by Jake Packard
Jack Storm’s arresting good looks and down-to-earth disposition, his inborn charm and natural charisma, as well as an innate wisdom beyond his years, soon won the recognition of people in the government at that time. He became the youngest person ever to be nominated to a judgeship in the Second Federal District.
He did not like being a judge. In what he always perceived as an unwieldy and outdated legal system, Jack detested basing his decisions on matters of procedure as opposed to matters of justice. He hated letting the bad guys with good lawyers go free.
So he stepped down from the bench. But because of the many supporters he had gathered, and the efforts of his long time friend and college roommate, Sam Gallant, before too long, Teddy’s son blazed a campaign trail for Manhattan Borough president, which he won by the largest margin in city history. Oh, the grand times, overflowing with gusto, good spirit and the flush of success. Endless opportunities presented themselves for him, his wife Anita, and their newborn baby boy.
The blast came just weeks after he took office. Life as everyone knew it changed forever.
Some say Jack’s single-handed vision and fortitude kept the city from ripping itself apart and burning to the ground in terror and anguish. Though he did play that large a part, it did not come easy. He had to make personal sacrifices as great as any other single person who survived the infamy of that day. He stood firm in his personal grief and despair, exuding the natural leadership and strength that the city so desperately needed. He worked with furious passion to keep the shock, bloodshed, death, and disruption from sinking New York into the depths of a physical and moral abyss.
Long years that seem like centuries later, he still ruled the fractured and besieged city through its daily tribulations, but now more with his intuition and his heart than with his well-known iron fist. He still retained most of his youthful good looks, and wore well the scars of his monumental rise to power with distinction and dignity, like the graying of sideburns.
On the morning of the winter solstice the Mayor sat at his state-of-the-art workstation ringed with flat screen monitors. All the information he could want from anywhere, rested at his fingertips, but something felt off. Ironic, he thought, that all this great knowledge never came with any real answers, like those he now sought. He had learned to create his own solutions, and his city survived on those outcomes. But today that felt not enough.
One of the many dedicated landlines rang. He picked it up knowing who called, but took a deliberate pause for composure. “Morning, Sam.”
Sam Gallant, his chief of staff, former Columbia roommate, and the original John Kennedy Storm supporter from a long time before the bomb said, “I have Euro-Reich, Sony, Apple, Digi-Bell, and Singapore, for starters, all on hold. The Union of New England City-States, as well as NYCTV and LAFox are demanding more than the feed you’re allowing through ABCNN. They’re screaming at me that the brownout is against the charter and, if they can’t create their own coverage, they want to be fused in and allowed to broadcast the signal through their own links. They are complaining about the brutish attitude we are taking over this issue. And Jack, maybe you should run that by the General.”
The General Pellet sat very close by listening in.
Sam continued. “Everyone is in a very urgent mode. The Ayatollah in Basra is threatening his usual embargo . . .”
Jack interrupted. “It is all legal Sam, under the Emergency City Charter, which I enacted last night.”
“I was hoping we didn’t have to get into that again, Jack. You know how I feel. Even though it is legal, it is politically dangerous. It’s already working against us. I don’t want to see you start digging your own grave.”
“Listen, Sam, I figured that if we went brown, it would be far less explosive and much more conducive for Salem’s unhindered release. This situation is too volatile, even without the complication of multiple media outlets trying to accompany everything we do.”
Jack stopped. Voices sang in his ear.
Sam continued. “But Jack, judging by the way the Alliance seems to be forming ranks over this, I think you are underestimating the power shift possibilities. By making it off limits you are focusing the world more keenly on these events. I know there are influences in and around this office that would like to play down the potential value of his strength, but I feel we may just be on the verge of a volcano, and if this causes the top to blow off . . .”
Jack broke out of his reverie and interrupted. “I know how you feel, Sam. Sorry, it’s done, and you have no choice. Just do your job, which you do better than anyone, and tell everybody out there to keep it cool. This is my city. I make the rules. This is working out just the way I anticipated. We are at the eleventh hour and everyone’s uptight. So now, I’m going to act like I’m conceding something. Tell them that I will grant a feed out from ABCNN so they can broadcast with their own sponsors, but they get no coverage of their own. Now they’ll feel like they won something. The transmission goes out all over the world, but it’s still under our control.”
Sam paused. He breathed. “As always, Jack, you are the man. But may I indulge you with a little sidebar of my personal concerns? Even though this is your city right now, I caution you that this Salem thing has the ability to easily nosedive out of everybody’s control.” The phones hung up on both ends.
Several feet away, a grim General Pellet looked at the Mayor and said in a monotone, “It is a different world one moment after the next, Jack, and that’s why we do what we have to do.”
“Now don’t you get me started, Rodney. You and Sam are the only people left who know me from way back and can talk to me in earnest.” Storm smiled like a kid for just the briefest second, then returned to the profundity in front of him.
