The Priest
Formerly known as Bob (part 28)
Run Away
Sunrise in the desert, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful things you will ever see. There’s a barely perceptible change when you notice the outlines of mountains and the stars begin to fade. Then there’s a riot of color from deep black to blue and purple to red and finally to the brightness of the day. At least it used to be beautiful in the old days. Now the beauty is tempered by the unbearable heat and the ugliness of the post-apocalyptic world. I was dreaming about that when Dolly and Por, trying not to make too much noise, arrived back at the camp.
We were already awake.
“And where have you two been?” I said.
Por got excited and looked to Dolly as if saying, “Can I tell them, can I tell them.” If she had a tail she would have been wagging it.
“I got to kill someone, I got to kill someone.” She blurted.
“Jesus, Por you don’t have to act like you just got a pony for Christmas. That’s pretty fucked up.” I said.
She dropped her eyes and looked like a child who just lost a cherished toy.
“Don’t be that way.” Said Dolly, “She’s excited and wanted to share.”
“Why is that exciting? She just fucking killed someone.”
“It’s exciting to her because she’s, well, special.”
“What’s special about her?”
“Do you remember what I told you about my past?”
“What little of it you told me, yeah.”
“She’s like me.”
I looked over at her and she turned away.
“Can I be like you?” Tiki asked.
“Me too.” Said Stuffy.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Are you people insane?”
They looked at me and said in unison. “Well, yeah, it is the apocalypse.”
Stuffy punched Tiki and said, “Jinx.” And they both laughed.
I looked at Dolly, shook my head and asked him what had happened.
“She killed their leader, and then we ran.”
“That’s it.”
“Yeah, It’s not an epic story.”
“Surely there’s more to it.”
“No, it is what it is.”
“Why did you just kill one of them?”
“It’s scarier.”
“How is it scarier to just kill one of them?”
“They’ll wake up and realize that someone can get to them, and then they’ll get scared and leave people generally and us specifically alone, and since you’re all awake we need to get moving.”
“In the daytime?” I asked.
“The people whose lives we just upended are going to go through a short period of anxiety, and then, like most groups of vicious, ignorant folks they’re going to start working themselves up to a state of righteous indignation. This should take maybe an hour or two and that’s our window to put some distance between us and them.”
Stuffy raised his hand. Dolly looked at him with barely disguised contempt the way a long-time teacher would look at an annoying student.
“Yes Stuffy.” He said.
“Are they going to kill us?”
“Not if we get moving.”
“What if they’re faster than us?”
“Then they’ll kill us.”
Tiki raised his hand.
“Yes Tiki?” Said Dolly.
“Are they going to eat us?”
“I have no way of knowing that, I’m sure it depends, entirely, on how hungry they are.”
“I really don’t want to get eaten.” Said Tiki.
“I don’t think any of us do. So maybe we should cancel whatever this is and get moving. What do you say?”
We got the carts ready as the night gave way to day. It never really got cool anymore. The difference was kind of like having a house that was 90 degrees when it was 115 outside, it felt cool immediately, but then it was just 90 degrees, and it didn’t feel cool at all. We got on the road, with a sense of dread still heavy in the air.
I wanted this to be over. I’m sure everyone wanted it to be over, but I think, and there’s no reason I think this, that I wanted it to be over more than the others. There’s no real way to measure that, so I just had to secretly believe that I wanted it to be over more than everyone else. It made me feel special. The specter of trying to escape from the dreadfuls sat like a rock in my stomach. I guess I was going to have to re-evaluate my position as a killer extraordinaire. Even Por, and why would I say that? Why would I say “even Por” is it because she’s a girl? And why would I say that, why would I say “girl” when I know that she is a woman. It was more of the old-world bleeding into the new world. And what the fuck am I doing thinking about these things now? We might be dead by nightfall, and I’m worried about whether I should think of Por as a girl or a woman.
Dolly points at me and Por and says, “You two take point, Stuffy you and Tiki are on cart duty, I’m going to hang back a little, so I can keep track of what’s behind us.”
We took our positions and began to move. Dolly stayed about fifty yards back and kept stopping and turning his head to listen and look for any pursuit.
We began to walk.
“Are you all right?” I asked Por.
“Why would you ask me that?”
“I just wanted to make sure that you were okay.”
“You were a “nice guy” in the old world, weren’t you?” She said.
“I guess so, yeah, I think I was a nice guy.”
“Fuck me. You guys are the worst.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t ask Dolly if he was okay, you didn’t ask Stuffy or Tiki, but you did ask me.”
“I was concerned about you.”
“…and you weren’t concerned about the rest of your friends?”
“I am, I just…”
“You just what? You just thought you would ask because, and only because, I’m a woman. You have nice guy complex a distinctly old-world set of attitudes. You still think in terms of life as it was and completely ignore life as it is.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You don’t think you meant anything by it, but you did. You were probably a helper too, weren’t you?”
“What’s a helper?”
“A helper is one of those guys who decided that, for whatever reason, all women needed you to fix them.”
“I didn’t think that.”
“Sure you did. You just didn’t know it. It was bred into you. You weren’t even aware that you were doing it most of the time.”
“You make it sound like a bad thing.”
“It was a bad thing, and it was worse because it was unconscious. You were guilty of unconscious sexism, and you didn’t even know it, and that’s kind of fucked up.”
“Why are getting hostile?”
“Because that shit has no place in this world. There are two types of people now, competent ones and incompetent ones, and the incompetent ones die. That’s all there is. So, FYI, in the future, such as it is, you better make sure that those are the only two distinctions you make because if you go up to a woman and try to pull all that sensitive crap, she may decide you’re one of the incompetent one and take you out.”
“Uh, guys…” Dolly called from the back.
We turned.
“They’re coming.”
I always thought I was a nice guy in the old world too.
Thank you Michael🙏Universe is sure a weird place, that excellent ”nice guy” analysis was excatly what I needed to read right now. Helps me to deal with someone.