by Laeser, Nico
The preacher looked on with anxious anticipation as the first question was read out.
“Here we go. Question—Is there a god? Answer—I don’t know ... settle down, quiet please. Answer—I don’t know, I’ve not met God or angels, and I have not seen a Heaven or Hell.”
The murmur of the crowd spiked with exclaimed questions of, “How can she not know?” and, “Then where do we go?”
“Quiet, please. You can shout all you want after; just save it until I’m done. Question—Will all the dead come back? Answer—I didn’t know that I was dead until you, Haley, told me about my death. I don’t remember seeing anyone else where I was.”
“Question—What is it like in the afterlife? Answer—It was like a dream, a dream I’m starting to forget. It’s like I fell asleep on the day I died, and woke up just a few days ago.”
Gary read aloud each question and answer, and each seemed to disappoint or anger the crowd further. There were no satisfactory answers, no epiphanies or great truths, only answers that raised more futile questions.
Sarah had died, was unaware of her death, had gone somewhere to dream a dream she could no longer recall, and now she, and others, were back among the living not of their own choice, and with no greater knowledge than anyone among the now stirring crowd.
“Looks like there’s going to be trouble,” Powell said, gesturing to a number of the group rushing toward the stage.
One of the men veered from the group, snatched Haley up by her arms, and shook her, while barking something inaudible over the rising volume of the others. Sean lunged, wrapped an arm around the man’s neck, and wrenched him away from his daughter. As the two red-faced men wrestled and shouted back and forth, the others closed in. One of the group pulled at Sean’s arm, while another man flew in with a fist. The collective yell swelled in volume, deepened in pitch, and was punctuated by the intermittent screech of rubber-soled shoes on the church hall’s wood floor, and by the dull, flat sounds of impacting limbs.
Gary jumped down from the stage as groups of people swarmed in, and he pushed his way into the writhing crowd. It was hard to see who was fighting for whom, but it seemed like everyone wanted some part in it. A large man squeezed into the melee, while a teenage boy, cupping a hand to his dripping and bloody face, crawled out between the kicking, stomping fence of legs.
“Jesus,” Powell said, as he rushed toward the boy I now recognized as Jason, the seventeen-year-old cashier from the gas station.
Jason, pointing back at the crowd, tried to get past Powell to re-enter the fight. I watched, dumbfounded, as Powell tried to hold him back. Then Powell spun toward the fight and edged his way in, turned sideways, pushing and shoving his way through. People, who days before, had requested water, blankets, and food, people who had been too tired to stand, were now pushing, kicking, punching, and screaming.
I made my way to Jason; his nose was obviously broken and leaking a steady stream of blood that dripped from his chin. He spat a mouthful of blood and ranted through his hand when I was near enough to hear. “I was trying to get them to stop. They’re trying to drag the little girl out from under the piano.”
“Where are your parents?” I asked.
“They’re in there too,” he said and lowered his gaze to the floor. All the fight seemed to drain out of him quicker than the blood from his nose, and I wondered what side his parents had taken in the fight.
“Stay here, I’ll try to find the little girl,” I said, unsure of how I was going to accomplish the task I had set for myself.
I waved to get the preacher’s attention. He rushed over, leaned down, and helped me up onto the stage. The piano rang out with a dissonant chord as two of the men plowed into it before taking their fight to the ground, their arms working like two sets of blood-leaking pistons driving alternating blows at each other’s faces and bodies.
As I stared down into the whirlpool of violence, I realized it was not only the men of the group, but the women too, and they were just as vicious as the men. I called to Haley, forgetting for a second she was deaf, and cursed myself over the folly. Flat on my stomach, my arm hanging down between the stage and the piano, I waved my hand and tapped on the piano’s underside. She put her small shaking hand in mine and peered up at me through the gap with reddened eyes, wide open and lined with tears.
