THE SECURITY GUARD

His glasses are Coke-bottle thick, but still stylish—I notice that the rims are laced in gold. He's got a lot of gold on him. Gold bracelet, gold watch, gold earrings. I make a comment about his style preferences, to see how he'll respond.

"I never had nice shit when I was growing up," he says earnestly. "Didn't have much of anything that I could call mine, other than books. Now I've got as much as anybody else. There's power in that."

At first, I thought the job would feel degrading, you know. Just sitting around all day, protecting rich people. Watching them drive by in their cars that cost more than most peoples' houses, on their way to houses that cost as much as jumbo jets.

But, actually, it was a pretty good job. The rich folks, they were decent to me. I got tips from just about everybody in the neighborhood on Christmas. Like, $500 average, from about 100 different families.

No kidding?

Yeah, my "end-of-year bonus" was higher than my annual salary.

The property managers were only paying me minimum wage, but that's all I was really worth, anyway. Half the time I just walked the grounds of the neighborhood, waving at the rich people who lived there. In theory, I was supposed to be checking cars and handing out tickets to anyone who wasn't supposed to be parked there, but I never did that. The only way you got through the gates into the neighborhood in the first place was because you were supposed to be there.

The real purpose of me walking around and waving at everybody was the sense of safety folks got from seeing me. You know. There's a guy with a baton and a gun on his hip. My kids are safe here. That sort of thing.

Whenever I wasn't walking the grounds, I just sat in the booth up front, checking IDs of people coming through. Cars only came in every five minutes or so. In between that, I had plenty of time to read.

I was working my way through one of those "100 books to read before you die" lists when Bastille Day II really kicked off in my neighborhood.

They came swerving in, six or seven carloads.

I was nose-deep in a Dostoevsky novel, so it took me a minute to register that this was trouble. Before I could stand up and radio for help, a guy jumped into the booth with me and slammed my head into the wall.

He gets right up in my ear and says, "Don't die for these fucking billionaires."

I had no idea what was going on.

Then he said they were looking for "rich people shit to liberate and replicate." All the people with him kept yelling "Bastille Day Two: Electric Boogaloo!" and just laughing their asses off.

I got scared, then, because I had seen the memes online about it. Up until this point, though, I thought it was some kind of weird joke, like the "storm Area 51" meme from way back.

But these guys were serious. All of them were carrying weapons. Not just guns, but fucked up shit like scythes, chainsaws. One of them had a goddamned claymore.

A claymore, like an explosive device?

No, a big-ass sword. Like from Final Fantasy.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, so it didn't take too much convincing from them for me to open the gate. They made it pretty clear that they were gonna get in either way.

I figured I could call the cops as soon as they went through. But they weren't having any of that. They took me along with them.

I figured out that the guy who'd jumped into the booth with me was sort of the group leader, so I asked him: If I pointed out a few of the houses with the nicest families, would they leave them alone?

He thought about it for a minute, even though a bunch of people in the group wanted to dismiss the idea outright. Finally, he goes, "Sorry, but there's no such thing as a good billionaire."

His crew loved that.

They all cheered and ran through the gates. And from then on out it was pretty much nonstop carnage.

Surely not everyone in the community was a billionaire.

Of course not. Nobody there was. Multi-millionaires, sure. But you don't live next door to other people if you're a billionaire. (Laughs.)

These guys, the raiders, they didn't really care, I think. They split up into groups of three or four and started knocking down doors.

A bunch of them had battering rams, like the kind SWAT teams use. They'd blow out the windows or front door and all run in, shooting guns and breaking shit. Dragging people out of their beds. Gunning them down in their driveways.

One guy in particular, he was an oil executive that lived at the very top of the hill. They brought him out, and actually sort of called a ceasefire for a minute so people could bear witness to his execution.

I swear, I have no idea where it came from, but one of the crew drove up to the top of the hill and unloaded a full-blown guillotine from the back of their truck.

They got the oil executive lined up underneath, allowed him to blather out some final words, and then dropped the blade. Took his head clean off.

They had him lined up right at the hill's crest, so when his head came loose it started bouncing and rolling down the hill. Probably made it 60 or 70 yards before it hit a curb and bounced into somebody's bushes.

That was it for me. I pulled out my phone and dialed 911, not caring anymore if anybody saw me doing it. The line rang and rang, but nobody answered. I looked up and saw one of the raiders staring at me. He didn't even look mad. He just goes, "They're busy today." And then he ran back in to join in the fun.

About half of the people seemed to be there for the carnage. The other half were there for the loot. Every once in a while somebody would come out of one of the houses with an armload of shit. The raiders had pickup trucks waiting at the bottom of the hill, and once they got full of stolen stuff they'd drive off and get replaced with a fresh truck.

What kind of stuff were they taking?

Well, it was weird, because there was a lot of the stuff you'd expect, like jewelry, but also pretty random stuff like glasses, walkers, wheelchairs... stuff you'd normally see getting grabbed in a robbery.

One of their guys explained it to me, though. He said the economy was basically already collapsed, which meant that manufacturing of high-end goods of all sorts was over. These guys wanted to scan all of this high-end rich people shit into their reps so they could have access to it later. This guy told me that it was one thing to have a bunch of wheelchair parts ready to go in a rep's library. It was another thing to have a bunch of the best wheelchair parts that money can buy.

I thanked the guy for explaining all that too me, and he was like, "Yeah man, no problem." Then he turned around, laid down on the grass with a sniper rifle, and started picking off people who were trying to escape over the community's outer wall.

I was like, cool, fuck this noise. Turned around and slipped out the gate and never looked back.

You didn't want to stick around, maybe join up with them and get some loot?

He peers at me over his gold-rimmed glasses, and says nothing.