by C. J.
“Yes, that’s perfect, the hint is that if you make it yourself, you could poison yourself or at the very least, possibly scar yourself for life, Danny interjected.”
“Well, I think they were going with something a bit less terrifying, but I’ll pass on your suggestions. Our people want to sell the shit out of it here in China first before selling it elsewhere. I think they are hoping the do-it-yourselfers will poop out; then they can come swooping in with this brilliant, newly perfected formula that makes all the rest look like worm turds.”
“You mean dirt?” asked Danny.
“Huh?” asked Bond
“Well, you said worm turds, and basically all worm turds are dirt. Digested dirt, but essentially dirt. Why is everyone staring at me? I thought I’d throw a fun fact in amongst all this heavy drama. Sorry,” sulked Danny.
“Okay, so the game plan is to lay low, keep the green safe and go about our lives in the same way as we always do. No big purchases, no fancy clothes, no suddenly appearing at work in an Armani suit and diamond pinky ring after parking a new Bentley in the employee lot,” lectured Maggie.
“Wow, a Bentley, I was thinking more of an Aston Martin, but a Bentley, now that’s class,” Kevin said while brushing crumbs off his lap.
“Do I need to repeat myself?” Maggie asked as she stood up with a tray of piping hot lasagna in her hand.
“No, ma’am,” came the chorus.
“That goes for you too, Bond. Don’t think I can’t find you, because I can and when I do you’ll wish you were back on the assembly line putting together cell phones for the masses.’’
“How do you know? No one knows where I came from,” was the barely whispered reply.
“Do you think I wouldn’t do some research on the guy who is bargaining all our hard work and can possibly screw up the entire deal. Just don’t fuck with us and everything will be cool. Keep your head down and talk to no one. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” came that semi-audible whisper.
“Good. We will keep in touch. Thank you,” and with that, Maggie ended the conversation with China.
“Oh my God, oh my God how did you do that? You are like Mrs. Bond. That was so cool,” Danny sputtered through a mouthful of extra crispy chicken.
“Oh, I have my ways. Like I said, I’m not going anywhere and rely on someone I don’t know without gathering a little background on them” replied Maggie.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
GRETCHEN MEADOWS WAS getting the loudest chewing out anyone in the company had ever received by Elmer Klumnick, the CEO of Teaberry.
Julie, Gretchen’s assistant, hovered near the door and heard the many explosions coming from within. After the last and loudest eruption, she suddenly remembered she had an urgent appointment somewhere miles away and was planning her exit when the door flew open.
Gretchen strode past Julie talking as she walked, assuming Julie was keeping up.
“We have 48 hours to put the moron of the moment on the air and have him announce that he is an incompetent fool, which is the actual truth. He has to state that the ingredients he listed are not only incorrect but could be possibly harmful if made by someone not trained in chemistry. Of course, as of yet, there have been no ill effects, but who knows what long-term effects this random compilation of ingredients may bring about. We need to make sure the boob stresses how unsafe it is for the untrained to make anything that can be topically applied to one’s body and the possible ill effects of using substandard ingredients. Are you getting, this Julie?” shouted Gretchen in the general direction of Julie.
“Yes, ma’am,” Julie squeaked, struggling to jog and keep up with Gretchen while taking notes.
“Let’s see, we should equate it to a meth lab or nuclear reaction. Something unstable that could go at any time. However, in safe, sterile conditions, with the top of the line ingredients, made in our lab, of course, the formula would be better than anything thown together at home and much safer. An ad campaign. We need an ad campaign.” Gretchen made a sudden stop, pointed to a wall next to Julie, and bellowed in her ear, “How about: Would you trust yourself or some guy down the street to heal you when you are sick? Or would you go to a professional? Seek the professional for your youth and beauty. Don’t trust your vitality to just anyone. Then we will show some dirt encrusted person in coveralls with a moldy jar of rancid looking face cream.” She saw Julie looking at the wall in disgust and snapped her fingers in her face. “Quit daydreaming, Julie, and send a note to marketing regarding a seek and destroy campaign along those lines.” Gretchen steamrolled ahead and shouted over her shoulder, “are you getting all this?”
