Desperado Sniper

 

Johnny Desperado had arrived in this city without anticipating that he would stay for more than twenty years.  It was a very old city, which people either loved or hated. In any case, it never left anyone indifferent. It was a city full of sun, violent passions and strong emotions.

Desperado had enjoyed its blue skies, while trying several times to leave it. He couldn't find a good job there and he didn't have a good place to live. Above all, he never saw a secure future for his family. The city was overrun by hordes of barbarians from every rotten place on the planet. There was permanent violence and insecurity, with robberies, burglaries and assaults.

Each time, his departure had been aborted or his return hastened. It was like a curse that kept bringing him back to the city. He had thus suffered the misery, violence, dirtiness and corruption of a city that held him prisoner. 

Again, he readily admitted, he had always enjoyed its year-round sunshine and indolence.

But Johnny Desperado had only passed through the city, he had never been knighted there. He had never known anyone "important" there, he had never been part of any network, he had never been initiated into local history. In short, he had never become an inhabitant.

The years had passed, both mediocre and soporific. The city's dazzling past had been totally obscured, the building blocks of the illiterate cities hid the ruins of the ancient palaces.

Johnny had certainly been able to meet the last natives, old poets of a thousand-year-old civilization. They were funny, good children wounded to have become foreigners in their invaded city. They remained in his heart after their death.

The besieged city did not even resist the barbarians. The new masters imposed their law and their customs, and maneuvered their army of destitute and uprooted people. One had hoped, perhaps, that the gift of the city would make the barbarians happy and that they would like it better, once it was put to their taste. It had not been the case. 

These violent and barbaric people wanted only to destroy. This was not their city, it was a place of conquest and revenge. And, besides, even their homelands were dilapidated, riddled with vermin. These beings lived like locusts, destroying everything in their path.

Desperado had understood, from the moment he arrived, that the old city would have a dark future. This city, like the whole country, was falling since it had forgotten its ancient oaths. There would be many deaths.

If the coming story was punishment, Johnny would at least want to punish the perpetrators.  But they were safe, abroad, far from the city and the country. What was being played out was planned at a very high level.

There remained the pawns, the hordes of wretches who devastated the streets and terrorized the inhabitants.  They would have to be exterminated, but how? 

Johnny had thought about it for years, straining his nerves and his reason. There was no solution within his reach.

He hesitated, of course. Not out of conscience, but out of fear. The prospect of ending up in prison, in the midst of these metagroups, was not exciting: he would be lynched.

It was not easy to be brave when one had been raised as a selfish, reasonably "democratic" white boy, physically diminished by a soft city life, psychologically diminished by the anesthetic speeches he had been fed since childhood. A man of Desperado's generation was leaving with a loser's mentality.

The country's heroes had all died in the country's many past wars. Their names were on the monuments of the country and the city. Only the weak and cowardly were left, ready to be led to the slaughterhouse.

So it took the usual motivations for a man to commit suicide to make up his mind. His wife had finally left him and the kids to follow a guy who talked about the future.

Desperado then wandered aimlessly around his apartment for months. He only went out to do rare errands. There, he kept running into more and more gangs of invaders, aggressive, provocative, predatory. Johnny would look down, walk away, sometimes with a kick.

One day, something changed in him. He forced himself to watch more closely the hordes of young people who were terrorizing the city. Every day they became more and more aggressive. They were not even afraid of the police they were harassing, knowing that the police had orders to back off.

The invaders were the most numerous. Those who had already been there for decades were more or less forcibly supporting them. All those families who had entered the country, year after year, had patiently waited for their time.

For years, midwives, schoolteachers, social workers and police officers had seen the number of barbarians grow. They were strictly forbidden to talk about it. 

Now the truth was coming out. Gangs were occupying the streets, entering homes, robbing, raping, looting. The country was entering the chaos that had been planned.

The people of the city were desperate. They were unarmed, materially and especially psychologically. Massacres of inhabitants had begun here and there. The media, under the orders of the government, tried to minimize the phenomenon. The inhabitants who could still do so, fled. 

Desperado did not want to flee anymore. His wife had left with another man, his children had forgotten him.  He had nothing left to lose. He was free to act.  Of course, with the little reason he could still muster in his inner chaos, he had tried to reflect on his deepest motivations, on his mental state, on his chances of success.

He had thought of praying to God to enlighten him.  But God was no longer there. God seemed to have turned away from this city and this country that only worshipped Mammon.

Desperado had been content to watch the invaders beat people, loot them, drag women into a corner to rape and humiliate them. He was trying to motivate himself, to reach the trigger point.

He remembered Bernard, a friend of his father's, a guy who was dying with what was left of his organs that had escaped operations to enrich the surgeon caste.

Bernard belonged to an extinct race, that of the men who stood upright. This generation, silenced by school and television, had not been able to pass on anything to its children. They, who would have been so useful in these circumstances, were disappearing in silence.

The old man had been a colossus.  Desperado remembered him when he was in his forties. He was funny then, sure of his ideas and his strength. Those were the days of laughter and conviction. Bernard was now a diminished old man, paying for decades of smoking. He had lost everything but his head, unfortunately. 

