Benny read out loud from the paper. “‘Pit Thrower. ’ What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Chong said with a mouth full of toast. “I think it has something to do with barbecuing. ”
It didn’t. Pit throwers worked in teams, dragging dead zoms off the backs of carts and tossing them into the constant blaze at the bottom of Brinkers Quarry. Most of the zoms on the carts were in pieces. The woman who ran orientation kept talking about “parts,” and went on and on about the risk of secondary infection; then she pasted on the fakest smile Benny had ever seen and tried to sell the applicants on the physical fitness benefits that came from constant lifting, turning, and throwing. She even pulled up her sleeve and flexed her biceps. She had pale skin with freckles as dark as liver spots, and the sudden pop of her biceps looked like a swollen tumor.
Chong faked vomiting into his lunch bag.
The other jobs offered by the quarry included ash soaker—“because we don’t want zom smoke drifting over the town, now, do we?” asked the freckly muscle freak. And pit raker, which was exactly what it sounded like.
Benny and Chong didn’t make it through orientation. They snuck out during the slide show of smiling pit throwers handling gray limbs and heads.
One job that was neither disgusting nor physically demanding was crank generator repairman. Ever since the lights went out in the weeks following First Night, the only source of electrical power was hand-cranked portable generators. There were maybe fifty in all of Mountainside, and Chong said that they were left over from the mining days of the early twentieth century. Town ordinance forbade the building of any other kind of generator. Electronics and complex machines were no longer allowed in town, because of a strong religious movement that associated that kind of power with the “Godless behavior” that had brought about “the end. ” Benny heard about it all the time, and even some of his friends’ parents talked that way.
It made no sense to Benny. It wasn’t electric lights and computers and automobiles that had made the dead rise. Or, if it was, then Benny had never heard anyone make a logical or sane connection between the two. When he asked Tom about it, his brother looked pained and frustrated. “People need something to blame,” Tom said. “If they can’t find something rational to blame, then they’ll very happily blame something irrational. Back when people didn’t know about viruses and bacteria, they blamed plagues on witches and vampires. But don’t ask me how exactly the people in town came to equate electricity and other forms of energy with the living dead. ”
“That doesn’t make even a little bit of sense. ”
“I know. But what I think is the real reason is that if we start using electricity again, and building back up again, then things will kind of go back the way they were. And that this whole cycle will start over again. I guess to their way of thinking—if they even consciously thought about it—it would be like a person with a badly broken heart deciding to risk falling in love again. All they can remember is how bad the heartbreak and grief felt, and they can’t imagine going through that again. ”
“That’s stupid, though,” Benny insisted. “It’s cowardly. ”
“Welcome to the real world, kiddo. ”
The town’s only professional electrician, Vic Santorini, had long since taken to drinking his way through the rest of his life.
When Benny and Chong showed up for the interview at the house of the guy who owned the repair shop, he sat them down in the shade of an airy porch and gave them glasses of iced tea and mint cookies. Benny was thinking that he would take this job no matter what it was.
“Do you know why we only use hand-cranked generators in town, boys?” the man asked. His name was Mr. Merkle.
“Sure,” said Chong. “The army dropped nukes on the zoms, and the EMPs blew out all of the electronics. ”
“Plus Mr. Santorini’s always sauced,” said Benny. He was about to add something biting about the bizarre religious intolerance to electricity when Mr. Merkl
e’s face creased into a weird smile. Benny shut his mouth.
Mr. Merkle smiled at them for a long time. A full minute. Then the man shook his head. “No, that’s not quite right, boys,” Merkle said. “It’s because hand-cranked machines are simple, and those other machines are ostentatious. ” He pronounced each syllable as if it was a separate word.
Benny and Chong glanced at each other.
“You see, boys,” said Mr. Merkle, “God loves simplicity. It’s the devil who loves ostentation. It’s the devil who loves arrogance and grandiosity. ”
Uh-oh, Benny thought.
“Mr. Santorini spent the first part of his life installing electrical appliances into people’s homes,” said Mr. Merkle. “That was the devil’s work, and now he’s sought the oblivion of demon rum to try and hide from the fact that he’s facing a long time in hell for helping to incur the wrath of the Almighty. If it wasn’t for Godless men like him, the Almighty would not have opened the gates of hell and sent the legions of the damned to overthrow the vain kingdoms of mankind. ”
Out of the corner of his eye, Benny could see Chong’s fingers turning bone white as he gripped the arms of his chair.
“I can see a little doubt in your eyes, boys, and that’s fair enough,” said Merkle, his mouth twisted into a smile that was so tight, it looked painful. “But there are a lot of people who have embraced the righteous path. There are more of us who believe than don’t. ” He sniffed. “Even if all of them don’t yet have the courage of their faith to say so. ”
He leaned forward, and Benny could almost feel the heat from the man’s intense stare.
“The school, the hospital—even the town hall—run on electricity from hand-cranked generators, and as long as right-minded people draw breath under God’s own heaven, there won’t be any ostentatious machinery in our town. ”
There was a whole pitcher of iced tea on the table, as well as quite a pile of cookies, and Benny realized that Mr. Merkle probably had a lot to say on the subject and wanted his audience comfortable for the whole ride. Benny endured it for as long as he could and then asked if he could use the bathroom. Mr. Merkle, who had now shifted from simple electricity to the soul-crushing blasphemy that was hydroelectric power, was only mildly thrown off his game, and told Benny where to go inside the house. Benny went inside and all the way through and out the back door. He waved to Chong as he vaulted the wooden fence.
Two hours later Chong caught up with him outside of Lafferty’s, the local general store. He gave Benny a long and evil look.
“You’re such a good friend, Benny, I’ll really miss you when you’re dead. ”