My Dead America

by Frank Weltner

  “Yes.”

  “See you then.”

  Michael thought it a bit strange that she'd ask where he was. After all, what did it matter? It was probably just her being polite.

  But what if he had just been set up, and she was a terrorist?

  He jumped up and started running.

  Shirley listened to her other cell phone, which was a toss-away phone, which she used to dial the cell phone attached to the bomb under his car. After a few seconds, the cell phone offered up something like a click. Then it went dead.

  Michael was at the farthest end of the FBI building when the floor began to crumble and red flames reached their hot fingers into his legs and head, severing it neatly as window glass from an interior office spun through his splitting neck bones like a huge sliver of death. As the building rose up and collapsed atop him he tasted his own blood as it ran upward from his neck and coated his hand along with the name of “Shirley L. Mandell, Shop Specialist.”

  Before the dust had even settled, Shirley, whose real name was not Shirley at all, dialed another number. Five phones in the building she was in rang. She then grabbed the already loosened hard drive from her computer as well as all the others in the building which she retrieved one-by-one and tossed to the garage. She then met the five others in her group in the Manager's office where the Manager and four other employees were lying in various positions with a bullet hole in each of their foreheads. All five of them disrobed and tossed their clothing into the room with the corpses. One of them tossed the video tapes and video camera flash cards on top of the bodies. They put on uniforms from another company's warehouse, tossed in a three minute timer attached to an explosive device, and exited the building driving a customer's van which just happened to have dark glass windows that no one could see through. As they took off, one of them reached out and pulled on a wire which unplugged five gasoline drums, causing the flaming agents to run through the offices and along the floors.

  They were one mile away and in the basement of another building. They had already changed clothes again, set off a bomb timer inside their van and tossed all the security tapes from that garage into the van. Then they got into five separate rental cars and slowly left the garage and headed in different directions. A minute later, the bomb went off in the first office tearing apart the muffler building and setting each room in it afire. A few minutes later the second building disappeared in fire and smoke.

  The landscape of the Washington DC hegemony had been altered slightly. The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building was in ruins along with the shattered bodies of hundreds of agents, informers, and computer specialists. Smoke rolled high into the sky from all three of the wrecked buildings.

  The President was on the phone being advised that terrorists had once again struck. Before his mouth even opened, the five were long gone, and the confidence of the nation's citizens was once again shattered into 300 million emotional mind-warps.

  Page 9

  Chapter Two

  Chesapeake Bay

  They had been in place for several weeks.

  Now that Washington's FBI Building and all of its Homeland Security Tracking Computers were dead, the path to winning what they wished for which was total independence from government greed, police actions, and constant lying, had opened just a little wider. Against all odds, they had prevailed. Using the trick of harnessing the enemy as a mule to carry bombs into his own hidden lair and then to destroy him with them in a single moment had worked perfectly well like it almost always had in the past. In fact, this single act of defiance had wiped away most of his security in one flashing breath of explosive heat. That bomb's fiery embers shot like stars into the building's inner heavens setting everything afire. All had been changed in one wondrous instant of advanced clarity. The demon dragon had been killed as the hundreds of peering FBI eyes had entered eternal darkness in one fell swoop. The Washington DC hegemony had found its most sadistic police state apparatus had suddenly entered into the deadly silence of a modern Hades in which the fifty trillion eyes of computer databases were transformed into mere blackened dust beneath that crest-fallen building's silent graveyard of bones and busted concrete where death had swooned and a thousand climactic moans had long since ceased their clamor.

  Bob, Shirley, Donald, Helen, Frank, and Ronald sat in the dingy, gazing at the wet walls of the Grand Chesapeake Bay. The waves splashed against the sides in tiny slaps. It was just enough sound to stabilize their vision of where they were, and the buoyancy of the vessel as it rose and fell inside the overwhelming midst of greater forces moving within the bay let them know that even with the knowledge and training they possessed, they had better be very careful, because the forces of nature, like the forces of governmental evil were all about them. Each of them knew in the push of things past and of others to come that they were lost here in a sea of troubles that could threaten to overwhelm them at any instant. Each of them had to be wary, constantly on guard for the forces of evil that had entered their nation, dissolved its Constitutional laws that never held much hope for the masses. The laws only pacified the people. They were bathed in a false veneer of hope which the courts would regularly grant and then dash to pieces so that case-by-case the people drifted amid the chaos. Instead of justice, they were hit with injustice. Millions of them were behind bars, steeled in these vast prisons of federalized hatred, as opposite decisions slammed them pall-mall against the rocky beaches of the government's slothful system of injustice. The nation had pretended to dish out justice and fairness, but its jails were filled with millions of horror-stricken souls whose only crime was testing out the freedoms promised, but finding that injustice and prison bars were the only path to which it led them unawares.

