Bitty Bang - "Boomtown" - Part III
May 25
We buried another child again today. Nearly all of them have gone. Then again, nearly everyone in the town has gone. Our peoples’ roots are so deep here, our family loyalty so strong, that no one left on the last train out on Friday evening. Not a one of us wants to leave any family members behind to an unknown fate. No one wants to be the one family member to survive the illness, to turn their backs on those that remain. The people that are left all have this haunted look in their eyes. It’s as if they have figured out it is only a matter of time until they, too, become sick and join their loved ones in death.
The town is practically deserted. Along with the school, the mill has shut down, the trains have stopped coming and the general store is only open for a few hours each day. Unfortunately, the town’s sole mortuary service has also shut down since Jacob Lasner died and there is no one left to run it. I have taken to doing what I can to give those that have fallen victim to this illness a proper burial. With no one to help me to tend the ill or bury those that have died, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do so.
It was difficult enough when the great fire swept through town many years ago. Spirits were low then, but we had numbers enough that we could rebuild, move on. Here, now, spirits are low and there’s not much to encourage people to keep going.
It was fully dark when Chris was woken by Lance vigorously shaking him, hissing, “Chris! Chris, wake up dammit!”
“What the fuck, Bass?” Chris growled as he swatted Lance’s hands away. He rubbed his hand over his face. “God, what’s going on?”
Lance shook him again and Chris growled in annoyance until he stopped. “Chris, she’s ... That girl you said that you saw in the school? She’s here.”
Suddenly, Chris was wide awake. “She’s what?”
“Here,” Lance repeated. Raising a slightly shaky hand, he pointed.
Chris looked where Lance was pointing. The room was dark. It should have been pitch black, but the girl cast off a faint, eerie glow. She was just as Chris had seen her earlier that evening - white night dress with eyelets and pink ribbon around her neck, night dress down to her ankles, dark hair loose around her shoulders.
“I think you better tell me now. From the beginning,” Lance whispered.
Slowly, Chris began to tell Lance everything. From the first chilled wind across the back of his neck when there had been no breeze that day, to the disappearing finger smudges in the dust on the bar top, to the shifting shadows, to the footsteps he’d heard in the house right before he’d hurt his ankle. Everything led up to Chris seeing her in the school house and the two of them seeing her now.
She still waited for them just inside the doorway. She’d tilted her head a little bit and her expression was almost impatient as she pressed her lips together and watched them. It was as if she were waiting, as if she wanted something from them, but Chris couldn’t imagine what that could possibly be.
Lance stood and held out a hand to Chris as he asked, “Does she want us to follow her?”
Chris shrugged, then took Lance’s hand and stood, then brushed dust and tiny splinters off his butt and the backs of his thighs. Still half asleep, he put too much weight too quickly onto his ankle and hissed. When Lance raised an eyebrow at him, Chris shook his head. The Tylenol he’d taken earlier in the evening had worn off and it had stiffened up during the night, but he’d be all right once they got moving again.
“I have no idea,” Chris finally answered. “Did you grab a couple of flashlights before we left the car? Tripping over God only knows what in the dark in a real ghost town doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. I hurt enough as it is.”
“Yeah, hang on just a sec.” Lance picked the bag up from the floor and started digging around in it. “A-ha!” he said as he pulled out two flashlights. He clicked one on and passed it to Chris, then clicked on his own. Two small beams of light lit the room, throwing eerie shadows on the walls and lit up the dust particles floating in the air.
When Chris looked again, the girl had moved a little closer to the front door. Chris elbowed Lance gently. “Dude. I think she does want us to follow,” he whispered. After shifting the flashlight to his left hand, Chris started to follow, then stopped when Lance’s fingers wrapped firmly around his arm.
“Chris! We don’t have a clue where she wants us to go,” he hissed.
Chris swung the arch of his flashlight around the small, dusty room. “Does it really matter?” he asked finally. “It’s not like we have a lot of choices out here.”
“Fine. Do you need some more Tylenol before we get going again?” Lance relented.
