I knew my place in the old world. I knew who I was and where I was going. I had a home and a family, and I’d dedicated my life to my calling. Everything was the way it should be. And then I lost it all, lost everything – and lost myself at the same time.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t like the person I’ve become. I am a hypocrite who has gone against everything I once believed and preached to others. I’ve lied to the people I’m close to, my only companions in this undead world. I’ve looted and stolen supplies from the base. I’ve killed those which were once human beings. And I’ve forsaken the god to whom I was once faithful.
I feel guilty, not only for doing these things which are so unlike me, but even for doing the things which used to be normal for me – goofing off, joking around, laughing, even smiling. Even the smallest pleasures here make me feel more guilty than happy. How can I laugh in a world overrun with zombies, a world in which my family is dead? How can I smile as I pull the trigger to blow out another undead brain? How can any joy exist in a world gone mad?
Somehow, it does. Somehow, life goes on. Somehow, it has for us.
Life has evolved. The world is new and different and strange. Nothing is the way it should be.
I am lost.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Week Five
It was a faint scratching noise that woke Brian. One moment, he was sound asleep, and the next, wide awake. He had just scrambled into a sitting position, his heart beating fast, when he heard a raspy chuckle.
“Chill, dude, it’s just me.”
Brian looked over and saw AJ kneeling close to the wall he’d made his bed against, a small knife in his hand. He relaxed, though his heart took longer to calm down. Forcing a weak smile, he joked, “You know, before the world was overrun with zombies, I wouldn’t have been so relieved to wake up to a guy with tattoos and a knife sitting by my bed.”
AJ grinned back. “Well, before the world was overrun with zombies, they didn’t let me have sharp objects, so… guess things have changed for both of us.” He waved the knife around carelessly, its silver blade gleaming in the weak rays of morning sunlight that filtered through the boarded windows.
Brian watched as he turned back to the wall and finished carving another notch on the crude calendar he had been keeping there ever since Brian and Gretchen had arrived. A month ago, Brian realized with a jolt, as he calculated the date. It had been the twentieth of April when he and Gretchen had finally made it to the base, the last of the survivors to arrive, and it was now the twentieth of May. That the ten of them had survived a whole month living in the chapel together seemed incredible.
“I can’t believe we’ve been here a month,” he said aloud.
“We should celebrate,” chimed in a voice over his shoulder. He turned and saw Gretchen standing in the doorway, still in the oversized t-shirt she wore for pajamas. “I mean, a month has passed, and we’re all still alive. In this situation, that’s a pretty big accomplishment. Plus, we’ve about got the base cleared out, right?” she added.
“Fuck yeah,” AJ replied with another shit-eating grin. “One more day in the cage should do it.”
Brian and Gretchen exchanged amused smirks. AJ had found a new favorite pastime around the base. Instead of zombie-sniping from the roof of the church, he now preferred zombie-baiting from a cage hung in a tree. For the last two days, ever since Kevin had suggested it, he had sat behind the bars of a dog kennel they’d brought back from the base’s veterinary clinic and rigged to the strongest branch of a tall tree with a pulley system, gleefully taunting the zombies who prowled beneath him.
The plan had proven to be an effective one: AJ used his rough, booming voice to call the undead, who came from all corners of the base, like housecats to the sound of a can opener, to circle around under the cage, reaching and moaning desperately. From their vantage points in the surrounding trees, Kevin, Brian, Nick, and Riley waited until a significant crowd of zombies had arrived to start sniping, their bullets picking the zombies off one by one. After each massacre, they let AJ down for a break and hauled the corpses off to a large burn pile. As the bodies burned, they raised AJ into the tree again to repeat the whole process.
It was highly successful. Brian estimated they had killed more zombies in the last two days than they had in all of their hunting expeditions around the base combined. The undead seemed oblivious of each other, yet tended to shamble along in hordes, and though their thought process was nonexistent, their senses were still intact. They were drawn to noises that signaled potential prey, yet failed to shy away from the sound of gunfire or the sight of their own kind falling at their feet. This made them incredibly easy to take down in large numbers.
