Partholon

by D Krauss

  “And pigs might fly,” John said. “So, Theresa, get a little face time with the Almighty. Make this happen. And, while you’re at it, Theresa, how ’bout elbowing a bit of explanation out of Him?”

  John stood quietly and dared her to call him blasphemous. She didn’t, and she wouldn’t, because his questions were legitimate and God always allowed good questions, even if He chose not to answer, even if John was on the outs with Him right now.

  Not for the first time in his life, of course, but he hadn’t been feeling this rebellious in a while, probably since being cashiered unfairly out of the Air Force nine or ten years ago. See, God allowed some self-indulgent president, who wanted to look like he was cutting government waste, to shuffle out all those war-mongering officers running around wasting taxpayers’ money, especially all those prior-enlisted twenty-year guys who were just a tad bit too rightist.

  Presto, instant civilian. John was given six months, just like that, no notice, no warning, and there he was, having to find a job and a place to live in competition with 20,000 or so other unceremoniously dumped officers. After twenty years of good service, to be thrown out like that, just because some boy president wanted to be well thought of at Hollywood parties. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

  That was bad enough, but this? John turned and looked at the crosses down the street. This? “You’ve definitely got some ’splainin’ to do,” he said, not to Theresa, but to her new Boss.

  A loving God? Do tell. Unless that was the error and He’s really a roaring, uncompromising God who visits the most severe repression for even the tiniest of deviations from His millions of rules, the kind of God the Baptists seemed to like. Maybe the Baptists weren’t so kooky. Maybe John skulked in ruins, a hissing and a curse, because they were the Nineveh and Tyre the Falwells and Robertsons had so gleefully warned about.

  But so harsh a God does not deserve love, only fear, and how long could so harsh a God have tolerated the Assyrias or Egypts or Attilas and Hitlers before collectively crushing the entire species, separating chaff from wheat, and burning them forever? The Baptist God would have incinerated men centuries ago, so He can’t be the Avenger. He must, indeed, be the loving God Episcopalians and Unitarians worship. That God would weep over the insanities and mourn the pain and be consoling and would never, ever have allowed this tragedy.

  Yeah, but... there’s the Holocaust, slavery, Vlad the Impaler, the Twin Towers, and now the Event, so, which is it? Loving, roaring, compassionate, vengeful, which God should John address?

  Yeah, yeah, free will. He got that. God is a gentleman and a respecter of boundaries and does not go where not wanted. He allows the full extent of desire and urge, even if it means six million people shoved into ovens. He makes quite a point by doing that. Proof, over and over, of the species’ sin, depravity, evil and hopelessness, and how lost they are without Him.

  Point more than made.

  “How much more evidence do you need, Lord?” John asked the ascending Dipper. “The species was in desperate need of Your Intervention. It was well past the time that Christ should ride out of the sky on His white horse, the clouds of believers accompanying Him, the sword issuing from his mouth and slaying Satan’s legions on the plains of Megiddo, or the Plain of Jars or the Great Plains, for that matter. Just pick a place. Just come. What the hell is the hold up?”

  John stood on the windblown carcass of his dead street, watching the rot slowly claim all evidence, Theresa’s mound sinking ever lower, Collier growing more distant, the moon casting silver shadows of burning crosses and mushroom clouds and killing fields across abandoned lawns and cars and moldering roofs and he just had to say, just had to mention again, that the point seemed made. “While You and Your buddy Lucifer were making legal arguments in some golden throne room, a lot of bystanders were getting killed. How ’bout you both ease up?”

  “Not being irreverent,” he told Theresa. “God is God, there is no Other and He is the Father of all. Period, over and out. No argument there. God exists. Slam-dunk. No thinking person can conclude otherwise. The only possible controversies are the form of God and at what level He involves himself, the Deist-Theist continuum.”