Chris tested his ankle. “Nah, I think I’m good for now.” He swung the flashlight one last time around the small room, finally coming to rest on Lance, then started again toward the small girl. He knew Lance would follow him before he’d willingly stay in the small house all by himself.
June 1
The townsfolk shut down the mine and the men spent two and a half days searching the hills, fields, train tracks and even some abandoned, shallow mine shafts searching for Easton Mills, but he was never found and neither was his body. Most folk assume that he either became disoriented and died of exposure, or perhaps that a coyote or eagle got him, but no one will say this in front of any of his kin. In all likelihood, we will never know for sure. After dinner on the third day, the men that remained got together at the general store and the search was called off.
The illness continues to spread through the people remaining in the town and the cemetery has run out of room. I had to start using a field behind the infirmary. Joshua Clark’s mortuary service was very busy until he fell ill himself and passed away earlier this week. Until his illness, he had been helping me to dispose of the bodies as people passed on.
It breaks my heart to know there is nothing I can do to save anyone when the illness strikes. To know that I can’t do anything to save any of them. To see the sadness in their faces when they begin to show symptoms, the knowledge that they know what will be coming for them, that their fate is inevitable, is such a sad and frustrating thing. I became a doctor to heal people and yet lately it seems that all I can do after delivering the bad news is help keep the people of my town comfortable until their time has quickly come.
Now, there are only four of us left. Easton Mills’ family rests here in the infirmary with me as I, too, have begun showing symptoms of this illness and have not the strength to make the twice daily trek across town to their home. It was decided early on that the three of them would be best off here where I could care for all four of us. Little Gracie Mills appears to be the strongest and healthiest of us and for the time being, she has been a great help in nursing her mama and papa. She is such a brave little girl and I tell her parents nightly that they should be very proud of her.
Until now, I’d always been able to give those that have died a proper burial even once Joshua Clark had passed, but now I wonder what will happen to the four of us. Not a one of us is strong enough to bury any of the others and what will happen to the last of us to die? Who will bury us?
Once outside, the girl continued down the empty, silent street. Chris shivered as she slowly led them toward the edge of town, though he wasn’t sure if it was from chilly night air or from other things. The temperature had dropped considerably since sundown and it was quite cool now. He could hear Lance walking quickly to catch up and Chris looked up just as Lance fell into step next to him. Chris smiled, grasped Lance’s hand in his, and kept walking, nodding his head toward the child.
Mostly, she kept to the center of the streets. As they passed in front of the empty buildings, Chris shivered. When Lance looked at him curiously, Chris explained, “It’s as though I can feel the residents watching us, even though I know they’re not there.”
Every so often, she would cut through a field of tall grass and one of them would stumble over something that their flashlights hadn’t picked up. One of the last lots that she led them through, Chris realized, was the town’s cemetery. He stopped Lance and shined the flashlight’s beam on first neat mounds of dirt with small stones and faded lettering. Eventually, the mounds grew more and more haphazard and instead of stones to mark the graves, makeshift rickety wooden crosses were used. Soon, there weren’t even wooden crosses and there were just mounds marking where people had once been buried. Many of them were eerily small and Chris shivered at the thought of so many children dying and having to be buried. By the time they’d reached the far side of the lot, the graves were very close together, as though whomever had buried them were trying to fit as many people into the lot as possible.
Finally, she stopped in front of another house at the opposite end of town. As Chris raised his flashlight up and up, he realized it was much larger than many of the other homes that they had seen so far. It was two stories tall with four boarded up windows across the front and a solid wooden door in the center. A sagging porch spread across the front and white paint chipped away from the clap board siding. A rusted iron fence edged a path that led from the street up to the porch steps in front. The girl was on the front porch waiting for Chris and Lance to catch up to her.
“Here?” Chris asked her, even though he knew she didn’t really have a way to answer him. She still stood by the door, but made a movement that seemed almost as though she were stomping her foot impatiently. Chris chuckled and looked at Lance. “I think this is it. Are you ready?” he asked. When Lance nodded, Chris went forward and pushed the door open.
