Things had not gone well. Not as well as Mort and Ellie first expected. With each passing year, Mort felt like a tick swelling on a steady diet of fear. Risk and random violence. Scenarios of intersecting mayhem and bloodshed. Pandemics. Wildfires and plagues of tree-eating bugs and flesh-eating microorganisms. 

When the trio of Paris immigrants knocked him over outside the Gare du Nord and ran off with his roller bag, he yelled alarm. Ellie screamed. And nothing happened. A few people looked at Mort as he scrabbled crablike on the pavement. Nobody stopped. Nobody chased the thieves. Ho-hum, just another tourist lightened of their load. 

The police asked him to identify the thieves, by race, as if saying “black” would help them narrow it down to two or three billion possible suspects. 

“Find my damned bag!” Mort yelled at them. “That would be easier.”

People half his age were getting knifed on commuter trains by right-wing nut-jobs. The garbage trucks had started returning trash as un-disposable. Mail arrived in the whirring clutches of drones operated on contract by kids who once had gone to school, but now did everything inside digital goggles. 

Menace lay around every corner, it seemed. The rules had come unglued. 

On Sundays, Mort sat by the sound console at the back of his church and looked at the backs of his fellow parishioners. Then he looked off to the left, where stairs ascended from the street into the sanctuary. He wondered if he would see the barrel first or the masked face of the assassin coming to help them meet their maker. 

On the phone with his son, he mentioned his growing fears. Willie supervised teachers in a big-city school system. 

“On my mind every day,” Willie said.

Willie had just gotten a free week off when the schools closed to avoid a particularly nasty new virus. They called it the defecavirus. Chinese pigs had engaged in anal sex with a yoga instructor. In short order, a wriggling mass of buttworms plopped out and slid downhill toward the waterways of the world.

Able to feed on waste plastic, the proliferating creatures quickly formed large, floating islands that became a point of passing interest to cruise ship passengers strolling the decks on their way to the buffet. No one knew they would swim up the coastal rivers of the western United States and start quietly attacking unsuspecting suburban homeowners from their toilet bowls. It made a colonoscopy seem like a spa treatment. 

Infected people would spontaneously melt into pools of fecal gravy. The buttworm was a stealthy bastard. Its victims felt nothing, had no warning. They would be walking along a sidewalk and wham, their clothes would collapse into a gruesome puddle as their skeletons and organs and muscles dissolved almost instantly. 

People only had time to gasp or say “Uh-oh” or realize what was happening and tell a companion “I love ….”  They never had time to finish the sentence.

“I was looking toward the west hills today,” Mort said, half-joking to Willie as Ellie and he sat on either side of their Yahtzee board, “and I saw the head and arms of the defecavirus peeking over the ridgeline. Checking us out. To see if we looked tasty.”

His son chuckled politely. 

“What are we supposed to do about this?” he asked.

“Just poop in the yard,” he said. “At least it takes our minds off the warmest winter in decades. It’s February, and I’ve got daffodils in my yard.”

Mort wondered how Willie could be so sanguine about the most horrific zootic attack yet. 

All the natural upheaval and human threat had stolen Mort’s sleep. He thought retirement would be a relaxing time of quiet, undisturbed slumber. How wrong he was. He and Ellie were both sleeping like shit. 

Ellie would wake up first and go to the kitchen for a snack, and her movement would wake Mort, and he would go to take a leak, and then they would meet up in bed and lie there staring at the ceiling for an hour or two.

“You awake?” he would ask.

“Yep. You?”

“Nope. Just not sleeping.”

He thought about all the things he could and couldn’t do. More locks on the doors. Replace the fire alarm batteries. Explore real estate in northern Manitoba. Buy more toilet paper. 

The day after one particularly lengthy bout of insomnia, he went to the store. It was packed. “I didn’t know the town had this many people,” his checker said. 

He passed the toilet paper aisle. He didn’t need any. Shelves had been stripped, like a field of corn after the locusts depart. Mort felt a sudden craving for toilet paper.

“Toilet paper?” he said to Ellie over cocktails. “Toilet paper doesn’t deter the buttworm.”

He told Ellie how powerless he felt lately. 

“You’re still in great shape,” she said. “You were always invulnerable.”

“I’m seventy-two,” he said. “I’ve never been invulnerable. Now I’m not just less invulnerable, I’ve got an over-abundance of vulner, and don’t know where to put it.”

“The garage?”

“Not unless we get rid of some of our disaster preparedness.”

We had stocked up on de-wormer. In case. Mort told Ellie he felt like a victim-in-waiting. What about a home invasion? What about car-jacking? What about someone driving a delivery truck down a sidewalk because they didn’t like pedestrians? 

She smiled at him, patted his hand. He pulled it back, and picked up his martini. 

“Did you see where they say eleven drinks a week will erode the plaque that causes dementia?” he said.

“They?”

“In the paper. Korea. They did a study.”

“Did any of those people also eat kimchi?”

