Robert consulted his watch. Goodness, this is odd. “Edwin, they left earlier than planned, did Judith not call you? That was almost two hours ago. Perhaps they stopped to shop?”
“Not with the baby with them. She gets fussy before dinner. Judith would never nurse her in public. It is unseemly. Whoops, there is the doorbell, probably them. Sorry to disturb you, Robert. See you soon.” And he hung up. From the distance, he heard his own doorbell ring. Company at this hour? Ringing the kitchen, he commanded Alice to see to the door.
Anticipating a social visit, Robert ran his liver-spotted hands through his still robust gray hair. He quickly donned his tweed sports jacket, covering the tea stains on his white linen shirt. To his surprise, Alice appeared, escorting two Norristown police officers. Their bearing was tense, their expressions tight.
Robert felt a wash of fear, a growing pain in his right arm. He stood as one of the officers spoke, hearing him clearly, but failing to fully comprehend.
“Mr. Doyle? We are sorry to inform you that there has been a tragic accident involving your family, all dead, skeletons, infant bones, no witnesses, undamaged vehicle, investigation.” The voices droned on as Robert’s ears filled with a white buzzing sound. His hand clutched at his chest, a feeble attempt to relieve the sudden pressure. As he tumbled over, his pain-glazed eyes hesitated as they registered the specter of the looming mass hanging quietly over the top of the French doors, now undulating with golden striates. As he smashed his face on the corner of his partners desk, the excruciating pain in his fatally damaged heart could not prevent the despairing realization that Netty had somehow managed to save her coup de grace for him.
THE END
ALIEN SPECIES INTERVENTION
BOOK 2
ECHO
J.K. Accinni
Chapter 1
2033 AD
Scotty slipped out his front door unnoticed, easily overlooked if you failed to notice his ringworm and impetigo scars. Barely three and a half feet tall, even at six years old, it put him in the underdeveloped category, another result of the wicked fall his mother had taken while pregnant with him. The fall had initiated his premature birth, keeping him in a grossly understaffed neonatal hospital unit where his tiny body had contracted a number of skin diseases which had left him scarred and disfigured.
To add to his misery, his left eye muscles had not fully developed, allowing his eye to wander in its socket, giving him headaches, vision problems and disfiguring facial effects. The fact that his father continued to deny responsibility for his mother’s fall illustrated the truth of his sister, Abby’s, claims. His mother had married a full-blown leachy weasel.
Scotty looked up and down the bleak empty hallway, dirty graffitied walls, a testimony to the futility of the lives packed like termites in the ugly utilitarian monstrosity he called home.
He cautiously peeked in the stairwell. Seeing it empty, he scrambled down the cold metal stairs, his tiny worn sneakers masking his footfalls. Emerging from the gloom of the stairwell, he recoiled from the sudden glare of an unexpectedly sunny afternoon.
Scooting around to the back of his building, he dodged empty beer cans, used condoms, and piles of dog feces to hide in the big cardboard box he currently used as his fort.
Yesterday, Chang Appliance, the largest Chinese appliance chain in the world, had delivered something to an exceedingly lucky tenant in his building. He and his buddy, Germaine, had quickly claimed the treasured empty box, dragging it to the back of their tenement in the giant public housing neighborhood of Short Hills, New Jersey, hoping they could hide it from the big guys—at least long enough to have some fun with it.
Short Hills, formerly a bastion of affluent homes in the early part of the century, no longer boasted anyone who could afford them. As a result, the Socialist New World Party had strengthened the urban renewal and eminent domain laws. When the real estate market for large expensive homes (the most visible trapping of despised capitalist pigs) collapsed due to the exodus of the wealthy to more welcoming countries, the homes were appropriated. After removing the squatters and gangs, the bulldozers made way for what some called inevitable progress. The kind of progress that produced nasty government-subsidized housing projects: pretty ironic for a state once known as The Garden State.
Now New Jersey blossomed with one huge hideous urban ghetto after another. Just like many other states undergoing a similar renaissance. Not everyone agreed to call this progress. Like his mother.
