Fanatics: Zero Tolerance

by Ferguson, David J.

  Just one more war – this time with nukes - was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Mankind’s patience with religion finally ran out. It was time to draw a line in the sand; time for Humanity to grow up; time to begin showing religion zero tolerance.

  No-one could be sure, of course, just which set of religiously-motivated nutcases detonated the first bomb; but by the time the fallout had begun to settle, everyone knew that they were sick and tired of religion and the conflict and bigotry that inevitably trailed along in its wake. Tolerance didn’t work.

  But the real disaster was not what they thought it was. It was something worse, something no mad scientist, evil magician or hellfire preacher could have dreamed up; it approached silently, stealthily, a cataclysm so bizarre and subtle that the victims would mistake themselves for survivors…

  FANATICS

  Or,

  Zero Tolerance

  A novel of endings

  By

  David J. Ferguson

  David J. Ferguson hereby asserts his right to be identified as the author of this work. No unauthorised copying in any shape or form is permitted without the prior consent of the author. © David J. Ferguson 2014. First Kindle e-book edition 2014.

  PART 1: Peace Process

  “FANATICS - don’t sit there looking so smug - YOU’RE a bigot, and a bigot is a kind of fanatic. Don’t you know we’re all made of the same stuff? None of us is as reasonable as we think we are. Haven’t you ever longed to kick someone’s behind and just MAKE them do what you can see is the right thing?”

  - from “Instant Wisdom” by G.C. Campbell.

  *****

  What kind of answers do you think you would get if you asked people “What’s the single most disastrous thing that could happen to our civilisation?”

  Nuclear war?

  Global warming?

  Earthquakes?

  Plague, perhaps?

  They seem like fair enough guesses, but they’re all wrong.

  The answer is something worse, something no mad scientist or evil magician could have dreamed up; a disaster so bizarre and subtle that the victims will suppose themselves to be the survivors.

  Allow me to introduce you to someone who thinks he is an expert on this. His name is Lemuel Page.

  *****

  Lemuel Page was undoubtedly charismatic; one of those of whom it is said that we either love them or loathe them.

  He had a kind of humility, but it did not seem to be the right kind; his was aggressive and self-righteous. He valued a kind of love and a kind of peace, but they did not seem to be the right kind either; they looked more like a highly refined set of regulations for living. People persuaded to Page’s point of view straightforwardly interpreted them that way, not seeming to see any conflict.

  Such folks are usually dismissed as hypocrites or bigots or both. Those belonging to Page’s school of thought, however, had achieved the doubtful accolade of a more distinctive name for themselves: the general public thought of them as “Lemmings”.

  In his favour, of course, it had to be said that a provocative, controversial figure like Page was just the stuff that a good chat show could be made of, especially if he was set alongside someone with violently opposed opinions - Doctor George Campbell, for example, known to despise Page for his end-of-the-world rantings.

  The producers of “The Shannon Show” rubbed their hands together gleefully every time both men agreed to appear on the programme. The fireworks display was always spectacular.

  *****

  Gerry Marshall was a Sociology student who should probably have devoted a bit more of his time to studying human nature, particularly the nature of women, and especially the nature of his girlfriend.

  She relinquished her status as such by offering him an unexpected goodbye, standing up quickly and walking out of the pub, leaving him leaning across the table and gaping slack-jawed at the place where she had been. A moment or two later, he got up and stormed out after her, presumably to give her a piece of his mind, or perhaps a knuckle sandwich or two. He certainly looked angry enough to opt for the latter. He completely forgot about his brand new and rather expensive mobile phone, which rested unattended on the pub table for a grand total of only twenty-five seconds before someone nicked it.

  McCandless, sitting in the next nook, observed the bust-up with approval - not because he liked watching rows or believed that men had the right to hit women, but because the absence of Gerry Marshall and his ex-girlfriend vastly improved his view of the redhead and the brunette on the other side of the pub: now he didn’t have to crick his neck to watch them surreptitiously.

  *****

  The man with the sandwich-board was a Lemming, and proud of it. He had a firm grasp of The Way Things Really Were. That was why he stood in the pedestrian precinct around Cornmarket in Belfast, handing out leaflets to passers-by. “The Rapture”, by Lemuel Page, B.A., B.D., Ph.D., etc., warned in explicit if rather over-academic terms of God’s coming judgment on an evil world.

  Some people took the leaflet without looking at it and stuffed it into their pocket without giving it another thought; this oddball figure with his sandwich boards and religious tracts was as much a part of the background of city life as the buskers, artists, and even lamp-posts and phone boxes one passed every day, and was considerably less of a nuisance than the Hare Krishna people with clipboards who insisted on replies to the questions in their pseudo-surveys.

  Other people, embarrassed by their spiritual kinship to such a weirdo, gave him a wide berth, or pretended to be looking at something else if they found they had strayed too close to him.

  A significant minority later read the piece of propaganda they had accepted. Reactions to its contents were mixed; but at least one person was provoked enough by what he read to wish that he’d gone back and torn up the tract before the sandwich-board man’s eyes.

