by Sergio Gomez
Alejandro buries his head in his dad’s chest and cries. After what feels like an eternity of crying that would never stop, he finds he’s all dried up. A nurse comes in to the room and puts a hand on his back. He sits up and her hands slides off.
She says something to him—something sympathetic, but he doesn’t hear the words, just gets the tone of it.
He leaves the room.
*
The next memory that flashes in his mind is tied to the last one; he knows this because the walls in the waiting room are the same off-white as the one in his dad’s hospital room. The chairs his family are sitting on, holding each other and crying, are the same kind he was sitting on as cancer took his dad away.
Carlos is weeping into their mom’s chest, and his boyfriend—the source of the maltreatment he received from his father for years after he came out, the source of many arguments and disdain and distance between them--is rubbing his back, crying too. His uncle Pedro, their dad’s only brother, is sitting in the chair next to his mom’s. The hat on his head is low and his head is hanging low, he’s fighting back tears and trying to keep a straight face.
He looks up when he sees Alejandro come out of the hallway and nods at him. Alejandro nods back.
His mom looks at him, and she knows what it means that Alejandro is out of the room, and she begins to cry hysterically. She’s screaming, “dios mio!” and she trembles with every syllable.
He kneels down between Carlos and his mom, and puts his arms around them, and together they weep.
*
The memories take him forward, years after his father died. He’s standing on a stage, receiving his diploma from the university he’s graduating from. His mom is in the sea of hundreds of people, applauding her first son to graduate from college. Applauding the first Mexican she knows of who graduated from college, really.
Alejandro spots her in the crowd and he knows there are tears of joy filling her eyes. Carlos and his fiancée are there, too, applauding. Next to them is Maria, who flew in from California for the ceremony, and she blows a kiss to him.
He’s never felt more proud of himself than this moment of seeing the joy brought to those he loves.
*
Again he’s in a hospital room, but this time the air in the room is carrying happiness. Maria is in the hospital bed, hairs are stuck to her sweaty forehead and she’s just catching her breath after the hours of labor she had gone through.
The doctor walks up to Alejandro, holding their son in a blue blanket. “Mr. Ramos, do you want to hold your son?”
He wants to scream “YES!”, but the moment has temporarily stunned his tongue into a useless glob, so instead he grabs his son for the first time and peeks underneath the blanket.
Charlie looks up at him with bulging eyes that every newborn has, and he reaches out with a wrinkly hand. Alejandro touches the tiny palm with a finger, and he feels a soul clenching energy shoot through as a connection of love he’s never felt before in his life is made between him and his son.
The infant in his hands doesn’t even know what love is, but Alejandro knows--he can feel it in every bone in his body, in every cell that makes him a human--that he would do anything for this tiny person that fits in the palm of his hands, he would die for him.
11
The memories ended with a bang that he assumed was the sound of his skull cracking against the barn floor, but he felt no pain. Maybe death really was painless, he thought. But then the bang came again.
He opened his eyes.
There was no shining light from the heavens, no angel of death staring back down at him, no hand of God reaching down for his soul, what he saw was support beams that held the barn’s ceiling up. There was a cobweb between two of them that crisscrossed.
He didn’t notice that there was no weight pinning him down until he was already sitting up. Standing next to him was Charlie.
In one hand he held the gun and in the other the lantern. He was still pointing the gun at the Noche writhing on the floor. There were two bullet holes oozing out blood on its body, one in its neck, the other in its forehead.
“I took the gun when you told me to run.” Charlie said, still looking at the creature. “I ran back cause I knew you’d need light…but I was too late.”
The Noche twitched.
“Looks like you were right on time to me,” Alejandro said.
He rose and stood over Charlie. He grabbed the gun from him and put it back in its holster. “Next time don’t come back.”
Charlie looked up at him in disbelief. He knew in his heart this was the right thing, and now he couldn’t fight off the urge to argue.
“But, Pa, you taught me to shoot—“
“I taught you to shoot so you can protect yourself!”
Charlie pouted his lip, for the first time in years he pouted them like a child.
“Promise me next time you run, no matter what.” Alejandro barked. His hands were shaking.
Charlie let out a sigh through his nose.
Alejandro grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Promise me, promise me!”
“Okay, okay.” Charlie said, avoiding eye contact.
“Say it!”
“I promise.” Charlie said, and met his dad’s eyes.
Alejandro put his arms around him and he could feel every muscle in Charlie’s body tighten up to keep himself from crying.
He knew Charlie was mad at him—and maybe rightly so because he did what he thought was right—but he knew he would get over it and that next time he wouldn’t put himself in danger like that.
He stroked his back and kissed him on top of the head.
Charlie crossed his arms.
“What you did was brave, thank you.” Alejandro said.
Charlie uncrossed his arms and looked at him, the boyish look in his eyes returning for the moment.
Alejandro broke away from him and found the rifle several feet from where he had been tackled. He strapped it around his shoulders and said:
“Now let’s get the hell out of here before more of those damn things decide to show up.”
