Ahhh. Springtime in the city. A time to get back outdoors and enjoy that beautiful midwestern weather. I must have been inside BIMPT for far longer than I thought.

Living in post-apocalypse Kansas City wasn’t exactly how I thought it would be. I mean, it wasn’t as fun as my last super intense drug binge for sure. Doing drugs was fun and sociable then. Now it was mandatory. Sure, it’s pretty fun at first, but after a while, the ups and downs start to take their toll. Robert was constantly frustrated with the tooth grinding, but I was practiced enough in these areas that I could actually teach him a few things! How to ride a high, how to sleep when you’re high on coke, when to stop taking Q so you didn’t aspirate on your vomit and die. It was actually an area where I was the knowledgeable one for once!

This drug binge was still less fun. First of all, the only people to party with were an aging man who clearly hadn’t realized how badly he had misread the situation when he told me he had “as much as we could possibly need for the immediate future” (Note: he did qualify this with “if we are judicious and medically regimental with the material” but I really never gave that a second thought – turns out we were way fucking short by any real estimate but I didn’t learn that til later) and what amounted to a zombie-like race of mindless lemmings that barely acknowledged your presence. None of these people were particularly fun or engaging, and Robert clearly was overly concerned about my drug abuse (“if you continue to take the drugs in this fashion, I have to sincerely doubt if you are seriously attempting to maintain your condition”), but I was the most hated person in the world and so beggars can’t be choosers. Eventually we struck a deal that I’d handle my shit and he’d handle his and if things ever got to the point where one of us feared for their life then we’d have a code phrase and invoke it for dangerous times. It worked out ok after that. I forgot what the code word was when I was high though, so I figured Robert would probably just end up shooting me one day. It was still the best option I’d had in the last year.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix things, how to stop BIMPT. It was getting worse. We had a radio and reports were increasing risk of Samskara attacks and pending war. BIMPT was being hailed as a leader in the field of Samskara research and had proposed a cure. A part of me wanted to stop them, wanted to win, if nothing else because of how bad they fucked my life up. “Robert if we can control our sickness, why can’t the whole planet? Why can’t we give everyone drugs?”

“We could, certainly it would require a world-wide effort to mass produce and self-monitor as well as ensuring the safety of the next generation. This would require a public-private partnership at levels never before observed, beyond any pandemic, beyond any public health initiative. It would require separation of those who had not been infected and placing their survival and needs above the rest of the world. It would require first world nations to almost entirely shoulder the cost of third world countries, it would…

“Ok, I get it, not going to happen.”

“Correct, this is not the way humanity functions.”

I had a ton of things to do other than just contemplate the impending destruction of mankind. We could generate power. A lot of buildings and homes in the area had backup generators and many were gasoline powered. Believe it or not, gas wasn’t actually that hard to find. Most of the pumps were broken, but Robert showed me how to access things directly in some of the big tanks around the city. Gas actually lasts a long time if you keep it away from oxygen, and many of these tanks were hermetically sealed. That meant that we could crack a tank of hundreds of gallons, use it over a series of months and then move on to the next one. Because of the drone surveillance, we basically had to move around through buildings, during dusk, etc... It’s not like BIMPT and others didn’t know we were there, but we also didn’t want them to come looking for us. Robert told me a few had tried and all had failed. Grady had taught him a lot and having the advantage of cover was a big deal in an actual fight. Sure, they could just bomb him out or nuke his gas station or whatever else they wanted, but ultimately what purpose did that serve? Robert thought they let him live only because the possibility of capturing him was more valuable to them than revenge killing him. With Grady and his crew gone, it was possible they’d just give up and remove him. That made me think it was a good time to move but Robert said that moving wouldn’t likely stop them for more than a week or so. At that point, it seemed like more effort than it was worth, so I just found my own bunk and moved in.

The second day, Robert showed me a pretty cool arcade. Most of the machines were still playable once we fired up the generator. Over the next few weeks, I got extremely good at pool, shuffleboard, a couple of random video games I remembered playing as a kid in the 90s, and a few other things. Mostly I played pinball for hours at a time setting high score after high score. The machine always failed once the genny stopped, so I pretty much always set the new high score. I played for almost two hours on one quarter after a while. The last year of my life was such a mess that honestly some days I felt like this was a reprieve from so many different awful scenarios that I couldn’t have asked for more. I had expected to spend the rest of my life either being tortured by BIMPT, the government, some other BIMPT-like corporation, or something worse. Pinball was a pretty cool alternative.

