The Dead

“Practicing atheist, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“And what exactly is the advantage in that?”

“Honesty. I live authentically. I can make myself into whatever I choose, because there’s no one in charge. No one who has any real authority. I mean, someone might beat me over the head, but it’s not as if he has any right to. Up till then, it’s total freedom. Doesn’t that sound pretty good?”

“Sure. Except for the beating part.”

“Well, we all get screwed sooner or later. Before, if it wasn’t the police, it’d be a heart attack or cancer. Now it’s the living dead. So I might as well not take any shit, huh? Willingly, at least.”

“Words to live by.”

“Being snide the best you can do? I expected better. Come on, Max. What’s the advantage in being a Christian?”

“Hope.”

Steve chuckled. “Do you really think you’re going to get out of this? Has anyone gotten out of this? Since the folks that were just raptured off to Heaven, that is?”

Max didn’t answer.

“This is Hell, right?” Steve went on. “And isn’t Hell supposed to be forever? It sure seems to me like your God was designing for eternity. The dead can’t die, the sun’s on its fucking last legs-”

“That doesn’t mean we’re trapped here,” Max answered. “Some people have been taken up, we know that much. If it comes to that, God’s been snatching people away from Legion and his kind for at least two thousand years. I think the world hasn’t been rearranged quite so much as it seems. Maybe the rules haven’t changed, but the game’s just going faster. Parts of this planet were Hell long before the dead came out of their graves. Maybe all of it was. This is just a continuation of our lives after all. A logical extension, deliberately chosen.”

“Deliberately chosen?” Steve laughed. “Don’t tell me I got into this situation on my own steam! If God asked me where I wanted to wind up, do you think I would’ve said, ‘Oh, yes Sir, please send me to Hell’? He never spoke to me. Never showed me the danger I was in. Just wound me up and let me go, then blamed me for doing what came naturally. Which wasn’t so terrible. And what do you bet that just about everyone in this world-without-end- amen-Auschwitz wasn’t any worse?”

“You know what?” Max asked. “There’s only one person whose heart of hearts I really know. That’s me. And I’m a scumbag.”

“So you think everyone else must be just as bad? Is that your opinion as a self-confessed scumbag? Not very charitable. Or logical. I guess we just see ourselves in other people.”

“Well, when you’re a student of history, it’s kind of unavoidable,” Max said. “You crack open those books, and what do they describe? One unending horrorshow. The Cult of Kali. Aztec priests wading in blood. The Crusaders in Byzantium. The Thirty Years’ War. Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General of East Anglia. Drogheda, Dachau, the Collectivization of the Ukraine…”

“So what are you saying? That that’s the rule? That because some people have been rotten, everyone must be rotten?”

“Not everyone,” Max said. “I believe in saints. As for the rest of us… well, that’s a different story. Ever hear of that study, Steve? The one where they made guys think they were giving people electric shocks? One in ten of those guinea pigs, one in ten, ran the needle right off the meter just because the folks in the white coats told them to. Even when they started hearing screams, even when the screams stopped, they kept hitting the button. So what does that tell us? One out of every ten people you’ve met would probably fit right in at Treblinka or Tuol Sleng. You brushed shoulders with potential mass murderers every time you went to the mall.

“But do you have to be a mass murderer before you’re thoroughly rotten? I don’t think so. If Hell were reserved for the Hitlers and Pol Pots, my father wouldn’t be out there now, taking orders from Legion. And Dad was one of the better people in my life.

“I’ve known folks who cheated every employer they ever worked for, gas station mechanics who stuck it to every customer they could, plain ordinary housewives who made such a hateful tortured mess of their children’s lives that maybe a just God might feed them to the flames. I’ve held polite conversations with good ole VFW boys who turned livid at the memory of Japs bayoneting Chinese babies, but who couldn’t see anything wrong with B-29’s raining fire on Jap babies in Tokyo… Most of the people I went to college with frothed at the mouth at the idea of tiger cages. But if you told them about the Commies burying people alive in Hue, or killing Montagnards by feeding their intestines to hogs, they’d insist it wasn’t true until you showed them the proof-then insist the Reds must know what they were doing. Which usually left yours truly feeling like feeding some people’s intestines to hogs might not be such a bad thing after all… Jesus Christ Almighty, the human race deserved to be blown off the map a long time ago.”

Steve applauded softly. “Done?”

“Yeah.”

“So,” Steve mused, “we’re all capital offenders, eh?” He nudged Gary. “Learn anything about yourself from that little tirade?”

“None of it sounded like me,” Gary said. “I’m not a Goddamn Nazi.”

“Hell no,” Max said. “You wouldn’t have the balls to be a true believer. But what do you bet you’d follow your orders like a good jellyfish when the time came?”

“Bullshit!” Gary shot back. “Are you a mind reader now? Can you look right into my soul?”

“No. But I know you, Gary.”

“Max,” Father Chuck said, “that’s enough.”

To his own amazement, Max decided not to take it any further. There was a long, ugly silence.

“Max?” Father Chuck asked at last. “Could you write me out the words?”

“Words?”

“For the sacrament.”

“Sure, Father.” Earlier Max had found a pen and paper in a bolster box above one of the bunks; Father Chuck, holding Linda’s flashlight, illuminated the writing pad as Max wrote out the formula.

“I’ll hear confessions now,” the priest said, taking the top sheet.

“Here?” Dennis said. “Where everyone can listen?”

“I’ll go to the rear of the cabin. You can come back one at a time.”

“Just watch out with that flashlight, Father,” Max said. “We don’t want ‘em spotting it. Stay below the bulkhead and keep the beam low.”

“How long is this going to take?” Steve demanded. “It’s about time someone else took watch.”

“Relax,” Max said. “None of us are very bad, right? It’ll be over before you know it.”

He went back with the priest and whispered his confession. Linda followed, then Dennis. Camille went last, after some prodding from her husband.

When it was all over, Max and Dennis replaced Gary and Steve on watch.

“I see you’re still here with the rest of us,” Gary said.

“How do you explain that, Max?” Steve asked, breaking out his food.

Max said nothing.

“Maybe Father Chuck doesn’t have any power after all,” Gary said.

“Shut up, Gary,” Linda said.

“Maybe there’s just no way out,” Steve said.

“So why make our last hours so much more miserable?” Father Chuck asked wearily.

“Just trying to enlighten you,” Steve said.

“Or drag us down with you?” Linda asked.

“Yeah, maybe,” Steve replied cheerfully. “Though I might point out we’re already in the same hole.”

“Dennis,” came Camille’s voice, plaintive in the darkness, “Why are we still here?”

“I don’t know,” Dennis replied.