by Alyson Miers
The last victims of the Plague had died in the spring of 2012; immediately after that, twenty people from the area around the nearby city had found each other and made a home for themselves on that previously historic farm by the Paleola. Of those twenty, three died in the first winter after the Plague ended, leaving seventeen adults to develop what was left of the farm whose previous management had died along with everyone else. Even before those three deaths that winter, they saw two of their new community's strongest personalities engaged in a conflict of beliefs that would rage on for years before they reached a detente.
The village's first schoolteacher, and the only person who produced any lasting written material, was a woman named Eileen Woodlawn. It was her journal that Charlinder liked to read when he could steal a bit of free time, and she espoused the scientific philosophy, that the Plague developed just like any other airborne virus, only it turned out to be far more destructive than all the rest combined. A man from the same small town, whom Charlinder knew only as Mark, argued for the side of religion, that the Plague was an act of God. As long as the conversation did not stray to the topic of the Plague, or God's Will, Mark and Eileen were able to work and even live together with minimal antagonism, but when they did argue, it led to some of Eileen's most colorful journal entries.
Charlinder took the journal, with its battered cover and pages worn down to velvety softness, over to his bed, and sat down on his mother's old mattress, which he had kept after her death. He thumbed through the pages until he found the entry that marked the beginning of the conflict.
August 10, 2012
This bullshit cannot go on. I knew he was a Jesus freak when he said something about how the Plague victims are with God now, and if he were just waxing spiritual about how it's in God's hands, that would be okay, but now he thinks he can tell us what God wants from us. If I hear one more time about how God brought about the Plague to punish us for our sins, I may have to grab something blunt and beat up that old retired fireman. Leann just got pregnant, and of course everyone is delighted, because we'll have to have lots of babies to keep our whole species from going extinct, but we’ve just started figuring out how to live without civilization and we’re not sure how we’ll even feed ourselves once we’ve gone through the last stocks from the supermarkets that weren’t looted down to nothing, but no one wants to listen to me. I say maybe we should try to figure out some contraception so the babies don’t happen faster than we can feed and clothe them, and everyone is like, sure, whatever, we've got time to figure that out. Mark is the worst of all, telling her she's doing God's will, and all that crap about not resisting His divine interventions, like it's all us women's responsibility to pop out babies like gum-balls from here on out.
To her credit, Leann doesn't appear to be going for it, and I wonder how long it'll be before she has a mood swing and gives Mark an earful, because that'd be hilarious and I'd kick myself if I missed it. But I also have to wonder how the hell this is going to work. We’re coming along pretty well with the food procurement and preparation, and José is doing a good job of teaching carpentry to the other guys, and I’m working on teaching the other women how to use the spinning wheel, but we couldn't even shear more than one sheep this spring without hacking its wool to bits. Can we at least make it through the winter before we go adding any helpless mouths to feed? And could Mark please shut up about the fire and brimstone and expecting us all to be fruitful and multiply, for a change?
The debate between Mark and Eileen became more personal as the months went by.
March 23, 2013
The old man's picking fights now. I swear he’s got too much time on his hands. There’s no excuse for that, either, because it’s not like we’re in any danger of running out of shit to do around here. Marissa and I are teaching English to José so that he can better teach carpentry to the menfolk, and Mark has known José longer than any of us but he’s not even learning carpentry very well, and maybe he’d be learning it better if he stopped getting up my grill. As long as he doesn't try telling the rest of us what to do, he can rail on about his Lord and Savior all he wants, but that would make too much sense. Oh no, now he wants to go out of his way to piss me off, and he's doing a great job of it.
Today, Mark decided to corner me into having Round #942 of the Neverending Debate with him. It doesn't matter what I say, he'll never listen, because logic dumped his sorry ass long ago. He's always going to swear that God made the Plague to punish us for our sins of loud music, short skirts, premarital sex, and not going to church. And as he constantly reminds me, I can't say that I know he's wrong. I can never really find evidence against his position, because the concept of God's existence and everything associated with it can never be either proven or disproven as long as The Man Upstairs doesn't poke his head out of the clouds and tell us if we can't share, we can't have. As long as things keep going the way they’ve been for the last few thousand years, and nothing happens that can’t be explained by nature or debunked as a hoax, the entire case for God all comes down to the world's biggest example of how you can't prove a negative. The fact that there might be more substantial evidence to back up my argument regarding the Plague if we still had the technology and infrastructure for travel and research doesn't matter, as far as he's concerned. As long as I can't change his mind, no amount of evidence on my side will ever have the least merit to him.