Mort heard a loud scream out front and ran to the door. A pitox had the neighbor kid in its jaws and was struggling to drag him from under the circus netting that covered his family’s house and yard. The pitox flapped his wings and slowly lifted into the air, the kid screaming and struggling and growing smaller as the pitox reached elevation and soared toward distant trees.

Interspecies mingling had given them the pitox. When pitbulls and the flying fox somehow delivered the world a hybrid love child, it replaced skateboards as the scourge of suburbia. These malevolent attack bats would swoop down and pluck pets and unsuspecting children from the streets. Parents had taken to draping their homes in circus netting, but every so often, they would have to step outside. Many of the parents now wore sidearms. Soccer moms walked the sidelines with .410 shotguns at the ready.

As Mort watched the child and the pitox disappear, he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. He needed a gun. He realized that some things were inevitable. Aging and decline. Even so, he wasn’t so sure he should willingly stroll around with a “Kick Me Here” sign pinned above his ass. 

He had never owned a gun. Never shot one. But damn, it seemed as if everyone had one. A necessary thing, he supposed, given that ... everyone had one. He had read the ad inserts in the paper, by a store that stocked a variety of guns and ammo. Mort thought he might check that out. If he had a way to fight back, maybe he wouldn’t be so oppressed by his basket of fears. Maybe he could provide security to his church community as they prayed before the hour of cookies and coffee.

At the back of the store, past the rubber boots and denim cargo pants and canned chili and steer manure, he found Lance. He stood against a background of rifles and shotguns and automatic weapons, behind a glass case full of semi-automatic handguns and revolvers the size of lamb shanks. 

Lance. Of course, Mort thought. Lance, reincarnated many times over after his Neanderthal forebears started business at the back of a cave, taking root vegetables in exchange for long sticks tipped with chipped obsidian shards. 

“How can I help you?”

“I need …”

“I understand,” Lance said.

He took Mort on a tour. Asked a few questions. Determined that he probably needed something smaller than a bazooka or .45 or a .357 or a 12-gauge pump with a short barrel. 

“I’m not worried about bears,” Mort said.

“You may be the only one,” Lance said.

Mort must have looked quizzical.

“Everybody’s weirded out about these new things coming up from California.”

“Things?”

“It’s insane. Some cross between a wolf and a cow. Like they spied each other across the pasture under a moonlit night. Voilá. The bullf.”

“Bullf?”

“The size of a cow, the attitude of a wolf. Not real fast, but if it catches you …”

Mort heard another customer behind him, asking another clerk about ammo for a 9 mm. He snuck a quick glimpse of the guy. He looked like Mort’s dad, dyed hair, pomaded and swept back. Probably a furniture salesman. 

“Maybe a pea-shooter,” Lance said, and showed Mort some derringers and small .22 autos.

They settled on a .38. When Mort got home, Ellie was at the dining room table. He set his  package in front of her. 

“What’d you get?”

“A gun.”

Mort wasn’t going to be coy, or hide it in his sock drawer for her to find by accident.

“You’re shitting me, right?”

“When the shit goes down.”

“I don’t want a gun in my house. We have grandkids. We have pets. Are you insane?”

“I’ll lock it and hide it where the pets can’t find it.”

“And when Gorilla Magoon breaks down the front door? What then? Ask him to wait while you get your ladder and keys and climb up in the attic to get your arsenal?”

She excelled at sarcasm. Mort, on the other hand, knew when to quit. He swept the package off the table and retreated to his den, where he carved out a secret storage pocket in the pages of a long-unread hardback novel. His grandkids weren’t likely ever to open that. Hell,  Mort had never opened it in twenty years. 

“Cute,” Ellie said.

She was watching from the doorway. “How’s that work?” she asked. “You’re face to face with mayhem, and go, ‘Excuse me, I want to read you something’?”

“Better to have something than  nothing.”

“What if you had been sipping espresso when those Charlie Hebdo assholes started spraying restaurants in Paris? What then, Dirty Mort?”

“At least I could take some of them with me,” he said.

“Have we ev-er, have you ev-er felt the need to have something more powerful than a ballpoint pen? How long have we been married? How long have we not needed a gun? When did anything happen that would suggest thinking differently? Your decision defies logic.”

“Isn’t the ballpoint pen the potential rape victim’s weapon of choice? Sorry, I forgot. I always carry a pen. You prefer car keys.” 

It was the best he could come up with. She had him reeling. Full of lead. Bleeding profusely. At times like these, the tough go outside and mow the lawn.

Ellie eventually cooled off. She let the matter drop. Sort of. Passing him in the hallway, she would give him the eye roll. Or the head shake. Or a combo. Body language with volume.

Mort quietly slipped the gun book into the drawer of his nightstand. What’s the good if it’s in the other room when a killer comes knocking? He thought it might help him sleep easier. He was wrong. Thoughts of the gun merely replaced thoughts of other threats. Lying there with Ellie in their quiet hunger for sleep, he found himself imagining showdown scenarios. They played in black and white, like every noir movie he had ever seen. In each scenario, he was the heroic lead, reaching for his piece in the face of dastardly dudes, firing several shots -- BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! -- to move the plot along. 

