Ambulance

Five years after society collapses, two army scouts are dragged into a conflict over a stolen ambulance, prison wine, and which cult will end up controlling the religious future of a new republic?

Two men with shaved heads and the number 11 tattooed on the back of their necks pushed their dirt-bikes between a gap in a pile of crashed cars on an abandoned highway bridge. One of them leaned his dirt-bike against a white work van that had been sandwiched between two pick up trucks. The driver`s side door of one of the trucks was open and both men looked inside and saw two dead racoons in the fetal position on the passenger`s side seat. A group of yellow jackets buzzed around the bodies and groups of them were landing on the racoon’s nose`s, disappearing into the sinus cavities, then coming out of the racoon`s mouth while they and danced about the splitting flesh of the lips and drank at the eyes, in peace, in the sun.

“We can’t eat them. Right?”

Jeremy and Edgar looked like twins because of their shaved heads and the fact they were both Portuguese and Irish. Jeremy was taller by a few inches, but Edgar had more muscle. Both were dressed in camouflage jackets with black work pants, black boots, and black backpacks on. Jeremy leaned his head into the truck and studied the bodies before shaking his head.

“They died from poisoning; they were probably eating antifreeze or something. Theres no wounds on them. Plus, we have the MRE`s and tuna, right? If you want, we could hunt for deer. There was a shitload of feral dogs around the quarry last time, Glenn shot three of them, good meat on them, no parasites.”

The road was packed with commuter traffic filled with desiccated bodies. He looked down at the river a few hundred feet below him and he could see a semi-truck and a couple dozen smashed up cars and vans that were rusting out, half filled with mud.

Jeremy reached into his left side pocket and thumbed the aspirin bottle that had two grams of cocaine and Adderall mixed inside of it. He walked around to the back of the truck, took out the bottle and the bunched-up sandwich bag that was stuffed inside it, and a brass-colored house key. He dipped the key into the powder and took a bump. He did three more after that, then pinched his nose shut and inhaled as hard as he could. He clacked his teeth together and smiled at Edgar.

“It`s a theft charge, right? Nothing else added on to it?”

Jeremy handed Edgar the bag. Edgar took four quick bumps and gagged on the last one. Edgar gave the bag and the key back to Jeremy. Edgar wiped his mouth and reached into one of his jacket pockets and brought out a piece of white paper. He unfolded it and read it out in a low, purposefully monotone voice.

“The Republic of Rhode Island grants the holder of this warrant legal authority to carry out justice for the following issue: theft of a vehicle from Cumberland farmer Ian Clark and his family. The sentence is arrest, imprisonment, and rehabilitation at the India Point Labor Center, in addition to…”

“I don’t need the rest; I just needed the charge.”

“A theft charge, though? I hate when they send us all the way out here on simple warrants. You know the guys in Squad Eight have fucking kayak patrol on the river? All they do all day is catch turtles and fish. One of them showed me a song from an acoustic guitar album he wrote while on guard duty at their ammo dump.”

“I wish we could bring a car with us. The last time we had to do this with just bikes I tried to handcuff one woman, and she bit me on the collarbone so bad I had to get four stitches when we got back to camp. Shot her and tossed her in the water behind where the Chinese buffet was.”

“Someone blew up the center of the bridge from Cumberland to Central Falls that was near the old town hall, and none of the clean-up crews have gotten anywhere near there yet. All the roads are clogged up and about a dozen people got killed last year from IED`s around there. It`s all back roads and home-made mines. The Burke brothers got blown up in a jeep over there.”

“Lieutenant is only making us do this because I guess he knows the family from before the war. He also wanted us to check on those pedophile brothers that live in the Diamond Hill State Park, the ones that make grenades for us. But thank fuck I convinced him that was too out of the way for us.”

“The clean-up crews in Providence haven’t even cleared out all of downtown yet. They aren’t going to get up here for years. If the Pulse Attack had happened at night instead of 5 o clock in the afternoon…”

Jeremy thought about the day of the first attack and how he had watched two dozen people in the Providence Public Library fall over and die at the exact same time while he had been using the computer.

Remember the old woman that was making xerox copies that fell and smashed her face on the machine? How the blood got all over the glass plate and you could see the light shooting up at it and any of the new copies that were coming out had black smears all over them? I was there printing out ticket stubs for the Max Creek show at The Met because my phone screen was cracked and I didn’t think the people at the venue would be able to scan my ticket through the email they sent me. Remember the cop that burst into the front entrance a half hour later and he pointed his gun at you because you were the only living person he had run into and he thought you had caused it somehow?

“The first summer after the attack I was stuck on ‘highway reclamation duty’. We had to be down on the highway at five in the morning, and we`d be there until it got dark out. We would use tow trucks and backhoes, and wrestle shit out of the way. On my first day, the first thing I saw was a minivan packed with dead kids. Someone counted after and there was a woman driving, and 7 kids in the van. There was a toddler in a cat sweatshirt that had fused to her body and after being eaten at by ants and whatever the fuck else got in there and ate holes in the fabric, it made her look like she was made of black lace. Lounging in their car seat, with a pair of pink sunglasses still on. Thousands and thousands of cars full of bodies. We`d roll them into the old hospital parking lot and the heavy machinery crew would smash them down after their parts were stripped out. After a while they took me off highway duty, and I got put dealing with helping to cremate the bodies.”

“I heard you guys dumped them in the bay, I didn’t know you would burn them.”

“It was like 50/50. I saw them put a whole bus into the water packed up with bodies once. But I spent all my time in the fire pits. Rolling people into a pit of gasoline and throwing a Molotov cocktail at them. One guy that worked there would ladle out the fat of the burning bodies to keep things burning evenly if they hadn’t dropped off our gas supply for the day. After a bit my main job got to be dealing with the dozens of dogs constantly showing up and eating and fucking each other around the perimeter of the parking lot we did all the burning in. The one-eyed man in charge of the gasoline would play ZZ Top all the time and he and I would eat ten strips of acid and fuck around with the homemade flamethrower he had rigged up. Twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. One time I stayed up for two days straight because one of the guys on the crew showed up with an ounce of molly.”

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They got to the end of the bridge and Jeremy could see the giant pentagram that someone had spray painted onto the front of an apartment building. In the front yard of the house a seven-foot-tall cross made of 2x4`s had a dozen people’s names written on it in black or red magic marker. Edgar put his bike up on its kickstand before walking over to the monument. He put his hand on the wood and turned back to Jeremy.

