Kevin awoke and there was no music from his alarm clock radio, only dead air. Lucky for him, the blaring of a car alarm from the street below was loud enough to wake him. He lurched out of bed aware he was running late and hurried into the bathroom. He turned on the shower and was about to step in, when he heard the noise of a cart being pushed across the floor of his apartment floor. With the shower still running and some water dripping onto the bathroom floor, he slowly creaked out of the bathroom and peered into his living room. There was a man wearing pajamas placing his TV in a pull cart. It was his neighbor, Hank.
"Hank," asked Kevin.
Hank looked at him, grabbed his baseball bat sitting next to him on the floor and swung at Kevin's head. Kevin fell backward into his bathroom door dodging the blow. Hank did not say a word and stalked into the bathroom clutching the bat. Driven by malice, Hank cranked up the bat for a fatal shot to Kevin's head when he suddenly lost this balance on the slippery bathroom floor and fell on his back.
Terrified, Kevin entered fight or flight mode; Kevin's brain chose fight. Next to the bathtub was a glass candle he had left from a bath a couple nights before. He grabbed the glass candle and hurled it at Hank's head. It broke over Hank's skull and chucks of wax and glass fell to the bathroom floor. Hank grunted and dropped the bat in a daze. Without hesitation, Keven picked up the bat and smashed Hank's torso, kneecaps and head with the bat. Hank was clearly knocked unconscious, if not dead.
Kevin's chest rose frantically with each breath. He had never been in a fight, nevertheless knocked someone unconscious. He put on his bathrobe, grabbed his phone and called the police. There was no service. He figured he better put Hank in a secure place in case he wakes up. He tied Hank's hands to the toilet plumbing with rope. He reached for his cell phone, no service. He ran to his computer and tried to get online. There was no access. "What the hell is going on," he thought. He opened the door to his bathroom slightly and watched Hank lying motionless from the cracked door. He wondered what had possessed him to steal his TV and other belongings in broad day light.
Kevin lived on the third floor of his apartment complex. He looked out the window and was amazed at what he saw. It was a scene from a zombie outbreak film. From his apartment window, he could see his parking lot where his car and other residents' cars sat. Nearly all of them had been broken into. Glass from shattered windows littered the parking lot. In the distance, he could see smoke emanating from what he assumed was the grocery stored down the street. On the street adjacent to the parking lot were a line of businesses. There was an upscale restaurant, a Starbucks and other retail stores. They all had smashed windows and looked vacant. There was a car billowing smoke, sitting right in the middle of street. He looked at the businesses and there were bodies sporadically strewn across the entrances and sidewalks. It was a scene of anarchy-not the idealistic Noam Chomsky promoting anarchy indicative of a classless, utopian society. Not the kind of world your privileged libertarian friend gets off to. This was a brutish wasteland.
Kevin spied a police officer casually strolling down the street looking in all the businesses. The police officer's car was parked a block or so away. Kevin opened the window and screamed, "Hey, Officer...Help!" The officer looked at the third story window. "There was an attempted burglary, I need your help," Kevin said.
"Ok, stay put, I will be right up there," reassured the police officer. "Are you armed," asked the police officer. Kevin indeed was armed. He had a pistol with ammunition under his bed but it was unregistered. He had received it from his libertarian friend, Marshall. "No," replied Kevin. "What a strange question," he thought.
Relieved, Kevin stood at the bathroom door keeping an eye on the unconscious Hank while looking out the peephole of his apartment until the police officer arrived. Finally, the police officer arrived. He entered and asked Kevin to have a seat on his couch in the living room while he fills out some paperwork. He opened his notebook and grabbed a pen from his breast pocket.
