Bloodboots: A Breadcrumbs For The Nasties Short by Steven Novak

1.
    I guess I shouldn’t be surprised how quickly we turned on each other. We should have seen it coming, everything that happened. It was staring us in the face. The human race is a fickle thing. For all our advancements, we never really evolved. When life became easier to manage, so did we. We lost our claws. Our teeth dulled. We traded who we really were for a life of relaxation. We shoved it to the rear of the closet, buried it in clothing and gadgets and pills to make us forget it existed in the first place: self-imposed ignorance. 

    We forgot we were animals.

    Before the world went to shit, I was a day trader. I spent my days in a world of concepts, ideas and numbers devoid of substance beyond the nonsense we assigned. I dealt in ghosts, moved them around and put them back again. I was good at it, defined my existence by it, and believed I was special because of it. It bought me things, lots of things. If my car was better then my neighbors’, I won. If my apartment was bigger, I let them know it. If my girlfriend had a better ass, I flaunted it. When people looked at me they saw something they wanted and couldn’t have. I was perfect, a golden god atop a temple of green. I made them jealous. Publically they claimed to hate everything I stood for. Privately they wished they were me. That’s just the way it was. There’s no denying it. When I looked at them I saw numbers, price tags, and name brands, comparisons. They existed to be judged against, to confirm what I already knew, to feed my ego. 

    The Crash of ’38 was an end to the fun. It took almost everything, nearly cleaned me out. My girlfriend took the rest. When I couldn’t buy her things, I no longer served a purpose. Our relationship wasn’t really a relationship at all. It was an agreement. I was fine with that. We both knew it. Physically she was out of my league, flawless, feminine yet firm in a way that made every inch of me ache. She was out of everyone’s league. Her body was perfect, the best money could buy. My wallet was long, and thick, and gorgeous. Without it she wouldn’t have given me the time of day. She was willing to spend her nights on her back because she could spend her days wrapped in money. Made sense to me. Nature has always paired the strong with the strong, best with the best. For a period of time that’s exactly what we were. We had so many things to prove it. 

    Strength meant something very different then.

    The fallout from the crash was bigger than any of us expected. Everything had been tied together, one economy for one world, the glorious beginnings of a utopia built on the common ground of greed. Suddenly the numbers we created were working against us, fictional constructs given a life of their own, taking on meanings we never intended. They were fighting back. The comforts of the middle, the things that kept them docile and manageable, went away. The bottom swelled, spread into areas they weren’t meant to, learned things they were better not knowing. The protests came first and riots shortly after, the desperate blows of desperate people. They were hungry. They were tired. They’d had enough.

    The animals had found their teeth.

    Groups emerged, old and new. Differences became a reason to hate. Hate became a pastime. I’m not even sure who fired the first missile, or where it landed, or how many died. No one is. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. When it happened, it happened quickly, couldn’t be taken back. A country I’d never heard of was suddenly gone, half its bordering neighbor blown off the map. There wasn’t any fallback plan or secret strategy for victory. There was only survival: them against us, us against the world. They pushed a button and they just kept pushing.

    The one with the most bombs wins.

    The first sentence in the epitaph of the human race. 

    When they exhausted their bombs they turned to gas. When the gas was gone they got creative, secret things created in secret labs by men