an owl hooted and a sudden rustling of wings was heard. A second later, a rabbit’s cry broke the silence and was abruptly cut off. It sounded a lot like a woman screaming.
'You ever think about buying it, Cleese?' Monk said with a yawn. 'You know, about dying?'
'I try not to dwell on it, Pal,' Cleese laughed as he spoke. Absentmindedly, he swirled the remaining liquor in the bottle in his hand. A small whirlpool was created in deep brown liquid which dissipated when he stopped. A lone bubble rose to the top and then burst.
'No, really. Quit bullshitting around and answer the fucking question.'
'No, I find it hard enough to keep my mind focused on just what’s in front of my nose. I leave the afterlife to the greater minds.'
'I do. Well, I have been… lately.'
Cleese eyed him and raised an eyebrow.
'Oh?'
'Thinking about it, I mean. I sometimes wonder what lies beyond all of this. I used to think it was shit like Heaven or Hell, but now, what with The Dead getting up and walking around and eatin’ motherfuckers… It all just kinda puts a weird spin on the ball.'
'What d’ya mean?'
'Well, before all of this shit went down, someone just died and, if you were a religious man, you accepted the fact that he went before Saint Peter at his Pearly Gates. You were judged and spent the rest of eternity either palling around with God or having hot pokers shoved up your ass by Old Scratch. It was just what we were told back when we were all in Sunday School and our heads were still soft. Only now… we’ve found out that dead isn’t always dead and sometimes God makes other plans.'
'Do you believe in that—God, Heaven, the shit those guys in the polyester suits tell you every Sunday on television?'
'Hell, I don’t know… I will say this though… Over the years, there have been times when I did believe, believed with all of my heart. But then… then this shit happened. And there are times now when I look into the eyes of one of these dead fuckers and I wonder…'
'About?'
'About what they are. What they see. What they feel. If they think.'
Cleese nodded, but remained silent.
'Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be one of them, how terrible it must be. To lose everything you are and only be left with that hunger, that fucking need. I wonder how I’d feel. I… I can’t imagine it. I won’t let myself. All I know is that I wouldn’t want to ever become something like… that.' He looked at Cleese and then looked away. 'And then I think that if there is a God that he must be a real son of a bitch to let this all happen. How much must He hate us? How much must we have let Him down?'
'Well, lookit you… The Deep Thinker.'
'Fuck you! I’m being serious.'
'Look,' Cleese said, 'I don’t know shit about religion or Saint Peter or any of that stuff. I mean, I’ve seen a couple of Cecil B. DeMille films, but I ain’t no scholar. I just always thought that anytime someone says that he knows what God or whoever is thinking, then odds are that man is full of shit. Personally, I think it all falls together like this: Truth or God or The Big Stuffed Panda whoever or whatever it is that you think is running this dog and pony show has a lesson that he wants us all to learn before we die. He’s taken all that you need to learn that lesson and broken it apart, like a jigsaw puzzle, and spread them out across different schools of thought. Science has a piece. Religion has a few. Fable, literature, philosophy… They all got a bit. Sometimes, a piece can be found in a holy place or even in a dirty joke. We may be stumbling on one of them right now with this conversation.'
Monk nodded while Cleese took a second and re-wet his palate.
'Hell, you never know where you’re going find one of them puzzle pieces.'
'I think I found one up a whore’s cooter once,' Monk said with a wry grin.
'Yeah, and how is your mom?'
Monk thrust his middle finger into the air.
'Anyway, our job, the way I see it, is to listen carefully to what everyone has to say—The Jews, The Hindis, The Christians, The Muslims, the scientists, the philosophers, the writers—and find those pieces that help us define our puzzle. When we think we’ve found them all, or as many as we can, then it’s our job to put them all together and try to figure out what exactly we’re supposed to know. I’ll tell you one thing… It’s not going to church every Sunday and sitting quietly with our mouths open—like baby birds—waiting for someone else to regurgitate up the answer to all of our prayers. In the end, you die and you move on… to whatever. Hell, who knows? Maybe, you get judged as to whether or not you squandered this life, this gift that was given to you.'
Monk sat quietly and stared off into space.
'I don’t know,' Cleese sighed. 'This whole zombie thing… I kind of agree with Chikara and her Budo Warriors. It’s a test—a challenge, a wrinkle in the fabric, a monkey in the works—that we all gotta rise up to confront and to defeat or be crushed under its wheels. I believe that it’s only through challenge and hardship that we can forge our souls into something more than what we are now. Adversity does indeed temper the spirit.'
'Wow…' Monk said quietly, 'now look who’s the Deep Fuckin’ Thinker.'
'Well, you asked,' Cleese said with a resigned shrug.
'No… no. I’m impressed. Who knew that kinda thinkin’ was goin’ on in that lump of shit housed in your skull?'
'Yeah, well again, fuck you.' Cleese paused for a moment and then looked up. He raised the bottle in a silent toast and took another drink. 'How about you? How’d you end up in this little corner of Paradise?’
'Me?' Monk smiled in the dark. 'Well, I’ll tell ya… After being a Merchant Marine for more than my share of years, I ended up working as a longshoreman on some docks in Anacortes, Washington. I was offloading cargo and doing some repair on ships that sailed down the Strait of Juan de Fuca from the Pacific Ocean. It was grunt work mostly, but like you, I’d sorta run out of options and decided to spend some time up in the Pacific Northwest; getting rained on mostly.'
Again, he looked off into the distance and breathed in deeply.
'Anyway, I was working on the docks during days and picking up overnight watchman shifts for BP at their Cherry Point Refinery every now and then. So, one night, I’m at the refinery and an alarm goes off. Work shuts down immediately so they can investigate. Long story short, it turns out that all hell’s broken loose back in the world and that hell had come calling at the front gate. Soon, it was every man for himself.'
'There was a lot of that going on…' Cleese said quietly to the wind.
'Yeah, no shit. Anyway, I say ‘Fuck it!’ and hop in my ride and hightail it the fuck outta there. I head back to where I was staying and did my best, trying to lock it all up tight. I did ok considering I ain’t much of a carpenter. Later that night, I’m laying in the dark and hearing almost continuous gunshots and screaming. Now, I’m no dummy—despite what you’ve heard to the contrary from the idiots here—and I knew, from what I’d seen for myself firsthand and from what was coming through on the television, that every one of those gunshots and every one of those screams had a story behind them. And none of those stories was having a happy fuckin’ ending.'
'Yeah, no shit.'
'So, I did what a lot of people should have done and that was grab what I could in the way of supplies and head for the goddamn hills. That part of the country, it’s pretty easy to do that.'
Cleese nodded and rubbed at his eyes. Monk had, up until now, been pretty tight-lipped regarding his past. He was not going to ruin this opportunity to learn a little something about him by interrupting him now that he was on a roll.
'I manage to find this empty cabin up near the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The place was this nice 'A' frame timeshare or some shit; loaded to the gills with food, water, and was as remote as hell. I didn’t encounter too much in the way of UDs up there, but believe it or not, I had my share. I ended up staying there until I finally ran out of food.'
Monk paused and seemed lost in the memory.
'Y’know… I could have lived like that forever. Isolated. Nobody to give me shit. Hell, man, it was as near to fuckin’ bliss as I’ve ever experienced.'
Cleese smiled again, knowing the place where that feeling from came all too well.
'Anyway, I finally come back down to civilization and the worst of it is pretty much over. The Army is mopping
