Sweetness in the Dark

by W. B. Martin

  “Get this damn kid away from me. Or let me borrow a knife and I’ll end his little bedtime story,” Chairman Z screeched. “Get me out of here. I’m tired of hiding out. I’m glad its over.”

  “All right Sergeant. You and the guard escort the two of them to the holding cell in the warehouse,” Paul ordered. “We’ll have to look into this more. I’ll notify Cheyenne. The location of these two has been the subject of much consternation there.”

  “No, Uncle Paul. You can’t lock up my mom. Whatever she did, I’m sure she didn’t mean it,” Isaac pleaded.

  Sergeant Wilder maintained his grip on ‘the chairwoman’ and shoved her toward an adjacent building. Chairman Z followed with the guard firmly gripping his arm.

  “Uncle Paul, do something. Thats my mom, I know it,” Isaac implored.

  “Dad?” Matt asked.

  “They’ll be locked up ‘til we get to the bottom of this.”

  Suddenly a shot rang out followed quickly by another. Paul and the boys sprinted towards the sound inside the warehouse. They found the sergeant and the guard standing over two dead bodies. Chairman Z lay crumpled on the floor beside the woman. ‘The chairwoman’ seeped large quantities of blood from a hole in the side of her head. Isaac fell to his knees and cradled the woman’s body as he cried hysterically.

  “What the hell happened, Sergeant?” Paul yelled.

  “Damn, he was fast,” the sergeant said. There was a look of surprise on his face. “Never thought someone could pull my weapon and get off two shots before I could react. I guess I’m getting old.”

  Well, yeah. You’re in your sixties, Paul thought, but he kept it to himself. From the look of consternation on the sergeant’s face, Paul knew the man was suddenly feeling very foolish.

  Sergeant Wilder explained that as he opened the cell door, Chairman Z grabbed the .357 Magnum revolver he kept in a shoulder holster. The first shot was against the side of the woman’s head and then he quickly placed the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger. Both died instantly from the blasts.

  The sergeant retrieved his weapon and reholstered it. The guard disappeared to get a detail to dispose of the bodies. Paul knew that pictures would be taken and statements collected by Army personnel for the record.

  “Come on Isaac, we need to leave,” Paul implored his nephew. Matt bent down to help his dad get Isaac out of the death zone.

  Once outside, all three pulled in the fresh air. The investigators filed past them and the guard returned with a cleanup crew. It would all be taken care of in a short while.

  Except for Isaac. He would suffer the thought of his mother and uncle gunned down violently. And no matter what he could offer in response as to the real identity of the most notorious thugs to come out of ‘the Pulse’, Isaac would always believe it was his family.

  Another two victims of the sun’s attack on Earth. Well Isaac, they just joined the billions of victims who preceded them, Paul thought.

  Chapter 38

  Cheyenne, Wyoming

  Early winter weather hit Cheyenne as Amanda made her way to the Convention Center. It had been turned into the temporary Capitol Building of the Union of American States. The three bodies of Congress met in separate rooms as each worked out the functioning of the new government.

  The apartment that she shared with Paul was a few blocks from the Convention Center. The cold wind of a late fall snow made Wyoming as pleasing as if she was ice fishing on Red Fish Lake in the Idaho Sawtooth Mountain range.

  But Idaho didn’t get the kind of winds that Wyoming experienced and Amanda pulled her hood tight over her head to try and survive the short walk to her favorite restaurant. The locals had finally gotten with the recent demand for good coffee and Amanda had made it a ritual now to support the owner’s efforts.

  She could make it at home, but the cafe offered good coffee and usually good company. It had become the unofficial hangout of the young political types from around the country who had found themselves suddenly living in Cheyenne.

  “Ms. Savage, come and join us,” a booming voice yelled over the din of the crowd. Before she even turned, she recognized the voice commanding her attention.

  “Horst Petrasek, it’s been too long,” Amanda said after she gathered her coffee and walked to the back of the restaurant. “And Rebecca Richards, too. What a surprise to see you here.” And it was a surprise to see Rebecca sitting with Petrasek, the power broker of Texas. What are these two up to? she wondered.

  “I just found out you’ve been assigned to hear our petition of entry. You are moving up,” Horst said.

  That was true, Amanda thought. The President had recently appointed her as his representative to the Commission that would hear requests from non-member states and provinces that wished to join the UAS.

  The UAS had grown since the Constitution had been ratified by the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution had been sent out to the various states and provinces for ratification. Once two-thirds had approved it, the new government was official. Each state and province then sent their Senators, Representatives and Councilors to Cheyenne.

  The last month had seen some additional states vote on the issue. The stragglers were finally showing up in Wyoming. Of the three states that had left the Convention during deliberations, Oklahoma and Louisiana soon made amends and quickly approved the new Constitution. Since they had voted before the two-thirds majority vote that finalized the agreement, they were full members.

  Texas had stayed aloof. Large enough to be a separate country, as it once was, Texas was now outside the UAS borders. But here was Horst, sitting in Cheyenne.

