Judgment

by Tom Reinhart

  After a half mile or so I came upon some road kill on the side of the highway. A year ago it would have been a deer or a possum. Today it was human, a maledicted, most of it eaten away by animals and bugs; nature reclaiming the Earth. Yet still it moved, somehow a soul still inside waiting to be judged. It had one lidless eye left in its skull, and I saw it follow me as I walked by. Creepy as hell and yet I had now become accustomed to such things and just kept walking.

  I wondered for a while why the Judges never took the maledicted, only grabbing the living. I could only guess that if you're already dead your path to Heaven, or Hell, was different. There was something quite cruel about it, it seemed. Many used to throw out the old cliché, "The Lord works in mysterious ways." I saw it as a flawed deity with a flawed plan, but what did I know. I'm just another one of the human cattle that hasn’t been caught yet. My time will come eventually, I'm sure. Joe, Steve, Margie, Jennifer; I watched them all die. I've watched the whole world die, and I still have no real idea why.

  I feel badly for Evelyn. In some ways I wish maybe she hadn't survived the car wreck, just so she wouldn't have to live through this. Perhaps that's the cruelest part of it all, thinking you're better off dead; but to deliver a child into this world?

  I don't even want to think about that right now.

  I was lost in all these thoughts, watching the road below my feet go by a step at a time. So lost in thought I hadn't noticed the maledicted walking up on me.

  “Where do we go?” she asked, and I jumped out of my skin. She was right next to me, and with the breeze blowing into my face I hadn't even smelled her.

  “Do you know where we're supposed to go?” she asked again. She didn't appear to have been dead for very long. She was clearly deceased, but not very much decomposition had started yet. I could tell she had been a pretty woman, her facial features still intact. She had long curly hair, although now it had a straw-like texture to it. She had a simple dress on, and no shoes. I backed away a few steps, knowing the unpredictability that came with their brain-dead insanity.

  “Go? Where are you trying to go?” I asked her, slowly trying to put more space between us.

  “To be judged.”

  In that moment I saw the confusion in her eyes, and the fear, and the sorrow. I looked her over to see how she had died. She was covered in old dried blood, but I could see no wounds. It was when she reached out towards me that I noticed the gaping slices in her wrists. Like so many who were afraid to be judged, she had committed suicide instead. Now she found that she was denied the right to make that choice, and would wait as a rotting corpse.

  I knew what she needed to know, but couldn't bring myself to tell her, nor would her rotting brain understand. So I stood in the middle of the road with the dead woman, and I wept for her.

  She stared at me, her head cocked slightly to the side. I could see the cracks in her dried lips, but there was no more blood to bleed. There was a bug in her hair and another on her leg, but she seemed to not feel them.

  “I think that's our house,” she stated as she pointed to one of the farms on the north side of the road. “Are you ready to come home now? Molly's late too.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Her mental faculties had left her brain minutes after the oxygen did, and that was a couple days ago. She was just a package of disconnected memories, trapped in a corpse.

  “Do you know where we go?” she asked again. “Maybe Molly's there.”

  I wanted to get away from her now. I couldn't help her, and at any moment she could become violent, or start yelling and attract Judges. “I'm sorry. I have to go,” and I began walking quickly away from her.

  “So you don't want soup then?” she called out to me.

  No, I don't want any freakin' soup.

  As I got further away, I heard her call to me one last time. “Mister...”

  I stopped to turn and face her. She was still just standing in the road with bugs crawling on her, not knowing where to go or what to do.

  “I'm sorry,” she said, her eyes full of sorrow like a child who was just scolded by a parent but doesn’t understand why. I thought about her apology for a long moment.

  “Sorry for what?”

  “I just want to die now please.”

  The vision of her sadness, and hearing her words, it broke me. My spirit sank and the tears streamed down my face as I turned and walked away.

  What kind of god does this?

  I turned off of the road and headed across a large open field. The grass was up to my knees, and every so often I would see a wave of bending grass move away from me as rabbits ran from my strides. Just once as I reached the top of a hill I turned to look back towards the road, and the woman was still standing there; just standing, waiting, but not knowing for what.

  Looking the other way down the hill I saw one of the farmhouses. My thoughts turned back to Evelyn and the things that we needed. Medicine, food, clothes. I shifted my backpack, gathered myself, and headed down into the farm.

  It wasn't a very large house. A single story rancher, but it sat upon a huge tract of land that still had crops on it that never got taken to market. A tractor still sat out in the middle of the field, the last bits of a pile of ash clinging to the ground nearby. Further out several cows lingered lazily about. A small baby calf, standing alongside its mother, lazily chewed grass. While mankind was being exterminated, the rest of nature went on.

  A dog barked not too far away, making me wonder why. I froze for a moment to scan the field and the sky for any signs of life or movement. There were no maledicted in the fields, and no angels in the sky. I waited a moment longer to be sure, and then headed to the house.

