Talk-Polywell.org

It’s not that they’re stupid or ignorant, it’s just that they’re in that middle channel between both those faults, and won’t get out of it. They simply have no idea what desperation can do to people. As the one person in the room who didn’t have their thumb up their arse in terms of organizing a “rescue” mission, he started putting it together. He was tired, exhausted but he knew he’d do it. One more whack, once more into the breach, one more carry for the Gipper, but this is definitely the last hop with these people, with any people. It’s going to be Mac by himself from now on.

They got back there, and this time around, Mac got as many guns as he wanted, carried by as many bodies as they could scrape together and put out into the field. No swinging dicks carrying lots of firepower, no rescue mission. They arrived in force. Of course, by the time they got back there, everyone had run away. It’s natural, nobody wants to be punished, whether they did anything or not.

No Siree Bob, there are no survivors. They started humping what’s left of the bits of them up onto the trucks. There’s a man and he’s talking at Mac. At a guess, Mac thinks he’s Swedish from the cadence and speaks their usual excellent but stilted English. His mouth is going at a rate of knots but his eyes look at Mac desperately. He still wants to believe in his comfort blanket fantasy of some innate third world superior decency. You know, that usual bollocks about the ennobling effect of grinding poverty and the delusion of calmly accepting death by something as brutal as slow starvation, without ever kicking back. Oh to live in his lovely little world.

Most people do not go gladly into that good night; they fight tooth and nail every darn inch of the way. He’s learning what hunger and desperation can really do to ordinary human beings. Both of those things are probably outlawed in Sweden. It’s such a wonderfully civilised country.