  “So, I take it you Texans want to become part of the UAS. I’ll look forward to your presentation to the Commission,” Amanda offered. The Commission had been established by the new Congress to hear requests for admittance. Already on the docket were requests from Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Those jurisdictions had held plebiscites on their future and the citizens had voted overwhelmingly to join the Union of American States.

  “I was just explaining to Ms. Richards here how important Texas can be to the new country. We had a big contingent saying we should go it alone, but I put a halt to that talk,” Horst said.

  Amanda watched as Rebecca smiled at Horst. Rebecca had been elected to represent her district in Colorado. No one was sure how a flaming liberal could get elected after what had happened, but rumor was she had kept her mouth shut about everything except her role in bringing about the new Constitution.

  Things never change. The same politicians lie about their record and the voters never dig for the truth, Amanda thought. History would repeat itself. Luckily, Rebecca was one of the few liberals in the entire Congress. With the big-city haunts of most liberals depopulated, the survivors were in a decidedly conservative mood.

  “Yes, Ms. Richards has been a voice in the new House of Representatives. I’m sure she is looking forward to working on your petition,” Amanda lied. Rebecca and Horst getting along? Not in my lifetime, Amanda thought.

  “Well, I would have never believed it, but it seems that Rebecca and I seem to agree on a number of things.” Horst said with a real Texan ‘shit-eating grin’ on his face.

  Oh great. If these two are agreeing on anything, God help the rest of us, Amanda thought. “That is good news. Building consensus; that’s the name of the game in the new country,” Amanda lied again. She needed to see the President and warn him of this new play for power. Whatever Horst was up to, Amanda would see that the Texans wouldn’t get away with it.

  Amanda claimed an appointment and excused herself from the smart little gathering. She would leave Rebecca and Horst to their own conspiratorial talk. She hit the door and the cold wind took her breath away.

  * * *

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this Commission will come to order,” Lars Lundquist gaveled the first meeting of the Commission to Review Membership Standards into session. Lars had been appointed by the Alabama governor to the new Senate. He had q
uickly been appointed Chairman of the Financial Committee. Being Chairman of the Review Commission was one of his many other duties.

  Each body got three members on the Commission, as well as three appointed by the President. The twelve members would hear requests to join the UAS. Their recommendations would be forwarded on to the Congress for official action.

  “Will the representatives of the Great State of Texas please come forward?” Lars asked.

  Horst and his staff stepped forward. While Horst readied himself in front of the microphone, his staff handed out their formal written request to the Commission members and the reporters in the audience.

  “If I may begin, Mr. Chairman. Texas comes before you with a strong case why it needs to be part of the Union of American States. The UAS, as it is known, is a strong community of freedom-seeking states and provinces. Texas has always had a similar calling for freedom since our beginning,” Horst explained.

  He continued with the litany of Texas history from its beginning as part of Mexico up to the day it walked out of the Constitutional Convention. It was a long presentation that covered numerous events.

  A few items were left unsaid, like the attempt to steal the nation’s gold, Amanda thought. She would be polite at the moment and let Horst ramble on. Amanda noticed that Rebecca attended the meeting and sat right behind Horst.

  When Horst finished with the formal presentation, the Chairman asked the Commission if they had any questions.

  “The Chair recognizes Ms. Savage,” Lars said.

  “Mr. Petrasek, recent articles from newspapers in Texas have expressed a less-than-favorable opinion of the wisdom on joining the UAS. How do you reconcile this apparent difference in Texan voter sentiment?” Amanda asked.

  “Ms. Savage, we have had our disagreements down home, but I can assure you and the Commission that the entire State of Texas is behind this,” Horst said.

  “I believe the newspapers have been most critical of the President’s proposal to Congress of establishing our country on a ‘gold standard’ for our monetary policy,” Amanda said. “That was a topic of discussion at the time of the writing of the new Constitution, among other items, and it was decided to delay that issue. I believe, like the original Bill of Rights in the old Constitution, that a number of amendments are being proposed to tighten up our new Constitution.”

  “That would be our understanding, also,” Horst answered.

  “Is Texas ready to state how they feel about a ‘gold standard’ being added to our new Constitution?” Amanda asked.

  “I’d like to answer that question,” Professor Vernon Bush of the University of Texas said. “The State of Texas, upon admittance to the UAS, would oppose the establishment of a monetary system based on gold. We feel that it is an unnecessary restriction to the full development of our economy.”

  The statement caused the Commission members to break down along partisan lines. The ‘gold standard’ had been a stumbling block in adopting a new Constitution. One side wanted to return the country to a monetary system based on the value of gold and silver. The opposing side wished to stay in a ‘fiat’ money system based on faith in government.

  “But we’ve gone over this many times,” Lars stated. As an economist at the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University, he was the leading proponent of money backed by gold. Rebecca was now agitated and demanded to speak. She had been a vocal supporter of fiat money based on the government printing as much paper as they felt they needed.

  “But Keynesian economics worked for all those years to keep the world’s economy growing. People’s lives improved because governments took it upon themselves to assist the disadvantaged,” Rebecca said.

