“So what am I supposed to do if I see a crime?” she interrupts. “Just rough them up?”
“If you want,” Ray says, placing a pinch of chew into his cheek. “Or you could take them to the Judge, who will probably give them hard labor such as shit disposal. They get an electronic bracelet that tags them. It’s pretty much the same punishment for any offense, so only bring in the hard cases you really want punished. The worst offenders get put outside the wall.”
“What about proof? Is it just my word?”
“Yup,” Ray says. “That’s how it is here. You got to understand, though, that our main role is not to solve and punish crimes. The locals mostly do that for us. The people here all watch out for each other. They usually know if somebody commits a crime, and sort it out themselves without our involvement. We’re not really in the justice business. Our job is to keep the peace.”
“We’re not cops,” Wendy says, disgusted. “We’re armed thugs.”
“Yup. You want out?”
She does not even have to think about it.
“No,” she says.
“Our unit’s shift starts around sundown. Then we get to patrol a Third World shantytown in the dark for twelve hours. Memorize your beat, don’t get lost, don’t fall in the canals, don’t get killed. Especially don’t get killed. We need people like you, Wendy.”
“I’m nothing special, believe me. Especially for this work.”
Ray stops and spits a gob of tobacco juice into the dust. “You don’t understand. We need people like you to survive. Listen: One day this thing is going to end and things are going to get back to normal. To do that, we’re going to need people who can remember what normal was and can make things right again. There are not many cops walking the earth right now. Every time one dies, all those memories of how things used to be dies with them.”
“I’ll live, Ray. I survived out there for weeks. I’ll make it in here. This is nothing.”
“Just know the original cops in this town were good men and they died trying to hold this place when it was first being built. Not all of them died by the hands of the Infected.”
Wendy smiles at him, touched by his concern.
“I promise I’ll be careful,” she tells him.
“You do that, Wendy,” Ray says, eyeing her sadly. “You do that.”
Speakers mounted on poles in the area squawk, we are winning; ask what you can do to help, before screeching loudly and resuming a tinny rendition of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”
Paul leaves the FoodFair supermarket, dog tired and enjoying the night air after hours of handing out food packages, shifting boxes and mopping floors. The food distribution center has no air conditioning and keeping the camp supplied is hot, sweaty work. His tattered clerical uniform, recently cleaned and patched, is already getting ripe again. He could use a shave and a haircut. But he did good today. He digs into his pocket for his wilted pack of Winstons and lights one up, sighing. The cool air feels good and he is happy for the opportunity to finally rest. After his smoke, he will brush his teeth and hit the sack with the other workers, lying on his old bedroll with bags of rice as a mattress.
The camp is still noisy but is slowly settling down for the night. The parking lot of the FoodFair is covered in tents and campers and people huddled around their cook fires. He takes another drag and exhales, enjoying the relative peace. He remembers that the last time he had a cigarette like this, Pittsburgh was on fire. The Infected streamed through the cars. He threw a Molotov. He cut somebody in half with his Remington. The Bradley roars in his head.
He stills his mind with a short prayer of thanks that he remains alive to do this good and useful work. Maybe God does not want to listen, but being omnipresent, he cannot help but hear it.
“Is that you, Paul?”
Paul sees a figure sitting on a bench and approaches. It is Pastor Strickland, sitting with one hand cupped around the flame of a candle and the other holding an old photo.
“Do you think it’s impossible to still love somebody who is Infected, brother?” Strickland asks him.
“No,” Paul says. “I think it’s not only possible, but unavoidable.”
The man smiles, wiping his eyes.
“But they hate us in return,” Paul tells him. “That is the hardest thing to bear.”
Strickland rubs tears from his eyes with the palm of his hand. “The love is just as hard.” He adds, “You did good work today, Paul.”
“Thank you.”
“This means something to you, doesn’t it? The work, I mean.”
“It’s the only way I know how to be me,” Paul answers, surprising himself with the sudden insight. He wants to think about it more, but his tired mind cannot hold onto the threads.
“There will be a march within the next few days,” Strickland says. “A march of Christians trying to make things right around here. There’s more that can be done working together than by one man alone. You might want to give a listen to what they have to say. I’ll be there, too.”
Paul slaps the back of his neck to kill a mosquito. “I’ll do that.”
They pass the next few moments in silence. Paul finishes his smoke and grinds it out on the asphalt with his boot. Strickland blows out his candle. A dog howls in the distance.
“Can I tell you something, brother?” the pastor says quietly in the dark. “Can I speak to you as a man of the cloth? Will you hear a short confession?”
“Of course.”
“I always wondered if you could be a Christian and cry at a funeral. I mean, if somebody is going to heaven, shouldn’t we be celebrating? It’s the same here. The world is dying. Why are we so sad? Why do we cling to this miserable life? Maybe this is it, Paul. Maybe the Lord is calling us all home. If so, why do we resist the call? Why are we fighting God’s will? And why does it feel so horrible? Why does it taste like ashes? Why does it fill us with sadness?”
Paul has no answer, but he understands the essential question. He has asked himself the same question repeatedly in the past.
“I don’t know,” he says.
Sara would have an interesting answer, he is sure. His mind flashes to the battle between the Infected and the mob and what happened after the Infected overran the last knot of fighters: sketchy images of himself walking down the road, returning home to his wife. But he cannot remember what happened after that.
He is beginning to worry that he may have killed her.
Ethan runs between the shanties, his finger itching and throbbing. He hears his pursuers shouting to each other. He believes he has lost them.
It happened suddenly.
The woman was telling him that the Marines had landed in New Jersey when her friends noticed what he was wearing.
He still wore scrubs from the hospital—the pants, anyway.
They thought he was a doctor.
Ethan spent the last few days at the processing center trying to locate his family, sleeping on the floor and living on handouts. The arrangement was not so bad. The school still has electricity and plumbing, the government’s way of demonstrating its strength. In some ways, he has been living in luxury compared to many people in the camp.
They sat on folding chairs, fanning themselves with their cardboard numbers. The woman told him she heard the Marines had landed in New Jersey.