SURVIVALISM 1

When the power went out for the last time we knew we would have to kill the survivalists as quickly as possible, while they were still in their bunkers.

For a few days we had all been talking over the problem. The township of Threshold hosted at least a dozen families that could be considered survivalists, or doomsday preppers, or postapocalyptics - "posties" - or eschatologists, or pork and beaners, or whatever you wanted to call them.

None of them were new, but they had been more active than usual over the previous few months, consolidating their stockpiles of food and water and batteries and guns and ammunition. If they hadn't built their bunkers themselves - hiring earthmovers and cement trucks and day labourers from the camps - they simply had prefab fallout shelters shipped in on the backs of prime movers, and buried them up there in the hills, on their farms and their ranches.

They took their children to the shooting range next to the bowling alley on Main Street, and taught them how to fire and strip and clean their weapons. One of the older girls had a pink ghost AR-15 with extended clips. She would burn through $200 worth of ammunition in half an hour. Flushed and sweating and breathless, the boys crowded around her. She was a good shot, apparently. They all told her so.

The posties wore camouflage everywhere, all the time. They drove nothing smaller than Ford F-250s, needing the extra torque for their flags and bumper stickers. Around town they carried their weapons openly and talked about sight-lines and defensive positions, pointing from one building to another building and then to the road out of town. I watched them use military hand signals to order pie at the diner. They went to church every day and drank beer and said the government would be coming for all of us because of the leftist police state and the homos and the immigrants. Had they been able to pull it off, I suspect the posties would have mined all the streets to stop the endless columns of black women and abortion doctors they imagined were coming to ruin their way of life. One of them said: "There's no 'us' in 'liberty'." I thought that needed some work.

At the first whiff of the end times the posties loaded their shotguns and sealed themselves underground with their families. And we knew that once their tinned peaches ran out and the water stagnated - or they simply grew bored, the romance of crowding around to watch one another shit into a chemical toilet next to the bunk beds having dissipated - they would have no real choice but to descend, armed, onto the town, and take what they needed by force.

And they would have to take it by force. We resolved to not let them have anything. Preparing for catastrophe is one thing, but anticipating it with desire is something else. We didn't need people like that in the new world. To my mind, the new world didn't really need any people in it at all, but there we all were anyway.

We spot welded the primary hatches and secondary escapes and then used the posties' own trucks to drag boulders over them. Air vents had insecticides and herbicides poured down them and were then sealed. There were probably more humane ways to do it, but none of us could think of anything that didn't involve getting in close, and we didn't want to risk it. Many of the townspeople of Threshold expressed sadness and concern for the children trapped down in those bunkers. For my part, I was simply glad that there were no animals down there: everything other than the dogs had been released by the posties before they locked themselves away, and the dogs had been shot on their front lawns as soon as Fox News went off the air.

It was amusing, over the next few weeks, to watch the cats swarming into town. First a trickle and then a stream as they realised their cans of ash and giblets weren't going to be opened, and they had been left to fend for themselves. We were glad to have them there. Food rotted in supermarkets faster than we could eat or preserve it, and the rodent and insect populations boomed, and the cats helped to manage that. They never had the chance to turn feral, and provided comfort and companionship to many. Bibles might provide solace depending on which bits of them you read, but they don't warm your lap or soothe your heartbeat.

We found one bunker already open. Somebody called up for help from below, and we found a bearded man with his hips and legs trapped beneath huge steaming bags of seed. Water had got into the seed from somewhere, invisibly, and after a time many of them had swelled with mildew stink and blight, while others sprouted and fed off the decay. The man told us his wife had gone to solicit help after the sacks of seed had fallen on him while he was dragging them from the shelf, hoping to dry them on the bunker floor, but she had not returned. His eyes kept darting to his AR-15, propped against the wall just out of reach. His fingers scrabbled uselessly for it as I hammered a survey post slowly through his forehead. I expected this to be a revelation: instead I felt that same brief upset you feel when you walk face-first through a spider's web, inadvertently ruining their hard night's work.

Another of the posties had been a retired paediatrician, or so we were told. There was a sick baby that needed attention, so a few of us went up and called into the retired paediatrician's gun slit. He shot out at us and Jake caught it in the chin, and the slug bounced around inside his skull. We threw fire in through the gun slit. That hadn't been my idea, but I went along with it because community and shared purpose is important. It turned out that the retired paediatrician had actually been a podiatrist, and had been hoarding gold against whatever future he had imagined. When we cracked the place open a couple of days later we saw that the gold had melted and run across the floor, then hardened again. Two blackened skeletons were stuck in it. Something silver glinted at a joint, and I tore up a titanium hip, cracking it away from the bone. Coated in gold, like a thick-bladed, curved dagger with a bulbous hilt. Right away somebody asked if they could look at it.

WHATEVER IT IS IN THE HUMAN PSYCHE

Alex Furlong is 32 years old, a car salesman and father of three, from Perth, Western Australia.

