EYESHOT
PART 1: EYES ON THE STREET
Ostrograd Metropolitan Area
04/11/17
Living outdoors had been more trying than Spiridon Kryokov had imagined before he correctly decided not to risk returning home. He had been perhaps more than a block away from the posh condominium when a blacked out police SUV nearly clipped him from the side in their frenzied haste to approach the security perimiter around his domicile. As if a magnet drew him inward, closer and closer with every day Spiridon approached the heart of Ostrograd where his given name crawled upon the lips of every living man, woman, and child. His face however was different now than that on the television or printed on contemptuous newspapers, the only known picture they could find was the one printed on an outdated security badge for TekAdvokat, the IT security firm he had been working with for 8 years - the very age of this photograph.PART 1: EYES ON THE STREET
Ostrograd Metropolitan Area
04/11/17
This man who walked the inner streets of Ostrograd was wider now, puffed up from the consumption of artificial foods and a sedentary lifestyle split between two very similar chairs and computers at a lonely home life and a stress ridden work life. He wore glasses now that covered much of his thin hazy grey face with thick black bars and scratched lenses that nearly obscured a set of green eyes. In contrast with the younger man in the photograph, smiling brightly without the glasses or retarding weight, he also wore a disappointing beard and mustache that grew in like unwanted acres of weeds. In the first few days of this exodus it seemed like everyone acknowledged him, greeting him as any respectable League Denizen should, but as the condition of his clothing, skin, and demeanor deteriorated into filth so did his public acknowledgement. Many more like him as he was now slithered through the heart strings of Ostrograd, begging for Blochs, rummaging through trash, and sleeping tightly with emptied glass companions on public benches.
No other pictorial evidence of the man existed online, for he had fully eschewed the social media cancers of the day. As much as he hated Ostrovakia, its nosy intellectual beehive of self-righteousness, the innane and unnecessary e-tumors consisting of empty political arguments, posed pictures of excess, and videos put on by arrogant hams marketing their sexuality to the youth. Spiridon hated them. He hated them all and had exacted vengeance on Ostrovakia and the world in his attack on them, killing and maiming some, but better yet: focusing the social media cesspool, a chaotic goop, into singular reaction to his precious bomb. The materials needed for his weapon had all been gathered online as well, from various merchants and delivered by various sources all to the same address. No questions asked, no signature required for innocent acquisitions of a chemical here, a wire there, all culminating into a bomb that he hoped would bring down the nation and inspire a wave of destruction across all of Europe.
Most were missing his point it seemed however, the printed news from foreign publications he found in trash bins all placed the blame on Catholics. Not surprising he had thought, but not what he intended when he attacked the Museum for National Progress, much of it centering around the social organization of progressivism and her cousin communism in Ostrovakia, and how these all-controlling ideologies manipulated technology into being something anti-human. Catholicism was as impure to humanity and self-ownership as Communism, Kryukov believed, and neither order of cardinals or commissars deserved to rule over the bodies and minds of men as they did in nearly every nation in Europe.
These mixed feelings of gratification and disappointment haunted him worse and worse with every day as he blended in with the street people of Ostrograd. He was tired of sleeping in the alleys behind dumpsters, avoiding pedestrians and lurking in the shadows. Tonight he would sleep in a nice park he had found earlier in the day, plenty of drunks were already there and he could fight one for a bench off of the ground if need be easily. One such opportunity arose when he saw a man several years older than him urinating on a cat statue and leaning on the statue of a babushka feeding the cat while sitting on a bench. As if this was his life now, and it was, he shoved the man away to his drunken surprise - toppling him over on the ground still urinating.
Laughter rang out from somewhere in the park, sending Spiridon into a sudden terror. "Who is it?" he demanded, looking from side to side violently until meeting the eye of a cellphone camera pointed directly at him, "Fuck off I said, put that thing away!" he ordered a smiling teen, standing in a gaggle of two girls and several other boys. "Tell your friend to put his thing away first!" one of the boys said over a ruckus of laughter. Spiridon began walking towards them, stumbling forward with his dirty hands out to strangle one of them or smash the device, he was not sure which he would do first, but they all began to run in different directions, each with their own phones out by now recording the spectacle of one man moaning and pissing himself on the ground and another mad man screaming "I'll fucking kill you, give me that phone, I'll murder you all!"