Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End

by James Curcio

  “Huh?”

  “The brains. Never mind. We’d better go.”

  “Yeah...”

  The two of them jumped into the car and took off.

  Inside, the waitress was on the phone. “That’s right. A coked out prostitute and a transvestite with tits! Splattered poor Ed’s head all over the parking lot.”

  Jesus tapped on the window with the handle of her gun.

  Loki opened the door. “We should have just left you assholes.”

  “Joyride, sorry,” Lilith said.

  Jesus entered silently.

  “What happened?” Loki asked.

  “We were going to get pancakes, but got distracted,” Lilith said.

  “Description match. Lilith and the tranny,” a young cop said to Trevino.

  “Her name is Jesus.”

  “Doesn’t seem right, calling it that,” the cop said.

  Trevino stared at him a minute and shook his head in disgust. “Anything physical?”

  “I just wouldn’t fuck anything with a dick–”

  “Evidence.”

  “Oh. Casing. Tires.” He shrugged.

  Trevino grunted. He peered down at the chalk outline where Ed’s remains had been minutes before. It was stained black around the head region.

  “If we can bring one of them in and work them with the witness statements–” the cop said.

  “–Good luck with that.” Trevino turned and walked back to his car, scowling.

  He met his own gaze in the rear-view mirror. Exhausted, sunken eyes returned the stare. They closed. He took a deep breath and went perfectly still. Then, in a flurry of rapid motion, he slammed open the glove compartment, pulled out a napkin, and held it across the steering wheel with his pen out. He wrote “GROUND ZERO’S JUST GROUND” crudely, with his left hand. Crumpled the napkin in his fist.

  He got out of the car and approached the waitress. She was leaning outside the front door, hands shaking as she sucked down a menthol cigarette.

  “Would you mind showing me where they sat, ma’am?” he asked.

  Stubbing out her smoke, the waitress nodded.

  A few minutes later, Trevino stormed out.

  “Did you look under the table?” he asked the cop.

  “Yes. Nothing.”

  Trevino held up an evidence bag with the napkin inside. “This isn’t nothing. Write it up.”

  “I didn’t find it.”

  “Write it up and you didn’t miss it, either. Do better, kid.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Time to call the Suits and ask for more resources.

  Intermission

  It took Don a long time to realize that the horrible buzzing wasn’t emanating from a three-foot tall green goddess with udder-like breasts. Hathoor the cow-goddess had somehow been jumbled up by his subconscious, now sharing cognitive space with the green-skinned alien that Kirk tried to fuck, and the backwards-talking midget from Twin Peaks. She was hovering above him, her mouth wrenched open in an eternal, orgasmic wail – that electric heat scraped his eardrums with razors, gutting his miserable brain like an acoustic fishhook. Stuck on the end of the hook, he flopped and floundered, dragged slowly from a far more pleasant realm.

  No, not a fishhook. It was an alarm clock. Which meant he had to go to work. A treadmill, headed nowhere. The wailing cow-teet Goddess had abandoned him to this cold world of concrete, business briefings, bullshit, and the only Gods he had left came in Grande and Make-My-Heart-Explode-All-Over-Your-Shoes sizes. That cruel gutterslut. The ungrateful whore of a cunt mother of a– OK, OK. I'm awake.

  He couldn’t remember the night before, though the drool ringing his mouth was a good indicator that it had been far from pretty. Fragments began to cohere, and his eyes widened and then slammed shut.

  Yeah. He had crashed a company’s stock and smeared their public image because he was bored and Wild Turkey was a hell of a drink. No strippers, no reptile wrestling. Just an empty bottle, an empty apartment, and a horde of empty people that would do anything to – He rolled over and fell straight onto the floor. Train of thought derailed. The alarm continued ringing from one room over, droning on like an unfed baby.

  He finally reached the alarm and threw it. Hard. Really good thing he never had children. He tapped keyboards and mouses as he made his way to the harsh glare of the bathroom, knocking computers out of their binary dreams. After brushing away the residue of last night’s dinner, he sat down in front of a monitor and started scanning the headlines over a cup of unsweetened black coffee.