“Well, in that case,” said Gretchen, “we should definitely celebrate. How about a nice, big, group dinner tonight? I’m sure Jo will help me get things together.”
Brian nodded. “That sounds good.”
“Hell, we can just roast hot dogs and marshmallows over the cremation pit,” AJ added, a devilish gleam in his eyes.
Gretchen made a nauseated-looking face, and Brian just shook his head. AJ’s warped sense of humor was often too dark and crude for his taste, but he had grown accustomed to it. What he hadn’t gotten used to was AJ’s carefree enthusiasm over killing the undead, the way he shot down zombies without hesitation and without remorse. Yes, Brian went out on hunting trips and sniped from the trees, as well, but every time he pulled the trigger of his gun, he felt a little tug of his stomach, too. Every time he shot a woman, he remembered jamming the towel bar through Leighanne’s head. Every time he killed a child, he thought of Brooke and Bonnie. He did it out of necessity, but he would never get used to it, and he would certainly never relish in it the way AJ did. To Brian, it was only a means of self-preservation.
He and the others got up, dressed, and ate a bowl of dry cereal each. “We’ll go for more supplies and have better food for dinner,” Gretchen promised, as AJ led the team of snipers outside to prepare for another round of zombie-baiting.
“Just watch your back,” Brian warned her on his way out. “There may still be zombies trapped inside some of the buildings.”
“I know.” Gretchen smiled. “Good luck.”
Brian followed the others to the ambulance he’d brought back from the medical complex, which they were now using to transport the cage around the base. “Shotgun!” Nick called, racing AJ to the passenger seat, as Riley slid behind the wheel.
“Fine, but we’re leaving the back doors open,” growled AJ, forced to climb into the back of the ambulance with Brian and Kevin. “I wanna shoot ‘em as they chase us.”
“I know just the thing to bring ‘em crawling out of the woodwork!” Nick called back from the cab. Through the window that separated them, Brian could see him fumbling with the dashboard controls. As Riley turned on the ignition and pulled the ambulance away from the chapel, the siren – and, presumably, the lights – began to wail. It was joined by a creak… a set of footsteps… a clap of thunder… an eerie howl… a drumbeat… a swelling synthesizer… a familiar bassline…
Brian started to laugh. “I shoulda known...”
Nick rolled down all the windows and cranked the music up on full blast. “It’s close to midnight, and something evil’s lurking in the dark… Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart…”
AJ joined in, his raspy voice surprisingly smooth. “You try to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it… You start to freeze, as horror looks you right between the eyes… You’re paralyzed…”
“’Cause this is Thriller!” they all sang at the top of their lungs. “Thriller night… and no one’s gonna save you from the beast about to strike. You know it’s Thriller…” The remaining zombies were starting to emerge from nearby buildings. “Thriller night… You’re fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller toniiiiight…”
Lights flaring, sirens airing, music blaring, the ambulance rolled down the street, and the undead dragged themselves behind it. Sitting in the open doorway, his legs swinging jauntily, AJ raised his gun and aimed at the front of the pack.
“You hear the door slam…”
BANG!
“…and realize that there’s nowhere left to run…” he sang without missing a beat, as the lead zombie dropped, the others stumbling over it.
Brian followed suit. “You feel the cold hand and wonder if you’ll ever see the sun…” He squeezed the trigger of his rifle, and another zombie fell.
“You close your eyes…” Nick’s voice rang out enthusiastically from the front seat, as he poked the barrel of his gun through the open window. “…and hope that this is just imagination.” His shot took down an incoming ghoul on the sidewalk. “Girl, but all the while…”
“You hear the creature creeping up behind…” crooned Kevin, and he turned and tapped the glass partition to get Riley’s attention. “You’re outta time…”
“’Cause this is Thriller!” they chorused, and Brian, Kevin, and AJ were suddenly thrown sideways as Riley whipped the ambulance around in a U-turn. “Thriller night…” (“Ow!”) “There ain’t no second chance against the thing with forty eyes, girl. Thriller…”
“Whoo-hoo!” Nick howled out his window.
