**********
Everything about the ill-favored dig had been confiscated and locked down, the participants scattered to the four winds.
Cassandra’s last conversation with Sarge, before he finally acknowledged the undeniable signs of radiation sickness, went something like this:
“It’s like finding Atlantis,” Cassandra had said. “Everything we thought we knew has changed. How could we not report it?”
“What you should be asking,” Sarge had answered, “is how can we report it? You’re smart, Cass. You know what would happen. We have global religious, military, economic, and political systems built on the backs of peasants who’ve been encouraged -even trained- not to ask too many questions. They’re happy with either their rigid beliefs or their ignorance. They just want to live their lives without complication. This wouldn’t throw a monkey wrench into the works: this would bring down the whole machine.”
Sarge summed up
“The problem isn’t the reality, it’s the people. They don’t want to know that the truth of what goes on behind the scenes in their orderly world is uglier, smellier, and more full of shit than a bouquet of assholes. Bringing this out isn’t the kind of thing that would get you censured, or cause you to waste your academic life teaching at some shit-on-your-shoe university in Christ-Fuck Lousy-Anna. There’s too much at stake for too many powerful organizations. This could get you killed, and I don’t think you’re a martyr. Isn’t it enough that you know?”
Cassandra didn’t need anyone to interpret the handwriting on the wall. She had known it from the beginning.
Six weeks later, it didn’t surprise her to find out that Sarge had died at the US naval hospital at Bethesda, Md. Or been disappeared. They wouldn’t let her see him before he was gone, and that might have been for the best. Cassandra was connected enough to have heard what was going on. There were rumors that he had been changing. His bones had coarsened and grown and his skin had paled and atrophied to the thinness of vellum, hugging tight to the branching trees of blood vessels pulsing just beneath. His eyes had never closed during his coma and had denatured from dark brown to a weak, arctic-ice blue, predictive and jarring to the nurses who administered his eye drops. He never awoke, but it was reported that he did speak while in his coma. A sonorous and disconcerting series of whistles and clicks and glottals which was avidly recorded by bedside monitors and studied by the best linguists in the world, who’d had zero success in identifying or translating it. Maybe with more of a sample they could crack it. The scuttlebutt was that he still looked and acted remotely human but there was something... something more than a little scary about him. EEG’s monitored constant fifty cycle per second beta waves, typical of deep concentration, almost as if Sarge were learning when, by all diagnostic criteria, he should have been drowning in the dreamless throes of an alpha coma. His hormone levels and circadian rhythms had been changing and had, just before his death, stabilized on a sixty-three hour cycle. Rumor had it that there was now renewed interest in an exoplanet recently discovered in the boondocks of the Milky Way, right in earth’s own neighborhood, orbiting Tau Ceti, a whisker-thin twelve light years away. Spitting distance in the cosmic scheme. The best measurements so far put the rotational period of the planet at sixty-two hours forty-eight minutes.
That he was gone, Cassandra thought sadly, was probably a better thing for him. He was now an active danger to not only himself, but the seven billion other savages that had spread over the planet from that genetic bottleneck of seventy thousand years ago.
She herself hadn’t changed. Not physically, anyway. She had entered the next iteration. What had seemed murky and unsolvable before was now clear. Her mind was bright with new ideas and new ways of thinking. The riddle of the bones had revealed its solution: some had stayed, some had gone, and some had been fit for neither and had been discarded.
Where were they now, she wondered, looking up. Were they still out there, looking back at us and wondering what we became? Or were they gone, too, leaving only their mutated offspring? She would know soon enough.
She could hear them, in her head, and understood the unknown language that others were still trying to crack. She was now tethered to them by some fantastical, quantum entanglement, a far flung, cosmic cousin connected across a vast gulf of time. They had come not to destroy mankind, but to save it. They hadn’t brought the fires of a nuclear holocaust; they hadn’t needed to. They stayed just long enough to teach us how to make it for ourselves.
Lawyers
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
The parties in the case, plaintiff and defendant, were two teenage girls, both only sixteen years old and new to their driver’s licenses. No injuries involved in the crash at the intersection, but major property damage to both a Tesla Model X Roadster, and a Mercedes SL 550. But the civilized thing to do was to set a meet between opposing counsels. No need to drag this whole thing through the courts when a nice little settlement could be hammered out between two men of good faith.
