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.

1. Quik-Stop

Some people say that it started in a lab. Others say it moved from monkeys to man somehow. Like AIDS. Others say it’s God’s judgment. People said that about AIDS too. The thing is, when you’re running for your life, it doesn’t fucking matter. It just is.

I’m standing in a convenience store. I knew this place back before, and it was shitty then, a couple dudes from India who didn’t give a shit about the people in this ghetto neighborhood, never washed anything, the stainless steel rollers in the hotdog heater had turned brown. I mean it’s stainless steel. I still ate them. They were a dollar. I shouldn’t think about those hot dogs though. That shit makes me hungry real fast. Hot food doesn’t happen anymore. The gas doesn’t run. Smoke brings them. So I pick among the cans. 

There are still so many cans, and that makes me feel two ways. One, where are the people? I mean, if no cans are being taken, then there aren’t any people. That means my chance of survival is pretty low. No big fucking surprise there, but still. It’d be nice to think there was someone else out here. The other thing I think is, if no cans are being taken, there aren’t any people, so at least there are lots of cans. So it’s a complicated feeling.

I look for carbohydrates. I mean, I’ll eat canned spinach, but you can’t run real long on that. Some Chef Boy Ardee works good- a little mealy two years past it’s due date, but edible and it’ll keep my energy up. I fill up my bag on that stuff, and turn my attention to the street outside.

Quiet as Hiroshima that day in 1945? 44? I wasn’t that good in history. I specialized in escaping class, something that is a little more useful now. I mentioned that this used to the ghetto. The same thing that made it bad then, the many close buildings, the walls, the concrete, makes it prime living territory. So many places to hide, so many fortresses to create. 

The store has a two sets of doors, so I go through the first one, hiding behind a smashed bubble gum machine, and a poster for a frozen fruit drink. The street still looks quiet, and I pop through the last door and stride, keeping low, toward an overgrown backyard. It’s only a few yards of open space and I give myself an eighty percent chance of making it unseen.

I hear feet. Sprinting feet. They are coming down the main street, they haven’t seen me. I could go on, but if they see me they’ll know my little duckee. Blood on the trail. It’s not worth it. So I turn.

There are two of them. Now they see me. One lets out a screech. From the sound of it, she’s a female, but there isn’t much else to tell that. She’s ripped out most of her hair. The other one is taller, and I figure he is male.

They are dirty everywhere but around their mouths, where their tongues clean a circle. Only mess around their mouths is blood, which is mostly between their teeth but flecks about on their faces sometimes. Even at a sprint, a tongue comes out periodically, licking their upper lip. Their clothes are ripped rags, turned into a uniform gray from the dirt and the sun. Their bodies are gashed. Their zeal in pursuit produces these cuts, as they hurdle barbed wire fences, and crash through doors with no thought to their health. Still they are whole, moving at a full out sprint. They will be on me in a moment. I almost think that they are smiling at the thought of this, but I’ve never seen one smile I don’t run from them much anymore. I haven’t won many of those races, and then I was out of breath for what happened next.

I wish I had the sword she had in Kill Bill. Turns out most of the katana blades in North Philly bedrooms, usually full of video games (which don’t work, there is no electricity), and comic books, are worthless when it comes to actually chopping through flesh.

What I ended up deciding on, in the absence of a samurai sword that could fell seven with a single blow, is the top bar of a bike frame, with about a foot long wooden handle shoved up one end, and bolted in. The other end still has the twin bars that hold the rear wheel, but I bent them out, so that they face opposite directions. I left the bike seat bar on, and about six inches of the vertical bar of the frame. This I hammered into a spike. It’s basically a spikey club, something that the first cave man would have been pretty proud of, but which I, having grown up playing Halo and shooting plasma shrapnel through the universe,  knew to be corny.  That was why I named it Ackee.

She lunged first, her teeth gnashing twice the in air, ready for the meal already. He was a little too my right so I stepped to the left, and swung Ackee up. It’d have been a finished blowing if not for it burying a point into one of her flailing arms. She screamed again. BITCH. DO NOT SCREAM. She’s stuck to the Ackee now and he’s coming at me. I rotate so that she’s still between us, and Ackee is keeping me separated from her gnashing mouth. He roars in frustration. This is making too much noise.

I kick her in the chest, and she unplugs from the end of Ackee. He’s at me in a second. There was a time when I made mistakes in scenes like this. When I got nervous. I didn’t get better, really. A bit. The main thing that happened was, I’d been this close enough times, and I realized, “I’m going to die.” After that, I was a lot calmer. I don’t worry about surviving. I swing Ackee up and down into his head. Easy as you open a door. Two of the tines embed in his skull, but with a quick pull up, the point twist out as he sinks down, and I send it whistling into his girlfriend’s head. THUNK. The devotion dies in her eyes.

Ackee is quiet and effective. Of course, I can’t forget the screams. The pitter patter of more sprinters sounds in my ear. I decide to see if I can make the duckee. It sound like five or six this time, and I’ve never faced more than three at a time. Hopefully I make it unseen.