Regolith

by Brent Reilly

“Henry, the White House still says the Rock may miss us. Conservative media are accusing us of spinning this story for partisan gain, even though I have emailed every news organization with links to the latest IAU notices. The ability of conservatives to spin everything to fit their preconceived narrative is truly mind blowing. JPL and the Minor Planet Center are 100% certain that the main body will hit us. Anyone who believes the Palin Administration over them deserves to die.”

  An “IAU Notice” referred to the global notification system used by the International Astronomical Union. If the media tried to look fair and balanced by saying the IAU says this, but the White House Science Advisor says that, then they were going to get people killed. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Sentry system calculates the orbits of near-Earth objects while the Minor Planet Center, run by Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution, collects all NEO information.

  A lot of people were going to die before sunrise.

  32

  Cooper couldn’t believe all the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Even the lane going south looked like a parking lot inching north. He could have walked faster. On both sides of the road, 4X4s, motorcycles, and even people on horses passed him driving off road, parallel to the narrow highway. And it didn’t escape him that it must all be coming from Mexico, since that was the only thing south of Green Valley. And not a traffic cop or border patrol agent in sight.

  He sure didn’t feel presidential. He mentally kicked himself for seeing Jackson right before the asteroid fragments hit. Ann told him to stay home in the governor’s mansion in Austin.

  Crawling north on Highway 19, he finally noticed the portable DVD player sitting in the passenger seat. A note facing the driver’s seat warned, “PULL OVER BEFORE READING.”

  Something chilled him, and it wasn’t his failure to lock his car. His heart seemed to stop beating, but he was only holding his breath. He learned long ago to face bad news quickly. Still driving, his right hand ripped the paper from the DVD player, unfolded it, and his worst fears were realized.

  “Give him what he wants or else.”

  He immediately pulled the green land yacht over to the side of the freeway, nearly killing some Mexican kid on a horse, and drove behind some tall sagebrush for privacy. He slammed on the brakes, resulting in a quick fishtail move which raised a cloud of dust that choked him through the open window. He tore at his tie and top shirt buttons. Not that he would have been breathing easy anyways. He clutched his chest in fear of a heart attack. Wouldn’t that suck? To die of a heart attack right before winning the presidency and, more importantly, becoming a billionaire?

  It’s all over, Cooper told himself. He pissed away everything he spent a lifetime working for. Just to finger some pussy. At least Clinton won re-election before getting caught. His father warned him to never do anything he couldn’t justify on Oprah. Tears started flowing and would not stop.

  “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

  He started head-butted the steering wheel and found he couldn’t stop. Just when he was about to have it all, he could feel it all slipping away. He would be an outcast, a Gary Hart-meets-Paris Hilton comedy target. Imagining what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would say made him nearly wet himself.

  At 62, Cooper couldn’t blame his inexcusable lack of self-control on his age. On his wife, maybe, who couldn’t suck cock if his life depended on it. And explaining how he preferred to masturbate over fucking his old, dried-out, unimaginative wife would not win him any points. Not even KY, axle grease, and WD-40 could juice Ann up enough to make fucking her more than a hard chore. Fucking his wife was like jack-hammering a concrete sidewalk. No wonder she insisted on waiting until their honeymoon before having sex.

  Who did this to him?

  Jackson certainly would not have offered $1 billion if he held a porn movie staring Daniel Cooper. Shit, their meeting would have lasted ten minutes, with Jackson simply dictating what Cooper was going to do or else.

  Cooper reached over and gently handled the portable DVD player as if it were a dirty diaper that someone forgot to close. Sure enough, Cooper found himself staring at a porn movie starring himself. His blackmailer put a few clips from the end of the encounter at the beginning, so viewers would have no idea that they had just met. Monique’s face was digitally blurred and there was no sign of that damn beast that Jackson passed off as a dog.

