My Dead America

by Frank Weltner

  All the banks were concerned about were how many dollars could they earn in their endless speculations and whether or not the next hedge on their bets might yield them enough money through mischievous banking invention to retire early. The banks had acted in an outrageous and fool hearty manner. In the end they had destroyed America.

  The government didn't even care. Everything was certified as OKAY as long as the handshakes between banks and politicians including a fat sum of money for a Senator's campaign cache came to the fore to ensure them another term closer to a fat retirement check and an even fatter lobbyist position in the outskirts of the great Mother of endless corruptions, fortunes and payoffs, the nation's huge out-of-control hamster money wheel known now as that Washington DC hegemony out there on the East Coast where the criminals held their sway and everyone else be damned.

  The meeting broke up, and Specialist Clayton made ready to lead her men and women into the great shell of a Capitol and reconnoiter the situation. After that, she and her team would seek out and find the rich who were most likely holed up in deep bunkers where they had somewhat successfully hidden from the plague, and execute them forthwith for the murder of billions of human beings solely for greed and the need to control the world. They were not people to be coddled but to be totally exterminated for their uselessness and their proven abilities to destroy whatever working people created through sweat equity by absorbing all profit associated with it. These denizens made a total laughingstock of working citizens by shuffling funds printed by the Bureau of Printing and Engraving into accounts which gambled away the nation's future and insured that every gallon of gasoline, therm of natural gas, and bushel of corn would be sold at an artificially high price which insured a steep profit for the non-working bankers. These greed mongers had become money grubbers of the fifth estate and the group that had murdered the golden goose which had made America the wealthiest of all poor nations in the world in the first place.

  Donna Clayton, who had been trained at Fort Bragg with Winkler whom she had seduced and loved in many a motel along the roads that entwined that city, already knew the drill, knew what had destroyed America, and knew that it was their duty to clean up the two percent of humanity that survived the plague. That meant eliminating those for whom the great dying off had been started in the first place—the politicians and bankers who devised the conspiracies known as the collective New World Order and its money dodges that dogged America into idleness and desperation. It had now caused her own underground to make plans. Soon these soldiers would take hold and exact the revenge due to the banksters for their crime against humanity. They planned to finish the job fast and totally, leaving no one alive, not even the children. If one person lived, another die off would surely occur in the future. These were families who never gave up. They simply could not be allowed to survive. Not one person out of all of them.

  Donna’s team reached Washington in one week. They had used what was left of the rapidly declining roads that led to the American Rome inside the dead and dying District of Columbia, that tiny square of evil that had destroyed its once successful economic and social system because it had always supported banks to the detriment of its own people. It was always reported in the false presses owned by the banksters that everything was fine, that the government represented the people of the nation, but election after election had proven that nothing ever changed in Washington. It was always the bankers and speculators who never worked a day in their lives who were the kings of America. The ninety-nine-percent of citizens who were mere slaves for the rich to hire and fire at will were considered to be sheer welfare queens. The people knew better. The reality, they said among themselves, was just the exact opposite. It was the bankers and politicians who were the real welfare queens. These bankers fed from the open spigot of the federal reserve. They got money for free every day. The money came from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving where fiat currency originated either as ink on paper or as mere computer digits that slithered into their hands first on a daily basis. The bankers no longer used that currency for what it was intended—to supply housing and business loans—from money issued interest free to banks to keep the nation afloat and in funds. Instead, the bankers used it to speculate in those very commodities that citizens needed to warm their homes, feed their families, and drive their large suburban vehicles with expensive gasoline, made expensive by the banks themselves and their endless buying of gasoline and oil barrel futures, spewing their own private monetary madness into an abused system of supply-and-demand that used to be based on consumer shopping habits but was now based on banking speculation. As a result, these items rose and fell not by sales but by puts and calls from large investment firms seeking smooth sailing into wealth and not caring who suffered as a result of it. Those days were now at an end, because the bankers were soon to die for their murders around the world in the name of worldwide control through the criminal thinning of its population. Any way you looked at it, this was pure murder and nothing less than murder, but on a scale far grander than had ever been tried before. Be assured, just as soon as the raiders found them, these one-percent greed people and their entire families would be dead and silent forever in their bunkers which would become their final resting places.

  Good riddance. Filth needed to be wiped clean off the face of the Earth lest they do it again to humanity. They had not only stolen the world's inheritance, they had planted the plague which they used to kill off most of the Earth's people. It was all done in the name of profit. There was no sense of humanity, no concern for human life except their own, and no remorse whatsoever. There would be no chance for remorse and redemption granted to them this time. Those days were over for good. The cows were out of the barn, and the door was barred shut so they could never return.

