by Urban, Tony
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t intend to be short with you, but it’s the same all over the county. I returned from the McAndrews’ farm no more than ten minutes ago. They lost over ninety head of cattle just like that.”
Wim heard the doc’s fingers snap through the ear piece. “What’s going on?”
“If I knew, I’d be in a hell of a lot better frame of mind.”
Wim paused, unsure what, if anything, to say.
“Listen. I’ll try to stop over this evening, and if not then, tomorrow morning. What do you have left over there?” Doctor Allen asked.
Wim tallied his stock in his head. “Five goats. Three cows. And Miss— One pig.”
“Mmm hmm. Well, try to segregate the animals from each other. Do that and hold down the fort until I get there. All right?”
“Yessir, I will”
“And Wim?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve got to put that sick pig down. I don’t know if it’s possible to stay ahead of this mess, but that’s the only chance.”
The call clicked off without a goodbye from the good doctor. Wim held onto the phone for a few long moments before he accepted the fact that better news wasn’t coming.
He moved to a place in the house he seldom visited, his Pa’s old workroom. The first thing he noticed when he turned on the light were the tools the old man had used to tie flies. Small vises and hooks and bobbins with brightly colored threads. Pliers so small Wim doubted they’d be usable in his own meaty paws.
He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but he thought he could still smell the Beech Nut tobacco Pa chewed almost nonstop. That, mixed with the aroma of Hoppes gun oil, was the old man’s cologne. Hung on the back wall of the room were a variety of rifles and revolvers. On the sprawling oak desk his Pa had built all on his own were box upon box of ammunition. Wim ignored all the firearms and reached into a drawer to grab a different type of gun.
The captive bolt pistol had been used only twice before. It was quick and efficient, like it was designed to be, but Wim thought it made doling out death obscenely easy. And as he shuffled across the barnyard toward his dying pig, he worried that she deserved a less mechanical ending.
She hadn’t moved since he last saw her and her breaths came in shallow, hitching wheezes. He knelt before her and traced his fingers over her belly, gently scratching like she’d so enjoyed before this whole mess. She remained unresponsive. Wim leaned into her and whispered in her ear.
“I’m real sorry about this, Miss. You were a good mama and a good pig.”
He pressed the barrel of the gun against the center of her forehead. When he pulled the trigger, a stainless steel bolt shot out with a boom, broke through her skull, destroyed her brain, then retreated back into the pistol with a swish. The entire process took a fraction of a second.
Wim followed the vet’s instructions and quarantined the rest of the animals from one another.
It didn’t help. By sunset the doctor had failed to show and every animal on the farm was dead.
Chapter 4
In May of her eighteenth year, Ramey Younkin lost her virginity, failed her senior year of high school, and watched the world as she knew it come to an end. In many ways, the awkward and painful two minutes in the back of Bobby Mack’s Ford Tempo was the worst part. God, he was such a white trash loser.
Life had been a consistent downward spiral since her father left them two years earlier. Not that she blamed him. Loretta, his wife and Ramey’s mother, was almost a decade into a drug addiction, which started with pain pills after a minor back injury. When the local pain clinics caught on to her game, she moved on to trading prescription narcotics with her minivan mom friends the same way little boys swap baseball cards.
When her father left, he asked — more like begged — Ramey to join him. But she was one of the cool girls in her sophomore high school class and actually enjoyed living in the town she now realized to be nothing more than a dead-end wasteland of unemployment and welfare. The sort of place people only lived because they had young children to raise or old parents to look after. Or because they were too stupid to realize how awful it was. She also knew, if left all alone, her mother would be dead in no short order. So, Ramey stayed.
A year ago, Ramey woke to a 4 a.m. phone call. After taking twenty dollars for a happy ending at the truck stop by the turnpike, Loretta's would-be John turned out to be an undercover cop who arrested her for prostitution.
