Judgment (18 page)

              This morning from the position of the sun I felt about a quarter of the daylight time had passed, so it was probably between nine or ten. I was never completely sure about the time anymore. I'd stopped wearing a watch weeks ago. Anything electronic or battery powered with the time on it was now a thing of the past. I had found a wind up pocket watch and for a while I tried to keep time with that just to maintain some sense of normalcy in life. But after a while it seemed pointless. The closest thing we needed to time keeping now was limited to "It'll be dark soon".

              Evelyn was trying to keep a calendar on the wall, marking off the days as each night passed so we could estimate when the baby would be due. We probably weren't even close to being right, but she needed to feel like she knew.

              We tried to form routines, to eat at certain times, to make all our trips for supplies at the same times every day, to go to sleep at the same times. We tried to form some sort of a normal life, but it was hard when animated corpses could appear at your window any minute, or an angel from Heaven might spontaneously combust you while you were going to the bathroom in the bushes.

             
Yeah. Welcome to the new life.

              But we were making the best of it.

              The road, as usual, was empty. Any signs of human life had become harder and harder to find as the weeks wore on. Ash blew up and down the highway, collecting in piles along the sides against the tall grass. Deer seemed more and more abundant, the same familiar herd moved back and forth across the road with regularity, unafraid of human interaction since there was none to be found. It seemed like nature was reclaiming the earth as humans faded from existence.

              After a half mile or so I came upon some road kill on the side of the highway. A year ago it would have been a deer or a possum. Today it was human, a maledicted, most of it eaten away by animals and bugs; nature reclaiming the Earth. Yet still it moved, somehow a soul still inside waiting to be judged. It had one lidless eye left in its skull, and I saw it follow me as I walked by. Creepy as hell and yet I had now become accustomed to such things and just kept walking.

              I wondered for a while why the Judges never took the maledicted, only grabbing the living. I could only guess that if you're already dead your path to Heaven, or Hell, was different. There was something quite cruel about it, it seemed. Many used to throw out the old cliché, "The Lord works in mysterious ways." I saw it as a flawed deity with a flawed plan, but what did I know. I'm just another one of the human cattle that hasn’t been caught yet. My time will come eventually, I'm sure. Joe, Steve, Margie, Jennifer; I watched them all die. I've watched the whole world die, and I still have no real idea why.

              I feel badly for Evelyn. In some ways I wish maybe she hadn't survived the car wreck, just so she wouldn't have to live through this. Perhaps that's the cruelest part of it all, thinking you're better off dead; but to deliver a child into this world?

             
I don't even want to think about that right now.

              I was lost in all these thoughts, watching the road below my feet go by a step at a time. So lost in thought I hadn't noticed the maledicted walking up on me.

              “Where do we go?” she asked, and I jumped out of my skin. She was right next to me, and with the breeze blowing into my face I hadn't even smelled her.

              “Do you know where we're supposed to go?” she asked again. She didn't appear to have been dead for very long. She was clearly deceased, but not very much decomposition had started yet. I could tell she had been a pretty woman, her facial features still intact. She had long curly hair, although now it had a straw-like texture to it. She had a simple dress on, and no shoes. I backed away a few steps, knowing the unpredictability that came with their brain-dead insanity.

              “Go? Where are you trying to go?” I asked her, slowly trying to put more space between us.

              “To be judged.”

              In that moment I saw the confusion in her eyes, and the fear, and the sorrow. I looked her over to see how she had died. She was covered in old dried blood, but I could see no wounds. It was when she reached out towards me that I noticed the gaping slices in her wrists. Like so many who were afraid to be judged, she had committed suicide instead. Now she found that she was denied the right to make that choice, and would wait as a rotting corpse.

              I knew what she needed to know, but couldn't bring myself to tell her, nor would her rotting brain understand. So I stood in the middle of the road with the dead woman, and I wept for her.

              She stared at me, her head cocked slightly to the side. I could see the cracks in her dried lips, but there was no more blood to bleed. There was a bug in her hair and another on her leg, but she seemed to not feel them.

              “I think that's our house,” she stated as she pointed to one of the farms on the north side of the road. “Are you ready to come home now? Molly's late too.”

              I had no idea what she was talking about. Her mental faculties had left her brain minutes after the oxygen did, and that was a couple days ago. She was just a package of disconnected memories, trapped in a corpse.

              “Do you know where we go?” she asked again. “Maybe Molly's there.”

              I wanted to get away from her now. I couldn't help her, and at any moment she could become violent, or start yelling and attract Judges. “I'm sorry. I have to go,” and I began walking quickly away from her.

              “So you don't want soup then?” she called out to me.

              No, I don't want any freakin' soup.

              As I got further away, I heard her call to me one last time. “Mister...”

              I stopped to turn and face her. She was still just standing in the road with bugs crawling on her, not knowing where to go or what to do.

              “I'm sorry,” she said, her eyes full of sorrow like a child who was just scolded by a parent but doesn’t understand why. I thought about her apology for a long moment.

