Monkey Wrench Read online

Their neighborhood wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst, either. Once an upper-middle-class neighborhood, over the decades it had decayed into a predominantly lower income neighborhood, at least with no obvious gang activity.

  Yet.

  And the owner of their building actually did what he could to make repairs in a timely manner since he had several military widows in residence and received stipends from the government for each one.

  Stacia plodded home, depressed and angry at Marvin and his stupidity. There, she undressed, pulled on one of the oversized T-shirts she slept in, and tried to get some sleep. She needed to be out the door by eight that night to make sure she caught her bus.

  The last bus of the day from her neighborhood to the plant.

  If she didn’t make it, she’d be farked.

  I’m going to let Marvin do whatever the fark he wants. I’m done trying to look out for him when he obviously doesn’t give a crap about looking out for himself. Or us.

  Chapter Six

  Rev. Hannibal Silo sat in his study. He’d just released a lot of tension by completing his daily discipline ritual with his wife. Belting her ass, until it was glowing red and hot, and then fucking her ass while she used the vibrator on herself.

  Two nights in a row of that had reduced her to pathetic, shame-ridden sobs that were music to his soul.

  Who needs antidepressants?

  He smiled. Well, Mary did, because he’d had her taking them for so long. Not so much antidepressants as depressants, medication meant to keep her docile and compliant.

  He’d taught her the facts of life when she’d dared defy him once before, years ago, early on in their marriage. A nurse had tried experimenting with taking Mary off the drugs while he was out of town.

  Fortunately, he’d arrived home early and unannounced, fired the nurse on the spot, and crammed the medicine down Mary’s throat before she was questioned by authorities and denied there were any problems.

  By that time, the medicine had once again taken effect.

  And Mary had sported a blistered ass from the belting he’d given her for defying him and asking the nurse to “rescue” her.

  Not to mention she’d had a very sore asshole from the fucking he gave her.

  Before that night, he usually didn’t resort to physical discipline with her. Only when he felt she was growing too complacent, or he’d especially been in the mood to spank her before she sucked him off or he fucked her. More a way to keep her mentally off-balance, to never know what to expect from him.

  To obey him.

  Even more importantly to Silo, to fear him.

  From that night on, he’d given her the daily discipline ritual. Obviously, she’d needed it.

  Now it was second nature to her but she still cried every night.

  And that always gave him a hard-on.

  Tonight, his main task before bed was to go over the text for one of the special sermons he would film in a few days. Little half-hour shows that would air in paid time slots on other networks, as well as would be posted on the church’s website.

  Jerald had written this one with emphasis on creating additional anxiety over the growing Kite epidemic. Yet it was vital they not alienate any potential new followers at this point, and they wanted to ensure the continued support of their current sheeple.

  It doesn’t matter what label you give God. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care if you’ve worshipped in a temple or a mosque or in the middle of the woods. I do not believe in judging people, and never have. That is not my job. I cannot condemn someone for who they love, as long as they are adults. I cannot condemn someone for a divorce. I cannot condemn someone who has turned their life around and focused themselves on being a better person and improving the world around them.

  If you have grown tired of judgment, of divisive dogma that does little more than serve a human agenda, perhaps it is time for you to allow me a chance to show you what love is supposed to be, what God means to me. Allow me to introduce you to my God, to my church. And if you still feel you wish to look elsewhere in seeking spiritual comfort, then I would be the first to offer you a smile, wish you well, shake your hand, and thank you for keeping an open mind. Jesus would not tolerate me doing anything less than that.

  He spoke the lines aloud, testing the cadence, the timing, adjusting very little.

  As usual, Jerald had done an impeccable job of imitating him. On paper at least.

  In the years Jerald had been with him and helping him write his sermons, donations had soared. Jerald had studied thousands of hours of his past sermons, watched him in real life, and had combined the best of neurolinguistic programming with gentle religious rhetoric to complement Silo’s style.

  The man was a friggin’ genius.

  Had Silo known about NLP back in his early days, he might have soared to superstardom years ago.

  They had several large satellite churches all over the Unites States, as well as in other countries. In the largest ones, they held live sermons with a video screen, the local congregations following along as he gave his sermon. In some of the smaller ones, or ones where time zone issues conflicted, they replayed the sermon at a more reasonable hour.

  But they’d discovered if they broadcasted the live sermons, even if they fell in the middle of the night local time, people would still attend. Oh, smaller numbers to be certain, but every dollar taken in during a sermon was another dollar in the pot.

  Silo also had the churches simulcast his special speaking engagements. That way, people who couldn’t afford to travel to see him in person could still see him, for free.

  And the offering plates were always passed around, meaning more income. The parishioners felt included, felt like he was allowing the poor a chance to see him speak, like he was accessible to them. He conducted periodic live sessions with various churches when tithes lagged, accepting direct questions and comments from attendees.

  Those always raised the tithing. People liked it when they felt they could connect to him.

