by JD Dutra
He turned to look at his crew, to ask for help, but Ivan’s men were moving into the group, entering the thick gray smoke of the stun grenades without any thought to their own safety. They moved like serpents into a nest of rats, not shooting anyone but just tasering then restraining them, one of Jimmy’s men after another, it was as if they wanted everyone alive. A second jolt of electricity ran through his Jimmy’s body, rolling his tongue inside of his mouth as his teeth chattered uncontrollably. His fingers curling, twitching in a grotesque display of lost control and his vision began to blur. The image of the bottom of the crate filled with desert rocks was the last thing he thought of, before his consciousness slipped away.
*
After some time, he didn’t know how long, Jimmy woke up to the sound of mumbling voices. He had a splitting headache and when he opened his eyes, darkness was spinning around him. He panicked, thinking he was made blind or drugged.
“What’s going on?” He yelled, his words slow and disoriented.
“Jimmy yo, wake up! They put us all in a box man!”
“Who?” Said Jimmy, still confused, but the voice of the man talking to him sounded like Snappy.
“Them Russians man! They tasered and knocked out our entire crew and put us in a metal box or somethin’. We gotta find a way to get outta here now!”
As the loud screams and shouts all around him began to make sense, Jimmy could see small holes that let in thin columns of bright lights through the walls that surrounded him.
“Who pissed their pants? I can smell it!” said Jimmy.
“They are driving us somewhere Jimmy, you gotta think of somethin’ right now,” said Snappy, his voice breaking with fear.
“Hey yo, Jimmy, wake the hell up! I thought this was going to be a smooth transaction man so what a hell is going on?” The voice came from somewhere in the darkness of what Jimmy now recognized as the back of a small moving truck.
Jimmy didn’t bother answering, choosing instead to walk towards one of the corners, the one where a bright light cut a line at the bottom, from one side of a wall of the back of the truck to the other.
The cargo door.
He began banging loudly on the door and shouted, “Open up, I’m thirsty! Open up now!” But no one came.
“Where is Baby… Baby Ray?” He said weakly.
“I don’t know man, last I saw he was planted face first on the gravel near the cars, before the bombs started going off,” said Snappy, who followed Jimmy around in the darkness like lost child.
The truck suddenly stopped and Jimmy began to bang on the door again, he was feeling claustrophobic in this dark, small space with another dozen men.
Jimmy ran his hands along the wall, passing them over several small cracks that poured in bright yellow light. He pressed his face onto the wall and put one of his eyes to a small hole and looked outside. There was the Asian woman, the white girl’s daddy as well as Ivan plus what looked to be his entire crew. They were standing a few feet away from the truck and the walls of picked apart cars behind them told Jimmy they were still at Rus’ Pick and Pull.
He saw Oneita and Baby Ray standing next to each other, bound by the hands and with their mouths shut with a thick strip of duct tape. They appeared to be crying.
“Open the damn door!” Jimmy yelled, but no one from the outside responded.
He pressed his face against the wall again, looking outside. He now noticed the strange look of pity and perhaps even fear on some of the faces that stared towards the truck, as if anticipating something that would be too hard to watch. Ivan looked unemotional, detached.
“I think they’re gonna shoot us up in here or set fire to this damn truck! Everyone, to the door and kick it down!” Jimmy shouted and he felt his men pressing towards the doors in the back of the truck. The sound of kicks against the metal sheet that kept them inside began to fill the air, in random patterns at first, then they found a rhythm, their feet ramming the door over and over again in loud bangs, each kick letting more light into the dark box than before.
The sounds of heavy machinery, oversize motors and grinding gears suddenly echoed all around them, muffling the sounds of their desperate attempt to free themselves.
“They gonna flatten this truck with us in it!” Someone shrieked in desperation, and the kicks to the door and banging intensified, they felt like caged animals being driven to the slaughter. Jimmy kept shouting orders, trying to rally the men to keep kicking the door as hard as they could, but the door seemed able to bend but not break.
Something picked up the truck off the ground, everyone inside the box lost their balance and fell to the floor, Jimmy rolled onto his men, all of them being tossed onto one another, like bugs being shaken inside of a can. The sound of grinding gears increased and it became louder, blaring and roaring closer with every second that went by. Jimmy began wailing in fear, everything around him began to tremble and the fetid smell of defecation that suddenly filled the hot metal box was his own, he couldn’t control his bowels anymore.
“Somebody help us! Please,” Jimmy screamed from inside the box.
Standing a few feet from the ten-foot long moving truck that caged Jimmy’s entire gang, Mei Lin began to imagine the horrific scenes that would unfold next. She had never witnessed an execution, let alone one as gruesome as the one about to happen in Ivan’s yard. She turned away from it and saw Oneita and Baby Ray, burying their faces into each other’s shoulders, crying and shaking with fear.
Maybe they’ll be next?
