The End Began in the Middle-04

"The freakouts were fantastic to witness. All the screaming about people being gunned down in places where guns were already banned, knifed where knives were banned, and so on only to scream that the bans need to be made worse- as if that would solve the problem! Morons. Fucking retards, the lot of them!" I said, "In their desperate, yet futile, attempt to make their feelings the law of all they abandoned all reality and embraced their collective insanity- as if they were nothing more than overgrown children. Reaping them like wheat before a thresher was more than punishment- it was judgement."

"But there had to be more than that?"

I smiled again. "True, there were plenty more, and after I executed that first gang at that convention more took up my path on their own- I never met them, never knew who they were, and never heard from them. They just picked up the gun and began executing the enemies in their neighborhoods as I did to those trespassing in mine. Most of them would get caught by the police state, and gunned down themselves in time, but those who--like me--showed their quality by staying inside the enemy's minds and thus avoided the traps set for us, quickly came to clear out their neighborhoods."

"A purge, then?"

"The likes of which no one then alive in this land had ever seen."

"The ones buried deep into the power structure proved hardest to take out, as they expected people to try killing them, so they took some work to handle. I resorted to using them as secondary targets when I went after more available targets, like the dumb twats trying to ban everything. I'd also picked off some opportunity targets, and settled some long-standing scores, as I went about the bigger business."

I looked again at the boy. I looked deep into his eyes, as I did when I gave the watered-down version to his father years ago. I saw there what I expected out my own son, that he got it, that he comprehended what all of this killing meant- why it was needed, and better than the alternative.

"Is that how you became king?" he said.

"Not directly." I said, "But it was the start of how I became king. I killed all of the invaders, the liars, the whores, the crooks, everyone who dared step foot into my land and mess with what is mine- I killed them all, and I am damn proud of all that butchery. When the apocalypse came, I knew that I would not be one of the weak pussies that got eaten by the horde. I knew--well before the event--that I would become one of the masters of that world, and when it came I became one of the happiest men in the world."

"Ken would be the other?"

"Yep. We got along fine for that reason."