The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination

by Bright,R. F.

  Fred looked unsure.

  “Sounds tricky, but it ain’t. Just follow the Seventh Avenue or Thirty-fourth Street signs.”

  Fred made a brave face.

  The Conductor looked around and made a disapproving face. “This used to be the most beautiful train station in the world. Pennsylvania Station. I seen pictures. They tore it down to put up Madison Square Garden. Man! Madison Square is fifteen blocks away. Office-tower on top — ugly as a bunion. Made the train part of this train station into a desert of soulless cinderblock tunnels. Sad, really sad. Turned travel from a thing of beauty into pure drudgery.”

  As the train slowed to a stop, Fred could hear the men stacking up at the exit doors behind him. He nodded to the Conductor and pressed his way out, ready to fight. But there was no one there, not a soul. Where are the legendary private militias? Fred crept quietly down the platform, saw the pedestrian tunnel entrance, and all eleven hundred and twenty-three of them headed in, retching in chorus. “What’s that smell?”

  What little light fell into the tunnel clipped off about ten feet in, so the first men to find the surprise had to feel for it. “Holy shit,” one of them yelled, “It’s stuffed solid with garbage. Rotting garbage!”

  The Conductor pushed to the front and aimed a long black flashlight at the wall of garbage before them. “This a development!” For a full minute, everyone stood staring at the tightly packed wall of trash plugging the constipated tunnel.

  Fred asked hopefully, “Is there another way out of here?”

  The Conductor opened his eyes as wide as cue-balls, and declared, “No! Hell no.” He pointed down the track. “That way goes back to Weehawken. I have no idea where all these other tunnels go. You be walking around in here for years, come up in Cleveland.” He shook his head despairingly and offered Fred the flashlight. “You in a world of shit, brother-man.”

  Fred pointed the light at the garbage.

  “I don’t know how long them batteries gonna last.”

  A surge of pushing and shoving knocked everyone back. “What the fuck! Let’s do this!” yelled someone, egging the men on with a mad passion, and with nothing but their hands they began scooping out the garbage, burrowing in like human centipedes, singing, “Let’s do it and do it and do it. Let’s do it and do it and do it . . .” a boot camp work detail double-time all the veterans knew.

  As the garbage moved out of the tunnel it became apparent that it had to go somewhere, and someone yelled, “Put it on the train.”

  “My ass!” barked the Conductor. “No garbage on my train!” He ran to the engine and the train quickly retreated backward, or was it forward? toward Weehawken.

  “That’s even better,” said Fred. “All the room we need, right there. Stack it on the tracks, boys.” He didn’t know how far it was to the surface, or if there was room in the tunnel to put all this garbage. But that didn’t matter. They were burrowing through, dragging the garbage behind them and dumping it in the tunnel, and it didn’t look like anything was going to stop them.

  Many hands make light work, but nothing could fix the smell. Decaying, moldy, fecund food rot mixed with sickeningly sweet industrial fragrances leaking from household cleaner containers. The men spent half their time heaving and gagging and shuddering in horror. Within the dense pack of rot, invisible but squeaky, creepy claws scratched and scurried. After an hour’s digging, the garbage became more loosely packed, but it smelled just the same. A man stumbled over something sticking out of the floor. Fred turned the flashlight on — it was less disgusting to dig in the dark — and spotted a concrete step. They cleared the step, then the next one, and soon they were going up.

  “This might be where the intersection is,” shouted Fred. The men dug more vigorously, encouraged by this small victory, and quickly found turnstiles, utility doors and other tunnels and stairs. “Don’t go down any tunnels until we find the sign for Seventh Avenue,” said Fred. “Dig all the way up to the ceiling. That’s where the signs are.” The Conductor had described these tunnels perfectly: ‘soulless cinderblock passages’, no more human than the ones the rats made.

  In the ceiling, a cluster of enameled signs in no-nonsense black and white were unearthed: LIRR TICKETS, said one, SUBWAY 1 2 3 (each number inside a red circle) A B C (in blue circles). TRACK 13 – 14, said a smaller one. None said 7th Ave., or 34th Street. Fred suffered a moment of debilitating indecision before pointing the flashlight to his left. “Go that way,” he said.

