[b] A Fate Worse Than Death - Chapter 01
That last punch literally popped one of my eyes out of my head. It was now dangling from its socket, giving me a very interesting view of my cigarette burned tits, both of which were missing their nipples compliments of the butane torch that had been used to turn them into a pair of charred lumps of cooked meat before the Red soldier with the pliers ripped what was left of them from my squeezies. The torch was then used once more to cauterize the wounds. Why I'll never know, we zombies don't bleed, never had, never will. My reaction to all of this was not exactly what my torturers were expecting, but hell, we zombies don't have much feeling; that's not our fault.
Allow me to introduce myself; I'm Mariah 377, manufactured in October 2072, too late, it turned out, to be of any influence on the final resolution of Civil War 3 that finally settled matters for good. I, like a few of the more advanced Mariah models, have a small but succinct history of the former United States of America implanted in my memory files to act as a guide for why I was doing what I had been programmed to do.
Believe it or not, my main function is to strike terror into the hearts of our enemies, the Red state people, through guerrilla warfare and terrorist activities. Unfortunately they won the best two out of three falls and my purpose no longer has meaning. However that has nothing to do with carrying out my prime directive.
Civil War 2 broke out shortly after a cloned Right, Connors 5, was declared president of the USA by the Supreme Court, after the hotly contested election of 2052 that had brought out nearly three-quarters of the newly qualified voters as decided by the Supreme Court in its landmark decision in the case of Bilbo vs Obama. The judicial writ effectively disenfranchised ninety percent of the current US population. Only those who met one of the following set of qualifications were declared fit to cast ballots in any national election.
A qualified voter had to be worth at least ten million dollars, as determined by the IRS, a member of the upper three levels of corporate management for organizations with annual sales in excess of ten billion dollars, a baptized member of the US Church of the Crusader, members of Congress and their immediate families, those made voters by Congressional action and members of the US Army of Freedom, which was currently carrying out campaigns on three continents. Once it became common knowledge that the cloned Right, Connors 5, was none other than a physically improved version of Connors 2, it was all over as far as who would provide the leadership for the USA in future generations.
Of interest, Connors 3, the brother of Connors 2, was the last US president to be fettered by the 22nd Amendment, since repealed. He was forced to end his tenure in 2021. He in turn was succeeded in office by his brother, Connors 4, who held the office of US President for thirty-two years, despite a number of severely debilitating illnesses, which caused him to be put on a ventilator and kept alive via a feeding tube, until he was well past one hundred years of age.
During the final eleven years of his term in office, the acting president of the country, in reality, was his much younger wife who he had wed shortly before taking office. You talk about poetic justice. It was the election of 2012 when the opposition party ran a woman against Connors 3, that effectively destroyed them as a political force, ultimately paving the way for the Right Party to take over totally. It was during the term of Connors 4 that the Right Party became the official political organization of the nation, selecting candidates for the various national offices that went on the official ballot used for all national elections.
In 2054, three Blue states located on the Pacific Coast of the USA declared their intention of seceding from the nation. Negotiations between them and the national government failed, leading to a brief but decisive war, which left the three Blue states in radioactive ruins. Prior to the actual war, over ten million people with Red state leanings were allowed to migrate into the adjoining Red states. It became quite obvious to the national government that a land war would only play into the seceding states' hands after a disastrous campaign that cost them upwards of fory thousand casualties in the first month of the war.
Although these particular Blue states had a significant population and a powerful economic infrastructure, not to mention approximately one hundred nuclear weapons located on various air bases, they were no match for the number of nuclear weapons that were launched from silos in various nearby Red states. Unfortunately the collateral damage to adjacent Red states was horrendous since the winds were blowing west to east during most of this period. The entire populations of eleven Red states were effectively eliminated, including the ten million folks who had been allowed to leave before the conflict began.
In one of those quirky twists that happens on occasion, Blue state survivors attempted to migrate into Mexico, but were turned back by the Mexican army supported by the national militias of Texas and Oklahoma. During this turbulent period, Connors 5 took this opportunity to successfully attack and effectively obliterate France with a suite of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The rest of Europe quicklydeclared their neutrality in any conflict involving internal USA issues. This action also silenced the complaints of the Canadian government concerning the loss of the city of Vancouver, which was taken out by accident by nukes targeted for Seattle.
Connors 5, who had been appointed President of the USA for life by the Congress, which now consisted of only members of the Church of the Crusader, plus a few token representatives of the surviving Blue states, declared the remaining Blue states to be in a state of rebellion and Civil War 3 began in 2069. The number of nuclear weapons used by both sides was small in most cases with only an occasional city buster utlilized to remove such problem areas as New York and Boston. Unfortunately a few large Red state city populations such as St Louis and Atlanta were also eliminated in this manner. What turned the tide for the Red states was their ability to use clones to effectively overwhelm Blue state armies, and excise portions of the population deemed to be enemies of the Church of the Crusader.
