Authors: Joe McKinney
Chapter 29
The door was open, but neither of us moved. We were still face-to-face, waiting for the other to flinch. I saw his eyes flick to my badge just for the thinnest fraction of a moment, and when our eyes met again, I could tell there was a lifetime of hate stored up there. That was the symbol he hated so much. I was every cop that had ever bullied him, made him feel small, fucked with him just for the hell of it.
“Simon,” the voice from inside the church said. “Come inside.”
Simon didn’t want to leave. He wanted to put his hands around my neck and squeeze. But there was something that wouldn’t let him do that, and I sensed it was that voice from the darkness.
At that point, I knew there wasn’t going to be a fight, and Simon knew it too. He snorted at me like I was lucky and walked back inside the church.
The other two men followed Simon inside, leaving me alone on the threshold. It was dark inside the church, and all I could see were a lot of silhouettes standing between the pews.
Somebody coughed. Feet shuffled on the wooden floor. The voice said, “Officer, come inside please.”
I took one last look at the yard full of dead bodies, remembering the last church I’d been in, and stepped inside. It was dark, but I could still see the faces closest to me. Simon was standing in the corner, giving me a smoldering, hateful look. The man who let me use his rifle was standing next to an older woman and two young children. The others stood in groups, watching me.
“Thank you,” I said, not really knowing what else to say. “You people saved my life out there.”
Simon said something under his breath and turned away.
“You’re welcome,” one of the other men said. It was the same voice I had heard through the doorway. “Come in. We don’t have much here, but it’s warm and dry, and you look like you’ve had quite a night.”
A very distinct change came over the room when he spoke. The others made way for him, and even in the dark, I could see that he was their center, their leader.
We shook hands. His grip was powerful and confident, and I got a sense from just that handshake why the others looked up to him. He carried himself with natural, unassuming confidence, like one who always seems to be in charge, and accepts the responsibility as easily and with as much grace as another man might put on a coat.
I decided right away that I liked him. Simon had already made it clear that if it were up to him, I’d be a bleeding piece of hamburger out there in the elms, but this man was not that way. He welcomed me, and because these were his people, they welcomed me too.
I looked him over quickly while I shook his hand. He was an older black man, maybe five-seven or so, and about 150 pounds. He wore clean blue work pants with a sharp crease, a black belt, and a starched, light blue button-down shirt, fastened at the neck. His eyes danced with fiery intensity behind fragile, gold-rimmed glasses. His boots were brightly polished. I guessed he was in his sixties, with a good splash of gray at the temples, but it was hard to be sure because his body was thin and ropy with muscles.
“I’m Tiresias Maple,” he said.
“Thank you, sir. I’m Eddie Hudson.”
“Call me Tiresias,” he said warmly. “Everybody here does.”
“Are you the minister here, Tiresias?”
“No,” he said. “No, unfortunately, the Reverend Joshua Jones died earlier this evening.”
“Oh,” I said, and then a long, uncomfortable moment followed. “I’m sorry.”
“Please, don’t be. You had no way of knowing. And besides, we’re glad you’re here. We’ve been inside since before nightfall and haven’t heard anything about what’s going on. The radio and TV have been off the air for a long time now.”
I looked around at the others in the room. They were watching me expectantly, and I could tell they wanted good news. Better news than I could give them.
“It’s bad out there,” I said, because if I were in their shoes I’d want to know the truth. “There are fires burning all over the city, and the places that aren’t burning are overrun with those zombie things.”
“What about the army?” somebody asked.
“I don’t know anything about the army. Maybe they’ve got troops on the way. I know we could use them. From what I can tell, most of the police officers and firefighters are dead. And I’ve heard this is happening all along the Gulf Coast, from Mexico to Miami. If that’s true, other cities are probably hurting as bad as we are. That’ll probably slow down the military response, too. They’ll have to divide their resources over a huge area.”
A woman in blue jeans and a black top asked me, “What about a safe area or something? Ain’t somebody coming to get us?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but what you see is what you get. I just came from Police Headquarters hoping to answer that very question, but it was overrun. If somebody had a plan, it’s out the window now. There’s no one left to take charge, and I haven’t seen another police officer for hours.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” somebody else asked.
“I don’t know. Find a way to survive, I guess. From what little I’ve seen, you people are better off than almost everybody else.” I looked around at their faces and tried not to think of the folks at the Lexington Baptist Church. These people didn’t need to hear about that. “I guess you just hold what you got till something changes.”
