A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller

by Charles W. Sasser

  Judy emitted a hopeless little giggle. Her mood seemed to improve as the conversation continued in a light bantering tone. She suddenly turned serious again.

  “Corey, they’re showing your picture on the news. You and that other cop that slugged you at Ron’s funeral—”

  “I explain all that next time I see you.”

  “The news is saying you killed some people and might be accompanied by that woman from Jerry Baer—”

  “Judy, look—”

  “Don’t worry, Corey. I seen her show last night when she told what really happened. You and me, we don’t really know one another, but you seemed like a nice guy that wouldn’t do nothing like that without a reason.”

  “I am a nice guy.”

  She tittered.

  “I can prove it.”

  “How are you going to do that from all the way in Oklahoma?”

  “What I show up on your doorstep and ask to go for another walk?”

  “I suppose I’d just have to go. I ain’t had no Sno Cone since. Way Dennis acting, he don’t give a darn for nothing except his career anyhow.”

  “So you think Sharon Lowenthal telling the truth?” he probed carefully.

  “I was watching her show when Dennis telephoned last night. He got mad when I told him what I was watching and ordered me to turn the channel. Dennis said she won’t ride so high and mighty when Mr. Wiedersham gets her back to New York.”

  “What you reckon he mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. He just told me to change channels.”

  “Did you?”

  She giggled. ‘I ain’t as blond and obeying as he thinks I am.”

  “I didn’t think you blond from the beginning.”

  “I sure could use me another Sno Cone.”

  Big C returned to the window after he hung up. Nail and Sharon were sitting on the log, still holding hands.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Skokie, Illinois

  Dennis Trout swigged Maalox like a man dying of thirst coming upon an oasis in the Sahara. He was pissed, which was why he was out driving aimlessly; he needed some time alone away from advisors and aides and all the other assholes who surrounded him on the campaign trail. Marilyn, thankfully, had chosen to stay at the hotel in North Chicago with Reggie. She was pissed too about something or other—a chronic condition with her, it seemed—and calling him by his last name. “Trout, you are so fucked up.” He telephoned Judy because he needed to talk, but she was also on the rag about something. The cunt told him—him—that she couldn’t talk now. Probably dying her hair or watching As The Stomach Turns on soap TV.

  A red light caught his rental Prius on Madison Street that ran west in Skokie to U.S. 41. Wiedersham had selected the car for him, as he seemed to select almost everything else in Trout’s life. His campaign-wise brother-in-law thought it proper that Trout demonstrate his support for President Anastos’ environmental initiative by driving a “green” car rather than the Buick Trout preferred.

  He took the opportunity at the red light to nip from the pink stuff while he waited. His fingers drummed impatiently on the steering wheel. He turned the radio up so loud it vibrated the little roller skate car. Pink doing Dear Mr. President, an attack on former President Bush.

  His thin hair stuck up like bristles on a hairless Chihuahua. A restive hand raking across his scalp returned with a glob of whipped cream.

  “Fu-uck!”

  He had about had it up to here.

  The whipped cream came compliments of some bitch where he was addressing a meet arranged by the Illinois National Education Association. Normally the NEA, like most unions, sucked up to Progressive candidates. Everything was going along fine until some clown who said he was a student stood up to ask a question at the end. Instead of asking a question, he read a statement to the effect that he wanted the U.S.to investigate Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians.

  As the student finished reading his statement, the bitch rushed up out of nowhere and smashed a whipped cream pie in Trout’s face. Security hauled the guy and the twit out in handcuffs, both of them shouting, “Allahu Akbar! Death to the Great Satan!” Trout was so furious he didn’t give a damn if Homeland Security took them out in the woods and shot them in the head after making them dig their own graves.

  Wiedersham downplayed the incident when he reached Trout by cell phone. “It was a Tea Bagger plant trying to make us look bad. They were really Jews. That’s how we’ll spin it to the press. They can’t touch us, Dennis. We’re riding high.”

