Book of the Dead (27 page)

Most of the people here (I think there are more than twenty of us) carry guns. I wondered briefly how the others had come by theirs, but that thought threatened to make me remember how I came by my own. I was able to curtail such thoughts just before the fog would have lifted to let me see.

Maybe, one day, I will let myself remember. Some day when I feel stronger than I do now. Some day when I feel stronger than I can ever imagine myself feeling.

Hoagie and several others set out this morning on a hunting expedition. I asked him what they hunted around here, but for reasons I cannot begin to fathom he became uncharacteristically brusque.

“Meat. Food. Anything that’ll give us the strength to survive another day. Anything whose death will help preserve us so that, maybe someday, some of us will have survived long enough to see the end of this.”

His manner disturbed me. I had never seen him so agitated. But, true to form, when he saw that I was taken aback by the tone of his response, he smiled and softened. It was a sad smile, world-weary and resigned, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a smile of any kind, so I did my best to smile back.

“Thought for the day,” he said: “All the rules have changed. Everything you ever knew is wrong. All mores have been abolished. Never confuse mores with morals.”

He smiled at me again, but this time there was a grimness about the smile that made it impossible for me even to try to return it.

I am confused again. But I suppose that, with all that Hoagie has been through in the past few weeks, I shouldn’t expect to understand his every action and gesture.

As the hunting party returned that evening, most of the members of the camp stopped what they were doing in order to greet them. Dawson was lashing some branches together to improve the lean-to he had constructed. He finished the knot he was working on, then rose to join the others.

His stomach constricted in grief when he saw the two dead men the hunters were bearing back to camp. Somehow it had not occurred to him that the hunting expedition would prove so hazardous.

“Of course, you idiot,” he reprimanded himself silently, “like Hoagie says, it’s a different world out there. More dangerous. That’s probably why he acted so strangely. He was afraid he might not be coming back.”

When the full implication of that thought struck him, Dawson felt the onset of panic. He pressed roughly into the crowd to get a closer look at the two dead men. It struck him as odd that there were no exclamations of grief surrounding him. Only quiet, iron-voiced conversations, in the grim tone of men discussing disturbing but necessary work. Were the Hub’s inhabitants so inured, he wondered, that they couldn’t whip up any feeling for their own?

Then the words began to register:

“…not long dead, by the look of ’em…”

“…two, four days each, should be half-palatable…”

“…best we can hope for, considering…”

“…what I wouldn’t give for a side of fucking beef…”

“…venison…”

“…a Big-fucking-Mac…”

When he gained a vantage point, he lost all ability to be confused by these half-caught phrases. There was something familiar about one of the corpses. Not the familiarity that he had feared, but something irreconcilably worse. The fog that had obscured his recent past vanished in an instant. He could not take his eyes off the bright blue, short-sleeved shirt with its huge, dark stain of dried blood, except to look up at half of the man’s familiar face. The half that had not been destroyed by one or more of the hunters’ bullets.

There was no doubt left in him. Though he sorely wished there was.

Hoagie’s voice cut sharply through the others.

“Rory, Mojo, Harrison—you clean and dress ’em. Greg, build up that fire and get the rig set up.”

Dawson doubled over and vomited where he stood.

   
  I leave this place at dawn, though there is nowhere in this world that I can go.

“Listen to me, dammit! You can’t stop the fucking world from bein’ the way it is. The world’s got a helluva lot more momentum than you or me or every goddamn soul in it could ever fucking muster. You gotta accept that first.

“After that, you got two choices: you quit the world by dyin’, since that’s the only way out that works; or you give in to the momentum and live as long as you can, hoping against hope that the world is gonna get better. ’Cause if you don’t give in to that momentum, you’re quittin’ whether you say so or not, ’cause the world’s gonna roll right over your sad old bones. It’s gonna crush you, baby.”

Hoagie’s face was red and tight. His voice a controlled fury. Dawson refused to look at him.

“You walk outta this camp tomorrow and you’re quittin’. Quittin’ help and hope and any chance you might have of even thinkin’ you might live long enough to see the end of this thing.

“And all over what?

“You say it’s a matter of principle, but it’s not. Principles are based on morals, and what you freaked out on ain’t morals, it’s a breaching of your basic cultural training. That’s all. Training you received in order to get along in a culture that is now dead. It died weeks ago, man. Might as well be years. Might as well be centuries, for all the good your stickin’ by its learnin’ is gonna do you. Dead is dead. Let it go, man.”

Hoagie took a deep breath, trying to calm himself a little.

“Try to think of it this way:

“The world you grew up in had mechanisms to teach you how to deal with all of the compromises it demanded. You learned so well that most of the time you never even knew that you were compromisin’ your silly ass off. When that world died, everything became new, different, more demanding. The compromises became obvious because they weren’t the same ones you had lived with every fucking day of your life. There weren’t no mechanisms anymore to teach you how to accept them, either.

“Okay, the world sucks. Everything you knew is wrong. But you can deal with it so long as you adapt. Adapt or die. That’s what it comes to.”

There was a lengthy silence.

“You getting any of this?”

A longer silence.

“Fine. Make your own choice, man. I’ve made mine.”

Hoagie turned to walk away, but Dawson’s meek voice arrested his movement.

“It scares me Hoag.”

Hoagie turned to look back at his friend. Dawson’s eyes were pained.

