Cancer Cells

Without humans, there is no one to hunt.

I remember that line from a National Geographic documentary.

What else do I remember?

The jingle of the collar of a dog attacking a fleaspot with its hind leg. A cracked vase of dried chrysanthemum casting shadow in slanting afternoon sun. The purl of cars on a bridge as heard from underneath. Quiet memories assault me now when I sleep. My memories of childhood are crisp. But I don’t remember people.

Not that I believe that nonsense about one’s life passing before one’s eyes when one dies, nor that you will kill me.

Is this what you wanted when you locked me in here?

As if I care.

You’ll read what I write, understand, release me, and kneel while I slit your throats. Or if you want to run shrieking into the jungle like monkeys as I shoot you in the back of your necks, so be it. There is only one way this can turn out.

I gave much thought to how to kill you, and write down my findings only in case I fail, and leave people behind me, so that someone will come after me to resume my efforts to cure the earth.

In the back seat, I carry a suitcase and two red plastic five-gallon jugs. The suitcase contains found clothing; the jugs contain gasoline and water respectively. I hotwired a lot of cars; I changed a lot of tires. Tires have started to collapse and decay. And I wear them out. I need speed, it is my reason. The highways are untrafficked though by no means wide open, so it is risky pushing a hundred when the roadway might be unexpectedly cracked in two or blocked by a jackknifed semi. But speed was what I did. There were a few stretches that I often returned to—former highway 15 from L.A. to Vegas—but for the most part I liked to drive too fast on highways I had never been on, leaning forward to see what curves and obstacles were up ahead. I wrecked a couple of cars or more, but sustained no major injuries. I wear seatbelts. Sometimes a helmet. I’m not crazy.

I’m not.

You are.

California is not a place I like driving. Earthquakes and flooding have made a dangerous mess of highways. It is unsafe for driving at the speeds I am accustomed to. But there I went, heading west at 120 on 40. I scraped between two abandoned cars parked so close a side mirror was sheared off, spun in the air, and flashed in my rear-view mirror. I ran over a coyote family crossing the road. Their bones made quite a crunching percussion. I slept and ate in the car, became a metal shellfish. Night was not a time for me. Animals and the things I did. I had to wait it out. In the reclined passenger seat I slept in fitful bouts, trying to ignore the sounds of beasts walking around the car or scampering over the roof, howling, sometimes in low voices speaking. I kept my eyes tight; if there were any living people out there, they would have to make their presence obvious before I would believe in them.

Once when I opened my eyes at the slanting dawnlight, there was a wolf curled on the hood, apparently for the heat. When I yelled and knocked on the windshield it didn’t move. I yelled until I was out of breath. I didn’t want to step outside, though I needed to pee, so I tried to start the car, but the starter had died and the twisted key issued only clicks. I unrolled the window slowly. The wolf rose to its feet, head lowered, yellow gaze locked. The shotgun left the hood streaked with a gruesome paste not even 100 mph winds could scrub, and no matter how much wiper fluid I pumped on them, the flecks of windshield blood only smeared into arcs.

I wondered when I would have to give up auto travel. Gasoline evaporates and tires collapse. Deserts are crisscrossed by cracking, sand-flooded highways, increasingly impassable, packed with dead vehicles in crystallized gridlock. Bridges tilt in the torrents passing beneath them. Falling trees and crumbling mountainsides bury the asphalt roadways or take them down into valleys with them. Increasingly, I am confined to deserts. I would try to drive into the mountains or valleys and end up having to backtrack.

Survivors had collected on farms scattered throughout this wilderness. These communities are a recrudescence of a disease that had almost been eradicated. Cancer cells. Biotherapy had been 99% effective. Surgical intervention was necessary to complete the cure. A system of communicating between cells had been established despite the absence of a working telecommunications grid. There were radio stations in barns. A nomadic committee comprising one representative from every commune walked from farm to farm. Their purpose was to coordinate, share or trade resources, and work out increasingly formal, consensual structures for how the groups might resolve disputes or collaborate. The committee, for the most part, served to preserve equilibrium among cancer cells. They were the law, but were generally welcome wherever they traveled. When they returned to a farm, that farm’s representative would return to work the fields, and a new representative would be chosen. They wore pieces of old uniforms they had come into somehow. A police hat, a random badge, blue trousers with piping.

