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Novels by William Walling
Novels by William Walling
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Virtualbookworm.com Publishing, Inc., College Station, Texas
ISBN-10: 1589393414
Type: Fiction
Pages: 249
Copyright: © 2003 by William Walling
ISBN-13: 9781589393417
Price: $7.95 (eBook)
A draconian solution to global overpopulation dismays the Christian community, although a necessity to restrict re-growth in the wake of climate change disasters which make the environment no longer able to sustain a decimated population, let alone permit an increase.
Be fruitful, advocates Judeo-Christian Scripture, and multiply, and replenish the earth. Historical demographics reveal how diligently we have complied with this “Eleventh Commandment.” Eight millennia before the Savior’s birth, global population in inferred to have been roughly five millions. When Julius Caesar fell to the daggers of envious man, the centuries-old Roman Republic fell with him, and the estimate jumped to approximately two hundred and fifty millions, then escalated in the mid-seventeenth century to half a billion. By 1850 it reached one billion, and circa 1930 less than a century later some two billion human beings lived out their lives in the world’s islands and continents.
At the turn of the third millennium, six billions-plus crowded the globe, and the fragile environment, compounded by pristine threats imposed by accelerating global climate change phenomena, began showing definite signs of the coming marginal ability to sustain themselves. Despite wars, famines, plagues and other natural disasters, the relentless numbers continued to march upward at the alarming, exponential rate of three or four births per second, eleven or twelve thousand each hour, and threatened to double again in a relative short span of years. But what might lie beyond the crucial crossroads when our planet can no longer tolerate the succeeding multitudes? Learn the draconian population control tactic illustrated by TRIAGE, and pray that this fictional account never turns into reality.
Excerpt
Triage
William Walling
tri•age (’trē,äZH) noun [Fr. “separate out”]. Classification of war casualties,
or civilian disaster, to determine priority of treatment:
Class I Those who will die regardless of treatment.
Class II Those who will live regardless of treatment.
Class III Those who can ber saved only by prompt treatment.
Part One - Victoria
Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
Genesis, i. I. 28
Prologue
Most summer afternoons around three and four o’clock, twelve million denizens of the Greater Denver megalopolis have to deal with a minor inconvenience. Prevailing westerlies push warm, humid air from the Great Plains against the Continental Divide. The moist influx rises, collides with cooler, drier air high above the mountains, and moisture condenses. Pedestrians scurry for cover as thundershowers drench the region, though not for long.
Soon the air clears magically, the sun reappears. For a time, until endemic high altitude smog settles back in, the Rockies can be seen rearing majestically, silhouetted against a cerulean sky.
The exception that aided in proving the rule occurred late one summer evening, when the minor inconvenience turned into a major bother. A window-rattling electrical storm stalked the area, its noisy passage continuing on into the wee hours. Lightning strikes speckled Greater Denver and the outlying exurban sprawl with power outages.
To homeless scavenger Nate Senich the blackout was neither a bother nor any sort of inconvenience, but the godsent opportunity he had watched and waited for all summer long. A lightning strike had blasted a transformer, chopping off power in the general vicinity of the Denver City Park, specifically a high, electrified fence enclosing the zoo’s deer compound.
His emotions whipsawing between dread of the consequences if things were to go wrong, and a foretaste of the soaring elation in store if everything went well — an ambivalence shared by three oddly assorted companions — fear burned in Nate’s gut like ripe jalapeño peppers, garnishing his omnipresent hunger. Clenching and unclenching his fists to still the trembling, he psyched himself up for the coming effort, licked chapped lips and whispered nervous urgings to his companions, telling them to stop bellyaching and get ready, goading them to risk the bold sortie, reassuring them it could be done quickly, easily, just as rehearsed.
Heart thudding in his chest, his mouth dry, Nate tensed, steeling himself to surge erect, bolt across the patch of sun-browned lawn and scramble up and over the dead electric fence. But at that moment the full moon slid from behind scudding thunderheads and loosed a wash of moonlight that silvered the trees and walkways, the clump of withered shrubbery behind which crouched he himself and three other emaciated men.
