The Manhattan Prophet

by Jake Packard

* * * * *

  The Meeting

  As the helicopter lifted off from the shores of Cranberry Lake, Maria felt stronger than ever, sharp, centered.

  After the introductions, the chancellor of Euro-Reich kicked the meeting off with a long piercing stare that made her shiver. It then turned into a stony cold smile that didn’t even try to mask his personal consternation.

  The Sony CEO spoke first, most clearly and succinct . . . events of the past several decades have left western man in no position to clamor for the individual liberties and personal freedoms in which they luxuriated before . . . life needed to be restricted, limited, regulated . . . and most importantly, the media has to be controlled . . . it causes too much fear . . . it causes too much chaos and discordance . . . the pace of the Exchange proved all that . . . Broadcast news glued people to their TVs as horrific events of enormous magnitude unfolded all over the planet, and the media with its own self-interests put their biased spin on things . . . this made the daily challenge of control and distribution of the resources that keep people alive most difficult . . . we live in a post-Exchange world, at any moment another huge disaster could take out millions and put the entire planet into advanced economic aftershock . . . society depends on trade and the buying and selling of goods and commodities . . . any danger that threatens the super-corporations and the allied cities must be removed . . . the Alliance was not prepared for a worldwide movement that enhanced the spiritual, de-emphasized the material, and advocated a return to simpler ways . . . the leaders of the world agreed, Salem was bad for business.

  The others of the Alliance at the table had heard this speech before, but seemed to admire the eloquence and ardor with which he delivered it once again. Yet the woman who ran Singapore affected Maria the most. Smooth, like a tree snake clinging to the bark without any apparent effort, blending into the environment, putting both prey and predators off guard. She rose from her chair, walked around the room to where Maria sat and leaned on the conference table. She propped herself right in Maria’s face. She took Maria’s hand in her own and looked deep into her eyes. They trusted Maria she said . . . they had studied all of her Salem Jones clips of the last six months . . . they knew the story because of Maria’s efforts, her research, her passion . . . now they needed her . . . they needed her to help the world stand against the ignorance and the superstition.

  The General, operating with apparent ease amongst the corporate czars, interjected. He thought Salem hid in New York, inside Shantypark.

  The lawyer for the Microsoft delegation intervened and applauded Pellet’s hypothesis. All who wielded the world’s power seemed to agree.

  Then the curious woman leaned deep into Maria’s face. Her voice turned even softer, but more forceful. Whispering, her face so close the breath from her words moved tips of Maria’s hair . . . my dear, one more newscast broadcast live over every station in every part of the planet could change the way the whole world thinks . . . unprecedented exposure in a world of monstrous precedents . . . they needed the exclusive interview . . . the opportunity of a lifetime.

  The General laughed and agreed. She already had the sympathies of the entire planet. People connected to the story through her. Maria was the one woman for the job.

  The pale, thin middlesex director of Digi-Bell agreed with the General, and asked where the location of this newscast should take place.

  Right outside Shantypark, Pellet answered. Broadcasting from there would show the world that that they had nothing to fear because they, the powers that be, had everything in control.

  The rest of the room vocalized a collective agreement, but John Kennedy Storm, as throughout the entire meeting, remained unusually quiet.

  After that business, they asked her to leave. While waiting for the Mayor and the General to finish, she gathered her coat and wandered out the door, leaving Jerry, who had great reticence for the cold, back in the lodge by the cozy fireplace. She made her way back down the steep path towards the lake, her head filled with promises and dreams.

  She stood at the water’s edge, near an egg-shaped boulder. The lake, several inches away, barely licked the sand on which she stood. In the strength of the noon day sun, she became awash with the incredible possibilities waiting for her. Yet she found focus centered right here on this spot. She tried to imagine how many countless times the planet had rotated this lake to this vantage point under the winter sun.

  “It is said this is the boulder by the lake where the clan mother came to birth her children, and there…” he said pointing to a cluster of white birch on a rise near where they stood, “was found the remains of a longhouse she used hundreds of years ago to guide her people, her warriors and farmers, in the ways of the Great Fathers and the Creator Mother.”

