Chaos Theory: A Feel Good Story About the End of the World

by Colin Robertson

  The spell of shock broken, the police and ten CIA agents all took up defensive positions behind their vehicles. "What the hell is going on?" yelled Police Officer Stan Mitchell.

  Charlie wanted to admit he had no idea, but he knew he had to appear in charge right now. "Just stay down," he said firmly. He'd never been under fire before. He'd always wondered how he'd react. He was terrified, but functional. So now I know, he thought. Charlie gave hand signals to the CIA field agents, telling them to fan out to surround the facility. He had no idea what was going on inside the building, but there was no way whoever was inside was getting out without his say-so. The agents rested on their haunches, ready to make the fast crouching run required to flank the structure. Charlie gave the nod. As the agents started out, a massive hail of bullets flew from the post office windows, shattering windshields, puncturing car doors, and rattling nerves. The agents ducked back to where they'd started. Evidently, thought Charlie, they've got us pinned down.

  The truth was, the people inside the post office had no idea they were even out there. The volley of gunfire had been a coordinated attempt by the employees to drive back the Germans. The postal workers, while able to put out a massive volume of bullets, weren't particularly efficacious with their aim. Most of the gunfire had hit the interior ceiling, raining dust, and debris upon all concerned. The rest had landed outside in the parking lot. A few stray bullets had hit the floor wounding a carpet salesman named Don, and striking Doug Hicks twice in the chest. The aspiring author died, sputtering deliriously, "Evil, a sin, is alive."

  Finally, there was a pause as everyone seemed to reload at once. The Germans had superior training and experience, while the postal workers had better defences and more firepower. There were now three dead mercenaries. Sheila was alive, but lay on the floor against the wall. She had a hole in her shoulder and a badly mangled hand spouting gouts of blood. She was in shock and could only wonder where her wedding band had landed after her ring finger had been shot off. The brief lull also allowed the dust and gun smoke to dissipate as shredded ceiling fans did their thing.

  "It's the PGA!" yelled one of the local police officers, finally able to catch a glimpse inside.

  "The Professional Golfers Association?" asked Charlie in disbelief.

  "The Postal Gun Association," the officer explained.

  "Oh," said Charlie, as if this made perfect sense.

  "They've got way more firepower than we do," said another officer.

  Suddenly, there was a massive barrage of bullets from inside the post office. Every window shattered from every pane. Inside, walls disintegrated and furniture turned to mulch.

  The gunfire lessened, lessened again, then stopped.

  Silence.

  A tinkling crash sounded, as the last glass shard fell from its frame.

  Silence.

  Charlie, the agents, and officers waited. Common sense said the shooting should start up again, but something told Charlie that the shooting was done. Trails of gun smoke could clearly be seen drifting from the open windows. "On my signal," said Charlie.

  "We should wait for backup," said one of the officers. The others nodded their agreement.

  "You wait for backup," said Charlie. He looked past the police officers to his own men. "Now."

  Charlie made a crouching dash towards the building's front steps, using the cars for cover as best he could. He felt a clear sense of urgency. Something told him that he had no time to do this by the book. The agents, caught between a sense of self-preservation and not wanting their boss to go in alone, followed more cautiously, guns raised.

  Charlie scrambled up the steps on his knees and rolled to just under one of the front windows. He listened for a moment, before peering up over the sill. Inside, the air was still thick with particulates. He could make out eight bodies immediately, six civilians in the middle of the floor and two postal workers behind the counters. The first was Ed, whose corpse had been shot over a two-dozen times. The second was Sheila, maimed arm at her side, a single bullet hole between her eyes. Charlie recognized the tikka-mark precision of the wound. A ceiling light fixture crashed to the floor, breaking the silence.

  Charlie motioned the agents forward, then arose himself and stepped through the now doorless door frame. Gun ready, he stepped over the bodies of post office customers. Charlie sniffed the air, puzzled. Despite the hanging clouds of gun smoke and the blood soaked floor, the scene smelled inexplicably fresh and clean with just a hint of floral essence. A glance about seemed to confirm everyone to be dead several times over. Suddenly, one of the presumed corpses sat bolt upright. It was Mr. Helms, covered in ceiling plaster and someone else's brains, but somehow miraculously unscathed. "Who the hell are you?" he shouted. As a result of the gunfire, Mr. Helms was even deafer than usual.

