Made in China Chapter 3

I understand there is a good chance that my darling Zula is already dead and, even if I win the race, I will get nothing. No kiss, no love, no pussy. Nothing but a corpse! That dream haunts me. But I have to believe. Maybe that is what is wrong with the world. No one believes in anything anymore. No one believes in love, life, God, country, or in each other like they used to. But maybe, it creeps into my head sometimes, they never did and those legacies of patriotism, God and loyalty were all phony. I am no dummy. When I went to school before the official end of public education in 2029, I was an honor’s society student at General Sherman Junior High School in Ohio, well suited for high school and college until my high school wound up landing in Lake Erie after a tornado threw it a hundred plus miles from where it had stood since 1966. Jokes swirled about "schools of fish" even though it was full of hundreds of students when it was thrown and probably some of them when it landed. So I am qualified to reason that she may not be around anymore, although Heathcliff Bernard goes on TV at least once a night to show pictures of her bound and gagged but live and well. Those pictures could have been taken anytime or cropped, my skeptical brain contests. His videos could have been prerecorded or she could have been played by a robot girl (you can barely tell the difference in person let alone on television). If she hasn’t been killed off by that terrible vaginal disease that God imposed upon the world for some cockamamie reason, or in the jaws of a super-shark when she sneaked in for a dip, then she just as well could have been kidnapped and raped by the terrible marauding men known as The Casanovas who travel around in over-sized trucks looking for women, any women to “romance.” They are the men who didn’t turn gay or abstinent when women began to drop like flies in 2027. They became violent rapist killers, their doctrine spray-painted on the backs of their truck gates and leather jackets boasting, “Least we ain’t fags!” Everyone seems to have to have something to hang his hat on. In these desperate times, it seems imperative. I hang my hat on the fact that I will be the one that never gave up on Zula Zane. I will be the one that saves the last scrap of beauty before it is thrown to the goddamn hyenas.

The year is 2039. The Mayans said that the world would end twenty seven years ago but it didn’t, unfortunately. That was when the rapid melting of the ice-caps began which is what they say spawned the tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes. Televangelists have been crowing that the world would end anytime now for the past thirty some years and that Jesus will waltz back to earth and take what is His, to which most people say, “Let Him have it!” People do not believe in Armageddon quite like they used to when things were smooth sailing, but there are a few stalwarts who believe all this misery is Armageddon foreplay. Generally, people don’t believe much in anything other than the present, other than the barrel in their mouth, the tornado that is whipping them and all their possessions up like tiny pieces of cake batter, or the fact that their bodies are being eaten by the second occurrence of the Black Plague, which is now called the White Plague…

Ho hum.

The White Plague started roughly around 2034. It was rumored to have been created in a lab as an attempt to kill President Adam Berklantis of Oregonia, one of three alien worlds which threatened to destroy Earth in the past dozen or so years (all three of which deciding against it). So the bubonic plague was whipped up in a lab and injected into at least a half million of one million Twinkies, his ransom for letting Earth live; but little did the responsible Earthlings know Oregonians are fabulously impervious to the bubonic plague. Somehow the plague escaped the lab and here we are, bringing out our dead, ringing around the rosies, so on and so forth. Others say the return of the plague was a natural occurrence as a result of the millions of rotting corpses lying everywhere, too many to bury or burn efficiently, and rats and dogs fed on them and multiplied like wild and the fleas fed on them and multiplied like wild, so on and so forth. Yet, some say it was God’s doing—shortly before they were bludgeoned to death by people tired of hearing that old line.

The reason it is called The White Plague is because The Black Plague Part II, or The Return of the Black Plague, both sound dreadfully tacky and for some reason it seemed to kill a hell of a lot of more white people than people of color. No one seemed to know why, so naturally, and humorously to those with a sick sense of humor, they called it The White Plague. Even some of those infected had a sense of humor. One stand-up comedian named Rollie Rose, did a very popular stand-up act all about the bubonic plague while infected until he dropped dead on stage which yielded him his greatest laugh of all.

But The White Plague would soon start believing in affirmative action and kill indiscriminately.

