Art thought it was strange. The militia had considerable manpower and firepower. Shouldn’t they have been able to deal with a problem like this easily enough?
Whatever. It didn’t matter. He was as good as dead. He’d do what he had to do just to avoid being tortured to death by Sarge. He knew that that was a very real possibility. Hell, he’d been on the other end of it. He’d been the torturer. He’d ripped a man’s ears off on Sarge’s orders once, using his knife to dig into the flesh.
What was the point in stopping now? The only option left to him was simply shooting himself in the head.
It wasn’t a bad option, as far as they went.
But something inside him kept him away from it. As he crouched there in the shadows of the suburban trees, he gripped his handgun tighter. It was a revolver he’d taken off someone he’d killed, someone he didn’t even remember. There’d been too many of them.
Almost on a whim, as if to prove something to himself, Art suddenly brought the muzzle of the revolver to his skull, pressing it hard against a point above his ear.
His finger was on the trigger, pressing ever so slightly.
He felt like a shell of the man he was.
But he wasn’t a shell. He was a tool for those who were in power, those faceless figures who passed their orders through the harsh mouth and fists of people like Sarge.
Everything had been stripped from Art. And it hadn’t just been the EMP. Even without his old life, he could have remained himself. He could have kept his values, acted as he once would have.
But maybe he’d had no values to begin with. Maybe his life had been nothing but a farce. Maybe he’d been nothing but a cog in a system that had made no sense.
“That’s bullshit,” he muttered to himself, the pistol still at his head, his finger still on the trigger. “You’re just trying to talk yourself into it. Your life was something. You did things. You were somebody.”
So why didn’t he just do it? Why didn’t he just kill himself?
It was the simple answer.
But the reality of it was that he couldn’t.
There was something left inside him, something primal, instinctual and intense.
Slowly, Art pulled the revolver away from his head.
He’d do what Sarge wanted. He’d help the militia remain in power. He’d do his part, however small. What was the difference? None of it mattered. The world was already over. In a few years, they would have all killed each other or starved to death.
The militia was focused on power. Gaining territory through violence. There were rarely, if ever, any discussions on the essentials. Growing food was never talked about. Rebuilding any kind of infrastructure was out of the question.
The militia would collapse in on itself. It was only a matter of time.
So the way Art saw it, nothing he did mattered.
He’d become a nihilist, in a sense.
Art had been there for hours. He didn’t know the exact time. He didn’t have a watch anymore. The smartwatch he’d worn before the EMP obviously didn’t work.
No one had gone in or out of the house in that time. There was no light visible through the windows. But they could have been blocked off. Or candles could have been lit in the basement, or somewhere out of view.
Art’s stomach was rumbling with hunger. The nihilism he’d just come to terms with didn’t prevent him from feeling the physical demands of his body.
But the hunger didn’t make him realize that the simple pleasures in life were worth living for. Instead, it made him just want to get it all over with so he could head back to his “home” and maybe get something to eat, provided the guys had scrunched up something.
Hell, maybe there’d be some food in this rebel hideout.
Pistol in hand, pointed down, his arm swinging, Art moved half-crouched towards the house.
He moved as silently as he could across the yard, which was hidden in darkness from the moon by a tall pine tree.
Crouching down beneath one of the living room windows, Art held his breath and listened.
No sounds.
Hell, there was probably no one there.
He might as well just go in and have a look. Maybe he’d luck out and they’d have left their master plans on the kitchen table or something. Maybe they were out on some mission.
Maybe the whole thing was just a paranoid fantasy of Sarge’s. Could there really have been a group of rebels organized enough to have cell-like operations spread out throughout the suburbs?
Art didn’t know, and he wasn’t going to waste much time thinking about it.
His elbow cocked, his revolver pointed to the sky, Art tried the front door.
To his surprise, it wasn’t locked.
Well if there were rebels here, they weren’t very intelligent. Probably wouldn’t be much of a threat.
Art opened the door slowly, bending his elbow to lower his gun as he did so. He pointed it into the yawning darkness of the house.
Someone was running towards him in the darkness. He could hear the footsteps pounding on the floor.
It didn’t matter who it was. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see.
Art squeezed the trigger. The revolver kicked. He squeezed the trigger again. Then a third time.
A body fell to the floor with a crash.
More sounds, somewhere else in the house. Crashing footsteps. Everything was dark.
Urgent whispers from somewhere. There were people in here. A lot of them.
Art couldn’t shoot them all. He had only three rounds left. He turned on his heel. He was close to the door. He could make it out.
“Get him!”
“Don’t shoot him!”
He was halfway out the door when something hard, solid, and metal crashed into the back of his skull.
Everything went black as he fell forward through the doorway, his revolver dropping from his hand.
Art woke up with his eyes still closed. He didn’t know how much time had passed. He didn’t know where he was.
His head couldn’t have hurt more. Everything hurt. He’d been through too much. Why wasn’t he dead?
“He’s awake.”
“Get the bags on.”
The bags?
What the hell was going on?
Where was he?
He opened his mouth to speak, to ask, but nothing but a hoarse gurgling noise came out.
His eyes seemed to be stuck closed. It was a struggle to open them. His eyelids felt sticky and heavy.
A dim candle-lit room swam into his blurry field of vision.
Three figures appeared. They weren’t faces. They were just cheap plastic bags with eye and mouth holes cut out. They looked like grotesque masks, some Halloween joke gone too far.
But Halloween was a pre-EMP event. Now it was just reality.
Art opened his mouth again to speak. Just more gurgling noises.
“Just,” he finally managed to say, getting the first word out.
“You got the sock?” said one of the masked figures.
The sock? What were they talking about?
Within Art’s diminished field of vision, he saw one the figure pass a sock to another.
Art didn’t realize what the sock meant until it was swinging in an arc towards him. It must have been filled with coins or rocks. Whatever it was, it was hard. The hardness hit him in the stomach, knocking the wind right out of him.
Despite the pain, Art somehow had the presence of mind to put the pieces together. They were wearing masks and hitting him with a stuffed sock. They didn’t want him to know who they were. They didn’t want to be identified later. And they also didn’t want to leave any visible marks.
Whoever they were, they apparently didn’t want to kill him.
“Just kill me,” said Art, finally getting the words out.
“Just kill you?” A male laugh, deep and raucous.
“He wants us to kill him. Did you hear that?”