Weekly contribution to Underground Write Club. This week's theme was POWDER.
It’s not always speed that kills. When my grandfather died, he was eighty-eight years old. He drove his car until he was eighty-seven. At the end he was so disconnected that he didn’t realize there was a hole in the floor of his old Buick. He was driving so slow that he was a danger to people who would phase out on the road. The state of Vermont waited until he killed a nineteen years old girl on the Interstate. Poor grandpa, he was so pent up about it that no one had the heart to tell him the girl was dead. He hit his grave eight months later thinking he had lived as a God fearing American who respected the Ten Commandments for almost a century. In a way he did, his license should’ve been taken away before that.
There is no fun that can be had hurting people slowly. Tonight, people will die, many of them. I hope to achieve a three digits number. I never did. My highest body count was eighty-one, when I blew up a compound with a Bazooka back in Bosnia. Those were the days. Back then, the boys in the platoon called me “The Wrath Of God”, because I used to inflict punishment the correct way. With a brutal mercy. When you head is flying in one direction and you legs are going the other way, you don’t curse God for letting you suffer. If there was a God anyway, I would’ve died back there, under a rain of bullets.
When I failed to die, I understood this wasn’t over. I had been given training in death and destruction; it’s all I ever know how to do. I understood that I needed to do it again and again until a rain of bullets would strike me down. It’s been thirteen years now and they couldn’t even figure out who I am. The police nowadays, they can’t even difference the smell of peanut butter and cyanide. I’m afraid that the stench of gunpowder is a foreign notion to most of them. For me, it never left my nostrils from the first time I inhaled it.
The doctor said the powder burned my nostrils and the doctor estimated I had lost eighty percent of my sense of smell. I estimated that the doctor had lost about the same percentage of his judgment. Never had life smelled better. The aggressive and constant attack to my senses made me more alert to what was really going on. The day I was introduced to the smell of gunpowder was the first day of my life.
Today I’m going to make it count. I don’t like to hurt people so that’s why it’s all or nothing. One big boom to find them all and in the darkness bind them. Not sure about the accuracy of the Tolkien quotation. Anyway it’s not important, if I’m being a good boy today and make my homework properly, I might just get what I’ve been looking for. What’s important is the ignition. What you need is a good detonator. Something that will provoke a spark with a minimal risk of technical failure. What I like to do is to put a remote controlled chip in the powder, which I will have plastic wrapped. It’s not even going to look like a bomb. Maybe like packs of Iron Ore, which is what I’m hoping for since my target is that bunch of exploiting sons of bitches at IO Industry.
This time I won’t hide. I don’t need it. I will stand in the blazing inferno and look at my enemy with defiance. I will be handsome, I will be glorious, they will know how you can turn a man into a God. I will make the creation of man disappear so maybe I will be able myself. Only then, only then I’ll truly be one of them.