The preacher joined me and helped pull her up onto the stage; she ran behind my legs, making herself as small as possible and putting me between her and the melee. Powell was on his hands and knees, slumped over Sean’s no longer flinching body, while Gary tried desperately to hold back the front row as they lashed out with feet and fists. The fight showed no sign of ending; as some people tired, others took their place, striking and sliding around on the blood-waxed floor.
An explosive crack rang out in the hall, echoing over the high-pitched squeal in my ears, and the fight was over. The police officer who had paid me a quarter to prove I was alive stood by the back doors of the hall where Gary had stood just a few hours earlier, but in place of an air horn, the officer held a gun, drawn and trained on the crowd.
“Break it up,” the officer shouted.
The majority of the crowd dispersed slowly from the ring of blood, away from the nucleus of carnage, and the heap of seemingly lifeless bodies. A few people remained by the piano, covered in blood and unidentifiable save for their clothes. Gary was on his knees, trying to lift Powell up and over Sean, but Powell made no effort of his own.
As the people spread around the hall, the officer kept his gun out in front, trying to cover the widening target, while backing up slowly toward the door. With Gary’s help, Powell rolled onto his back. He opened his eyes and brought a hand up to rub at the side of his jaw, and I let out the breath that had been caught in my throat.
The preacher dropped down from the stage, and he and Gary helped Powell to his feet. When they let him alone, he staggered a few steps and took a knee. He shook off further attempts to help him up and leaned in to check Sean’s neck for a pulse. It took all three of them to lift Sean’s limp body and carry him to the stage.
“Is he ...” I began.
“He’s out, but he’s alive,” Powell said. He shot a glance at the girl cowering behind me and added, “We need to leave.”
I held the fire exit door open while the three men carried the limp body of the fourth. Haley trailed after her father, and I ran to get the truck.
The bloodied men lifted the bloodiest into the bed of the idling truck, and my heart sank; thoughts of my father’s body wrapped up in the back, now blended with the sight of Haley’s father. Haley and the preacher climbed into the truck, and the rest climbed in the back with Sean. Gary pounded a fist on the roof, and I put the truck in gear. As we pulled away from the church, there was a loud bang from inside, followed by two more in quick succession over the dull, sustained, and oscillating vowel sounds made by the little deaf girl as she cried.
11 | A flock of wolves
Gary’s voice rose to a bark. “I’m not going back there, and Powell’s got to look after Sean.”
“There were children in there,” I said, unable to stay the emotion in my tone and on the verge of tears.
“Those children have parents, and it was their parents that did that to Haley’s dad. You saw what they did to Sean, and Powell, and he was only trying to help. They were fighting over that little girl like she was meat. Now she’s gone, they’ve got nothing to fight over.” Gary glanced back and forth, from me to the preacher. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you expect us to do, or what we can do. I almost got my head caved in trying to break it up. You weren’t in there, they were dragging Haley around like a ragdoll and kicking at anything that was still moving, and now, at least one of them has a gun; we all heard it go off. Even if it was the cop who fired, there were more of them than there was of him.”
My stomach churned around Gary’s words, and we each sat with our heads in our hands, staring at the floor or kitchen walls.
&
nbsp; Powell entered the kitchen and broke the silence. “He’s okay. Dazed and confused, maybe a couple broken ribs and probably a concussion, but it looks like he’ll be okay.”
“How are you?” I asked in a hollow, defeated tone.
Powell grimaced and shook his head. “We spent all that time trying to help, fixing things, and patching people up, just for them to turn on each other and tear it all down in minutes.”
“It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” Gary said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“There’s been no food deliveries, nothing in for over a week; when the non-perishables run out, they’ll kill each other for what’s left,” he said.
“These are normal people, regular people ...” I began.
Gary laughed a joyless laugh. “You're fooling yourself if you think they’re all going to hold hands and share the crumbs.”
I looked to the preacher for support, but he looked away.
“What about the decent people? They’re not all as bad as you make them out,” I said.
“The ones that don’t fight over the crumbs won’t get any. You saw what they were like over Haley, like wolves over a carcass,” Gary said.