  Trout didn’t feel like he was riding high. Cream pie in his hair and all sticky on his shirt, coat and tie. He turned Pink up even louder to dilute his anger. His fingers stuck to the volume knob. He licked them. Coconut cream. He hated fucking coconut.

  A Dodge SUV in the lane next to him honked. The driver motioned for Trout to roll down his window.

  “So you’re listening to rock, huh?”

  “You think?”

  “Maybe you should listen to Rush Limbaugh instead so you can learn how Anastos is screwing up the country.”

  That observation, Trout suspected, came compliments of the Anastos/Trout bumper sticker on the Prius. Another Wiedersham idea.

  The gray-haired old man in the SUV waved and went on through with the green light. Trout’s lane was slow enough to allow his rage to build. This was one fucking sick world with everybody in it seemingly mad at something or somebody. It would be a much better world when the assholes were all gone.

  Trout had his eye on the SUV several cars ahead of him. Stepping on the gas, the tiny tires on the Prius screeching like a piss ant, he whipped into the other lane and got right on the old man’s bumper. Cars honked. Trout ignored them.

  He swerved up beside the SUV at the next red light. The old man glanced over. Trout shot him the finger. He had an urge to jump out, pull the guy out of his car, rip off his head and piss down his throat. There was something to be said for road rage.

  The SUV ducked into the next residential street while Trout gave chase, hoping the old fart would get nervous, then scared, then terrified, then have a massive MI and slam into a parked car.

  There were stop signs at every intersection. Trout stared balefully into the old man’s rearview mirror, trying to catch his eye. The SUV started making rolling stops, then no stops at all.

  These little fucking people really thought their opinions mattered.

  The SUV got stuck behind a hockey mom, or whatever they were calling themselves these days. Trout accelerated into the opposing lane and stopped next to his victim and turned his radio up loud again. The elderly asshole glanced in Trout’s direction; he looked terrified. Trout leaned over so the senior troglodyte could get a good look at his face and remember who he had fucked with when Trout won the election.

  Then Trout let him go. He pulled over to the curb and gulped a mouthful of Maalox. He felt better after he got out and used his key to scrape the Anastos/Trout sticker off his bumper.

  Circuit Court Overturns Voter ID

  (Phoenix)—Chaos erupted at the Maricopa County Courthouse in downtown Phoenix today after a three-judge panel from the Circuit Court of Appeals decided that people need not show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The crowd chanted, waved Mexican flags and bore signs charging racial discrimination against undocumented aliens.

  The Appeals judges called the Arizona requirement for proof of citizenship inconsistent with the National Voter Registration Act, further stating that having to prove one is an American citizen in order to vote is an undue burden on minorities and immigrants...

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Keystone Lake, Oklahoma

  Before Sharon left the Safe House to return to New York, she, Big C and Nail met Lieutenant Jack Ross before daybreak on an open-all-night Wal-Mart parking lot in Sand Springs, a Tulsa suburb. Ross would transport her to the airport since it was unwise for either Nail or Big C to take the chance.

  “Most of the TPD cops
won’t be looking too hard for you,” Ross said, “but some are already kissing up to the Feds. Kimbrell’s Homies have the airport covered like stink on you-know-what. Kimbrell’s a real piece of work. It appears the Feds might appoint him our new police chief once the police are nationalized.”

  Ross handed Nail and Big C each an ATM card under assumed names.

  “A number of secret patriotic donors have deposited money in the accounts to keep you going for awhile,” he said.

  Nail and Big C protested against accepting charity.

  Ross said, “It’s not charity. These people understand what’s going on and they’re not happy about it. Look at it that you’re fighting for them.”

  It wasn’t much of a farewell event in the parking lot. Sharon suggested they offer a prayer.