“There aren’t many who are left alive from back then, Jack.” The General answered.
The two most powerful men in New York sat motionless, silent, each immersed in their individual universe, stuck in some wordless glue.
Pellet broke through the frost now forming around them. “Don’t worry, the brownout is sound. I will make it work. Like you said, we are giving the world the coverage and the commercial time they demand, just keeping it all under our control so it doesn’t become a circus. No one knows who this Salem Jones is or even what he looks like. Or most importantly, who he actually works for. These writings of his could all be coded messages that will kick-start the jihad all over again. They could be a signal to the sleepers of al-Qaeda or ISIS or, just as bad, activate the Born Again from the Rockies. You have to exercise control in this case, Jack. Besides, if we had let them in, the security concerns at Rikers would have gone over the waterfall.”
Jack rose to the surface from the bottom of the ocean of his inner dialog. “All of a sudden you are concerned for this man’s safety? All month long I’ve been trying to keep you from turning this into another Dallas, 1963.”
Pellet smiled without being glad. “I did not plan on assassinating him.”
Jack stared into the General’s eyes. “Do not ask if I believe you.”
The General continued. “But, we have to prepare for every contingency, Mr. Mayor. That is why I am alive today. That is why you are alive today.”
The phone rang on Pellet’s desk. He picked it up. Sam’s voice muttered from in the earpiece, “It’s for you. The President of the United States. On line five.”
Pellet barely reacted. “Tell her I’m busy and to call back later.” He hung up the phone.
Jack felt a chill run through the room, and then it ran up and down his spine. He turned his eyes to an ebony picture frame placed in full view by his main personal monitor. He reached for it and held it close. In the picture a younger Mayor stands next to a beautiful dark woman with long straight black hair, holding a brown newborn infant. In the background with his arms around them all, smiling like the cover boy for Grandpa Magazine, beamed the very proud Theodore Roosevelt Storm. All four caught motionless in a slice of digital time, forever alive together
in every dimension except this one.
* * * * *
The General
Hired by the Corporation to protect and defend the city-state of New York, one of Rodney Pellet’s official titles made him the Chief of Police of New York City. He derided the name. As touted as they once had been, the NYPD had become a useless burden, degenerating into a union of impotency, without the muscles or balls to enforce the rules a post nuclear exchange society imposed upon itself. The city could not afford a company of corpulent traffic ticket writers who could not deal with the massive social problems of the new world. So, when the First Army privatized its operations after the decentralization of the federal government, and they became commissioned to the city for its defense against all its enemies, out went New York’s finest, and in came the First Army under the auspicious leadership of General Rodney Pellet.
Having known the mayor since high school and the historic championship basketball game, the media had a field day with Pellet’s appointment. They made it seem like a perfect fit. Like the Mayor, the General seemed destined to be a media star as an NBA marquee player. So his decision to go to West Point after attending one of the most dangerous high schools from one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city caused a loud commotion. Like Jack, Pellet had bigger dreams of his own than just hoops. In that way they were too much alike.
So the press let is ride instead of looking for cracks under the veneer and avoided creating the usual problems for politicians. Even the jugheads on the Alternet let it slide. New York needed some positive news after so many successive tragedies. But, it didn’t seem right for the people to refer to him as “General,” even though that is what they got, so the puppet press titled his position “Chief of Police”, an unabashed euphemism that Pellet hated as much as he hated the press.
The General swung his chair around in the operations room in the armored office. He watched Jack look at his picture. Pellet saw something in Jack he had never seen before. There were slight, but noticeable variations in the processes going on within the mayor’s usual very aggressive, yet very reflective form of analysis and deliberation. Now he sometimes seemed to drift somewhere else, out of touch.
He knew that Jack mourned his family. It was a theme his entire life. The Mayor’s mom died in childbirth, so he grew up as the only child of Teddy. Although poor, his dad made him first priority. Jack could actually pause, take his time and collect his thoughts as he grew up alone with his dad at the dinner table. Theodore doted on his every word.
Being the youngest of seven brothers and one sister, The General grew up in a different way. Rodney had to scream to get any attention. His parents had to work all the time just to feed the kids and hardly ever were around at home to watch baby Rodney. So, the general raised himself by observing his older brothers who let him tag along wherever they went. Thereby he came to his own conclusions about life, one of which was that he had to defend himself and those he loved at all times and at all costs. He learned that early on, and he learned it well. He instinctively knew how to attain power and keep it against all odds. That may have revealed itself way back on the streets of Brooklyn where the mystery is still unsolved.
Late one afternoon Rodney and two of his older brothers were chilling out in the park by the school, which was really an area of concrete and broken glass with a couple of net-less and bent basketball rims. Kids of all ages always hung out around there and that’s where they learned the stuff they really needed to know to survive life as it actually was.
