I looked out my bedroom window. First mistake of the day.
Up above me, the skies poured down vaporwave rainwater, broken only by the passing shelter of a zeppelin’s underbelly. Down below people shook hands and spoke of shares and futures as they stepped over the bodies of the corporateless in the gutters, and there was a McDonalds in every hand. And across the interstate I saw the face of some gutless unshaven slob staring back at me in the reflective glass of a skyscraper.
Just another day on the mean streets of the 20th century, where freedom reigned and there was a world war around every corner. I took a long drag on my breakfast cigar. GMO marijuana, of course – the real stuff was hard to come by ever since the Cuban embargo kicked in – and I brooded on how sick I was of this life with the help of this morning’s paper. Hitler, Mussolini, Archduke Ferdinand, and Vader… I was sick of war. I’d done my time back in the trenches of Vietnam and now I couldn’t sleep for memories of the A-bombs going off inside my brains.
My doorbell rang, my door slammed open, and in walked Trouble, first name Big middle name Time. She was a platinum blonde flapper with a suit whose shoulder pads could’ve cut the eyes from an unwary passerby or a handsy coworker without blinking.
“Mister Bogart?” she inquired.
“Just ‘Schwarzenegger’ is fine,” I told her. You don’t stand on ceremony when you’re talking to someone from C-level. This was a corporate class dame if I’d ever spotted one, and she had the hard and spiked look in her eyes of someone who’d clawed their way into it by force rather than birth, who’d placed coke plants with her own two hands and personally funded disinformation on smoking health hazards. In her mother’s day she would’ve harpooned whales.
“Good. I’m here for a delicate situation, and a little bat told me you’re just the man for it.”
“Then you can call me by my maiden name instead,” I said. “’Discreet.’”
“Wonderful. There’s been a murder and the police aren’t investigating it.”
“Who’s the victim?”
“My husband.”
I didn’t frown, but it took concentration. I’d been sent on a lot of wild pigeon chases by spouses too desperate to believe that a loved one’s death was an honest accident. “Any suspects?”
“Oh, I killed him,” said the C-level airily. “I just need you to prove it.”
My cigar stub vanished somewhere into the 50-yen shag linoleum carpet. I didn’t notice. I didn’t care. I barely managed my first question, which was “huh?”
“I’m Vice President Hunter S. Margaret Atwood,” said the dame with a smile you could’ve sharpened a bowie knife on, “and I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, Schwarzenegger Discreet Bogart.”
***
First things first, I ziptied her to a chair. She helped.
“Spill the beans, sister,” I told her. “What’s your angle here?”
“Why, I have no angle whatsoever, Schwarzenegger,” she said innocently. “Simply report my deeds to the police with enough evidence to support my claims. They’ve denied me so far. I will hire you for a retaining fee of a hundred Euros a day, plus expenses.”
A man could get pretty far on that money. But there was something at work here I didn’t trust. “Why’d you do it?” I demanded. “President George Roosevelt was the highest in the polls since William Churchill.”
“Oh, I loved him so,” she said. “But it had to be done. This country’s new wars will not be over worlds, or even stars like Mr. Vader believes, but over temperature gradients. I knew the field was too important to be left unattended. So did my husband. But we…disagreed on policy. And now that he’s dead, I myself am president of the United Nations of Americas. There’s just one problem…”
“No body?”
“No body!” she spat at me. “The slippery pigfucker tripped and fell down the garbage disposal in our kitchen after I slit his throat. And until he’s proven dead, I’m the vice president. Only the president can declare a new war!”
“Damn,” I mused. “Profit preserve us, this is a pretty pronounced pickle we’re facing here. Did his x-files survive?”
“No. The disposal left only meat and mangled polyester. Not even his credit card was left intact.”
This was getting intense. “I’m going out for a smoke,” I told her. “Be back in a minute.”
Then I stepped outside my door, pulled out my matches, and lost consciousness.
***
When I woke it was in a murky haze that reminded me of Vietnam, where I’d left so many of my friends behind in Flander’s Fields.
