by Jake Packard
The opposite held true for the Muslim world. The Saladins on that side of the planet decried that kind of behavior as undeniable evidence of Satan on earth. References to Sodom and Gomorrah were replete in their sermons to the kneeling faithful, whose spiritual leaders controlled every aspect of their daily lives. As their governments fell under wave after wave of fundamentalism, mosque and state became one, and the sexes became more and more segregated. As the West kept getting it on, the East got none. The two sides tore away from each other at lightwave speed.
Of course, nothing stays the same. Down came the bombs, the mutations and epidemics. In the States, as the government cracked and society fragmented, the lower and poverty classes swelled in size and commenced fucking like there was no tomorrow, because in many instances there wasn’t one, or certainly didn’t seem to be one. What else could a person with no chance of a real life look forward to but sex, drugs, and rock and roll with others of the same fate? Black market Cialis derivatives poured in as steady as the smizz.
The middle class, also reduced in size, put a Victorian blanket over everything, grateful to the rich for whatever crumbs they could get. They smothered their children in chastity, and those that erred lost their chances of marrying up.
The rich, always with the most options, took advantage of the emerging technologies while reverting to a Middle Ages morality. Like royal families, they used sex and marriage as a way to control their wealth and make themselves richer.
Herbie felt very lucky not to be alone in this world of woe. Thrust into that dwindling middle class after the Exchange, already in love with a lovely woman who loved him back, he knew his good fortune. Danielle could not fall asleep without him rubbing her, massaging her, tickling her. She would clutch for his warmth as she tried to find a peaceful dream in a wicked world. The mother of his daughter showed him the joys of partnering with a lover, a best friend, and a soul mate amidst the fetid stench and erosion of the modern world.
Danielle kept his life together after he witnessed the horrors first hand. Everyday he raced with the news crew as fast as possible to each successive tragedy. When he returned home, he would find his private blessing, ready and waiting to take him back in whatever twisted shape he had been bent into. She would nurse him back to health all through the night so he could get back out there, straight and strong, and do it all over again the next day.
It seemed like a good idea to sublet the apartment and move to Westchester so Sophie could grow up somewhat holistic. He, on his rare days off, could at least catch his breath and savor the reason he worked so hard. A new beginning, the start of a new life. But number three: you never know what is going to happen next.
With the attack on Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, perfectly timed and performed so that the maximum amount of radiation could be spewed out over the largest population, he lost everything he thought he had managed to save in that one terror-filled afternoon.
Now because sex was linked to memories of a ruined woman floating in a bathtub of blood, it became the furthest thing from his mind. Those images did no good for an erection. Instead he consumed enormous amounts of alcohol to ease his daily suffering.
That’s why this morning as he got ready to leave for the editing suite it seemed so strange that he couldn’t get Maria’s smile out of his mind. It stimulated this old familiar tingle at the base of his balls.
Herbie caught himself in a frozen pause by the entrance of his apartment building. For how long he stood there in a deep trance he did not know, but when the psychic landscape shook, he found himself back into the empty lobby on the West Side of Manhattan. Luckily no people had passed by to witness this private moment of his, lost in time again with Bullmoose.
He opened the door and stepped out into the curious cold. It rushed onto him and clung to his face as he descended the several steps of the aging concrete stoop and turned towards Broadway. He walked in the direction where Central Park used to be. All around him the working world rushed to industry, sidestepping around him as he made his unsteady way to work.
Several squirrel killers, constantly moving, lighting smokes, looking about, gave him a never you mind. Yesterday they would have seemed more reassuring, but today they seemed ominous.
The same silent, angry families sleeping on the air vents coming up from the subway huddled together for warmth. They too barely looked at him as he walked by. Their blood clean enough to keep them out of Shantypark, but nothing else in this world left for them, except this warm patch of sidewalk they guarded with a vicious urban vengeance. They too gave him pause, because yesterday they would have been part of the landscape. Today they seemed neglected.
