THE MEN WILL BE HUNGRY AFTERWARDS
At the Boy’s House
The men will be hungry afterwards. She’ll bring fried chicken. Everyone loves her fried chicken. Maybe she should poison it and kill them all. She absolutely did not just think that! La la la la. Poor little Mia. The child should have known better. This was all the fault of her parents. They should have made sure Mia understood the rules and the dangers in breaking them. This is no laughing matter! La la la la. Turn up the heat to sizzling. Good fried chicken is all about what you do to it before you drop it into the hot oil. If there is anything even remotely good about this situation, it’s that her own son, Samuel, might come to realize the way of things and straighten up and fly right. The kids are only ten, she likes to tell herself, but still he needed to spend more time playing with the other boys and less time messing around on the computers with Mia. Now it’s come to this. She must remember to save him a couple of drumsticks.
At the Girl’s House
“The Fewer is an old meanie!”
Just a tweet.
She hadn’t even included a hashtag. She hadn’t addressed it to @POTUS and she had certainly not addressed it to His personal account. But she had also taken no precautions to cover her tracks, which totally surprised her friends, because if anyone knew how to surf the dark net, it was Mia. It was like she was sending him a message, sticking her tongue out at the most dangerous man on the planet. That had turned out to be a serious mistake.
It was just a joke!
Okay, okay, but let’s not do that again.
Everyone stopped laughing when the President’s Patriotic Police in full riot gear swarmed in and arrested the entire town.
The Upshot
Fox sent in a team that was actually bigger than the whole town. There were cameras everywhere and people running all over the place managing cables and lights and shouting at one another. Unsmiling men in the black and silver uniforms of the PPP prominently displaying assault rifles stationed themselves strategically at every corner and in every business. Everyone worried they would fine the tunnel running from their church basement to the church basement of their sister city on the other side of the Wall, but so far, it had remained undiscovered. With any luck it would remain that way until after this was all over.
The men of the Town Council milled and muttered about at the door of the church like they were waiting to be invited inside.
Samuel and his father stood a little apart from the men. His father held on to Samuel’s shoulder both to reassure the boy with his touch and to make sure he didn’t bolt.
Samuel looked up at his father and asked, “It’s just pretend, right? I don’t really have to do it, right?”
His father looked around quickly to make sure no one had heard what the boy had just said. Then he leaned down to speak in a low voice.
“That might have been true a few days ago,” he said. “We could have handled this if was just us and our so-called Political Officer. We could have bought him a few drinks, and no one would have been the wiser, but now it’s gotten totally out of hand. You’ll have to do it for the cameras, so all these people will leave.”
Samuel looked around wildly like he was thinking of making a break for it. His father could feel him trembling beneath his hand on his shoulder.
“It’ll be okay,” he told the boy. “Look over there with the other women. Your mom. I think she made chicken. This will all be over in a flash and we’ll be eating drumsticks.”
Samuel looked over at his mother in the roped-off area for the women. She didn’t meet his eyes. None of the women were looking at him, either. Some were looking up and some were looking down. They were waiting for the signal to go inside and sit down in the pews.
A moment later, a white woman in a fancy costume that made Samuel think of evil clowns stepped up and spoke to his father.
“I think we’re ready to start,” she said. She didn’t look at Samuel.
His father pulled him forward and into the church. The men followed them in, and then came the women of the town.
The woman in the colorful uniform pulled Samuel away from his father and out of the way while the townspeople found their assigned places. Then she marched him over to his starting position just inside the door and in the middle of the central aisle between the pews.
“Okay,” she said loudly. “Listen up!”
Everyone got quiet.
“Looks good,” she said. “Get ready. Here we go.”
A moment later, she shouted, “Action!”
Someone pushed Mia out from behind the curtain. You could see the big pushing hands dart back out of sight as the girl stumbled forward onto the stage where Father Diego usually stood to mechanically recite how they all had to try harder to make the President’s plans work. It looked like Mia might fall, but she caught her balance and stood looking out at the town, all her friends, her parents, her neighbors, the cameras, the news crews, the police and their guns. She wore a simple white summer dress with a pattern of green and blue flowers scattered down the front.
She hesitated a moment more, but then, as instructed, she lifted her hands up to her chest and put her palms together as if in prayer.
She looked terrified.
The woman directing things gave Samuel a little shove from behind, and he moved forward down the central aisle toward Mia. On both sides, the townsmen had been lined up like a gauntlet. The women had been assigned places in the pews, and they all twisted around to watch him pass. The cameras and lights and soldiers made the place look completely alien.
It was very quiet. Everyone was looking at Samuel. He was having some trouble getting enough air into his lungs, but he kept moving. When he got to the front, he turned sharply to his left and moved to the stairs leading up onto the stage. He walked up them and then turned back and walked up to Mia. She turned to face him.
This was all so stupid, so terrifying, so adult. The future was a dark cave with teeth and tongue, and Mia and Samuel were about to be snatched up and chewed to bits and swallowed.
He could choose to simply not do this. He could grab her hand, and they could run out the back and into the desert. They could hide in the gullies and eat prickly pear cactus fruit and sleep with the coyotes and the roadrunners. Surely the strangers would give up and go home sooner or later. Samuel and Mia could slip back into town unnoticed, could get back to their old lives, and everything would be okay.
He looked into her eyes and she looked into his. He wanted to whisper that it would be okay, that it would be quick, that he was sorry, that he would always be her friend, but then he saw that there was a camera back there pointing right at his face. There would be another one behind him pointing at Mia’s face. They did not want to miss one juicy bit of this. If he whispered his words at her, they would read his lips and make them start all over again. If he did it right the first time, it would be over. He wished he could tell her that it would be best if he just did it right the first time. The two of them would grow up. They would become outlaws together! They would ride horses across this desert and shoot arrows at the President’s Police. Maybe they would get married and their children would never ever have to do something like this. Would she ever believe that he had had such a plan on that awful day? Her face was now completely blank like she had gone off somewhere else where things were not so bad.
It was time to do it.
He reached his right hand forward, low and with the palm facing up, as he had been instructed, and plunged it between her legs, pushing the thin fabric of her skirt back, too. He glanced down, as instructed, to check his position. Everything looked right. He grabbed at whatever was under there, her pussy, they said, and gave it a little squeeze.