Category: Planetary Status Reports

The kids started playing this game called GROMP, it amounted to finding a street on a hill that ended in a t-bone with one or more homeless present. The kids would stake out these streets and surreptitiously organize their mayhem, flash mob style madness, and pick a night, a day, at midnight.

Morgan, one of the noobs to the crew, didn’t fully get it. He was still in high school and still believing the magic-surprise future sold by miserable old drunks.

“YO, MORGAN, GRAB ONE OF THESE …”, Maya had a gym bag containing two bowling balls. They stood approximately 200 feet above their targets in altitude, 400 feet for hit. There were no guarantees and generally the odds were against a SPLAT, or what the crew affectionately trademarked – a GROMP. The bowling balls would sometimes reach 60 or 70 miles per hour, depending on the hill and the distance. Sometimes the ball would hit some debris, and get that last NOICE bounce, bearing down on the head or the torso of the homeless rats that no one cared about and everyone wanted dead.

“WATCH THIS!”, exclaimed Maya with a riotous voice. Some of the nearby POD style apartments turned on their lights, or their basic security system did. People knew the deal, under ideal circumstances the police would be there in an hour. This game usually lasted 5-10 minutes. Maya ran a little to pick up speed and tossed the ball down the hill. She had a nice arc on her through, and the first bounce directed most of its energy forward, and it seemed she would nail an old lady in a tent.

As part of STAKING OUT a site, the kids would take photos, have conversations with the homeless, knowing that hours later one of these old piles of lost hope would be dead, gone, erased.

The ball was down the hill in seconds, Newton’s rules seeing it through. Morgan was studying the physics of inclined planes at school, and the site of this merged and melded and led his mind down the path of figuring out how much kinetic energy would be released on impact. He imagined it was nearly 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of force under the right circumstances, but perhaps it was worse.

Maya’s throw nailed the old lady in her chest, the loud soft thump mixed with street person groans and growls gave them the GROMP, and that was the signal they needed to go.

Much of the city was chaos, and it was no guarantee getting anywhere; this crew had Maya’s armored van, and it was her dad’s paranoia that gave her the ultimate GROMP chassis.

“You gonna be choir practice tomorrow?”, Maya asked Morgan as she drove him and the others home.

“Probably, maybe.”

“You get used to the feeling, because it’s a good feeling.”

Maya turned her attention to the streets, getting by the abandoned zones, closing out the night.

THE END