“Thriller night...” The engine revved as Riley slammed the accelerator to the floor, and the ambulance rocketed towards the flock of zombies. “You’re fighting for your life inside a-” Brian winced at the impact of a zombie’s body hitting the front fender. “-killer-” Another undead body bounced off the ambulance. “-thriller-” A third zombie was thrown up onto the windshield. “-toniiiiight…” With a sickening creak, the zombie slid down the windshield and off the hood. Brian cringed again as he felt the crunch of its body beneath the front tire.
“Night creatures calling, the dead start to walk in their masquerade…” The ambulance plowed into the walking dead, rolling over their flailing bodies. “There’s no escaping the jaws of the alien this time…” Brian stared down in disgust at the flattened zombies that emerged from beneath the ambulance, their bodies crushed, bones mangled, yet in some cases, teeth still gnashing. “This is the end of your life…” He pointed his gun and put one out of its misery.
“They’re out to get you… There’s demons closing in from every side…” Even as Riley turned around again and drove past the carnage, more zombies appeared, swarming after them like children chasing an ice cream truck. “They will possess you… unless you change that number on your dial…”
“Now is the time…” Nick sang, slinging an arm around Riley’s shoulders while he fired casually out his window with one hand. “For you and I to cuddle close together…”
“No,” Riley said, peeling his arm off of her, “this is not the time.”
“All through the night…” Nick went on, grinning at her, “I’ll save you from the terror on the screen. I’ll make you see…”
“That this is Thriller…” A volley of gunfire took out zombies in all directions. “Thriller night… Girl, I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try. Thriller…”
“Whoo-hoo!” AJ crowed, as his shot took out yet another zombie.
“Thriller night… So let me hold you tight and share a killer, thriller…”
“Ow!” they squealed in unison, as the last zombie dropped.
Nick turned the music down. “Okay, if we were in a zombie musical, that would have to be our closing number.”
“Nah… it’d be the one before the intermission,” AJ argued, as Riley pulled the ambulance to a stop on the side of the road. “Cause we ain’t done here yet. Cage me!” He jumped out of the back of the ambulance, dragging the dog kennel out behind him.
“Yeah,” said Nick, hopping out of the cab, “but what other zombie song is more epic than ‘Thriller’? You gotta save the best for last, dawg.”
AJ considered this for a moment, as Brian helped Kevin get the kennel ready to hoist into a nearby tree. “I dunno… I think you win there, dude. But combine an equally epic, un-zombie-related song with zombie fighting, and you’d still have a pretty sweet finale.” He ducked into the open kennel and sat down, gripping the bars with his fists. “I’ve been caged!”
Brian and the other three grabbed the ropes on the other end of the pulley and heaved, raising AJ high into the air. “What equally epic, un-zombie-related song did you have in mind?” Nick asked, as they secured the ropes to hold AJ in place.
AJ grinned and waved them off to take their places in the surrounding trees with a cryptic, “You’ll see.”
It was good to have some entertainment in the post-apocalyptic world, thought Brian, as he scaled the trunk of a tall maple, straddling one of its thicker branches. Sometimes he felt guilty for laughing or even smiling in this world, a world in which the dead walked, a world in which beautiful women and little girls died and came back to life and died again at the hands of their father. But just as he’d told the countless congregation members he’d counseled before funerals, acceptance was a part of the grief process. At some point, life went on and returned to normal. This life was far from normal, but even so, it was impossible not to laugh at Nick and AJ’s antics.
“Y’all ready?” AJ shouted from the cage. “Bring it on, bitches! Come and get me, you undead motherfuckers!”
They had cleared the area of zombies in the ambulance, but before long, his shouting brought new ones shuffling up to investigate. Just as they had every time before, the living dead clumped together beneath the cage, reaching and moaning, stepping over each other in their mindless attempts to get to their prey.
