perfidy

The Ministry is all about sharing.

We share so much with each other- our knowledge; our wisdom; our decades of experience with fighting robots, prostitutes, fart jokes, industrial construction, rhetoric, and prostitutes- that as a unit we are better equipped to bring enlightenment to the world than any other random sampling of five men.

Our long term goal is, at its core, quite simple: to bring our love of sharing to the scattered, feral remnants of humanity still stubbornly clinging to life after the Ragnarok, and generously share our whips and bullets with them.

But aside from cruel leather, cold steel, and the hard heart to wield them both, we want to ensure that the arts survive as well. Toward that end, we are going to write a story. We wanted to store fine literature, paintings, and sculpture in the Ministry Culture Bunker and Catastratorium, but after making a go of it found that that stuff takes up too much space. We are putting some Grecian and Chinese pottery to use, storing Kool Aid and pencils and whatnot, but anything without an apparent utilitarian application was left outside.

We felt it was up to us to do someting to ensure the written word would survive beyond the Apocalypse.

We are now crafting the literature that the mutated inheritors of the cursed Earth might care to read sometime, maybe between avoiding deathbot patrols or after outrunning a zombie horde. It's the first fiction piece co-written and serialized by participating Ministers and, although the planned release date is sometime after Doomsday, we will share drafts with our loyal reader.

Readers. Loyal readers.

Forthwith, the first installment of our first stab at serial writing:

Part 1: Diesel Angst

Alexei Weber detested the bus.

The one he waited for every morning was enough to loathe, just on its own. The engine’s rushing roar hurt his ears, and sometimes the hurt migrated between them and became a headache. The mephitic stench of burning diesel fuel singed his nostrils and made him nauseous. He didn’t like the tint on the windows, allowing those inside to see out- and in all probability laugh at him, he felt- yet preventing outsiders from seeing in. He never was quite sure what he’d find inside, hiding behind those opaque windows. Even the scale of the thing: too long, too high, with too-big tires, unsettled him.

The bus stop nearest his apartment was shabby and dark. Litter tended to accumulate there, blown on winds that in other parts were pleasant, but by the time they reached his shabby end of this shabby city were hostile. Regardless of the season and time of day, the bus stop was always in deep shadow. The old office buildings and millworks that dominated those dozen forlorn blocks of the North End weren’t good for much else now than as obstacles. The economy was long gone, leaving only huge brick husks that blocked the most direct route to somewhere else. It made grim sense to Alexei that the ones on his street would block the sun, too.

And beyond hating the bus just for being a bus, he resented it. He resented that he was reduced to riding it. He resented that the city was so broke it only ran twice a day. He resented that the only job he could land was downtown and much too far to walk, and beneath him. He resented having to live in his tiny walk-up apartment. He resented the dumb luck that put him there, and the poor decisions that kept him there.

Everything that Alexei Weber had ever done wrong was made manifest in the bus, and it came to remind him every morning.