Friday, March 03, 2006

Microfiction: Mad Man WIth A Bad Plan


Some of us define ourselves by who we hate, who is pissing in our sandbox, angry at the world as a way of life.
Marty was one of those people. He hated most women. The bitches out for his nuts, anyway. He hated people of color, any color, although he would be mortified to know that the office sysop knew he surfed to Asian she-male websites on his office computer in the mornings before anybody else came in.
He hated spics, Jews, blacks, queers and even tossed Unitarians in the mix because, well dambitt, you have to take a stand somewhere.
In the dead of night, he laid awake thinking up new ways to kill em' all. Mass murder, genocide, he would find himself finding new and better ways to get even with all those ball busting bastards, from his ex wife to his boss to that queer in the shipping department who he was sure wanted to give it to him up the ass.
He started stockpiling guns, ammo, knives and reading up on how to wage war, make bombs, booby trap houses and cars, and how to cultivate anthrax and other nasty things. He actually worked up a good napalm substitute one weekend in the middle of nowhere in the Nicolet National Forest, out camping and shooting guns and drinking heavily, far from his apartment. He thought of it as fun with gasoline and powdered Tide Ultra Clean.
He had a plan, and with time it became a mission, one that had as much urgency and importance as any suicide bomber's.
He was going to take out those fucks at the office, once and for all, and them commit suicide by cop.
He gave notice, sold most of his worthless crap, and headed back into the National Forest to train. He spent a month, the whole time studying commando skills from books, hiking, working out and shooting both his pistols and his AK-47.
He actually became something close to a real Army Ranger, in his own limited way.
He hiked back out to the camper, and headed south, the roads eerily empty, the power out. What the hell was going on?
No matter, he thought, and he kept on driving, playing the scenes from his office massacre to come over and over again.
He made it back to the office as dawn broke, loaded up his guns, strapped on his armor, and headed in, still obsessing over the sheer act of bravery and warrior like intensity he knew he could pull off. He'd start by killing the first ones in the door, and work his way up to as high a count as he could before the cops took him out.
He felt a little bad about making the cops shoot him, but it was worth it to clean up the vipers nest that his workplace had become. Insurance was a pure form of business evil, the thought.
The door was open, the lights out, and he started to get a glimmer that something was seriously wrong. Things he'd been ignoring all the way home finally started to fall into place, and he realized nobody was in sight, and that the glow he'd been seeing on the horizon wasn't the sun over the lake. It was fire, and a big one. headed his way, and there was not a human moving anywhere in sight.
Right before the fires took out the business park, he painted the walls with his brains using a single big, slow moving slug from a .45.
Not because he would burn, although he knew he would, given the wind, the fire's speed and the blocked exit roads, or because of joy over everyone being dead.
It was because he realized that without the rest of the world to give him something to bitch about, life wasn't worth living.

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"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." Ralph Waldo Emerson