Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

Galton Nye: My heart goes out. I'm not saying anybody deserves to go insane and be gunned down by the curfew police, but please consider how Nighttimers live. The rest of us, who live our lives according to the word of God and common sense, we should not have to foot the bill for their sins.

A person only has to look at how Nighttimers behave. They expect life to be just one big party. Their lives revolve around sex. Crashing their cars, and meaningless one-day stands with strangers. Our minister devoted one entire sermon to describing their lifestyle. It gets hard to feel sympathy for people so reckless with their own health. These so-called victims are people who don't respect themselves. Or respect God.

If they want to thin their own ranks, I say let them.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: In the mid-1960s, the American anthropologist James Neel inoculated members of the Yanomami tribe in Venezuela with a virulent strain of measles. Neel and his team of researchers refused to treat the sick; instead, they documented how the disease spread, killings thousands, in order to test a controversial theory of eugenics.

Neddy Nelson: You have any idea how bright the sun looks if you've been raised at night? Have you spent a hundred-something-thousand heartbeats wondering if you're not already dying of rabies? Maybe you haven't boosted in weeks, because you're afraid you won't be able to?

You ever see friends you recognize get machine-gunned by police on real-time traffic cams?

You ever found yourself trapped in a world where you're everybody's worst nightmare?

Jayne Merris:

If you ask me, the first sign was finding public bathrooms locked at night. Pretty soon, a lot of public drinking fountains stopped running except in the daytime. Daytimers staked out the bathrooms and restaurants and drinking fountains they wanted, and Nighttimers had to settle for the rest. The segregation only got worse as the rabies epidemic spread.

The twelve hours we spent on the backside of the planet, if you ask me, the night turned into just another kind of ghetto.

Neddy Nelson: Do you have any idea how sweet the sunset looks after you've been sweating and bleeding, pissing yourself, in the backseat of a wrecked car all day? Can you imagine how sweet those sirens sound at evening curfew?

Galton Nye: We used to hear stories in Bible-study group, how these so-called Droolers would try to spit in your mouth. The way Nighttimers carry on, they only protest so loud so their spit flies in your eyes or into your food. I'm talking about intentional high-risk conduct.

My heart goes out, but I say, sooner or later, the quarantine had to start.

30–In Mourning

Lynn Coffey (Journalist): On the first day after Rant Casey died—an apparent suicide witnessed by thousands of people, millions if you count the television rebroadcast of his car exploding—on the very next day, a curfew officer named Daniel Hammish, age forty-seven, a nineteen-year veteran of curfew patrol, was making his evening sweep when he assaulted a passerby. Hammish bit this stranger, with his teeth, in an unprovoked attack, on the exposed skin of her neck. Responding emergency medical technicians found Hammish delirious and seemingly hallucinating, before he lost consciousness and subsequently died.

Todd Rutz (Coin Dealer): The police come into my store, show me a mug shot of the kid who's been selling me his coins, that's the first I know the kid's name is Buster Casey. They tell me he's died in some car wreck, was on the news. Ask, what did I know about the kid, this Casey kid? They ask stuff like, did he ever exhibit violent tendencies? Did the kid ever kiss me? Or bite?

Crazy questions.

Lynn Coffey: In my opinion, there was something a little stagy about Casey's death. First, he was careful to drive the largest, brightest car that night, literally heaping that car with lights, drenching it with gasoline, and driving zigzag through the playing field to attract as many taggers as possible. Plus, the television newscopters and the way he called the radio station and kept talking until he'd burned. Even the way Casey ran that red traffic light, smack dab in front of some cops, seems calculated to give him a full lights-and-sirens escort to his next life.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): How does one compensate for the loss of a peer?