by K Helms
Dunlap’s eyes then moved on and scanned the walls of this tidy little cage. They were lined with certificates, also framed in polished silver, in honor of his dedication to the company. All in recognition of his apparent efficiency at the expense of the lesser man in steel toed boots. Some sell their souls dirt cheap.
Didn’t his boss realize that he was a rat in the trap just like his underlings? For certain, his trap was far more opulent and prettier than theirs. But gold chains are still chains, reserved for fools ready to believe they make the man. Didn’t he realize that he was just as expendable as they were?
Dunlap knew that it would eventually come back around.
It always did.
Power comes in degrees, but it is not necessarily equivalent to the power trip it causes.
In the wrong hands, even a small dose of power can induce major delirium. It can eat through a lifetime of morals and ethics in a matter of moments and transform a human into a monster. He believed that was what Mary Shelley had been trying to say. He had seen it unfold a hundred times. There had been several good people in the factory below who had gotten a promotion then BAM! They started acting like they didn’t even know the rest of those bums that they had eaten their lunches with for the last ten or fifteen years.
But oh how easily that power can be destroyed or matched by another. It never takes much; a handful of metal can buy it or cancel it out.
Power is a big game of duck, duck, goose.
Dunlap felt like spitting on the desk, a big fresh one, black with the dust that everyone in the factory breathed day in and day out, but he elected not to as his eyes trekked around the remainder of the Martha Stewart designed cell. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction that they had managed to piss him off, but he was weak now.
Dunlap felt sick with disgust and he felt his envy transformed into rekindled anger.
Why would he envy this man? He hated himself for that earlier weakness and resolved to channel it to where it belonged,
Every scar, every callous on his hands was a testament to the fact that he had never sold out. He could have done so, like so many others had done before. He could have told them all the lies they wanted to believe, all that they wanted to hear to get a better, easier job, but he refused to live his life as a liar. At least he wasn’t some fat cat in a tailored suit, soft from the plush lifestyle built on the backs of the poor. At least his calluses weren’t on his knees. He still had his soul. It might be a darker shade than some, but it wasn’t for sale.
He tensed when he heard them enter the office.
They always traveled in packs, like jackals. They had their hired guns with them as well. One of them walked to the desk and tried to intimidate him by looming over him where Dunlap sat.
Dunlap rolled his eyes. Same shit, bigger pile, but he allowed them their moment.
The suit had a cardboard box in one hand and Dunlap secretly wished that it was to hold his boss’s personal items as they cleaned out his office.
He would have given anything to see the boss standing in the unemployment line with all the miscreants he had fired for ridiculous reasons. There, he would be just another number and it would have to deflate that grotesquely swollen ego somewhat. Humility is good for the soul.
The suit tossed the box on the desk and Dunlap heard a light sound of unseen items tinkling against each other and immediately knew what they were.
“How’re those powder burns, Dunlap?” asked one of the suits sarcastically.
“Got any salve? They itch some,” he answered, goading him on.
“One hundred and fifteen rounds, Dunlap. Eight dead employees…” said the lead detective, jockeying for position in front of the other suit. Dunlap shook his head in disgust. It was always the same. Someone always had to try to usurp the power from the hands of another.
Dunlap said nothing but gave a smirk instead.
The lead suit looked like he was going to snap. A vein bulged and ran down the middle of his forehead. He shoved a well-manicured finger in Dunlap’s face. It smelled like Vaseline and ass, and it seemed to Dunlap, like his breath smelled the same, but he could be mistaken.
“Tomato…tomato…” Dunlap said, maintaining control. He forced himself to breathe.
One of the uniformed officers put a hand on the detectives shoulder and told him to go easy. Dunlap could see that the uniform cop understood his plight. He may not have agreed with his actions, but he knew how it was to be a dick in the dirt.
“Get this creep outa my face and read him his rights,” said the detective before storming out of the office himself.