  Maria turned to see Deganawida looking deep into her eyes. He didn’t startle her, but how did he get so close without her hearing him? And beside him stood little Tadodaho, eyes much wiser than his age.

  They stood in silence looking at the world over each other’s shoulder. She studied the cluster of birch at the top of the hill, imagining a great house where people could live in peace and harmony, and he stared out at the lake waters, reflecting on the power of the sun.

  He began to pray in a tongue she didn’t understand but which stirred her soul.

  The ancient chanting and the mantra of Deganawida’s melody, something she recognized but could not place, still swirled in her head a couple of hours later when Sam guided the stealth chopper down into a perfect landing onto the helipad on the City Hall roof. Without a moment’s thought or hesitation, Maria jumped out on the run.

  * * * * *

  The Broadcast

  Herbie sat in the driver’s seat, parked in the security zone across the street from the mayor’s office. When he saw Jerry and Maria step out of the side entrance and on to the street, he threw the Hummer into gear and moved the vehicle along side the curb to pick them up. They popped into the back. Herbie noticed the voltage in his body when he made eye contact with Maria through the rear view mirror.

  In and around all the excitement Maria felt with her career about to skyrocket, she knew it would be hard work to ignore Herbie. She longed to talk with him.

  Branford, back to his cocky and conceited self, like yesterday never happened, began to chatter away. “Eighty-ninth and Fifth Avenue, cabbie, and get the asphalt out of your asshole buddy, we are in a hurry.”

  “How did you know where we were going?” Maria shot out at Branford.

  “The General called me himself. Wanted me to look out for the crowds of homeless trash hanging around Shantypark. Doesn’t want them in the picture. This is going to be a clean broadcast. Herbie, if he ain’t too drunk, is gonna line us up again with the satellite that’s going to put us live everywhere on this news hungry planet.”

  Squirrel killers posted on every corner waved the Hummer through the traffic, which made the drive uptown quick, a relief to Maria who did not want to listen to Branford’s constant insulting babble. The closer they got, the thicker the crowds grew, completely opposite the norm, because most people always kept as far away from Shantypark as they could.

  Herbie pulled the Hummer up by the chosen broadcast location near the old Guggenheim Art Museum, now desolate and bullet ridden. It stood like an empty monument to ages long past, when people created artistic expression of their world simply for creation’s sake, and not for politics or money.

  Maria jumped out of the car before Herbie could even put it in park. He found it hard to take his eyes off her. How could he never have seen her like this before? He didn’t move, riveted to his spot behind the wheel. He knew he had to set up the transmitter but he felt compelled to watch over her.

  She brushed some of her wavy raven hair off her forehead and stood in wonder as she watched people emerge from every wrinkle of this debilitated part of the city. They came out in a slow, tentative manner, from the abandoned luxury apartments, doorways, alleyways, and burnt-out vehicles on th
e streets around, all moving towards Maria. They recognized her, they had compassion for her. They had seen her before on all the newscasts, but now their eyes sought more. As if nearness to her gave them some answers they needed. She stood amazed, She felt light-headed, almost tipsy, as they advanced towards her. Despite Jerry’s admonitions of danger, she found them childlike in their gentle approach. Like munchkins discovering Dorothy after she landed in Oz.

  But Branford found them cult-like, with the vacant eyes of deer caught in headlights. “The squirrel killers would have a field day just plowing into these pathetic animals. There wouldn’t be enough body bags to hand out to remove their carcasses.”

  The doe-eyed people continued to congregate around Maria, but with great deference. They just wanted to reach out and touch her to see if she was real.

  “Jeezuss, look at these gross freaks,” Branford remarked. “The General was right about this. Your boy must be inside that shithole. If you were the Manhattan Prophet, whom would you walk amongst? The rich and well bathed who look at you with fear and scorn and want to see you dead? Or amongst the sick and miserable, the wretched and the doomed, the ones who really need you the most?”