Desperado had gone to see him in his little shack, far away in the mountains. They had talked for a long time, the time to regain confidence after all these years of distance.  Desperado had finally told the old man everything: his disgust as a humiliated cuckold, his rage and his project.

The old man had considered him for a long time, the passion of his youth seemed to spring up again in his eyes. Several times, his hands had agitated. But his face remained closed, indecipherable. At one point, he seemed to want to speak, but he remained silent.

Bernard remained there, lost in his agitated thoughts, his eyes wet.

After a time of waiting and interminable silence, just as Desperado was about to get up to take his leave, his old friend abruptly got up and left the room.

Desperado stood up, disconcerted. He could hear his friend searching for something in the next room.  Desperado approached.

The old man was looking behind a piece of furniture, under a jumble of clothes and bags.

Bernard pulled out, with a sudden gesture, a rifle! He went to look in some drawers and took out a scope and a silencer.

"It's a Ruger 96, in 22 Long Rifle. That's all I kept. They took everything else. It's good stuff. It's up to you."

How about you? 

At my age, I don't need it anymore. When they come here, I'll probably be dead. I'm giving you my rifle because I don't have any more children. If my daughter was still here, I would have given it to her. But God has already taken her from me...

Bernard showed him how to load, shoot, screw in the silencer and attach the scope. He put about twenty boxes of cartridges in his hands and asked him to leave. There was nothing more to say. Johnny Desperado didn't know if Bernard was angry or in agreement with his plan. It was a prodigiously awkward moment.

Desperado got back in his car and drove back down to the city. He looked at the gun that was there, beside him on the passenger seat. It was beautiful in its wood and steel dress. He couldn't wait to use it, like a child who has been given a toy. 

He drove through the northern districts, along the old highway. It was wartime, there were fires everywhere. He saw the police flashing their lights, the military trucks screening the entrance to the area.

Like many motorists, he continued on his way.

He was able to get out and enter the southern part of the city. Numerous groups of dark-skinned men were walking the streets, scanning the cars, provoking them.

Johnny felt like taking them out right there. But if he stopped to draw his weapon, he would quickly be surrounded.

He needed to operate more comfortably. He set out again, but that night he found no circumstances favorable to his plan.

He decided to go home. Arrived on the parking lot of his building, he went out quickly, running towards his door not to fall on someone of knowledge, likely to see him thus armed. 

Arrived at his floor, he closed the door. It was already almost dark, the city was alive with the usual sounds of explosions, raging shouts and car horns. Public transportation from the nearby train station was no longer running, due to too many "incidents. The police were entrenched in the city's two main police stations, the neighborhood police stations having all been closed.

It was night, the time when the city was given over to looters, to gangs who opened the doors of houses to help themselves with impunity.  It was the hour when everyone was holed up in their homes, barricading all the doors and windows, trying not to hear the sardonic laughter, the screams and cries of the neighbor or her daughter.

Desperado did not turn on the television and its pathetic programs. He slumped down on his couch, took a beer and stared into space. It was a little chilly outside. The hordes of young people were starting to go out, to start their usual night parties that systematically ended in looting and rapes. 

Jonhnny looked at the few pieces of furniture that still remained in his apartment, the calendars he hadn't taken out since his wife and children had left. There were no more pictures, no more photos. He had removed everything.

Desperado didn't see anyone anymore, his social life was already long dead. He ruminated for many hours on his life, which had been ruined by a lack of jobs, meager wages, and a lack of prospects. He had never done what he wanted to do.

By dint of obstacles and barriers in this country framed by cronies and networks, he had exhausted everything that was still alive in him. He had tried several times to become self-employed, to find a job. He had failed everywhere

He had taken refuge in the bars and had thought he would find friends there, under the too bright light of the neon lights. But they were only poor guys like him.

His wife had waited, she had suffered from this man who no longer wanted anything. His children had only seen a silent father who watched television with an absent eye, taking every opportunity to escape from family life. They had not grown to love him and neither had he. He had been an egotist and an antisocial person, addicted to television and the computer. Like all his generation and those that followed, he had grown up with a screen between him and reality.

He was now paying the consequences, like his peers, with a sterilized soul, an empty heart, and the streets overrun with predators. 

His mind was invaded, for several hours, by these dark thoughts. In the dead of night, he looked up at the square where the idle bands usually gathered. They were there.

He got up, placed his sofa with his back to the window. He opened the window, half-opened the shutters. He grabbed his rifle, put a bullet in the magazine and quietly put the barrel on the backrest. He looked for a comfortable position. He got up again, fetched a big cushion to arrange his shooting position.

Perfect. He shouldered the gun and took aim. Through the scope, he could see many people. The place was several hundred meters away, it was far. But the .22LR bullets shot well out to one kilometer. 

That was more than enough for what he wanted to do. He searched for a long time and eventually found a group where several individuals had gathered.

They were gesticulating, singing, smoking and beating drums. They were really scary looking, those bastards!

Desperado liked the smell of wood and vinegar from his weapon. He could hear his breathing subsiding and feel his blood pounding in his temples.

He was alive! He was finally feeling good. He fired."

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