I just want to make it clear I had no intention to leave Kansas City ever. I was just going to stay and die. My own personal confinement to protect the world from myself. I was a reclusive shut-in. Half the world thought I was dead already anyway. I assumed the other half thought I was a dick and wanted me dead. It turned out the number was actually only around 25%.
People are fucked up. Really weird creatures. Can’t predict ‘em. Can barely deal with ‘em. Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, The New York Mets, all the really fucked up people of the last few centuries have one thing in common. They weren’t alone. Hitler wasn’t gassing Jews in the morning and then leading the armies at night. Idi Amin didn’t kill almost 500,000 people by himself. They had armies. They had followers. They had underlings. They had fucking fans. People that thought they were cool, thought they were doing the right thing. People that thought that these leaders knew the way to a better life. Those people were almost certainly wrong, but they were there all the same. I think some people just want balance in the world. Like they don’t care what they are supporting as long as they aren’t supporting the same thing as everyone else.
Anyway, when I found out that I was essentially the beloved figurehead for a growing cult, I was pretty fucking surprised.
Also, just being honest here, a little flattered.
I really can’t emphasize how firmly I did not want things to happen like this though. Honest to God, I mean, I just wanted to try and live a semi-normal life. I was having fun and Robert was a good life partner, albeit a bit older than I prefer. I also would’ve preferred he’d be extremely attractive and into kinky sex, but I honestly thought that we could just handle things together and hang out and keep each other company til the end and it would be good.
Why did things go wrong? Same thing as always with me. Dumb guy asking dumb questions.
“…internet interest in John Brunsen has done nothing but increase since his disappearance from society after the terrorist attacks in downtown Atlanta.” Robert was listening to his small radio in his part of the abandoned gas station. I overheard my name so I popped in.
“That about me?” I asked.
“No, well yes, but it’s not important,” Robert said.
“Can I listen?” I asked.
“Not now. I want to be alone.” Robert said.
“Can I just listen to this part? They are talking about me man” I asked.
“I said not now.”
“It’s about me man, how could I not want to hear it? I been sitting here, cooped up forever, assuming the entire world hated me and now I hear that might not be the case and maybe I just want to hear that?” I said.
“I said NOT NOW.” Robert shoved aggressively me from the room and slammed the door.
You have the understand that in our fragile state, this was a moment of shock for both of us. Any sort of violent outburst between us could possibly result in all-out war. We both knew it. If the Samskara took hold, one of us died. We had known this day would come. As two powder kegs living together, you have to realize that if things go wrong, they could go extremely wrong. We had plans setup. There were phrases and things we knew that we could do to keep from igniting one another further that Robert had insisted on implementing.
Robert was a sensible and thoughtful person who immediately began ameliorating the potential damage. I did the opposite because I am neither sensible nor thoughtful. Robert, immediately concerned he was slipping, began frantically search for his clonazepam to settle himself. Myself, angry and too stupid to realize it, immediately began searching for something heavy and bulky to smash in Robert’s door with so that I could rip his face off with my bare hands and then wear his skin as a suit while I used his thigh bone to impale my enemies.
“Let me in the door or I pry this son of a bitch open, I heard what they said man. I want to hear this,” I said.
Robert was calm. “John, think for just a second. Try and think. Turn off your emotions and think. Remember what we’ve talked about. Human brain, not lizard brain. It is an extremely bad idea for you to come in here right now for multiple reasons. I didn’t want you to know about this because there is nothing good that can possibly come of this.”
“You knew? There is a fucking Brunsen worshipping cult out there and you knew and you didn’t tell me? Was I supposed to just sit here and wait til you start shitting yourself and wipe your ass while you die? Or did you just want a friend for the apocalypse? What the fuck, man? You can’t hide shit like this from people.”
“John, please listen to me. Use your meditative phrases. Channel that anger out of you.”