The uniform grabbed Dunlap by the collar and assisted him to his feet. Dunlap unclasped his hands and heard the chain between the handcuffs jingle.
He was sure that his boss would have liked the new adornments, if only they had been made of gold.
But, at least, he had gotten his honest.
Prologue Part 8 – Won’t you be my neighbor
Whispering Willows Apartments
Waynesburg, Pennsylvania
Whispering Willows sounded like it should be a peaceful place to call home. The name of the complex brought to mind visions of tranquil ponds surrounded by trees with hanging wisteria blowing gently in the breeze. It would, of course, have children that looked like innocent cherubs playing on tire swings and housewives hanging laundry on clothes lines while papa toiled hard all day long at work only to be revived by the mere presence of being with his family just like Ward Clever being greeted by the Beaver, or by June's.
Whispering Willows was nothing like the peaceful vista the moniker claimed it to be, not even in the spring and summer. The truth was that papa most often didn’t go to work at all, unless you counted selling meth out of his roach ridden living room, and mama didn’t hang up the laundry or cook dinner or do much of anything but get fatter and fatter and let her enormous litter of government sponging mutants run through the neighborhood like the heathens that they were. When winter blew its icy breath it was even less so an accurate moniker. On came the multi-colored Christmas lights that would hang in no particular pattern until June or July, if they came down at all and the blinking bulbs did little to grace the dump with any Christmas cheer.
He gave the panorama a furtive glance and saw that one of the leafless limbs of a Japanese maple tree draped low from the weight of a plastic baby Jesus that hung from a noose made of bailing twine. There was nothing sacred anymore; at least not in this high-brow neighborhood. The idea that Whispering Willows was in all actuality, a cluster of three story cinder block, low income housing units, where every welfare recipient and drug addict in the county seemed to congregate, never ceased to infuriate Jerry Sims.
Low income housing should in reality be just that; reserved for those with jobs of low income, unfortunately that was not the case. Jerry drove his 1990 Honda Civic for two different pizza joints and relied on the tips from those aforementioned drug addicts and welfare bums. They were a demographic of notoriously bad tippers, if they even tipped him at all. He felt fortunate when they didn’t rob him as he delivered the pies.
There were a few folks in the complex that actually did work for a living, but they were the minority. Pride was not an issue or even an afterthought at Whispering Willows. Jerry could think of only one other person in the whole damn place that paid taxes and didn’t mooch off the government as another entitled, worthless baby factory. He had only talked to the man a couple of times in passing. Hito was an Asian fellow that had seemed nice enough. Hito was young, and although Jerry usually felt envious of younger people for their good looks, he hadn’t held it against Hito. Hito was built like an action hero and had a smile that made all the girls swoon. The Japanese guy was married to a white chick, not that it mattered to Jerry. These days everyone seemed to marry outside their race; not Jerry though. Marriage was for idiots. He didn’t have much, but at least he had some freedom. Jerry had seen Hito take a verbal beat down from his pretty little wife that se
emed to inflict worse damage than Steven Seagal at an all you can eat buffet full of ninjas. Jerry thought that the dude ought to have her locked up for domestic violence. No one deserved to be treated like that.
The only good thing about living in Vagrantville, Pennsylvania was that the commute to work was easy enough. He never had to navigate through rush hour traffic because no one was in that big a rush, they just waited around for the tax payers to give them their every desire.
Jerry didn’t notice the gray-black form that swooped from the sky and wrapped its shrouded arms and legs around him when he came home from work. There was no physical manifestation just a feeling that consumed him. Anger; no, not quite anger. That was too small a word. Wrath best described the emotion that swept over him, and filled Jerry completely that day. He seemed to breathe it in through his nostrils, but never exhaled it, and with every breath he grew more and more furious.
He entered his basement apartment, slumped into the worn side of the couch and thumbed the remote to watch TV. Breaking news was all over the networks. It seemed to him that the whole world was going to hell.