When I first started at Decada Motors – they used to be called Succulent Prestige, but people kept coming in looking for plants, apparently – I had just turned twenty four. Prior to that I was in men’s garmentry, working the third floor of David Jones at Carousel. That wasn’t a bad job for somebody with an MBA, the money and hours were decent and I enjoyed working with our customers, helping them find just the right jacket, just the right accessory. I’d been doing it for a couple of years, and a couple of months before Christmas, Jeff – that’s Jeffrey Decada, the owner – and his wife, Aurora, came in looking to buy a bunch of Ermenegildo Zegna ties as “stocking stuffers” for their best clients.

That impressed me. Not that he was buying $300 Zegna ties – I’d sold plenty of those in my time, because they really spruce up a $200 Pierre Cardin suit for a school formal – but that he wanted to buy a hundred of them. I’d never had a customer like that before, so casual about dropping thirty grand on ties that weren’t even for him, and I could tell he wasn’t a bullshitter, so I got nervous. And Aurora – I mean, Mrs. Decada – picked up on that, though Jeff didn’t, and afterwards he came over and told me that his wife said I should stop by “the shop” the next morning.

“The shop” being the Succulent…uh….

Decada Motors, yeah. Right opposite Cottesloe Station, on Curtin Avenue. Jeff looked at me and said “If you go out there and sell me a car at sticker right now, I’ll give you the full incentive in cash”. The incentive is just what we call the commission.

So I was like, okay, and I went out onto the floor, and I was there the whole day – I actually had to ring my manager at DJ’s and pull a sickie, because I was on shift – and I didn’t sell shit, didn’t even get a nibble, though there were plenty of potentials. I went back into Jeff’s office and I just kind of looked at him and he nodded and said “Come back tomorrow if you want to try again.”

That seems…that seems a very inefficient…

I know, right? But it turned out Aurora – I mean, Mrs. Decada – had been in his ear. So I went back the next day. And then the day after that, which was a Sunday, so the place was closed. But on Monday I made my first sale. Bentley Continental. My third day! I couldn’t believe it. That was the cosmic eye on me, man. Most guys, Jeff reckoned, their first sale was usually a Porsche 911, because they’re easy to sell to the sort of person who wants to buy a Porsche 911, who tends not to know much about cars or anything else for that matter. And it could take them up to a month to sell even that. But a fully chromed hybrid Continental, in your first week? That is beyond alpha level. And true to his word, JD gave me the full incentive, in cash. I’d never seen so much money in my life, not even in the end-of-day at DJ’s. And he shook my hand and he looked me right in the eye and he said “You just sold a car” and I was like “Fuck yeah I did, you don’t need to tell me.”

Right.

I learned on the newsfeed that night that the guy who bought it – freshly retired, well-presented, unconnected, seemed pretty together when I was talking to him – drove it off the lot, down the street a few blocks, pulled up near a school, then waited for the kids to start crossing the road to catch their bus. He got nineteen on his first pass – apparently he slalomed through them, that was the word they threw about – then turned around and did it again. He made four passes.

How did that make you feel?

I’ll be honest, I was still buzzing from the high of my first sale, and I was pretty amped that the car held together so well with so many bodies smashing against it, even little ones with their rubbery bones. Say what you will about the Pakistanis, they really build the shit out of a Bentley. Tendons wrapped around the axles, air intakes full of blood, something like half a click of intestine twisted up in the drive shaft…didn’t slow it down. Not the same bit of intestine, but. Different ones.

Right. Impressive.

Of course, then he drove it over the river to O’Connor, to one of the foundries, and smashed it right into the melt crucible or sprue deck or whatever it’s called. Smashed it to bits. The fire was burning for a week.

And that was officially the first incident, wasn’t it?

It was, right. I mean, when you think about a car, the sort of car that I could sell you, for 99.99% of the population of the planet it’s just not something they’d even bother letting cross their minds, if they even knew about it in the first place. Some high earners here and there might fixate on a vintage Jag or a Beemer or the like, save their pennies for a few years to afford the deposit while they’re still in their forties, then spend the rest of their lives paying off the interest and then five thousand kay servicing it’s gonna need.

But a dealership like Jeff’s? Generally speaking, you don’t walk into Decada Motors, selling vehicles that retail up to multiple millions of dollars – and still have paint protection listed as a “recommended extra” – unless you’re, I dunno, ultra-rich from birth, or you’ve just won the lottery.

Or cashed in your superannuation.

Or cashed in your super, yeah. Which is what started happening. I mean, it was always happening, but it was the way it was happening this time. Seventy year olds, men and women both, coming in with their super payouts, dropping the full amount on a new Maserati six-wheeler, or a slung powerblock Lambo or whatever. Some of them were coming in with four or five million-

And you took it?