“Is this new? I was out here about a year ago doing a supply drop off and this shit wasn’t here.”

Jeremy put up his kick stand and took a plastic canteen from an olive-colored satchel that was attached to the side of the bike. He took a sip of water and tossed the canteen to Edgar.

“This is why we’re here. You know Tommy, the officer from the motor pool? Has the weird black and bleached blonde hair?”

Edgar nodded as he drank.

“People buried here are his family, and the two assholes were going to meet today are his cousins. He was telling me about it at the last full moon party we had. Did a couple lines with him and he went off. His two uncles moved out here with their families to work with the forward scouts. They said they were going to build a check point on the bridge, then build up this building with solar panels, a garden, a water purification center, a whole bunch of stuff. Tommy said everything was fine for about six months, he`d come out here and check on them, bring them board-games, candy. He said they had a whole bunch of potatoes and rhubarb growing and they gave him a bag of veggies for him to take back to the city with him.”

Edgar pointed up at the pentagram on the side of the apartment building and Jeremy nodded.

“Yeah, everything was fine until the checkpoint got attacked. One of the uncles gets killed, both aunts are killed, a few of the kids die from their wounds. After that, the surviving uncle barricaded everyone inside the apartment building and started drinking a half gallon of home brewed booze a day. Tommy showed up a few times and tried to get inside until he got shot at with a shotgun and told to mind his business. A couple of weeks later one of his cousins got picked up by one of our patrols on the highway, screaming and ranting about electricity.”

Edgar shook his head and tossed the canteen back to Jeremy. Jeremy packed it away and smelt weed smoke as Edgar lit a joint. He offered it to Jeremy, but he refused.

‘Electricity?”

“The uncle started to tell all the kids how they had killed his brother. How since they had never been to confession, they had clogged up the walls of the apartments with sin, and now it was turning all their insides black and rotting them out one at a time. He made them dig an eight-foot-deep hole in the dirt basement of the building and line it with tarps, while he would go down to the river and fill up buckets of water by himself. Brought enough water back to fill the hole after a few days and he started putting the kids in it and praying over them. One of the younger kids started to cry after being left alone to float in the dark so the uncle drags a generator into the basement, strips an extension cord, and makes the kid plug it in while they are still in the water, in front of the rest of the family. After that he pulls the body out of the water, then jams the cord down the kid’s throat while he bites their face so bad the cheekbones were showing. Killed three more of the kids that night before one of them managed to escape.”

Edgar looked up at the pentagram and nodded at it.

“I heard something about someone killing kids in the woods, but I didn’t know it was out here.”

“Tommy came back out here and found them all dead. The uncle shot himself in the head and had a bunch of bible verses written on his chest and legs with red marker. Tommy buried them all in the front yard and made that cross. He said after that he tried to burn the building down, but it wouldn’t catch, the whole back of is burnt out now. Two of his cousins lived near-by and they`re the ones that got their shit stolen. Tommy and I got all fucked up near the river downtown a couple weeks ago and he was giving me line after line and bawling his eyes out. He threw a samurai sword he had with him into the water and then almost drowned trying to get it back out.”

Edgar walked up to the cross and read the names. He exhaled a mouthful of smoke up at the cloudless blue sky.

“So how did we end up here? Why aren’t Tommy`s crew helping him?”

“He offered me a quarter ounce of coke as a bonus. He trusts us.”

Edgar laughed and shook his head.

“So where are they meeting us? Here?”

“The cemetery on Scott Road. I told Tommy to tell them we would be by sometime around noon.”

Jeremy checked his watch at it was a quarter `till noon.

Edgar licked the tips of his fingers and put out the joint he had been smoking. He walked back over to his bike, raised the kick stand, and started walking it again. Jeremy did the same and the two of them looked up as a group of crows flew over them and landed on the telephone lines.

“Do you know what got stolen?”

“A car, or a truck.”

Jeremy looked up at the smashed out second floor windows of an apartment as he pushed his bike. There was a Christmas tree in the corner of the room that birds were flying in and out of.

I haven’t been up here in a while. He thought as he muscled the bike over a crack in the curb

Not After they stopped doing the regular northern patrol when we found those people crucified at the casino.

______________________________________________________________________________

They pushed their bikes in front of the old yankee style cemetery and looked around. The town fire-station was on the opposite side of the cemetery, and Jeremy was scanning the windows when he heard somebody whistle. A pair of red-haired men with freckles were crouching behind a marble headstone. The man on the left put both his hands in the air and walked towards Jeremy.

“Are you with The Republic forces? You know the Lieutenant?”

“Yeap. You`re Tommy`s cousins?”

Jeremy took the paper with the warrant to investigate out of his pocket and held it up in the air.

“Somone stole something from you? A truck?”

The taller of the two men stood up and reached his hand out to Jeremy. Jeremy shook it.

“Sorry for…for being jumpy. I`m Ian, this is my brother Connor. Just wanted to make sure it was you, just in case somebody was trying to rob us, ya know?”

Jeremy nodded at both men, then pointed at the warrant.

“So, somebody stole your truck? Any idea who did it?”

“Well, it`s an ambulance, not a truck. About three weeks since it happened, and another week after that was when we reported it, but yeah, we fucking know who has it.”

“An ambulance?”

“We converted it to use for hauling stuff around. Been renting it out the other folks trying to grow shit around here when we don’t need it. One night this group of a dozen or so people shows up, pointing guns at us, screaming they needed it for ‘The Mirrored God’ and that “if we were sick of being slaves’, we could find them in the woods behind the old elementary school. I gave them the keys and they made some weird sign with their hands at us before they left. We followed them down the road a bit, but they slipped into the woods.”

“The mirrored god?”

The two brothers looked back and forth at each other. Ian crossed himself and shook his head back and forth.

“Our father taught us all about communion and the gift of absolution before he went to heaven himself. One of the coyote meat traders that comes through here told us a few days ago he`s been hearing a lot of things about people out in the woods. Said he met an AWOL Militia man that said he got five hundred hits of LSD and twenty pounds of dried meat because he gave a woman with a bunch of eyes tattooed on her face his rifle, all his ammo, a bullet proof vest, and four grenades. Met another man who said he was hunting deer when he came across seven men in a stream wearing all white and building a table.”

“Building a table? In the stream?”

Ian shrugged.

“He said he was stalking a group of white tail deer, off one of the old state trails, when he saw the deer start running the opposite way they had been heading in for the last mile or two. Said he looked down a hillside and saw seven men in what he figured was linen, all of them switching between laughing and singing, hammering together a wooden table. He watched them for an hour before they took out a mirrored box from a trash bag they had with them. They all got silent and stared at the box until they all started screaming together at it. They did this for about a half hour, then they all left, laughing and joking again.”

