Because We Were Cold

December 4, 19881

They say that he killed himself. Took a gun, put it to his head, and ended. I almost would have done the same thing if I were him.
I passed a store today. One of the only stores left in the lower east side that isn’t burnt to the ground. There thirty people just standing outside of it, looking at a television in the window, the news telling people where they thought the fallout was. Everyone knows they’re going to die; just a question of how long it is. Every once in a while I’ll see a beat up old man lying in the in a bloody puddle next to a sign that says something like ‘save yourself’. The pope is dead, religion failed. All that’s left is anarchy, and the government is pretending that they’re really in control.
They said that the C-Gate bomb they dropped on the SAU was a great success, took out the entire union, and left a great scorch where Moscow used to be. Not a single cockroach ever again will squirm on the infected soil. Then the fallout took out the whole Middle East, and spread to Europe, and Asia. It’s coming across the ocean now, and we’re sitting ducks. Soon the water will be irradiated, and we won’t be able to drink, then the air will be unsafe to breathe, and we’ll all get cancer, and the streets will be lined with the success of one man. Colgate Thompson, the man who destroyed the earth.
Everyone was so happy… No more bombing drills, no more of the damn communist witch hunts. Then the fallout hit the Middle East. People started asking questions, getting nervous. Nervousness descended into anarchy, and anarchy descended into quiet. A deep, deep quiet. This city will destroy itself before the bomb gets a chance to.2

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December 5, 19886

Same old song and dance today. The hospitals filled with people who think they found a lump. News thinks it’s going to be days longer before we get a whiff of that fresh radioactive smell.
I saw a kid running through the street with a cape on, mother rushing after him. Kid thought he could fly off the peer with his new radioactive powers. Kid thought wrong. Landed in a pile of rocks. No one goes to clean the corpse. Parents greave, and will die in two days. Who will greave for them when everyone in the world is dead?
More word came on that Colgate bastard. They said he had a breakdown in the protective bunker they had him in. He ran away, and the rumor is that he shot himself three times in the leg, then once in the head. All that it takes to end a human life. A summary of our existence. We blow ourselves up every chance we get.
They’re turning the white house into a great big fallout shelter, trying to save their precious president. Doesn’t really matter any more though, everybody else will be dead, and Reagan will be left to sit for eternity with the secret service guards that he and all the other fearless leader presidents have depended on. Weak is what that is. Total weakness. I won’t be surprised if somebody just takes out a gun and shoots Reagan dead on the spot. Probably his own man. Everybody blames him for what happened here… Is it his fault?
The great gust of wind that’ll come with the fallout is what I’m looking forward to most. One great swoop in the hand of god to crumble the buildings and put us right back to where we belong – the dirt.7

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December 6, 198810

The White House got burnt today, Reagan inside. Secret Service got told only five of them get to go in the shelter. People can only take so much, and the charred ground the lies within a perfect lawn of what was once the whitest house is a prefect example of just that.
A blanket of snow fell last night, covering the sidewalks in a slushy paste that quickly turned to mud when the rain fell today. Miserable looters trudged home early, freezing in the darkness, and swearing at there misfortune. I can only imagine the bodies lying in the muddy streets tomorrow mourning. Like worms after a storm.
Took my walk today, had a seat in the middle of Union Square, sat in the drained fountains. Indescribable scene, the blood on the streets. Not just the empty sidewalks, but on the hands of the people. There bloody hands fill with murder and anguish and the knowing that any minute now we could all get sucked into the winds of oblivion and finally get that long awaited chance to kiss the dirt…
There is no law, and if there is something that doesn’t please you, you destroy it. How primal, but how perfect it is that we as humans go to this in our final hour…
The news predicts two more days. I’m holding my breath.11

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December 7, 198814

Reports from Bolivia today. Reports that showed our final hour approaches. The streets empty, the churches are filling. The burning buildings that have for days carried the brutish songs of the lawless and drunken swine now sing a hollow silence, with reverberations of whimpering. The city is screaming. It wants do die now. It knows its going to hell.
I went to the store with the television shining in the window. Store was closed. Sign read ‘Out to lunch, be back soon Repent’. Looks like the whole city is religious now. Like a child misbehaving, hitting its mother, but falling down and crying. Wants to take it all back. The mother picks the child up, brushes it off and goes back to everything being peachy. We do not have a mother anymore.
This is our final day on earth. I spent it lying in the street. Feeling the way the dead feel. How I envy their finality, their completeness.
The child who jumped off of peer was recovered today. Buried amongst those who were killed amidst the anarchy of these past days… Television said that we lost more people in the craziness than we did in the entire war against the SAU. We never destroyed the enemy. We only destroyed ourselves.
If this is the last day we have on earth, and someone happens to come across this, I am so, so, sorry for all of this… all that I have caused…15

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December 8, 198819

I see it coming. It’s a great greenish wind. Just the way that I designed it to be… Please kill me.20

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I’m so sorry.