From his perch, Brian heard AJ’s singing rise above the moans. “Zombies are walkin’ under me, reachin’ way down low… Ain’t no sound but the sound of their feet, machine gun’s ready to go... Are you ready? Hey! Are you ready for this? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? Out of the trees, the bullets rip… to the sound of the beat.”
“EPIC!” Brian heard Nick yell from somewhere across the circle of zombies.
Then the hailstorm of gunfire began, as bullets rained down on the undead. “Bum bum bum… another one bites the dust!” sang AJ, as the zombies started to fall. “Bum bum bum… another ones bites the dust! And another one gone, and another one gone… another one bites the dust!” He cocked his own rifle, poking its barrel through the bars of the cage. “Hey! I’m gonna get you too! Another one bites the dust!” he belted, as he blew another zombie away.
When the dust had settled on the heap of corpses, they let AJ down. His dark eyes were bright and almost crazed, his smile twisted and maniacal. “What’d you think of my song for the undead, eh?” he asked, quite pleased with himself, as Nick opened the door to his cage.
“Like I said, dude… epic,” Nick replied, slapping him a high five.
Brian watched their interaction with a sad smile, wishing he could be so carefree, wishing he could dismiss the creatures he killed as mindless, soulless monsters. To an extent, of course, he could. It was the only way he could sleep at night, though that was often a struggle, too. But not completely. Because although they were monsters now, he could never forget that they had once been people – husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. They’d once had souls.
He respected that and remembered it, even when the others seemed to forget.
***
They ate at the club that night. Gretchen and Jo had worked on dinner all afternoon, gathering ingredients and cooking with the electricity supplied by the generators. They had provided quite a feast, spread across a large, round table in the middle of the club’s dining room. It was the first time the ten of them had sat down to a formal meal all together, with no one taking guard duty, hunting zombies, or sleeping off the night shift.
As Brian looked around the table – Gretchen beside him, Riley next to her, then Nick and AJ, Kayleigh and Howie, Jo and Gabby, and Kevin on his other side – it occurred to him again how lucky they were to be alive five weeks after the dead had risen. In another age, he might have used the word “blessed,” but not anymore. There were no blessings, no miracles, only luck. They’d gotten lucky, in surviving the initial zombie outbreak, in finding each other, and in coming together in this fortress. That luck, aided by survival skills and sheer determination, had kept them alive.
Still, he wasn’t surprised when someone suggested they say grace before their meal. It was Jo who proposed it. “I think Kevin should say the grace – if you don’t mind, of course,” she added, looking directly at Kevin. “You’re our leader. You’re the reason we’re all gathered here.”
Kevin shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Brian saw his cousin’s eyes flicker towards him. He quickly looked away. He was relieved when he heard Kevin say, “Sure. Let’s bow our heads.”
Around the circle, they joined hands and lowered their chins to their chests. Brian slipped his hands into Kevin’s and Gretchen’s, but he kept his eyes open, staring down at his lap. Beside him, Kevin cleared his throat. “Heavenly Father… we thank You for providing us this meal – and Jo and Gretchen, who prepared it for us. We thank You for shining Your light through the darkness of the past few weeks, in order to guide us through it…”
Brian glanced up. Nearly everyone else had their heads down, their eyes closed in prayer, but across the circle, AJ was staring back at him.
“…We thank You for our survival, and we pray for the souls of those who succumbed to the virus. We ask Your forgiveness for the violence we’ve been forced to commit against the undead, and we also ask that You watch over the loved ones we have lost…”
Their eyes met, and as Kevin finished his solemn prayer, an understanding passed between them.
“…In Your name, we pray. Amen.”
“Amen,” the others murmured.
“Let’s eat,” said AJ. Brian shot him a smirk across the table. Out of everyone there, he’d never expected to feel camaraderie with the tattooed atheist who had broken out of drug rehab to join them. On the exterior, they seemed as different as could be. Yet, the saying was true: opposites attract. For the third time that day, Brian was grateful for AJ’s presence.