“Yes,” Julie whimpered, bypassing Gretchen due to her coming to a sudden halt in the middle of the hallway, hands on hips.
“Yes, that should do it. If we can sell the public our overpriced crap, we can un-sell them someone else’s shit in a jar,” Gretchen stated.
Julie looked up from her notebook. “You don’t want that in the ad campaign, do you?” At Gretchen’s withering look, she added. “No of course not. Sorry.”
Julie continued to write furiously until she realized Gretchen had gone silent. She looked up and wished she hadn’t, because she would never forget the look in Gretchen’s eyes as she stared down the hall with her fists clenched and absolute hatred in her eyes. She uttered through clenched teeth in a quiet voice that became louder and began to border on the hysterical. “Now all we need to do is hunt down the idiot of the century Tranwrach.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
ONE MONTH LATER...
one story similar to thousands like it-
Tessa hung up the phone as she shouted for her husband, Blake. She didn’t receive a reply and found him in their unfinished basement with a measuring tape and a pile of magazines on the floor.
Tessa was trying hard to keep a huge grin off her face. She placed her hand on Blake’s shoulder and said, “That was Stacy. She was hard to understand, but she told me we needed to come right away.” Tessa grabbed Blake by his shoulders, looked into his eyes, and softly said, “I think this is it.”
Blake sighed deeply, “We’ve gotten false alarms before,” he said, and folded his arms across his chest. “Stacy is a great nurse and companion for Aunt Vera, but we shouldn’t get our hopes up. She tends to cry wolf quite a bit.”
“So you’re not getting your hopes up?” Tracy said, pointing to the stack of home theater magazines on the basement floor.
“Well,” Blake muttered and cleared his throat. “It doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”
“Stacy was crying, Blake. This really could be it.”
Blake and Tessa looked at each other and simultaneously broke into enormous, grins jumping up and down holding each other’s hands. Blake started singing, “Three million dollars, three million dollars, crazy, dried up old Aunt Vera and her dried up doll collection.”
“You don’t have to comb those creepy dolls’ hair and dress them up in their smelly old clothes, complete with moldy bloomers, every visit.” Tessa smirked.
“What are we doing here? Let’s start practicing our sad faces and get on over there,” Blake shouted as he pulled Tessa up the stairs.
Stacy met them at the door of Aunt Vera’s ten-acre estate. The house was a monstrosity of ugly. The building was turd colored brick, shoe box in shape, with no landscaping to break up the ugliness of the design. Its filthy windows had brown grids, which make the house look as though it had bars on its windows rather than an interesting design feature.
Stacy’s eyes were red and puffy. “It happened all so fast” she sniffled, grasping Blake’s hand. He took this opportunity to practice his sad face and was trying to squeeze out a tear. “I know I should’ve asked your permission, but she had been going downhill and had been in so much pain, that I...”
“No, don’t say anything Stacy” interrupted Blake. “What matters most is that she is no longer in pain. Isn’t that right, Tessa? We couldn’t bear to see Aunt Vera suffer any
more. What happened in this house doesn’t leave this house.”
“I’m so glad you feel that way. She told me she didn’t have anything to lose, that she might as well try it,” Stacy sobbed while patting Blake’s hand.
Blake suddenly had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Try what? What did you try?”
Tessa’s screams behind him interrupted any further conversation. He turned to look at his wife and saw an expression of extreme horror. She pointed at something coming down the staircase behind him. Blake heard a voice, a loud, healthy voice coming from behind him. Whoever was descending the steps was doing so quickly. He turned and saw Aunt Vera bouncing down the steps. She was waving to him and Tessa with one hand and had a hideous doll in the other.
“Isn’t it a miracle, sir? That face cream gave her a new life. She has many more years left in her. Isn’t it wonderful, sir?”
