What the Hand: A Novel About the End of the World and Beyond
Page 11
I kicked myself for not leaving the city when I had had the chance. Back then I wasn’t sure exactly what the Mark would consist of, but I figured I would leave as soon as they began the requirement.
This was a mistake. Months before they began the implant surgeries, they locked the city down with roadblocks. When the implants were announced, I tested the roads leading out of the city and ran into checkpoints every time. Without special travel papers, no one was allowed to leave.
My only hope was the four-wheel drive on my SUV and getting out through the hills and mountains bordering the highways leading out of the county. Each day, I ventured out to find a path, but even the dirt roads had checkpoints, and traveling cross-country inevitably led to dead ends.
***
Now it was too late; now they were at my door. I should have locked Wiley in another room, but he was a sweet dog, harmless to strangers, so I merely pushed him aside and opened the door quickly before they had a chance to break it down.
There were four of the cold men in black jumpsuits, their wrists bearing the Mark of the Beast. Immediately one of them grabbed me by the collar and shoved me against the wall. Wiley, bless his heart, went after his ankle, and another Minion shot him dead.
“No!” I shouted, and I fought against the Minion to reach my dog, till the others grabbed me and threw me down. Wiley was my last link to Sophie, and I had become quite attached, even reliant on, the little fellow. I began to sob. “Why did you have to shoot him?” I asked.
“Shut up! The mutt had it coming,” said the Minion who shot him.
***
That was basically the same thing my grandmother told my father after the old man who lived next door shot his dog when he was a boy. Each time my father’s dog got loose she would run over to the neighbor’s backyard to bark at the rabbits in their cages. The old man was an ornery son-of-a-gun. One day he became fed up and shot the dog with a twenty-two rifle. My father heard the shot and ran over to find his dog lying wounded in front of the rabbit cage. He carried her back to his house and asked his mom to call a doctor. “She’s a goner, and we can’t spare anything for a doctor,” she said.
My father cried and cradled the dog on the porch while she succumbed to the wound. “Stop crying,” said his mom. “She had it coming anyway.”
My father never got another dog, and he wouldn’t touch any of the dogs we had in the house growing up. He didn’t want to become attached, and now I understood why.
***
I was embarrassed because I couldn’t stop crying. And like my grandmother, one of the Minions urged me to stop, except he used a baton to my stomach to do it.
As soon as I could breathe again, they brought me into the living room, sat me in a chair, and the tallest one slapped me a couple times. He was Hispanic, spoke with a slight accent, obviously the leader of the bunch. “I am Captain Guerra. We just wanted to ask you a few questions, Mr. Somerset.”
***
Except for his height and sadistic nature, the SS wouldn’t have had much to do with Captain Guerra, unless it was to cart him off to the gas chambers. The SS only took pureblooded Aryans. The Antichrist, on the other hand, was an equal opportunity employer. Race was never an issue. Anyone with a soul would do.
***
“Why didn’t you report for surgery?” continued the captain.
I had prepared for this moment. “I was sick. I had an infection,” I answered.
He slapped me again. Apparently, I hadn’t prepared well enough. “Don’t lie to me, Somerset. You were supposed to show up with a clearance. It’s in your notice!” Captain Guerra said.
“I was too ill to come down.”
“Where is the clearance then?” said Guerra.
“I only got the medicine. I didn’t know I would still be sick.”
Again, he slapped me. “You’re lying. What kind of infection?”
“I’m not lying.” Of course I was lying, but I had scored some pills from a doctor two weeks earlier after feigning a urinary tract infection. He wrote me a prescription for antibiotics. “I had a respiratory infection…in my lungs—I couldn’t get out of bed.”
“Where is the bottle?”
“It’s in the bathroom in the master bedroom—in the medicine cabinet.”
“Check it, Carter,” ordered the captain, and the husky one who shot my dog took off down the hallway. Captain Guerra stared at me with a vicious smirk on his face. “He better find it.”
In a moment Carter was back with the empty bottle. I had lied to the pharmacist that I didn’t want my live-in girlfriend finding out about the urinary infection and asked him not to label it that way. The bottle Carter brought back read only: For Infection.
The captain looked at it for a long time before he set the bottle down on my coffee table. He seemed to calm down. He told the other two to search the whole house. “You got anything to drink?” he said.
“Yeah, what do you want? I think I got some juice left….I got water.”
“You got juice?”
***
Fruit and fruit juices were a rare commodity, as were most fresh goods during the early days of the New World Order in America, before the Antichrist began working his magic by providing an abundance of goods to the masses bearing the Mark of the Beast. This would also serve to wear down the holdouts, surrounded by plenty yet forced to scrape by until they complied. Before all that, it was tough to find even essentials, but my former drug dealer had turned to dealing in black market goods, and I was able to obtain certain hard-to-find items for a price.
***
“A little apple juice…I’ll get it.” I started to get up.
