I’d never been a smoker before the world went to shit. I tried it on a lark, bumming one off Shelly one night, and thought it wasn’t so bad, and in a world without consequences, why not indulge some vices? Arn, ever the moral authority, told us both we smelled bad afterwards, and gave Shelly a hard time in particular because she was pregnant, not to mention that he assumed the child was his.
As time went on, me and Shelly only smoked after he’d gone to sleep.
Dana said she didn’t like me smoking either, but she only said it once. Our marriage in a nutshell.
Shelly told me, if cigarettes are the worst the little bugger has to get through, it’d be a goddamn miracle. Shelly understood, like me, that a world with a shortened life expectancy demanded different rules. Arn was still the early to bed, early to rise type, like he had something to get up for, like starting our hunter-gatherer missions a couple hours later would make a difference.
One day Shelly and I had gotten into an argument, because she drained the goopy red tomato water from her canned pasta and prepared a separate jar of marinara. I don’t know why it got to me so bad that day—I was always annoyed at any of us wasting resources, but something about throwing away the stuff from the can and opening a new jar drove me nuts until the two of us were yelling at each other, before Arn stepped in. He told us both to be quiet, but was sterner with me, because though Arn and I had been friends since before either of us met our wives, there were still certain loyalties a man had to put first, not in spite of, but because the world was ending.
That night, when Shelly and I were alone and smoking, she didn’t apologize about the sauce, and I didn’t apologize for the fight, but the two of us out enjoying a bud side by side was all the reassurance needed that it was water under the bridge.
“You know, if we keep smoking, we’ll run out of cigarettes,” she said.
“Or out of lighter fluid.” I shook the Bic, lighter than it had once been, and inhaled. The smoke tasted sweet.
“Or out of matches.” She took the lighter from me. First flick of the trigger, it caught the end of the cigarette. She always got things right. Shelly was pretty all the time—I’d never denied that—but by that glow of flame, she looked as exquisite as she had the night we’d given in and slept together, before going back to our respective spouses like nothing had happened. All of that before The Damned started setting fire to everything in their path, before the four of us fled to our house in the woods together.
“You still getting sick?” It was a stupid question when we all lived in close enough quarters for her to know about my irritable bowels and for me to know the rhythm of Arn’s snore after he reached a deep sleep. Hell, we could tell one another’s footsteps on the hardwood floor based on rhythm and weight. I hadn’t heard Shelly get sick, and Arn hadn’t said anything about it for a week.
She shook her head. “I think I’m out of the first trimester. That’s when the morning sickness stops.”
I wondered when she’d start showing, or if she would, but felt like I ought to have known about the time span of morning sickness already, and didn’t want to ask and come off as even more foolish. Arn would know these things. Arn would make a better father than me.
We’d joked about it before—Arn’s unwillingness to sleep with Shelly for fear of the weight of his body crushing the baby or that he might hurt the baby if he penetrated her. We laughed about all of this.
But that night, Shelly didn’t laugh. “For all I know, the baby’s gone already. How would I know?”
I knew it was my role to say something reassuring about faith or at least that there was no sign the baby wasn’t fine, and so no reason to worry. But she didn’t seem worried.
“I think that about The Damned sometimes, too.” She took a long drag and exhaled the string of smoke from her nostrils. “We hide from them, but maybe they’re gone. Maybe the smoke we see in the distance isn’t them burning to destroy anything. Maybe all we’re seeing is other people trying to stay warm.”
I could fall asleep listening to Shelly. Her voice had this hypnotic quality sometimes. I liked it that night.
“Maybe we’re gone, too,” she said. “Maybe all we are is a bunch of ghosts who haven’t realized we’re dead yet.”
It still caught me off guard when I blew my nose into my handkerchief and the mucus came out black as oil. There’s a kindness to it when something fundamentally strange doesn’t become the norm. It helped me remember the world we’d known before The Damned wasn’t so long past.
Another example of something that remained strange: the killing.
We’d finished the last of the venison, and the joy from Arn’s most recent kill had evolved into dread over where our next meat might come from. Arn was a better hunter than me, but that wasn’t saying much, because neither of us had the kinds of fathers to take us out into the woods when we were children. My parents were city folk who’d moved when their jobs relocated them, and never fully assimilated to small town living. Arn’s were indoor folks who took any threat of storm as cause to board up windows and hide away. I think that’s why we became friends in the first place, for this sense of displacement since birth, certain we didn’t belong in our small town, but unsure where we might fit in.
Arn was a better hunter by virtue of better hand-eye coordination, better aim, superior physical strength. We’d learned that when I shot at animals, I not only wasted ammunition, but scared them way. Now, only Arn used the gun. And that last deer—he’d shot it, and we thought he was dead until he half-slid and half-crawled from us while we were in the process of deciding how best to transport his carcass home. I’d dropped down, desperate not to let a week’s dinner slip from our grasp, even as wrestling a mostly dead deer felt both grotesque and profoundly cruel for all my unfair advantages. Arn had more coolly, not to mention more effectively, nailed the deer in the head with the butt of the gun to finish him off.