They turned quiet while they took all that in.
Tiresias finally broke the silence and said, “It looks like we’ll be on our own for a good while still. The Lord helps those who help themselves, so it’s time to help ourselves. I’d like everyone to continue fixing the damage and boarding the windows. When that’s done, we’ll begin the service.”
The others went off, murmuring to each other about what I’d said.
“Officer Hudson,” Tiresias said, “you’re welcome here. There was another police officer here earlier. An Officer Gibbs. I’m sorry to say he’s also passed on.”
“Gibbs?” I had a classmate at the academy named Gibbs. A big, dumb guy who you couldn’t help but love, even though, God help him, he could hardly tell if he was wearing his uniform frontward or backward. “Did you happen to catch his first name?”
“No, I’m sorry. He was in pretty bad shape when he came to us.”
“What does it matter?” Simon said suddenly from the shadows. I hadn’t noticed he was still standing there. “One cop’s just like another. As long as he’s dead, who cares?”
He came out of the shadows just enough for me to see his face, his eyes searching for a fight.
“Something you want to say to me?” I asked him.
“Tiresias, why are you gonna let him stay. After what that first cop done to us, how can you let this one stay?”
“That’s enough, Simon.”
“He don’t care about us.”
“I said, that’s
enough
.”
Tiresias put a lot of emphasis on that last word, and it worked on Simon. He backed away, but the hate was still smoldering in his eyes.
Under different circumstances a look like that would have earned him a night in the jail, and probably a lay-over in the hospital too; but things had changed.
Tiresias told Simon to go and light the candles for the service.
“From now on,” he said, “we worship in the light.”
Simon slipped away without saying anything else, leaving me with Tiresias. I saw the blue spurt of a dozen matches, and soon the whole inside of the church began to glow with a yellow, flickering light.
I could see the others moving around inside, and some were even smiling. God help me, it was the first smile I had seen since before Marcus died, and it filled me with warmth.
“We’ve had the church blacked out since before nightfall,” Tiresias said, and pointed to the boards on the windows. “Our thinking was that those persons out there are somehow attracted to light and sound. Anything that might indicate the presence of an uninfected person.”
I nodded. “You’re not worried about the light attracting them now?” I asked.
“Actually, I am,” he said, taking off his glasses and breathing on them. He took a moment to polish them on his shirtsleeve, a gesture that reminded me more than a little of Ken Stoler. “But I think it’s more important to give people the small signs they need that things will get better. These people have been through a lot, and they need something more than just huddling together in the dark.”
“This is the service you talked about.”
“Yes.” He slipped his glasses back on. “I was hoping you would join us.”
“I shouldn’t,” I said. “Ever since this started, I’ve been trying to make it back to my family. That’s where I want to be.”
“You’re a young man, Officer Hudson. You must have a young family.”
I nodded, and looked away. “I have a son. Andrew. He’s six months old.”
“That is young,” Tiresias said, and to my surprise he chuckled. “I remember what that was like. I have two daughters myself. They’re both grown.”
“You must be worried about them.”
“I am. One’s in Dallas, the other in Atlanta. I’m very worried. I’ve said my prayers for them, though.”
I had nowhere to go from there, nothing I could say to him. His problems weren’t that different from my own, yet I didn’t share his confidence. Prayers weren’t enough for me. I needed to hold my child to put my mind at ease.
“You’re welcome to stay,” he said at last.
“Thank you,” I said uncomfortably.
He took a moment to glance around the church. The inside was well lit, and the pews were filling up.
“I take it you’re out of ammunition,” he said
“I am,” I said. He surprised me with that. “How’d you know?”
“I saw you holster your weapon earlier. I don’t think you would have done something like that if you still had bullets left in your gun.”
I nodded.
“That officer I told you about earlier,” he said. “He was badly injured when he came to us. He was only able to fire a few shots before those people out there attacked him. His body is upstairs. Perhaps you’ll stay for the service. Afterwards, you can take whatever ammunition you can find and then you can go to your family.”
I didn’t want to, but I realized it would be stupid to say no. He and his people had been good enough to take me in when I needed it most, and now they were giving me ammunition, too.
“Excellent,” Tiresias said. “I’ll start in just a moment.”