He was surprised that it swung inward easily, as though its hinges had been well oiled and maintained through the years, but one quick look assured him that the door’s hinges were just as rusty as everything else in this town. As was typical for old farmhouses, the door opened into a hall with 2 closed doors and a flight of stairs on their left. Chipped porcelain knobs were still in their places on the doors and Chris itched to turn one and see what was in the room beyond, but the girl went further into the house and Chris continued to follow her. The hallway ended in a large room that still held living room furniture. A floor lamp stood in the corner with a faded and torn sofa positioned in front of it. A large wooden stereo stood against the wall, and another chair sat catty corner to that. But still the girl did not stop as she led them through a spacious kitchen, through another door until finally, she was no where to be seen and Chris and Lance had to stop at a closed door at the end of the hall. There was an old glass knob on this door and Chris reached out to turn it, hoping that it wouldn’t end up coming off in his hand. Glancing quickly at Lance first, he turned it carefully and pushed the door inward.
The door creaked softly on its hinges, but swung free and stopped when it was completely open. The room beyond was long and narrow and probably the most untouched by time that they’d seen yet. Beds were set up along the wall to their right, with musty drawn privacy curtains still hanging to the floor between them. On the wall directly across from them was another door. Pushed against the wall to the left of the door was a cluttered desk, a chair and -
“Dude,” Lance gasped, interrupting Chris’s mental inventory.
Still seated in the chair, collapsed over the desk were someone’s remains. In one hand was perched a writing quill. A ink well whose ink had dried up long ago was waiting nearby. Open on the desk was a thick leather bound journal.
Chris walked slowly around the room as his mind tried to block out the horrors he was seeing here. There was not one, but three more bodies laid out on the beds in the room. Thin blankets covered them, but as best as he could tell, there were two adults and a child. It was the child’s remains that held his attention the longest. As he was studying them, the girl appeared again next to the bed and Chris finally realized what was bugging him so much about this one. The child’s body was hers.
“Lance!” he hissed. “Lance!” he said again when Lance didn’t answer him. “Get that Bass Ass over here.”
“What?” Lance asked as he crossed the small room. He stopped behind Chris and put on hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Oh Holy shit,” he said and Chris knew he didn’t need to explain. Lance had figured it out, too. Lance held up the book that had been on the desk in his free hand. “It’s a journal,” he explained. “This is what passed for an infirmary here and apparently, these were the last patients. But what could she want? The little girl?” Lance asked.
Chris shrugged and continued to stare down at the small form in the last bed of the infirmary. “That must have been the doctor then.” He was almost past freaking out when the little girl nodded her head in agreement with him. It was the first time she’d responded directly to something one of them had said. He looked at the journal in Lance’s hand. “If these are the last patients, where is everyone else?”
Lance opened the book and, without thinking about what he was doing, sat down carefully on the edge of the girl’s bed. “Only one way to find out, right?” he asked as Chris sat next to him. “Hopefully this journal can tell us something.” Lance opened the journal. The pages were dried and brittle, the ink faded, but still legible. He took hold of Chris’s hand and, when he was sure he had Chris’s attention, he began to read.
June 3
The flu has claimed three more victims. Gracie Mills and her parents passed passed away this morning in their sleep. For one brief moment, her parents took each other’s hand and then let go again before they fell asleep, never to wake up again. Fortunately for Gracie, she was not awake to see this and she died in her sleep shortly after.
I continue to grow weaker and it is quite impossible for me to give Gracie and her family the proper burial that they all deserve. The most that I can do is say a prayer for them as they lay in their sickbed and know that soon it shall be my turn to join them. All in all, the illness claimed about two hundred people. Once we’ve all died, will anyone remember us? Will someone find our town sometime in the future and wonder what happened to us all? I can only hope that my journal provides some of these answers. Will Easton return here, grown up and be thankful that he had managed to survive this or did some of the local wildlife find him before he was able to find his way to another. . .
