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America: Sometime in the not too distant future. “We have to do this by Friday or we won’t be alive to do it at all. There is no turning back now. However this started, it ends in forty-eight hours. I’m sorry but tomorrow is all you get. How is the rest of our plan coming together?” “Everything else is set,” he said, impatient and angry at his new deadline,“we have our doctored passports, our tickets, and our field hands are waiting for us once we get off the plane.” He unloaded a small carry-on suitcase onto the card table hastily set up in the far corner of the empty warehouse. “Providing we can get out of D after the shutdown.” “Of course, but also providing I can bring her down in the first place.” He looked at the array of falsified passports and international visas sprawled out upon the table in front of him. Three Berretta 10mm pistols weighed down and framed the documents, their blue polished skin misled the casual eye as to the power of death that lay beneath their armor. “Have you heard from that Detective lately?” “No, I don’t know where he is. I’m going to run by his place in the morning and see just what in the hell he’s up to. I’m afraid that his zeal for destroying THOMASS may cloud his judgment to just how suicidal a mission this is.” “Or he may know that same fact only too well.” They both ignored the implied warning. He picked up one of the loaded steel magazines that lay beside one of the pistols. With his thumb, he forced out a hollow point shell into his palm. The lone golden light bulb hanging above him glittered off of the brass casing as he weighed the bullet within his open hand. “Forty-eight hours,” but no one heard his whisper. In another town not too far away, a lone figure gripped a key within his wet palm, turning the sliver of steel over and over again as he dug the teeth end of the metal into his skin. The Ryder truck’s banana yellow walls seemed too loud for him to be safe, but he discarded the caution as superfluous. When he arrived at the driver-side door, he stopped and stared into the small silver circle encasing the keyhole. “There is still time to walk away,” he whispered, the pale, white mist from his breath gliding up in front of his face and dissipating into the moist air around him. But his hand dismissed his words by sliding the key into the stiff steel sheath, and he turned the lock to the right – a heavy clunk from within the door’s thin skin- and opened the high, skinny door. Inside, the two-seated cab smelled new. The black, vinyl seats were coated light gray with a slick film of the cold morning’s dew. The windshield and windows were covered in the same, but he didn’t clean them off. Instead he sat and stared into the impenetrable film that colored the outside world into dark shades of greens, blues, and blacks. To his right, high on narrow tracks, a silver New Jersey Transit train slipped by carrying its morning commuters to Brick Church, Hoboken, and beyond. The high trees and shrubs bordering the parking lot were easily discernable, but the rest of the world blended into the wash of an unrecognizable whitish gray wall reaching up high on his left side. His breath poured from his mouth in translucent clouds, reminding him of the cold air, but his skin hadn’t registered the bitter temperature. If he shivered, he didn’t think it was from the cold, anyway. He looked down to the detonator lying still on the floor of the cab and decided it would be best if he ran over the plan in his head one more time… “With my signature, this law “This new law that I sign today “This legislation is essential
“It is now my honor to sign -President George W. Bush, October 26th, 2001
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