“You? I thought you said you weren’t the minister here.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m a bricklayer. Been doing it for more than fifty years. But I’ve been coming to this church for longer than that, and the folks here asked me to lead them in prayer after the Reverend Jones died. I had planned on waiting till morning to do that, but after what’s happened, I think now is as good a time as any.”
We shook hands again and I took a spot next to a pillar behind the last pew. My plan was to leave as soon as I could slip out and try not to be noticed. I figured the fewer questions they asked me, the easier it would be.
The place was alive with moving light. It made the place seem warmer, friendlier. People around me chatted with each other and exchanged greetings and it was almost surreal enough for me to think I had dreamed everything up to that point.
Almost.
The people milled around like Sunday morning until they saw Tiresias mount the pulpit.
Everyone took their seats.
That’s when I slipped away. I stepped back into the shadows and made for the upstairs room near the front door, where Tiresias said I would find Gibbs’s body.
I half expected every step to carry me over the edge of a cliff. It was like there was a big coiled snake moving slowly through my gut. I wanted to sit down and rest, to let the sick feeling inside me pass, but I knew I couldn’t. I still had miles to go before that could happen.
I took the stairs slowly, one at a time, lugging my heavy, mud-and blood-stained boots up the steps like I was climbing a gallows, and from somewhere behind me, I could hear Tiresias leading the others in prayer.
Chapter 30
The upstairs room was really just a storage closet. They kept a few broken chairs and a cheap metal picnic table off in the corner, but the rest of it was empty.
Almost empty, anyway. There were eight corpses along the opposite wall beneath a blue window. The bodies were covered with white tablecloths and tied off with a small gauge rope.
They reminded me of the root balls of trees about to be planted.
There wasn’t any sign of gore. There were no pools of congealed blood and no foul odors. It was all very clean and decent. The bodies were laid out on the floor, but it had been done with obvious respect.
Of course, Tiresias and his people had only been able to do so much to cover up the violence that had brought those bodies to that point. I saw a white hand and wrist, still wearing a watch and wedding ring, sticking out from under the sheet, like it was reaching for something.
I stopped in my tracks, waiting for the rest of the body to unfold itself and come after me. That didn’t happen, though. The body was at rest.
Even still, there was something grotesque about the way that hand rested there, palm upwards on the floor, like it wanted something I couldn’t give. I got the feeling from that mute gesture that it was reaching back for the life that had once moved it, even if that meant returning to this nightmare world of the necrosis virus.
It wanted even that.
I moved very slowly as I crossed the rest of the way to the bodies and worked back the sheets, one body at a time, until I found Gibbs’s corpse. I pulled the sheet back far enough to uncover his gun belt, but I didn’t want to look at his face. It made it easier, somehow, not to.
He had two full magazines in his belt pouch and I took them both. I slapped one in the gun, tucked the other into my belt, and then slid the sheet back over his body.
I kept meaning to turn around and go, but it was hard to look away. It was like watching the hands of a clock chase each other around the dial. Nothing ever seems to change, but all the while, something precious slips away.
I looked out the blue window at the unburied corpses in the parking lot, and I thought about what it all meant. The problem was so big, so incredibly vast.
I had a vision of myself standing in the middle of an immense, utterly featureless plain, the horizon impossibly distant in every direction. Wherever I turned there were miles and miles of nothingness. There was no sound, no taste, no reference of any kind. I was alone, and my questions had no answers. If I could have painted a picture of my personal hell, that featureless plain would have been it.
I heard footsteps.
They stopped somewhere behind me, and I turned to face them.
Simon was standing there, and he was holding a bat.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
He shrugged, but he made sure I saw the bat.
“Is that supposed to scare me? It doesn’t, you know. After all, I’m not the one who brought a bat to a gun fight.”
“You ain’t gonna shoot me.”
“You sound awfully sure of yourself.”
“Yeah, well, I got good reason to sound sure of myself, because I’m gonna knock the fuck out of you if you take one step closer.”
My pulse quickened, and my body tensed. This was familiar territory for me, the old game of who’s got the biggest balls.
“What’s wrong with you, Simon? Did somebody write you a ticket and hurt your feelings. Come on, fess up. I bet you’ve got warrants, don’t you?”
“You think this is funny?”
“No, Simon, I don’t. I think you’re an asshole. That’s about as far as I’ve taken it and that’s about all I care to know. Now why don’t you take your dumb ass downstairs before you get yourself hurt.”
