
“Let’s assume it’s a communicable agent,” says Mara, “and let’s assume we’re exposed. What do we do?”
“Quarantine,” I say, but my mouth is dry and the word sounds insincere.
Tommy laughs, but stops halfway through.
“Seriously?” says Geoff. “You want us to hole up in your house and wait for it to pass?”
“If we’re already infected,” I say, “then it doesn’t matter. If not, then isolation is our only defense.”
“Unless it’s not a virus,” says Tony. “Unless it’s something else.”
Mara looks at him, and for the first time, I see her uncertainty.
“What else would it be?” she asks.
Tony shrugs, but his mouth is a straight line.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “If the adults are compromised, it’s up to us.”
Mara folds her arms. “We need to observe. Monitor symptoms. Document everything.”
I nod, and begin to copy the structure of the table onto a clean sheet. I note the date, the names, the baseline behaviors. I will record every anomaly, every deviation, because if there is a pattern, it will be here, somewhere in the accumulation of data.
The ticking clock in the kitchen marks out seconds with the precision of a metronome. The kettle does not boil. The house is sealed up tight, but the air feels electrified, a charge building without discharge.
Then, from the direction of the porch, a heavy, deliberate thump against the front door.
All of us freeze. The room has no cover, no exits except the way we came.
There is a second thump, softer this time, as if the visitor is not certain they want to be let in.
Geoff makes to stand, but Mara holds up a hand, palm down, and he sits again, his body tensed like a trap ready to spring.
The third knock is the same as the first: measured, precise, inhumanly patient.
“We’re not answering that,” I say, and nobody argues.
The thumping stops. For a minute, there is nothing but the whine of the fridge and the tick of the clock.
Then, from the window, the red pulse of the tower intensifies, painting the walls of the room with a deepening blood hue, as if the house itself is signaling some internal alarm.
Outside, the door remains closed, but I sense the pressure building. Inside, we are a closed system, five vectors of potential catastrophe, waiting for the next symptom to present.
I resume taking notes, my handwriting steadier now, each letter a defense against forgetting.
The kettle remains cold.
The red light pulses on.
The next phase has already begun.