BANG! (A Genre Mélange)

By the close of New Year’s Day 2030, every human inhabitant of the planet Earth had been fingered. It was no longer a big deal for anyone to cock thumb and extend index finger as if they comprised a real pistol and, with a simple BANG, shoot someone dead. Really dead. Dead dead. I can’t believe they’re dead kind of dead.

            But exactly one year earlier, the day I, Spencer D. McSwain, became the first human to be fingered, it hadn’t yet happened to anyone else. And because I was the very first person to be biologically armed, so to speak, no one believed me when I said that I’d never held a gun. Not once in my entire 29 years of life.

Of course, by now everyone has heard the story of how I was standing by the ATM counting my money before heading to the food palace, when the mugger, most of his face hidden behind a mask because the world was having yet another Covid-mutation resurgence, walked up to me and said, “Give me the money, jackass.”

He was a big guy. Maybe 6’2” or 3” and proportionately muscular. Since I’m only 5’8” and on the soft side, I probably should have given it to him. But it was my last hundred bucks. Without it, I would have gone hungrier than even a starving artist like me could stand. So I said, “No.”

Refusing to accept my answer, he balled his hand into a fist and took a slow step closer to me just as my stomach started to growl.

Hunger makes people do funny things. And hungry as I was, I did the funniest thing: I cocked my thumb and extended my index finger as if they were a real handgun, and I shouted, “Stop right there or I’ll shoot!”

He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

For a second, I thought he’d turn and hi-ho just to get away from the nut he’d surely deemed me to be. But he must have been hungry too and therefore needed the money, so he balled his other hand and took yet another step closer.

You see then, don’t you? that there was really nothing I could do other than lift my hand and, making like I was taking steady aim at his heart, say, “Bang. Bang. You’re dead!”

Not in a million years did I expect him to drop like a fly. Not in a million years did I expect my index finger to shoot anything other than blanks. Geez, what am I saying? I didn’t expect my finger to shoot anything at all.

I fainted. Or so the bank’s security cameras captured me doing. And I stayed fainted until the cops arrived minutes later and, real guns drawn, ordered me to drop my weapon.

“I haven’t got a weapon,” I said, trying desperately to rub the nightmare from my eyes.

When they repeated their order and I understood that mine inexplicably was not a nightmare but a real live horror show, I raised my hands over my head and screamed, “I’m not armed. I swear to God, I’m not armed!”

With that, I was grabbed, cuffed, and, with exaggerated enunciation, informed of my rights by a cop whose name tag identified her as Miranda. Yep, Miranda. What were the odds, huh? Indeed, what were the odds that everything that happened that day would happen as it did?

Since no weapon was found at the scene and no gunpowder residue was found on my hands, I was unceremoniously tossed in an interview room like a beef patty about to be grilled.

Balding Good Cop came in first, carrying a cup of coffee and two doughnuts. They were for me, he said, because I needed to put some meat on my bones, and he needed to lose some. He wobbled to a chair, sat with a thud, and grinned benevolently.

Eying his girth and deciding I could trust that he meant what he said, I thanked him and gobbled the jelly doughnut first.

I’d barely attacked the cream-filled one, when Lean, Mean, and Hairy Bad Cop growled in, threatening to put me away for all eternity and then some.

“Now, now, Adolph,” Good Cop said, “Let the young man finish his doughnut. He’s a good boy. No priors. He’ll tell us how he did it in his own sweet time.” Turning to me, he added, “How about finishing off the other one, son? Or maybe some pizza?”

“Maybe later,” I said, “After you release me.”

“You’ll be released over my dead body,” Bad Cop said.

And, yep, you guessed it. Those were the last words he uttered.

It happened fast and like this: I looked at him and said, “All I did, sir, was point my finger at the guy, just like I’m now pointing at you. And I said, ‘Bang. Bang. You’re dead.”

And with that, Bad Cop dropped instantly, much like the mugger had dropped. Dead as a doornail.

