Free The Stranger by Simon Clark

watching it all happen from across the street. Why don’t they just put anyone arriving in town in quarantine until they’re sure? They don’t have to wait until I’ve passed fucking judgment on some poor fucking stranger.” I began to feel angry again. That anger always lurked below the surface . . . as soon as I started to think or talk about what I’d done it came shooting out of me in flames of bloody red.
    Ben was quick to try and calm me. “Greg. We’re lucky to have you. You’ve saved our necks.”
    “Lucky?” I gave a sour-sounding laugh.
    “Sure. Before you turned up we’d let anyone in who came to town, bread bandits as well as our own countrymen. But we didn’t know what was in the blood of the bread bandits or what was in their brains. We’d give those people food and lodging. They’d be completely normal, completely sane. But then . . .” He clicked his fingers. “One day, they’d snap. One Chilean guy said he was a doctor. He was polite, charming even. But one night he went downstairs, grabbed a carving knife and cut the throats of the family he was lodging with. Now you’re here, Greg. You’ve got a nose for who’s infected. Somehow you can see it in them, but we can’t. You’re our best early warning system.”
    “Yeah, right . . . but now I’ve killed a guy who’s an American. Who might have been born just down the road.”
    “And that means the disease has spread. We know it can infect our people.” Ben nodded back at the yellow notice. “That means the town has got to be more security conscious. From now on nobody comes onto the island. No one leaves.”
    “And that means suddenly our world has gotten a whole lot smaller.” I looked ’round. “We’ve turned the place into a prison.”
    He shook his head. “Not a prison. A fortress.”
    “Either way, nobody’s going anywhere, are they?”
    We headed off to Ben’s apartment, where he’d left some beers in the icebox of the refrigerator. Even though the electricity had been cut at midnight they were still cold enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. He also maintained a store of rechargeable batteries. So we sat there listening to Hendrix hurl those amazing guitar sounds out into the cosmic hereafter while we poured the beautifully cold beer down our hot and thirsty throats.
    For a long time we didn’t say much. Suddenly a whole army of question marks had come marching over our mental horizons. They were dark, menacing. And I found myself thinking: Why had the disease suddenly spread to our own countrymen? Had it infected us here in Sullivan? If it had, when would we see the first symptoms? Or would it be only me who recognized the disease in people? If that was the case, how long would it be before I used the ax on a neighbor? Or even Ben, sitting there on the sofa, listening to Hendrix’s guitar calling out to eternity?
    I swallowed the beer in big, hard gulps.
    There was another question, too. A weird, twisty one. One that lurked in the background but seemed every bit as sinister as the rest. What had gone wrong with that human head we found tangled up in the branch? How could it bud an extra pair of eyes? Questions, Valdiva. Questions. Questions.
    We’d been in Ben’s apartment barely an hour before the siren started. Its phantom wail cut into the room like the bad news it was.
    When the siren called, able-bodied men and women were expected to collect weapons, to assemble at certain points in the town, to be ready for Trouble with a capital T . On account of his shaky hands, Ben wasn’t in the guard—the idea of him handling a rifle with those twitchy fingers put the fear of God into the guard sergeants. Even so, he came along. He often wrote articles for Sullivan’s (increasingly) slender newspaper; with a change of hats he moved from stock clerk to reporter. In ten minutes I was sitting in the back of the a pickup barreling with half a dozen others in the direction of the wall. Which was a