My Dead America

by Frank Weltner

  They meandered through the corpses, heading through Greenwich Village where they came upon a clan of one hundred survivors. They were rather ragged, except that a lot of new shirts were visible, since whenever they tore one, they just walked into a store and took what they needed.

  “How do you like it in New York guys,” one of their spokesmen asked?

  “It's just dandy,” Bob replied in his best country accent.

  Bob liked acting like an impertinent fool, way out of line, and expressing a wild irony that was always spot on.

  The spokesman's name was Quincy. Frank didn't usually trust men named Quincy or Estevan or some other pretentious sounding name. It reminded him of scoundrels who thought they were better than him, who looked down on hard working, self made men with hard earned degrees as trailer trash, when, in Frank's mind, “banking trash” and “greedy Wall Street trash” took the cake. The one-percent people tasted to him like Twinkies. Those were the dudes whose destruction of this nation and all of the others around the crapped out world of their bad banking exploits had led to this inhuman catastrophe of death and dying which these fat rich dolts had required in order to make this very universe and especially America into a dead, squalid toad. It had been planned and happened all because the very selfish and evil one-percent had wanted it to be that way, which was now this way, and the only way left to everyone who was unlucky enough to be alive amid the ruins of buildings and unburied corpses in which unkempt streets were the morgues, and the survivors were the grave diggers whose work would never be finished.

  Before heading north toward Central Park, Frank and Helen moved their group deeper into the Wall Street morass where the seat of evil had been sequestered for almost three hundred years of exploitation, power grubbing, and seduction of the nation's industries and government. Everything earned came here. It didn't matter if it were built in China and sold in Saint Louis, the profits came to New York City and Wall Street. In addition, the little accoutrements along the way, like charges for shipping, handling, taxes, and commissions for sales made their way instantly to Wall Street, albeit sometimes via Washington where the hegemony's cat heart clawed at the very decency of every person stuck in this society.

  Quincy knew exactly where the bunkers were in the Wall Street area. As soon as the dying began, everyone noted that the Wall Street people clammed up. Their only trouble was that too many of them had to take taxis to get to their bunkers, so the peasants had a good idea where the safe places and havens had been stashed and where the rich were hiding and celebrating life in perfect safety down below. They were underground, beneath the great trading rooms of CNBC's cable network, whose graphical coverage of the monetary carnage had raged across the nation's television screens daily. The one-percent were still living down there, below the dying in the streets, beneath the colorful television tickers in the great hall of greed where the rich stole from the semi-rich and Goldman Sachs' culture of super-greed and screw the world caused gasoline to rise sky high in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Fall of Rome. Goldman was to America what the Visigoths had been to Rome and Constantinople and all of it happening while AIPAC did to the United States what Christianity had done to Greece, Italy, France, Egypt, and the rest of the carved up Roman universe.

  We had all suffered at their hands, and now a bunch of them, but not all of them were holed up under their banks in bunkers, and their lives were about to be snuffed by a few armed and surviving peasants who were bent on revenge. There was to be no forgiveness and no return to the vileness of capitalism. The one-percent were going to be zero-percent, and, as everyone was taught in math classes zero was known to the ancient mathematical gurus as the number of perfection. These killers of mankind were finally going to reach economic Valhalla and utter satisfaction.

  Quincy took his armed platoons to one bunker after the other. Frank had forged papers showing they all were the children of large banking families, so he and several others of his undercover “bankers” were allowed inside. They were given the great tour of the bunkers where they noted that ingots of gold and silver as well as bags of diamonds were kept in safe boxes so that the greedy themselves could not steal all the stuff that made them so much better than all others in the world which made them more qualified to continue their lives of opulence during and after the great dying off. Frank, Helen, Bob, and the others remained cool and polite, playing their roles perfectly. This allowed them to deposit the new samples of the deadly virus that had been prepared for the poor. Now, it had been tweaked in order to kill off the rich. Several of the best counter-agents had stolen these materials from FBI laboratories in Wisconsin. They gained control of them by threatening immediate death to its developers if it wasn't coughed up along with the vaccines to render it useless. Now, the good guys had the vaccine. The bankers didn't. So, the tables were now turned upside down. Now, the ninety-nine-percent were going survive, at least the few of them that were still alive and kicking. But the bankers were going to die, and they deserved it after what they had done in bringing so much pain and death to the entire world.

  Bob and his group released the new virus secretly inside eighteen greed bunkers in seven days while the grand tours were given to him thinking he was from a banking family. The same thing would soon be going on in all the major cities and towns. Using computers inside the first bunkers, precision maps to the other bunkers were surfacing. The net was beginning to envelope the guilty ones.

  Since these hidden bunkers were silent havens committed to total stealth, they were not able to alert other bunkers of the pestilence that the survivors who came to dinner brought with them. They had no way to know that doom was coming to a new future inside their own hidden bunkers. Too bad for them. Within days and weeks, they were dead and gone. Their plot had come to nothing.

  Good riddance.

