by Borne Wilder
“What happened to the Rapture? Did I miss it?”
“There was no Rapture. You guys fucked that up with the internet. Social media, to be precise.” Michael rubbed his brow and chuckled. “You fucking humans will believe everything you read, except the Holy Bible.”
“Yeah, I had a feeling Facebook would fuck everything up, one way or another.”
“Porn had a lot to do with it, too. I won’t say it to God’s face, but I knew the stupid faces you people make when you orgasm wouldn’t be a good enough deterrent for you all to keep your hands off yourselves.”
“The O face was meant to be a masturbation deterrent?”
“Yep. I came up with the idea to make masturbation stink, but no one listened to me. Do you realize that two-thirds of the population, spends more time rubbing on themselves than they spend on breakfast, the most important meal of the day?”
“I know I do.”
“After all this is over, humans will have their priorities straight.”
“All this, the nuke in Iran, the war machine turning, the Holy Spirit bolting, is all this, because of my brother?”
“In a way, it is. Mostly, he’s just a figurehead, a spokesperson. He may think he’s in charge, but someone else is pulling the strings.”
“After all this, what happens to Ron? Is he fucked for all time?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t look good for him. It’s been said, there is no hope for those who take the mark of the beast and he’s the one handing out that mark, but no one knows the extent of God’s mercy. Maybe nothing will happen to him.”
“We should have known better than to get mixed up in Nolte’s shit. I’ve always said that Nolte could fuck up a wet dream, but I never imagined he’d play such a big role in fucking up the world.”
“Dynamite comes in small packages.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that somewhere. What happened to him? I left when those things busted down the doors of the church.”
“Well, either the demons ate him, or they took him to the holding area, he wasn’t there, when we got there. He was one hell of a shot; I’ll give him that; he painted the walls of that church black with demon blood before they took him out. Gabriel popped the ones that were left.”
Michael hopped off the hood of the car and walked over to Ron’s trunk. It popped open without him having to touch it. “Well you no longer have to split the money two ways; of course by the end of the week; toilet paper will be worth more than this shit.”
“What do we do now?”
“We wait for it.”
Static electricity suddenly filled the air around the two, a rush of air, which smelled of rotting eggs, produced Nolte and four winged demons. They had popped into the dimension of time, already running.
Nolte frantically jerked at the assault rifle, which was stuck through one of the leg-holes of his diaper. The demons were hot on his tail. “Fuck you, Niglets! You’ll never take me!” With the rifle finally free of his diaper, Nolte dropped and combat rolled to one side. He came to his feet firing back at the demons behind him. Three shots produced three muffled explosions of black mist.
As the unholy mist settled to the street, Nolte cocked his hips to one side and placed the butt of the AR15 at his waist with the barrel pointing skyward. Charlie immediately recognized the pose. “He’s doing his Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“What’s up, Twinks?” Nolte put a Virginia Slim between his teeth and swaggered toward them. “Got a light, Chickenshit?”
“How did you make it out of that church?” God had removed the Holy Spirit but saw fit to leave Nolte behind. Charlie was starting to think that God might be touched in the head.
“The birdbath saved me. Those little niglets don’t watch where they’re going when they’re pissed off. When they came pouring into the church, they knocked over the birdbath. Holy Water splashed all over them. They started popping like a pack of ladyfingers.”
Michael couldn’t help but laugh. He even felt a smidge of admiration for the corrupt little man, not too many humans will do so well against the coming locusts. “Have you given any thought to what I said, you disgusting little man?”
Nolte looked at the angel with one of Junior’s looks of deep confusion. Cocking his hip again, he gripped the neck of the bottle of mescal protruding from his diaper, as if it were the butt of a revolver. Charlie recognized it as Nolte’s Joe Kidd. “What was it you said to me, Pillow-biter?” Nolte pulled the bottle free of his diaper and handed it, dripping with piss, to the archangel, who waved it off. Still maintaining eye contact with Michael, Nolte thrust it toward Charlie, who did the same. “Pussies.” He spun the cap off and bubbled the neck several times. “I don’t remember you tellin’ me a damn thing, Shirt-lifter.”
