Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil

by Jarl Jensen

  The agent’s perfect smile carved through the darkness. “That’s the spirit.”

  Dylan Elan Powers The Declaration of Independence

  Consider the mind of a mass shooter. They are monsters, yes, but their commitment to their disgusting cause is without question.

  My guess is that most of these shooters walk in believing that killing people is easy—at least as easy as buying guns in America. But they discover that it is in fact a massive emotional undertaking. The human mind, no matter how warped an individual mind may be, re-creates the pain other people feel. If you watch someone fall, you flinch and feel their pain. Similarly, when killers shoot their victims, they feel their pain, even if they have dehumanized their targets in their own mind. This is in part why so many mass shootings end with the shooter’s suicide.

  —Justin Wolfe

  What’s up, cucks? Trying out my new GoPro. Not ready to post yet to Facebook Live, but I’ll plan to have this upload automatically after the big day. Only got about ten followers right now anyway. Something tells me there’ll be more interest in my content after I do my shit tomorrow.

  Anyway, today it’s grapefruits. Tomorrow, it’s human heads.

  It’s a little darker than I thought it would be when I started this test. Took me forever to set up, so I lost most of the light. If you can’t see what I’m looking at because it’s a little dark and I’m still not sure how to change these camera settings on the fly, this is a firing test. Not on an actual firing range. Going a little nontraditional, like always. Found some unoccupied farm north of the city. Looks like it hasn’t been planted in a couple years. Nobody for miles around.

  Over there on the hill, you can maybe see how I set up the targets. Working with hay bales with grapefruits on top to simulate human heads. You can see how I got ’em all lined up like people in a movie theater. The hill even simulates the banked seating in the place I picked for the big event.

  Plan to take my first shots from about thirty yards out. Won’t be that far on game day, but what’s that the jocks say? You practice hard, you play hard? Or some stupid shit like that?

  Starting with the AR-15. Weapon of choice. Plan to work my way up to the Remington, then finish any remaining heads off with the Glock from close range. That’ll be the same order I do things tomorrow.

  But you ain’t here to hear me talk. You’re here to watch some simulated heads explode. So strap in, cucks. Today’s the day I start declaring my independence from the weak and the average.

  Chapter 23 Entering the Matrix

  The FDA, a federal agency, approved OxyContin and other opioids and did nothing for years. While billions of prescriptions were issued, thousands of people died. Now Mr. Social Media wants you to put Oculus over your eyes and ears, while others from Silicon Valley are looking to tap directly into your brain. There is nobody at the wheel.

  —Justin Wolfe

  “I’m telling you what, if even one more of these assholes picks at my food again, I’m gonna do a shooting.”

  Evan blanched. “Don’t say that so loud,” he said, immediately regretting the scold in his tone.

  Whether she was miffed by it, she didn’t show. “Fine. But you get my point. It’s okay if they use the bathroom. I’ve made peace with that. I mean, where else are they gonna go? But how am I supposed to prepare this dinner if I’ve got to fend off peckish cops every thirty seconds?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, they’re supposed to be outside preventing another riot from breaking out. Is my gazpacho some kind of threat to the civil order?”

  “Don’t believe I’ve ever tried your gazpacho, Nor, so I wouldn’t know.” Evan glanced nervously over his shoulder to make sure his quip hadn’t offended her. Given her generally miffed expression, there was no telling.

  Of course he couldn’t blame Nora for her frustration or her sarcasm. He was grateful that so many police officers had turned out to keep the protestors back, to be certain, but in the end, the threat was out there, not in here. It seemed to Evan—and to everyone else, for that matter—that the police weren’t at all focused enough on keeping the crowds back. Their curiosity about the makeshift marketplace and the thriving businesses on this previously rundown street was just too considerable to ignore. The idea filled Evan with pride; these businesses were so compelling that not even on-duty cops could ignore them long enough to do their jobs.

