Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

XXVII

They walked for two days toward Chattanooga, looking for human settlements but finding none. There was only the long broken highway and the occasional dead automobile. They saw people in twos and threes once or twice in the distance but paid them the courtesy of leaving them be. Once, a line of Red Stripes sent them into a ditch, where they watched and waited as the column marched past.

They said little to one another. An uneasy pall hung over the trio. To Mortimer, Sheila now seemed like something alien and dangerous. Equally disturbing was how Bill took the episode in stride, almost as if a young girl hadn’t blown a stranger’s testicles into hamburger at all.

Mortimer realized his problem had nothing to do with Bill or Sheila. They knew how to conduct themselves in this shattered world. Mortimer didn’t. But he was learning. Violence is the way now. It gets you what you want. Solves your problems. What could we have done with the guy anyway? Let him go? No. Squeeze a trigger and the problem goes away.

Mortimer considered his brief interrogation of the Red Stripe. Somewhere a ghostly, mysterious leader pulled the strings of a reluctant army. This too must be part of the natural order. It was too much to hope that the world might be left to heal on its own. Society had always been defined by its antagonists. The Greeks fought the Romans and the Romans battled the barbarians. Now the desperate and bedraggled refugees of a broken civilization had the Red Stripes to deal with. It depressed Mortimer to think that conflict was the natural state of the universe. It all started with a Big Bang, and it would just bang and bang and bang until it banged itself out.

No wonder Nietzsche said people would need to invent God if He didn’t exist.

Stupid Kraut.

Who decided to invent Nietzsche?

One of Anne’s books. She had so many egghead books, wanted to go to the University of Memphis to study philosophy, but Mortimer had talked her out of it. He had talked her out of so much. Talked her out of living. Oh, God. No wonder she’d left him.

Nine years to figure that out.

Jesus.

That night they made camp in the middle of Interstate 75, the husks of old cars on three sides of them providing shelter from the wind. Over a modest campfire, Bill fried the last of the suspicious sausages Sheila had liberated from the Joey’s pantry.

“I should have asked him if anyone else made it out,” Sheila said.

Mortimer looked up. He’d been nodding off. “What?”

“The Red Stripe. Whatshisname.”

“Paul,” Bill said.

“I should have asked Paul if any of the other girls made it out. I tried to find them before we left, but I guess they were with clients. I hope they’re okay.”

“I’m sure they’re fine.” Mortimer didn’t believe it for a second.

“Sure.”

For a moment, she seemed to want to say more, but maybe she didn’t know how. She rolled over and went to sleep. After a while a sound like soft crying came from her side of the campfire, but it was difficult to tell over the howl of wind through the busted-out car windows.

They next morning they started walking again, every muscle in Mortimer’s body groaning from sleeping on the ground.

By midday he spotted the remains of Chattanooga’s insignificant skyline, humping up from the horizon like the yellowed bones of some long-lost skeleton rising from the dead.