She remembered the stories her grandmother had related to her about growing up on a working family farm with cows and hay barns and wide open meadows, replete with the simple harmonies of sunrise crows, twilight crickets and the exceptional fragrance of newly mown grass and wild wood violets.
His great-grandmother had spent her summers as a child delving into the woods, looking for wild strawberry patches and black caps growing along the side of the road, probing waterholes and brooks for magical polliwogs, turtles, minnows, even snakes, which she invariably dragged back to the farmhouse—a favorite pastime.
Instead, Scotty lived with the perpetual smells of hot air brakes, big rig exhaust and alley-rat infested garbage. He heard the sounds of gunshots and screams as the bullies of the neighborhood beat on their latest victim. His playground consisted of hot smelly asphalt and discarded cardboard boxes as his playthings.
Luckily, his mom knew of a few areas that had missed out on the progress. Like Sussex County. Full of rolling hills, mountains, packed trout streams and bucolic lakes. It even bragged some surviving timid black bears that penis-challenged hunters had failed to eradicate in their perpetual attempts to prove their manhood by putting food out for them in the woods, waiting in trees with their weapons, then shotgunning them down, cubs and all.
Hardly convenient, the wealthy found the remoteness objectionable, leaving no albatrosses for the government to tear down. The lack of access to mass transit, actually the reason the area had stayed rural, undesirable to the masses for the same reason.
An hour before dinner, Scotty’s parents started fighting again; the same old thing. His mother, one of the four million polio victims in the United States from the epidemic of 2018, had frequently yet unsuccessfully tried to convince his father to relocate. She dreamed about better healthcare and quality of life in a less populated area. Like Sussex County.
His big sister, Abby, a dialysis patient, needed to get to the hospital three times a week. As a toddler, she had developed chronic kidney disease, acute and undoubtedly fatal, requiring her to be in and out of hospital since a baby. She really needed a kidney transplant, but they didn’t have the money to buy one from China or South America as did other patients of loftier financial means.
When the country decided to worship at the altar of socialized medicine, an understandably desperate shortage of doctors ensued. Over-utilized emergency rooms, with a standard back up of thirty six hours on any normal day before the polio epidemic, suddenly morphed into requiring an appointment to get in. Dying before your appointment became common, creating a huge underground market which sold these appointments to the highest bidder. Family allowances limited the amount of doctor visits per year. Inevitably, rationing became as necessary as breathing.
Simple sore throats or innocuous coughs, easily overlooked by busy adults trying to avoid burning a valuable medical visit, still spread germs. Unfortunately, polio was highly contagious. An airline passenger can infect an entire plane with one phlegmy throat. The government burden of bloated bureaucracy put the final nail in that coffin.
The epidemic started because of a Muslim law, passed in 2005, in Northern Nigeria. They issued an Islamic Fatwa, declaring the polio vaccine part of a secret conspiracy by the United States and the United Nations against the Muslim faith. Their claim declared that the vaccine drops, secretly designed to sterilize the Muslim true believers, stimulated the virus. It then reappeared in Nigeria and spread throughout Africa. In this world of high-speed airline transportation it didn
’t take long to span the globe. Legal immigration figures show the number one source of immigrants in the good ol’ U.S.A. to be from Africa. And who could blame them?
The SNW Party now exercised iron control over the government. The exceptionality of the United States had started its decline long ago when the masses realized they could use their vote to elect officials willing to rape the country in their efforts to buy those very votes. So they elected the politician and party that promised them the most swag. They didn’t care that someone must inevitably pay for it, so long as it wasn’t them.
As a result, availability of capital to grow the private sector diminished. Small businesses suffered and disappeared. Taxes shot through the roof. Large corporations left the country along with the wealthy. The Hollywood elite bailed quickly; France, London and Mexico their preferred destinations. A pound of chopped meat in a grocery store (if you could find it on the shelf) now cost $33.00. And it was mostly pink slime fillers at that. Thank heavens for food stamps.