This was what Walter Shott, of the firm Shott, Toth, E. Chin, and Stones, was thinking as he sat down across from his opposite number, Sterling Stickett of the Stickett, Toomey, Goode firm.
“Ordinarily,” Shott began, “I would just let the insurance adjusters handle this, but my client had her very expensive Tesla Roadster demolished by the negligence of your client who, from the evidence I see, washed out from the Ray Charles school of driving.” Shott smiled.
“Teenage drivers,” Stickett agreed. “Bad enough when they’re sober, but we can’t forget the red eyes of your client, the whiskey on her breath, or the silver coke spoon hanging around her rear view mirror.”
Shott dismissed the claim as unimportant. “Yes, well ISP records show that, at the time of the crash, your client was accessing the Dongs for Days porn site while likely doing the tiptoe through the two lips. Enough to distract anybody.”
“Oh, like your client wasn’t soaking the whisker biscuit while reading Fifty Shades of Gray on her phone at the same time,” Stickett responded.
“We’ll stipulate to that,” Shott answered, “as long as you’ll stipulate to the fact your client was checking her e-mail, cc’ing the latest Kardashian scandals, and texting her 118 Twitter followers.”
And so the battle raged for the next fifteen minutes with parrying and counter-punches of writs, rats, torts and re-torts, answers and accusations, with neither attorney giving an inch. Finally, Stickett tried to break the logjam.
“You do realize,” Stickett said, “that both our clients were probably equally culpable. Both distracted and negligent. All we’ve got so far is a case of dueling counter-suits.”
Shott took a measured breath. Stickett’s logic was inescapable.
“You’re right,” Shott admitted. “There’s no golden goose to be plucked here.”
Shott and Stickett looked at each other for a moment before Stickett, with a resigned sigh, shut his brief and tossed it to the center of the table.
“Well,” Stickett said, “What do we do now?”
“The only thing we can do,” Shott replied. “The only option left. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Stickett said. He closed his briefing folder and tossed it atop Shott’s.
“We’ll sue the cell phone companies.”
Zombies
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2017
All Rights Reserved
“Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.” - Shakespeare, King Lear
She didn't know it, and -though the signs had been there for years for anyone with eyes to see- there was no evident, immediate warning, but today was going to be Loretta Jones' last day fishing at Badin Lake.
Loretta was not a people person. Between her fishing rods, folding chairs, coolers, sun umbrellas, portable grills and tackle boxes, she had staked out her claim for ten yards all around. Thos
e foolish or unlucky enough to err into her sacred bubble were treated to an ill-omened glare from behind her calico-frame sunglasses and a brisk and agitated whisking of her hand fan. No-one accompanied her on her sojourn as friend or confidant. She was childless (mainly because she wanted to be) and her tin foil hattery had driven her husband, the late, great, Mr. C.O. Jones, to a premature dirt nap ten years before, and that's the way she liked it.
Although it wasn't really, she liked to think of this bit of lake-front beach as her private cove, her own closeted concavity of lake pressed into the soft clay of the Uwharrie National Forest by a giant finger. In the center of the cove, some ninety feet from each bank, a curious little round island stumped up from the rippled glass. Monkey Island it was called, though no-one really seemed to know why. Its vertex was dominated by a twenty foot high swatch of Pampas Grass that had always reminded Loretta of the crazy, troll doll hair. The frayed bouffant towered over the cringing brush groveling in the dirt like inferior serfs beneath the searing glare of their overlord.
She'd started in shade but the sun had now rode Apollo's chariot to its acme and the fiery orb beat down on the floppy hat covering her blue-rinsed hair. She lately had begun to worry about sunburn as the march of sixty years had leeched a bit of the melanin from her black skin, turning her to a wan copy of what she had once been.
She heard rocks and twigs crunching as someone walked by her, a bit close, she thought, for her taste.
“Yah,” she cried, flicking her fan with a celery-cracking snap at the uninvited interloper. “Mind my line, boy!”
The accidental trespasser, a young man in his early twenties, seemed taken aback and he stopped short, looking at Loretta.
“Sorry, granny,” he said apologetically. “I thought...”
“You'd best be doin' less thinkin',” Loretta said, “and more movin'.” She waved her fan imperiously in a shooing gesture.
The man hurried on.