Boom…Boom…Boom…
His jaw clenched. He felt his stomach seize into a knot and his heart began to pound harder. He looked up at the ceiling. The neighbors upstairs ran on heavy heels creating an amphitheater in his apartment, with no regard for the noise they made.
All he had ever expected from anyone was respect, that and maybe some common courtesy. Jerry really didn’t think that was too much to ask.
For Jerry Sims there were a few simple rules to apartment dwelling, rules of etiquette that should never be overlooked. 1.) Thou shall not take your neighbor’s parking space. 2.) Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife. 3.) Thou shall not stomp around like an elephant with polio when there is a person living in the apartment beneath you and finally 4.)Thou shall not crank the bass up on your stereo until the walls breathe with the rap beats and techno rhythms that your neighbor truly despises at three o'clock in the morning.
Now these are simply the rules. He didn’t make them up. He believed they were common knowledge. They have been passed down from generation to generation since that first apartment building called Petra. Jerry thought that, more than likely, that was why it was abandoned and full of holes.
As if on cue his neighbor’s upstairs cranked up their stereo. Rap beats pounded down upon his apartment, the bass vibrating his windows in their frames.
“Ahh... damn it all to hell!" he screamed up at the ceiling with a voice full of hatred.
At that, the booming footfalls began in force.
The rules of apartment dwelling were also common sense. Jerry had given it a lot of thought. Every time you stomp a heal to the floor, you tell the maniac that lived and was seething below you, exactly where to aim his .357.
He reloaded twice.
He was sleeping peacefully and dreaming about kittens when the cops arrived.
They rousted him from his slumber, wrestled him to the floor and slapped the cuffs on his wrists. The cops led him outside to the waiting cruiser, reading him his rights but Jerry was nonplussed; the thirty-five minute power nap had done wonders for his nerves and Jerry was smiling when they manually ducked his head for him, as they placed him in the back seat of the cruiser.
“I think you might need some psychological help,” said the officer riding shotgun, looking back over his shoulder. Jerry knew they thought he was crazy because he shot his neighbors.
That was not the reason to call him crazy.
If you asked Jerry, he was crazy because of all the freakin’ disrespect. That’s why he was crazy. Shooting the inconsiderate sonsabitches was only a result of that insanity. They could call him crazy if they wanted to, but they would be just as crazy for thinking that he was crazy for the same things that they had probably fantasized about doing their own damn selves.
But really he was not technically ‘crazy’, more concise, he was simply stressed out.
That is what living in an apartment complex built with under-code, paper thin walls does to a man.
“It was the acoustics, man,” he told the cops as they drove to the station.
The cop in the passenger seat shook his head in disbelief. “Look, Mr. Sims, I understand that this place is full of low lives. Hell, we’re out here all the time, and we know how tempting it is to take the law into our own hands, but you should have called us, your reaction was just plain crazy,” he said trying his best to be sympathetic. All the locals knew that Whispering Willows had an enormous, per capita crime rate.
“Yeah, call it crazy; call it overkill…just don’t call it bad marksmanship.”
The lead investigator told Jerry that he should probably not represent himself in court at that last comment but Jerry continued.
“I loved the sounds of those bodies hitting the carpeted floors above me…and the screams that came from above… well, OK; I thought that was pretty damn annoying too, so I shot them again, if nothing else, so they would quit whining. I even managed to take out their stupid boom box. It felt very liberating to bust a cap in Tupac… Ha ha West-side mutha fucka,” Jerry said making a very un-gangsta sign with his right hand.
The two uniformed cops glanced at each other with looks of incredulity and eyes wide in astonishment. Maybe they could understand why the man had become a vigilante, after all, the people he had killed had a long and varied criminal record and they probably had it coming, but Sims was raving like a loon. Jerry’s face was still taut with pressure and red with anger and he was very nearly yelling. They thought if they didn’t get him to the station pretty soon and get him some medical help he might possibly have a stroke.
