When Bigmouth set the twenty-minute timer, he assumed he would already be heading up the Washington Parkway toward Baltimore, safely on his way to his niece’s sweet sixteen. The gardener had been molesting his niece since she was eleven and wanted to be there for her at the celebration.
He knew he would get caught eventually, but Bigmouth was looking forward to all the attention he would get from the media, the chance to tell his story over and over again, to go down in history, and whatever else he was daydreaming about as he turned onto the Parkway. But instead of achieving all that glory, he was vaporized along with 62,000 other people within a thirty-block radius of the White House.
***
The Illuminati looked to kill two birds with their nuclear assassination. Besides disposing of an uncooperative president, the Illuminati wanted to cripple the American economy to help usher in the one-world government. The destruction of the Capitol and the cleanup of the fallout would be another huge blow to America’s finances, already depleted by poor management, terrorist attacks, unending wars, and recurring natural disasters.
***
The Illuminati made a big mistake when they helped Arthur Friedman get elected, and lots of people died because of it. They were also wrong about the sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln. They were good with civil wars and all, but they didn’t like old Abe messing around with the great institution of slavery. The Illuminati were all about slavery since they invented it a long time ago to mine for gold and other metals they needed to build spaceships for the aliens and otherwise control the planet. They also used slaves to help build the great pyramids.
***
I found that out at the Hall of Knowledge when I was trying to figure out how they managed to move those big pyramid stones since they weighed about two and a half tons apiece. The slaves, however, as most historians believed, were not there to move the stones, but only for the finish work and to get drinks and stuff. How did they move those great big stones? Magic—well, it would have looked like magic to the slaves and the other humans anyway, but it was actually an anti-gravity device developed by aliens.
***
As history would show, though the Illuminati convinced the actor John Wilkes Booth that his greatest performance would be on the balcony of the Ford Theater instead of the stage, slavery would not last, at least not in its very public form.
Yes, the Illuminati would lose this cherished invention of theirs as public policy; but not to worry, they were able to keep many of their other great inventions like war and murder, rape, abortion, torture, prostitution, gambling, pornography, and on and on.
3
I spent my youth in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles built on the backs of the aviation, military, and film industries. My father, an engineer, worked on various missile programs for Hughes Aircraft. My mother was a housewife and living saint.
***
Howard Hughes launched Hughes Aircraft in 1932 and would become the first American billionaire. The Bible states that it is “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.” This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it was meant as a warning because it was pretty darn difficult to get into the New Kingdom if you died with lots of cash. Why? That kind of money kept most people separated from God. But the Bible doesn’t say money is the root of all evil, it says: “Love of money is the root of all evil.” So if you were at least willing to give it up at some point, you might have made it into paradise; otherwise, you were left open to vice, obsession, greed, paranoia, materialism, egotism, and especially demons. And the more obsessed with money you became, the worse it would get, until the demons were pretty much running your life.
Howard Hughes eventually went mad because he tried to hold onto his money without listening to the demons. The demons wanted him to participate by putting millions into the furtherance of one-world government. Since he refused, they tormented him with their voices until he went insane—so insane, he spent his last days in a dark room wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet, counting piles of green peas, and pissing in jars.
Howard’s demonic experience was a blessing in disguise, however. For his choice of insanity over capitulation to the Illuminati, he squeezed through the eye of the needle and landed in paradise. He now lives here in a place called Tent City, the only place in the New Kingdom where the dwellings are more humble than the shacks where I live. He lives there with most of the other rich people from the Old Earth who did something or other good at the very last minute to escape the pit. And like the rest of us, he doesn’t urinate at all anymore.
***
The Valley was a good enough place to grow up I guess. We spent most of our days running around with the other kids in the neighborhood. Back then, parents would let their kids out the door in the morning for school, or play, or to smoke cigarettes and knock each other in the head, and didn’t much think about them till dinner time. Parents didn’t worry that some maniac or pervert might steal their children off the streets.
But that all changed in the late seventies when kids began disappearing all over the place. Hardly any of these kids were taken by aliens. Aliens couldn’t take anybody who didn’t open themselves up to demons in some way. Since kids were mostly innocent and protected by Guardian Angels and all, demons and aliens usually left them alone.
On the other hand, child-raping, murdering psychos were grabbing children left and right. These sick individuals had been around a long time. They just didn’t get a lot of heat or press because, for centuries, unwanted, orphaned, and runaway children were viewed as disposable, so they had plenty to choose from. I mean way back when, you could send a kid to work for fifteen hours in a dark mine or some other awful place, beat the crap out of them, lock them in a closet for the night without food, and hardly anyone gave a gosh. Who had time to worry about a few missing or murdered throwaways?
Much later, laws were enacted specifically to protect children from maniacs and awful parents. These laws helped people to view children in a more protective light. Orphans and runaways were harder to come by, so when these scumbags began crawling out of their holes in droves to kidnap and otherwise harm any kid they could get their hands on, the public took notice.