Uttering a sibilant curse, Nate whispered, “Okay, soon’s the moon dives back under me ‘n Red go up and over, grab a fawn and heist it over the fence. Art, you and Slick man the rope. Then we all cut and run like the hammers of hell.”
“More meat on a big one,” pointed out the redhead.
“Terrific!” His stage whisper louder than if he’d spoken normally, Nate said indignantly, “How you figurin’ to haul a full-grown buck or doe over a ten-foot fence topped with barb wire? Snatch a fawn and scarper is what I say. The zoo guys could get power back any minute, then where’d we be?”
“Up shit creek,” admitted Red.
“Uh-huh, without no damn paddle, either.”
The moonlight faded, gradually snuffed by a passing cloud. Nate refused to chance reconsidering, and maybe chicken. He drew a deep breath and reared to his feet. Bent over at the waist to aid in hoped-for concealment, he trotted clumsily toward the deer compound, the redhead at his heels.
Getting into the compound proved harder than Nate had anticipated. Haphazardly climbing ladder fashion, the pointed toes of his badly scuffed Western boots kept slipping on wet chain-links. Praying that power would not be restored and fry him like a bug, he used a pair of side-cutting electrician’s dikes stolen from a nearby fire station to snip the coil of vicious concertina wire looped atop the formally electrified fence. Beside him, Red went over first, snagging his shirt, tearing it on a sharp, lopped off wire end. Nate threw a leg over in the darkness, nearly losing his balance, then slipped twice more climbing down, with Red wheezing and grunting alongside.
The meager herd of mule deer moved away skittishly, milling toward the far side of the compound. Fast on his feet for someone in poor health, Red darted toward the anxiously stirring deer, chased after a fawn, tripped and sprawled face down, managing to stretch out and capture the half-grown animal by a pipestem rear leg.
Hustling to lend a hand, Nate failed to notice the doe that came up, prancing to protect her fawn. A razor-sharp front hoof poleaxed the redhead, catching him above the left ear. Weak-lunged and diabetic, not to mention being malnourished since birth, Red went down like an emptied sack.
Nate swore softly and charged after the fawn as it scampered away. Catching hold of the animal’s hindquarters, he rolled it to the ground, slit its throat with a rust-speckled hunting knife. He stooped over Red, fearful of touching him, and listened for breathing. No breath was left in the redhead. The moon emerged from scudding cloud anvils and dimly illuminated a dark pool forming beneath the other’s head. Red’s eyes were open, staring blindly in the moonlight.
Panic drained Nate’s strength as he staggered to the fence, the blood-soaked fawn cradled in his arms. His fingers trembling badly, he had difficulty tying the dangling length of fraying hemp around the animal’s forequarters and upper torso. Art and Slick yanked on the rope. The fawn bounced against the fence, moving upward in fits and jerks with Nate clambering in awkward haste beside it. He helped jiggering the carcass over the top with one hand, and then nearly fell again in his haste to descend the other side of the fence.
“What’s with Red?” Slick busied himself helping Art stuff the fawn into doubled, king-sized plastic trash bags.
“Stove-up, deader ‘n yesterday’s news. Get a hustle on!”
“Can’t just leave Red here. It ain’t right,” objected Art.
“What the hell else can we do? Move your butt, f’Chrissake!”
Street lights flickered, winked to life as three shadows hastened away from the deer compound. Nate labored under the doubled trash bags holding the carcass of one of the Denver Zoo’s few remaining mule deer.
* * *
Hours later, slumped against the cement-block wall in the basement of a ramshackle abandoned house in an older, rundown section of Greater Denver’s Wheat Ridge district, Nate laid both hands across his distended gut and groaned in ecstasy.
