The Roman Toilet Ultimatum
by Torrance P. DerSitis (my thriller novel pen-name)
“City coroner,” the voice on the other
side of the door stated with all the authority you would expect from a person
who was allowed to exhume the dead on just a whim, rip open their bodies and
poke around to their heart’s content and Chisley Torgair thought, “But wait, I’m
not deceased. What could the coroner possibly want with me?”
That was to be his final thought
because just then a pigeon began cooing madly at the window of his dingy
one-room walk-up and when he turned to look he was met with a .22 slug right
through the head. He never heard the breaking glass. Oddly, his last question
was answered with the pull of a trigger.
A shadowy figure on the fire escape,
still holding a smoldering gun then uttered some seemingly nonsensical words that
would soon reverberate not only through the local precinct house but
internationally from a yurt in Irkutsk to a back deck barbeque party in Tobermory
at the tip of Georgian Bay with everyone in casual slacks, plus a couple of
stops on some ice floes along the way, beneath which lay secret laboratories
where recreational mutants were being bred, part insect, part mammal to
undermine the willpower of the human race, the project headed up by a group of
disgruntled ex-KGB and CIA agents and scientists who were not happy with their
severance pay, or so some said. “Makes the Cold War seem like Miami, eh, Yuri?”
was the joke they liked to beat like a dead horse around the facilities. A dead
horse they would have gladly eaten instead of having to chow down on freeze-dried
and microwavable entrees with names like “Glucose mit Hoof und Meatbowls and
Chocolate Cesspool Pit.”
“Tungsten spit-croft filberts divisional
seepage trust wingo-wingo gestational crust,” were the enigmatically
strung-together words the shadowy figure murmured reverently as he watched
Chisley Torgair momentarily twitch on the ground before his lights went out. Doesn’t
take long with a .22 drilling you a third eye while a pigeon shits in that sad
excuse for a flowerbox outside your rooming-house window that you fill with
your stubbed-out cigarette butts and lung oysters hawked up morning, noon and
night and all that despite your first name being Chisley. How did Chisley
Torgair, a broken-down and alcoholic Venetian blind assembler, though once the
scion of a wealthy family until he got into black market guinea pig breeding
and tried to pass off a couple of rats with glued on hair he cut from
passed-out drunks sleeping in his alleyway as “show pigs”, now currently jobless
and his only family that hadn’t disowned him the yellowed and mottled pictures
that came with his wallet, fit into the big picture? Moments later the city
coroner and his assistant broke down the rooming-house door but they were too
late. The assassin had disappeared.
“Goddamnit, Plitzsky, we’re too
late!”
“I know, didn’t you just say that a
moment ago?”
“No, that must’ve been someone else
or else you’re hearing things. When’s the last time you got some sleep,
Plitzsky?
“Don’t worry about me, Chief. I can
run on empty until I’m mummified.”
“If you say so. Anyway, this guy’s
playing us like a marlin on 120 Ib. test line. Teasing us for hours until we
just wanna give up, fling ourselves in the boat and die.”
“I hear you, boss. My gills are
hurting just thinking about it.”
This gave the coroner pause for as
far as he knew his assistant had never before displayed any type of affinity or
affiliation with fish species.
A hundred miles away in the
countryside in a heavily secured barn surrounded by an electrified fence, rows
of cows stood, their skullcaps cut away and plexi-glass domes placed over their
brain cavities. Their udders were hooked up to lie detector machines and the
cows were being asked questions by a group of men in lab coats.
“Your mother’s maiden name?” one man
barked.
“You have eight apples. Sally takes
away two. Then a laser disintegrates another. But the laser is so swift it’s
actually beaming into the future. So, did those apples actually exist in the
past or did you create them with extrapolations based partly on memory, partly
on misguided future desires mixed with an overwhelming sense of regret and despair?”
yelled another. The cows looked neither confused nor intrigued. They appeared
neutral as did their test results.
In an office overlooking the barn
floor below, Dr. Mibley Forblooth took it all in and lit a stick of incense
before placing it gently in the makeshift shrine he had erected to Phil Horvance,
philosopher, god, chartered accountant and his recently deceased brother-in-law
and who had vouched for his initiation into the secret sect of which he was now
president. A sect that was now poised to take over the world if they played
their cards right and the detonation buoys they’d contracted out to a bunch of
undergrad engineering students to build were both working and had been placed
in the right freighter shipping lanes. Of course all the students would have to
be killed afterwards.
As he placed the incense into the
shrine built from the limbs of superhero toys, condiment packs pilfered from
fast food restaurants and rat droppings, and ignoring a text message on his
phone asking “How’s it going with the bovine?” he intoned the holy words, the
words actually not nonsensical at all but a code for a very simple set of
instructions with nevertheless complex and catastrophic repercussions beginning
with the downfall of the three great superpowers of the world. And with all the
technology of today to think that this entire, crazy scheme had actually been
hatched way back when in the lavatories of Rome when some bad mutton had sent a
bunch of scheming senators into the communal facilities where they then,
between grunts and gas-passing swore and plotted revenge on all emperors, past,
present and future. But as they say, “when in Rome…” I guess the same could be
said for Sudbury after the sun’s gone down.
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