His eyes narrowed on me and I knew things were about to get really nasty.
When he took a step for me I drew my gun and pointed it right at his head. If he had been a little faster, he probably could have put the bat upside my head. But as it was, he stopped in his tracks.
My finger was twitching on the trigger, ready for him to make a move.
Wait for it, wait for it.
“Stop it. Both of you. Stop it.”
It was Tiresias. He was behind Simon, standing at the top of the stairs. Simon didn’t take his eyes off me. My gun didn’t move.
“Simon,” Tiresias said, his voice was softer the second time.
But neither one of us moved. Simon was fighting a battle with himself, and I watched it play out on his face. He desperately wanted to wrap that bat around my skull, but at the same time I knew Tiresias had a special power over him.
In the end, that power won out, and Simon let the business end of the bat fall to the floor with a thud.
Damn, that thing would have hurt.
“Simon,” Tiresias said, gently, but very firmly. “Go downstairs.”
Simon didn’t say another word. He wrapped his fury up inside him and walked downstairs, leaving me with Tiresias.
When he was gone I said, “I wouldn’t have shot him unless he made me.”
Tiresias didn’t say anything to that for a long moment. He took his small, gold-rimmed glasses out of his shirt pocket and slipped them on. In his powerful hands they looked like they might crumple.
He smiled at me and said, “I’m blind as a man can be without these things.”
“I didn’t start that,” I said, pointing at the stairs. “I don’t know what his problem is, but I didn’t start it.”
“He doesn’t like the police.”
“Was that it? Gosh, I couldn’t tell.”
“His feelings are misplaced, obviously, but tonight has been very hard on him.”
“Yeah, well, it hasn’t exactly been a cakewalk for me either.”
“No, of course not. It’s been hard on all of us. But it’s been especially hard on Simon. He lost his mother tonight. She was a good woman, and a dear friend of mine.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “But he acts like I’m the one who killed her. I never said a cross word to him before he tried to get me to fight on the porch.”
“Things are rarely as simple as they ought to be,” he said. “We carry so many things around inside us, so much baggage. Sometimes that baggage keeps us from changing when we need to.”
“That may be,” I said, “but it still doesn’t answer why he hates me so much.”
Tiresias paused over that for a moment. Finally, he said, “I brought Simon and his mother here as soon as I heard about what was happening. Simon’s mother was a nurse. When the first wounded starting showing up here, she treated them as best she could. Your friend Officer Gibbs was one of those wounded. She worked on him for a long time, but in the end there was nothing she could do for him but let him slip into that coma-like state the infected have. At the time we still didn’t understand what was happening with the people who did that. How they—came back. After he rose up he attacked her. That’s how we lost her. Her body is over there with the others.”
There was nothing I could say to that. It didn’t make Simon any less of an asshole in my opinion, but at least it gave his hostility a context.
We stood there for a moment in silence before he said, “You must be eager to leave.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You said you have a six-month-old son, right?”
I nodded. “His name’s Andrew.”
“So young,” he said, and whistled through his teeth. “Do you know where you’ll meet your family?”
“I haven’t got a clue. We didn’t have time to make plans. I don’t know how I’m going to find them. I’ve already been to my house once tonight, but they weren’t there. Her car wasn’t in the garage, so I guess they could be anywhere. I just don’t know.”
“And there’s no place you can think of where she might have gone? Your church maybe? Or another family’s house?”
“No. It’s just us.”
“So where will you start looking for them?”
“You know, I don’t have the foggiest idea. They could be anywhere. I suppose I’ll go back to the house and start from there. Maybe they left me a note or something. Last time I was there I didn’t really take the time to look around. First thing I need to do though is find a car.”
He cracked a small smile. “I don’t think you’ll have a problem with that. You have friends, after all.”
“I appreciate your optimism. But I think I’ve been kicked around a little too much tonight to share it. From where I’m standing, it looks like I’m going at it alone from here on out.”
“That bothers you.” It wasn’t a question, just a dry observation.
“Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“Absolutely. Being alone is a terrifying thing. It’s enough to scare any man, even one who is as equipped to take care of himself as a police officer.”
I nodded uncomfortably. All I wanted to do was get out of there, find a car, and make my way back to my house.
