I jerked up my .300 Win Mag, and peered through the scope, looking for it. Something was moving down at 5th Avenue and 31st Street. The high-powered scope on the rifle I had taken from a Marine base near Philadelphia made it seem like I was standing at the corner of the intersection instead of the outside observation deck of the Empire State Building.
No one should be in the city of New York. It was my city. Hadn’t I renamed it the township of “Blainesville” in large, spray paint letters on City Hall when I’d first arrived? Who dared to disturb my solitude?
It was a dog. Someone must have left their poodle to fend for itself during the hurried evacuation five days earlier -when the military had become reasonably sure that was where I was headed. Not that the evacuation was complete by the time I arrived in New York, excuse me, I mean Blainseville. There had been plenty of targets.
I once read on the Internet the city had close to 8 million people. I would have looked it up now, but the government had a policy of shutting down all of the cell towers, electricity, and other communications channels in the area I was in. They wanted to deny me any means of contacting others.
At any rate, there were still a lot of people scrambling to get out of New York as I’d jaunted down the Veranzo-Narrows Bridge. Some of them, rather than traveling north as the authorities had ordered, tried their luck going south, hoping to get west of me before I arrived. The massive throng of people on the bridge had seen me coming and had parted like the Red Sea. There was a stampede in the opposite direction, which killed more people than I did with my gun. Still more had drowned as they dove into the bay.
Even when I reached Manhattan-proper, there were plenty of targets to choose from. I shot all races, genders, religions, and sexual orientations. If there was one thing I wanted them to remember about the reign of Blaine Morrison, it was that I didn’t discriminate. I left a rainbow-colored swath of death and destruction wherever I went.
The gray-haired poodle in my riflescope was gnawing on the leg of a ten-year-old kid I’d shot through the lower-torso the day before. He and his dead mother next to him had also been the last human beings I’d seen. New York was empty. Garbage blew through the streets like tumbleweeds, rats roamed the streets without fear, and I was the first person in a hundred years to see the Milky Way in the skies of Manhattan.
I put my rifle down and gazed upward at the twilight sky. Watching a nuclear warhead descend from low-earth orbit is an interesting site to see. It starts out as just a white blob of light that could be mistaken for an airplane. As it continues to enter the atmosphere, it resolves into an orb with a long bright streak behind it that lingers in the air. It’s like watching a shooting star, but much bigger and slower.
I longed to see one of the military’s ICBM’s get within kill range of the city, but, of course, before that could happen, a Golem streaked up from the ground below, and intercepted the warhead. It diverted the weapon to far out over the Atlantic Ocean, and there was a blinding flash of bright light, followed by a mushroom cloud of vaporized salt water and whale guts.
I’d counted 6 attempted nuclear strikes so far. I suspected the military would give up on the idea soon enough, as it was completely ineffective. The good news was that all of the debris thrown into the Earth’s atmosphere would divert enough sunlight to solve our global warming problem.
“So, I’ve got that going for me…” I said aloud.
But, it wasn’t nice.
I could live as comfortably as I wanted, taking whatever I wanted, and I could have any woman I could catch, but I was an enemy of mankind. If I wasn’t hated by all, I was at least feared, by every last man, woman, and child on the planet.
“The touch of Midas,” I said.
I pulled out the notebook I’d picked up at a convenience store near Madison Square Park, and began to write:
Where do I start? I thought.
“At the beginning,” Mrs. Price, my eleventh grade English teacher, said in my mind.
###
I stared down the barrel of the .22. I saw the grey soft lead of the bullets in the chambers of the cylinder. If I had held the barrel under a light, maybe I could have seen the bullet with my name on it. It was cocked. All I needed to do was pull the trigger slightly. The hammer would fall on the rim of the cartridge, igniting the primer, thereby exploding the gunpowder, and sending a slug into my frontal cortex, permanently disrupting my body’s homeostatic equilibrium. But…I started to have my doubts about this course of action.
Was a .22 going to kill me or just leave me severely disabled? Was it going to hurt, and for how long? Although I didn’t explicitly believe anymore, I’d been raised Baptist. Part of me was also a little afraid of going to hell for committing suicide.
Holding a gun on myself was more difficult than I would have thought, so I put it down on the passenger seat of my car and gazed out at the forest of Georgia pines.
There was a full moon permitting me to see the outlines of the tall, shadowy trunks, reaching up into the starry sky above. The branches of the trees sat far above my car, swaying in the night breeze.
After Diane’s tearful confession, I had left the house and driven north on highway 90 for about an hour, and then down a couple of country roads until I had pulled into the parking lot of what looked like a State park. By that time, I was somewhere in south Georgia. I had grown up on the Florida panhandle just to the south of here, but I didn’t recognize the place.
“Bitch,” I said, not for the first time that night. “Fucking, stupid whore.”
“I was unhappy! You were never around, and I thought he loved me!” she had screamed when I opened the front closet, and grabbed my jacket and car keys. She had gripped at my arm, her fingers digging into my flesh, as I continued to rummage around in the top shelf of the closet, looking for it. When I pulled it out, she had stepped back, and her red puffy eyes had bulged, with sudden fear enveloping her tearful countenance.
“What do you need the gun for?” she said, almost begging for an answer.
I had pushed her to the floor of the front foyer of our house, where she lay in a sobbing heap. Then I threw open the front door, jumped in my car, and sped off into the night.
