by Javan Bonds
He pulled his walkie-talkie from his belt. “Well, hang on. I’ll call the preacher and see if he can provide you some bait.”
The cardiologist smiled, realizing the mayor had anticipated his next request. The noises of a bovine would be like a dinner bell for the carnivorous afflicted.
Randy clicked the radio on as he walked out of the room into the hallway. Dr. George turned to enter the examination room and check on young Hunter Daniels.
The Phantom doctor was surprised that the boy had made almost no sound while his arm was being set, even now remaining utterly quiet. Maybe the death of his father, Daniel, the genius behind the pontoon bridges and the draw bridge over the river, had changed the boy from a happy-go-lucky child into a silent recluse; it was too early to tell.. Since entering the clinic, the boy’s stepmother had not stopped crying uncontrollably. Her apparent “boyfriend” had done nothing but unsuccessfully attempt to console her.
Throughout the setting and casting of the arm, The Medicine Man could make out only one of her many repeated phrases: “This is all Smokes’s FAULT!”
24
Heresy
BROTHER WILLIAMSON HAD received a call on the radio from the mayor about an hour ago. Mayor Collins was looking for an “easy to handle calf” The Phantoms could use on a top-secret mission. He had been told not to expect the head of livestock returned; details would be explained upon the arrival of the soldiers. The Man of God understood. Even though the interim government of the island city had an official radio channel, it was not completely secure and sensitive information could be accessed by any of the residents. Soje Williamson was pretty sure Mayor Collins wasn’t planning to make veal steaks. Whatever the “mission” was, he was willing to trust in the Lord to see everything through. He already had a young calf waiting in the catch pen, innocent of whatever fate might befall it. The Man of God was confident several soldiers would have no problem loading it into whatever vehicle they were driving.
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“…They’ll catch you up on it when they get there. Over and out.” The radio transmission ended and Mortimer almost shouted with glee.
The old man turned Robert’s truck across the highway to make his way to that old preacher’s land. He drove by the Carr funeral home, now being used as temporary housing. Mortimer had to give these people some credit. The island wasn’t crowded, but they were using all available space in the most prudent way.
Even though Robert and that stupid little bitch he kept around were too damned loud and annoying, it was better than hiding from dozens of those shit-eating bastards. He had enough nonperishables to last for weeks. A small beef cow that he could slaughter somewhere up the road would stretch his food supply for weeks more, possibly even longer if he could carry enough salt with him.
☠☠☠
“I don’t give a good goddamn preacher! Randy sent me instead!” Mortimer was just hoping that he had remembered the mayor’s first name. He was hopeful this gullible religious fanatic would give him what he wanted.
This stupid old colored guy was really pissing him off. He didn’t figure it would be hard at all to trick him into giving up one measly calf. This stubborn Bible thumper was going to waste so much time that those soldiers would be here before he could make his getaway.
Blasphemy? Heresy? Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do. “Well then,” the good brother said, “I’ll just give him a buzz to make sure thats what he wants to happen.” Before he could radio in, a Humvee pulled up near him. “Guess I ain’t gotta call no more.” He pointed to the approaching Phantoms in their Jeep.
In the past couple of days, these four young Indian men had been taken in and showered with gratitude and respect by the islanders. They were being treated as saviors, though they had done nothing more than participate in routine patrols and keep the overall peace. The Man of God wanted to tell them that Guntersville simply appreciated their presence, that their stability and representation of support from the outside world made them feel hopeful and secure, and best of all, that they were not alone in the world. That little white kid with the cartoon picture books wanted them to wear suits of armor. People were really just glad to see a functioning, apparently moral military unit, regardless of its country of origin.
☠☠☠
“So the mayor told you what we needed?” one of them asked in heavily accented English.
The pastor gestured to the baseball field. “Yep, I got your little fella in the pen.”
The blood drained from Mortimer’s face as one of the soldiers pointed at him. “Who’s this?”
Soje decided that the Lord would judge this old guy in the end; in the meantime it was his Christian duty to give until it hurt. “Mr. Lester here was just pickin’ up a cow.” He gestured to an old and sickly looking heifer in the pen adjacent to theirs. “Don’t mind him none.”
Mortimer turned and began walking to his cow. He was still shaking after almost being busted. Why didn’t the preacher tell them I was lying and trying to steal their cow? Maybe it’s something to do with that “What Would Jesus Do” shit. Mortimer whispered to himself. Ah, who cares. They hadn’t tackled him yet. The old man decided he was in the clear. Mortimer mumbled, “As long as Jesus gives me provisions, I don’t care what else He does.”
This old cow just looked beaten and tired. It would obviously be more demanding of care, but the old man knew beggars couldn’t be choosers, and meat was MEAT.
☠☠☠
25
Mo Journal Entry 10
THIS MORNING’S BREAKFAST was slop with a side of slightly darker slop. It tasted like and had the texture of something close to zombie shit. It was entirely worth eating the stuff to see the soul crushing confusion and then the burning hatred in the eyes of The Oracle. He nearly lost it when he found that his dessert was nothing more than a stale sugar cookie.
