Ben Bedard - The World Without Crows

Silence.

“The worm might have been the agency, but it was not the REASON, folks. The parasite they named the Vaca Beber was only the physical manifestation of God’s displeasure! Think of the world that was so recently destroyed. Think of it! We were destroying what God gave us to care for. We were supposed to be the caretakers of this planet, but instead, we were killing it. We were living in vice and filth! The rich kept all their money while the poor died like animals. What kind of Christians were we? What kind of people would live like that? Is it any wonder that God should look down upon us in His terrible wrath? Is it any wonder that we were judged? And that judgment was terrible. He struck us hard!”

The man’s voice had fallen to a tortured whisper. “It fell to us, the survivors of that judgment, to build another world, a just world. Oh, my fellows, my friends and neighbors, how that weighs on me!” He shook his head. “How often I think, like all of us do, why was I spared, Lord? Why am I standing here while good people like Leo and Jane here, they are not?”

The congregation held its breath in anticipation.

“No one can know the answer to that question, folks.” The man shook his long, severe head. “We do not have access to the mind of God. We cannot know what He knows.” He paused for a long time, his gaze falling over the whole crowd. “But we do know this. Folks, we do know something.”

No one moved.

“Today we live another day because people like Jane and Leo here fought to protect us. They died trying to keep us whole and safe. We don’t want no more of the world outside.” He shook his head. “No. We want to be left to ourselves. No Minutemen, no United States of blah blah blah. Just ourselves, taking care of each other like we were always supposed to do. Love your neighbors, not some damn jungle in Brazil! That’s what God wants. He wants us to be here, HERE, in this place, taking care of our own. That’s what Leo and Jane were doing out there on the bridge when they were gunned down and their bodies were horribly mutilated. That’s what they died to protect! For you. And me. And God’s plan. That’s why we’re all here today. That’s why I’m thanking God for my life, for all you folk, and for Leo and Jane. I intend to repay them with full obedience to the ideas they died to protect. We won’t be moved. No sir. Our resolve will not be diluted. We will stand independent. We will live free or we will die. And I swear to each of you this,” the man said, his voice dropping to a hiss.

“There will be vengeance,” he said. Then his voice rose high and terrible, shaking the church. “There will be Almighty Vengeance for those who seek to destroy us!”

The crowd leapt to their feet, screaming, cheering, and weeping.

Through the crowd of people, between the aisles, Eric watched the man walk toward them. He eyed Eric for a moment and then turned to the man who held them.

“Take him to the Cave,” he ordered. “Bring the females to Becky.”

Grief is more various than death. Death is simple. The heart stops, the brain ceases to function. It is the same with each human being and most animals. But the experience of death never stays the same. Grief moves, transforms, and is always unexpected. Eric was learning this in the Cave. He had seen so many people die. He had lost nearly everyone he had ever cared about. His life was surrounded by death. Eric thought he would become used to it by now.

But slumped down in his chains in the Cave, Eric could not rid his mind of Sergio’s eyes, the surprised, wide-open look he gave to the sky. Was he surprised to find himself dying? Had he seen something in those last moments to surprise him? Or was it just meaningless contortions of the face at death and it meant nothing?

He had lived with Sergio for weeks, but what did he know of him? Not much. They had rarely spoken, and when they had, it had often been practical. Did you bring the water? Do you see anything on the road? Help me with my tent. The more he thought of him, the more it seemed to Eric that Sergio had somehow become more important to him than he knew. Sergio had been a part of his life so completely, he had been nearly invisible. Now Sergio would never speak to him again. Never help him up. Never smile his way. Never scramble up a tree to scan the horizon with his binoculars. Eric would never know him any better than he did right now.

In the darkness of the Cave, he could see Sergio fishing, the shining line arcing over the river. The contented look on his face after he emerged from the river, the wet fish hung from a rope in his right hand. Sergio was never more at ease, and Eric wanted to know this man.

The grief was he never would.

What they called the Cave was a dugout basement next door to the church. Two men dragged Eric there, tugging at the rope around his wrists until they burned. They pushed him down a flight of wooden stairs. Eric fell the last few steps, stumbling forward, smelling mildew and cold, moist air. He lifted his face from the ground and spat out damp earth. One man jerked him up so roughly that Eric cried out in pain, though he meant to keep silent.

They shoved him through a brown, dirt passage shored up with boards. It was lit by hanging light bulbs shining like a yellow disease. The passage sloped down, and as he descended, he felt the air grow more stagnant. Dangling roots brushed against his face like cobwebs. Soon it seemed to Eric no living thing existed anymore. Nothing but mildew and worms.

But he was wrong.

They came to a small, square room, lit only by the light from the dirt passageway that led to it. Huddled in the corners of the room, chained to lengths of rebar stuck to blocks of buried concrete, were several people. A few of them were wearing jerseys of Boston sports teams, marking them as Minutemen. But their clothes were in rags and their faces were gaunt as skulls. The room smelled like an outhouse. Eric stumbled to his knees as a man jerked him downward to cuff him to a loop of rebar.

“Please,” one prisoner rasped near him. “Please give us water.” His voice was sand. When none of the guards said anything, he repeated, “Please.”

One of his guards, a huge man, suddenly stepped forward, and quick and brutal, smashed the prisoner down with the butt of his rifle. “I told you fuckers not to say anything,” the guard hissed. He lifted his rifle and struck the prisoner again, shattering his jaw against the cold earth.

The rest of the prisoners moaned in sympathy, but crawled closer into their shadows, cringing away from the guard.

Eric sat and said nothing.

When the guards left, Eric listened as the man who had been struck choked on his blood.

No one said anything. Eric doubted they had the strength.

So he had come to it at last. This was what he had been running from. This was what had made him avoid gangs. But it had found him anyway. Sitting in the Cave, Eric felt as if he had always known it would come to this. He was destined for this.

Eric had found his hell.

There were no guards in the Cave. They just left them chained there. There were no visits. No water. No food. Most of the prisoners were too weak to speak. One of them was already dead, the body chained uselessly to the ground. The man who had begged for water died the first night Eric spent there.

When the guards left, the Cave was darkness. Cold, utter darkness, of a kind Eric had never known. Soon light seemed to be nothing more than a memory. In the complete dark, Eric could not believe in the dazzling sun. Within hours it was hard for him to imagine he had once hiked underneath a summer sun. As the days passed and no light touched his eyes, he listened. Smelled. Felt the ground around him. With each passing hour, he felt less like a human and more like a worm. He felt like those worms baked alive on dark asphalt in summer, dried out into coils of stiff flesh.