The Home Front

Dulles Samuelson walked back onto his houseboat, Singapore Surprise, with another bouquet of roses, another box of chocolates, and another bag of Columbia Heights pupusas.  He had hoped for a long time for Angela de la Paz to move in with him, but finding her in his bed days ago--sobbing uncontrollably about unstoppable evil forces--had not been quite the way he had wanted it to go.  He left everything in the kitchen and went to find her in the bedroom.

"Did you like it?" he asked.  "Nobody can be in a bad mood while watching 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure!'"

"Yeah," she said flatly.  "Be excellent to each other."

He crawled under the quilt and told her dinner was hot and ready.

"You're the best," she said flatly.  "I mean it," she added, knowing she was still not smiling at him.

"That's not all I am!" he said, with a kiss.  "Just got a call saying I've officially passed Quantico!  I have three more days off, then I report to FBI headquarters to meet my new boss on December 1st!"

"Wow!" she said, and actually started to smile.

"Heading into the belly of the beast!"

Angela almost laughed.  "If you're ever in trouble, I'll get a vision."

"I know," he said, "but I intend to take care of myself!  You still have bigger things to worry about."  He saw her frown.  "Not worry!  I mean--"

"I don't have any visions about anything else," she sighed.  "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing."

"Let's take the boat to warmer waters for a couple of days.  Then you should go back to work," he said.  "Whatever Charles asks you to do, your moral compass will tell you to do the opposite!"  He winked, getting one more tiny smile out of her.

Meanwhile, Charles Wu was meeting with Bridezilla at her Prince and Prowling office to discuss the next moves for his SuperPAC.

"It's not over yet!" she said, placing the Christmas tree in the miniature Disney castle her boyfriend ("Esperantu Edward") had given her as a Thanksgiving gift.

"So they don't mind you having something like that here?" asked Charles.

"Why would they?" asked Bridezilla, who had stopped caring what people thought after getting reinstated as a junior partner.  "Now, if I had the guinea pig house here, that wouldn't be allowed."  She hung a miniature wreath on the tiny door, took some photos of the result, then sat down at her desk.

Edward had assured Charles that he had given up spying and was going straight for Bridezilla's sake, but Charles still had misgivings that this relationship had blossomed at all.  It was going to be bad when it blew up, and Charles would take the blame for introducing them--even though it had only been for the miniatures!  "So why do you think it's not over yet?" he asked, still unable to explain to his handlers in Hong Kong OR Beijing (a) why Donald Trump got elected or (b) what to expect from the maniac.

"Look, Charles," she said, "I'm not expecting you to keep paying me after your SuperPAC failed, but that man is a nutjob!  Even some of the bigots I grew up with in Virginia did not vote for that greedy pig-on-a-stick!  I know how Pentagon people think, I know how CIA people think, I know how FBI people think, I even know how some of the Supreme Court Justices think, and I'm telling you:  he is going to have a lot of trouble dictating anything!  The conservative establishment--"

"The military-industrial complex?"

"Call it what you will," she said with a sweet smile, "but they are not going to let this country become a stooge of the KGB!  Or stand by while he lines his own pockets at their expense."

"Seems like the old-guard GOP is kissing his ass to get appointments," Charles said.

"That's right, and they are soon going to outnumber him by a long shot!"

"Congress is kissing his ass, too!"

"The Republican Congress has enough rope to hang itself with now," she said.  "All of the Senators and Reps have to think hard about their own reelection.  Do you realize that Texas only voted for Trump by a 10% margin?  That is minuscule for the GOP in Texas, Charles!  Now he's going to build the wall or not build the wall, and these Senators and Reps will have to be for or against one of those results!  There will be no fence-straddling on Donald Trump!"

"Maybe I'll move to England for awhile," Charles said.  "I can't--"  He realized he almost said "spy on a government I don't understand", but caught himself.

"Prince and Prowling has always prided itself on succeeding no matter who's in power in Washington, Charles, and I know your business interests will, as well."

Charles Wu had bribed and paid and hired all sorts of people over the years to get the information he needed and resell it lucratively, but something about bribing Donald Trump or his Administration was more than he could stomach, no matter how much it would help his own finances.  Angela said Trump has no soul?  Why won't she just kill him?

 Up in Dupont Circle, Condoleezza Rice was staring out of the giant video screen in the upper floor meeting room of the Brewmaster's Castle.  "This meeting isn't adjourned yet!" she said.

"We've been at it for five hours!" groaned the investment banker.