I considered this ragtag band of hippy farmers playing at being sheriff a metastasization. This roaming cell I tried to eliminate first, in such a way as to breed fear, instill mistrust between cells and jam future communications. The first time I saw the committee, they seemed armed, but without any serious firepower like the assault rifles I collected in my trunk. They yelled at me from the side of the road as I tore past them in a black Mustang. At that time I did not know they had connections. I thought they were just nomadic scavengers. Fish in a barrel.

I drove for twenty more miles, parked the car, waited until dusk, armed myself, and walked back down the road. As I suspected, they had a fire. I stuck to shadows and crept up on it. Standing against a tree I observed at once that nobody was beside this fire, that there was a second fire deeper in the woods, and that a German Shepard near the fire had taken notice of me. A growl was rising from its throat.

To my astonishment, they were prepared.

It was a trap. After sustaining one minor bullet graze to the arm and mowing down two of their sentries and their dog, I made a retreat and don’t think I was followed. I vowed that would be my last bullet wound, and I doubt very much you will force me to renege on that promise.

After my crash landing, I had lost my plane. I wasn’t going to try to take off in one of the abandoned, unmaintained aircraft you find in hangars, so I could not track the committee’s movements by air. I would have to ruminate on the problem or wait until I had them cornered and unsuspected. I knew that my attack would force them to arm themselves more thoroughly, and that packing heat would eventually override their bucolic natures. I had not killed them, but I had infected them with the violence of fear.

Many of the farms used low power FM to communicate, making it possible to triangulate the colonies’ locations using my car radio.

The first farm I found had ten people—two normal, healthy families who raised crops and livestock, canning, curing, and drying what they could to make it through the winter months. The men were furriers, and these furs provided for some commerce with other farms, usually for fuel. The families occupied various rooms in an old farmhouse. They took me in, fed me on their best food, and let me sleep in the crawlspace above the kitchen. My second night there, I went outside, threw their fuel around, burned the house down, and shot them as they ran out. The spectacle of the fire consumed the sound of the gunshots, so I was able to get everybody before they figured out what was happening. Not that they were prepared to fight. But I reminded myself to use a silencer for future massacres so that I would not run the risk of scaring away the victims before I could shoot them. I did not seriously think any of these farmers could resist me by force, but of course if they ran into the woods I would have trouble tracking them. It is easy enough to find silencers, or accessories for guns. America is full of guns.

That time I made no effort to hide the bodies. I slept in my car. One of the victims crawled off during the night—a teenaged girl I shot in the arm and, I thought, chest—but I wasn’t worried about her chances of survival alone, wounded, and homeless. It was becoming a pretty hazardous world; at night one needed shelter. I burned down the barn and other structures just to deny her any. Hazardous, that is, because of the animals. The old dangers—human crime and violence, and toxic waste—were resolving themselves, if slowly. Well, there were no laws to break, and the absence of people eliminated any strife. I don’t consider my actions criminal in any case. These procedures were medical, eliminating pathogens from the surface of the earth. In my travels I saw former cornfields turned to gravel and mud. Nonrenewable genetically-engineered seed and a battery of herbicides and pesticides had transmuted arable soil into black sand. Acres of clods in this capital-ravaged landscape. If employed by Monsanto, I certainly could have engineered a better soybean that would not have left this legacy, but my talents were occupied elsewhere. Nuclear power plants had not been shut down properly. When their power failed, the coils that cooled the water in which thousand-degree nuclear fuel was stored failed. The water boiled off and the plants burned down, releasing tons of radioactive smoke, creating disaster areas worse than those a nuclear bomb would have left. Radioactivity announced its presence in landscapes where nothing grew. I drove through these white areas quickly with the windows up and ventilation shut off. I call these large tracts of dead land white because they usually were ashen. But most places outside the desert were so green a jungle grew in a wall right along the edge of the highway, screaming with birds. Entering a white area was like driving into a sudden snowstorm: a dusty white dirt that met the far off and cloudy sky, the stubble of former trees the only indication that I was on Earth and not the moon. The effect was like driving through a giant ashtray. I tried not to inhale until I had passed through into the green on the other side where clouds of insects again painted the windshield and animals stood in the road staring dumbly at my approach, like the moose apparently content to sacrifice its life in order to mash my grille, leave my windshield cracked and bloody, and total my car in a carnage of steaming hissing meat and dribbling pungent gasoline. Another dead car to be around longer than dinosaur bones, as its fluids and bad ideas sank into the groundwater, titmice nested in its broken headlights, ferrets birthing children in its nests of shredded upholstery.