“Rise and shine, gaijin” said a man’s mouth next to my ear in a heaven Texish accent. I tried to turn my head and couldn’t because I was tied down at wrist and ankle.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Mister Bogart,” sneered the voice, which I’d heard a hundred hundred times on national radio.
“Thanks for not killing me instead,” I said. It was a bluff: the ache in my skull had brought last week’s hangover back from the grave twice as strong and twice as vengeful.
“Don’t mention it, hombre,” said the voice, and its owner walked around in front of me and sat down on a backwards-facing chair like he was in a video about to warn high schoolers not to inhale LSD.
There he was, two hundred pounds and six foot five, in a cowboy hat and a thousand-dime suit: ‘Big’ Billiam Gates, the biggest carbon-lord the fossilized fuels industry had ever seen. Personally pulling a pair of wire cutters out of his pocket to fuck me up. Some people would’ve killed to be in my position.
“So, what’s gotten a bee in your bonnet, Billy?” I asked.
“You’ve been in cahoots with the vice president,” he said. “I bet I know what lies she poured in your ears. Told you all about the glorious future of temperature warfare, didn’t she? Told you about how she’s going to make a grillion dollars for every Amersican man, woman, and dog by sending the thermometer industry through the stratosphere and to the moon?”
“No,” I said, half-truthfully. It didn’t matter. One of the many things Big Billiam had enjoyed for much of his life was not having to pay attention to anything anyone said to him.
“Well, that putz is full of shit and full of smarts. Yeah, the future isn’t in world wars or space wars, and it even has a role to play in temperature. But she thinks it’s gonna be cold. Ice cold. She’ll have us packing parkas and stuffing stockings and winterizing roads until the end of time. Me? I’ve seen the way we’re headed. My Model-T and Windows XP are just the start: the whole world is going to run on a carbon economy sooner or later. And when we do that? Things are going to heat up. She wants a cold war, but I say things are going to get HOT.”
“You’re insane,” I told him. “Nobody’s going to happily sign up to cook themselves and the entire rest of the planet to death just so you can make a few bucks.”
“Believe what you like, schweinhund,” he smiled. “With you here the vice president will never ascend to the throne…and will never start her cold war. Instead, me and my friend here will get our way. Isn’t that right, comrade Reagan?”
I would’ve gasped if my lungs weren’t fluttering desperately for air. Instead I could merely stare, wide-eyed, as the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of the California stepped into the room.
“Indeedy it is old chap pip pip,” he said. “Jolly good. Arigato much for having me toodle-oo over here. I say I say what shall we do with this fella here wot wot?”
“He knows too much,” said Gates. “Let’s throw him out for the thylacines. A last meal before we raise the temperature and it floods all of Australia, eh mon ami?”
“Fuck you,” I said weekly as I was wheeled over to the door.
“Dasvidaniya, ya son of a bitch,” chuckled Gates.
And then the door flew off its hinges. Behind it stood fourteen RAF SWAT officers, armed to the teeth with punji sticks and mustard gasses. At their head stood the smirking figure of my old boss.
“Alright, gentlemen, what seems to be the problem here?” asked FBIA director J. Edgar Nixon.
One more inch, just one more, and I’d have worked my left hand free off the cuffs. My right pocket protector held a PDA, a pen, and a pen that was actually a knife. Any of them would be better than nothing at a time like this.
That was when the white phosphorous bomb went off. With a roaring groan, the great mass of the CN Tower began to slide away beneath our feet, suspending us over the bottomless abyss of the Grand Canyon. My entire life flashed before my eyes from infancy during the Boer War to the icy plains of Northern Vietnam in my tragically cut-short teenage years to the freshly-constructed Death Star taking shape even now in the skies above New York and I knew that I’d seen too many wars…
…but if I acted fast, I could still stop this one before the Y2K crash.
TO BE CONTINUED IN VOLUME XXXIII OF 20th CENTURY ACTION STORIES! REAL HISTORY! REAL ACTION! REAL GOOD!