  “We got it done,” Bob said. He had been with the rebellion as long as anyone, having thought it up in the middle of a green dream in which storm clouds swarmed inside this vision of the world and painted the government's history with its grotesque and quavering brush so that the vision of the world was furry and bewildered by the dark colors. Each citizen possessed his own mental Picasso which was as surreal as Trotsky, anarchy, and the bolshevik cruelties of a dreadful homeland security offensive that the government's thugs waged against them at all times. All of these endless negative things waged persistent war on America's thinkers and protesters within the vast horror of darkness into which America had transformed itself. Everyone feared the worst. Each American now knew that an extremely dire future was on the way to escort them into their own personal little hell on Earth.

  His full name was Bob Thornton, and he was a Harvard graduate with a Ph. D. in Social Disorganization, a specialty which was thought to be the per-requisite of persons who, like Bob, were mentally different, open to weird interpretations of history, and known to view the entire world the way a swan sees it while encircling the world during migrations as he carries within his throbbing wings those deadly and festering diseases from dark African jungles into the cold and precarious streets of Manhattan's lower peninsula where political strife and rebellion were always alive and totally in vogue.

  Bob had wanted to be a ballet dancer, but he had broken his foot in a hockey game in high school. The delicate bones necessary to pirouette and balance a beautiful dancing girl atop his shoulders needed the utmost in perfection within the foot's exquisite architecture to properly balance up and down, right and left, and the well-timed movements of bending knees unwinding like a strong set of springs while hurling into the heavens the twirling body of an angel of dance as she moved with the magic of a shooting star across the brightly accoutered stage lights.

  I am the leader of the dance, the mover of the beauties of this world, the dancer to miraculous orchestrations, yet I am this no more.

  And so, Bob had entered into the deep moroseness of a political dissident, a man whose artistic mind had been squashed by a thoughtless boot as though some inarticulate soldier had decided to take him out with no more thought than a fire ant biting viciously into a wo
rm's anus. He was poisoned forever, and, although he might still dance, he could never lift a girl over his head and sail her into an artificially starry heaven atop the world's most demanding stages.

  His forlornness led him into politics at a time when all of America was being betrayed by its leaders. Of course, they were never its leaders. They were only its middle men. Their real leaders were the bankers, stock brokers, speculators, generals, CEO's, and the millionaires who had the money and intention of running for themselves everything they might get their hands onto.

  He had sat in on enough political meetings to understand that the government's eternal harassment would never end the persistent nagging of snooping eyes, jangling handcuffs, and water boards that gushed panic into the hearts of those who were wise enough and brave enough to endure the magnetism of his own self-immolation at the hands of the post-industrial moth men of law enforcement whose only joy was in the suffering of those they placed inside their system where they might have their way to beat, pierce, and strangle nearly unto death nearly person they might ensnare, then repeat it all over again. The horror of America was without limit, and all of those in the movement to create a democracy of real and not just imagined freedom usually felt the horror-stricken fear that powerful law enforcement goons are trained to dish out for their insidious and nameless leaders.

  Bob had been jailed in a van with Shirley, Donald, and Ron. They had been caught running from the police for no reason. They had just wanted to remain faceless to the gendarmes, nothing else. They had, in fact, done nothing wrong. They were sitting inside the metal box surrounded by its vile little police bars where they placed their shaking fingers against the sky through these vile, wobbling windows. Everyone invited to a ride inside a paddy wagon must endure these crimes against each nation's citizens until the wagon slowed and braked. Then, the police either dumped them at the station or opened the doors and told them to get the hell out of their hideous paddy wagon or else. You just never knew. Often, the police stations were already filled, and the judges had been told not to incarcerate another perpetrator, because each judge was given a maximum of two prisoners only that day, and they'd already given it to some ignorant, half-stoned low-life who was too stupid to even behave for a few minutes before a judge.

  Inside the van, they had discussed the vagaries of freedom and how some professors would actually argue in classes that sitting in a paddy wagon with huge locks on the door was a part of the absolute freedom that is only possible in a democracy like America. “After all, you will get your day in court, and, even if the judge finds you guilty, at least you were able to give your side, and you can't argue with that.”

  “I can argue with that,” Bob had said. “You are damn well right I can argue with that. There's nothing democratic about pulling a person off the street and taking him to some court that's as sterile as a medical clinic, then asking the person to explain himself before the judge. Suddenly, the person under arrest is asked to defend himself, but nothing was ever proven, no rules of evidence were enforced, only unfounded accusations by the arresting cop who is defending himself against you and whom the court is supposed to defend against all comers. You call that a democracy? It's something very not like that at all. It is a shop of horrors where the person who is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty is suddenly treated like an already convicted criminal and asked by the judge if there's any convincing reason why he shouldn't be jailed for trial. Hell, he's supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, so why is the poor bastard in cuffs and standing before a judge who is sworn to uphold what the police do? But the professor, on the other hand, tells me that this is freedom. Only if freedom is incarceration for everyone.”

  Helen laughed.

  “I remember the many times we've been jailed together,” Helen said. “First we were shackled, and the goons with the cuffs made certain that they cut our wrists when they applied them. They always wanted us to feel pain, and so, the louder we howled, the bigger their woodies. I find these police disgusting.”

