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BLACK HELICOPTERS EPISODE
49 SUNDAY
the NINTH - In
the East End, twelve blocks from CNC’s convention site, the road to Hell
bucked, buckled, bowed and swayed like a bad bridge in an eight-plus Richter
quake. A trash can careened into the ankles of a police horse; its rider
plunging across the sidewalk into a plate glass window to set off burglar
alarms… swarms of kids rushing past the bloodied officer to grab jogging
pants, support hose and sneakers. Demian and Richard Reid shepherded a corps of hefty
alt-right skinheads and beery undergraduates… loosely coordinating the
bustling, weaving swelling mob as it assembled haphazardly... pointing out
targets, leading chants: "Don't gimme
shelters, gimme homes! No more evictions and foreclosures!" |
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Forty throats replied, and then a hundred...
"Don't gimme shelter, gimme
homes!"
"Remember
the Pit Stop!" Richard reminded the older congregants of a beloved Wake
Street dive, bulldozed six months earlier.
"No fuckin’ condos!"
"Burn
the condos..." Demian proposed.
Two
hundred voices cheered back! Three! "Burn the
condos!"
The mob,
become an organism with half a thousand heads and five thousand agile
agenda-fingers fingering, lured the police and Turks deeper and deeper into
what remained of the hardscrabble East End ghetto neighborhood... drab streets
of tenements with shops on the ground floors of those on the widest boulevards.
Some of the managers of these had hastily armed themselves. Before an Arabic
grocery, bakery and liquor store... in the window of which reposed a glittery
sign proclaiming "Canadian Club welcomes Coalition for a New
Consensus"... the proprietor beckoned over Reid, a customer he knew well.
"Where is this trouble? What is reason?"
"It's
a march against the Jews! Down with Zionist pig bankers!”shrieked
an insurrectionist. “Free Jerusalem for
free people. Viva la jihad!"
He proceeded east, fist pumping the air, leaving a puzzled but
undamaged merchant who, in a few moments' time, was chanting and cheering too,
unfolding a dusty Palestinian flag to place in the window and motioning his
sons inside to bring free doughnut holes and sodas to pass out to the passing fedayeen. At a
home for the elderly three doors down with a sign in the window...
"Attention Conventioneers - This is Not a Hotel!"... curious seniors pressed their noses against smudgy glass as
Glenn and Demian passed.
"Raise
pensions! Stop the raid on Social Security," Glenn cajoled. "Join us!
Restore Medicaid! March to end the
savings tax!"
The
elderly returned forced smiles and waved back... a few even clinked walkers
against the window but, prudently, declined to venture outside. Down the block,
a firebomb exploded the front window of a second hand novelty shop, showering
the sidewalk with flaming Beanie Babies and tendrils of melted, yellow Spadoodles.
And a
crowd of pale, excited students surrounded the vintage red Porsche owned and
operated by a local gentleman of leisure taking care of business in one of the
seemingly abandoned buildings.
"Dude riot! Dude riot! Dude
riot!"
Responding
to the undergraduates pushing at it, the vintage Porsche screamed back with the
alarms and electronic voices of a decade past...
"Burglar! Burglar! Burglar!" it wailed.
"Asshole! Asshole!" the students bellowed back
and, with sticks and bricks, construction debris and trashcans, began the task
of reducing it to junk. The kat dealer who owned it
skittered down the stoop of that derelict building at the sight of the
destruction of his wheels, but the vista of so many white people with weapons
thronging East Eleventh and massed Turks gathering in the middle of East
Twelfth Street convinced him to duck around the corner. There, he narrowly
escaped capture by a mixed force of local police and Guardsmen, stealthily
advancing to contain the riot. A couple of kids in noserings
weren't so lucky... half a dozen cops trapped them in a blind alley beside a
burned-out auto body shop and began beating them to bloody pulp, ripping the
metal from their beaks with canine yelps of glee.
Somebody
finished off the Porsche by plugging its gas tank with a Molotov cocktail
fashioned from an empty half-liter can of ABM.
Four
black UN helicopters, surrounded by a flotilla of American drones, circled the
East End blocks only a dozen feet above the rooftops like angry wasps as the
flames flamed upwards… blades ominously whup-whupping as snipers dangled from
their belly doors… and, promptly, cylinders of gas burst in the street below.
Clouds of bluish-purplish vapor billowed up, driving coughing, angry people
down Jefferson Street - past the Sanctuary and towards the empty lot on which
the first condos had been under construction until poleaxed by plague,
recession and the credit crunch and had, as the Urinal reporter’d
told Andy, been picked up by Peppermill for the proverbial song.
