But that proved more difficult than he had thought.
As he had assumed, based on the X that covered the town on the map, Goodwin had been evacuated. He was prepared for the empty streets, the darkened buildings, the ghostly nothingness left behind. What he wasn’t prepared for was what greeted them a good five miles prior to reaching the town. Signs had been staked along the shoulder and the median, the handwriting done in harsh lettering with thick markers of varying colors, some signs so large they looked like billboards, others so small they were barely noticeable among the clutter. Snippets of phrases stood out as they drove by: THIS IS A DEAD TOWN; THE LORD GIVETH, THE LORD TAKETH; POPULATION ZERO; SODOM & GOMORRAH. One sign in particular caught David’s attention, perhaps because it was decorated much like a poster for a high school pep rally, adorned with glitter and letters cut from brightly colored construction paper. It read:
Let the little children come to me,
and do not hinder them,
for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.
As they drew closer to the town line, David saw small crosses erected in the grass on either side of the road, eerily similar to ones he sometimes noticed along the highway memorializing victims of automobile accidents. There were too many crosses here to count, blank white structures perhaps two feet in height, each one identical to the next. That was what he found most troubling—the sameness of all those crosses—for it spoke of some morbid unity that had taken place here, a ceremonial mourning of the collective dead.
“I don’t like those things,” Ellie said, gazing out at the crosses as they drove by.
“They’re just crosses.”
“Did all those people die here?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. It was a lie; he felt the wrongness of it on his tongue. “I think they put them here before they evacuated.”
“Crosses mean someone’s dead,” Ellie said flatly.
David said nothing.
“Where did the rest of the people go?” she asked.
“Someplace else.”
“Why are we here?”
“Because no one else is.”
“So people left this place because of the disease,” Ellie said. It wasn’t a question.
“According to the newspaper, yeah,” David said.
“That means the disease was worse here than in other places.”
David nodded. The white crosses blurred together as he drove.
“What if it’s still here?” she said.
“What’s that?”
“The disease,” she said. “The Folly. What if it’s still around, hanging in the air or something?”
“I’m not sure it works that way.”
“But it might.”
He glanced at her. “You’re immune, Ellie. You’re safe.”
“But what about you?”
He smiled wanly at her. “I’ll be fine, too,” he told her. Thinking, That son of a bitch Kapoor won’t get inside my head with his lies and his tricks.
They drove beneath an overpass. American flags hung from the ramparts, and there were stuffed animals tied to the chain-link fencing. A plastic doll’s head dangled from a length of rope like some primitive trap. In startling white letters, someone had spray-painted across the roadway a single, blinding word:
CROATOAN
“What’s that word mean?” Ellie asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, though he recalled a history lesson from his school days about a group of settlers who mysteriously vanished from Roanoke Island in the sixteenth century, leaving no trace behind, save for the word croatoan carved in the trunk of a tree. He thought it best not to mention this to his daughter.
“I don’t like this place,” she said. She had gathered her shoe box into her lap again and was now running her fingers along the three eggs inside the nest. “It’s scary.”
“It’s just a town,” he assured her, wondering just how confident his voice sounded. “It’s roads and buildings and cars. There’s nothing here to be afraid of.”
“There’s nothing,” she said, and David couldn’t be sure if she was repeating part of what he said or if she was making some observation of her own. Perhaps trying to convince herself. “It’s not just a town,” she added. David did not ask her to elaborate.
Just before the city line, they were greeted by a road sign welcoming them to Goodwin, Kentucky. It was incongruous, though, since it was posted on what remained of a chain-link fence outfitted in concertina wire. Several sections of the fence had been knocked down, including the part that should have run across the roadway. The place had been quarantined at some point, too. David drove through, feeling his skin prickle. There were more white crosses here, and someone had painted a crude biohazard symbol on a tree trunk in neon orange.