Part 3, Chapter 2 (Second Half)

Whoa, late post. Sorry about that!

I'll put the next chapter up on Thursday. Enjoy!

Dave

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2 (Continued)

But an hour later, I stop again as I approach an old military roadblock. It’s made up of short concrete barricades, backed by several military vehicles, and spread across the width of the road. A couple of weeks ago, the barricades were big news because they meant that the entire city was now under quarantine. It made the city feel like a lost cause, and was emblematic of how out of control the plague had become. Here were these blockades of concrete and steel and guns, trying to fight a plague of microbes and plasma and bits of DNA – no more effective than Emily holding her damp t-shirt to her mouth.

The most notorious roadblocks in the US, or at least those with the highest media appeal, bordered the built up areas of New York and Chicago. Millions of people were trying to escape the hotbeds of disease, which embodied city life, and get out into the country and whatever cities they presumed to be clean. Missoula, Montana, State College in Pennsylvania, and Boulder, Colorado, being prime examples. Of course, all the cities fell. Everywhere fell. After a few weeks, infection rates were so high across the board that nowhere was “clean”.

And anyway, there was no way the authorities could hold back the millions of men, women, and children trying to flee the cities. Before the crowds overran almost all vestiges of authority, people would simply run through the fields to evade the checkpoints. People got crazy and when they hit a roadblock, nothing was going to stand in the way of their own survival. Furthermore, the men holding those roadblocks together were as scared as everybody else. As the hierarchy of authority began to crumble, as even the president got sick and died, it became increasingly difficult to find a way to keep the masses in order.

I remember an image from the front page of one of the last issues of The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. The February 14 edition. In a half-page photograph, an old woman holds her hands up in plea to a masked military officer who tries his best to ignore her. She implores to him, on her knees. He stares over her head, into the distance, impersonal and inhuman; his expressing cracking just enough to convince us otherwise. But the woman’s face utterly crumples in despair. All is lost, the photo says. I’ll never forget that image.

Similar emblematic stories and images emerged from around the world, documenting harsh methods of disease control. In the U.K., authorities opened fire on a crowd of eighteen thousand protestors outside the Houses of Parliament, and then again, on the same day, in Hyde Park. The protest was against the closing of the borders and the subsequent crackdown on all British emigration.

Authorities also closed the U.S.-Mexico and the U.S.-Canada borders. Like in Britain, this wasn’t about controlling the movement of people; this was about halting all movement completely. No immigration. No emigration. No imports. No exports. Nothing. Across the world, almost all countries tightened their borders, to various degrees, and then within the countries themselves, cities too were often sealed. This, of course, was a disaster. No country was self-sufficient. The world was paralyzed.

In the U.S., military personal were stretched between calming public discontent and keeping that very same public quarantined. Soon enough, as the plague’s death toll rose to epic proportions, those checkpoints and barricades became little more than ghosts of authority. Now the old concrete barriers are monoliths to a previous controller; monuments for those gods to whom we almost sacrificed our freedom.

And here I am, poking around this symbolic ground of oppression, as a scavenger, looking for anything of use.

I’m surprised to find a well-stocked weapon’s cabinet in an unlocked, temporary office. I’m even more surprised to find that all I need to unlock the cabinet is a key, which is on the desk in the office next door.

I’ve never held a gun before and now I’m holding a semi-automatic machinegun; big, gray, heavy, cold steel. My experience in videogames provides me with the terminology of weapons. So I know this is a semi-automatic, an MP5 maybe, which is the most prevalent of videogame guns.

I walk to the edge of the road, towards a verge of snow-covered grass, which faces onto scrubland and, beyond that, a rock-face. I aim the gun, pull the trigger, and there’s a click, but nothing more. It appears that digital violence hasn’t taught me well enough. I turn the weapon over in my hands and fiddle with its mechanism for a while, searching for a safety catch. I want to see if there’s ammo inside the clip, but I don’t know how. I feel impotent holding the gun. I’m supposed to feel its power in my hands and equate it to my cock. The archetypal cock: thick, hard, my entire being and source of power. The cock. The gun. “Click.” But nothing happens.

“Click.”

“Click.”

I search around some more and find a switch. I twist it around its axis and settle the weapon again. Then I take aim and pull the trigger.

The force of the shot is so unexpected, it scares the shit out of me. The pellet of metal breaks the sound barrier and the shock travels up through my arm, into my body, so I can feel how tight my feet grip the ground. The power of the gun makes me feel big and in control. I feel powerful, as promised. I shoot more, at a wall, then at a car. I worry that the car might explode if I hit its petrol tank. Then I stop worrying. I’m in charge now, after all, so I shoot the car some more, aiming for the tank now.

The car doesn’t explode, but my whole body feels invigorated.

I pull the trigger again and again. The bang, the flash, the clang of metal against metal. It feels great.

After a while, I stop, control my breathing, and lower the gun. The car is now pocketed with holes and sitting on deflated tires. Paint has chipped off across the length of its body. Windows are smashed and the side mirror hangs by a few wires. What could be oil or gasoline is pooling on the ground beneath the car in a fast spreading dark patch.

I put the safety back on and pull the trigger to check if the gun’s disabled. It clicks its dead sound again so I strap the weapon to my pack along with my other collected miscellany and drive away on the snowmobile, heading north.