Rather than go down quietly, she fought with the officer, scratching his eye so bad he needed surgery. Loretta was also high as a kite on oxy, a drug for which she had no prescription. That hat trick earned her three months in the county jail and a fine so hefty they had to sell the house Ramey grew up in.
That’s how they ended up in a thirty-five-year-old double-wide in the Happy Acres Mobile Home Park. And that’s how Ramey went from being elected to the homecoming court to daily catcalls and insults every time she strolled down the school hallway.
At first, she thought the taunting would end if she ignored it. It didn’t. She skipped a day here or there when she didn’t feel up to the harassment, then skipped entire weeks. When May rolled around, a letter came in the mail stating that she had missed forty-five days and had been expelled. Apparently, the maximum number of days you could miss and still graduate was forty. If she’d known that fact, she would have kept count.
The day she received the letter was the day Bobby Mack told her she looked beautiful in green when she passed him at the community mailboxes. He probably meant her tits looked good in the tight, “Kiss Me I’m Irish” (she was not) t-shirt she was wearing, but at her lowest of lows she took the bait. Ten minutes later, they were sharing a joint in his car. Fifteen minutes after that, he had her jean shorts off. Two minutes later, she realized flunking out of high school a month before graduation wasn’t the worst part of her day after all.
Bobby kept sniffing around like a randy dog, but one mistake was enough for Ramey, and every time she saw him around the trailer court, she spun and raced the other way. She vowed to get back on track and enrolled in cyber schooling. It was all going according to plan for about a week.
Loretta threw open the metal screen door of the trailer. Because the hydraulic stopper was missing, it swung all the way out and crashed into the cheap, aluminum siding. Ramey, in the middle of a calc test on her laptop, barely looked up. Nothing about her mother was subtle, not even her entrances.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Morning, Babe.”
“It’s almost three in the afternoon.”
“Thaswha Imeant.”
Her eyelids drooped and she looked two decades older than her forty years. She was pretty once, in a small town trashy sort of way with her permed dishwater blonde hair and curvy figure. With a little maintenance, she could have been beautiful. But drugs had taken away her looks, just like they took her husband, her home, her job, and her future. Her eyes sat deep in skeletal sockets, and when she opened her mouth, she revealed a set of teeth that would scare away small children. Ramey still hadn’t grown accustomed to her mother’s new look.
“Sure you did,” Ramey said without looking up from the computer.
“Don’t sass me, smarmouth.”
Loretta stumbled into the cabinet holding their mismatched yard sale dishes. After paying her fines and buying this rundown trailer, almost all the money from the sale of the house evaporated. Aside from a few thousand dollars that Ramey hid for a rainy day (she had a feeling a monsoon was coming), Loretta burned through the rest in months.
With the stigma of her arrest, Loretta’s minivan mom friends turned their backs on her. After all, they only popped pills recreationally, they weren’t dirty whores. With her oxy supply cut off, Loretta turned to heroin. The sores and track marks on her arms gave that away and Ramey wasn’t believing her affirmations that they were mosquito bites or poison ivy, depending on which lie her mother felt like telling that particul
ar day. She’d given up on trying to save her mom. It was hard enough trying to save herself.
Loretta took an Old Milwaukee from the fridge and collapsed onto their stained floral print couch. She turned on the old tube TV, possibly the only such television remaining in America, Ramey thought, and flipped through the channels.
Ramey heard a reporter say, “Vice President has been sworn,” before the station changed. Loretta settled on a faux reality show where camo clad hillbillies discussed the merits of jerky made from venison versus jerky made from beef. In the midst of their argument, the oldest of the men broke wind and Loretta laughed so hard she too farted one so loud and wet that if she’d been sober, she might have checked her underwear just to be on the safe side. But sober she was not, so her own fart only made her cackle even more. The laughter quickly dissolved into a violent coughing fit, which she drowned out with the beer.