Now, sitting in my car in the parking lot of an anonymous park, I wished I’d used the gun on her first. I wouldn’t be having these doubts; I’d know whether a .22 could do the job. We lived in a state where I was likely to get the chair for murdering my wife, anyway, which would have meant someone else could have done my dirty work for me. But, knowing my luck, I’d probably just get life in prison. Then I’d spend my days being told when to eat, when to sleep, what to wear, and watching out that some guy named Bubba didn’t anally rape me in the shower.
“Of all the people she could have screwed, why did it have to be Nick Norris?” I said.
Nick Norris, the star quarterback of our high school. The asshole who was supposed to “peak” in high school. The asshole who’d been in the NFL for a single season before his career-ending injury. The asshole who came back to our hometown a local legend, and started a very successful auto dealership. The asshole who was a millionaire.
Diane had started working at his dealership a couple of months back. My job as a low-level clerk for the Gadsden County Clerk of Courts just wasn’t cutting it. She had been a cheerleader in high school, and Miss Gadsden County one year. She was still beautiful, and, as Diane had explained tonight, that son of a bitch, Norris, was after her from the day she started working for him. Probably the reason she got hired in the first place.
Norris had finally “caught” her tonight after happy hour. Diane had had a couple of drinks, and he had again professed his love for her, and, this time, she had relented. Afterwards, as they were getting dressed in the motel room, he had told her it had been fun, but he’d have to let her go, as he couldn’t have her distracting him at work anymore.
Diane had then come home and tearfully unburdened her guilty conscience on me, begging for forgiveness. Since she had completely kept me in the dark about his previous advances, the news had hit me like a sucker-punch to the solar-plexus.
“I fucking hate this!” I yelled as I punched the steering wheel of my twelve-year-old Honda Civic, then howled in pain. I popped the trunk of my car with my good hand, and got out. I had a cooler in there.
The reason I hadn’t joined Diane for happy hour was because tonight was the final showing of this year’s Shakespeare in the Park in downtown Quincy. I had been playing the part of Hamlet, and I had brought the ice chest and beer for the wrap party afterwards. So, while Nick-mother-fucker-Norris, had been screwing my wife, I had been discussing the two off-off-Broadway productions I had performed back in my New York days to my fellow Panhandle-thespians.
I opened the cooler and grabbed a big chunk of ice. I held it against my swollen hand, and looked out into the forest. I realized the moon wasn’t the only light source. About a hundred yards into the trees, I could see a faint bluish light that seemed to dance and flicker like a candle flame. It was between the trees, and it didn’t look like a light bulb, nor did it look like any fire I had ever seen.
I reached into my cooler and pulled out a beer. I popped the top, and downed half of it -all while keeping my eye on the unearthly luminescence. I walked over to the passenger side of my car and grabbed the pistol from the front seat, which I put in my jacket pocket. I turned on the flashlight app of my phone and picked my way across the forest floor.
This was easier said than done. The pine trees in this area are tall and thin, and let in sufficient sunlight to allow for the growth of other plants beneath. The most common of this flora is a palm with a sharp needle on the tip of each long, thin blade. They tend to grow in clusters, and I had to walk through a swath of them, and god-knows whatever critters might be residing therein. Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes are not uncommon amongst the gulf pine forests, and this seemed like as good a place as any for one of the little bastards to be hanging out.
The light from my phone helped me avoid the worst of the Freddy Krueger palms, but, just as I thought I was clear of them, something got me. I felt something sharp slide into the meat of my lower calf, and I thought I’d been bitten by one of those damned rattlesnakes. I jumped forward into the air to clear myself of the palms, dropping my phone as I fumbled in my pocket for the gun. I landed badly and twisted my ankle, barely holding onto the revolver, but managing to point it back behind me in the direction of whatever had gotten me. Once I was on the ground, I found my phone next to me, the flashlight app still on. I reached down, and pulled up my pants leg, shining a light on it. There was a single, small bloody hole in my leg.
“A rattlesnake bite would have two holes, right?” I said.
No one answered me.
It must have been one of those damned plants.
I put the gun back in my jacket pocket, and brushed the dirt and vegetation off my pants as I slowly stood up. I was so busy cleaning, it took me a while to notice that my phone’s battery had died and that everything was illuminated in a pale shade of blue. I spun around, and saw a twisted, deformed body surrounded by an unnatural azure glaze.
I pulled the gun back out, and approached the prone figure. I thought whoever it was must surely be dead, which is why, when it suddenly raised a three-fingered hand, I yelled, jumped back, and squeezed off a round with my pistol.
I saw the bullet kick up dirt about two feet from the creature. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was lucky I missed.
I say “creature” because it wasn’t a man….but it also wasn’t an animal. It had three arms protruding from its chest, and each of those had three long “fingers” on it. As if that wasn’t weird enough, each of the…fingers… had three little fingers on them. Although it had a blue light surrounding its body, the skin was green.
“I’ve discovered the swamp thing,” I said aloud.
That got the creature’s attention, as its three…eye stalks… turned and peered at me.
It said nothing, but I knew its thoughts. Most of them were just images: A world with three suns. Other creatures like it. Its version of sex. Its version of money and power, and its version of…loneliness. I also understood that this being was now dying of old age.
Over the next several minutes, the images in its mind got weaker and more erratic. Like a radio station slowly loosing reception as you travel in a car further and further away from the source, until, finally…nothing but static.
The blue glow flowed off the creature’s now-lifeless body, and, I realized, with sudden alarm, towards me. I turned, and ran, but not fast enough. It caught me like a large wave breaking over me at the beach. I was surrounded and enveloped. My senses were overwhelmed and momentarily shut down.
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