We said Arn was the better hunter, I the better gatherer, by virtue of my book-based knowledge. I’d presented, with more certainty than I felt, that berries colored blue or purple were more likely poisonous, so we should only bring back the red, orange, and pink ones.
There was some comfort in a day like this. We’d found a garden full of berries, too manicured, too organized, to have occurred naturally, a remnant of another time when someone probably fetched samplings from the forest to seed a garden. I plucked one from the vine—the fragile texture of a raspberry, the shape and size of a strawberry, juice running off at the touch, an almost artificial red like a maraschino cherry. I blew the brown and white flecks of the outdoors from its surface and popped it in my mouth. It was both more sour and harder than I had expected, but not bad.
“Don’t you think we should wash them first?” Arn asked.
“You really think the water’s cleaner than the berries now?”
He shrugged and placed a berry in his own mouth and made a face at the taste of it, but that didn’t stop him from eating two more before he joined me in filling our plastic waste basket. The basket would overflow before we cleared this garden and went back for another receptacle. Berries didn’t sate our appetites like meat, but they’d do for a few more days, holding off on the canned reserves—that is, if Shelly hadn’t already broken into another can while they were out. It took more to satisfy a pregnant woman’s appetite than any man’s.
We argued about fire. We only had so much propane to burn through, but more than that, there was the debate about staying warm versus the risk or revealing our location to less friendly folks—or, just as bad, friendly folks whom we couldn’t afford to split resources with. We hadn’t seen other people for what must have been weeks—maybe months. None of us thought to count days until that count had become more of a guess than an objective fact.
There were people out there. We could see the smoke of other fires at night, after the bigger fires we thought might end it all, that turned snot black with ash, had died down. The remaining fires, a half dozen at different distances, different directions, might have been signs of hope, I told the others. I cited pyres burned on holy days in Latvia that I’d read about in books. That kind of book knowledge wasn’t received so well. Impractical. Maybe showing off. As if I didn’t mean well, and as if they couldn’t understand.
I didn’t mean it when I suggested we join The Damned. But after one of those three-day stretches without any new kills or discoveries of food waiting to be harvested, it was a sensible enough thought experiment.
From what we knew of The Damned, they were deplorable and devoid of kindness. They took credit for burning the first cities, when there was still media to report on them, and as far as we knew, they continued burning the world with no clear endgame, no clear sense of whether or when they’d turn on themselves. But in a hierarchy of needs, it was appealing to imagine having a band of people to protect each other, to provide for each other, to be the thing that was feared rather than to be afraid.
Of course, I should have known that suggesting such an objectionable idea would provoke an objectionable response, irrational and out of proportion like the way people got bent out of shape after football players knelt for the National Anthem, or the way September 11th could only be spoken of in low voices and with patriotic undertones.
To wit, at my casual suggestion that we join The Damned, Arn shoved me hard. We were back at the house, late afternoon, after a long day of attempted hunting and gathering, quibbling all the while about which direction to go and how far to wander from home.
He shoved me in the kitchen, hard enough for me to stumble and hit the back of my head on one of the cabinets where we kept our store of canned goods. I cared more about those reserves than my head.
Arn stood in a wrestler’s stance, as if expecting a fight, as if he weren’t so obviously at an advantage, even if it weren’t for my sore head.
I asked him, “What did you do that for?”
“We are not joining the Damned.” He spat the words. I used to be so annoyed at things like spittle flying when someone talked. It hardly seemed to matter in this version of the world. “They don’t care that a woman’s pregnant. They don’t have a use for babies. And I’m not going to let them get their hands on my wife or my child.”
So there Arn stood, not only the moral authority, but the righteous father figure I wasn’t, never would be. “Do you really believe everything you heard?” I asked him. “If they let babies die, how do they expect to live on?”
“They don’t.” He positioned his body between me and Shelly. “That’s why they’re called The Damned. They’ve accepted that man’s time on earth is over. Are you saying you have, too? Just so you can live a little longer?”
Arn may have been right, melodramatic as he was in his explanation. Everything he described was what I knew of The Damned. Their name. Their way of being in the world.
“You want to join the Damned.” This was a voice he’d used to back down bullies on the playground, back when we were kids, back when it was me and Arn against the world. He’d never used this voice against me before The Damned. But in this new world of fires in the distance, a baby on the way, I was growing accustomed to it. “You’re not going to them so they can torture you and get you to tell them where to find us.” It was a leap, but not an unrealistic one. It dawned on me that Arn had been thinking about this. “You just say the word, and I’ll send you to hell myself.”
I didn’t leave, and I didn’t push Arn any further. I didn’t apologize. I went to bed.
At some point during my imagined scenarios of telling him off and letting him know I’d slept with his wife and clocking him with cast iron skillet, I remembered Dana.
