How to Survive a Nuclear War

by Miles Baldwin

  I heard a grumble.

  Roger looked around the room. “What was that?”

  No one responded.

  Roger stared everyone down, then continued. “Look at downtown America. You people have taken it over and look what you’ve done with it. It’s a goddamn sewer. Everything’s falling apart, crime is everywhere. Look at Africa. The whole country is fucked up. Everybody is hacking each other’s arms off and spreading disease like crazy. Everything you touch turns to shit.”

  He paced up and down the aisles growing increasingly frustrated that his little speech wasn’t eliciting a response. No one was volunteering to die tonight. He pointed the rifle at the man closest to him and fired a single shot. The man’s head whipped back and then slowly fell forward.

  Screams and cries erupted throughout the room.

  Roger said nothing. He walked to the front of the room and leaned the rifle up against the wall. Then he manipulated the lift controls and began the nightly ritual of covering the body with cement.

  Chapter 14

  Treadway Dental Clinic is housed in a brown cube-shaped building on Lincoln just south of the city. A short drive from my office which was the primary reason I had selected it. I pushed the door open and stepped inside the waiting room. Framed pictures of teeth lined the walls, those of the before-and-after variety. The subjects’ gums were pulled back in the photographs, something which I found gross.

  There were a half dozen people waiting for their appointments. I spotted a window at the far end of the room with a sign on the frosted glass. The sign instructed patients to sign in, ring the bell, and be seated. I did just that and took a seat between a rotund middle-aged woman and a skinny teenager. I rifled through the magazine selection and found nothing of interest. I sat back and looked around the room. Everyone else was reading a magazine. I reached for a well-worn celebrity rag.

  The window slid open. “Steen O’Mannon?”

  “Yes?” I stood. There at the window sat perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. My heart stopped beating and I felt lightheaded. It was like I was floating on air as I made my way over to the window.

  She was young and gorgeous with blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes, perfect teeth, and a curvy athletic figure. She wore a blue silk blouse and a delicate gold chain around her neck. In an angel’s voice she asked, “May I see your insurance information please?”

  My mouth felt dry and my palms were sweaty. “Um, sure,” I managed to croak. I felt myself getting an erection, which for me was nothing unusual at that age, a strong breeze could produce the same effect. I handed her my newly-minted insurance card, just one of the many perks from graduating college and landing my first real job.

  Her nametag read Julie and I watched her as she studied my card and wrote something on a form. Knowing full well that I shouldn’t be doing this, I stole a glance down her blouse. White bra, tiny red rosebud in the center, ample cleavage.

  “Here you are, sir.” She handed the card back to me.

  Busted. I had been a little too slow on the uptake. Instead of being offended, she smiled. I held her gaze and smiled back. Despite the fact that I was a tall, good-looking kid, at that age I was hopelessly shy around women.

  After the appointment, Julie checked me out of the clinic. I mustered the courage to ask for her number and we began dating. A year later we were married. Meeting my first wife is a pleasant memory for me, even though she eventually became my ex-wife. I can separate the two in my head. As they say, the person you divorce is different than the person you married. Anyway, meeting her is a good memory that I can replay over and over again. My happy place, available anytime I needed to escape reality.

  That little mental vacation was interrupted by Roger. It was evening and he burst into the room and greeted us with that now-familiar line: “Hello negros! Guess what time it is?” Gaping smile. “It’s negro time!”

  Like the others I cringed when I heard those words. It meant the circus of the absurd was about to begin. Night after night we were subjected to unspeakable acts of cruelty and none of us knew when it was going to be our turn.

  Roger preached another sermon extolling the greatness of whites and the shortcomings of blacks, after which he proclaimed it was time to make the world a better place. He focused his attention on a man near me.

  “Come on, negro,” Roger taunted. “Tell me why I should let you live.”

  The man answered, “I don’t deserve to die. I have a family.”

  “You have a family,” Roger repeated. “You mean you’ve contributed to the destruction of America. Every time you people reproduce you make this country worse than it already is. More welfare recipients, more car thieves, more drug addicts, more killers and thugs. When will it end?”

  “Please,” the man cried. “I’m begging you. Please let me go.”

  “Let you go? Yes, we should have let you go. A hundred years ago. Let you go back to Africa where you belong. You don’t belong here, negro.”

  Roger was working himself up again.

  “Please!” the man begged.

  Roger marched over to the auger controls and began manipulating them. The auger growled to life and began moving overhead.

  “No!” the man pleaded.

  Women cried and screamed.

  “Jesus God! Help us! Help us somebody, please!” a woman cried.

  “Lord have mercy,” another said.

  Roger positioned the auger directly over the man’s head. He pressed a button and with a loud hydraulic whine the auger began to spin. Dirt from that afternoon’s planting flew through the air. The auger was tipped with a steel screw about six inches long and an inch wide. The screw whirled dangerously above the man’s head.

  Roger left the auger controls and confronted the man. He shouted, “Alright, last chance negro. Why should I let you live? What good have you done? Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

  The man shook his head. He knew it was no use.