He felt invisible to the anonymous now rushing past him. Faceless people jockeying around him on the sidewalk, readjusting their earphones, keeping cadence, as if he didn’t exist. Herbie could only describe their emptiness, never so clear to him before, not only as clueless, but also as thankless. Yet how different were they than he? Not much, he reflected if this was yesterday. But it just wasn’t, it was today.
The undeniable golden fog still hung in plain view over Shantypark, adding to his unease, which the thankless, marching briskly away in their hurry to oblivion, didn’t even notice.
* * * * *
City Hall
Maria walked through the inner security checkpoint at City Hall, feeling a bit woozy from drinking too much red the night before. The guards recognized her from yesterday’s news reports, but remained expressionless behind their darkened plastic face guards.
She flashed her press credentials to the gargoyle that the Mayor used as a receptionist. Maria did not like the nasty biddy squatting at the reception desk, especially her insipid little face mail from the night before. She gave Maria a faint, condescending smile. But Maria took the high road and ignored her contempt.
She crossed to the other side of the lobby, her Prada footsteps echoed off the hard tile floors. She lighted down onto a leather couch beside the armored door.
The thick steely grey door to the mayor’s inner office glistened in the fluorescent light with a metallic sheen. Mayor Storm installed the door during the last gang war after one of the jihadist gangs kidnapped a deputy mayor during a daring daylight raid and eventually beheaded her. ABCNN televised the atrocity live with the highest of ratings, much to Marty and Ira’s enrichment. At that time Maria was only a middle school brat getting straight A’s and trying to evade the parental blocks on her Internet browser.
Hostilities had subsided years ago with the formalization of the territories within Shantypark and the arrival of the First Army to put muscle behind that unwritten understanding. At that point everyone thought the armor on the mayor’s office door unnecessary. Jack alluded to the press that he would remove the ominous entryway because it didn’t seem pleasant or diplomatic. But he hadn’t yet, probably because you never know what’s going to happen next.
Jerry pushed through the outer door into the grand hallway.
It troubled Maria that he might be able to tell she felt uncomfortable, but she figured he wrote it off to the red wine. But thank God, she thought, that he didn’t pull out his biopod, because she knew her heart beat too fast. He sat down next to her on the couch with a slight grin.
A red light started to blink on the control panel on the receptionist’s desk. She picked up a phone, listened, looked up with an icy glare, which Maria ignored once again, and pushed a button.
The armored door began to grind. Maria stood up next to Jerry, waiting for the door to slide open wide enough for them to step in to the mayor’s inner sanctum.
They entered the large operations room behind the solid steel wall. Huge banks of monitors lined the chamber, ready for anything from worldwide teleconferences to video surveillance of street-to-street combat. Hard linked to the city’s central database, the system gave real-time updates from thousands of cameras situated in strategic sites throughout New York. A decade ago they ran a war for the preservation of the city�
�s existence from the here.
Once inside, Jerry blustered overly gracious good mornings to the Mayor, his Chief of Staff, and the General sitting behind a mahogany conference table. He then sat down on the opposite side. But Maria went straight to a side table with a simple but generous coffee service. She poured hers black into a white coffee mug that had the new city-state logo of a red apple with two bites taken out, one from each side. Under which the words read “I still luv NY.” She loved the mayor’s brand of reality mixed with optimism.
Maria sat down joining Jerry and took a sip of her hot coffee, which immediately burnt her lips. She hid the pain and annoyance quite well, except from Jerry, and waited in awkward silence as they observed her from across the table. Each man came to his own conclusions about this woman who had just become a famous international TV personality.
A sudden calm fell over Maria, and her heart rate slowed to a steady beating. She knew this came from a place deep inside where she felt alive and without fear or constraint. She couldn’t put on an act for them even if she wanted to.
Sam broke the ice. “Okay folks, it is now 7:11. We have clearance at 7:18. So I suggest we move this on to the chopper forthwith. We can conduct the briefing once we are airborne.”
She gave Jerry a quick ‘what’s up’ glance. He shrugged, and they tried not to appear too dumbfounded.