The
black copters rose as Glenn Savitt, eyes burning,
separated from Demian, Richard and the dude rioters,
now chanting the still-quixotic “FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!” He stumbled into an alley… an artificial lane
fashioned by the long-deserted construction workers and fronting a dilapidated
trailer… looking for something to wipe his eyes with.
At a
reasonable distance, upwind of the gas, one man in a dark suit, dark glasses,
black shoes and radio tailed him, barking directions into a radio. Four surveillance drones, a mini, no bigger
than a hummingbird; the other three approximately the size and girth of possums,
hovered overhead and then took off.
Across
the street, another did the same.
Opposite
the construction site, several burly workers piled out of a white van with
smoked glass windows.
Construction
workers... with gas masks...
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SUNDAY the NINTH - 5:01 PM
In his corner suite at the Ivona,
a rangy, pockmarked man pricked his ears up at the knock and voice of Tom Beedle. He glanced from the door to the hotel table, on
which reposed a Sig Sauer in its shoulder holster, radio and several cell
phones, shook pills out of a pillbox, dry-swallowed and instinctively checked
the window. No fire escape.
"Geiger? This is Tom. Tom! The operation's
busted. There are law enforcement gentlemen with me and the exits are covered. Time to cut our losses."
Geiger sighed, dry swallowed another handful of pills and looked
out the window as he punched out two buttons of a pre-programmed number on one
of the burner phones, then down at the carpet. He muttered a few short words,
most of them of a legal or obscene nature, killed the connection as the
knocking intensified and picked up the holster, deliberating; then placing it
on the bed before walking towards the door, coughing all the way.
"Geiger?"
"I'm
not armed. I'm opening the door... I've already contacted my supervisor and my
attorneys. Please don't do anything stupid!" he added in a wide, flat
voice that might have come from anyplace east of Denver, west of Tulsa.
The
crew from the Masty basement, augmented by a few more
local police burst through, but after a few moments of dramatic lunging and
ransacking, the Sergeant gestured towards Geiger's electronics.
"Is
there any unfinished business we ought to take care of before going downtown?"
"We
are downtown," Beedle protested,
but the Sergeant gave him a withering glare, so he nodded.
Another
UN helicopter passed, its rotors almost brushing the window of the Ivona.
"If
I tell you what you want me to," Geiger bargained, "will you get me a
Splice from the machine downstairs before I get into your car?"
"It's
one of those smart machines," the Sergeant advised him, "goes up to a
buck seventy-five a can during the middle of the day."
"I
have a debit card in that billfold," Geiger pointed, so the Sergeant
nodded, and an officer picked up one of the cell phones, handing it to Beedle's operative. "Hello! Perseus?
Ah... we got a fire in the hole. Right, that hole. Fire…"
He lay
the phone down, pointed to the radio. Again, the Sergeant nodded.
"Legionnaire! Legionnaire! This is Scipio calling,
Scipio."
"Roger!"
a voice answered through the static.
"We
got pink elephants. Ah yeah... that's right. Elephants."
"Roger!"
Geiger
put the radio down, nodded, and placed his hands behind his back for cuffing. A
policeman frisked him, one of the FBI agents picked up the radio, glancing
curiously.
"Two
teams? Two sides! Let's have a guess... locals reporting to our Democratic
Mayor and some of the Guard working for our Republican Governor? Pink elephants? Legionnaire? Somebody didn’t understand that “Get Smart”
was a comedy, not a fuckin’ training manual?"
"You
said it, sir, I didn't," Geiger replied. "I’m a consultant. Business is business and I’m only following
orders!"
Beedle's face flushed.
"You
didn't tell me you were working for the Governor, too!"
"You
didn't tell me I couldn't! Take five for the Splice," he told the officer
who… regarding Geiger’s debit card as if it were an IED… removed cash from the
wallet on the bed, before the consultant added, generously, "...get one
for yourself, too, and keep the change!"
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SUNDAY the NINTH - 5:13 PM
From
the VIP section, Anne and Andy watched Catfish Jack Parnell approach the final
meters to the podium, waving and bumping select fists as he advanced.
"Glad you made it," Anne whispered, "gangplank's
coming up. If you hadn't jumped on board, you'd have been stuck down in that
60’s peanut gallery forever."
"I
don't know," Andy demurred. "I got responsibilities..."
"To whom? The Sanctuary? That
bunch of bums... don't worry, Jack'll see their
safety net restrung..."
"Around
our necks, he will. And if Tillerman's elected?"
