Rot & Ruin

that he would take this job no matter what it was.

“Do you know why we only use hand-cranked generators in town, boys?” the man asked. His name was Mr. Merkle.

“Sure,” said Chong. “The army dropped nukes on the zoms, and the EMPs blew out all of the electronics.”

“Plus Mr. Santorini’s always sauced,” said Benny. He was about to add something biting about the bizarre religious intolerance to electricity when Mr. Merkle’s face creased into a weird smile. Benny shut his mouth.

Mr. Merkle smiled at them for a long time. A full minute. Then the man shook his head. “No, that’s not quite right, boys,” Merkle said. “It’s because hand-cranked machines are simple, and those other machines are ostentatious.” He pronounced each syllable as if it was a separate word.

Benny and Chong glanced at each other.

“You see, boys,” said Mr. Merkle, “God loves simplicity. It’s the devil who loves ostentation. It’s the devil who loves arrogance and grandiosity.”

Uh-oh, Benny thought.

“Mr. Santorini spent the first part of his life installing electrical appliances into people’s homes,” said Mr. Merkle. “That was the devil’s work, and now he’s sought the oblivion of demon rum to try and hide from the fact that he’s facing a long time in hell for helping to incur the wrath of the Almighty. If it wasn’t for Godless men like him, the Almighty would not have opened the gates of hell and sent the legions of the damned to overthrow the vain kingdoms of mankind.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Benny could see Chong’s fingers turning bone white as he gripped the arms of his chair.

“I can see a little doubt in your eyes, boys, and that’s fair enough,” said Merkle, his mouth twisted into a smile that was so tight, it looked painful. “But there are a lot of people who have embraced the righteous path. There are more of us who believe than don’t.” He sniffed. “Even if all of them don’t yet have the courage of their faith to say so.”

He leaned forward, and Benny could almost feel the heat from the man’s intense stare.

“The school, the hospital-even the town hall-run on electricity from hand-cranked generators, and as long as right-minded people draw breath under God’s own heaven, there won’t be any ostentatious machinery in our town.”

There was a whole pitcher of iced tea on the table, as well as quite a pile of cookies, and Benny realized that Mr. Merkle probably had a lot to say on the subject and wanted his audience comfortable for the whole ride. Benny endured it for as long as he could and then asked if he could use the bathroom. Mr. Merkle, who had now shifted from simple electricity to the soul-crushing blasphemy that was hydroelectric power, was only mildly thrown off his game, and told Benny where to go inside the house. Benny went inside and all the way through and out the back door. He waved to Chong as he vaulted the wooden fence.

Two hours later Chong caught up with him outside of Lafferty’s, the local general store. He gave Benny a long and evil look.

“You’re such a good friend, Benny, I’ll really miss you when you’re dead.”

“Dude, I gave you an out. When I didn’t come back, didn’t he go looking for me?”

“No. He saw you go over the fence, but he kept smiling that smile of his and said, ‘Your little friend is going to burn in hell, do you know that? But you wouldn’t spit in God’s eye like that, would you?’”

“And you stayed?”

“What could I do? I was afraid he’d point at me and say ‘Him!,’ and then lightning bolts would hit me or something.”

“Scratch that job off the list?”

“You think?”

Spotter was the next job, and that proved to be a good choice, but only for one of them. Benny’s eyesight was too poor to spot zoms at the right distance. Chong was like an eagle, and they offered him a job as soon as he finished reading the smallest numbers off a chart. Benny couldn’t even tell they were numbers.

Chong took the job, and Benny walked away alone, throwing dispirited looks back at his friend sitting next to his trainer in a high tower.

Later, Chong told Benny that he loved the job. He sat there all day, staring out over the valleys, into the Rot and Ruin that stretched from California, all the way to the Atlantic. Chong said that he could see twenty miles on a clear day, especially if there were no winds coming his way from the quarry. Just him up there, alone with his thoughts. Benny missed his friend, but privately he thought that the job sounded more boring than words could express.

***

Benny liked the sound of bottler, because he figured it for a factory job of filling soda bottles. Benny loved soda, but it was sometimes hard to come by. Some pop was old stuff brought in by traders, but that was too expensive. A bottle of Dr Pepper cost ten ration dollars. The local stuff came in all sorts of recycled bottles-from jelly jars to bottles that had actually once been filled with Coke or Mountain Dew. Benny could see himself manning the hand- cranked generator that ran the conveyor belt or tapping corks into the bottlenecks with a rubber mallet. He was positive they would let him drink all the soda he wanted. But as he walked up the road, he met an older teenager- his pal Morgie Mitchell’s cousin Bert-who worked at the plant. When Benny fell into step with Bert, he almost gagged. Bert smelled awful, like something found dead behind the baseboards. Worse. He smelled like a zom.

Bert caught his look and shrugged. “Well… what do you expect me to smell like? I bottle this stuff eight hours a day.”

“What stuff?”

“Cadaverine. What, you think I work making soda pop? I wish! Nah, I work a press to get the oils from the rotting meat.”

Benny’s heart sank. Cadaverine was a nasty-smelling molecule produced by protein hydrolysis during putrefaction of animal tissue. Benny remembered that from science class, but he didn’t know that it was made from actual rotting flesh. Hunters and trackers dabbed it on their clothes to keep the zoms from coming after them, because the dead were not attracted to rotting flesh.

Benny asked Bert what kind of flesh was used to produce the product, but Bert hemmed and hawed and finally changed the subject. Just as Bert was reaching for the door to the plant, Benny spun around and walked back to town.

There was one job Benny already knew about: erosion artist. He’d seen erosion portraits tacked on every wall of the town’s fence outposts and on the walls of the buildings that lined the Red Zone, the stretch of open land that separated the town from the fence.

This job had some promise, because Benny was a pretty fair artist. People wanted to know what their relatives might look like if they were zoms, so erosion artists took family photos and zombified them. Benny had seen dozens of these portraits in Tom’s office. A couple of times he wondered if he should take the picture of his parents to an artist and have them redrawn. He’d never actually done it, though. Thinking about his parents as zoms made him sick and angry.

But Sacchetto, the supervising artist, told him to try a picture of a relative first. He said it provided better insight into what the clients would be feeling. So, as part of his audition, Benny took the picture of his folks out of his wallet and tried it.

Sacchetto frowned and shook his head. “You’re making them look too mean and scary.”

He tried it again with several photos of strangers the artist had on file.

“Still mean and scary,” said Sacchetto with pursed lips and a disapproving shake of his head.

“They are mean and scary,” Benny insisted.

“Not to customers they’re not,” said Sacchetto.

Benny almost argued with him about it, saying that if he could accept that his own folks were flesh-eating zombies-and that there was nothing warm and fuzzy about it-then why can’t everyone else get it through their heads?

“How old were you when your parents passed?” Sacchetto asked.