  John watched the moon and stars fight each other for lighting privileges. Look at that. How much more evidence do you atheist assholes need? Pre-adolescents, puerile, creating complex series of half-rationalizations and pretexts to avoid any sense of responsibility. Didn’t want the boundaries of morality or authority or ethics; wanted power and libertinism and lust and guiltlessness, and so intellectualized God’s non-existence. Bunch of babies.

  And so were the Holy Joes. Simpering bunch of hypocrites, Falwell-worshiping, fake smiling, sugar-sweet judgmental jerks; they didn’t know God any more than the athies. Dulcet toned, hypersensitive and easily shocked, willing to attribute the most mundane things to God’s Own Will, so that crossing the street became a special Act.

  “You make me sick,” John said. “You make God sick, too.” Self-righteous pricks all over TV, talking about perdition and the rightful justice of an offended God and implying the athies and sinners brought this all about. No, they didn’t. If anyone caused an offended God to raise His hand in anger, it was you bunch of arrogant wimps.

  “Screw you guys,” John said, pointing an aimless middle finger in some aimless direction. Useless bastards. John needed to find the three or four reasonable believers left in the world, the ones who really knew God. Explain, please, two thousand years or so later, why we await the Messiah.

  “Just give me your best thinking on this, okay?”

  Here he was, sexton to this national ossuary, attending the forgotten bones and kicking the shards off his feet, and he needed to know why.

  It cannot simply be punishment, no more than the night trains into Treblinka were God’s Judgment of His Chosen. There was more to it, having to do with the nature of Evil, the nature of man, the nature of life itself and he could not accept that God, for some simplistic, superficial reason of necessary Justice, made John the solitary pallbearer at thirty or more funerals, eulogies lost in the wind, names already forgotten.

  God is not vindictive.

  He can’t be.

  John stood for a moment and felt the silence from Theresa’s mound. The universe whirled above him.

  He went off to check cables.

  18

  John stood on the edge of the pool, the NVGs down so he could see it. The cover was still on, but he was clumsy by nature and knew his toes would find some way to hook the canvas and send him sprawling. Supposedly, an elephant could walk across the cover without breaking it, but, knowing his luck, John would hit the right angle with the right speed at the weakest point and plunge through. Death by drowning, in his own pool. Embarrassing.

  Snuffy was standing next to him and giving off a pleasure growl every moment or so. No doubt remembering when the pool was actually a pool and he ran around it barking his head off because John was in the middle, tilted back in a floating chair, unconcerned, beer half submerged to keep it cool. Snuffy had a pathological hatred of water and figured John should, too, so what the hell are you doing out there, man? Bark bark bark.

  He reserved even more hatred for the Polaris automatic pool cleaner and howled his rage during its cleaning cycle. John chuckled, remembering how the Polaris periodically surfaced and sprayed the dog in the middle of his stalking. Once, Snuffy actually got his teeth on the cleaner and dragged it out, ready to eviscerate it. John had, fortunately, been nearby and rescued it.

  No longer a problem. John ran the Polaris only once a week, at midnight on Fridays for an hour, standing by while it cleaned. Noisy as hell, that thing, so he stayed outside and kept a wary eye, while Snuffy stayed inside so he wouldn’t go nuts. An hour was enough – since the cover stayed on year round, the Polaris didn’t have that much to do, just pick up some sediment.

  And that might be overkill because John didn’t have to keep the water squeaky clean anymore, just potable. He ran the pump every night
for about eight-ten hours, which wasn’t enough, needed twelve, so he compensated with heavy chlorination. Forget the pH; there’s no way he could keep that balanced and scale would eventually force replacement of the lines and pumps. No problem. He had extras next door.

  Worth it. Very worth it. Water was an issue now, somewhat scarce unless you lived on the Potomac. There were only so many reservoirs and creeks, and Bundys and Vandals and Raiders staked those places, waiting for victims. Yeah, bottled water was available by the truckload, but try filling a bathtub or sink with that. Besides, the bottled stuff was for drinking. Everything else required a big water source and getting to those meant running the gauntlet.