"Then
he'll inject moral responsibility into public charity. After he cuts taxes and unemployment
insurance, mines the border and kicks out the twelve million Mexicans that
Trump never got around to expelling, there’ll be lots of minimum-wage jobs and
full-time, too. With overtime! And, without all those religious leeches
hanging off the President like barnacles, like..." and she nodded,
obliquely, towards Reverend Malik, also on the podium, cheering Parnell's
approach as if the politician were the Messiah himself.
"I
don't fit into this." Andy glared at the politician, now mounting the
front steps... recessive scalp alarmingly visible (the Catfish was holding one
of those big, black Garth Brooks hats he favored in his left hand like a big,
black satellite dish, waving it at faces he recognized), then his eyes, his
politician's smile, shoulders. "I feel like the troll on the fairy
castle's lawn."
"Nonsense! You've been doing all the good work, just as
people like Glenn and I have done for years, just getting none of the benefits.
And you have a firmer sense of reality than he does, sad to say. If people of
competence and principle continue standing on the sidelines like the rich girls
at fancy colleges because of some inarticulate posturing that they're
preserving their moral virginity, then I guess we really are
doomed to Entropy..."
"Dunno. Maybe I'm just one of those old-fashioned Americans
after all. Revolution in the blood like Thomas Jefferson, not some half-assed
Broadway Hamiltonian reforms..."
"That
old slaveholders’ Constitution,” she snorted, “guaranteed life, liberty and
pursuit of happiness. Not happiness! That's for everyone to
figure out however they can. If the bastards don't take it away from us while
we're sleeping..."
"But
he," Andy pointed, "he's the one calling for repeal of
the Bill of Rights."
"Only
as a rhetorical device," Anne shushed him. "He's only suggesting
reforms like separating campaign financing from the free speech provisions...
not actually calling for repeal... as a way of waking people up to their
responsibilities and motivating them to organize."
"Fake news generating fake policies? I don't trust that Catfish," Andy
glowered. "That catfishin’ Catfish has hooked
you good. Look how he walks... is he
wearing high heels?"
"They're
not heels, they're lifts. Heels are on the outside of the boot, they'd look
ridiculous. Ross Perot wore them. Jack has the lifts inside, so most people wouldn't even notice. And it's not because
he's vain... well, mostly not... it's strategy, carefully worked out with focus
groups. Short people don't get elected President."
"James
Madison did," Andy objected.
"They
didn't have TV back then and, besides, E and R ain’t
exactly the Federalist Papers," Anne conceded. "The Coming Kill-Off” ain’t “Common Sense” either, nor is the Don the Dow. But nobody else in DC’s even close, either...
Aaron fuckin' Burr would tower over your contenders likely to be running in
either of the major parties. Biden and his Ukrainian gasboy, his
lock-em-up Vice of color? Again? Hillary? Again? Bernie the Burn? Al Franken – well him,
probably not, but one of the billionaires? Stay-rrr? Clooney? Swallwell? The
Squad? The Democrats can’t fix
the budget, can’t create jobs… but the President does seem awfully proud of
sending his leaky Attorneys General out to seize properties that rent to the
medical marijuana outlets in California and using the IRS on his enemies
list. Bill said he felt your pain, so
cancer patients better damn well feel theirs.
And the Repubs… if their
basket-case President-in-exile forgets to file? Jeb?
"Who?" Andy began to ask, but then the Catfish
turned, raising both hands over his head. "Speaking of buttons, I'll bet
your fish in high heels is short in another department."
"Stop
it!" Anne elbowed him in the ribs. "I work for his fiancée... well,
the lady who's going to be in a couple of days, whether he knows it or
not..."
"And
you think he'll go along with this?"
"If
he wants her money, he will. And he's one fried Catfish filet without it!
Jack's a moron, but he's not a moronic moron! She's got the papers already
drawn up for him to sign, but they'll announce just before the New Hampshire
primary... or Super Tuesday in the Deep South, depending on the polls and the
viability of that local guy, the one from South Carolina? North Carolina? Whatever!
A midnight court clerk’s signature and, afterwards, a White House
reception after the fact... if he wins, if he loses, she'll probably..."
but the rest of what she thought to say was drowned out by the screaming and
applause that rolled down from the rafters, a shrill, confetti-garnished fog
that enveloped the podium of Masty Hall.
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SUNDAY the NINTH - 5:14 PM
The capricious wind brought a squall of
gas through the skeleton of a doorway Glenn had taken cover in and,
half-blinded, he stumbled out and up the construction alley towards the street.