We buried another child again today. Nearly all of them have gone. Then again, nearly everyone in the town has gone. Our peoples’ roots are so deep here, our family loyalty so strong, that no one left on the last train out on Friday evening. Not a one of us wants to leave any family members behind to an unknown fate. No one wants to be the one family member to survive the illness, to turn their backs on those that remain. The people that are left all have this haunted look in their eyes. It’s as if they have figured out it is only a matter of time until they, too, become sick and join their loved ones in death.
The town is practically deserted. Along with the school, the mill has shut down, the trains have stopped coming and the general store is only open for a few hours each day. Unfortunately, the town’s sole mortuary service has also shut down since Jacob Lasner died and there is no one left to run it. I have taken to doing what I can to give those that have fallen victim to this illness a proper burial. With no one to help me to tend the ill or bury those that have died, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do so.
It was difficult enough when the great fire swept through town many years ago. Spirits were low then, but we had numbers enough that we could rebuild, move on. Here, now, spirits are low and there’s not much to encourage people to keep going.
It was fully dark when Chris was woken by Lance vigorously shaking him, hissing, “Chris! Chris, wake up dammit!”
“What the fuck, Bass?” Chris growled as he swatted Lance’s hands away. He rubbed his hand over his face. “God, what’s going on?”
Lance shook him again and Chris growled in annoyance until he stopped. “Chris, she’s ... That girl you said that you saw in the school? She’s here.”
Suddenly, Chris was wide awake. “She’s what?”
“Here,” Lance repeated. Raising a slightly shaky hand, he pointed.
Chris looked where Lance was pointing. The room was dark. It should have been pitch black, but the girl cast off a faint, eerie glow. She was just as Chris had seen her earlier that evening - white night dress with eyelets and pink ribbon around her neck, night dress down to her ankles, dark hair loose around her shoulders.
“I think you better tell me now. From the beginning,” Lance whispered.
Slowly, Chris began to tell Lance everything. From the first chilled wind across the back of his neck when there had been no breeze that day, to the disappearing finger smudges in the dust on the bar top, to the shifting shadows, to the footsteps he’d heard in the house right before he’d hurt his ankle. Everything led up to Chris seeing her in the school house and the two of them seeing her now.
She still waited for them just inside the doorway. She’d tilted her head a little bit and her expression was almost impatient as she pressed her lips together and watched them. It was as if she were waiting, as if she wanted something from them, but Chris couldn’t imagine what that could possibly be.
Lance stood and held out a hand to Chris as he asked, “Does she want us to follow her?”
Chris shrugged, then took Lance’s hand and stood, then brushed dust and tiny splinters off his butt and the backs of his thighs. Still half asleep, he put too much weight too quickly onto his ankle and hissed. When Lance raised an eyebrow at him, Chris shook his head. The Tylenol he’d taken earlier in the evening had worn off and it had stiffened up during the night, but he’d be all right once they got moving again.
“I have no idea,” Chris finally answered. “Did you grab a couple of flashlights before we left the car? Tripping over God only knows what in the dark in a real ghost town doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. I hurt enough as it is.”
“Yeah, hang on just a sec.” Lance picked the bag up from the floor and started digging around in it. “A-ha!” he said as he pulled out two flashlights. He clicked one on and passed it to Chris, then clicked on his own. Two small beams of light lit the room, throwing eerie shadows on the walls and lit up the dust particles floating in the air.
When Chris looked again, the girl had moved a little closer to the front door. Chris elbowed Lance gently. “Dude. I think she does want us to follow,” he whispered. After shifting the flashlight to his left hand, Chris started to follow, then stopped when Lance’s fingers wrapped firmly around his arm.
“Chris! We don’t have a clue where she wants us to go,” he hissed.
Chris swung the arch of his flashlight around the small, dusty room. “Does it really matter?” he asked finally. “It’s not like we have a lot of choices out here.”
“Fine. Do you need some more Tylenol before we get going again?” Lance relented.
