A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller

by Charles W. Sasser

  “My husband is an optical surgeon,” the grim brunette began. “About a year ago, he accepted a position in a mental health facility in the Colorado Rockies near an isolated little ski village called South Fork. The money was good, so we agreed we should separate for a year and build up a nest egg. We live in New Mexico. Cass comes home on weekends. I began to notice he seemed extremely stressed out. He has nightmares. Finally, even though the doctors there are sworn to secrecy, he told me what was going on. He said they would kill him, and me, if they found out he was talking.”

  She took a deep breath to calm her nerves.

  “This place,” she said, “is as bad as anything that might have come out from behind the Iron Curtain in the 1930s. Electrified fences surround it. Armed guards patrol the perimeter. Cass was assigned to the hospital to remove corneas from patients. Apparently, they are political prisoners deemed dangerous to the government. Cass thinks there may be dozens of other facilities like it hidden all over the United States. People are... People are...”

  It was like she found it so beyond belief that she couldn’t say it. Finally, she did.

  “It’s something out of a SciFi horror movie. People are being executed as needed and their organs harvested for distribution to hospitals. What’s left of the bodies are incinerated. One hundred percent of those sent there will never leave that place. There’s a big turnover. More buses come every day filled with new prisoners.”

  Tears ran freely down Marsha Ross’s cheeks. Judy turned pale, her mouth agape. Big C expected almost anything from Washington, anything but this. Incarcerating people who opposed government social policies started with World War I and President Woodrow Wilson, who tossed thousands of citizens in jail for no greater crime than speaking out. Until now, however, the U.S. Government had never resorted to political genocide.

  “There was a boy in one of the cells named Smitty,” Carolyn went on. “He had been an AmeriCorps volunteer. Something had gone wrong and he was arrested and sent to South Fork. Cass felt sorry for him, but there was nothing he could do.

  “About two weeks ago, Smitty’s cellmate was taken away for surgery. They moved a new guy in with Smitty, a Tulsa policeman named Ross. Smitty begged my husband to get in touch with Sharon Lowenthal from the TV show. He told my husband she would remember him from something that happened in Arkansas. She and you, Corey, and Detective Nail must have made some impression on him.”

  Big C waited for her to go on.

  “Cass forbade me to contact Sharon Lowenthal because he said she was likely next on the hit list and would end up in a place like South Fork, along with anyone associated with her. That could be dangerous for him. I just couldn’t do nothing, understand? I started trying to find Jack Ross’ wife and finally located Marsha hiding in a motel, scared nearly to death.”

  “Trusted friends of ours on the police department put me in touch with her,” Marsha explained.

  “I don’t blame her for being scared,” Carolyn said. “So, Marsha called you, Corey. That’s about it. I don’t know what you can do about it. That place is like Fort Knox or something.”

  Big C had to ask it. “Carolyn, you know if Jack’s still alive?”

  Marsha hung her head.

  Carolyn said, “As of day before yesterday he was.”

  “My God in Heaven,” Judy wailed. “Does things just keep getting crazier?”

  Big C took her hand and squeezed.

  “We may still have time,” he said to Marsha. “Carolyn, I going to need some information. I need the location the concentration camp, layout, guards, anything else your husband might have told you.”

  United Nations to Patrol New York

  (New York)—Due to a series of events which has caused wide international notice, such as the anti-illegal immigration law enacted by the State of Arizona, the United Nations has announced that its nation members will begin patrolling the New York City borough of Staten Island to safeguard Mexican and Arab Muslim immigrants...

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chicago

  Dennis Trout had no one. Judy bailed out on him when he needed her most, making an excuse that she had to go to her mother’s in Bugfuck, Oklahoma, for a few days. Ever since she left, she kept sluffing him off when he cell-phoned her.

  “Dennis, my mama and me is at the hospital. Can I call you back later?”

  “Dennis, I’m cooking ’cause the whole family’s coming over for fried chicken and mashed taters.”