  "Quiet!" whispered Charlie.

  "Wyatt? Who the hell is Wyatt? Wyatt Earp, maybe. It's like the OK Corral in here!"

  Charlie held his finger to his lips, gave him a look meant to convey the peril of the situation and hissed, "Quiet!"

  "Oh, quiet. Well, that makes more sense."

  Behind the service desk, Charlie discovered four more bodies. They were the postal workers. Three of them had been shot in the head. I don't need to be a forensics expert to sense a pattern, thought Charlie. At his signal, the men flanked either side of the double doors behind the desk. It was the only possible avenue of escape. Charlie kicked the doors open and rapidly aimed about the sorting room. The room was large and well organized. Engines whirred, powering unsorted mail onto an untended conveyor belt. The floor was covered with letters and packages tossed from overturned bins. Someone had ransacked the room, and had done so quickly. Charlie felt the same sinking feeling of being too late.

  From the loading dock beyond came the sound of a starting truck engine.

  Throwing caution and common sense to the wind, Charlie and the agents ran to the loading dock, just in time to see a postal truck peel out of the gate. Charlie looked to a second parked truck. Its tires had been shot to shreds. "Out front!" he yelled.

  The CIA agents leapt over the carnage in the lobby and out the front door—as the postal truck roared past the surprised local police and disappeared down the road. "Follow them!" Charlie shouted.

  * * *

  Moments later, Charlie was bouncing wildly in the passenger seat of the agency SUV. They rode dangerously close to the back bumper of the police car in front of them. The local officers knew every turn and hurtled dangerously over the twisting gravel road. Charlie's driver, trained in pursuit, struggled to keep up. Beyond the flashing lights of the police car, Charlie could just see the fleeing postal truck roof. "They can't be allowed to escape!"

  "They won't, sir. There's nowhere for them to go."

  As if to erase all doubt, a roar from above signalled the arrival of the helicopter Charlie had called in. He knew there was no way for it to land in these woods, but it would ensure their quarry would have nowhere to hide. He glanced up to see the steel undercarriage of the chopper through the treetops. Adrenaline rushing and heart pounding, he realized he was enjoying this. For the first time in months, he felt alive.

  All at once the road made an unexpected turn in a most unhelpful way. The driver of the postal truck banked hard, but not before leaving the road entirely and crashing into the brush. It then came to an abrupt stop. The truck had developed instant engine trouble—the kind caused by having a tree stuck through its carburetor. A low branch from the same tree had also shattered the windshield. The driver, amazingly uninjured, staggered from the passenger-side door and attempted to flee into the forest.

  The pursuing vehicles stopped. Police and CIA agents spilled out.

  "Freeze!" yelled one of the officers, levelling his gun on the suspect. The fleeing driver stopped where he stood and raised his hands.

  The others focused their attention on the smashed postal truck. The lopsided wreck was now still, save for a single rear wheel spinning slowly in the air. />
  "You're surrounded!" yelled Charlie. "Come out with your hands up."

  There was a long pause. Everyone waited, weapons drawn. Based on what they'd seen at the post office, most expected the unseen assailants to come out, guns blazing.

  "I said, come out with your hands in the air!"

  Another minute passed. No one moved. One of the rear doors had been flung open on impact. Charlie stepped slowly sideways, gun raised, to position himself to peer inside. After several steps he was at an angle that allowed him to see half of the interior. It appeared to be empty save a few spilled mail bags. He leaned slowly over to get a better view.

  "It's empty," he said. "It's empty," he said again. It dawned on him that somehow he'd been duped. "God damn it!"

  "Turn around, with your hands up!" one of the officers shouted at the driver. The driver did not move. "I said, turn around!"

  The driver slowly complied, revealing himself to be a terrified thirteen-year-old boy Charlie instantly recognized as Alex Graham.

  Chapter 8

  "Here kitty, kitty..." – E. Schrödinger

  1988 was the year Charlie's father decided to give his thirteen-year-old son one more chance to prove himself. Ever since Charlie had learned that chickens were the direct descendants of Tyrannosaurus Rex, he'd felt better about being a disappointment to his father. Despite this, it was impossible not to yearn for the chance to change that. He therefore could not say 'no' when his father offered him a summer job. "The whole point of having a son," he told Charlie, "is to live on through him. A father's son makes him immortal. In other words, if you fail at this, you're pretty much murdering me." Charlie's father came from the Sun Tzu school of parenting.

