Blaze of Glory

CHAPTER 2

That’d been two days ago.

Two days of an Uber-Dantean Hell where everyone was a demon and everyone was damned. Buckley had run and killed- his flight or fight instinct working simultaneously within his spinning mind. Everyone he’d known, everyone he’d yet to meet, was a threat.

He tried not to kill. He really tried. Deep down, smothered in swathes of terror, Buckley’s humanity struggled with the necessities of his murders. Like the twenty-three year old private he’d once been in Lebanon, however, he understood as no suburban protestor ever could, that absolutely, positively, without a fucking doubt, everyone was a threat.

Everyone.

Like the shopkeeper who sold him his daily pack of menthols he’d found price-tagging the bodies of dead customers and placing them beside warm beer and hot dog relish.

Or the cat lady who lived next door, who he’d found feeding on a particularly large calico from her once prodigious collection of fifty-seven felines.

Or the crossing guard who was embattled with a herd of school children in an abattoir of pigtails, gnashing teeth, and freckled screams between two thin yellow lines that had once meant safety.

Buckley had known and loved them all. He was a Christian and had tried to live his life by the complicated precepts of a sometimes-confused God. He did not covet his neighbor’s wife, he did not lie, neither did he cheat or steal. Even when it hurt, Buckley had been known to turn the other cheek.

Now, however, as when he’d been in Lebanon just before the Barrack's Bombing that killed 299 Marines, Buckley understood that turning the other cheek was akin to allowing a bright-eyed, young Arab boy with an AK and no sense in the world to take pot shots at his convoy when they went out on their thrice weekly trip to the coast. And like the neighborhood paperboy who’d chased him for six blocks on a bicycle, the cards in the spokes a continuous clackity-clack warning of what could be, Buckley had tried to avoid the killing.

But just like in Lebanon, killing became necessary and Buckley had tired before the child. With resignation he’d spun, aimed and fired. When the empty bike tumbled past, he felt defeat in his victory. Buckley would have cried if he could, but he was too dried up inside.

The religious called it The Day of Doom. The environmentalists called it the inevitable effect of sunspots on the hole in the ozone layer created by greedy industrialists who’d never listened to their warnings. The conspiracy theorists called it a military experiment gone awry. The liberals called it a purposeful assault on humanity by the conservatives as if a roomful of right-wing extremists had cooked up the entire event after a round of eighteen holes at a whites-only golf club, followed by drive-by lynchings of the losing player’s caddies. The conservatives called it an attempt by California tree-huggers to hijack the news with tales to scare children at bedtime. Even the Trekkies were heard spouting “I come in peace” crap about terraforming or terracotta or whatever. When the Governor of North Carolina, presidential hopeful and the anointed savior of the Democratic Party, was eaten alive on national TV, people stopped caring who was responsible.

It was a fucking disaster, pure and simple.

And in the top floor of the Franklin Hotel where Buckley had managed to find brick and mortar safe harbor, he wallowed in the dregs of charcoal filtered salvation watching it all. As a citizen of Wilmington, he was a veteran of seven hurricanes, an earthquake and two tornadoes. He couldn’t help but wonder how FEMA would classify this. It wasn't as if no one believed, just that the event was too much. Maggies were one thing, but a sentient herd was another.