Obviously, I was feeling very stupid today, because I made the mistake of having a discussion of bio-terrorism with Patricia where Mark could hear us. We were just minding our own business, cleaning a deer carcass and throwing ideas back and forth about the possibility of a terrorist having created the Plague and it went much farther than they expected and then got out of control, and Mark heard us talking, and he starts up about how now I'm changing my mind, so I'm not so sure after all. And if I don't know where I stand, he says, that means I know there's something missing in my arguments. That was the most logical thing I've heard him say in ten months, too bad he still can't come up with any positive evidence for his side other than "I believe in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ." I said just because I can show a little flexibility, doesn't mean I'm losing any confidence. But of course that didn't even slow him down, he keeps going on about how our sins brought God's wrath on us, and we're living with the result, and sooner or later I'll accept that, and give myself over to God's will, so finally I lost it. I asked him, if the Plague was God's wrath, then what separates us from the dead? I'm a godless heathen, Marissa's a dropout, Tom made his living in divorce, Sarah's a pagan, Amin and George are both homosexuals, and Mark's a jackass, so why are we still alive while so many faithful Christians died like flies?
Mark said our punishment was to be left behind.
That was a pretty sharp one coming from him, actually; I was impressed. And I couldn't really argue with it, either, but it was still more of the same you-can't-be-right-until-you-prove-me-wrong nonsense, so I didn't take his bait. I picked up a handful of deer intestines and told him that I didn't have to justify my scientific theories, or defend my logic to him, or be under any pressure to show him more evidence, when he was the one expecting me to believe it all came from the Great Big Grampa Up In the Sky saying Naughty, naughty, you got caught-y, puny humans! And he should stop trying to do his Mack Daddy Magic on Molly, too, because she is never going to have his babies, just forget it. He walked off in a huff at that point. Why did he have to make me take it that far?
The battle over the source of the Plague, and its accompanying debate over sexual morality and differing ideas of correct behavior, would be a source of tension for years to come, but it was at this point that fellow survivor Laura, who had been a Christian minister before the Plague wiped out her church, attempted to mediate their differences.
March 25, 2013
Laura came to have a little talk with me last night. I don't know whether it was Mark or Patricia who went and told her about our latest fight, but apparently Laura thinks my line a
bout the Great Big Grampa in the Sky wasn't very funny. I guess she would think that was kind of gauche. And I do feel for her, being jammed in between a nut-job like Mark and a curmudgeon like me, because anyone who tries to settle our differences must be either a saint or a masochist. On the plus side, I haven't had to argue with the nut-job since he interrupted me from helping Patricia gut that deer the other day. Maybe I got the filthy old perv where he lived by bringing up Molly.
But anyway. Laura told me all about how my worldview is a religion just as much as Mark's, and how we segued into this part, I don't exactly remember, but she also told me she's trying to talk some sense into Mark. Good luck, Reverend, is all I can say. She has some interesting things to say about why an almighty God would want to kill nearly all of the people on Earth with a vicious disease, though; she's given this much more honest thought than the nut-job.
The part where she really bugged me--and this is the part where I'm worried she came to me with an ulterior motive--is when she started reasoning with me about my stance on children. She tells me it'll take some time before I can expect everyone else to take the need for birth control seriously, and I need to choose my battles. Choosing battles is fine, but is Leann, or some other girl, going to suffer damage from pregnancy before the rest of us get off our asses? Or will we have to see a baby die of malnutrition or exposure? Which one will it be, everyone? Then--this is the part that really caps it--she told me I need to make babies some day to do my part for this community. No matter how hard I work here, and how much I contribute, it won't really count unless I pass on my genes, is what I'm being told. I'm sick of hearing it. I don't want us to be the founders of another society of powerful men and the women who have their children. We have more potential than that. It’s not wrong of me to point that out.
Despite Laura's attempts at diplomacy, the nut-job and the curmudgeon continued to butt heads for another thirteen years. The remaining survivors moved to develop birth control methods after a mother of seven died in childbirth, and her loss was enough of a shock on Mark to get him to choose his battles with Eileen. They agreed to disagree about religion, and the fighting ceased after that point. But while Eileen ostensibly won the battle over the reproductive burden on the surviving women, the larger war merely became an undercurrent in the survivors' culture. Eileen's version was the lesson they learned from their schoolteachers, while Mark's version became an oral tradition passed down from storyteller to small children. The differences between their stories gave way to ebbs and flows of discussion and dispute around the village over the years. The interplay between inquiry and faith came and went with time; sometimes they went years without tension, and sometimes one couldn't go anywhere in the village beyond Spinners' Square without being asked what one thought of the latest Sermon on the Plague.
Charlinder had no interest in the oral tradition passed down from Mark's side, but even more, he had no patience for the thrust of his community's debate. The argument was always about why the world's human population was almost entirely wiped out between 2010 and 2012. He didn't care about why. Since he had taken over the teaching duties, he had been trying to encourage his students to ask what their ancestors' lives were like before the Plague occurred. If they could understand that, he argued, the issue of "why" might very well fall into place. Either way, they needed to know of the achievements, struggles and pitfalls of pre-Plague cultures, so they would know how to work toward the future.
Still, while the Faithful irritated him and the arguments bored him, he could not dismiss the oral tradition out of hand because no matter how logical Eileen's story of the Plague appeared, there were some things she could never adequately explain.
