2.a.iii
Tanya took a
deep breath and said, “Some of us. You
have to understand, the players that they didn’t… remove from the game the night
of the election were eliminated after nine
eleven .”
Mr. Jones
furrowed his brow, but before he could ask, Tanya continued, “We haven’t been
able to prove that the attacks were initiated by them, meaning our government
or the corporate conglomerates that control our government, or if it was truly
an act of terrorism by scary foreign guys and the party in power just took
advantage of the situation. What’s
clear, however, is that certain powers were granted to certain agencies in
order to deal with the supposed threat. Those
powers were then, of course, used to force those like us into hiding or, in
some cases, to eradicate us.”
Mr. Jones
shook his head. “Who? Who’d they get?”
“Remember Ben
Buck, the Dollar Man and his sidekick Two Cents?”
“Yeah. Dollar and Cents.”
“Well,
Professor Inflation got a hold of Two Cents.
No one knows what that bastard did to him, but Two Cents has been
worthless ever since.”
Tanya turned
the pickup into a parking lot of a huge grocery superstore. She shut off the engine and said, “We still
don’t know who killed Ben. His brains
were smashed in with the Gold Standard.
Most people think it was a member or the Foreign Market but I think it
was an inside job. Only American hands
can lift the Gold Standard.”
Tanya opened
her door and got out of the pickup. She
motioned for Mr. Jones to follow her.
“Here?” he
asked.
“We need
supplies. I doubt the stuff at The
Office is still good after all this time and we need to lay low for awhile.”
“But
here? This is a Waldos,” he said.
“Yeah, I–”
“Companies
like this are part of the problem.”
“I know,”
Tanya said. “But there are no locally
owned places anywhere near here.”
Mr. Jones made
a reluctant exit and followed Tanya toward the superstore.
“Who else?” he
asked. “Anyone ever locate John?”
“As in John Q
Public?”
“Yeah.”
“No. After his brief return in the late nineties
he fell off the radar again. No one’s
seen him since. Most members of The
Union are unaccounted for or assumed dead.
Miss Pension suffered the loss of most of her family at the hands of The
Crash. She went after that beast and
ended up a quadriplegic.”
As they
crossed the threshold of the Waldos superstore, Mr. Jones wrinkled his nose and
held his fist up to his mouth.
“Oh God. It stinks.”
“They all
smell like this,” Tanya said.
“It’s like…
panic sweat and fast food.”
“With a hint
of cheap plastic and formaldehyde”