  He lashed out at her in anger and frustration. “Are you fucking somebody else, Judy?”

  She hung up on him. The cunt hung up on him.

  He called her back after he cooled down. “I’m sorry, Judy. I’ve been under a great deal of stress. This was a bad time for you to leave town.”

  “Can we talk when I get back to Washington, Dennis?”

  Can we talk? was always a bad sign.

  “You are coming back?”

  “Where else would I go?”

  She didn’t say she loved him.

  The nervous tic in his left eye got worse. Wiedersham suggested he see a doctor. Marilyn said it made him look ridiculous.

  What he needed was to escape this sham campaign for awhile. People around him ate, slept and lived politics twenty-four hours a day, even when they went to the john.

  After delivering one of his canned speeches at a baseball field, he looked up to see a small private airplane flying over bearing a two-word message emblazoned on the underside of its wings: Stop Anastos. A “Freedom Rally” was being held on a soccer field at the same sports’ complex. Out of impulse and curiosity, he donned dark glasses and a hat so he wouldn’t be recognized and slipped away to take a look for himself. A first-generation Vietnamese man was starting to speak.

  “Nearly forty years ago,” he said, “I left South Vietnam for political asylum in the United States. I still remember vividly the communist tanks rolling into Saigon, although I was only six years old. Trust me, such images can never be erased. My family was among the first one hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees allowed to come to America. It was a miracle from God.

  “I am telling you right now that this is the greatest country on earth. Freedom and opportunity to succeed put me here today. This person standing in front of you could not exist in a socialist communist environment. But what I see now is that old nightmare of communist tanks rolling into Saigon starting to replay in America. If you don’t know it, if you think socialism is a people’s movement, I can tell you from experience that the only difference between socialism and communism is the caliber of the rifle aimed at your head...”

  Trout felt sick. He fled to his hotel room and swigged from a bottle of Maalox, followed by a chaser of Jack Daniels. His eye twitched like crazy.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Scranton, Pennsylvania

  The Jerry Baer Show w/Sharon Lowenthal aired live from New York. James Nail was waiting for it so he would know she was all right so far. She appeared on the screen, beautiful and as high octane as ever with her curly black hair and dark eyes, wearing a blue-gray pants suit and a blue ribbon in her hair.

  If anything ever happened to her...

  Alone in his tiny hideout in Scranton, waiting to heal from his wounds, Nail rushed from the frig with a Coke and a bologna sandwich and plopped into an overstuffed chair that was no longer that overstuffed. Sometimes he thought the world might have been better off if TV had gone kaput fifty years ago for all it and its video game progeny had dumbed down and savaged the culture. Tonight, however, it allowed him to at least see Sharon.

  She gave a cherry “Good evening, America!” She looked tired, stressed. With deliberate irony, The Communist Internationale played in the background:

  ‘Tis the final conflict,

  Let each stand in his place.

  The international working class

  Shall be the human race...

  An old video of Ronald Reagan filled the screen: “Those who have known freedom and lost it w
ill never know it again.”

  Sharon reappeared, perched on the edge of a table stacked with books. Behind her stood the well-used blackboards made famous by Jerry Baer.

  “All over the world,” she began, looking directly into the watching eyes of America, “socialists and communists are coming out of the woodwork. Americans are being pitted against each other by those who seek complete power. When the United States was still on its way to becoming the freest, most productive nation in the world, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that the rich and the powerful would somehow find a way to kick the door of freedom closed. America, that door is closing.”

  She was energetic and persuasive, but Nail was starting to doubt that anything could wake up a people gone asleep over the years. Big C liked to quote his old grandpappy.

  “Give to a pig when it grunts and to a child when it cries, and you’ll have a fine pig and a bad child.”

  Americans had become “bad children.”

  Sharon peppered the show as usual with clips of the powerful and influential caught openly revealing their socialist mindsets and declaring their intentions, President Anastos had recently begun referring to himself as a “citizen of the earth.”

