Made in China Chapter 16

            On the radio as I pull away onto the relative safety of the Missouri highway, news of the Vermin War starring General Ontario Whatley and the US Armed Forces, excitably reports new breakthroughs. Rats being pushed back to Lake Michigan, and drowned in the Mississippi. General Whatley is white as a ghost but loves the Ace of Spades (which looks better capitalized). He carries dozens of the playing cards in the left breast pocket of his specially designed camouflage fatigue jacket. Modern camouflage looks like a soup of regurgitated guacamole and Jim Beam but he looks unbelievably natural in it. Whatley had the ominous Ace of Spade symbol spray-painted on the bottom of all his Apache helicopters as he wages war against those giant rats and their impressive private army of bubonic-carrying fleas. He became legendary giving the cards out to people that he kills himself but he doesn’t kill many directly anymore; he orders others to do it. But occasionally, when he gets the hankering... Whatley couldn’t give a damn less that people are being killed by the plague, killing or dying are no big deal to him. He takes his military career so seriously that he wants to defeat the enemy he has been assigned to defeat at any cost, for another accommodation, even posthumously, another cheap ten-cent ribbon for his uniform, a promotion, a parade. He has a Blue Eagle he wears proudly and his peacock-chest looks like a piñata. In Gen. Whatley’s warped-head he believes it is all for freedom and he is one of those that have dropped the A from America to create the entirely different entity that is Merica. There is a movement afoot to have the name changed officially. Whatley has no real training to be a general, no West Point education―West Point doesn’t exist anymore―but he spent twenty-six years enlisted, stationed in Spokane, Washington most of that time doing clerical duties after having been highly-decorated in the war against the terrorists back in the 2020s, a comrade of Captain Jumping Jack Flash before Flash went rogue. That was the war that bankrupted the United States officially (all the while making some American businessmen very rich), and led to China buying a majority interest in the United States and the beginning of a peculiar disease that killed all but Chinese women.

Ho hum.

            Then Captain Whatley, former Marine Recon, a bad mother-motherfucker because motherfucker wasn’t a strong enough a word, killed four sons of mastermind terrorist Mesa Musa-Ali and someone who looked like Mesa Musa-Ali in snow-cone line at Disney World with his bare hands. Those four sons were all attending a birthday party standing around in expensive Italian suits holding balloons and cameras. They were not terrorists and had no interest in terrorism but their deaths were a symbolic victory and Whatley himself flew the Apache helicopter that ripped them and twenty-four other people apart, including MM Ali’s granddaughter, who was blowing at five candles when the guns went hot. Captain Whatley went on clerical duty when he got home because he was nuts, after the parade. But there, in the confines of his office that sat snuggly on the most secure military base in the country, far away from any nuclear missile controls, and at the expense of the American taxpayer, he destroyed at least forty-three filing cabinets, a hundred and six staplers, turned fifty-six electric pencil sharpeners into IEDs and detonated them, and last, but not least, holed-up for a weekend in his office with a civilian secretary named Lucy Jolly, and did God knows what to the poor girl before finally releasing her with a shaved-head and badly beaten-up lady parts. She never spoke again and died six days later from severe internal injuries. But that was before the KITTY made that sort of behavior legal, before everyone in the world was pussy-crazy and it was legally permissible to rape anything with an applicable hole. Back then, it was only legal to rape if you were in the military.

He is still nuts. General Whatley met with President Jimbo Templeton in the White House in Wheeling, West Virginia, at the tangerine-roofed former Howard Johnson, before taking his post as commander of the U.S. Armed Forces against Vermin. President Templeton was desperate and pants-less, a blinding white gut hanging over the waistband of his baby-blue polyester trousers with a nine iron in his golf-gloved mitts, driving golf balls off the roof, which screamed across a closed highway and into the woods while Whatley’s helicopter sat idle in the background, propeller chopping. President Templeton asked him one question before promoting him from Clerical Commander of the U.S. Marine Corps to his brave new post. “Do you like pussy, son?”