  “We must continue to pray as if everything depends on God while we behave as if everything depends on us. We must never forget that we’re on a holy mission. Where politics wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine but demonic. God can overcome evil if we but depend on Him.”

  They joined hands behind Big C’s pickup and Sharon asked for God’s guidance in the terrible days ahead. Afterwards, she hugged Big C and kissed him on the cheek. She lingered in Nail’s embrace. Big C saw tears trickling off her chin.

  “Wishes on a falling star come in threes, don’t they?” she whispered. “I still have one more wish coming.”

  Then she was gone. Big C and Nail returned to the cabin, each quiet and contemplative and keeping to himself. Nail brooded most of the day while sitting on the fishing log. In a way neither man could define, Sharon had managed to convey to them the enormity of events that were history in the making. Big C wondered how the Founding Fathers might have felt when they signed the Declaration of Independence.

  That evening, he joked about their seven-course meal—a bucket of leftover Kentucky Fried chicken and a six pack. They watched the Zenergy Channel while they ate. President Anastos and his teleprompter were doing a live telecast from the White House Rose Garden.

  “During this Recovery Summer, we have, uh, fought back from the worst of the recession, but we still have a lot of work to do,” he said, head wagging from side to side. “Let me be very clear, individual salvation is not going to, uh, come about without collective salvation...”

  A mouse appeared suddenly on the screen out of nowhere and scurried across in front of the President’s lectern, as though mocking him. A female among the press corps emitted a shriek. Big C jumped to his feet and let out a whoop of laughter.

  “It’s a sign!”

  Nail remained silent, glaring at the TV.

  The picture switched to an Atlanta, Georgia, suburb where thirty thousand people thronged a Federal Building to put their names on a list for the government to subsidize their rent and house payments. In Boston, high school students and their teachers demanded students be issued free condoms, along with no interest Good Life credit cards. In Pittsburg, protestors angry over high unemployment rates rioted. A flash mob of more than one hundred descended upon a Walgreen’s in St. Louis and stripped it like a swarm of locusts. A bunch of antiwar demonstrators in Washington ran amuck. Homies arrived to keep order, but not to fire on them as they had the Tea Partiers. No one interfered with Cindy Sizemore when she climbed on top of a parked car with a bullhorn.

  “You get America out of Afghanistan and Israel out of Palestine and you’ll stop the terrorism,” she raged. “Just what is the noble cause Americans are dying for? Freedom and democracy? Bullshit! They’re dying for oil to make oil companies richer. They’re dying to expand American imperialism in the Middle East. America has been killing people since we first stepped on this continent. We are the ones responsible for death and destruction. Our only hope is a One World Government. I’m going all over the country telling people their country is not worth dying for...”

  Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and most of the rest of the Middle East was in revolt as the Muslim Brotherhood and communists worked together to overthrow governments and implement “change.” In Cairo, one hundred thousand demonstrators roared in unison, “Kill the Jews!”

  A pretty black reporter named Arthell in Chicago interspersed a lighter note in all the chaos and mayhem when she showed a clip of a congressional candidate named Dennis Trout getting smacked with a pie in the face. So this was the wimp with whom Judy was having her affair—balding, pale-skinned, haggard-looking? Big C almost fell out of his chair laughing. He hoped Judy saw it.

  Then it was right back to the same old turmoil, turbulence and deceit, mostly from Washington. There was a shot of Senate Majority Leader Joe Wiedersham fork-tonguing about the new Health Care Bill and what socialized medicine meant for “the people.”

  “We’re going to get public option,” he promised. ‘It’s just a matter of when. ACOA and PEIU have been a major factor in helping us develop and execute the strategy that makes great progress on our goals and in motivating the public to support them.”

  Big C recognized that as politicalese for, “We’ve rammed this down your throats and now you’re going to pay for it whether you like it or not.”

  Nail got up and took the Winchester 30.06 from a corner of the room. He spent the rest of the day cleaning the rifle before he retired to Sharon’s bed. Big C understood. It was like sleeping in her bed brought him closer to her.