Ramey tried to tune it all out and concentrate on antiderivatives and integrals. By the time she finished her test, Loretta was passed out on the couch and snoring like a buzz saw. Ramey realized the television had gone silent and, at first, assumed their service had been shut off due to an unpaid bill. When she looked to the screen, she saw a generic announcement reading, “This is a Test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. This is only a Test.” Ramey scrolled through the channels and saw they all had the same white text on the same blue background.
She shut off the TV and returned her attention to the laptop. A quick trip to Twitter seemed normal enough at first. #EastWestKardashianBaby was the top hashtag, but second on the list was #deadpresident. Further down, after #beiberpenis and #beyonceshair was even stranger.
#zombiepresident
Ramey clicked away from Twitter for an actual news site, but before one could load, the Internet went down.
Chapter 5
As he snorted a thin line of coke off the fifteen year old girl’s perky C cup breast, Mitch realized his life was damned near perfect. Months ago, if you'd have told him he would love private school, he'd have said you were a stupid son of a bitch. He’d assumed the kids would all be nerdy little rich fuckers who wanted to be surgeons or physicists or, like his own father, politicians.
The rich fuckers part was right, of course. Only God and his father knew how much tuition here was, but that was his only correct assumption. For the most part, his fellow classmates were just like him. Kids with too much money, too little responsibility, and parents who were too busy to supervise. Or care, for that matter. Mitch was days away from finishing his junior year at The Marsten Academy and never wanted it to end. Especially with Rochelle’s perfect, bouncy tits to play with.
“Save some for me, Mitchy,” she said as he made another line disappear up his nose. “Don’t hog it.”
He grabbed a glass vial and considered pouring the cocaine on his cock, but settled on the back of his hand. Rochelle quickly sniffed it away. Mitch watched as her pupils contracted and her IQ dropped to double digits and grinned. A hyena’s grin. He poured more coke on the tip of his tongue, then took her perfect, pencil eraser sized nipple into his mouth and rolled his drug laced tongue around it. She moaned so loud and long he thought he might cum just listening to her.
They fucked like rabbits. When she was high, she’d do anything Mitch could imagine and some things he’d never even seen on the internet. God, he'd been so very wrong about private school.
Rochelle passed out after almost an hour of screwing, but Mitch was flying high and sleep was nowhere on his horizon. He grabbed his cell phone and saw he had eight missed calls, all from the same caller — Senator SOB according to his caller ID — otherwise known as his father. He thought about listening to the eight subsequent voicemails, then decided against it. The day was going great, why ruin it?
Instead, Mitch took a bottle of Valium (prescribed to one Rosalita Guiterrez) from the nightstand and popped two in his mouth. He was halfway through dry swallowing them when the phone rang again.
“Son of a bitch!” As the words came out his mouth a pill snagged in his throat. He coughed and gagged as the bitter taste filled his mouth. When the pill finally slid down his gullet, he swiped the phone to answer. When he tried to speak, his raw throat spasmed and another coughing fit overcame him.
“Mitchell? Are you sick? What’s wrong?”
Mitch found an almost empty can of Red Bull on the floor and downed the few remaining sips of liquid. “I’m fine. What do you want?”
“Didn’t you get my messages?”
“I was studying,” Mitch said as he looked at the beautiful, naked girl on his bed. “Anatomy.” He had to cover the phone as he laughed at his own joke.
“Forget about that.”
That was new. Senator SOB was all about studying. Mitch realized something must be seriously wrong and wondered if he'd done something worthy of expulsion. Maybe his side business dealing drugs had been exposed. As he thought about round two with Rochelle, he hoped that wasn’t the case.
“You’re being evacuated.”
“What?"
“I’ve sent a helicopter for you. It will arrive within the hour.”
“What?”
“You’re a spoiled asshole, Mitchell, but you’re not stupid so open your ears and close your mouth. There is a viral outbreak and Congress and their families are being moved to a safe zone. Go to the football field and wait. Don't take anything with you. And speak of this to no one.”
Mitch wanted to say ‘what’ again but stopped himself. He hated his father, but what he heard in the man’s voice differed from the anger and rage he often aimed in Mitch’s direction. What he was hearing was fear.