  His Hummer blocked the Landshark sitting in its shadow. Cooper’s face, however, showed up very clearly. The cameraman made him fill up the screen. Yep, there he was grinning like a schoolboy as Monique humped his finger. He was fucked. Yet he couldn’t stop watching. Like the movie Titanic, knowing how it ended didn’t make it any less compelling.

  Right when he sucked her finger, at the bottom of the tiny screen words scrolled across like breaking news on TV. He had to squint his eyes because of the small screen, but he clearly made out the large, bold print, all in capital letters.

  “THE CAMERAMAN JUST CAME INSIDE HER, SO GOVERNOR COOPER IS NOW CLEARLY ENJOYING THE TASTE OF ANOTHER GUY’S HOT CUM.”

  His head snapped back like a bullet tapped his forehead. He tried to deny it, but deep inside he knew the truth. The taste was unforgettable, like leftover clam chowder. It reminded him of the time he went down on his ex not knowing her husband had came inside her an hour before.

  Hot vile bubbled up deep inside him. Through the open window he barely managed to turn and lift his head before he threw up like a damn drunk. Most of it landed on the outside of the car door, but some of it drooled onto his tie, shirt, and jacket. He even spotted some of that tasty whale. A part of him wondered why he never asked what kind of whale it was. He spit and spit until he got dry heaves. Goose bumps covered his arms and the opposite of a thrill fell down his spine. He could not get the taste out of his mouth. He was going to have nightmares over this, he just knew it.

  A joke from his college days sprang up at him: a guy walks into a bar and orders six shots of whisky. The bartenders pours them while asking what he is celebrating. “My first blow job,” he says after pounding all six shots back to back. Impressed, the bartender then offers him another shot on the house as congratulations, but the guy turns him down, saying, “if six shots can’t get the taste out of my mouth, another one won’t help.”

  Cooper roomed with a guy back in college who thought blow jobs were better than sex. Instead of a girlfriend, he paid chicks to suck him off. Swallowers only. Virtually every morning a girl would show up just to get him off. He said it helped him concentrate. Over many years, this guy spewed his seed into thousands of different mouths. Man, that guy was loaded.

  Cooper once asked his rich roommate to borrow $500 because he didn’t have money for tuition. Which would force him to return to his tiny town looking like a total failure. He couldn’t even afford a girlfriend. Not even with his mother’s bake sales at his father’s church.

  His preacher father always told him that life isn’t fair.

  His roommate, however, refused, explaining that it is better to give than to lend, and it costs about the same. But he did offer to pay him a record $500 for a blow job.

  Cooper remembered trying to figure out if he was shitting him or not, as the ceiling fan squeaked and the Munsters show laughed on the boob tube. He had just opened a letter from his dear mother, God rest her soul, that contained a check for $47.47. The roommate didn’t appear to be joking. The girl scheduled for that morning no-showed, and he wanted his fucking blow job. To show he was serious, he held out five $100 bills, pulled down his pants, opened his favorite porno mag, sat down in his plush Lay-Z-Boy blow job chair, and started jacking it.

  “But I ain’t gay,” Cooper remembered saying.

  “I ain’t either,” the guy replied. “But you need money and I need a blow job. You ain’t gay if you suck a cock. You’re gay if you fall in love with another man. Straight men cannot fall in love with each other. Guys in prison have sex, but because they’re horny, not gay. You never heard of situational homosexuality?
”

  Yeah, like that would fly with his family if they ever found out: “I’m not gay, I’m just too lazy to live within my means.”

  Swallowing a guy’s seed was not worth $500, but not having to return home a total loser, after so recently escaping a town his father dominated, was worth killing for. And so he got on his knees and sucked the guy’s cock. Or, more accurately, the guy grabbed his head with both hands and forced his mouth down repeatedly until he shot his wad and forced Cooper to swallow.

  Afterwards, one part of him said, “fucking disgusting!” The other part said, “that’s a lot of money for five minutes work.” After tax, that was three months pay washing dishes and taking crap from friends.

