Political Humor

This week’s installment of our on-line political humor novel is written by that Southern Bell, Snig of Snig’s Spot.

Next week Alex L will take the helm, then our very own JumpOut. If you’re interested in writing a chapter, check out Mild Max for details. Come on, you know you want to.

Ch 3: Shorts in a Snowstorm

I calculated how long it would take me to reach the six inches to where I’d laid the shotgun down, turn around and blow whoever was behind me away. Longer than it would take for them to pull the trigger. Apparently whoever it was, was reading my mind.

“Don’t even try it… ” For once in my life, I did what I was told.

“Get up nice and easy- keep your hands where I can see them.”

I remember thinking to myself that has to be the most effeminate voice I’ve ever heard on a guy as I turned around. I had my butt cheeks clinched together out of reflex.

I almost relaxed when I realized I was looking at what appeared to be a woman over the cold steel. Mid-20s, long dark hair, and oddly enough, shaved legs. I did my best in the semi-darkness to discern whether he or she had an Adam’s Apple.

Around these parts, things were seldom what they seemed and it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that this was some dude wanting to be a lady. Whether a he or a she, the shorts during the lovely snow we constantly had was a dead giveaway- Californian by birth, that I could be sure of. Didn’t matter if they were wearing a parka too, they’d be in shorts nine out of ten times.

Once again, someone was reading my mind. “I am a girl. I was born a girl, live as a girl and like boys. Any questions?”

I had questions, plenty of questions…but I knew better than to ask any of them. There are times that the only answer is, No ma’am, which was my answer to her.

“Are you a…”, I began to ask, but she immediately cut me off. She continued to train the gun on my nose as she fished around in her pocket for something. She produced a piece of paper, looked at me, back at it and back at me again. She smiled slightly and eased the hammer back into place, lowering the gun and re-holstering it.

I started breathing again.

“I was really hoping that was you I started following back at Holy Cross Cemetery,” she said.

I was slipping. I should have known I’d grown a tail, but I didn’t. I’d been bouncing too long at Thunderdome. I was too out of practice. I almost didn’t hear her when she asked how much Cutter had charged me. I rattled off some figure, my mind elsewhere like thinking about who the Hell was this chick, how’d she managed to tail me when I hadn’t even planned on going anywhere earlier, and for what reason?

“That son of a bitch! He charged me three times as much!”

“Yeah, Cutter is a son of a bitch. That’s for sure. Now, since you seem to know who I am, how about you tell me who you are?”

Whoever she was, at least she was easy on the eyes. It was sort of mesmerizing to see a real woman -especially one with shaved legs. At least I knew for sure she wasn’t some hippie biker bitch. Like the legendary hippies of the 60′s, real hippie biker bitches never shaved their legs.

About that time we both heard them. Shouts of, “Someone’s over here! It’s got to be him!”, were getting closer.

She turned out the flashlight and asked if I wanted to live to see tomorrow in a hushed voice. “If you do, come with me now,” she’d said.

I had two choices- ignore her offer and stand my ground and fight- most likely to my death, if I was lucky.

She stood up and started off toward a shack at the edge of the wall. I thought about my odds for a brief moment. Die eventually at the hands of an angry mob of homospecials or possibly die eventually at the hands of a beautiful woman?

The choice wasn’t too hard for me to make. I grabbed my gear and followed her through the rubble to the door of shack and we disappeared inside just as the flitters reached the spot we’d just been standing.

She was feeling around on the floor of the darkened shack. She asked if I’d had breakfast yet. All I could think was what an inane question that was considering all that the flitters had split up and were kicking over everything they could and tossing Molotov cocktails into any semi-standing buildings trying to flush me out.

No, I’d not eaten and I wasn’t even remotely hungry. Had she lost her damned mind? I was beginning to wonder if I’d made the right decision just as she snatched something up from the floor.

“In here! He’s in here! Bring the real fire power!” I heard just as she jumped in the tunnel beneath the trap door she’d just opened.

“Come on!” she hissed at me.

I thought about it one last time- stay and fight or go with her? There was what appeared to be a partial case of dynamite on the floor near what had once been a window, probably left behind by some schmuck who couldn’t carry it all or who planned to come back, but never made it.

That could help me I remember thinking.