  Nail was gone the next morning in his old pickup when Big C awoke. He had left a note on the table by the coffee pot where Big C would find it.

  Had some business to take care of. Back later.

  The scoped 30.06 was also gone.

  Oklahoma Homeland Director Slain

  (Tulsa)—The Regional Director of Homeland Security based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was slain early this morning as he emerged from his home to drive to work. Witnesses in the upscale neighborhood where Anthony R. Kimbrell, 45, resided in South Tulsa said they heard a single rifle shot at approximately 7:20 a.m. Kimbrell died instantly from a high-powered rifle bullet through the head...

  Kimbrell’s assistant director, Gary Philby, told reporters that a sniper killed the Director. He named former Detective James Nail as a person of interest...

  “Nail is a rogue cop who should be considered armed and extremely dangerous,” Philby said. “He is a former sniper for the Tulsa Police SWAT team and was trained at Quantico by the FBI...”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Keystone Lake, Oklahoma

  There was no discussion between Nail and Big C about the bullet through Kimbrell’s skull. However, both understood that it was more urgent than ever that they flee the state. And soon. According to TV news, Homeland Security and AmeriCorps were sending in task forces to hunt down the two fugitives. “Sources” further related how Sharon Lowenthal had already been questioned in New York but provided authorities no helpful information.

  Nail thought they should stick together; Big C pointed out that it was best they split up and assume aliases. “They looking for a redneck Indian and a nigger traveling together.”

  “What will you do, C?”

  Big C shrugged massive shoulders difficult to disguise on the run. The two men sat together on the fishing log by the creek.

  “I think to get the Defenders back together,” he decided.

  “It’s come to armed rebellion?”

  “Bro’, I love Sharon like my own sister, but she can talk peace and God-love till the cows come home and Jesus break the eastern sky and it not going to make a bit of difference. Things done gone too far. What about you? Where you going?”

  “Maybe it’s better if we don’t know where each other’s at?” Nail suggested.

  “It’s no good plan to go to New York.”

  Nail nodded without comment. Both men watched the brown water rushing by after the recent rains. Big C broke the silence presently to tell a story from when he was a kid coming up in the Oklahoma Panhandle, where blacks and some Indians still share-cropped.

  “We so poor poverty
was a step up,” he began. “But we proud and don’t take handouts from nobody. It embarrassing to take welfare in them days. They seven of us living in a three room shack west of Guymon. One year the crops fail and we have no choice except starve. Pop sent me to county barn to pick up what he call ‘gimpy groceries.’ Government surplus commodities. Sign your name and they fill your tow sack with cheese and rice and beans and powder milk. I only twelve, but I was a scrapper. Fight at the drop of a hat, even if my own hat—”

  Nail grinned tightly. “I can’t believe that about you.”

  “I not always the peaceable sort like I am today. Anyhow, I’m in line and this man work for the government push me or something. I’m ready to fight. What he say make a bigger impression on me than anything else in my life. He say, ‘Boy, if the government feed you, it will do what it damn well please.’ From that day on, I never took nothing from nobody I didn’t earn. Tolstoy right when he say, ‘The more is given, the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more they poverty will increase.’”

  Big C sometimes surprised people with how well read and knowledgeable he was when all they judged him by was his fractured grammar, which Nail suspected he affected to some degree to keep him tied to his roots.

  “What happened to us?” Nail wondered dourly. “To us as Americans?”

  “Government feeds us,” Big C responded. “One in six owe his living in some form or other to government. We become slaves, more so than my old great-great-grandpappy ever was on the plantation. It make no difference what color your skin is. We got the entitlement culture. We think we entitled to what somebody else got, no matter if we earn it or not. Once you become a slave, you sign up to do massa’s bidding.”

  He glanced over to see if Nail was following him. Nail sat with his hands clasped across his knees and his head down, listening.