44
They entered the hospital. It took about fifteen minutes for the tea party to quietly penetrate security and to move beyond its front desk. Each of them signed in and indicated the floors and offices where they were heading. Some were going to the physician offices, nurses stations, staff areas, pharmacy, and various specialty departments. Others were going to speak with patients wherever that was deemed possible.
Ronald Parsons headed toward several doctor’s offices. He entered them rapidly, speaking with the receptionist, making a five-minute appointment for later that day, then going to the next doctor’s office and doing the same. Then, he went back to the first office and waited. After two hours, his name was called, and he went into the back room. There, he was seated for the doctor. After another ten minutes, Doctor Edwin Rosen came into the room.
“I understand you need five minutes with me,” Dr. Rosen said.
“Yes. I am here on account of the problems you are having with Obama Care. How do you feel about the program so far?”
“I think it is deficient in funding, and my patients are not getting the care they got before that program began. We, as physicians are not being paid correctly, either.”
“Do you blame the government, the treasury, the congress, the president, or the insurance companies?”
“The major problems are due to the way our government is elected. They are basically taking bribes in order to get enough funds to win an election. Then they feel like they have to vote for the needs of those who made their election possible by paying for their campaign costs.”
“Can you give me direct instances?”
“No. But you are the reporter, and I think you already know the instances, at least in your city and state. You have access to the financial statements of the candidates as well as to those of corporations who advertise for them without even being in contact. That’s your job. Mine is healing patients.”
“Have you sent patients home to die who would have been totally eligible for treatment before the Obama Care program started?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Rosen. “I think all of us have been forced to do these things.”
“Does that reduce the survival rates of these patients?”
“I think it does, but I have no way of knowing. There’s always three major ways of treating a disease. One is by doing nothing, one is by administering medicine, and the other is by using surgery.”
“Which is better?”
“That depends on the patient and the situation.”
“Do you think you are still able to treat patients in the same professional way?”
“I do not treat them in the same way, but I do treat them in a professional way. I do everything that I can for them considering the parameters of treatment that are allowed to me.”
“Is that what the doctor ordered or what the insurance company ordered?”
“It is what the insurance companies allow.”
“We are suggesting that you contact senators and congressmen to let them know that their program has resulted in less care for your patients and that the situation as it exists presently is intolerable.”
“I write them all the time with that message, but it does no good. The situation still seems frozen. I don’t see any reasonable way for it to improve.”
“Why is that?”
“I think with all of the useless wars around the world, our government is basically bankrupted for the next twenty or more years. There’s no money for health care, and there never was. The government decided since 1789 when it first met in Philadelphia that the United States of America was going to be in the business of waging wars against the Indians and the world. It turned out to be a matter of tragic proportions. Such decisions almost always lead to unhappy outcomes.”
45
The Lambrecht Theater on Broadway’s magic mile of lights had been all done up for the new musical sensation, “Girls!,” which had received banner headlines in the media for weeks. Everyone billed “Girls!” as one of the best original Broadway musicals in two generations. Opening night was a gala sell out as were the next three months, all of them purchased by fans sight unseen. Big wigs had been sold front row seats for as high as eighteen hundred dollars each.
James Stone had already been at work in the theater. Although he dressed as a construction worker, he worked in the darkness high above the theater’s auditorium as a rogue sapper. Down below, he could see the stage and seating, so he knew exactly where to place his plastic charges for maximum kills. The military had trained James in undermining and bringing down all manner of buildings and defensive structures. At the Lambrecht Theater, James would punish even more Americans for what Obama Care had done to his son, Brandon. The ranger was quite content in placing his plastic explosives in just the right points inside the walls and ceilings to insure a perfectly horrendous implosion of the huge theater’s walls and roofing just when it was packed to the max with the filthy rich. He was hoping that the mayor of New York among others was going to be happily seated inside the Lambrecht for what the ex-ranger figured was going to be the biggest show in Broadway’s entire history. He hoped it would be a night to remember.
