Truncated: Apocalyptic and Loving It!: Truncated, #1

By Matt Orlando

Bill is a just above average guy in a sea of the way above average people of Orange County, California. He's struggled his entire life to be somebody and he's done nothing but fall short. Stuck above the middle, but below the top, the fight for self-worth and approval has left him broken, tired, and painfully bored. His life is meaningless. That is, until a series of man-made, and nature induced calamities brings the apocalypse right to Bill's doorstep. Now, he is a lone gunman in a world absent of rules or morals, without the shackles of comparison, or the weight of anxiety. It's kill or be killed. Life is finally simple, and Bill, is finally happy. That is, until Bill becomes the reluctant leader of a band of misfit survivors who are putting a damper on his newfound coolness. With any luck they'll make it to his mom's in NorCal without getting shot. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Orlando
• Release date: May 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386398202

Matt Orlando

Matt Orlando is a screenwriter, director, and producer who lives in Orange County, California.  After failing in the corporate world and then sucking as an MMA fight trainer for ten years, he put his hand to writing.  At least nobody was getting hurt.  His first film, “A Resurrection” was theatrically released in 2013.  Truncated: Apocalyptic and Loving It! is the first of a three part “Truncated” series…maybe a four part... who knows?   He can be reached at: [e-mail] mattorlandobooks.com or Facebook: @mattorlandobooks 

Book preview

Truncated

Matt Orlando

Truncated:\ˈtrəŋ-ˌkā-təd, ˈtrən-\

Shortened by or as if by having a part cut off; cut short.

TRUNCATED

That one had been close. I’d felt the sawdust. There were splinters in my cheek. I could tell without even looking because my face had gotten warm all of a sudden. I had to be bleeding. I was sure of it. Damn.

Phil, my neighbor of two years, was shooting at me. I had ducked behind an oak or a maple. Or possibly something else. I never took the time to find out. For some reason, I felt bad about that.

Phil! Would you stop fucking shooting at me please!

I could hear him mumbling a yell or yelling a mumble from somewhere behind one of his open windows. I didn’t know what time it was. But it was nighttime and it was pitch-black in there. When the first bullets cracked by my head, I ducked. I think. Or fell. My elbows hurt, so I may have just dove to the ground. It was unexpected. I had thought everyone was gone.

Phil! We’re neighbors! Fuck!

More mumbles. He was probably chewing tobacco, which was sort of weird because we lived in Orange County, California, only a few miles from the beach, and there’s not a lot of that going on here. He might have told me a while ago that he had come from somewhere like Wisconsin. But I never really listened when people talked.

Phil! Listen! I’m just going to my brother’s! Okay?

I waited for a long time. Time passes slowly when you’re being shot at. That’s what I was thinking. It’s weird what you think.

I peeked. Then felt the tree shudder twice. Two lead slugs burrowed towards me through the tree, but the nice nameless tree stopped them for me.

I said I’m going to my brother’s! Jesus!

We know what you’re doing, Bill! It was Helen, Phil’s wife. You’re trying to raid us!

Raid? Who talks like that?

"I’m not trying to . . . raid you!"

I can see your gun, Bill, and that backpack you wanna fill up!

Helen! I’m going to my brother’s and we’re getting the hell out of town! Got it? My backpack is full! I can’t fit any more! Now tell Phil to stop shooting or I’m gonna waste him! Seriously!

There really weren’t a lot of options. I could low-crawl through the gutter. But then I’d be risking an ass shot. Or even if Phil grazed me. The chance of infection. Gangrene. A week later, sawing my arm off while biting down hard on a dirty stick with an empty bottle of Jack Daniels at my feet. No thanks. The tree was going to have to do the trick. Sorry, tree, I thought.

More waiting. I was sure they were talking. Talking about shooting me again.

I looked around the neighborhood. A long, keyhole-shaped cul-de-sac. Upper middleclass everything. Even the plants and pets and gutter water. The leaves fell middleclass. We were so safe, so protected by our middle classness. We smiled and waved and commented about the weather. A cement prison made to look like you were free, lulling you into being something you weren’t. I hadn’t been able to breathe. A slow tightening clasp of my own hands around my throat, wondering the whole time why I wasn’t getting any air. Until it all happened.

