by Mike Leon
“No. That’s not true.”
“What about the water-powered car? I got the blueprints upstairs.”
“We don’t hide things to stay rich.”
“I don’t know. I got a vault full of shit that says otherwise. I got Tesla’s death ray, the Lance of Longinus...”
“Shush, Walter,” she interrupts.
“...the Rossi Reactor, three crystal skulls...”
“Shut up,” Victoria urges, looking to see who might be watching them. By now, the paper pushers have given up their own conversation and are staring at the two of them.
“...the alien ballistic deflector field generators from the Coyame crash – oops. A ninja stole those. We don’t know where they are.”
“STOP IT!” Victoria shouts.
He stops. He has nothing else to say. He’s tired of this. He’s tired of cleaning blood off his hands every day so this whore can hang vagina paintings and Elkan Rothschild can make throw rugs from polar bears.
“For Christ’s sake, Walter.” She leans close to him and takes his arm. “They’ll kill you for talking like that.”
“Tell them to go right ahead. Here’s a tip. Jack Daniels is more likely to finish me off than some candy ass gunships. Try that next time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Talking about the attack choppers that came to kill us at the lizards’ factory.”
“The lizards? You mean the reptoids? They’re real?”
“Don’t play stupid with me.”
“We didn’t send any helicopters to kill you.”
“One of you did. Maybe not you. Maybe Reynolds or Krupp. Maybe Elkan. Then again, maybe it is you. Maybe you’re hiding a tail under there.”
He slides his hand down the small of her back and gooses her. She shrieks and pushes away from him. She slaps him, but he’s too drunk to feel it really.
“What?”
“You’re being ridiculous!”
“I’ve done this for twenty years. I’ve been your loyal dog. You people throw a stick and I go fetch it. No questions. And I tell myself it’s for some greater good. I figure you’ve been holding all the cards for a long time, you must know all the secrets. You must have some kind of overarching plan. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I tell myself that, somehow, all this blood on my hands is keeping the world from falling apart. But now that lie is falling apart. My world is falling apart.”
Victoria raises one eyebrow and purses her lips. She looks up at the ceiling as she brushes back some strands of hair that had fallen into her face. She sighs.
“You need to cheer up, Walter. Come with me for a drive.” She steps away and motions for him to come with.
He considers her offer carefully. Partly because he is afraid she might be luring him into another trap, and partly because he is a little bit too drunk to do much of anything without thinking about it for a bit. He goes with her.
They head down the stairs and outside. In the blacktop parking lot out front of the Graveyard building she springs a question on him out of the blue.
“The Lance of Longinus, really?”
“Yup.”
“Could I see it some time?”
Walter shrugs.
“If you want. It’s just a spear. I don’t understand what all the hubbub is about.”
She leads him past the rows of pickups and hummers favored by his operators to a bright orange sports car that sticks out like a cheetah in a dog pen. She pops open the driver’s side scissor door. The passenger side door springs open and nearly strikes Walter in the chin. He reels backward a step.
“I gave my driver the day off. Sometimes I find it relaxing to drive myself like regular people.”
“Yeah. Just like regular Joe. What is this? A Lambo?” Walter asks, as he climbs into the car beside her.
“Aventador. Why? Is it too bourgeois? I knew I should have taken the Fiorano.”
“Oh, no. Not a Fiorano. I thought Cash for Clunkers took those beaters all off the road.”
“Don’t be droll, Walter.”
Walter shoots her a nasty look and then leans his head against the window. It feels nice. He could fall asleep there.
Victoria revs up the engine and the car stereo assaults his ears with the sounds of Loverboy’s 1981 hit, Working for the Weekend. It rattles his eyes open.
“What the fuck?”
“It’s Working for the Weekend,” Victoria says, quite matter-of-factly. “You know my father commissioned this song?”
“I had no idea the late Master Russell was such a seventies dance music fan.”
“Eighties,” she corrects him. “And he wasn’t. It was part of our behavioral programming initiative.”
She throws the car into reverse and it lurches backward out of the parking space. Walter lurches forward in his seat. She slams on the breaks and screeches to a halt, only to mash down the gas and Walter is pressed back into the seat as the car zooms forward.
“We do that, you know,” she continues. “We pay people to write pop music. That’s one of our other operations. There’s a team in Chicago that does it all. We don’t produce all of it, of course, but quite a few of the most popular ones. This is going way back. Game of Love, the Mindbenders song, – that was the first one. The purpose of a man is to love a woman? The social conditioning is right there in plain sight. Many of them are really quite obvious once you’ve been told. You’ll never listen to the radio the same way again.”
“I never listen to the radio anyway.”
They come to the outside gate and Victoria slows the car. The sentry begins to approach her window, but Walter waves him off. The sentry signals to his comrade in the gatehouse and the chain link sliding gate rolls open before them.
Victoria jets out of the compound and onto the open road. Aside from the Graveyard building behind them, there is nothing but sterile desert for miles.