“And you think those are all the same group?”

“I think there are a bunch of different groups like that out here. Worshipping…a mirror, or something like that. One night the two of us were fishing up at the reservoir and we heard a bunch of singing and chanting and wailing from the opposite side of the water. Had to have been at least a few dozen people. One night at the house I went to get some firewood and I found a cheap mirror left on the seat of one of our ATV`s.”

“And they told you they`re behind the school?”

“Yeah. And that’s the same area that hunter saw them in.”

Jeremy turned and looked down the suburban street. One of the houses had burned down, another one`s roof had a gaping hole in it and birds were flying in and out of it.

“How far is the school from here? A mile?”

“More like a half mile. The auditorium and the cafeteria collapsed after they got torched, but a lot of the classrooms are still standing. If we`re hunting or fishing sometimes we`ll camp out there. There used to be a shitload of canned pears in the basement, but I don’t know if they got stolen or not.”

“What are you paying us?”

Ian`s smile started to fade away. He looked at his brother then back at Jeremy.

“Are you serious? I thought since my cousin was…”

Jeremy cut him off.

“You think we drove up here for free? You think we`re cops? We didn’t even name a price yet, why are you getting upset?”

Connor and Ian looked at each other and nodded. Connor pointed at a house across the street from the cemetery.

“You fuck with Pruno at all?”

Jeremy`s face lit up. He sat down on the edge of one of the tombstones.

“Is that what you guys have been doing up here? Making prison wine? Are you growing your own fruit?”

Ian took out his cell phone and opened his picture gallery and handed the phone to Jeremy. It was seven different pictures of a giant pile of apples, with Connor standing next to it, giving a double thumbs up.

“You two are growing this? How much did you get in a season?”

Edgar looked over Jeremy`s right shoulder and then took the phone from him.

“It`s not us. You know Ghost Farms, on Diamond Hill Road? They used to sell apple pies and pumpkins and local honey, all that shit, before the war?”

“Yeah, my brother worked there back in the day during the fall, making cider, picking apples, all that. They give us a shipment of food every month.”

“The owner`s daughter survived the attacks and she and her husband have been replanting their orchards. We were breaking into the old veterinarians at the same time as they were, almost shot each other, but I recognized her from high school. They paid us to help them divert a stream last spring and I made a joke about making booze with the apples and that turned into them giving us a shitload to use for brewing.”

“What about the sugar?”

“Got about two hundred pounds of it in our basement. There was a tractor trailer that tipped over about two miles from here. We brought everything back here and stashed it.”

Jeremy stood up from the tombstone he was sitting on.

“Twenty-five gallons and you get your shit back. That, or I go down there and tell those cultists you are planning to kill all of them, that you and your brother bought guns from us to attack you with, that we saw grenades. You don’t have to give us everything today, but…”

“My cousin told me you wouldn’t pull this kind of SHIT! That’s the whole reason I told him instead of paying off one of the fucking crackheads in the woods around here to go steal my shit back!”

For a second Jeremy thought about shooting Ian and Connor and digging up one of the old graves and putting them in it. Stomping down on the grass with his boots to smooth it all out. Or if he cut off their heads with a hatchet and used the pocketknife that he kept with him to peel out the meat and muscle under, in, and around their eyes, and leave it on one of the gravestones and sit and stare at and chain smoke cigarettes.

Ian put his hand on Connor`s right shoulder.

“Old Jackie and Young Jackie spent how fucking much last fall after they set up their farm? The guy with the eye patch? Pay them.”

Connor turned towards Ian and then looked back at Jeremy.

“Listen to your brother, Connor. It`s just prison wine.”

Jeremy stood up from the gravestone he had been sitting on and held out his hand to Connor. The two of them shook.

“I don`t want these assholes to know we`re coming, so I`m gonna leave the dirt bikes here. If we don`t come back within two days, tell your cousin what happened the next time he comes through on patrol.”

Jeremy crouched down, peering over a green Toyota Corolla that was parked inside of a two-door garage. The right side of his face pressed up against the metal of the car and then he stood up high enough to get a look at the road. He couldn`t see anybody, but he and Edgar could hear dogs barking. They had heard them a few minutes before and had run into the garage and laid flat on the concrete.

“You don`t see anything?” Edgar whispered up from the dark.

“Shh”

Jeremy waved his hand at him and kept staring at the house across the street. A yellow ranch house with white curtains that kicked up in the breeze and he thought he had seen the shape of a person slip into the kitchen.

The shape of a person, with a rifle on their back. He thought as he kept staring straight ahead.

“What if we go out the back? The garage has a connecting door to the house.”

Jeremy didn’t answer. He kept looking at the kitchen window. The wind blew the curtain far enough for him to see a German Sheppard nosing around in a trash can. He could see it was wearing a vest with the number ten spray painted on the side of it.

“Theres a dog in the house across from us. It might have on a bullet proof vest.”

“Time to go.”.

“Shut UP and wait. If anybody comes out of the house…”

Jeremy took out a small pair of green binoculars from his breast pocket, but they didn’t help. Jeremy saw the dog amble out of the front door, then towards the backyard of the house. He stood up and walked over to the door that joined the house to the garage. He tried the handle, but it was locked.

Edgar pushed himself up off the floor and tried the lock himself.

“What now?”

A gunshot blew a fist sized hole a foot above the door handle, and Jeremy was confused enough for a second to think Edgar had done it before another series of shots went off and one of them shattered the glass of the driver`s side window of the Corolla. Another burst of shots and Jeremy dropped to the floor, and he almost pulled a muscle in his neck as he slammed down.

“EDGAR?”

He saw Edgar`s body slumped face first against a pile of trash bags in the corner of the garage. Jeremy could see half the skull was missing, and that blood was pouring from a second wound in his neck.

“YOU FUCKS!”

Edgar`s blood drained onto the floor and Jeremy could feel it started to soak his pants. He was looking back at the door to the house when he heard someone on a megaphone begin to shout at him.

“WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED! THROW YOUR GUN OUT HERE AND WE CAN TALK!”

“YOU JUST KILLED A MILITA PATROLMAN, YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!”

Jeremy felt stupid yelling the last sentence out. He felt like he was yelling at some audience from a church basement stage that was laughing at him for trying to sound tough. He was about to yell again when someone smashed down the door from the garage to the house. He tried to roll onto his side and get a shot off, but a man in a black motorcycle helmet and a bulletproof vest booted his gun from his hands, while another man pointed a shotgun at his face.

