Chapter 6 - Lynching in the Park…
Several months passed, and still, the Company refused to produce another Gus clone, no matter how the demand for such a product exploded.
Shareholders pleaded with the Company to restart production of the Gus model. Rumors leaked of impending legislation to force the Company to share its clone-creating secrets with potential, rival manufacturers, of raging debates behind boardroom doors. Company stocks rose and fell according to whisper, until suddenly, the Company returned to private status and located its headquarters off-shore before anyone could understand how they succeeded to extricate themselves from public trade.
School children, encouraged by their parents and their teachers, emailed Company stores begging for the creation of more Gus clones. The temples of the Risen Moon grew crowded with people desperate for proof that death was but a jump into another realm.
No matter who begged, or how the worship and the demand for the Gus clone grew, the Company refused to birth another Gus.
Then, Digger Newman, high priest of the Risen Moon, held a press conference in front of a mountain of cameras and microphones. His words enhanced through surround sound speakers, his face broadcasted in high definition into a legion of homes, Digger Newman labelled all those associated with the Company pariahs, and called every clone model not named Gus a blasphemy.
And on that night, the city burned.
“Seriously, Registrar Ferris? Do you really think it’s going to matter whether or not you keep your pink tie on straight? You’d do better to worry about getting this bullet-proof vest on nice and tight.”
Lester grunted as Registrar Haynes tossed the bundle of armor into his arms. Lester did the best he could to wrap the vest around his chest as the armored personnel carrier jostled over potholes, nearly bouncing his head off the inner ceiling. He was nervous, and frightened, and so no matter how the fellow Registrars around him snickered, Lester Ferris couldn’t help but fidget with the knot to his pink tie.
Registrar Haynes pounded Lester’s shoulders to test the armor’s bindings. “I suppose, though Registrar Ferris, that if anyone’s earned the right to be a little eccentric, it’s you.”
Lester broke a thin smile. He wished Marlene sat beside him to hear someone describe him as “eccentric.” It would have made her happy. Marlene had always prodded him to stretch beyond his familiar and comfortable confines. She had always encouraged him to be brave, to have the confidence to stretch a little further. She reminded him to have fun. Marlene had convinced Lester to apply for a position with the newly established Bureau of Registrars, when the duties of said post were so simple. If that motorcycle jump truly proved that her spirit waited for him, Marlene had to be laughing at how Lester looked in a bullet-proofed vest, bouncing in a personnel carrier with a gun holstered on his side. If only she was alive to see how a job shuffling paperwork had so transformed him.
“It’s Digger Newman we should be visiting,” growled Registrar Hamptom several seats down from Lester. Hamptom was a massive man, with the pair of arms that Lester imagined very capable of breaking lesser men’s necks. Lester found it difficult to imagine any time when Registrar Hamptom sat behind desk to sift through account books and ownership titles. “Not right that Digger gets to spout off in front of all those cameras and we’re the ones having to face the danger of it.”
“Digger’s got every right to practice his religion as he sees fit,” rebuked Registrar Kelly, a slim, attractive blonde at Lester’s elbow, a woman who Lester thought appeared very comfortable with the assault rifle across her lap. “Last I check, the government doesn’t have any right telling a person where they can, or cannot, find their god.”
Hamptom rolled his eyes. “You’re sounding like one of Digger’s mooners.”
“Mooner or not,” interject Registrar Wessex, the youngest in the back of the personnel carrier, “no one’s got the right to set a city on fire. Digger knew what he was doing with that press conference. He’s got no right to harm people.”
“Digger’s not hurting anyone,” Kelly snapped.
“That plenty out of all of you,” and Registrar Haynes stood in the bouncing truck. “We’re not going to a debate contest. There’s a whole hell of a lot of crazy on the other side of this armor, and this truck’s getting ready to vomit us right out into the middle of it.”
Lester swallowed. He needed no reminder of the danger. Two months ago, Registrar Franklin and his hounds had fallen into a covered well shaft while tracking an undocumented clone. The fall had likely broken both of his legs and left him defenseless before the batch of abominations some basement laboratory had discarded down that shaft. The hounds that survived the fall likely fought as ferociously as they were able, but those broken clones had torn Registrar Franklin to pieces, pieces they had wielded against the Registrars who later stumbled across Franklin’s demise. Lester had been among them, and the memory of that scene still rolled his stomach and pulled the bile up into his throat.
