American Apocalypse Read Online Free Page B

costumes, or as I preferred to call them “uniforms.” Uniforms
sounded much more dignified, even when it was only me that I was holding the conversation with. But I could not get past the image of me on the Batbike: cape fluttering in my slipstream, as I pedaled furiously somewhere “on a mission.” That was a little too insane, even for me. So I gave up on the uniform idea, although from then on I mentally referred to my wheels as the Batbike. Too bad it was green. But if I squinted, and it was the right time of day, it did look black.
    I wanted to do something with my life other than just scrounge a living from the crumbs of a society that never had much use for me anyway. I had grown up a throwaway. I had never mattered enough to anyone to protect. Hell, it was a big deal for Mom to remember to feed me. I knew firsthand what it felt like to be prey, in my case, prey for Mom’s latest boyfriend to beat on after he got drunk. I would stay quiet and out of sight until he’d eventually turn on her. Mom had a talent for picking out a certain kind of asshole and then slowly driving him insane until he snapped. Sometimes they would come find me to beat on. Other times I would try to distract him from beating on her and take the blows instead. I had been helpless in a world where everyone was bigger, stronger, and knew more than me. I may have gotten older and bigger, but not much else had changed. Except now I had a secret, a powerful secret that made everything feel so much better. But at the same time it felt wrong, too. I went back and forth in my head arguing the different sides. In one corner I had “Why care?” with “Fuck them all” pacing in the opposite corner and “Never again” off in a third.
    I didn’t really like Why care? He was a whiner who just wanted to find someplace safe to hide away and eventually
die in. Fuck them all was angry—very, very angry—a burning red violence that alternated between intense flaring heat and smoldering. He wanted to hurt people, any and all people; I knew once he started it wouldn’t stop until he was killed. Never again was the hardest to see and promised nothing immediately. The only promise he offered was that I could get myself to a place where I no longer had to be a victim. The price was I had to do my best to protect those around me with what I learned. It turned out to be a simple choice: good wolf or bad wolf. Carol made the decision for me: When the memory of her face floated up into the three-way conversation, Fuck them all lashed out, and I couldn’t live with that. I really did love her. I squeezed him out, a growing intense pressure that was trying to take me over from the inside, and I boxed him up and never opened that box again.
    Three months went by and the Gardener killing was old news. The level of violence had increased exponentially. It was like one day a switch had flipped and people began not to give a damn. People were just angry. Angry at what they had lost; angry that no one was coming to help them; angry that it had not gone away—that every morning when they got up, nothing had changed. When it had changed overnight, it was almost always for the worse.
    What really bothered people was that it was unequal: It was as if a bomb had dropped, but had only blown up some people. It made some folks crazy that their old friends and neighbors could still go to the mall, eat in restaurants, and watch the game on their digital HDTVs. It just wasn’t fair, goddamn it! If they had to suffer, well, then other people should also. So they began making people
suffer—sometimes by stealing something, other times by using sharp objects, even sometimes through the most bizarre forms of torture. But most of the time, people just sat around and hated and envied.
    I spent the next three months adjusting. I also bought a new garden trowel and a sharpening stone from a hardware store. They did not have them in black—they were all green or stainless. I was