But I digress. All these poisons would be folded back into the ecology, no matter their halflife. The white spaces will again become green, long after I am dead, having taken as many as I could with me. Thanks to me.

How long before the language was deforested? How long would the words for trees hang on, before they too were at last uprooted and sent the way of the dodo? If language was the detritus of that which no longer existed, a clutter of empty symbols snared in their own semantic equations, then wouldn’t it be better forgotten? Perhaps language is a constant in the structure of the universe, like electromagnetism and gravity, irrespective of whether people understand or harness it.

 

I developed a style after my next slaughter. After two more I even wished I could start over and rekill the first two farms just to give my debut homicides the signature touch of my repertoire. The second farm was pretty large, and after the initial burn and harvest with an assault rifle, I hid in a barn until the survivors had crept back and I could arrange to mow down most of them in a line. I was very patient. I used hand grenades I procured from an abandoned armory. This was a good way to kill them as they slept, such that the survivors would be too dazed to give me any trouble. They shouldn’t all have slept in the same place at the same time.

There was no way I was going to clean up a mess like that, so I poured gasoline on the bodies and torched them, burning down much of the remaining buildings and surrounding wilderness in the process. This was gratifying, but a waste of gasoline, so I made a note to stockpile other, less useful flammable chemicals as I came across them in my travels. I had quite a long shopping list of tools to help me kill. Not all of them were efficient, but as a former scientist I had a natural curiosity to see how quickly or slowly a human specimen could be dismantled.

It was at the third farm that I was able to work the killings up into something more worthy of me. I lashed the youngest one’s body to the turret of the barn. I impaled skulls on stakes to greet visitors from any of the entrances. I hung bodies from high tree branches where animals would not be easily able to drag them away, so they could sway in the wind and send an unsettling message to visitors.

Admittedly, I became self-conscious. I had somehow shifted from killing victims to communicating with whoever might discover the bodies through my choice of how to arrange the scene of the crime. I could leave the bodies for the animals to maul and make it look like a crime of nature, I could try to make myself look like a gang of savage marauders, or even some supernatural beast. But what I settled on was to make it look like the farms were killing each other. If I could just instill enough fear and hatred this way, they would be able to help me with the work of wiping themselves out.

I remember the dirty chaotic old world and miss it. After the plague, people lost their animal edge. I was a weapon designer, not a killer in the useful sense, but I still expect that murder used to be much more challenging five years ago. I regret not having tried my hand at it. The covering of one’s traces must have been the central concern. An effective police force stood in for the spineless “morality” you mud farmers have—it forced one to keep moving. You kill too many people in one jurisdiction, they were sure to catch up with you. You couldn’t keep your day job and kill when you wanted, you had to earn a living at it in order to keep paying for hotel rooms and gasoline, auto repair. And you would have had a lot of competition in those days—killers all over the place kept victims somewhat wary. Now there were no police, and fewer victims to choose from, living in isolated knots usually connected to farms or fishing waters. They knew no violence more extreme than how to kill a bear, they couldn’t defend themselves, and they wouldn’t chase you. I decided that for the rest of my years, I would find and be taken in by these strangers, and live among them as a guest, eating their food, even helping in the fields, until the night I would kill them, make art, move on.

