The United States of Air: a Satire that Mocks the War on Terror (8 page)

Thinn gulped, and tossed a greasy burger wrapper into the nearby garbage can.

“Wrappers under control, sir.”

“And Thinn?”

“Sir?”

“Have a talk with fuzzy cheeks here.” He turned to the rookie. “What’s your name, son?”

“Officer Olde, sir,” the boy said, rubbing at his puffy eyes. Nice kept a tight grip around his friend’s bicep. “I said nothing more than the truth, sir. I believe in the Prophet. That’s why I became a cop.”

“Isn’t that precious,” Erpent said. To Thinn: “Officer Olde needs a lesson in protocol. Don’t you agree, Sergeant?”

Thinn pinched the rookie’s cheeks. “I’m putting demerits on your record,” he said. “You’ll be lucky to keep your badge when I’m through with you.”

“But why would you do that?” Olde asked. “I’ve done nothing wrong.” He waved to me and Green. “Happy hunting!”

“Don’t you worry about that,” I called over my shoulder as we limped toward the car. “We’ll have Fatso behind bars faster than you can say ‘Go the Power of Air.’”

For some reason the cops laughed at that, a laugh Erpent cut short with a look. Thinn and his colleagues waddled over to their cruisers and drove off. The ambulance waited for us to follow. The park was empty now, except for the three of us and a blood stain where Nick Hungry had died. Only the murmur of the Thin House water fountain in the distance could be heard.

We climbed into the Smart Car. The vehicle had no back seat—always a conundrum when transporting handcuffed suspects—so Erpent perched on Green’s knees.

As I pulled away from the curb, I smacked my forehead with my palm. “You ought to give Judge Oscar Meyer-Weiner a call. We got the guy’s name and social, right?”

“Get a warrant,” Green said. “Good idea.”

“Put a toilet tap on the guy’s house. His family, his friends, known associates. Anyone goes poo in those toilets, or even a little pee-pee, we’re going to know about it. Maybe they can lead us to Fatso’s hideout. We might even find his Thanksgiving convention this year.”

A toilet tap is just what it sounds like: the sewer company comes out and installs a fecal monitor on the sewer output valve of your home. It can also detect urine, and pretty much anything else you might care to flush down your toilet: tampons, used condoms, withered celery stalks, old boots, computer hard drives, sacks of flour—dime bags of ground-up grain were especially common during food busts—what have you. The sewer company also has fecal monitors on all the sewer branch lines. This way we can compile effective statistics as to which neighborhoods harbor the most food terrists, and what kind of food they consume. Although the press had kept silent about this new technology at the Prophet’s request, word had begun to leak out into the criminal community. Many hoods had taken to building latrines or outhouses in their backyards, which severely limited our ability to track their movements. Their bowel movements, that is.

Erpent snickered. “A warrant. How quaint.”

“Hey,” I said. “We swore to uphold and defend the Amendment. The Constitution is part of the Amendment, last time I checked.”

“It’s the other way around,” Green said.

I frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Judge Meyer-Weiner!” Green said into his cell phone. “Sorry for the late call. Got an emergency for you.”

We’d had a citywide toilet tap authorized by the judge for months, looking for a single strand of Fatso’s DNA, anything we could use to track him. But Don Fatso was meticulous in his hygiene, and no matter how much he ate—and he was rumored to be a glutton of the first order—not a drop of pee, not a milligram of his poo ever found its way into the D.C. municipal sewer system.

While Green organized the toilet tap, I followed the ambulance as fast as I could. But the paramedics pulled away from us. I couldn’t keep up.

“Faster!” Erpent urged.

“What difference does a few minutes make?” my partner asked, hanging up the phone. “We’re both going to the morgue.”

“Every second counts,” the SS man snapped. “It’s a matter of national security.”

I hunched over the steering wheel. “I know a short cut.”

“Take it,” Erpent said. “That’s an order.”

I popped the flasher on the roof and squealed around the corner onto Avenue the Prophet Jones. Heading straight into the heart of Georgetown.

“Are you crazy?” Green shouted. “Go back!”

Erpent clutched the dashboard. “Are we going where I think we’re going?”

I peeled through a red light, swerved around a burned-out police cruiser. “Fastest way to the morgue is through the ghetto.”

“Fastest way to get eaten by cannibals, you mean!” Green shouted back.

