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.

2. Angie

                I used to think that they were hungry, but that’s not it. They’re angry. I was hungry. I'd always been a fat guy. It was only two months into this, the All-Fucked Era, and I’d lost a lot of weight. I was running a lot, fighting a lot, and not eating hot food, which I already mentioned. I started to look a little better, though I was sad as a dead crocodile when the Cheetos everywhere turned stale. Can you imagine, walking into a store and bags and bags of Cheetos are spilling off the shelves, and you open one up, shove a Cheeto in your mouth: Styrofoam. I still ate them.

                The point is, I was thin, and a little scruffy, but not too much. I lived with a couple of people back then. There were more people. They were older and I was sort of their kid. One guy was this fifty year old mechanic named Jim. He used these big wrenches. The other was Kwanesha, she was only twenty five, but she and Jim were a couple. Back then we used to joke about me being the kid, and how they had to make some babies to replenish the earth. But even then, we couldn’t imagine bringing a kid into this place. Much less being pregnant. Anyway, we were at a different market, getting cans, when this girl scampered down an aisle. She was really little, like four foot ten, and dirty, but clearly not a VB, because she was looking over her shoulder, not forward. VBs always look forward, at where they’re going, at what they hate.

                “They’re coming,” she said.

                “How many,” said Jim.

                “I don’t know.”

                “Estimate.”

                “Twenty? A lot.”

                “Fuck.” This was the way we all felt.

                “Why’d you lead them to us,” I said.

                “I didn’t know you were here.” In her hand, which was little, was a Little League Bat. The sound of crashing, of shelves being knocked over, of food stuffs flying everywhere, echoed through the store.

                Kwanesha said, “Back entrance.”

                We followed her, with Jim taking the rear. The mini-girl got out in front. We made it into the stock room without making too much noise. I was checking out her butt as we walked along, but it was really her face that I was excited about. Maybe any female would have looked amazing to me right then. I don’t know. I thought she had the fullest, most perfectly shaped lips, bright eyes. She was small, not young. I mean, she was my age- I was sixteen then.

               So back to fat. Being fat sometimes is a symptom. It’s funny, it being All-Fucked Era, there is a lot of time to think about your life. I don’t have any social life to think about now, it’s me and them. But I think I was fat because I didn’t care. I didn’t care because I didn’t think I had a chance. I didn’t think I had a chance because I didn’t know anything about girls. So, fat, afraid, and with no social skills I wasn’t exactly going to be bagging like a ShopRite employee. Fact, girls didn’t see me.

                That was a ShopRite we escaped. And the girl, her name was Angie, came back with us. We lived in a row home. We stayed on the second floor, and it seemed pretty safe. For two months she thought I was really annoying, because I was. I said mean things to her all the time, like how she led the VBs to us, or like, what good would a ninety pound girl be in a fight with VBs. She mostly ignored these comments. Eventually I figured out that she didn’t care what I thought, and that my technique of pretending that I believed I was better than her wasn’t working.

                 We had a lot of time together. Jim and Kwanesha said that it was near the end and they had to get in what fun they could. They had triple boarded the back room windows, but I still worried about Kwanesha’s noise. Anyway, they spent a lot of time together. I had some comics and old magazines but I’d read them all so many times and new reading material was something you had to risk your life for. So Angie and I were together a lot. So I decided to ask her where she was when it happened.

                 Angie said, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

                 I said, “We’ve got to do something.” She was re-reading a magazine for girls and didn’t respond. I added, “It’s not like you’re ever going to be able to get that make-up.”

                She looked up at me. “True,” she said. 

                “You don’t need it,” I said.

                “You know that if I was Eve, and you were Adam, which is just about what it is, the human race would die?” This was no revelation to me. 

                “So we’re stuck here with nothing to do. You might as well tell me how you survived.”

                She had been home alone. She had three older brothers, and her mom. Her dad wasn’t home much. She was watching the news, which was talking about violent outbreaks, in prisons and hospitals. She had looked out the window, and saw the street. She saw there eight large people tear into an old couple who used to sit on their stoop. It had disturbed her and she called 911 but there was no answer. Suddenly she’d sensed that it was all coming apart at the seams, that this wasn’t incidents, but everything, and she had scampered out her back window, and up a drainpipe onto the roof. There she had huddled in a corner, and, in the warm August air, listening to screams, fell asleep. 

                In the morning, she could see that people wandered the streets in groups, that their eyes were vigilant, their ears attentive. They jogged and sometimes sprinted. They chased after noise, kicked in car windows. No-one was acting normal. They didn’t drive. Always on foot. Vehicles were smashed into others.  

                For most of us survivors, it was accidents like this. If you were in an institution, a school, at that moment, you didn’t make it. 

                She went back in the house. One of her brothers was there. It was her favorite brother, the oldest, I forget his name, but he was the one that taught her to catch and told her to watch out for assholes but wasn’t paranoid about her dating, except when she needed it. He would make meals for her when she was little. But it wasn’t him, if you know what I mean. He looked at her and came for her. She ran back the way she came, shoving her little body back out that window, and shimmying that drain so fast. When he came for her, she was ready.

                This is another thing about survivors. We didn’t think that long. We adapted. I’m just saying, if you spent a lot of time getting your bearings, you didn’t have any. 

                She broke a brick off a chimney. She stove her brother’s face in as he clambered up. The first hit, he stopped climbing. The second hit, he went down.

                Another thing about survivors. None of us spent too much time trying to meditate on the things that had passed away. No time for sentiment. Realism. Toughness. You would think North Philly would have done better. Maybe we did. Maybe I’m the last human. 

                But yeah, I liked Angie. And I wasn’t fat. That gave me hope.