The Manhattan Prophet

by Jake Packard

  Silence. All eyes and ears upon the General.

  “Consider this scenario. You’re driving with your honey on a dark country road. The top is down on your convertible with a full silver moon shining high in the sky. As you cruise along, late summer crickets serenade you along with that MP-12 sound device you bought to plug into your soundboard. Everything you can touch and feel seems like go for love and romance.”

  A few snickers could be heard in the crowd.

  “When suddenly, a squirrel dashes into the road in front of your wheels. What would you do? How would you react? In that automatic reflex lies the essence of who you really are.”

  “One type of person would hit the brakes and swerve, avoiding the collision. A noble act indeed, trying to preserve the sanctity of all creatures, no matter how small or meaningless in the scheme of things. But perhaps, through circumstance, this avoidance action ends up injuring an innocent bystander, yourself, or your companion, certainly ending any chance for getting lucky at the end of the night.”

  A few loud laughs, hand slaps, and “yeah baby’s” heard in the room.

  “A second type of reaction leaves a person frozen, indecisive. The inability to parlay sudden and potentially dangerous information into action leaves the consequences of this situation completely out of their control. They become a victim of life. I guess that’s okay for some people, but not for me, or my Marines.”

  Pellet stopped and scanned the auditorium, each person believing that they made direct eye contact with him. Their attention now perfect, he brought it on home.

  “I believe we can make choices in this world! We can do better than merely survive. For we are literally the captains of our ship, and truly the masters of our own destiny. We can win at whatever we do and we most certainly can have it all!”

  Now he began to roar. “These are the people I want! I want you all, the third type. I want the person with no questions or qualms! I want the person who will put that pedal to the medal without a moment of hesitation. I want the person who will drive the car straight at that miserable little rodent and squash its ass out of existence. And then they can drive on down the road and fuck their baby’s brains out of their heads all night long. And they can do this all because of the thrill of the kill! That’s who I want under my command! I want the squirrel killers in this room in my Marine Corps!”

  At that point the recruits would jump up in a frenzy, shouting and whooping, certainly squirrel killers every one.

  But, over the next eight weeks, the training Pellet had in store for them would tell which small percentage of them would make it.

  He strode back down the center aisle through their ecstatic outpour of celebration, nodding from side to side as the din of their roar of adulation for him grew in volume. He exited out the back door into the limo and cruised through the streets back to his suite in the aircraft carrier.

  Later, he lay awake in his soundproofed bedroom, above the below deck barracks that housed his troops. Pellet pondered yesterday’s unfortunate developments at Rikers, and prepared for tomorrow. In his mind he knew what he had to do.

  A secured cell phone rings. He slapped the women sleeping next to him on their butts. Without a word, they rose out of bed, put robes over their lithe bodies, and slipped out the door.

  Even for him, he had people to answer to, although inept and incompetent fools. He listened to them, agreed, and hung up.

  But he had his own sources, and planned contingencies, and always remained ready to spot a weakness. He made another secure call, from a different device. A voice on the other side grunted, the sounds of popcorn in a microwave crackling in the background.

  You never know what is going to happen next.

  * * * * *

  Cleansing Waters

  Gracie Mansion, New York City’s renowned mayoral residence, now housed hundreds of homeless and transient citizens, instead of the mayor and his family. Mayor Jack Storm preferred it that way for two reasons. One, he loved his people, hated to see their misery, and the mansion could house hundreds of the homeless non-infected ones. Two, he would rather live uptown, where he had been born and raised. And, of course, he no longer had a family.

  For months after Anita, their baby boy, George, and his father Theodore were extinguished together under the shadows of the Statue of Liberty, Jack lived alone in his office in the same Armani suit he wore when the dirty bomb detonated near Ellis Island. The weapon had been smuggled in years before and had been stored below the waterline on a freighter that miraculously sunk in its berth a few months before the blast. This limited the range to mostly New Jersey, and some of the West Side of Manhattan.