  But then, they really needed to be doing their jobs. After a night of FBI raids on the Farm and breathless newscasts both in town and on the national networks, no one was any closer to figuring out whether and how the attack had happened. As a result, tensions remained high between the locals and the Farm residents. All that tension seemed to be rising to a boil outside. Meanwhile, the more the police distracted themselves with the allure of the New Circus, and the more they shuffled in and out of Valence House, Pastor’s Farm to Table, and Dollar Bread, the more it looked like the war zone had come in from the streets.

  For now, even with the distracted police, the war zone remained contained to the north side of the street, well enough away that the Farm’s entrepreneurs could conduct their business, but certainly not well enough away to escape all the shouting and chanting. Of course the residents had gotten rather used to these demonstrations over the past days and weeks, but watching it happen right here on this previously rundown street of Savannah just seemed so surreal.

  Through that surrealness, the neighborhood didn’t seem to be taking super well to all these new pop-up businesses. Evan blamed the protestors—many of whom had fled the riots, only to encamp along the perimeter the local police had set up surrounding the makeshift New Circus the Farm residents had assembled like a weird, ragtag block party outside Nora’s restaurant, Muna’s bakery, and Valence’s movie house. But whoever held the blame, there was no denying the general aggravation in the air.

  Actually that wasn’t entirely true. There were four camps, really. The protestors ringed along the perimeter certainly held a less than favorable view of the New Circus. The residents represented the opposite end of the spectrum, the four dozen or so of them manning and womanning their hastily assembled tables of wares with defiantly disaffected expressions—just a bunch of businesspeople trying to do some business in this completely bananas environment.

  Aligning on the spectrum between these two camps were the patrons and the spectators. The former, most of them kindly residents of Savannah and the surrounding area, appeared all too happy to be out in droves, purchasing the genuinely good goods and services these Farm entrepreneurs had managed to salvage from the fire. The latter watched all hungry-eyed in clusters standing at all angles from the scene, just waiting for someone to get too violent and for the shoving and shouting and tear-gassing to start.

  It was a whole big thing. But the fact that the residents had rallied so quickly after the tragedy, that Nora, Muna, and Valence had been so willing to use their preplanned Dinner and a Movie Opening Night to support the bounce-back efforts at the Farm, that so many good people from Savannah had turned out to buy things, even if so many more had also turned out to scream about it—well, all of this filled Evan’s heart with joy. He just didn’t have the general stability of temper to actually watch all of it unfolding.

  And so he had come to the kitchen to watch Nora instead. Usually, bearing witness to her cooking would level him out, no matter what happened to be bothering him. But on this night, she too was carrying quite a lot of stress, so the effects didn’t seem to be sinking in.

  “Maybe you could casually hint about how Muna is preparing his famous cookies for dessert,” Evan said, “so they would leave you alone and bother him instead.”

  “You kidding?” Nora said. “I’m not gonna do that to him.”

  Evan shared his girlfriend’s pain. They’d all been feeling entirely violated—and pretty much at a constant clip—since the stampede, riot, and fire had begun. Nora and Evan hadn’t even had a chance to enjoy their first night sleeping
next to each other in quite some time, because Evan had been forced to stay up to oversee the FBI effort to search for clues about the arsonist. They had tossed bunks all night and found nothing. No accelerants. No signs of bomb making. Not even so much as a manifesto. They had dragged in dozens of residents for questioning, some of whom hadn’t yet been at the Farm long enough for Evan to have even learned their names, and still nothing.

  Whether it was their frustration at the continued federal presence in their homes or a general desire to immediately rise from the ashes of this attack, the residents had banded together at dawn to make a decision. They would reopen their businesses, and if the FBI intended to inspect the Farm indefinitely, then damn it, they would open those businesses elsewhere.

  The conversation then turned to where that where would be. The local farmer’s market had already made it clear that the Sotos were the only Farm business they could tolerate at any one time. The flea market couldn’t spare the room. And the city would never approve an application to host a block-party-style event on some random street downtown.