"Five hours?" she mocked him.  "It took me seven hours just to explain to W the difference between Sunnis and Shiites!"

"We don't really need to know that, do we?" asked the Midwestern Congressman.

"My new secret agent was delayed, but he's joining you now.  He will be our point person at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the one security agency too bureaucratic for Trump to dismantle."

At that moment, a handsome young man with an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump, Jr., entered the room in a wheelchair.  "Good evening.  Sorry I'm late.  This building needs a handicapped parking spot!"  He quickly saluted the Heurich Society Chairwoman on the video screen, then started rolling around to shake hands with everybody in the room.  "My name is Captain Tyler Glockmann.  I just finished my second tour in Iraq.  Before that I did a tour in Afghanistan."  All of this was a lie, but it did not feel like a lie.  It was his twin brother who had served bravely overseas while this man, Thomas, stayed at home with the useless legs he had possessed since the skiing accident over ten years ago.  "The terrorists couldn't get me, but a drunk driver did!" he said.  This also did not feel like a lie, since a huge part of him had felt dead since Tyler was killed in the car crash while on leave--something very few people knew, one of them being Condoleezza Rice.  "Now I'm ready to serve my country on the most important battlefield in the world:  the home front against Trump."

The men of the Heurich Society looked at the crew-cut soldier who might have been on a Nazi recruitment poster if not for the wheelchair and realized Rice had stumbled upon the perfect mole.  "Welcome to the Heurich Society!" said the international arms merchant, who was echoed enthusiastically around the room.

Over in Foggy Bottom, Dr. Khalid Mohammad returned from his hospital shift to find "Muslims go home!" spray-painted on his apartment door again.  He pulled out the can of spray paint he carried in his bag for just this purpose:  spraying over it before his wife might venture out of the apartment and see it.  I guess it's time to buy a house, he thought, though in what neighborhood he could not say.

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COMING UP:   The cursed Rolex is stolen!

A Demon Restored

Rudy Giuliani was having none of it.  "I was a prosecutor!  I know what a crime scene looks like!  This was obviously staged to embarrass the President!"

"You mean Trump?" asked the sheriff, with his hand on his holstered gun.  (God damned New Yorker!)

"President Trump!" snarled Giuliani.

"Not yet," said the sheriff.  "Is this gonna be your job?  Invading Trump properties to trample crime scenes and harass local law enforcement officers?"

"How dare you speak to me like that?!  The FBI will hear of this!"

"Well, I hope the FBI figures out who leaked my Virginia crime scene investigation to a private citizen who holds no office in our Commonwealth!"

"This murder could have taken place anywhere!  The body was obviously dragged here--"

"Bodies," interrupted the sheriff, who could now eliminate at least a few of his officers from suspicion--since only those few knew about the second body.

"Bodies?!"

The sheriff unholstered his gun and pretended to examine it.  "Now it's time for you to leave, or I'm gonna arrest you--"

"You can't evict me from the Trump National Golf Club!"

"Boys?"

With that, Giuliani retreated hastily, pulling out his phone to call the Donald.

The sheriff sneered and turned around to head back to the area the second body had been found--if you could call it that, he thought.  The forensic pathologist on the scene was certain it was human, but her preliminary thoughts were that the baby had been a victim of some type of genetic experimentation, coupled with some operations.  Clearly some type of appendage (she hesitated to say "tail") had been removed, and the body's covering was a mixture of skin, scales, and scars.  The green tinge might be evidence of a serious chemical imbalance, possibly from poison.  A host of tests would have to be run to determine cause of death.  The sheriff had seen a lot of sickening sights over the years, but this tiny, swastika-tattooed cadaver (recently washed up from the golf course pond) was going to haunt him for a long, long time.  And when this wasn't haunting him, he would be thinking about the Caucasian man whose dismembered parts had been placed in a swastika on the 6th green.

"They'll never know," sighed one of the Shackled, floating nearby.

"They're better off not knowing," said the other ghost.

"But that woman--"

"She'll come to justice eventually."

"Eventually?  How many times do we have to tell ourselves that?"

Somebody who might have been witnesses, but missed it all, were Kevin ("Monkey") Mundy and his teenage bride, Brittani.  Kevin would have told the police that Barbara Hellmeister had simply been attempting experiments to correct her baby's birth defects.  Brittani would have told the police it was not human anyway, and had no soul.  And the murder of the baby's father, Ernest Ironman (Adolf Eichmann's grandson)?  Well, that followed months of bickering about Donald Trump, and the eruption of Ernest's fury when he realized Barbara had accidentally killed the baby.  Some people call another a "Nazi" when disgusted with him or her, but in their case, it had been a knock-down fight about who was not a Nazi.  And Barbara had won that fight.