Dad was the first person I heard say, “We got to do something about those rats!” And Dad did what he said. My mother and father are a middle-aged black couple because my real parents committed suicide like Evan Braun and Adolf Hitler shortly after I was born in 2009 when life was peachy and there were only signs of ruin which everyone mostly ignored or denied. They left me for dead but my dad found me as he was “pickin.” “Pickin” is the term for salvaging what can be salvaged from dead people’s houses and homes. The scrupulous wait for the people to be dead; others make them dead sooner. My father, the man who adopted me, was the scrupulous sort. His name is Bobby Bubonic. In high school, dad was a champion of the javelin. He bragged that he was the greatest javelin athlete in the world until he tore his meniscus shortly before the US Olympic trials in 1992 when he was twenty years old. When I was growing up I remember him carrying his javelin around with him through the house with his pronounced limp hoisting it up in the front lawn threatening to throw it somewhere. But he never threw it. At least, I never saw him throw it. He might have when I was at school or when I was sleeping. But the determined look in his eye when he was holding it inspired me to greatness. Or at least believe in greatness. I was convinced that he could throw that javelin to the moon.

“Gotta do somethin’ about them rats!” he said way back in 2020 when the rats were about the size of gophers. Dad took his javelin and began spearing them by the dozens but there was little he could do to prevent them from reaching the size of bears. Killing rats became our great pastime. He used the javelin and I used a .22 pistol until gun powder, caps and metal became too expensive, then I had to use a samurai sword I found pickin’. Had everyone killed rats like dad and I killed rats they may not have spread the bubonic plague along with their flea buddies by 2034 to half the world. But that was the year dad became famous for doing what we had been doing for years. He changed his name from Milt Morris to Bobby Bubonic and even made a costume and wore a mask slaying rats that were as big as bears with his javelin. People took video of him and his popularity soared and eclipsed even that of Evil Eddie the Executioner, one of those rogue nomads in Eastern Kansas who killed travelers and recorded it becoming a reality TV star (there was no law against murder in Kansas or twenty two other states). Dad became a cult hero and received more than one personal phone call from the President of the United States, numerous letters from senators and fan mail from as far away as Australia and all sorts of accommodations. Within a year he became the most famous man in the United States and he was urged to run for President.

He declined. Out of curiosity and for the record I asked him why when he came over to my house to offer me some help with my car for Death Race 666. “Son, he said (I was always referred to as son, rarely as Blatz, which was more than what most kids got) putting his large brown hand on my shoulder, “Man’s gotta know when to climax. Ain’t ready jus’ yet. Time ain’t right, no sir! We had us twenty four presidents in the pas’ twenty two years. Doesn’t seem like a job worth the takin’.”

He was always right. He only talked that way to sound folksier. He graduated with a Master’s degree in English from Michigan State.

“You sure ya know what you gettin’ into with this race?” He wiped some oil from his hands and leaned over inspecting my clean as a whistle 5.8 litre supercharged 4-valve V8 turbo-boost engine.

            "Positive!” I said. He smiled at me. “I have to save her, dad.”

“But women don’t wanna be saved by some knight in shining armor anymore, son.” I learned everything about life from dad. I looked at him puzzled. Before that moment he seemed to be for me being in the race. “A chance to do something great” he once referred to it. Same as he did when I went to war in Turkey despite a thousand to one odds of coming back (and that was just coming back at all; it was a million to one coming back alive). Sometimes I thought he wanted me to die. “Your mother didn’t sit around waitin' for me to save her. She saved me. Well, I let her save me but...”

“What do you mean?”

“I met her soon after I tore my meniscus. I was gettin’ drunk every night ready to end it all. Then she saved me. Came in like an angel and swept me out that rotten bar and I ain’t had a drink since or a given’ thought to another woman. Women are much happier when they save you.”

“That may be but my situation is clearly different. Those other guys who are racing to win her don’t deserve her and they intend on doing some awful thing to her. I got to have something, dad. I got to have something to make myself right in this world.” To that, dad said no more of it.

“Well, got me some more rats to kill…” He took his javelin, smiled, and left. He was too damn smart for his own good.

My real parents were idiots. I found out a little about them when I was thirteen and my mother, Luella, gave me some of their things in a small cardboard box. Two Nazi armbands, a couple hats, a Nazi flag, an Imperial Eagle pin, a real Nazi WWII dagger, a Luger pistol and a photograph. I threw everything out besides the Luger because guns are far too valuable to discard. Apparently, they were both higher-ups in the Nazi Party of America, Ohio Division. They misspelled Division as Divizhun because they said only Jews spell it the other way. Dad had a mustache like Hitler and mom looked just as treacherous in her all black SS uniform with slicked-back short blond hair and high Germanic cheekbones. She was pretty except for the hateful look on her face and her cold eyes. I never knew why they committed suicide. Evidently before shooting themselves with the Luger I now hold in my hands they slipped me a cyanide pill.

I must have spit it out. It was stuck to my chin when I was found.