The End Has Come

Jingo found the small spray bottle, uncapped it and began spritzing his pants and shirtsleeves. The stuff had been fermenting for days now and even through his own body odor and the pervasive stench of rot that filled every hour of every day, the stink was impressive. Moose’s eyes watered.

“We’re alive, for a start,” Jingo said, handing the bottle to Moose.

The big man shook his head. “Not enough. Give me a better reason than us still sucking air.”

“A better reason than being alive? How much better a reason do we need?”

Moose waggled the little bottle. “We’re spraying cow piss on our clothes because it keeps dead people from biting us. I don’t know, Jingo, maybe I’m being a snob here, but I’m not sure this qualifies as quality of life. If I’m wrong, then go ahead and lay it out for me.”

They stood up and looked down the hill to the fence. It stretched for miles upon miles, cutting this part of Virginia in half. Their settlement was built hard against the muddy banks of Leesville Lake, with a dozen other survivor camps strung out along the Roanoke River. On their side of the fence were hundreds of men and women, all of them thinner than they should be, filthy, wrapped in leather and rags and pieces of armor that were either scavenged from sporting goods stores or homemade. Dozens of tractors, earthmovers, frontend loaders and bulldozers dotted the landscape, but most of them were near the end of their usefulness. Replacement parts were hard to find. Going into the big towns to shop was totally out of the question. Flatbeds sat in rows, each laden with bundles of metal poles and spools of chain link fencing.

On the other side of the fence, stretching backward like a fetid tide, were the dead. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every race, every age, every type. A melting pot of the American population united now only in their lack of humanity and their shared, ravenous, unassuageable hunger. Here and there, stacked within easy walk of the fence, were the mounds of bodies. Fifty-eight mounds that Moose and Jingo could count from the hill on which they’d sat to eat lunch. Hill seventeen was theirs. Six hundred and fifteen bodies contributed to the composition of that hill. Parts of that many people. Though, to be accurate, there were not that many whole people even if all the parts were reassembled. Many of them had already been missing limbs before Jingo and Moose went to work on them. And before the cutters did their part. Blowflies swarmed in their millions above the field and far above the vultures circled and circled.

Moose shook his head. “If I’m missing anything at all, then please tell me, ‘cause I’m happy to be wrong.”

-2-

As they began prepping for the afternoon shift, Jingo tried to make his case. Moose actually wanted to hear it. Jingo was always trying to paint pretty colors on shit, but lately he’d become a borderline evangelist for this new viewpoint.

“Okay, okay,” Jingo said as he wrapped the strips of carpet around his forearms and anchored them with Velcro, “so life in the moment is less than ideal.”

“‘Less than ideal’,” echoed Moose, smiling at the phrase. “Christ, kid, no wonder you get laid so often. You could charm a nun out of her granny panties. If there were any nuns left.”

Quick off the mark, Jingo said, “What’s the only flesh a zombie priest will eat?”

“Nun. Yeah, yeah. It’s an old joke, man, and it’s sick.”

“Sick funny, though.”

Moose shook his head and began winding the carpet extensions over the gap between his heavy gloves and leather jacket. It was nearly impossible to bite through carpet, and certainly not quickly. Everyone wore scraps of it over their leather and limb pads.

“Okay, okay,” conceded Jingo. “So that’s an old joke. What was I saying?”

“You were talking about how life sucks in the moment, which I’ll agree about.”

“No, that was me getting to my point. Life sucks right now because we’re all in a transitional point.”

“‘Transitional’?”

“Sure, we’re in the process of an important change that will shift the paradigm —”

Moose narrowed his eyes. “Where’s this bullshit coming from?”

Jingo grinned without shame. “Books, man. You’re always on me to read, so I’ve been reading.”

“I gave you a couple of Faulkner novels and that John Sandford mystery.”

“Sure, and I finished them. They were okay, but they didn’t exactly speak to me, man. What’s Faulkner got to say about living through a global pandemic? Nah, man, I needed something relevant.”

“Uh huh. So . . . who’ve you been reading?

The little man’s grin got brighter. “Empowerment stuff. Dr. Phil, Esther Hicks, Don Miguel Ruiz, but mostly Tony Robbins. He’s the shit, man. He’s the total shit. He had it all wired right, and he knew what was fucking what.”

“Tony Robbins?”

“You know, that motivational —”