Chris tested his ankle. “Nah, I think I’m good for now.” He swung the flashlight one last time around the small room, finally coming to rest on Lance, then started again toward the small girl. He knew Lance would follow him before he’d willingly stay in the small house all by himself.
June 1
The townsfolk shut down the mine and the men spent two and a half days searching the hills, fields, train tracks and even some abandoned, shallow mine shafts searching for Easton Mills, but he was never found and neither was his body. Most folk assume that he either became disoriented and died of exposure, or perhaps that a coyote or eagle got him, but no one will say this in front of any of his kin. In all likelihood, we will never know for sure. After dinner on the third day, the men that remained got together at the general store and the search was called off.
The illness continues to spread through the people remaining in the town and the cemetery has run out of room. I had to start using a field behind the infirmary. Joshua Clark’s mortuary service was very busy until he fell ill himself and passed away earlier this week. Until his illness, he had been helping me to dispose of the bodies as people passed on.
It breaks my heart to know there is nothing I can do to save anyone when the illness strikes. To know that I can’t do anything to save any of them. To see the sadness in their faces when they begin to show symptoms, the knowledge that they know what will be coming for them, that their fate is inevitable, is such a sad and frustrating thing. I became a doctor to heal people and yet lately it seems that all I can do after delivering the bad news is help keep the people of my town comfortable until their time has quickly come.
Now, there are only four of us left. Easton Mills’ family rests here in the infirmary with me as I, too, have begun showing symptoms of this illness and have not the strength to make the twice daily trek across town to their home. It was decided early on that the three of them would be best off here where I could care for all four of us. Little Gracie Mills appears to be the strongest and healthiest of us and for the time being, she has been a great help in nursing her mama and papa. She is such a brave little girl and I tell her parents nightly that they should be very proud of her.
Until now, I’d always been able to give those that have died a proper burial even once Joshua Clark had passed, but now I wonder what will happen to the four of us. Not a one of us is strong enough to bury any of the others and what will happen to the last of us to die? Who will bury us?
Once outside, the girl continued down the empty, silent street. Chris shivered as she slowly led them toward the edge of town, though he wasn’t sure if it was from chilly night air or from other things. The temperature had dropped considerably since sundown and it was quite cool now. He could hear Lance walking quickly to catch up and Chris looked up just as Lance fell into step next to him. Chris smiled, grasped Lance’s hand in his, and kept walking, nodding his head toward the child.
Mostly, she kept to the center of the streets. As they passed in front of the empty buildings, Chris shivered. When Lance looked at him curiously, Chris explained, “It’s as though I can feel the residents watching us, even though I know they’re not there.”
Every so often, she would cut through a field of tall grass and one of them would stumble over something that their flashlights hadn’t picked up. One of the last lots that she led them through, Chris realized, was the town’s cemetery. He stopped Lance and shined the flashlight’s beam on first neat mounds of dirt with small stones and faded lettering. Eventually, the mounds grew more and more haphazard and instead of stones to mark the graves, makeshift rickety wooden crosses were used. Soon, there weren’t even wooden crosses and there were just mounds marking where people had once been buried. Many of them were eerily small and Chris shivered at the thought of so many children dying and having to be buried. By the time they’d reached the far side of the lot, the graves were very close together, as though whomever had buried them were trying to fit as many people into the lot as possible.
Finally, she stopped in front of another house at the opposite end of town. As Chris raised his flashlight up and up, he realized it was much larger than many of the other homes that they had seen so far. It was two stories tall with four boarded up windows across the front and a solid wooden door in the center. A sagging porch spread across the front and white paint chipped away from the clap board siding. A rusted iron fence edged a path that led from the street up to the porch steps in front. The girl was on the front porch waiting for Chris and Lance to catch up to her.
“Here?” Chris asked her, even though he knew she didn’t really have a way to answer him. She still stood by the door, but made a movement that seemed almost as though she were stomping her foot impatiently. Chris chuckled and looked at Lance. “I think this is it. Are you ready?” he asked. When Lance nodded, Chris went forward and pushed the door open.