There was a library nearby too. I read a lot of books when I could. It was hard to read when your head was halfway to the moon on Qbars but I can read like a motherfucker geeked up on blow, tearing through book series left and right. It was all schlock, I made a dedicated decision not to bother educating myself about anything during this period given its known terminal nature, but it was fun to just sit around and read nonsense. It made my own situation less grim, less dire.

It wasn’t all glitz and glamour of the arcade and the library though. Unfortunately, most all refrigeration had failed which meant that finding stuff to eat was pretty tough. It had been years since the bombing so most of the canned food was out. It lasted a long time but food poisoning shits weren’t worth risking. This left us really just a couple of options, mostly it left us dry beans. White beans, black beans, spotted beans. All sort of beans. Beans and vitamins. Vitamins were key as you can’t survive on beans. Fortunately, their shelf life was basically infinity. We found rice when we could too, which was commonly spoiled or infested, but occasionally it was edible. Life became a steady diet of multivitamins, beans, rice and occasional twinkie or whatnot whose preservative levels were high enough to preserve them through both biological and nuclear genocides. Sometimes we found honey which was basically the only sugar we could have. Honey was liquid gold. I already had as many drugs as I could reasonably handle so finding honey became like scoring for me.

I should point out just how bad things were. Kansas City was mostly leveled. The nuclear strikes against the city had been designed to have overlapping circles of destruction. It wasn’t like some places were nice and some places weren’t. The overwhelming majority of the city was flat. Grass and trees grew out of what was once a bank. There weren’t a lot of animals, but we saw some occasionally. Robert shot a rabbit one time and we made rabbit and bean stew. It was honestly pretty terrible. I decided I could just eat beans if it meant the bunny got to live. I’m not a vegetarian or anything, it just isn’t worth killing a 14oz bunny to try and scrouge a few flecks of meat off it. Robert had picked apart a number of the suburbs, places where there was still enough standing to scavenge from. There wasn’t a lot more places to go, but we weren’t living for the future so it hardly mattered.

The other problem was constant exposure to radiation. Geist had been living here a long time, so we were fairly sure that background rad levels were under control, but honestly it’s not like we had a Geiger counter to measure anything we used. For all I know, the spoon I used every day was hotter than fresh yellowcake. BIMPT had been pretty concerned about things, but whether or not that was just fronting due to the Samskara sickness we didn’t know. I was living pretty hard at this point, and since Geist hadn’t died yet, I figured cancer ten years earlier wasn’t likely to impact my overall existence.

I passed my days with a mixture of heavy drug abuse (hiding how much I was using from Robert was always an issue), arcade games, and scavenging. Robert was a fairly solitary individual and spent much of his time locked in his broken freezer unit listening to the radio. Radio was like tv, only extremely fucking boring, so I got over it pretty fast. The one exception was baseball. We got baseball games on the radio. As a diehard Atlanta fan for most of my life, I would always listen when they played. Robert was from New York originally and lived for the days the Mets played. Atlanta played New York one day and he even brought out an old Tom Seaver throwback jersey he had procured from some store. There were dueling chants supporting our team as the game turned out to be a barnburner. New York won in the end. Honestly, it was probably the happiest two people with nothing in common other than a constantly altered mental status due to debilitating alien poison coursing through their veins could be.

Most of our conversations were at night since I was out during the day and neither of us slept well. It was a side effect of the uppers/downers profile. Sure, some days you sleep for 18 hours straight, I mean, I hit the coke hard enough during this period to probably be classified as mentally insane for the rest of my life were it not that anyone would already classify me that way to begin with, but most nights you are just jittery. It’s fucking hard to sleep on coke. It’s hard to stop too, and whenever Robert wasn’t there I always struggled with ‘judicious use’ as he called it. Some nights I was gacked out pretty hard.

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“If you could do it all over Robert, what would you change?”

“I would focus on chemistry.”

"That’s it. You would focus on chemistry? That’s the only thing you would change out of all of this?” I spoke quickly, in staccato sentences. I could even hear it myself. When I was like this Robert always got mad so I tried to slow it down.

“Yes, my life would follow much the same course but without this extremely negative and deleterious detour into violence, drug abuse, and hermetism, all of which I find reprehensible. I would also pursue academic science more heavily given what I understand about the industrial side now.” Robert said.