Whatley explained carefully and lucidly that he loved pussy before pussy loved him, skillfully without mentioning Lucy Jolly and his “lost weekend.” He even showed President Templeton the greatest pussy tattoo every etched into human flesh, which he proudly bore on his right upper-arm. Whatley recalled nothing better in the world than a plump woman’s bare bottom on his lap. Templeton laughed and asked him the same joke he asked the Russian Premier over dinner a week before. “How do you find Lori Lu’s pussy?” Lori Lu was the fortune cookie first lady, one of the most famous women in the world, a secret Chinese agent, and a master chef specializing in rat fricassee. Currently, the president was poisoned by her cherries jubilee but he didn’t even know it.

“Roll her in flower and look for the wet spot!”

Whatley didn’t laugh. His mother was a woman of considerable size. “Well, son,” (Templeton called everyone son), “if you fail at killing those rats there is no way in Hell we will ever have good pussy on God’s green Earth again. So you might say you’re the last hope of every heterosexual male in this world.  The last hope for the American people to be free of Chinese rule!” He looked over his shoulder. He didn’t want Lori to hear. He knew enough not to trust her but not enough to not eat her cherries jubilee. President Templeton wasn’t in China’s plans for the future. “You have to kill those rats first and foremost then I know we can kill the KITTY and get good old Merican women back.” Whatley was all “yes, sirs.” Nothing less from such a conditioned soldier. The national anthem played as Templeton smacked presidential-sealed balls into the woods as his stomach began to ache. It was the new national anthem adopted by a harebrained congress only a few years before to reflect a new generation of Americans, passed along furtively on a larger bill called The New American Freedom Act. No one had the courage to vote against it on its name alone. The new anthem is Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part II and it blares in the background.           

....

            Gen. Whatley came up with the government strategy of dropping lye, or sodium hydroxide, out of Boeing C-17s on the sites of the disasters where thousands of mutilated rotting bodies would normally have been a buffet for hungry rats. Sometimes, Whatley waited for the rats to appear and then he’d drop the “motherload,” as he called it, and the rats would burn and cry a God-awful cry. You haven’t heard anything until you have heard a rat as big as a Volkswagen burning under a smothering blanket of lye. All they could see if they looked up would be that hovering black Aces of Spades. He smiled when he talked about the sound they made, his eyes like two pickled olives behind his yellow-tinted aviator sunglasses wearing, as always, a German SS officers hat with the skull and crossbones on the band. “No one,” he said reverently, “killed people and things better than the Germs.” He was right. And in a courtroom in Jerusalem, a zombie Adolf Hitler was hearing all about it.

The bodies of the catastrophic dead were once burnt in bonfires but no one wanted to touch them after the plague returned, obviously, so they were crudely scattered, and the fires were out of control and made things even worse than before the disaster struck. So the government position became to let them lie and the rats got out of control, so on and so forth. Enter Gen. Ontario Whatley and the lye. There were only so many rats that Bobby Bubonic could kill with his javelin and though he had developed a cult-like following, leagues of “Bubonics,” there simply weren’t enough brave souls like him.

            The problem with the lye was that it began to blow in the wind which didn’t bode well for people who lived through the disaster downwind so a new plan had to be developed. They tried Napalm but, again, fires raged uncontrollably. An egghead named Jimmy Puff came up with an alternative to lye. He was a rat romancer who incidentally discovered that rats have a strong aversion to flowers, so instead of dropping lye, General Whatley was ordered to and reluctantly began dropping the world’s largest bouquets from those same C-17s on the tragic dead of the nation’s latest disasters. And he said, all the while gritting his teeth as the rose pedals caromed and the petunias, roses, marigolds, and lilies dropped so beautifully, “Never felt more like a fag than I do today, Momma.”

            He had a strange habit of talking to his dead mother, who he still hoped would come back as a zombie which fueled his passion for the study of Zombieism, or Zombie science, as they call it. Besides Bobby Bubonic books and hard-core pornography, the other hot literary item was zombie books, all which promised to help turn your loved ones into zombies—modern-day alchemy, if you will. Of course, they didn’t work. They were as hokey as chain-letters, which were also very popular. “Send me a dollar and this letter to seventeen people or suffer terribly bad luck. Send it and win the lottery. Get laid.” The letter always said something about Jesus Christ, or had a drawing of him in it. Who knew Jesus was into blackmail?   

            A zombie Kurt Vonnegut is going nuts somewhere in Indiana.