  They dug for only a few minutes before someone shouted, “Here’s the escalators.” They cleared a bank of escalators, six wide. “This gotta go to the lobby,” shouted several men.

  The Conductor hadn’t mentioned escalators, but Fred had to make a call. “Up we go, boys.” His heart sank into a puddle of doubt. They could be digging their way to nowhere. The militias might have switched the signs. That’s what he’d do. But the trains came in underground, so they had to go up sometime. It felt right. He hoped it was, because they were digging to beat the band now that they’d become used to the smell.

  As they topped the escalators, the men were heartened to find another cluster of signs: AMTRAK NJ TRAINS; HILTON PASSAGE; and MAD SQ GRDN. But no 7th Ave, or 34th Street.

  One of the men said, “Let’s go to Madison Square Garden. Gotta be some exits from there.”

  Fred couldn’t argue with that, but just as he was about to give the order a skinny man wearing a yellow sleeping bag as a coat stepped up and said in a grating New York accent, “You don’t wanna go dat way. We was goin’ along fine. Da street’s right dair.” He pointed into the wall of garbage. “Right dair!”

  The mere possibility of getting out drove the men to a final frenzy. In a minute the big red EXIT sign appeared overhead, and then the 7th Ave sign, then the 34th Street sign.

  In seconds, they burst out onto the 7th Avenue sidewalk.

  Sleeping Bag Man pointed up 7th Avenue and said to Fred, “That Conductor didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “But he looked good!” said Fred.

  The smelly horde quickly assembled on the sidewalk, stunned by what they saw. Every inch of 7th Avenue was crammed bumper to bumper with the city’s former fleet of metro-buses, and each one appeared to be occupied. All of the buses’ tires were flat, and most had some kind of chimney protruding through the roof and laundry hanging on lines stretched from mirror to mirror. An old woman stepped from the nearest bus, #10 Battery Park, and called Fred to her side. She recoiled, pinched her nose, and said, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Fred looked surprised. “How’d you know we were coming?”

  She shook her head, and said bitterly, “What took you so long?”

  Camille paced back and forth outside MacIan’s closed door, peeking in every two minutes. A small but insistent medical team had nudged her out, around an hour ago. She was about to make a fuss, when she heard clapping. That was it. She shoved her way in and made it to MacIan’s side. He was awake, but looked dazed. Camille brushed a snarl of hair from his face and stared into his eyes. He didn’t seem to know what was happening, but the goofy smile he gave her told her what she needed to know. Her courage soared.

  He was surprisingly spry under a web of braces and bandages as they lifted him into a wheelchair. Camille shooed the aides away and pushed him into the hallway. She stumbled when MacIan grabbed a tire and the chair screeched to a twisting halt.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, tilting his head back toward his room.

  Camille wheeled him back in, shut the door, and pressed her back against it. “There’s a big deal going on. You’re the guest of honor.”

  MacIan pointed to a monitor filled with split screens displaying the ‘big deal’. “They don’t need me. I certainly don’t need them.”

  “And what about me?”

  His eyes sharpened mischievously. “Here’s the thing. I don’t want to die anymore. I thought I wouldn’t mind, but you made me change my mind.” He pushed bandag
ed fingers through his hair. “And I damn sure ain’t sharing you with anybody. Not now that I got you here. Why would I do that?”

  Her whole skeleton trembled. No one had ever said anything like that to her.

  “All this Tuke stuff. It made me realize something. If we’re able to create hell on earth, why not create a heaven on earth? Mine begins with you.”

  Camille’s heart burst open. It had arrived . . . Love’s gift.

  Tuke roamed the amphitheater going from team to team. Nine in all, separated only by task but working toward the same goal. At this moment, they were reconfiguring the largest computer networks on the planet into one gigantic bot-net. Tuke urged them all on, but was mostly focused on the team collecting passwords, especially the kind that change every few seconds. The Church used ones like that. But they wouldn’t need them after Tuke shut the digital universe down, then turned it back on again.

  A global reboot. Default to original factory settings.