“Militia?”

Jeremy felt himself being flipped onto his stomach and handcuffed. He tried to resist, but someone drove their knee into the center of his back and the pressure of that against the concrete floor made it feel like his rib cage would burst. Two more people grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him out of the garage and onto the driveway.

“MILITIA?”

“Eleventh…Recon under Lieutenant Lopez. You…”

A man with long black hair squatted down on his hands and knees and looked at Jeremy in the face.

“I thought you stopped coming out this far after the awakening at the casino. Or that’s what we heard, at least.”

Someone rolled Jeremy onto his back, and three people with black bandanas on their faces looked down at him. One of them had a shotgun aimed at him. He felt the wetness of Edgar`s blood soaked into his pants up to the waist on his left side.

“You going to say anything else, or are we going to shoot you and toss you back in that garage with your buddy? If you`re just going to start repeating your name and rank over and over, then don`t waste our time.” The man with the red hair said as he lightly tapped Jeremy in the stomach with his foot.

“We got a report about a stolen truck from those two brothers that live at the cemetery. Said you were fucking up their deliveries.”

The red-haired man and the three men with him started to laugh together.

“A truck, huh? THEIR deliveries? Those two fuck ups calling US the weirdos, huh? That’s fucking good. I haven’t laughed like that in a bit. I knew they were going to call their fucking cousin.”

Jeremy locked eyes with the man with the shotgun and tried not to start shaking.

“And what are they paying you with, huh? Knowing those cheap pieces of shit there`s no way its cash. Must be that fucking prison wine. They paying you in booze or what?”

“Booze. Twenty five bottles to get the truck back. If you let me go now, I`ll give you all of that, plus the dirt-bike I have back at their camp.”

All of them started to laugh again. The red-haired man knelt back down and got in Jeremy`s face.

“You know what happens tomorrow? Do you know where we are? You don’t, do you? We failed at the casino, but tomorrow, The Ritual starts. This time the aspect of Venus WILL make their appearance; we WILL see THROUGH the mirror and you and all your useless friends in the city will dissolve away.”

Jeremy felt his shoulders tighten up and he thought the person with the shotgun was going to shoot him until he was lifted onto his feet. He felt the shotgun against his back, each barrel a train tunnel pressing into him. The man with the freckles stood in front of Jeremy and pointed down the road.

“Our camp is about ten minutes from here. If The Reverend doesn’t want you, then you can take us to your dirt-bike.”

“Want me for what? You`ll have about three days to get the fuck out of this town before the other recon people come looking for us. They`re going to cut off your reverend`s head and jam their dicks in its mouth until the teeth shoot out of it. Take the bike. Let me go and I go back to Providence and tell them I didn’t see shit.”

A shorter blonde man took a step closer to Jeremy.

“What kind of dirt bike is it? Do you know what year or model?”

Jeremy went to answer, but he felt somebody push him from behind.

“Jordan, are you KIDDING? Who gives a fuck about a DIRT BIKE? Tonight is the full moon, and Reverend said if we couldn’t find anyone tonight then we`d have to wait another month.”

Jeremy felt another shove and he started to walk across the driveway.

“What have they been saying about The Mirrored God in Providence?”

The red-haired man looked at Jeremy with a broad smile.

“I don’t know…I`m not really…religious so I might…I might have missed out on the news.”

Jeremy thought about the Baptist triplets that had lit themselves on fire on the train tracks of the old Providence Station three years ago and having to help clean it up because the security crew bribed him with two ten-strips of acid and a new bandana. The man with the red hair laughed out loud.

“Reverend told us about when your President Heath sent a gold crossbow with a wolf etched on the side of it, but he threw it in the river because he doesn’t take payment from useless little whores. He isn’t a pimp. He said when he heard that you people take orders from a WOMAN it made him want to throw up blood.”

Jeremy spit on the ground and kept quiet.

“Once you can let that whore and your old life go, things will be so much easier for you in the new worlds to come.”

A breeze went through the air and the overgrown trees surrounding the abandoned neighborhood groaned.

“Two dirt bikes. Me and the dead man`s. Uncuff me and…”

His vision went black as he felt a wool bag being put over his head. Somebody slipped their arm around his right arm as he tried to stop himself from hyper-ventilating.

As soon as they took the bag from his head, Jeremy could smell meat cooking over a fire. After a few seconds he could tell it was dog. The first time he had ever eaten it he had kept thinking about his springer spaniel from when he was a kid, but after the first few bites it had tasted like KFC but with more grease and he was into it. He saw a dozen people crowded around him holding wooden spears with handguns stuffed into simple leather pouches that hung from their belts. Two women had half of their faces painted red and they were aiming arrows at him. He put his hands over his head and cleared his throat.

“We all know about the deportation orders, but I don’t give a fuck about that. We were contacted about a stolen truck, but I care even fucking less about that. If you let me go, for your troubles, there`s two dirt-bikes that you can keep. When I go back to Providence, I`ll tell them I didn’t see shit. Nothing has to change.”

Somebody punched him in the back of the head and the crowd started to laugh. Two men in jean overalls grabbed him and started dragging him forward as the crowd parted in the middle. A voice started to scream into his right ear.

“THE LAST TIME YOU PEOPLE CAME AROUND HERE YOU SAWED OFF BRUCIE`S HANDS AND KICKED HIM INTO THE RIVER. NEVER AGAIN!”

Jeremy looked around the campsite and saw about two dozen tents set up in a circle. Some of them were domed camping tents, others were pop-up shade covers like you would see at a beach or an outdoor barbeque. One group of tents was set away from the main circle, and he watched as a man underneath one of the pop-ups put a flame seared dog head onto a wooden cutting board and split it in half with a meat clever so fast that the two halves stayed in place for a few seconds before each tipping to one side. Another man had laid a raccoon corpse on its side and had cut the stomach open over a wooden picnic table, the intestines were sliding into a black plastic trash can as the man smoked a cigarette and scratched at his right eyebrow with his thumb. Jeremy was pushed along through the ring of tents, towards the middle of the campsite, past a six-man Coleman tent with an American flag hung on the side of it with a home-made stitch in it that connected all the stars with a line of rough rope. He was focusing on the flag when something reflected in his eyes and blinded him for a second. The man on his right leaned close to his ear and whispered.

“Don`t try to lie to her. Don`t you fucking dare dream of it.”