***
In 1979, a six-year-old boy named Etan Patz left his New York apartment to catch the school bus. He was never seen on the Old Earth again. To help in the search for the missing boy, his photo was placed on a milk carton. By the mid-1980s, you could hardly find a milk carton without some poor kid’s picture on it. One minute you’re all set to have a great day running all over the place with your friends or whatever, pouring milk on your Captain Crunch, and the next thing you know, you’re staring at some kidnapped kid who might have been tortured and murdered and only God knew what else.
It was enough to give any parent a permanent panic disorder. Most parents just stopped letting their children out by themselves altogether. And by the early nineties it was pretty rare to see a little kid walking around alone. The sounds of children at play in the streets of the Old Earth were all but muted, their childhoods stolen by a handful of murderous and perverted creeps.
***
Of all the outrages that went on during man’s reign on the Old Earth, the abuse, molestation, kidnapping, and/or murder of children was the saddest and most horrible. It got so bad God almost cut free will to intervene again, just like he did when He wasted everyone in the Great Flood. But instead, Jesus or one of His angels would jump into a kid’s body right before they were to be molested, punched, choked, tortured, or otherwise harmed, to endure the suffering for them. That’s why many of these poor kids, if they were found alive, couldn’t seem to remember much when interviewed by detectives or psychologists.
***
Yeah, there was a big flood that wiped out most of the planet. Even some of the most skeptical Bible-hating scientists agreed on that one. Yes, there was a Noah, and he built an ark and stuffed the whole thing with animals. Y
es, it rained for forty days and forty nights. The darn thing was sitting right there on top of Mount Ararat in Turkey the whole time. Nobody could find the ark because it was so high and covered in ice and snow most of the time. Besides, the Illuminati told the Turkish government to keep everyone the heck away from it so the truth of its existence wouldn’t attract any more believers. Yes, I read about it at the Hall of Knowledge.
*
Most of that missing kid stuff, thank the good Lord, was after my childhood. In my day every kid in the neighborhood gathered on the streets in front of their homes to play football, hide and seek, ditch, catch, ride skateboards, stand around, throw sticks, or whatever else they could figure out to keep from dying of boredom.
What a hassle that was for us, too, because we didn’t have all that high-tech gaming junk, the internet, iPods, iPads, or cell phones and whatnot. If you wanted to make a phone call, you had to walk all the way to the kitchen. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to mess with a big old record player or tune it in on the radio. If you wanted to know something that wasn’t taught in school, you had to go to a public library and check out a book with a little card in it and a date stamped on it. And if you didn’t return the book by that date, they’d fine you a nickel a day or something, and that was just about your whole allowance. And so you wouldn’t have any money for practically a month, but your dad would beat the crap out of you anyway for being irresponsible, when you were just trying to finish the stupid book and you forgot because you were just a dumb kid.
***
For the most part, the Valley was rows of same-like houses with same-like families. The moms stayed home while the dads went off to work. My mother was the sweetest lady on the planet and my life saver; my father was pragmatic and hard, and he yelled and whipped us an awful lot.
***
I have two older brothers, Gerry and Geoff, and a younger sister, Gina. Parents were always giving their children names with the same first letter in those days. I guess it made it easier for them to yell at us or get everybody moving in the same direction. And the names were always called in the same order, from oldest to youngest, so we couldn’t tell who was in the most trouble: “Gerry, Geoff, George, Gina, get in here,” or “Gerry, Geoff, George, Gina, take the trash cans to the curb,” or “Gerry, Geoff, George, Gina, who broke the mustard jar?” and on and on.
***
Every weekend we were dragged to the local Catholic parish for services and catechism classes. Church was an hour of torture, but catechism was worse because it seemed to take over most of our Saturday, the rest of which was spent pulling a never-ending crop of weeds or doing some other made-up chore in our backyard.
That yard was only about 1100 square feet, but somehow it was never quite finished, at least not to my dad’s satisfaction. I don’t know how he came up with so many projects in that tiny backyard. I guess it was because he spent most of his childhood doing chores on a farm in Nebraska, so he figured we needed to work even if there was nothing to do.
***
I don’t know why I dreaded church so much as a kid. I’m not sure if it was the hard pews, the kneeling, the old priest who always seemed to be yelling at us when he was only reading, my mom pinching us for squirming, my father smacking us on the back of our heads for fidgeting, or just the heaviness of the place. It felt ancient or something, like the very first pope himself might show up at any minute. Or perhaps it was the overwhelming presence of my own guilty conscience. Whatever it was, I couldn’t wait to get out of there every Sunday. And I stopped going to church as soon as my parents stopped forcing me to go.
***
I was pathetically skinny growing up. I barely had any chest at all. I should have been bigger, though, because I could sure eat. It seemed like I was famished all the time, even though I stuffed my face all day long. I could eat three chickens at one sitting when I was only about eight. My mom couldn’t understand where I put it all. I would sneak into the kitchen after everyone went to bed and eat a bowl or two of cereal, and more if I had had to fight my brothers for the leftovers at dinner because I would always lose.