The streetlights had turned off just after it all had happened. The lawns growing over their perfect edges. I thought of what it was going be like after we were all gone. Dogs going back to packs like wolves. No more little yip-yip dogs. They’d be the first to go. Annoying little snacks. Bred-down furry accessories that were once massive killing machines that could take down a three-quarter ton moose. But could now fit in a small purse.

Nature would un-manicure itself. The roads would be gone. Replaced with weeds and crabgrass. That wild place before we changed it to suit our needs.

As I was deepening into my existential epiphanies, two bullets snapped right by my ear. I may have felt the shockwaves. Or imagined them. I felt my ear for blood.

Hey! Knock it off! I yelled at him. Or really, I’m gonna shoot you!

You go ahead and try! We’re not afraid of you, Bill! This is our house!

Her again. I was starting to remember. She had followed him out here from Wisconsin. That was why she talked like that.

Phil! Please! Just tell Helen to shut up and let me walk on! If I walk towards your house, then shoot me! But if I’m walking with my back turned in the other direction, then don’t! It’s simple!

I waited.

Okay?

They were probably talking about shooting me again.

Fuck you, Bill! Helen screamed at me.

I was trying to remember if I had even liked her. I think she had made me peach cobbler once and sent me a Christmas card with a picture of their cat sitting miserably with a pair of cloth reindeer antlers tied to its head. I wondered if Phil and Helen had eaten the cat. I hadn’t seen it around.

Phil began to unload on the tree. It sounded like a .22. A bunch of sequential cracks rather than ear-splitting booms. I thought the other gun might have been a lever action .30-30. Which was kinda badass, when you thought about it. Phil, a guy I had shared barbecue and beer with, was actually working the lever on a high-powered rifle on me and probably spitting chaw on the ground next to him. Then wiping his chin on his sleeve. Classic.

But classic as it was, Phil and his crazed wife were really pissing me off. If I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be in the gutter three houses down from mine by Phil and Helen from Wisconsin. I had planned for this for an entire year. Or maybe more like two. And regardless of how long it was, it would be a very below average way to go out.

The problem for Phil was that I could see the little red flashes coming from his gun as he endlessly cycled those small, but dangerous rounds, one after the other. It had to be one of those plastic hundred-round barrel shaped magazines that always jammed.

It jammed. Phil cussed through his chew spit. I brought up my stainless steel, twenty-round, fiberglass stock, Aimpoint sight M-14 and aimed at Phil, my neighbor, who crouched somewhere in the dark black of his hallway. I fired twice.

I knew. Even before she started screaming. I knew.

It was crazy. But not if you understood the circumstances.

I stood up. My knees were aching. My elbows throbbed. Yeah. I must have dove straight down on the tree roots.

Helen exploded from the house. My eyes went right to the belly skin bursting from her stretch pants. It was so bright that at first I had thought she was wearing a hot green undershirt. It sort of glowed. I was having trouble figuring out how she was still so portly with everything that had happened. Then she started shooting. A revolver. Probably a .38. Maybe a .357 magnum. There was blood. Phil’s, if I had to guess. She screamed a blood-curdling, bat-shit, crazed-psycho scream, that reminded me of a movie demon voice. She was moving fast for a big girl. And I couldn’t count on her running out of rounds before she just set the barrel on my face and pulled the trigger. Which was going to happen. Sooner than I would have liked. I screamed for her to stop. But she was on a mission. Running. Firing. Screaming. Firing. So I made it quick. She was just past the ninety-degree turn in her walkway. She did kind of a back flop. It almost looked athletic.

I checked around to see if anyone else had seen. But everyone else was already dead or gone, so it was just me. Me and the tree.

She twitched a few times. She had never felt a thing.

I let out a deep breath. It was horrible. I had just shot my neighbors. The world was falling apart. Practically eating itself. I didn’t know if I was going to survive another block.

And I had never been happier.

