The Last Persecution

Chapter One The Time of the Antichrist

Another Day in Browntown

Morning came loud and noisy to Browntown, like an engine, like a train-rumbling down the tracks into the city from the east, blaring out its warning horn, Whaaah! with engines huffing and pistons chugging. Like an old train, morning came gruff and cantankerous; it came rusted, and oil stained. It came reeking of diesel. And Doctor P. L. Tarrec, himself moved like an old train, especially in still grey mornings, gradually building up speed to face each new dismal day. Whaaah! the warning blast wailed again. Doctor Tarrec froze, still tired, stalled on his feet.

From the bedroom of his basement level apartment he looked up to a small rectangular window, too small to be an egress window, but it let in a bit of light. Along with the light, rain water had seeped in around the uncaulked edges over the years, staining and blistering the wallpaper; the pattern of printed oak leaves, acorns, and mushrooms was obscured in ragged rust colored streaks. Cold, grey light streamed in now—not sunlight, not yet. It was not quite four a.m. What light there was at this ugly hour came from silver street lights. Sunlight and heat would come later, but he would hardly be any warmer. Doctor Tarrec rarely felt warm these days. Was he an actual doctor? Of either the medical or academic variety? I don’t know, but that’s what everyone called him.

Whaaah! That makes three, he said to no one in particular. Good morning, everyone. Another dismal day in Browntown. Browntown was a dying place, dingy with decay, but it wasn’t completely dead yet. It limped along like a leaf in the wind, clinging desperately to the tree branch at the cool end of September. Much of the city had burned during the Leader’s ascension riots–and later during the Night of the Long Fires. The buildings and homes and structures that hadn’t burned or been demolished with explosives were pocked with bullet holes, the architectural equivalent of acne scars and liver spots. Windows were busted everywhere and roofs collapsed. Concrete and rebar were piled in the middle of the streets and sidewalks. But people still clung to life in the city.

It may have been only the desperate pretense of normality but life, of a sort, went on. Children went to school. Fans attended sporting events and cheered for their favorite teams and players. Goods were exchanged. Cars and groceries were bought and sold–either openly or on the black market. Old men still sat in the park reading newspapers, smoking cigarettes and playing chess. So what if the range of their conversation was truncated? They still sat in the park every afternoon as if nothing had changed.

But everything was different. The Leader changed everything but everything went on just as always. We all pretended not to notice. Or pretended to pretend not to notice. Who were we deceiving? The Leader? His security forces? Ourselves? Anyone?

Doctor Tarrec dressed himself. He was slow in his early morning motions, but he was meticulous in his garments, even if they were worn and threadbare. He was stylish, I suppose, but decades out of style. His grey, wool pants were neatly creased. His plain, lavender colored shirt was neatly ironed and tucked into his belted pants. He wore a maroon ascot with a grey and black sport-coat. He checked his reflection in a mirror and decided it was good enough.

Below the window hung a battered calendar, a multi-year reusable calendar marked with filigreed signs of the Zodiac and Kabbalistic Sephirot. No one printed the yearly paper calendars anymore, with bright pictures of mountain landscapes, or scampering kittens, or voluptuous women in swimsuits and red, red, smiles a mile wide and deep, wide, with inviting eyes and dark, curled lashes. Printed paper calendars were gone, replaced (as most things were anymore) with digital displays, connected (as most things were anymore) to the information cloud. Doctor Tarrec, in general, preferred the old and distrusted the new; he distrusted anything as ephemeral as a digital nebula of electronic information. He turned the page of his calendar from August to September, the end of another summer. He was a few weeks behind. But he hadn’t been in this particular apartment in at least that long. He had several apartments throughout the city, most of those were secret, and hidden, leased under a variety of pseudonyms.

Tarrec distrusted the future; it filled him with anxiety. He’d seen enough of the past to know that the future would be dangerous. And worrisome. He’d seen some of the future too-in visions, in dreams and revelation. And he didn’t like what he’d seen there either.

It was September twenty-second now. There were dark days ahead, yes–dark, shrinking days. He could read the cabalistic notations of this strange calendar. He could mark the wax and wane of the moon and the coming and goings of black tom-cats. Dark days, yes, and long nights were coming, coming with great potential for good or for ill. But he didn’t trust it.

