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Things aren’t much better in the morning. No one says anything outwardly hostile, or even rude, to me; in fact, they don’t say anything at all. They’re nice to Katy though, and she’s probably the only reason they tolerate me.
After breakfast, it’s time for “morning duty.” Gale takes Katy under her wing, and I go outside with Chap to walk the fence.
“We look for damage,” he explains, not meeting my eye for obvious reasons. “Also, keep an eye out for signs of erosion where the ground meets the fence.”
“I suppose we need to fix what I did last night.” I mumble.
“We’ll take a look at it, but Kevin says he thinks he got it pretty well secured.”
I’m surprised to hear Kevin’s name spoken in the present tense, like he’s still alive. If he was bitten last night, he should be a goner by now.
“How is he?” I’m going to feel stupid if the answer is ‘dead,’ but I can’t afford to appear unconcerned.
“We’re not sure. The bite is more like a scrape. There’s a chance, albeit a tiny one, that he wasn’t infected. Most likely, he just got a touch of it.”
“I didn’t know you could only get a little bit of the bug. What does that mean for him?”
“We’ve only seen a few cases like this. It takes a while, days usually, for the bug to set in. It comes on like a cold, then a fever, a few symptoms show, like dark circles under the eyes and pale, waxy skin, and finally the full-blown bug. Once that hits you, it’s over pretty quickly.”
“I didn’t know it could happen that way.” I’m so tired of feeling like an idiot. Yesterday, I thought I pretty well had it all together in this zombie apocalypse world- man, it feels weird to use that phrase- but I didn’t know crap.
“It’s good and bad.” Chap keeps his eyes on the fence, searching for damage or weaknesses, as we walk along. “On the one hand, he knows it’s coming and can say goodbye to friends and make his peace with God. On the other hand, he knows it’s coming. It’s a horrible thing to contemplate.”
It is exactly that, so I refuse to contemplate it. “Do you think he still believes in God after all this has happened?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“Come on, dude. How could any kind of God let this happen? Do you think there weren’t millions, heck billions, of people who prayed to their God of choice for this thing to go away? I’d say he’s batting zero on answered prayers.”
Chap exhales slowly. He doesn’t appear mad at me. Instead, he seems to be thinking about his answer. “I’m not going to try and talk you into believing in God, or any god for that matter. But I do wonder why you think God is a takeout menu.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Too many people treat religion like they’re ordering from a drive-through. Heck, parents get sick of their children asking for things all the time. How would a god feel about billions of children asking for things all day long?”
I shrug.
“They ask for what they want, or what they want for their friends, family, or country without any consideration for what the consequences might be. ‘Give me this, give me that. Do this for my family. Make my country win this war. Send my son into combat and bring him out unscathed.’”
“What’s wrong with that?” I find that I’m actually interested in what he has to say.
“Think about it this way. My kid goes into combat and comes up against your kid. What’s the purpose of armed conflict?”
“To kill people.” That feels insufficient, somehow, so I add, “To destroy a target or take control of something.”
“Right. The bottom line is, killing is part and parcel of any combat situation. So, when someone prays, ‘Please bring my son back from combat safely,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘Dear God, my country wants this hill to help it achieve its worldly aims, so please make sure that, when the killing starts, our sons kill the sons of people in that other country, and not the other way around.’ Does that sound like something God would do?”
“Depends on the god, I suppose.”
“Fair enough.” He flashes a grin, and then turns back to the fence. He spots a place where one of the ties holding the fence to the post has come loose. “Keep a watch out for buggers, will you?” I keep an eye on the encroaching forest while he produces a pair of pliers and tightens it up.
“Okay, so asking for things when you pray isn’t cool. But why wouldn’t God stop the bug? I can’t think of any possible reason it could be considered a good thing.”
Now it’s Chap’s turn to shrug. “Maybe problems on earth aren’t important enough for a supreme being to notice. I just don’t think the reason there’s a god or religions is to fix problems on our planet.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Do you remember that famous John F. Kennedy quote? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’ It’s the same thing. People ask what their god can do for them, or in your case, decide what god ought to do for their world, and when it doesn’t happen, they conclude there’s no god. That’s not what it’s all about for me. Faith gives me a purpose in life.”
That word touches a nerve, and before I know it, I’m spilling everything I’ve been thinking about the futility of our existence, and how life is nothing but an endless cycle of daily survival. When I’m finished, Chap smiles.
“Did you feel this way before the bug?”
“No, I don’t suppose so. Before the bug, there were a million reasons for living; school, college, a job some day. I had my whole life in front of me. And then there were the little things: movies, games...” I realize how incredibly lame I must be sounding to a guy who’s done time, but he just nods.
“I hear you, but let me give you another way to think about it. School, college, whatever, those are ways to get the job you want, right?” I nod. “But isn’t a job just a way of getting food and shelter in order to keep yourself alive? And once you’ve got that job, you go back to it day after day after day.”
“I get your point.” If he thinks he’s making me feel better, he’s wrong. He must be a sorry chaplain if this is how he counsels people.
“Now, let’s consider girls.” We reach the place where I cut the fence. Someone has closed the gap, binding the cut edges together with aluminum ties, but Chap obviously thinks there’s more to be done. He pulls a roll of wire from his pocket and hands it to me while he inspects the fence. “Women are fun, and they add drama to your life, but isn’t the purpose of a relationship to find someone to make babies with, so your kids can go through the same daily grind?”