  And, periodically, Jerald would handpick local parishioners after careful research and pay all expenses to fly them to Albuquerque to meet with Silo privately for several hours.

  Those meetings Silo always found tedious, but it never failed that when the people returned home, they talked him up so much that it was worth the ROI when the next tithing reports came out for that church.

  It was far more cost-effective to bring people to him than to waste his time going out and visiting elsewhere. Especially now, with Kite burning up the globe. They’d lost five churches already, the latest losing communication with them a week ago.

  All attempts to contact them remained futile.

  Jerald had recommended keeping those facilities on the satellite feed, though. Just in case there were still parishioners who knew how to turn on the equipment. It wouldn’t do to have them feel abandoned.

  In other words, it didn’t hurt anything to keep the feed going, rather than dumping them off the server access.

  Their web team had reported drastically decreased page hits in India, China, and other countries in the region. That, more than anything, had been a startling benchmark.

  But their page hits were steadily increasing in the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, Russia, areas in South America, and Western Europe. Online donations from those areas were also on the rise.

  Jerald had suggested an extended schedule of video feed events to those regions where donations were on the uptick.

  Again, it couldn’t hurt.

  Jerald had also conducted several vigorous rounds of interviews and hired Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese voice actors to dub some of his sermons and Internet-only content for Central and South America as an experiment. They already had translators who live-captioned every sermon in local languages, their jobs made easier by having early access to the scripts.

  Jerald wanted to see if it made any difference having different audio feeds available.

  Silo took a break a
nd leaned back in his chair. The first batch of volunteers was being prepared at that moment in the LA facility. They were undergoing some pretty rigorous mental, emotional, and spiritual programming. As long as they successfully completed that portion of the program, they would then be trained for their mission.

  Spreading the word of God. Spreading the feeling of God’s love.

  Of course, they’d be spreading Kite the whole time.

  They expected a portion of the candidates to wash out. They were hoping for at least a twenty-five-percent success rate. Because the ones who made it to the second part of the program would not all likely be successful in their missions. Anything could happen. Their illness could progress faster than anticipated. They could have problems actually carrying forth their objective. Hell, some junkie could mug them and kill them.

  Then again, as long as junkies got the drugs, that would be okay. The objective would still be achieved, getting Kite the drug into people’s veins so it could spread Kite the virus throughout the lower rungs of society and begin culling the herd.

  Ah, the beauty of Kite the drug. One of Silo’s operatives had picked up the recipe for that from a very scared North Korean national who had apparently missed the radioactive barbecue of his homeland by a few hours when he escaped on a boat that dropped him off in Busan, South Korea.

  Wanting nothing more than the funds to get the hell off the Korean peninsula, he’d eagerly sold the recipe to an information broker from Russia whom Silo had used in the past. That broker had given Silo first dibs on it, because he knew how much Silo was willing to pay for the other half of the equation, scientists on The List.

  Jerald had immediately set to work putting together a small team of chemists with backgrounds in illegal pharmaceuticals to create a test batch, which they’d just finished unleashing in New York City.

  It was a resounding success.

  And they had synthesized a much larger batch of it and were using it on their new volunteer “apostles.” The drug created a functional euphoria, an addictive high without taking away a person’s ability to think and reason. And the effects of one dose lasted nearly twenty-four hours.

  But with that first dose, the brain’s pleasure centers were irreparably altered. The first dose, literally, would hook you.

  It was that effect they were capitalizing on with their volunteers. Mix the drug with the mindfuck and hardwire the Glory of God right into their cerebral cortexes.

  Or, whatever part of the brain it was that the drug impacted. That wasn’t Silo’s concern. All he cared about were the results.

  The results being that their test subjects would feel great, better than they’d ever felt in their lives. They were being told it was an experimental vitamin and vaccine mixture. Then they would be charged with finding the most unfortunate people they could and improving their lives by literally injecting them with the essence of the Holy Spirit so they could feel that good, too.

  Amen, hallelujah, pass the potatoes.

  They would not, of course, be told what would happen to them if they didn’t get their daily dose. Not even the volunteers would know about that. They would be told to keep giving themselves the injections every day, and would be given enough for seven days.

  The chemists had even come up with the idea of making it a different color than the rest of the doses, so the volunteers would think it was different.

  In seven days, the volunteers would either be dead or dying from Kite the virus. Hopefully taking out a shitload of worthless people with them.

  They were also being programmed with some very paranoid suggestions that they had to be careful not to expose themselves to any authorities. That the government was fighting to stamp out the Word of God, and that they would try to stop the volunteers from fulfilling their God-given mission.

  Amen, brothers.

  Yes, suicidal, paranoid, brainwashed volunteers armed with a highly addictive drug, carrying a deadly virus payload. Of course, they didn’t know they were on a suicide mission. Two of the criteria for selecting the volunteers had been dumb and poor. Meaning people who were easy to manipulate, and who had families who likely wouldn’t push too hard for answers regarding their loved one’s disappearance when a gigantic cash payment showed up in their bank account.

