However, becoming president requires decades of ingratiating oneself with the moronic, amoral types who need to be liquidated, which is too tedious a career path to pursue.

Only catastrophe can bring about radical change for the better.īy the time that he was a college sophomore, Spenser wanted to be president, so that he might control a nuclear arsenal that could be turned on those millions of his compatriots in flyover country who were too stupid or too selfish to strive for the changes that must occur. Only twenty-eight, Spenser Auggie Whooton hadn’t been around when the world was supposed to end with the United States and the Soviet Union unloading thousands of hydrogen bombs. The idiots who built the place are long dead. Its shelf life is forty years, and it is replaced every thirty. One of the largest rooms contains freeze-dried food in sealed canisters, enough to feed fifty people for a decade. In such light, mystery layers its vaults and corridors, a sense that here the seeds of the future wait to grow, that as master of this realm, he will be a grand historic figure a hundred years from now. Sometimes, as now, holding a candlestick on which a taper is impaled on a pricket, the melting wax collecting in a brass drip pan, Spenser wanders the chambers of this redoubt. The great unwashed think that contempt is an unworthy emotion, when in fact contempt, even more than envy, is essential if those who share his philosophy are ever to build a better world in which retaliatory injustice is the only justice and truth is always and only what enlightened leaders say it is. In Spenser’s estimation, most people are idiots.

Through no fault of their own, the apocalypse never came. Those paranoid yet optimistic fools who constructed this place had stocked one room with twenty thousand pounds of candles cached in metal drums, to be used after the public power supply failed and the hundreds of propane tanks for the backup generator were empty. With a bachelor’s degree in the study of the literature of the illiterate, a master’s degree in creative deconstruction, and a second master’s in crafting reality, he is keenly aware of the profound ignorance of the masses and the danger they pose by their stubborn insistence that life has meaning. Of course, Spenser knows that neither good nor evil exists, only what is logical and illogical. At the moment, the pulsing of a score of lambent flames paints the walls of his study with radiant shapes and shifting shadows like contesting spirits engaged in the eternal battle of good and evil. He has put filters on the overhead light panels, softening their fluorescent glare.

These windowless rooms spare Spenser Whooton from the sight of a world he despises. Here, there is no robin song, no trees where birds might roost, no sky through which they might fly.

Red Rain by Dean Koontz