  He was mostly looking for Google alerts linked to Europharm's recent “product releases.” Europharm was his employer. One in a long line of corporations he’d infiltrated. Don had everything there was to be had on them. Documents, files, video and photographic evidence, financials. Every piece of information that passed through the company was available to him, from the sickening and puerile emails passed between certain secretaries and middle managers, to the top-level deals with other corporations and bodies of government.

  Right now, some eleven-year-olds were strapping bombs to their chests and calling themselves the Youth Resistance. That couldn't really be causally tied to their products, despite the fact that the members of this little cult had more chemicals than blood in their veins. Legal got them off with a slap on the wrists but the press – diligent little public servants, always in search of the biggest scare-hypnotic they could find – was still working their street-corners, trying to tie this Youth Resistance to the viral following of a band called “Babylon.”

  The worlds of PR and SEO had joined forces. You just needed two words mentioned next to each other in a newscast and pretty soon, the two of them may as well have fucked each other for the past decade. Weapons of destruction in Iraq, you say? Don only knew that he had to keep his finger to this pulse, as when you want to bring down Goliath, it’s best to sling someone else’s stones. Better the Youth Resistance or Babylon than him, when it came time to lose a pound of flesh in the courtroom. (Or to the court of public opinion, which took a Super-size order of flesh with a side of blood and offal.)

  “Nice,” he said to no one in particular, leaning back in his chair. Asshole execs had assumed this story would get buried beneath the fold. Instead, it was getting top billing. “EUROPHARM CHEMICALS LINKED TO YOUTH RESISTANCE SUICIDE BOMBERS.”

  Had a certain dadaist ring to it. Just like he'd said, bold in the fucking New York Times. But no one ever listened to him. Those on the board would get theirs. They'd all get theirs.

  He almost fell backwards, and quickly sat up straight.

  The Europharm AG boardroom glowed with a diffuse light, emanating from behind frosted glass globes positioned at regular intervals along the slate walls. Don recognized a number of the faces around the table, the sinister cabal of leeches that sat on the board of directors – the head of marketing, the Vice President with his classic comb-over, the rat-faced CFO – all men of note, who held onto their positions precariously under the critical gaze of the company’s CEO. There was some unspoken executive rule: Stereotypes are only allowed past this line. Don imagined they drank their morning coffee after crawling out of sarcophagi hidden somewhere on the mysterious thirteenth floor.

  The present CEO’s predecessor, Mark Greenwald, had increased profits by a wide margin. Ironically, Mark died from complications from Effexarin, a drug he helped market. God giveth and He taketh away.

  Before Mark’s passing just a couple weeks ago, he handpicked Al, the current CEO. The board took umbrage with this decision, but, through a series of Shakespearean power-plays and a healthy dose of good luck, Al maintained the CEO spot. Quite simply, Al beat the board’s first pick to death with his own mother’s arm, and ripped the face off of the second replacement. Eventually the board had to bow to the unremitting will of their new Genghis Khan.

  This group of desiccated mummies were leaning in towards the shiny mahogany table, waiting on Al’s reaction to the vice president’s most recent sugges
tion. This would be the first time Don actually sat in a meeting with Al since the changeover occurred.

  What Don found at the end of the table shocked him so completely that he almost dropped the report in his hand. He frantically looked from one sweaty suit to the next. They were all subconsciously holding their breath, eyebrows raised expectantly. None of them seemed concerned with anything aside from Al’s acceptance of their ideas – expressed with guttural hoots, arm flailing, or cooing.

  They weren’t distressed by the fact that Al, their CEO, was a chimpanzee.

  Al crawled onto the table, shot a wrinkled pink hand up into the air, and let out a grunt before it dropped down, knuckles rapping loudly. There came an audible sigh from the crowd. Apparently, they interpreted this as approval for the advertising budget. A $500,000 campaign, greenlit with the wave of a hairy arm.

  In an attempt to regain his composure, Don straightened up and cleared his throat. “I know this isn't a PR meeting, but. I wanted to bring up the piece that was recently published in the New York Times.”

