Karma (Five) (Two of Four)

Clyde Henry and Ted's cute tracking-device placed Mancini in some town in the middle of nowhere called Scrotchy, Nebraska. It was, quite presumably, deserted of anything more modern than neglected infrastructure and feral junkies and nomads and such wild animals who were guided by the light of the sun long before the intellectual recognition of names that have been born and died or meander vicariously between those two poles. One never heard of a newspaper being printed anywhere farther away than Alabama, or even the least form of tech-media like a blog or some minor/amateur concern of rogue journalists. Most people -- myself included -- inferred little more than tragedy and hopelessness in the dramatic horror that resulted in a deep and paranormal silence following the major events of the late-2020s. Brutality, within and among humans, has forever been at odds to sustain a balance between the cerebral and the pragmatic. It's one of the cruelest aspects of our condition that we pray to barbaric gods in the desire for personal serenity. It is into that vast disquiet that unholy enterprises are absorbed into an inky black nightmare of themselves and fall totally into grievous death beyond any reach of light or return. 

Doom is inconvenienced by nothing. It is patient as a monk meditating in their robes, always hungry, always aware, bashfully content in its role in things. 

Doom is what brought us out of South Carolina and towards Nebraska. Doom lingered in everything beyond the Forde pick-up truck's windows, night or day.  

Of course, there was always the possibility that Mancini could be anywhere -- and therefore not in Nebraska -- and Ted and Clyde Henry factored in that possibility as we drove westward. If their calculations turned up some promising target who just happened to be particularly intrigued by socialist world history and/or the life cycles of various species and/or anything else befitting an American Terrorist doughtily forming a strategy to deliver one more everlasting deathblow to noble society at large, they'd plan a detour from the primary destination. These detours ended in one of two ways: either the person of suspicion humored our less-than-neighborly investigation with delight at having met a new person in an otherwise vacant world, and they'd politely and enthusiastically ask Ted and Clyde Henry about the device -- what it could do, how they procured it and so on -- and in one case a heavyset woman approximately in her 50s and living alone in a small suburban house in Kentucky (?) actually recognized Mancini's name. "That little Italian fella defended the salesman rapist decades ago (Spook McEntyre)? What do you want with him for?" Or...the people weren't so pleased that anybody, under any circumstances, was reviewing the contents of their daylight, midnight, gaslight searches and just who the fuck were Ted and Clyde Henry and these two hapless schmucks they got with them ? 

I had this feeling before we were even five-hundred miles away from South Carolina that nothing was going to be half as easy as we originally anticipated. I never thought he (Mancini) was just going to give up whatever life he had to appease a gang of modern privateers in the name of Confederate justice, mind you. But I hadn't figured in the misgivings of (other) total strangers getting inbetween me and a degree of higher learning. State after state, house after house, mile after mile, there was this awful suggestion we were meant to know something that proffered little and typically nothing of the heart of its being. The public of the new, quiet America; the warm debris of yesteryear's infernos; the haunted promise of tomorrow that was the only lasting consolation in all of this: they emerged from the storm of their shared circumstances, and we burned gas and read browser-histories.