  And that’s when it hit him: with easy money, he could afford a girlfriend. He wouldn’t have to listen to his old man bitch about how hard his mother worked selling cookies every fucking Sunday. He could be free. Not in any Jeffersonian sense, but in the oldest economic sense. The poor are not free -- they’re just not enslaved. Only those with money are free. He could be his own man, finally. Becoming a man-whore could set him free!

  And all he had to do was swallow his roommate for $20 whenever some bitch no-showed, or when he wanted seconds, although that cost $50 because it took several times as long. He bought knee pads for those. More unexpected, once he made his decision, he quickly grew accustomed to the taste, just like he did broccoli. Of course, not every time he sucked while on his hands and knees. He sometimes woke up to find his roommate forcing his mouth open to fuck it until he came. Or he would force Cooper to his knees, tie his hands behind his back, and fuck his mouth.

  After forty years, he could still vividly remember how it tasted. The sensation of the penis head inflating in his mouth like a blow fish right before it exploded would stay with him til the day he died. Sperm wasn’t something he would choose on a menu, but it was still better than asparagus. The experience horrified him, but did not in the least traumatize him.

  Someone finding out -- that would traumatize him.

  He made more money sucking cock than he could working full time. Giving blow jobs allowed him to afford a girlfriend, who ironically had no aptitude for giving head. He ended up going through dozens of girls until he found one who sucked cock better than he did. Then he fucking married her.

  Once, when financially desperate, Cooper even offered him anal, but played if off as a joke when the roommate turned him down, saying, “I told you, cocksucker, I ain’t no fag”.

  Out of morbid curiosity, after watching his girlfriend do yoga, Cooper began stretching exercises until he could suck his own cock. He learned that a man who could suck his own dick saved a lot of money on dating. What bothered him was that he gave himself head more and better than his fucking girlfriend. The taste shocked him, though. Not just bad, but fucking disgusting. Much worse than his roommate’s. He tried changing his diet, drinking gallons of milk -- nothing worked. His cum simply tasted nasty, although his girlfriend liked it well enough until six months into their marriage. Not that the disgusting taste stopped him. Only growing back pain ended this form of self-satisfaction.

  Given his intense stress and inept wife, he’d probably blow himself every day if he could. Orgasms clear the mind.

  Over the next four years, Cooper figured he made several thousand dollars, back in the 1960s when that was a lot of money. He kicked himself for never tracking it because he remained curious how much he totaled from prostituting himself. And the roommate never tried to rub it in or make fun of him. Partly because he was a good guy, and partly because this all started in 1968, right after Dr. King and Malcolm X got assassinated, and so he got his anger out by having a redneck suck his big black cock.

  Sucking dick for a living taught Cooper everything he needed to know about politics. Politicians are just prostitutes who fuck people for money. Ironically, he felt dirtier as a politician kissing ass than a prostitute sucking cock.

  His dream after graduation was to make a fortune selling a device that gave the equivalent of a blow job. The idea of getting blow jobs on demand from a machine obsessed him for years. Unfortunately, he was a terrible inventor who couldn’t find anything that worked better than his left hand.

  What kind of sick creep would pull a stunt like this?

  His head pounded, his stomach rumbled, and his skin felt flush. Cars raced by, playing hurry-up-and-wait, oblivious that the next possible president of the United States sat like a drugged out, bumbling moron along the side of a minor freeway, desperately trying to get the taste of sperm out of his mouth. Again.

  Cooper knew it would be a huge hit on the porn equivalent of YouTube. If Henry Fucking Jackson knew of this, he would have gleefully dictated his demands. The cameraman was certainly a man, so that eliminated virtually the entire Jackson household.

  He groaned as it hit him like a cruise missile.

  David. The fucking son did this to him. David would have the time and technical skill, and giving his father this leverage probably scored him a lot of points.

  What to do now? David was always a weird one, left widowed while still a teenager. Obsessive-compulsive. Emotionally detached. Anger issues. Used to be the unofficial Arizona cage-fighting champion. Still lives with his mommy and daddy so someone else takes care of his children.