Jeremy heard windchimes and saw a white marble statue of an eight-foot-tall woman wearing an ancient Greek helmet. It was in the middle of the circle of tents, and he could see more people showing up to stare at him. Two men with wooden spears were sharing a cigar and laughing at him as they pointed. The statue had bits of crushed multicolored glass that covered the eyes. The piece of glass in the exact middle of the right eye had a tiny red dot of paint in the middle of it. Three dead wild turkeys had their feet tied together hung from a steel chain that was looped around the statue’s right wrist. A red snare drum was tied to the left hand, and it spun in the breeze. The same guard leaned in again.

“She hates liars. She hates them so fucking bad.”

Three circular black oak tables were around the statue; two of the tables were covered in flickering candles, the third had animal jaw bones, small bundles of flowers mixed with sticks that were tied with red ribbons, a severed coyote head that had Kennedy fifty cent coins were the eyes had been, hundreds of dollars in paper bills, several bags of white powder, three glass wine jugs filled with acorns and dry seeds Jeremy didn’t recognize, and three bleached white human skulls. The two men let goof Jeremy`s arms.

“She`ll hear your case.”

Jeremy looked up into the glass eyes and thought about being in the Museum Of Fine Arts in Boston before the attacks. He thought about his mother posing next to the giant statue of Aphrodite for a picture while his Dad sat down on one of the benches and winked at him as he ate a pack of almonds he had smuggled inside his jacket. He thought about when he knocked their front door down after The Attack in 2020 and seeing their bodies on the couch, ants and wasps crawling from his mother`s mouth and up out through her nose and around the room with a low hum, flies crawling over the inside of his father`s glasses and lips.

“Do you know who that is?”

Jeremy felt someone put a hand on his right shoulder and he turned around. A balding black-haired man with glasses and a horizontal scar under his right eye stared at Jeremy. He reminded Jeremy of a reverend from the 1800s who had seen his son killed by a fever. His blue eyes had a tinge of grey to them. The man pointed at the statue.

“I`m Reverend Kevin, but do you know who THAT is?”

Jeremy pictured his mother in the picture again. He thought of her laughing. He heard the hornet`s buzz as they were eating her sinus cavity in front of the family pictures on the wall.

“It`s Athena, right? They had one in Boston that…”

Jeremy turned to look at the statue, but the man grabbed his shoulder again.

“Do NOT speak to her yet, speak to ME.”

“I`m with The Militia. I was asked to come here to get back a stolen truck, but I already told your people that if they let me leave, you can have two dirt bikes, and my assurance that…”

“You can lie to me but don`t lie in front of HER!”

Kevin took a .38 revolver from a holster and held it at his side.

“We tried to work with your ‘people’ last spring, and they KILLED my sister`s boyfriend. Didn`t bring in enough SLAVES for you pieces of shit and...”

The man put both his hands up and laughed. Jeremy`s eyes locked on the gun and he felt himself almost starting to shake.

“Why am I letting you get me upset in front of her?”

“Take the bikes, I`ll walk out of here, you guys are far enough north that nobody is gonna give a fuck what you do out here for a while. I know I don’t.”

One of the men that had dragged him over to the statue handed him a stack of papers that had been stapled together on the left side. The front page said, ‘THE MIRRORED GOD, REVELATIONS IN THE RIVER”.

Jeremy looked down at it, then up at Kevin and the two guards.

Jeremy opened to the first page and started to read. He could see it was a printout from a computer message board from a post from 2006 from someone named Arson Daily.

“READ IT OUT LOUD! LET HER HEAR YOU!”

Jeremy looked down and started to read from the top of the page.

“I never wanted to hurt…”

Reverend Kevin pulled the hammer back on his gun.

“LOUDER!”

“I never…wanted to hurt anybody, all I have ever wanted to do with the energy afforded to me through my relationship with nature was try to…foster a belief system in people that if they work hard to put a positive energy into the world…they can receive back in a physical form. The first time I summoned the river spirit was when I was ten years old.”

Jeremy felt his mouth start to dry up a bit around his lips. He heard more windchimes from behind him.

“When I tried to tell my grandfather, he beat me for lying. When I tried to tell my grandmother, she believed me, but beat me for consorting with a devil beyond my understanding. This was before my grandparents’ deaths from cancer related to them being cursed by Apollo, but after the first time I was able to construct The Speaking Cube within a river. The purpose of this book is to teach every person on the face of the earth how they can harness any three foot deep running body of water to bring forth the spirit known to the current human race as Athena”

“ENOUGH.”

Jeremy saw the crowd of people around him getting closer. The two men from earlier that had dragged him now had guns with them. Another man had a wheelbarrow that was filled with plywood. Jeremy watched as Kevin walked over to the back of a red pickup truck and picked up a three foot by three-foot mirror inside of a black frame. He walked over to Jeremy and shoved it into his arms.

“I can hear it in your voice already. That this is going to be a waste of time for all of us. But we do her bidding, and everyone gets a fair trial. You see that gap in the tree line over there?”

Kevin pointed to Jeremy`s left at a break in the group of trees they were inside of.

“We`re going to head over to a stream now. You`ll have two hours to read the scriptures and figure out how to use the box. If you don’t…the goddess has willed you to be…”

Automatic machine gun fire broke out and one of the men standing next to Jeremy had his lower jaw blown off. Jeremy saw the sun reflect in the spit that blew out of the man`s mouth. A woman to his right dropped to the ground and rolled to her left, clutching at her collar bone and screaming until another bullet entered in through her right eye and splashed her brains out all over an ant colony on the forest floor. Kevin ran towards the tents, and Jeremy dropped to the ground and lay on his stomach. He saw three men with blonde hair and blue eyes wearing black bullet proof vests with drab olive-green army uniforms. One of them swept his rifle in Jeremy`s direction and he flinched as he thought he was about to be shot in the face. The bullets went over him, and he heard screaming from a tent behind him. He looked back at the men in the bullet proof vests in time to see one of them get shot in the neck and the other two try to help him as he bled out and seized in their arms under a tent with a smiling face of a sun on it. He saw a blue Dodge Caravan to his right, parked between two tents, and he crawled on his stomach towards it. He felt his neck knot up and whenever more gunfire rang out; he felt his thighs and his arms rattle.

“YOU WON`T TAKE HER FROM US!” He heard someone scream from behind him and fire an automatic weapon.

“SHE IS IN THE PROPHECY; SHE HAS BEEN ALIVE FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS!”