PART III: THE WALL
1
The storm had died off to a light drizzle by the time they found a major road. The map was splayed out on the dash board, and Alejandro was reading it as best as he could through the wrinkles and cracks that had formed on it.
Before, finding other survivors seemed like the best course of action, but now it seemed like the only course of action. There was just too much danger for them to travel alone. Between hostile humans like the brothers by the river and Los Noches, strength in numbers was going to be the key to survival.
“Pa,” Charlie said, looking up from the doodle he was making on the back cover of his word search.
“What?” Alejandro asked.
“I didn’t want to kill the creature. I just got so scared when I saw it was trying to kill you that I pulled the trigger.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if he knew the question was silently hanging between them ever since the incident at the barn.
There was a question in there that Alejandro had to read between the lines to hear. “We have to kill them or they kill us. It doesn’t make us bad people.”
Charlie nodded, but that wasn’t satisfactory enough. He held up his doodle to show his dad. “Look at this.”
Alejandro looked at the doodle. It was four ape-like figures, hunched over in the trademark way of Los Noches. Two of them were drawn bigger and one of them had breasts.
Alejandro raised an eyebrow, a little confused as to what it was exactly. Charlie turned red.
“Jeez, is it that bad?”
Alejandro glanced at it one more time. “It’s a family of Los Noches, right?”
“Yeah,” his face grew hotter, suddenly regretting showing him the drawing. He continued on anyway. “Seeing those young ones at the river got me thinking…these creatures have families just like us—like we used to have when mommy was alive.”
> Charlie put the book in the glove compartment, and that somehow made it less embarrassing to talk about. “And I thought about how the one I killed…well, it won’t be going to its family today. Or ever.”
The ramp to get on the highway was coming up. There were no signs to indicate this, so Alejandro was going off what the map said. He hoped nothing would be blocking the exit, like a multi-car pile-up or something crazy like that.
“Better than me not coming home to my family,” Alejandro said.
Charlie shifted in his seat. “I guess that’s true.”
“We can’t think of Los Noches in those terms, Charlie. It’s us against them, that’s how we have to think of it.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could live together with them and the rest of the animals?”
Flashbacks of Los Noches killing the bear raced through his mind. “That would be nice, but reality is that humans aren’t even sticking together anymore. And we have to live in reality if we want to survive.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Why humans are attacking each other?”
“Yeah, why do you think the man at the carnival was shot to death and why do you think those two brothers tried to steal our stuff?”
“Because all of the survivors are scared.”
“Scared like us.” Charlie chimed in, and he looked at Alejandro to see if his guess was correct.
Alejandro felt his son’s eyes on him. “That’s right. The brothers saw us and decided to stick their guns in our chests before we did it to them. Maybe they were bad people before The Chaos, and they would do that sort of stuff even under normal circumstance, but I think it mostly came from them being scared to be on the other side of it.”
A question seeped into Charlie’s mind, but he didn’t have the courage to ask it so he kept it to himself. Even though it would weigh on his mind like an anvil until he got the answer to it eventually. “Why do you think John didn’t try to steal our stuff or kill us?”
He had tried to kill Alejandro, coming out swinging an axe in a blacked out rage, but he wasn’t going to tell Charlie that, so he said: “Because John was in his farm home, isolated from the crazy world The Chaos left us in.”
“You think he would’ve turned into something like the brothers had he been alive long enough?” This was as close as he was going to get to the question on his mind.
Alejandro thought about it for a second. “I’m not sure, Charlie.”
“But he was a good guy, right? For as long as we knew him, he was good to us. He made us food and invited us in to where he was staying. He had to be one of the good people, right? Right?”
The questioning was beginning to take on a tone Alejandro hadn’t heard come from Charlie in years—the tone small children use when they expect a specific answer out of an adult. The kind of tone that was usually reserved for questions as trivial as what flavor ice cream is in the cart or if they were allowed to stay up past their bedtime, and not questions of a person’s moral fiber.
Alejandro took in a deep breath, then tried explaining it the best he could. “On TV they called it The Chaos because it was ruining cities. People were fighting and killing each other, and the weather was suddenly unpredictable, but I think the name is still accurate because it’s thrown concepts like good and evil into chaos.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying there’s no good people?”
“What I’m saying, Charlie,” he turned off the road and got on to the on-ramp to the highway, “is that we can’t measure good by the standards before The Chaos.”
“What’s the new way of measuring it then?”
“I’m not sure it’s important today.”
“But, didn’t you tell me,” Charlie was beginning to lose his composure. He was seeing all of the virtues he had been taught to value become unraveled and smashed by the man who had taught him to value them in the first place.
It was like the first time he had seen the Philly Phanatic take off his head at a baseball game.
Except this wasn’t the illusion of a cartoon creature being destroyed before him, these were the entirety of his world-views, the virtues that he saw in his dad that made up the man he looked up to most. The ones he, unknowingly or not, had crafted his personality around to make himself a good person.