“Everyone take a breath,” Registrar Haynes broke Lester out of his awful thoughts of that day. “We’ll unload in a matter of minutes. Everyone check your scream posts again. We’re going to need all of them working to cover the park.”
Lester knew they had arrived at the park when the sides of the carrier began popping in the concussion of glass bottles and stones. He squeezed into his helmet a moment before the carrier’s rear hatch lowered, and his knees felt their age as he jumped from the vehicle. The weight of his vest and the scream post slung over his shoulder tugged quickly at his breath. But Lester willed himself forward, determined to not turn away from his duties as a Registrar.
Lester hardly recognized his surroundings when he stepped into the park. The Company had created the park during its zenith, before a Gus clone failed a motorcycle jump of over some four-hundred feet, before so many in the world considered a clone to be, somehow, divine. The park in the center of that city had been a wonderful garden then, filled with manicured lawns, with alabaster fountains, with marble statues of the industrialists and innovators who paved the way for the industry of the clones. Goldfish ponds dotted the stone path that twisted through the park’s famous botanical gardens. Groves of trees stretched to provide a cool, shaded place to enjoy picnic lunches. There was a field for every kind of a sport, and the park hosted community events throughout the seasons - autumnal hot air ballon festivals, winter skating exhibitions, spring dramas performed on the park stage, summer concerts and fireworks. Marlene and Lester had cherished the park in those days, and they had felt thankful for a Company who invested to create such a green sanctuary of space in the midst of their city towers, a quiet place where one might catch a breath, might hold hands with love, might take a simple walk.
A battleground seething in riot replaced the park Lester had cherished with Marlene. Wooden pavilions and gazeboes burned, and the flames danced ominous shadows across a trampled ground. Lester turned and scanned the city skyline that circled the park. He saw that the tall, windowless structures of the clone housing towers burned as well in the distance, and Lester wondered if those clones inside had managed to escape the flame, wondered if those who did would find any sanctuary from the violence. There was no more green bliss to be found in that park filled with wailing sirens. Fire filled his city.
“Alright, Ferris,” Registrar Hayne’s voice filled Lester’s helmet, “we need you to hurry to the center of the park and get your scream post thumping. All of them have to scream for us to disperse this crowd.”
A throng of cursing, shouting faces flooded the park pathways in front of Lester, trampling through flower beds, shattering windows with improvised cudgels, striking at neighboring faces whenever the park failed to provide an instant target for their rage. The chains of park swings were wielded as weapons. Roaming bands attacked trees with axes and saws. Something struck the back of Lester’s helmet as he hesitated, shaking Lester out of his stammer. Lester took the scream post from his back and aimed ahead of hi
m. A wave of shrilling, terrible noise belted out of the post as Lester held down the trigger, and the mob retreated from the hurt that filled their ears. Lester progressed towards the park’s heart, blasting short salvos from his scream post whenever the crowd thickened in front of him.
The park’s destruction was terrible, but the oldest of the groves had been spared the axe so that the riot might show its horror. Corpses swayed from the branches of that grove. Lester peered through the gathering dark and noted that each twisted face bore the Company brand. The lynched clones hung overhead were those models other than the divine Gus. They were the taller clones the Company sold to the industrial, rural farm complexes. They were the blonde and the brunette clones sold to the pleasure brothels. They were the bald, pale clones grown for the single purpose of donating blood and organs to mankind’s injured and sick. They were all clones other than Gus, all with the misfortune to fall to that human flood raging against a creator who refused to create new messiahs. Lester’s mind swooned as he looked upon all those bodies swaying in the trees. The grove was not large enough for that mob’s cruelty. There were not enough trees to hold the hate that enflamed that night.
“Hurry it up, Ferris! I’m just ahead on top of the hill! Hurry my way so we can get your post screaming!”