Jeremy pulled himself underneath the car and crawled up, so he was laying under the middle of it. He saw two sets of legs with black combat boots and army uniforms run by. He laid flat on his stomach and didn’t move. He was about to crawl out from under the front of the car when he looked to his left and saw a man in a red sweatshirt step out from behind the open passenger door of a car and fire at four people running through the tents. He stepped out in a low crouch, but someone shot him in the face, and he fell backwards into the door and slammed it shut. Jeremy thought he heard Kevin yelling something, but he couldn’t be sure it was him. He wriggled out from under the front bumper of the car and almost lost his balance as he stood up and started to run. He felt a bullet pass by his left arm, and he ran forward towards a blue box truck with a splintered wind shield. He pressed himself against the left side and pictured the statue`s glass shard eyes when a bald man with a shotgun stepped from around the back of the truck and aimed it at Jeremy`s chest.

“You`re the one they just brought in? Who are you with? Put your hands above your HEAD!”

He thought about lying for a second as he raised his hands.

“Militia.”

Jeremy looked at the shotgun barrels and hoped he would get shot in the head or the heart and not in the stomach or lungs.

“Have you found it in your heart to accept that Joesph Smith is the Prophet? That he is going to end war for all of us?”

Jeremy could feel how fake his smile looked. He pictured an infomercial for the Church of Latter-Day Saints he had to sit through when he was a kid. They used to show it on TV between episodes of Star Trek. He remembered his history teacher trying to explain having multiple wives.

“My uncle Tom was Mormon, he wanted to talk to me about faith the next time he came to my parent`s house on summer vacation, but this was 2020…and the Pulse Attack happened…”

Jeremy didn’t have any uncles, just three aunts. He had never lived in a house, just a series of different apartments around northern Rhode Island and briefly in Attleboro, Massachusetts.

He heard screaming in short bursts. Somewhere to his left a woman was shouting in Spanish.

The man with the shotgun jammed the gun into Jeremy`s ribs.

“Turn around and head into the woods. We have a base near here, we can talk about your president and what she owes to God after this.”

Jeremy nodded and pointed at the statue in the distance.

“If you get me back to the patrol check point I`m heading to in Lincoln, you could talk to the president today, if we get the fuck out of here. It`s less than an hour from here by dirt bike on the old highway to Providence.”

Bullets sunk into the door of the truck they were standing in front of. The passenger side window exploded.

Jeremy and the bald man started running through the half circle of cars and trucks. The heat had risen into the low 90`s and Jeremy could feel beads of sweat leaking into his eye. He felt his heart pounding in his chest, and he felt like he was going to throw up a stream of straight bile. The bald man stopped running and pressed himself against a blue ford van when Jeremy heard the crackle of someone yelling into a megaphone.

“THIS IS THE RHODE ISLAND VATICAN REGIMENT. UNDER THE ORDERS OF POPE IGNACIUS, COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP! YOU ARE ALL APOSTATES AND WITH GRACIOUS GODS WILL IF YOU SURRENDER NOW, YOU MIGHT STILL KNOW SALVATION ON EARTH AND IN HEAVEN!”

Jeremy watched the bald man rub his face with his left hand and bang his head against the van three times. He looked over at Jeremy.

“I thought we lost them. We were scouting out a boat wreck down on the river, looking for guns, when they come out of the woods with a giant cross and demanded we give them everything we have and join up with their pope. One of my men shot one of theirs with an arrow and we ran back in the woods. BUT THAT WAS DAYS AGO!”

The megaphone made a screeching feedback noise, and the voice started again. Jeremy could see the man with the megaphone through a gap in the tents. He was wearing a white zip-up sweatshirt that had blood all over the front of it.

“COME OUT NOW WITH YOUR HANDS UP AND YOU WILL BE…”

More gun fire cut through the air. Jeremy watched two men with AR-15 rifles fire on the man with the megaphone from the side of a jeep. The man with the megaphone sat down on the ground, tilted to his left, and tipped over as he bled out from a wound to his heart. Blood spilled out of his mouth, onto the ground. He saw more people on dirt bikes driving around the circle of cars. Jeremy crouched down and then crawled underneath the van he had been leaning against. The bald man grabbed at his leg, and he kicked at it.

“Get under here, motherfucker! Get DOWN!”

Jeremy kicked at the man`s hands as he tried to pull Jeremy out by his left leg. He kicked again when he heard a gun shot and saw the man fall dead on the ground, shot through his right temple. His eyes were locked on Jeremy as he heard a different voice on the megaphone.

“THIS IS THE FORWARD SCOUT GROUP OF THE ARMY OF THE PROPHET JOSEPH SMITH. WE ORDER THE VATICAN REGIMENT TO DENOUNCE THE PAPACY AND PRAY TO GOD FOR SALVATION!”

Jeremy looked up from his hiding spot under the van and watched as a dozen men in police riot gear marched into the middle of the circle. They had riot shields spray painted white, with red crosses drawn onto them. Some of them are wearing white zip up sweatshirts, others have on white t shirts. Behind them, hidden in the cars and trucks, he could see more people in white sweatshirts aiming rifles and handguns. A second group of people ran out from the circle of cars, directly at the first group. The men with the shields held up against the initial rush, but Jeremy watched their formation fold when two of the center shield men were shot in the legs and the second group pushed through them. He saw a woman in a flannel shirt stab a man in a white shirt through the right side of his neck with a hunting knife and start smashing his head against the ground once she couldn’t get the knife out. A man in white dropped his shield and shot a man between the eyes before another man smashed in the left side of his skull with a sledgehammer so hard he fell on one knee and almost lost his balance before he was shot through the left side of his cheek. The bullet blew out eight of the men`s teeth, with the muscle from his upper palette. Jeremy watched his stand up straight and fall again as he tried to shove his hand in his mouth and stop the bleeding before he was shot in the back of the head and fell face first onto the ground. A man in white held a shield over a red-haired woman`s face and angled the corner to come down on the bridge of her nose. He could see the heels of her boots driving into the dirt, kicking it up and mucking it around while she swatted at the shield. After the eighth blow to her face, her hands fell to her sides and her whole body seized up and shook from side to side and the man with the shield threw it away and shot a man that had charged at him in the stomach with a Glock he had pulled from a holster on his right hip. A bleached blonde Asian man with the number nine tattooed on his right temple had his knees on the chest of a Spanish teenage boy and was stabbing him in the face with a screwdriver. The tip came down on the boy`s right eye socket and shattered it. He tried to reach up at his eye as the blonde man jammed the screwdriver into the boy`s left eye. The boy rolled his right side, and the man stood over him, stabbing at his nose and his lips and screaming something at him Jeremy couldn’t hear until he threw the screwdriver down and was hit in the ribs with a crowbar by one man and shot in the heart with a .38 revolver by another. A green haired man was on the ground choking out another man with what Jeremy guessed was either an extension cord or a section of cable. There was one woman on the outskirts of the circle of cars that was aiming an arrow, but before she could shoot it someone shot her in the chest and she crawled towards the woods, randomly reaching her right hand straight up and looking towards the sky. The men with shields tried to reform the half-dozen of them left alive, but one of them was bleeding from a giant open wound above his left eye and he passed out face first. A girl Jeremy figured was no older than twelve picked up a knife and stabbed a man in the back of his leg and wrench the knife around in a circle until she was shot in the left side of the head and collapsed with blood leaking from her mouth. Jeremy was watching the woman`s mouth open and close repeatedly as she tried to catch her breath when he saw the grenade land next to her head. He let out a small yipping noise as he drove his palms into the ground and used them to push himself backwards as he wriggled his hips. He closed his eyes and buried his face in the dirt as the explosion happened. He felt the concussive blast in his throat as he tasted dirt in his mouth and over the back of his head and he wondered if he would die instantly or have brain damage from a hole blown open in his skull and if he would wander around laughing and clapping his hands up at the sun and the moon until an infection rotted his brain and coyotes ate his body. The heat flew over the back of his head, and he felt his stomach knot up as he thought about the car above him exploding.

