“So you’re suggesting it was all just a big misunderstanding? That it wasn’t any kind of set up?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Sorry you got in the middle of it.”
“He almost killed me,” said John. “What did he want from you?”
“The same as everyone else. Food, I guess. Maybe water.”
“Why didn’t you help me?”
“Like we said, we’re not armed.”
“Not armed? Not even a hammer?”
“Nothing.”
“You could have used your hands.”
“We’re pacifists.”
John was stunned.
“Seriously? Pacifists?”
The two men nodded solemnly.
John’s heart was slowly starting to calm down. He’d been pumped full of adrenaline from the fight, from shooting yet another man. He’d lost track now of how many he’d killed. He knew that it simply didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that he was still alive.
“I can’t even believe it,” said John, starting to laugh.
The men stared at him.
“It’s no joke. It’s our belief system.”
“We’re deeply committed to the nonviolence interactions that humankind is capable of…”
“Is that like a religious thing or something?” said John, cutting him off, still chuckling.
“No. Nothing like that.”
“We were philosophy professors,” said the other one.
“Were? How’s that working out now since the EMP? I imagine you’re out of a job now.” John couldn’t stop laughing. The idea of pacifists now was just simply too absurd.
“We’re continuing to develop our ideas and our systems of thought.” He spoke solemnly as if it was the most important thing in the world, developing systems of thought.
“So what would have happened if I hadn’t been here, and that man had come up to you?”
“We would have tried to dissect the situation.”
“That wouldn’t have worked,” said John. “He was a pretty good escalator, if you know what I mean. I’m guessing you would have just run.”
“Basically, yeah. That’s how we’ve survived so far.”
“Sooner or later that’s not going to work.”
“Don’t think we’re not aware of that eventuality.”
“I notice you don’t use the word possibility.”
“Of course not. It’s bound to happen.”
John stared at the men. He knew they were telling the truth. No one could come up with something that absurd without it being the truth.
“Well,” said John. “Good luck with that.”
He turned on his heel, leaving the men there. There was no point in inviting them back to camp. They would be nothing but huge burdens. John tried to imagine what would have happened if one of the camp members had been a pacifist.
Maybe it was the stress or the simple absurdity of the idea, but John started giggling.
“Hey!” called out one of the men from behind him.
John turned. “What? You want to convert me to your particularly useless and dangerous brand of philosophy?”
“No,” came the solemn answer. His voice was deep, carrying well through the darkness. “We wanted to warn you.”
John walked a few paces back towards them.
“Warn me of what?”
There was silence for a moment.
“There are a lot more of them. They’re coming this way.”
“That’s why we’re on the move.”
“Who’s coming? What are you talking about?” said John.
“Men like the one you just killed.”
“Explain,” said John. It wasn’t a question. It was a command.
“They’re desperate. Men and women. They’re not looking for anything but their own survival.”
“Sounds just like me,” said John. He held his handgun at his side, his arm loose. The gun felt good there, comforting, even when he wasn’t threatened in the immediate sense.
“We’re talking about a huge mob. We think it started…”
“In a city?” said John, suddenly getting the idea.
John remembered the huge mob of people in Center City Philadelphia that had almost killed him back before he’d escape the city, when he’d just met that therapist. What was his name? Larry? Lawrence? It felt like so long ago. In reality, it hadn’t been more than a few months.
So much had changed in such a short amount of time.
The masses in the city had been half-crazed, barely recognizably human, and yet so human at the same time. That was what happened to humanity when it was deprived of the essentials. The instincts kicked in, telling the body that it needed to get sustenance. At any cost.
“Yes, we think so.”
“So there’s this big mob out there? And it’s coming this way?”
“That’s correct,” said one of the former philosophy professors, the self-proclaimed pacifists.
John stared at him. It certainly looked like he was telling the truth.
“And what’s your plan?”
“We’re trying to get out of the way.”
“How do you know they’re coming this direction?”
“We’ve been running from them for a week now. Sometimes individuals, front runners, catch up to us. That’s how we know they’re close. That man that you killed, he was one of them.”
“Thanks for the tip,” said John, turning back around.
John didn’t have any reason to doubt the professors. They were the types of people who lived by principles, no matter what. John didn’t agree with their principles, but he recognized that these men contained the sort of integrity that wouldn’t allow them to lie about something like a half crazed mob coming John’s way.
The pacifists, John thought, were grateful that he’d saved them. If he hadn’t shot that wild half-crazed man, the pacifists might dead.
Pretty convenient for them. They didn’t have to get their hands dirty. But they’d gotten what they wanted.
And when people like John weren’t there to fight for them, they just ran.
Well, there wasn’t much point in dwelling on what would happen to them. The answer was too obvious.
John hurried back through the woods, heading to camp.