“I’ll go back, if I can use your truck, Emily,” the preacher said quietly.
“And if you don’t come back, we’re stuck here with whatever food is left in the house and no vehicle,” Gary replied sharply.
I was about to speak, when Powell interjected. “Gary’s right; if we go, there should be at least two of us. If you go alone and get trapped, injured or—well, if something happens to you, there’ll be no one to help or to bring you or the truck back. We’re going to need to go out sooner or later for food and to get fuel for the generator.”
“The slip tank out back is full, should last a while if we shut the generator off when it’s not being used; it’s diesel though, we’ll need gas for the truck,” I said.
“So who’s all going?” Gary asked.
“I’ll go.”
The group stared back at me.
“They’re less likely to attack a young woman and a preacher,” I added.
“Don’t be so sure; I’m coming too then,” Gary said.
“No,” the preacher said in a firm, unflinching tone. “We need the extra seat. We have to find Margaret.”
The rest of us looked blankly at each other and back at the preacher.
“The piano player. She’s too old to fight over crumbs,” he added.
***
I changed into an old work shirt and jeans and contemplated fetching my father’s gun from the back of his closet, but decided against it. There didn’t seem much point in carrying a gun if I wasn’t willing to use it, and I had already seen more blood than I could stomach in the brawl.
It was dark outside. I was barely able to make out the preacher waiting by my dad’s truck. He had the bag of supplies, a light version of the everyday travel bags Gary and the search teams used, containing a siphon kit, food and water, and a variety of other survival items.
Along the way, we stopped at crashed or parked cars, checked them for gas, and siphoned what remained in their tanks using the surgical tubing from the kit. The tubing had originally been intended for use as a tourniquet or IV line if required, but now, the fluids that would keep us alive were gas and water, and one was necessary to procure the other.
We stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of town, but without the tools or knowledge required to bleed gas from non-powered pumps, we resigned to filling the acquired gas cans with gas siphoned from the tanks of parked cars at the station.
The preacher suggested we fill up the truck with food and meds on the way. His manner and tone implied there would be no stopping on the way back from the church to the house. It appeared that Gary’s talk of wolves had made the preacher question his faith, but for now, it was only his faith in people that had been shaken.
We idled at the corner grocer and loaded the truck bed with cans, dry packaged goods, and flats of bottled water; the money I had left at the cash register was still there, untouched. From the clinic where Powell had seen his first ghost, I grabbed all the pill bottles, first-aid kits, syrups, bandages, and whatever else would fit into the remaining space in the back of the truck, while the preacher brought out the last of the food.
Every unseen bump in the road was realized and punctuated with a loud shuck sound as thousands of pills, packaged pasta, and bottled water jumped in response to the debris-strewn terrain. When we neared the church, I slowed the truck, and the preacher said to turn off the headlights so as not to draw more attention than was gained by the sound of the truck’s engine. The radio, that now played nothing more than white noise, was powered off and displayed the time; it was eleven after three in the morning, but I didn’t expect the people inside the church hall would be sleeping.
“Wait outside; if I’m not back in ten minutes, then leave,” the preacher said.
I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off.
“Keep the engine running, and if anyone but me comes near the truck, just drive on. I don’t want to believe that people are as bad as Gary says, but I’m not willing to stake your life on my optimism.”
He got out of the truck without letting me respond, and I watched him move in the moonlight to the fire exit we had used for our escape. He pulled at the door, stopped, and searched his pockets, and after a slight hesitation, he carried on around to the front of the church and out of sight.
At twenty-five after, I climbed out of the still-idling truck and made my way to the front entrance of the church. The blue-tarp staging tent had been blown, or torn, down, and the remnants of it hung limp from a two-by-four, lag-bolted through the mortar between the old bricks of the church wall. The blue sail appeared gray in the moonlight and flapped noisily. I hadn’t noticed the night’s gentle breeze before seeing its effect on the tarp, but it now caressed the stubble surrounding the stitched wound at the side of my head and found its way under my hair and down the back of my neck.