  Jackson once showed him a best-of video of David’s dozen cage fights that caught fire on YouTube after the media discovered the governor’s son kicked the fucking shit out of the state champion. What Coopered remembered most was how much David seemed to relish giving and taking pain, like he was trying to punish himself as well as his opponent. It was unnerving. Besides, David had probably already uploaded it as a password-protected file on some obscure website and hid a backup copy somewhere.

  And he doubted that he could sweet-talk David into destroying all copies. David didn’t even want anything for himself. All he wanted was for his father to get whatever he asked for.

  That thought surprised him.

  It dawned on Cooper that David would not even have done this if his father was not so afraid of losing access. The irony was that he was already giving Jackson everything he asked for. That thought finally calmed him. There was no need for blackmail because he was giving Jackson everything he wanted anyways.

  Having regained his composure, Cooper got out and buried the disk down a snake hole. Then he peed over it, before collapsing the hole with his foot.

  He turned on his Blackberry, and sure enough, he found several messages from his campaign manager. The oldest subject title read, “Where the F are you?”, followed by “Must leave now to escape impact!” Finally, “Plane Gone. Meet U at Butlers.”

  He opened that last one and discovered that the Air Force jacked his ride. With highways swamped, they couldn’t get far by car, and Butler insisted his log cabin, shielded in a ravine in the mountains, was the best place to wait out any meteorites. It had a solid log roof and was well provisioned. Or they could take Butler’s helicopter to safety. Safer than fucking Austin.

  He was glad Ann left Austin for Alaska, but a part of him wondered how many sympathy votes he would win if, like LBJ after the assassination of President Kennedy, she didn’t make it. Despite himself, he briefly imagined all the pussy he could get as a single president. Kennedy-class tail, in both quantity and quality. And she did promise to do everything possible to elect him president…

  As he marched back to his borrowed car, he realized he needed serious time to strategize. Everything changed since yesterday. How was he going to convince his staff that Jackson should be on the ticket? After bad-mouthing him so much.

  Well, Butler’s was as good a place as any to ride out the meteorite shower. What decided it was that he just passed Ajo Highway (AZ-86). From there he could take Mission Road south through the San Xavier del Bac mission site to get to Butler’s place near Keystone Peak in the Sierritas Mountains. The Sierritas had public, state, and private land all mixed together. Butler’s cabin supposedly offered a stun
ning view west towards Babo. After all, as the professor reminded the public a million times, you can be too close to an asteroid impact, but you can’t be too far away.

  33

  Someone had moved two televisions from the bedrooms and turned them on MSNBC and Fox News. Because, really, who watches CNN anymore? The professor had hooked up a computer to the main television, a three meter tall 3D monster by Sharp, which showed a chat room on, with lines of dialogue flowing quickly down it. David had an even newer, bigger model in his bedroom to watch high definition 3D porn, but it was too heavy to move downstairs. Everyone seemed to be “talking” at the same time. His father had enlarged the letters – otherwise it would have been impossible to read in real time. Thankfully, everyone had a different color to instantly distinguish between the “speakers.”

  Jackson scanned the wall screen, but couldn’t make sense of it. Numbers and equations were interspersed with arc-seconds of resolution, Janskys of measurement, and Doppler shifts.

  “How big is it now?” Jackson wanted to know.

  “Five kilometers, but it could lose another kilometer before it impacts us.”

  “Five?” a cameraman asked. “I thought it was twelve.”

  “Originally, when discovering passing Mars, but every out-gassing cost it some mass. Every time it changed course after circling the Sun probably cost it a cubic kilometer. It was shaped like a potato. Now, radar imaging shows its shape is more like a bowling pin flying head first towards us.”

  “So it’s only a third as big! That’s great news.”

  “Yes. The rock that finished the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was around ten kilometers. It all depends on its speed, angle, and composition. Given the same crushing strength, a slow asteroid can penetrate deeper into our atmosphere than a faster one. Iron-rich rocks naturally hurt more than water-rich ones.”

  “That’s great, right?”