“Do you guys think that it bothers me to go to prison? Hell, no it doesn’t. They have a curfew where everyone shuts their cake holes and I’ll be able to sleep. I’ll never have to worry about some punk with a sound system, which cost more than my car, taking my parking space. I won't have to deliver pizzas to those shit birds anymore. Do you know how much it sucks to kiss those filthy asses to get a one dollar tip?
“It sounds like a pretty peaceful scenario, if you ask me, the prison, I mean. I suppose you think I’m crazy for all that carnage, don’t you? I really don’t care. I know that I’m not crazy…I’m just really stressed out, man.”
At the police station Jerry was as good as his word and he settled into his cell without any protest. Officer Kypers shivered and although he never told anyone, he was sure that he had seen a gray-black form like smoke emerge from Sims and shoot through the wall out of sight.
Sims asked for an extra pillow and he thought that the guards were respectful, even pleasant as he slipped peacefully to sleep in his new smaller apartment.
From the next holding cell he could hear someone groaning, but the soft sounds didn’t disturb him, they soothed him and lulled him back to sleep.
Part One
Scenes from the Apocalypse
Chapter 1 - Action 7 Aftermath
Parkersburg, West Virginia
Claire Fontaine stood beside the open passenger side door and checked her make up in the side mirror of the Action 7 News van and straightened her nearly perfect auburn colored hair. The cold December air blew in blustery gusts but her hair barely moved. She knew how to prepare for the spotlight. She had always been a fixture at the center of attention, from high school cheerleader, to prom queen, and now to television news reporter. Parkersburg, West Virginia was, however a stepping stone. There wasn’t enough notoriety in this Appalachian shithole to suit her tastes. California or New York was where a woman of her talent and looks belonged.
“You look fine, Claire,” said Mitch Rodriguez as he shrugged the heavy camera to his shoulder.
“Thanks Mitch, too bad I can’t say the same for you,” said Claire. This was familiar territory for the two. Mitch rolled his eyes, but remained silent. He knew that when it came to Claire it was best to just let it go or you would have to listen to that mouth of hers for the rest o
f the day. She turned her attention to a pock-marked, heavy set man wearing a pit-stained white dress shirt and red tie that he had loosened from his collar. He didn’t seem to mind the cold. “Hey you…” she started.
“Drew. Drew Finley,” he interjected, and then added with a sly look “The ladies call me Dre.”
“Yeah…right… sorry Drew, things are a little bit hectic,” she said.
He smiled a politico grin that made her wary of him. Something in that smile was just weird. “Not a problem, Ms. Fontaine. I’m a big fan of yours,” he said and she felt his eyes crawling over every square inch of her exposed flesh and she was suddenly grateful for the cold weather and the bulky clothes that hid her well-sculpted physique.
“Are you ready Mr. Finley?”
“You bet,” he said with that creepy, too-toothy grin.
“Mitch?”
The camera man nodded and held out her microphone. She took it and positioned herself in front of the camera.
“In three…two…one…” he pointed at her.
“This is Action 7 News on the scene of the Farrell Company Fun Factory. We are standing outside, directly behind the Police cordon where, just minutes ago Parkersburg Police took into custody lone gunman, Michael Steven Dunlap, age forty-three from Parkersburg. Security cameras recorded Dunlap as he entered the Farrell Company Fun Factory as he did every morning. But this morning was different; Dunlap came armed with an AR-15 assault rifle and an agenda to kill as many managers in the small factory as possible. At last report there are eight confirmed dead and seventeen wounded. Here with me is long time employee and supply manager Drew Finley.”
She turned to Finley who stood beside her, still smiling. She thought to herself that the creep didn’t look very upset about the deaths of his co-workers; maybe he was a shoe-in for a promotion now. Mitch turned the camera with her actions and captured both in the frame. “Mr. Finley what can you tell us about Mike Dunlap?” she waved the mic under his chin.