25
National Security Agent Green drove a rental car to the coroner’s office where he presented his Homeland Security card to the secretary. Green was rushed into the autopsy room which smelled to him of various stages of human rot. Bob Green could not understand what motivated anyone to become a forensic criminologist. They were always dipping their hands inside people who had just died of one trauma after the other. Many parts of these unfortunate victims were nearly in shreds from the vicious societal mayhem of which they had become victims.
Fortunately, Agent Green felt rested this morning. The jet flight to this city where people were going ballistic over Obama Care had been notoriously uneventful. In fact, it had been a downright bore. Even the rather lumpy and wrinkled stewardesses seemed out of sorts as they marched up and down the airliner’s aisles like the ugly elderly trolls they had become over years of unrewarded public service. There was definitely nothing on the flight to give a young man a morning rise, so he had spent his miserable flight time sleeping with his head against the outer wall. When he exited on the tarmac, he figured correctly that this little city was nothing but another way station on the circuitous path to his monthly paycheck. If a woman were to show up along the way, he’d willingly and gratefully jump her and be done, but only if she were willing. He was not the type of guy to force these things. If they wanted him, fine. If they didn’t want him, that was fine, also. Whatever. Otherwise, he’d just serve his time like any other willing and patient captive held in the bowels of a desperate small town prison as this one was.
He entered the premises of the morgue where he knew that hundreds of Obama Care corpses were patiently lying in wait just to have their vitals analyzed under the auspices of the coroner’s flashing scalpels. When he got to the coroner’s autopsy table, he introduced himself, making sure he puffed up the authority of his federal badge. Green thought that puffing himself up as a federal agent was a lot of fun. He loved the feeling of power he got when he put down the locals. They usually groveled before him. “I need your reports on these two cases you’ve been working on,” Dr. Yong, Agent Bob Green said in a harsh voice. “We are working with many coroners.”
The trouble was that Yong was no federal agent’s patsy. Arrogance might work fine for others, but Yong was at least as arrogant himself, if not more so. Green did not yet understand that he had met his match. He was about to discover a different world.
“That’s your problem, sir, and not mine. I just do my job,” Yong said to Green. “As for my reports. They are in a filing cabinet which my secretary can help you with. As for me, I’m swamped with rotting corpses which are kept barely stabilized by refrigeration, but, as you probably know, there are so many of them that it’s going to take several more weeks for me to open and catalog them for my report files.”
“What’s your overall conclusion, Dr. Yong, concerning what you’ve seen and investigated?” Green asked him.
Yong continued lifting a solid heart from the body of one Nathan Goodfellow as though agent Green was not in the room at all.
“This is an enlarged heart,” Dr. Yong said into his phone’s voice recorder. “Heart failure was imminent.”
Green was a federal agent, and he was not used to being ignored like this. He felt like Yong was treating him like an unwanted irritant. Which might not be very far from God’s honest truth.
“I’m a federal agent, sir, and I need more attention from you than this, sir. I can help or hinder your efforts here, you know.”
“Mr. Green, let me tell you that we don’t need any Homeland Security bullshit here. It is the federal government which you represent that is responsible for all of this national and local mayhem that people like myself have to deal with at the ground level as I am now doing. I am carrying out to the best of my meager abilities a scientific method for living with the mess that the federal government made of Obama Care, and, until you correct what you are doing in that corrupt Babylon known as Washington, more and more are going to die in reaction to your mismanaged health care system. That system, by the way, is really nothing but an insurance boondoggle and a fraud, and everyone knows it. Those of us out here in the heartland are sick and tired of it, my dear friend. Now, if you expect me to stop dissecting and cataloging the dead because a sorry ass investigator from Washington is standing here next to me with his golden federal badge dangling from a chain on his scrawny chest, then you are mistaken. I am unconcerned about the federal government, because I don’t live in Washington, DC. I live here. The problem was started in Washington where you and your agency grows its nasty little policing and spying flowers, of which you are evidently one variety.
“I suggest you get back there and stay out of my domain. I know how to handle this. My reports will be on line soon, and you can read all of them there and then. But I don’t have time for you now.”
“I’m with Homeland Security. You have to work with me.”
“No, I don’t. I have more than enough to do. My assignment is to investigate each of these homicides and write my official report. My work grade does not require me to work with you right now or ever. This triage of cases caused by your government’s incompetence is overwhelming me, and that’s all I can work with. Now, my friend, Detective Branch, is sitting right over there by the reporting and observation desk. Detective Branch might have time to work with you. As for me, I’m not stopping my work for anyone. There’s still several hundred families wanting to take possession of their loved ones so they can bury their bodies in a decent and Christian manner, and I intend to help them in that regard.”
“You are an ass,” Green said. “Do you know that?”
“I can tell you of a few women who would agree with you about that,” Dr. Yong said, smiling widely. “Your observations have been made by ladies far pushier with their female senses of self importance than you can ever hope to be. They have made that very clear. Of that, I can assure you.”
Green looked at Detective Branch.
“Is he always like this?”
“Generally, yes. I’ve gotten to know him over the years,” Branch said. “And he’s right. He doesn’t have any extra time at all. His findings are right here, Bob, and I can work you up a summary of our situation while Dr. Yong continues to work at the cutting edge of the homicides in question.”
“So, Detective,” Green asked him, “what are your assessments of this case?”
“For starters, it’s like Dr. Yong said. The government is the main killer. If they’d done their job of running a proper health care system instead of this expensive and worthless Obama Care charade, all of these bodies you see on the slabs and in bags would be at home in bed warmly sleeping next to their spouses instead of waiting in this cold and God forsaken room to be dissected. I and half the town agree with Dr. Yong on that.”
“Sounds like a form of domestic terrorism,” Green said, “with all of these mass murders and all.”
“Wrong,” Detective Branch said.
“How am I wrong?”
“The terrorist is the federal government’s health care program, sir,” Detective Branch told him. “The murders and mass killings are a natural reaction to the indifference of this health care system which doesn’t want to treat people the way they used to be treated before congress got involved and began to muck everything up. As for the murders, they are just gunshots perpetrated by the government’s indifference to these people’s relatives. It’s the government that’s at fault.”
Agent Green proceeded to the coroner’s huge stacks of reports. They had been authored well. The descriptions of the deaths were precise. Each had been tersely written. The people died of their wounds. Each wound was described, each head and thorax opened, each brain and organ inspected, and the reason for death noted. Their deaths were from traumas and gunshots. Green put the reports away. He’d seen enough.
As he left for his car, he was handed a piece of paper written by Dr. Chen Yong. The note read, “Thanks. Remember this. Death by Obama Care. That
’s what it’s all about, Agent Green. — Dr. Chen Yong, Coroner.”
“Fuck these people,” Green said to himself. “They are out here arrogantly destroying America. All they have is their insolence toward us, but we’ll win. We’ll get them back. We own the government, and they don’t. So we will always win, and they will always lose. That’s the one thing that’s certain.”