Nothing from childhood, or even from before the outbreak. My memories of people really begin when I began to execute them. This started with human testing of prisoners in our bioweapon research lab. Then I was able to explore new methods of terminating life on behalf of the community where I lived, which was not a dirty farm but a shining pyramid that was truly the culmination of everything. I could take the least desirable people out into the desert and conduct experiments to see how severely they might plead. And bleed. A dirty woman destroyed our creation, an experimental subject on whom I had first tested the vaccine. She is dead now, of course. I pursued her and finally ended her life by firebombing her from my airplane. But the plane unfortunately suffered some structural failure and so I was forced to execute a crash landing. After that I had to travel by automobile, and was unable to rejoin my people where they lived in a fortress with the last full-scale electrical generator functioning. It is only a matter of time, however before they discover the good work I am doing out here and bring me back into the fold. The work of purifying the planet is not yet done.

I am one of the most successful businessmen in the history of the world, one whose name was never printed. With a bulletproof designer biocontainment briefcase—packed with crystal vials of weapons grade smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, airborne, waterborne, foodborne—I was floated through the corridors of power. My burning vectors refracted through the lenses of governments and those to whom they answered. I was a VIP in every capital in the world. Even the most fundamentalist governments fed my every whim with champagne fountains, sex, solvents, opium, hashish, cannabis, oil, jeweled Kalashnikovs. What I sold commanded fear. Nobody shook my hand.

As you can see, my work was perfect.

Our project was to create a virus that would attack every cell in the body with a fatality rate of 99%, but a slow incubation period during which it was highly communicable by air, skin, and vermin. Deploying the epidemic ourselves would have been trivial. First we sold the weapon to our enemy. Of course, there was no easy way for them to test the vaccine we sold them. In the end we may have been undone by one of the scientists in my employ. It hardly matters.

Sometimes a good idea just catches.

Behind electrified fences and sprinkler systems, in the walls of our pressurized pyramid city, we poured effervescent toasts to the first falling domino from a chilled bottle of rare vintage vaccine and watched the fires on TV until the only station was ours.

I found this fourth farm by accident. I drove by people working in the field, who waved with half-smiles. There was a wide-spread taboo against the automobile, a lingering superstition that its use would lead back to the old ways, and the farmers tended to drive trucks and tractors sparingly, only for farm work, never for travel. It was a stupid prejudice; regardless, it was increasingly hard to keep a car going. Of course I chose convertibles and sports cars. I routinely stopped at automotive places, filling my trunk with spare parts and tools. They lay on blankets in the trunk. Beneath the blankets were guns, ammunition, hunting knives, baseball bats, handcuffs, rope, wire, explosives, bottles of everclear tourniqueted with rags, acids, barbed wire, razors, pillowcases, golf clubs, grenades. Sometimes I offered some of these new tools as gifts to my host communities. Eventually I would kill them and take the gift back.

They had waved at me, if visibly suspicious of my red Corvette, so I considered that an invitation. I pulled into the farm, my car then surrounded by barking dogs and a few curious strangers trying to pull the dogs away and shush them.

This you know: a thin black man appraised me, bending toward the window. I told him that I was traveling, taking logs of communities, a sort of census bureau. I feigned ignorance of the committee. I was invited for dinner, though they seemed uncomfortable around me. They asked questions about other communities and became silent when I told them about a nearby farm I had recently visited. He went to get coffee, but from the kitchen there came a crash and curse, and he reappeared saying he had accidentally broken the pitcher, apologizing, offering tea, which I accepted, though I wondered what it was brewed from. When I put together that the black man was the leader of this farm, I felt a pang of something I did not recognize. My gut told me to kill him immediately.

He gave me a bedroom and I lay awake listening to the house. I thought it might be best if I just stayed awake and killed them that night, perhaps keeping the young woman alive to take my time with. But somehow I was surrounded by them, I think there were four, but I was having trouble focusing. I felt gelatinous. My wrists were tied to the bedframe. Most of the people hung back out of the lantern light, but the thin man sat on the edge of the bed and said that he believed I had killed the neighbors. I tried to look incredulous and protest but was too sleepy to feign surprise. Then he put a shotgun on my lap, and I saw that it was mine. I discovered my feet were also tied to the bed. I fell asleep thinking of ways I could mutilate them, and interesting places to leave their bodies: on the swingset, in the yurt, in a boat in the pond.

