“Meeting…” The hiss and crackle of a stereo interrupted the message. I crouched behind a metal trash can big enough to hide my body from view. No smells of rotting food. I looked inside. Empty. Not even a plastic bag lined it. There were no people in this section.
A speaker popped again and I found the source. A dozen feet away from where I hid stood a tall metal pole with a speaker attached. The fairground’s music and announcement system.
“Meeting at Stage 1…Fifteen minutes. All must attend. Meeting at Stage 1…”
If they used the same names as the state fair, I knew where to find Stage 1.
The quality of light made me guess it was late morning, though even a vague outline of the sun wasn’t visible through the fog. I skirted along the edge of buildings, sidewalks, grassy areas, the skeletons of vendor stations. The building the old woman and I had taken refuge in was one of several animal housing structures near the horse racing stadium. There were no sounds of people or activity, but I thought maybe this was for safety reasons.
Stage 1 was near the exhibit buildings, on the opposite end of the fairgrounds from where I was. Those multi-storied cement fortresses encircled a cement-stepped amphitheater and were partially surrounded themselves by canals used for paddle-boating during better times. They would form a type of castle, moat and all.
There was no one in sight. This made me uneasy. I reminded myself Cal Expo took up hundreds of acres and I was still along the edges of it. But how long had I actually been in the fevers? Hours? Days?
Stage 1 opened to air, except for the backside, which opened to a cement walkway that connected several warehouses. The layout made it easy to see people coming while also drawing the eye to it like a magnet. Dozens of people milled around the opposite side of the stage across the algae-filled water. People lined up underneath tents with tables that displayed huge, open pots sending curls of steam into the air. My stomach cramped.
People lined up with bowls in hand, waiting for their turn at this outdoor soup kitchen. Winter clothes obscured faces, genders, ages. I thought I might pass through unrecognized. I thought it might be worth the risk of getting caught for a chance at a bowl of food.
“Ladies and Gentlemen. Sergeant Bennings would like your attention.” The electronically amplified voice sounded tired. People shuffled and faced the stage. The food servers paused.
I walked on a curving asphalt ramp, lost sight of the stage and the crowd for a moment, and then suddenly became a part of the crowd. No one questioned me. No one seemed to notice me. People focused on eating or on the stage. Those few people who talked seem to do so in furtive whispers as if trying to hide criminal activity. The smell of unwashed bodies reminded me of fermented pickles, which only made my stomach rumble louder. Now I could see the dirt caked onto clothes and exposed skin. Now I could make out genders and guess at ages.
I drew my clothes tightly around myself, arranged my greasy hair to obscure my face, used the bulky bodies of two men facing the stage to hide me from the sight of others.
A man in army uniform took up the microphone. He stood in front of scarlet stage curtains that must have been commandeered from a game stand. He stood spread-eagled and looked out across the water over the crowd for a long moment. Once the few whisperings fell into a strained silence, he spoke. “We’re all hungry. I’ll make this quick and to the point. We are all survivors, some of the last human beings in this great city. We’ve lost communication with the outside which means one of two things: the CDC is following standard quarantine procedures, or this is countrywide. Maybe worldwide.”
A person behind me gasped. Others stood in grim silence.
“We will hold the line here. We must. All of us are responsible for the safety of our new home. We have survived for over a month already because we follow the rules. You must follow the rules. There are no exceptions. There can be no mistakes when our very humanity is at risk. Therefore, anyone caught breaking the rules,” his voice deepened and he pressed his mouth closer to the mike so that his voice distorted, “will face a hearing and execution.”
Sergeant Bennings turned, as if to cue someone offstage. The curtains trembled and moved apart. They revealed a gallows stage with a noose already around the neck of a woman, plump and pear-shaped, in a sweatshirt and jeans, wobbling on top of a wooden box.
“This must be a joke.” The words left me before I realized I'd spoken.
The two men I hid behind shifted at my voice, and I quickly lowered my head to stare at their shoes, hoping they would not look at me, see me, see my infection.
They did not turn around, but one said, “This is no joke. It’s what's kept us all alive and uninfected for this long.”
“Doesn’t make it right,” the other guy whispered.
“Shut your mouth. Better not let any of them hear you.”
“In accordance with standard quarantine containment procedures,” Sergeant Bennings said, speaking into the microphone like he was reading from a script, “and the prevention of bodily fluid transfer and the limited supplies of drugs available at this time, Fillipa Stenfor, you are hereby sentenced to death by hanging for helping a known infected escape detection—”
“Her own grandmother, for God’s sake,” the first man whispered.
