Digging In

"He's a rapist!"

"You're a rapist!"

"We don't even talk like that in West Virginia!" insisted Ernest Ironman, sick of his Nazi lover's support for Donald Trump.

"You chained me up!" retorted Barbara Hellmeister, who was obsessed that Trump shared a common ancestor with Adolf Hitler.

"How many times do I have to apologize for that?!"

"Apologize to our child!"

"What?!"

"I wanted Eichmann genes, and you passed on hillbilly swill!" snarled Barbara.

"Are you two even registered to vote?" asked Kevin ("Monkey") Mundy, walking cautiously past them to retrieve another beer.  (Monkey had recently married a 14-year-old, but that was not statutory rape in Virginia.)

The two (who were not registered to vote) ignored him and continued arguing.

Monkey went into the bunker baby room (secretly constructed thirty feet below the 9th green at Trump National Golf Club) to check on his young bride, who had volunteered to change the baby's diaper just to get away from the bickering.  He found her standing four feet away from the diaper table.  "Brittani, what are you doing?"

"I'm hoping the freak will roll off, hit its head, and die," she said without looking up at him.

"Brittani!"

"He has a green face and a scaly tail!"

"I told you, there was a bunch of in-breeding in West Virginia, and sometimes these birth defects just happen!  We have to act like we don't notice!"

"It's not human!"

"Sure it is!"

"I don't wanna come here anymore!  You can't even pan for gold in the pond when the golfers are out on a nice day like this!"

"But I love coming here!"  The DC Water employee scratched his wrist under the cursed Rolex which had first given him the crazed obsession to pan for gold and diamonds.  There was no place more exciting for him than the Trump pond (inhabited by the demon Ardua).

"We never hang out with my friends!"

"Your friends are in high school!  Are you gonna change that diaper or what?"

"You change it!  I want a divorce!"

Hidden in one of the exit tunnels, Angela de la Paz and the Warrior had been listening in on bunker conversations for hours.  As the sun began to set, they headed back out to inspect the fugitive demon.

"What do you think?" asked The Warrior, who was over 300 years old but did not possess Angela's supernatural gift for fighting evil.

"It doesn't have a soul," she said.  She had already known this from looking for the baby in the DreamTime before even coming out here, but the Warrior's careful monitoring of the people here under the influence of Ardua had convinced her it was time to pay a visit.

"Will you kill it?" he asked.

She sighed.  "I'm worried what effect that would have on the parents."

The Warrior contemplated this for a few minutes as they drew closer to Ardua's presence.  "The demon is growing large again," he said.  "I think it is feeding on their hatreds and pouring evil into that baby."

Angela sat down to take her shoes off and stick her feet in the pond.  The old Prophecy had predicted she would kill Ardua one day, but she had not been able to do it yet.  The new Prophecy was elusive.  "It was feeding on the Trump poison before they even arrived.  Now they are all feeding on each other."

"What will you do?" asked the Warrior again.

"Wait for the Election," Angela said, much to his surprise.

Several miles away, triple agent Charles Wu was trying really hard to understand what was going on with this election, but his SuperPAC strategist, Bridezilla, was constantly distracted by her new boyfriend and their mutual hobby.  "In China, saving face is extremely important," said Wu.  "My business colleagues are shocked at how many scandals Trump survived, and yet his ship is now sinking because of vulgar comments he made over ten years ago!?"

"I told you if we dangled enough money out there, somebody would come up with a good video!" she said, smiling as she watched Ed expertly installing miniature sconces to adorn the windows of the dollhouse living room where her conjoined guinea pigs slept.

"You sure did!" nodded Wu, wondering how much longer he had to watch this before she would serve dinner.  When he had introduced "Esperantu Edward" to Bridezilla as a special thank-you for how hard she had been working the past few weeks, it was with the idea that the miniaturist would simply offer her some ideas for Thelma and Louise's (and the human dolls' on the second floor) home, but he had been shocked that one of the espionage world's most amusing spies would spark her romantic interest.  "But why would Republicans abandon him now?  You can't tell me that John McCain is more concerned about this than the nuclear football!"

"No political cover," said Bridezilla, rubbing her hand on Ed's lower back.

"Mike Pence thinks raped women can't get pregnant, but Republicans--"

"Pence never used vulgar words."

"Trump's been vulgar for decades!"

"He crossed a line in that video.  It can't be defended."

"I don't understand where the line is," pleaded the man who had once considered himself one of the politically savviest foreigners in Washington.

"That's what you have me for!" smiled Bridezilla.  Then Ed said something to her in Esperantu, and they both laughed as Charles Wu shook his head in bewilderment.

Across the Potomac in Georgetown, the Seekers were eating delivery pizza after another grueling session of deprogramming a Trump cultist--the third this week.

"Why isn't this getting easier?" asked the Methodist minister.

"They're digging in their heels," said the Jewish rabbi.

"Our work is more important than ever," said the Jesuit theologian.

"He's right," said the Muslim iman.  "It's when people lose hope that they are most easily swayed into violence."

"But nobody has killed for Trump yet," said the Hindu guru.

"Not that we know of," said the Greek Orthodox priest, crossing himself.

"We have five more requests for this week," said the Jesuit.  "I think we should divide into two or three groups.  We all know what we're doing now."

"Do we?" asked the Unitarian minister, biting her lip.

A mile away, the Assistant Deputy Administrator for Hope was working into the night at his State Department office, tearing his hair out that domestic political chaos was encouraging nuclear saber-rattling in Russia and North Korea, and even more violence in the Middle East.  The U.S. was nobody's sheriff now.