  “That's not what this meeting is about,” Dave, the head of advertising interjected. “You're just here as a favor.”

  Don generally reported to Dave. Don's contempt for this beast had nearly shattered his impeccably obsequious façade when they spoke privately. His cover would be blown, and that could get ugly very fast. He wanted to squeeze Dave’s T-bone steak neck until his eyes turned to foam.

  The Beast. That’s what he called Dave to himself, reciting it over and again in a hate-mantra incited to invoke the Gods of malice that’d let him hold cover just a bit longer. It wasn’t just because the man was evil, the very embodiment of the abomination that beset the fall of Babylon. It was the way he wheezed when he breathed, like he wasn't even human. The veins that stuck out of his eyes swirled in place, like gray worms. The bulge in his strangely fitting slacks made it look like he was wearing a diaper when he waddled around. Don wasn’t sure how much of his anarchistic world view actually leaked in these instances. Possibly too much.

  They were still in the boardroom. He was eye to eye with a chimpanzee. A chimpanzee valued at 6.2 billion dollars. No time for such daydreams. “I'm sorry, what were we talking about?” Don asked.

  “The New York Times article that you're about to waste our time with,” Dave said.

  “Let him speak,” one of the Lawyers said, after scrutinizing Al’s face. “He is curious to hear this.”

  Al sat down on the table and lobbed a fountain pen at Dave’s head which missed by a narrow margin.

  “See?” the lawyer said, shrugging. Dave fell silent.

  Don tried to stare straight ahead without matching gazes with anyone. “Let me just read the article…you at least need to think about drafting a counter-story or a press release.”

  Al circled his fist in the air a number of times and then defecated.

  “He wants you to paraphrase,” the CFO explained over his bifocals. “His time is precious.” He then gestured to one of the assistants waiting in the shadows, who quickly swept in with machine-like efficiency to deal with the ape droppings.

  Don sighed as he tried to avoid staring at the pile of chimpanzee dung in the middle of the boardroom table as it was removed from sight. “Dr. Andrew Mosholder, a senior epidemiologist for the FDA. Moss-holder. The hell kind of name is that? Anyway, he uh found that children given antidepressants were nearly twice as likely to become suicidal as those given placebos. This you know.”

  “Yeah. Easily ignored by doctors so long as we provide sufficient incentive,” the CFO continued dryly.

  “A second series of similar tests were undertaken, in the hopes of proving the first series–” Don looked around the room. Everyone was staring at the monkey, waiting for a reaction. “Fuck this. I just want to be sure you understand the kind of business that you are in, before I unleash unspeakable war and unholy vengeance on you and the rest of your kind in the name of the mother hive brain. You are messing with a warlock.”

  As Don spoke Al waddled off the table and fell asleep in his chair.

  “I’m sorry Don, our CEO doesn’t consider this news worthy of his time, but we will talk about it later–”

  Dave said. “Now let’s move on to real issues, shall we?” He waved his hand dismissively in Don’s direction.

  Don shook his head, heat rising to his cheeks. They hadn’t heard a word he’d said. “Yes, sir.”

  He turned and left.

  The rest of the day, Don couldn’t focus on his work. Instead, he pondered the company he now served.

  This was Europharm’s business: One: Restless Leg Itchy Crotch Syndrome Is A Real Disease. Inventing a disorder based on constellations of psychological and physical complaints, and selling medications which help some of those symptoms, while in the process creating new ones in other areas. Whenever the patent on a drug was about to run out, mysteriously a new disorder would be diagnosed and dispatched to the press, a drug would be renamed, a marketing campaign re-tooled, and the machine marched on.

  Two: We Have A Cure To Your Wretched State of Existence, Just Speak To Your Doctor. Convincing doctors to over-prescribe their meds. He felt sorry in a way for the doctors, who really did want to help their patients and had to sort through hundreds of ad-speak laden glossy pamphlets every day.

  Three: You Are Afflicted, And It Will Never Go Away. (But our drug may help keep the symptoms at bay.) This was generally done to the patients by proxy through the doctor.

