The End Began in the Middle-03

"The entire community where I worked could not believe that someone not only exposed them, but delivered judgement. The government promised to 'find the killer', but never did. In part because I knew how to ensure that none of their investigations would amount to anything, and in part due to me knowing how limited their resources were. I buried them in corpses, so to speak."

"Dad said that once something got you mad enough, you couldn't be stopped."

"Your father doesn't know the half of it." I said, satisfied with myself, "It's something I figured out when I was a young man: the secret to killing your way to victory is to outpace the other side. That's very hard to do when the other side is a bunch of dead shamblers, but next to them is an omni-present police state. Same skills needed, however."

He gave me that look.

"If I overwhelmed the ability of the cops to keep up and investigate, then I could proceed with impunity. So I did just that; I kept stacking the corpses like cordwood, executing one or more of the enemy every day and ensuring that the continuity continued. Five in a game studio's offices, three at a movie party while the party went on, a dozen at long range with a rifle when they wandered off in a big park, several home invasions, and so on. I got a weekly count of 100 once during this period."

Now the realization came over the boy as he saw his aged, elderly grandfather as the experienced and remorseless manslayer that I really am.

"How long did you keep it up?"

"I started on the first weekend of July that year. I won by the end of August. Eight solid weeks of daily killing, the latter part including me taking the fight to them across the country. Generations of social infiltration and degeneration wiped out in two months. Two months, my boy! All my life I'd been lied to about the power of killing, and I proved them all wrong--permanently, eternally wrong--in just two months! Had the world not come to an end when it did, my part of it would have been able to stage a counter-revolution that would've cleansed the country by the end of the following year. A flood of blood so great it would have sated the thirst of the worst of vampires."

The boy looked at me with a mix of awe and fear. Good. You respect your elders for a reason: they've spent a lifetime mastering skills that you barely know exist.

"Do you know how-"

"One thousand, four-hundred, fifty-six." I said, "The last one I did live on global television, and I still walked away as if no one saw me- and that's because no one did. I shot one of the leading mind-fuckers, a high priestess of this cult, as she gave an interview to one of the major media networks' prime-time news anchors. Her head exploded like a popped balloon and got brain, blood, and bone all over the newscaster."

I chuckled. I had a livestream of that interview going, muted, to ensure that I dialed in the target properly without taking any shots so I saw that I got it right when the chick's headless corpse flopped to the floor like a sack of cement and the chatroom's collective freakout got me rolling with laughter. Right then, I knew beyond any doubt that victory in this culture war was mine.