Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) by Joshua Guess

mouth, and the room breaks out in
applause.

After closing up his pants, the man jumps on top of
a bar stool and points a finger around the room. 'Anyone here brave
enough to try it?' he says.

A young blond woman in the back of
the room raises her hand and says, 'Sure, but you don't have to hit
me with that bottle.'"

Try as they might, our people
couldn't help laughing. I don't know if the noise was enough for the
guard to see where they were, but they could see him smiling through
their binoculars.

The guy kept telling jokes for a while, and
people from inside the fallback point started to come out. It was
near dusk by the time someone finally pulled the guard to the side
and had words with him, and after that he was silent. But he and his
partner kept on smiling, even gave a little bow to his unseen
audience.

I don't know if this means anything. I don't know if
there was an ulterior motive, or if the guy was just bored and maybe
realized that our people were probably just as bored. Two years of
tension, fear, and mistrust has made me way more cynical than a guy
not yet thirty should be, but I find myself hoping that it was a
sincere gesture of goodwill.

Not in a large sense. The Exile
guard didn't try to broker peace with us or make new inroads to
understanding the divide between our two groups. I think that for a
little while, he just wanted to be normal. That he understood the
people watching him and his home for signs of violence were just
that--people. An enemy, sure. But human beings with hope and love and
fear and yes--even a sense of humor.

It could be that this is
some cunning plan on the part of the Exiles to put us at ease,
possibly to make us see them as less of a threat. I admit the
possibility, though I can't believe anyone would think we were
gullible to fall for something like that. The Exiles are a lot of
things, but stupid is not one of them.

I'm going to choose to
believe that this was a human moment, maybe a way to thank our people
for saving his life and that of his partner. Bringing a smile to
someone's face is a gift, especially in times like these. I say we
take it at face value and be thankful. Still careful, always
cautious, every wary...but thankful. We can all use a few laughs now
and again.

Thursday,
March 29, 2012
Lori
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess I
think one of the most profound truths that we as survivors can
recognize is the power of human stories. That's a big part of why the
joke-telling Exile guard struck such a chord in me. The guy wasn't
doing anything superhuman or amazing. He was just trying to be funny,
to connect for a minute with people he had every reason to fear at
the least.

Most people around here had a similar reaction, and
came to some approximation of the same conclusion: people are
strange. Wonderfully so at times. Enemies can kill each other one
month and respectfully salute the other side the next. We haven't
forgotten (or forgiven) the Exiles for the horrendous deeds they've
wrought (I've wanted to use the word 'wrought' in a sentence for a
while. You're just going to have to deal with it being there now) but
that doesn't mean our attitude toward them is unbending or
unchanging.

Now we're starting to see them as individuals
instead of a group. Racism and prejudice of all kinds throughout
history has been perpetuated because of the path of least
resistance--hating groups is easy. Because you can slap all the worst
things people in it have done on the whole shebang. None of us doubt
that every person with the Exiles has had to do some awful shit, but
as I've said (a trillion times), so have we all. But not every person
in the group is likely to be at the worst percentile of the
psychopath bell curve. We know that intellectually. It just took one
guy bucking the attitude of his people, taking a risk in trying to
give our watchers a laugh, to make our hearts begin to admit that
truth.

And so, we come to this morning.

There's this
woman, see. And her husband. And their