Judgment (13 page)

              He turned his head slightly to look at me, his face mostly veiled in dark shadow, offering only a glimpse of candle flame reflected in his eyes. “You’re still alive?” was all he said, and I couldn’t quite be sure if it was a question or an observation. He turned away, taking another sip from the dusty glass in his hand.

              It was an odd question I thought, considering it should’ve been obvious.

              “So far,” I answered.

              I saw him nod slightly. “Not sure if that’s good or bad anymore.”

              Being a police officer I assumed he would have some insight into what was happening, what was being done by the authorities, and what help was coming. That wasn’t the insight he offered.

              “You can have my gun if you want, if it will help you.”

             
What a strange thing to say
.

              I got the sense that this was a broken man; someone who had given up, surrendering to the fate that would ultimately get us all. “I’d prefer you kept it, actually.” I sat on a stool a few spots away from his, and after glancing my way once more he slid a large bottle in my direction.

              “Whiskey. Help yourself. It’s Fireball, it tastes like Red Hots. Good shit. You remember Red Hots?”

              “Yeah,” I answered as I reached for the bottle and poured myself a little into a glass that I had done my best to wipe the dust out of.

              “Don’t worry about the ash anymore,” the cop told me. “It’s pointless, and the whiskey will kill the germs.”

             
It’s not germs, its damn human remains.

              “So, do you know what’s happening anywhere else? Is there help coming? The military? What is the government doing?”

              Even in the dim and shadowy candle light I could see him chuckle. “There’s no government anymore. There’s nothing. They’re all dead. It’s just me, you, and the whiskey.” He pulled his radio off of his belt and slid it down the bar towards me, kicking up dust as it went, the ash slowly floating up into the air to join the rest that drifted and danced in the candlelight. “If you can get anyone on that thing, you let me know.”

              “There has to be help somewhere. There has to be people, doing something. This can’t be just the end of the world.”

              “This is it. We are it. It’s fucking over man.” He took a long drink and gestured for me to slide the bottle back. I complied, and he refilled his glass. “And we deserve it too. You know that, right?”

              I didn’t answer right away, trying to think for a moment what the right answer was. He spoke again before I could figure it out. “I’ve been a cop for fourteen years. I started out thinking I would do some kind of good, help the community and all that. I was gonna save the world like some superhero. ‘I’m gonna get the bad guys’, I used to tell my kids. Then I found out that we’re all the bad guys.”

              I didn’t say anything, watching him take another sip of his whiskey. “I’ve arrested hundreds of people, even shot a few. After a while I realized we’re all the same. The only difference between a good person and a bad person is getting caught being bad.”

              I took a sip of my drink, using my sleeve to wipe wet ash off of my lip before I answered him. “You don’t really think everyone is bad do you? Do you think you’re bad?”

              It took him a second, like he was carefully weighing his words. “I arrested a man once who had two teenage girls chained up in his basement. Do I need to tell you what he was doing with them before he started cutting their limbs off? How about the guy who put his cat in the microwave to see if it would explode? Let me tell you man, humans are the worst creatures on the planet. Explain to me how we can dominate the world with our intelligence and ability to create amazing technology; yet the things we still do to each other, it’s like we’re just savages. Murder, rape, torture; we’re still uncivilized barbarians disguised in the thin veil of societal laws to mask it all, and it’s all just a bunch of bullshit.”

              He paused for another shot of whiskey. I had resigned myself to just listening to him as I refilled my own glass. There was something quite surreal about sitting alone in a bar with a cop during the end of the world and getting drunk together, and yet, all things considered, I had decided to embrace it for the moment.

              “Look at what we’ve done to the world,” he continued. “I mean, I was never much of an environmentalist type; in fact I thought those hippy wackos that chained themselves to trees on a construction site were nothing but misguided nuisances. There’s some validity to their claims though. Humans really don’t care how our expansion and evolution affects the world or the other creatures on it. We cut down forests like they were meaningless. Trees that take centuries to grow, give oxygen to the atmosphere and shelter other species; we knock them down like they’re nothing. We pour concrete where green fields of grass used to be. We pave asphalt roads where once were beautiful streams vibrant with fish. We build huge towers of steel and glass that block out the sun. We build factories that puke torrents of toxic smoke into the sky. No one cares. It’s more important to develop the next cell phone or luxury car. You know what I’m saying?”

              I was never much for environmental causes either, but I nodded agreement to appease him. I wasn’t sure how much whiskey he’d already had and this didn’t seem a worthwhile time for a debate.

              “We don’t care about the other animals on the planet either. Sure, we like them and all. I mean, who doesn’t love a cute puppy, right? But that didn’t stop people from experimenting on them and torturing them. I mean, c’mon man, we strap them down in laboratories and put shampoo formulas into their eyes to see if it burns before we sell it to the public. Really? How fucked up is that? We take wild animals that God put here; we cage and imprison them, then force them to perform tricks in circuses for our entertainment. Heck, we hunt them down and mount their stuffed heads on our walls. What the hell gives us the right? If I was God, I’d be pissed off too.”

              He paused for another sip from his glass. I did the same, not having anything else to do tonight.

              “Hey, did you know there are restaurants in Asia where they take a live monkey and trap its head through a hole in the center of the table. Then people whack it on the head with little hammers until its dead, and then they eat its brain? Are you kidding me with that shit? Yeah, I’d say humans are messed up.”