Just like young'uns today, she thought. Not a brain in their heads and all down for whichever dim-bulb victims' group is crying foul in the latest oppression lottery. She wondered who was gonna go claim the jackpot today. The tree huggers? The save the crickets crowd? Sure, they'd be picketing her choice of bait. Maybe the Vegetarians are Murderers, too. They kill plants to eat cadre was the gold medal winner in the most recent Victims' Olympics. It was some crazy shit, alright. Oddly enough, the one issue that had finally made her see the light was a choice of toilet. What reasonable person could argue with one bathroom for men, another for women? It wasn't as if it were back to the bad old days of separate but equal race segregation. Still, it had come to this: fifty different genders, each demanding their own shithouse. It was just too bad that there weren't more men left like the late Mr. C.O. (that would be Clarence Osbert) Jones, who had flamed one of these SJW, D and I snowflakes into a shaking puddle over some of the snowflake's trifling horseshit.
A big man, you could always tell when and where Mr. C.O. Jones had made an appearance by the head and shoulder shaped holes of smashed wood in the jambs and headers of doorways.
He'd stood sentry outside a public restroom while his eight year old niece, Althea, went in to use the potty. Some guy, so he had later told Loretta, had walked up and made a beeline for the ladies' room.
“Yo, dude,” Mr. C.O. Jones had said in his booming foghorn of a voice. “The men's room is the other door.”
The man, woefully educated beyond his intelligence at PCU, had decided -unwisely- to have words with Mr. C.O. Jones.
“I have a right to use whatever restroom I like,” the man had proclaimed with all the smug certainty and self-important righteousness of the utter and entire fool. “If I feel like a woman today, I can use the ladies' room.”
Mr. C.O Jones had righted that wrong notion. “As long as my niece is in there,” he had informed the man, “you'd better grow a dick and use the men's room. And if you think you're gonna have trouble findin' it, I'll make it easy for you. Walk through that ladies' room door and I'll rip your newly sprouted cock off and park it in your coal chute.”
A tiny, unwilling smile briefly graced Loretta's lips at the memory and was gone just as quickly. As much as she had harassed and harangued him into an untimely exit from this earthly gyre, when Mr. C.O. Jones had been alive, nobody had screwed with her, and she was right proud of that.
Ah, but it was all coming to a head, now. She'd heard for years how the population was being dumbed down, how the CFR and the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers and the UN and the Fabians and even the USG were plotting to cull the world of its useless eaters and remodel the earth into Eden for the Elites. She'd initially dismissed it as cocked hat, conspiracy caca until she one day found herself incapable of juxtaposing her normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance comfortably against reality. As with most people, the redpilling took hold when she realized she wasn't a member of the chosen: the select club of Blood Drinkers and Baby Eaters. She was part of the Trash Class. She was no Tyra Banks or Beyonce, a genetic blue ribbon winner who could be used as a blow up doll for the less than benevolent overlords. She had no truly useful skills that couldn't be replicated by AI, or a robot, a machine, or any young, beautiful urchin from the street who would simply shut up and do as she was told for a night's shelter from a storm or a crumb from the master's table. She had exceeded her best-by date and might even be passed over by the organ harvesters. Once the wealth had been extracted from the producers of the world, it would be game over. And with the worldwide debt bomb ticking down to zero, it wouldn't be long. The Powers That Be had not yet effectively moved their project of setting half the poor people in the world to killing the other half along a little faster, so Loretta knew they would have to get more proactive. In short, she had figured out they meant to kill her, too, and it would no longer be death by a thousand cuts. It was gonna be big.
So she had prepared. When the great culling came -and she was sure it would, in some form she hoped to recognize- she would be ready. When the vig came payable, she would have the best laugh.
And that time, she was about to find out, was now.
With no warning, the sun which had smiled so warmly was suddenly a dark frown. The sky, a happy and blemishless blue mere moments before, now filled with an ominous black cloud that swept aggressively out of the north, binding the compass from east to west. The anvilhead boiled and baked and puffed like a gasping pastry in an oven. An amassing wind stomped the mercury down twenty degrees and whipped the placid waters of the lake into whitecaps. The two story high Pampas Grass on Monkey Island flailed like the troll's hair of which it so reminded Loretta.
Sinister, blue flashes crackled inside the cloud, jumping from one point to another like sparks. It wasn't lightning (Loretta really couldn't say exactly what it was), but it boded no good intent.