Lester found Registrar Hampton waving at him and hurried up the steep hill. The park center rested at the bottom of the hill’s other side, teeming with rioters who gathered before the proud monuments the Company had erected in the city’s green center. Staccato rifle fire echoed over the crowd, bursts from Registrar Kelly’s weapon as she attempted to clear space for Lester’s scream post in front of the park’s once majestic fountains. Lester hurried as well as his aging knees allowed him, worried that Registrar Kelly would soon be pressed to do more than fire shots into the night, worried that the numbers in that crowd were too zealous in their crusade to balk at bullets roared overhead. What did such a crowd fear of death? They claimed that the divine vision of a burning motorcycle taught them that death was but a simple leap across the divide.
“I’ve got a spot for you, Ferris!” Kelly’s voice thundered in Lester’s helmet. “Get that post thumping so it closes the loop! Get that thing screaming and send this riot home!”
The crowd shifted as Lester sprinted towards Registrar Kelly. Perhaps they suddenly sensed the Registrars’ tactics, for the rioters turned and surged in the direction of the rifle fire to put themselves between the Registrars. Lester felt stones strike his back, thud against his helmet. He kicked through the hands that reached to trip him, grunted as blows from homemade bludgeons struck his padded shoulders. But Lester Ferris did not fall, and his legs, though they cramped and burned, delivered him through the crowd.
A gunshot suddenly thundered over Lester’s shoulder, ringing his ears as he watched Registrar Kelly lifted off her feet in front of him for the force of an impact that splintered against her armored chest. Lester turned and, somehow, instantly found the man within the crowd who broke the breach of a shotgun and slipped a pair of new shells into the smoking barrels. Lester’s hand did not shake as he unholstered his snub-nosed gun. He didn’t hesitate to raise its sights. There was but time enough to aim that weapon at the gunman’s chest, time enough to act, but no time to hesitate and to fail.
Lester Ferris emptied his gun into the man’s chest. He had shot targets, and he had shot undocumented clones. But Lester Ferris had never before shot a man.
“She’ll be fine, Ferris.” Hamptom’s voice echoed within Lester’s helmet. “Her vest absorbed it. Focus on setting up that scream post before the crowd decides to surge towards us another time.”
Lester’s hands moved mechanically. He gave no thought to the way his fingers assembled the scream post, paid no attention at all to how he twisted together his equipment’s components. His mind quickly calculated the wavelength required to merge his scream post’s shrill with those of the other posts pulsing through the park, and so amplify their fury so that no crowd, regardless of what they believed a memory of a motorcycle jump told them, could withstand the pain to visit their ears, to rattle through their minds. In only a handful of minutes, Lester assembled the post and secured it into the ground. He flipped a single switch and waited to witness the effect ripple through the rioters.
The machine hummed for a moment before turning silent. Lester smiled, for he knew his helmet suffocated the scream post’s shrill to protect the Registrars. He knew the posts were thumping in unison. He knew it would not be long until the park emptied.
The rioters heard the shrilling posts without protection. They fell onto their knees at the sudden pain. They wailed and screamed as their brains numbed and their guts loosened. They writhed, and they convulsed. Every face in that park screamed as pain burned through their ears and exploded into their skulls before slicing down their spines. The screaming posts were too terrible a weapon to resist. Not even the most devout of the Risen Moon could protest against that shrill. All of them crawled and clawed their way out of the park. They stumbled and tripped until they finally distanced themselves from the source of that shrill that refused to unclench their minds.
Soon only the Registrars, the swaying corpses of clones who were not Gus were all that remained in the park.
Lester stood frozen, staring upon the body of that gunman that lay at his feet.
“You saved me, Ferris,” and Registrar Kelly set a hand upon Lester’s shoulder.
“I don’t regret it,” Lester spoke. “I’d shoot the man all over again. It’s only I’d never shot anyone before. I’d only shot the abominations before.”
“The man shot me. Man was abomination enough in my book.” Registrar Kelly nodded. “Marlene would be proud of you, Lester.”
Lester shook his head. Again, his fingers fidgeted with his pink tie’s knot. Lester didn’t share the sentiment. He doubted Marlene would have felt very proud at all if she was still alive, if the cancer had not those years ago, a lifetime ago, planted her beneath the ground.
Lester Ferris sighed. He thought his Marlene would have been terrified.
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Mr. Moon's Daredevil Messiahs Page 6