  The crowd thickened to the point where Jerry became uptight. Sticking to the safety of the Hummer he yelled out with urgency to Maria. “Do not go too close to those Shantypark walls, very bad men live in there.”

  Branford scoffed back, “Yo, dude, don’t you see this squadron of squirrel killers right here spread out all around us with heavy duty automatic weapons. Can’t you see their headquarters just a couple of blocks away? We are surrounded by the good guys man, and besides, there hasn’t been a raid coming out of Shantypark in over ten years.”

  Maria’s eyes glowed with delight as the Salem believers continued to encircle her. She didn’t feel Jerry’s paranoia, for in these people’s eyes she saw no hostility. Instead they seemed so innocent, almost helpless, as though lost in the woods and trying to find their way back home.

  An armored truck pushed its way up the avenue through the thickening mass of humanity congealing around the shoot site. The people in its way complied peacefully and parted a path that allowed the vehicle to pass. More soldiers jumped out of the back in full battle array and herded the people away from the Shantypark walls, and away from the camera. The General intended to show the world that a situation of control existed in New York, but at the moment it resembled a renegade cattle drive of acolytes.

  “Pellet don’t want these hordes of freaks messing up his video, that’s for sure.” Branford chuckled, as he set up the tripod to take the satellite hook up. “Oh, shit! Herbie, waddaya doing now? Get your ass out of the truck and jack us into this whole wide world.”

  Herbie didn’t move; he saw it before at Rikers Island. In came Pellet’s best, the Pythons, rodent killers of another sort, trained in crowd control. They entrap their prey, stun it and strangle it. They fanned out behind the armored vehicle carrying their titanium shields. They locked them together and pushed the people as far away from the camera focal point as possible. So many of the enchanted Salem proselytes had clamored all over the site, it had become a chaotic mess. The soldiers needed extra effort to remove those devotees caught on the inside of the perimeter they tried to establish. Herbie knew he had to get moving with the transmitter, but felt stuck in limbo, just sitting and staring at Maria from behind the steering wheel.

  “You know what, little dick,” Branford shouted, “I’m gonna shoot this anyway while you get your lazy ass ready for the transmission. The General will probably get a kick out of watching his troops clean up this human garbage dump.”

  A black BMW sedan with dark-tinted windows appeared behind the Pythons. Jerry sounded relieved. “There’s the General now. We can get this interview going and get the heck out of here.”

  General Pellet’s bulletproof Beemer moved slowly through the crowd, when a single burst of an automatic rifle dropped a squirrel killer standing only ten yards away from Branford’s tripod. The soldier buckled and fell to the ground like a bad toy.

  Screaming erupted. Shouts of panic rang out amidst the rapid spattering of automatic fire. More squirrel killers got shot, died. Men in ski masks with automatic weapons rappelled over the barricade from Shantypark, others burst out of the ground from manholes. Those neophytes closest to the camera, so docile and acquiescent before, fled in terror. Some fell victim in the crossfire as squirrel killers began to spray lead back from the direction it came. In an instant the camera crew became isolated, exposed, and vulnerable.

  Jerry, in shock and disbelief, stood by the open passenger door of the Hummer. He shouted, “Everybody over here . . .” but never finished his sentence as a bullet struck his throat and another his heart and he crumpled.

  Branford, standing next to Maria took a bullet in his chest and went down into the tripod, knocking the camera onto the ground, his body convulsing.

  Maria started to run towards the Hummer, but tripped over the collapsed tripod and fell to the street.

  Herbie leaped out of the driver’s seat into the erupting bloodshed, the automatic fire pounding his ears, punctuating the declarations of many sudden deaths. Somehow he reached her without being hit himself.

  Several thugs in ski masks poked out of the sidewalk nearby from a well-camouflaged hole in the ground, like deranged groundhogs invading from hell. Without hesitation, Herbie dove on top of Maria, covering her body with his, trying in the last way possible to keep her from harm.