  The debacle occurred on Charlie's second week working at his father's industrial cattle farm. Since starting the job, Charlie's thirteen-year-old self had found that he identified more with the cows than his coworkers. His coworkers were adult men who scowled and swore. The cows, on the other hand, were completely content and apparently oblivious to their ultimate fate. Charlie found himself exchanging glances one morning with a cow while mucking out the pen. The cow watched him with her large brown cow eyes and wondered about nothing. This, of course, was what all cows wonder about. Zen Bhuddist's could only hope to achieve the same sense of nothingness a cow attains every minute of every day. "Oom," said the Cow, backwards, while meditatively chewing her cud. Charlie was no animal rights activist, nor even a vegetarian. He was, however, a thirteen-year-old boy, idealistic and somewhat impulsive. In an act of inspiration he decided that the cows needed to roam free. He unlocked the gate and told them to "Make a run for it." The cow's being cows simply stared back it him. He was forced to lead and shove them through the gate, until some sort of flow started and the animals began to exit in force.

  Of course, being a thirteen-year-old boy at the time with no actual interest in farm work, Charlie didn't know much about cows. For example, he didn't understand that they were thoroughly domesticated animals and had virtually no instinct for self-preservation. They certainly had no comprehension of what to do on an interstate highway. Faced with the headlights of an oncoming tractor trailer, one can only assume their last thoughts were, "Oom," backwards.

  "You're not my son," his father said with disgust, standing amid a heap of once valuable cow carcasses. "You're just like your mother."

  * * *

  Forty-year-old Charles Draper sat in a borrowed office. He was looking at Alex Graham, who was looking at an image projected from a laptop on a desk. The projection showed a grainy photo of Colonel Rynard Gruber, ten years younger, taken in Prague by a parking lot security camera. When the photo was taken, the Colonel had just executed a Greek businessman and stuffed him in the trunk of his own car. He had then driven the car to a long term parking lot near the airport and boarded a flight to Moscow. This ensured that the crime and this photo were not detected until his trail had long gone cold. Despite his having been paid a half-million dollars for the job, the soldier of fortune had used an internet discount coupon to save twenty dollars on the parking spot. Rynard Gruber was, if nothing else, pragmatic.

  "You're sure that's him?" asked Charlie.

  Alex nodded. An untouched doughnut sat in front of him.

  "Not hungry?"

  "It's grape jelly. I hate grape jelly."

  "Oh. We'll get you another one."

  "They said it was all they had."

  "That can't be right." They were sitting in the Carlstown Police Station, having commandeered several of the offices for agency use. Surely there must be more doughnuts in the break room, Charlie thought, it's a police station for Christ's sake. First, however, Charlie needed to make a phone call. He picked up his encrypted cell and called Robert Morely's assistant, Herbert Chow. "Hi Herb?"

  Herb responded with his customary "Yo," followed by the crunch of potato chips.

  "We're dealing with Gruber."

  "As in the baby food?"

  "No, that's Gerber, I said Gruber, as in Colonel Rynard Gruber."

  "Who the hell is that?"

  "A mercenary known to be in the exclusive employ of Mathias Boltzmann."

  "And who the hell is that?"

  Charlie sighed. Boltzmann was on the agency top watch-list. Chow should know him. He could hear Herb licking the potato chip flavouring from his fingers. "International arms dealer. Known as the Walmart of Warlords, the K-Mart of Coup d'Etats and the Amazon.com of Armaments." This last reference was surprisingly accurate. Boltzmann's brazen approach to the business was unrivalled. He was the first weapons smuggler to go online, with a fully functional website operating out of Romania. Charlie had visited it and, despite its total lack of ethics, it was hard to argue with its customer service. After adding a dozen canisters of chemical weapons to his cart, the website had helpfully suggested that "Customers who bought sarin gas, also bought wing-mounted crop dusters."

  "Oh... that Mathias Boltzmann."

  "Pretty much means Project Loose Thread is unraveling."

  "Jeez. Bob's gonna be pissed."

  "Yup."

