The Returned by Jason Mott

Author:Jason Mott [Mott, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Mira
Published: 2013-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Samuel Daniels

Samuel Daniels had been born and raised and taught to pray here, in Arcadia. Then he died. And now he was in Arcadia again. But Arcadia had changed. No longer was it the small, escapable town it had been. The town through which travelers came and went without pause or hesitation, having only a few moments’ thought devoted to pondering what it was people did with their lives in such a place. A place of flat, tired-looking houses. A place with two gas stations and only two stoplights. A place of wood and earth and tin. A place where people seemed to be born from the forests that butted up against the fields.

Now Arcadia was no longer the detour, but the destination, Samuel thought, looking out through the fencing, seeing the slow unfurling of the town toward the east. Far off, the church sat, silent and still below the firmament. The two-lane blacktop that led into town was gnarled and chipped where it had, not so long ago, been smooth and even. Each day there was more traffic coming in. Less traffic going out.

The people of Arcadia were not locals anymore, he mused. This was not their town. They were visitors, tourists in their own land. They went about their daily lives uncertain of where they were. When they could, they clustered together—not unlike the way the Returned were rumored to do at times—and they stood, looking out at the world around them with a look of somber confusion on their faces.

Not even their pastor, with all of his faith and understanding in God, was immune. Samuel had gone to him, seeking the Word, seeking comfort and explanation for what was happening in this world, in this town. But the pastor was different than Samuel remembered him. Yes, he was still large and square—a mountain of a man—but he was far away, as well. He and Samuel had stood in the church doorway, talking of how the Returned were brought into Arcadia and transported to the school, which was already becoming too small of a place to hold them. And as the trucks passed and the Returned could be seen, now and then, peeking out—taking stock of this new place in which they found themselves—Pastor Peters would scrutinize them, as if searching for someone.

“Do you think she’s alive?” the pastor said after a while, completely ignoring the conversation he and Samuel had been engaged in.

“Who?” Samuel asked.

But Pastor Peters said nothing, as if Samuel were not the one to whom he was speaking.

Arcadia had changed, Samuel thought. The town was surrounded by fencing and walls, caged in and cut off from the world like a castle. Soldiers everywhere. This was not the town he had grown up in, not the small city that squatted on the countryside, open in all directions. This was something else.

Walking away from the fencing, he gripped his Bible. Arcadia, and all within its walls, had been changed, never to go back to the way it was.

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