“You told me it was important to be a good person, that’s what you told me, dad. Were you lying?”
At the question of him lying, he saw his dad’s face change. The possessed look of a man who is stuck on a deserted island hunting wild boars with nothing but a spear in his hands took over. That look on his face that wasn’t the man he called Dad, but a new person bred from The Chaos. Perhaps the man who had kept them alive up until now, but just the same the look scared Charlie.
“You want to know what I honestly think about who’s good and who’s bad in the world?”
“Yes, yes, I do!” His voice was raised higher than it ever had been toward his dad, but that look in his eyes both scared and angered him. “Tell me the truth. I’m not a baby anymore.”
The crazed look on his face was gone and it was his dad driving the truck again. As glad as he was to see it disappear he knew it wouldn’t be the last time he saw it.
Alejandro’s voice was low when he said it, because it pained him to have to tell his son something so awful. But it had been invading his mind like a dark shadow behind every other thought, and getting it out would make him feel better. “I think the closest thing to good people this world has left is anyone who is still alive.”
“Even if they do bad things?”
“They do these things to survive. The brothers wanted our supplies because they were either running out of food or because they knew they eventually would run out of them. It wasn’t good or bad driving them—it was survival. And instinct, something primal.”
Charlie leaned his head against the window and watched the light rain tap against the glass. His head was spinning and all he wanted to do was sleep so he wouldn’t have to process all of this. “Pa, where are we going?”
Alejandro relaxed a little, glad to have moved on from the topic. “We’re going to Philadelphia.”
“Philadelphia? But, the news said that that’s where the worst of it would happen.” He wasn’t exactly sure what ‘it’ was, but he remembered the newscasters repeating that major cities were the worst of where ‘it’ was happening.
“That was a year ago. Maybe things changed and we can find other survivors to group with there.”
“What if they didn’t change?”
Then we’re walking into our deaths. He thought, but said: “Then we’ll turn back and come up with a different plan.”
Charlie closed his eyes and went to sleep.
2
Alejandro drove down I-95 gripping the wheel as if his life depended on it—and in some instances, like for example when he needed to swerve to avoid running the truck into a hole that seemed to end at the bottom of hell, it did.
There were left over cars on the highway, rusting on flat tires and every window shattered into hundreds of shards. Some of them were burned to a point where they only resembled the vehicle they once were because their frames were still intact. Others were turned over upside down; their plastic bodies crushed like soda cans in the areas where they had collided with the median divider or with other cars.
He was moving at 20mph and would only dare hit a top speed of 30mph if he was sure the road up ahead was clear of any pieces of car or holes deep enough to break an axle, or worse, get stuck in.
As he maneuvered in and out between the dead bodies of the cars (in his head he couldn’t get out the thought that these cars were “alive” at some point) and avoided the worst of the torn road, he pieced together that what he was driving through was the remnants of a mass aerial bombing.
That’s why he also had to avoid pieces of cars on the roads; bumpers here, hoods there, and chunks of tire everywhere. The road itself was beaten up, turned to a big chee
se grater by the explosions.
Things must have really gotten crazy in Philadelphia and the surrounding areas, because the vehicles looked to be pedestrian grade vehicles. This wasn’t the military fighting each other, this was military execution.
Alejandro looked into the cars he drove by, morbidly curious to see if he saw the remains of a body or any hints of humans, but of course he didn’t. By now Los Noches would have gotten to them or animals would have eaten them.
The death was almost palpable on his tongue and Alejandro felt an emotional tug, as if he were driving through a graveyard and the vehicles represented the headstones of the people who had been killed in the traffic jam, left with no choice but to watch the bombs explode until one hit them.
He rubbed a hand on his eyes to wipe them dry. As he was doing this Charlie woke up from his nap and looked out of the window at the demolished highway.
“Jesus…what happened?” It was the first time he had ever used Jesus’s name in that way and it made him feel a little more grown up.
“The military—or something like the military must have been dropping bombs on all of the cars. Don’t look.”
“It’s everywhere, though.” He said, looking past Alejandro through the driver’s side window.
“Go back to sleep—“
But the conviction in his command died off as he slammed on the brakes. He had never seen it in person, but what he saw up ahead made him think of how the Mongolians must have felt when they ran into the Great Wall.
The tires shot up loose pieces of black top as the truck came to a screeching halt. Alejandro had to swerve to the right to keep the truck from falling into a bottomless hole a few yards in front of the wall that seemed to have come out of nowhere, like a magician had summoned it up when he saw them approaching.
Alejandro and Charlie got out of the truck without a word exchanged between them. The wall was at least twenty-feet high, thirty or forty feet high in some parts. Standing this close to it they both saw that it wasn’t one solid object, no, the wall was a pile of thousands of boulders packed together to make up a giant barricade keeping anyone from traveling further down the highway. It didn’t stop at just the highway, though it continued on as far as they could see in both directions.
