“What’s your plan?”
Turk frowned. Behind the veil of cigarette smoke, he suddenly looked much older than he had when they’d first met out on the street. “Plan? What do you mean?”
“You can’t stay here forever,” David said.
“Why not?”
“Well—”
“We get everything we need from town. Don’t cost nothin’ ’cause there ain’t nobody there to charge us. Anything else we might need, we get in a car and drive there. The rest of the world’s still ticking. Mostly, anyways. Said so yourself.”
“What about your son? What about school?”
“Pauline schools him.”
“But those other people out there in town—the people at the firehouse and all the others. Heck, you stuck a gun in my face because you didn’t know who I was. This environment can’t be good for Sam in the long run.”
Turk laughed. “The long run? Just how much time you think this world has got, boy?”
David just stared at him. It was by no means a unique notion, but it troubled him to hear Turk espouse it in such a flippant manner. Worse still was the man’s apparent resignation to it—that they were all going to die in the end, and that no one would be spared this illness, so why fight it? They just sat there eating their hearty breakfasts and looted deserted stores and waited for the end.
“You can’t think like that,” David said. “We’re still healthy. Our kids are still healthy. Maybe there’s hope.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Could be many of us will be spared, and we’ll just have to pick up the pieces once this thing . . . well, once it blows over, I guess. But, see, there comes a point when you got to take a look around and say, hey, what the heck am I livin’ for? The world’s gone to shit, most of my loved ones are dead, and things are just gonna get worse and worse. It’s like them zombie apocalypse movies. You know the ones I’m talking about? Folks in those movies are always struggling to stay alive, to get from one place to the next place, to do whatever they got to do . . . but for what? You really want to live like that? For-fucking-ever? No, thanks.”
Jesus, David thought. Yet what troubled him most was what Kathy had said to him on the last night in their home together, a thing that echoed almost verbatim Turk’s sentiments . . .
“I’ve become quite the religious man, Dave,” Turk said. He produced two more cigarettes and handed one to David. “Something like this, a man can’t help but fall back on his faith. And you know what I figure? I figure this is the rapture. This is our penance. This is the final plague. We’re talking real-life book of Revelation shit, my friend.”
“You sound like a Worlder now,” David said.
“No.” Turk held up a finger. His expression was stern. “Those peckerheads, they’re like Wiccans. They want to see Mother Nature drag things back to the Stone Age. That ain’t got nothing to do with Jesus Christ.” Turk cleared his throat. “ ‘And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war.’ Now, Dave, I don’t know about you, but it’s my opinion that mankind as a whole ain’t been faithful and true for some time now. And if we ain’t in the middle of a war, then I don’t know my head from my ass.”
As a general rule, David reserved his own opinion about people who quoted the Good Book, but for some reason it seemed fitting coming from Turk. Or perhaps it was the current state of things.
“Mall shootings, school shootings, passenger jets blown out of the sky or slammin’ into skyscrapers, those animals in the Middle East choppin’ off heads and lobbing bombs at each other since the dawn of time—what we’re doing now is paying the piper,” Turk said. “Bill’s come due. It’s come down to the individual to confront his or her own sins, and to either make amends and appeal to God, or to go down with the rest of the lot in a crowd of screaming lunatics.” With that, Turk bolted up from his chair and shouted out across the yard at his son, who was halfway up the tenuous branches of a magnolia tree. “Get down, you idiot! You’ll break a leg and then where’ll you be? I ain’t fixin’ to mend no broken bones, boy!”
The boy dropped down from the tree, slapping bits of bark away from his palms. Ellie stood beside him, still watching him as though he were something curious swimming around inside an aquarium.
Turk turned to him, grinning. “So in the meantime, I got this nice house, a pretty wife, a happy little yard where my kid can play, damn fool that he is. Nothing so bad about that, in my opinion.” The cigarette jounced between his lips.
“Okay,” David said. “I understand.”
“Do you?”