He was surprised that it swung inward easily, as though its hinges had been well oiled and maintained through the years, but one quick look assured him that the door’s hinges were just as rusty as everything else in this town. As was typical for old farmhouses, the door opened into a hall with 2 closed doors and a flight of stairs on their left. Chipped porcelain knobs were still in their places on the doors and Chris itched to turn one and see what was in the room beyond, but the girl went further into the house and Chris continued to follow her. The hallway ended in a large room that still held living room furniture. A floor lamp stood in the corner with a faded and torn sofa positioned in front of it. A large wooden stereo stood against the wall, and another chair sat catty corner to that. But still the girl did not stop as she led them through a spacious kitchen, through another door until finally, she was no where to be seen and Chris and Lance had to stop at a closed door at the end of the hall. There was an old glass knob on this door and Chris reached out to turn it, hoping that it wouldn’t end up coming off in his hand. Glancing quickly at Lance first, he turned it carefully and pushed the door inward.
The door creaked softly on its hinges, but swung free and stopped when it was completely open. The room beyond was long and narrow and probably the most untouched by time that they’d seen yet. Beds were set up along the wall to their right, with musty drawn privacy curtains still hanging to the floor between them. On the wall directly across from them was another door. Pushed against the wall to the left of the door was a cluttered desk, a chair and -
“Dude,” Lance gasped, interrupting Chris’s mental inventory.
Still seated in the chair, collapsed over the desk were someone’s remains. In one hand was perched a writing quill. A ink well whose ink had dried up long ago was waiting nearby. Open on the desk was a thick leather bound journal.
Chris walked slowly around the room as his mind tried to block out the horrors he was seeing here. There was not one, but three more bodies laid out on the beds in the room. Thin blankets covered them, but as best as he could tell, there were two adults and a child. It was the child’s remains that held his attention the longest. As he was studying them, the girl appeared again next to the bed and Chris finally realized what was bugging him so much about this one. The child’s body was hers.
“Lance!” he hissed. “Lance!” he said again when Lance didn’t answer him. “Get that Bass Ass over here.”
“What?” Lance asked as he crossed the small room. He stopped behind Chris and put on hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Oh Holy shit,” he said and Chris knew he didn’t need to explain. Lance had figured it out, too. Lance held up the book that had been on the desk in his free hand. “It’s a journal,” he explained. “This is what passed for an infirmary here and apparently, these were the last patients. But what could she want? The little girl?” Lance asked.
Chris shrugged and continued to stare down at the small form in the last bed of the infirmary. “That must have been the doctor then.” He was almost past freaking out when the little girl nodded her head in agreement with him. It was the first time she’d responded directly to something one of them had said. He looked at the journal in Lance’s hand. “If these are the last patients, where is everyone else?”
Lance opened the book and, without thinking about what he was doing, sat down carefully on the edge of the girl’s bed. “Only one way to find out, right?” he asked as Chris sat next to him. “Hopefully this journal can tell us something.” Lance opened the journal. The pages were dried and brittle, the ink faded, but still legible. He took hold of Chris’s hand and, when he was sure he had Chris’s attention, he began to read.
June 3
The flu has claimed three more victims. Gracie Mills and her parents passed passed away this morning in their sleep. For one brief moment, her parents took each other’s hand and then let go again before they fell asleep, never to wake up again. Fortunately for Gracie, she was not awake to see this and she died in her sleep shortly after.
I continue to grow weaker and it is quite impossible for me to give Gracie and her family the proper burial that they all deserve. The most that I can do is say a prayer for them as they lay in their sickbed and know that soon it shall be my turn to join them. All in all, the illness claimed about two hundred people. Once we’ve all died, will anyone remember us? Will someone find our town sometime in the future and wonder what happened to us all? I can only hope that my journal provides some of these answers. Will Easton return here, grown up and be thankful that he had managed to survive this or did some of the local wildlife find him before he was able to find his way to another. . .