Topher's Ton

Survival of the Fittest-2

“Zorn, this is Saanvi.”

Zorn said, “Hello.”

Saanvi looked at him.

“Your name is Michael but the Mayor calls you Zorn.”

“Yes. People have called me that my entire life.”

“I understand nicknames. The Mayor says people use them when they’re friends. He said it is a ‘term of endearment.’ But that’s not how people used it on me.”

Zorn took a sip from his jar.

“How did they use it on you?”

“My last name is Fickerald, but they called me Fucktardal.”

Topher suddenly felt horrible. As strange as the woman was, he hated bullies, and she’d obviously suffered more than one in her past, and he had reminded her of it, before, when he threatened to call her by her last name. He put his jar on the ground and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“What can we do for you, Saanvi?”

“I made a report of the damages and casualties, Mayor.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Right now I’ve counted thirty-seven injured and two dead. Six of the cars are destroyed, and we’ll have to replace almost all the tires. But the animals are safe, and our supplies and civilians.”

Topher gaped.

“Only two dead? Are you sure? I could have sworn I saw more.”

“I was only counting our people. We’re okay. Michael Zorn’s people, though . . . .”

Zorn remained silent, pressing his lips together until they were white.

Saanvi said, “I met a man named Barry outside. He was a dentist.”

“Barry’s alive?” Zorn asked.

Saanvi glanced at him, confused. Hadn’t she just told him that? She was about to explain this to him but remembered what the Mayor had told her about stating the obvious. Instead, she said, “Would you like to know the names of the dead, sir?”

Topher thought for a moment, then said, “No.”

“But, sir.”

“All I want to know is if you’ve burned them yet.”

Saanvi’s face turned red.

“It’s wet out, Mayor.”

“So?”

“We’re out of gas. You know we’re out of gas. I told you we were out of gas. Before. During the fight. You told me to throw rocks.”

“Saanvi, I don’t have to remind you what happens if we don’t burn them.”

“No, sir.”

“Then find a way.”

Saanvi gave him a clipped nod and left without another word.

Zorn took a sip of his beer.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“The last time I saw you was on Riddle’s couch.”

“Did I show you what that crazy bastard did to me?”

“No.”

Topher took off his boots and socks and showed him what was left of his toes.

“Why?” Zorn asked.

“He was going to use me as fertilizer.” He put his socks back on, navigating the holes with his remaining digits. “Said he was a ‘connoisseur’. Had a trophy case with decapitated heads in it. Reinholdt was there. Well, his head was. Can you imagine how horrible that would have been for me? Spending eternity next to that dumb bastard?”

Zorn grimaced. He finished his drink and set the jar on the ground.

“I don’t know what he had in store for me. One moment I was on his couch, dropping off to sleep, the next, I woke up in a basement in California.”

“My god.”

Zorn looked around the tent, listened to the rain patter outside.

“You seem to have done well.”

“Riddle had a bunker,” Topher said.

“What?”

“A bunker. Under the pump house. It’s how I survived. After the radiation died out and the flood waters receded, I had everything I needed. Seeds. Books. Guns. Ammo. He actually had a press and bullets, powder and casings. I’ve got it all here, too.”

“Of course you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Zorn shrugged.

“It means that these things just have a way of happening to you. I bet the next thing you’ll tell me is about how you’ve created a sanctuary to save the world, and that you were on your way there when we tried to kill you.”

Topher paused.

“Well, actually . . .”

“Oh for god’s sake!”

“It’s not exactly like that, Zorn.”

“Really? Good.”

Topher told him about how he used Riddle’s supplies to establish The Ton. How it took him two years to fight off the raiders, grow the food, attract a population.

“We even put up walls,” he said. “But it wasn’t enough. Disease doesn’t care about walls. It found us and burned through us like we were dry grass. There was nothing we could do about it. There wasn’t even enough time to kill everybody again or burn the bodies after they were dead. We just ran. That was a month ago. And now we’re here.”

He picked his jar up and settled back into his chair.

“Topher, that’s horrible,” Zorn said.

“Survival of the fittest.”

“Sure. Sure. But, why even try? You had everything you needed in the bunker. You didn’t have to save the world.”

“Nobody else was doing it.”

Zorn felt the old, familiar bitterness rise up in him again.

“It always has been about you, hasn’t it?” he said. “Nobody is smarter than you, better than you.”

Topher rubbed his face.

“I don’t know where that’s coming from, but I suppose I deserve that.”

“You do.”

“I’m different now, Zorn. I’ve changed.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“How do I explain this to you?”

“That’s not my problem.”

“You know, my whole life I’ve felt like a fool. Like my ideas were stupid. Like nobody should take me seriously.”

“Come on, Topher. You? You’re the most arrogant person I’ve ever known.”

“I hid behind it. It was my armor.”

Zorn snorted. Topher reached behind him and held up a jar of mayonnaise.

Zorn said, “So?”

