by Chris Winder
She hoped Developer-gate would disappear, anyway. The little town she used to be Mayor of lived for nearly a decade on impact fees and other construction fees. How was she to know that the housing market would crash?
Then the interviewer showed up, looking as spiffy as usual. He was dressed in a very casual blazer, the kind with extra patches of fabric sewn onto the elbows, as if he’d had the jacket for decades, a modest tie, a very light tan-colored shirt underneath, dark blue pants, brown shoes and Shannon was pretty sure she saw the distinctive pattern of argyle socks. Very tasteful.
* * *
Meanwhile, Max had found a device of his own. There he was, minding his own business, burning ants with a magnifying glass when he suddenly found that his eyes hurt and there was something in his mouth. He coughed, sputtered, and finally spat out what turned out to be dirt.
He stood, took a few steps back from the ant nest he was terrorizing in order to make sure that while he was fixing whatever was wrong with his eyes, his enemies wouldn’t have the opportunity to regroup and attack.
After carefully cleaning the dirt out of his eyes, he was shocked, surprised, and if truth be told, a little excited to see that the ant nest was no longer a cone. Instead, it was a crater about a foot wide.
“Whoa”, Max said in awe in his high-pitched seven-year-old voice. “What happened?” His first thought was that the ants must’ve gotten really mad this time. It wasn’t the first time he’d come outside and spent nearly the entire day subjecting them to the focused energy of the sun, smelled the putrid stench of their burning bodies and enjoyed watching their abdomens expand before bursting into flame. Heck, it wasn’t even the twentieth time.
This time, he thought, he may have finally pushed them over the edge. As he backed away from the crater, he quickly scanned the yard to see if other ant nests had done the same, but it didn’t appear that they had.
“Wait a minute”, Max said. “This is dumb. Ants don’t explode the top of their hill.”
Max approached, feeling more apprehensive than he sounded. Ants were now boiling out of the nest in the hundreds, but there was something right in the middle of the crater they were attacking. Something small, black, and… plastic?
He watched the ants attack the thing and begin spreading out from the center of the crater to attack anything that happened to be close enough. Max hoped these ants would spread far enough to find and attack another colony. He was pretty sure watching one colony attack another would be an exciting event that could keep him busy for hours. But, as Max thought about hopefully upcoming ant-war, his eyes kept returning to the black thing.
He first wondered if the ants had built their nest there because the black thing was there. Then he wondered if the black thing exploded, and that’s what happened to the top of the nest. Then he wondered if the black thing had fallen from the sky and crash-landed, resulting in… that had to be it. Max looked up at the sky, shielding his eyes from the sun as if he expected to see a plane or a dozen more things falling from the sky with little parachutes like the Marines did it. Of course there was a plane leaving a long, white contrail in the otherwise clear blue sky, but it was too far away, near the horizon, to have dropped the black thing.
Whatever it was, Max bet it would keep him busy for a while, so he decided to retrieve it, even if it meant that a few ants had to die in the process.
Max walked to the dog house, which now served as his fort because the dog ran away, and retrieved a stick he had found last summer. He used the stick to poke the black thing, push it away from the ants and then fling it across the yard to get the rest of the attacking army off of it. Then he spent a few minutes whacking the ants that continued to pour from the bowels of their fortress, grunting and grumbling with the effort as he slew his enemies.
Once he was satisfied that the ants had learned their lesson, he went looking for the black thing. It hadn’t gone far and there weren’t any ants on it so he picked it up, brow furrowing in concentration as he inspected it. There was still a lot of dirt on it so he used what was handy, spit and his shirt, to clean it off. He turned the black thing over and over in his hands hands as he cleaned it, but couldn’t figure out exactly what he was looking at.
The black thing was black, that much he knew. It was about the size of a half-dollar, had seven buttons on one side, and three on the other. All the buttons were round, except for the middle button on the three-button side, which was square. It looked a little like the key fob his mom used to unlock the car, but hers only had three, maybe four buttons. Naturally, he pushed a button.
