Banging Claire Danes & Killing Zombie Rebels

That red hair will put fire in your belly.  Every time.  Just a bad idea.  A poor decision.  Waiting to happen.  To phone in the police.  To tear your heart away from its cruel captor.  Every time, the same trial.  All the same excitement.  I try to push the thought of her out of mind, to focus on the task at hand.  We have to expel these rioting Wal-Mart employees from the district by five o’clock, after that we operate these armoured assault vehicles for free.  There’s no over-time this month.  Fucking stingy Uncle Sam for you.

I say we just need to hunker down for a minute

I strike a middle-aged, screaming white guy at about twenty mph, and he disappears under the headlights.  When the tractor treads crunch his bones up, the sound is just like Osiris being scattered about the banks of the Nile.  My gunner begins operating the ammunition belt.  Obese people wearing poly-cotton t-shirts over their faces like bandanas scatter, red blooms indiscriminately appearing across the backs of many.  There are so many of these fuckers, their cheap clothes in tatters, teeth rotted by a diet of fizzy drinks, potted meat and crystal meth: it looks like a zombie horde.  The rebellion has been going on for nearly a month.  Some cities are being wrestled back to order.  Most aren’t.

But this is only one reality; I should know, because I “walked-in” to this one a week ago, on Halloween.  In my old reality-stream, the Wal-Mart strikers were disorganised and non-militarised, too disjointed to be looked at as a cohesive movement.  But then, in my old reality-stream, Cheney hadn’t seized control of the Executive branch and suspended the Constitution.  Rumour has it his corporation is showing ambitions towards subsuming the Judicial branch soon as well.  And I hadn’t been drafted in 2007 during the joint invasion of Korea, Japan, and Siberia.  And that’s only one reality as well.

But this redheaded bitch’s scent is everywhere on me, mixing with the urine, the gunpowder.  I don’t know what I’m thinking half the time, I feel manic, out of control.  It’s been great.  I sense it can’t turn out well.

I am in no way qualified to tell how it happened, my displacement from one reality or dimension or whatever, into another.  But I can see the exact when, the circumstances leading up to that displacement.  It was Tom, an old friend; it happened when he “added” me to his contact list on the social network.  I confirmed with the user interface that I did indeed recognize this person.  We hadn’t spoken in at least a decade, probably were on our mutual paths to forgetting each other.  And then the social network’s programming algorithm picked us both out from among the data.  Arranged a few signals and Tom saw my face rendered before him on a laptop screen, and half a moment later, his appeared in front of me.  A withered circuit, reconnected just at the apogee of decay.  A transmission unforetold.

I clicked the avatar of Tom; I suddenly felt a fierce need to piss.  It actually moved me.  As I stood up, my vision was like from ten feet in the air or down a tunnel; I picked my way to the downstairs toilet with some difficulty.  Relaxed.  Released.  And then I had this like, epiphany: I realised that if it’s always only left or right for us, up or down; back and forth, on and off, you and me; I and you, I and everything else; then the wall in front of me, the water in the toilet bowl, the atoms comprising the urine running through the middle of the flesh of my very own cock – they are all experiencing me the same as I, at the same basic, uncomplicated binary level, am experiencing it.  We truly are only the mirrored inside of a sphere, looking at itself always, the observer being none other than that which is observed.  Upon this realisation: I felt whole.  My perspective suddenly went back to normal.

But when I left the bathroom, when I opened that door, I walked-in to a kitchen that was off kilter.  Too dingy.  My clothes had changed.  I felt in much better shape.  I noticed, too, that I was on some kind of very strong amphetamine and I smelled horrible.  Tattoos on my knuckles.  I turned around to the bathroom mirror, and fired my pistol at the person looking back.  Suddenly I have a killer’s instinct.  And a side-arm.  Fuck me, I thought.  This is happening.  I dropped the weapon in the kitchen sink basin.  Then I picked it up and collected it back in its holster.  This is happening one way or another.  Might as well be locked and loaded.

It only took a day before I had been completely absorbed into this alternative me.  First a mile in his shoes, then his schedule.  His job.  Where is this ‘he?’  Well, if he’s meeting my world, he’s pissed off and making a mess, to be sure.  Shit, that’s all I had been doing there anyway.  I’ve never been very gracious with my own belongings, but here I am being careful about everything.  Chain of command: respected.  The car parked outside my place: serviced on Tuesday.  The bank account filled with the spoils of doubtlessly heinous acts like the errand I’m currently undertaking: countenanced and appreciated, but otherwise untouched.  The fiery-headed playmate who has been showing up since that first night, when she made me wad her panties into a ball, stuff them into her mouth and take her in rough fashion… well, actually I have been finding it quite easy to take her in a rough fashion.  I was in the middle of something of a sexual drought back home.  Has me calling her Emily.  Just a few days ago, I would have told you she was a famous actress named Claire, had played that middle class teenager in a coming-of-age cable drama in the early ‘nineties.  Here, she’s a chanteuse and sometimes prostitute in a vice club run by the Midwest’s biggest gangsters, the Obama-Emanuel cartel.  Apparently I’m also on their graft.  Can’t wait to meet them.  We are all employees.

But back to the task at hand.  Pacifying the rebellion.

You really cannot help but sympathise with the movement.  Basically the slave-labourers of the western world, deliberately under-educated, poorly nourished, and jacked into credit schemes to kill any latent ambitions among them.  The only non-munitions jobs left in this country that hadn’t been moved to special trade zones.  Then, when a few among them had risen up to unionise, were murdered as an example of the company’s power, a group of charismatic rednecks laid out a plan to the rest that was straight out of the ultra-violent Hollywood entertainment they’d been steeped in for decades.  Once the rhetoric and the blood-shed reached the meth-belts in the country… thus burst the proverbial powder keg.  Equal parts common-sense justice and brutal, animalistic stupidity.  But then, I have to earn my pay-check as well.

After three hours or so of mowing down this patch of rioters, the universal ‘oh, shit’ light blinks at me from out of the dashboard.  We’re going to run out of gas.  We’ll be stationary.  Is there ample ammunition to dispatch our seething redneck audience?  What then?  As I ponder this, the engine clunkles, misfires a few times, rattles dead.  My machine gunner tosses a few grenades over the side and closes his hatch.  “Time to radio for air support – thank God it’s still four-thirty!” he deadpans.

The flash just enrages the swarm, already bloodied with their friends’ or family members’ syrupy vitality.  They pound the assault vehicle’s brushed carbon-fibre exterior panels until their fists explode and whither.  Another wave of angry faces and hungry mouths take the last one’s place.  Their shouts and war-cries become one din.  Until the vehicle is flipped over onto its side.  The ejector-mechanism is triggered somehow.  A moment to unhook my safety harness.  As I push at the ground to roll over, there’s a sharp crack on the back of my head.  I am suddenly aware of millions of claws tearing at me, I’m pulled in several directions.  Vox populi smells even worse than I do.

Fuck me.  I’m worm’s meat.

Oh, but for Emily.  I can still hear her departing words from this morning.  ‘Don’t tell me you love me.  Just tell me you had fun.’  The way her eyelashes splay out like wings, and match the crowsfeet, those laughlines we call them alternating things.  We get older, we get old.  We get kicked about by rebel meth-heads.  And then we are all carpet-bombed back to the hell of potential from whence we all spring.