“A little girl gave this to me, right before you attacked.” Topher put the jar back down. “It told me all I needed to know. I’m not that fool anymore. I’m sure of it. People die for fools all of the time. People die for fools, they die for monsters, they die for idiots. But they never give the last jar of mayo in the world to one.”

Zorn tapped the arm of the lawn chair.

“You know, it doesn’t matter if you’re an i***t or the smartest person in the world. If they die for you, then it’s your fault.”

Topher didn’t answer, and they sat in awkward silence for a while. Finally, Topher said, “I was thinking that you’d like to join us.”

“Join you? Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to kill us?

Topher looked startled. Kill them? The thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. It wasn’t an invalid question, he supposed, but still.

“No. We’re not going to kill you.”

“I’m not sure what to say,” Zorn said. “We didn’t really have any goals beyond surviving. What’s your plan?”

Topher could have lied, said that he wanted to start again, that he was looking for a new place to call home, but he didn’t have it in him.

“I don’t have a plan, Zorn,” he said. “I’m out of ideas. I don’t know what to do next. The only thing I know is that there are people out there who are following me for some reason and I feel responsible for them, so I’m just kind of winging it here.”

“Don’t you think they’ll see through that?”

“It’s not like I’m lying to them. Before you attacked us, we were heading up north. There are suburbs there. Maybe they haven’t been looted yet.”

“That’s a long shot.”

“But it’s at least some kind of shot. Don’t you understand? I have to give them something to hold on to. Hope, a mission, something. Otherwise they have nothing.”

“That makes sense.”

“Zorn, you have to come with me. I can do this alone, but I’d rather not. I need a friend.”

Zorn thought for a while before he responded. A friend. He hadn’t thought of Topher Bill in over twenty years, and even before that he didn’t think of him as a friend. An arrogant madman who constantly got him in trouble and exposed him to situations in which he was attacked first by monstrous wolves, then by zombies, and finally by a serial killer. Just thinking about it made him angry. All of his people, they were good people. Now they were dead. But then he was partially to blame for that, wasn’t he? Topher had plenty of good people, too, and in this kind of landscape, the only true safety was in numbers. Unless some other group had more people than he did and oh Christ, he could go on forever about this, couldn’t he? In the end, he said the only thing he could think of. The least committal. The least inflammatory.

“Okay.”

Before they left, they burned all the bodies.

They wandered up I-95 for a week, hunting in the woods, catching rainwater. The suburbs in Northern Virginia turned out to be a treasure trove. So many apartments and McMansions. They spent a week looting Springfield, then headed west to avoid the contaminated zone around D.C. In Vienna they nearly ran into a band of outlaws outside the Metro station. Zorn wanted to engage, but Topher didn’t want to waste bullets, and by the time the argument ended, the outlaws had vanished.

It was there that they first saw the warnings. Sometimes it was a red ankh painted on front doors and traffic signs. Sometimes it was something simple, like a sheet of plywood with the words “SHE IS HERE!” painted on it, also in red. Once, scrawled on a sheet hanging from the roof of a house on Lawyers Road, they saw this:

“WHEN SHE COMES, RUN.”

They stopped in Reston to take inventory. The caravan separated good food from bad, classified weapons and ammo, and shed their dirty old clothes and shoes for fresh new ones. Topher found a linen jacket in a townhouse that overlooked a lake. He brought it out to show it to Zorn.

“Look what I found!” he said.

Zorn, who was holding an unopened can of peaches, said, “Peachy.”

He opened it with a knife and sniffed.

“Doesn’t seem to be bad,” he said, and guzzled it down.

He pointed the empty can at another red ankh, this one painted on a boarded up window.

“What’s with the symbol?”

Topher squinted.

“I’m not sure. It looks Egyptian. Does it matter?”

“Maybe it’s the government.”

“What government?”

“A new one?”

“A new one that uses Egyptian symbolism?”

Zorn chucked the empty can aside.

“I think we should leave.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Zorn, look around you. This place is a gift. All the food we want, no bandits, no rapists, no crazy cult leaders. There are schools we could rebuild, a library, lakes. Lakes!”

Zorn pointed at the ankh.

“And that.”

Saanvi walked up behind him.

“It’s the symbol of Isis,” she said. “The blood goddess.”

“Blood goddess!”

“The blood of life, of rebirth. When Seth cut Osiris into a thousand pieces and threw him in the Nile, Isis took the parts back into herself and gave birth to him again. She’s a symbol of resurrection.”

Zorn pondered this.

“I suppose in that light, it’s not so bad.”

“The cult of Isis sacrificed people the same way,” she added. “They used to cut them up into little pieces and throw them in the Nile.”

By the end of the spring, they’d completely restocked their food truck with all kinds of canned goods: fruit, tuna, beans, peas, carrots, soup. They found more ammunition, bullets and rifles and handguns locked up in gun safes or tucked away in shoeboxes. They did not, however, find any medicine. No aspirin, no Neosporin, no antihistamines, and certainly not anything more serious, like morphine or insulin. They didn’t even find any good drugs.

“I know the potheads didn’t make it out alive,” Topher grumbled to himself. “Some hippie has to have a stash somewhere.”