And that’s when the Molotov cocktail landed just inside the window.

The tunnel shook from the explosion just as I slammed the trap door shut above my head. Dust and small rocks rained down on us.

“Do you think you could move any damned slower?” she asked. “I was told you were a professional.”

A professional? Oh geez. I realized I was looking at her back as she making her way down the tunnel. I started following her, thinking I still didn’t know her name, but at least the flitters thought I was dead…

The story so far:

Chapter 1: Behind Thunderdome

Chapter2: Click

Welcome to Chapter 2 of the on-going saga of Mild Max. Today’s installment of this online political humor novel was supposed to be written by JumpOut, but Obama’s Brown Shirts have wrecked his computer.  We look forward to seeing  his twisted political humor here real soon. So for today anyway, your stuck with me…again.

We have a new  Mild Max blog.  It’s really nothing more than a calender. This way you can see who will be writing what chapter and also get a chance to put yourself on the list.

Chapter  2: Click

As the pink mist settled to the ground, I knew the decision had just been made for me. I’ve seen what a shotgun can do to a man’s head before, but never the head of Bruce, the significant other of guy who hired me. OO buckshot at close range will kind of mess-up your day.

How he ever got into my room, with its heavy steel door locked from the inside, was a mystery. What wasn’t a mystery was what was going to happen in a very few minutes when the boss and his flitter friends found Bruce’s brains sliding down my wall.

I looked down at the all but headless corpse. It was dressed in strips of studded black leather and little else. I picked it up the gun lying on the floor next to it. It was an old Taurus 41 caliber revolver. A nice enough round, but the shiny finished, short barreled, five shot pistol was better used as a conversation piece than a serious weapon. Still, in a pinch… I stuffed it into one of my jacket’s deep front pockets.

That pocket was empty. The other ten or so were filled with all kinds of little goodies. I’d had this jacket sewn around some body armor. A little heavy, it’s waterproof, ballistic cloth outer shell protected the insulation and the body armor under that, protected me. It ‘d saved my sorry butt on more than one occasion.

Looking back down at the body, I knew this was no social visit. I tried to think back to what might have possessed him to try to kill me. Who knows? I probably pissed off someone. Got a knack for doing that.

I had three things going for me. First was that I was always prepared to get out of anywhere, fast. My overwhelming desire to not end up the way Bruce did, meant I always slept with my shotgun across my chest, boots on and my rucksack packed. You were a fool not to, and fools didn’t live very long in this part of town. I planned on living, for a little while longer anyway.

Secondly, I had a plan. If you can call running as fast you can a plan. The third thing I had going for me was a destination. I knew how to get out of town. Not that it’s all that hard to get out. Nobody cared if you left. Everyone cared if you tried to get in.

So I ran through the dark, snowy streets of San Francisco.

The angry shouts, gunfire and high-pitched screams, that echoed through the burned-out buildings and down the rat infested alleys, could only mean that they had discovered the mass of goo that was Bruce, from the shoulders up.

The rest of the night was a blur. I ran out of breath long before I ran far enough. I slowed a bit and pushed on through the back streets and overgrown parks. I remember that there was some weird shit going in the old Holy Cross cemetery on the outskirts of Dalyville. The demonic howls, loud moaning and bonfires were enough to keep me to the shadows.

It must have been about 1 AM when I hit The Barrier. Frisco sits at the ass end of a narrow point of land. On one side of the city is the Pacific Ocean, on the other is The Bay. The five mile wide Barrier cuts the northern end off from the rest of the world.

The Navy shipyard in Alameda is across the bay. When they abandoned it, a bunch of us went over there. We found enough of the crew still hanging around to help us bring back a lot of firepower. Everything we couldn’t load on the ships, we blew up.

Frisco became a military power overnight. A lot of the hippies didn’t like what was happening to “their” city and began causing trouble. Funny how violent people can be, who preach love and peace. Like they really changed anything. We just shot a few of ‘em, and the rest scattered like rabbits.

The barrier is not just the wall and old Navy gun emplacements, it’s a wide strip of barren land on either side. Getting up to the Barrier wasn’t a problem. Getting the couple hundred yards across the other side alive -or not wishing you were dead- would be.