After our hearty breakfast of goop, Easy lead our group through the main building to get our work papers from the benefactors. To the surprise of absolutely no one, even Smokes was deemed fit for work. We were summarily sent to the fields, loud complaints about the “slave owning crackas” could be heard throughout our long march. I reminded The Oracle more than once that the warden was a black woman. Of course my reasoning went completely unheeded.
The enforcer watching over us with a shotgun was not directly threatening but he didn’t seem friendly. It was pretty damn intimidating to be hawked over by a large man swinging a 12 gauge and wearing mirrored sunglasses. I should have been used to backbreaking manual labor. The only differences between this and digging the canal was that my dad didn’t almost spit streams of tobacco juice on the workers or lord it over us with a Mossberg.
I barely finished the last entry during one of our rare and short breaks. I have no idea how I would have made it through the day without Smokes belting out perfect renditions of any requested song. I’m not shitting you, he pulled off “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” Yeah, I’ll admit that I got sexually aroused when “Main Street” came around. Seger is one of the greatest.
I bring it up again, the warden is a black woman with white slaves. Of course, The Oracle and The Loner are also her slaves, it just seems like all of the white people picking corn were looked at differently by the guard. I don’t think I interacted with one worker who was not in our private group of protagonists. Everyone else could probably be thrown into the Insignificant Character category.
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I looked over to see the guy wearing the plastic badge pushing and screaming at one of the field hands. This brave but stupid worker was apparently not willing to be bossed around like a disposable field hand and had decided to push back. I wasn’t sure why this altercation began. The picker might have been sleeping on the job or maybe the guard just didn’t like the way he looked. I cringed when the slave made his stand, because I could immediately see what was going to happen. The guard bowed up and slammed the man in the chest with the butt of his shotgun. That would’ve prob
ably broken several of my ribs, but the worker reached up a pleading hand to the enforcer. The prison guard let loose on the downed man and hammered his face and chest with the synthetic stock of his weapon. Bones could be heard snapping amidst the cries for help and the pleading for mercy. Two medics appeared from nowhere, forcefully manhandled the destroyed body onto a gurney, and carried the bloodied pile off screen.
☠☠☠
Back to my thoughts before I was rudely interrupted by someone being murdered. Is this karma or irony? I don’t want to call it, I might get arrested by the irony POLICE.
☠☠☠
26
Mo Journal Entry 11
I COLLAPSED ONTO the couch in my brother’s room. “I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I ain’t doing that shit tomorrow!”
I noticed my brother grin at Aka mischievously. He agreed, “Yeah, it was a hell of a workout.”
I glared at him. The bastard didn’t even show up until it was almost quitting time. “So Hammer said you two were gonna find the armory?” I asked my brother as I glanced in the direction of The Expert.
She nodded as my brother began, “All the credit goes to Aka.” He waved at his fiancée. “She teased that guard so much he needed a cigarette.” He chuckled before adding, “We were thinking about it and we decided that it won’t take a grenade to get in there.”
He put up a hand at Hammer’s start. “She can just get that same guard to unlock the door. I can come up behind him and knock him out cold once he opens it.”
It’s funny how quickly my brother went from a contented, warlord-pet pacifist to a bloodthirsty guerrilla. I was sure he knew several ways to knock a person unconscious with one finger. He seemed eager to wreak some violence on these mall cops. I was proud of him.
The captain shrugged. “Good thinking. That just gives us more time before an alarm.”
I hated to be a killjoy. “Sounds great, but what about the towers? I’d rather not get mowed down by machine guns as we make a run for it.”
The Expert thought about it. She offered, “We can set tripwires at the doors. We can also set them on fire as we go by.”
I’m amazed this super soldier only lost one eye during her military service. Her idea of planning a mission was to hope that we would not get ripped in half by a mounted machine gun! I wanted to tell her that she was not Gene, she could not just quick load, and she only had one life, as far as I knew.
I was getting ready to call my dad to give him my final farewells. Professor Smokes spoke. “We need an alternative plan in case the schedule changes. We may run into unforeseen anomalies.”
Fuck! Is this a joke, God? If he says creepy shit like that, you know something bad is going to happen. Well, maybe he just thinks Hammer’s idea to handle the towers is just as stupid as I do.
A thought came to me. I looked at Aka who shook her head as the words left my mouth. I asked, “Did you notice any rocket launchers in the armory?”
Damn, I’ve been wanting to shoot a bazooka for a long time. I have absolutely no clue to what The Oracle was referring with his eerie “unforeseen anomalies” and shit. You can bet your ass he won’t just fucking tell me. That’d make my life too easy; The Screenwriter forbid I ever get a break.
Easy brightened, “Some of my creams are flammable.” The Expert smiled with agreement. She added, “And we can use that to make sticky bombs for the towers!”
I knew he was talking about the creams he puts on his face every morning. He probably spends more time in the bathroom than his fiancée!