  “What about Valence’s theater?” Aria had suggested. “Ain’t he doin’ some kind of opening night?”

  This idea took off before anyone could object. There, on a single street close to Savannah’s downtown—but not close enough that it would raise too much of a stink with the city planners—and on a street that most residents preferred to avoid, no less, stood a row of three businesses owned by Farm entrepreneurs. The city surely wouldn’t let the Circus businesses operate on a cordoned-off street, but as long as they had the approval of the store owners, there was nothing preventing them from lining shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk outside the theater, restaurant, and bakery.

  And, hey, Valence just happened to be throwing a dinner-and-a-movie occasion for his theater’s opening night. What better way to get plenty of foot traffic to this impromptu marketplace?

  “No,” Valence had said at first. Just no.

  “What do you mean no?” came the response from the other residents.

  “Are you kidding? You want to set up all these fuckin’, uh, makeshift booths in fronta my movie house? On opening night? Nah, man. Forget the visibility and walkability shit. You gonna bring that mob to my doorstep. All the protestors and cops. It’ll be, uh, fuckin’ anarchy. No one’ll turn out for the goddamned movie.”

  On the former point, Valence had been absolutely right. It was fuckin’ anarchy outside his movie house. On the latter point, no one could have been happier to be wrong than Valence Newton.

  How these many patrons lining up to buy at the New Circus and then file into Valence’s movie house, Evan couldn’t say. He’d watched for a while, but still he couldn’t fathom how so many people had managed to break through the line of police and protestors all along the northern side of the street. The PD had sent enough manpower to stave off a blitzkrieg, if only for a night. Evan never heard an official count on the number of cops holding the perimeter, stoically keeping the protestors separate from the patrons and poking in and out of Nora’s restaurant to sample her food, but he would have estimated it at four dozen at least.

  “I mean, they’re everywhere,” Evan reminded Nora as she stood behind her main prep table, assuming the defensive posture of a lizard guarding its eggs. “Don’t say anything threat-like and maybe they’ll leave you alone.”

  “Right,” Nora said with a roll of her eyes. “If I just hold my tongue, the big, bad, gun-toting men will stop popping in here to swipe samples of my amuse-bouche.” She held up a paring knife in mock threat.

  Evan shrugged. “So skip the amuse-bouche.”

  She glared at him.

  “Okay, don’t skip it.”

  “You’ve seen how Valence talks before these films. He’ll be up there an hour. His guests are gonna starve without these things.”

  Just then, one of the cops wandered in, trying to look alert through an inability to hide his boredom.

  “And anyway,” Nora said, gesturing the knife toward the agent, “these clowns didn’t pay for a ticket. They don’t get to eat.”

  The cop’s expression remained unchanged. Either he didn’t mind being called a clown or he was pretending not to care. Even as Evan and Nora watched him skirt along the perimeter of her kitchen, then make his way to the secondary prep table along the far wall, he made a clumsy, careless move to palm an egg and bacon canapé. He smiled nervously as he shuffled out.

  “You see?” Nora bellowed, still brandishing the knife.

  Evan held up both hands. “I’ll talk to Cruise and get them to stop.”

  Cruise was the movie-star-handsome FBI agent who had originally approached Evan with the news that they would be spending all night tossing bunks. This had only just happened last night, but already it felt like years ago. Evan called him Cruise not because his name was in fact Cruise—it was Jones-Lacy or some other hyphenated kind of thing—but rather, because Meryl had decided that the man bore a vague resemblance to Tom Cruise. Even though they were still worried about her recovery from the fire, everyone hated Meryl for pointing this out, because now that was all they saw. In almost an instant, it had become impossible to separate one’s opinion of the agent from one’s opinion of the actor. This made it difficult to take anything he said seriously, a fact that leant more than a little surrealism to the whole affair of being investigated by his scurrying army of flak-jacketed underlings.