I think I`m outside of the circle. He thought as he tilted his head up to look back towards the open area where everyone had been fighting. His ears were ringing, but he could make out people screaming around him. The first thing he saw was a man`s torso that had no head, no right arm from the shoulder down, and no left leg from the hip down. A torso with no legs, no arms, but with the head attached was next to that body and it was leaning up at an angle so that it was looking towards Jeremy. He crawled backwards and his legs were halfway out from under the car, and he was silently repeating to himself that he couldn’t believe he could move when he heard someone yell at him.

“WHO THE FUCK IS UNDER THERE? COME OUT NOW!”

Jeremy felt someone pull at his left leg and he rolled onto his back to see Reverend Kevin pointing an AR-15 at him

“Mr. Militia! And they say God doesn’t have a fucking sense of humor! Stay here, motherfucker!”

Kevin eyed Jeremy up and down, then looked over his shoulder. He walked over to the edge of the open circle and opened fire. Two men came out from inside of a tent, and Kevin shot both four times each in the head. When he came back to Jeremy, he was shaking his head.

“This is technically your fucking fault, you know. Before I threw that grenade, I thought about how they could have found us, and they must`ve seen us bringing you in.”

Kevin looked to his left, trying to see the source of a woman screaming, but he ignored it and looked back down at Jeremy.

“We need to finish the test. We need to get you down to the river and see…”

Kevin aimed the gun at Jeremy`s head.

“We`re going to need soldiers for the crusade, and if God allowed you to survive this, then maybe we can…”

“Take the fucking bikes and get the fuck out of here before their back up comes, I`ll stay on the highway and look for a patrol and we`ll both be set.”

Kevin looked confused.

“What TRUCK? We took an AMBULANCE from those fuck up brothers, but no truck. I bet they didn’t tell you what was in the back of it? I bet they didn’t tell you about the fucking rocket launchers, did they?”

“Rocket launchers? Where the fuck did they get them from?”

“STOLE them from us, and we stole them from one of the fake militia groups operating out of a riverboat!”

“Why an ambulance?”

“One of them could stand up and shoot out the back of it without anybody seeing them while the other one drove. Saw them kill a couple in a chicken truck last week. They were working with us for a few months, but they refused to do the ritual. The night after we kicked them out, they came back here and drove the fucking thing out of here in the middle of the night.”

“My bike is still back at the cemetery. You take my partners, and we can make it back to the city by night fall if we leave soon and there`s no weirdos out on the roads, right? Maybe more nine o clock, but…”

“We aren’t going anywhere. My whole security force is dead, and SHE is exposed.”

Kevin ran around the side of the truck and jogged towards the statue. It was untouched, still standing on the table. The various offerings of meat and other trinkets that had been around the surrounding tables had been knocked off. He picked up a dog skull and placed it on one of the tables.

“If we miss the afternoon offering, she is going to get pissed with us and fuck with the weather. That’s all we need. Do you remember last summer, those crazy rainstorms that rolled through? That was because someone drew a subpar image of her on a wooden crutch.”

Kevin crouched down and was picking up coins that had scattered around the leg of one of the tables. Kevin slung his AR-15 over his shoulder, and Jeremy saw the glass wine jug that was filled with seeds and broken sticks, and he picked it up over his head and brought it down on Kevin`s skull. Kevin fell to his right side, hissing and mumbling, while trying to reach up towards his own face to cover it with his hand when Jeremy picked up the remains of the glass jar, a big section of it from near the mouth. Kevin reached backwards at the rifle slung on his back, but Jeremy grabbed him by the hair, pulled his head back, and smashed the glass into the meat of the right side of his neck, wrenching and cutting towards the adam`s apple while he cut his own hand. Kevin managed to pull away a bit for a second, so Jeremy pulled Kevin`s hair tighter and he used the backside of his palm to jam the glass shard in deeper into the muscle and he rocked it back and forth until Kevin fell onto the ground on one knee and then rolled onto one side while trying to suck in air and crawl away using one of his elbows before his face went down into the dirt. Jeremy slid the blood covered rifle off the corpse and over his own shoulder. He kicked Kevin`s corpse in the back of the head one more time before he jogged back to the car that he had been hiding underneath, and he crouched beside it. He took a red and black plaid bandana from his back pocket, wiped his mouth, then wrapped it around the cut on his right hand. He leaned against the car and took deep breaths while listening to people die in the woods around him. He could hear someone screaming “LEONELLA!” over and over from somewhere to his right. Someone else was screaming something in what he thought was Latin. A stray gun shot went off a few hundred feet in the distance and the noise rolled around and off the empty cars and campers.

