After the Plague by T. C. Boyle Page A

Sally.
    Sally in her virginal parka and fluffy boots, locked in her mother’s grip and fighting her way up the walk against a tide of chanting zombies—and I recognized them too, every one of them, the very ones who’d been dragged away from my brother’s door in the dark of the morning. Sally wasn’t coming in for an exam—there weren’t going to be any more exams. No, Sally meant business. You could see that in the set of her jaw and in the way she lowered her head and jabbed out her eyes like swords, and you could see it in every screaming line of her mother’s screaming face.
    The light was fading. The sky hung low, like smoke. And then, in that instant, as if some god had snapped his fingers, the streetlights went on, a sudden artificial burst of illumination exploding in the sky above them. All at once I felt myself moving, the switch turned on in me too, all the lights flaring in my head, burning bright, and I was out the door, up the corridor, and pushing through the double glass doors at the front entrance.
    Something was blocking the doors—bodies, deadweight, the zombies piled up on the steps like corpses—and I had to force my way out. There were bodies everywhere, a minefield of flesh, people stretched out across the steps, obliterating the sidewalk and the curb in front of the clinic, immobilizing the cars in the street. I saw the punk from this morning, the teenage tough guy in his leather jacket, his back right up against the door, and beside him one of the dumpy women I’d flung him into. They didn’t learn, these people, they didn’t know. It was a game. A big joke. Callpeople baby-killers, sing about Jesus, pocketful of posies, and then the nice policeman carries you off to jail and Mommy and Daddy bail you out. I tried to kick them aside, lashing out with the steel toes of my boots till my breath was coming in gasps. “Sally!” I cried. “Sally, I’m coming!”
    She was stalled at the corner of the building, standing rigid with her mother before the sea of bodies. “Jesus loves you!” somebody cried out and they all took it up till my voice was lost in the clamor, erased in the everlasting hiss of Jesus. “We’re going to come looking for you, brother,” the tough guy said then, looking up at me out of a pair of seething blue eyes. “You better watch your back.”
    Sally was there. Jesus was there. Hands grabbed at me, snaked round my legs till I couldn’t move, till I was mired in flesh. The big man came out of nowhere, lithe on his feet, vaulting through the inert bodies like the shadow of something moving swiftly overhead, and he didn’t so much as graze me as he went by. I was on the third step down, held fast, the voices chanting, the signs waving, and I turned to watch him handcuff himself to the door and flash me a tight little smile of triumph.
    â€œSally!” I shouted. “Sally!” But she was already turning around, already turning her back to me, already lost in the crowd.
    I looked down at my feet. A woman was clutching my right leg to her as if she’d given birth to it, her eyes as loopy as any crack-head’s. My left leg was in the grip of a balding guy who might have been a clerk in a hardware store and he was looking up at me like a toad I’d just squashed. “Jesus,” they hissed. “Jesus!”
    The light was burning in my head, and it was all I needed. I reached into my pants and pulled out the gun. I could have anointed any one of them, but the woman was first. I bent to her where she lay on the unyielding concrete of the steps and touched that snub-nose to her ear as tenderly as any man of healing. The noise of it shut down Jesus, shut him down cold. Into the silence, and it was the hardware man next. Then I swung round on Mr. Beard.
    It was easy. It was nothing. Just like killing babies.

Captured by the Indians
    At the lecture that night they