The word heaven zombies makes me turn my head to the crowd of insane ones. I ask myself, “Are they the same as angels are?”
Jesus says, “There is one thing that I do hate. I hate it with passion. I loath it…”
He hates perfection.
“What are you going to do?” I ask Jesus, ready to leave. “Are you going to go through the walm like Satan did.”
“Never.”
“Why? You’ll lose your soul if you stay.”
“I have already lost my soul, so it is no use going.”
“What? You seem perfectly fine.”
“That’s because I am Jesus. Jesus is supposed to be filled with love. It is just routine for me to act this way, emotion has nothing to do with it. And also because of routine, I will never leave my people. I am their last protector. Even if I still had soul, and still cared about things, I probably would’ve stayed.”
But then it would’ve been out of love, not routine.
Jesus says, “I need you to do something for me, Leaf.”
I nod.
“I need you to survive.”
I nod again.
“I have been writing a BIG history book.” Jesus pulls out an old-skinned pack. Patting it — a hard drumming. “This is the book of Man, all the events since man’s birth are in it. And it has been handed down and down and down, until it reached me. Man will never die if he is kept in memory. Memory saves people from oblivion. So I need you to get through the walm with this history book, and save it. Then you need to continue writing in it. Write about you and your friends, the society that you start within whichever world you end up in. Breed and build your numbers, see if you can create a human civilization again. Before you die, hand it over to the next generation. And hand it down and down and down. Until there is only one human being left alive.”
“What about the humans we leave here? What is going to happen to them?”
“They have no emotions,” Jesus says. “They are not human beings anymore.”
He places the history book in my lap. Then a hand on my shoulder. “And the very last human alive must bury this history book on a high peak, and the words written on the tombstone must say this.” He draws the words in the dirt:
Scene 21
Flying Fish
I climb the hill to the ruins of Satan Burger and see a flock of flying fish scavenging for scraps of food. The fish aren’t the winged, footed fish-birds that I once saw in the midget president territory. These are normal-looking fish that seem to have confused the air with the water, swimming through the oxygen with their flappers, and getting rained on quite a bit. Maybe the fish confused the air with water because they are insane.
I walk up, up, watching the fish dive down to the Satan Burger rubble to piles of burger-wastes, dead customers, bloody demon corpses. I see Mortician up there. He’s climbing on top of the rubble. He’s probably looking for water, or maybe for his pirate hat, but I don’t say anything to him.
At the flat edge, Christian is relax-sitting on a piece of sign. Smoking a cigarette with comfortable breaths — a pile of cigarette boxes near him taken from the broken cigarette-dispenser demon. I go to him.
The only thing I can hear is the train-roaring wind and Nan’s cries coming through it. I see her once I get to Christian. She’s on top of Gin’s body, wrapped around him, punching him for not working right.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Christian.
“Not much,” he says, shrugging. “Not much.”
“What happened to Gin?”
He looks over at the corpse on the ground. “He’s gone.”
Finishing his cigarette, Christian stands up and looks at Nan. “While Nan was unconscious, after the earthquake took down Satan Burger and knocked her asleep. Gin ate a Satan Burger, right there. He put his nostrils inside of Nan’s mouth while he ate it, and his soul wandered out through his nose holes, just like Satan said, and it was absorbed inside of her. He was gone before Nan woke up. Gone to… oblivion.”
I watch Nan pushing at him, screaming, swirling. Gin’s body parts are still moving, still alive. Breakfast runs around Gin’s face. It smacks him, but the face is soulless tissue.”
“Satan was wrong,” I say. “There are people that will give up their immortal soul and go to oblivion to save another person’s life, even if that person doesn’t love him.”
She loves him now.
“What’re we going to do?” Mortician asks. He jumps down from the rubble toward Christian. “Satan’s gone and he was the only one who could help us.”
“We’re basically fucked,” Christian says, lighting another cigarette, this one a menthol.
“What do you think, Nan?” Mortician yell-asks her. “What do you wanna do?”
It takes her many cries, getting them all out. A gash bleeds down her forehead.
Mort asks her again.
More talking between Mort and Christian. Then she interrupts with her answer: “I want to die ! All what I want to do is die. That’s the only thing I was guaranteed in life, how come I can’t anymore? If only there was an afterlife, any sort of small afterlife, I wish Gin and I could go there. I wish we died last week, when death was working right.” But they pay no attention.
“Give up, Mortician,” Christian says. “You know we’re fucked.”
Mort says, “I know we’re fucked, but our souls are running out. We might as well do something before we’re boring zombies like everyone else. Let’s do something fun.”
“We aren’t fucked yet,” I finally tell them, wondering if they would’ve thought about it themselves. “If we go through the walm, we can find another world. One where we won’t lose our souls.”
“Dumb ass,” Christian says. “Whichever world we end up in will still have a walm in it, and it will still eat our souls. You can’t get to a walmless world by going through the walm.”
“But then we’d be new people,” I argue. “New people don’t lose their souls to the walm here, so I’m positive we’d be fine.”
Christian shakes his head in an I don’t know fashion.
“Let’s do it,” Mort says. “Even if we lose our souls, at least it is something we can do.”
“But how are we going to find the walm?” Christian asks. “We’ve never been there. It’ll take us forever to find it in this city, especially with all these crazy people around.”
“I think there is someone who knows where it is,” I say.
“Yeah? Who’s that?” asks Christian.
“Stag and Lenny.”
“They’re gone,” Christian says. “The Silence took them. Nobody comes back from the Silence.”
I shake-spin my head. “I’m willing to go. I’ve been inside of it twice already. I’ve been inside of its stomach bag, and I have returned. For some reason it will not digest me. I’m probably too disgusting. One of them still has to be alive somewhere inside of it. I’ll find the Silence and get them out.”
“I’ll come too,” Mortician says. “It sounds like fun.”