I didn’t take anything other than my incentive, so if you’re asking me if I did my job, then the answer is yes. Of course I did. I’d sell you a five million dollar car as easy as I’d sell you a five hundred thousand dollar car. Didn’t make the slightest difference to me. What, you chuck a zero on the end of a number and suddenly I’ve got to do an extra day of phoning around, an extra ten pages of due diligence? I’ve got to ask them if it’s really what they really truly want for their lives? The rules suddenly don’t apply, and we should give them a full refund if they come back a week later and go “yeah, nah”? Fucking guy who can't afford a thirty thousand dollar car is the same sort of guy who can't afford a million dollar car. If you want to drop your entire nest egg on it, that’s hurting no one but yourself.

That isn’t the case here, though, is it?

Well, it turned out not to be.

In the media they started calling it “Grey Terrorism”.

Dumb fucking name if you ask me, but I guess that’s what they were. Men and women who’d been working for over fifty years, doing all sorts of jobs, taking every single cent that they had…the childless, some of them were even selling their houses, or taking out second mortgages if they could, just to get the upholstery upgrades. Not that many of them owned houses in the first place, maybe one in twenty. But yeah, they’d buy the car, shake my hand – none of them ever showed me even a flicker of a smile, I remember now – and they’d take off and drive it right through the door of a church during mass, or bounce it off the kerb and into a kindergarten playground. Right onto the sandpit.

The weird thing was, even though my Bentley is on record as being the first instance of “grey terrorism”, it happened about thirty seconds later in Adelaide. A minute after that in Sydney, then a double in Melbourne. Within a few hours reports were coming in from all around the world, just all these old people using their superannuation or whatever they called it to buy an outrageously expensive car and then drive it into something.

A catalogue of atrocities: 

A brand new Rolls Royce Silver Spirit speeding down a Beijing runway, colliding with the forward landing gear of a 787 passenger jet during take-off.

In Idaho, a gasoline-soaked Lamborghini Aventador does circuits inside a packed Wal-Mart on Black Friday. 

Post-match football crowds on the streets of Manchester marmaladed across the bitumen by a drifting Lexus LFA. 

The Arc De Triomphe a cakedrop of twisted, gore-soaked carbon fiber monocoque as twelve Bugatti Veyrons assault it from each watch dial avenue simultaneously, the first coordinated attack. 

St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, burning so hot that the snow melts a kilometre high, the shattered wreckage of a Dartz Prombron at the epicentre.

The Sydney Opera House. 

Mexico City locked down after an endless procession of Aston Martins and Audi S8’s power slide through the bustling produce stands of La Merced Market. 

A chartered private helicopter simply drops a McLaren P1 filled with bowling balls through the roof and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God's sullen face crushes ten nuns below.

Whatever, man. It wasn’t until that first convoy made it across the lawns of Capital Hill in Canberra that anybody did anything about it. That lot had spot-welded armour to their Ferraris, which was pretty wild. Even with the added weight, you get up enough speed in a V-14, no amount of bollards or iron fencing or dirt-filled Hescos are slowing it down.

The government’s answer was banning the sale of luxury cars, correct?

That’s all the government knows how to do, ban shit. Anything with a lot sticker over a hundred and fifty grand, yeah. But that’s not exactly what happened. I mean, visibly that was what happened, but there was a white list with about fifty thousand names on it, they could still have whatever they wanted, they just had to do a special order and have it delivered right to their door in an armoured truck, but they all had to have speed limiters and GPS trackers and remote killswitches and all the RFID tags went into a big database.

But the grey terrorists – or, at least, those who were assumed to be greys – couldn’t buy anything much better than a Prius or a Mondeo or the like, which meant that they had plenty of money left over, and whatever it is in the human psyche, a pile of money always gives you pause. Doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, or how much of it you’ve already got, or how fucking crazy your brain is: I’ve never seen anybody not spend a second too long staring at a pile of hundred dollar bills.

Anyway, Decado went bust a few weeks after that. Even with the whitelist, there’s only so many million dollar cars you can sell to the Frutzharts or the Ferners or whoever in a given block of time, even though they were the ones who lobbied Parliament to still be allowed to buy the fucking things. So I got a position at a Mazda dealership, and I’ll be honest, I still sold plenty of cars to people I knew were greys. It didn’t bother me that now, instead of emptying their entire bank balances on a single purchase from me, they’d first fill their glove compartment with Patek Philippes, the boot and back seat with Louis Vuitton luggage, just to make up the difference in cost, and carry on how they had before. But I guess it wasn’t quite the same for them. It certainly wasn’t the same for me. It all just kind of naturally petered out.

Where do you work now?

Sam’s Super Spacesavers. We sell single-occupant vehicles. They’re just fucking bikes with doors. You can fold ‘em up and stick ‘em under your bed. Takes six trips to do your shopping for tea, you’d honestly be better off walking. I hate the place.

What do you suppose was responsible for this, I don’t know, mass delusion? This…global retiree meme? The idea they had, that these actions were all they had left?

What I think is that the only decision people have left these days is choosing where to dig their own graves. I don’t know that I’d blame any one particular event or sensation. I think that these people were just like any of us: taking their entire lifetimes to realise that they never had anything to live for.