He picked up the nearest dish to pass, and the others followed suit, filling their plates. Spunky trotted laps around the table, eagerly awaiting table scraps. The somber mood set by the prayer lifted as they started to eat, conversation flowed easily in between bites.
“We all still need to stay alert and be cautious. There may still be a few stragglers hanging out in some of the buildings,” Kevin said, “but after today, I think we’ve gotten most of them. We’ll need to finish disposing of the bodies tomorrow.”
“Ew.” Kayleigh made a disgusted face. “Can we please not talk about burning dead bodies while we’re eating?”
“Where do you think that meat you’re eating came from, Kayleigh?” asked AJ. He snickered when Kayleigh dropped her fork with a look of horror. “That’s not chicken…”
“Oh, stop,” Jo chided, trying not to smile. “It is too chicken. It came from the restaurant’s freezer. The generators kept it frozen.”
But Kayleigh ate around the rest of her chicken breast.
“It’s real good,” Brian told Gretchen pointedly. In truth, the chicken was tough and dry from being frozen so long, but he knew she and Jo had worked hard to pull off a homecooked meal.
“Really? Thank you,” Gretchen replied, beaming at his compliment.
“So what now?” Riley asked. “The base is clear, we have plenty of supplies… What’s our plan from here?” Brian could tell she was the type of person who always needed an assignment, a goal to work towards. The way she talked, she’d been a workaholic in her former life as a journalist; downtime probably wasn’t something she was used to.
He wasn’t surprised when Kevin had an answer for her. Kevin, the man with the plan. He was like Riley in that respect, always looking ahead, aiming for some target. “I think our next step needs to be broadening our search for other survivors,” he said slowly, toying with the fork in his hand. “I know we’ve broadcasted on the radio, and we’ve been outside the bare perimeter looking, but we need to do more of that. We need to extend our parameters and make sure we’ve checked everywhere. Now that the base is secure, we’ll be able to devote more time and manpower to the search.”
The others nodded in agreement. Though their group of ten had grown close in the month they’d been together, none of them liked to think they were the only ones left alive. They all held on to the hope that, somewhere, there were others like them. Kevin seemed confident that such survivors existed, but others were more skeptical.
“You know I’m down for going outside the base, but do you really think we’re gonna find anyone else, Kevin?” AJ spoke up. “I mean, I know I’m the cynic here, but seriously – it’s been a month, and we’ve heard from nobody since Brian and Gretchen showed up. And did anyone see any signs of life on their way here?”
They exchanged grim looks across the table. Finally, Jo said, “We may not have seen any signs, but we have to believe in what we can’t see. That’s what faith is all about. We have to have faith that God wouldn’t leave us alone in this undead world.”
“What about Noah, Mom?” Gabby countered. “God left him and his family alone. They built their ark, and He flooded the world and killed everyone else, except for them, right?”
Jo paused, thoughtfully rubbing the wooden beads of the rosary she wore around her neck and looking as if she didn’t know quite what to say to that. In his preaching days, Brian would have explained that God was both testing and rewarding Noah’s faith. Noah, because he was righteous and followed the Lord’s instructions, survived the flood with his family and repopulated the earth. Now he knew it was just a fable, designed to promote the sort of blind faith Jo was talking about. Be good Christian, and the Lord will save you in the end.
“It’s just a story, Gabby,” he said dully. “That’s all the Bible is, a bunch of stories people wrote a long time ago to tell you what to believe in and how to live your life.”
“Brian…” Kevin started with a warning tone, but Brian ignored him.
“There may have been a man named Noah,” he continued in a monotone, not caring who he was offending, “but there was no ark and no flood that wiped out the rest of the world. It didn’t happen.”
Gabby recoiled, her dark eyes narrowing as she frowned. “How do you know?” she challenged him. “It’s ancient history. What if a hundred thousand years from now, people read our diaries and say the world was never taken over by zombies either, that our writing is ‘just a story’?”
Brian offered a patient smile, but before he could reply, Kayleigh jumped in. “They’ve looked for the ark, Gabby, in the mountains in Turkey. They’ve never found it or any proof that it existed. I’m a Christian too, but Brian’s right – you can’t take everything in the Bible literally.”