  That terror attack by the Jihad on the opening ceremony of the worldwide convention meant to save the world killed off his family who had attended, along with most of the world’s leaders, and thousands of others who thought they were lucky enough to get a ticket to the event. The atrocity also wiped out the last elected mayor of New York and most of the city officials who presided there as hosts to the world. This made Jack, left back in Manhattan to run the city government during the extravaganza, the designated mayor. His first acts, from in the bunkers, had to manage this unfathomable and overwhelming tragedy, and the immediate catastrophe of radiation and chaos. He had no time to change his clothes.

  The scale of human disaster expanded worldwide during the next few weeks of the Exchange. With so much urgency on helping the devastated survivors, the dead could not be properly mourned.

  When the initial emergency slowed to a constant droning exhaustion, Sam forced him to move into this apartment on 122nd Street, near Columbia, near his old hood. Sam had it furnished with some of the stuff from his old apartment with Anita, and decorated it with things from Jack’s childhood with his father. Although surrounded at all times by squirrel killers for security, it was as close to normal as Sam could make it for the man he loved like a brother, and a leader he would follow anywhere.

  But that couldn’t keep the voices from drifting in on Jack, and the tides of soapy waters from washing him over.

  Lately Jack wondered if he lived a complete delusion. He wanted simple acts of kindness to be the foundation of governing. Instead, he contorted the basic human freedoms he was brought up to believe in, and denied them to his city as something necessary to restore society into something remotely resembling life before the bomb. Was he right? Maybe, for back then. But these days he felt introspective, soul-searching, and full of doubt.

  During the post-Exchange years America lost even the slightest pretense of social justice and equality. The gulf between rich and poor became an uncrossable chasm. The glue which used to keep the great society of immigrants from all over the world together, dissolved. Security became the only concern. In order to give the city any chance to come back after the attack, Jack had to create a fascistic form of pseudo-democracy. He held elections, and he welcomed rival candidates, but his popularity rose to such high levels, he has served New York City as its only mayor since the bomb. And when the City Emergency Regulations were enacted, as they were now, he had absolute power. He subverted every democratic principle he grew up with.

  But the credit for New York success story all went to Jack. The city crawled out of the crater into some semblance of control and prosperity. It served as a role model to a world beset with disaster.

  Jack knew his totalitarian policies toward population restraint in the face of catastrophe kept the city together. The iron fist, and not his heart, had been applauded and imitated around the globe. But deep down inside, he still believed in the basic goodness of humankind, even as a firsthand witness to horrors of unspeakable proportions.

  And again, after these winter solstice events, he sensed the verge of another pivotal moment for the city he loved.

  But in the last few weeks, he heard whispers. Voices he thought he knew, from a far off fantastical place. That made him lose focus, which shook the confidence of those around him who treated him before like
a king.

  Jack believed every issue had many points of view. He listened well to others and then formed his strong opinions accordingly. Then he fit them into the new reality that constantly had to be relearned in the never-ending spiral of the constant evolution of all things. Because adaptation is paramount for survival, and that is how he kept his city from tearing apart.

  Life on earth was an integral part of an unbounded universe, and Jack believed that mankind had to be an important part of the endless struggle between creation and destruction, light and dark, good and evil.

  Jack knew that General Pellet thought he was getting too soft. According to Rodney, Jack still believed in those old Hollywood endings too much, where the hero triumphs over intergalactic evil in every scenario imaginable, and ends up on some other planet with a gorgeous and brilliant woman on his arm that truly loves him and whom he truly loves.

  But if the good guys always won in the end, why had he seen so many good men die such horrible deaths?

  In the dark hours during the civil twilight, unable to sleep, alone in his solitary world, there came a hushing and an irresistible sigh.

  Jack’s eyes welled with tears, and then he cried.

  A voices started to sing, and others joined in.