  If this worked, and if they got away with it, they would conduct another operation elsewhere on a much larger scale.

  Meanwhile, they would be putting more batches of Kite the drug out on the street for sale to prime the pump, as it were, in urban areas where drug activity was already high and where they wanted new batches of infections.

  If the plan failed, or if any of their people were captured before they died, they already had a backup plan in place. For starters, the clinic wasn’t an official Church of the Rising Sunset facility. It appeared as such on the outside to the casual onlooker.

  But the corporate charter, bank accounts—everything—was set up as an independent entity that could be traced back to someone from Saudi Arabia who only existed on paper there. Even the computer system was self-contained and in no way connected to their larger network. The logos used on the facility’s brochures and paperwork were just different enough that the church’s lawyers could claim it was a case of fraud and trademark infringement.

  Nowhere in the official church rosters did the LA facility even exist. And nowhere in the LA facility was Reverend Silo’s likeness.

  Yes, recruitment messages had been sent out via their normal channels. But the origins of all of those messages could be traced back not to an official employee of the church or a message board moderator, but to a user of the message boards, a non-existent PR person at the LA facility who simply used publicly accessible church channels to spread their misinformation. If anyone from their church was cornered as having promoted the facility, Jerald already had an easy explanation ready—they were all simply mislead. Honest mistake. They were guilty of nothing but being trusting, because they thought the clinic was legitimate and part of the church’s large and ever-expanding charitable network.

  Nowhere had Silo ever mentioned it, anywhere. He would absolve his people of any guilt and make public mea culpas on their behalf, placing the blame squarely back on the “people” who ran the clinic and tried to capitalize on his church’s good name.

  Jerald was a friggin’ genius, as far as Silo was concerned.

  In case of an accidental media exposure that they weren’t prepared to deal with, Jerald had made sure the facility had gas lines running throughout the building that could be remotely opened and ignited.

  Whoops! Gas leak. Sorry, our bad.

  If that was the option they had to resort to, and people came to the church and questioned it, they could always claim they believed it was a legitimate research facility, and that any malfeasance resulting from its operations was not known to Silo or the church at large. That its illegal activities were most certainly not known to, nor sanctioned by, the church.

  Every option had been covered. Very few people knew about the Kite virus aspect of the operation. The volunteers wouldn’t be infected until the day before they were sent out on their missions. The people involved in the training aspect were church loyalists who were not only being paid well via accounts traceable to the facility and not the church, but their families were already safely nestled in completed church strongholds throughout the country. The chemists participating in the Kite the drug aspect of the training were also being paid well, and now had secured places in strongholds for their families, too. They also did not know the full extent of the operation or its ultimate goals.

  Then there were the researchers who knew all about Kite the virus. They were attempting to synthesize a vaccine and were able to obtain fresh Kite virus samples nearly every day, either from dying or dead victims, via health department contacts working at the new LAX international airport.

  They just had no idea those samples would also be used to infect the volunteers.

  Only three on-site s
taff actually knew the full story, and nowhere were they listed in any of the facility’s computer records. One was Dr. Able Isley, a psychiatrist firmly under Silo’s thumb. He’d personally recruited the two other doctors. They were suffering extreme financial and legal duress and willing to suspend their Hippocratic Oaths long enough to help with the project. They also accepted huge sums of money for their participation and silence, as well as had guaranteed places for themselves and their families in the church strongholds.

  Win-win.

  Well, except the volunteers. They would be the ultimate losers. Them, and the people they infected. At least the volunteers’ families would be financially well-off.

  But Silo didn’t really care about any of them. They were merely tools by which he could do God’s work.

  Jerald had arranged that any of the volunteers who didn’t successfully complete the program would be reported as having sadly died in tragic accidents as they were returning home. The facility, of course, gave the families an immediate insurance payout of twenty-five grand cash, seeing that the volunteers had been there on business. Oh, and they covered all funeral cremation expenses and had the cremains shipped to them.

  It was the least they could do.

  The payments were coming from an account in Switzerland that wasn’t tied to the church in any way, so no one on Silo’s Albuquerque staff would see the payouts. Only Jerald.

  And he wasn’t talking.

  They’d already had to eliminate a few volunteers who’d washed out.

  Jerald had made sure the volunteers they’d selected came from locations scattered across the nation, and did background checks to make sure none of them knew each other. And they would be sent out in teams to cities they weren’t familiar with. There wouldn’t be a “pattern” to put together. The volunteers who made it through the program and completed their missions wouldn’t be talking about them.

  They’d be dead.

  Likely, with everyone focused on all the other troubles going on in the United States, as well as the world at large, the last thing anyone would be worrying about were a few tragic deaths out of the hopefully tens of thousands that would soon keep public health officials hopping to get ahead of the new Kite infections to control the spread of the disease.