             
I’d have to agree with that one.

              I let him just keep talking, taking it all in. He was becoming a little more animated, as if his own speech was exciting him. With each movement I watched the dust lift off of him and gently float down into his glass. He drank it either without noticing or without caring. His rambling went on regardless.

              “And what we do to each other, that’s even worse, man. We can’t control our greed, so we rob and steal from each other. We can’t control our lust, so we rape our neighbors and cheat on our spouses.  Hell, we make video games about it. And Hollywood celebrities glorify sexual transgressions and violence on the big screen, and we all worship it and make them into heroes. We place zero value on the lives of other humans, choosing instead to pursue our own selfish desires, no matter the cost to someone else. As a cop, I got to see the really evil people; the ones who tied children up in basements and did unspeakable things in the darkness. There are nuts out there that are eating other people. People are really fucked up man. And the worst ones? The worst are the ones you trust, the ones you least expect; the teachers, the priests, the family members, who take advantage of your naïve trust, not knowing that every one of them has evil inside them. Yeah, I can’t blame God at all for what he’s doing right now. We deserve this.”

              “But there are good people in the world, right? We’re not all bad. I’m a good person. I assume you’re a good person.”

              “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t single out individuals. It’s a species thing. We’re all flawed, the whole damn human race. It’s in our DNA. It’s like God made us but he screwed it up, so now he’s going to wipe the slate clean and start over.”

              “We can’t know that for sure.”

              “I don’t think we can really understand any of this anyway. Did you ever take one of those little red laser pointers, and shine it on the wall and make a cat go crazy chasing it? Think about the difference in what you know, and the cat knows. The cat thinks it’s some insect he’s chasing, meanwhile you have a piece of modern technology in your hand that you yourself don’t even know how to make, and the cat’s mind can’t even grasp its existence. That’s humans and God. You think we can even begin to understand what sort of laser pointer God is taunting us with? Good luck with that. We are fools, thinking we can understand what else is out there in the universe. We’re just the cats, foolishly chasing the red dot.”

              Things went quiet after that, as if the cop had run out of things to say, or just didn’t care to say them anymore. We sat quietly drinking whiskey together while the world died outside, and somehow, we both died a little on the inside washing down the despair with whiskey. After a while I heard the rustling of wings pass by not very far away, and the cop noticed me being startled. “There’s no point in running you know. We’re all going to die.”

              “I don’t want to die.”

              “It isn’t your choice anymore. Do you really want to live in a world like this anyway? I mean, all the brownies are burned and the spiders took our shoes.”

              Brownies? Spiders with shoes? What the hell are you talking about?

              Without looking my way, the cop placed his gun on top of the bar between us. “You should really take this now. I don’t need it anymore.”

              “I don’t want your gun. You need it too. You’re still a cop, even in this world now.”

              “Take it. I don’t want it anymore, and the bugs are coming. Shoot the bugs.”

              What?

              At first I thought it was the whiskey. His now strange behavior was making me uncomfortable and nervous, and I realized taking the gun from him was probably a good idea. As I moved closer to him to reach for the weapon, he leaned back on his barstool, allowing the candle light to better illuminate his full face. I could see now that he was dead. Even in the dim flickering light, I could see the pale color of his skin, the blue hue of his lips, and the deep dark circles around his sunken eye sockets. One of New York’s finest, now one of New York’s deadest. I couldn’t tell how he had died, but it was clear that like all maledicted, his oxygen-starved rotting brain was beginning to go insane. He would be dangerous soon.

              “I’m dead you know,” he said suddenly as I took the .45 caliber gun off the bar top. “Yeah, I know I’m dead. Kind of obvious, right? Weird too, being dead. But it’s okay; my wife had a huge insurance policy.” He laughed, but he struggled to make the sounds. I guess when you’re not breathing there isn’t enough air in your lungs to do such things. In the candle light I could see the dust he was coughing up. I heard the wings again, closer this time.

              “I should be going now.”

              “Yeah,” he started, still coughing out dust, “be going now. The spiders will be here for your shoes soon.”

              Yeah, I need to get away from him.

              I actually thought about taking one last sip of the whiskey. Alcohol is funny that way. Smartly though I turned and stepped through the broken glass and back out onto the sidewalk into the darkness. I couldn’t see any sign of the angel we had heard, and I quickly began the short walk back to where Margie and Steve were sleeping. Behind me, I could hear a dead New York cop slowly losing his mind, singing and old Simon and Garfunkel tune with all the wrong words.

              *  * * *

              The next morning we made our way to the west end of Staten Island, walking the Outerbridge Crossing into New Jersey. Steve made a joke that it was a toll road, and I told him I would wait for them to bill me. Now on mainland USA the congestion and traffic jams of abandoned vehicles were behind us, and in the parking lot of a Walgreens we found several cars to choose from, all still full of gas. It took three cars before we found one with a battery still able to turn over the engine. Once it fired up and spit ash out of the exhaust pipe, we found ourselves on the Jersey Turnpike. For a couple hours we weaved our way through crashed cars, wandering maledicted, and an apocalyptic countryside. At some point during the night we turned onto a highway heading northwest, wanting to avoid Philadelphia. A short while later I saw the headlights reflecting off a sign that said “Welcome to Pennsylvania.”