The Zona (15 page)

“My themes were simple.  The world is bad, the government is bad, we are good; you are safe with us.”

The Reverend smiled again.

“I made so much money.  The compound capacity was three-hundred, and I owned it free and clear.  My dad built it with his first followers.  The canvassers were told the money was to cover our expenses, with the rest going to help charitable causes furthering equality.  I kept the money.  The beauty of the church was that the outside world was as bad as I claimed.  There was no real convincing required. Most of our members came to us from low and middle class neighborhoods of Barstow and Los Angeles.  They had seen riots and violence.

After a similar church in New Mexico got torched by the old Federal government, we invested in guns and a first rate surveillance system.

I don’t have to tell you what happened next. Everyone knows this part.  One day it started raining and it never stopped.  The cities flooded, homes and hills slid off into the ocean, waves pummeled the buildings.  Men and women fled the coast in droves.

It was funny to me, ironic if you think about it.  I rationalized gun and food hoarding to my flock by hinting that end times were near, never expecting that the end times were actually upon us.

My dad once told me that people need convincing, and the end of the world is the best convincer.

He said, ‘Son, people are only going to follow what they fear or love, and by God we can give them both.’

So I had guns and I had food, and I had medical supplies, not because I needed them, but because I wanted my flock to think we needed them.  And then the fucking apocalypse happens!”

Reverend Greek clapped his hands together.

“I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, as they used to say.”  

The waterline on the coast rose and tornadoes chased tsunamis through Los Angeles.  The National Guard did their best in rallying the hordes of survivors.  They raided supermarkets and gas stations for food and supplies.  The soldiers pulled back to Orange County and set up tent hospitals and refugee villages above the waterline, but then most of the guardsmen were pulled away to repel the Mexicans near San Diego and Calexico.  Everywhere was descending to chaos and the nation’s protectors were spread thin.  Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs went lawless in the course of about twelve days.

“There were about eight million people in the greater Los Angeles area and something like thirty percent of it was completely underwater.  A lot of people died in the Storms, but there were survivors trapped under the waterline, too.

Elders in my flock suggested that we use my boat to hunt for people marooned on their roof tops and apartment buildings, to do God’s work in a real and tangible way, to act like Christians.  For the first time since I was thirteen, I actually thought maybe there was a God and he was playing his hand.  That maybe it was a good time to start acting outside of self-interest, just in case.

So I left with the stronger men of my flock, the long-distance canvassers.  We loaded up a van with rifles, ropes, food, and first aid supplies and hitched my boat to it.  We launched at the waterline.  Huntington was like an all-access marina.  You should have seen my craft, a beautiful sixty foot fisher with all the bells and whistles.

We spotted our first castaways about a half mile in, poor folk on their rooftops, half dead from exposure and dehydration.  The water stank like sewage and oil, which was a large part of it.  The top layer glistened oil rainbows in the sun.

At our third rescue a fat blond guy in a wife beater pulled a .38 and demanded we jump ship, like he was a pirate or something.  Before I could get a word out, Jericho Ericson, one of my flock, put two 30-06 rounds in the guy’s chest.  The stranger spun and sprayed and hit the water.  The funny thing was nobody flinched.  Not my flock, not the castaways we’d just taken aboard, no one.  Everyone was sort of numb, like nothing could surprise us after the days of storms.

We went through the day like that.  We filled the boat.  We ferried the castaways back to Huntington.  They waded through the filthy shallow water up to our van, where the flock was waiting to taxi them to the compound.  Order was easy to keep, the flock had guns, and the refugees didn’t.

Out on the water we saw other boats rescuing folks, same as us.  You wouldn’t believe it.  Row boats, yachts, wave runners, fishing craft.  Whatever was not destroyed in the tsunamis or storms.  At one point I saw a yacht, a full-on luxury craft, with a famous movie star.  Can’t remember his name, he played a cop in all those action movies, not the disgraced governor but the other one.  And there he went, pitching in with the rest of us.  Sometimes we saw people too far gone for help, people dried out and waiting to die.  Jericho shot and killed three more men that day.  He had developed a knack, I guess.

For me, it was a long day of work in contrast to what had been a pretty soft life.  I refueled the boat at the van, set back out, and the boat filled up in an hour or so.  The whole thing was like spitting in the ocean.  I saved all the people I could, but before turning back I saw thousands more, laid out on their rooftops.  They moaned and called for help, some fired shots at the boat, some shot flares into the sky, but there was just too many of them.  I remember one family refused to get on board, said that they would rather wait for a military rescue operation to come.  They’re probably still out there, their dried out bones waiting for what don’t come.

We worked through the day and into the night.  We took the castaways who shined flashlights from their roofs.  We worked until there was no spare fuel, until we had just enough to get ourselves home.  On the last run I watched flashlight beams and torches extended to the horizon, a thousand specs of light from people who I’m sure died waiting.”

Reverend Greek’s hand shook in front of the fire.

“We returned to the compound.  The flock sang hymnals to the refugees.  It seemed like a good idea, though the refugees didn’t sing along.  They looked empty, like the world was over and they were caught in a dream.  We made a tent city in our courtyard and converted the main house into a kitchen and eating hall.  All in all we saved three-hundred forty-six people.  One of them died that night. He was far gone with fever and infection when we found him.”

Reverend Greek spat in the fire.