  The war crime of the century had been paid for and committed by these freaks, and their punishment would be the firing squad, the rope, and the poison gas. Whatever was available would be used. There would be no trials. Their mere existence in bunkers built to keep them safe was a grave testament to their involvement in the great dying. The bunkers would also now be their very graves to keep them quiet forever. Donna and thousands of soldiers like her were committed to the complete extermination of these anti-Christ vermin who had committed these unforgivable acts against humanity including their nation's own citizens and leaders almost all of whom were now dead. Seven billion dead pairs of eyes were upon her soldiers and upon others like them. She was expected to begin the roundup of the guilty, to take revenge for what had been done to all mankind at their hands, and she was going to do so. After all, her own family had been decimated by these jerks, and their punishment meant only one thing. To save the world, they needed to be wiped off its face forever and not one of them allowed to survive to plan again another second dying off like this one, then the third, fourth, and fifth, all of them lying along the road to a future history of suffering they would plan for us as the need arose in their sadistic and selfish minds. Once bitten, forever warned. They knew exactly what mankind expected of them.

  Fortunately, they had also survived. Although the printing presses no longer worked nor did the satellites, TV sets, and electrical grids, the hand cranked rifles still worked to perfection, and these soldiers were very capable of using them for the right purpose. Although the bankers were unaware of the survival of these committed rebels, in a few days and weeks they would learn of them. That was the last thing they would know. It was already too late for these bankers. There was nothing they were going to do to save themselves. They were already counted among the dead. Only the dying was yet to be extracted from them. That was coming over the immediate horizon. Lady Justice was about to come alive, shake loose her hair, and allow it to flow in the winds like a golden garment that sparkled in the healing powers of the sunlight.

  Page 9

  Chapter Twelve

  Philly...

  Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, was only a shadow of its former g
reatness. It had always been a drab has-been city. It's history was spotty. The bright spots were dead old shrines to Benjamin Franklin, who was the old rake whose publishing empire had helped to spawn the colonial banking rebellion against King George of England who was painted as an ogre with no good traits in those Ben Franklin newspapers. The truth was somewhere else, but as usual it never hit the news, because it wasn't in the slightest interesting enough to consume a single paragraph of reportorial creativity. Nor would it reflect the wealth of idiosyncrasies of the nation's editors whose only job it was to crush out common sense and corrective assessments of the realities of politics in The New World of colonial farm boys and half-educated wastrels who walked the streets in search of work. Of course, that was a mythical picture of America. The people who floated here across the ice-filled wine dark seas hadn't sailed here to waste their lives working for idiots like Benjamin Franklin who was nothing if not a fat whore-mongering pig whose every opinion was aired in the presses merely on account of him owning practically all of them himself. You might say, the Revolution was Franklin's alone. The others came along, because they envisioned profits for themselves in Old Ben's smile which they couldn't help but see everyday as it was constantly engraved inside their morning papers.

  Bob Thornton led the crew to Philly. It was filled with the wreckage of death. Corpses lined the streets. The parks weren't much better. Although most citizens preferred to suffer their death throes at their homes and in bed, there were hundreds who preferred death in a park instead of waiting in their homes for their inevitable descent into hell. Those in the park probably wanted peace and quiet, distance from their dead wives, husbands, and children, and a moment's peace before departing. A few of them were protected by their pets. These dogs slept beside their owners, protecting their bodies from the ravaging hordes of hounds in search of human meals. For the loyal, there was the dignity of protecting those who patted their heads, fed them, and provided them with a warm and comfortable home.

  Bob Thornton led his armed and deadly crew through several downtown parks in Philadelphia. “Chew Playground” was littered with bodies, mostly of young people who fled their homes as their parents passed into the other world where bankers wanted them to be. Only one child remained alive, and he ran up to the crew with his hands waving over his head.

  “Well, hello!” Bob said.

  “Hi,” the boy said to him.

  “Is your family here?”

  “They's all dead, sir.”

  “Do you have a name, son?”

  “Yea, they call me Tiger.”

  “You don't look much like a tiger,” Bob Thornton said. “How'd you get a name like that?”

  “I have a toy tiger I slept with at my house,” Tiger said. “That’s where I got the name.”

  Bob Thornton envisioned a poor white boy with a plush tiger doll which he squeezed as he slept. So, that was Tiger.

  He handed Tiger some candy bars from his pack.

  “We'd like to take you with us, son, but we are traveling fast. Do you have anyone you can stay with?”

  “No, sir. They's all gone now. Died together in our house.”

  “How far is that,” Thornton asked.

  “It's over there,” the boy said. He pointed at an historical townhouse that faced the park.

  Thornton lifted the boy up and walked to the house. His crew carefully located the boy's dead family members and carried them in their sheets into the park, where they dug a large grave and buried them, side-by-side. It looked like some Nazi burial from World War Two propaganda films produced in Jewish Hollywood. Thornton said a few words, then they covered the family with dirt after taking Tiger back to his home which they stocked with food and soda from the neighborhood's local food mart. Then, they hurried off, after wishing Tiger well and instructing him to stay at home where he'd be safer if gangs started roaming the streets, which would come next, as soon as things solidified a bit.