Samsonite in hand, Michael stepped around Nolte, careful to avoid contact with the stinking man. “Here you go. Try not to spend it all in one place.” Nolte tried to snatch the case out of the angel’s grip but was met with a sharp backhand, which knocked him flat on his back. “You know what, I really don’t have anything to do today,” Michael handed the case to Charlie; “you want to go steal a Veyron, with me?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Shotgun!” Nolte yelled from his sitting position on the street. The two ignored the little diaper-clad man and got into the Lamborghini.
Nolte grunted and got quickly to his feet, motioning for Michael to roll his window down. “Hey Angel,” Nolte cleared his throat, “who do I see about this salvation shit?”
“Good luck, Idiot.”
The Lamborghini shot away from the curb like a slingshot, Charlie was getting the hang of it. “Where are we going?”
“I know of this super sweet Bugatti in Aspen, but we can’t spend too much time there, Yellowstone is supposed to blow sometime in the immediate future.”
“What do you mean, blow?”
“Ash, knee deep from Denver to Ohio, our driving days are almost at an end.”
“Yeah, I knew my luck wasn’t going to hold. If it’s too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.”
If it isn’t true, it sure as hell ought to be.
Thank you for taking time to read Dead Nolte.
If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review.
Word of mouth is an author’s best friend and much appreciated.
For a daily dose of inane drivel and Short Stories:
www.bornewilder.com
Contact Me:
[email protected]
For more of Borne Wilder’s inane observations and short stories,
check out ‘Touched in the Head: Short Stories and Crazy Tales’ By Borne Wilder.
Also Visit: www.bornewilder.com
Other Books by Borne Wilder
Plastic Jesus
Touched in the Head
The Christian
Somebody Stop Me!
Short Stories
Beauregard
The Battle for East Louise
Bubba Thibodaux
Plastic Jesus (Excerpt)
Initially, Golbert had only planned on bringing one visitor to the tobacco barn. Although the added company presented some unanticipated logistical problems, it opened up a whole new can of beans. Cool beans. Beans of possibility. On the drive out, he had run through a few scenarios. Of course, the mother/daughter sex thing, was one of the first to present itself, but he found it decidedly cliché and in truth, though he was sometimes forced to dabble with methods worn out by the monsters who had come before him, Golbert hated banalities.
Finally, he had decided he would use the experience to further test his theory of a mother’s conviction or the extent of it. An experiment of sorts, a test to see if the natural instinct of motherhood, could be challenged by the natural instinct of self-preservation. It had worked on a smaller scale, as a means to get them into the vehicle without incident, but that had only been plucking at the maternal apron strings, he wanted to swing from them,
like a world class sociopathic gymnast.
Golbert grabbed two cinder blocks from the corner of the barn and placed them side by side. “Have a seat, ladies.” Golbert said, as politely and hospitable as one might expect from the maître d' at the Four Seasons. For some reason, the girls seemed to become simultaneously confused, as if they had forgotten how to sit down. “On the bricks, bitches! Sit on the bricks!” The maître d', as polite and accommodating as he was, could not stomach stupidity.
In the middle of the barn sat a ratty barber’s chair. It had been a lucky find in one of the other dark corners of the building, although, Golbert could not for the life of him, figure out what purpose a barber’s chair might have served in a tobacco barn out in the middle of nowhere. On a tripod, a contractor’s work light cast its brilliance on the chair, giving its poor condition a surreal, new appearance.
Ideally, Golbert would have liked to have a stand or a small table next to the chair, from which to work, but the dark corners had only produced the blocks and the chair. A makeshift bench was fabricated with a loose board and two cinder blocks. Even though he would have to bend to reach his instruments, it had a more professional air than just laying them out on the floor like some rookie. Deep down in his gut, a few butterflies flapped their wings. Gone was the adrenaline rush of the capture and awakening in its place, was the anticipation of death. Golbert adjusted the light on the chair a little more to his satisfaction and turned on the CD player he'd located between the legs of the light. The soothing sounds of Simon and Garfunkle’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” filled the old barn. It was time to get the show on the road.
