Kill ‘em All

No questions this time.  Just one long pull up another prairie roller.  My shoes have a hard heel and I can’t really even out my stride today.  My shins are splinting.  But even heel jarring clacks of hard rubber and shinsplints are not enough.  I am running hard.  Hills.  Mud. Sludge.  Open fields.  Car exhaust. Oklahoma assholes.  Bring it.  

I have an idea for a book. I’ll call it Bring It!  and it will be moderately bad SciFi.  See, there’s this guy who lives in a metal box.  His society is a metal box.  His house is a metal box.  His future is a metal box.  Of course, only the metal box he lives in and works in is described, the rest is metaphor.  In his time, metal boxes are the rule.  I would make up a complicated religion around a one eyed red god with complicated idols and everyone wears a big red eye on their necks.  And the big red eye church runs that shit. 

But this guy has visions.  Not of a red eyed god, but of a vagabond who’s face was ripped apart in some unkown war and he sits in the falling ashes and he talks nonsense and bad ass philosophies and is anything but divine.  I don’t think I’d ever explain the temporal aspect of this motherfucker, from the past, talking to metal box man.  But this jackal covered motherfucker would influence metal box man, who thinks he is a god. When metal box guy asks what he should say to people who threaten him  when he acts up, the old man who is god says to tell them, “Bring it!”  This turns him into a legendary, badass man in the sheep society.  He would start to get irritated.  He would start fights at the water cooler with his paper moving punk-ass coworkers.  He would start running bleachers, like this motherfucker here.  He would break a motherfucker’s head open on the bus.  In his world of metal sheep, no one would be ready for a badass.  Of course, he would have to start physical training.  

As it turns out, the red cyclops was just the last survivor of a war.  And everyone that was left was mutant zombies and wolves.  You know, so he could be a badass.  He is also the father of the metal box race.  Guys like him are sort of useless in a metal box society, and indeed harmful to it.  But he has no idea his dreams are fucking up the future utopia (and it is a real, functioning utopia).  

Toward the end of the story, the former metal box guy is starting a fight with a shit ton of people and building a following.  His people are unreliable, shit is all fucked up, etc.  As the revolution he starts begins to collapse, the final vision is the one where realizes all the red eye churches are based on this psycho sitting in the ashes.  But he still trusts him and asks what to do when everyone is failing and some want to kill you and you don’t know who to trust.  He tells him, “Kill ‘em All!”  

Those are the last words in the book.  Also, they are the title to the sequel.  A badass back alley knife fight of a sequel.  And dude is never a hero and he never has a fate and it ends up just being a story about one guy deciding to be a badass who ends up running shit, motherfucker.  Maybe the final words of that book, when he’s in heated argument with cyclops dude, would be, “You think you’re God?  I run this motherfucker! You got me? I run this motherfucker, until the goddamn end! You hear me? Until the end!”

And then cyclops dude would be attacked by the circling wolves and would tear the jaw out of one and use it like a club to beat the wolves ass even though you know his shit is doomed.  And he would shout because he’s really just been a crazy, though insanely tough, old man all the time, “Unto the end! (smash) Unto the end! (smack)” 

Etc.  Those words are the title to the third in the trilogy.  It would be called the Badass Trilogy.  

And my lungs burn and my sides are killing me, but I will run five more minutes of these fucking bleachers in this nameless goddamn school.  I am Beowulf.  I am Spartacus.  I am Hiawatha.  I am the motherfucking man.  Click clack, I’m a fucking train, bitches.  And when I’m done, I stand up on top of the metal bleachers and suck air down into the bottom of my lungs and clench my fists at my side.  Breathe it in, blow it out. John Henry, Jesus, Casey Jones, whatever.

Bring it.  Kill ‘em all.