The cold shiver completed its journey down the length of my spine as I turned and reached for the door handle. The door burst open while my hand hovered inches away, and a black shape stood, silhouetted in the doorway against the candle light from inside the hall. My body was frozen to the spot, but my heart and stomach jumped in sudden terror.
“I thought you would have left.” It was the preacher’s voice, but there was something different in his tone.
I breathed a shaking sigh. “Did you find her?” My words bounced over the beat of my thumping heart.
The preacher stepped forward into the moonlight, his face appearing as a monochromatic mask with sparkling highlights that traveled slowly down the weathered gray of his cheeks. He shook his head. “Let’s go,” he said.
I leaned to see around him, to see inside the hall, but he moved to obscure my view, shook his head again, and said, “Don’t.”
The drive back to the house was accompanied by a silence so dense it seemed to swallow my questions before they reached my lips. The preacher had not found Margaret, but what he had found had changed him somehow.
12 | ... to the converted
The fireplace flames danced around a mentally projected image of the blackened man who had entered the church on a stretcher; somewhere in the back of my mind, I could still hear his lipless, gargling scream. I enjoyed the warmth from the fire, but the flickering beauty of flame had been exposed as a facade, a trap, a siren beckoning those ignorant of its true nature and destructive capability closer, while it tongued the air like a viper trying to smell out its food. Fire will eat until there is nothing left, feeding on anything that will burn, and stealing the oxygen from the space around it to fuel its insatiable needs, and anything that will not burn is used as a platform to reach its next meal.
“Want me to bring in more wood?”
I turned and waited for Powell’s face to materialize as the bright after-image between us
slowly faded from yellow to green, to red, to nothing. “It’s fed for now. How’s Sean?”
“He’s okay. Haley’s in there with him.” He shot a glance past the breakfast bar, separating kitchen and living room, and added, “Has he said anything?”
I shook my head. “Not a word. I don’t know what he saw last night, but it must have been something terrible.”
“This whole thing must be hard on a preacher. He’s probably got more to think about, or re-evaluate, than all of us. The rapture is supposed to take the living straight to Heaven, not deliver the dead back to earth,” Powell said.
Gary cleared his throat, readjusted his position in what used to be my dad’s favorite chair, and resumed his subtle, yet steady, snore.
“How did you sleep?” I asked.
Powell shrugged. “Better than I have in a while, but that’s not saying much.”
“What you said before, is that what you think this is, some kind of rapture?” I asked.
“I’m just thinking out loud; I don’t know what’s going on. If Haley’s mom doesn’t have a clue about what’s happening, then what chance do we have of figuring it out?”
I nodded slowly as the realization set in, that perhaps we would never know the how and why but be left with only speculation in the midst of the resulting chaos and confusion. “I’m going to fire up the generator, then you can help me cook breakfast,” I said.
Powell offered a smile. “I’ll go and check on the preacher.”
***
With the generator fueled up, it sputtered and roared to life on the second pull, and after a slight adjustment of the choke, it settled into a low rumble. On my way back around the house, I stared down and over the fields. The town was out of view behind several hills, but thick black clouds marked its location in the yellow sky above. The black smoke clouds drifted up and across, seamlessly joined to the airborne marker of the next town over, and possibly farther. I wondered about the scale of destruction, if the fires had raged everywhere, ravaged the whole country, perhaps the whole world. I wondered too about the ghosts. Had they appeared everywhere? There were no ghosts at the house, not my mom or my dad. I wondered about Sam, if he’d made it through the chaos, hoping, beyond my realistic fears, he was alive and safe somewhere, but knowing there was little safety to be found while at war. Applying my newly gained knowledge of the behavior of a frightened mob, and imagining the situation amplified by automatic weapons and a preexisting hostility that was never truly explained by the media, was enough to extinguish all but the slightest unrealistic hope of my brother's safe return. Perhaps our dad was there with him, watching out for him, or perhaps Sam was now sharing a dream in the afterlife with Mom and Dad.