“That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to. It’s everywhere. It’s in all of the supermarkets and shopping malls, convenience stores. You can’t escape it. I bet you know Hips Don’t Lie – or what about Just Dance? You know that one, don’t you?”
“No,” Walter answers. He’s lying. He just doesn’t want to admit she’s right.
“That one has a subliminal message instructing girls to have unprotected sex. It’s one of our more subtle efforts. My idea, actually. Certainly not as crass as Tik Tok or Air Force Ones.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Air Force Ones? To get poor blacks to waste all their money on shoes.”
“No. I mean all of it. Why do any of that?”
“To keep them pacified, darling. It’s absolutely necessary for civilization to continue.”
“It sounds like mind control. And I’m pretty sure it’s evil as shit.”
“Oh, hardly.”
“You’re ruining people’s lives.”
“Poppycock. We spend billions every year trying to bring out the best in people. Education initiatives, scientific research grants, college scholarships, think tanks, air drops of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, public television – we keep Sesame Street on the air for goodness sake. You cannot fathom the amount of effort we put into human progress.”
“But you still mean to make a quick buck selling sweatshop gym shoes.”
“A quick buck? Really? Knowing what you know now? I am wealth, Walter Stedman. I am the goddess of the almighty dollar given form. I could pave every road in this country with gold if I wanted. I don’t do it for money.”
“Then why? There’s no reason.”
“Because, despite our best efforts to educate people, to teach them to move forward, to pursue answers to the big questions, despite screaming the secrets to success to them at the tops of our lungs, about half of them still amount to nothing but ignorant savages. That half has to be quelled somehow. Human beings with no hopes and no purpose are very dangerous creatures. So we feed them those things to keep them occupied.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t buy it. Shitty pop music ain’t a reason to live.”
“Isn’t it? I think you would be surprised what kinds of things people will devote themselves to. It used to be religion. Die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes. Karl Marx. Brilliant thinker – even if he did cause us some problems. My grandfather’s generation and before, all they had to do was tell people God was watching to make them behave. God says not to kill or steal or any of those things that make civilization fall apart. And if you do those things you’ll go to Hell. Fire and brimstone – because some people may be too stupid for reason, but everyone understands fear. That worked for a long time. But then came Darwin and Marx and science. The old opiate began to erode. In a very short span of a few decades, it stopped working the way it did for millennia. After the war, it only got worse. The sixties were a very turbulent time for the western world. The group was losing control. My father was afraid there would be another dark age. They desperately needed to find something else to keep the masses under control. Ultimately, the answer presented itself. When God is dead, it turns out people worship the only thing left – themselves. And thus we had the new opiate: lifestyle obsession.”
Walter starts to interrupt her, but what seemed like insanity only a minute ago suddenly starts to make too much sense. He leans back in the seat and closes his eyes.
“Modern industry was already flooding everyone’s senses with garbage to consume like never before. Hula hoops, record albums, Members Only jackets, gold grills and ugg boots. The products tend to materialize on their own. We only help perpetuate the desire for them. We set the expectations. We create the need. Billboards tell you a giant TV and three-hundred dollar shoes will make you happy. Sitcoms show you that normal is a house in the suburbs and exactly three children. Music tells you that success is being the sexiest looking girl in the club. These distractions keep people from asking the big questions. Why go on a shooting spree when you could play World of Warcraft all day instead? Who wants to start a revolution when they can put on a slinky dress, bump and grind all night, fuck a stranger and blame it on the A-A-A-A-A-Alcohol? Why work hard at something bad when it’s so easy to feel good?”
“It’s still wrong. What you’re doing is wrong.”
“Would you rather we killed them? That was Henry Krupp’s plan. He wanted to gas everyone who couldn’t pass a positively archaic IQ test.”
“Christ. I knew there was a reason I never liked that guy.”
“What we’re doing is ensuring a future for the human race as a whole.”
“How? By hording all the wealth and turning everyone into zombies? It doesn’t sound like much of a future to me.”
“Your problem is you can’t see the big picture.”
“Yeah. A bigger picture will make everything better.”
“Have you heard of the Fermi paradox?”
“Nope.”
“Of course not. The Great Filter? No?”
“I told you I don’t read, woman.”
“Well, it’s a scientific paradox. That’s kind of like a theory. You see, given the size of the universe and number of astral bodies, intelligent extra-terrestrial life is statistically very likely to exist. Carl Sagan estimated a million other civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone. So then where are they?”
“The aliens? Area 51. Ten levels down.”
“Okay. Forget about those aliens. Why don’t we see more aliens?”
“Like the reptoids?”
“You’re wrecking my example. Look, really smart scientists figured out that nearly all intelligent civilizations destroy themselves long before they develop interstellar travel. It’s something they call the Great Filter. That’s why we don’t see aliens flying around the night sky or dropping in for a visit. They’re all dead. They blew themselves up. We can’t let that happen here. We have to beat the filter.”
“Why? So you can go to space?”