Stacy was talking to thin air as both Tessa and Blake had sunk to the floor in a dead faint before Aunt Vera reached the bottom step in a bouncy skip.
FORTY
IN A GRIM OFFICE MUCH like millions of others around the world, a heavyset man sat in a too small chair. For the hundredth time this day and every day for what seemed like forever, he reached into his front shirt pocket for cigarettes that were not there and cursed silently to himself. He pushed a button on his desk. Almost immediately a skinny man with greased back black hair slid into the room. Killian Fridin always seemed to glide about rather than walk thought Sebastian Linear.
“When were you last out and about with our clientele, Fridin?”
Killian scratched his greasy head, rubbed whatever had come off the mess of grease between his fingers, analyzed it for a moment, and then spoke. “Well, sir, I saw our clientele,” Killian grinned as though he’d come up with this witticism on his own, and continued, “this morning at breakfast. Nothing unusual to report, the usual complaints about the food and lack of certain fruits, etc.”
“I’ve been watching the monitors closely the last few weeks, and yesterday I took a little stroll around my little facility. I’ve been watching a few people in particular,” As Sebastian said this, he tilted his head toward a bank of monitors against one wall of the office.
Despite the office being severely out of date, the video system was state of the art. A large screen could bring up video from any of the row upon row of color monitors, and from one of those, Sebastian pulled up video. On the large screen could be seen a laundry room with industrial sized washers and dryers; a dozen or so men in matching uniforms moved listlessly around the room. Sebastian, apparently looking for someone in this area, kept panning around the room and muttering to himself. As he did, he shifted in his chair, which groaned with each move.
Killian kept glancing from the monitor to the poor chair straining to contain Sebastian’s bulk, torn between curiosity about just who or what he was looking for and if this was the day that that poor chair would finally collapse. There were two office pools going regarding Sebastian’s chair. The first one involved the date the thing either collapsed or, Killian’s personal dream, crashed through this floor to the kitchen on the level below. The second pool involved the date when Sebastian having eaten one too many of Professor Good Fry’s AED Burgers, (which consisted of 1 ½ lbs. of ground beef, one slice each of cheddar, Swiss, American and Monterey Jack cheese, six pieces of bacon, all smothered in thousand island dressing), and became so wedged into his chair that he had to be extricated by the fire department. Alas, today was not to be the day for either of the pools to come to an end, so Killian focused his attention on the big screen.
“So, Boss who are you looking for?”
“Those exchange prisoners we added last year.”
“Oh, yes, those two are extremely creepy. Even for this place. They are way too polite and well-mannered. I have a feeling they could slit your throat while drinking tea. Voss and Muis. They are usually together, and you can hardly miss them. They are like a couple of redwoods, solidly built and towering above everything and everybody else. There they are!” Killian suddenly shouted in his boss’s ear.
Sebastien would’ve jumped out of his chair, but due to his bulk he was wedged firmly in and only managed to slide forward, cracking his knee into the corner of the desk. “Mother fucker. Damn it, Fridin, I’m right here. Just point or tell me where. Never mind, I see the moving skyscrapers now.”
Sebastien zoomed in on Voss and Muis who had just approached a table with two large sacks of laundry and were dumping their contents out on the table. “I knew it!” Sebastien exploded, pounding his fist down on his desk. Look at those two. Do you see? When they first arrived at this little slice of heaven, what did you call them?”
“Well, I’m sure it was all in good fun and nothing that would offend anyone,” Friddin murmured while swiveling his head around looking for anyone that had snuck in while he wasn’t looking.
“For Christ’s, sake’s man, there’s no one in here, but you and I. You know how politically correct I am.”