Georgetown was D.C.’s food ghetto, famous the world over for the lawlessness of its food dealers, where you could get anything—anything—your overdeveloped and unnecessary digestive organs might desire. But for a price. The common wisdom held that it was only safe to enter Georgetown by day. Especially in the morning, after the addicts had gotten high off their white rice—they boil it, can you imagine?—and collapsed into bed in a drugged stupor. Some are even known to freebase the stuff, wash it down with a glass of water. But after dark? Don’t go to G-town, the ooga-booga cannibals will eat you.

Please. Stories to scare children into eating their vegetable-flavored air.

Where others see a cannibal, I see a lost soul. Someone who needs to hear the Prophet’s Gospel of Air. How I long to press a copy of
Food-Free At Last
into their bloodstained hands, get down on our knees together in the middle of the entrails and body parts, and pray. For faith. These people deserve our compassion. Not our derision and scorn.

I had been wanting to come here after dark for ages to spread the good word, but Green always seemed to come up with some excuse to keep us away. My visits were few and far between, and never at night. Now was my chance to save some souls. Even if it was only a brief visit.

To my surprise, Green and Erpent grabbed the steering wheel and tried to turn us around. But I was resolute. The fastest way to the morgue was by doing the Prophet’s will at the same time. Isn’t life just like that?

We turned a corner, and there they were. A jeep barreled down the street toward us. Men with automatic rifles clung to the roll bars. Red stains ringed their lips. One gnawed a bone, and threw it at us as they sped past. The bone bounced off our roof. Painted in red on the side of their vehicle were the words “Suck the Marrow Out of Life.”

Green clutched his service weapon. “Let’s hope they aren’t hungry.”

Erpent looked behind us. “Here they come!”

The jeep pulled a U-turn and roared after us. I popped the glove compartment. Empty.

“What a tragedy.”

“You’re telling me,” my partner said. “I don’t fancy being someone’s dinner.”

“No,” I said. “I mean we’re out of literature.”

“They’re going to kill us and eat us,” Erpent said, “and you’re worried about what kind of kindling they’re going to use to cook us?”

“No, silly,” I said. “That’s the Sushi Gang behind us. They don’t cook their victims.”

He gasped. “You mean they eat them raw?”

“They’ll cut off a leg and blowtorch shut the wound,” Green said. “Meat keeps fresher that way.”

Gunfire sizzled around us.

“Sizzle, sizzle!

Like crispy frying bacon

and fluffy scrambled eggs!

Served with French toast

and drenched in maple syrup! Yum!”

The flying Twinkie wriggled and chirped against my leg. I gritted my teeth.
Not now. Focus on the scenery. Look at all the empty storefronts spilling broken glass into the street.

“They’re gaining on us,” Green said.

“What are you so afraid of?” I asked. “They are poor, misguided souls who don’t know any better.”

“And that’s enough to kill us!” Erpent screamed. “Now do something!”

I spotted the Golden F’s up ahead. “Relax. I’ve got a plan.” I turned down a narrow alley, sped around a disused strip mall and pulled into the Air Temple drive-thru. I realized with horror that the jeep had been unable to follow us. We could just make it out, creeping around the block, looking for some sign of us. I would have to be quick, or I would lose my chance.

I rolled my window down. “Yeah, can I get half a dozen Prophet Packs and four condensed
Food-Free At Last
s?”

“They don’t strike me as readers, partner mine,” Green said.

A second jeep rolled after the first.

“Better make that a dozen Prophet Packs,” I said into the microphone. “And be quick about it, please. We got souls to save!”

I reached for the horn, to let the cannibals know where we were, but Green and Erpent wrestled my hands away from the wheel.

“What are you doing?”

“Can they see us?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe they’ll give up. Dawn is coming soon.” Military street patrols began at dawn.

“And lose our chance to bring them freedom?” I protested. “Let me go!”

The twin roar of the jeeps echoed in the street and faded into the distance. They were heading away from us—and their only chance at salvation.

I struggled, but Green and Erpent held my arms tight to my chest. “This is on your conscience,” I said. “Not mine.”

“They gone?”

“Looks like it.”

Four hands released their grip on me.

“Now what do we do?”

“Go after them,” I said. “And where are my Prophet Packs?” I smacked the drive-thru mike. It fell to the ground.

“Uh-oh,” Green said. “This must be an abandoned Air Temple. Probably being used as a food lab. We got to get out of here, now.”