I happened to glance back at the bodies and I noticed the hand still sticking out from underneath the sheet. Tiresias had said Gibbs was injured not too far away, and I figured that meant his patrol car had to be close by too.
“What about Gibbs’s car?” I asked him. “Did you see where he left it?”
“Yes. But I’m afraid it won’t be much use to you. When I found him he was climbing out of a culvert a few blocks over. His car was at the bottom of that culvert.”
“Eddie,” he said, and it startled me a little to hear him use my first name, “do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
Here it comes. Leave the sermon early, the preacher grabs you by the ear later.
“No,” I said warily. “Shoot.”
“I’ve been thinking about everything I’ve seen tonight. Sitting in this church, there’s not much else to do. Just sit and pray and think.”
He walked over to the blue window and looked out, then ran his finger lightly across the sheet, respectfully, mindful of the heavy burden under it.
“So many people have died tonight,” he said. “So many friends and strangers and people I’ll never know. It boggles the mind. What I want to know, Eddie, is if you’ve tried to put some kind of value on it. Have you thought about what it means?”
His back was to me, which was good, for had he been looking at me he would have seen my mouth fall open. The man was in my head, saying the words that I had said to myself in the exact same spot where he was now standing. I was dumbfounded.
I thought about telling him about my vision, about the featureless land where answers had ceased to exist and that I had named my personal hell, but I held back. Somehow, I just couldn’t put that in words.
Instead I simply said, “That’s not an easy question to answer.”
“No, it’s not. But it occurs to me that those of us who live through tonight are going to have to try and put some kind of meaning to it. Those of us who live are going to be defined by this, changed by it in ways we can’t even begin to imagine right now. You will have to raise a child in this new world. You have to put your thoughts in order. If not now, soon.”
I thought about it, about putting my thoughts in order, about what I might tell Andrew about this night, many years from now when he happened to ask what it was like, and it shamed me that I had nothing to say. There was a great big hole where the answer should have been. All I could think of was that I wasn’t ready for something like this to happen, that it wasn’t fair.
I had no idea how to put it all in one little neat package. The world had flipped upside down and left me hanging. There was absolutely nothing in my experience to prepare me for the new world Tiresias was talking about. Now that I was asked to articulate what I was feeling, all I could do was stammer around the issue.
“I don’t have an answer for you, Tiresias. I just don’t know what I think. I guess my gut reaction is that it just isn’t fair. I saw one of the officers I used to work with die tonight. I watched him as he slipped into one of those things. He was a husband and a father, just like me. He loved his wife and his new baby as much as I love my family, and in the end, he couldn’t even remember their names. He told me he didn’t even remember what love felt like. That’s the worst part of all this, I think. That’s what really scares me about those things. It scares me that I could lose my mind that way. Die without any understanding. It makes me wonder what we did to deserve that kind of cruelty.”
He nodded silently. I got ready for him to harangue me about God, and maybe give me the bit about Job and how we’re just not equipped to understand the ways of God, but to my relief he simply turned and stared out the window.
When he turned back to me he said, “For me, tonight has been about salvation. For you, it seems to be about justice. We couch our thoughts in different language, but I think we’re not too far off from each other. Justice and salvation, after all, are two sides of the same coin as far as God is concerned.”
He turned and looked out the window again, and it seemed his mind was focusing on something that only he could see.
“I was standing here when I saw you come out of the trees,” he said.
“I’m lucky you were there.”
He tapped on the window thoughtfully. “You know, it occurs to me that the hardest part of the days and weeks and years to come is not going to be putting the conveniences of our old world back together, but reestablishing the bridges between those who survive. There’s a lot of work ahead of us. A lot of community building.”
“How do you mean?”
“I used to come home and watch the news. I would sit on my couch and stare at the TV and shake my head, wondering why we never seemed to get anywhere. Everything was the same. Always the same thing, night after night, year after year. I have the terrible feeling that what we’re seeing out there is the failure of our community, that all of that death is simply the manifestation of our lack of place, a sense of who we are and what we mean to each other. Our cities have turned into a nightmare landscape of violence and apathy where personal responsibility is optional and our affection for one another withered to a ghost of its former self. I know as a police officer you have seen what I’m talking about. Perhaps you’re better equipped than most to understand what I mean.”
“People have always been that way though, haven’t they? None of this is new, like you say. Isn’t it man’s nature to be self-serving and cruel. Brotherly love only goes so far as it’s mutually advantageous.”