“I have a right to be angry here man. You can’t hide shit like this from people. There are people out there that don’t hate me? You know how long I’ve been sitting around feeling like shit because the whole world thinks I am a terrorist who killed a bunch of innocent people for no reason.”
“You did kill a bunch of innocent people.”
“Not for no reason though!”
“I don’t think those outside of this building will understand that.”
I shoved my make-shift pry bar (a hockey stick that I occasionally used for slapping shit around in the wreckage) into the door. “They might fucking understand it. We don’t know because you turned the radio program off.” I struggled hard and the hockey stick snapped. I was even more pissed now as not only could I not get into the door, but I also broke my best hockey stick. That meant a trip to the sporting goods store, which was like a 5-mile walk and it was getting hot outside. I would get hot and sticky and the trip would be a big shitshow. I was getting angrier about it by the minute.
“I broke my stick dude. Not cool. God dammit let me in Robert.”
“You know what is happening John. You have to stop. Slow down. Control yourself.”
People telling me what to do never really helped even before I had all these fucked up problems.
“What’s the problem man? It’s not like I can call them up and tell them I’m alive. I can’t walk out of this joint without getting drone bombed, arrested or just plain old executed. There isn’t any way I am ever going to communicate with these people. I just need this one thing, the idea that there are some people out there that don’t think of me as the world’s greatest shithead. Honestly Robert, I need to hear what they have to say. I need to see in me whatever it is they see in me. I just need a reason to think that forgiveness is possible, even for someone as horrible as me.”
Robert’s door opened. He appeared sad as he held the door slightly ajar. My words had clearly got to him. He knew the same pain; he knew the same sadness. “I get it. I do. The answer remains no.” Robert slammed the door. He nicked the tip of my third finger. Honestly, if that hadn’t happened it’s possible that I would’ve just given up, but the only thing more initiating than watching violence done onto others is seeing violence done onto you. I felt a surge well up inside me.
“Fine then, fuck you dude. I will do this this myself.” I kicked his door before I left. It hurt my toe.
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I was raging. Who was this motherfucker and why did he think that he could do this to me? There were people out there who were trying to talk to me, maybe they could help. Maybe they would start a Facebook page or something to beg for my forgiveness. I could come out and talk about how BIMPT had destroyed my life. Do talk show circuits, maybe go on Oprah and explain my side of things. People needed to know this shit.
There was an evil god damn company out there ruining thousands of lives, mass murdering by the dozen, the HR guy was a dick, and I think the government is probably in on it, and I am….you know, I am more or less innocent. Victim of circumstance. Maybe there would be a Senate hearing or something. If I could rally the people, maybe there was a chance that people would support me. Here I am, at the cusp of getting my god damn life back together and this guy won’t ever let me listen to the god damn fucking radio.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Not a problem, time to take matters into my own hands.
I had this thought a long time ago. Basically right after I “moved in” so to speak. I hadn’t ever acted on it, but it set there in the back of my mind, malingering, waiting until I needed to call upon it. Things caught on fire pretty regularly in KC. Even in functional cities fires broke out. In this devastated wasteland, even with all the gas lines off and everything else, things still happened. The whole area was monitored by drones. Some of these were designed to drop fire suppressant, some of them patrolled the border, some of them had cameras. Almost all of them were exclusively property of people who wanted to keep everything on the interior of Kansas City a secret.
I was no longer one of those people.
The way I figured it, this thing was simple. If you had a big enough problem, it would start to catch satellite feeds and other sources. Sure, your local weather channel had satellite access, but nothing that could resolve a campfire on the ground of KC. So all I had to do was make a big enough problem that people would notice. I realized pretty quickly that drawing my name in the dirt wasn’t going to do the trick, it would take something substantially larger. Shit, I set an entire building on fire and no one noticed that one because the drones came by and put it out before anything got worse. No, I was going to have to make a statement. Show the world that this place wasn’t as empty as it once looked.
Downtown Kansas City was more or less decimated. There were a few things left standing. Amongst them, lay the key to my salvation. All I needed was a bit of ingenuity, a little luck and some hard work.