Like a rod -defined and regular- a blue beam shot out from the cloud and struck the lake with a booming Ka-Choom! sound. A welt of water ten feet high shot upwards from the impact of the beam.
More blue beams -complemented with a chilling, brain-frying buzz- reached down from the cloud, clutching and smacking giant handfuls of water.
The flashes pounded the lake -Ka-Choom! Ka-Choom! Ka-Choom!- so frequently that the air itself seemed infused with a blue tint. With little thought to reckon how she had deduced it, Loretta knew today was the day one among the Reptilian Overlords had at last decided to put a round below the waterline of the good ship Terra, and the whole world was going down like a two dollah crack ho.
Other visitors to the lake had turned to the phenomenon, gazing skyward. As the blue beams swept over them with their ghostly glows, Loretta saw their sudden transformations in the spooky, unearthly luminance.
Even after the beams had disengaged from their victims, those it had touched retained an unhealthy, pale blue tint to their skin. Dark, cracked panes of veins suddenly erupted in the thin parchment of their faces and at their temples, pulsing so violently that Loretta was sure the
y would burst. Their eyes lost all luster and their faces, save for a sudden feral upturning of the lips, drooped like warm taffy. When they turned to look at Loretta, staring at her with their leaden eyes and moving towards her with a shambling, brainless gait, she knew the game.
She had little time before the pall engulfed her. Scrounging desperately in her oversized purse, she pulled out her custom-made tinfoil hat, complete with chin strap and propeller on top to deflect toxic thoughts and radiation. Tossing her floppy hat away, she hurriedly donned the crinkly headgear to defend herself from the Government Zombie Death Ray.
They'd really figured it out this time. Turn everyone but a few chosen into zombies. The zombies would eat each other, saving the hassle of messy cleanups and burials or cremations. In six months or so, the private armies of the elite, protected in their underground bunkers, would be dispatched to mop up the few remaining flesh eaters and police up the bones.
Hastily abandoning all she had come with, Loretta scampered back to her car, mercifully shielded from the eschaton by her tinfoil hat. Those who had laughed at her were soon going to be laughing from the other side of their faces.
Happily, the zombies edging towards her moved even slower than her arthritic, sixty year old frame did and she made it to her elderly Buick with only a couple of stumbles. As she stabbed the key into the ignition she was briefly afraid that embedded in the Government Zombie Death Ray might be some kind of EMP that would disable her vehicle.
Closing her eyes and hoping for the best, she turned the key. The ancient Buick sputtered to life and assumed a choppy sort of combustion, really no worse than it had been for years. She let out a rattling sigh, shifted into reverse, and bailed out of the gravel parking lot with a spinning of tires.
She flicked on her headlights, hoping the reassuring, everyday light from their beams would lessen some of the alien twilight. They didn't help much. She had, for the moment at least, outpaced the roiling clouds, but they would catch up soon enough. She tried the radio and, as expected, got nothing but white noise.
The day had been hot, but now she rolled her windows up against the gloom. She had to get to her refuge soon. Whatever else the ray might be doing, it had already changed the air to knives in her lungs and her breathing was strained, draining her of fire and blood.
It wasn't far to her house, and the way was mainly on the back roads. She passed only a couple of cars. She didn't count those that had swerved off the roads and were now surrounded by feasting zombies.
As she slowed down to navigate the town's byways, the beams and clouds again overtook her, but she was calm. She was safe. Taken all in all, she thought maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that the world was ending. A world without white people was fine with her. A world with no people at all was even better. To her mind, the rest of the world's inhabitants -whatever their tint- clung to a tier a couple of rungs lower than rejects from The Gong Show.
Almost all the way home, she rolled by the local Pick-up and Stick-up. The plate glass windows were already shattered, the alarms blaring, flesh-slicing sharks' teeth of broken glass littering the sidewalk and pulsing galvanic blue in the crackling lightning. All manner of miscreants -from thug life hoods to middle aged men in business suits- were in and out of the broken windows, toting armloads of ill-gotten booty. She imagined the cigarettes and the booze had been the first things to go. Somehow a fire had broken out and the smoke, not yet thick, billowed out the broken window and only partly masked the licking, orange flames. She shook her head ruefully and knowingly, her lips pressed down to a prissy little slit. So soon it had come to this: Fire, thieves and kings broken by the sting of the sweeping beam, the wise and the dense alike falling unclean from the ray's indiscriminate wrath. They wouldn't have long to enjoy their crimes.