“You’re inviting whatever it is that did this to them, made them walk again and all, into your own systems. What if it’s a virus, a bacteria, an infection of some sort. It could kill you. It could make you like them.”

Hoagie shook his head.

“If we don’t eat, we die. Then we’ll be like them soon enough. Some of us have been eatin’ like this for two weeks or better, and we ain’t lost no one yet. At least not like you mean.”

Dawson let his gaze fall back to the ground.

“I don’t know. I just can’t…”

He left the phrase unfinished.

I am weak. A coward. I have proven this in everything I’ve done. I don’t know where to go. I am not even strong enough to maintain my own resolve.

If I stay. If I choose, even, to eat with them. Am I choosing, out of some reserve of strength, to adapt; or more simply, out of weakness, choosing not to die?

Are such distinctions real, or am I merely tormenting myself as Hoagie insists?

Morals? Mores? Are any distinctions ever real? Do we ever, really, encounter any choices we are capable of making?

It has been days since I could bring myself to write. I see, now, that it serves no purpose. Probably never did.

Alot like my life, that way.

I see this now as the journal of a dying man, as dictated to his murderer. Cause of death: betrayals. First his betrayals of others, finally his betrayal of himself. The fogs have lifted completely. I can now see all of it. It is only by the grace of that fog that I have lasted this long.

Excuse me: that
he
has lasted this long. This is an obituary, I must remember to keep it impersonal.

His betrayal of the woman—leaving as he did, when he could have stayed and saved at least her— wounded him severely. His betrayal of the preacher —again in leaving when there was something yet that needed to be done, one final favor begged but never granted—wounded him further.

But he was finished off by his betrayal of himself, ironically, in not leaving when he should have.

As further irony his cause of death will be assumed, by others, to be starvation. And all because of the betrayal that he refuses to commit.

Let his epitaph read:

WEAKNESS

brought him to death’s door

STRENGTH

gained him entry.

I thought I would not write again, but there is no more solid solace to be had this night.

Hoagie is dead.

A hunting trip. One got up behind him somehow. Tore most of the back of his neck away before the others shot it.

He died before they got him back to camp.

I asked them, angrily I must admit, why they had brought him back. I implied, all indiscreetly, that they intended to make a meal of him, as well as of the beast that killed him.

Harrison slapped me hard for that. Several others hit me even harder with their eyes.

Can’t say as I blame them. I was not the only one who loved the man, nor the only one who relied upon his love.

“We are not cannibals,” I was told. And, though I wouldn’t admit it at the time, I understand the distinction.

They have not put him down yet. Have not immobilized him. They have a ritual, it seems, in which they must wait for him to rise before they shoot him. I suppose that this is done in the hope that he will not rise, making the shooting unnecessary.

I understand this on a gut level, though pragmatically it seems a needless extension of the anxiety.

They have been courteous enough to grant my request for the vigil. All of it. Though I gather that this sort of thing is usually done in shifts.

I can’t really explain why I want to be the one that finally puts him down, except to say that I feel I owe him this much, at least. Owe it to the preacher and the woman and myself.

I guess that I still have something to prove. That I am not all weakness and betrayal. That I can, at least once, do right by those who have done right by me.

The camp sleeps. Only the perimeter guards and I remain awake.

I am waiting.

It should not be long now.

Twenty-four hours since his death, and the vigil continues.

It is amazing.

I allowed Harrison to relieve me at dawn, but made him promise me the watch again tonight, if it is necessary.

I pray that it is. If anyone that I have ever known deserves to rest in peace, then it is Hoagie. Tomorrow at dawn we will bury him, regardless.

Harrison tells me that Hoagie might not rise. That this happened once before, in the days just preceding my arrival. The man had died in a similar manner, but he never rose or walked again. They buried him not far from here, and his grave lies undisturbed.

Mojo, who claims he is a reincarnation of some famous Aztec shaman, says that ingesting the spirits of one’s enemies frees you from their power after death. That the habit of eating the ghouls has protected Hoagie from the “demons of the other world” that otherwise would have possessed him and made him walk with them.

He also claims that such protection can be had simply by eating their hearts.

I don’t buy that, any more than any of Mojo’s other stories, but it makes me think.

I am thinking of something I once said to Hoagie about viruses, infections and contagion. I am thinking about acquired immunities and built-up tolerances. About vaccines and anti-bodies. Life-saving poisons.

I am not a biologist, but it makes more sense to me than voodoo.

I am also thinking about coincidences. About rare, but natural, immunities. Wondering how likely it might be to have two such cases in so small a community. I have heard of and witnessed no cases like this anywhere else, but my experience—statistically speaking—has been too small to base reliable conclusions upon.

I am also learning how to pray.

We buried Hoagie this morning.

At his wake I broke my fast.

I understand, now, what he was trying to tell me about choices, but for me it is not continuing life that seems so important. It is the chance to refuse to rise again, after my inevitable death.

That is my determination.

My choice.

I am willing to make the necessary compromise.

The stew gagged me, though the meat was made as inconspicuous as possible. Harrison tells me that that is a common first reaction. He also says that the stew is less strong when fresh.

I am getting better at prayer.

It occurs to me that word of this possible cure must get out. Perhaps, with this information as a starting point, some vaccine might be distilled or manufactured.

But how to get the word out? To whom? Who is left to utilize or broadcast this information?