  Gerry Marshall had been too preoccupied to pay the tract any attention at the moment he’d been given it; his mind was full of the things he had not managed to tell his girlfriend before she had walked out of his life (he had been unable to catch up with her; a girlfriend’s car had been waiting for her just outside the pub). He whipped the tract from the Lemming’s hand before the man had quite let go of it, and marched briskly past, shoving it into his pocket.

  He couldn’t believe it. He had really thought she was as cosmopolitan, as broad-minded as himself; and when she told him the reason she was ditching him, he was convinced that the whole thing must have been a practical joke. He was more than just hurt; he was embarrassed by his lack of perception about her. He had believed they were alike; kindred spirits, to use a hackneyed phrase. How could he have missed seeing that fatal flaw in her? How could he have thought he had anything in common with someone so weak, so gullible, as to embrace that bourgeois crap so wholeheartedly? How could any girlfriend of his get religion? She’d been at pains to explain to him that she wasn’t a Lemming - no, not her. Not one of them, not a Lemming! They were fanatics; she was throwing her lot in with more reasonable people. But he was amazed she could see any difference.

  He strode on to where he’d parked the car, getting angrier by the moment. To think that he had travelled all the way from Portrush just to hear that! She might have called him instead; at least then he’d have saved the petrol money, and maybe had the satisfaction of cutting her off in mid-sermon.

  He reached the car and got in; as if it knew that this was the one day it couldn’t cross him, contrary to its usual performance, it started first time.

  He was onto the motorway before he realised that the noise level for this trip was below the norm. He switched on the radio and turned the dial, trying to find some music that matched
his mood.

  Station One had news. “...McDonald has stepped in personally; and the general consensus is that if anyone can find a way out of the morass to a civilised solution, he can. Meanwhile...” This caught his attention; McDonald was one of the few politicians Gerry had any time for. But the item finished only a few moments later, and was followed by what was obviously a space-filler.

  Station Two: a deejay who seemed to like talk more than music (surprise, surprise). “...and don’t forget about Del Shannon’s interview tonight with big big BIG personality Lemuel Page!” Gerry gave a bad-tempered grunt. He hated that man’s very name. It would have fitted one of those po-faced preachers popular in Cromwell’s time just perfectly. “I’ll bet none of you would have guessed I’m really chummy with the big man,” the DJ drivelled on. “In fact all of us here at the studio call him Lemmy the Lad, hah! Hah! No, I’m only kidding...”

  Station Three was the kind of magazine programme whose discussion topics typically ranged from the serious to the vacuous, with each receiving the same earnest but shallow treatment. “Of course UFOs exist! It’s only a matter of time before we all see them. The evidence is mounting -” at this point there was a muffled interruption by another participant. “Look, while we sit here with our noses buried in trivial, parochial affairs, important things are happening out there. World-shaking things - no, listen - I think it’s most irresponsible of you to make light of all this...” So, thought Gerry, God drove a flying saucer, did He? Well, there was hardly much point discussing it now. If He was smart, He’d probably have flown it away from this ball of dirt long ago.

  Station Four: a women’s interest talk show, where somebody called Marilyn was enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame. She was explaining how, at this late stage of her pregnancy, not many days passed in which she did not have to suffer some irksome complaint or other; but the good days felt especially good. Everything was working out just right: the doctors said Baby was in the best of health, Eric’s new job was allowing him more time at home with Marilyn, and of course the windfall which had allowed them to pay off their mortgage completely was a very big morale booster. No wonder people kept telling her she was glowing! It was hard not to smile each time she thought about it all; the future held so much good in store. It was easy for Gerry to imagine her stupid moon face, and his hand itched to slap the smile off it.

  Station four: an advertisement. “...a mortgage is the biggest thing you’ll ever take on. But with the Open Friendly, you can feel confident about planning for the future. With us, now is always the right time. Think future. Think Open Friendly.”

  Gerry thought about the hot woman who’d been sitting at the other side of a pub table from him only a short time ago. “Don’t talk to me about the future!” he shouted at the radio.

  The next ad was for some new brand of mobile phone, which reminded him that he’d left his in the pub. He couldn’t think of enough swearwords to express how he felt; there was almost certainly no point in going back to look for it now.

  *****

  “Tomorrow belongs to us.”

  - Quote from a speech by the Christian Democrat Party leader, Samuel Christie, and adopted as a CD Party election campaign slogan.

  *****

  “Stop eyeing them up, Barry! Get over there and chat them up!"

  Barry McCandless started, shifted in his seat and affected an air of disinterest. “What? What are you talking about?"

  His mate, Tompo, grinned at him. “I saw you watching them! Why don’t you get up and do something instead of daydreaming?"

  McCandless shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “They’re not my type.” This was a half-truth. He looked across the pub at the redhead and the brunette again. They were classy, the kind of women who caught his attention more firmly than any other when he saw them on a cinema or TV screen. But that was precisely the trouble; they were too classy. Somewhere deep down inside him, so deep that he was unable to question it, was a sense of certainty that he had no chance with these two.