And now, a familiar task awaited him.

He stood beneath the window counting the minutes, breathing and counting his breaths. He was trying to accomplish two contradictory things at the same time: First-to anticipate the arrival of his enemies. They would be coming for him soon. He knew this as he also knew that he could hide, but not for forever. He could run, but not far. They would find him. They would catch up to him again. But he would anticipate their arrival. And-second–to relax. They were coming for him, but he would be ready. He would be prepared. Calmed. He would meet the future with a steady hand, at least with as steady a hand as an elderly man can hold.

There and there. Now here, and here, a delivery truck rumbled passed outside the window. Right on time. Now the street lights flickered once, twice, then whiffed out, as regular as clockwork. ‘And that’s an obsolete simile in this digital age’, he thought. Everybody ready now. Everybody up, he whispered to no one in particular.

He could hear them now, tramping down the street as they did every other morning, a squadron of heavy boot heels. One hundred marching men, two hundred boots in regular time. Clump. Clump. Clump. Clump. ‘As regular as boot heels,’ he thought, ‘now that’s a simile appropriate for the times.’ He chuckled at his own little joke. The Leader’s Cataleptic Troops were as rigid in their routine as they were in their physical form. Lockstep and lock-jawed, the Cataleptic troops felt little pain and they never tired.

Behind the Cataleptic Troops followed the ATT-771s, the Black Scorpions, prowling almost noiselessly ten centimeters above the potholed surface of the street, their drivers scanning the neighborhood for cached weapons, concealed explosives, fugitive citizens and Red-Illegals. They scanned for coca-communists and for bomb-throwing anarchists, for the modern day descendants of Leon Czolgosz. Tarrec couldn’t hear the nearly noiseless Scorpions from his room, but he knew they were there. He didn’t need to hear them; he could feel the change in the air. He could feel the buzzing, electrostatic pressure in the air as they scanned the buildings. The Scorpions were armed with electro-mechanical stingers tipped with needles and about fifty different neurotoxic poisons, and with the power to torment their victims for nearly half a year. Tarrec hurried now.

Alarm clocks elsewhere above him in the apartment building went off. Morning news programs turned on automatically: . . . reports of overnight violence in Des Moines. Seventy three deaths and . . . Disease Control are astounded by an outbreak of another particularly virulent strain of measles . . . and ". . . here to promote his new film, 9mm Lover. . . and . . . new travel restrictions in Tulsa, Oklahoma were announced today. No travel within a thirty mile radius of the radiation zones. . . "

That last report caught Tarrec’s ear. ‘Thirty miles. Thirty miles. . . A no travel zone? What is thirty miles?’ he wondered. On a table next to the bed he found a pencil and a small spiral-bound notebook. He began to write, trying to decipher the unspoken connections. He scribbled down the words that came unbidden to his mind.

When the courthouse clock boomed the hour, Tarrec startled from his meditative trance. The bells surprised him as they did every morning. The bells were regular and orderly, but they still consistently startled him. He dropped the pencil, saw it fall and bounce off the corner of the bedside table and skitter across the floor. Then he saw what he’d written in the notebook. It was a number and two words surrounded by astrological doodles and pointed arrows:

30 miles-Zombies

A number and two words and all of them two syllables long. There was something hidden in this. There was something happening there that the reporters were not reporting. But what? ‘What do the undead have to do with the living–even in Tulsa, Oklahoma?’ Tarrec snorted in frustration. There were just too many puzzles here, too many unanswered, too many unanswerable questions. He didn’t have time for them all this morning. The courthouse bells had already rung. Things would be starting soon. So he listened.

Now further down the rail, he heard the final loathsome blast from the train. Whaaah! But still, Tarrec listened for more. He could hear the grumble of Cyclopean helicopters low over the buildings and the rattle and growl of traffic in the streets.

Then Doctor Tarrec, like a magician, waved his hand and the morning was begun. The sun rose over the surly city. Doors slammed. Cars roared. I have seen the future, he whispered. If he whispered under the volume of the televised news he would not be heard by the listening devices installed by the Right Government™ He knew they were listening to him, that they were spying on him. They had been for years. I have seen the future and it is not real, he told himself.