Before he’d finished speaking, men with guns stepped out in front of us. I was flung back in my seat. Green’s shoe ground my foot against the gas pedal.

A gunman leaped aside, we jumped the curb and squealed back into the street.

“But those addicts needed our help!”

“We’re in a hurry,” Erpent said. “The body’s probably at the morgue by now.”

“Not going anywhere til dawn,” Green said. “Right now we need to find a place to hide.”

Erpent checked his watch. “But that’s half an hour from now, at least!”

Green snapped his fingers. “Rat Boy. Let’s go there.”

“Rat Boy?” Erpent asked.

“You’re right,” I said. “Finding Fatso is more important than those dealers.” My spirits lifted. I could feel the Prophet’s guiding hand at work in our investigation.

“Rat Boy’s a low-level informant. He helped us find Fatso once,” Green explained. “He might be able to find him again. Plus, no cannibal would ever look for us there.”

It was only a quarter mile to the Foodville where Rat Boy lived. Green was right, the Sushi Gang would never go there. Not enough flesh on the skeletal residents to make it worth their while. Next time I came to Georgetown, I would have to bring more literature. And leave Green and Erpent at home.

In the light of the remaining streetlamps, I got a glimpse of the ghetto by night. White men in business suits and expensive silk ties lounged on street corners, looking nonchalant. Their women, in well-cut wool pantsuits and subdued make-up, ground their hips up and down the sidewalk in low-slung pumps, with that mother-of-three come-hither smirk. And all of them prepared to scatter at the first sign of the Sushi Gang.

Such suffering. Such unnecessary squalor. All because of their addiction. Because of those evil food terrists at the French Food Mafia. My Twinkie broke into song, and I gripped the steering wheel tighter. Fatso was the greatest threat the air-eating world had ever seen. He had to be destroyed.

He had to be.

Six

It was a notch in the Prophet’s tape measure the day the ATFF captured Bakin Cheez Burgher VIII, a.k.a. Rat Boy. Heir to the Fat Boy Burger franchise, and great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Bakin Cheez Burgher Sr., the founder and much-reviled head of that calorie-distribution ring, the youngest Bakin Cheez became famous as his own company’s best customer. When the ATFF froze his assets, he fled to Switzerland. Or tried to, anyway. This was before the Prophet closed the borders. We caught him only because he was too big to fit in a first-class airline seat. He argued with the flight attendants long enough to delay takeoff. By that time the armed ATFF squad had limped aboard the plane, resting every few feet to catch their breath—that body armor is heavy, let me tell you—and escorted him back to the gate.

“This man is a symbol of what is wrong with our country,” the Prophet declared in the Thin House Rock Garden. He had replaced the dead rose bushes with Stonehenge-like slabs of West Virginia granite. “Look at him.” He turned and drilled a finger at Mr. Burgher VIII, who lay on his back, chained to a flatbed truck. “Eight hundred putrid pounds. Those great folds of fat. The slobbery jowls. The demented eyes of a crazed food terrist.

“The mouth was not made for eating!” the Prophet roared suddenly. “It was made for consuming God’s own air. And Mr. Burgher here is going to learn to eat air the hard way, whether he likes it or not. When we are done with him, he will be a role model of what any citizen of this great nation can be: thin.”

He gave a signal, and the Skinny Service driver turned the ignition. The flatbed truck hummed to life.

“Off to Fat Camp with him. Off to Fat Camp with all you food terrists out there who can’t understand three simple little words: ‘just say no.’

“And to those of you who say, ‘slow down.’” Exaggerated finger quotes. “‘Let us not go to extremes.’ I say to you: we have come to this hallowed spot” —and he swept a hand at the Rock Garden behind him— “to remind America, the Land of Air, of the fierce urgency of now. This is not the time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”

The Prophet’s words rang in my ears as the three of us limped through the Foodville toward Rat Boy’s hovel. The fierce urgency of now. That I understood. Twenty-two and a half hours to find Fatso. No one was ever more fiercely urgent than I was at that moment.

On our way through the shantytown we passed numerous emaciated bodies covered in swarms of writhing maggots. Amazing the lengths you French will go to weaken our faith. Employing Hollywood special effects artists—members of
La Résistance,
your network of domestic
saboteurs—
to construct such lifelike corpses. The maggots! The smells!