              “Sorry for what?”

              “I just want to die now please.”

              The vision of her sadness, and hearing her words, it broke me. My spirit sank and the tears streamed down my face as I turned and walked away.

              What kind of god does this?

              I turned off of the road and headed across a large open field. The grass was up to my knees, and every so often I would see a wave of bending grass move away from me as rabbits ran from my strides. Just once as I reached the top of a hill I turned to look back towards the road, and the woman was still standing there; just standing, waiting, but not knowing for what.

              Looking the other way down the hill I saw one of the farmhouses. My thoughts turned back to Evelyn and the things that we needed. Medicine, food, clothes. I shifted my backpack, gathered myself, and headed down into the farm.

              It wasn't a very large house. A single story rancher, but it sat upon a huge tract of land that still had crops on it that never got taken to market. A tractor still sat out in the middle of the field, the last bits of a pile of ash clinging to the ground nearby. Further out several cows lingered lazily about. A small baby calf, standing alongside its mother, lazily chewed grass. While mankind was being exterminated, the rest of nature went on.

              A dog barked not too far away, making me wonder why. I froze for a moment to scan the field and the sky for any signs of life or movement. There were no maledicted in the fields, and no angels in the sky. I waited a moment longer to be sure, and then headed to the house.

              An old Chevy truck sat out front, next to a satellite dish of equal size. On the front porch sat a couple of rocking chairs, beside a table knocked over on its side and a broken glass. The front door was broken, the wood cracked and splintered near the knob from when someone had forced it open.

              I entered the foyer, where I stood and listened intently for any sounds of an occupant. After twenty seconds of nothingness, I shouted to draw out anyone who may not have noticed me yet. Noise would always bring angels and maledicted searching for its source.

              “Anyone here?” I called out, and waited. Nothing. I began my house tour in the kitchen, looking for the usual; canned goods, dried pasta, rice. Even the starches that had weevils in it, we ate anyway. I never opened refrigerators anymore. Anything at all that had been in there to begin with was perishable, and opening the door now just unleashed a disgusting burst of foul air worse smelling than any maledicted. I found a pack of beef jerky, but mice had already eaten into the plastic and it was molding.

              I stuffed what was usable into my pack and wandered into the living room. All the reminders of the old world were there. A TV, magazines, and an old vacuum cleaner still plugged into the wall that must have been running until the power grid shut down. I noticed half of a pile of ash in front of it, with thin streaks of dust trailing off underneath the vacuum.               I couldn't decide if it was humorous or appalling, but it appeared that someone using the vacuum had been caught, judged, and then sucked up into their own vacuum.

              On the walls were the typical family photos, of the typical family doing typical old world things. Things I would probably never do again; amusement parks, picnics, sporting events. It was all gone now, sucked up into God's giant vacuum cleaner.

              There was a piano in the corner, a beautiful baby grand. I played a little when I was younger, and not having heard music in a long time, I couldn’t resist tapping on a few keys. It made beautiful sounds, and revived memories I had long forgotten. With nothing else of use, I moved on to the bedrooms. I passed a closed door in the hallway, and opening it saw it led down to a dark cellar. It reminded me of the incident with JD.

              No thanks, I'm good up here.

              I moved on to the bedrooms, following the same routine we did in every house we searched. I went through the dressers for usable clothing, searched the closets for guns or weapons, and looked under beds for anything else of value. At first it felt shameful, digging through people's lives, through their only possessions. After a while it sank in that they would never be back for them again, and it became easier. More than once I found stashes of cash, and had to laugh at how entirely useless it was now.

              As I was moving to the second bedroom, I heard the front door creak open. I froze, silent, waiting. I held my breath, afraid to make a sound. I heard the shuffle of feet on the floor, and the familiar ruffling sound of feathers folding upon themselves.

              Shit.

              A Judge had entered the house.

              This was a small house. I had one narrow hallway to exit out to the front door, and the Judge was there. I knew if I waited another second he would turn the hallway to the bedrooms, and there was nowhere to hide. In a moment of panic I quickly opened the door to the cellar and closed it behind me as gently as possible.

              Down a set of narrow rickety old steps I went, down to a dirt floor. It was a cold, damp, musty place, mostly empty except for a few milk crates full of recyclable bottles and some other unrecognizable junk. The only light coming in was through two small rectangular windows at ground level, the dim sunlight fighting its way in through years of dust and spider webs.

              I heard the angel walking on the wooden floor above me. As I moved around in the cellar I could follow his steps, the wooden planks creaking and dust falling from the ceiling wherever he stepped. He was in the kitchen. He made no sound, disturbing nothing; seemingly just looking, listening, and searching. I followed his steps into the living room, then into the hall. He was headed for the first bedroom I had been in when he suddenly stopped. I couldn't tell exactly where now and I felt panic settling over me. If he opened the basement door, there was nowhere for me to go. I would be completely trapped. I thought of Evelyn.

              Don't go alone, she told you, you idiot.