  The raiders from Shantypark converged on the helpless pair huddling on the pavement clutching each other for safety. They picked them up, pulled them apart and threw them back down into the hole. They jumped in after, closing the tunnel behind them.

  As instantly as it started, it stopped. Shattered people lay in the street, and shell-shocked soldiers moved about, tending to their wounded and dead.

  Pellet emerged from his protected vehicle and walked the scene of the slaughter. He surveyed the damage with a blank expression. He looked at his cameraman groaning in the street, writhing in a puddle of his own blood, pleading to the General for help. General Pellet pulled his pistol from its holster and put a bullet through Branford’s head.

  * * * * *

  Hell-Born

  The padding of little feet, like wood sprites, scampered by near the footings of the tent, but their cackling belied their innocence. The infant demons, danced around her and above her like dervishes chanting and shouting. She moved, and abruptly they scattered this way and that, heralded by the waves of tyranny and fear from the unseen lord of darkness, which they served. Bats flew by, screeching, talons distended. Rats ran on the ground, mouths chewing, scurrying over her bindings, and leaving their droppings on her eyes and lips. The gravity weighed on her chest so fiercely that the weight of the incoming mass felt incalculable to ordinary human senses, let alone hers so heavily drugged.

  Occasionally she glimpsed a man’s face, like the hideous one missing many teeth that licked her neck, or that pierced and scarred one covered in tattoos, whose one eye dangled from a bloody socket as he peered between her legs. Staccato popping like soundtracks of old movies about newsrooms with prop typewriters, splotches of men’s laughter, skin slaps, and little smacks of dripping water leaking from some slit in something somewhere flooded her hearing. All the feeling in her skin had gone without a trace, leaving her unable to move, too numb to feel. And a wind tunnel roared, drowning out any chance for a discernible cry for help into the locusted and many-tendrilled night.

  At one point her mother came through an open window and sat on the sill, consoling and soothing, and said, “Honey, things that were meant to be are meant to be. No matter what you do, I love you dearly. But stay away from bad people, like my old friends, you know, the perverts and psychopaths you talk about on TV all the time. Your dad says you look much too serious, and he loves you, too, but he wants to see you happy, married already, with children.” And then, at the commercial break as Mom got up
to leave with her Chanel and her Jimmy Choos, she introduced the angry angel who put a needle in her leg, and shot Maria up with more spoon-cooked smizz.

  Time stilled again. The ugly ogre standing guard laughed and left the tent when Jerry came to pay his respects, affable, like he just had his third jelly doughnut and a caramel macchiato. Not too foppish, because she knew him better than that, he gave her a big wink, indicating with his Breitling black on black that it was all the time he had left and toodle-ooed out the window. Branford followed after him, hands in his pockets, shuffling his feet and shrugging his shoulders.

  The leaders of the Alliance paddled in a crystal galss canoe, asking all the right questions she knew the answers to, but Maria had not enough time or energy to muster the words.

  Shots rang out, and people screamed, and bodies fell . . . and that saving scent wrapped around her, embracing her in the hour of darkness, the memory of which has kept her alive up to here . . . but now, that almost gone, there is nothing left in the darkness but that seething, bogus angel.

  An acrid, malicious odor from something breathing close by rankled her nostrils. Unable to scream, she was sure a hell-born monster sniffed at her neck, examining her behind the ears.

  “This one will do quite nicely,” Gregor grunted, and his henchmen standing by chortled and guffawed, and chugged their black-market whiskey till it dribbled out their mouths and down their grizzly chins.

  * * * * *

  ABCNN

  The shock from the murder of the entire news crew rocked the ABCNN New York Bureau. Losing Maria Primera, only one day after becoming a global media star felt like an earthquake. But, the footage of the raid captured by Branford’s camera skyrocketed the Salem Jones story into a staggering record-breaking income in the media industry for a twenty-four-hour period, offsetting the loss of income Marty and Ira would have felt if they had been able to convert Maria’s instant stardom into a reality show.