"You can't keep me locked up here forever!" hissed Brittani, as Kevin tossed an apple and a protein bar into her cage.

"Well, I'm not letting you divorce me!" he snarled, angry that he had been forced to put so much time into setting up this basement prison that he was neglecting his prospecting for gold and diamonds.

"You're a monster, and your friends are, too!"

"White trash like you should not be mocking West Virginia DNA problems!"

"My daddy's gonna kill you!"

"Your daddy's too busy crowing about the KKK-endorsed President-Elect, and harassing people of color down state!"

"I'll kill you myself!"

Kevin scratched under his cursed Rolex and went back upstairs to try to think in peace.

Over on the Arlington shore of the Potomac, Angela de la Paz shivered in the frigid wind.  "I messed up everything."

"No, not you," said the Warrior, putting his centuries' old arm around her.

"I let it happen," said Angela. 

"We all let it happen.  Or none of us let it happen.  Bad things happen."

"Bad things?  I should have stopped all of that!  And now Ardua is back in the river, full of the evil energy she sucked up out there!  I thought the Trump evil would collapse, and she would collapse with it!  That demon is back in the river, and the body count is just beginning!"

"Do you see those ducks?" the Warrior asked without expecting a reply.  "Most of them come for a brief time, eat what they can, barely make ripples in the water.  You were called to do much, much more."

"And failed!"

"Only the arrogant believe themselves incapable of failures.  You have given life and hope to many, and will continue to do so.  This city of men," he said, pointing across the cold water to Washington, "needs you more than ever.  But you are not alone."

Deep in the chilly water, Ardua of the Potomac laughed at the puny humans and trembled with pleasure thinking about the arrival of the one they called "Steve Bannon"--the Kingmaker, the Great Snake, the New Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan's Knight!  And unlike many of the unwitting Washingtonians, this one wanted to be all those things!
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COMING UP:   
Condoleezza Rice places a long bet!

Get out the vote!

The Freaks who lived in the Anacostia River Tunnel Project had legally registered to vote in August, but were getting a hard time at their Southeast early voting polling station.

"Your name is Captain Von Trapp?" asked the poll worker, dubiously.

"The Fifth!" replied the smelly man with a foot-long beard.  "Captain Von Trapp the Fifth!"

"You can't challenge him just because his name is weird," whispered the poll worker beside her.

"It sounds fraudulent!" she whispered back.

"It's on the roll!" the other poll worker retorted.  "You have to let him vote!"  She turned to the next in line.  "Name?"

"Fearless Leader, Junior."  The other poll worker kicked her under the table.

Meanwhile, Dulles Samuelson was taking a break from FBI training at Quantico to go to early voting with Angela de la Paz in Washington.

"The FBI is messed up," said Angela.

"I've heard every piece of gossip under the sun:  Comey working with Hillary, Comey working with Rudy Giuliani, FBI leaking to Wikileaks, FBI in cyber war with CIA, FBI investigating Loretta Lynch."

"Are you sure you want to work for the FBI?"

"I'm sure it will go back to normal after the Election."

"How do you know what's normal?  They used to wiretap Martin Luther King and John Lennon!  That place is messed up."

"Every place is messed up.  I'll do what I can."

The ghost of Dulles Samuelson's father, Henry Samuelson, clutched his forever-CIA head in his spectral hands and tried to scream out loud.

Over at the secret CIA facility under the "Washington Times" headquarters, psychiatrist Ermann Esse was debriefing his handlers on Operation Barbie Doll.  "I was able to design a couple of campaign outfits for KellyAnne, but that was as high as I got as a fashion designer with the Trump women."

"Do the outfits make her look really bad?"

"She doesn't need clothes to make her look really bad!"

Dr. Esse sipped water nervously as his handlers descended into a major argument.

"I told you this was a stupid idea!"

"We tried every other idea!"

"Maybe we should let the voters decide!?  This CIA-FBI war is not good for the country!"

"You're not good for the country!  And we're not conceding the Election to Comey and Giuliani, of all people!"

"It could be worse.  Trump could be easy to control once we get rid of the Russian agents in his--"

"Oh, that's your plan now?!"

Dr. Esse was exhausted from forced labor for the CIA.  He quietly walked out of the room and headed to the cafeteria.