The moment the button was pushed, every single car on the planet with electronic door locks unlocked their doors. The sound of an entire planet’s cars going ‘bweep-bweep’ was mesmerizing. The echo continued for several hours and the sounds melded into a cacophony of chirps. One year later, the event would be marked by much higher insurance payments, due to the number of stolen vehicles which occured on this day.
The effect of button-pushing wasn’t lost on Max. He’d heard his mom’s car beep, and the neighbor’s car, and the other neighbor and their neighbor and understood how far it went. He understood that he held power in his dirty, little hand. The power to control… car locks… all of them… and maybe other things too, but car locks for sure. He decided that the right thing to do would be to push more buttons. If he was going to be all-powerful, he should know what that meant.
Max pushed a second button… and nothing happened.
Then he pushed a third button, waited for something amazing to happen, but heard and saw nothing different, because it happened half-way across the world.
Just as the last button was pressed, the North Korean regime was, by remote control, maneuvering fissile material into their first-ever completely functional intercontinental ballistic missile warhead. Finally they would be able to strike at the heart of their enemy, the United States. That was, until the robotic arm, finely engineered and crafted for this single purpose, decided to use the large orb of plutonium as a basketball. It squeezed, threw it on the ground, squeezed again, and finally tossed it into the missile’s warhead. Then it began to beat on the material, the warhead, the protective walls surrounding it and finally, just by luck, activated the device.
Just under thirty minutes later, a glass of ice-water, located in her kitchen, in her house in Camden, Arkansas tinkled ever so slightly from the shockwave generated by an underground nuclear explosion half-way around the world. Its owner barely noticed.
Three minutes later, three things happened, all at once.
One thing that happened, was Max, mashing buttons like crazy trying to make something else exciting happen, caused the Zonie Universal Remote model BX-4 to shut down every single television on the planet for one hour, completely depleting its battery.
Another thing that happened was that Shannon’s interview started and went off without a hitch, except for the fact that nobody saw it and the news station wasn’t interested in wasting their time repeating the whole thing over again.
The final thing that happened was Admiral Eekbo’s order to begin transmitting the mind-control signal to every television on the planet. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for the people of Earth, the signal didn’t reach anyone because there weren’t any televisions that were turned on except the really old sixty pound cathode ray tube models which weren’t advanced enough to actually broadcast a mind-control signal. People who had the old televisions only saw snow.
6
If you couldn’t afford a car that was fast enough to get out of its own way, that wasn’t his problem. If you couldn’t accelerate from zero to sixty in less than ten seconds, that also wasn’t his problem. However, if you took your piece of junk, barely street-worthy, pathetic rattle-trap mom-wagon out from under your carport next to your roach-infested single-wide and crawled down the road like you had all day and so did everyone else, that became a problem.
Tyler found himself stuck behind one of those mom-wago
ns in the fast lane of a four-lane highway in a town he hated almost as much as he hated the driver and the mom-wagon he found himself stuck behind. He saw it, the big, lumbering, booger-colored trash can from nearly two miles away. It was just turning right out of a strip-mall parking lot. No way it’s going to make a right-hand turn and end up directly in his lane, he thought to himself. That ugly thing is just going to continue to turn right and stay in the slow lane where it belongs. It knows better than to… and then it happened. Just as he was racing-up to it, the driver, who must have been blind as a bat not to see a bright-red car, headlights on, screaming down the highway, changed lanes.
Time slowed down and Tyler’s mind raced. This gave him time to think about what he wanted to do. He could swerve to the center turn lane, but they were approaching a hill and there could be someone preparing to make a legitimate turn, so that wasn’t a good idea. He could swerve to the right, but he’d tried that once and the snowbird in the hundred-foot-long motor home and trailer actually wanted to make a right turn ahead and had squeezed him against the curb. He could ram the thing and hope he killed the other driver so he could then sue the surviving spouse. However, mom-wagons were transportation of the poor, barely one step above bicycles, so there wouldn’t be anything for him to get even if he did win. Instead he decided to punish the driver by scaring the idiot. Maybe next time he or she would just stay home.