  An old Chevy truck sat out front, next to a satellite dish of equal size. On the front porch sat a couple of rocking chairs, beside a table knocked over on its side and a broken glass. The front door was broken, the wood cracked and splintered near the knob from when someone had forced it open.

  I entered the foyer, where I stood and listened intently for any sounds of an occupant. After twenty seconds of nothingness, I shouted to draw out anyone who may not have noticed me yet. Noise would always bring angels and maledicted searching for its source.

  “Anyone here?” I called out, and waited. Nothing. I began my house tour in the kitchen, looking for the usual; canned goods, dried pasta, rice. Even the starches that had weevils in it, we ate anyway. I never opened refrigerators anymore. Anything at all that had been in there to begin with was perishable, and opening the door now just unleashed a disgusting burst of foul air worse smelling than any maledicted. I found a pack of beef jerky, but mice had already eaten into the plastic and it was molding.

  I stuffed what was usable into my pack and wandered into the living room. All the reminders of the old world were there. A TV, magazines, and an old vacuum cleaner still plugged into the wall that must have been running until the power grid shut down. I noticed half of a pile of ash in front of it, with thin streaks of dust trailing off underneath the vacuum. I couldn't decide if it was humorous or appalling, but it appeared that someone using the vacuum had been caught, judged, and then sucked up into their own vacuum.

  On the walls were the typical family photos, of the typical family doing typical old world things. Things I would probably never do again; amusement parks, picnics, sporting events. It was all gone now, sucked up into God's giant vacuum cleaner.

  There was a piano in the corner, a beautiful baby grand. I played a little when I was younger, and not having heard music in a long time, I couldn’t resist tapping on a few keys. It made beautiful sounds, and revived memories I had long forgotten. With nothing else of use, I moved on to the bedrooms. I passed a closed door in the hallway, and opening it saw it led down to a dark cellar. It reminded me of the incident with JD.

  No thanks, I'm good up here.

  I moved on to the bedrooms, following the same routine we did in every house we searched. I went through the dressers for usable clothing, sear
ched the closets for guns or weapons, and looked under beds for anything else of value. At first it felt shameful, digging through people's lives, through their only possessions. After a while it sank in that they would never be back for them again, and it became easier. More than once I found stashes of cash, and had to laugh at how entirely useless it was now.

  As I was moving to the second bedroom, I heard the front door creak open. I froze, silent, waiting. I held my breath, afraid to make a sound. I heard the shuffle of feet on the floor, and the familiar ruffling sound of feathers folding upon themselves.

  Shit.

  A Judge had entered the house.

  This was a small house. I had one narrow hallway to exit out to the front door, and the Judge was there. I knew if I waited another second he would turn the hallway to the bedrooms, and there was nowhere to hide. In a moment of panic I quickly opened the door to the cellar and closed it behind me as gently as possible.

  Down a set of narrow rickety old steps I went, down to a dirt floor. It was a cold, damp, musty place, mostly empty except for a few milk crates full of recyclable bottles and some other unrecognizable junk. The only light coming in was through two small rectangular windows at ground level, the dim sunlight fighting its way in through years of dust and spider webs.

  I heard the angel walking on the wooden floor above me. As I moved around in the cellar I could follow his steps, the wooden planks creaking and dust falling from the ceiling wherever he stepped. He was in the kitchen. He made no sound, disturbing nothing; seemingly just looking, listening, and searching. I followed his steps into the living room, then into the hall. He was headed for the first bedroom I had been in when he suddenly stopped. I couldn't tell exactly where now and I felt panic settling over me. If he opened the basement door, there was nowhere for me to go. I would be completely trapped. I thought of Evelyn.

  Don't go alone, she told you, you idiot.

  I waited in the dark silence for what seemed like an eternity, waiting to hear another footstep on the creaking wooden planks. Instead I heard the cellar door open, and saw the sunlight from upstairs come flooding down, illuminating the dust that floated rhythmically in the beams of light.

  I tried to tuck myself into the furthest darkest corner. I saw the Judge’s feet as he came down, step by step. I was completely trapped. There was no way he wouldn’t see me. As he stepped onto the basement floor, adrenaline and panic kicked in and I ran straight towards the steps, wanting to dodge around him and flee upwards before he realized I was there.

  I never made it.

  There was a sudden singe of electric shock as his large fingers wrapped around my throat. He lifted me clear off the floor, setting me down in front of him and I felt his wings wrap around me.

  At first there was panic. Maddening, can’t breathe panic, like you’re about to drown, looking up at the surface of the water that you can’t reach in time before you run out of air. Then came an odd sense of surrender; a strangely calm peace that almost felt medicinally induced. In an instant I went from blind panic to an overwhelming sense of serenity. Suddenly I was dreaming, as if I had skipped over the early stages of sleep and leapt right into deep slumber. The world around me simply ceased to exist.

