lost etc

“What’s to become of them?” The lost, that’s who she had on her mind.

Fifty-something cheerful souls waltzed off into the mountain forests from the event. The searchers had scoured the region now for upwards of three months, but now more pressing new concerns drew their expertise elsewhere, not excluding political concerns. The governor’s office had issued a statement, calling the “intensive search phase” over, and opening a “scaled back yet sustained effort” to find them. Politically motivated or not, the public interest sure was waning. New crises, new distractions.

On the day of their disappearance there had been only one crisis on most American’s minds, it was only a week out since the downtown core of Kansas City had been dusted with radioactive hot shit from the small twin blasts. What had moments before been the pair of cargo vans spaced half a block or so apart. An apparent “lone wolf” (aren’t they all?) parked them in the early morning pre-work hours – and triggered the blasts during what passes for morning commuter traffic in KC.

The nation turned inward from its usual numerous distractions and diversions, but in place of a somber solidarity and mourning for the victims (yet still being identified and admitted to radiation treatment facilities hastily thrown up in white FEMA tents like a tailgate party gone atomic) this inward turning was with teeth and claws, gnawing and tearing. The far right cultists saw it as The Call to Arms, the white Christian nationalist cohorts saw a sign of Second Coming, or of the antichrist.

Law And Order politicians and their law enforcement lackeys everywhere (themselves solidly in the camp of authoritarian toxic chauvinistic personalities proliferating on social media) took the event to signal nationwide open-season, cracking down on “anarchist elements” within their cities and counties. Peace activists, punks, pacifists, community organizers, skateboarders, mutual aid societies, loud garage rock bands, and anyone left of a fascist’s ass crack was harassed, thrown in the back of unmarked vans (not unlike the now incinerated and irradiated KC vans), caged, jailed, thrown The Book at.

The backlash was pathetic, coastal newspaper think-pieces urged calm against growing incidents of suburban firefights, social media posts of no consequence, and a physical response here or there (chuck a half empty water bottle, or better yet bottle of piss, at the riot cops and it’s a new terrorist incident, ratchet up the HSAS level to red, live rounds authorized).

Op-eds both-sided the violence from air conditioned offices guarded by private security guards – guards who went home late in the evening to impoverished neighborhoods, blackened streetlights, and crackling distant gunshots. Never mind the KC bomber’s (or bombers’ ) 4chan manifesto, a schizoid screed of parroted conspiracy theory podcasts and gym bro misogyny.

That forest rainbow gathering, as they call the semi-mythical hippie revival revisionist events, began without media attention. The media lives and breaths death and dying, not aging free-lovers, naive idealists, jamming to hypnogogic synths and drum circle beats, flower tiaras, acid tabs, and warm homebrew organic beer from a hatchback. But they vanished.

Loved ones, expecting their wayward eccentric aunt, or starry-eyed little sibling, to slide back into the “real world” after a week or so cosplaying Heaven on Earth, began contacting local authorities. Isolated incidents – perhaps a longer-than-expected bender, trip, couch surfing with new kin, or succumbed to the dreadedly common  auto accident or overdose.

After only a cascade of these concerned folk build up, only then did some Podunk sheriff deputy or uniform-badge-armed kid discover the ramshackle campsite paradise abandoned deep in the woods, without even a Roanoke left behind. Search dogs nose down tracked higher up into the foothills up steep sided ravines, but each dog-human pair wound up tracing disparate paths as if the whole congregation had wandered in all compass directions dispersing into the wilderness like shit-scent diffuses in an alleyway.

Rumors of a second radiation event – this gathering was a meeting of the masterminds behind the bombing of KC, planning and constructing more dirty bombs – spread without any credibility given the insignificant and relatively unimpressive list of attendees the FBI still poured over.