I was glad that my brother was being helpful. I turned to The Oracle to gauge his reaction to our evolving plan, hoping to see some reaction that would guide us. Nope, not a damn sign. Nothing to tell me whether we were heading in the right direction or would face an unbelievably horrible death scene.
“We could take Kimbo out while y’all are raiding the armory, cause more confusion.”
Smokes immediately fell back into his customary speech patterns. “Watchoo wanna kill all da colad folk fo, white bread?”
I uncharacteristically retorted to his accusation of racism. I poorly attempted to joke, “I’ve not even discussed with my brother my plan of getting rid of you. I’m waiting until you people leave to put on my Klan hood and light up a cross.”
The room got deathly quiet and every person looked shocked or horrified. Even the white lesbian looked at me with disgust. Come on, it was a joke! Lighten up! I was about to begin my humiliating apology for the existence of white people and my crappy excuse for a sense of humor.
Hammer thankfully interrupted my Chris Matthews moment. She answered my earlier question, “Well, that wouldn’t necessarily cause havoc. If she’s in her office, it might not be that hard to terminate her quietly; and really that’s a better way to go.”
The manicured statue that was my brother supplied, “She’s in there every morning and she thinks I’m a perfect model citizen. It should be pretty easy for me to get in there to give her a report on the new inmates.”
I almost laughed at the joke I could make about being a male model citizen. Then again, I was looking at my stone faced sibling. “So you’re going to go up to the third floor and break her neck with karate?” My brother began nodding his head. “And then you're going back to the ground floor to karate this other guy?”
His nod came to a crawl as he said, “Neither should take much time.”
I shrugged. Perhaps it didn’t take that long to kill a person with a well placed chop. Maybe cracking someone’s spine was as simple as a Vulcan neck pinch.
I wanted some full sleeves on my skinny arms tomorrow in case we ended up running through the woods. We were in a zombie apocalypse but I was still worried about briars and shit. I looked through Easy’s footlocker and found the closest approximation to long sleeves I could realistically wear: a grotesquely large short sleeve polo shirt. We were nearly the same height; I didn’t realize my bodybuilder brother had a wardrobe designed for Mighty Joe Young. Shit, Smokes could fit his entire body through one of the arms! I would have to tie rubber bands around each wrist. I could probably get by without wearing pants as long as there was no breeze. I reckon it could be worse, it could smell like Easy’s cologne. It did have the faintest hint of cocoa butter lotion.
Aka noticed my rummaging. She graciously decided to come help the deviant that was her future brother-in-law. After some discussion, I held up the hopelessly large shirt that I had picked out. She scoffed and stepped to her own footlocker and pulled out a piece of clothing. She returned with a black scrub top and a smile. Thank God it wasn’t pink or covered in rainbow kittens. I slipped it on over my shirt just to make sure it fit. Plus, I wanted to smell like lavender. This African princess was fairly tall for a female. I would like to say that it fit pretty tight around my biceps. You know, because I’m so muscular.
I’m not going to think about how it affects my “man score” to be able to fit into my brother’s fiancée’s clothes. I simply thanked her as I folded the shirt in my hand and returned to the COUCH.
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Interlude 3
AS I REACHED my seat, I could hear my brother continuing his list of complaints to the general group about how the prison was not a lavish five-star resort. “And the toilet paper is another thing; it’s only one ply!”
This is the most sissified thing for any male to bitch about. Do you hear men crying in the stalls at Walmart or pulling out feminine napkins because they can’t bare the scrape against their sensitive anus? I actually prefer one ply compared to your six ply toilet tissue. It’s cheaper and doesn’t fill up a septic tank as fast. I don’t think anyone can take Sheryl Crow’s advice of only using a single square per dump with one ply, but it’s certainly more economical. I nearly retorted, “One-ply don’t bother me, my asshole ain’t as sensitive as your lady parts!” but decided to keep my mouth shut after I thought about it. I might as well have added, “My boyfriend Lance made sure of that.”
&nbs
p; I now feel less masculine for thinking I’m more masculine for not being prissy than I did when I fit perfectly into clothing designed for a woman.
The radio chimed. “Mo, this is Gray Fox, do you read?”
I was thankful he interrupted Easy’s whining about the thread counts of the sheets and that he asked for me I replied, “We got you, Daddy. What’s up?”
He sighed before coming back, “Well, a lot. I will summarize. Dr. George’s Phantoms are going out tonight to capture a peevie. We have a PT boat. Now that–”
My testosterone overdosed sibling interrupted, “Like in Apocalypse Now? Sweet!
“It’s really only a bass boat with a machine gun mounted to the deck, but, yeah, it’s pretty much the same thing.”
I’m sure my brother intended to ask him to text over some pictures. He would then realize the prison staff had confiscated his iPhone, which would likely send him into another bitch fest. He would completely ignore the fact that he wouldn’t be getting any service after armageddon.
Compare it to my father discussing the monetary worth of comic books a few weeks ago with The Tech or Hammer’s delusional driving etiquette. The world has gone mad.
“So y’all got a plan for getting out of there?” I was proud he decided I was useful and would be in the middle of the strategic committee.