Before this shooting, I’d planned on making short work of the cream-filled doughnut too, but given what happened, I left it in on the plate. Good Cop grabbed it in a flash. Shock does that to some people, you know. It makes them crave glucose to power the muscles for fight or flight.

Good Cop opted for flight. Can’t say I blamed him.

In lieu of another interrogation attempt, six members of the Bomb Squad, each dressed in full professional regalia, examined me next.

When, after being stripped to my birthday suit, I was declared wire- and timing-mechanisms free, it was decided that I should be imaged—you know what I mean, plutonium scan, XYZray—all the stuff I’d have insisted on myself if only I’d been insured. But what starving artist could afford medical insurance in the days before our transformation?

After threatening to cut off my fingers if I so much as cocked a thumb, much less any other digit, the authorities interrogated me ad nauseum. Chomping to know whether I’d bought the weapon or printed it myself, they made it clear that if I told them where I’d dumped it after the shooting, things would go well for me. But if I didn’t sing, it would be curtains.

Of course, I couldn’t sing. I didn’t know what had happened any more than they did, and I fell to my knees moaning precisely that. So, at a loss as to what to do next, they put me through another battery of diagnostic tests.

Tired and hungrier than I could stand because I had to remain in the fasting state for all the blood draws, I began to grow frantic, certain that there would be no end to the poking and prodding and, worse, there’d be no dinner.

That thought caused me to fall to my knees again, this time in the hope that there really was a deity willing to step to the plate on my behalf. For impossible as it was for me to believe, I’d killed two men. Not just one. Two!

Ironic, isn’t it, that it was numbers that saved my hide?

  As long as I was the lone shooter, I had plenty to fear. But when person after person started banging away left and right and police switchboards in every corner of the world started lighting up with reports of homicide after homicide, all charges against me were summarily dismissed and I was released on my own recognizance.

It was clear: millions of us were now fingered and hundreds of thousands more were being fingered by the minute.

We were in the thick of an unprecedented epidemic and whither it came or how long it would last, nobody knew.

What to do, what to do, eh? when the FBI, the KGB, Mossad, and even little ol’ Interpol are so overwhelmed that their leaders retreat to the same secret bunker to make nice and collaborate with their sworn enemies so that together they might defeat their greatest common foe since global warming?

Well, if ours were a rational human race, I’d say we’d start by sitting tight on our hands and refrain from being cocky—no pun intended.

Indeed, much as I very much believe that laughter is the best medicine for nearly all that ails us, let’s get serious. Handguns—whether inorganic little pieces held in the hand, or biological killing machines born of the hand—are no laughing matter. You already know the tragic statistics. You already know.

What we need to remember now, what must be cemented in our history books for posterity’s sake and humanity’s future is what you and I witnessed during the year of our transformation. For yes, the remorseless psychopaths and pedophiles and rapists and domestic abusers and drug lords, and the heartless swindlers, self-serving CEO’s, reprehensible public servants, and immoral providers of so-called entertainment were indeed efficiently done away with to choruses of jubilant halleluiahs. But so were the innocent. But so were the innocent.

How many children playing cops and robbers died that first week? How many wayward lovers the next? And need I remind us of the months and months of carnage for a slight imagined or a word misunderstood?

A good morning said to someone who wasn’t having one suddenly had consequences. Irrevocable consequences.

Marriages that could have been dissolved in the courts ended in the cemetery.

International disputes were left with precious few nationals to resolve them.

Closer to home, we shut ourselves off from neighbors and co-workers only to make antagonists of our own flesh and blood before we turned our hand to the foe deep within.

How many of us, knowing well that no silencer can render a gun less deadly, pressed finger to temple and thought, simply thought—

BAN_

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 Zoë Blaylock is an emerging writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Westchester Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, The Wild Umbrella, and other publications. Educated principally in the school of hard knocks and droll encounters, she earned her degrees at Harvard and is now a last-chance athlete in San Diego. HereForThepresent.com