Michael Pocelinko, 22. Twenty-two years of dumb thoughts buoyed by a filial geyser of cash. Michael Pocelinko was turning crafty now, though, riding that geyser to new heights, gazing at the arrayed countryside with greasy perspicacity.
He already had three locked vaults in his basement compound, his Ark: One for pistols, nestled in woodchip terraria, with drip-bottles filled with bullets. One for shotguns, surrounded by a moat, languorously sunning themselves on artificial rocks beneath potted acacias. One for rifles, leaned in little cubicles, wearing little ties, drinking mugs of machine oil with clever slogans, "you don't have to be semiautomatic to work here, ~but it helps~!" All of them in pairs, so that they could be fruitful and multiply. But Michael knew he had to expand.
The impenetrable future rose before Michael like a blazon of dark possibility. When the gun stores shuttered forever, when ownership was banned, when the last free men cast lead balls from Montana towers to resupply their pipe-muskets against the swarthy hordes, what next? America might fall, but surely pockets of resistance would persist, and surely the Feds would continue to seize and oppress what crude firearms remained, on and on unto infinity, until ATF cavemen had confiscated the last throwable rock on Earth's barren surface. Michael wasn't planning for the apocalypse, or the post-apocalypse. He was far beyond that.
Fueled by the inexhorable power of daddy's wallet, Michael was buying every possible gun. Directed energy weapons were old hat--vault 4, superconducting barrels bubbling in liquid hydrogen with little plastic castles and flash-frozen goldfish. He had guns that shot spikes, stalagmites, icicles, popsicles, sickles, hypodermics that inflicted sickle-cell anemia. He had a gun made out of motorized dead butterflies that he bought from a crooked lepidopoterist in Sri Lanka, who claimed it would summon hurricanes to sunder the target with counterroating winds. He had a gun that shot an infinitely telescoping rod with a sensor that stopped it always a centimeter from any surface, in case the Feds moved in with commando toddlers that only needed to be frightened away. He had water guns, some with built-in heaters in case the feds attacked with golems made of tea. He had a gun that very slowly grew incompressable crystals out of its barrel, in case the Feds tried to crush him on a geologic timescale. He had a steampunk gatling gun that fired 3,000 leeches a second, and whose maker claimed it sucked blood faster than vampire John Henry. He had net guns and nettle guns and knitting needle guns. He had a howitzer that shot bazookas, which shot pistols, which shot miniature guns made of carbon nanotubes, which shot bullets so tiny they could pick the parasites off a gnat.
In a high turret of his compound, Michael employed a crack team of five-year-olds to think up new possible guns. "This one shoots candy canes!" Michael found a dealer on the Archangelsk black market who was rumored to have ties with corrupt elves at the North Pole. He bought the gun.
"This is a dinosaur gun. It was made by a T-Rex and so the trigger is tiny, because he has a tiny arms. But the gun is HUGE!" Michael scoured the badlands of Utah and Colorado until one day a mute paleontologist with a harelip blindfolded him and led him to a secret grotto, right below the K-T boundary. There were ruins of a prehistoric city, massive and terrible. Sitting on a workbench was a gargantuan ray-gun wrought of pure iridium. Michael bought it.
"This one shoots ICKY BOOGERS. It has a tube to load them straight from your noseholes ehehehe!" In the post-post-post-post-post-post-apocalyptic future, who knew what the Feds would try to restrict? Michael had it custom-ordered.
Day by day, the vaults of Michael's compound grew full to bursting with guns. He expanded them ever downwards, until vault 668817-AF-0Z2 penetrated the Mohorivicic discontinuity and he inadvertantly acquired the Gun of the Magma Men. Michael still wasn't satiated, and scoured the ends of the earth, daddy's credit card in one hand, a handful of golden trinkets in the other. He had to have them all. Every possible gun.
On his 80th birthday, Michael wheezed at the top of the Thousand Stairs of Ngrydyl. The forgotten Plateau of Zynd stretched before him, where a lost sect of buddhists were rumored to have a mandala-making gun of great power. It captured sandgrains from the wind, stored them, colored them, and fired them with micron precision. Michael was gonna buy it.
But the exertion had been too much. The strange man with pockets of gold was treated to the finest sky-burial, and the ravens considered his fat western meat a great delicacy.
Meanwhile, in America, a man bought a hot dog.
