Fear and Loathing After the Bomb: Part 5 – The Filth of the Living
Citizens of New Bunker! I have not even yet breached the walls of your city with my insuppressible canon of truth and already I have been exposed to atrocities committed by the very hands of your leader Vincent Conroy! I suppose if you don’t live in New Bunker you can just skip this column all together. Of course I’m kidding you fool! The state of things in this city are surely indicative of the plight of us all. In some varying degree we are all oppressed by those who would deceive us with their greed and play upon our fears.
The logistics of your city has always baffled me. New Bunker is one of the largest settlements in the world. I have heard estimates that nearly a hundred thousand are found within its walls, though much fewer calls it home. Most settlements cap their population at under a thousand. New Bunker indulges one hundred times that number. Indulge it does. People come and go. New Bunker thrives for one reason and one reason alone: it is one of the last places on Earth where you can descend into the base activities that have corrupted humanity since the day we realized that there were two great feelings in the world. Fucking like animals and getting something for nothing.
Prostitution and gambling.
People come from miles around to lay down their lives possessions for a chance of leading the good life. Just to make it inside the city there is a price; a working piece of technology, food, clean water. Once you get inside it only gets worse. The city’s lifeblood comes from the outside. There are the hydro farms, the water purifiers chugging away to keep you fed and quench your thirst, but the vast majority of the value of this city comes from the outside. The near sighted will give everything up for a chance to win big, to make the right bet and be set for life, suddenly a member of New Bunker’s elite. The even nearer sighted will spend their life savings just as quickly between the legs of a whore.
Though come to think of it, if you’re going to lose your shirt one way or the other at least your dick should be empty.
Once you get inside it’s a simple exchange: everything you brought with you for some small amount of New Bunker Dollars and the promise of citizenship. Of course, now you have nothing except for scraps of paper that are worthless in the outside world and you’ll quickly find that everything is very expensive. For most people there’s only one way to get more scraps of paper: playing the odds on a game of chance. It’s a brilliant racket. Sure, if you’re big enough some New Bunker mobsters might hire you as muscle, if you’re sexy enough some pimp might provide you with an opportunity to sell your holes for top dollar. For the rest of us? Life becomes about pushing your way against the odds in rigged games until you’re down to your last dollar and you need to decide between one more pathetic wager or the small comfort of a used up whore’s warmth in a rented bed.
What’s next? You’ve got nothing. Anything you had belongs to the city now, and if you’re not paying they don’t want you. Think about it. Other than the whores, the pimps, the casino pit bosses, how often do you see the same person in this city? Chances are you yourself haven’t been here very long, a few months at best. You either came here with enough wealth to stay a while or you got lucky early on. Sooner or later your luck will run out. If you’re not a part of the organism that Conroy has constructed you’re just the shit passing through it. Soon the city will be done with you and you’ll be pushed out its asshole back into the wasteland. Easy come, easy go. At least you got the chance to lead the good life for a little while. Back into the wild to fight for survival once more.
Or so they would have you believe.
Given the choice between being hurled out into the zombie infested radioactive hell hole out there with nothing but the shirt on your back and something, anything else, would you take it? It seems you might not even have much of a choice.
The guards who were so quick to sell out their master showed me the underbelly of this city. A huge portion of the people that are supposedly “living” here are little more than slaves to the city now. Those who’ve lost everything, working for next to nothing. Fuels and supplies? A group of Conroy’s slaves and a few armed men, they return with supplies and maybe 50% of the men they left with. Garbage removal? A worker is chained to the steering wheel of a dump truck and is told to drive miles out of the city to a landfill, the guards place wagers on whether or not he returns. With just enough fuel to get there and back again, he can’t run. If he does he doesn’t get far. The trucks are fitted with GPS locators; he’ll surely die but the real valuable item, the truck, will be recovered.
It gets much, much worse. The hyper powerful got to where there are in this world by completely abandoning their morals. You don’t squeeze life out of your own kind and be slowed down by a little thing like a conscience. Devoid of morals in a world gone mad they develop appetites for the most despicable of pleasures. Men, women and children kept for the most unnatural purposes. Feeding the carnal appetite of the most depraved individuals. The lucky ones end up killed in the process, the unlucky must endure.
Vincent Conroy has built a city on the backs of a slave class. You live in comfort while they toil and die for your life of pleasure. I can’t hold down my rations as I see the beaten bloody form of a girl who can’t be more than 8 years old carried on a stretcher towards me. My eyes are inadvertently drawn to the seemingly unnatural amount of blood between her legs. I heave again. At first I hope she’s finally found peace, but as they get closer, to my horror I realize she’s still breathing. Someone will find another use for her.
I can’t stop vomiting, I’m not even in the city and I can’t stop vomiting.