Another silence. A hospital bed. Dana had herself propped at an incline, the same kind of angle she’d liked to sleep at in the final days of her pregnancy. I was slouched over in an arm chair, somewhere between awake and dreaming, more in my head than in the world, contemplating if we’d bury our stillborn daughter and imagining the weight—or the absence of heft—to such a small body’s coffin. Heavy as pain. As light as a life itself.
Someone from the hospital came in. A nurse, I think. I dimly remember acknowledging her and that she was a mousy woman with thick glasses and a lilt in her voice. She said she was sorry after each sentence like, I’m pleased to meet you. I’m sorry. I’m here to talk about your options. I’m sorry. She’d made some mention of harvesting our girl’s organs and looking into the viability of it, because it might help another child, and the concept turned my stomach as sleeplessness and grief and hunger overwhelmed me more with every word this woman said. It must have overwhelmed Dana, too, because she cut off the nurse mid-sentence and told her she needed to stop stop stop stop stop.
We’d had the body, intact, cremated.
Back home, in the room we’d set up for a nursery, Dana had her turn at rage, ripping down the brightly colored pictures of barnyard animals she’d framed and put on the walls, throwing them across the room so the glass fractured and the frames scratched the wood floors. Pulling at the crib, too, until she got a bar from it free, through some combination of adrenaline-induced strength and my shoddy craftsmanship in assembling the thing. She slammed that bar against the rest of the crib. Chipping paint, chipping bits of wood, and yet, in the end, failing to destroy much of anything, maddeningly ineffectual, so she threw the bar to the ground before she collapsed into a sobbing ball. I held her and after some time asked if there were anything I could do for her.
She told me to burn it all.
I’ve had these moments in my life when everything stops and everything changes.
The accident I got into three weeks after I got my driver’s license and I rear-ended somebody at a stop sign.
When I quit my college job at the library circulation desk without another job lined up.
The otherwise uneventful night when I shared Chinese takeout with Dana and consciously recognized the two of us getting married and having a life together less as an abstract possibility than a probable direction my life was headed in. The night when we got married. The day when we found out she was pregnant.
When I first kissed Shelly, more so than when we first slept together, because bridging the distance between our bodies made anything else possible.
This new world, this new life, Shelly out of her first trimester. I stood by the kitchen window overlooking the porch outside and watched her smoke alone. I did that sometimes, before I joined her, or when it felt harder to be with her than to keep away.
And then I heard the drums.
From the window, I could see Shelly had her earbuds on. The ability to charge her smart phone was scarce, the choice to listen to music an indulgence, but I knew music to be one of those last bastions of peace for her, one of the last reminders of the old world. Depending on the volume of the music, or the degree that the drum sounds might hide in the rhythms she consumed, it was possible—maybe probable—she didn’t hear the drums at all.
The drums grew louder.
I’d thought the drums were an urban legend, from those early days before we were sure if The Damned were real at all or what they were up to. There were no confirmed survivors of an attack from The Damned, so who could be trusted to know what to expect when they arrived?
Drums were impractical, a tool for old armies to keep in step. But what kind of order did this band of people need? Time didn’t exist as it once had. No warring party to strategize around, only victims. Time in terms of sunrise and sunset. Time in terms of dwindling food stores and loneliness and death.
Maybe The Damned were the keepers of time.
I saw the smoke next. They carried torches, the stories went—those stories we’d gleaned and traded, morphing with each second-, third-, fourth-hand account, back when we talked to other people. They used the torches to burn what they found, and to see their way to it—to start fires that cooked livestock and wild animals, strays and abandoned pets.
There’d been speculation that The Damned were cannibals.
They’d get to us soon, but there’d be time to run and hide, I hoped. Maybe. Because it was an assumption, too, to think the smoke and the drums were harbingers. Maybe scouts had already found our house, our small food reserves. Maybe they’d follow, give chase if they saw which direction their prey fled. Or maybe they’d signal to beat the drums faster.
The smoke drew closer. How long had I been watching, paralyzed with thought? Wasn’t that always my problem? I still had time to make it to someone. I could wake Arn. The two of us would have the best chance at a fight, not to defeat The Damned as a whole, but those who might block our way as we made an escape.
And there was Shelly. Putting aside how I felt about her, didn’t a pregnant woman represent more than the present moment, but the future of people who didn’t go around killing and burning what was left of civilization? It didn’t need to be a choice between her and Arn, I knew, but as the drums beat closer and the plumes of smoke took clearer shape like volcanic mist before an eruption, I speculated that there was no guarantee I would make it from Shelly to Arn or from Arn to Shelly, even if whomever I reached first insisted on trying.
Dana. Why hadn’t I thought of Dana before Shelly or Arn?
It had to be Shelly or Arn.
In that moment, it seemed a horrible choice to make.
But the next, it was beautiful—glorious even—to have this decision before me, not between lesser evils at the end of all things, but greater goods. Wasn’t that the most a person could ever ask for?