  They always formed gangs. There was closeness and strength in numbers. Gangs also represented family and political power when there were no police to beat your head and keep you straight as an arrow.

  Thornton leveled his radiation meter at the dust that covered a windowsill. The plague had caused dozens of reactors to go critical and melt down. The result was always the same. A final series of hydrogen explosions hurled radioactive rods into the air. The effect was so traumatic, the rods shattered into dust. That material was hurled high into the air where it moved across the continent and out into the Atlantic. Cities along the route received radioactive materials settling onto their streets, windowsills, and roofs. The meter reflected double the radioactive limit, but the safety limit had been raised ever since Chernobyl and Fukushima rewrote mean background radiation levels across the globe. Millions would have eventually died from this, but the plague took them out faster than their cancers and leukemias could.

  “Radiation is within limits,” Thornton announced. “We don't have to worry about that.”

  Thornton remembered the hysteria over the Three Mile Island disaster which caused a minor meltdown. The Three Mile containment chamber prevented ninety-nine-percent of the hazardous material from hitting New York City. It was bad enough that no more permits to build nuclear reactors in the United States were ever approved from that point on.

  His best friend, Ricky Thompson, took the meter from Thornton and stuffed it into his knapsack. He hoisted the sack onto his back on a single belt, and used the other belt to hang his M-14 so he could keep his hands free.

  “We haven't found many survivors, sir,” Ricky said.

  “They are here, son.”

  “Where?”

  “We'll find them.”

  The corpses still littered the streets, but they had now dried into bizarre and scarey leather. Their faces took on the aspect of a strange alien race all done up for Star Wars. They resembled humans but in a different sort of way.

  “You know what's strange, Thornton,” Ricky asked?

  “No. Seems to me like a dead Philadelphia couldn't be any stranger than this. Corpses, loose barking dogs, birds eating what's left. It's pretty darned scarey actually.”

  “There's something else,” Ricky said.

  “Shoot. I'm not a good guesser.”

  “Don't want to play, eh?”

  “It's not 'Let's Make a Deal', son. Is it?”

  “Nope. Sure isn't. But what I find so crazy is that all of them are not facing each other, but seem to have died with their smart phones and iPads in their hands. I think they died texting their friends and relatives.”

  Thornton had already noticed the huge number of phones in their hands. He figured that once this was cleaned up, the archaeologists would gather all the phones together, charge them, and see the last messages of this generation. There would be calls to girlfriends, mothers, children, and acquaintances. He figured their very last moments would be seen inside these phones and tablets as the deadly plague sapped what remained of their exhausted energies. The end came upon them so rapidly. It caused them eventually to be unable to walk or even to breathe. These were their final moments. Their last thoughts were right there waiting to be resurrected for scholars to study inside their text and voice mails.

  “Strange,” Thornton said. “It's as though they died texting and phoning. You'd think they'd be paying attention instead to the last beautiful visions of sunshine they were ever going to see.”

  “The poor bastards. Most of them were living a life of texting. They died the same life. Probably figured their texts would last forever somewhere out on the Internet. They were still seeking Eternal Life as they died.”

  These phones in their hands with their preserved pics and words were America's primitive man cave drawings that had been discovered one hundred years ago deeply hidden in the ground in Southern France, and in our future, if we have one, we'd know more about these people than we'd ever known about any other group of human beings in Earth's history.

  They spread out
to cover more area. The routine was the same. Count dead bodies. Count survivors. Get addresses of the survivors. Make the survivors know that America was lost, but that a new era was about to begin, and each of them would have important parts to play. They were afraid of suicides. Millions had already given up and hanged themselves, and ropes dangled here and there where some had done that. Most had been cut down. However, after awhile, they seem to have been left on the rope to keep the animals from eating their flesh off their bones. Who would have ever guessed such things would happen to Americans, Brits, or Mexicans? It was just too sad and overwhelmingly bizarre. Who would have thought of dogs eating their masters for want of food? There were also stories of dogs protecting the dead bodies of their owners, then eating them in order to keep other dogs from desecrating them. The dog-man bond could not get any closer.

  Ricky guessed that he'd rather be eaten by his dog than by anyone else's. It made sense in a man-dog way. If the only way to protect him would be to finish him off and digest him to keep other hounds from tearing him to shreds, then, in dog minds this was probably the right way to do things. Protection was the name of the game for dogs. In a crazy way, it made perfect sense. At least it got the job done. Once the master was eaten other dogs could not touch him. Perfectly understood concept.

  They'd have to clean this mess up using construction equipment. They'd scoop up all the bodies to clear the streets. Then, they'd come back and search each house, business, hospital and apartment. There were so many dead, they'd spend months dragging them through halls, down stairs, and even dumping them from windows. Half the bodies were nearly naked. It wasn't like they had much dignity left. The clean up job was too immense to bother with niceties. There weren't enough survivors to accomplish that. As corpses, the dead were definitely in search of better resting places. The bonfires took care of it. Flames rose high above the towns and cities night by night as the final end-game played itself out.