One of those guys who went over to get the ships was a friend of mine. I use the word “friend” only to say that we wouldn’t try to kill each other if we met in a bar. He made his living getting people and goods into and out of the city. His name was Cutter, and he was a Koyote.

Cutter was pretty easy to find, since he was looking for me too. He’d heard what happened and knew I’d be heading his way. I guess business was slow. Being a friend, he only charged me the going rate, not the “I’m frikkin’ going to die if you don’t help me” rate.

I shook his hand, right before he closed the well camouflaged door at the end of a series of low, wet tunnels, which zigzagged across the open stretch of land on the southern side of the wall. I continued to crawl for what must have been an hour. Through busted concrete and twisted metal, through dead bushes and broken glass, until I couldn’t go on any farther.

Wet, exhausted and freezing my Jennys,  I had to take a break. Wouldn’t you frikkin’ know, just when I decided I’d found a good place to rest for a few minutes, I heard a click.

It’s one of those sounds that sends lightening bolts running up your spine, into your fingertips, and your fight or flight response into overdrive. It took everything I had not to move. I knew that sound all too well. It was the sound that woke me tonight and started all of this. The sound of a revolver’s hammer being placed into mess-up your day mode.

The story so far:

Chapter 1: Behind Thunderdome

Welcome to the first installment of a blogging community written, on-line political satire novel.  What this means, is that we are asking you to volunteer (you don’t get paid) for the ultimately prestigious honor of writing a subsequent 400-700 word chapter.  This  generous offer is open to all of our readers, so you don’t even have to have you’re own blog to join in.

Radioactive Liberty may not be the first to do this, but who else a has ever given you a chance to play in a satirical future world of Global Cooling?

Mild Max should be written in the first person and remain in the genre of those old, schlockishly penned, dime store novels. Next week, our very own taser waving lawman, JumpOut, will be adding chapter 2.  The following week it’s Snig, of Snigsspot fame’s turn.

Want to get in on the fun?  Drop us a line at lesjameshumor, that’s at gmail, and we’ll be happy to give you a date.  No, not that kind of date, the date we expect perfection from you in the way of a well crafted piece of literary art.  Then just pretend you’re at the DMV.  Sooner or later, it’ll be your turn. Hey, it’ll be good practice for the Obama soup kitchen lines.

We’ll need your contribution by midnight on the Wednesday the week your post is scheduled to be published (Publish date is Friday).  That only give you five days to be brilliant. Not like you’ll need that much time.

This first chapter is kind of long. Sorry, it was necessary, to get all of the background story into place.  Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess.

Chapter 1: Behind Thunderdome

It’s a dark and stormy night -somewhere on the planet. It just isn’t very dark or stormy here. Here is San Francisco. Here it’s daytime…in August… and it’s snowing lightly.

My name is Max. I use to be a traffic cop, when there was traffic, when it didn’t snow on Frisco in frikkin’ August, or at all for that matter. Back then we were all worried about man made Global Warming but that was almost twenty years ago. That’s when the Mayan calendar ran out -back in 2012- and so did the warm weather.

Stupidly, we all listened to Al Gore and his band of butt kissing “scientist”. We banned coal during the first four years of the Obama Presidency. Next, we turned every plowable square inch of California and the mid-west over to planting corn and wind farms. Then Cali Governor, Jerry Spaceship Earth Brown was more than happy to give up his limo and drive around in a Chevy Volt. What that lead to, was all of the petroleum-powered cars in the state being taxed right off the streets.

Most of the rest of the country was right behind them. Only Alaska, Texas and Idaho held out, but soon enough, even they crumbled under the economic pressure. Thousand of scientists, worldwide, held conferences, wrote papers, went on TV -when they could- to warn us that global warming was a big hoax.

They screamed that the planet was cooling, not warming. The idiots in Washington and at the E.U. didn’t listen, they didn’t need to hear it. They already knew . It was the power from energy manipulation that they were after, and a little inconvenient “truth” wasn’t going to stop them from getting it.

Most of the scientist drowning them out, got their grant money from the power-hungry politicians, who wanted a crisis that could be “scientifically proven”. So instead of preparing the country for frostbite, we got handed sunscreen. A lot of people bought into the lie and then a lot of people bought it.