I would lose because my brothers were much bigger, but also because I was a horrible fighter to begin with. My father wasn’t the type of guy who would teach you neat junk like fighting or pay to have you sent to karate school or someplace. Some of the kids in my elementary school already knew karate and kung fu and boxing, and all kinds of cool stuff like that. This one kid, Tory, would smack other kids around every day with his karate. One day at recess, I beat him to the drinking fountain, and he karate-chopped me in the neck and then kicked my feet out from under me in about a second flat, knocking me on my butt. It hurt like heck, but it was pretty impressive how smooth and fast he dropped me. He was only nine years old.
***
I attracted lots of bullies growing up. It was mostly my fault. The most attention I got from my brothers was when they were pushing me around, so I learned to pester them until they came after me. But it didn’t stop with them. I became a smart aleck to anyone and everyone, not having the good sense to pick and choose with any caution those I verbally slighted. And the more annoyed someone became with me, the more I word-punched, until they whined, walked away, or smacked me.
I didn’t learn my lesson until I was a sophomore in high school. I guess I hadn’t been beaten hard enough till then. It all started when I was placed at the same table as Susan Shaker in second period Home Economics. She was a junior and the snotty girlfriend of a particularly large and nasty senior named Bret McNeil.
***
Mostly only girls took Home Economics back then, but this class was full of males, me included, because of the unusually attractive teacher, Mrs. Enderbiden, who was Swedish or Danish or something, and always wearing these fantastically tight skirts and sweaters. She was pretty much the main topic of conversation among the boys for all three years of high school.
***
Anyway, I don’t remember exactly what I said to McNeil’s girlfriend to set her off. I just remember she bugged the crap out of me because she kept referring to Bret as her fiancé, which was completely ridiculous because she was only a year older than me and neither of them even had a job or anything, but it was just the sort of pretentious thing she would always say anyway. She’d say stuff like, “My fiancé is taking me to Bob’s Big Boy tonight,” or “My fiancé and I just love the strawberry milkshakes at Bob’s Big Boy,” and on and on.
I must have said something stupid because she turned to me with the coldest stare I’d ever seen on a girl. “My fiancé is going to beat the living tar out of you after school today.” The way she said it, so matter of fact, already scared the living tar out of me. Always on the ready with some clever retort, for once, I had practically nothing to say. All I could manage was, “Huh?”
“You heard me,” was all she said, and she turned her back to me.
***
I don’t think I was ever that afraid in my whole life, not even when I was hiding, flat on my belly, deadly silent, watching the flashlights of the Minions of the Antichrist bouncing off the walls of our cave.
***
I stared at the large clock till the end of that period, and again during each of the four remaining periods, begging the hands to slow down, listening to the seconds tick, each louder than the loudest droning lecture, louder than the loudest classroom racket.
Too soon, the last bell of the day rang. I was shaking, but for some reason I didn’t freeze, nor did I seek help from a teacher, which would have been the smart thing to do. No, I picked up my books and shuffled out of that classroom and down the hall like a condemned man escorted by invisible guards.
I couldn’t bring myself to look up as I walked, but I could sense something different around me. The movement in the hall was abnormal. It didn’t flow with the usual rush of students anxious to escape the dullness of public education. I lifted my head slightly. They were congregating, waiting against the walls in their li
ttle cliques, whispering and pointing. And just as I realized it was all for me, I ran into a wall of a boy. Bret McNeil, at least a foot taller and three times my width, blocked my path. I looked up at him because I had little choice, except maybe to continue staring at the floor.
This kid was central casting for bully. He had blonde, scraggly hair with hints of red throughout, a deeply pocked and freckled face. His nose was extra sharp, his long chin seemed to pull his bottom teeth away from his upper lip in such a way that he always looked to be grimacing in pain. His small eyes stared hard at me, popping from their sockets like loose contact lenses. “You messin’ with my girlfriend?” McNeil snarled.
The pockets of students moved in around us. I couldn’t drop a pencil in that hallway on any other day without being spotted and hollered at by some overly vigilant teacher, but, of course, none were anywhere to be found as I was about to die a bloody death not five feet from one of their classrooms.
I had nothing to say at that moment; I couldn’t have spoken if I had. I looked down. He pushed me. “You hear me?” he shouted, even more fired up now because of the crowd and my inability to respond.
“No,” I finally said, barely audible.
“What did you say, you little punk?” and he pushed me again.
I was forced back a few steps, but I just kept staring at the ground. “No,” I said a little louder.
“Look at me!”
I didn’t want to look at him; he was scary up close—heck, even far away. But he grabbed my chin, lifting my face till I was looking straight up his dirty nose. “That’s my girlfriend, scrub. You don’t mess with my girlfriend!”
I was about to plead for my life when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something that changed everything. There was Susan Shaker, front row to the coming slaughter, grinning from ear to ear like she’d just won a first class trip to Fiji for her and her dumb boyfriend.
What the Hand: A Novel About the End of the World and Beyond Page 3