“We had a lot of food, plus generators, guns, and tall concrete walls.  This gave us an incredible advantage over the rest of humanity.  Tornadoes landed north and south of us, but Rancho was left largely intact.  What nature left alone, scavengers and gangs stripped bare in weeks.  But scavengers couldn’t touch us.  The best thing about old, pre-Storm California was its restrictive gun laws.  They’d done such a good job keeping the citizens gun free in good times that scavengers had little to work with in bad times.  Gangs came to breach our walls with maybe a couple of handguns, or a rifle or two if they were lucky.  Jericho equipped our tower guards with scopes, night vision, and Barrett rifles that could explode a man within a mile.  Our security ran like clockwork.  A gang would come for our goods, our boys would erase whoever was the loudest, whoever looked like the leader, and the gang would move on to easier meat.

After the rains subsided a bit, Rancho heated up.  Not a normal heat; a moist, sweaty heat.  Like a swamp.  The sand turned green with algae and muck.  Then came locusts, mosquitoes, flying bugs I couldn’t name if I wanted to, eating everything leafy that wasn’t covered up, or sucking the blood off the animals.

We had greenhouses and water catchments.  Rain came and went.  The first few months were actually pleasant aside from occasional skirmishes with gangs.  The refugees for the most part integrated with the flock.  We took in lone survivors and refugee families if they came to our walls looking sane and safe.  Many adopted our religion with the understanding that those who didn’t were free to go when the federals restored everything.  Television and radio were still up with emergency broadcasts, but the messages were old.  Cell phone service, internet; they all went out with the collapsed infrastructure.  The news we got was from wandering refugees and the occasional people we took in.  News in those days was all about hope.  Everyone wanted to believe that the rebuild was coming.  The government would come back and relocate the refugees, rebuild the economy.  They would reclaim the United States and regain their happy lives.

The seasons changed with no word from the federals.  Everything was so hot and balmy with goddamn bugs everywhere.  It was in the first summer that the sick broke out.

One day our gate guards let in a family that had come from the south, Chula Vista or Del Mar.  They carried a little boy, eight or so, covered in angry red bumps.  The boy was pocked and feverish and the family swore it was chicken pox.  We put him in the medical tent with other refugees, those with heat stroke or broken arms; the parents were fed and housed as best we could.”

“Was it small pox?”  Lead asked.

“Of course it was,” Reverend Greek said bitterly.

“It was new small pox, virus one on the Zona list.

It tore through the compound for two weeks.  Sickness moved like the devil’s snake, eating men and women whole and all we could do was isolate the virals and watch them die.  We lost eighty-three. We buried them out past the south wall of the compound.  The dirt was like muck and clay.  The graves were wet, but we dug them as deep as the land allowed and, prayed over them.  We stopped taking new refugees after that.

The scavengers just about vanished after the pox really took hold.  The wild men were too sick to throw rocks at our walls or swing clubs.  Even cut off from other humans, even after the new pox had run its course; we’d still get sick.  I guess it was the bugs; mosquitoes, lice, God knows.

From a rifle tower I watched the smoke of funeral pyres run three hundred and sixty degrees.  All those roving gangs and wannabe villages fell sick and burned their dead.  I swear to Christ it got so bad the clouds rained ash and everything reeked of smoke and burnt meat.

I fought for the lives of my flock.  Every sickness was like a challenge from God.  I received these people and sheltered them and I felt the obligation of leadership.  We had no doctors.  Two of my flock were registered nurses before conversion.  They ran the sick tent.  One of them died four months into the calamity.  She caught pneumonia and it took her apart.  On her last day it sounded like she was breathing through glue.  She whispered words we didn’t catch and then closed her eyes forever.”

Reverend Greek pulled a silver flask from his jacket pocket and took a sip.

“She was one of my wives.  Her name was Ellen Dannon Bell and she was a believer.  She was thirty-five years old, pretty face, thick-bodied but still good to look at; a real solid woman.”

Reverend Greek put the flask back into his jacket.

“I’d offer you some of this hooch, but I probably have leprosy and it’d be a shame for you to leave here with that.”

Lead looked past Reverend Greek out to the navy blue morning sky.  The sun would soon come.

“How did you come to Tucson?”  Lead asked.

“I walked.”  Reverend Greek said with a laugh.  “Though not straight away; we stuck it out in Rancho for about eight years.  Aside from the viruses, it wasn’t difficult to stay put.  We’d been an isolated community before. The refugees tolerated our religion and we tolerated them, lest they broke our laws.  Families were formed, children were birthed.  People worked together.  The one punishment was exile.  It didn’t take long for everyone to get in line.  Plagues reduced our numbers pretty quick; the deaths bonded us, surviving bonded us, belief bonded us.  We gardened in the compound.  We rationed food and water best we could, but our stores dwindled.  I told the flock to still themselves and wait for God’s deliverance.  We’d given up on the government.

Worry rippled through my people like a current.  Then came murmurs and whispers and quiet words of fleeing, of starting somewhere else.  I refused to discuss the abandonment of my compound.  From where I stood, the outside world was populated by feral men and animals.  From the towers I watched them scavenge through the husks of the old world like coyotes, lean and desperate.  There was no proof of better grounds.  Humans stayed behind stone walls, to risk our safety was to risk those of us who had rightfully earned our lives by enduring the days of plague and sick.