2

YOU SEE, BEFORE it all happened, I’d become bored. Which doesn’t seem possible. I lived in Orange County, California. There were beautiful, fit women everywhere. A good job. Food in the fridge. The ocean a few miles away. Air conditioning. Nice car. House. A nice house for a single guy. Too nice.

Ceasar wept when there were no worlds left to conquer. I mean, I didn’t conquer anything, but someone did. They conquered it so much, there was nothing left to conquer for anyone. You woke up in your safe neighborhood. Your Keurig spewing out a perfect single cup of non GMO organic coffee three-continent-blend. The rain-head shower nozzle spraying pure warm drinking water over you from a three phase tankless filter system. Your thermostat was dialed in with your smart phone so that you could tell your house that you want it to be seventy two degrees when you leave the office, but you want the living room at sixty-five degrees because you like to snuggle with that soft llama-fur blanket you picked up on Amazon from some secret mountain village in Tibet.

I’d had it good. What a wonderful life. People would kill for it. Some poor third world orphan with a homemade shiv and an empty stomach. He would be face down praising some carved idol for a two night stay at the recently deceased Casa de Bill. You can’t blame us though. For the way we are. Growing up with everything. Born and raised in paradise.

But I was special. I had a condition. A curse really. I didn’t pick it. Or maybe I did. It was called being just above average. Height. Weight. Looks. Intelligence. Money. All just above average. In Orange County, it was the kiss of death. An almost somebody. A could-have-been.

This near-mediocrity carried its own special kind of boredom, an almost polished, plastic kind, reminiscent of a Malibu Barbie dollhouse. It appears shiny and neat, but really you are trapped for eternity, looking out at the world with a smile that feels like someone else painted on you, rather than your own. I wasn’t Ken. But more like Ken’s decent looking friend, Bill.

I hadn’t been good enough to be the best at anything, but I had for sure never been the worst. I was the thin line that separated the oil from the water. I was neither, but I had a foot in both. In Orange County they made shows about the lives of kids who lived in Laguna Beach, or, for some reason, shows about rich housewives who just seemed to cause problems for themselves, that were watched all over the world. In Orange County, just above average didn’t cut it. They knew it. I knew it. And they knew I knew it.

But you had to choose sides. The poles were where it was at. Where there was still the fight. For something. Anything. But if you were just above average, you really didn’t fit in with either one. You were a dog lost in your own yard. Homeless. But with a nice home.

The game. The insidious soul sucking act. The sameness. The fitting in. Cars. Women. Restaurants. Clothes. Do better. Be better. Be one step ahead. But don’t step out of line. Don’t be too different. The moms with their Lululemon and strollers. Dads with golf shirts and loafers. Talking as though this was going to last forever. Programed robots. Clichés layered over clichés. I was captain. Captain cliché. I played and sucked at the teat. And I was spiraling.

You know you’re spiraling. Hitting that almost lower than you thought possible. That point where you wish the demons you were afraid of as a child would finally come and take you away. That black shadow under the bed. That feeling that something is in the room with you. Sending chills up your spine and hairs standing. My hair stood on end for a different reason. I was relieved. Like the news you get as a kid that you’re going to Disneyland and not the dentist. Come and get me. Grab my foot as it hangs over the bed and drag me under. Please.

Before it all happened I had started having this recurring dream about aliens sending giant fire-breathing robots that roamed around the city burning just about everything. I never ran in the dream. I would stand and wait directly under that metal mammoth, like the Chinese guy in that Tieniman Square photo. Upright and rigid in front of the tanks. Then I would look up and grin until a robot turned its giant Cyclops red eye to me and poured its quenching flame over my head and body like a pure, cool mountain waterfall.

I know it sounds crazy. I sound crazy. He shoots his neighbors. Has dreams about fire breathing robots. Lives a seemingly perfect life. Has everything a man could want. But really I was dying. A piece at a time. I just couldn’t buy the dream. Not all of it. Something held out. I dreamed of something more. As silly as that sounds. I wanted. No. Needed.

More.

3

SO THERE I was, standing next to a nameless tree, looking at my poor neighbor Helen. Her foot twitched for the last time. Christ. I did that, I thought.