  The teams: Dumpster Fire, GateKeepers, Money Changers, Clerks & Tellers, StuxFux, Lulzabye, The Makers, The Commons, and The Bed Bugs were consumed in their tasks. The situation unfolding in New York was just a rumor here.

  “Please, ladies and gentlemen,” said Tuke, and the cavern settled. “We’ve mobilized several million veterans, sympathetic civilians, local volunteers and most of our own staff to stop an armed attack on the Sunday in America show.”

  An uncertain grumble filled the air.

  “This attack, initiated by reactionaries within the NPF, must be prevented. If it isn’t, all our plans will go down the drain in the ensuing catastrophe.”

  The grumble turned to groaning dread.

  General Joe Scaletta put the final touches on his outfit and agreed with the man in the mirror: full dress blues are always the right choice. He certainly did look snappy and self-satisfied. Pre-empting whatever nonsense Tuke had cooked up was a no-brainer. When the government overreaches, the military steps in and saves the day. That’s how it is, was, and always will be. Nothing was going to change that. History repeats itself, and history has proven the military coup a necessity, lest tyrants rule. Of course, every time history repeats itself it gets a bit more expensive, but in General Scaletta’s mind, Tuke was a tin-pot tyrant, out to make un-American changes to absolutely everything. He had to be stopped.

  A sharp knock came to his door. “Yes!”

  Aide-de-camp Elvgren entered. “Captain Wunchel and his team are saddled up and ready for your orders, sir.”

  “I want them to arrive a few minutes after the show begins, so everyone can see us taking over.” He blanched. “Not taking over, taking over. But . . . oh, hell, you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Oh-eight-hundred, sir.”

  “They should take off in forty minutes, oh-eight-forty.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  General Scaletta stepped back from the floor-length mirror, and frowned. “The full dress . . . not too much, is it?”

  “No, sir. Spot-on and max-impact.”

  “Yes it is, isn’t it?”

  Once Corporal Elvgren had gone, General Joe struck a domineering pose and mouthed the words he feared to say aloud: “Representative Joseph Scaletta.”

  73

  An unseasonably warm sun had burned off the heavy fog surrounding Central Park, and no sooner had Max and Lily landed on the Great Lawn than Airship Two was spotted by the jubilant crowd. The weather had become extremely unpredictable as the water level crept up the island’s pricey shoreline.

  On that same shore, at the western end of 42nd Street, Jon Replogle and company were forming up in the Manhattan/Weehawken Ferry Station. Captain Banjo was halfway back to New Jersey for his second of many shuttles. They headed out for a two-mile hike, straight across Manhattan Island, to the UN Complex at the opposite end of 42nd Street, on the East River. Simple as that.

  Fred milled about the Village of Buses while the locals tended to the veterans, after dusting the vile debris from them. He’d gone nose-blind, but could tell by the faces of the Bus Villagers how revolting they all were. But the festive mood in the improvised village raised everyone’s spirits, especially Fred’s.

  A contingent of nearly fifty young people in tattered pin-striped suits and knee-high rubber boots arrived, with mobiles displaying Fred’s picture, which he found amusing. Even he knew the rubber boots meant they lived on streets where the water was knee deep, or deeper, and he guessed pinstriped suits were in surplus. And they were looking for him! In New York. He liked that.

  He followed them to a U-shaped courtyard between three buses parked close together and covered with an awning made of expertly rolled and woven plastic garbage bags. Fred eyed a small group of people in shiny dusters waiting there with two nondescript corporate IT guys. There were many factions here, and they were all waiting on him. A large monitor at the deep end offered a quick face-to-face with Levi Tuke. “Mr. Burdock, congratulations on that miraculous feat of excava . . .”

  “Where’s Max?” barked Fred.

  “He’s heading out of Central Park with his friends, who outnumber his enemies ten thousand to one. He’s safe. We’re reevaluating our estimates. Seems there are far more of us than we ever knew, and far fewer of them than we were led to believe. They really had us fooled.”

  “And Lily’s there too?” asked Fred.