Kansas City wasn’t known for some great imposing skyline like New York or some place. Frankly, I had no idea what was there before they dropped the bomb. Of the remaining buildings left standing, one of them was the Western Auto building. If there was one thing that people still cared about, thought about, reminisced about in Kansas City, it was the Western Auto building. The building itself wasn’t huge, maybe it was 100 feet tall but it was shaped like a piece of pie and on top of it, a giant sign that said, “Western Auto”. The sign had become the signature image, the picture that all the ads and pamphlets used to show the public the dangerous face of Samskara. Sure, they still called it Grey Plague, and it was all PSA type stuff, but it was an image the same way people still thought about the Twin Towers. I almost laughed when I thought about the commercials. Back then it was just Grey Plague to me too, this unimaginable shit that fell out of the sky a long time ago and would never affect anyone again because we spent so much time making ourselves safe. Look at me now mom!
This was the only way I was ever going to get a message out.
The building had been turned into apartments before the bombs hit which meant it had a staircase all the way to the top, and the top was where I needed to go. It was a long trudge to the building. I knew roughly where it was, but it wasn’t like I had GPS software to find the location or provide me directions. There was enough left from street signs to figure out which way was North. Robert had shown me where the downtown area was so I knew roughly that I had to go North to get there but I had no idea how far it was. I jumped on a bicycle I had found lying around and had commandeered weeks ago. I rode straight north, forgoing any sort of disciplined attempt at avoiding confrontation and instead barreling towards my goal.
Along the way I realized my break from Robert was going to cause me some significant problems. I had no way of monitoring and keeping my dopamine levels under control which meant either I would turn shambler, psycho, or just burn out and die pretty soon. Without all the other stimuli from the modern world, I had no idea which one would happen first. It seemed like pretty even odds across the board, so I was hoping for shambler since it meant I might wake up one day in the future and hopefully all this would be over. Maybe that was the right decision. Hole-up somewhere and just let the Samskara take me wherever they thought best. According to Robert it was coming for all of us eventually anyway. And what was the alternative? What was I even expecting from this group of people? The Brunsenites I started to call them to myself. What would they do if they knew I was still alive? Would I still be hailed a hero? Would it even matter?
I was on a pretty serious high to begin with, which when combined with my poor aerobic fitness, left me unable to make the whole trip before I had to stop and catch my breath. I waited until I felt better on a park bench, the only thing left standing within hundreds of feet. It was concrete and had been unseated by whatever blast hit it but remained upright. There was something comforting about park benches, even when they are the only thing standing in the desolate wasteland of a bombed out biological wasteland. I set on the bench until I remembered how Robert had stressed that the world out here was incredibly dangerous which motivated me to continue moving. I arrived at the pie shaped Western Auto Building after a few hours of riding. My legs were burning and my body felt like mush. The front door was closed, but most of the windows had been blown out in the past so I simply knocked out the rest of the glass and went through one of those. Of course none of the lights worked, which meant no elevator would work, which meant that I had a lot of stair climbing to do.
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It ended up taking me almost two days to assemble everything the way I wanted. It was a ton more work than I thought. The whole time I spent working the anagram in my head. The problem was that letters just weren’t that useful. It would’ve been nice if my name was clearly spelled out in it, but it just didn’t happen that way. That’s when I got the idea about the tires. It solved a lot of problems but meant I would have to go back home for a quick break or I’d be mush before I could finish.
The building was around 8 stories tall, plus I also had to go through roof access. Hauling everything up all the steps and ladders was exhausting. I also had no food and was now detoxing hard (again) and while I was better than ever at handling it, the dyskinesia had set back in and everything was happening through a twisting and shaky field. I was close to starving (I had gone out and searched out small bits a food a few times when I couldn’t take it anymore and had gotten lucky and found some bottled water) and definitely dehydrated. The only thing propelling me forward was a stubborn and dogmatic approach to initiating a change. A couple of times I tried to logically evaluate the idea, to make sure that what I was doing made some sense? Was it me doing this? Really me? Was I being controlled? Paranoia is a side of all the drug abuse to begin with. Mount real problems on top of that and the line that you cross before entering the zone of “paranoid schizophrenic” gets pretty blurry. Add in all my other bullshit and you can basically smear it clear across the page.
