9
By the time May rolled around it had reached the point where I simply had had enough. I was tired of scratching out my meager existence. Tired of the bullshit and the stress and the gnawing anxiety of survival. For after alclass="underline" what exactly was I surviving for?
Depressed, weary, broken, I thought it over and came to what I thought was the only reasonable solution: I would kill myself. So one dreary night I got a knife and made ready to lay my wrists open.
Believe me, I didn’t do this lightly. But I was exhausted. I just couldn’t go on. You had to be an animal to survive and it just wasn’t in me to do it day after fucking day. The world was dying one day at a time and my wife was gone. What was the point of trying to go on, trying to survive? Warmongers and politicians had torn the guts right out of everything and now it was all over. The American dream had become a global nightmare and gone was the green perfection of high summer and the cool white kiss of low winter and all the Saturdays and baseball games and Fourth of July’s and crisp Autumn days and children’s voices singing Christmas carols. All fucking gone. All wadded up like a piss-stained newspaper and thrown into the trash.
What was left was a lunatic asylum without boundaries.
Weather patterns went to hell. Freak storms swept the globe.
The water was contaminated.
Crops left rotting in the fields.
What remained of the human race was rioting, insane, or dying.
Diseases we had thought very little of in our enlightened age of antibiotics, and had long since been kicked to the curb, came knocking on the door with a fresh bloom of death in their cheeks: cholera, typhoid fever, bubonic plague, diphtheria, infectious influenza. A dozen mutated forms that were never even properly categorized.
Fallout came down in deadly clouds, in sweeping dust storms, in the rain that fell from the sky.
Rats and flies and mosquitoes and every form of vermin imaginable-and some unimaginable-were breeding in numbers that were unthinkable.
Gangs ran wild in the streets looting and raping and murdering.
There were bloody encounters between private militias and the army.
Bodies were piled on the sidewalks.
Entire neighborhoods were being “sterilized” to slow the spread of disease.
Corpses were burned in black smoldering pits.
This was the final inheritance of the nation and the world. While the TV and radio stations were still broadcasting and the internet was still active, I saw it all and was sickened and horrified like everyone else, pushed down into some dark quarter of my mind where I could scream in silence. And when all mass communication and mass media failed…I saw it out my window, in the streets below. There was no point in surviving. No point in seeing what a year would bring or ten of them. It had all been wiped clean. Just like they had always said about nuclear war: five minutes from the rocket age to the Stone Age.
I did not want to see what would come next.
So, alone and beaten, completely hollow inside, I pressed a knife to my wrist. And as I did so I heard a hissing sound like a gas valve left open. And a voice, a clear and authoritative voice, said in my ear, “Do you want to live?”
I dropped the knife first and then slid out of my chair like my bones were made of rubber. I was numb. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t even fucking breathe. I hit the floor, senseless and terrified, shaking so badly my teeth chattered. That voice, that awful voice-
“Do you want to live?”
“Yes,” I said when my breath came back. I wasn’t honestly sure if I wanted to or not, but I was so scared I was afraid to say anything else.
“Will you come unto me?” the voice said in a cool glacial hiss. “Through me there is deliverance, there is survival. Expiation. I demand atonement. Bring unto me the burnt offerings selected by thy hand. They shall be blessed by fire.
“Sacrifice…”
That was The Shape.
It never showed itself and maybe I was too unclean to look upon it. It told me how it had to happen, how it all had to come down. I had a benefactor. I didn’t know what it was or what it wanted at that point, but it kept talking to me, whispering in my head, always pointing me in the right direction, keeping me alive. It terrified me. It intrigued me. I felt special. I felt damned. Months later, I could not be sure I really heard it. Maybe it wasn’t a voice at all, maybe it was some warped subjective impression. And maybe I was just insane. But that’s how it began. That’s how I sold my soul to stay alive. That’s how I got into the business of condemning people to death.
But I didn’t know about that part. Not then.
10
After that, I lived like a spider.
After The Shape had whispered to me-alluding to things I must do but never naming them-I hunted the city, seeking out damp, dark corners and crevices where I could secrete myself, webby and lightless places where the roving gangs of scavengers and the packs of wild dogs couldn’t find me. I became good at hiding and stalking mainly because The Shape was always in my head, telling me where to find food and shelter, which damp and dripping cellars were safe and free of rabid rat colonies.
Then one day while out searching for weapons, I got drafted.
The Army or what was left of it found me.
I came out of an alley and I saw two men in white biosuits. They carried tactical carbines and were pointing them right in my face. There was no point in running; they would have cut me down in ten feet. So I just stood there, dumbly, the Browning Hi-Power at my waist and my scavenger bag thrown over one shoulder. I suppose by that point I looked like any other ragbag…unwashed, ragged, eyes crazy and desperate.
They kept their rifles on me.
“Listen,” I finally said, holding my hands up, “I don’t want any trouble. I was just trying to find something to eat. I’ll just back away and go my own way. Okay?”
The two men just looked at each other through the plexiglass shields of their white helmets.
I started backing away.
And as I did so, the one on the left sprayed the alley wall with his carbine. 9mm rounds chewed into the brick just above my head. I went down on my knees, hands still up. “Jesus…take it easy, guys…just…take…it…easy…”
“You ain’t going nowhere, fuckhead,” one of them said. He looked at his partner. “Check him.”
The guy charged over and knocked me on my ass. He stripped the Browning away and the scavenger bag, took my knife, everything but the clothes I wore. Then he made me lay spreadeagle in the alley, facedown in a dirty puddle. He ran a Geiger Counter over me, checked for sores, ulcers.
“Looks clean,” the soldier said.
“Get up, fuckhead,” the other guy said. “Congratulations, you’ve been drafted.”
I looked up at him. “Hell are you talking about?”
But the guy just laughed as I was handcuffed and led to an olive drab tactical van down the street. They shoved and kicked me all the way. And when they asked me how I liked the Army, I told them to go fuck their mothers. Which got me a rifle butt to the back of the head and a ticket to la-la land.
Drafted.
That’s what those assholes called it.
I was part of a clean-up crew, me and a bunch of other idiots that had been likewise “drafted.”
There was nothing remotely military about the job. We simply had to pick up bodies. Decked out in white biosuits, we tooled around in garbage trucks collecting the dead which were a serious health threat.
That was how I met Specs, this skinny little guy with oversized glasses that the soldiers liked to pick on. Me, Specs, two others guys named Paulson and Jackoby made up the collection crew. Of course, the sergeant in charge?some hardballed lifer named Weeks?collectively called us his “Shitheads.” He also had pet names for us: I was “Fuckhead,” Specs was “Mama’s Boy,” Jackoby was “Shit-fer-Brains,” and Paulson was “Mr. Fucking Useless.”
It was quite a scene.
The corpses were gathered, then tossed into the hoppers like Monday’s trash. The first time I saw Paulson pull the lever and cycle the bodies through, the hydraulic ram crushing and compacting the bodies, I threw up. Right in the street. My stomach was already bad from handling all that green meat, but the sound of it, those blades scooping the bodies into the main bin and smashing them to a pulp…it was just too much. I went down on my knees and stripped my mask off, blowing my guts right on the pavement.