The country now consisted of a populous that couldn’t catch a break as rival political parties outdid themselves robbing from the taxpayers. The country, no longer a melting pot, became a nation of fighting tribal factions and competing ideologies. The SNW Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Green and the smaller Republican Party perpetually slandered each other in their quest to control what remained of the country while the people did their best to hold their families together.
The SNW, made up of a variety of minority groups, highly paid union workers and ex-illegals (45 million added to the Medicaid rolls. Read: free medical care) who were granted amnesty by the Democrat government in 2016 represented the majority. Ex-union officials made up 50 percent of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The unions controlled 80 percent of jobs. Either you worked for the federal or municipal government, or you worked in the service sectors. There were no manufacturing industries.
There no longer existed a national language. Children attended school for four hours a day, eight months a year; the average work week was a mere twenty five hours. The public insisted that politicians respected their need for rest and recreation. If they didn’t, they lost their jobs—voted out. Capitalism reigned no longer.
The outdated pieces of paper called the Constitution lost their relevance and respect. The new law of the land required the courts to consider the beliefs and requirements of all global groups when assessing legal responsibility. Political correctness ran amok. And the deficit—stratospheric. Why do you think China had such a large economic presence? They owned the United States. Yes, what a lovely country the people lived in.
The Chinese depended on that. Money for research and development in the U.S. had vanished. Our scientists had moved to other countries, as had the best doctors, the rich, Wall Street, and the entrepreneurs who had found their spirits crushed by taxes and burdensome regulations. Everyone needed capital to survive. There was no capital in the U.S. The government would spend, spend and spend on the populous. Surprisingly, the world’s superpowers, China, Russia and Iran, still allowed the U.S. to borrow money, even though repayment of the principal appeared unlikely. And the interest sure was a doozey.
And then the polio came; the U.S. the hardest hit. Over ten million children and four million adults died in the U.S. The highest percentage of adults came from minority communities, mostly immigrants from third world countries. Another three million were left maimed and crippled to one degree or another. Urgent medical care meant emergency rooms came under siege; the doctors almost nonexistent. Too many hospitals closed for lack of operating funds and too little reimbursement.
It hadn’t come as a surprise to many to learn the United States Health and Human Services Department had quietly stopped budgeting for the creation and implementation of the polio vaccine in 2013. They had taken responsibility for vaccines and immunizations away from parents who had long ago rejected the poisons in the makeup of the vaccines. The boards of education, no longer monitoring the children’s vaccination requirements, demanded congressional investigations that went nowhere. Conspiracy advocates abounded. The most popular theory postulated that the virus, deliberately released by the government, would serve to thin the ranks of the entitlement classes. Abdicating responsibility to deadly disease; clearly far easier and more expedient than Congress risking re-election in a controversial attempt at fiscal responsibility. C’est la vie. Massive riots in the streets enabled citizens to vent, but the efforts for change advanced anemically.
*
Scotty grew hungry for his dinner while waiting for Germaine. If his best buddy didn’t show soon, they might lose their prize to the big kids. He didn’t want the big kids to spot him without Germaine for backup. The last time that had happened, they had held him down and pulled off his pants. They had jeered and taunted him, calling him ‘Scotty-watty tissue paper’ and, worse yet, ‘ass wipe’. They had left him pantless on the pavement to slink home in disgrace. His mommy had held him and shed tears with him. His daddy had made fun of him and called him a sissy boy. He didn’t think sissy boy sounded nice coming from his daddy’s mouth. Now his daddy referred to both him and his big sister as parasites.
He smiled the first time he had heard it. It had sounded like a big important word. He had loved the way it rolled off his tongue and liked to repeat the word over and over, enjoying the syllables that popped out of his mouth so satisfyingly. Then he remembered his mother’s face after his father had said it. It looked crumpled in. That’s when he realized it was a bad word. Now, the word just slithered out of his mouth like a venomous snake looking for prey to strike.