The overuse of chemical and biological weapons, plus poor battle management strategy on both sides finally resulted in a United States of America that consisted of only portions of six Southern states. The western border ended at Dallas, Tulsa was the northern limit, a rebuilt New Orleans the southern and the relatively small city of Dothan in Alabama was the eastern flank of what now was the USA. The new USA capital was located in Jackson, Mississippi.
All people of color were forcibly relocated outside of the boundaries of the nation. Those who could, volunteered to become members of the Army of Freedom, which was still holding its own in Africa and South America, but had taken substantial losses in Asia. The remaining population that had been expelled was forced to make the trek south to Central America and beyond in an effort to find an area that could support them.
Zombies such as myself and Elijah 47 were lost in the shuffle when the enforced racial purification started in what used to be the deep South. We have some very unique characteristics and capabilities. I find it oddly amusing, that is if I had a sense of humor, that both sides chose to develop ultimate weapons that they originally ridiculed or attempted to eliinate entirely. After all Connors 2 was four square against cloning for any purpose, yet there he was, a reborn clone himself. How strange is that? I guess his people were a lot more pragmatic than they were given credit for being. Without clones they not only didn't have a viable Connors to bring forward in 2052, they never would have won Civil War 3 so clearly.
On the other side of that coin why would the high tech folk of the Blue states home in on voodoo as the spring board for the technology that produced the "zombies", an unstoppable force capable of endless cycles of reconstitution under all but the most stressing circumstances? Had the war lasted another year, the zombies might have tipped the balance since they were unmatched in guerrilla warfare, and were considered by friend and foe alike as the ultimate terrorists.
All I know for sure about the process that resulted in my creation was that it involved a unique mineral found only in certain portions of Africa and the use of lightning to catalize it, causing the inert protoplasm to become animated. This for some reason that I truly do not understand infuriates those who profess to believe in an entity that created them , but not me. Getting back to my subject, it was a bizarre coincidence that the principles that led to mass scaling of clones was also responsible for the protoplasm that was used in the creation of we zombies.
In point of fact the creation of the living dead had been pulled off on occasion by African witch doctors who were lucky enough to be in the right place with the right chemical soup when lightning literally struck. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, these poor creatures were unable to sustain life for more than a few days, but they sure raised hell during that period. This was the stuff of legends and the basis for the voodoo cults that took the magic of reanimating the dead to the New World. We are its ultimate result.
The Blue state scientists gave us some very unique capabilities and over the top styling. I am so beautiful and well built, attributes that entice the male of the species that only something like fourteen percent of them capable of attaining an erection will not be moved to have sexual intercourse with me. These numbers have an uncertainty of plus or minus five percent. I prefer to believe the minus five percent numbers myself, based on my adventures over the past year.
I stand one point eighty-eight meters tall, weigh approximately seventy kilos, despite the fact that I do not possess a skeleton support system, can bench press one hundred and fifty kilos twenty times and run the hundred meters in nine seconds flat. Giving me this sepia coloring was debated hammer and tongs for over six months before the first Mariah model rolled off the assembly line. In actuality it tottered from the Lightning Chamber facility that had been set up in a secret location.
Admittedly being a woman of color called attention to me, but that was the purpose once news got around about how deadly dangerous zombies such as I could be. The same argument held for the Elijah model as well, only he was as black as the ace of spades to not only terrify the Red staters, but also to evoke those deep seated forbidden feelings in members of the white female population.
We are almost impossible to kill provided you don't know the trick to making any reconstitution an impossibility. During the first three months that we operated in Red state territory we lived high off the hog, so to speak. Our casualties were less than five percent, naturally all of them permanent kills, occurring by accident in all cases. We were responsible for well over three thousand deaths; damned few ever got away with just a missing limb. This may not sound lke much, but by this time the total Red state population was hovering around five million, still substantially larger than that of the Blue states.
The Blue state commanders were planning on releasing upwards of five thousand zombies over the next year. Based on a projected kill ratio of three hundred to one, it wouldn't take long to reduce the total population of the Red states by nearly thirty percent, at which time they would be prepared to release another ten thousand to finish off the Red states permanently.
Two things got in the way of this optimistic projection. The Red state folks found our Achilles' heel, but we might have survived that. However when coupled with the destruction of the manufacturing facility caused by a barrage of tactical nukes fired from the remaining US Army of Freedom missile submarine lying off shore just a few miles from the Lightning Chamber, we were cooked. As the old saying goes, the rest was history. This is when my personal story begins to get interesting, in a sick sort of way.
( To be continued - rolf palsy )