Europe went straight to hell when Russian Putinist destroyed the natural gas pipelines that heated a lot of the continent. Civil unrest wrecked what was left of the Russian economy. The Red Army still had plenty of fuel then, to overzealously run over all who stood in their way, and a lot of those who hadn’t.

China and India didn’t fare any better. The end result was the same, hundreds of millions of freezing, starving people. South America and Africa weren’t very stable to begin with. They didn’t stand a chance.

Australia, Canada, northern Europe and most of Asia are all packed in ice. San Francisco is the new Anchorage.

By end of Obama’s second term, the price of oil had dropped to record lows but the taxes to pay for all the 2008, 09, and 10 bail-outs, jumped the price of gas up to over 12 bucks a gallon. The bottom dropped out of what was left of the economy and so did the mercury in those now outlawed types of thermometers.

The basically bankrupt oil companies went to Washington to beg for help but they just got flat turned down. Congress signed their death warrants. The gas stations soon went dry. Not that anyone could afford gas anyway. So we got stuck with electric cars that needed to be plugged in to re-charge or those running on biofuels. That pretty much killed interstate commerce. There should be a punchline in there somewhere but I don’t remember anyone laughing.

When the snow began falling year round, the corn crops failed and the solar panels got covered. The government called out the National Guard to sweep off the panels but they couldn’t get anywhere, since they didn’t have fuel for their trucks. The photovoltaic panels, that were supposed to be so all hell-fired wonderful,  never produced more than about 10% of the electrical needs for our city.  Now with the cloudy days and almost constant light snow, they’re down to about zip.

The military couldn’t defend the wind farms, when the eco-terrorist started toppling them because they were killing the frikkin birds. They couldn’t stop the same groups from blowing-up the hydroelectric dams because they were preventing salmon from migrating up-stream. Those morons reduced the available power around here to almost nothing.

It would have been too much, if the cold and suicides hadn’t killed off the majority of the population. Between not enough crops able to grow, no way to transport what there was, frozen water pipes, and no heat, most people didn’t stand a chance. It became survival of the fittest or maybe just the unlucky.

Those of us who made it through the worst were still royally screwed.

Somewhere in his third term, Obama just disappeared. Not that anyone cared by that point; we hadn’t heard much from Washington for a while. Most of us had stopped even listening anyway. What were they going to say to us? Sorry?

Over the next few years we adapted. Things got better but never good. Not like the old days.

So here I am, bouncing at Thunderdome. It might be the asshole of the world, but it keeps a warm roof over my head. “One goes in, two come out”, they say. Usually hand in hand. Soft, limb-wrested, hand in hand. It makes me sick but it’s the only work I could find.

I use to enjoy seeing these guys get beat to hell, now I protect them from it. Twisted karma is what that is.

They named the bar after that classic movie. All the guys that go in there all made up, dressed in black leather, lots of skin showing. Makes me want to puke.

It was there, one night, that I overheard a couple of theses flitters talking about a place down south, where the sun was warmer and there was crops not growing inside old building, turned into hot houses. Outside in the light and all, like nature intended. I’ve heard rumors over the years that the tropics might still be all right. Some say it’s got to be more like what Missouri used to be – not too bad. But no one here really knows for sure.

Yeah, I’ve heard it all before and I’ve even thought about leaving. But I got a safe place to stay -as long as I make sure to sleep lightly, with my shotgun across my chest, in my windowless room, with the steel door locked from the inside. OK, maybe it’s not perfect. Actually… it’s pretty shitty.

The problem is getting to this mythical land. Outside the city’s defenses, bands of bikers roam wild. They got their turf divided up between the Roadies and their fast, skinny-wheeled machines and the Off Roaders with their full suspension mountain bikes. You just don’t want to mess with either one of these groups. Beyond them is a vast blank space.

The few citizens that have made it into Frisco, tell stories of hiding from wild, four legged animals and even wilder animals that walk upright. It sounds like the Wild West meets Genghis Khan out there.

Still, I hate it here and can’t see any good reason to stay. I don’t know if it’s really any better, down in what use to be the tropics, but I can’t see it being any worse.

I’m starting to seriously think that I’d rather take my chances out there, with the biker gangs and bands of rabid, vegan hippies, than wake-up some morning to find my skull cracked and my pants around my ankles -behind Thunderdome.