Guerra put his hand out to block me and turned to the husky one again. “Get me some juice, Carter.”
Guerra, pulling up a chair, sat across from me as close as he could get. I could hear his men rummaging through the house. Guerra was smirking and staring again. Carter came back with the juice and the captain spoke, “We know you’re a runner.”
“A runner?” I knew exactly what he was talking about.
“Don’t play dumb,” said Guerra, and he slapped me again.
“You mean I want to leave town somehow. I don’t have anywhere to go even if I could.”
“We know everything, Georgie. We know about the camping supplies and the survival gear. We know about the food and the bottled water. We know about the guns. We know about the Christian books and the Internet searches: best places to live off the land. You’re not very slick, Georgie.”
Just then the two Minions ransacking the house returned and one of them interrupted, “We found nothing.”
“We got a mountain man here boys—a real Daniel Boone,” said Guerra. Carter and the other men laughed. “Where are the goods, Georgie?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The captain stopped smiling and stood. “Stand up, Georgie,” he said. I did. He was an inch from my face. “Don’t be stupid, Georgie—I could take you down to headquarters and beat it out of you.”
***
I knew something was up then. I was wondering why Guerra wasn’t already beating the crap out of me. I never heard a Minion tell anybody they were going to be beaten at a later time, unless they were already beating them up while informing them it was to get worse. And the slapping thing was odd, too. These Minion guys weren’t big on slapping. They were much more into punching. No, something wasn’t right. I wouldn’t find out why until later, but these guys, I knew, weren’t going to hurt me that day, so I stopped being so afraid. Still, I decided to cooperate as much as I could to buy some time; besides, I was tired of being slapped.
“I don’t want any trouble.”
“Of course you don’t, not this kind. Where is the stuff?”
“You mean the camping gear?”
“All of it—the gear, the food stores, the weapons,” said Guerra.
“It’s not here anymore,” I said.
“Where is it?”
“Do you know what the penalty is for selling weapons?”
I knew it was death. “This was a long time ago, before all those laws came out,” I said.
***
The founding fathers had guaranteed Americans the right to bear arms. They wanted individuals to be able to protect themselves, not only from individuals who might cause harm, but also from tyrannical governments like the New World Order. Slowly, beginning with semi-automatic weapons, the Illuminati-controlled government banned ownership of other firearms. By the time the NWO took over, hundreds of millions of weapons had been confiscated and destroyed, and it was illegal for the average citizen to own a firearm of any kind. When resistance to the dictatorship did finally break out, the small bands of poorly armed patriots were easily wiped out.
***
“Who did you sell them to?” Guerra said.
“Different people…strangers…like I said, it was a long time ago.”
Captain Guerra paced about the room for a moment like he didn’t know what to do unless he was punching someone. I knew if it were up to him, I’d have been beaten to a bloody pulp already and probably dead.
He pulled out a small envelope from his front pocket. “You have a date with the surgeon in a week and a half. If you miss it, you will know the real me,” Guerra said, and with that, he led his men out the door.
***
I cried some more for Wiley, my last living connection to Sophie, and buried him in the backyard on the exact spot where she disappeared.
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I sat on the couch, staring at the date on the appointment card. It wasn’t enough time. Over and over, I had tested the perimeter of the city without success. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t face the prospect of torture. I knew I couldn’t hold up. I heard the horror stories from some of the victims who’d caved. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes before I’d have cut my own wrist open and shoved the chip in myself. I stayed up most of the night praying for a solution.
***
Microchip technology had been around and improving rapidly since the late 1950s. By the time the Beast was feeding the tiny machines, some were as small as a grain of rice and some contained billions of transistors.
My father designed microchips for the guidance systems of missiles at Hughes Aircraft in the 1970s. These microchips told the missiles where to go. In 2003, during the Iraq war, micro-chipped missiles were synced with precision laser beams guided by satellites. These new “smart bombs” were used in the opening attack on Bagdad.
The president at the time, George W. Bush, used the term shock-and-awe to describe the attack, which was seen live on cable news all over the world. There were lots of flashes, bangs, explosions, buildings collapsing and whatnot, and it was pretty awesome and shocking. But the real shocker was the war lasting another eight years, producing some 200,000 civilian and military casualties.
So, with all the smart weaponry, why did the war last so long? The Bush Administration got so carried away with the shock-and-awe part they forgot the rest of the plan. Instead of locking the place down and declaring martial law, they let everyone run around like grad night. Looters, criminals, radicals, insurgents, terrorists, and other knuckleheads had a field day, until it became too late to rein in the chaos.
This kind of madness would never have happened during World War II. After the defeat of Germany, martial law was declared, curfews were enforced, and looters, resisters, and knuckleheads were shot on sight. What do you know? It worked. Germany was mostly under control in a matter of weeks, and the rebuilding could begin without thousands more needlessly being killed.