The next morning I shouted for water until eventually someone brought me a glass. The girl. I smiled at her. She poured the glass on my face. I choked and sputtered and protested this inhumane abuse. I was treated with the most abominable callousness. These barely evolved orangutans who desecrate the earth have the audacity to treat a fellow human being like one of their mules. Roped to the bed like a goat, soiling myself, cruel and unusual punishment clearly in violation of my human and constitutional rights by these ignorant hypocrites who claim to live in harmony with nature while burning trees for fuel and raping the earth of vegetables and game, who have the cold-bloodedness to snare rabbits but lack the courage to kill a man.

At dusk I was spoon-fed chalky soup by the thin man, with his straw hat, sitting on the side of my bed. And I let him know that he was being unreasonable, barbaric, and his behavior was an affront to community, human rights, and due process. He smiled at this last one, which I had to admit was a bit outdated, but for the most part he seemed seriously to consider it. And then I must have fainted. I was dimly conscious of being untied, lifted onto a plank of wood, and stretchered out of the house and into the woods. I think I asked them more than once where they were taking me, but my drugged mind seemed unable to absorb whatever answer they gave. I fought to wake up but more water was poured into my mouth, making me choke, belch, and pass out to the sound of my own moaning.

This time I woke up feeling bad. My arms were numb and tied behind me, I was outdoors, looking into a barn, and when I leaned my head back I realized I was tied to a tree. I wanted to struggle with the ropes, but I couldn’t feel my hands.

So they were still discussing what to do with me. In the meantime they would feed me and keep me alive, tied to the tree. I tried to appeal to their kindness, called them fascists, referred to a police state, and all manner of criticisms I remembered liberals had held about the government before the collapse, but none of it seemed to help my cause. I confessed nothing, and doubted they would be able to find evidence.

But for now I was being made to suffer, but in the end it would only increase my power over their sniveling guilty consciences. Though I was a bit dizzy, I thought through the worst possible contingencies. These people certainly couldn’t dust for fingerprints, compare tire tracks, or do any sophisticated forensics. There would have been no security cameras, no photographic record. I could have left the murder weapon behind, even a gun that had been registered in my name, and there would be no way these hippies could trace the gun or match a bullet to a firearm. I was innocent. I nodded off, smiling.

But when I awoke there were two children before me. I pleaded with them to untie me, but they continued to appraise me coldly. It began to dawn on me that I hadn’t seen any children at dinner the first night, but these two looked somehow familiar. Then one of them opened her mouth, sort of croaked, and ran away, the other pointed at me, his lip blossoming in a sort of pout. The thin man stepped from behind me, and hefted the child onto his hip. “Is this the man?” he asked. The child brought his fist down repeatedly on the thin man’s chest, weirdly robotic, and then I understood that these were children from the third farm. I remembered being introduced to them but I did not remember killing them. Something had happened and I had blacked out—maybe I had drunk something before using the chainsaw, or maybe I just got carried away—and I woke up in my car somewhere down the road.

The thin man put down the child and it ran away, shouting the same thing over and over, a word I did not understand. This farmer crouched before me and ran his hand through my hair. “Water?” I choked, trying to look more piteous than I felt. He stood up and walked away.

“Due process,” I heard the thin man say somewhere behind me, and he again asked me to confess. I shouted a string of insults at him, referring to my rights and other notions I thought would melt his communitarian heart. I couldn’t tell if he was still back there. Later I heard arguing. Someone was being told to do something she didn’t want to do.

That third farm had done wonders with renewable resources, really the whole place was a marvel. They manufactured solar panels of various designs, which I would have thought impossible for them. Most of the people who lived there had ended up in the composting toilet, in pieces, but I was starting to regret not having hidden the other bodies. That farm had had a wimpy consensus-based, non-hierarchical job rotation, and all decisions had to be made unanimously as a group. As soon as I learned that, I realized I could get away with anything, because, even if they could form a consensus when most of them were dead, it would take them forever to agree on how to punish me. One of the couples even had a GPS finder for their child, a device run on scavenged batteries that broadcast a signal to a finder, allowing them to know where the child was at all times. I couldn’t believe those satellites were still up there, working, and saw no way I could bring them down. The child, who was a bit slow and probably autistic, had a tendency to wander off into the woods. This was how I set a trap for the parents before I hunted down the rest. Those three bodies were likely never found. That farm had been strictly vegetarian, and even the cattle would die peacefully of old age. There was nothing for me to fear.