“John!” said Cynthia, looking up. She’d been staring into the dying flames of the fire, apparently lost in thought. “What happened to you?”
“What? Oh, nothing.”
“Were you attacked? There’s blood on you. Are you OK?”
John had almost forgotten that he’d just killed a man. It was sobering to realize that killing now came so easily to him that killing a man had merely become just one event in a day, so easily forgotten as soon as something else came along to occupy his mind.
“Oh,” said John. “Yeah. I’m OK, though. Not injured. Not really, I mean.”
“What happened?”
John brushed the question away with his hand. “It’s not important. I think we might have bigger problems on our hands.”
He told her about what the pacifists had told him. He told her about his experience in Center City Philadelphia, about what the mob had done. He told her how he’d seen countless mutilated bodies. How there’d been skulls smashed in with blunt objects, how there’d been torsos punctured with anything vaguely sharp, how the mob had roared and screamed together almost like a single organism, a beast that seemed impossible to fight against.
“Shit,” was all Cynthia could say.
She looked back into the fire, seemingly lost again in thought.
“But wait,” she said. “Shouldn’t they all be dead? I thought everyone was dying off. Killing each other.”
“I guess not,” said John. “I think these guys I met are telling the truth.”
“The pacifists? You really think you can trust pacifists?”
She said it while trying to keep a straight face, but her smile broke through before long.
; John laughed.
“I may not agree with him,” he said. “But yeah, I think they’re telling the truth. I could see it in their eyes.”
“So why is this huge mob of people still alive?”
“Who knows,” said John. “Maybe they had more access to food wherever they’re coming from. Enough food to last them until now.”
“So they’re coming this way?”
“That’s what it sounds like. What I’m thinking is that even if they don’t come directly this way, we’re bound to get some of the runoff.”
“Runoff? We’re talking about people, not rivers.”
“You know what I mean. Stragglers or offshoot groups might pass by this way.”
Cynthia gave him a serious look, all of the humor dropping away from her face. She could certainly be as dead serious as anyone when lives were on the line. “We’ve got to get ready.”
“I’ll go tell Georgia,” said John. “We need to start as soon as we can.”
“She’s asleep. Wasn’t feeling well again. Decided to head to bed early.”
“Then I’ll wake her up.”
13
PAUL
“Do you think he believed us?”
Ken nodded. “I think so.”
Paul said nothing. He stared into the fire, watching not the flames but the orange coals beneath the burning wood.
“These coals,” said Paul, speaking after a full minute of silence. “They’re like humanity. Soon the flames, our great achievements, will have extinguished, leaving nothing but the glowing embers of what once was the greatest achievements this planet has ever seen.”
“Knock off the philosophical talk for a minute, won’t you?” said Ken. “You’re not in front of a classroom any longer. There’s no need to talk to me like that.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t slip back into the speech patterns that we based our whole careers on. You talk like that more than I do.”
“Maybe so. But there’s a time and place for it.”
Paul’s career was over along with everyone else’s. His, in particular, offered almost nothing useful now. The world had fallen into chaos, where violence ruled. For his whole career, he had argued against the use of violence.
He knew now that everything pointed in the direction of him being dead wrong.
But while he may have lost his job, his prestigious position at the university, he wasn’t going to let go of his ideological beliefs. He’d stick to them no matter what.
He and Ken had agreed on that. They’d been colleagues. They’d been preparing for an upcoming conference, which they were hosting together, when the EMP had hit. Ever since then they’d been on the run, surviving with their wits, narrowly avoiding being killed too many times to count.
Their intelligence had served them well so far, despite the narrow misses. They’d been able to outsmart and outmaneuver the others. They had the ability to strategize, to visualize complex problems in their heads, and arrive at elegant solutions speedily and without much mental effort.
But that only went so far.
Paul knew that their time on this planet was coming to an end. Probably sooner rather than later.
“I hope he did believe us,” said Paul. “Because he doesn’t seem like the type who deserves to die.”
“How can you say that?” said Ken.
“You mean you want him to die?”
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that it sounds as if you’re making a value judgment on a man that we just saw commit murder.”
“It wasn’t in cold blood. He was acting in self-defense.”
“You know as well as I do that we’ve both disproven the self-defense rationale for violence of any sort. We’ve talked at how many conferences on that very same topic? We’ve co-written papers where the essential thesis rejected that very same notion. Don’t you remember any of that?”
“I’m not saying it’s wrong,” said Paul. “But that was all academic. It was completely theoretical. This is the real world. There aren’t any academic papers anymore. There’s not even a judge or a jury. The only thing that matters now is whether you live or die.”
Ken nodded. “But there are still ethics that exist in a timeless flux. How could you forget the shadows on the walls?”
“Don’t start with that Aristotelian crap with me again. I’ve had it up to my ears for my whole career.”