One of the UN helicopters passed overhead; blades whup
whup whupping, raising up little whirling devils of
trash and smoke and sawdust... suddenly, half a dozen construction workers with
gas masks under their hard hats were facing him and, through teary eyes, Glenn
saw them lifting two by fours and lead pipes. Their foreman began walking confidently
forward, raising his right hand, in which was a cell phone.
What
was a construction crew doing out here? It was Sunday... were they on fuckin'
overtime?
The
purple gas swirled away, the foreman tugged his gas
mask off. He had a sparse red beard and was missing two front teeth.
"Aren’t
you uh… Andy Morrison?"
"Hey
guys, I'm with the Convention," Glenn said, fingering his Raggedy Andy
tags… which, he hoped, at this distance, wouldn't be scrutinized. "Just passing through. Honest!"
He looked
back into the construction site... most of the gas had dissipated but a dark
man was approaching through the scaffolding. He carried a radio. As he
advanced, smiling thinly, he said...
"Morrison?"
Glenn
stepped back, looking from one to the other, turning the Convention dogtags over and over like worry beads. "No, I'm...
like, is there a cop around? Police? Shee-itt!.. Police!"
“Cop
free zone,” radio man smiled before a terrific grating of grinding metal from
the street drowned him out as one of the black, hovering UN helicopters downed
by a well-aimed brick that had hit a blade skidded by the alley, tipping over
in the street, right upon the half-completed doorsteps to the condos. Several
dazed Turks crawled out as the big bird began to throw off smoke... Norwegians,
Glenn calculated, from their hair and language, or maybe mercenaries from one
of the Baltic states...
The
construction workers backed off…
Half a
dozen townies rushed one of the Turks, knocked him over, and one grabbed his
blue beret. The other Unapissers rushed him and he
tossed it to another, then another... the Turks swearing in their native
language, finally one enunciating: "War crime trials, war crime! Give back
man hat!"
"Hey, UN!" Glenn ventured but, trapped between the
approaching factions, he instinctively edged back,
towards the lone man who hadn't displayed a weapon yet. The radio began to
crackle... the man lifted it to his ear, using an index finger to point to
Glenn to remain where he was. A crackling voice stuttered out... "Scipio
says he's got elephants. Elephants! Commence the procedure!"
"Roger!"
said the dark man.
"Dude
riot!" shrieked one of the locals, leaping on the shoulders of the
brawniest UN peacekeeper in the street.
The
construction foreman's cell phone buzzed, he lifted it to his ear. Glenn
couldn't hear what he said, but it couldn't have been pleasant, Red Beard
slapped it back into his shirt pocket with a curse.
"Fuckin'
fire inna hole," he shouted across Glenn to his
adversary, slapping his palm with the length of pipe he'd brought out of the
white van. "What about you?"
"Elephants!"
"See
you in Anchorage, then, I hope..."
"San
Antonio, first," the dark man reminded him, opening his jacket as he put
the radio away, exposing the handle of his gun. "Unless one of us gets
called up to Montreal for the G-10 conferences... fuckin' horns of the beast
now that the Russkis, the Chinks and the Indians are
in it! Indians! – I guess they mean the Apu Indians, not the woo-woo
Indians. Fuckin'
eggheads..."
"San
Antonio, then!" said Red Beard. "Agreed! You," he pointed to Glenn with the pipe,
"are one lucky bastard, Morrison. Keep your mouth shut and hands clean and
you might get allowed to live."
"Fine with me!
Though I’m not…"
Glenn
turned, but the dark man with the radio was gone and, when he turned back, the
phony construction workers were piling back into their vehicle. Within seconds,
the white van was speeding off past the brawling townies and Unapissers thronging the street, and Glenn slumped against the
aluminum wall of the Peppermill condo construction trailer, hyperventilating.
As his breath slowed, he opened his eyes... and there was another man – this
one in a Gulf War vintage Army shirt tagged "Douglas" pointing a
pistol at his nose.
"Morrison,
you killed my buddy. My only buddy!"
"Hey, man, chill!" Glenn tried to explain.
"I'm not Andy, he's with the Conks, inside Masty Hall. Hey... I don't know what or who you're talking
about."
"That’s
your name on those twinkly dogtags. Andy Morrison, right?
You killed Paulie," "
"Hey
man, everybody takes money. I didn't," he added, realizing, in the
instant, his mistake. "I mean... Andy didn't..."
"Guys
like you that think they run the world and leave the good people, the real
people hanged in jail cells. "Now it's your turn,
man..."
"Whose
turn?" Glenn began to question, but the question dissolved in a red flash,
a shower of white sparks... then, only, blue sky...
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