  “Ms. Richards, let me educate you on the details of your view that people’s lives saw improvements from government action.” Lars was red-faced in frustration at having to inform yet one more ill-educated individual on the way the world really worked.

  Lars explained that the key action happened in 1971. That was the year that President Richard Nixon closed the ‘Gold Window’, taking the USA officially off the gold standard. The action was a result of years of foreign governments exchanging their paper dollars for real gold. If Nixon hadn’t taken the USA off the gold standard, America would have seen its entire gold reserve transferred overseas.

  “But we need to rebuild the country and we’ll need to borrow money to get that done,” Rebecca retorted.

  “No, Ms. Richards. We need to do it the old-fashion way. Work hard, save money and invest in new productive enterprises that will bring more growth. Just like our country did for the first one hundred and fifty years of its existence,” Lars said.

  “But the people will demand that it happen faster. We need to get the country back up off of its knees,” Rebecca said.

  And who put the country on its knees? Amanda thought.

  “Just a couple of statistics for you, Ms. Richards. The first is a quote from Paul B. Farrell after the 2008 financial collapse,” Amanda said. “Writer Farrell points out that action to supposedly save our monetary system ‘forced Congress and the Fed into bailing out our too-big-to-fail banks to an estimated $29.7 trillion in cash, credits, cheap money loans and debt relief.’ ”

  “Almost $30 trillion dollars created out of thin air,” Lars reiterated.

  Amanda continued. “Another figure, Ms. Richards, for you to contemplate; $202 trillion. That is the amount of unfunded liabilities of the old United States government. That includes Social Security, Medicare, Federal Retirement Funds and other unfunded, so-called entitlements. Again, borrowed money and promises to pay at some future date. We can thank the sun for ending that bankrupt scheme.”

  Lars started to speak, but Amanda wasn’t finished. “$600 trillion.” She said it again for emphasis. “Yes, $600 trillion, ladies and gentlemen. That would be the amount of derivatives outstanding before ‘the Pulse’. A total of $600 trillion of IOUs owed by private investment companies.”

  “Well, if you say that all that debt vanished when ‘the Pulse’ hit, then we can start anew with a clean slate,” Rebecca said.

  Oh boy, this woman is dumber than a post, Amanda thought. She would need more than a basic education in the way the world worked.

  “Ms. Richards, I guess we need to back up,” Amanda said as she tried to hold her composure. “We don’t need to go back to the 19th Century to understand how America rose to the top of all the nations in the world. We can agree that by the Second World War, the United States was the largest economy. The country came out of that war with almost half the industrial capacity on earth.”

  “Yes, I know. The ‘Greatest Generation’ crap again. At what cost to the poor in the Third World did our extravagance cause?” Rebecca asked.

  “I’m glad you brought up the ‘Greatest Generation’ as written about by Tom Brokaw. I have an opposite opinion of that generation,” Amanda said. “Yes, they did a wonderful job defeating totalitarianism. Then they came home and went to work. And they raised the ‘Baby Boomers’, the most self-indulgent generation the world had ever seen.”

  “That would be your opinion,” Rebecca retorted.

  “And many others. But the ‘Greatest Generations’ real crime was their irresponsibility in carrying on American values. With the United States on top of the world and much of the rest of the world devastated by war, the ‘Greatest Generation’ believed that the hard work that had advanced America so far could be compromised,” Amanda said.

  She went on to explain that as the other countries rebuilt and became more competitive, the United States didn’t adjust to the new situation. America continued as if the other industrialized countries would always remain minor competitors.

  Meanwhile, Americans enjoyed the good life of inexpensive consumer goods. Socialism in America took hold as the wealth that had been gathered to America was deemed suitable to be spread among the less fortunate. This added to the attitude that America could enjoy life without working hard. Then the governm
ent decided that watching industry after industry leave for cheaper locales was a good policy. The ‘Greatest Generation’ stood by as the ‘giant sucking sound’, as Ross Perot had described it, drained the life-blood out of the country.

  “Wages plummeted as American workers tried to compete with Third World wage earners. It wasn’t a recipe for success,” Lars added.

  Amanda added, “In the 1960s, the bottom ninety percent of people in America owned sixty-five percent of the income. In the 2000s, that same ninety percent had been crushed down to eleven percent.”

  “The rich got richer. That’s why we need to tax them more,” Rebecca said.

  “You’ll never understand, will you? A strong vibrant country is sustained when everyone is doing well. The United States has always had a strong middle class, but what of that middle class before ‘the Pulse’?” Amanda asked. “The last numbers showed that forty-eight percent of all Americans were living in low-income households. And even worse, thirty-seven percent of all household were led by someone with a net worth of zero or less than zero.”

  “The middle class was killed off by the policies of our old government. No greater crime exists in the old United States than what was perpetrated upon the American people,” Lars added. “And it can be all attributed back to leaving the ‘gold standard’.”

  “And that is why the President has called for the establishment of a banking system based on the Swiss model. Many banks in Switzerland have over one-hundred percent of their assets backed by gold. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, the Swiss government actually had to devalue the Swiss franc,” Amanda said. “The Swiss franc had increased so much in value that Swiss exports were suffering.”