"Man, I would change all sorts of shit. I’d be nicer to my mom. My dad left when I was young. It turned her into a drinker. She never really gave a shit about me after that, but I guess I never really did anything to give a shit about. I was pretty much always a B student, I didn’t play sports, I didn’t play music, I mostly just hung out and watched tv on the couch, I never kept my room clean, I never helped out around the house.”

“John…”

"I guess if I had helped out more and tried to forge a bond I could’ve helped her. The next thing I would change is that I would ask out Julia Mincer senior year, I was pretty sure she was into me but she was just so fucking pretty that I couldn’t imagine it so I never really did.”

“John, please…”

“Maybe if I had asked out Julia, or even Mary, fuck man she was so hot, either Julia or Mary, if I just asked out one of them, oh shit, or that one girl whose named I never remember with the tits, if I ask out Julia, or Mary, or the girl with the tits, she would’ve helped me straighten out. Maybe we would’ve went to the same college and I would’ve actually passed so I could’ve gotten a decent job so I didn’t have to cook up my stupid scheme that got me into all this, oh shit but wait, then I wouldn’t have gotten to fuck that one girl, you remember the one I told you about? The one with the piercing in her lip, oh man…”

"JOHN!

I stopped.

“John, you are rambling. I think you might have exceeded your limit again. Please, please, do try and be regimental with the medication.”

“Robert, you are an excellent listener but you are an awful person to party with man.”

“Partying as you call it was never one of my interests so, thank you. Indeed, I have never been interested in simply wasting my mind on pointless chemical indulgences.”

“They aren’t pointless man. It’s fun. Super fun. Don’t you ever enjoy the feeling you get? I got fucking wrecked the other night. Total out of body shit. Woke up in the arcade without my pants on. Third highest score I ever got in pinball though. It was a pretty great day all and all.”

“Yes, I also find the chemicals pleasurable at times, but I also do my best to remind myself that it is purely for medicinal purposes and moreover, it is also killing me slowly. Of everything that we have here, most of them have little medicinal value. I have been forced away from pharmaceutical grade material and into street grade material. Truly embarrassing if I am honest. Another reason to focus on chemistry, I could potentially generate my own compounds with the right laboratory and precursors.”

"Damn, me too then. We could cook up all kinds of shit. You bake ‘em I’ll take ‘em Doc.”

“Hardly my point. Regardless, the only things we have left that have any real benefit is the Quetiapine, which is rapidly diminishing and the ketamine.”

News to my motherfucking ears! “Dude! What the hell? We’ve got Special K and you’ve been holding out on me? Where’s the cat valium at man? We can get into that shit whenever you want. How much do we have?”

“Yet again, you have misunderstood me, and while I continue to try and convince myself you are only speaking in jest, it does get harder and harder as the weeks go by. Regardless, while ketamine can be used as an anesthetic for small animals as you note, recent research has begun to describe its uses in resolution of major depressive disorder and social anxiety disorders. It seems like its dissociative effect is so potent that it is possible for it to almost reset the human brain. It allows access to repressed memories and traumatic events and helps the brain resolve the trauma. It can functionally alter aspects of the human mind that we cannot manage otherwise. Clinical trials using ketamine have found remarkable results. The medicinal uses are potentially endless, particularly if we can hone its effects.” Robert said.

Fuck it. I got to try. “Maybe we can take a bunch and it will erase the Samskara from our minds? Maybe we should try that?” I said it will all the naivete I could muster, laying it on as thick as humanly possible. This was a once in a lifetime chance.

“I appreciate your interest John, and I too had this thought. Clinically, it doesn’t seem that the Samskara rely on any sort of repressed trauma. They target more or less everyone. Moreover, simply recovering from sort of major depressive episode isn’t really relevant to Samskara associated psychosis. As such, your hypothesis has a number of flaws. The greater problem is of course that the likelihood that you cannot leave the dissociate fugue that ketamine induces is too high. Even if we were to monitor one another, without some means for real-time understanding of neural dopamine levels, it would just be far too dangerous. While its primary pharmacological effect is on NMDA receptors, and ketamine’s effect on dopamine agonism in the brain remains controversial, there is some reliable evidence it may affect dopamine reuptake and thus may block dopaminergic signaling in the brain. Obviously I am years behind the current science as I am lucky to find much of anything of value out here. However, if you combine the dissociation with a lack of dopamine signaling in the brain, my guess is that even small amounts of ketamine carry a very high risk for a one-way ticket to what you have referred to as “Shamblerland”, a word I have to admit I find amusing. For this reason, I have spirited it away such that neither of us takes any on accident. I only keep it in case we end up in some sort of Doomsday scenario and we must use it as a last resort. This would be a one in a million chance that somehow, someway, ketamine overdose is sufficiently damaging to the normal neural pathways that it somehow would short circuit the Samskara’s effects. Scientifically, this just isn’t plausible.”