His heart raced. His eyes popped open. He needed whiskey, and slipped from bed to get some.

In the morning, haggard and hangdog from lack of sleep, he told Ellie he might have had a panic attack. He had lain awake in fear of everything. He didn’t know what, but something.

“Did you shoot it?” Ellie asked.

“Har-de-fucking-har.”

“Isn’t that why you got a gun? So you could rest … easier?”

“What would you do differently?”

She pursed her lips, looked to the ceiling, rubbed her chin. 

“Get rid of every lethal weapon in the house?”

“OK,” he said, “I’m selling your car.”

A couple of weeks after arming their household, Mort was buying coffee for a friend. The friend was speaking. Mort heard not a word. All he could think of was his gun. It was still at home, where it could do him no good if an armed miscreant decided to hold up the barista for tip money. What would he do then? Throw hot coffee at him? Or her?

That’s when he realized that threat was everywhere, unscheduled, all the time. Constant and unrelenting calamity was the stepchild of terror and environmental degradation. The proliferation of buttworms and attack bats and carnivorous cattle (even if early evidence suggested that they preferred to eat vegetarians), in addition to the growing population of loose-screw humans,  all insisted to  Mort that he never  leave the house again without a holstered gun.

Mort moved the gun from his nightstand. He reasoned that its proximity may have incited insomnia. For a few days, he slept better. 

Then he woke at 3:00 a.m. and thought he heard something beyond the bedroom door. He lay there, listening. He wasn’t sure. What if someone was in the house? 

He slipped from bed, listened at the door. He could hear nothing, so he opened it slowly and padded down the hall. Quiet. Still. He went into his office. He reached to a shelf and retrieved the revolver. It felt warm. Like it had a pulse. 

Gun in hand, he walked through the rest of the house. Windows and doors secure. Nothing amiss. Safe, at last. As always. Again. 

In bed, he could think of nothing but the gun. It was almost as if it were whispering to him. Calling him from his wife’s side. Inviting him to come closer, to hold it, to caress its cylinder, its hammer. To spend more time together, getting to know each other. 

In the days that followed, Mort found himself thinking almost constantly about the gun. His mental state reminded him of how he had once, three decades earlier, taken a lover for a week, until her estranged husband called while she and Mort were fucking. She ran for the phone -- it was in the days when phones hung on walls -- and he sat there, semi-erect, listening to them chat, before he got up, got dressed, and left. 

For a week, though, that other woman (he couldn’t remember her name) had a stranglehold on his brain. He felt horribly guilty, but it didn’t stop him from running to her side. Now, after getting the gun, he felt the same way, running to its side in the middle of the night, wondering if he would ever have a need to use it, if he would ever get a chance to use it. 

Something was happening. To the world, yes, and to him. He thought he would never know the answer to his questions if he didn’t force the issue. One day, he stuck the gun in his coat pocket and drove to the city. 

Darkness fell as he looked for parking. It was a former industrial zone, full of new condo towers, next to historic flophouses. Where young urbanites came to drink, inches from sidewalks choked with drug dealers, mental health outpatients, runaways, and the transient homeless. It was a marketplace of risk. Loss and lust, despair and desire. Its ambassadors milled aimlessly, waiting for what came next. 

Mort locked his car, stepped to the sidewalk. From his pocket, he heard her voice, calling him. Touch me, she said. Hold me. Feel me. Just your finger. Just for now. 

He held her in his hand. She throbbed as he walked, wary, avoiding eye contact but looking at everything, everyone. Every so often, he would turn and stare into windows, to make sure nothing was following him. 

The wullf. 

The buttworm. 

The pitox. 

He would change direction, so his path became unpredictable. 

Unconsciously, he stopped and pulled a wad of folded bills from his pocket. He slowly counted them before putting them back. Bait for predators. He felt like a coquette, flashing fishnet stocking. 

Power oozed from his pores. Every nerve ending sparked electric. 

He mopped his brow. He had never felt more alive, nor closer to death. 

He knew, of course, that it would come. It comes for all. Sometimes in sleep. Sometimes on a blade. More than ever before, he felt its breath. This was where it lived. In SRO hotels. In alleys full of needles. In bars with bars on the windows. In the hands and hearts of feral felons. 

He felt like he had never felt. Disease and demonic beasts roamed the earth. Pestilence and paranoia. A time to do -- or be done unto.

Hand to hand, bullet and brick, fist and foil, they all agitated for the calm inside the aftermath. Mort couldn’t stand the waiting. The not knowing. He had to make something happen. 

The lover in his pocket tingled. She needed it. She had to have it. 

Calm came over him. He took a deep breath. Ready for anything.

Like gunfire. Begging to be heard.

Like the question, suddenly looming huge and mean and laughable in his cerebrum. 

No answer. No memory. No doubt, and nothing but.

He couldn’t take another step. 

Not before he first took out the gun. 

And tipped the cylinder. 

And looked to see if it was loaded.