He developed trouble sleeping, nightmares a common occurrence. He never remembered any of his dreams, but he knew they always contained a big dark murky figure who resembled his dad. Unfortunately, Scotty had developed into a suspicious, defensive little boy, trusting only his mother and sister.
He loved his half-sister, Abby. Abby’s daddy and his mom had never married. Everyone said young and foolish made a bad combination for marriage. That’s what Abby said too. He didn’t think his mom had ever behaved foolishly. If she had been his age, he would have made her his very best friend. Even though playing with a girl made you look like a loser.
Thirteen-year-old Abby became Scotty’s strongest advocate. Whenever Scotty refused to go outside for fear of bodily harm, Abby would sit him down and spin stories of imaginary worlds, fantastic creatures and handsome, brave little boys. He loved hearing Abby’s stories even more than playing with Germaine.
That’s why he couldn’t understand why his daddy ignored Abby. His mommy said sisters and brothers must always protect one another. But he knew his daddy didn’t want to protect Abby.
Late one night when he got up to go potty, he heard his parents fighting. He heard his father shout something about Abby hanging around his neck like an anchor. He heard his daddy call Abby a bad name. His daddy said he didn’t want to be responsible for a bastard kid that didn’t belong to him.
Overhearing his daddy gave him a stomachache. His troubled sleep left him tired and cranky the next morning. But he still managed to promise his mommy he would always protect Abby, even if he had to stand on a chair to do it. He thought it would make his mother happy. He didn’t understand why she cried instead.
Late one fall day, Scotty came home from grade school, his paperwork in his eager hands. He wanted to show his mom the smiley face the teacher had given him. His daddy was supposed to take Abby to the hospital for her weekly dialysis treatment. Mommy worked six days a week at the grocery store, so Daddy reluctantly took responsibility. When Scotty had remarked that Daddy should work so Mommy could stay home more, he claimed he had very important things to do and that a dummy like Scotty wouldn’t understand. Mommy looked like her tummy hurt when Daddy said things like that.
Actually, the little boy didn’t recall his daddy ever working like Mommy did. He often saw her late at night, removing her shiny leg brace to massage her tired muscles.
Scotty realized most of the dads in his building didn’t work. They formulated important matters to discuss in the rec room. The dads wouldn’t let little kids in the rec room because of the beer and smoking. So when he found Abby unconscious on the floor of her bedroom, he ran down to the basement and pounded on the door of the locked rec room.
“Hello, anyone in there? Daddy, I need you. Daddy, Daddy. Help.” He knew Abby should have gone to the hospital this morning. Why hadn’t Daddy taken her? But no one would open the door to a crying six year old. He tried again, banging over and over. The door suddenly opened, omitting smoke and loud raucous music.
“Kid, what cha doing screaming out here? Get lost.” The big man wore an old stained shirt, the sleeves rolled up over his fat hairy arms. He exuded an unfamiliar bad smell.
“Is my daddy here? I need him to come home. Abby’s on the floor.” Scotty danced nervously, his voice small and frightened, his wandering eye floating erratically.
“I’m not gonna say it again. Don’t be bangin’ on this door.” The big man burped, sending a gust of rancid beer breath in Scotty’s face. He cringed, the door slamming in his face.
Scotty knew saving Abby by himself would require some bravery.
He ran outside into the dirty street, his heart pounding so hard he thought the bullies in the neighborhood might hear him.
Choking back his sobs, he ran up and down the street, dodging cars and screaming for the police. He glimpsed the old grannies from the neighborhood who congregated at the corner, lounging in cheap plastic chairs, holding court on the sidewalks. He scrambled out of the street, hurrying toward them.
“Abby’s going to die. She’s on the floor. Please, we need help.”
Unable to hold back the tears overflowing his wild eyes, he dragged the grannies to his family’s apartment. A nice Muslim lady sat with him while two other black grannies made a few cellphone calls.
Alien Species Intervention: Books 1-3: An Alien Apocalyptic Saga (Species Intervention #6609) Page 17