  Psych meds were the biggest sellers in this market. Because the diagnosis of these disorders is symptomatic – you can't test for bi-polar disorder. Why not? If these diseases are caused by abnormal levels of certain neurochemicals, then you should be able to test someone and see if they're considerably off from the norm, like testing someone for their vitamin D levels. Don knew this kind of testing was impossible. He knew it because he'd seen the reports. The fact is, people's neurochemical levels only become abnormal after they've been subjected to their drugs. But these are subtleties the public is bored by. Uncertainty gives leeway for spin.

  These more nebulous disorders were Europharm’s bread and butter. Admittedly, they did this as a result of substantial financial pressure. Though the first pill may cost millions in R&D, the profit margin on every pill that follows is phenomenal. The trick is getting it in enough bloodstreams. A lifetime sentence of medication sounds like a cash register opening, to the boardroom.

  This is where public-facing marketing kicked in. Even to a well schooled doctor, if a particular disorder is getting a news report every night, it’ll be at the top of their mind.

  Their lobbying also gave them a firm grip on the legislation on the other end of the process. It was, as they say, a “fixed game,” which explained why Dave was unruffled by the news that Don presented in the board room. Popular opinion could fuck itself in a closet with a rusty shovel, the story would be out with tomorrow’s trash.

  He emphatically pounded his skinny white fist on the desk in front of him. Something has to be done. It’s time for shit to get real. It’s time for The Plan.

  Later that afternoon he entered Dave’s office, carrying his laptop under one arm and his lunch (contained in a paper bag from McDonald’s) in the other. Dave’s horse-faced secretary was too focused on typing out a text message on her cellphone to bother acknowledging his existence.

  Dave sat behind a massive desk, silhouetted before floor-to-ceiling windows. Don stood in front of the desk for a moment in silence, broken only by Dave’s labored breathing. Don felt like Luke Skywalker confronting Jabba the Hutt.

  “You wanted me?” Don prompted, resisting the urge to deliver Luke’s line. If Dave caught the reference it would be all the worse for him, and if he didn’t it would just confuse him.

  Still not looking him in the eye, Dave slowly opened up a drawer on his desk, and pulled out a cigar. After running it under his hairy nostrils as he inhaled deeply, he leaned back and pushed a button, turning off the smoke alarm.<
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  “Yes,” he said at length. “Have a seat.” His blood-shot eyes finally locked with Don’s. They were the eyes of a reptile. A stony, stupid and yet ruthless cunning lurked there that constantly asked: can I eat it, or will it eat me?

  Dave clutched the cigar impotently between his teeth as they stared at each other uneasily. Instead of speaking, he crossed his feet on the desk, which was bare except for an ashtray and a thick glass with a telltale pale amber puddle inside – the remnants of Glenlivit on the rocks left out too long.

  This was meant to demonstrate his superiority in this environment, however Don was too busy thinking about alcohol. Don was a fan of single malt himself. In his opinion it was a liquor well suited to back-room meetings.

  It wasn’t right for this meeting, however. Scotch was a drink to be shared between co-conspirators. The plot he was about to unleash called for a couple shots of tequila, which was generally a far less Machiavellian liquor. He doubted Dave would catch his sinister intentions if he asked for Cabo Wabo, a brand owned by a rock star, which seemed fitting, all things considered. But, no. This plane would have to be landed sober.

  “You are an idiot Don,” Dave said, breaking a measured the silence. “Sometimes I really wish we didn’t hire any of your kind here, but it seems that if we want an IT department, there isn’t any choice. Otherwise, you’d probably be homeless, handing out small-minded feel-good pamphlets on street corners. But I am a nice guy. You know that right, Don? So let’s talk a little bit about business, shall we?” He lit the cigar. Each breath sounded like a death rattle.

  Don pulled a chair up to the desk and gingerly put his laptop down on the floor. “Sure, let’s.” He could smell scotch on Dave’s breath from ten feet away. It cut right through the pungent smoke. I warn you not to underestimate my powers, Don thought to himself.