  Roger screamed, “That’s right, nothing! You got nothing! You and your ilk bring nothing of value to our country. All you do is take. Take, take, take! And that’s all you’ll ever do!”

  The auger continued to spin. Women screamed hysterically.

  “Stop it!” one woman yelled.

  “Leave him alone!”

  “Monster!”

  Roger went back to the controls. He faced everyone and announced in a loud voice, “I will now make America a better place.” With that, he pressed a button and the auger began to descend.

  “No!” the man screamed. “Please, NO!”

  The screw was just inches above his head. The man writhed and lashed and screamed, but to no avail. The spinning auger kept coming down and it caught hold of his head and immediately began to screw itself in. The man let out one last ghastly scream. Blood and brains sprayed out of his skull as the auger bore down. Gore flew everywhere as the huge auger literally disintegrated the man’s head.

  Roger raised the auger and it stopped spinning. Blood dripped from the end of it. People screamed and cried and sobbed. Roger said nothing as he laid a fresh mound of concrete where the man’s head had once been.

  ***

  When I awoke the next morning I was overwhelmed by feelings of sadness and despair. The whole situation was terrible, simply terrible. The day seemed to drag on forever. Minutes seemed like hours, hours seemed like days. Sweat dripped from my forehead and ran down my face. Insects came and went. Occasionally I got the aggressive fly – you know the one. The fly sent straight from hell that just won’t go away. My stomach growled and I was starving.

  Otis was quiet for most of the day. I thought perhaps despair and hopelessness had crushed his spirits, too. Then when I least expected it he let one rip. “Douche bag drinker!”

  If I hadn’t been so miserable, I might have laughed. Was he talking about Roger? I hoped so. I tried to think happy thoughts. I thought a
bout the owner of the company I worked for. He was a likable fellow, and no one ever accused him of being politically correct. He was always doing quirky things just to get a laugh. Like when he named one department with an unusually high number of young attractive females Administrative Support Services, which he thereafter affectionately referred to by their acronym, ASS.

  Eventually evening rolled around and right on cue the door flew open and there was Roger – the crazy mother-fucker that he is. When was he going to die, anyway? I thought he had radiation poisoning. He looked fine to me.

  Roger gleefully announced, “Guess what time it is, bitches? It’s negro time! Hello, negros!”

  Groans all around.

  Roger laughed. “What, is that all you have to say? How about, hello Roger! Thank you for feeding us and taking care of us? How about, thank you for paying for our welfare checks and our food stamps? Huh? How about that? Where is the love?”

  No one said a word.

  “How about we start a chant?” Roger said. “You people love to chant, don’t you? It’s that jungle fever in you. Come on, here we go. Say it with me now.” Roger began chanting, “No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!”

  The room remained quiet. I could feel the tension rising in the air.

  “Come on, I thought you liked that one. That’s what happens when whitey has to put one of you down. Right? It’s time to march! It’s time to rally! Fuck yeah! Get down! It’s time to boogie! Let’s get it on! Let’s get funky!” He started undulating his hips and pumping his fists in the air. “No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace! Fuck yeah!”

  Roger was particularly animated tonight. I wondered if he was drunk.

  He continued. “No justice, no peace. What the fuck does that mean, anyway? I’ll tell you what it means. It means a white man had to shoot a black man in self-defense and now you are holding the city hostage until whitey gets punished. Throw whitey in jail. Put his ass on death row. That’s what you think.

  “Let me tell you something, negros. You don’t even know who the enemy is. Look in the fucking mirror. That’s your worst enemy. It ain’t whitey. Do you know who kills the majority of blacks? Look around you. Other blacks, 90% of the time. 90% of black people who get murdered are killed by other blacks. Where are your marches about that? When are you going to protest that? Huh? Black on black crime?

  “Did you know that in 99.9% of the arrests made in this country every year no one gets shot? No one. 99.9% of the time. Then once in a blue moon a white cop has to shoot a black man in self-defense, and what happens? You go crazy! The whole fucking world goes nuts. You take to the streets and march and riot and break into stores and steal stuff and burn down everything. You fight the cops and throw Molotov cocktails. You scream racism.” He paused for a moment to catch his breath. “You know what you are? You are a fucking disgrace; a disgrace to mankind.

  “Do you have any idea what kind of hell you make this country for everybody else? Just by your existence? Do you have any idea how much better off America would be right now if we’d sent you back to the jungles of Africa where you belong?”

  He looked around the room. No one responded to his taunts. Finally he gave up and just chose someone. “You there,” he pointed to a woman in the second row. “I think tonight’s gonna be your special night.”

  “No!” she screamed. “Why me?”

  He got closer. “Because you exist. Because I fucking hate you. I hate everything about you. I hate the way you talk. I hate the way you look. I hate the way you smell. I hate your shitty fucking attitude.”

  The woman sobbed.

  “Get ready, because you’re going to die, and it’s going to be slow and horrible.”

  “No, God, Jesus, please, no!” the woman begged. “I don wanna die! Please help me! Please somebody! Please help me!”

  Roger worked the controls and positioned the crane over the woman’s head. She watched as it moved toward her. “Whachu doin? Whachu doin?”