“So we can reach the next step, Walter. So we can become whatever it is we were meant to be. That’s what the group wants. You wanted full disclosure. There it is. We’re keeping secrets because the world isn’t ready for them. We’re hiding death rays and fusion reactors for very good reasons. You saw what happened after they built the bomb. We don’t want that. So, yes, we’re a huge international conspiracy. You got us. Guilty as charged. But we’re not evil. All we want is to move forward.”
“Into what?”
“We don’t know for certain. Something better? Look, Sagan and Shklovsky proposed that intelligent species either destroy themselves quickly or survive for billions of years. We’re a new species. We’re only two-hundred-thousand years old and we’ve been civilized for a quarter of that.”
“How would we destroy ourselves?”
“All kinds of things. Nuclear war. You know a little about that one, don’t you? What about global warming, advanced artificial intelligence, technological singularity, biological weapons, a botched physics experiment? They’re making black holes at the Large Hadron Collider every second!”
She had to bring up the Large Hadron Collider. That was an embarrassment. Kill Team Two had inadvertently damaged the machine in 2008 when they were there to quietly retake the facility from militant Christian fundamentalists. The CERN director still sends the DPSD inquiries about it, which they forward to MI6, who forwards them to the CIA, who sends them to the MND, which then asks the DPSD again. That exchange has continued on in circles for longer than the collider itself.
“You got any hooch in this car?” Walter asks abruptly. He knows she has something in here. This is the first time he’s ever seen her without a drink in her hand.
“No, not in the car.”
Walter bends over farther than his old back should permit and reaches under his seat.
“No. There’s nothing under there,” she says.
He retrieves a half gone bottle of red wine. It looks expensive. He doesn’t give a shit.
“Dammit, Walter!” she squeaks.
He pops the cork and gives it a swill. Good stuff.
“I want to know about the lizards. Everything you know, I want to know,” he says.
Victoria gives him an annoyed look as she slows the car.
“You know more than I do. You’ve apparently met them face to face.”
“Bullshit. They made you!” He throws the cork at her. She swats at it but it smacks into her chest and lands in her lap.
“Is that what they told you?”
“It’s what Blood Drinker said.”
“Well, I suppose it could be true. I don’t really know. No one does. You’re talking about things that happened before recorded history.”
The car comes to a halt beside the road and Victoria pulls the parking brake. She leans over and her fingers demand the bottle. He hands it to her.
“Who’s Blood Drinker?” she asks.
“He’s the Nazi reptoid that killed the fake Reynolds and two of my fire teams. They were there in the war. The Nazis were working for them. That’s what Van Duyn had.”
“You’ve seen proof?”
“I have Van Duyn’s photos, and a bunch of the dead ones from the factory.”
“You have bodies? You have to go to the group. We have to tell them.”
“I’m not showing them anything yet.”
“Why not? Walter, they have to know about this.”
“I know for a fact that one of you is one of them.”
“What? What makes you so sure of that?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s someone Van Duyn would let into his house, and also has the pull to send Apache gunships after me. Not too many people in that venn diagram. It’s one of you.”
“That’s not possible. No one knows who we are.”
“Plenty of people know who you are. The President, the UK prime minister, the chairman of Samsung and El Malo Grande were all at that stupid visitation. They know who you are. Anybody gets to them, they get to you.”
“That’s ridicul
ous. Our security is…”
“Run by me. And I’m telling you this is real. There’s a conspiracy in your conspiracy.”
She passes the bottle back to him.
“Let’s say I humor you. Who do you think it is?” she asks as Walter gulps down more wine.
“Well, we’re all alone and you haven’t eaten me yet, so I’m guessing I can rule you out.”
“Elkan helped you find the photos.”
“And practically gift-wrapped me for Blood Drinker.”
“All of them knew you were there. We discussed it in the meeting. Some of your operators knew too. It could be Reynolds. Maybe the look-alike was a setup.”
“Or Krupp. That creepy fucker is the obvious choice.”
“No. It’s always who you least suspect, Walter.”
“That would be Eric. The kid’s dense.”
“He’s still a kid, Walter. I didn’t have much to bring to the table when I was twenty-four either.”
“What if I bring you proof?”
“I don’t know. Then what? You want to whack a group member?”
“That’s the plan.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. What kind of proof could you possibly bring me?”
“I’m working on something right now.”
“What?”
“How do you make the gold?”
“I can’t spill all my secrets.”
“Likewise. Got any weed?”
“I’m an alcoholic, not a middle schooler,” she says. And then she finishes off the bottle as Walter looks on impressed. She tosses it on the floor at Walter’s feet and turns slowly to him.
“Walter, if you’re right…” She stops short. If she wasn’t frightened before, she is now.
Walter tosses up his left hand in a gesture for her to continue.
“If you’re right,” she says. “This could go much deeper. If they’ve been manipulating us, then they could be manipulating everyone – the Chinese, Eastern Europe, the whole planet.”
“I know.”
GRENADINE
Sid Hansen has a raging hard-on. It is slowly making him insane.
He lies on his back, eyes wide open in the dark, looking up at the blank white ceiling. His fingers are curled around the handle of a large butcher knife resting on his chest. It is his only weapon.
