Zombies and Loathing: Part 10 – The Next Step
Good morning and happy day. I say happy day not because the world is happy; it most certainly is not. The world has gone to hell, this isn’t news. What is news and the source of my own personal, albeit certainly fleeting, happiness is that I am very much alive. My faithful readers are surely happier than zombies at a genocide. As you have read, the past 24 hours have not been kind to old St-Brigid. However, things are looking up. The only thing remaining is to turn my energies towards cashing the cheque my mouth has recently written. It’s not that I’m not good for it. Don’t you worry, I will tear down the power structure in this mockery of modern society. The problem, as it has always been, is finding an appropriate time and method for my hydrogen bomb of truth.
My new associate has provided me with a safehouse and the promise of greased palms and suborned law enforcement to facilitate the next step. With the last of the drugs out of my system I am finally thinking clearly again. That reminds me, I need to see a man about some pre-Collapse military grade stims. Wasting 8 hours of every day sleeping seems criminally negligent given the situation I’ve found myself in. In order for the next step to work I will need to be as unyielding as the undead. After my run in at the bar I realize that the outside world has grown impossibly more hostile towards the champions of truth. I would be a fool to waste any amount of time in taking the plunge into political upheaval.
The next step.
It’s a slightly daunting thing, overthrowing a man like Vincent Conroy. I have realized that in the aftermath of what I am about to do other men (my new accomplice included) will come exploding from the rotten woodwork of this city to try and seize power for themselves. If not orchestrated with the utmost care and precision, the wrong man will come into power and you all will be no better for it. Or worse, the infighting will tear the city apart. Enough killing will bring the undead down like a pack of slow moving sharks to the newly menstruating city of New Bunker.
Readers from outside the New Bunker area might think this a good thing. Through my column I have already exposed just a small sampling of the atrocities committed in and around the festering womb of this wretched place. Why not just burn the place to the ground?
That course of action, however tempting, would make me no better than the other men and women who have taken up power in this time of humanity’s twilight. Sure, the pit bosses and pimps of this city might be more useful to society at six feet under, but that’s not the whole story. What about the men, women and children who have come here as refugees? The teenage girl whoring herself to stay alive? Who am I to push the boulder down from the top of this mountain and crush all those people in the resulting avalanche? I am nobody. I am only the delivery mechanism of the truth.
In this case though, the truth is a bullet. When the trigger is pulled, the city will experience drastic change, whether it is prepared for it or not. I have the monstrous responsibility of taking aim with this gun and firing the bullet. Like a surgeon whose only tool is a loaded gun with a single bullet instead of a scalpel, this city is my patient. If I don’t aim carefully I will obliterate the brain or the heart and the corpse of the city will be a feast for the greedy and corrupt and later the undead. No, I must aim carefully. My weapon is blunt and destructive, but it doesn’t mean it requires no thought or skill to wield.
So this is the predicament I am in. I am armed to the teeth with truth, but until I know my precise target my gun is effectively useless. So what now?
Now I find out everything I can about those closest to Conroy. A man like Conroy does not build his empire out of the soundest of building materials. A man like Conroy is a spinning top at the peak of a house of cards. I will find what I need to know to remove a few pieces and the whole thing will come crashing down. The golden bullet that I’ve had since I got here will be the kill shot. Bang, pow, blood splatter on the wall.
The only trick now will be to stay alive and out of harm’s way long enough for my brand of truth to infect this city from the inside out.
Hold on New Bunker, we’re going on this roller coaster together. The rest of the world? Take note. What I do here I will do in your city. I have been too passive for too long.