Alright, let’s try this another way. “Robert, I’ll be honest here, I just want to get high on ketamine. May I have some ketamine? Please. You can keep the rest, please just give me one human dose worth of ketamine. Not the bullshit sedative dose. The real dose. The fun one. Give me ketamine. Please.”

He was disappointed, but more so with himself if I had to guess. He had the look that TV fathers get on their face when they find out the middle child purchased a joint from an older kid at school in a sitcom. “John you are aware that drugs, particularly the ones we are taking can damage your heart and brain?”

“Robert, I can say this with all honesty: No, no one has ever before told me about the dangers of drugs. Thank you. Thank you, Robert. I will stop immediately.”

"Sarcasm is a tool of the weak-minded John.” Robert said.

“So are drugs. I guess my mind is weak. My heart is strong though, watch this shit!” I erupted from my bed into jumping jacks. After about 40 I fell back down into bed. Robert said nothing but seemed amused. The joke went on too long though and I let it die.

We set alone in the darkness for a few minutes. I tried not to talk because I didn’t want to bother him. Things just kept slipping out though.

"What if we try to contact everyone? Tell them what happened?”

“John, we’ve been over this before.”

'Yea, yea, I know. No one believes a terrorist and a missing scientist and BIMPT will cover it up and how would we even do it and all that other stuff you always say.”

“Not to mention the fact you would almost certainly call down the wrath of the many institutions who are desperate to protect this information and almost certainly assure our immediate deaths. While I know I am bound for the grave soon, I am not interested in hurrying this adventure along and certainly not under the yoke of my former captors.”

“But…you know the major thing I would do different is that I would try and tell people. I would try and get this information out. Are you really okay with sitting around knowing the entire planet is doomed? The human race is imploding without even knowing it?”

“It is inevitable,” he said glumly.

"It doesn’t have to be man. Maybe we can help people?”

“John, either go to bed, or keep such thoughts to yourself. There is no way around what has already occurred. We have lost. The war was over before you joined, before it even started. You are currently its most notable soldier, but much like Gomer Pyle, your role is minor and ultimately unimportant.”

I set thinking about his comments for a long time. My own actions were probably proof enough. I’d killed, killed for almost no reason even. Indiscriminate violence. It meant nothing ultimately. How could we stop such a thing?”

“I think people are better than you give them credit for man. If the world knew about this, people would band together. We just have to give them a reason to want to help each other again.”

“John, stop.”

“No, come on man. Can we like…fix your radio so it sends out messages? What if we call someone on like 60 Minutes or something? I…I don’t care if we stop the Samskara. So what if they win? Can we at least just stop BIMPT? Can we at least just try to explain to people what’s happening? How come you won’t even give humanity a chance?”

Robert was quiet for a long time. “To what end? To what end will this go? If we delay the BIMPTs of the world, not only BIMPT itself but all the other institutions and governments and businesses and dictators and the rest of the malfeasant cadre of criminal overlords that run this world, then what? Eventually, as you so boldly put it, the Samskara will ‘win0’.”

I didn’t have a good answer. “Cause fuck them that’s why.”

“Purely for revenge then? The least noble motive of all if you ask me. What’s done is done. We had agreed we could live peacefully this way, albeit not as happily we might otherwise, I have enjoyed your company overall John despite your incessant swearing, foul body odor and constant flatulence.”

“I’m trying man, I am. And you fart too dude. That’s not fair. Everyone farts.”

Robert laughed. “You are correct, I also must pass gas sometimes. I was too hasty my friend. My apologies.”

"Apology accepted.”

The night was still.

“Robert, thank you for giving me a chance. For being my friend.”

“Thank you in return John. You have made my life more enjoyable as well. I was lonelier than I realized.”

We had a number of similar nights. Two people, with nothing in common, living happily together as the last two people on Earth. Nothing lasts forever though.