  I felt warm and protected, like being in a mother’s womb while dreams played out on the walls of my mind. The realization came that these weren’t dreams, but memories. It was my life, from birth to now, playing out before me. It blazed by in fast forward, and certain moments seemed to slow down, as if to be studied more closely. I saw things I had been ashamed of, things I had done wrong; and I saw moments of self-proclaimed greatness. I saw the moments I had suffered, and the moments I had made others suffer. With each specific event, it seemed as though the actual actions didn’t matter, but more so the reasoning behind them; the malice or the selflessness, the desire to hurt or the intent to help another. I saw things I had done wrong, harm that I had caused, but I felt the reasoning behind them. Often I had done wrong not from malice or bad intent, but simple ignorance, naiveté, or fear.

  One particular moment seemed to replay over and over. I saw a memory from my childhood, when I was probably twelve or thirteen. I was near my family home on the north shore of Long Island. A large body of water, the Long Island Sound, had mostly frozen over for the winter. Near the shore, where my friends and I frequently played, the ice layer was broken, fractured into mini glaciers floating with patches of icy water in between. I saw a dog clawing at the ice, trying to get itself out of the water. I saw myself as a boy, crawling without hesitation out onto the ice towards it. The memory played out, showing the young version of myself pulling the dog by the scruff of its neck up onto the ice, dragging it to the safety of the shore. Suddenly, consciousness and cold reality returned, as I was forced out of this sleeping state like being shot out of cannon.

  My knees buckled slightly as the angel released me. Although I’m sure it was only seconds, it felt like an eternity as I stood face to face with the Judge. But I was still alive. I wasn’t turned to ash.

  Wasn’t I judged?

  I saw the Judge’s lips begin to move. I expected to hear the same words I had heard so many times before during the judging of others; a sin or some other transgression. Instead, I heard one simple word even more alarming. With a single low breath, the angel said my name, “Adam”, and then he turned and walked up the steps. He left me there, standing in the musty dank air of the basement. I was neither in Heaven nor Hell, nor had I been turned to dust. Everything was just as it had been.

  Why had I not been judged? How does he know my name, like the angel in the barn? I don’t understand.

  I was afraid to move. I felt like someone who had just been narrowly missed by a speeding car. I had been caught, and I’m still alive. I stood silent and motionless as I listened to the Judge walk away, through the kitchen, and out the back door. I heard his wings take flight, and he was gone. I fell to my knees and cried.

  Chapter 12

  Holy Water

  “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”

  ~ Genesis 1:28

  Evelyn was puking in the bathroom.

  This routine had started a couple weeks ago, and now the morning sickness came with predictable regularity. Her swollen belly clearly showed the signs of pregnancy. Strange feelings ensued. It’s hard for a mother not to feel the natural and primordial joy of carrying a child; but against the backdrop of an apocalypse casts a whole different light on the situation.

  There was also the risk to ourselves. Her mobility would become an issue later on, and her medical and nutritional needs would become a continuously growing burden. I wasn’t sure if an infant could properly develop on beef jerky, cat food, and six month old packs of ramen noodles.

  When the baby is born, what about its crying? The noise would bring danger from all directions. Judges, scavengers, wild animals; the baby would draw them to us like a magnet. Although never officially discussed, I think there was an understanding between us that we would simply keep moving forward, and do the best we could for now.

  Yesterday we made another run into the town just up the highway. It’s still a great area for scavenging. We encountered no one, just one pack of feral dogs that I was able to scare off. We never once saw a judge anywhere. There’s a grocery store with still much of its interior intact; lots of canned goods left, even some bottled water. For whatever reason there seems to not have been much looting here. We actually had a moment of laughter when we went down a particular aisle and saw shelves stocked with baby diapers. Those will no doubt come in handy. There was a sporting goods store with clothes, sneakers, and an abundance of baseball bats; enough to dismantle a horde of maledicted if the need arose.

  We even found a gun store, and although it was fairly empty, I did find a sawed-off shotgun the owner had strapped under the counter in case of a robbery, and a few shells to go with it. It was one of the smoothest, trouble free runs we’ve
had. Almost too easy. Signs of human life, and Judges, continue to become more and more scarce. I’m alright with it. It was sort of fun feeling like this could be ‘our town’. If the motel keeps working out as a good place to stay, I could see us being here permanently.

  Evelyn came from the bathroom, stood beside me at the window and smiled. The bruise on her neck was fading now, but she still didn’t speak. Honestly, it had been so long, I think she simply forgot to try. I believed scar tissue had settled over her vocal chords and she’d probably never speak again. We had both become so accustomed to communicating the way we were, it just didn’t matter anymore. “You ok?” I asked her.

  She nodded enthusiastically, then put her hand on her stomach and stuck her tongue out, the universal symbol for ‘yuck’.

  “Yeah. It’ll get better,” I told her, as if I knew what I was talking about. “Morning sickness is only supposed to last the first couple months, right?”