The Top Hat Apocolypse

So It Begins

  My name, hometown, age, ethnicity, location . . . they're irrelevant.  "We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."  So, give me a name by my actions.  Paint me a body, a home, a childhood.  Make me who I truly am.  So here's to a painter's eye:

  It's 2064.  Government and civilization, collapsed.  Homes and neighborhoods, destroyed.  Life and prosperity, choking.  Strangled by the very hands of its own body.  "Humanity" is a lost word, buried with the souls and bodies.  Buried with . . . us.

  Breathe.   Run for the break between the trees.  Breathe.  Get to the water.  Breathe.  Disappear in it.  Breathe.  Falling.  Gasp.  A shot rings boastfully.  I'm down.  Being dragged through rough water.  Mud.

  "I got 'er!  I got 'er, y'a morons!  Quickly, quickly, my men!"

  My mind drifts between coherent and lost, a rhythmic dance with my pulse.  With every beat, an eccentric switch between life and not.  Shallow pants slip between ashen lips, hissing between teeth.  It's hard to make sense of . . . the colors.  Lanky and scraggly teaming with the short and stocky.  Buzz cuts or long, braided manes.  Dark and light skin tints.  And eyes.  A million eyes piercing and jarring, laughing while crying.  An older man, maybe his late forties.  His eyes are a suffocated green.  His skin a melancholy olive tone.  Gray, white and black hair, wild.  But what can't be forgotten is his haunted face.  His somber face has enveloped my field of vision, making as if we're the only creatures left.   He's sad.  It doesn't make sense.  

  "Hurrah!" they sing.  "Yip, yip!" they charge.

  But distress is all that's seen.

  "What have we done?" he asks to his brethren.  "What have we done?" it echoes.

  "Whatever can you mean, old man?" a young, poppy man cheers with a grin on his face.  "Why, we've saved ourselves yet again!  Another elimination means more points!  And with that . . ." he tapers off to lean in close to the ghost of a man, "and with that, we may feast."  Another round of chants erupt and he jumps in full force.  They're dancing, I think.  Some kind of . . . 

  "But why?" he interrupts, a shallow, hollow beg.  "Haven't we done enough damage?  When will it be enough?"

  A different man, well, more or less a boy, jumps out amongst the hulk of cheering bodies.  He, barefooted, crouches and pounces from one small jut of charred rocks sticking out of the ground to the next, like a tiger or lion.  He roars, possessed.  "It's enough," he slobbers, "when we remain, and no other."  

  They cheer.  I lie.  Only now do I really see what's happened.  The Hunters got me.  In the stomach, left side, with an arrow.  But pain doesn't hit.  No, we know no more pain.  No more misery.  I am in no more pain now than, say, a dozen minutes ago.   Because psychological trumps the physical.  Because to know the pain that we've known . . . is to know Hell.  Is to know the Demon himself.  

  I'm running out of blood and, so it seems, oxygen.  I pull at air, but it pulls right back.  I gasp and gag, but it simply makes a noose of itself, a life giver and taker.  I try to force my eyes into alert attention, but my eye lids plead exhaustion.  Like a rubber band, the more I pull, the closer to snapping.  So I give in.

  The man cries.  Dressed like a slave, he wears rags pieced together in a less than fashionable pattern.  They're torn and brown and muddied and distraught.  It's hard to tell his origin; his skin is caked with grime, his body infested with disease.  His teeth have rot.  His eyes are watery with drugs.  And yet, he's the most perfect of the imperfect for shedding the tears wasted before.  Wasted on things without matter nor reason.  Now, they're spent for a heavy price.  Lives.  Our lives.  And, looking at his crumpled, leathery face, I know he understands: it's his life, too.