Everyone looked at Kayleigh, surprised, as always, to hear something insightful come out of her mouth.
Before Gabby could retort again, Jo said, “Kayleigh’s right, Gabby. It goes along with what I was saying, though. Just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in it. Whether it really happened or not, the message you should believe is that the Lord shows mercy to those who are faithful.”
“Why believe in something that’s not true?” said Brian abruptly, and the heads of those who had been looking at Kayleigh whipped around to stare at him instead.
“Brian, please,” Kevin pleaded again.
“No, really,” Brian said, pushing back his chair. He stood up, his heart pumping fast and his face heating up, as he looked down at the table of nine. “The Lord shows mercy to those who are faithful? You really think that? All those zombies we killed today… you think none of them had faith when they were still human? God didn’t show them much mercy, did he?” His eyes came to rest on Jo, and though he knew he should stop talking, he let the words continue to spill out of his mouth, releasing the feelings that had been brewing inside of him for over a month. “What about your husband? He wasn’t a good Christian? God didn’t save him.”
Jo’s face had gone white. Beside her, Gabby’s eyes were filling with tears.
There was a loud crash, as Kevin’s chair toppled backwards. He had jumped up, his eyes flashing dangerously. “Shut up, Brian. Shut up now,” his deep voice demanded.
But Brian could not stop the rush of emotion that was carrying his words. “My wife and daughters were good Christians, the same as I was! You knew them, Kev; you knew they were!” he cried. “If there was a merciful God, he would have saved them, or he would have killed us all! The Lord I believed in wouldn’t have let me live and then turned my family into crazed, flesh-eating zombies that I had to kill with my bare hands!”
“Brian!”
The room blurred before him, distorted by the angry tears that stung his eyes. “I was a father!” he sobbed. “No Father would make His children do that!” He looked down at Jo again and bitterly shook his head. “How can you still believe in a merciful God? How can you still have faith in something that doesn’t exist?!”
Jo just stared at him, clutching her rosary, tears streaming silently down her cheeks. She looked deflated.
The devastation in her eyes was enough to break Brian. Heart thundering in his ears, he turned and bolted for the door. He flung it open and stormed through it, escaping into the night air.
He took off down the sidewalk, walking without any sense of direction. It was dark and quiet outside. A breeze ruffled the leaves of the nearby palm trees, and the effect was calming. He began to slow down, his pounding footsteps softening to tired shuffles. There was a lone car parked in a parking lot up ahead, and he drifted toward it. The driver’s side door was unlocked, so he slid in, slumped over the wheel, and buried his face in his arms.
With loud, racking sobs that shook his entire body, he started to weep. He wept for Leighanne and the twins, whose memory tortured him so. He wept for Jo and Gabby, whom his words had hurt so deeply. He wept for himself, though he knew he wasn’t worthy of self-pity.
Crumpled over the steering wheel, he didn’t notice the figure that crept out of the shadows, and he jumped when he heard a tap on the window. His head jerked up, his heart leaping into his throat. It slid back down in relief when he saw that it was just Gretchen.
Wordlessly, he reached across to the passenger side door and opened it for her. She slipped inside and shut it softly. “Hey,” she whispered.
His voice was a hoarse croak. “Hey.”
She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. “I told them I was gonna go and see if you were okay… but I know you’re not. Of course you’re not.”
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have lost control like that. I should never have said all those things.”
“It’s how you feel, though, isn’t it?” Her tone was understanding. “It’d been building up for a long time.”
Straightening up, he turned to her and nodded miserably. “Still… I’m better than that. Or at least I thought I was.”
She offered a sympathetic smile. “Everyone says things they regret.”
“I know. But I don’t, usually. I don’t know what came over me.”
“No one’s perfect. Grief affects people in different ways.”
Brian sniffled and shook his head. “It’s not just grief,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “I feel… lost. Like I don’t know who I am anymore. I know I lost a part of myself when I lost my family, but there’s more to it than that. I can’t explain…”
“You can try,” Gretchen encouraged. “I mean, I’m here to listen, if you want to.”
