4. Hope(less) at the End of the World

                Sometimes I watched Angie. Her legs looked nice. She called me a creep but I was only doing what boys have always done. I told Angie, about a week after she told me she wouldn’t be with me even if I was the last man, “You shouldn’t have said that.”

                “What?”

                “That I had no chance.”

                “I was just trying to be real with you.”

                “Yeah, but now I’ve got nothing to live for.” It was a bitch-ass thing to say, but hopeless people say those things.

                “Yeah you do. Stop being a baby. You can live to kill these VBs so we can have the city back.”

                Jim, Kwanesha, and I first met in a group of people that followed this guy. He was a big man, some kind of Baptist preacher, with a beard that looked tough. His signature weapon was a truck jack, and he swung that thing like god’s own hammer.

                His people were pretty organized and they picked us all up at different points, and we all got the same speech at different times. “I’m Pastor John. I don’t know what you believe, but I believe in a God that cares about us. He wants to save us, and we are about salvation. Even if you don’t believe in God, you got to agree, this city is a mess, these crazies are tearing it to pieces. It wasn’t meant to be this way, and we’ve survived, I mean, God has saved us, so we can save this city. There are other people out there need saving. Now, you join up with us, we’re systematic, and we kill VBs.”

                He didn’t demand that you believed anything, just that you fought. It was a nice idea and none of us needed any more convincing. We’d been aimlessly surviving for a few weeks, hiding in corners.  Most of us hadn’t faced off with one VB yet, and here is this guy leading an army. We wanted to fight back.

                He had systems. We’d get into a warehouse, with an escape route set, usually with a vehicle out back or something. Then someone, usually a small fast person, would go outside, until one of the VBs saw them, then they’d run back, we’d be set up in a gauntlet, two rows of armed people, and the VBs would get killed. At first it was kind of amazing.

                Pastor John gave sermons about the city after we killed off the VBs. It would be green again. Whatever cancer-causing, tower of Babel technology we’d unleashed that’d brought on the plague, would no longer be used. We’d live a good life, a simple life.

                A couple things happened. I hit it off with Jim, because he knew comic books, and Kwanesha because she always said, “Fuck this god shit, but I’m down to kill some crazies.” She had a lot of pot, and we’d sneak up to the roof sometimes. One time we were waiting in the warehouse, and the runner popped through the door, and was like, “A lot are coming.”

                Jim was always in front with the pastor. He was big too. And then eight came through at a time. And the pastor hacked down two, and four got a hold of Jim, and they were falling on him. Jim talked about that moment, see them teeth only an inch from his face, holding a whole one in each hand. He said the thing that he hated about that moment is that he might have become one, not that he might stop living. Kwanesha screamed at us, and the rest of us yanked them off Jim, and did them in, but it changed Jim a little. He wasn’t that gung ho after that.

                But it was the next time we did it, so we’re talking maybe only two months into the All Fucked Era, it went crazy. The thing was, that was when they started with the screeching. At first, the screeching was like a battle cry, but then we realized that it was a call. One would scream, and others would come, and they’d scream too. So there was kind of like a ripple in a pond effect. I mean, us, inside that building, we didn’t know what was going on. We’d set up our gauntlet and were beating them to death. This was after guns too. If someone got tired they stepped back, and another came up. I’d taken to using an ax, which was the most common weapon. Try beating someone to death sometime. It takes a lot of effort. But if you can get an ax shot anywhere to the head or neck, it’s done.

                What happened that time, they’d scream and come in. But they kept coming. It was on my second break that I looked over and saw that there was more dead crazies than there were of us, and that they were coming to the door even harder, even faster. My arms were tired. I had a water blister on the pad of my thumb. The place smelled like blood. That’s when I thought about how it worked. Ordinary Wednesday in late May, and where is everybody? Kids are in school. Lots of people in work places. And it was only the loners, or at least the alone, who survived, or stayed sane. The ratios of them, the VBs, to us, had to be astronomical.  

                I rested until Jim’s next break. I said to him, “There is too many. We got to go.”

                He nodded and grabbed Kwanesha. Nobody noticed us walk out the back. They were too caught up in their mission. Us leaving, it meant something. It wasn’t cowardice. We weren’t afraid. Jim took his place in that line again even when they almost caught him. Us leaving was saying that there was no hope of killing them off. There were too many. That future green city of Amish farms, that wasn’t going to happen. We weren’t going to make it.

                When Angie said that my hope could be killing them all, I told her that story. She said, “You can hope you find Weapon X: Issue 4.” I still hoped she’d change her mind.