A few miles away, some Heurich Society members were also feeling uncharacteristically ineffective.  It had only been a week since Condoleezza Rice was elected Chair of the Heurich Society (to replace deposed Dick Cheney), but members were already aggravated.  For one thing, they thought since she could only hold meetings over the speaker phone, they could run circles around her; however, she had set up teleconference capacity in the upper-floor meeting room of the Brewmaster's Castle, and could now stare ominously at them from a giant video screen.  For another thing, she had dismantled the political operations sub-committee for allowing Russian agent Donald Trump to get nominated.

But what really ticked them off was she had allowed the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series!  (The Heurich Society had been scheming against the Chicago Cubs since the dawn of the Cold War!  A woman running national security was one thing, but women meddling in baseball curses?)  And so, instead of consolidating their financial assets and shoring up their military-industrial complex to retain ultimate Washington power no matter what, several of them were meeting secretly at The Palm to discuss how to oust Condoleezza Rice from power.

"Are there any nude photos of her?"

"Lesbian love affairs?"

"Any love affairs!"

"Hot mic comments?"

"What if we just vote her out?"

The other men looked at the Midwestern Congressman in disbelief.  After an awkward silence, the international arms merchant spoke:  "Even Dick Cheney fears the Bloodsucker.  Only a stake through the heart or total decapitation would work."  The Congressman burst out laughing, but nobody else did.

Meanwhile, social worker Hue Nguyen and some visiting family members were escorting residents of the Arlington group home for the mentally challenged to early voting in Virginia.  The big brown helping dog, Millie, was trotting to and fro, letting the nervous residents take turns petting her.  Some feared the Russians were stealing the Election; some feared Mexican aliens were stealing the Election; some feared outer space aliens were stealing the Election; and many feared that voting was a trick to get them locked up in a secret facility.  Psychologist Leo Schwartz had argued at length with Nguyen about the appropriateness of registering them to vote, but in the end, he was hard-pressed to deny that their semi-delusional grasp of the facts was actually worse than the flood of lies and dirty tricks shaping the mindset of many of the country's voters.

"Where are the ice cream trucks?"

"I thought there would be more aliens."

"Those are aliens."

"Those are Trumpists."

"Is that a gun?"

The social worker looked in alarm at a middle-aged man leering at them and showing the gun in his holster.  "Those folks actually registered to vote in this county?"

"Yes!" said Buckner's brother, who was 6'4" and built like a linebacker.

Melinda whispered to Millie a Spanish plea to go attack the man, and Millie ran over, jumped up on the man, and started licking his face.

"Gaa!  Get him off me!"

"It's a girl!" cried Theresa.

"Get your psycho dog off me!"

Other people in line were now laughing as the social worker retrieved Millie.

"The dog is a cog in the machine against mean!" chanted Freddy Ritchings (AKA Brother Divine of the International Peace Movement).

"I know you!" cried a woman nearby.  "You're the host of the Church of Twitter!"

"A Tweet can be sweet when the heart takes the start!  Hatred in Twitter is like a World Series no-hitter!" Freddy continued.  ("Go Cubs!")  "Vote like a goat, and no ovation for the nation!  A ballot of love gives sinners a shove!"

"Hillary's the Antichrist!" someone shouted.

"Trump is a pig!"

Soon there were fistfights, and the man with the gun shot it into the air.  Several residents of the Arlington group home took off running, with Millie and various family members in close pursuit.

Floating above the polling station, some members of The Shackled shed ghostly tears, but one said, "Fear not, my friends.  This too shall pass."

Back at DC's Southeast early voting station, the identical "Reiki Triplets"--who had been holding hands and sending out positive energy to fellow voters-- approached the poll workers, who shook their heads in disbelief.  Maggie went up first, and could see the negative energy weighing on the woman's head.  "It's all gonna be alright, child," Maggie said, holding her hands up.  "There are higher powers in play."

"That woman cloned herself to register to vote three times!" cried Glenn Michael Beckmann, who was dressed in citizen riot gear.

Cal and Sassy surrounded him, raised their hands, and did their mojo, causing Beckmann's over-medicated brain to short-circuit and pass out.

"I think we're gonna have a lot of extra clients this week!" said Maggie, taking her ballot from the poll worker, who was feeling much better.  "You have a blessed week, now!"

Over at the White House, Bridge had never heard so much commotion from the ghosts.  "It'll be alright," the gardener kept saying, for his own benefit as much as theirs.  "It'll be alright."

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Washington Water Woman is fleeing the country after the election, but hopes the civil war will be brief and she can return to blogging in two weeks!  Ardua of the Potomac will certainly be on the move....