Harbinger

I wrote a short story. In one sitting. Under a hour. I'm overjoyed! Now tell me what you think of this story! And flesh it out, too! :D Harbinger Not too long ago, there were two friends who were university students. One was on his way out the door with a diploma, and the other was muddling around, sampling life and frantically trying to stay in school. Max was a budding philosopher, taking extravagance in the works of Wittgenstein and Russel, while Starky was a jack-of-all-trades, learning about quantum implications of the Big Bang just as he would about which electrical wires to run in for a technocommercial building. Their meeting comes by chance, at a social event before the doors of the university opened for classes. They bump into each other at the keg, and pour drinks and discuss meandering items - who they were, where were they from, and what they were doing that night. After a few cups of cheap beer and some shots of the potency, Max and Starky get into a headslong discussion of philosophy, physics and symbols. Max mentions something about Wittgenstein's power, and desires to have it himself. It appears that, during Wittgenstein's days as a professor, he exerted so much influence that his students were constantly in awe and deep respect of him, even as he babbled and self-proselyzited his ideas. It drew up to one point where, in the throes of his own power, Wittgenstein ordered a heavily admiring student to drop out of school and go work in a cannery. Thus, the student did. Max grinned slightly at the possibility of having such power and broke into a more broad smile. Starky looked slightly perturbed, and warned Max,"You do that, and I'll make sure I set you straight." Both men grinned heartily. A few years later, after getting his dual degrees in Philosophy and Political Science, Max makes a succession of very successful runs at the offices of the alderman,and the mayor, and is poised to run for the Governorship. Starky is nowhere to be found, having dropped out of university not too long after the conversation at the keg took place. Max is smiling and waving to his constituents from an open-top Cadillac, and in the back of his mind, he's pondering the magnititude of his power, and to a lesser extent, what Starky said a few years ago."You do that, and I'll make sure I set you straight." What did he mean? Max put it out of his mind, and thought about the luscious campaign volunteer he had sex with the night before. She was a dirty blonde, very curvaceous, filling out her white blouse and dark slacks. They had rolled around on the couch, and Max thought that she might have stained the couch when she began to shudder violently. His smile grew wider. Then he started to think about her husband. Why would people get married so young, at 20, 22? Her husband was already an important man in the world of law, and had the beginnings of the straits of a well-connected man. Surely he had some suspicions; Powerful men always had them. The Cadillac pulled up not too far from the platform on which Max was to speak. Frosty hands and voices flourished, and he shook and answered as many of them as he could. Thoughts continued to reverbate in his head. His days as an alderman was rather puritanical, focusing on issues of garbage disposal, snow removal and repairs of the parking meters, then a few drinks and some chinese food, then sleeping alone. One chance night, after a bad meeting, he had gone to a bar to get a little of the fire back, and he bumped into a beautiful, waif-like woman, and they struck up a conversation. Within hours, they were having rough sex, and she was screaming like crazy. He couldn't help it. It was so addictive, so thrilling. She had bled quite a bit, but he was satisfied. They met up again and again, him finding out that she was a former run-away who got a break and worked her way up to mid-level management at a nearby company, but a bad relationship left her rather wanting, and in some cases, searching for pain. There was a click between them, and many nights someone would bleed or leave battered and bruised, but satisfied. One night, just after Max had seized the mayor's election in a landslide, they had gone out again, to celebrate. By dawn, he woke up hungover and found her dead, apparently from internal hemmorraging. So he took steps to dispose of the body, eventually interring it into a small patch of ground not far away from the lake, in hopes that when discovered, the body would either be disfigured or wash into the lake and sink. It had begun to snow as he was burying the body, so he took the time to carefully dig up the dirt so she could be buried and the parcel of dirt replaced to show that there had been no disturbance of the soil. As he set foot back in his place, he began to think about the way the body was buried. There was so much purity in how it had been accomplished; The surface was not of a disturbed appearance, but underneath it, there was something decaying. There was a gloss of beauty on the green-and-white ground, even as a nullification was going on only a few feet underneath. He thought about it: This was what she was like. Her life was the null object, and she wasn't happy. She looked for pain to punish herself, and he had willingly taken advantage of it. Max shrugged. It was the cost of things nowadays, he thought. A small amount of scotch splashed its way into his tumbler as he left to start the day at the office. Max made his way up the steps, turning back every now and then to continue greeting his followers. The snow had began to fall gently. As his time in the mayor's office went on, Max began to find himself doing things only dictators would do — illegal detention of dissidents, secretly authorizing police shoot-to-kill orders, and paying bribes to people for support, especially those who wanted to run against him. Later on, there would be extortion attempts made against those people. It was a political machine of the finest kind, and anyone under it was subject to Max's absolute power. A lot of power-fascinated women made sure they had been sampled by Max, and high-pull men would try to curry favor with Max in order to improve their own standing and pull. Oftentimes he would accost the women of those high-profile men, and enjoyed it. Taxes were raised almost on a whim, and policies were established for no reason at all. Max had began to embodify Wittgenstein's power, and was getting hooked to it. The spokesman introduced the challenger to the governor's office, and Max took the steps to begin his talk. It was standard rhetoric, to do better than what the incumbent has done, to promise things that would take longer than his term to accomplish, and to do things that won't be done anyway. As he began to wind down, something struck his left eye. He winced in pain, and people gasped. Rivulets and splotches appeared out of his eye socket, and before long, a bullet pierced his heart. As he lay dying, he began to openly regret every act he had done, and asked for forgivance from the creator. Max shut his eyes and gave up, his last thought on Starky's words. The police converged on the supposed origin of the weapons. All they found was an air rifle, a .22 rifle with a spent casing and one other bullet, and a note."Left eye to wound: To remind of the perils of looking down the wrong path.Heart to kill: To show that no matter what, one is always with a conscience." An officer looked out the window from where the killshot had come, and outside of a grand collection of gawkers and city personnel, a lone figure walked down the street slowly, green-jacketed and knit-capped, and a cigarette emanting from his lips. The officer failed to note that this figure had walked past them as they rushed the building, down into the middle of the street and away from the scene. Starky knew what he had done. The revolution had begun, and he would be the anonymous father of it.