Tied together, like they were, the ladies would be easy to recapture, had they the good sense to run, but once he separated them, he wasn’t quite sure what would happen. He was reasonably sure that mommy would stay, once he had her 'sunshine' strapped into his chair, if not, he was almost positive she would return once sunshine’s screams began to fill the air. Mommy appeared to be the type, where abandonment wasn’t an option, however, she also had the look that she wouldn’t sit still when Golbert brought out his wire cutters and began to snip the tips of her daughter’s fingers off. Despite her whitened teeth, manicured fingers and ‘come fuck me’ attire, Mommy looked like a fighter; he realized, he would have to weigh her down or she would attack.
Golbert plopped another cinder block down in front of the mother. He stared at the two sitting on their brick chairs; he could see both of them wishing for a do-over, wishing they’d put their shopping off for another day. Humming along with the milky sweet voice of Garfunkel, he put a zip-tie on each of Mommy’s ankle. He wove two more ties through these and connected them together, as a chain, by a third, which he had put through the hole in the block. “Remember those old cartoons, where the convicts had to drag a ball and chain behind them?” He shot her a wink and a smile. “I wonder what idiot thought that shit up? Just pick up the cannonball and run like hell, right? This is my version.” He had affixed the cinderblock, tightly between her legs, so that even baby steps would grind the skin off the inside of her ankles.
“We have money. My husband will pay you whatever you want.”
It donned on Golbert why mother and daughter were being so quiet up until then, they were stupid. Even with the barber chair lit up like a surgeon’s table, these two had only downgraded their situation from a carjacking to a kidnapping.
“Lady, I have all the money I will ever need. I can buy a new boat whenever the old one gets wet.” He couldn’t help but be disappointed that the girls were stupid. He hoped their diminished capacity wasn’t severe enough to hamper the intensity of the horror he was about to put them through. Screams of pain were fine and dandy, but wails of realization and cries of understanding held the ring of truth.
Contemplating how one will die is a natural thing, Golbert knew this. With the life that had been chosen for him, he assumed his would ultimately end with a lethal injection, or in the gas chamber, and probably sooner than later. Unless he met with some unfortunate accident, his fate was pretty much sealed by state law. Whenever, he was finally caught and his virgin prints were finally entered into a database, detectives around half the country would have a collective law enforcement type orgasm.
In the end, the death penalty was a given, but there would be so many jurisdictions fighting to get their hands on him that he probably wouldn’t see the inside of a courtroom for years. Even if he was caught tomorrow, with the appeals process and the jurisdictional cat fights, Golbert would probably enjoy a long life of incarceration. The normal people of the world had many more possibilities to consider, their manner of death was, unless genetically predisposed to illness, still up to fate.
Golbert looked into the scared confused faces of his girls and decided that trying to explain the boogeyman to them, would be a complete waste of time. No one wants to think that their life is out there for the taking, on any given day. Deep down they know it’s true, but no one wants to admit to themselves, that life isn’t fair and that their life is not special, that their life might be shortened by someone’s greed, or jealousy, or as in Golbert’s case, whim. No one wants to think that everything that they had accomplished and endured was for nothing more than to create a pool of blood for some sick fuck to jack off into.
“Do you believe in God?” Golbert asked the two. “I know it sounds rather cliché, considering the circumstances, but I’m not trying to sound ominous. I would just like to know your thoughts on the hereafter.” Golbert walked over to the daughter and ran his finger down the line of her jaw. “I’ve heard it said, that if there isn’t a God, then your free will is nothing more than a way to amuse yourself.” Neither of them answered, however, the mother let out what could be considered a moan of despair. Had it been recorded and replayed later, the layman might think it had been sexual in nature, but Golbert knew it to be of a religious origin. He was quite sure; Jesus had made the same sound when he realized he’d been forsaken. “Belief in God can be quite powerful in times when one might find themselves in need of comfort. And when preparing one’s soul for the next life, prayer can be a strong sedative. Although, it might be a fool’s errand because time spent on prayer might be better served, contemplating escape in such a situation as yours.” Golbert smiled and wiped a tear from the young girl’s cheek. “In the event that there is a God and you have not yet caught his ear at this juncture in your life, I suggest that you pray loudly.”
