In the segment of "The Country/The Country," my political thriller set in a fictional
country resembling our own, I posted today, events move to a crisis in the small city of Monro, where Voting Day is about to take place.
Keel, the novel's principal character, a retired teacher living a largely self-contained existence, has learned that the Leading Candidate in his country's election of a new leader -- a loud-mouthed, rabble-rousing
businessman called 'Pig'-- is bringing his frenzied campaign to Keel's city of
Monro.
In chapters 22 to 24, (here's the link:
Keel comes face-to-face with the campaign's violent, bullying tendencies, as
ordinary citizens cower in their homes. Somehow the nastier details of the Pig gang's takeover of the small cities on the campaign trail never seem to make into the popular news media: cars stolen, drunken parties, confiscations of booze, food and firearms. Plus some short-term disappearances among the female population.
To add to his s own anxiety, the opposition has chosen Keel
to confront Pig in person.
Here's an excerpt from Chapter 24, "Vikings of the Road."
The Pigglies who
traveled with the leading candidate called themselves "Road-Kings." Some special in-group faction of these
christened themselves "V-8 Kings," a motorhead term that sounded to
Keel like Vee-Kings, raising echoes of an ancient, perhaps legendary wave of
invaders called Vikings. So in Keel's thoughts they became Vikings of the Road.
However named, or
nameless, they arrived in force, overwhelmed their opponents,
ferreted out opposition leaders, especially those critical of Pig, and hung
them in effigy from lampposts. Sometimes, if the opposition did not cave and
cower immediately, but stimulated the deeper foul and feral instincts of the
attackers, they hung women too, letting their colorfully draped bodies swing in
the air as warnings to the locals and stimulants to the sadism of their own
followers. A subterranean current of angry rapacity they could tap as needed.
If they turned it on, it would flow.
In his own
dream-haunted consciousness he saw the engines
left to roar even after the vanguard arrived and secured the Capitol Zone,
pulling their machines up onto the grass and staking them on the broad lawns.
Tents would be planted there soon and on other nearby green spaces, the few
square blocks of city commons where an occasional monument served as a tent
pole.
He saw more; day-dreamed
more deeply. He could not turn away.
The newcomers surged
over the landscape, set fires to warm themselves, broke out their canteens and
flasks, smashed a few windows when they found doors locked against them,
rousted out a mayor's aide and a handful of councilors from City Hall to serve
as guides and local reference sources (the mayor himself, a secret Pig ally,
having been tipped off and allowed to flee to the city's sub-lands), then began
to tamp down some of the engine-roar so long as the local populace remained
suitably cowed.
After which they began
looking for stuff. Drink and provisions came first, of course. Then girls, a
little later.
The nearby markets
were quickly looted. Employees fled at the sight of the approaching Pigglies,
their beards, their bellies, and their girth; and their flesh marked with
arcane symbologies... He recalled momentarily the opposing symbols of guerilla
graffiti artists; the comparatively harmless 'Kevvens.'
...
Now he kept off the main roadways, hearing from these wider spaces the
aching sound of car alarms, loudspeakers, and the screeching of brakes
typically followed by the deeper bang of collision, but on this occasion
simply by louder sirens. He did not walk toward these noises.
He followed the
residential streets that looked as if the sirens had done their clearing work,
for now nobody was venturing out of doors, even to stand on a porch and crane a
neck at the sky.
Block after empty
block. Angry noises in the distance, no one on the sidewalk or the streets. The
occasional vehicle pawing slowly up to intersection to take a fearful peek
before making a turn. Its driver rigid and anonymous behind the wheel. The
corner shop closed, locked down for the night hours before nightfall. Dog
owners bade their pets to stay inside and hold it. The cats were in closets,
whining.
By the time he came
within blocks of the Capitol Zone -- the distance of a long shout in the street
that no one would hear -- the compounding of sirens and amplified PA noise rose
to a volume beyond which ordinary conversation could not be attempted. Keel
imagined pointing to his ears and shaking his head if anyone else manifested on
the street, but no one did.
Faces appeared at the
upper windows of the four and five story apartment blocks, looking dumbstruck,
dazed. Beyond the last brick building, the view opened and he spied a few
scurrying figures, walking hurriedly away from the center, their bodies hunched
forward as if lowering the head to protect the ears. They did not look at Keel
or anyone else, but hurried past. Homeward, he supposed -- or hoped. Unless
their homes had already proved unviable, commandeered by the intruders or
rendered unbearable by the constant noise or foul exhausted air, and they were
now hastening to some more distant sanctuary.
Fugitives from the
party: hands shoved deep into pockets, features raw, red-eyed, perhaps from
passing through smoky patches.
Keel thought about
trying to stop someone, forcibly, to demand an account.
What's going on? What are you afraid of?
But it would be like
trying to lay hands on a tempest.
Then smoke reached his
senses, flowed thickly in streams, borne by the wind.
He ducked into a
narrow alley, a final sanctuary between cramped buildings, and studied the
prospect of Capitol Plaza between volleys of smoke. He saw the bonfires, wood
fires sprinkled with trash, burning on the Plaza lawn and others spread across
the old town green like pustules from a raving fever. He saw the brightly
colored tents, planted here and there where the green space allowed.
He saw what he took to
be dummies, effigies, hanging from the lamp posts. Some clad in what looked
like business suits. He heard the loud pulsing sounds of what he supposed was
meant to be music. What did they call it -- Crash Music? Train Wreck? Dead
Mental?
A small knot of men,
suited but not wearing overcoats, huddled on the stone portico outside the main
entrance to the District Capitol building, the old stone heart of the Capitol Zone.
Its carved columns gave little protection from the elements, the stiff
late-winter wind, whiffs of smoke blown by a cross-breeze into their faces.
One of the men,
gray-headed (possibly a mayor's aide, Keel thought) began to cough.
The noise grew, as if
amplified by open space. He did not know what he would do if anyone approached him, but no one did.
He left the alley and
walked slowly toward the smoky fires, a jumble of waste wood and garbage at
their base, dismembered chairs dispersed among them. Toward the human figures
dispersed across the lawns, some edging in or out of tents: the central one of
these a big circular, party-looking big-show shelter; the others triangular, monochrome,
with tent-pole spines and a revivalist aspect. People gathered, unhurried,
looking at home here unlike the fugitives hurrying way. They wore
big-shouldered jackets, sports caps, belts with chains; men and women dressed
alike. Figures merged, broke away, threw their heads back and laughed, lifted
cans or bottles to their mouths. Some strode purposefully away from the plaza
lawn to the town green on the other side of a rectangular big-shot parking
area, the green's civic monuments now draped with the tent cloths and plastic
layers of improvised shelter. Others strode from the green back toward the plaza,
pausing to slap hands or greet others, shouting 'hallo!s' to acquaintances.
The carnival air of
these ambulatory figures contrasted so strongly from the cowed, fugitive aspect
of those escaping the city center -- and (he noticed) the huddle of anxious
figures planted outside the city hall entrance -- that Keel struggled to
understand what he was seeing in this transfiguration of a once familiar
setting; to assimilate these new impressions.
Festival? Or conquest?
It took him a moment to convince himself that the people he was now critically
regarding were the campaign followers of one Karol Pegasso...
The Pigglies.
Creatures of his dreams, nightmares...
Their dreamlike aspect
changed as a pair drew closer. Noticed him, exchanged a glance, turned his way.
Large men, two of them.
For more see:
"Second-act
crisis" implies there's much more to come. There is. I will be posting new segments of
my serial novel twice a week from now through the November election.
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