  “International order is one we must achieve,” he said.

  Former Black Panther Duane Smith, now current White House environmental czar and PEIU president, delivered his own prognostication. “Free enterprise has failed, never to be revived. America needs 21st Century State Capitalism—like the Chinese.”

  “The Constitution really doesn’t prohibit the government from doing virtually anything,” said Senate Majority Leader Joe Wiedersham, a rumpled, obese man in a thousand-dollar suit. “Theoretically, nothing prevents the government from taking one hundred percent of your income.”

  A prominent guest on a late night talk show was berating the rise of the Tea Party Movement. “The nice thing is that people who are too dumb or lazy or uninformed to cast a ballot aren’t compelled to vote; they can join a Tea Party. Far too many people are voting as it is. We’re going to have to drag the ignorant hillbilly half of this country into the next century, which in their case means the 19th Century. They’re too stupid. They are like dogs. They can understand inflection, they can understand fear, they can understand dominance. They don’t understand issues...”

  Sharon lowered her head, as though in prayer. Nail felt her anguish. She looked up into the camera.

  “America, if there’s one thing these good, tolerant, open-minded Progressives cannot stand, it’s Middle America. Your old-fashioned decency rubs a lot of lefties the wrong way. They look with suspicion on hayseeds in the heartland who fly the flag on the Fourth of July. They snicker at ordinary folks who like to go bowling or who pray or stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at a high school football game. They don’t understand why anyone would want to eat at Golden Corral or Red Lobster or shop at Wal-Mart...

  “Government wants to tell you hayseeds what to eat, how much air to put in your tires, where to live, how high to set your thermostats, how much money you can make....Government takes away our personal sense of responsibility. While we were asleep, government through handouts taught people not to believe in themselves anymore—to depend on government instead. Progressives want us to believe in a Nirvana Utopia. They sell the idea by using envy and government checks like candy from their pockets, taking power in exchange for promises of ‘hope and change’ they can’t possibly keep. This is not fairness. This is lust for power, the face of tyranny in disguise.”

  She referred to a passage from Cloward and Pivens on how to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism:

  Gradually expand government spending until the country nears fiscal collapse. At that point, a public accustomed to its entitlements will presumably turn on its capitalists masters when they propose cutbacks to restore fiscal balance...and turn the nation’s fiscal crisis in a socialist direction.

  Sharon returned. “The ideas of Karl Marx have killed one hundred million people,” she said. “It’s starting all over again—here in America. Through high powered satellites, drones and massive databases, government can track and control us by using our cell phones, cars, credit cards, driver’s licenses, and passports. Government agents can secretly open the mail of American citizens, read our e-mails, listen in on our phone calls and serve search warrants without authorization of a judge. Local police are being federalized; AmeriCorps is building a private army. The Constitution is being shredded before our very eyes.”

  A man identified as a former FBI agent came on to stare boldly into the camera as he related how he went undercover to infiltrate a radical organization led by President Anastos’ confidantes Bill Ackart and Bernadine Samson-Ackart. At one of their meetings, he said, the conversation turned to the subject of how to best counter obstructionists by building “reeducation camps” and “mental health facilities” in the American Southwest. Those who were too hardcore to the right to be reeducated would have to be eliminated.

  “There I was,” the agent said, “sitting in a room with thirty other people with graduate degrees, powerful people in government, listening to them figure out how to eliminate twenty-five million people—and they were dead serious.”

  The agent had been killed in a mysterious hunting accident afterwards.

  Sharon displayed an official-looking document.

  “This is a copy of the Presidential Directive that establishes presidential continuity of government provisions, or ECG—Enduring Constitutional Government,” she explained. “During an emergency, the President of the United States may declare ECG and maintain it until he decides the coast is clear. It involves emergency action that can be implemented in the event of a national crisis, such action including the arrest and detention of ‘traitors,’ ‘insurrectionists,’ ‘criminals’ and other malcontents by military commanders appointed to run state and local governments.”