She turned onto the road leading to her house. On porches and in front yards, her neighbors all looked to the fast spreading cloud. There she was, Jezreel Cole, one of those white women that took all the fine, black men. Loretta knew that was the in thing now, and she supposed that was better than when the in thing had been to have them standing on the front lawn with a lantern in their hand, but she still didn't like it. Not that she hadn't had her own dalliances with white men after Mr. C.O. Jones had departed, but that was different. She -Loretta- knew what she was doing. Jezreel didn't even notice her as she drove by.
And there was Connie Prager. With her nine league boots, four-axe-handle wide ass and fashions by Zeppelin, she would never be charged with being light on her hooves. Even now, in the birthing throes of the world-ending cataclysm, she stood like a transfixed sheep on her front porch, watching the forbidding black cloud advance, a greasy chicken leg gripped in one paw, its grease running down the doughy flab of her arm, a bag of cheese puffs clutched in her other hand. To complete the Acid hallucination, she was shoeless, wore a tube top and a pair of cut off jeans that choked off the air to her cottage cheese thighs.
Seriously, Loretta thought. this is what you wear to the Zombie Apocalypse? She shook her head again.
She spotted Johnny James, at fourteen the youngest of the James clan, and one of only a few white folks she actually liked. He'd always been kind and respectful to her. Not that she had that much sympathy for him, but he was the only dim bulb in the whole burnt out, inbred rack, even if he was a squat-to-piss pussy. He, like everyone else, was spellbound by the gathering storm, but he managed to spot her and wave a hand in greeting. Loretta ignored him, her sights set only on getting to her shelter.
She pulled into her driveway with a screech, jammed the Buick into park and bolted for her doorway, her two hundred and ten pounds jerkin' and twerkin' as she moved faster than she had in a while. Once inside she could handle whatever came. Anyone came banging on her door would get nothing and like it. If they persisted with their tomfoolery, she'd dry gulch them with six rounds of nine millimeter aspirin in the ten ring. That would cure whatever ailed them.
She bolted her door and walked around latching and locking all her doors and windows, pulling down and securing the specially installed steel shutters, knowing time was short. It would only delay a determined invader for a short time, but she didn't intend to hang around that long. The Zombie beam worked fast, even if it didn't work on everyone. Sitting here alone in her house, an old black woman without the protection of Mr. C.O. Jones, the first roving band of armed dindus, beaners, or meth-mouthed, mullet headed crackers would have her roasting on a spit just for a can of sardines. She couldn't linger. Mr C.O. Jones was no more and she had to deal with the Zombie Apocalypse on her own.
Moving to a door so carefully concealed in the wall that sometimes even she had trouble finding it, she stopped only long enough to grab a crewel work sampler hanging on her wall:
And Faith Shall Throw the Dead Below.
She flicked an inside switch on and took the sampler with her as she descended the well-lighted stairs, and not a second too soon. What had been an uneasy order had already descended into chaos. The hideous sound of the beam was now here and she heard shouts and screams outside. She paused for only a second, looking back as she thought she heard footfalls on her front porch, expecting to hear a knock on her door and an entreaty for aid. But there was nothing. She turned back and hurried down the steps.
Everything was prepped and ready, courtesy of a $250,000 life insurance payout on Mr. C.O. Jones, and she had no need to do anything else save shut the well-concealed door behind her.
She had a whole world full of canned goods, dehydrated meats and vegetables, candy, petrol, well-concealed solar panels, battery packs and ventilation systems, water purification, septic and well systems, medical books, first aid supplies and antibiotics. She had a blooming arsenal of firearms and extra ammo. If push came to shove, she even had an old, dug well in her hibernation space, complete with twenty galvanized buckets and a thousand yards of rope. She was properly outfitted for a year, but could actually hold on to a subsistence survival for better than a decade if it came to it.
Hell, the house could burn down on top of her and she could still survive and thrive.
Still, even with all her planning, she knew she had to abide by the cardinal rule of the Zombie Apocalypse: always save the last bullet for yourself. Thinking this, she prudently set her 9 MM on a shelf above her canned goods and sat back to wait out the disaster.