It took me 67 tires. That was the hard part. Getting them off cars, finding them, rolling them up things, dragging them to the roof. It was a ton of work. I got lazy towards the end. The B didn’t look as good as I hoped.
Back to the anagrams. Easter un tow. Tease Turn Ow. Taunters Owe. Saunter wote. Anus tower. Holy cow, Anus Tower actually fits? I mentally jotted down Anus Tower as my backup. There was a lot there. None of them really made any sense. I was trying to use all the letters. I had them all down, that part was easy. The hard part was changing the sign such that someone could figure out someone was there. I figured it out when I realized I didn’t need to use all the letters. In fact, I just went ahead smashed part of the ‘U’ that I didn’t need and turned it into an apostrophe. I tossed the rest off the roof. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough, and I loved mythology, so there was a little bit of me in there too.
Everything was finally setup, but it was obvious from my condition that there was no way I could continue as I was. That was okay, I had forgotten something I needed anyway. I started the long ride back to the abandoned gas station, sick, tired, malnourished, dehydrated and near death or something worse. Even still, I was reluctant to go. I liked Robert. This whole thing, he wasn’t going to understand it. I didn’t want a showdown. I didn’t want a fight. I did need his drugs though, and it wasn’t just like when I was a kid and I was bored. I could feel sanity creeping away at the edges. Small things were setting me off. I’d drop something on my toe and the next thing I know I’d be punching a wall til my knuckles bled. I was talking to myself constantly. At least I hope I was talking to myself. I lost track of time. Things were getting done without my consent or knowledge. I didn’t understand it but I knew the route I was going down.
I arrived back at the gas station shortly before nightfall. It was also the time Robert was most likely to be gone. He took this time of day, the low light, to go out and find anything we needed, he needed now I guess.
He was gone when I got there. There was a note at least.
“John,
I understand why you left. You are always welcome to return. If you return and see this, please take my radio as a gift and a sign of contrition. I do hope that you understand that what you seek does not exist, but maybe the simple act of hearing it yourself will be sufficient to instill that in you. If you decide to return, please do bring back the radio though.
Your friend,
Robert
P.S. Do be judicious with the cocaine, I believe you might have developed a problem.”
I read it three times. It had been so long since someone had signed something that they were my friend it was almost enough to make me stay. To make me just consider what it would be like to simply wait things out til the end. I wished he had been there. I probably would’ve stayed. Some days I wish I had, but I didn’t.
I bundled up enough uppers and downers, to last me a month, did three fat lines of coke, tapped out a fourth, had a panic attack about overdosing after detoxing, did the line anyway, and then headed out. I got about a 40 feet out the door before I remembered the radio. I was disappointed when I realized its inclusion meant that I had to dump some of the drugs. Someday, I would find a way to thank and repay Robert though.
None of that mattered now though. I was here for something else.
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I was worried the flamethrower wouldn’t have any juice left when I picked it up, that all this had been for nothing. Lugging this giant piece of shit back to Downtown Kansas City was a nightmare. When the igniter hit and the first burst of flame popped out it all felt like it was meant to be. I had to be careful (judicious Robert would say) as overdoing it would burn the building down but starting a tire fire isn’t as simple as a box of matches. Ultimately it would probably be the end of the Western Auto building, but it served its purpose. I did the tires first, then the sign. Then I took out the radio and listened and waited. I took up shop in the lobby, waiting for visitors of any kind, hiding at first and then not. I knew the building was done for, but I figured I had some time. It took almost a full day for the mainstream news cycle to pick it up.
When Robert finally showed up, I was still listening.