Picked clean, what was left of the fawn hung on a spit Slick and Art had jury-rigged from a length of half-inch pipe and two “Y”-shaped branches lopped from a dead parkway tree. Battered kitchen cabinetry and two hollow-core doors scrounged from upstairs bedrooms had been smashed into kindling and burned on the cellar’s cracked cement floor, leaving a charred mess.
Slick’s loud belch earned a snicker from one of his mates.
Sated, Art wheezed, “Gawdalmighty, roast venison! Didn’t think I’d ever see the day.”
“Want . . . more?” Despite a mouthful of badly decayed teeth, Slick still chewed noisily.
Art grinned. “Couldn’t choke down another mouthful. Besides, not much left except bones ‘n gristle.”
Slick’s chewing suddenly stopped.
Art gasped.
Startled by the other’s sudden intake of breath, Nate’s alarm peaked when the old fellow loosed a heartfelt exclamation of dismay. “Oh, Jesus-my-beads!”
Ruddy in the faint glow of smoldering embers, a pair of Greater Denver’s Finest quietly tiptoed down the basement’s rickety wooden stairs. Polycarbonate visor-shields pulled down over their eyes, body armor in evidence, the cop in the lead covered the threesome with a riot gun. Two more officers edged downward behind the first pair, one holding a laser rifle. The other rearmost officer switched on an electric torch, blinding the diners.
“Against the wall, spread ‘em!” The not-to-be-argued-with command echoed hollowly in the basement’s confines.
Rough hands frisked Nate. Beside him, leaning on his hands at an angle against the wall, Slick sobbed in a gurgling falsetto. A cop kicked Art’s legs out from under him when he failed to comply fast enough with a curt order.
“Stupid assholes!” remarked one of the officers.
“How’d you, uh . . . finger us?” asked Nate, feeling dead inside despite the only decent meal he could recall. “What made you pick up on us?”
“You kidding, Dipshit?” His grin nastiness personified, the cop used two fingers to push the visor-shield up over his helmet. “The stink of roasting meat only attracted maybe three or four dozen sniffers. They’re lined up three deep along the sidewalk.”
“Sniffing,” said Nate dully.
“Yeah, and drooling.”
Art retched, vomiting all over a cop’s bulletproof vest. The officer swore a fulminant curse and beat him senseless with a truncheon.
Slick cried, “Oh, Jesus-my-beads!”
* * *
Eight thousand kilometers eastward in Rome it was getting on toward noon of a humid summer morning. Although a prominent member of Famiglia Pontificia, the Pope’s inner circle, few habitués of Vatican City would have recognized Louis Cardinal Freneaux. Eyes downcast, head heavy in thought, His Eminence was dressed for travel in a summer-weight, dark gray business suit, a perfect complement his somber expression. With no more than minutes to spare, he hurriedly descended the outside stairs leading up to the papal apartments and hastily made his way across the San Damaso courtyard.
In less than two hours, with or without him aboard, a hypersonic jet would depart Leonardo da Vinci International for New York. The limousine driver had been instructed to pick him up on Via di Porta Angelica, at the gate adjacent to the Swiss Guards’ barracks, but despite the need to hurry he felt an overpowering urge to seek solace in the basilica before commencing the dreaded journey. With faltering resolve that amply reflected his depressed state of mind, Cardinal Freneaux bypassed Raphael’s Loggia, and skirted the Sistine Chapel to avoid the inevitable gaggle of summer tourists.
The interview had not merely gone badly, it had in fact turned into a frightful ordeal, a far worse confrontation than he had anticipated. Renowned in private for a mercurial temper well salted with an acid wit, His Holiness had not been just angry, he had been in high dudgeon. His harsh words and strident directives, delivered in staccato Italian, beat and reverberated silently in the cardinal’s mind like a cacophony of clangorous bells:
“This abomination has gone on far too long, Louis — nearly thirty years! It must be stopped, and we mean to see that it is stopped. No, I will not listen to another word from you! We shall brook no more of your sentimental arguments. Never again will you be allowed to try and exacerbate the infamy perpetrated by that woman and the other eight United Nations death merchants. Whatever personal opinion you may hold of you’d do well to keep to yourself.