He was in the ceiling area day after day, dressed as a construction worker, cutting through planks of wood that held the roof up then sticking plastic explosives in the cuts connected to triggering wires, one after the other, then covering them with black goop so that no one was the wiser. The goop dried in minutes and looked just like the wood to the trained eye. He had just finished the final ten cuts in a particular section, while day dreaming in his mind that he and his son, Brandon, were trout fishing in the cold mountain streams nearby, hitting on brookies with hand tied flies. Brandon and James loved to tie flies in the frigid winter months, discussing and dreaming of the great catches they would make in nearby streams that spring where the brookies fought the strong cold currents of life. The eager brookies poked their heads upstream to maintain their positions as they doggedly scrambled against the deadly rush of water. They were down there in the rocks lost to all the world in the icy water’s incessant flow toward the ocean.
In James’s day dreams, Brandon was still fit, and his manly muscles bulged as he applied his fly lines inside the stream’s drooling coldness as the brookies flashed their tiny sides to the wary fishermen who were bent on their destruction. James imagined Brandon’s excitement as his flies inched their way over the tiny rapids, moving in spastic flashes of color toward the eager brookies below. His flies looked to all the world like delicious insects just waiting for the aggressive trout to take them into their hungry mouths as they moved down stream. Brandon’s arm moved in its dance-like trance beneath the verdant northern forest as his artificial flies hurled themselves upstream and settled neatly into the surging river. Down they came, falling past the shimmering rocks, between the rivulets and through the rapids toward the awaiting trout whose constant hunger for insects represented their greatest weakness. Above their cold, watery homes lurked a small close family of clever, hungry men. Each of them were warm blooded creatures who strung their deadly hooks with artificial flies.
The Fly Fisherman’s Bar and Grill was Brandon’s favorite restaurant. It was where the two of them ordered breakfasts of eggs and steak, their usual fare at four in the morning. That was a sacred time when the air was ice cold and the equally icy river pounded its incessant current against the rocky shores outside in a grumbling thunder as it spiraled through the mountain passes and turned sideways here and there inside the narrow valleys and cut its watery way toward the ocean’s distant shore.
The Fly Fisherman’s Bar and Grill produced fantastic breakfasts every morning. These tasty morsels of eggs, meat, potatoes, and coffee were far more than enough to keep the business flourishing. Even when a fisherman’s morning catch had been made, the restaurant stood ready to help. Its staff cleaned and cooked up the pan fish caught by its customers and served them on plates covered with small red potatoes, green beans, and a simple mount
ain kale and onion salad.
No wonder the Fly Fisherman was the only restaurant within ten miles. It had regularly driven all of the other restaurant hopefuls and new comers right out of business in short order.
James watched his almost silent battery operated saw cut neatly again and again into the wood that supported the roof of the old Lambrecht Theater which was already showing signs of an ancient weakness. As the outside wind whipped itself over the top of the massive theater, its roof creaked and shook. James imagined it suddenly shattering into pieces and floating rapidly down. In his mind, he saw its deadly pieces turning like pounding bat wings against the walls as they descended upon the unsuspecting audience down below. When this happened their deaths were a certainty. The final moments of their lives would create another media sensation. This grand event would be the next fitting memorial for his dead son and another of his perfect revenge killings.
The American people could be stand offish about Obama Care all they wanted, but now many of them would do so only at their own peril. James knew now that he was not the only person out there working to right the wrong by killing those willing to put up with the centralized madness that medicine had become. He was merely one of many seeking revenge for their dead relatives. Whether the FBI knew it or not, most of the surfacing Obama Care revenge artists were loners like Stone.
They were lone wolves. They didn’t seek to involve others. This was what made it so difficult for government goons from the myriad security departments to catch them. Their lives were dedicated, forfeited even, to revenge. In choosing such a surreal commitment, they almost sought their own deaths along with those of the others whom they were busy killing.
James heard a man’s footsteps through the wall. Someone was checking on the roof. James had anticipated this. He unzipped a hidden piece of equipment and stepped inside. The cleverly camouflaged bag in which he hid was the same color as the rest of the roof. Its outer surface also resembled the miles of wood pieces on both the roof and the floorboards. As the guards passed him in the roof area, their flashlights lit up the floors and walls, but they only saw wooden beams everywhere including in the faked pictures of wood that lined the outside of James’s devious cloak, so they moved on, confident that the roof was safe from anyone wanting to mess with it. Soon, James crawled out and continued his deadly work.