Tyler closed the gap and kept his speed steady. He didn’t want to risk smashing into the back of the slow, possibly blind, driver so he didn’t lower his speed. This was something he’d done several times before, and he was getting better at it each time.
As the seconds passed by, he judged the distance, looked for cross-traffic and watched the tailpipe of the mom-wagon to make sure it wasn’t going to drastically change speed. When he was close enough that he knew the driver should be able to see him, he flashed his lights. Everyone knew that if you were in the fast lane and someone behind you flashed your lights, it meant get over. If you didn’t, you deserved whatever came next. After a second, he flashed his lights again, but he didn’t really expect the driver to move over. Usually it took the noise to make that happen. His tires were new, so he knew the noise would be outstanding.
When he was close enough, based on his speed, the speed of the vehicle in front of him and his own experience, he smashed his car’s horn and slammed on the brakes, being careful to keep the vehicle pointed in the same direction down the road. He swore he saw the driver’s eyes, a woman, in her rear-view mirror grow as big as saucers. Everything looked good to him. He was braking early enough that he wouldn’t hit the minivan, but not so far back that he wouldn’t have the effect he was looking for, which was pure terror, regret, rethinking life choices and questioning whether or not to drive ever again.
The driver of the minivan accelerated, braked slightly, swerved to the right, almost hitting another car and finally swerved left into the center turn lane. Then, Tyler could hardly believe his eyes, the rear end of the mom-wagon launched into the air, back wheels leaving the ground by at least four feet. He was dumbfounded. He’d never seen such a thing in his life and was pretty sure he’d imaged it. His car was still skidding, tires pouring milky smoke from his wheel wells so he took his foot off the brake, just in case he actually needed to steer to avoid… whatever had just happened.
He passed the van a second later, just as its rear wheels hit the asphalt again and bounced. The stupid driver had rammed some kind of ugly Oldsmobile low-rider with tiny, little wheels that looked like they’d been stolen from a carnival ride. It also looked like whoever painted the carnival rides had also painted the car. It was sparkly dark maroon on the bottom half and sparkly tan on top with a sparkly white stripe separating the two.
Tyler snapped his head and eyes back forward. The rest of the street was clear in both directions and the nasty wreck was behind him. Other people might be shocked, but not only had he been able to see a really cool accident, he might have actually caused it, taken-out a stupid driver, and likely totaled a really stupid-looking carnival car. Tyler laughed so hard his eyes watered. He put the hammer down and created as much distance as quickly as he could between himself and the two wrecked cars, and was still laughing when he pulled into the parking lot of the salvage yard where two of his friends were waiting for him.
He was laughing so hard when he got out of his car, both of his friends looked very uncomfortable, especially when they saw the tears running down his face. Tyler had a hard time relaying what had happened but after he did, all three laughed. He’d be able to impress his classmates for weeks with this story, he thought to himself.
Tyler stood and did his best to swipe his blonde hair from his eyes without looking feminine and wiped tears from his eyes.
“Dude”, asked one of his friends, a tall spiky-haired blonde friend named Craig, “what if you’d wrecked, man. What if that minivan, I don’t know, spun-out and ended up in the lane in front of you?”
Tyler and his other friend named Steven, who’s hair was only slightly less red than Tyler’s car, both gave Craig a hard look. “Simple, idiot”, Tyler sneered, “I would have swerved into oncoming traffic, if there were any, but the road was clear. Even if I had wrecked, my dad would’ve just bought me another car. I don’t drive a Honda. I drive a BMW. I drive quality. Now, get your tools before I decide I don’t like you any more.”