***
The same microchip technology, which fed information to the smart bombs, was then used to create implants first placed in dogs and cats as homing devices. But the manufacturers had broader plans. Various government agencies, corporations, and banks had been pushing for their use in humans for years. Their argument was that the chips would eliminate security problems, prevent bank fraud, and make it easy to track missing persons, criminals, and terrorists. The public wanted no part of it—not until things got really bad.
After economies around the globe began to tank, before the Antichrist took full control, crime had been getting out of control. Muggings, robberies, kidnappings, and even murders occurred in places once relatively crime-free, on a regular basis and in broad daylight. Criminals were especially interested in credit and debit cards. Most crooks would steal the card numbers from restaurants, retail stores, and trash bins, or by computer hacking, but the more violent ones kidnapped and forced their victims to give up the PIN codes or make withdrawals by beating and torturing them, or threatening family members. The government insisted the implants would solve the crime problem, so they began accepting volunteers. And because people were afraid, many did.
***
Soon after the Antichrist moved the government to New Babel, he brought the London computers there, linking them to a microchip manufacturing plant that began making the implantable chips in mass quantities. The Beast was growing.
***
Not only was it the number of the Antichrist, 666 also represented the eighteen numbers laid out in three sequences of six, which were imprinted on the microchips and were the key to the information on the implants. The 666 microchip was a whole different animal compared to the volunteer implants of the previous decade, which were basically small credit cards inserted beneath the skin. This chip would contain a person’s whole life. It would also come with strings.
Before the surgeries, the patients were brought to a special room. These rooms were called churches because they contained altars with statues of the Antichrist. The patient would have to kneel, denounce Jesus Christ, and worship the Antichrist as God. After the surgery, their wrists would be placed in a machine to stamp them with a tattoo. The tattoo looked like an old Roman coin. It was a black circle with a picture of Talley and the clear but staggered numbers 666. This was exactly what John saw in the vision he wrote about in Revelation. There would be no more pretenses.
***
Some of my neighbors on the Old Earth had already received the implants and the tattoos. Like guilty children, they seemed nervous, and for some reason, wanted to talk to those in the neighborhood, including me, who didn’t yet have the Mark. I didn’t trust them.
In less than two weeks, it would be my turn to accept the Mark or die a horrible death. I don’t know when I finally fell asleep, but it was late. Even so, I woke up early, tired but too anxious and scared to go back to sleep. Staring up at the ceiling, I repeated my prayers from the night before.
After I got out of bed, I went to the backyard and stood at Wiley’s grave. That’s when I remembered something: another dead dog, this one stiff and floating in our pool. It was at the old house over the hill where we lived when I owned the mortgage company. I had completely forgotten the incident or pushed it out of my mind somehow.
We had only had the dog for a week or something. He was a stray little ratty dog with so much hair you couldn’t see his face. He snored and made funny wheezing noises. Sophie and Renee found it at the park. Sophie begged me to keep it. I told her no. I didn’t want to deal with it. We were set to take the dog to the pound that weekend. I was the only one home. I let the dog out to pee. It was an accident.
But it wasn’t an accident. I was seeing it clearly for the first time. I had forgotten about the dog. It was a hot day, but I didn’t think to fill his water because I was going to be right back to let him in the house. Except I was distracted by a phone call.
It was my partner in the mortgage company and other criminal enterprises, Justin Lister. I was working from home that day. Justin had called me up for one of our infamous lunches, which always began in a dark bar with a crap load of drinks and ended up at a racetrack, casino, strip club
, or some other degenerating location. So I left. I left the poor dehydrated dog to find a drink in the swimming pool.
I was trashed by the time I came home to find the dog floating in the pool. I buried him quickly. I even blamed it on Renee because she wouldn’t let me throw him in the pool to teach the dog to swim when they first brought him home. Then I made myself forget.
***
But that morning in the backyard, standing over Wiley’s grave, it all came back. Now I understood why I had cried over a nameless dog I barely knew. I felt the guilt and the shame again. I lived the poor dog’s hot afternoon over and over in my mind, and I cried again. I cried for his suffering. I cried for my little girl who was heartbroken. I cried for the consequences of all my lies. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.
***
Then I remembered something else I’d forgotten, as clearly as if it had happened the day before—an incident which occurred about five months prior. I was waiting in one of the long lines to get into a market with mostly empty shelves, when I recognized one of my former employees, a loan processor named Mary Hammond. I spotted her coming out of the market with a small bag. She had been an efficient processor, kind and quite attractive. Now she was still very pretty but much thinner than I remembered, and tired looking, as most of us were in those days. “Mary,” I said as she passed by.
“George?” she said, and her expression changed quickly from wonder to near indifference.
I thought I knew why. I had left my employees under awful circumstances. They were let go without pay when the company folded because we were broke. “Yeah, it’s me. Wow, it’s great to see you!”
She didn’t say anything. I stepped out of line, grabbed her by the elbow, and led her away from the crowd. “Let go, you’re going to lose your place,” she said.