“You sound like you’re suddenly starting to reject your life’s work.”
“No,” said Paul, slowly. “It’s not that. I’m still deeply committed to a life of nonviolence, at whatever cost.”
“So where do you get off saying that that murder was justified?”
“I’m saying that it worked for that man. I’m not saying that I would do the same. Part of my non-violence work has always involved the acceptance of the individual’s right to their own philosophical and ethical guidelines. Who am I to judge that man for his non-violent act?”
“That’s the whole point!” shouted Ken, waving his hands in the air in frustration. “That’s the whole damn point of all our work. It’s to judge!”
Paul said nothing.
“You’re not even going to argue with me?”
“What’s the point?” said Paul. “I’m done. We’re done. We can’t keep running forever. We can debate the philosophical intricacies for eternity, but we don’t have eternity here on this Earth. Not anymore.”
“All right,” said Ken. “You win the argument. Finally, after all these years, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Let’s forget the whole thing. We’re arguing because we’re stressed. It’s understandable. Let’s get our stuff together and get going. The mob will be here before long.”
“Get going? Where to?”
“Wherever,” said Ken, not really paying attention. He was already picking up things from the campfire, throwing them hastily into his pack. “Wherever we can stay alive. Wherever we can continue to think.”
“Wherever we can continue to philosophize irrationally?”
“It’s not irrational. It’s completely rational. You sound like you’re losing it. Are you feeling OK, Paul?”
“No,” said Paul, the words feeling heavy as they came out of him. ‘I’m not feeling OK. Just go on without me. I can’t do it anymore.”
“Now you just sound crazy.”
“It was bound to happen,” said Paul. “You know as well as anyone about the reports of extreme stress on an individual’s psychological makeup, on their decision making, and on their will to live.”
“You’re talking about the rats again? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m sick of talking about the rats.”
“I don’t see why. They’ve been a staple of our careers.”
“Yeah,” said Ken, letting out a forced laugh. “But only because no one else could figure out how those learned helplessness rat experiments connected at all to the study of pacifism as a doctrine.”
“Well I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It really does have a connection, you know.”
“Come on,” said Ken. “We were just doing that for the numbers. We were the only ones doing it, and it worked out in our favor. It made for titles about as salacious as they can get for the academic world.”
“No,” said Paul. “I’m serious. There’s a real connection.”
“Then by all means, tell me what it is,” said Ken, who appeared to be only half-listening as he zipped up his pack and adjusted the straps.
“Remember that one experiment?” said Paul. “Where they would drop a rat in a tub of water? There was no way for it to get out. They measured how long the rat would swim for. And what was it? Something like a minute before it simply gave up and drowned. Now if that rat saw another rat that was able to escape, it got hope, essentially, and was able to swim for four to five times as long before it would eventually drown.”
“Fat lot of good it did that rat,” muttered Ken. He was kicking dirt onto the fire with his beat up
sneaker.
Soon the fire was all but extinguished, and only the light of the moon illuminated them.
“Don’t you see?” said Paul. “We have no escape as pacifists. We’re going to give up sooner or later. And I’m just deciding that this is my time. I’m going to give up right now. We’ve been running for too long. Go on without me.”
“You’re nuts,” said Ken.
“Call me whatever you want. I’m sorry to do this to you, Ken. But I just have nothing left inside me. There never was a fight. But the will to survive… it’s been killed off.”
“So you’re just going to sit there until you either starve to death or get killed?”
“That’s the plan,” said Paul, finally actually making up his mind as he spoke the words.
Ken shook his head.
“I guess I shouldn’t have packed up my bag. We’ll have to camp here tonight until this mood of yours shifts. You know, your little bouts of intense depression were tough enough to deal with when you were just my colleague. But now they’re actually putting our lives in danger.”
“This isn’t just a bout of depression,” said Paul.
“Sure,” said Ken. “Sure it isn’t.”
He was already unpacking his bag.
“The thing is,” said Ken, “is that if someone else comes here tonight, we’re dead. I guess I won’t start the fire. It just makes it easier for people to find us. So settle down for another cold night. I guess it’s good it’s not snowing, though.”
Paul said nothing. He was staring off into the darkness, his mind wandering to a thousand places. But wherever his thoughts went, they didn’t change what was deep inside him. He’d lost the will to live, and he knew that now more certainly than he’d ever known anything. He was so convinced of his nonviolent philosophy, that he couldn’t shake it no matter what, not even to save his own life, or the life of his longtime friend. And it led to a complete sense of hopelessness that he’d never be able to shake.
14
MAX
Max and Mandy had driven away in silence through the moonlit night. They hadn’t seen the Spaniards again, and they hadn’t discussed the topic any further. They both knew well that there were plenty of people out there in worse situations.
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