This farm, I noted, had a hierarchy. The thin man was obviously the leader. That didn’t bode as well. Though the thin man was obviously a pacifist and incapable of violence, I didn’t feel completely good about it. My misgivings multiplied when I discovered that they had incarcerated a prisoner before. A murderer, a jealous alcoholic trashed on some homemade potato wine had killed his lover for sleeping with the thin man. The culprit had been tied up. They spoke of him in the past tense, but would not answer my questions about what had happened to him. It seemed unlikely that they had executed him, more likely he had been exiled. If I was able to convince them to untie me, I might consider just fleeing. But probably I would find a way to come back and finish what I had imagined.

It was dawn and I had not really slept. I heard footsteps and murmuring and before me stepped the thin man, with an adolescent girl. The thin man carefully loaded a shotgun and handed it to the girl.

I don’t remember what sugary righteous bullshit he said exactly, but it was clear he was instructing the kid to shoot me. Fuck this, I thought angrily. The kid took the gun uncertainly, and the man advised her that this would be an important experience, and that she was never to kill without the thin man’s permission, but that someday the thin man would not be around and then she would have to assume the responsibility. It was also okay, he said, if she enjoyed it.

I began screaming. What kind of way to raise a child is that, I demanded. I demanded a fair trial, I called them murderers, racists, capitalists, and everything that came to mind that I thought might trigger their guilt. I made a self-description of how I had come to help them, how I was a guest, how I used to be a social worker. I may even have accused them of murdering the other farm and trying to pin it on me. I think I mentioned child abuse as well, accusing them of torturing the young children’s mother in the barn before executing her, but then I realized I had said too much.

The girl raised the shotgun and I strained against the ropes to turn my head away.

But she couldn’t do it. She started to cry. The man put one hand on the rifle barrel and with the other pushed her to her ass. He raised the gun and cocked it and pointed it at me with one arm, still repeating an angry question to the girl. I yelled. He didn’t fire, he just shook the gun in demonstration, then threw it at her feet.

I was yelling, the child was protesting, and the man was screaming at both of us to shut up, and finally grabbed and discharged the rifle into the air, bringing a rain of sassafras leaves and silence. A woman ran across the lawn at the sound of this, but, seeing I was still alive, seemed disappointed and wandered away. “Murderer,” I whispered as spitefully as I could at the man, who returned a look so intense I had to look away. Apparently he wouldn’t settle to execute me, it had to be a lesson for the young one. He shook his head and walked away, shotgun over his shoulder. The girl refused to look at me and went into the barn, presumably to sulk in the hayloft.

There was a birdfeeder near the tree and all day I watched these feathered vermin gobble seeds, argue with each other, and fly away. Cardinals dominated, and came in male/female pairs. The bright red males with their Mohawks of peaked feathers seemed unintimidatable. Fat sparrows traveled in defensive flocks, and the chickadees seemed to hang back until the group had moved on. The titmice, who also seemed to move in couples, would appear very briefly to snatch a seed and wing away to a treetop to devour them.

At one point a squirrel came tentatively across the lawn like a nervous inchworm, climbed the pole, and began to stuff its face with birdseed. To my surprise the cardinals attacked. Two males and a female fluttered about it, and drove it down the pole. The squirrel chattered angrily from the ground while the cardinals took watchful positions in a nearby tree. Eventually the squirrel began to inch its way back up the pole. This time the cardinals attacked more forcefully, but the squirrel was tenacious, taking position atop the birdfeeder. The female swooped to rake the cringing rodent with her talons, as it turned around and around, shrieking. Finally one of the largest males seemed to drop straight down from the sky and spreading its wings to brake the fall, impaled the squirrel’s eye with its beak. Chirping oddly, the squirrel slid off the birdfeeder in a drizzle of blood and fell to the grass, where it wormed in circles. Again the red hammer came down. The squirrel fell dead in the grass, its neck snapped. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I began to rock, trying to work at the rope that bound my wrists against the tree trunk.