He had work to perform, apotropaic work. There was evil to prevent and darkness to dispel. He had sympathetic magic to perform against missiles of lead and against all of the Leader’s pretty war things, all of those lovely war toys. This morning Tarrec had a synthetic magic to practice as well; he had leaden missiles to change into golden spears of sunlight. He would, if he could find the power, transmute the Leader’s evil, all his base metals into something shining and new.

Another day had begun in Browntown.

Little Paranoia with Your Morning Coffee

He left his apartment quietly, with the automated television still playing at a deafening volume. It was a rerun of the popular reality game show Torture Teams. Doctor Tarrec could still hear the shrieks and screams of the ‘contestants’ as he left the apartment. Before closing and locking the door, he placed a toothpick between the door and the painted, wooden jamb. He knew that the Right Government™ Watchers who regularly swept his apartment complex would notice it when they entered his place, and that they would fastidiously replace it as they left. Doctor Tarrec put it there because he knew that they would expect it from the ‘paranoid old coot.’ He half suspected that they knew that he knew this, but, Good Lord!, how far out could one spin that spider silk suspicion before one became actually paranoid instead of merely functionally paranoid. You need a little paranoia with your morning coffee, he often said, just to get along in this world. But too much is overwhelming; it paralyses. Too much kills. Just enough paranoia keeps you motivated and moving.

With the obviously inconspicuous toothpick warning system in place and the door secured and locked, Doctor Tarrec made his circuitous way across town. He never took the same route twice. Sometimes he took a bus-getting off at random stops, making three or four transfers-sometimes he hired a pedicab, sometimes he walked. He backtracked through alleys, climbed up fire-escape ladders and went across the skyline, politely bowing to and greeting the Chinese laborers in their rooftop rice-paddies with a breathless, "Nǐ hǎo" as he ran. He ducked into shops and restaurants, then out through back doors. He cut through school yards and used car lots. He carried a flashlight to navigate dark sewer tunnels.

And all these prevaricative routes worked. No one ever discovered his private, and still secret, laboratory-not the Right Government™ agents with their high-tech gadgetry and well trained negotiators, not the Brotherhood of Games with their mystic eyes and flights of spying crows. That ‘paranoid old coot’ knew how to keep himself hidden when he wanted to.

I once asked Doctor Tarrec about his ability to avoid detection, to lose his tails and go his way about town without being photographed by the Watchdog Cameras or recorded by Owl shaped videodrones overhead. In jest, because I really didn’t believe in such things then, not as I later would, I asked him, Do you have a doppelgänger that you send off as misdirection to fool the agents? Or a golem to lead your pursuers away?

He turned on me with a suddenness that scared me. And I saw in his wide, dilated eyes that he was scared too. A golem? No. A golem? Never! Never think it, my boy. Then he relaxed. Or tried to, anyway. He even tried on a smile, trying to make a comforting smile fit into that frightened face. He put his soft, wrinkled hand on my shoulder to reassure me of his affection. There is no trusting those magic mechanicals. And doppelgängers cannot be pressed into anyone’s service. They are too chaotic. He sighed and looked at me as if he were evaluating my potential, examining some metoposcopic quality in the lines of my face, reading my features for a glimpse of my future. "I do have. . . tricks, he said eventually. Tricks and secrets that I may teach you, but not today."

A Low Rent Lord of Flies

It’s funny-though not haha funny, but funny like a ventriloquist hangman throwing campy voices to his victims as they swing from the gibbet. It’s a bleak sort of humor, laughing and dancing at the end of the world sort of funny-that so many of the groups and programs and vehicles developed by the Leader and his followers within the Right Government™ were named and patterned after the animal kingdom.

There were the ATT-771s, the stinging Black Scorpions that patrolled the streets, scanning for delinquents and derelicts. There were the Watcher Owls, a junior civil scout group for wide-eyed kids, 8–13 years old who were trained to spy on adults–their parents and teachers and neighbors-and to report any deviation from the common behavior standards as well as the owl shaped videodrones that flew over the city. And the Sternodogs, of course, were everywhere, hunting like lunatic killers with their heads enveloped by flames of blue fire. The Leader of the Right Government™ even borrowed Adolf Hitler’s Werewolves for his neighborhood militia groups. He commissioned them to put up an armed resistance to America’s enemies, armed them to fight as a homegrown defense league against terrorists, communists, and other treacherous-ists.