  The van rattled down the street as the bars on the windows shuddered and moved erratically, the vertical bars rising up like boney fingers pointing into the distant stars floating outside in some universe that seemed super free, simply because it was not contained in a small metal box with no horizon and no sense of propriety.

  “We are martyrs tonight,” Bob complained, “same as always.”

  “Right, Bob,” Donald said. “We were right to figure this would happen. It's always best to expect the worst. No one was ever disappointed by figuring that the police were lower than dirt, never gave a shit, and loved busting balls whenever they could. We know what's up with these dudes.”

  Shirley looked at the systemic violence of the metal van, how it interrupted her view of the world at large, encased her in its endless walls which allowed her less than twelve feet in either direction as her domain here on Earth. The very existence of such paddy wagons, as Shirley saw it, was an affront to every citizen, every city, and every nation. With this type of hovel existing to keep protesters and rioters from walking the streets like free citizens, the entire world would soon be only fit for maggots.

  “We have been shit on,” Shirley said. A tear came from her left eye, then another and another. Ron watched them move down her face like the tiniest of streams and fall to the floor like rain drops. “I can't stand the horror,” she said. “It's just too much for me to endure.”

  “Get over it,” Ronald said, “because this indignity is not comparable to water boarding at Gitmo. Believe me, Shirley, these bastards can do a lot worse than this. They've done it to you, to me, and to thousands of people just like us.”

  Shirley wiped the tears from her face. “I can't stand this,” she said, “I am so mad I want to scream. Nothing we do does any good.”

  “We aren't doing enough. That's the problem,” Ronald said. “But when we get started, we need to be worse than these cops ever were. That's for sure.”

  “We will be worse,” Bob said. “We'll be a lot worse. We will take out their buildings, cut down their armies of cops where they stand, and eviscerate the jails of their guards, until we can unleash all those innocent pot smokers they've locked up forever and who now hate the government in earnest and just want to live in peace, place them back on the streets, and run them through the cities with reefers dangling from their fucking lips. We need to do it all. But first and foremost, we need to wipe these greedy government bastards off the face of the Earth. We cannot run a revolution when the police are still breathing and ready to wipe us out every time we protest something. Also, we cannot tolerate these bank licking government people who want to hunt us down, or the politicians who take banking money for their elections and then hand their congressional banking corrupters fat ass tax breaks worth hundreds of billions of dollars up the ying-yang as paybacks. We'll never get anything we want until they are all good and dead.”

  “What are you saying,” Shirley asked?

  “I'm saying we need to take them out. You know. Shoot them. Stomp them until their skulls crack open. I mean we need to take these bastards out. Otherwise, they'll just do it the next time, and the next, and the next. It's ad infinitum if we don't kill them.”

  “A bit revolutionary,” Helen said.

  “I'll say,” Frank offered.

  “Bob's right. These jack offs are always more than ready to beat our heads, cuff us until we bleed, and put us behind bars. As long as we allow this, they are going to do it. But, if we ever just beat their brains to a pulp with their own billy clubs, they'll never go after us again.”

  “Yes, they will,” Bob said.

  “I disagree,” Shirley chimed in. “If we kill or stomp them nearly to death, it'll end. Otherwise, they'll just keep doing these things to us.”

  “Our time will come,” Helen said, “and believe me, it's coming.”

  They stopped, and the door flew open.

  “Come on kids,” the cop said. “Party time's over.
”

  “Party time is just beginning, you mean,” Helen said. She looked the cop in the eye as she jumped down to the ground. “Got yer woody yet, officer,” she asked.

  “You wipe that smile off your face, girl,” he said, “We don't allow ourselves to be talked to like that.”

  “Sure,” Bob said. “that's why so many of you are in trouble for raping prisoners. It's because you don't allow yourselves to be talked to like that. Why? Because you are so perfect. Because you treat us all with so much respect. Ain't that right, officer?”

  “Yea, that's right, punk. Now, let's get our asses into the court house.”

  He'd like to corn them with his police stick, but it would mean his badge and his gun. They'd be gone, if anyone found out and testified. He had grown up in a police family where the talk at home was a lot about how much his dad and uncles got by with abusing their prisoners. To hear them, it was a real hoot being a cop in the day. Every cop had a license to detain, badger, and ruin people's lives, just as long as he behaved a little bit. No corn sticking, no head banging in front of some asshole's camera so you could be vilified in the press and made out to be some sort of monster, when, actually you were the nicest guy on the police force. Besides, the girls liked a cop in his fancy nut-case uniform with his fat-assed police issued gun, and that meant that that each cop was cool. Nothing else counted.

  “I want ice cream,” Helen said to the gendarme.

  “I'll give you ice cream,” the cop told her. “Only, honey, it ain't going to have the ice, and it won't be the cream you think it is.”

  “Didn't your mom tell you how to act in front of a lady?” Helen asked him.

  “I don't see no lady. Are you a lady? Is that what you are saying?”

  “Yea, that's exactly what I'm saying, officer.”

  “Well, honey, where I come from ladies don't wear handcuffs into a court. That makes you not a lady in my book.”