Later that night, he found a young NYPD officer who was about his size whom he knocked out and rapidly pulled into an alley and killed. He broke the youthful officer’s neck in the manner he had learned over and over again during ranger training. James just never knew where or when he might need to use a skill set like this. James never even dreamed he’d use that military move on one of New York’s finest. Yet, he had. James undressed the cop. Then, he placed the man’s naked body into a garbage container. Next, James carefully packed the cop’s uniform into a box he found in the alley and left. He’d have good use for the man’s uniform.
Even better for James’s plans, no one even found the policeman’s naked body. That night, contents of the garbage container where he had buried the young policeman were themselves placed inside a huge refuse truck which applied five hundred pounds of pressure which merged the man’s body with a menage of vegetables, breads, and scraps of metal. In short, the cop simply disappeared into the huge mess of the world’s recycling frenzy as though he had never lived and loved.
46
The next morning, James headed back to the theater. He had a lot more struts to compromise with his cutting tools, wiring, and his plastic explosives. He considered the implosion of the building as an impending artistic creation. As it plunged downward into the darkness, it would symbolically bury some of the pain of his son’s demise. As he raised his arms and his cutter over his head, he surmised just how surprised the audience was going to be when the musical’s early ending crumbled around their dying bodies, hands, and faces. He doubted if many of them would even have the time to scream or to cry out for help. That’s how rapidly their end would come. Most if not all of them would be crushed or impaled by wooden pieces. Others would be torn apart in the crushing weight when the huge brick walls collapsed inward along with its megatons of decorative sconces and statues. All in all, it was a very good idea for a revenge act. It would work just fine for James Stone at any rate.
He attached thirty-five more plastic explosives that day then made his way home. On the way, he came upon a gaggle of whores on the sidewalk and flashed a twenty at the one he wanted. As she worked him in the alley, James wondered how his life had come to this. He had gone from a loving husband and father to a sniper of Americans who supported the very government that had killed his son who was also a war hero and deserved far better than that. He cleaned up and continued his walk toward his apartment. He felt no guilt. James decided after his family was gone that he’d never get married again. In addition, James would not date ever again either. Although the loving had been good with his wife, the pain of separation from her and his son were just too much for his heart to fully absorb.
Now, the only thing left to bring him pleasure was revenge. Revenge over the loss of his only son. A finger under the nose of the oppressor. That oppressor lived in Washington DC, where he was supported by the taxes of almost every American on the North American continent. James saw that government as a thing of adversity and evil. The Americans themselves were merely relegated to the unsure status of mere economic units skidding along the bottom rungs of corporatist factories and office cubicles. They had become the little nameless worker bees that kept the system going. Their busy hands helped to keep alive the darkening and vile toilet bowl of political corruption in which America’s political system swirled.
James imagined the government’s drones dropping bombs onto the innocent people below. He had begun to associate America’s foreign war victims with his own son. Their innocent eyes looked at the descending bombs flung at them from hundreds of faceless American drones. These descending bombs attracted their imminent victims’ curious and widening eyes. Those innocent victims could hear the bombs whistling down through the air during their last few seconds of life on this earth. They were the other microscopic foreign Brandon’s down below killed by the American corporatist crony government.
The bombing work at the theater was like honey to a bear for James. It was the natural outcome of a lifetime of patriotism leading him down that inexorable primrose path to nowhere. It trailed forward and downward toward the flagrant treachery and final betrayal of America’s slacker government. In the final reality, the country had no heart for Americans. Its heart was set solely on corporatism, hard drugs, wars, petroleum, dollars, and greed. A man’s son meant zilch to them. Many Americans no longer had any stomach for love and relationships. They were now merely the world’s hate mongers. Not only did they hate foreigners enough to kill their children and mothers from the air, but they turned on their own people by inventing Obama Care so they could deny health coverage to the sick and infirm and use their insurance money for profits to be squandered on more wars of death and dying inside the myriad of innocent nations around the world.
James washed the plastic explosives from his hands and prepared to walk home. Tomorrow was the long anticipated opening night of “Girls!” He didn’t want to be late for the big show. He stopped on the way home for a potato knish at the deli, climbed the stairs to his room, and fell asleep in his own bed. The last thing he saw was the picture of his handsome son who had been a hero in several wars before being betrayed by his uncaring and disloyal government. He fell asleep with Brandon on his mind.