June 19, 2012
Everyone keeps asking me how I knew when it was okay to come outside.
It almost sounds like they're accusing me of something. No, that's not right, it's more like it's a challenge. Everyone keeps talking about how it's just so fascinating how we all knew to come outside by May 14th. The possibility that there were still some other survivors hiding out in their houses after the rest of us found each other doesn't seem to occur to anyone, but the point is, everyone keeps talking about how we knew it was safe to come outside, and they keep bringing this question to me like it's supposed to Mean Something to my ridiculous god-free self.
I'm kind of afraid to answer their question, because I don't know if it's what they want to hear, or what I want them to hear. I just remember that I woke up that morning and felt like someone was whispering in my ear. I could almost hear a voice saying, "Come outside, it's okay. It's all different now, but you'll be safe." I felt like someone was pulling back the covers on my bed and rubbing my back, which sounds really creepy now, but at the time it all made sense.
Why I had that hallucination at the same time as or briefly after everyone else knew the Plague was done, I can't explain and that would be fine by me except some people seem to think they can explain it. And to be quite honest, I don't think there were any survivors who came outside any later than I did, either. What makes me think that way is anyone’s guess, but whatever. We all agree that those of us who came outside when we found each other were the only ones who were going to come outside. We seem to have had some pretty epic timing for the most part, and I think it was mainly a matter of everyone reaching their limit at the same time. How many people could have lasted long enough to join us but instead blow-jobbed their firearms in the previous months, we'll probably never know.
The door opened, and Charlinder's uncle, Roy, came into the cabin. They looked so different that Charlinder sometimes wondered how it was possible that they were both direct descendants of his grandmother. Charlinder looked like someone had taken a shorter person by the ends and stretched him; everything looked elongated except for his hair, which was so coarse and curly that it stood out from his scalp no matter how close he cropped it, so he never bothered to crop it very close. He was darker of skin than most of his fellow Paleolans including his own family, and had inherited a large hooked nose from somewhere on his natural father’s side, as it wasn’t visible on his mother’s. His facial hair still grew in patchy, so he stayed clean-shaven all the time. Roy was several inches shorter and broader in the shoulders, with softer, graying hair starting to grow thin at the front. He had a broader face with a flatter profile and grew a full, dense beard that his only nephew envied.
"Hi there, Uncle," Charlinder said from his place reading Eileen's journal.
"Hi, Char," said Roy. "What are you doing?"
"Planning tomorrow's lessons."
"Are you planning lessons, or are you enjoying a day in the life of Eileen Woodlawn?" Roy asked.
"I'm looking for lesson material in her journal," Charlinder answered. It wasn't really true, but his uncle knew enough not to worry.
"How were the kids this morning?"
"Noisy as always."
"And what did you do after school?"
"The usual, went to Spinners' Square."
"Any news today?"
"Not really. Just a little visit from Yolande and Kenny."
"Those two," his uncle said knowingly.
"Yeah, those two."
"What were they scuffling about this time?"
"Kenny wants Yolande to knit him a sweater, and Yolande's in one of her moods."
"Kenny might as well bark up a tree. Otherwise, a slow day?"
"Slow day, yeah."
They kept on with their pursuits without saying anything; Charlinder with his reading, Roy sharpening his arrowheads, for some time until Charlinder decided not to let something rest.
"There was something about the Sermon last night," he said.
"Yeah? What was the Sermon about?"
"They're talking about the origins of the Plague again."
His uncle only looked at him blankly for a moment. "At least they don't have something worse to worry about," he said finally.
"But do you think there's anything to what they're saying?"
"She had a lot of unpleasant things to say about it."
"But what did she say that one time, when she got really angry, that the older woman who was a minister wasn't too happy about?"
"You mean when she said they were talking about the 'Great Big Grampa Up in the Sky'?" he recalled with her journal entries fresh in his mind.
"Yes, that. You don't have to say it out loud to any of the Faithful, but that’s what we’re dealing with."
Charlinder kept that much in mind, but something about that day kept him awake. The reason why the ideas espoused in some of the Sermons left him cold, particularly those regarding the Plague, was not that he was offended by the fact that some of his community believed in a supreme being that Eileen derided as the Great Big Grampa Up in the Sky. It was that, as shown in the history texts that Eileen brought into the survivor community, the greatest bringers of war, through all the centuries of civilization, were greed, racism, and belief system. They were not a civilization and would not be for a long time. Since most of the village's assets were public property, and everyone was responsible for making sure everyone else was fed, clothed and sheltered, economics were a non-division in their community for the foreseeable future. The body count of the Plague had blurred out racial separations all over the river valley when the survivors decided that working together to stay alive was more important than who’d done what to whom in their former lives. People like Charlinder, whose ancestors originated on at least three different continents (in his case, Europe, Africa and the Middle East), were the overwhelming majority rather than a curiosity and while variations remained, racial boundaries were impossible to delineate as they once were. Gender, age and creed were probably the only dividing factors they had.