“During the coming audience,” the Pontiff had continued vehemently, “you are to convey absolutely nothing in the way of salutations and felicitations. You re not to stand on ceremony, Louis. You shall deliver our message verbatim, and you shall deliver it firmly, forcefully. There cannot be the slightest possibly of misunderstanding. It is our firm conviction to carry through with the ultimatum, and it is something you must make perfectly clear.”
“Yes, Holy Father,” had been his meek response. But what else could it have been?
Feeling the weight of the world resting on his gaunt shoulders, Cardinal Freneaux entered the basilica. There before him lay the shrine of shrines, gloriously lit beneath Michelangelo’s soaring dome. The four curlicue, gilded bronze columns of Bernini’s baldacchino supported the high, draped canopy above the papal altar in splendor. Beyond, at the far end of the apse, a bronze throne held the symbolic wooden chair of Peter. Long a Prince of the Church, Freneaux had enjoyed the spectacle innumerable times. Even so, it never failed to move him.
He bent as if to make obeisance, then an inner voice urged him to hesitate. With a catch in his throat, he wondered for perhaps the thousandth time what the saintly Fisher of Men would think of the modern world humanity had inherited.
With a single tear rolling down his sunken left cheek, he turned and left the basilica in a state verging on despair.
It promised to be anything but a joyous trip.
One
The tall man waited with outward patience, standing stiff-backed, knees together opposite the desk where Dr. Duiño’s executive assistant feigned work under his own punishing scrutiny. An imposing presence not much under two meters in stature, the tall man was forceful in appearance, with a proud aquiline nose, sleek dirty-blond hair, and chill hazel eyes. The wraparound collar of his pearl gray tunic was fastened despite the fact that a scheduled rolling power brownout had paralyzed portions of Greater New York during the night and early morning hours, leaving the anteroom overly warm and stuffy.
The youthful executive assistant barely lifted his head to dartd occasional furtive glances at the tall man. When their glances happened to cross, he squirmed. “Terribly sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Rook. I can’t imagine what’s keeping her.”
“I’m sure Dr. Duiño is very busy, Harold.” The tall man folded long arms across his chest, a gesture hinting of a mild rebuke. “Don’t trouble yourself. Pretend I’m not here.”
Plunging back into the paperwork littering his desk, Harold divided his time between a checklist of names and the flat-panel computer display integral within his desk. When at last the intercom chimed, he was quick to say, “You can go right in, sir.”
Rook nodded, turned on his heel. When the blast-resistant door to the inner office slid into the wall and he entered, Harold looked immensely relieved.
The sanctum of Dr. Victoria Maria-Luisa Ortega de Duiño, Chair of the U.N. Department of Environment & Population’s nine-member Triage Committee, was as severe and desiccated as the woman herself. A blue-and-white United Nations ensign hung behind her ebony desk on the left; on the right, atop a travertine pedestal, the diorite bas-relief presented to her by Mexico’s preeminent sculptor depicted a stylized version of UNDEP’s logo, a set of balanced scales superimposed on the globe of Earth, and beneath it the motto:
TERRA STABILITA
A pair of utilitarian guest chairs crafted of clear Honduras mahogany were adrift on a sea of wall-to-wall shag the color of oatmeal. Save for an antique French pendulum clock, and a floor-to-ceiling bank of video panels — now dark — the austere yet spacious office was enclosed by oyster-white walls. Damask draperies of pastel yellow shrouded a glass wall overlooking the East River ninety floors below.
Rook did not presume to speak. Hands clasped behind his back, he chose a spot not far inside the door, and in a stance outwardly subservient regarded his superior with a vacuous, indolent expression.