“Of course, right. But can’t be too careful these days. Well, you know we had never done an exchange program before, and then we were told we were part of a trial program involving the Limburg Providence in Belgium. I couldn’t wait to see the Limburgers. I mean the jokes just write themselves, don’t they? And when they showed up, it was like a gift from heaven. They are like walking bricks of moldy cheese. Enormous, muscled cheese, but cheese just the same. All lumpy and pockmarked, yikes! And their scars! Frankenstein would’ve run off screaming like a little girl after taking a look at those too.
“Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Look at them now. Any cheesy jokes come to mind?”
Fridin looked at the screen, turned to Sebastien, and then back at the screen. “That can’t be them.”
“No? Wait for Sgt. Mongo to walk by and notice the size comparison.”
“You know he hates it when you call him that. Holy crap! That is them! No one is bigger than Sgt. Moritski except for the Limburgers. But they are, are...”
“Human-looking?”
“Yes. Wait! How did they get that super youth cream stuff? We pulled all the ingredients from our menu, and I can’t think of a prison that orders face cream for any reason.”
“How does contraband get into any prison Fridin? If the will is strong enough, it will find a way in. I received a memo regarding just this situation. I need to reply regarding how many inmates have been affected and the strength of the formula they are using. I have a feeling this may change sentencing guidelines a bit. These two supermodels are in for a string of armed robberies with violence and are supposed to do forty years. Now they have added ‘X’ number of years onto their lifespans. Should they get additional time here? Is the number of years supposed to be the punishment, or time needed to protect the public from violent criminals who’ll be too old and weak to do any harm when they’re finally released. But now, given this, who knows? ”
“I never really thought about it.”
“Well, people with bigger salaries than ours are going to do the thinking and hopefully come up with something.”
Six months later
If an inmate is found to have ingredients to make a formula or have a formula in their possession, additional 15 years will be added to their sentence. Said inmate will be examined to determine, if possible, how long they have extended their life depending on the formula they have taken, and their sentence will be extended accordance with these findings.
One month later
Thousands of lawsuits filed regarding unfair sentencing.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
FOUR YEARS LATER
A grandmotherly woman dressed in a dark gray wool suit enters a sparsely furnished office deep in the bowels of the Pentagon. She peered over her oversized tortoiseshell glasses and asked the surprised looking man behind his desk, “Are you Theodore?”
Theodore Boston, aka the “Boss,” jerked
upright in his chair, clicked off his computer monitor, and stifled his first response, which was, “How the fuck did you get in here?”
“Excuse me, ma'am, you must be lost. What visitor’s group are you with? I’ll call for someone to escort you back to your group.”
As he reached for the buzzer to call his assistant, he mentally rehearsed a massive ass chewing for a) letting Grandma Mosses wander into his supposedly secure office area, and b) giving her his name not to mention his first name. Wait I don’t think my right-hand man even knows my first name. Boston paused, hand hovering over the buzzer, and looked up at the woman again. He now saw that she was wearing a government ID on a lanyard. The name was Skerry. Christ, she was from the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The sweet little old lady face suddenly disappeared, and in a nanosecond, a transformation occurred.
“Mr. Boston, do you take me for a fool?” asked the woman, who now looked more barracuda than grandma. “Well, do you?”
“Oh, well, no. I thought that was rhetorical. What does the Committee want with me, ma’am?”
“Right now I am your worst nightmare.”
“I can see that.”
“Did you say something, Theodore?”
“No. No, ma’am just clearing my throat.”
“Your unit as far as I can tell is totally useless and redundant. I know all about you and it. You are the Administrator of the United States Assistants For and From The American People. From what I have been able to dig up, U.S.A.S.S.T. is a cleanup unit that handles various let us say miss steps by one of our agencies, employees, or extraordinarily idiotic citizens. You are also supposed to prevent widespread panic after a national or world disaster, diverting blame from the US and its government by assigning blame to some unbalanced sap, unstable country, or, if conditions are right Mother Nature. You and your team of...”, Skerry paged through her iPad “ twenty employees are spin doctors. I’ve been trying to access your past missions, and a majority of the reports have been redacted due to being highly classified.”