  As each bunker was killed out they were carefully sealed up permanently with solid doors marked “DEADLY VIRUS INSIDE” so that the people outside would not venture in and catch their death. It would be difficult to be re-infected with this one or the original one as the contamination was of a limited time period after which it died down and could not raise its ugly and deadly head.

  Better safe than sorry.

  Frank and Helen discussed how justice rarely occurred in society under the one-percent rulers where the rich and greedy pecked at society, enslaved everyone, profited from all business and banking transactions, owned the entire means of communications that allowed them to poison billions of minds around the world with their banking and capitalist propaganda which they always falsely labeled as bringing democracy to everyone. Of course, that so-called democracy merely meant allowing banks to operate freely without taxation and using contracts to destroy the lives of everyone and to abscond with everything worth having.

  “It is going to be a long haul,” Helen reminded Frank.

  “It already has been. My entire family is dead.”

  “Don't I know,” Bob interjected. “My entire state is probably dead and gone. I know that my town is. All my clan is gone now. Well, we wasn't much.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Helen said. She kissed his lips. “At least the best DNA in that sorry town you grew up in survived, and it's you, Bob. Don't let your hunk be under-estimated for handsomeness and virility, because you are what we women call good, lover boy.”

  Frank bumped her arm.

  “Hey, what about me?” Frank crowed. “I'm not Bob, but, really, honey, aren't I any good?”

  “Oh, Frank. You know you are good, baby. Don't even question that.”

  She kissed his cheek.

  “You are both good.”

  Bob kissed Frank's cheek.

  “You are good, Frank.”

  Frank shrugged. That was not his idea of good.

  “Jeez. Oh, well. Then, let's get out of here so we can exterminate the rich bastards in their bunkers everywhere they are.”

  It had to be done now. Once the rich were allowed t
o dig themselves out, they'd use their money, arms, medical materials, and gold to restart their exploitation of mankind all over again.

  This time, that was over completely. It's re-emergence simply wasn't going to happen.

  Seven billion deaths were a lesson that wouldn't be forgotten by anyone who survived.

  No mercy.

  No peace.

  No forgiveness.

  They were going to get it back the exact way they had given it out.

  The rich.

  The government.

  The justice system.

  All the crookedness was going to be tossed into the lake of fire once and for all.

  Bye, bitches.

  It's done.

  You are done.

  Men, women, children, everyone involved in these families of death were going to meet their maker. No forgiveness. Zero tolerance. No one left alive.

  See ya.

  Page 9

  Chapter Fourteen

  Capitol Re-Entry...

  All nations are turds left by the rich to show they've been there and done their worst to everyone they can get their greedy hands on. The one-percent who are greedy beyond compare live in eternal sadness. These greedy people are those who own nearly everything in the world but are never satisfied and want more. They are constantly grabbing what the little people have left, not because they need it, because they have all they would ever want, except for their mental illness which drives them to want more. Whenever the rich breathe, they are grabbing at what you have and stuffing it into their pockets and portfolios just because there's things out there they haven't touched yet, and their pockets are huge and seemingly limitless. So it goes.

  The second crew to enter Washington already knew the lay of the land, the places where the survivors lived on canned foods that stood quietly in the empty supermarkets in search of someone to open them and eat out their innards like the hungriest of predators. As the crews surveyed the goods in the markets, stores, and shopping malls, they were aghast. Everything a man or woman might be convinced by advertising into wanting but not really needing was there to be taken and used, all for the asking. The trouble was, there was so much stuff and so few people who might need it or even think they needed it that these crews didn't even know where to begin.

  “Look at this crap,” Donna said. “I once thought I needed more and more of this. Now that the world is gone all around me, I know that none of this stuff has any value, unless it's food to sustain us. Most of this was just crap that they flashed in front of me on their frigging TV Shows. I was like a hypnotized gimp caught inside of “Let's Make a Deal.” I sat in my living room pretending I was a contestant spinning those colored wheels that led me to nowhere, because in the final analysis, it never really mattered what the contestants won from those spinning circles except in that crazy make believe TV Land inside my living room.”

  She was tempted to tear the place apart for what it had made her into. Not only that, but the greedy assholes who owned these stores of nonsense products were the very ones who had nearly exterminated the entire known world. Why did they do it? That was an unanswered question for which there might never be an answer. It was a lot like “Which came first? The chicken or the egg?” No one had ever figured that out. Perhaps the answer didn't really matter as long as there were chickens and eggs and people left who could eat them. Donna, however, was tired of being one of the nameless chickens, crossing roads, and being asked by nameless cops to explain why she did that. It was none of their business, that's why.