That night they forgot to bring me food. I tried to shout but found that without the evening water I was voiceless, so I slumped there, arms behind me, shoulders burning, forearms numb, and tried to work through my confused thoughts, without much luck. Escape, kill them, were the two main ideas, but I didn’t know what order they came in. I couldn’t uproot the tree. Working my way out of the rope was hopeless, since I could neither see nor feel my arms. I could try to talk them into releasing me but I finally had to admit I wasn’t sure how to do that. Threatening them didn’t seem wise. Offering to run away and never return? I thought I had already played that card to no effect. Acting piteous to invoke sympathy also seemed like a dead end, since by this point I was quite weak, prone to crying fits I barely managed to contain, and sick all over, shivering, crossing my legs for warmth. Confession? They wanted a confession. I didn’t see how that would work. Their consciences wouldn’t let me die by starvation or any other means. I wasn’t sure they had established my guilt. As if it would help, I tried to walk back through how I had come to this to see what mistakes I had made. The thought of killing them was the only one I could fix on, so I tried to remember how many people I had seen here, at first trying to count them on the numb and unseen fingers behind my back, finally kicking off my shoes and using my toes to keep track. I had trouble, but it seemed there were nine, including the escaped children, who might be especially hard to catch this time. I must have fallen asleep, or sort of. I could hear a discussion at the farmhouse, raised voices carried over to me. I imagined words like killing, justice, but was weak and unsure. Clearly the timbres were those of a painful disagreement about something, almost certainly me, which I took as a good sign. Finally dawn approached. I heard creatures crashing through the underbrush behind me but tried to ignore them. As dawn broke through the mist a family of deer walked past me. I hissed at them and they bounded off into the woods, except the male, who came over, hooves grinding the dirt, and bit my nose. Blood filling my mouth, I drifted off again, and when I came to, I heard an intermittent scraping behind the barn. It was a regular sound, and I thought it might be a grave being dug for me. I knew the man was back there.

He told me that he was my employee in the old world. My head of security. Whether I remembered or believed him is irrelevant. All people have always been dead to me. Nothing you say makes any impression on me. Nothing anybody “feels” has ever done more than enrage me. Sperior man has a right and purpose, a responsibility to kill. The sperior man must kill. The inferior man will of course try to stop him but the inferior is slow, soft-witted, noncommittal. This means that the sperior man must plan his spree with care, execute it with suddenness, speed, and deliberation. The structure of sperior man’s life is thus as follows: self-care, amassing respectability, knowledge, money, and sex partners. Copulation. And then an effort to kill as many inferior people as possible in the shortest time, by hand, through an act that will be labeled criminal or terrorist, or, best, as a military action.

There is an I in sperior man, but no room for you.

The next day he had found the key to the manacles in my trunk, pilfered from a bondage shop in Reno. My ankles were chained to the tree and I was allowed to sit in a chair at a small table. I was given a notebook and pen and told that if I wrote a full confession I would be allowed to go free. Of course this is coercion, and I everything I have written is a lie designed to seem plausible to you, because I must be allowed to live.

Then they are standing here: the committee. Oh, what a ragtag band of legislators, their clothes torn and inappropriate, salvaged from anywhere. I ignore them as I write. Many of them wear plastic armor—sports gear—and I surmise they are the combatants. One heavyset one looks ridiculous in a cup and shoulder pads. All of them carry backpacks hung with pots and pans and implements of various sorts. I am so delirious I almost recognize a woman with an arm in a sling. Her hand doesn’t work right; I’m sure I would remember that. They stand in a semicircle studying me seriously. So. These are the people I have been playing with this whole time, the ones who I arranged bodies for, lit fires for, left bizarre graffiti for, false clues for. This is my chance to perform my innocence, my victimization and outrage, for real. But as I sputter, blubbering bubbles of blood from something ruptured inside, I remember the body I had left tied to a cupola on the roof of a barn, weather vane impaled in its eyesocket, and I start to laugh. They just keep staring.