  Charlie hung up the phone. He realised that he was holding his breath. He forced himself to exhale. "It's not the end of the world" was something people said to put negative events into perspective. After all, compared to the end of the world, what could be that bad? Now, it was literally the end of the world, or could be, if Charlie failed to recover the lost device.

  "Can I see my mom now?" asked Alex.

  Charlie stared at him blankly. He'd forgotten that the boy didn't know what had happened to her. Alex had been unconscious when Gruber had dispatched his mother and friend. Charlie opened his mouth to speak. He hadn't a clue what to say. It's not the end of the world? The world can end in different ways. Charlie knew that first hand. He looked at Alex's hopeful face. In the boy's mind, his mother might still be alive. Now, it was Charlie's job to kill her with certainty.

  Outside, in the police station break room, one of the officers reached for a doughnut. "Grape jelly again?" he groaned.

  "They're all grape jelly," said the front desk clerk, who had come in to get a can of Mr. Pibbs from the pop machine.

  "Why?"

  "The chief only likes grape jelly."

  "He only ever eats one! So get one grape jelly and the rest glazed."

  "I suggested that, but he said he doesn't know which one he'll want."

  "Oh," said the officer, "well, can't argue with that."

  Across from the break room, through the half-closed blinds of a borrowed office, Alex Graham put his head in his hands and began to cry. Charles Draper stood still for a moment, unsure what to do. He then shook himself from his trance, walked around the desk and gently stroked Alex's hair. He did so stiffly, awkwardly, as if trying to recall something he'd forgotten. The boy collapsed into him, sobbing uncontrollably.

  Chapter 9

  "Are we not men? We are DEVO." – R. Santorum

  When the President first took office, the Camp David Situat
ion Room looked nearly identical to the Situation Room at the White House. That meant the requisite presidential blue carpet and solid wood table surrounded by comfortable leather chairs, all in boardroom brown. The First Lady, determined to put the 'camp' in Camp David, had ordered the room redecorated in 'country rustic'. The cabinets had been redone shaker style, the walls wore a summer floral print, and the dark wood furnishings were replaced with wicker. With her famous attention to detail, the First Lady even insisted that lemonade be offered as the drink of choice whenever the room was in use. That and her famous caramel fudge squares, of course. The result was a comfortable, homey feel that made launching cruise missiles seem a little less grim and a lot more Martha Stewart. Thanks also to the First Lady, The Secret was mandatory reading for the President's entire staff. The Secret, authored by an Australian television producer, enjoyed a cult following for its premise that you simply had to will the universe to bring good things to you. "The 'law of attraction' worked for me, let's make it work for America," she said. "It's science!" When the President's Science Advisor tried to tell her that this was not how the actual law of attraction worked, she told him that it certainly would not with an attitude like that. The following week, the Science Advisor was replaced, along with the Camp David Situation Room side table.

  "A complete dossier on Mathias Boltzmann is in your briefing documents," said Secretary of State, Sarah Maxwell.

  "I haven't had time to read it," said the President. "Brief me on what's in the brief, but keep it... short."

  Sarah nodded. It was hard to focus and look at him at the same time. The Commander-in-Chief had developed a cowlick that stuck out like a weed from the top of his head. He was blissfully unaware of this and, in Sarah's opinion, looked completely ridiculous. Sarah petted her own head in the hope of inspiring him to do the same. The President only stared at her, as if wondering if she might be a giant house cat in disguise. You can't tell the President of the United States he has a cowlick, thought Sarah. As the Commander-in-Chief spoke, the tuft of hair waggled back and fourth like the tail of a happy dog. God help me, she thought, he looks like Tintin. Sarah didn't exactly look up to the President to begin with. She secretly shared the opinion that he was a sort of idiot savant, minus the savant part. She did, however, like being Secretary of State and, since their political futures were entwined, she'd learned to work around him. Sarah also had to admit that The President did have some sort primal political instinct that served him well. Years in government had taught her that a good political gut was better than brains. K Street was stuffed with brilliant former candidates who didn't know when to keep their mouths shut. Secretly, the Secretary of State wondered if she too might have wound up working in a political think-tank had she not tied herself to the 'Idiot Savant in Chief'. Go team, she thought. "Mathias Boltzmann is well known to us, Mr. President," said Sarah. "He's also well known to terrorist organizations around the world. They call him the 'Walmart of Warlords', selling more than fifty-million dollars worth of weaponry in the last year alone."