  MPD patrolled the few District spots, like the McArthur reservoir located near AU, but there were far more Raiders than cops and John heard gunfire from that direction all during the workday. On the Virginia side, you were on your own and to get water, you went heavy. The Alexandrias drew from the Potomac in armed convoys, at least, they used to. John frowned. Sometime this weekend, he had to look for them. Wouldn’t be pretty.

  Theresa had never liked the pool. She wasn’t a pool or beach person and saw it as a waste, especially when she’d come out and find John and Collier spending valuable weekend chore time splashing each other. She complained it dropped the house value, too, because no one wanted to buy a pool.

  “Yeah?” John had snorted, “Why’d we?” She had no answer for that. Now, houses with pools were prime real estate, the object of Bundy desire, a built-in cistern eliminating one more vulnerability in this State of Nature.

  John jealously guarded his. It was hidden behind a six-foot wooden fence, itself hidden with creeper and a few years’ worth of leaves. Be a job just to hack through all that and find the fence alone, never mind the pool. John had a motion-detector camera trained on the pool that sounded every time he let Snuffy out, a nightly test of the system that he didn’t mind because the pool was too important.

  John reached down and patted the cover affectionately. No one’s getting close to you, baby.

  John unhooked one edge of the cover and peered at the water level. A couple of inches below the tile. Eh, no big deal. John had by-passed the internal lines and attached intake and outtake hoses directly to the pump, draping them over the side into the water. It wasn’t pretty: hoses splayed along the deck and lay at the bottom, but John depended on rain and snow melt and couldn’t keep the constant half-tile-from-the-top level the internal lines required. Besides, the pool was no longer decorative.

  He reattached the cover, picked his way across the lines and stood by the pump. Pressure was up, hmm. Have to backsplash this week, which was a pain because he had to move the concrete blocks and mattresses he used to muffle the pump’s noise. Which meant resetting those blocks and mattresses afterwards so the noise would drift down the back hill, just like the secondary Magnum did. Pain-in-the-ass Saturday job. Do it before searching out the Alexandrias.

  Eh, might as well do a Claymore check on Saturday, too. John grimaced. He hated doing that. Dangerous, real dangerous.

  John had a lot of Claymores. A lot. Not even sure how many anymore. He found them when he liberated the grenades, the LAWs, the M60s, the M-16s, and the ammunition from that Ft. Belvoir ammunition bunker. They were all piled up in a corner and John immediately knew what they were – he’d seen a few while fooling around with the army on some joint missions. The Air Force didn’t use them because, after all, they were the dignified service and didn’t trifle with such vulgarities, but John always thought they were cool.

  He’d loaded up a few, along with the other stuff, but came back after the Mall Apocalypse and got the rest. Figured they’d come in handy.

  The army designated them the M18 because the army’s just gotta call everything by a number but everyone knew them as Claymores. They were the dumb man’s high explosive defense. They came in individual bags with all the trimmings for a do-it-yourself killing field: a blasting cap, an infinite amount of wire on a spool, a triggering device, a circuit tester, instructions, and even little legs which stood the mine up. Claymores looked like curved olive-drab bricks and weighed about the same. The bricks had sights on them and were further idiot-proofed with the words “Front Toward Enemy” on the murder side.

  They were destructive little buggers, seven hundred steel balls wrapped in C4, one gigantic shotgun blast. John played with a couple of them in the big soccer field on Route 1 across from the Belvoir main gate. He put one on its little legs, aiming it at a set of bleachers, unspooled the wire to about a hundred yards away (just in case it wasn’t completely idiot-proof), then pressed the lever on the M57 firing device (there’s the army again). Wham! Ball bearings, heat and shock shredded the bleachers, throwing parts of it all over the field. John was astonished. “Hoo wah,” he said, and loaded up the back of the Pathfinder.

  He placed the first group of Claymores inside the neighbor’s house – three directly underneath the Magnum facing out, three in the ceiling and one in each corner of the room, all facing in. He set two Claymores apiece in the other rooms, one in the opposite corner facing the door and the other in the ceiling right over the door. He wired them back to a control panel next to the camera panel and labeled each to correspond with its closest camera view, then folded all the wire extensions into a master M57 which would blow all the Claymores at once.

