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Awakening on my final day, I ascend the steps of my underground bunker, which serves as a pseudo bomb shelter, into the morning sun, atop Nine Mile Hill.
In the evening, the Sandia Mountains and the star-speckled sky provide a peaceful backdrop for the counterpoint of small arms fire echoing from the city and the sporadic fireworks when yet another quiet suburban meth lab is sabotaged by the competition.
Legalization has apparently not appeased those who remain averse to the higher prices which invariably accompany regulation.
I don my blue hat with the “No Fear” logo boldly embroidered across the front and toss some scraps to Hope and Armageddon, my two mastiffs. We fly on down the hill, the dogs hitched behind me in their cart, squinting and slobbering into the wind. Both are too stupid to turn away from the dirt being kicked up behind me by the spinning wheel of the unicycle — I am frugal to a fault.
Sunrise, and it is 115 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat from the road is enough to deep fry any living creature on this typical winter day. We whisk past the newest addition to the city: a factory for hood-mounted rocket propelled grenade launchers, the latest in auto accessories. Descending toward the modern, barbaric chaos of Albuquerque, I grin with the knowledge that I am making this daily commute for the last time.
Our eyes burn as we glide through the haze near the chemical plant, a manufacturer of the food substitute that has become the basis for the meals served by the remaining restaurants in town and for the “edible” products still being packaged by local grocery chains.
I notice the pedestrian walkway over the mighty Rio Grande has been blown up again — no doubt easy pickings for middle school dropouts on their nightly pursuit of fun and diversionary destruction.
Crossing the river by foot, I nod to the ducks in the deepest channel as they luxuriously cool their ankles in the inch-deep ooze of foamy toxic waste.
We proceed under the 48-lane highway, which I note is a parking lot today, due to a geriatric variation on the blitzkrieg. A million doddering old men simultaneously mainline cocktails of Geritol and Viagra suspended in power drinks and aim their mobile motels toward the Duke City. They drive at exhilarating speeds, typically reaching up to 45 mph under the posted limits.
They converge here for the annual Hot Air Balloon/Surface-To-Air Missile Event, which boasts family entertainment and outdoor recreation combined with a public display of ballistic marksmanship. Given that competitors who score a bull’s-eye will be exempt from the requirement to ever take another driving test, it is always a huge draw with the older crowd, and it provides temporary relief for those still embittered about the outcome of the last five or six world wars.
I should note that we’ve had less congestion and accidents since the addition of drunk and impaired-driving lanes, which weave safely between the other lanes and sometimes cross in front of oncoming traffic, through holographs of telephone poles and street lamps, across yards and down the hallways of abandoned homes. The social conscience of civic leaders has been appeased, and with the drive-thru narcotics dispensaries providing a flourishing source of city revenue, everyone has been pleased with the results — even Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
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Arriving on campus for the big event, I secure our vehicle of conveyance to a nearby guillotine and implore my foolish beasts to guard it well. My brief retirement party is as boring as one might expect, given that the governor has been forced to declare us bankrupt yet again — the University’s coffers drained by a new set of corruption scandals, which this time involved a failed SeaWorld venture and what had once promised to be a potentially lucrative chain of outdoor ice hockey stadiums.
We share a rare thimble of water, and with a handshake and the promise to do lunch in the indefinite future, I toss my useless pension IOU into the trash and exit the room. At that moment, the latest department hire, my successor, whose salary is twice mine — compensation for the disadvantage of youth and inexperience — enters the building. The reverse draft this creates causes the room’s door to rudely slam behind me, inflicting a welt down my back as though I had just been flogged.
Outside, I find neither the unicycle nor the bodies of the dogs. Only Armageddon’s head remains — a sign of the times, I suppose. They aren’t the first canines to fall victim to the black market, and they can easily be replaced by the puppies my neighbor breeds for his heavy-machine-gun moving-target range. But I picture Hope being devoured at the underground Pooch-fil-A by poor, carnivorous college students with greasy fingers, as I remove the leash from what remains of my dog of war.
Embarking on the long trudge uphill toward my humble domicile, unencumbered by the weight of my stolen possessions, I soon encounter a roadblock, the taped-off scene of yet another shooting. The fourth grade students from a class in the local militia enclave, led by a “rogue” teacher, surprised a group of protesters who had been demanding an end to the recent placement of ammunition vending machines in school cafeterias. The students’ successful flanking attack has left in its wake a trail of carnage several blocks wide.
Homeland Security tanks have cordoned off a swath of the city, and a dozen of the police department’s urban-assault helicopters circle the escape routes, searching for the miscreants, who are all identifiable by a tattoo on their foreheads proclaiming “Intolerance Will Set You Free.”
Circumventing this impediment, I cautiously work my way through a lower-end neighborhood which was recently “cleared out” by a controlled burn. Little remains beyond ashes and a few partial walls, yet I suffer the sensation that ghosts lurk in the shadows and that the rats, which may have devoured the last inhabitants, eye my intrusion with ravenous curiosity.
As I climb out of the valley, I am hit head-on by a wall of sand of Dust Bowl proportions. I crawl to a nearby abandoned barn where, hours later, I dig my way out of a foot-thick layer of newly displaced desert that is smothering and suffocating me. Stepping away from the collapsing structure, I gaze up at the sky and take a final breath.
Late in the evening, raising the bed covers in their over-refrigerated mansion, the police commissioner turns to the mayor with a wink and conspiratorial smile, and whispers gratitude for the newly provided flotilla of drones that has successfully taken out the last of today’s band of juvenile urban terrorists. The late night news displays an image of what is proclaimed to be the only remaining evidence — the torn scrap of a blue baseball cap with tattered stitching of just one word: “Fear.”