  So he relaxed his tortured soul and just let it go. It spun around and around in the heavenly river, swirling in the eddies of pure and cleansing waters.

  # # # # #

  Part 3

  Second Day of the Prophet

  Sophie

  The sunrays broke through the upper canopy onto the moist grass. Rainbows bounced off droplets of morning dew like divine spraylets of pigmented light.

  Herbie climbed up the hill immersed in the aroma of the damp autumnal forest. Each breath he inhaled went straight to his heart, carrying the healing of an abundant and unscarred earth, mother to us all.

  Almost to the top at the clearing, he saw the beautiful white mansion, silhouetted in the rising sun, haloed by its refractions. The magnificence of the edifice beckoned him in.

  He paused and lifted his head listening to the reverent chorus. A tonic up an octave and then down a fifth, and up again . . . and he heard this before and felt he knew it . . . repeating, the same and yet never the same.

  Herbie entered a high-walled hexagon, Pisa-like in its list toward the sky, the ceiling one huge skylight. The building tilted and rotated to follow the sun. The great room’s white walls bathed in rapturous sunglow. Herbie felt nourished, and united to all things within the ocean of consciousness made by the mixture of light energy and earth.

  He lifted his face up high to the apex where the radiance lavished the walls. With a casual fluttering of his hands he floated upwards into the great height of the hall, each motion of his arms taking him higher. With just a tilt of a wrist or the flick of a finger, he could change direction at will. He gloried in the freedom of flight.

  Looking back down, he saw the great hall filled with people cheering for him in unparalleled harmony. And he knew at once he could never let them down.

  A toothy jaw smiled up at him, and pointed with a bony finger.

  Doubt crept in.

  His arms cramped.

  You can’t fly with fear.

  The skylight fatigued and slowed. Shadows fell over the smooth veneers of the once living walls now gone geriatric, rigid in rigormortic decay. The smooth surface cracked and peeled, revealing cobwebs in the corners built by scurrying spiders of unusual intrepidity.

  Herbie careened off a wall and the crowds below began fleeing in terror. He fell into a nosedive, plummeting to the surface, the war drums of the netherworld now drowning out the beauty of the celestial melody.

  The floor rushed up to his face,

  The instant of impact.

  His eyes slam-jerked open.

  The alcohol had worn off.

  The hangover had just begun.

  He lay awake at four o’clock in the morning in the aftermath of a binge, dreaming about his death.

  Herbie’s body sweated through his clothes and wet his blankets. He heard the pipes in his building rattling and grumbling like cholestorized arteries denying lifeblood to a body in decay. He lay petrified under the soaking bed stuff, not knowing what else around him was dying.

  He closed his eyes in dread of the nightmares in the oncoming sleeplessness he would have in the dead of this night.

  His sweet Sophie in a green hospital robe, hair fallen from her head, eyes drugged for pain, hands reaching for his fingertips on the other side of the safety glass darkened by the lead. “Mommy’s home,” he could hear himself say, “She’s not feeling well, but I’ll go get her now.”

  “Please Daddy, don’t go, I’m scared; I’m so scared.”

  You are sacred; you are so sacred. “Don’t worry, honey, nothing can happen to you. I won’t let it.”

  Back home, the EMTs pulled Mommy’s bloodless body out of the bathtub. The grief almost suffocated him while he filled out government forms for an apathetic emergency crew that had seen this so many times before.

  Before he made it back to the hospital to be by her side, Sophie slipped away. Probably at the same moment as Danielle died. More ruined lives in and amongst the millions.

  He buried his wife and daughter on the same day in the family plot in Putnam Valley, near his mother and his grandmother. He gazed with unmitigated grief at the graves he had grown accustomed to of the previous generations, those of the wombs through which his life had passed. Now two fresh plots lay beside them.