That ill-fated day, a much older badass bully with some of his big-ass friends approached the three youngest Pellet brothers with the sole purpose of removing them from whatever pocket money they may have been carrying. Rodney, being the very youngest, and too small, was assumed to have none, but he still had to be held back by two of the biggest of those assholes while he being forced to watch them knock his brothers bloody around the park. Finally, the brothers Pellet relinquished five dollars and some change they had made earlier in the day helping out their landlord. It wasn’t easy work cleaning up the mess in their apartment building’s basement left by that the last batch of squatters. Just cleaning up the skuzzy shit wouldn’t have been so bad, but the squatter’s themselves were still there, and two of them were dead, the third almost. The smell was an exponent of awful and, when the last squatter who was originally assumed dead awoke from some unconscious condition derived from some designer drug, he became extremely agitated. The Pellet boys had to go into physical combat with a zombie just to get paid a few bucks.
All in all, it was just a bad day. But Rodney, forced to stand back and watch as some misanthropes from the hood beat up his beloved brothers, took it real bad.
Later that night, Rodney seemed a bit distracted during dinner and while helping to clean up afterwards. When the rest of the brood wanted to watch old reruns of Desperate Housewives in the living room, he volunteered to stay alone in the kitchen and finish. Always so well behaved, they didn’t have to pay him much mind. After the show finished, Rodney still worked away, whistling while washing up the last of the dinner stuff, while putting the dishes and carving knives away. He took a shower. After which he passed through the living room where they still sat watching TV, and said good night with the dreamy tones of a peaceful sleep already in his tired little voice. He slept so well his brothers had to drag him out of bed to get him to school on time the next day.
But there they learned that the very bully who had harassed them the day before was found in the park stabbed to death so many times that his head and limbs were scattered about like so much gutter trash. To this day they never found a clue as to who did it. However, the Pellet brothers were never bothered by anyone again. And everybody wanted to be Rodney’s friend, as the shine around his special talents started to glow.
Pellet took another sip of coffee as Jack put the picture frame on his lap. He watched the Mayor close his eyes. He said, “I’m assuming you are still in the process of letting go?”
“Don’t we have far more important things to concern ourselves than my emotional life?” Jack’s abrupt answer surprised them both.
“If I didn’t think it was paramount to this moment I wouldn’t be bringing it up. Dwelling in the past might be affecting your decisions right now. So let’s try to stick to the present, Jack.”
A chilly psychic wind began to blow as Jack put the picture back on the shelf.
“This compromise, this arrangement we had to make to handle this sticky mess is the worst house of cards,” Jack said. “I went along with the brownout for one reason, Rodney--your counsel. No one else in the administration wanted it. The Alliance is against it, as is every multinational that owns a piece of this city.”
“Well, considering the multiple, high-level consequences this event can mean to New York City, as well as the incredible lack of information I have to work with, I still think we are playing it too soft.” Pellet answered.
“Nonetheless, my old friend and most powerful general in the so-called free world, what is most important right now are my considerations. Forget about what the Alliance wants.”
“We have already discussed ad nauseam what could happen if it turns out this dude is really another attempt by the jihadists to perpetrate more chaos and disorder here in New York,” The General countered. “My clients hire me to keep that from happening. Believe me, it’s politics all over again, just a game they have to play to placate their populations while maintaining market flow. So, publically they complain about some breach of charter or broken contracts, but I know what they really want. They want me to do this my way.”
“What a joke, Rodney. If we did it your way you’d shoot him in the head on the jailhouse steps as he walked out, even though by law he’s a free man.”
“Not me, Jack. Too many cameras. I’d make it look like an inside job.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?”
“It would have been the right thing to do to protect my city,” the General r
etorted.
A dead, silent standoff between the two most powerful men in New York. The cold psychic wind began to tinge the room an icy blue.
“You know, the way I look at it, Jack, I was the one who compromised for you, beyond what I think is right.”
“Good then, General,” the Mayor responded. “That will have to do. Now everyone needs to stay firmly committed to the strategy that is now in motion.”
“But where does that get us, Jack? We have no plan after eight o’clock this morning. At that point we are at his mercy. Where is he going to go? What’s he going to do? Do you think he’ll just saunter into the Plaza Hotel for a massage and a cocktail?”
“Come on General, why so melodramatic? You have the most sophisticated corps of military police ever, equipped with the most modern techno-detecto gear. He can’t just disappear. So we have to wait and see.”
“According to your plan, or lack of plan is better put, we are just going to give up control to this complete unknown alien and allow him the first move. Didn’t we learn this lesson already, Jack? How much fallout can we handle, political or otherwise, from sitting on our thumbs and doing nothing proactive?”
“You are assuming he is guilty of something. What? He has lived in that prison since the moment he was born. Most people on the planet consider that grossly inhumane, since he never committed a crime in his life. But more importantly,” Jack’s eyes narrowed into slits as he asked, “Do I perceive same vague possibility that you might want to deviate from our agreed-upon plan?”