Batteryville

Disease

"Do you know what a leper colony was?"

I said no because I wasn't a hundred percent sure and I wanted the guy to tell me.

"It was a closed off place, walled off or even better, an island, where people with leprosy were put."

The chain that was attached to my left arm and then to this guy's right arm pulled when I got too far ahead of him, which was every few steps because he just kept slowing down.

He said, "Have you ever heard of Grosse Isle?"

I said, "No," because I'd never heard of it.

"When the Irish were fleeing the famine," he said, "and they got to Canada they were quarantined on an island called Grosse Isle."

"Why?"

"Cholera."

He slowed down and I had to pull him along. It wasn't easy. I was holding my bike with my other hand, my free hand. On the other side of the guy telling me about disease and death were a few more people handcuffed to the same chain.

Erin was in front of me, also on the end because she was walking her bike, too. After riding pretty hard all day, when we'd slowed down started to look around for a place to stop for the night and we let our guard down. We stopped by a river. The water was clear and cold.

"They called the boats the coffin ships because so many people died on them," the guy said. "So when they got to Canada they put everyone in quarantine on Grosse Isle, even people who were healthy on the ships, but then a lot of them got sick and died, too."

I said, "Oh yeah?"

The guy had been talking almost since I'd been chained to him. Which was pretty soon after Erin and I got picked up by the river. Two guys just appeared out of nowhere pointing rifles at us.

Wearing gas masks. At first Erin laughed, she thought it was like a Halloween costume but then she saw the rifles. We hadn't even started to unpack our bikes and they let us bring them. They said they weren't going to hurt us, it was just a precaution.

"Probably seven or eight thousand people died on the island," the guy said. "That was a lot back then. Well, I guess it would be a lot now." He laughed a little at that but I didn't see what was funny. "And more died in the fever sheds in Montreal where they were quarantined, too."

I didn't need to ask him why he was telling me all this, the guys with the gas masks and rifles had told us we would have to be quarantined if we wanted to pass through their territory. They said it was just a precaution, they weren't bad guys but we couldn't see their faces and I wondered about people who thought they needed to tell you they weren't bad guys. They'd taken me and Erin upstream a little to where there was a rickety bridge that we walked across single file and then along a road until we met up with the rest. Probably a dozen people chained together and four more guys with guns and gas masks leading them along a bigger road. They chained us up to the end of a couple of lines and here we are now, still walking.

"They were afraid the people were bringing disease from Ireland, you see?"

I said, "Yeah, I see," but I don't think he believed me.

"But they put healthy people into quarantine on the island and in the sheds, healthy people."

"Yeah?"

"And they got sick, of course. Cholera, typhus, it's very communicable."

"So?"

"Don't you see," he said, "that's what's happening here. We're all healthy but we're going to be quarantined with sick people. We're going to get sick!"

He was pulling on the chain then, trying to get further away from me but that just brought him closer to the person on his other side and they shoved him hard back towards me.

"Hey, settle down, we're almost there," one of the guys in the gas masks said.

"Yeah, it'll be okay," I said. "If we're here now it means we survived the virus, it means we're immune."

"That virus, sure, you don't think there's another one?"

"Why?"

"Because we're still here. When you have cockroaches you keep exterminating until they're gone."

I said, "Cockroaches," and as I did Erin turned her head and looked over her shoulder at me. I think she was smiling, amused by my predicament. But then I figured she was sympathetic, she was smiling at me in solidarity.

"Yeah, cockroaches, what did you think we were?" He was pulling his hands back and forth, yanking me off balance and then the person on the other side. "If you don't get them all they just come back."

"The cockroaches come back?"

"Yes, haven't you been listening?"

Not like I had a choice.

"All right people, here we are."

Everybody stopped walking and I was going to say, see, he said people not cockroaches, but as I was looking at what we were coming up to I kind of felt like a bug.

Where the huge lake narrowed down to a river there were two big bridges crossing the water.

Under the bridge on our side was a big penned in area, the fence like the Batteryville wall made out of steel containers and truck trailers but this one was way taller, five containers high at least.

Inside the pen were people. Lots of people.

"We're all going in," the guy chained to me said. "But we'll never come out."

People were starting to pull on the chains then, straining to get away but the guys in the gas masks said, "Settle down, you're not going anywhere."

"No!" The guy next to me was screaming. "I don't want to, no!"

The chain was pulling on my wrist, really hurting, scraping the skin.

"Stop it!"

"No!"

And then, bam, he got hit in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle. "Stop fighting it, you're going in."

We all went in.