MoWyo
The Best Hell Money Can Buy (Vol. I)
I decided to keep the baby.
Being maternal in MoWyo demanded a certain level of sacrifice.
Survival of the fittest was often a family affair on this side of the fence.
“Your son put a gun to my head. That was stupid. He would have been spared.”
I pressed my boot into his father’s face with an unnecessary amount of force. The lack of recoil definitively confirmed the fatality. I took a breath and looked on the bright side. “At least you’re not leaving any orphans behind. You and the wife can rest easy.”
The matriarch was flat on her back beside her husband. Sheila was stargazing in silence like a sixteen-year-old. The tableau appeared to be breathtaking. I kicked some dusty brush on both their bodies. It barely camouflaged the killing. The last of their name was floating face down in the creek a few yards away. I pushed him free of the pebbles with my tattered Puma and watched the deadwood float downstream until he was out of sight.
“Done and done,” I declared.
It was dickish. I regretted it later that day.
My daughter had seen it all before. Infants in MoWyo were quickly indoctrinated to the suck. She barely stirred inside her baby carrier. I took the opportunity to reload while she was resting. Lauren unconsciously cooed in response to every chamber click.
“That’s my girl.” The whispered affirmation was learned behavior from the original Lauren. Her memory was my training manual. Living in the wasteland left little time for Lamaze. The manmade Mordor wasn’t designed for new mothers. Unfortunately for our adversaries, we were already accustomed to that eternal constant. Incarceration in MoWyo couldn’t alter our conditioning. Being an endangered species in the outside world made us particularly tough opponents in purgatory.
Threatening my family was an automatic invite to the fiery furnace.
Three dead bodies and a bloodline could attest to that fact.
The damned decedents left no descendants.
******
*MoWyo is a biologically contaminated wasteland that I reference several times in a short story collection called He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins!1 There are 3-4 chapters in the original manuscript that I’ve decided are second-rate & I’m going to rewrite them as a personal accountability exercise if nothing else.
MoWyo is basically an open-air prison for poor people and other social castoffs in this dystopian “moneytheistic” world I describe. It’s like an apocalyptic Australia with crazy mutated wildlife and lots of other fun stuff. I knew at some point I had to write a chapter outlining the contours of this hellscape, which is only hinted at in the five stories that precede it. So, I did that, and the original version is agreeably horrific, but (IMO) incredibly derivative. It was also the penultimate chapter and kind of important from a story progression point of view, so I guess we’ll see how revising it from the ground up goes. What I’m in the process of writing here bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original version of MoWyo.
From your perspective as the reader, this may be akin to watching the Hindenburg slowly crash into the ground at a drastically reduced frame rate. Which might provide its own perverse form of entertainment.
You’re welcome either way.
The revision will remain a work in progress for…however long it takes me to finish it.
This is the WTF wavelength I’m trying to achieve here, but in short story form: