Instead, I sat down to rest and considered the woman with the diabetic child. Even if she was a moron for letting the insulin run out, the problem was larger than one worthless woman. There were a million other idiots who every day made terrible choices that incurred no consequences. Liberal college professors who taught students to hate America. Simpleminded voters who elected presidential candidates based on nothing more than hope and change. Postmodern scientists who pretended as if theirs were the only facts that mattered. I had been raised to believe in a merit system, a country where the best would thrive, but the only happy people I knew were those who contributed nothing.
Now there was no room for emotion. No quarter for political correctness. You either survived or you didn’t. You either won or you lost. No more trophies just for showing up.
By the time I reached the first name on my list, dusk had nearly fallen. The sky was striated into layers of orange and pink and gray that made me think of the Grand Canyon. Mitch Brown’s neighborhood had been new in the 1980s, rows of single-story ranch houses that no one here could afford to maintain. A white pickup stood in the driveway, and when I finally knocked on his front door, Mitch didn’t answer. Eventually I wandered into the back yard, in case he was grilling dinner. He wasn’t.
This beautiful new dusk, filtered through the haze, made the world look dreamlike. Unreal. It was absurd to believe we could find ten men this way, walking the streets of a city made enormous by single-passenger commutes. I looked straight up, as if answers might be found in the sky, and saw stars twinkling through the haze. I considered how many suns must be out there, and how any of them could blow up with no warning. The more I thought about it, the more I could appreciate how something that appeared stable on the outside could be volatile on the inside… that a star, or anyone, could blow in an instant, killing everything around it. Everyone around him.
I walked out of the back yard and found myself on Mitch’s driveway. The light was so low I could barely read the map. If I went looking for the next guy, Paul Wilkins, I’d be out well after dark. That didn’t seem like a good choice, so I decided to head back.
I was stuffing the map into my pocket when I noticed a man approaching from the house next door. He was broad-shouldered and muscled, dressed in a red polo and jeans. It was dark enough that I couldn’t see his features clearly. Other than his size there was nothing special about him, nothing noteworthy to describe.
“Hey, there,” said the man. “You know Mitch?”
“I came here looking for him. You know where he is?”
“Not sure. He works in McKinney. Maybe he never made it back.”
I had no idea where McKinney was, nor did I care. The whistle in my brain rose again, screeching, shrieking.
“You need him for something? You come here on foot, you must really have wanted to talk to him.”
This man meant nothing to me. His presence here was pointless. He was fat waiting to be trimmed.
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“What doesn’t matter? Mitch got something you need?”
When I reached for my gun, the world turned black and I nearly lost my balance. For a moment I thought someone had hit me. But I quickly recovered and pointed my weapon at the man’s head.
“Hey,” he said in a terrible voice. “Hey, buddy. I didn’t mean nothing. I was just looking out for Mitch.”
Like I said, it was dark and difficult to see features on the man’s face. Without a face he hardly registered as a man at all. My gun was pointed at the shape of a head and I wondered if I would feel remorse. If I would feel anything at all.
But I had been chosen for this and there was no turning back.
I flipped off the safety. The man’s knees buckled.
“Please, buddy. Please. I don’t want to die. Please don’t shoot me.”
I stared at this crouching figure, this miserable beggar. For such a big man he was awfully chicken-hearted. I stepped closer, pointing downward at his head. My finger wrapped around the trigger. The whistling in my ears faded until I could barely hear it at all.
“Please, man. Please don’t kill me.”
The sound of the gunshot was enormous. Unreal. It seemed to echo around me in a spreading wave. Blood and bone and brain matter splashed into the grass. The body buckled and reached as if trying to find its missing head. I watched, transfixed, as these animal arms and legs began to comprehend a new reality and slowly lost their will. What did it feel like when consciousness was replaced by nothing? Did it feel like a warmth or glow, a kind of full-body euphoria? Did the terrible sound finally end?
I was still standing there, considering the body, when a screen door opened. A figure staggered out of the same house, what appeared to be another man. This fellow was shorter and slimmer than the meathead I had executed. Instinctively I backed away from the body, and when this new man saw why, he fell to the ground and began to make an awful sound. It was something between a wail and a scream and I couldn’t bear to hear it.
“Why did you do that?” said the fellow, his dark face looking up at me. “Why did you kill my Tanner?”
Then the man rose to his feet.
“I loved him! He was only trying to protect me! Why did you hurt him?”
My head felt expansive again, like when I ate mushrooms with Keri. My mind whistled and shrieked. The gun felt heavy, like gravity was trying to take it from me.
“Why?” the man cried again and took a step forward.
With great effort of will I raised the gun and pointed it at the approaching figure. It stopped walking and put up its hands in a protective stance.
“Don’t do it! Please! He was only trying to protect me.”
I couldn’t stand there forever. Eventually someone would come looking to see what had happened.
“What’s your name?” I asked, but somehow I already knew.
“Mitch!” it cried. “Of course my name is Mitch! What do you want from us?”
“Mitch Brown?”
“Yes! How do you know me?”
You might think, after the day’s events, that I’m a bad guy. But I don’t believe in bad guys. Instead, I think good guys are sometimes forced into tough choices.
What would you have done, right then, if you were me? Maybe it wasn’t Mitch’s fault that I killed his friend, but how could I take him to see Jimmy after what I’d done? What I’m asking you is, if you were in the same situation, would you have let Mitch live? Or would you have corrected the problem so it couldn’t come back later and ruin your life?
The guy would have starved to death in a few weeks anyway. That was the entire point of the EMP. So what I really did was save him a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Honestly, I think I did Mitch a favor.
SEVENTEEN
By the time I headed north again, the new star had fallen below the horizon, but still the sky glowed faintly orange. I took this to mean the fires were closer, no doubt propelled by the strong south wind.
Over the tops of houses and trees I heard a rising swell of sound that had to be people. A mob of them marching somewhere. Maybe looting. The mob was too far away to resolve individual voices, but I didn’t need to hear words to sense the collective anger and fear. It was the second evening since the EMP, after all, and still there was no sign of the government. No news at all. Nothing.
Gunshots erupted, a few quick pops at first. Then an enormous staccato roar that sounded like automatic weapons fire, followed by a crash of metal and glass. I reached for the reassuring shape of my own weapon, caressing it with my fingertips the same delicate way I like to touch myself.