Craig’s Honda wasn’t a bad car, but it wasn’t a turbocharged, several-hundred-horsepower piece of German engineering like Tyler’s fire-engine-red BMW. The improvements Craig made were all cosmetic, including a paint-job, a very large spoiler and ghost lights and a fart-can exhaust which sounded absolutely ridiculous. Tyler never let him forget who had the better car, whose family had more money and who was in charge of deciding whether or not their friendship, if you could call it that, would continue. Craig blushed, kept his mouth shut, opened his car’s trunk and returned with a small tool bag.
The jovial atmosphere the three had shared only moments earlier was replaced with a seriousness that seemed to suck the light from the sky.
“Let’s go see what the cat’s dragged in, shall we?”, Tyler said, waving a hand toward the entrance to the scrap yard. As they left, Tyler shot Craig a look of warning. Don’t try to get cute with me again, it said.
In addition to the BMW, Tyler also owned a crotch-rocket motorcycle that, if he were telling the truth, he was a little afraid of, and a 1965 Mustang he was trying to restore. Today’s trip was to walk around the yard in hopes of finding a wrecked mustang that he could get parts from. If the parts were small enough, he’d hide them in his pocket or his socks because there was no reason to pay the outrageous fees the yard wanted for parts that small. He could afford to pay for everything, but stealing was exciting, and excitement was what he lived for.
After paying four dollars per person to get in, which would be counted toward purchases if he found anything he liked, the three took their time and walked down each and every row, just like they always did. They listened to Tyler tell the others about every car, its horsepower, the year it was made and the relative cost compared to the additions he’d made to his own car.
“It would take that whole car, plus a few hundred bucks, just to pay for the paint job on the Beamer”, he would say. “See that car? Two of those to pay for my tires. Just my tires! I don’t even know how they let that kind of thing on the road”, he would say about another.
“See that car right there? That red one?”, Tyler said, pointing to a car that had clearly been t-boned. “That used to be a 1993 Saturn SL2. That was the last respectable car Saturn ever made. Thing came with a super-chip built-in. Flip a little switch from ‘Normal’ to ‘Performance’ and that little four-cylinder engine would plant you in your seat like it had rockets attached to its trunk. Not like my car, of course, but impressive for a grocery-getter.” The other two nodded sagely, though neither could remember having seen one, let alone drive one.
Two other cars ca
ught his attention, one was a once-impressive Mitsubishi Starion which Tyler thought had probably been doing Mach 1 when it wrecked, based on the fact that it was barely recognizable. The other was a 1965 Mustang, which was just what he was looking for.
The Mustang was in pretty bad shape. It looked like the driver had rolled it into a ditch and that it had just arrived no more than a few days ago, based on the still-green weeds and clods of dirt which clung to jagged edges of the twisted steel.
“Ok, boys”, Tyler ordered his friends, “let’s crack this thing open and see what’s left. Craig, you take the inside. See if it still has the original radio, especially the knobs. Look for small trim pieces too. Steven, pop the hood and see if the water pump looks good. I’ll start at the trunk and meet you up front.” Tyler liked being in charge. It’s what he was made for. The others could stand around with their thumbs planted firmly up their butts most of their lives, but when Tyler had a job that needed to get done, they moved, they worked and they did what they were told.
While Craig and Steven had a short argument about who was going to get into the driver’s seat, who was going to pop the trunk and who’s mom the other had laid the night before, Tyler went to the trunk. Of all the parts of the car, the trunk looked like it had taken the least damage, except for a small hole, about the size of his fist which had been punched through the lid. Tyler tried to open the trunk, but though it didn’t seem to be locked, wouldn’t budge. Probably busted when the last guy wrecked it. More likely it was a girl, Tyler thought. They didn’t know how to handle real power. That’s why they drove stupid cars.
If he ever got married, he thought to himself, it would be to a woman who knew how to drive a stick-shift and could appreciate power. So, he thought, he’d probably never get married. Women weren’t for marrying, anyway. Women were for cooking, cleaning and making their man look good. He also didn’t think he could deal with all the crying, floral crap they seemed to like and especially kids. The thought made him shudder.