Quarantine by James Phelan Page A

of scream you hoped you never heard, primal, life or death.
    Bang! Daniel hit the floor. The room was silent but for the sound of two men grunting and shuffling, the sound of a man being beaten, the hush of stunned onlookers as they computed what was going down and whether or not they should do anything about it.
    As I pushed through the gathered onlookers the silence broke. There were close on thirty people, several of them yelling and screaming.
    Tom was on top of Daniel, punching him in the face with his full force. Daniel was on his back on the floor. His head was bouncing off the tiles, and it sounded hollow and dangerous, like a coconut cracking. His face was a bloody pulp, becoming more and more swollen with every hit.
    â€œGet up! Go!” I said to Daniel, who rolled to his side. He stood up. Groggy. Swayed on his feet. His face was a bag of blood.
    â€œYou—”
    Whatever Daniel was going to say was stopped by more violence.
    I grabbed Tom as he lunged at Daniel again. But the surgeon quickly broke my hold and was punching the preacher back down onto the ground, putting all his weight into turning Daniel’s face and head into a mess on the floor: a plastic surgeon undoing a lifetime’s work and destroying his tools at the same time. Past, present, and future, all intertwined through an act of violence.
    Maybe he was blaming this man of God for his wife’s injuries, for the city or country or world being like this . . .
    â€œWhat kind of god would let that happen?” Tom said. “Your god!”
    I knew that if I did nothing then Daniel would die. I had to intervene.
    I pulled Tom off Daniel by his shoulders. I put my hands under his armpits and hauled him back onto the hard ground. He was squirming but I had all my weight pulling down at him. He was angry, but had eyes for only one man, and he was getting up, reaching out to attack again . . .
    There was a scream to my right. A piercing shriek.
    Audrey.
    â€œNooooo!”
    Paige stood by the door to the hallway, neither entirely in nor out of the room, watching us. She had my pistol in her hand. It was loaded. I pulled at Tom. He fell back, wide-eyed.
    Paige brought my pistol up, fired a shot into the ceiling.
    Everyone froze. The sound of that gunshot resonated in me, thunder in my heart.
    Tom looked around, dazed, out of it. He’d spun off the planet.
    Daniel’s face looked as if he’d put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. There was a mess of blood on the floor.
    The next sound was a kid crying in the bedroom. Then other people joined in. Some were screaming, some vomiting, many had fled the room.
    I let go of Tom and walked to Paige. “It’s over,” I said. “Go and help Daniel.”
    She put an arm out and held onto mine. I stopped, looked down at her, and I had the flash recall of seeing the lifeless eyes of Anna, glass marbles on an abattoir floor. But they were unalike, really. I reminded myself of Paige’s Californian tan and light, sun-bleached hair, whereas Anna’s hair was shiny and dark, a legacy of her Indian parentage. I blinked myself back into the now as Paige passed me the gun she was holding in her other hand.
    Four men from the crowd came and hauled Daniel to the medical room. His body, being carried like that, looked like a big broken doll. Others pulled Tom away. All the fight had left him a second after that gunshot.
    My hands were bloody—blood dripped and flowed off my knuckles where I’d scraped hard against the rough tiled floor in the struggle. My knees were grazed. I felt no pain. I could only think of how the sound of other people’s crying had worn me out.

9
    I woke up and it was still dark outside. On the bed next to me Paige was asleep on her back, her quilt down around her waist. Her California-tanned arm contrasted with the white sheets. She looked like an angel, an angel in vivid colors. I covered her, relieved that the need to talk about