  “Shut up!” Roger yelled.

  Others cried and shrieked.

  The crane lowered and the chains made a high-pitched tinkling sound as they coiled onto the ground around her. Roger stepped behind the woman and wrapped the chains around her neck.

  The woman screamed, “Don you be doin dat! Don you be doin dat shit! Get off me! Get the fuck off me!”

  Roger bolted the chains together and returned to the controls. With a loud whine the crane rose and took up the slack in the chains. The woman’s head was forced upward. She screamed and Roger stopped the crane.

  “You fucking cracker!” she screamed. “Get this shit off me!”

  Roger laughed. He pressed a button and the crane lifted another inch. The chains began to groan as they pulled on her head.

  “Aaaaaaaah!” she screamed. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!”

  Roger laughed harder. He pressed the button again. The woman’s screams became garbled as the chains began to choke her. When it looked like she might pass out, Roger pressed the button and held it. The crane labored and the chains barked. Then the inevitable happened. The powerful crane capable of lifting heavy concrete structures, pulled the woman’s head completely off. In a grotesque display that I desperately wish I could forget, the woman’s head popped off and flew through the air. It bounced off the ceiling and landed in the dirt with a loud thud. The room erupted in horrified screams and cries.

  The spectacle was downright ungodly. Arterial blood spurted from the woman’s headless body and splattered all over the ground around her. Her head rolled to a stop in front of the room and blood pooled beneath it. I closed my eyes in horror and disbelief.

  Chapter 15

  The days which followed were much like the ones before. New prisoners were brought in by day, gruesome executions carried out each night. I continued working my feet in the concrete and felt like I might be getting close to breaking free. The concrete’s surface was slick with perspiration and I had definitely lost some weight. I managed to break through the thin layer of concrete around my shoulders by arching my back over and over again. Fortunately the surface cracks disappeared when I returned to a state of rest.

  Roger’s mood was like a pendulum, and with respect to Otis the pendulum had swung the other way. Roger was becoming increasingly annoyed by Otis’s outbursts. Last night Roger tied the noose around Otis’s head again. When Roger returned the following evening, the first thing he did was pull it off. He tossed the noose and said, “Go on retard, say something stupid.”

  Otis shook for a second, then he shouted, “Tongue my scrotal anomaly! I will bitch slap yo mamma!”

  Roger wasn’t amused. He said, “Alright freak show, I think it’s time you joined the others. Up there in that great negro heaven in the sky.”

  Otis looked terrified. “G’oh boy! No! I don’t wanna die!”

  Roger chuckled. “Yes, it’s time. Your usefulness here is over. So what’s it going to be? You want your head popped off like the other night? You want the bee bucket? Or how about a quick bullet to the head?”

  “Splooge monkey!” Otis blurted.

  I said, “Go easy on him.”

  Roger glared at me. “You are in no position to negotiate here. You’re next, by the way. And I can assure you it will be neither be quick nor painless.”

  I ground my teeth.

  Roger returned his attention to Otis. “So retard, what’s it going to be?”

  “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!”

  “Let him alone,” a woman demanded. “Can’t you see he ain’t right in the head?”

  Roger walked over to the woman. “What did you say to me, negro?”

  “You heard me. We done had about enough of you.”

  “Oh really? And just what are you going to do about it? Report me? Call the police? Guess what? They’re not here. There’s no one to call, bitch. It’s just you and me.”

  Roger ma
de his way to the crate. As he walked he began singing:

  “Enjoy your death, Mrs. Robinson,

  “It will be so nice to see you die,

  “My, my, my.

  “Here comes the saw, Mrs. Robinson,

  “I will be so glad to see you go,

  “You ho, ho, ho.”

  He pulled out the chainsaw. He gave it a quick pull and it started on the first try. He raced the engine and screamed, “Yeah bitch! Who’s in charge now? Got something you want to say now, bitch?”

  He held the chainsaw high overhead and raced the engine with a crazy look in his eye. As he stood over the woman, he shouted, “Got any last words? Any last demands? Want to tell me what to do? Just one more time? Come on, you’re the queen, right? You’re the boss!”

  He looked down on the woman. She kept her head down and sobbed.

  “Look at me!” Roger screamed. “Look at me!”

  The woman looked up. Just as she did, in one swift move Roger dropped to one knee and swooped the chainsaw down against her neck. The engine labored briefly as he cut through bone, then it raced as the blade emerged from the other side. Roger killed the engine and dropped the chainsaw on the ground. He grabbed the severed head by the hair and lifted it up. “Here she is,” he shouted, “the queen of the world. She’s in charge of everything.”

  There were shrieks of horror throughout the room. Blood rained down from the severed head and splattered on the ground.

  He looked the head in the face and said, “What’s the matter? Got nothing left to say, queenie? No more demands?”

  He let go and it fell to the ground. He backed up a few steps, then he gave it a swift kick. Her head sailed across the room and landed with a dull thud.

  People screamed and shrieked and cried. I couldn’t watch. I concentrated instead on struggling against my bonds. I had no doubt he would carry out the threat he’d made earlier.