American Apocalypse by Nova Page A

peripheral vision caught Max’s movement as he approached the man he had shot by the Honda. That is when the guy in the Dollar Store decided it was time to go. He came out the door holding as hostage the elderly Korean man who worked there.
    Damn, this is turning out to be like a bad TV show , I thought.
    Then it got worse: Max decided to be a hostage negotiator. Somehow I doubt he had learned that in the
Marines. He told the hostage taker, “Okay, man, we can work this out. Let him go, and we will let you go. Let’s make this easy.”
    “Fuck you! Get away from my car!”
    “Okay, okay. Chill.” Max started backing up, away from the car.
    “You! . . . You too. You back up!” This was directed at me.
    I estimated the range and the probability of blowing his head off. The odds were pretty good that I could do this. Then again, if I missed or the old man twitched at the wrong time—well, it would be sloppy. But so what. I never liked him all that much anyway. I blew the side of the hostage taker’s head off. Max was moving toward him as the old man fell to his knees babbling. Hostage Taker dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Well, that was easy. Mama-san came rushing out the door to cradle the old man.
    Max walked up to me, touching my shoulder briefly, “You okay?”
    “Yeah. You?” He nodded.
    “I guess we are going to have to clean up this mess.” It was more like time to hide the mess, not that there were a whole lot of people who cared.
    “I knew you would take the shot.”
    “How’s that, Max?”
    “Did you really care if it worked or not?”
    I wasn’t going to lie; why bother, I knew he already knew.
    “No.”
    I went over to collect my share. The rule was, if you killed them, you got their weapons, plus any personal belongings of value. Max was right: I didn’t give a damn,
never had. With Max, it was a relief not to have to pretend. He also knew I didn’t care for the old man.
    I had come by the Dollar Store looking for a donation from them to show their support of the local police force. The old man had given me a battery-powered nose- and ear-hair remover. At first I thought he was telling me I was missing something in my daily grooming. I went back to my room, and spent some time peering into the mirror. Nope, all clear. I decided what the hell, I would try it anyways. It worked for about two seconds, then it broke. I was not happy.
    I told Max about it the next day. “He gave you what?” and then began laughing his ass off.
    “What?” A dim light went off in my head. “What did you get?” He just laughed more. He never did tell me.
    One of the things that some people—especially older folks who had lived well for so long—had a problem adapting to was how raw life could be. Nasty was how women usually described it; men, well, we just pretended it was nothing. Some of us actually believed that, although a lot depended on your age and how you had come up.
    Life was messy now and getting messier, like this. Violence in real life was not like a video game, TV, or the movies. It was infinitely more real. It smelled, and the smell was never good. Left to ripen, a human being became incredibly fetid. It was a stink that got into your nose, into your clothes, and into your mind—and it never left.
    Messy also described the way many of us were eating. Chickens were bought live, then killed, and gutted. Squirrels, dogs, cats—they all had to go from recognizable animal to dead meat. There wasn’t a lot of money available to be spent on professionally chopped and wrapped meat
anymore. Then what you got had to be transformed back into something that was palatable. Well, sometimes it was palatable. This, I figure, is why they made hot sauce. A little Tabasco made anything edible as far as I was concerned. Then there was the problem of disposing of all the fluids and inedible parts. It took water to clean up, and you needed to dump it all somewhere where you knew it would go away soon.