The War After Armageddon

Their faces held him. His vision wasn’t too far gone for that. Waiting in the long and nervous line for the last of the water — one plastic two-liter bottle per family — a woman furred with moles hardly looked as if her life had been an endless joy. And yet she held her child in her arms. Some man had found her winning enough for that. The instant her eyes met his, she looked away, down, shuffling a few inches forward, as if to escape his scrutiny, a woman eternally ashamed in the eyes of the world. Behind her, an old, un-shaven man stood open-mouthed, spectacles askew on his wet-tipped nose. His eyes wandered over the world, unable to rest, as if misery might come from any direction. A baggy jacket and stained cloth cap didn’t speak of a life of triumphs. Next came a man still of fighting age, his expression hard and ready to take umbrage. Harris sensed that the man would have been glad to see him dead.

Was that reason enough to kill him in cold blood?

An almost-pretty girl with gleaming hair held her little brother by the shoulder. Still young enough to imagine that all troubles were temporary, she appeared keen for life and full of expectations. Wide as a sofa, another woman pawed the sweat off her forehead, unsettling her black scarf as she quarreled with a bald man who would have run away had he not been her husband. The next segment in the human caterpillar read a book as he bumped forward, riveted by some useless idea, a caricature of the eternal intellectual as he swept unkempt gray hair out of his face. Children scooted up and down the line, too young for patience or to take thirst seriously, ignoring the calls of worried elders afraid to step out of line and lose their place. After shouting at a boy who marched up and down in a goose step, a mother eyed Harris as if he might draw a gun and shoot the child.

Was that really what they expected now? Or just what they were used to?

Harris was unequipped to romanticize them. He wasn’t able to assign them virtues that no random assortment of humans ever possessed. He didn’t need to ponder eternal verities to understand, viscerally, that every innocent heart in the crowd was outnumbered by those given to common selfishness.

They were human. Just that.

“Remind you of anything, Pat?” Harris asked the lieutenant colonel beside him.

“Germany, sir?”

“Yes. The Turks in that dockyard. Oh, the skins are a little browner now. And the weather’s hotter. We could use a little German rain. But I see the same faces… people who woke up utterly screwed. Wondering why all this is happening to them.”

At the head of the line, where the last pallet of water bottles shrank with alarming speed, two soldiers dragged an obstreperous man from the crowd and spread-eagled him against a wall.

“I’ll check that out, sir,” Pat Cavanaugh said.

Harris smiled. “Sorry for the half-assed philosophizing.”

“It wasn’t that, sir,” the younger man said quickly. “It’s just… The troops are a little prickly. Everybody’s fuse is short. I don’t want anything getting out of hand.”

As he watched the battalion commander march off, Harris turned back to the succession of faces. There was, in the end, a quality of disbelief about the crowd. For all their fears, their worried stares at the dwindling supply of water and their caution around the foreign men with guns, the human collective believed that, somehow, everything would work out: There would be enough water and, no matter what became of the others, the breathing, feeling, sweating “I” would be spared. It was the oddest thing, how the tribulations of the group reassured the individual.

It had to be biological, Harris decided. Long before his own experience in Germany — that inexplicable country — when Jews and Gypsies and queers and stubborn priests had waited in line for the gas chamber, tidily divided by gender, they must have felt the same narcotic hope, the identical mad conviction that “I will be saved.”

Harris didn’t know what to do anymore. He had briefly contemplated leaving the city, since he saw that he was only giving Mont-fort and his ilk more ammunition to use against the Army — the wicked general who cared more about protecting Muslim fanatics than about his own countrymen.

Yes, that was how Sim would present it.

But the faces captivated him. Doubtless, there were fanatics among them. Killers who needed to be shot for the common good. Pat Cavanaugh had been nervous about more stay-behind snipers seeded in the crowd. But the faces parading in front of Harris just looked thirsty and scared.

“This can’t happen,” he told himself. “We can’t do this. Sim can’t do this.”

And then he realized that, in his own rejection of what the future held, he had joined the line of optimists at Auschwitz.

Yes, Sim Montfort would do it. Wasn’t a people person, old Sim wasn’t.