He had crawled back underneath the truck and waited. A few times he saw feet run by him on his right side, but nobody noticed him. Several times he heard bursts of gunshots followed by screaming and shouting, but each time they got further away from him. A dog had strutted by at one point. After the last scream trailed off, he counted to a thousand before he slipped back out from the truck and began looking for the ambulance. At first, he thought it had to be at another campsite, but the campers and vans had been driven out there. A woman wearing a white t shirt with a red cross spray painted onto the front of it was sprawled out, face up towards the sky, with several knife wounds on her neck and face. Jeremy crouched down and leaned against the truck. He looked around the circle of cars, but there was no ambulance. Another gunshot went off in the woods, and he laid on his stomach for a minute before deciding to go towards it. A group of five people were dead in the back of a pickup truck, all of them shot in the back of the head. He saw a man with a steel sword stuck in his heart, laying on the grass in front of an Amazon delivery truck that had a cross airbrushed onto the side of it. He thought about the statue`s mirrored eyes and how if the world was still alive, he would’ve taken a polaroid picture of the statue`s face, scanned that image, then made a band flyer and later a t shirt design with it. He pictured himself being nervous about the artwork on a new band shirt and opening a cardboard box with his housekeys, waiting for everyone to show up for practice.

Remember when you went back to the practice space after the attack and how Jared`s body had rotted into the cheetah print rug we got from the thrift store that he would stand on while he played bass? How had his hair and cheek bones braided into the carpet and when you tried to move him his nose ripped off? How did you think you were going to drag his body to the traffic median across the road and bury him in that, but you couldn’t find a shovel? Remember how you shoved him into that dumpster, then tossed the carpet in with him, too?

Another gunshot made him look up, and through a gap in the trees in front of him he could see the ambulance. He saw the red lettering on it first, then noticed how tall it was compared to the trucks and vans near it. He opened the backdoor and saw two loaded rocket propelled grenade launchers that were sitting on top of the stretcher. A green wooden crate with more ammo for them was on the left side of the floor.

“Fuckers.”

He slammed the door shut and walked around the left side of the ambulance. He saw three men dead on the ground from gunshot wounds. One of them had a loaded .38 revolver in a holster around his waist. Jeremy took the gun and stuffed it into his pants as he hopped into the ambulance. He almost gave up looking for the key before he found it, in a tiny plastic box on the dashboard.

___________________________________________________________________________

The two brothers at the cemetery ran out of the house when Jeremy pulled the ambulance up their apartment building. They ran up to the driver`s side window.

“What…happened? How did you get it back? Did you kill them?”

Jeremy smiled.

“Nope. Told them all I would come back with a fuck load of medicine in exchange for this beauty.”

He kept smiling. He almost took out the .38 and started firing, but he waited. He felt the hammer digging into his gut.

“Where is your partner? Is he guarding the place?”
“Yeah, yeah. They had some questions about our inoculation program, he`s just getting the details before he heads up here.”

Connor pointed at the apartment.

“Do you want to have a drink while we wait?”

“Sure, bring it on out.”

Connor ran up the stairs to the apartment, the screen door banging as he went in. Jeremy hopped down out of the ambulance and leaned against the driver`s side door.

“Connor and I thought we heard gun fire before. That wasn’t from you?”

“Nope.”

Ian nodded and stuck out his hand for Jeremy to shake as Connor came out of the house holding a gallon sized blue plastic container. Connor held it up over his head and was laughing.

“I was going to pour you out a jar`s worth, but I figured you guys deserved a bonus!”

“All part of my duty in serving The Republic and her people. Can you put it down for a second, I need to piss.”

“Sure!”

Connor put the container down, then walked over to his brother. The two of them were about to high five when Jeremy opened fire on them. He shot Connor in the back of the head and the top rear of his skull blew open like someone had shot a neon red paint can that had been packed with hamburger meat and ground up bones. Ian tried to say something, but bullets tore through his face and buried themselves in his head. He toppled over and fell on his brother`s body and Jeremy shot both a few more times each in the face before starting to kick at them. Jeremy brought his foot up as high as he could and stomped out the bride of Ian`s nose and eye sockets. He flipped Connor`s body so it was face first down, then he got down on one knee and started grinding the corpse`s face into the pavement. He grabbed it by the hair and repositioned the head, smashing the two front teeth on the ground until they broke. He stood up and shot Ian one more time, this time in the throat. He stood over the corpses for a minute before he put the gun back into his pants. He caught his breath and started to drag Connor`s body out of the street and into the cemetery. He thought about burning the two of them, but it was too much of a hassle. He left Connor`s corpse on top of a plot that had a weather worn veteran flag sticking out from it. He went back to Ian`s corpse and dragged it to the same spot. He looked down and thought about stabbing their faces up with a rock, but he was over it now. The sun was getting low in the sky and traveling on the roads at night was dangerous.

“Your fuckhead cousin will have to bury you the next time he comes through on patrol.”

He walked back to the ambulance and drove it around the back of the apartment building the brothers had been living in. He opened the backdoor to the apartment and panicked when he thought he saw someone. It was a long sleeve shirt that had been hung up on a clothesline in the kitchen. The room was empty except for a square kitchen table and a plywood board that was leaned up against the wall. Someone had spraypainted “BOOZE FOR SALE” on it, and Jeremy laughed before he walked over it. He looked down at the sign and went to kick it over when he stopped himself.

If I stayed here and sold out the rest of their bottles, how long would it be before they sent a recovery patrol?

He looked back outside at the ambulance.

That time we had to check out McCoy Stadium took a month to get OKed before we did it. I`ll tell them the People`s Papacy took me hostage and then they all got killed in an assault on the camp. Those dead cocksuckers said their cousin comes through once a month, I`ll split the money with him and let him have any of the shit he wants from all the bodies behind the school. What am I going to do in Providence, anyway? If I tell them I don’t want to do their dumb-fuck patrols anymore, they might put me back on clean up duty downtown. Burning bodies and drinking homemade vodka until I black out every night and wake up covered in greasy soot.

He spent twenty minutes exploring the apartment before he went down into the basement and found the stash of booze. Dozens of plastic storage totes lined up and filled with plastic bottles. He took a gallon plastic jug of alcohol with him upstairs and as he took a sip, he almost dry heaved from the booze tasting like a mix of wet bread and paint mixed together. He sat down on a metal folding chair in the kitchen and stared at the “BOOZE FOR SALE” sign.

Burning bodies, endless patrol, or living in an abandoned cemetery and selling prison wine?

He stood up and picked up the sign. He walked out the front door of the apartment and set it against the building. He took a step back to look at it, then picked it up.

“Nobody is going to see it here.” He said out loud to himself.

He picked the sign back up and walked up the roads towards the main road, at the front entrance to the cemetery. He set it against one of the graves and then wandered towards the abandoned fire station across the street to see if he could find anything useful.