  Nail realized he was sitting on the edge of his chair and hadn’t taken a single bite from his sandwich. He couldn’t help sensing death trains or their equivalent being marshaled in rail yards across the nation. Long chains of cattle cars filled with human cargo to be hauled to mass graves. Unexpectedly, he thought of Lieutenant Jack Ross and the enigmatic phone call from Ross’ wife: “They’ve taken my husband!”

  “There are four conditions that must be present for Marxists to make their move to power grab the government,” Sharon continued. “They are: a bad economy; high unemployment; high dependency on government; uncertainty and fear among the population. Doesn’t it sound like everything might already be in place waiting for a crisis to set it in motion?”

  George Zuniga appeared on the screen. A large-headed, ageing man whose East European accent completed his villainous appearance. “Zee main obstacle to a stable and just world order is zee United States,” he said.

  Sharon pointed out that Zuniga had been influencing elections for years. “Expanding his influence,” she said, “through groups such as ACOA, World Alliance, and the Institute for Open Societies.” Zuniga, she continued, was the primary source of funding for scores of organizations promoting Progressive agendas. Time magazine reported that “not another single outside group has had so much sway over the government as The Institute for Open Societies.” An “open society” meant Marxist.

  “I don’t think it’s going too far to compare him to the evil emperor from Star Wars,” Sharon continued. “President Anastos carries a Blackberry around in case Zuniga calls. What Zuniga wants, Anastos gives him. Zuniga supplies the talking points and makes policy in virtually everything.”

  His Open Societies was donating millions to buy up journalists and media outlets, most recently National Public Radio. Sharon played a clip of a mainstream news interview with the “Spooky Dude.”

  “In view of recent evidence suggesting that zee incendiary rhetoric of Zenergy News’ hosts such as Sharon Lowenthal may incite violence,” he maintained, “I have now decided to support organizations that wil
l hold Zenergy News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting NPR and other media in an effort to more widely publicize zee challenge Zenergy poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”

  Immediately after this pronouncement, the “drive-by media” had taken up the howl. Sharon demonstrated with clips.

  “We can’t just dismiss Lowenthal,” a popular CNN anchor expostulated. “There is a good reason why we have exemption of free speech. We need to regulate and protect people from irrational, uncomfortable or offensive speech through passage of Senator Wiedersham’s FAD bill.”

  Speaker of the House Barbara Teague came on, staring out from her expressionless Botox surgeries. “I looked up the definition of sedition, which is ‘conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state.’ A lot of these statements coming from the likes of Sharon Lowenthal rub right up close to being seditious.”

  “We need to do whatever we can to regulate and control capitalist speech, eliminate it if possible,” chimed in President Anastos’ Regulatory czar, Sam Shrader, on another clip.

  A shiver ran up Nail’s spine at Sharon’s summary: “The mainstream media has fallen into Zuniga’s toilet and are splashing around in it like it’s holy water. They have got to take out Zenergy News in order to move forward in the shadows. They have got to take me out.”

  Jerry Baer had already been taken out.

  Sharon was standing up now, moving about on the TV set at Zenergy. She stopped. The camera closed in. She looked directly into it. Her boldness, her raw courage surprised and delighted Nail. At the same time, it made him nervous and unsettled about her safety.

  “Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a minister in Germany when Hitler rose to power,” she said. “He tried to get other ministers to join him in opposition. ‘Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,’ he preached. ‘God will not hold us guiltless.’ America, freedom is being crushed today in countries around the world. If America goes into decline, the light of liberty will start to flicker everywhere in the world. No other country is going to ride in to save us. Americans are all alone on a hostile planet. Speaking out is becoming harder and riskier because we didn’t speak out at the beginning. America, you are going to have to stand up against some of the most powerful people and institutions on the planet.”