  “Lovely as always. They’re joined at the hip. If you leave now, you’ll arrive in Times Square about the same time they do. Thousands of other groups are converging there also. We have no idea of where all these people came from. Wildcards. Damn wildcards. Social games . . . the wildcard always gets you.”

  That was enough for Fred. Max and Lily were on their way to the UN. His face hardened into an incandescent resolve that sent chills up the spines of the young people gathered here, in the city, on their own for whatever sad reason. None had ever seen a grown man whose every last fear had disappeared. His boy was OK. He was free. He had actually come to the end of something. He could now claim the dignity he’d lost in his broken promise. He would have his revenge, or at least be there when it got served.

  He sensed that everyone was waiting on him. For what? He looked at all their faces. And he said what he would have said to Max, if he were here. “Be careful, OK?” and he headed up 7th Avenue.

  Brave hearts and hipster snark melted. Suddenly Fred was everybody’s dad, and the whole family was off to Times Square.

  Bishop Virginia McWilliams Hendrix was in one of her twelve classically themed shower rooms, Venus on a Half Shell, revving herself up for a performance. Although she rarely sought company before a show, she usually bumped into Petey around the coffee pot, but not this morning. She chalked it up to Petey’s work on his floating greenhouses and today’s all-important maiden voyage. She clapped three times, the water stopped, and she swung the Venetian glass doors open. She gathered her dripping hair and reached for her Turkish towel bathrobe just as a knock came on her door.

  “What is it?” She began drying her hair with a fluffy towel.

  A boyish voice she vaguely recognized whispered, “There’s been some kind of disturbance.”

  “What?”

  “Some kind of disturbance. An electrical discharge. All our communication systems are down.”

  Her nostrils flared and she sucked in all the misty air around her. “Why are you telling me this, now?” But before the boy could answer, she screeched, “Where’s Petey?!”

  The young man, who’d come only to deliver a message, could scarcely restrain his glee at her distress. “No one’s seen him all morning, ma’am,” he said, in a voice tinged with suspicion.

  She hurled the towel at the floor as though struck by a horrifying possibility. “We’re not cancelling the show!? Are we?”

  “No. Whatever it is, it’s not affecting the broadcast systems. At least that’s what they say.” His suspicion grew sinister. “The blackout is unaccountably . . . s
elective.”

  The Bishop moved to an enormous sink basin carved out of a single boulder from Mt. Sinai. She stood ramrod proud, exhaled slowly, and with the palm of her hand wiped away a swatch of mist from its mirror. “Then it doesn’t matter. I’ll be on stage!”

  After a tremendous organizational effort at the Great Lawn, local New Yorkers led the veterans, hackers, ITs and their new plus-ones down a winding path toward the UN Complex, two miles away. Max could see the outline of a tumbledown wonderland that once was Central Park. The crowd lurched forward as the cobblestone path sloped down, and Max took Lily’s hand. He couldn’t tell where her joy began and his ended. She did a little skip that yanked him up to speed, and down they turned onto a beautifully paved walkway bordered with benches and drinking fountains in the same intricate style as the Brewery. The skeleton of an elaborate playground ran up to a huge carousel with a hundred painted ponies. Max had never imagined such a place. This, he could clearly see, was an attempt at paradise.

  It reminded him of Fred. His heart sank.

  The walkway grew wider as it curved around a gentle slope, where Max saw through the naked trees a large open area at the edge of a lake and the magnificent retaining walls that carved Bethesda Plaza out of the hillside. With the lake licking at one end, the plaza stretched across a full acre of herringbone pavers to an elaborate, extremely wide staircase divided by three stone arches over a massive portico. At the back of the portico, a set of even wider stairs rose and blended seamlessly into the others. It was the most complicated piece of architecture Max had ever seen.

  But he could tell that this place was all about the enormous circular fountain. The Bethesda Fountain. Its sculpted bronze pedestal of vines and water lilies stood forty feet high and cast an enchanted spell over the entire plaza. Unfortunately, The Angel of the Waters who had stood atop this national treasure for two hundred years had been privatized, and there was no water in the fountain. Water in public fountains was considered a waste by those who had their own fountains.