“Don’t worry, people, only good things await the global all-star TV reporter and her ever-faithful watchdog producer,” the General said. The armored door banged shut behind them punctuating Pellet’s not-too-subtle sense of sarcasm, locking them in as it locked others out.
“What’s with the riddles, General?” Maria snapped. Jerry held his chagrin inside.
“Riddles?” Pellet took the bait, stood up and moved forward to face them, always the believer that a good offense is the best defense. His quiet demeanor belied his personal ferocity, and he spoke with a soft and intelligent voice. “You call this a riddle? Yet I think it is you, Ms. Primera, that is the enigma here. That you could even express a mote of effrontery as I am about to offer you the opportunity of a lifetime, when I could just as easily crush your career like a troublesome mosquito, is beyond my understanding.”
Jerry cringed. Maria used every bit of psychic strength to stand firm. Pellet could have nailed her right there and then, but for the moment he needed her, so he lowered his voice even further and shook his head, smiling with an ostensible sense of paternal sweetness. “I am going to choose to ignore your impertinence and write it off as immaturity. However, I see this look in your eye that wants to blame me for what happened yesterday to your lost interview. So, I will leave you with one more question to reflect upon during this morning’s journey and that is. in what way conceivable, Ms. Primera, would my lack of knowledge to Salem Jones’ whereabouts aid in my job in protecting this city and its inhabitants from any further harm?”
Maria could swear the subtext meant, “Be assured that I’d kill him with my own bare hands if I could.”
Sam broke the jagged silence. “I suggest we take this upstairs. We have a two-and-a-half-hour flight ahead of us, which should get us to the next meeting exactly on time.”
Jerry jumped in. “What journey? Where are we going? And Your Honor, if it involves us and it’s newsworthy, why can’t I have my crew?”
The mayor smiled. “We can’t use cameras where we are going. It is too high-level confidential. No one outside this group will know. But, this trip will be much-needed background for you.”
Sam started handing out flight jackets and helmets from a closet near a mechanical sliding door. He pushed the button for the elevator that took them eight flights up to the helipad on the roof.
The helicopter lifted from the roof of City Hall into the winter sky.
Sam, as usual, took the controls with no copilot by his side on these secret flights. In the cabin, Maria stared out the window into a beautiful sight. Their height above the earth diminished the visual impact of the garish wounds that had been perpetrated upon Manhattan, blending the city below into a broad Google map of greater appeal.
Once they had left the city airspace behind, Sam put the aircraft on to autopilot and walked back into the noisy cabin. He took an empty seat and pointed to the button on his helmet. Maria understood and pushed the button on hers and could now hear his tinny voice. “Listen up. We are going to be flying low to the ground to this meeting. This chopper has been manufactured with the latest of stealth technology, so no one out there is going to know who we are, where we are, or where we are going.”
Maria caught Pellet’s eyes, confident, smiling. He seemed to be operating from several different agendas. She felt violated, worse than if he just mentally undressed her. It made her wonder what kind of pornography he liked. Perhaps those dirty pictures on the forbidden websites, with men in full parade uniform standing in front of some kneeling naked teen whose head he held forcibly at crotch level? She never trusted the General before but now for some reason he began to disgust her.
Sam handed her some documents. Maria, shocked by her own triple X-rated reverie, felt glad Sam could not invade her thoughts the way his voice invaded her ears. “Read these, Maria. They’ll give you the skinny on where we are headed. And these,” he handed her a thicker booklet, “will tell you about the very powerful people you are going to meet.”
* * * * *
Truce
All morning Jamal drifted in and out of consciousness and an effortless slumber filled with long revolving dreams. He lay in a satiny place of pure softness, an immersion in amber mist. The downy bed cushioned him against all the pain that wracked every muscle, bone, and joint in his thin little body. Voices glided in and out. Gentle, resonant tones emerged from hoarse, desolate places.
“My people were starving and angry, ready to kill, but now they don’t seem to want to fight anymore.”