  He hobbled out of bed into the dilapidated shower stall to try to get the cold water spark his toxic body back to life. He leaned against the cracked tiles in despair and broke down. He cried, and wailed and, screamed into the forsaken night, while his anguished tears mingled with the rusty water washing over him. For some reason he did not know, he began to pray for the first time in years. Please, oh God, he pleaded, make the world live. Make the world live. Stop the pain and make the world live.

  * * * * *

  Execution

  Jamal woke up to an ugly pungency, which made him want to puke. He gasped for air in uncontrollable paroxysms. He lay staked down, spread eagle to the frozen ground, every joint in his body ached. His clothes replaced with a burlap bag with holes cut out for his skinny arms and legs.

  Gregor knelt next to him inspecting the tumors developing around the glands below Jamal’s ears. His skanky breath wafted into the boy’s nostrils and made Jamal vomit up the digestive juices from his empty stomach. Some droplets of that essence of Jamal sprayed upon the shirtsleeves of the gang leader, so he smacked Jamal hard on the side of the head to shut him down. “This little shit’s no good,” he announced to his henchmen standing by, “he’s got AIDS.”

  Ibrahim stood nearby munching microwave popcorn and swilling whiskey. He couldn’t have cared less. To him the boy did not even resemble an abstraction of a human life. “Let’s get rid of him.”

  “Better idea. We take him to Reginald. We gonna put this out in the open.”

  Drums pounded and horns blared, everyone in Reginald Square in those graveyard hours before the dawn turned their heads. They heard the sound before and looked at one another with great glee. What better way to kick off a holiday season than a beheading?

  Gregor’s horde came from the east like their ancestors of the ancient khanates, ascending from out the Asian steppe, marching westward towards rape and pillage, taking no quarter along the way. By the time they reached Reginald, the crowd had grown larger, congealing into groups of similar human skin color, which offered the most safety. The middle of the square left open and unopposed.

  A bearded brown-skinned man wearing a simple dishdasha appeared out of the southeast corner of the mall, leading his mullahs. They grouped on the edge of the action like birds of prey descended from giant reptiles. Many eyes looking as with one head.

  On the northern fringe of the square, a large bald man with no eyelashes led a band of white men onto the pavem
ent, their bodies draped in leather and fur, wearing motorcycle boots, and showing many piercings and tattoos.

  Black men materialized from the south, and so the darker-skinned people in the crowd drifted in that direction, some very bald, others with kinky hair and some Rastafarian.

  All colors packed pieces with no pretense of concealment.

  The stani gang broke through the ring of jerry-rigged tents and dilapidated shacks that bordered Reginald. They marched in procession, flexing their power as the onlookers melted out of their way. They stopped in the center of the square and encircled the area, standing off any would-be lunatics stupid enough to attempt a breach of their circle. A motley stani in ragged robes raised a horn to his mouth and blew forth a truculent trill. Several muscular fighters placed the altar in the middle of the ring of warriors.

  Mysterious apparitions appeared, infiltrating with ease into all parts of the crowd, mixing unnoticed since they had no colors of their own.

  The Reginald Square people passed pipes, bottles, and vials. Disjointed pockets of cryptic laughter bubbled up in random spots, turning the crowd ever more fantastical. In Shantypark, an execution is always a good reason for a party, and the people busied dizzying themselves for the pageant.

  Gregor stood up on the platform just as the first light of morning showed phosphorescent blue in the eastern sky. The crowd hushed. He held Jamal up by the back of his head and announced with his gravelly voice. “This little nigger is mine.” He laid the boy down on the altar, neck on the chopping block, Jamal’s young Adam’s apple bobbed in fear. “This little bitch stole from me and will pay for his crime my way.”

  A tall, young black man, dressed in black clothing, walked out of the crowd and stopped just shy of the ring around the platform, a few yards from Gregor’s face. “Your choice of words sickens me, Gregor, almost as much as the sight of your stupid and repulsive face. You are a pagan and a pig, and I spit on your very existence.”