The second man said, “If you’re determined to get yourself killed, I’ll not be a part of it.” At that he walked off, exposing me to the wind and a better line of sight to the stage.
“Please confirm to all of us gathered here that you received the hearing as promised in the bylaws of this quarantine site.”
The woman hung her head, tucking her chin around the rope. She did not move, not until someone in soldier’s fatigues prodded her with the butt of a rifle.
She nodded slightly.
“Now you may share any last words before you are hung until you are dead.” Sergeant Bennings held the microphone to her mouth.
After a long moment of silence, she said, “Sometimes doing what is right and doing what is good—sometimes they are not the same thing. I do not regret my choices.” She stopped talking, and then nodded to show she was finished.
Sergeant Bennings stepped off the gallows box and held the microphone away, but it still captured his words to her, floating them to us like whispers on a pillow. “You should not have protected her. This could have been avoided.” Even from this distance, there seemed to be real sorrow etched on his face.
She did not answer him.
He waited another moment and then backed up several paces. With a sigh into the microphone, he said, “Proceed.”
Another soldier on stage kicked the wooden box out from beneath her feet. The sharp crack of boot against wood shot across the water like a slap.
I did not watch. Instead I examined my shoes as if my very survival depended upon tracing the mud-crusted laces, the little seed stickers attached to those laces, the colored scuff marks that were a mix of more mud and grease from being under the truck, a rust-colored streak that was likely dried blood.
By then they had hung her until she was dead and closed the stage curtains.
Sergeant Bennings came out again to speak against that scarlet background. “Shift change in two hours. Food served until 6 PM.” He left the stage.
I tried to process what all of us had witnessed in silence, without protest, without chaos, as if normal life now included hanging a woman on a stage.
But maybe it was normal now.
People milled around, talked in close whispers, lined back up for food. No one seemed to notice that the curtains had opened again.
The woman and her gallows were now missing, but five figures remained. Three stood in a semi-circle talking and gesturing at each other on the side of the stage, almost hidden, but not quite. They wore army fatigues. The fourth and fifth figures wore regular layers of winter clothes and pulled electronic equipment off the stage. There was something familiar about the fifth man. Something about his outline, the way he walked, the way he coiled wire, lifted a speaker off the stage floor. I squinted and my eyes swam and my heart lurched.
It could be Dylan. It could be.
I stuffed my infected hands in my pockets and approached the moat. I ignored the pain that made me want to limp like an old person. Even with everything I knew, my heart felt glad to see him alive.
Adrenaline made saliva flood into my mouth. I backed away from the moat's edge at the last moment. People would see me. They would stare. They would know I wasn't like them. They would know I was infected. They would show me no mercy.
I veered to join the end of the soup line. Maybe I could lose myself in the commotion of people moving and eating while I figured out if that was really Dylan I had seen, or if it had only been a ghost playing tricks on me.
I pulled my hair and hood over my face and shuffled along with the others to the pots of food. I made and then discarded a dozen frantic plans to bolt to the stage.
“They lost control of the fence last night,” a man in front of me whispered to his female companion. “Sergeant Bennings is stretched too thin. He says he’s going to put civilians on the perimeter.”
“It won’t do any good,” she said. “This place is too big, not enough of us came together.”
“When you kill half the refugees because you suspect they’re infected…” he let his voice trail off.
His companion grimaced. “It was the only thing to do. It’s a quarantine.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d had people—“
“My father was…but he was infected. Went crazy, tried to kill me. I would do anything not to get infected,” the woman said. “Sergeant Bennings is doing what has to be done. We’ll worry about whether it was right if we're still alive when all this is over.”
Her companion grunted, but otherwise kept his thoughts to himself.
The fifth man, the one who could be Dylan, still had his back turned to me as he coiled another cable.
Someone behind me cleared their throat. I shuffled to cover the space in line. The stage guy turned to drop the coil in a pile with other cables. My heart lurched into my throat.
Dylan.
I’d imagined him dead, imprisoned, infected, wounded. Yet he looked like none of those things. He walked with a strong gait, with a purpose. Only a few yards of water and asphalt separated us. He was breathing and alive and healthy and young. I had to get to him.
It was my turn to pick up soup from the table. Without thinking, I grabbed a bowl and spoon and looked up, straight into the eyes of my soup server.
Straight into Jane’s hazel eyes.