“They all had heard about it. They were all talking about it but, of course, none of them could have believed it would really be like this.”
“Yesterday I could never have sat down with you, without pointing all my guns at you.”
Once the sounds of velvety feet came into his tent and assembled all around him. Through half-open eyes he saw faces of many men, some dark like his, some white, some with lots of hair, others hardened and scarred but with merciful and mild smiles. All gathered around to witness in silence, to view his life with great endearment.
Other times he thought he saw women unlike any he had ever seen before. They had sympathetic, loving eyes that probed for his sorrow and pain, yearning to take away all that hurt.
One time he found himself floating out and above in the air looking down over the tent, people converged around the perimeter, hoping for a healing touch, even just one glance. Fragments of murmured conversation reached Jamal’s ears.
“My uncle stopped smoking smizz. He’s taking a shower for the first time that I can remember.”
“Yes, my brother, it’s unreal how clean I feel.”
“This baby girl is almost a year old and it’s the first time I have ever seen her smile.” Jamal looked down in wonderment at his grandmother holding his baby sister in her arms. The little girl was simply all smiles, one after another, and chubby baby healthy.
Floating out there just far enough away, the sun, golden and strong, burned forth all life.
Jamal opened his eyes and saw Salem through the tent flap, breathing in the words of all those who reached his ears. Sometimes his expression shined with genuine gladness, but often his eyes seemed hollowed by pain. But they always glowed with a light of their own embedded far behind the realm of human history, centered in the spiral of creation.
Jamal crawled out of his cozy bed and sneaked over to the tent flap. He peaked into the connecting tent where Salem sat, surrounded by men and women of all colors and kinds.
A thin black man, dressed in black clothes, who Jamal thought he had seen before, stood up to talk.
“I don’t kno
w where to begin. You got this joint all turned around, man, and that is good. Oh yes, all good. But, I have to say it again because this is beyond good, man, it is incredible.” The people around him vocalized assent. Marcus continued. “In a few short hours we have the leaders of the strongest gangs in New York gathered peacefully in one tent actually hearing the word “truce” being spoken many times. This is it. This is the Council. It does not get better than this.” Marcus looked about the tent and his voice turned bitter. “But Gregor ain’t here. None of us like his stinking ass anyway. Those stanis came in here organized. They were very good at being very bad. Gregor himself is one very sick dude. We don’t know who he is, but he can’t be one of us.”
Salem shook his head like a gentle older brother and smiled. “Let it go Marcus. We don’t have much time.” And then the room smoothed, and the feelings soothed, and nothing remained in that space that had any immediate opposition.
* * * * *
Cranberry Lake
The helicopter landed in a clearing in the middle of the mountains on the shore of a pristine blue lake, just beginning to ice over for winter.
Located far enough away from the nuclear explosions, the Adirondack Mountains did not suffer any direct environmental consequences. Of course, the socioeconomic fallout decimated the area. People, just scraping by then, became totally impoverished. During the restructuring of the economy and the huge waves of population migration into the former United States, many original Native Americans who had resettled in nearby reservations started drifting back.
Cranberry Lake lay tucked away in a forgotten corner of the Adirondack State Park. Back in the mid-1990s, a violent windstorm devastated the area. Recorded as a natural disaster, the indigenous said some great forgotten spirit who could see long into the future created the disaster. The storm knocked down thousands of acres of trees closing all the trails into the vicinity. It forced the state to close that area of the park for the longest time. After several decades, just as the new hardwood and evergreen forest made a magnificent come back, the Exchange hit. As the reality of limited nuclear war settled in around the globe, the descendants of the six Iroquois tribes scattered around these mountains in Canada and the Northeast USA, migrated back here to Cranberry Lake to become a nation once more. They went back to their old ways before Europe trespassed onto their continent with spurious claims of ownership. They came acked by some Christian god who destroyed the Indian villages with decimating diseases, and delivered superior weapons of destruction into the hands of the conquerors.