I looked back at my old house. I didn’t know if I would see it again. I didn’t care. I was finally free. I sighed the sigh you sigh when you don’t know what to do or how to feel. Or you’re really surprised that you feel the way you do and have finally decided to admit it to yourself. And then I heard something.

Times were very different from the times only several months before. We had forgotten, in America, that the birds you see have to eat that day or they will die. We just had too much. So we bitched about not enough Stevia in our cappuccino while stuck in traffic on our way to a meaningless job. We had ticked off the minutes to a retirement we could never enjoy because we had never accomplished anything in the first place. Those worms, that moth, those birds, were every minute, every second, eating and being eaten. And now it was our turn again. Back to basics. Just like them. It was probably the most comforting feeling I had ever felt in my life. No more confusion. Simplicity in its most pure form.

The sound I heard was a person or persons attracted to the sound of gunfire. Before it all happened, people went away from gunfire. As one should. But now, gunfire meant opportunity. I didn’t know how long Phil had me pinned down for. But evidently it had been long enough to bring the human buzzards.

What happened after it all happened was simple Darwinism. The strong survived. You may be thinking that if I’m just above average, how was I one of the survivors? I wasn’t that tough. Not really that strong for all intents and purposes. No great spiritual constitution. So how?

We’ll get into that. Later.

But I had figured it was probably a street gang. Probably Latino. And probably from Santa Ana. Or Costa Mesa. When it all happened and some people left and some people stayed, the ones with the guns and the ones willing to kill were still alive and thriving. In a sense. It was completely rational that the street gangs had flourished, because nothing had really changed for them. Only the scale. There was a certain hierarchy and order that worked within the gang’s organization that kept them together as a coherent unit, while everyone else was — every-man-for-themselves.

The cops were all gone. As a protective force, anyhow. That was both good and bad for the gangs, because now everyone was a target, even them. But then again, they were used to being shot at and shooting people. Just having a gun might feel powerful, but your common middle-class, white American would shit himself in a gunfight. A blossoming male ego would like to say otherwise, but it’s the truth. After the first shots had been fired, whatever had been in their colons, would be in their pants.

So I was in a fix. I had one exit. Right down the street in front of me. The worst, and I mean the worst mistake you can make was to start jumping walls into backyards. Starving dogs. Abandoned booby traps. And cranky guys named Phil from Wisconsin could be lurking.

I didn’t know the gang’s numbers. So I couldn’t afford to get cocky. You get into it with some guys, think you’re holding your own, and wham, Jose’s brother Juan puts one in the back of your head while you’re shooting in the other direction. But what I did have that these gang members probably didn’t have, was a strong knowledge of my street’s territory, and, more importantly, night vision goggles.

Phil had really screwed me up when he had started shooting at me. If I’d had my night vision goggles on at the time, I might have been able to avoid our little confrontation. So I crouched down behind the nameless tree. And then I wondered just how effing long it was going to take for me to get off my street. It was ridiculous. Within the first ten seconds of my journey, my neighbor Phil and then his wife, Helen, had tried to kill me, so I had killed them, even though I really didn’t want to, and now I was being surrounded by a Latino street gang.

I slowly pulled off my backpack. It was a rookie move not having those night vision goggles on. But the gang members wouldn’t just start shooting. They would send a recon guy to check it out. I was pretty sure he was ducked behind a two-foot wall, two houses down from Phil’s. The wall was built out of reddish cinderblock. The top bricks had ornate diamond shaped holes you could see through. The recon guy would be looking at me through one of those holes. That’s what I would have done.

A strange stillness took over my mind, while my heart fluttered like a hummingbird. I was fascinated by the duality. It felt good, like I was feeling my heart beat for the first time. I wondered if it was what being in love felt like.

I wasn’t too worried that the gang members would just start guns blazing. They needed to know what the hell was going on before they did that. Picture it. A just-above-average-looking white guy is ducked behind a tree with a backpack, camouflage fatigues, and a high-end assault rifle, near what appears to be a large dead lady on the