Dead Nolte (32 page)

Although Charlie hadn’t seen any fires or explosions as he
had entered New Orleans, the blue and red flash of emergency vehicles strobed
everywhere throughout the city. On the worst morning of Charlie’s life, the sun
painted the most beautiful sunrise, he had ever seen, across the horizon.

From the first time Charlie had ever heard about the End
Times, deep down inside, he had been sure he would be alive to see it.
Throughout his life, he had watched for the signs, he hadn’t devoted his life
to it, or worried over it, he had just kept an eye peeled. Lately, more and
more signs had presented themselves, in fact, according to history, there had
never been as many signs present at one time, but for reasons, either due to
repression of his fears, or his unwillingness to let go of hope, the more the
signs pointed to the End, the more Charlie seemed to doubt them.

Charlie considered himself to be a Christian and although,
he couldn’t quote scripture, he liked to think he understood it when he read
it. He didn’t consider himself to be like most other Christians, and definitely
not like the brethren who wanted to usher in the second coming. He just
believed. Once, he had heard Chuck Missler say; that ‘those who wanted to hurry
the End of Days hadn’t taken the time to fully understand Revelation or the
Book of Ezekiel. They had absolutely no clue, just how bad things were going to
get, once God had had his fill.’

Without warning or fanfare, Michael appeared on the driveway
of the witch’s cracker-box house. Three days ago, Charlie would have freaked
out, had he seen a biker appear out of nowhere. The archangel flashed Charlie a
sympathetic and crooked smile and took a seat on the front of the Diablo;
Charlie got out of the car and joined him.

“What happens now?”

“Pestilence and war.”

“Doesn’t that sound dandy.”

“It’s not going to be much fun for you guys.”

The magnificent sunrise, Charlie had been marveling at,
began to turn shades of gray at the horizon. Even the sun itself dulled. Flat
tones and shades that one might expect to see on a worn out black and white TV,
spread across the sky and bled out onto the land. No longer was the Lamborghini
a vibrant yellow, it too, had dulled to somewhat of an earth tone.

“What’s the deal with the sun, is it fallout in the
atmosphere?”

“Nope. The spectrum of light has changed. God is removing
the Holy Spirit from the world. He has to separate Himself from what comes
next. For the first time since creation, mankind will actually get to see, just
how well they can do without Him. You all are going to get really shitty with
each other.”

“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)

I
nitially, 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 shock 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.