Bram Stoker told us that the undead, the nosferatu, are served by the animal kingdom-the rat, the owl, the bat-that their legacy of evil is worked by the nocturnal moth, and the trickster fox, and by the powerful wolf. The vampire is assisted by animals of stealth and cunning, by animals of darkness and despair. They are his psychopomps, harrying the souls of the dead into hell. We should have made the connection. We should have seen it sooner. It would have saved us all sorts of difficulty. The Leader, like Count Dracula, like Beelzebub, is master of animals, a low-rent Lord of Flies.

Things that Must Be Said

Many thousands and thousands of pages have been written about the Leader. Book after book, by scholar and hagiographer alike, by professionals as well as overeager amateurs. Hundreds—thousands of gallons of ink and forests of pages have been devoted to his praise. The works of his critics, of course, never reached the printed page. Still we must persist; we must go on. These are the things that must be said.

He is an Illuminati witch–with all the attendant spells and incantations accumulated in a thousand years of secret study in the arcane libraries of the world. He is greatly improved in translation. He is a Triumphant Teutonic Terror, the Acolyte of Acedia. He is ithyphallic—but impotent. He is a roman a clef brought to life, a façade of fiction stretched over the sad, skeletal remains of real life.

The Leader is a Janus figure: one face is DISREPAIR, the other DESPAIR. Backward and Forward he reads the same. He is the beginning of and end result of conflict. Paul the Deacon, that revered Benedictine of old, described him as the gaping, yawning King of Chaos, the One going and passing into the void. He is scheming and plotting the beginning and ending of all our lives. Lo, he stands at the door and pounds upon the boards. If anyone hears his voice and opens the door, he will be rewarded. The door that is unopened will be battered down, and the Leader will enter, victorious anyway. He who has ears to hear should consider himself well warned.

He is the high priest offering blood sacrifices in the citadel of unbelief. He spills blood with vigor and drinks blood with vinegar. He is the secret storm of a dark heart. He is dysthymia. He is blunt affect. He is brutal and cold.

The Leader is good. The Leader is always right. The Leader is the first soldier, the first worker, and the High Protector of Stone Mountain, the Defender of this Shining City built on the American hill, and the eyes of all people are truly upon him and upon his Right Government™, and on every rotted root and branch therein. Beset, as we are, by terror without and disorder within, he is a rock stronger than oceans, wind-swept and God-blessed. He is the lie big enough to be told, and the lie told frequently enough to be believed.

GO AWAY! is written in the dust upon the window of his mind.

I’m Not Laughing at the Old Man Anymore

Some folks think that Doctor Tarrec is crazy, that he’s a kook, that he’s lost a shoe or thrown a screw. And they wonder why I spend so much time with him, why I take the things he says seriously. He’s so obviously crazy, or at least obviously politically deviant. In these days those both mean the same thing—and both are equally dangerous. The Leader has patience for neither the mentally ill nor the traitor because the traitor is mentally ill and because the mind of the mentally ill person has turned traitor against him or herself, and traitors, all traitors must die.

People think he’s crazy because he will frequently say something utterly fantastic like: "Fluoridation causes mental cancer, and the Right Government™ knows this for a fact. That’s why they put the fluoride in the water." They snort, and they laugh. They roll their eyes and wave their hands to dismiss him. He’s so obviously deranged. They wonder that he hasn’t already been picked up by ICE or Homeland Security or the Longarm Gendarmes, or taken into the slavering jaws of a blue-fire Sternodog.

But I don’t think he says these things, because he’s crazy—that’s too easy, too facile—I think he says these things because these things are crazy, because this world is insane.

He says ridiculous things like: The United States Air Force (USAF) is deliberately spraying psychotropic chemicals over my house to disrupt my work. They want to confuse my already age addled brain. They’ve been doing this for months now, but in the past week they’ve initiated a new tactic. In addition to spraying mind altering drugs into the atmosphere, they are now releasing some sort of electrically conductive particles. This is part of one of their massive electromagnetic superweapons-the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). If they can’t prevent me from writing, they will try to steal my words,

And he says: "It is true that the Illuminate, the Satanists and the U.S. Army all use the pentagon as a symbol, but to suggest that this is something more than mere coincidence is