  Donna picked up a can of hair spray. She used to apply the stuff by the ton in order to look good for the guys at City College. Today, being older and wiser, knowing that all of them were dead and being eaten by dogs, cats, robins, and, yes, in some places by the people who survived, because they were not close enough to a superstore like this one to use the stuff to sustain even their meager and threatened existence. And who really cared? Their moms, dads, sons, daughters, and friends were all dead, too. They even had the displeasure of seeing their friends and relatives at their worst, puffed up with gas from their exploding intestines, blood and other liquids oozing from their mouths and eyes, dogs eating their flesh as it rotted where they fell. If she could have buried them and not seen this apparition of a dying humanity, she would have. But the deed was too great. It had done in too many innocents, too many friends, fathers, sons, daughters, moms. And for what? So that the one-percent might wipe out the little guys, the ninety-nine-percenters who only served as loyal, hard-working slaves in their sleazy factories, delivery vans, stores, and army bases? It was absurd. Salvador Dali's surreal painting, “The Persistence of Memory,” had come very close to predicting these end times for mankind. His painting was brightly colored, the same as this brightly sunlit department store where the white puffy clouds sailed overhead through the transparent plastic ceiling. Like Dali's painting, the clocks were all permanently frozen in an electrically starved world where the street lamps were darker than the proverbial well digger's butt hole, and the rats found sustenance in the bodies of priests still dressed in the holy garb and strewn like fancy and bizarrely accoutered bastard manikins atop the public streets.

  The strangest thing was the persistence of silence and the openness of the cities. No one was out there to speak of. You had to explore these streets, buildings, even the sewers for a long time to find even a few survivors, packed together like frightened little animals, each of them so afraid of being the next one to die, having seen so many drop by the wayside right in front of them.

  Bob stood over the body of a priest in the wine section of the department store's liquor area. The holy man's eyes had been eaten away. Bob figured it was the rats that did it. Birds didn't seem to be lost inside the stores much, except here and there a bird flew up and down the walls trying to reach open air, but finding only a jail filled with cellophane-wrapped junk that was of no use whatsoever to a robin in search of real earth worms. For them, it was a trap filled only with waterless deserts, dry shelves, dry floors, dry stores that presented a death world for any birds unfortunate enough to be lost inside these huge coffins of dead material desires. Even so, a few birds evidently knew what they were doing. Some of them understood the way in and out of the morass of greed that all stores represented in the aggregate. Bob had seen a few nests with eggs in them even, and here and there birds fluttered in and out with twigs and food to keep their little houses alive so that the tiny pink babies with such sad and ugly eyes had food to eat on a regular basis and didn't seem to be starving. Nonetheless, so few birds were around, that the smart ones were only scarce anomalies inside the malls. It was the emptiness and lack of motion, the stasis of the place, that was so unnerving to most of them.

  Nancy had noticed it. So had Debra, Tom, and Bob. Each had seen it before, been almost frightened by it, yet for some ungodly reason, everyone seemed to crave it. These stores represented a virtual museum of society the way that it had always been. An historian could use a single mall as the finalization of the new reality into which mankind had stumbled through all the pain and death and dying, into a world without needs, one with endless shelves of goods and few even needing a thing they could offer, because so few customers had survived the big kill.

  “What is a world like this worth now?” Bob asked them? He jumped up on a check out counter and put his arms in the air. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he called as loudly and outrageously as he could, “Please make your final purchases!”

  YOUR FINAL PURCHASES.

  The words were so ironic. They contained and even escalated the pain of knowing. The total desperation of these words hung in the silence inside a store inside a mall without customers inside huge, darkling parking lots of abandoned cars that would never again be driven by people.

  The cars in the lots and streets would soon contain only the skulls and bones of their lost families. The passengers' bodies had been drying out. Little animals as well as flesh eating lichens were eating away
their skin and muscle. Birds had plucked their eyes. Some were already reduced to the starkness of skeletons. Only a mere specter of flesh remained, usually inside the elbows and necks where the bones were so close that tiny rodent teeth and bird beaks could not dig out the bits of sustenance that remained. The ants would get that part. Soon, the people would reach the absolute nirvana of beauty that the TV Shows titillated them with in sales of useless deodorants, bras, and underwear. Inside their cars and on the sidewalks and streets, Americans had lost all of their fat stores, all of their clothes, and even their shoes and socks. The animals had stripped them of everything. The pure bone that was left of them had only now allowed these people to reach that perfection of cleanliness, thinness, and proper height-weight proportion. The dead had now reached that feeling of total goodness that the TV Shows promulgated before swarms of audiences around the world who buzzed-about, spraying hair, pits, breasts, and gonads with chemical preparations to make them more presentable to spouses, lovers, and friends, all of whom had passed away with a dreadful suddenness rendering all of these preparations totally useless. Soon, the decaying would all be gone, and everyone would be equally thin and without any fat, just as they had always wanted to be. Now, the rich and the poor would both have equal shares of the world's goods.

  There would no longer be bankers exploiting them or advertisers hoodwinking them into becoming something other than the way God had made them. The constant exploitation and frustration foisted by the merchants of all things people never needed and which were stripping the Earth itself of millions of dying species, plants and animals whose existences were being wasted by the capitalist nightmares in which these people had been immersed via their materialist baptism into bottled chemical preparations nested inside beautiful neatly color coded bottles. They were immaculately displayed like lines of brightly nuanced toy soldiers who stood at attention in their perfected military uniforms atop all of these thousands of quiet retail shelves.