The large industrial material handler’s long mechanical arm came down and gripped the cabin of the truck, its four steel tentacles squeezing through the cabin like a strong hand crumbling a can of soda. The truck was picked up then lifted high into the air and moved over to hang above what Ivan’s men called, ‘the mouth of the bear’, a German heavy-duty mechanized car shredder that looked like a large metal box the size of a bus. It had a large metal bed on one side, a set of shredding gears in the middle and a conveyor belt on the other end. It was a machine meant to reduce cars and engine blocks from their normal size down to half an inch crumbs, through a series of overlapping grinding gears.
“I can’t look,” said Mei Lin before turning to Daniel.
“I can… I can’t wait to hear them scream,” said Daniel, his voice and face were so unsettling it reminded Mei Lin of the way Ping made her feel when he was around.
The truck was dropped into the bed of the mechanized shredder and the loud bang of a large piece of metal crashing down onto another cut through the air, followed again by the screams and curses from the men inside the truck. The hydraulic bed began to rise into the air on one side, sending the truck cabin first into the heavy duty grinding gears. The thick metal teeth suddenly bit down onto the front tires, popping them instantly and pulling them down into the bowels of the shredder, making the truck jerk from one side to another. A different set of sounds filled the air, the engine of the grinder began to work harder, and the noise of metal being crushed was deafening and incredibly violent.
The conveyor belt began to spill small metal and rubber pieces onto a large metal container. The mood of those who watched was tense, everyone wondered when the belt would turn crimson and wet with blood.
The grinding gears continued to tear and swallow the front axle of the truck and then, within seconds, half of the cabin was chewed and the conveyor belt was littered with small chunks of metal, rubber, glass and plastic. The screams of the men behind the cabin were disturbing, some of them were crying, begging to be let out, wailing, and the metal box in the back of the truck hadn’t even been touched by the large chopping gears yet, but the cabin was almost gone.
Oneita’s eyes rolled into the back of her skull and her body all of a sudden fell straight onto the hard gravel, her massive body doing nothing to help cushion the impact. Baby Ray cried even while the duct tape was firmly on his mouth, he fell to his knees and leaned over his woman, looking away from the car shredder, like a child
having a horrendous nightmare from which he couldn’t wake up.
The gears completed the mauling of the cabin and began to clamp on the metal box with Jimmy’s entire crew trapped within. The men inside screamed with such desperation and panic, loud enough to muffle the loud grinding noise of the gears. Then one scream pitched louder than all the others, and a strange noise began to pour from the grinding gears for the first time, they sounded as if they were lubricated and were now chewing both metal and wood. The conveyor belt rolled a sheet of crimson debris onto the large collecting bin, among the dark wet metal, pink and yellow bits of flesh, fat and crushed bone.
Inside the box that was collapsing all around him, Jimmy’s heart was hammering so hard he wished he would die of a heart attack. One man had already been swallowed by dark metal teeth that cut through flesh and metal as easily as a lawnmower cuts through grass and weeds. Men where shoving each other out of the way in the collapsing space, trying to stay away from the gears as much as possible, but as the grinding metal bit down it caught two of the men, one by the leg and another by the arm. Screaming, they sank down into the machine, their flesh and bones broken and consumed in just a few agonizing seconds.
The others still left alive yelled to be released, but there was no escape. Jimmy couldn’t look away when the gears crushed each of the men’s heads, they cracked open like the shell of a large snail under someone’s feet. He was all of a sudden paralyzed with fear.
“Jimmy! Help me!”
He felt Snappy’s hands out of nowhere clamp down onto his shirt, pulling him towards the grinding gears, which was mangling and swallowing one of Snappy’s feet.
Jimmy tried to punch him away, but the adrenaline running through the half of Snappy’s body that was still not mangled gave Snappy too much strength. Jimmy heard the wet crunching sounds of the gears, the smell of shredded bodies made him convulse with an urge to vomit. Snappy pulled him down and wrapped his hands around Jimmy’s neck.
“Help me, Jimmy!” Snappy screamed with agonizing pain.
Snappy pulled Jimmy down again, harder this time and the leader of the gang lost his balance, falling onto the sharp metal teeth right on his stomach. Out of a reflex he pulled his hands and face away from the gears but the sharp metal teeth tore his belly open and began masticating his bowels that spread under him, as he disappeared into the grinding machine. Never had Jimmy felt such pain in his entire life, it started in his stomach then it took over his entire body with each long and agonizing second. After what seemed like an eternity in excruciating pain, he lost feeling of his legs and arms, and before everything went black, he saw the gears turning inches from his very eyes, putting unbearable pressure onto his face.
Chapter 44
White House, Washington D.C.
Monday, October 26th, 2020
8: 00 A.M.
Barry left his bedroom, dressed casually and ready for the day, and he began to walk down the halls of the White House. Normally the place would be full and alive with people going from one side to another, house helpers, staff members, politicians. Now his voice was the only one that echoed through the corridors, he tried to keep his voice low as he spoke into a cell phone on his ear.
“To be honest, I miss you too, Robyn,” he said with a half-smile. “Tell the kids I can’t wait to see them either.” There was a pause as he listened to his wife for a few seconds, then he continued, “I’m glad your helicopter ride back here went fine. I was worried about you and the kids driving down on Freeway 270, there are a lot of violent mobs out on the streets and we’re thin with immediate staffers.”
