“Yes, he had several people in that car with him.
“I decided they were wise, you see. Not only was it a police car, but whoever those people was, they’d survived. How many specks got back in that car, after they siphon and leave one of their own tumbling out behind upon the road? I don’t know. I decide I’d follow them, but not close. Not so close that they might see.
“Oh, no. The living, you can’t trust no one now. You need other people, but there’s no one you can trust. We, you and I, we may be nearly the last two good souls to breathe.”
“All right. We can talk about that. You’re right, I hiding that from you.
“Not as many died as I care to say. No.
“Thirteen times from out of Denver, I meet the living. It goes like this.
“You roll down your window and hold your breath, you call people by names. If you don’t know their name, you just pick one. ‘Mike? Mike, is that you?’ See, because the real people, they’ll talk to you and scream for help. But most of the people ain’t real, most of them are things.
“Most of these things, the once-people still crawling out there, they ain’t men or women or kids no more. They’s of the Beast, the human is all burned out of them. They’s the hollow men.
“There’s nothing inside them not burned away, but hate and hunger and rape and desperation. See, the most primal needs, the instinct of the dying? They kill as much as they can, before they die. That’s the hate now born inside of them, eating them alive.
“They eat everything that moves. They’re worse than zombies, they’re the living. This ain’t no fantasy, this is the real horror. What people really are, when all that civilization is burned away and there’s only agony, no hope? Hate, that’s all that they are.
“I don’t stop for most, especially after one. I see a girl stooped in the breakdown lane, where US-6 become CO-119. Yeah. Not older than ten, she was eating another soul. Yes, that is what I am saying. And she ‘look’ up at me, my engine sound. Her eyes were all blown out.
“I tell you, if ever you hail the crawling, you call out a name and they don’t rise and answer, you drive away. Fast as you can. You run, you shoot if you have to. They’s of the Beast. They howl and chase and kill you now, if ever they still can move. It’s like the world is full of devils now, and all of them devils are dying, and their only hope left is to kill you, to drag you down with them before the end.
“Oh, I know my mythology. That’s what keep us sane to read, that fantasyland when I was in ‘Nam, me and Frankie Kilbride. Yeah. They say Charon, old Ferryman of Hell? He demand a gold coin from the dead for the comfort of the waters, the comfort of the netherworld. The damned without any gold to pay him for, old Charon he leave them on the shore forever, forever to know pain and to know what they become.
“I believe, truly I believe those of the Beast now are upon that shore. They standing there, poor as they can be. Like that girl eating her daddy or someone by the highway. And we, the living souls? We’re the gold. You know what I’m saying? These things, they will kill you if they buy any peace from taking you down with them. I do believe that. That’s all now they ever have.
“So you shoot them, and you purify. They not answer to no name? ‘Hey Mike’ and you get no answer? Then the soul is gone, then you burn them and send them down.
“I do it for you, if it need be. I owe you all. I do shoot well.
“Well, I was saying. I followed that old police car, but never too close. I drove through that hollow vein in traffic and ruin they had made. See, they pushed a path for me. Miles out, it’s not like you’re going to lose somebody you’re tailing. Worse problem is that they’re going to see you, coming up behind.”
“One more living, I did see, after the eating girl. Another soul.
“I see her rise up from the cornfield of the dead, where that little wildflower airport used to be. Athanasiou? Pretty name.
“She a girl, she wave to me. I open my car, yes. To that one. I take her in for a night.
“Amelia was her name, she still a soul and she remember. She had bottled water and some bags of nuts from a vending machine, all tied up in a shirt, and I the car. Must have been eighteen.
“She start at once trying to take off her pants and she offer herself to me. I say keep that on, I only need food and drink. She wary then, like then it’s a trap. It’s like that now.
“She told me things, after I refused her. When I didn’t touch her, she told me things she overheard in the airport at the end, things that I won’t share with you.
“It’s the world. Everyplace in the world is just like here now.
“But Amelia, she didn’t make it here. And you, Mrs. S.-G., you don’t, you don’t stop, even for any Amelia or any man like me. You cannot tell how people are going to react.
“Some I meet early on, when I was guilty still about the pregnant woman and trying to help, they run up and hug you, ‘Oh thank God, you real,’ and they treat you like you’re their mamma and their daddy and their baby all rolled up in one. And they go to sleep crying tears of joy, and then they die in the night.
“See, those ones, they was waiting. They was waiting to hear it was okay for them to let go. But others, they give you the eye like they going to kill you slow, only slow because they’re not hungry yet.
“And you don’t know. You get Amelia giving you hugs, you get an old woman giving you that feasting eye while she’s scoping you with a rifle. You just can’t assume anything anymore. Best case, you’ve got to go reign over those who you find as if you are the Queen o’ Death, you show them you dominate, until your gun is in their mouth and they certain you’ve the advantage. And only then, if they know you strong enough to kill them, can you ever dare to show the weakness of compassion.
“Like you just did, those days ago. Coming out there suited up in the ladder-shaft, Queen o’ Death reflecting red right out of you, covering me with some submachine gun straight out of James Bond? You didn’t hold that right, but you was close, my critical eye will tell you that right now. See, that was good. You meant business, you the death dealer come to save me.
“And now, you’re the nicest person left alive. That I promise you.
“So all right, if you understand.
“I follow that police car, I lose them up here on these old sweet mountain roads, or what is left of them. I took some wrong turns, after I laid Amelia down on the road. Best peace only I could give her, up above all the others. I saw no other living soul.
“One thing I did see, three deer walking out of the tattered forest, one doe with her face without any fur, the other two behind with milk-white eyes. Those two behind, they had seen the sky, they were blinded. And this, this one with the face of velvet rose, she was leading them, blind and all limping, they… oh. Oh, I cannot tell you.
“Pray good thing I got lost, following that police. Because otherwise I would have been right behind them, caught up too close in that canyon to know any better. In that dead end up in here, if they see me right behind, I don’t think it would have gone well for me.
“There was a gunshot. They had thrown out a woman, I am sorry to tell you. Yes, here in your canyon. First, I think they all might have stood out and drunk to her like a farewell or something, there was liquor bottles still upright in a circle. She’s draped now over the water pump.