Of course, Golbert knew there was a God, Plastic Jesus had affirmed it, Golbert just knew that God didn’t apply to him. He was one of the misshapen cookies that had somehow survived inspector twelve’s scrutiny and made it into packaging. Golbert wasn't above pointing out this fact and reminding Jesus, that one of his guys, in the soul department, had messed up. “I go hard in the cake, Nigga!” Golbert would sometimes exclaim when he was feeling particularly raw and urban, or when Jesus tried to poke a finger in his heart.
Though Plastic Jesus didn’t speak in the vein of dogma and tradition, things that developed much later than the first century, after the Christian doctrine had already been established in full, he could definitely bring up the “do unto others” stuff. He was a master of the guilt trip, however, Golbert was utterly immune to guilt, he couldn’t even fake it.
“We both know you’re wasting your time with the atrocities you commit.” Plastic Jesus had once told him. “You and I both know; you will never feel what you want to feel. These lives you take aren’t given to you, which is what you really want. In the end, when they finally submit, they come to me, not you. You are nothing more than a middleman. The peace you see in their eyes, I paid for and no amount of fear can outbid me.”
“Yeah, but I go hard in the cake, Nigga!” Golbert knew it was Jesus’ toys and his playground and urban posturing would not impress him, but he wanted the Savior to know if his salvation was no longer on the table, he planned to keep on playing.
Golbert never embraced the chaotic. He never did anything for s
hock value, nor had he sought out the darker side of humanity to fit a fad or trend. What he did, he did to satisfy some deep itch that could never be fully scratched. If Jesus knew the how’s and why’s of what made Golbert tick, he wasn’t letting on, or offering any solution.
From Golbert’s perch, in the span of fifteen, maybe sixteen years, since he had started his actual hands-on study of mankind, he had watched man emotionally evolve into a cold non-spiritual entity. They, the idiots who saw themselves on the cutting edge of all that is and will be, had decided to remove God from the schools so that their children wouldn’t be exposed to such nonsense and be guilted into submission. They would allow each child to develop their own perception of right and wrong.
By cutting free the ties of all thoughts of a deity and taking credit for their own creation, or at least assigning it to something less than them, an accident perhaps, men were able to replace divinity with themselves. With the death of God, still wet on their hands, they quickly realized, that the soul was no longer necessary and attributed all feeling and emotion to the synapse activity of the brain, allowing the heart to become nothing more than a bilge pump.
They not only dismissed the idea of a creator but became angered by the very notion of it. Spitting on those that could still see the separation of mind and spirit, calling them archaic sheep, rooted in past and shackled to stale illogical dogma and doctrine, blinded to any and all reason.
Any who clung to the idea of a higher power were shunned and ridiculed in the institutes of higher learning and dismissed as a lower species, too stupid to realize it was already extinct. Rotting flesh clinging to hollow bones waiting for the enlightened to finish them off with the truth, that morality is relative to the individual.
Of course, Golbert knew they were all full of shit, he had Plastic Jesus, he knew the limitations of man, even if the rest of mankind didn’t. Golbert knew that as long as man could form like-minded herds, they could survive the most difficult of trials, though, at times, there would arise the need to sacrifice the lesser of the enlightened, in order to keep the majority of the herd fat and happy. This would be made easy by relative morality, but as their numbers would dwindle, so would their power. Golbert was allowed certain insights through Plastic Jesus, and he knew without the collective, on his own, all by his lonesome, man becomes an impotent wad of shit no matter how enlightened and smart he has convinced himself he is. When mankind is faced with absolute loneliness, with no one but himself to impress, he will again be able to hear the voice of God.