If aware of his presence, Dr. Duiño gave no sign, continuing to occupy herself with a sheaf of papers neatly stacked beside the computer display. Her hair, short and brittle as her temper, was roached stiffly backward to form a platinum aura. Her features were wrinkled, sagging, although her eyes retained the dark and shining luster of youth. Around her frail neck, pendant against the handmaid lace mantilla thrown over her shoulders hung a polished silver crucifix. In two months and eleven days Victoria Duiño would celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday.
The most reviled and detested human being on the planet, she lifted her eyes at last. “My apologies, Bennett. I hadn’t meant to keep you away from your desk so long. Please have a seat.”
Rook made it a point to remain standing. “I take it the matter is pressing?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Dr. Duiño touched a button on the remote controller. Across the office, the larger of two holovision tanks lit, and a scene condensed. Rendered with startling realism via an encrypted, secure satellite transmission, it allowed viewers to eavesdrop on a courtroom scene. In its penultimate stage, the trial was taking place half a continent away.
“I wish to assure myself,” declared Dr. Duiño, staring unabashedly at her deputy chairperson as if gauging his demeanor, “we are obtaining full benefit from the Senich Trial. I assume you’ve been following the case.”
Rook turned with leisurely grace. He studied the scene in the holographic theater for a number of heartbeats, listened to a phrase or two of the summation rendered by a public defender. Despite an abysmally weak contention, the self-conscious young attorney was vainly trying to make use of the only ammunition in his depleted arsenal. Much less than eloquent, he was attempting to convince a dozen stone-faced jurors that the defendant had suffered severe deprivation all his life, and therefore deserved nothing more than relatively lenient punishment. To condemn the defendant, Nathan Senich, for the vile offense he and a pair of luckless companions had committed, pleaded the lawyer, would amount to an act of gross injustice.
Rook said, “I hope you’ll forgive me, Victoria. Alas, I’ve been too busy to keep up with the proceedings. I assume it’s the gluttony action mentioned in your memo.”
“It is,” was Victoria’s cool rejoinder. In her opinion, the unanimous guilty verdict soon to be rendered by twelve resentful, disgusted men and women was a foregone conclusion, the crime itself just one more ugly, despicable incident. A homeless transient, along with two miserable co-defendants, had capped their thievery of an animal belonging to an endangered species by reviving the ancient sin of gluttony. In her view, although totally indecent in itself, the deed was much more heinous than simply an affront to human society as a whole, exemplifying as it did one symptom of a global population slowly and steadily degenerating toward terminal illness. Her interest was purely political since, for the UNDEP Triage Committee, the trial carried important propaganda implications. Widespread howls of public indignation, fanned by print and electronic tabloid journalism, had created a volcanic avalanche of calls, letters, and e-mail, and if UNDEP press releases were to milk the sordid affair for all it was worth . . .
“The gall of those swine!” Victoria bit the indictment short in an uncommon display of vehemence. “In a starving world, they dared to slaughter and gorge themselves on the flesh of a fawn snatched from a protected compound in the Denver Zoo.”
Bennett Rook’s underlip curled. “Grotesque,” he said in a resonant, unruffled tone of voice. “Despite what you say, Victoria, frankly I can’t imagine what might be in it for us. In forty-eight hours or less, the remains of the mischievous gourmands will be fertilizing crops in Denver’s greenbelts, or perhaps the grounds of the zoo itself — poetic justice, one might say.”
“I’d much rather not hear you make light of it, Bennett.” A throaty burr crept into Sra. Duiño’s enunciation. “In my memo, you may recall, I asked you to have PR crack the whip on this court action. Thus far, you seem to have ignored my request. I believe we stand to reap a certain amount of public sympathy if trial coverage is handled properly.”
“We . . ?” Rook’s brows elevated. “Triage Committee? Sure you aren’t perhaps a touch overly optimistic about that? Nothing we do or say could possibly improve our image. Only the day before yesterday L’Osservatore Romano once again referred to you as the ‘Matriarch of Death.’ Decades ago PR abandoned any and all attempts to ‘sell’ our committee to the public.”
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