dogs that will use every ounce of instinct, subterfuge, and animal cunning to get the flesh they need to fill their empty bellies. They have an excuse for their savagery. We, however, did not. We were normal, uninfected, rational human beings and yet we were willing to play that perverse game, to sacrifice our own, anything to get a few more weeks of life.
The lottery was the greatest evil I had ever known.
Five sacrifices had been chosen.
One more.
Sighing, I unfolded my paper and as I did so some fatalistic urge within me hoped there would be an X on it so this nightmare would end and I wouldn’t have to live with myself, with the guilt that would come unfettered and sharp-toothed when I knew I had lived at the expense of others. Because it would come for me. There was no doubt of that. Like an unquiet ghost it would visit me in the dead of night, wrap its icy hands around my throat and throttle me awake, sweating and shaking, and there in the darkness I would have to face myself: all the evils I had done coming home to brood in my soul there in the midnight hour.
My slip of paper was blank.
I didn’t jump for joy. I felt…neutral, not happy and not sad, just… nothing. I felt like an empty can, to tell you the truth. A vessel, I guess, that every drop had been poured from. There was nothing left in me.
At that moment, as I tried to get a grip on what I was feeling, Murph rose up from his seat like he had suddenly been inflated. He did not stand up, he rose like a column of hot air. We all turned and looked at him and we all knew, of course. “I got picked,” he said in a flat voice. “You hear me, you assholes? I got picked. Me.”
He fumbled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tearing at the cellophane with clawing, fumbling, apelike fingers. He dropped two cigarettes, then a third, got the fourth between his lips and lit it. His face was oval like a moon, speckled in sweat, his eyes darting wildly in their sockets. He started laughing and he couldn’t seem to stop. Smoke drifted from his mouth and nostrils in a halo that enveloped his perspiring, bright red face and made him look like a cartoon devil.
“ AHH-HA-HA-HA,” he went at the top of his voice. “AH-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAH!”
“ Murph,” Doc said, coming over to him, wanting to smother him in empathy and goodwill, give him the speech about sacrificing for the good of all. He even reached out his arms right before Murph-not laughing now, his face hooked in a snarl of animal hate-bunched his fist into a ball and gave old Doc a shot right in the belly that folded him up to the floor.
Doc’s goons, Sonny and Earl and Conroy and that monkey-grinning slab of shit Ape, charged in and beat Murph to the ground and he took it. He did not even try to fend off the blows that came for him. He accepted them like they were his inheritance. He lay there on the floor, sobbing and trembling, curled up in the fetal position. The goons had to drag him out the door and by then nobody was saying a goddamn thing. You should have seen the self-satisfied, greedy fuck-you-I got-mine looks in their eyes like fat-bellied rats that had found another crumb to gnaw on that would keep them safe one more day.
This is what it had come to.
The germ had taken the good people and many of them were wandering around outside the shelter looking for food. What remained behind were the people in that room-writhing human worms squirming in the smelly dungball of the world.
They made me sick.
And the sad part was, I was one of them.
6
Doc’s sacrifices-his selections of juicy pink meat for the Wormboys-were set to be marched out the next night. They were separated from the general population… put in isolation, as Doc called it. Why? I don’t know. Did they pose a threat to us? Did we pose a threat to them? Or was Doc just afraid that if we had to look on them and see what was in their eyes, that depthless pain and desperation, that we might start acting like human beings again? That we might feel some intrusive, obstructive things like pity and remorse and remember that culture, true culture, was built upon morality, ethics, and compassion?
In order for civilization to function, you see, people must act civilized.
Doc was nothing if not a student of human psychology by that point. He was probably worried that the whole cloth of his little disenfranchised community might start to unravel thread by thread once we stopped worrying about our own skins and realized exactly what we were doing to those poor people.
I had it out with him as he knew I would, being the bleeding heart goody two-shoes that I am. Basically, I argued that if we were condemning those people to a horrible death, the least we could do is let them be human beings with all that entails for the last day or so of their lives.
“Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” he said, as if he were addressing a particularly stupid child. “Do you have any idea the trouble that would cause?”
“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
He smiled thinly at that: paternal, patient, a just and loving god. “Tommy, these people need to face this together. I feel as you do for them, but misguided pity at this point will only make it harder on them and us. Nobody forced them to play the lottery. They did it of their own free will.”
“They did it out of fear,” I said. “Fear that you’d throw them out to the living dead if they didn’t.”
“We have to have rules or we have no society.”
“This isn’t a society,” I said, “it’s a fucking zoo.”
Doc just smiled patiently at me. “No, it’s a community, Tommy. We survive by working towards a common goal and thinking as one. When we lose that, it’s all over. Now…this isn’t a prison or a cult. If you’re unhappy, feel free to leave. We’ll give you a rifle, food, you can even take one of the vehicles out there.” Then he leaned in close so I could see that beyond the fatherly warmth in his eyes there was something fierce and steel-gray as a gathering storm. “But if you walk out of here, Tommy, don’t ever think you can come back. You won’t be welcome.”
I just sat there, filled with too many emotions.
“Well?”
I stayed.
7
It was about eight that night when I heard a high trebly scream cut through the compound. I was in bed with Maria and I jumped up and nearly threw her to the floor. All I could hear was that pitiful cry and then I was pulling on my pants and shirt and boots and stumbling down the corridor, my heart pounding in my throat.
I heard the scream again and then I saw Earl stumbling in my direction, near the main entrance, and Ape was backing away from him like he had the plague.
Earl let loose with another shriek of pitiful wailing and I saw he was clasping his stomach and that his hands were red and glistening. “Help me…I’m cut… oh god…I’m fucking cut…”
He went down to his knees, moaning and sobbing, the entire front of his shirt like a blossom of blood. By then, dozens of feet were running in our direction, people shouting out to know what was happening, if the Wormboys had breeched the shelter.
It was about then that Murph came vaulting towards us, loping out of the shadows like a big monkey. His face was huge and shiny like a new moon, his teeth gleaming ice. He had a knife in his hand and there was blood right up to his elbow.
Ape watched him run by.
He had a shotgun in his hands, but he’d apparently forgotten how to use it as Murph threw the locks on the door and pulled it open, frantic and enraged and filled with the need to flee like an animal fresh from a cage. “FREEDOM!” he cried into the darkness out there. “FREEDOM! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA! FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST!”