  Plus, Cruise had this condescending way about him, holding an opinion of himself that completely disallowed for the notion of failure. Even when his whims on the Farm turned up no new information about the supposed arsonist, he found some way to reframe the situation so he looked like a genius. At one point last night, one of his agents had broken a water line while inspecting a toilet—why he needed to inspect a toilet, no one was sure—and the resultant flood had shut down a whole bathroom and ensured that Bob-O wouldn’t be attending tonight’s dinner and a movie or getting any sleep for quite some time. When Cruise heard the news of this, you’d have thought he deserved a parade. After all, in his view, the flood would put the would-be arsonist out of his comfort zone, and it would be no time before that would-be arsonist cracked.

  Now here they were, a sleepless night, long day, and several Bureau-caused disasters later, no closer to catching an arsonist. Still the majority of the agents were pawing around the Farm, even as Cruise had come to the theater with a small detail meant to search the crowds in the New Circus for any sign of suspicious behavior. The worst part was, given how the investigation had turned up precisely zero information of any kind, no one could even prove that this arsonist existed. All this effort, all these tax dollars, and all this disruption to the Farm and now the movie house and restaurant, and it had all come on a suspicion—or, as Evan thought darkly, fear of the unknown that had made these agents jump to a conclusion and then keep searching for evidence to support that conclusion.

  Nora practically read Evan’s mind. “I still can’t get over how a hunch that this was a resident can lead to something like this.”

  Evan sighed about it, not for the first time. “They wouldn’t still be here if they didn’t have other reasons.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Evan stepped closer to Nora’s prep table and leaned in to whisper his suspicion. “The arsonist is just an excuse for them to investigate our operations. Tossing bunks and breaking toilets is one thing, but they’ve been searching the admin shed and poring through our hard drives, too.”

  Nora’s eyes went wide. “How can they get away with this?”

  With a shrug, Evan turned and leaned against the prep table. “As our president has taught us, it doesn’t matter if it’s legal; what matters is whether the public can be made to accept that the ends justify the means.”

  Nora scoffed and got back to using her paring knife. Evan retreated to his thoughts. He could hear Valence arguing with someone next door—a fact made possible by the open doorframe providing passage between Valence’s
movie house and Nora’s restaurant. The moment the building permits had come in, David had installed this door with the careful application of a sledgehammer, followed by a power saw, followed by a startlingly small amount of time to construct a proper wooden frame in the hole he had just made.

  “Much easier when you don’t intend to install a door,” David had explained, clapping his sides and beaming with the pride of any good carpenter.

  “What do you mean you don’t intend to install a door?” Evan had asked.

  “Of course Nora wanted a swingin’ door with a window,” David explained. “Said it’s the best way to deliver food between the two businesses. But Valence insisted on a curtain. Said he couldn’t have any windows beamin’ in light from the restaurant and screwin’ up the picture. And he definitely didn’t want no doors swingin’ open durin’ his movies. Would’ve been too distractin’. So finally they settled on a curtain. Easy access. No light pollution.”

  So that was how Evan found himself bidding good luck to Nora and then striding through the curtain into the movie theater. His first sense upon entering was awe. Nearly all the seats were full, a stark contrast to how he had left them ten minutes ago. The room was buzzing from the tension everyone had carried in from the overenergized scene outside.

  Ten rows of seats bisected by a single aisle rose in a gentle upward grade toward the back of the house. Capacity in this room checked in at two hundred moviegoers. Evan knew this because Valence had been bragging about this number since the day he first acquired the space. Then he’d spent the entire month of preparation for opening night fretting about whether two hundred seats would be enough.

  At the moment, it seemed to Evan White that Valence had been right to worry. He checked his watch. Ten more minutes until showtime, and the theater was crawling with life with few seats remaining. The scene served a stark contrast to what was happening outside. In here, a couple hundred people sat shoulder to shoulder in admittedly outdated theater seats, all of them anxious for the calm escape of a movie to begin. Outside roiled a thankfully tank-free Tiananmen Square.