I contemplate his words, my stomach sinking deeper as the sun rises above the trees. He hands me a pair of wire cutters and indicates that I should be the one to repair the fence. He’s probably got some therapeutic reason for it. Maybe by mending the damage I’ve done, I’m symbolically mending my soul, or some crap like that. All I know is I’ve never been very good at manual labor, and I just want to get through this without cutting my hand and drawing more buggers this way.
“You’re quiet,” he observes as I thread the wire through the fence.
“I’m just thinking how much you suck at making people feel better.” The words are out before I realize what I’m saying. I’ve never been very good at watching my mouth around bigger guys, especially the jerks at school. Chap doesn’t seem to mind, though, and I’m not in the mood to care what anyone thinks anymore, so I keep on. “You just told me that there’s no purpose in living. According to you, there’s nothing more to life than feeding ourselves so we can live another day. What do you tell people who are thinking about suicide? To go ahead blow their brains out because life’s just a waste of time. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“Nope. I just pointed out that, according to your way of thinking, that’s all there is to life.”
“What?” I gape at him. I don’t understand this guy at all.
“You’re thinking about life the wrong way. Everybody wants to stay alive. There’s nothing we can do to change it, so there’s no point even considering it.”
“So what is the purpose of life, mister philosopher?”
“It’s whatever you want it to be. It’s whatever feeds you, man. For me, it’s trying to keep this community together. I don’t know if it makes any difference in the big picture, but it makes me feel good. I was such a lousy human being before I went to jail. I’m ashamed of the way I lived my life, but now, I’m doing little things to pick people up instead of beating them down. It feels good.”
“So, the purpose of life is to make yourself feel good? That’s messed up.”
“What’s wrong with it? If we all find something in life that we care about, something that makes us feel better without stepping on someone else’s toes, isn’t that a pretty good way to live together?”
I seem to have few answers today. This isn’t at all like anything I’ve been told before. It seems like people have always told me to sacrifice for others. You know, get crucified like Jesus, or martyred like Joan of Arc, or Martin Luther King, or Elvis on the toilet.
“It doesn’t matter anyway. There’s nothing left that makes me feel good.” A vision of Katy comes unbidden to my mind. I like her, always have, but I know she can’t be my purpose. Heck, she’ll probably ditch me as soon as she finds someone better. She’s just clinging to me because I was the first person in months she encountered who wasn’t one of the walking dead. She’ll gradually recover from whatever damage she suffered from living in such isolation all that time, warm up to the people here, and then she won’t need me anymore. Oh, she’ll be nice about it, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not in her league.
“So, what did you do to get put in jail, anyway?” I’m not actually interested; I just want to stop thinking about Katy.
Chap grimaces and goes red around the ears. “It was stupid. I was stupid.” He looks up at the sky and sighs. It’s a very odd feeling to watch this big, tough-looking guy struggle to answer a simple question. “You’ve got to understand, I was a jerk. I’m different now.”
“Okay.” I don’t know what else to say, but he seems to want reassurance, and that’s the best I can do.
“I used to think it was fun to mess with people. Weak people. I couldn’t stand them. My dad raised me that way, at least for as long as he stuck around. Anyway, between that and the booze and drugs, I was pretty useless.”
Icy cold creeps up my spine, because Chap is beginning to remind me of a few people I’ve known and loathed in my lifetime.
“When my friends and I were out, I’d give guys a hard time. You know, hit on their girls, make little cracks about the guy.”
“I get the picture.” My voice is as cold as my heart is right now.
“Anyway, this one guy decided to mouth off. He was this little, wormy dude. I don’t know what he was thinking, but what he lacked in size he made up for in lip. Pretty soon he had everybody laughing behind their hands at me. I couldn’t let that happen, so I laid him out. Then I hung him up by his belt from a doorknob. The cops got there pretty quick.” He shrugs. “The guy was hurt pretty bad. I deserved what I got.” He falls silent.
My stomach feels like it’s going to turn inside out. Suddenly I’m a freshman again, hanging from a coat hook in the school hallway. Brad holds my hands while Rich binds my wrists with duct tape. My underwear is climbing up my crack, and I’m fervently praying that the waistband will hurry up and tear so I can put my feet back the floor. (This isn’t my first wedgie.) All around me people point and laugh. Katy appears from around the corner and stops short when she sees me. She starts to say something, but then she covers her mouth. I can’t say for sure, but I think she stifles a giggle. Just as quickly, it’s gone, and she appears uncertain, like she’s trying to make up her mind about something. That’s when Coach Moore comes storming in. She shoves through the crowd, takes each of my tormentors by the collar, and drags them away.
She doesn’t however, stop to help me down. Neither does anyone else, and then the bell rings, and I’m alone, dangling by an elastic band and wondering if I’ll fall before my drawers render me permanently incapable of taking part in the act of human reproduction. Not that I’ll ever get the chance in this school after my humiliation.
My mom obviously buys me only the best whitey-tighties, because I twist and flail, but can’t get loose. Twenty minutes later, when a janitor lifts me up and off the hook, my eyes are filled with tears of rage, and I’m storming out the front door of the school, visions of Columbine in my head and no regard for the fact that there are three more periods remaining in the school day.
“Are you all right?” I’m back in the present, and Chap is staring at me. The concern in his eyes is genuine, and it sets me off.
“You’re an ass!” I fling his wire cutters over the fence, turn my back on him, and storm back toward the jailhouse. I don’t know where I’m going, but I don’t want to look at Chap’s face... or Katy’s.