  Satisfactory setup. He could take out one room at a time, or take out the entire house, depending on what he saw in the cameras. One or two intruders, and he’d just wait for them outside. Five or six in a room, bloowie. Ten or fifteen in the house, ka-bloowie. Setting everything back up would be a bitch, but that’s the price you pay for security.

  John planted the rest of them along the back hill, triggered with plain old trip wires. No cameras; not necessary, given the unlikelihood of an approach from that direction. People always take the path of least resistance – why kill yourself fighting up a bramble-laden slope when there are so many easier ways to get at him? Besides, he had enough cables to sort out.

  The trip wires worked fine in test and were low maintenance; he periodically checked them to make sure they remained taut and the blasting caps didn’t get too rusty. That, in itself, was somewhat hair-raising. The wires were hard to see and John was sure, every time he went out there, he’d forget quite where they were.

  He’d cut a small path through the field to help him get through without blowing himself up but even that was hard to see because, well, he’d made it hard to see. Why show someone else the way? So he stood a good chance of being shredded while doing routine maintenance, which fitted in well with the Grim Laws of Irony and spurred him to a caution of almost ridiculous proportions – taking a good five minutes between steps, peering intently at the brush.

  Pain in the rear, but you don’t tempt the Universe. Dogs or deer setting them off was a problem initially, but John sprayed wolf scent, which he found in a gun shop, around the area and that seemed to work. Reminder, do that this weekend, too.

  No Claymores around the pool. That was just asking for trouble and he had enough of that with the pool itself, like the constant worry of frozen lines. John bent down and fiddled with the intake. Seemed okay. It was chilly tonight, but not so bad. Spring was here and the danger of frozen lines was pretty much over, although, this being DC, there could be a surprise mid-April freeze. Sacrilege to keep the pump going in winter, but he needed water all year so the pumps had to run, even in the snow.

  John had double wrapped the lines with insulation, even where they hit the water, and threaded in some pipe heaters. Seemed to work; at least, he never had such a freezing problem that the water wouldn’t flow or the pump busted. Of course, there hadn’t been a really hard winter since the Event. Due. Push came to shove, he could always draw water through the ice and replace the pump and lines when it got warmer.

  “C’mon, dog,” he said to Snuffy and walked over to the side gate. He pointed and Snuffy did his snuffling thing, which had earned him
the name. John watched him for any signs of alarm but Snuffy’s tail wagged, and he looked up at John with a big green grin.

  “Good boy,” John patted the dog and cautiously cracked the gate, a hand on the .357. Satisfied no one or thing lurked there, he stepped out and quietly closed the gate behind him.

  The garden was tucked at the corner of the house, so well hidden John didn’t bother with monitors. If someone got close enough to find it, John had bigger problems than someone stealing his harvest. He’d already turned the soil and dumped the compost he’d cooked all winter so, this weekend, he had to turn the soil again and then lay out the plastic to keep the weeds down. Geez, going to be busy.

  He had lettuce and spinach started inside the house and, in a week or so, could go ahead and put them out. By early June, he’d be back on fresh greens. He was about a month behind, but he purposely erred on the side of warm weather. He’d rather the crops were a little late than risk their loss through a surprise freeze. It’s not like he could go to the store and replace his mistakes.

  He examined the irrigation system – a rigged-up series of soaker hoses coming out of a huge tin washtub with a hole in the bottom of it. The washtub was up high, between the bucket shelves of a couple of stepladders facing each other, so gravity could power it. It was quite the workout to fetch a few buckets from the pool and dump them in the washtub and he really should set something up, like a small electric pump, to make the job easier. Later, later. He had to let the pool water stand for a day or two to evaporate the chlorine before he released it through the hoses, otherwise he’d burn everything up, but the garden got a good soaking this way. Especially during dry seasons.