“Yes, Sir.” He hadn’t called his father sir in years, if ever.
The line went dead.
Mitch stood on the 50-yard line when he heard the helicopter approaching from the south. He’d left Rochelle asleep in the bed. That was easier than trying to explain away a last minute chopper ride to who the fuck knows where, especially when he was forbidden to give out any details.
A viral outbreak, his father had said. What did that even mean? Zika? Ebola? It must be pretty fucking serious to round up everyone in congress and their dipshit families. He wondered if that was just a cover story and if the truth was an impending terrorist attack. Maybe ISIS bought a fleet of nukes and planned to make every major U.S. city glow.
When he saw the chopper dropping from the sky was of the military variety, his terrorist theory gained even more strength. A door swung open and a soldier carrying one of the biggest rifles Mitch had ever seen pointed at him.
“Mitchell Frederick Chapman?”
Mitch nodded. His mouth had gone too dry to speak.
“Show me your ID.”
Not even a 'please'. Mitch flashed the Student ID on his lanyard. The soldier examined it, looked at Mitch’s face, then turned his attention to a clipboard. He saw what he wanted and waved Mitch forward. When he was close enough, the man grabbed Mitch by the back of the jacket and hoisted him aboard. Mitch fell into the dusty canvas seat and rolled into a sitting position.
“Buckle up.”
Mitch saw the soldier’s nameplate read Miller and did as ordered. “Where are we going?”
Miller didn’t respond to Mitch. Instead, he hammered the cockpit door and the helicopter began a rapid ascension. Mitch looked down at the campus where a few of his classmates were looking skyward toward the spectacle.
“Hey, where are you taking me?”
The soldier looked at Mitch through his black sunglasses. “That’s classified. Speaking of which, let me see your phone.”
It took Mitch two tries to pull it from his pocket because his hands had gone cold and sweaty. He handed it over to Miller who immediately powered the unit down. Mitch held out his hand for its return, but instead Miller tossed it out of the chopper, where it plummeted into the abyss.
“Nice,” Mitch said. “Thanks for that. You know who my father is, right?” Ugh, the ‘you know who my dad is’ card. Tha
t was low, even for him.
“I do. Now why don’t you shut your ratty little face—” Miller sneezed twice, then resumed, “And be thankful you’re one of the few people who get to live through this.”
He turned his back to Mitch, who felt like he’d just been punched in the gut. It wasn’t the insult. he’d heard worse, even from his own parents.
One of the few people who get to live… What the fuck was happening?
Chapter 6
The cold steel of the crescent wrench felt good in his hand. He liked the weight of it. That the bolt holding on the broken wheel bearing refused to budge hadn’t even annoyed him. Yet. Solomon Baldwin was a patient man. Patience was, he thought, one of his best qualities. The ability to remain calm when a lesser man would lose his temper or dissolve into a blubbering mess had risen him far beyond his expected station in life.
He clenched his jaw and used almost all of his considerable strength against the bolt. Just as it gave way, he heard two bints chattering away from the sidewalk. One power walked and held small weights in each hand. The other pushed a baby buggy.
Solomon didn’t know their names, but their plain homely faces were familiar enough. He remembered them from the neighborhood picnics his wife, Wendy, forced him to attend, even though he’d have rather spent his time crushing his own balls in a vice than socialize. Their voices were murmurs, but he knew they were talking about him.
“Last week, LuAnn saw the guy from the gas company, the one with the beard who reads the meters--”
“He looks like the guy from the Dos Equis commercials.”
“I guess, kinda. But she saw him walking out of their house,” she nodded toward the Baldwin homestead, “zipping up his pants and grinning like a tomcat.”
“God, I hope that’s true. Maybe I have a chance.”
“But your husband’s sorta handsome. Not like him.” She glanced toward Solomon's driveway, but couldn’t see him peering back from the cover of darkness beneath the car. “Could you blame her? He reminds me of a wild dog. About as charming as one, too.”