  Tompo looked at him incredulously. “But look at them! Are you saying that you’re not attracted to them?"

  “Oh, aye, they’re good-looking. It’s just that -” he broke off, unwilling to admit he had written off his chances. He cast about unsuccessfully for a way to avoid having to spell this out to Tompo.

  But Tompo was one of those annoying people who have a knack for seeing embarrassing truths about others, and just now his rogue talent chose to flex its muscles. “You’re chicken!” he exclaimed. He began making chicken noises and flapped his arms like short wings. “Chicken! Chicken!"

  “Shut up!” said McCandless. “I’m not chicken. It’s just -”

  Tompo broke into a loud “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” and the redhead turned to look in his direction.

  “Shut up!” hissed McCandless. He didn’t know whether to storm out in a bad temper or pretend to share a joke with this beautiful stranger by smiling wanly in her direction as if to say: I don’t know why I’m putting up with this idiot. In the end, he simply turned away so that she wouldn’t see his cheeks burning.

  A couple of his friends arrived just then, and McCandless relaxed, grateful that the focus of attention had been drawn away to someone else. But he was reckoning without Tompo, whose many faults included the fact that he did not know when to stop.

  “Hey, lads, have you heard? Barry’s in love!” McCandless turned to face the other direction again, pretending to be absorbed in something happening on the other side of the pub. Tompo explained everything in a too-loud voice. “See the redhead and the one in the blue top? He can’t work up the courage to ask one of them out, but he can’t keep his eyes off them. Look! He’s watching them now!"

  In fact, he had been trying not to look in their direction; but when they stood up as if to leave, he was, to his own astonishment, drawn out of his seat towards them as if by magic. Behind him, he could hear murmurs of amused approval, and Tompo calling: “Go for it, super-stud! If you’re not in, you can’t win!” As he walked towards them, he was thinking: What am I doing this for? Why am I doing this?

  “Excuse me,” he said. The girls turned to look at him. The redhead’s eyes were a deep, deep blue, and under their gaze, he felt as if he was an insect under a microscope. He tore his eyes away from her to the brunette. “My name’s Barry. I was wondering-” A lump in his throat stopped him from going on. The top three buttons of the brunette’s blouse were open, and from his angle, McCandless could glimpse white lace inside. It was all he could do to restrain himself from leaning forward to see more. He swallowed and started again: “I was wondering-”

  The brunette interrupted in an icy-smooth, yet razor-edged voice: “You really think I’d seen dead with you?” Then, pausing only to exchange a smile with her companion that was perfectly feline but for the physical absence of fangs, the girls turned and left the pub, leaving him standing in the open floor feeling more completely foolish than he had ever felt.

  Behind him, the kind of cheer went up that was usually reserved for the occasions when a barmaid accidentally smashed a pint glass.

  *****

  Gerry reached his flat in Portrush a little over an hour later. He stomped in, threw his coat on the sofa, made himself a cup of coffee, then sat down in front of the television to unwind. As a student, he naturally couldn’t afford what he called the “decent” channels (the ones featuring naked women, blood-freezing horror or, best of all, both), so he hopped back and forth between tediously cheerful children’s programming, old black and white movies and shopping channels trying to press items on him in which he knew he would not develop the least interest if he lived to be a thousand. He settled at last on one of the twenty-four hour news channels and waited for the main bulletin to roll around.

  While he waited, he searched his coat pockets for a packet of cigarettes. What he found was the tract written by Lemuel Page. He read it more than halfway through before his annoyance with it mounted to the point were he simply had to cru
mple it up and throw it across the room with an incoherent shout.

  The main news bulletin finally arrived. It featured two Christian Democrat politicians he’d never heard of criticising government policy; one spoke stridently, and the other quietly and so-reasonably, though with no less venom in his words for all that they were softly spoken. They both made a point of slagging off Lewis McDonald. Gerry watched them, clenching his fists and swearing at them under his breath. Soft-spoken or showing their true nature, what they had in common was as plain as the nose on any Christian Democrat’s oily face: they were fanatics who couldn’t find one good thing to say about anyone; who were unwilling to see the least trace of goodness in even a transparently decent sort like McDonald.

  He turned off the TV. Christian Democrats, Lemmings, the man with the sandwich-board and now even Gerry’s ex-girlfriend - they were all pieces of the same jigsaw picture; fanatics, one and all. Something should be done about them; and the president of the U.U. Anti-bull Society, Gerry Marshall, seemed the logical person to do it.

  But for the moment, he had no idea how it should be done.

  *****

  Del Shannon cringed inwardly. He liked George Campbell, and had been hoping that he would shine on tonight’s programme; that old bigot Page badly need to be taken down a peg or two, and his so-called insight shown up for the tripe it was.

  But Campbell, normally sharp as a razor, did not seem to be on form tonight; the best he could manage was a succession of cheap shots, and with each one, he lost more of the audience, who had begun the evening right behind him.

  Page, by contrast, (counter to his expected form) was coming across as courteous, gentle, and charming. Whether this was a deliberate ploy on his part was impossible to tell; certainly it was doing his cause no harm at all.