He looked away, staring out the windshield in silence. For a long pause, neither of them spoke. Then, without looking at her, he confessed, “I lied when I told you I was a music teacher. I’m not.” He could feel his heart thudding against his ribs again, but this time, it was from anticipation and apprehension, rather than anger. He had spewed forth so much verbal diarrhea that night, he had to come clean. He had to explain himself, to make her understand why. “When all of this happened, I was a Baptist minister.”
He heard her soft intake of breath and could tell he’d surprised her. “Really? Wow… I had no idea…”
“I didn’t want anyone to know. I disassociated myself from the church, from God, from all of it. I don’t believe it anymore.” He raked a hand through his hair, tugging at the ends of his disheveled curls. “All my ministry, I found myself trying explain how a God that’s supposedly so loving and merciful and all-powerful lets calamities happen to good people. Bad things have happened in my life, too, but I thought I was blessed. The Lord had always given me the strength to overcome. I was a good person, a faithful servant, and he never gave me more than I could handle. But this is too much… too much for anyone. No God would let this happen to the world he created.”
She nodded. “I understand how you feel.”
But he could tell she didn’t agree with his new beliefs. “You think I’m a bad person?” he asked. “For saying all those things… for forsaking my religion… for going against everything I’ve ever believed and preached?”
“No, of course not,” she said, so firmly that he was forced to look back at her. Her eyes locked with his. “You’re a good person, Brian. I’ve known it since the day I met you. I think… I think this all just affected you so much more because… well, you had the rug swept under you. Like you said, you lived a good life, had a perfect little family, and then it was all just taken away from you. And not in a way that would be easy for anyone to deal with. But especially someone who had always defended God, in a way, and justified His will. To have to figure out how He could let something like this happen… well, I don’t know how I’d explain it either. It still makes no sense to me.” She paused. “I think the difference between us is, you were so close to God before, you’ve taken it like a personal insult. Me, I’ve always believed… but I’ve never been all that religious. Maybe that’s why I don’t blame God.”
“I don’t blame him,” Brian said bitterly, clenching his jaw. “I blame whoever started this… the terrorists, or whoever they are. They’re to blame. Not God. Because the way I see it, there is no God.”
She touched his arm, rubbing it lightly. “I won’t argue with you. Thanks for coming clean with me. That had to have made you feel a little better, right?”
Reluctantly, he nodded. And it was true. His heartbeat was slowing again, and his chest felt a little lighter, as if a weight had been lifted. “Thanks for listening,” he whispered. “And for understanding.”
She smiled. “Anytime.”
***
They walked together back to the club, where the others had finished dinner and were cleaning up. They all stopped and looked at Brian as he walked in.
“I’m sorry,” he said at once, fixing his eyes on Jo and Gabby, in turn. “I lost my temper. What I said was completely uncalled for, and I’m sorry.” When no one spoke, he added, “I used to be religious. When I lost my family, I sort of lost my religion too. I didn’t mean to take it out on any of you, and I’m sorry for offending or upsetting you.”
He’d rehearsed what he was going to say the whole way back and decided to keep his explanation brief and vague. It had been hard enough telling Gretchen the whole story. He didn’t want to go through it again with the rest of the group, not that night. His meltdown had left him emotionally drained and mentally exhausted.
“You’re forgiven,” Jo said, but her voice was clipped, her body language stiff. He could tell she hadn’t recovered from the way he’d talked about her dead husband. Gabby, too, was still shooting him daggers. He ignored it, knowing she would need time to heal. He’d struck a raw nerve in both of them to prove his point, and he hated himself for it.
He was relieved when they finally finished cleaning up the club and headed back to the chapel. It was as hot and stuffy as ever inside, but at least he could seclude himself from the others, curl up on his makeshift bed and feign sleep until the real thing claimed him.
And that was what he did, lying awake until the sounds of the night faded away, one by one, leaving him with only his thoughts to fill the silence.