He listened to his wife’s reply and stopped by a refreshments station to make his own morning cup, no one was managing it this morning.
“As soon as you all come down here, Robyn, we are packing up and going to a safe place, I want to be out of here in the next hour or so. No, not Cheyenne Mountain, somewhere else, I’ll tell you about it when you get here. I gotta run, I got that broadcast I told you about, I’ll see you and the kids in our bedroom in just a few.” He heard her last words and felt a soft smile form on his lips. “I love you too, Robyn.”
Barry hung up the line, feeling better about his marriage than he had in a long time. Perhaps it was the mass deaths all over the place that put everything into perspective for Robyn and for himself.
It would be nice to maybe start over again, there was a time when we loved each other so much. Mr. Woods has disappeared anyway.
He opened the door to the Oval Office, coffee cup in hand, when he saw one of the staff men putting together the radio transmission equipment by the resolute desk.
“Mr. President,” the man said with a nod.
“Good morning, Michael. How long until we’re ready to transmit?” Asked Barry, before taking a sip of his attempt at imitating his deceased chef.
“Just about ready, Sir.”
“Very good, I’d like to be done in the next 10 to 15 minutes, my family just got here.”
“Oh that’s great, Sir, I know you were worried about them last night.”
“Yeah, and with Charlie, the old helicopter guy catching this virus, and the city the way it is, Camp David might as well be on the other side of the country.”
The man nodded and turned to connect some more cables.
“You look like you didn’t sleep well, Mr. President. This must be a terrible time to be in your shoes. I’m so sorry, Sir.”
“You have no idea, Michael,” said Barry, thinking about Lamar, the organization he once belonged to, the Chinese and the Russians. Things were strangely uneventful since he had slammed the phone on Lamar’s face just the night before. He reached for the Chiappa Rhino 200DS revolver he had in his pocket and touched it. A creeping fear inside him told him he’d be using it soon.
I only have six shots, I better make them count. I’ll kill anyone who tries to hurt me or my family.
“I’m sure having your family close will help a great deal. I’m single and my parents are in California, but they are safe for now so, that keeps me going,” Michael said.
“I’m glad they’re well, Michael, and you are correct, having my wife and children near will help me get my mind in order,” said Barry, “It will help me put in place the plan I came up with to put this country back in order.”
My family got here safe and sound. It’s time to refocus and lead this country.
Michael’s voice interrupted his thoughts.
“Mr. President, the equipment is ready when you are.”
“I’m ready now. Call in the rest of your staff and let’s get in touch with the American people.”
Michael sighed and said, “There is no one else who knows how to work this equipment, I’m it. But don’t worry, I got everything ready to go. As soon as you are done with your speech I’ll do some light editing and spread it around through the Emergency Broadcast System and social media so it will play all over the country… Where there’s still power, that is.”
Barry nodded and brought his coffee to the table, since the transmission would be via voice only he only needed to sound Presidential. He sat on his ergonomic chair and adjusted his seat and the gun concealed on his hip. He took a deep breath and looked at the radio equipment. There was no teleprompter or speech prepared by anyone and the night before he went through the most agonizing hours of his life. He had to reign in everything that was spiraling out of control, and he’d have to take full charge and responsibility for the first time in his presidency. Not even the Senate could stand in his way.
Michael came around and adjusted the microphone and headset and after a brief count, a green light came on and one of Michael’s thumbs went half way up in the air.
Today he’d speak from his heart. He had spent all night either talking to his wife on the phone or formulating a plan, he simply couldn’t sleep. He felt confident that the mix of his own ideas, his military advisors, and a few borrowed from the organization he was no longer a part of, was just what his country needed. H
e cleared his voice, sat forward and approached the microphone.
“My fellow Americans. Right now our nation is standing firm against the most brutal challenge we’ve ever had to face. I’d like to start by reminding you that our unity in this critical time is exactly what we need. Be kind to one another, understand that everyone you see is going through the same struggles you are.
“As your President I’ll put into effect, as of now, a few emergency executive orders that will help the government assistance we have out there go even further. These orders were created for a nationwide emergency such as this, we’ll broadcast a summary of what they are after I’m done speaking with you. Your fellow Americans expect your full cooperation, as do I.
“The ten FEMA Regions are fully functioning and after my broadcast we’ll put out a list of the location of the hundreds of camps within each region. Please try and get to one of them as soon as possible if you need help, or if you are able to help. Those are our bases along with our military installations throughout the country that we can count on to help you and your family. There isn’t anything sinister going on there, these are simply hubs so that we can coordinate labor and materials in order to rebuild our country. Those of you who are healthy, please, we need your assistance at this time. We have several jobs for you at these FEMA camps, where you can contribute to rebuild this country and get shelter and food in exchange. These camps were built to expand as much as needed so we can readily accommodate everyone who shows up.
“You are probably wondering what you’ll get paid with once you are in the camps, now that all major financial markets have collapsed around the world and ours as well. We are working on a brand new currency, we’ll outlaw the dollar in just a few days because of the overwhelming counterfeit reports we’re getting, and reissue a new currency soon. This one will be an all-digital currency so you won’t have to worry about fake bills or anything of that nature.
